Even God Can’t Have It All

By Donna Bowman

When not every good can be achieved, God prioritizes love.

We’ve all heard some of the unsolvable paradoxes that come with a God defined by “omni-” words. “Can God make a rock so heavy even God can’t lift it?” I bet most of us don’t take these very seriously; we suspect they’re just playing with semantics.

But there’s something important about this type of question, not so easily dismissed. Consider an example with which Christian theologians have long wrestled, in regard to Jesus: Could God give up God’s power? Or how about one that makes me tremble just to consider: Could God change the past?

All these paradoxes touch on the fundamental unworkability of a definition of divine power than boils down to what we tell children: “God can do anything!” The paradoxes are designed to help us realize—Well, no! Obviously not! But why not? What is this mysterious boundary we intuit, but can’t define?

I learned the answer from one of my grad school professors—the improbably named Will Power. He gave me a more precise definition of omnipotence: God can do everything that is logically possible.

Rock too heavy for God to lift? Not logically possible, therefore God can’t do that. Round squares? God can’t make them. 2+2=5? Nope. Alter God’s own nature? Arguably no, depending on your view of the “necessity” (in the philosophical sense) of God’s existence and properties.

For me, the biggest revelation in this more careful definition was about God’s relationship to time. God can’t alter the past because the past is a fact, like 2+2=5. But God also can’t know the future because the future doesn’t exist yet. It’s no knock on God’s power that God can’t do logically impossible thing, or know things that are unknowable.

If we replace that naive, fuzzy “everything” in the definition of what God can do, with the concept of logical possibility—a realm with boundaries, a set that includes some things and excludes others—our intuitions about the unfairness of those paradoxes start to make sense. Those “gotcha” questions purport to show that the concepts of God’s power and knowledge are incoherent on their face. But that’s only the case if we don’t think beyond a child’s impression of “all.” When we tell kids they can be anything they want to be, “anything it’s possible for humans to be” is implied … which we often discover when kids tease us with wanting to be Spider-Man or a T-rex. “Anything it’s possible for God to do,” in the definition of omnipotence, turns out to have a metaphysical meaning!

Now I’m supposed to be writing about amipotence, not defending the concept of omnipotence that Oord is trying to displace in the theological discourse. But I tell this story of my evolving understanding of omnipotence because it brings home the importance of priorities. The concept of logical possibility precedes and is prior to the concept of God’s power; it would be the same no matter what kind of entity we might imagine or speculate about.

When I talk with students about policies or outcomes—what they think should happen or how they think things should be arranged—I often find the same kind of fuzzy absolutism that characterizes the naive view of omnipotence. They care deeply about a wide range of issues, and imagine a world in which all those problems could be fixed. My job is to introduce this idea of priorities. All those things you want to get done are good! But what good thing should go to the top of the list?

This isn’t just about deciding what to do first, given that we can’t do everything at once. It’s about identifying the thing that is most important—that you wouldn’t compromise on even if it meant other good things couldn’t get done. I ask them: “What are you unwilling to trade off?”

Because all courses of action to do good things involve trade-offs. My favorite example is about the goal of a system of justice (something students have strong feelings about). Is it more important to make sure as many guilty people as possible face consequences? Or to make sure no innocent people are wrongly punished?

If the priority is to ensure the guilty are punished, we’re going to end up punishing a few innocent people, inevitably. If, on the other hand, we want to minimize the risk of punishing innocent people, some guilty people are going to get away with their crimes. Both punishing the guilty and not punishing the innocent are good goals. But we can’t prioritize them both. Which goal are you unwilling to trade off, even if it means the other goal will be compromised?

When inviting us to consider amipotence, Oord often begins with omnipotence, and specifically with the assertion that it is impossible for love to be omnipotent. As a process thinker I would say it differently: Coercing another free creature—turning them into God’s puppet—isn’t something that’s logically possible, so it’s no knock on God’s power that God can’t do that. But both Oord and I are making the same move: Love and coercive power are mutually exclusive. With amipotence, Oord asserts that God prioritizes mutual flourishing and respect in the relationship between divine and non-divine persons.

