God Can’t Because God Cares

By Eric Sentell

Life reveals either an omnipotent God who selectively loves or an amipotent God.

At age 25, my partner began having “episodes.” Her neck would flush crimson, her heart would pound, and then she would vomit and pass out. Her friends once found her unconscious in a restaurant’s bathroom stall. They called me, and I had to help her walk out of the building. We went home, changed her clothes, and visited the emergency room yet again, keen to ensure she wasn’t dying but also despairing of answers. Now we know each episode was a bout of anaphylactic shock triggered by an auto-immune disease called mast cell syndrome. Her mast cells had begun reacting to certain foods and drinks as life-threatening poisons.

The shocks began occurring closer together until they became weekly events. She experienced a couple dozen, any of which could have killed her. Her doctors methodically, maddeningly, marked items off their list of possible causes one at a time until finally delivering a misdiagnosis: carcinoid syndrome. Her episodes, we were told, resulted from the secretions of a cancerous tumor on her liver. Scans hadn’t revealed a tumor, but the symptoms fit. She began receiving excruciating injections of medicine monthly to neutralize the secretions and prevent more anaphylactic shocks.

A couple months later, we moved near her parents in southeastern Missouri. We signed up for AirEvac in case she needed to get to Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, two hours north, as fast as possible. Then, when she needed AirEvac one night, the pilot refused to fly due to the weather. Outside our home, the sky was serene. Law required the local ambulance to take her to the nearest hospital, in which we had zero confidence. I drove her to Barnes myself, raging at the impotence of God. I had prayed for the shock to stop. I had prayed for guidance in caring for her.

At 4:00 a.m., she slept in a hospital bed while I sat next to her. I watched a news report about an AirEvac helicopter crashing in a storm over southern Illinois, killing the pilots and patient. I perceived providence. What had seemed like God’s impotence had been God’s protection—an answer to a prayer that I didn’t know to pray. And the doctor on call happened to be her oncologist. He kept her in the hospital for four days and tried new medicines to improve her quality of life. Another answered prayer that I hadn’t prayed!

But her mast cell syndrome persisted. Yes, the injections mitigated the worst symptoms. Yes, the new medication regimen improved her life. In fact, she changed her diet a few years later and stopped needing the painful injections. But if God could keep us out of the air that night, if God could arrange for her oncologist to be on call, then why could God not simply stop her heart palpitations, nausea, and trembling while her mother and I debated how to get her to Barnes? Why did God not tell us through the Holy Spirit to start driving instead of wasting hours? Why did God seem content with the slower, haphazard process of working through flawed humans, the quirkiness of medicinal chemicals, and the inefficiencies of American healthcare? To put it another way, why was God’s power to help people who love and follow Him so limited?

When lay Christians (and many clergy) describe God as omnipotent, they mean that God can do absolutely anything and everything. He is not limited or constrained. Yet the evidence of our lived experience screams otherwise. We can look back on chains-of-events and ascribe hidden purpose to them, as I perceived providence in our AirEvac pilot’s wisdom. We can interpret reasons for events if we squint at them, such as presuming God’s plan in my partner’s oncologist being on call. But if we’re honest, what we call “God’s plan” after the fact may have had little to do with God. And if we attach “God’s plan” to unfortunate situations that worked out later, then we claim that God, on some level, wanted bad things to happen. By this logic, an omnipotent God chooses some unloving means to achieve loving ends. This could be true only if God’s abilities and options were constrained or if God were less than fully loving—if God’s power were limited or if God selectively exercises unlimited power.

Even the most fortuitous sequence of events does not justify why an omnipotent God would do it that way. Many faithful people prayed for my partner’s healing, and they didn’t mean, “Use a misdiagnosis, painful unnecessary injections, and an evolving medicine regimen over half a decade to help her slowly manage the disease better.” Their desire for a full, immediate healing would make them more loving than the omnipotent God who chose a partial, protracted healing. Perhaps God wanted to strengthen us somehow, but a loving, all-powerful God ought to be capable of educating and improving us through any means. Surely the omnipotent creator of the multiverse can get through to stubborn humans without needing pain, suffering, and genuine evil. Or He could keep all the AirEvac pilots from making bad decisions. If God respects human free will too much to hijack a pilot, then clear skies should be doable. Many Christians insist on God’s omnipotence because they assume only a deity of utmost power merits worship, but how can we worship a God of unlimited power who selectively exercises that power for our well-being?

Appealing to mystery—claiming that God in His utmost intelligence must grasp variables I cannot—also fails to answer the problem of evil. Jesus taught that God is at least as loving us (Matt. 7: 9-11), and at minimum, I would have told me to start driving to Barnes. I would stop famines, pandemics, wars, murders, and rapes. I would stop Satan and demons. If someone’s safety compromised my Divine Plan, then I would restore or change my plan. If God can do anything, then God should do anything to stop evil and promote well-being. Love is a verb. If God could control events for us but seldom does—as our experience shows—then God must not care much about His creation.

