God’s Power and the Therapy Room
By Steven A. Luff
From a cellular perspective, the understanding of God’s power as being non-omnipotent promotes emotional and social wellness.
I am a psychotherapist. My job, in part, is to help my clients better understand the biological, psychological, and social circumstances in which they have found themselves and then, within that context, help them systematically reorient their lives, set goals, and gain more resiliency as they work toward a better future. My focus is more bottom-up than top-down. That said, how do I navigate such issues as the Unknown, or, as one may refer to the Unknown, God?
Since my job requires that I orient myself around my clients and, if possible, help them live more purposeful, resilient lives, my goal is to help them build conceptions of the Unknown that help support that. Where they land is where they land. In that case, what is an adaptive (meaning “growth-promoting”) understanding of God?
I do not have a lot of space here to get too far into this rather boundless topic, so I need to narrow my parameters. Since this book offers responses to Dr. Oord’s theological and philosophical account of omnipotence, it seems appropriate to focus my attention on whether omnipotence, specifically, is an adaptive conception of God’s power and whether alternative conceptions of this aspect of God—like amipotence, as coined by Dr. Oord—is called for. To do so, I first need to introduce the fundamental biological reality of all living organisms—that of hormesis—and then state unequivocally from this perspective that an omnipotent conception of God’s power is maladaptive (not promoting health and wellbeing) and that an alternative conception of God’s power—amipotence, for instance—meets the needs of humanity more accurately and for three important reasons: a non-omnipotent understanding of God’s power promotes personal responsibility, trust, and connection, all essential elements of human flourishing.
Hormesis is the word given to the process in which all cells engage in which measured exposure to higher levels of stress induce cells to gain increased strength and resilience, even to stresses not related to the initial stress.[1] In simpler terms, a cell recognizes its viability and need based on its exposure to resistance. For example, a muscle cell maintains its normal lifespan, and may even extend it, by virtue of mild exposure to the oxidative stress brought on by its organism’s moderate exercise. The converse of hormesis is “allostatic load.” This is when a cell experiences more oxidative stress than it can adapt to and either has its lifespan shortened or dies. This is what happens to muscle cells when an organism experiences prolonged exposure to survival circumstances.[2]
Since all organisms—and yes, that includes humans—are made up of cells, this hormetic process can be witnessed at more macro levels than cellular, such as the building of muscle mass through weightlifting, cardiovascular fitness through running, or the ability to fight off viruses due to past exposure to viruses or immunization.[3] The take home here is that if an organism is to gain increased strength, resilience, and viability—another word for this can be growth—this requires the organism to interact with its environment at a threshold that maintains systematic and measured hormesis without dipping into allostatic load.
This process is no different for our emotions. Our emotional circuits are cellular, just like with our muscular or immune systems, but instead of being composed of muscle or white blood cells, they are composed of neurons. This means that the same hormetic process that governs other cellular systems governs our emotional systems too. Continued exposure to the normal interplay and dynamics of relationships and our physical environments helps our emotional circuits gain increased tolerance for uncertainty, thus allowing us the opportunity to be more expansive in our lives (pushing into the Unknown). However, when the neurons in our emotional circuits experience allosatic load due to overwhelm (read: trauma), two main adaptations occur: either the neuronal connections become hyper-sensitized, resulting in anxiety or fear, or get bypassed, resulting in depression or dissociation.[4]
Given this rather narrow description of our emotional experience it is clear how many of our emotional problems manifest. Our emotional circuits, which are housed in the mid-brain, largely develop within the first few years of life.[5] This means that the environment to which our emotional circuits were originally adapted are most assuredly not the environment in which we find ourselves at age twenty, twenty-five, forty, or fifty, yet we often continue to respond to those environments as if they were the same.[6] And that is maladaptive, unless we choose to make incremental (hormetic) changes to what we are exposed to and how we experience it until we become more adapted to, and resilient within, our existing environments. To do so requires a willingness to push into uncertainty, to push into the Unknown.
Hopefully, it is clear now how important our cognitive (neocortical) understanding of the Unknown—God—is. If God is omnipotent—meaning “all powerful”—then we can abdicate personal responsibility in terms of our need to do “the work,” retraumatize our emotional circuits through fear, and/or isolate ourselves from the very thing which ultimately heals traumatized neurons: people and community.
Gaining emotional resilience is no different from gaining physical resilience; in fact, in both cases, we are talking about cells adapting to resistance to gain strength, in the former case neurons and in the later muscle cells. With gaining muscular strength it would be counterproductive to believe that God is causing our suffering when we lift weights or that the Devil, for instance, is at work in the bench press. Or, perhaps even more counterproductive, is the belief that we do not need to go to the gym at all to get stronger as God will miraculously bless us with muscles. What we are talking about here is personal responsibility and ownership of the work that is required for abundant and expansive living. In the case of our emotional life, “fitness” is gained by the incremental reexperiencing of our relationships and environments to feel them differently. Belief in an omnipotent God compromises our ability to sit in this hormetic process regardless of the discomfort.
