It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)

By James Travis Young

“God’s love is more profound than anything else in the universe because it exists without absolute power.”

My “Bible-based” Christian upbringing led me to believe that God’s power is omnipotent.

As a youth, I never even thought about critically examining scriptures that declared the Lord was almighty. Not only did I take for granted the validity of popular English translations, but descriptions of God as “almighty,” “all powerful,” or “omnipotent” spilled over into the songs I sang while worshiping, my prayers, and even my hopes and expectations in life. Meanwhile, I came to assimilate a kind of magical thinking that selectively harmonized my unqualified faith with what I understood about science and the physical world I could see, feel, and hear.

Over the years, I rationally inferred that the scientific concept of entropy is a cosmic expression of God’s unlimited creative power. Classically, entropy is a principle central to the second law of thermodynamics proposing that you and I live in a reality characterized by inherent randomness and uncertainty, and that our disordered universe is observably growing and expanding. I believed that because the nature of entropy was seemingly limitless, it validated God’s omnipotence.

This idea was also the only way I could attempt to reconcile a God who is all powerful with the existence of evil in our world, not to mention the pain we all witness and experience daily. Actions have consequences, so bad choices produce bad results ad infinitum. This false syllogism wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was the best I could fathom at the time.

The problem was that I secretly thought and felt that, as a human ambassador of God’s unlimited power, I should be making a positive difference in the world within the reach of my arms. But since that wasn’t happening, I eventually came to believe I must have somehow fallen terribly short.

I began to suspect that, in a universe without limits, my personal failure to love others as God loves me results in evil abounding even more in the hearts and lives of those I am in relationship with. So, one day, I just decided that it’s all my fault—and yours too, by the way. I made all creation unwitting victims of unlimited but unfulfilled God-given potential.

Though I believed (and still believe) heartily in free will, I simply accepted that if God is all-powerful, and we, as humans, are meant to be God’s Spirit-filled agents, then shouldn’t we as the Church bear some accountability for how our mistakes and failures have contributed to the fallen state of our world?

Of course, that image is a reflection in a dark mirror. If evil seems to prevail on a daily basis in spite of God possessing unlimited power, I reasoned that, as the Church, we must also acknowledge a historical responsibility for our transgressions.

This includes but isn’t limited to acts like burning witches, torturing heretics, and dismembering the living bodies of Muslims during the Crusades. It is true that the Church has imprisoned scientists, scholars, and theologians over the centuries, murdered thousands of innocents during the Troubles in Ireland, its priests and pastors and teachers and counselors still even today sexually abuse children, and faith-profiteers like televangelists and even some pastors steal from the poor, sick, and elderly while wearing designer footwear and pleading for offerings inside lavish sanctuaries.

I even believed that we must also count as our collective failure the hundreds of thousands of Christians who for generations sold, enslaved, and lynched people of color, along with a number of their racist descendants who today claim to be believers yet still systemically disenfranchise entire communities. I was convinced we failed to stop the terrorists who bomb abortion clinics, not to mention the cowards who stubbornly protect sex predators, and all the millions of other evil people who commit unspeakable acts in the all-powerful name of God.

And who else do we have to blame but ourselves when almost certainly whatever church you claim probably shares on paper more institutional DNA with Westboro Baptist Church than Jesus of Nazareth? Especially when that exact difference, even under the best of circumstances, amounts to legalistic judgment versus unconditional love. Didn’t Christ himself teach that the “goats” who failed to tangibly love others were cursed to endure eternal punishment?

Surely, you too have heard similar teachings. In my case, such ideas were reinforced by sermons, a lifetime of reading poor or inadequate English biblical translations, lectures at denominationally-funded academically biased institutions of higher learning, and a toxic institutional western Christendom that still today tends to assign guilt in greater measure rather than accept, affirm, and love others it does not understand.

But I felt like I was missing something big…and I was.

Ultimately, all the blame provoked a useful question: How can anything responsible for so much pain and suffering both historically and in this present darkness represent an all-powerful God?

As I renewed my quest to live a life that reflected God’s love, I determined that anything I had thought or believed that was inconsistent with such love was no longer essential. If the church (or anyone for that matter) acts in ways that marginalize the love of Christ, then such constraints must somehow reflect universal limitations. And if there are limits to our vast, entropic universe, then could God’s power have limits?

This very personal question was heralded simultaneously by works authored by theologian Thomas Jay Oord proposing similar ideas. His books The Uncontrolling Love of God, God Can’t, and The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence have collectively dismantled any notion that God’s power could be omnipotent and recharacterized divine love in a context that accounts for the obvious limitations of our cosmic existence.

Guided by my friend Tom’s scholarship, scriptures that originally seemed to establish a narrative of unlimited divine power began to challenge me to rethink my assumptions about God’s powers.