Experience suggests that either God’s power or God’s love must be limited. If we insist God can do anything, then we must accept that sometimes God callously chooses to watch from the sidelines. And we cannot analogize God to a parent letting children fail, suffer consequences, and learn, for we are talking about evil like the Holocaust, torture, fatal birth defects, childhood leukemia, and one AirEvac helicopter crashing while another stays safe.

It is profound, then, that “the death of omnipotence” leads to “the birth of amipotence.” Killing omnipotence does not only make better sense of our lived experience; it also restores and preserves a God of utmost love. God can’t do anything, Dr. Oord argues, precisely because God cares and loves. God’s very nature is love, meaning God cannot not love. Love is not controlling. Therefore, God is not controlling. On what grounds can we assert that God is love? Scripture proclaims it (1 John 4:16). Jesus demonstrated it (John 3:16). And we encounter God’s love through our experience of the Holy Spirit, creation, moral intuitions, and relationships. If God is love, then permitting, predestining, or using misfortune is never God’s will.

Yet we experience and observe plenty of misfortune as well as haphazard human efforts toward promoting overall well-being—in other words, a clear lack of divine control. The natural world, with all its tumults, also shows a deficit of divine control. Either God’s love or God’s power must be limited, or else we wouldn’t experience and observe genuine evil, pointless pain, sorrowful suffering, and well-meaning mistakes with terrible consequences. If God’s power is unlimited, then God appears to be selective in acting for our well-being. But re-conceiving God as “amipotent” means that God does not act selectively for our flourishing. The “death of omnipotence” explains our lived experience as individuals and as a species in a way that enables belief in a God of love.

An amipotent God who cannot control is both all-loving and maximally powerful. We tend to conceive of “power” as imposing one’s will on others, as control, yet imposing one’s will always fails in the long run. Children rebel against dictatorial parents. People resist authoritarian leaders and systems. God’s eschatological victory might be achieved through overpowering, but at what cost to human dignity and the cosmos. Far greater than imposing one’s will on others, amipotence changes the wills of others. Amipotence persuades creation to align with the creator.

One could counter that God can, and does, sometimes control to achieve a loving purpose. When I was 8 years old, two nurses restrained me to administer vaccinations. They controlled me, but they also kept me healthy. I don’t recall if they tried reason or bribery, but if they resorted to force, I’m sure they felt limited in their ability to get compliance. Likewise, a (sometimes) controlling God would not be as omnipotent as some think. He would control due to a lack of other options. And if God may resort to control, then why does God allow dictators to start wars and commit genocides? Experience strongly suggests that 1) God never controls, 2) callously chooses when to control, or 3) can control only so much.

Miracles may also seem like evidence of God controlling to achieve a loving purpose. Experience shows that miracles happen, but not always. An omnipotent God should be able to deliver every miracle that would behoove us, which would be many more miracles than we witness. A God who imposes His will should keep the other AirEvac helicopter on the ground. Or did God not care as much about those pilots and their patient? Were they worse sinners? Jesus would say no (Luke 13:1-5). The selectivity of miracles further supports Oord’s critique of omnipotence and his proposal of amipotence. Selective exercise of omnipotence is selective love. Conversely, a non-controlling, non-coercive God cares equally about everyone and wants to deliver every beneficial miracle, but the very nature of His power is to influence, not dictate.

God can’t force mast cells to knock it off, because Love/God does not force, coerce, or control any part of creation. God can influence cells, bacteria, and viruses, but even microscopic life can behave stubbornly. God can guide medical professionals, but God cannot guarantee that finite, flawed, embodied humans will always understand the Spirit. God can incline AirEvac pilots toward caution, but He can’t control their minds. He can’t stop a storm, suspend gravity during a plane crash, or conjure steel plates out of thin air to protect children during a school shooting. If God could do anything, then God would do anything. The fact that God doesn’t do some things in our lives reveals that God can’t do some things. And if God is not omnipotent, is not callously choosing when to exercise power for our well-being, then God is love and worth following.

Bio: Eric Sentell writes the Substack newsletter, “Saving Faith,” and publishes regularly in “The Backyard Church” on Medium.com. He teaches writing at Southeast Missouri State University and attends Trinity United Methodist in Piedmont, Missouri, with his wife and son.

OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE

Eric Sentell rightly sees the connection between God’s love and power as asymmetrical, illustrating this through stories from his own life. The God who can do anything, he notes, is a God whose love becomes limited or inconsistent. Appeals to mystery offer little comfort. Our experience suggests that either God is not all-powerful or God is not all-loving. Sentell also addresses the challenging question of miracles, showing how traditional views struggle to make sense of them. Yet the uncontrolling love perspective embraces miracles without contradiction, allowing divine action to work persuasively rather than coercively in harmony with genuine freedom.

For more on Oord’s view of miracles, see this article.

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