Jewish Insights on God’s Power and Love
By John C. Merkle
Love is the true power of God and the principal divine attribute we are meant to imitate.
For forty-eight years I had the privilege and pleasure of teaching theology to college students. Like most college theology professors, I taught a wide variety of courses. In all those courses, the students and I explored diverse Christian and Jewish theological perspectives, and in some courses we also explored perspectives found in other religious traditions.
Throughout my teaching career, students and I together grappled with myriad questions and multiple theological responses to them. Of all the issues we studied, it was clear to me that the issue of divine omnipotence was one of the most intriguing to a majority of the students. And, from what students shared, it was evident that, of all the ideas explored, the idea that God does not have to be omnipotent in order to be God was one of the most widely appreciated.
Over the years, students repeatedly told me that it was difficult or even impossible for them to believe that God was both all-loving and all-powerful. If the all-loving God was also all-powerful, they wondered why there would be so much evil and horrific suffering in the world. Clearly, an omnipotent God could prevent this evil and suffering. Choosing not to prevent it had to mean that this God was lacking love.
Fortunately, from many of the authors I assigned, students learned that arguments for divine omnipotence die what Thomas Jay Oord calls a “death by a thousand qualifications.” But they also learned that this does not mean faith in God has to die. To the contrary, “the death of omnipotence” in the minds of these students gave them a new lease on faith in the God of love. I am grateful that the authors I assigned helped my students think critically and creatively about the meaning of God, including about which attributes commonly attributed to God should be considered truly godly, and which should not.
I began teaching college when Thomas Jay Oord was ten years old and most of his explicitly theological writings weren’t published until I was nearing the end of my teaching career. In any case, I didn’t discover his work while I was still teaching. If I had, I definitely would have assigned writings of his, both because they are full of profound theological insights and are thoroughly accessible to college students. His books The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence (2015) and God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love After Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils (2019) would have been ideal choices for many of my courses.
Now, after having offered my last college course, there is Oord’s most sustained treatment of omnipotence in The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence (2023). As in previous writings of his, in this book, as the title suggests, Oord is concerned primarily with affirming the power of divine love. His arguments against the idea of God as all-powerful go hand-in-hand with his case for God as all-loving.
My students didn’t have the benefit of reading works by Thomas Jay Oord. But they did read works by other authors who, like him, emphasized the love of God while challenging the idea of divine omnipotence. Among the authors my students found most helpful on this and other issues are Christian theologians Douglas John Hall, Elizabeth A. Johnson, and Dorothee Soelle and Jewish philosophers/theologians Abraham Joshua Heschel, Hans Jonas, and Melissa Raphael. As most readers of this volume are likely more familiar with Christian authors than with Jewish ones, I’d like to share something of the views on our topic by the Jewish authors I just cited.
Fully aware that many Jewish philosophers and theologians, like their Christian and Muslim counterparts, have regarded omnipotence as an essential attribute of God, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), one of the foremost religious thinkers of the twentieth century, boldly claimed that “the idea of divine omnipotence…is a non-Jewish idea.”[1] His point was that in the Jewish Bible and rabbinic literature, as also in the Jewish mystical tradition, God is portrayed as the source of all power, but neither as the only power there is nor as an all-controlling power.
Heschel’s rejection of divine omnipotence is rooted in his interpretation of the prophets of Israel as emphasizing the pathos of God rather than the power of God. He claims that in the vision of the prophets “the grandeur and majesty of God do not come to expression in the display of ultimate sovereignty and power, but rather in rendering righteousness and mercy.”[2] But God needs human cooperation for this divine righteousness and mercy to be rendered in this world. Identifying with God’s pathos, the prophets exemplified and championed this human cooperation, not relying on some imagined divine omnipotence but laboring with God in the divine-human cause of redemption. Such cooperation with God is incumbent upon us as well. We too are called to pursue the struggle “to overcome the powers of evil” through the “power of love.”[3]
Heschel calls attention to the traditional rabbinic teaching that the four-lettered name of God, Y-H-W-H, expresses both the oneness of God and the divine attribute of love. And, created in God’s image, we are meant to walk in the ways of God’s love: “Beyond all mystery is the mercy of God. It is a love, a mercy that transcends the world, its value and merit. To live by such a love, to reflect it…is the test of religious existence.”[4]
Grounded in his interpretation of the biblical prophets, Heschel’s theology of divine pathos is also related to the medieval Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, particularly as it was advanced through a popular creation myth by the sixteenth-century kabbalist Isaac Luria Ashkenazi (1534-1572). According to Luria’s mystical vision, the infinite God, having been the only reality, underwent a voluntary “contraction” (tzimtzum) or self-limitation in order to bring the world into being. In creating a world of beings with their creaturely powers of being, God had to give up having all the power of being. Creation meant the surrender of omnipotence.
