I Believe in God the Father Almighty
By Gijsbert van den Brink
By confessing God as the almighty Father, the Church encourages us to entrust ourselves to God in life and death, which we are ill-advised to do if God is only amipotent.
Two months ago my brother-in-law, 58 years old and a father of five, was diagnosed with pancreas cancer. That message came out of the blue. Until the time he went to his doctor because of abdominal pains he was doing well. But pancreas cancer is usually incurable, and as I write the decision has been taken to stop treatment as he doesn’t stand its side-effects. A committed Christian, my brother-in-law, is remarkably steadfast in his faith. “I hope and pray to recover,” he told us. “But if not I entrust myself in the hands of the Lord. He stands above everything and will take care of me, whatever happens.” I was moved by the purity of these words, and by the exemplary way in which he showed us what it means to be a Christian in such dire times. Although he believes God to be sovereign, he does not blame God for his fate; rather, God’s sovereignty is a source of solace to him. In fact, he does what millions of theistic believers throughout the centuries have done in such situations, commending themselves into the hands of God and trusting God to take care of them even beyond death.
If God is amipotent instead of almighty, these believers are all misguided, since God may be unable to help them.[1] If God is amipotent, whether God can be their eternal refuge depends on the cooperation of other creatures—creatures we actually don’t know much about. As Thomas Oord writes: “Whatever conditions we encounter after death are not decided by God singlehandedly. Our future in this life and the next rests, in part, upon (…) creaturely conditions.”[2] Oord suggests that this view is truly liberating, freeing people from traumas and troubles. Conversely, he holds that belief in God’s omnipotence is “both mistaken and destructive” (145). So, should I tell my brother-in-law that he should change his mind and revoke his trust in God, since his current belief in God’s sovereignty is destructive? One might retort that we should deal pastorally with the seriously ill—but perhaps it is not very pastoral to withhold important truths from them.
Let me be upfront: speaking from a Christian perspective, I think my brother-in-law is right and Oord is wrong. But before I point out why I think so, let me first state what worries me most in Oord’s discourse. That is the language. Oord deliberately uses forceful (not to say violent) language when evaluating the ideas of those with whom he disagrees—the language of death, killing, and burial. “It’s time to commit dictiocide: to kill ‘omnipotence’” (74). Omnipotence should be “dead to us,” and its “corpse” should be buried “for good” (115). Theists should instead turn to “legitimate” ways to understand God’s power (115). I find such language disturbing. History has shown that branding ideas as illegitimate and worthy to be killed can easily become the first step on a road that ends with branding the people who hold such ideas as illegitimate—and worse. Ironically, such language is even at cross-purposes with the view of God as “uncontrolling love” that Oord propagates. For there is no more efficient way to unilaterally control something than by killing it. But if God is supposed not to exercise unilateral control, why does Oord want us to do so with regard to ideas with which he disagrees? In a rare sentence in his book, Oord admits that his solution to the problem of evil is “tentative, speculative, and provisional” (105). Yet, that awareness does not lead him to show some generosity to those who prefer other solutions.
Now perhaps the ideas Oord castigates are destructive. That might explain his tone of voice. Indeed, Oord suggests that much. In particular, when God is worshiped as King of kings and Lord of lords (Oord uses, and in fact criticizes, this biblical expression), then absolute power is also ascribed to “earthly sovereigns,” who “should be allowed to break social and moral laws that apply to the rest of us” (87). I don’t know of any empirical research validating such a claim. But the logic of almightiness just as well works the other way around: if God is “King of kings,” all earthly sovereigns are accountable to God and none of them stands above God’s laws (e.g. as expressed in the Thora). So, there is no room for tyranny. Indeed, a few pages later Oord acknowledges that sometimes “worshiping God as King of kings and Lord of lords functions as a prophetic cry against ruling authorities and systems of oppression” (91; italics original). Thus, the case is undecided and yields no reason to “kill” the notion of God’s power that the church has upheld for almost twenty centuries.
Indeed, from their oldest creeds onwards the churches of East and West have consistently expressed their belief in “God the Father Almighty” (Nicene Creed, Apostles’ Creed, etc.).[3] It is remarkable that Oord never inquires why the undivided church did so. When as a Christian you get to doubt a certain classical doctrine, what is more natural than to carefully examine the backgrounds of that doctrine, asking what brought your forebears to endorse it? But instead of (in Popperian style) looking for strands of thought that might possibly falsify his novel idea, Oort follows an old-worn confirmationist approach, piling up evidence against omnipotence page after page, and occasionally twisting classical ways of thinking so that (because of their perceived “absurdity,” 149) they as well come to serve as evidence for his view. Let me briefly elaborate on this.
The church did not start to profess God as Almighty by accident. In fact, it was tempting for the first Christians to drop this confession. And we can easily see why. We are not the first generation that is confronted with the problem of evil (reading Oord, one easily gets that impression). In the first centuries, both Gnostics and followers of Marcion had opined that the true God could not be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth. For as a God of love (note the similarity with Oord’s argument), God could not be responsible for creation’s many evils. Their solution to the problem of evil was as simple as it was efficient: God did neither cause nor permit it. But the church said ‘no’ to this way out. It took the much more difficult path to confess the Father of Jesus Christ as the almighty Creator. Why so? Because it interpreted its faith as being in full continuity with the Old Testament (starting with Genesis 1). It was obvious to the church that the Old Testament conveyed a picture of God as unilaterally bringing the universe into existence and “singlehandedly” acting in it—clear signs of God’s almightiness.
