From Power to Love:
Reframing God Beyond the Childish Ego

By Joe Smith

Belief in omnipotence does little but feed the ego & reinforce us vs. them thinking.

I sat in the living room as close to the TV as possible. My family and I were dressed, head to toe, in the silver and blue of our beloved Dallas Cowboys. We watched as the clock ticked down on yet another Dallas Super Bowl victory. When it hit zero, we jumped up and yelled at the top of our lungs, celebrating what was the final Super Bowl win in the Cowboy’s greatest decade, the 90’s.

I looked at everyone and said, “I’ll be right back! Gotta rub this is some faces.” I jumped in my car and took off for my girlfriend’s youth group watch party.

Once I arrived, I just didn’t enter the room; I came in like Kramer to Jerry’s apartment. I flung open the doors and stood there as if surveying what was clearly my kingdom. Everyone looked up at the sudden noise and saw me in my glory. The chorus of boos began immediately.

I stood there, basking in their anger, soaking it up. I strutted around the room preening like a triumphant peacock. At that time, everyone hated the Cowboys. I mean, people still do, but not like they did when they were the most dominant team in sports. The negative energy swirling in that room did nothing but nourish my soul.

It felt good. Really good.

I made my way around the room, found my girlfriend and tried to give her a hug while acting all innocent, the look on my face showing that I just couldn’t understand why everyone was so upset. After teasing her with some lighthearted trash talk, I walked back to my car and drove home on cloud nine. Not only had the Dallas Cowboys won the Super bowl (again) but I got to do some serious bragging about it in a room packed with Cowboy haters.

I didn’t care that almost no one rooted for my team where I lived. If I’m honest, that was one of the best parts. It reinforced the notion that I was a member of a select few. I could walk around, with that silver star on my shirt or hat, and know that I was superior to everyone else.

I.

Was.

Better.

I look back and wonder why I responded in the childish way I did but I don’t have to dig far to know the truth. My big, fat ego.

That’s the simple truth. The Cowboys winning and even more so, the negative reactions to that winning, stroked my immature ego like nothing else. It’s like that itch right between the shoulder blades that is just out of reach. You know that feeling when someone finally scratches it? That’s what the winning and all the hate did for my ego.

It scratched an itch.

Of course, this story is an easy example of a childish ego. However, this scenario does play itself out repeatedly in my life and in the lives of many American Christians. Not so much with the Cowboys but the pattern is crystal clear in how we behave with doctrines and theological beliefs.

Western, American Christianity has decided that the thing that’s most important to our faith is not how we live it out, but rather what we think about God. Then, those things we think about God place us in theological groupings. We give those groupings team names that serve nothing but the ego and reinforce the cult behavior of us vs them.

Southern Baptists, Catholics, Church of Christ, Lutheran, Episcopal, Church of the Nazarene, Freewill Baptist, Independent Christian church, and on and on and on. Each team comes up with its own group identifiers and teaches their people that maintaining those group identifiers is what gives them entry into Heaven.

We’re in, you’re out.

We think the right things and you don’t.

And at the root of it all? Ego.

The first time I came across God Can’t and the idea of amipotence (all loving) was during a time of deep deconstruction. I was looking for a reason to continue pursuing the Christian faith and was hard pressed to find one. I don’t remember where I saw his book, but I do remember what I felt like reading it: disbelief to the point of anger.

“How dare you suggest that God is not all powerful! Who do you think you are to reject thousands of years of church tradition?” Memories of me belting out songs like “Our God is an Awesome God,” “How Great is Our God,” and “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” ran through my mind. All of them reminding me of just who God is. God is full of might and power. He lifts high the banner of righteousness while crushing his enemies under his feet.

I knew I didn’t actually believe that, not anymore at least. But coming face to face with the idea that God was not omnipotent but amipotent, hit something within me that I was not ready to confront.

My group identifier.

My ego.

I ended up reading God Can’t three times before I began to give myself permission to let go of these deeply imbedded notions of God. What I was experiencing was the letting go of my egocentric Christian group identifier. If God wasn’t this thing I had always been taught, then who was God and by extension, who was I?

The American church has so intertwined what we think about God with our individual and collective identities, that when I questioned God, I was essentially questioning myself. Worse yet, I was questioning the group. And to do so meant a dying of the ego or false self. If omnipotence dies the death of a thousand qualifications, as Oord argues in The Death of Omnipotence, then my ego must suffer the same fate.