Here’s the trade-off. Is it more important for God to be able to ensure the desired outcome—to make things turn out right? Or to deal with God’s creatures in a way that gives them the kind of autonomy persons deserve? Just as in the justice system example, there’s no right answer. Which trade-off you choose reveals something about your theology—who you think God is, and what role God plays in the cosmos.

Let’s throw another omni into the mix. I didn’t learn the term omnibenevolent until I got to grad school, but it’s one of the biggies. It means “God wills all good.” As a child, I was comforted by the idea that God only wants what’s good for me.

But as an adult, I recognize that even for God, it’s not possible to make all good things happen—because some goods are mutually incompatible. If this good is prioritized, this other good will be compromised. The traditional way of thinking about omnipotence offers no help in interpreting this fact. Indeed, this way of thinking thrusts us directly into the morass of paradox with which I began the essay. Somehow God is supposed to be able to make two mutually exclusive outcomes occur simultaneously. In logician’s terms, we expect God’s power to extend to both P and not-P both being true.

More than 20 years after Will Power taught me the true meaning of omnipotence, I’m continually amazed at how few Christians see a way out of the impasse. It’s a testament to how thoroughly the worship of power dominates lay thinking about God. Because as soon as the answer is pointed out, everyone understands that the omni words don’t stand alone but must be arranged to work together without contradiction. The way to do that is to prioritize them.

For example: God lovingly wills all good, and God lovingly does all God can do to bring about good. Love takes priority over power, over knowledge, over all of God’s nature. In scripture we find the adjectives of power, knowledge, and goodness applied to God—but only one identity: God is love.

So when God must trade off a good for a more important good, the guiding principle is clear and unmistakable. It is love, God’s nature and name. How does love guide God in these tradeoffs? Our own experience offers a measure of understanding. It’s not easy—but when we decide well, we decide according to a thorough understanding of our priorities. God, with perfect understanding and perfect conviction, can be trusted to perfectly express divine love in the most wrenching of choices.

Thus, God’s omnipotence can be better described as amipotence—love expressed in free action within the bounds of the possible.

Even understanding that God must choose in the face of trade-offs, some are unwilling to assert that love has priority. They worry that love ties God’s hands somehow, feeling that only a God who will do whatever it takes to bring about the good deserves their worship. Does amipotence boil down to thinkers like Oord and myself imposing our own priorities on God?

No. Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the full revelation of God. And Jesus’ life, as related in the gospels, clearly expresses the priority of love. Jesus’ power was direct by love, and Jesus explained his works of power as revelations of God’s love. Amipotence is the only description of divine love and power in relationship that is true to the revelation of God in Christ.

My favorite theologian Karl Barth took hundreds of thousands of words to work through what was, for him, the central tension at the heart of Christian doctrine: How can God be both absolutely free (the very definition of deity), and absolutely loyal to creation (the revelation of Christ at the heart of scripture)? Barth resolved this tension with this same idea of priority. God once and for all determined God’s own values—with creature-loyalty, or love, at the top of the list. All God’s actions, the entire drama of creation and redemption and completion, follow from that determination. (In process theology, we call this act of self-determination God’s primordial nature, and it has a lot of metaphysical implications.)

Barth’s method is an extended version of the intuition we’ve been exploring. Even God can’t have it all—so how do we know we can trust God to act based on love for us, rather than some hidden agenda? Because Jesus reveals that love is the first principle of God’s action, and that God will never trade off love for some other value. All else that God is, is subordinate to God’s love. Thanks be to God!

Bio: Donna Bowman is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Norbert O. Schedler Honors College, University of Central Arkansas. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophical theology from the University of Virginia, and learned process theology during her master’s work at the University of Georgia. In addition to theology, she writes about television, gaming, and knitting.

OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE

Donna Bowman begins her essay by examining the logical limits of omnipotence, noting that God cannot alter the past or know the future without undermining time itself. She acknowledges the trade-offs involved when considering God’s power. Like Donna, I believe God prioritizes love as the highest good when trade-offs arise. Jesus’ life demonstrates that God’s love is uncontrolling rather than controlling. While Donna embraces Karl Barth’s view that God freely chooses loyalty to creation, I argue that God’s loyalty is inherent to God’s nature, not a choice. Regardless, Donna and I agree on the central role love plays in God’s power.

For more on Oord’s view of God’s nature requiring God to love creation, see this article.

* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.