An Apology for Qualified Omnipotence
By Christopher Lilley
Arguments against omnipotence based on the number of necessary qualifications do not support abandoning omnipotence.
Introduction
In the 1989 Star Trek film The Final Frontier, the crew of the USS Enterprise find themselves on a quest to locate God.[1] After crossing an energy field called “The Great Barrier,” they come to a seemingly uninhabited planet where they encounter an otherworldly being who desires to use their starship to “carry its wisdom” across the universe. While most of the crew seems ready to accept this being as God, Captain Kirk immediately grows suspicious and asks, “What does God need with a starship?” Kirk’s suspicions about the divine identity of the alien appear to stem from his assumption that any being who claims to be God should be powerful enough to go anywhere in the universe without the help of a physical starship.
While we are not informed of Kirk’s precise theological background assumptions, it’s probably safe to assume he was working with some concept of omnipotence, or at least that a “God” worthy of the name shouldn’t be hindered by mundane realities like energy fields or space travel. Kirk would have also been likely unimpressed by such provisos as “God is omnipotent but cannot cross certain energy barriers.” For Kirk, if being “God” means to be all-powerful in any meaningful sense, then qualifying omnipotence with specific limitations (such as space travel) results in incoherence. In the avant-garde spirit of Captain Kirk, Tom Oord advances a similar argument against the traditional view of God as omnipotent, namely that the number of necessary qualifications to the concept of omnipotence ultimately renders it nonsensical. For Oord, “omnipotence dies the death of a thousand qualifications.”[2]
In this essay, I will critically examine Oord’s claim that one of the damning features of omnipotence is its excessive number of qualifications. I conclude that although Oord demonstrates that omnipotence results in odd and difficult conclusions, he falls short of justifying the “death” of omnipotence based on his conceptual analysis of divine power.
Qualifications all the way down?
Oord begins his critique by noting that qualifications on concepts or claims are typical. For example, when my children give me a coffee mug that says “best dad ever” for Father’s Day, the qualification of the phrase as a rhetorical exaggeration intended to show love and appreciation is clearly meant. Not that I am not the literal “best dad” who ever lived! However, for Oord, once a superlative attribute such as “omnipotence” is applied to God, the number of necessary qualifications renders the claim “God is all-powerful” vacuous. Oord insists that “the number and nature of provisos disqualify omnipotence as an appropriate description of divine power.”[3]
Oord draws our attention to how the claim “God is omnipotent” has been qualified in the academic literature to show why this is the case. For instance, in discussing God’s omnipotence, most theologians grant that God cannot do that which is logically or ontologically contradictory, such as creating a square circle or a married bachelor.[4] Nor can God perform actions contrary to God’s nature, such as sin, lie, or cease to exist.[5] I will not rehearse them all here, but through example after example, Oord demonstrates quite convincingly that to call God “omnipotent” in the sense of being “all-powerful” requires quite a bit of clarification, qualification, and nuance. Here, we arrive at what I take to be the heart of Oord’s argument against omnipotence from conceptual analysis. There isn’t any one qualification or provision that itself renders omnipotence unintelligible. Instead, the cumulative effect of so many qualifications renders the idea of “omnipotence” meaningless. For Oord, “The sheer number, I believe, undercuts any good reason to say, ‘God is omnipotent.’”[6]
To underscore this point, Oord makes two clarifications. First, the numerous qualifications of the term “omnipotence” run contrary to what most people think when they are told that God is omnipotent. For most people, to say God is “omnipotent” is to say that God has the unqualified ability to do anything.[7] Since this does not represent the many ways omnipotence is qualified in the theological literature, calling God omnipotent only confuses and misleads rather than telling us anything substantive about God. Second, even taking into account the voluminous work done by philosophers and theologians to qualify omnipotence in a conceptually coherent way, Oord argues that “attempts to salvage omnipotence do not match what 99.99% of people—both scholars and laity—mean by ‘God is omnipotent.’”[8] In short, for Oord, omnipotence dies the death of a thousand qualifications.
Qualified Omnipotence: Signs of life?
Oord has convincingly demonstrated that whatever omnipotence is taken to mean, it’s not a simple matter of saying, “God can do anything.” However, has Oord shown that the necessary qualifications for the concept of “omnipotence” render it meaningless? I don’t think he has. Why do the qualifications we find in the historical and contemporary theological literature render the concept of omnipotence incoherent? Statements such as “identifying the thousands of activities an omnipotent God cannot do should compel us to reject the claim ‘God is omnipotent’”[9] and “qualified omnipotence is an oxymoron”[10] are extremely strong claims. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether Oord has provided us with reason enough to compel assent to these strong claims concerning the “death” of omnipotence based on conceptual analysis.