For example, English translations which textually state in no uncertain terms God’s role as creator of the entire cosmos, like Colossians 1:16-17, Revelation 4:11, and John 1:3, take on a more nuanced meaning when understood as fragments within a framework of a larger Christological presentation harmonizing Christ’s sovereignty within Hellenistic thought. This broader context suggests that God’s creative power is not solely about exerting control or demonstrating omnipotence, but about sustaining, ordering, and being actively involved in the ongoing existence of the universe.

Using similar logic, Thomas Aquinas concluded that God is ipsum esse subsistens—the act of being itself, uncreated and the sustaining cause of all existence. But if God is uncreated, then how could God have created everything?

Questions such as these led me to become uncomfortable with the term παντοκράτωρ (pantokrator), an icon in Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic depictions of Christ, often translated into English bibles as “omnipotent” or “almighty.” What I did not expect to discover was that pantokrator is a verb made up by translators of the Septuagint to define the Hebrew expression El Shaddai. While there is almost no consensus for what Shaddai could mean scripturally, the most balanced interpretations involve determiners like “sufficient,” “plenty,” or “enough,” none of which come close to traditional definitions of omnipotence, or even “strong ruler of everything” (my own Greek translation of pantokrator).

So, if the Bible doesn’t explicitly describe God as omnipotent, did biblical authors even believe that? Could there be biblical passages which suggest divine limitations?

Indeed, there are many scriptures that present a universe with clear boundaries designed by God with limits. Passages like Job 38:4-7, Proverbs 8:27-29, Isaiah 40:12, Jeremiah 51:15, Psalm 147:4-5, and Amos 9:6 suggest a creation that is finite, restrained within structural boundaries. Likewise, verses like Hebrews 1:10-12, Isaiah 51:6, Psalm 104:5-9, and Revelation 21:1 indicate that the universe, though vast, is neither infinite nor eternal, but instead subject to decay and eventual destruction. Even scriptures such as Isaiah 45:12, Psalm 104:2-3, Job 26:7, and Isaiah 40:22 that affirm God’s sovereignty over creation also acknowledge the limitations of our existence.

If scripture presents a narrative limiting our universe, is that compatible with what science indicates about our existence? And what could this suggest about the nature and purpose of God’s power?

Einstein’s theory of general relativity presents the universe as a space-time continuum with measurable constraints such as the speed of light, which means there are all sorts of boundaries to our existence. For example, if divine, omnipotent power truly existed, could we not observe God acting in ways that defy or go beyond cause and effect? If Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle demonstrates that the universe at its most basic subatomic level is random and uncertain, then how could God possess powers to universally control or predict creation?

Plus, there is growing scientific consensus that the very fabric of space and time will eventually cease to exist. Theories like the Big Slurp, Big Crunch, and Big Chill suggest that the universe could either fall abruptly into an erratic state of low energy, gravity could eventually overcome and reverse cosmic expansion, or at some point everything will just lose all its energy and stop.

Why would a God with unlimited power create a fundamentally unstable universe susceptible to uncontrollable quantum forces, where all matter could either be obliterated at the speed of light, face catastrophic collapse, or fall into a terminal state of thermodynamic decay?

What would it mean if God is a force that is not omnipotent in the traditional sense, but rather that God’s power is limited by the physical laws of the universe itself? Could not God’s love be even more profound if it exists without absolute control over the material conditions of the universe?

Oord calls the power of God’s love amipotence: maximal divine power in the service of love. What if our future has not yet been written? And instead of blaming ourselves, what should it mean to you and me if the endings we fear are more accurately divine limitations? What if the failures of the institutional church signal an ending of religion constrained by all that is without love?

I have learned that I am not afraid of the end, and to live in the power of God’s love is to accept and give love without condition, without guilt—and if necessary, without the church. My entire life was spent tending a lamp of discipleship, only I was fueling a light powered by artificial means, institutional priorities like growth, longevity, and strength. But these cheap imitations compared to amipotent love are shiny baubles, cold lenses refracting sparks without flame.

In an existence and a universe and a world and a life that will all end, love is a treasure greater than time or space. Love means everything because it’s all we really have left.

Bio: James Travis Young is an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene and has served for decades in several active ministry roles. Travis is a columnist for Patheos at “Sacred Outcasts,” and his writing has been featured in several books and publications. He and his wife Mandie are making Christlike disciples in Galveston, Texas, USA.

OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE

James Travis Young explores the relationship between belief in an omnipotent God and the kind of magical thinking he once embraced. With honesty and insight, he wrestles with key questions about free will, divine power, blame, and sin. Over time, he concludes that viewing God as all-powerful creates serious theological and moral problems. Letting go of that view allows him to read scripture with fresh eyes and to reconsider cosmology in a new, relational light. This transformation also reshapes his ethical grounding, rooting morality not in fear of control but in freedom, compassion, and the creative power of love.

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

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