To be sure, as Oord rightly points out, words in the Hebrew Bible traditionally translated as “almighty” have a slightly different connotation. But the idea is certainly there, in texts which Oord largely glosses over. “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?,” God asks in Gen. 18:14, announcing Isaac’s miraculous birth. (Remember that Oord’s answer must be: “Yes, many things are too wonderful for the Lord since He is always dependent on creaturely forces.”). In the New Testament, Jesus echoes these words when comforting his disciples: “… with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26).[4] I agree with Oord that when we try to unpack such statements philosophically, we encounter intricate conceptual problems.[5] That testifies to the fact that a context-free analysis of omnipotence is hardly feasible. But when we embed the concept in its biblical contexts, it implies (among other things) that God upholds everything and is able to realize all states of affairs, the realizing of which is compatible with God’s nature. Indeed, God has “the power that … enables him to make all things subject to himself” (Phil. 3:21, NRSV).
Does this imply the end of genuine (= non-compatibilist) human freedom? Oord thinks so: “The logic of omnipotence … regards creaturely activity as unreal” (135). But this is conceptually confused. Oord suggests that power is a kind of object which only one entity at a time can have. So, if God has all power, creatures have none. But power isn’t a zero-sum game. I can have the power to mow a lawn, and many other people can have the very same power. Thus, if God has all power (in the sense mentioned above), that does not mean humans have none. In fact, as many Christians believe, God may have limited the realm in which God uses power to create a planet where creaturely beings can freely act. Or God may only occasionally intervene in human affairs. In both cases, human activity can be completely real.
But if God has such power, shouldn’t God use it more frequently to prevent evils from happening? Indeed, Oord goes so far as to state that if God can heal but rarely does, “God must want AIDS as punishment” (102). But how does he know? Perhaps God not at all wants AIDS but does want a world in which lawlike regularity and contingency reign in such a way that human freedom, morality and love can evolve.[6] Perhaps the existence of pointless evil is not pointless, since if every evil had a point, we would no longer combat it but let it grow.[7] Or perhaps we can’t know why God allows evils. So-called skeptical theists have argued that there are sound reasons to think that we humans are not in a position to fathom the reasons God may have—just like dogs are not in a position to understand the reasons humans have. Labeling this as “playing the mystery card,” as Oord does multiple times, is preferring rhetoric to in-depth analysis.
If, as heirs of the Enlightenment, we think human autonomy is a core dogma that should never be infringed upon, we may follow Oord’s path.[8] If we want to unconditionally put our trust in God on the day that we get cancer, we better walk by the church’s confession that God is our almighty Father.
Bio: Gijsbert van den Brink is Professor of Theology & Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and an Extraordinary Researcher at the Faculty of Theology, North-West University, South Africa. He earned his PhD from Utrecht University. Among other publications, Van den Brink authored Almighty God (1993), Philosophy of Science for Theologians (2009) and Reformed Theology and Evolutionary Theory (2020).
OORD’S RESPONSE
Gijsbert van den Brink believes that the uncontrolling God of love cannot be trusted on matters of life and death. Fortunately, believing that God’s love is uncontrolling is compatible with saying God resurrects or in belief in life after death. I don’t address this issue in the book he read, so I understand why he would not know my arguments. His best criticism in this essay, however, is that my language against omnipotence is sometimes more violent than it ought to be. He rightly notes that I do not need to be so hyperbolic. Van den Brink concludes his essay by giving us a choice between human autonomy as our core doctrine or trust in God. I think this is a false dichotomy. We can affirm creaturely freedom and trust in God’s uncontrolling love. Doing so provides us hope both now and after death.
For more on Oord’s view of God and life after death, see this article.
[1]. On ‘amipotence,’ see Thomas Jay Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage Press, 2023), 119-49; Oord nowhere defines the concept, but points out that it is derived from Latin ami (love) and potens (influence) (120). His Latin is weak, though; in fact, there is no Latin word ami that means love, nor is ami a derivative of such a word (the correct Latin is amor).
[2]. Oord, Death, 114; page numbers between brackets refer to this book.
[3]. For what follows and more on this, see e.g. J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 1972), 64-5, 136-39, 372-74.
[4]. Oord doesn’t comment on the meaning of the second text. As to the Genesis-text, he argues that this is a question, not a declaration (29). But this is beside the point, since it is obviously a rhetorical question. See in the same vein Jer. 32:17, Job 42:2, Mark 14:36, Luke 1:37.
[5]. Cf. Oord, Death, Ch.2. I already came to this conclusion in Almighty God. A Study of the Doctrine of Divine Omnipotence (Kampen: Pharos, 1993), 159. This is why I prefer to speak of God’s almightiness rather than ‘omnipotence.’
[6]. Thus e.g. David Basinger, Divine Power and Process Theism (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1988), 64-68; it is strange that Oord counts this book among those that “address well the issues of omnipotence” (3n6), since it provides a generous but penetrating critique of his own view of omnipotence.
[7]. William Hasker, “The Necessity of Gratuitous Evil,” Faith and Philosophy 9 (1992), 23-44.
[8]. Even though Oord is known as an adherent of “open and relational” theology, the notion of divine influence he propagates in Death is rather that of process theology.