First, at numerous points in his argument, Oord notes that insisting on omnipotence and qualifying it in particular ways results in some odd and counterintuitive claims. For instance, in illustrating some of the implications of omnipotence for the Creator-creature relationship, Oord rightly points out that parsing the balance of divine and creaturely power generates some decidedly odd conclusions.[11] But because something is odd doesn’t mean it’s untrue. For example, a brief perusal of the latest scientific literature in quantum physics reveals that the fabric of reality is far more complex and counterintuitive than most people realize. Most of what we consider solid matter or the everyday three-dimensional space we inhabit as finite human creatures is anything but simple or what our bare senses perceive. The reality is significantly more complex and far from settled, even among experts.
Nevertheless, this inherent complexity and “oddness” shouldn’t prompt us to reject the quantum world; we should merely acknowledge that reality is more than simply drawing hard and fast conclusions based solely on our everyday experiences. The defender of omnipotence might very well embrace her view’s “odd” and counterintuitive conclusions while maintaining that these “oddities” are not enough to reject the concept. After all, many Christian theological claims are quite odd, indeed!
A second component of Oord’s conceptual critique of omnipotence lies in the fact that omnipotence needs to be qualified at all, which Oord argues speaks to its underlying incoherence. Indeed, listing the many, many things a supposedly “omnipotent” God cannot do seems to undercut the idea that God is all-powerful. As Oord contends, “Consequently, the practice of qualifying omnipotence… makes little sense.”[12] However, the defender of divine omnipotence need not see these qualifications as impoverishing the concept of omnipotence but as clarifying the very nature of what it means to be God. We can find an example in Thomas Aquinas, who staunchly defends God’s omnipotence and yet readily acknowledges, “we can see that, although God is omnipotent, He is nevertheless said to be incapable of some things.”[13] How can this be so? For Aquinas, God is “pure act” (actus purus) in that God’s very essence is existence, without any potentiality, defect, or change.
Naturally, open and relational theology proponents will immediately object to this classical understanding of God’s nature. However, I take Oord’s critique of omnipotence to be an immanent critique. That is, for Oord, omnipotence is rendered incoherent on its own terms. For the defender of omnipotence, especially from a classical theist perspective, it’s not apparent that qualifications on omnipotence show the concept is flawed. Instead, following Aquinas, to say God “cannot” do things such as sin or die are just different ways of describing what God is in Godself, that is, entirely absent defect or potentiality. Understood in this way, saying an omnipotent God “cannot” sin is no more a strike against omnipotence than it would be to say a bachelor “cannot” have a spouse.[14] The inability to have a spouse doesn’t undercut the concept of a bachelor; it’s simply another way of clarifying what a bachelor is.
A final element of Oord’s argument against omnipotence critiques the position of those who argue that God’s power cannot be separated from God’s nature. Specifically, God’s will. In other words, “omnipotence” means that God can do anything God desires. For many theologians, making this connection to God’s will helps explain many of the qualifications to omnipotence as descriptive of the particularities of God’s will. For example, a perfectly wise God would not will to do evil, so the qualification is not on God’s power but rather on God’s will.
However, Oord argues that such qualifications as “God can do whatever God wants” are mere rhetorical wordplay and make omnipotence only so much “empty puff.”[15] Oord rightly points to the hollowness of claiming God is “omnipotent” insofar as “God can do all things compatible with God’s nature.” If that’s true, a rock is “omnipotent” according to its nature! For Oord, this qualified concept of omnipotence results in something that is either tautological or meaningless.