Many of the great Christian mystics and thinkers have talked about the ego or false self. Thomas Merton, Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Henri Nouwen and Richard Rohr (to name a few) all talk about an undoing of the ego or false self as it is a significant obstacle to spiritual growth and must be transcended or transformed for a deeper union with God.

I argue that American Christianity’s biggest hurdle to letting go of omnipotence isn’t theological in nature but egocentric. If God is not all powerful, and is instead all loving, then that changes how I must interact with the world around me. If God’s nature is love and we see that love in the essential kenosis or self-emptying of Jesus (Philippians 2:7), then I no longer find my identity and group identifier in power (which let’s be honest feels good) but in the kenotic love of God seen in Christ (which doesn’t feel as good).

I have found that Oord’s arguments align closely with Richard Rohr’s work on kenosis. In Rohr’s books “The Universal Christ” and “Falling Upward” Rohr describes kenosis as the process of self-emptying so that one can be filled with God’s all loving presence. He sees this act of kenosis as not one of loss but a gaining of the true self. The idea being that the only loss involved is the letting go of ego, control and self-centered desires. According to Rohr, kenosis leads to personal transformation and spiritual liberation.

The acceptance of amipotence over omnipotence would be a radical reordering of the entire American, Evangelical church institution. How it operates would be fundamentally altered down to individual church boards. It would be a letting go of a power structure that has existed since the church was co-opted by Constantine’s empire in the 4th century.

I have breakfast, almost weekly, with a friend I’ve known for years. He is a MAGA Christian nationalist, even if he wouldn’t use those terms. We recently had a conversation about Trump’s infidelity and the church’s silence towards it. We talked about how the Christian right is trying to implement laws and blatantly order power around a very narrow view of Scripture. And despite my attempts to show him the demonstrable harm being caused by these extremist policies, he couldn’t or wouldn’t hear it. His response was based on the group identity of power. That power, feeding the group ego, must be maintained and wielded to accomplish God’s will on earth. Consequences be damned.

His identity is so intertwined with the idea of an omnipotent God that he refuses to accept anything outside that identifier. I believe my MAGA friend is a snapshot of the larger attitude of the Evangelical church. Power, based on omnipotence, has so long been engrained in its identity, theology and teaching that to empty itself of that power would be seen as abandoning God and abdicating its influence on the world.

The American church system will never allow this. It exists to perpetuate itself and to do that it must always have an enemy; it needs something to defend against. For that to happen it must have a God of power and might. It must have a God that scratches the itch between our shoulder blades.

I believe what we are experiencing, due in part to the teaching of omnipotence, is not just a splitting of denominations. Rather, we are seeing the splitting of the religion into two separate faith systems. One will continue to use force and domination as a way to bring about “God’s will” and one will follow the self-kenotic path of Jesus.

As Oord says in God Can’t, “To say God is amipotent is to say that God’s power is power of uncontrolling love, a love that works through, with, and in creation without coercion.” If God is omnipotent, then the political & social violence we are experiencing are just fruit of that tree. Because an omnipotent God crushes His enemies and accomplishes His will through subjugation, and we better make sure we believe the right things so we can be on the right team. However, if God is amipotent (which I support) then it’s time we do the inner work of letting go, of observing the ego.

As I matured, I realized how silly it was to find my identity in a team. Whether my team wins or loses has no bearing on my actual life. Winning changes nothing, it only makes me feel, rather it makes my ego feel like it’s winning. It was a childish way of seeing the world.

Whether I am gloating about my team winning or my God being better than yours, it’s all the same. The stakes are much higher and the consequences much larger, but it is essentially the same immature, unevolved ego. It is time for us to move past such childish ways of seeing and behaving. As the Apostle Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 13:11 “When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.”

Bio: Joe Smith and his wife Tori have been in ministry for over two decades and have two children, Jenna & Brock. They have lived in Gainesville for 12 years & on staff at Shift for 9. Joe is also the Florida regional hub leader for the post-evangelical collective.

OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE

Joe Smith’s essay on how belief in omnipotence feeds the ego is a powerful and timely argument. His opening illustration about the Dallas Cowboys cleverly highlights the flaw in thinking that whatever happens must be God’s will. If God is omnipotent, then all events—good or bad—must be either caused or permitted by God. I also appreciated Joe’s honesty about his initial reaction to God Can’t. Like many, he first resisted the ideas but later saw their deep value. Joe’s application of amipotence to real-world issues is insightful, and I fully agree: our identity should rest in God’s uncontrolling love.

For more on Oord’s view on what it means to say God can’t do some things, see this article.

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