This doesn’t mean that we are alone, at least metaphysically, as we experience this discomfort. As Thomas Jay Oord points out in his book The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence, there are theological ways of viewing a God who is not omnipotent but is still with us as we experience the resilience-promoting effects of existence. I don’t know where God falls on the continuum between omnipotent and “amipotent,” but I will say that personal responsibly is key to living an abundant life, and while God is not punishing us nor can lift the burdens of life miraculously, knowing that God is somehow in the hormetic process may just give us the comfort and support needed as we do the work required to grow. God understands our suffering and is with us.
This notion of a God who is not punishing us by virtue of the work required of the hormetic process, nor lifting its burden while also granting its benefits, ties in with an understanding of God that is about trust rather than fear. If we can trust existence, if we believe that what we experience can grow us and expand our potential, we are more likely to push into the work. Furthermore, since fear is one of the main emotional adaptations that a recovering person is working on healing (fear was originally adaptive, but became maladaptive later), reexperiencing that emotion through conceptions of a God who is uncertain in intention and capricious in treatment may only be retraumatizing the very emotional circuits that need healing. In a way, this understanding of an omnipotent God is no different from that of a perpetrator who is “helping” his victim get better from the very abuse the perpetrator is inflicting.
While it may be a bit of a simplification to say that belief in an omnipotent God compromises the constitution of the very source of emotional healing—that of safe and trusting community—it is not too far off the mark. When humans begin to ascribe definitive understandings to the Unknown—including omnipotence—or at least adhere to theologies that fail to consider new information about existence, this leads to factions, rifts, and even that which allows for biological adaptations that are only adaptive (useful) for conflict, like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). After all, historically, how many conflicts, both big and small, had theological differences as their origins?
If we as a human race work toward conceptions of the Unknown that are less about absolutes and more about uncertainty and complexity, this allows for dialogue between people of varying and disparate belief systems and perspectives. Dialogue works toward connection and connection can lead to healing…if one is open to it. Whether “amipotent,” or some of the other conceptions for a non-omnipotent God mentioned by Dr. Oord in Death of Omnipotence, are adopted by various religious or even non-religious communities, trust and openness will follow. And so too will the potential for the hormetic healing of our global-collective maladapted emotional circuits.
Bio: Steven A. Luff, M.DIV., M.A. is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in the state of California. He works with individuals and couples mainly around addiction and particularly related to sexual behavior and religious faith. He runs the Faith & Sex Center in Los Angeles and is the author of Faith & Sex: Toward a Better Understanding of Recovery, Being, Relationship, and God.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Stephen Luff applies amipotence to his therapeutic practice, showing how a non-omnipotent God fosters trust, connection, and responsibility—all essential for human flourishing. He emphasizes how love relates to the integration of our emotions and bodily responses. A God who controls all would ultimately bear responsibility for trauma, undermining the possibility of emotional healing. Stephen’s central point is that belief in an all-powerful God can weaken our trust in the healing process. But trusting a loving, uncontrolling God offers a powerful framework for recovery and renewal, especially in rewiring maladaptive emotional circuits shaped by pain and past wounds.
For more on Oord’s view of God and therapy, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1]. Michael Breitenbach, Elisabeth Kapferer, and Clemens Sedmak, Stress and Poverty: A Cross-Disciplinary Investigation of Stress in Cells, Individuals, and Society (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2021), 228.
[2]. Bobba-Alves N, Sturm G, Lin J, Ware SA, Karan KR, Monzel AS, Bris C, Procaccio V, Lenaers G, Higgins-Chen A, Levine M, Horvath S, Santhanam BS, Kaufman BA, Hirano M, Epel E, Picard M., “Cellular Allostatic Load Is Linked to Increased Energy Expenditure and Accelerated Biological Aging,” Psychoneuroendocrinology, Sept. (2023).
[3]. Breitenbach, Kapferer, and Sedmak, Stress and Poverty, 202.
[4]. Sandra L. Paulsen, When There Are No Words: Repairing Early Trauma and Neglect from the Attachment Period with EMDR Therapy (Brainbridge Island, WA: Brainbridge Institute for Integrative Psychology).
[5]. Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, Third Edition (New York: The Guilford Press, 2020), 38-42.
[6]. Elaine Miller-Karas, Building Resilience to Trauma: The Trauma and Community Resiliency Models (New York: Routledge, 215), 22.