The defender of omnipotence may again turn to Aquinas and make a critical distinction in how we describe God’s power, namely that between God’s “absolute power” and God’s “ordained power.” In his Summa Theologiae, Aquinas agrees with Oord that statements such as “God can do all things compatible with God’s nature” are vacuous and tautological, noting that “if we say that God is omnipotent because he can do everything possible to his power, our explanation of omnipotence goes round in a circle.”[16] Nevertheless, Aquinas insists that God’s omnipotence entails both that “God can do everything that is absolutely possible” and that “God does not act from any necessity of nature… his will is the cause of all things.”[17]
On the face of it, this formulation would seem to succumb to Oord’s criticisms. Doesn’t stipulating that God’s omnipotence is necessarily conditioned by God’s will result in a tautology—“God can do whatever God does?” For Aquinas and many other medieval philosophers, the answer is no due to the different aspects of considering God’s power. For Aquinas, considering God’s power in and of itself is God’s “absolute” power (potentia absoluta), which encompasses everything possible that doesn’t involve a contradiction.[18] However, since Aquinas also holds to divine simplicity, there is no real distinction between God’s power and will.[19] This means that God’s power, when considered in relation to God’s will, is God’s “ordained” power (potentia ordinata), which encompasses everything God has ordained.[20] Applied to questions of God’s omnipotence, we might then say that God could have chosen not to redeem the world in Christ according to God’s absolute power, but since this is not what God has willed, it’s not possible concerning God’s ordained power. Understood in this way, saying that omnipotence is the ability for God to do whatever God wills isn’t meaningless. Rather, it’s derived from the scholastic distinction between God’s absolute and ordained power.
Open and relational theologians might very well reject divine simplicity and this classical distinction in God’s power. But, for Oord’s criticism to be a successful immanent critique, omnipotence must be demonstrated to be incoherent on its terms. Absent an additional argument for why a distinction between God’s absolute and ordained power fails, there is no incoherence or tautology in defining omnipotence in terms of God’s nature and will.
Conclusion
Has Oord killed omnipotence? No, I think an announcement of its death would be premature. While Oord has convincingly demonstrated that “omnipotence” requires many qualifications to make it coherent and that insisting on divine omnipotence results in many extremely odd and counterintuitive conclusions about God and the world, it’s not clear that Oord’s arguments here warrant his strong conclusion that “It’s time to commit dictiocide: to kill ‘omnipotence.’”[21] However, Oord has shown the steep conceptual cost of accepting omnipotence. While divine omnipotence may be a coherent concept, accepting omnipotence brings with it several challenging implications for how we conceive of God’s love, God’s relation to the world, and, most importantly, God’s complicity in evil. On these points, Oord shows us that omnipotence might give way to a better vision of God’s power, one conditioned by love.
Bio: Christopher Lilley is the Resident for Discipleship and Engagement at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. He earned his M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary and his M.A. in theology from Marquette University. Christopher is also a Postulant for Holy Orders in the Episcopal Church. He can be found on Twitter @Frosinthepines and loves to fish, hike, camp, and spend time with his family.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Chris Lilley offers a compelling argument for qualified omnipotence, engaging my own views with fairness and clarity. His essay reminds me that omnipotence can be coherently defined through qualifications. Some footnotes in the book cite sophisticated philosophical work that does just this. However, I argue that such definitions stray far from what most people—likely 99%—mean by “omnipotent.” My metaphor about omnipotence dying the death of a thousand qualifications was not meant to deny coherence entirely. Rather, it expresses that, after all necessary qualifications, the result differs markedly from traditional or popular notions of divine omnipotence, even among many theologians.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
For more on Oord’s view on qualified omnipotence, see this blog article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1]. Star Trek: The Final Frontier, directed by William Shatner (1989; Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures, 2013), Blu-ray Disc.
[2]. Thomas Jay Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage, 2023), 44.
[3]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 45.
[4]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 48.
[5]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 52.
[6]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 69.
[7]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 70.
[8]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 73.
[9]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 69.
[10]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 70.
[11]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 54–55.
[12]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 70.
[13]. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, bk. II, ch. 25, a. 1., eds. A. C. Pegis, J. F. Anderson, V. J. Bourke, and C. J. O’Neill. 5 vols. (Garden City: Image Books, 1955–57. Reprinted by the University of Notre Dame Press, IN, 1975).
[14]. For Aquinas, “The best thing to say, however, is that they cannot be brought about, not that God cannot bring them about.” Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 25, a. 3, resp., in Summa Theologiae, Questions on God, edited by Brian Davies and Brian Leftow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Emphasis mine.
[15]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 67.
[16]. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 25, a. 3, resp
[17]. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 25, a. 3, resp.; I, q. 25, a. 5, resp.
[18]. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 25, a. 5, rep. obj. 1.
[19]. More precisely, the distinction is one of reason, not of real relation.
[20]. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 25, a. 5, rep. obj. 1.
[21]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 74.