Four centuries later, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, prominent Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas (1903-1993) developed another creation myth, taking account of evolution, which Luria could not have done, and taking account of evil greater than Luria had known. Jonas writes: “My myth at bottom only pushes further the idea of the tzimtzum, that cosmogonic centerconcept of the Lurianic Kabbalah.”[5] While Luria had already taught that God needed creatures to help redeem the world, Jonas claims that “we literally hold in our faltering hands the future of the divine adventure and must not fail Him, even if we would fail ourselves.”[6]
Speaking of the suffering and caring God portrayed in his myth, Jonas puts it bluntly: “This is not an omnipotent God.”[7] He begins his argument on a purely logical plane, suggesting that for any being to act, including an all-powerful being, there must be another being in relation to which to act. But the very existence of any being includes some degree of power, which suggests that no being has all the power there is.
Jonas then proceeds to argue on a theological plane: “We can have divine omnipotence together with the divine goodness only at the price of complete divine inscrutability,” which is “a profoundly un-Jewish conception.”[8] Since omnipotence is a dubious concept simply from the standpoint of logic, and because “goodness is inalienable from the concept of God and not open to qualification,”[9] omnipotence must give way to goodness. Jonas, whose mother was murdered at Auschwitz, then writes: “After Auschwitz, we can assert with greater force than ever before that an omnipotent deity would have to be either not good or…totally unintelligible. But if God is to be intelligible in some manner and to some extent (and to this we must hold), then his goodness must be compatible with the existence of evil, and this it is only if he is not all powerful.”[10]
Precisely because God is not omnipotent, Jonas reminds us that we must not live as if redemption in and of this world is God’s task alone. On the contrary, this realization should compel each of us to live as a “mortal trustee of an immortal cause,” that great redemptive cause in which we must “help the suffering immortal God.”[11]
In challenging the idea of divine omnipotence, Heschel and Jonas do not explicitly claim to be repudiating a patriarchal understanding of God and offering an alternative to it. But in her book The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust, contemporary Jewish theologian Melissa Raphael shows how the rabbinic and kabbalistic image of the Shekhinah, the female figure of divine presence that accompanies the Jewish people in their exile, gives rise to a realistic feminist alternative to the “masculinist” views of God’s presence manifested by displays of “mighty acts,” whether they be acts of liberation or destruction.
The Female Face of God in Auschwitz includes a searing critique of post-Holocaust patriarchal theologies that assume omnipotence must be an attribute of God. These theologies take for granted the idea that, if God exists, God could have intervened to prevent the Holocaust. Since God didn’t intervene according to patriarchal expectations, God is thought not to exist or is accused of remaining silent and hidden, thereby abandoning—and, in the view of one post-Holocaust theologian, even abusing—those who fell victim to the Nazis. Unlike the post-Holocaust theologians she challenges, Raphael is not interested in trying to reconcile God’s supposed omnipotence and moral perfection with God’s alleged hiddenness and non-intervention. This is because “religious feminism considers that model of God and its ideological aspiration to omnipotence to be morally flawed from the outset, irrespective of the Holocaust.”[12]
For Raphael, the traditional idea of the Shekhinah accompanying people into exile fosters the belief that God is neither absent from places of evil nor indifferent toward evil and its victims. No, God is present even in the midst of hell, revealed in the actions of those who resist their degradation by attempting to live honorably while under assault and expressing love and kindness for others who have been assaulted.
Drawing on the image of the Shekhinah, Raphael argues that God was present and manifest in Auschwitz through the care and love that inmates displayed toward each other in that most dreadful of worlds. “God’s presence, as one who creates, loves, orders, and sustains the world, is revealed in the act of welcome,” writes Raphael. “That is the redemptive moment. It is not an interventionary fiat which overrides history and persons. If that does not seem enough it is because love has been made secondary to sovereignty and because what we may see as God’s limitation is part of how God is known: namely, as the transformatory power of love laboring to break into history as its redemption.”[13]
To be sure, Heschel, Jonas, and Raphael have not deemed love “secondary to sovereignty.” On the contrary, for them, as for Thomas Jay Oord, non-coercive love is the true power of God and is the principal divine attribute we are meant to imitate.[14]
Bio: John C. Merkle, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of theology at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in Minnesota. Among his publications are Approaching God: The Way of Abraham Joshua Heschel (2009) and Faith Transformed: Christian Encounters with Jews and Judaism (2003), both published by Liturgical Press.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
John Merkle draws on nearly 50 years of teaching theology to college students. Many students struggle to reconcile an all-loving and all-powerful God with the reality of suffering. I’m grateful that my work, along with the work of other theologians, has helped John’s teaching. He, in turn, reminds me of the rich insights on these matters within Jewish theology. Abraham Joshua Heschel, in particular, has shaped my thinking about a caring God amid suffering. And I like the work of Hans Jonas. But I’m not familiar with Melissa Raphael, although I’m eager to learn more. I’m thrilled to join a growing movement rejecting omnipotence.
For more on Oord’s view of God’s relationality, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1]. Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Teaching Jewish Theology in the Solomon Schecter Day School,” The Synagogue School 28 (Fall, 1969), 12.
[2]. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 214.
[3]. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1955), 376.
[4]. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 162.
[5]. Hans Jonas, “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice,” The Journal of Religion 67 (January 1987), 12.
[6]. Jonas, “Immortality and the Modern Temper,” Harvard Theological Review 55 (January 1962), 20.
[7]. Jonas, “The Concept of God after Auschwitz,” 8.
[8]. Jonas, “The Concept of God after Auschwitz,” 9.
[9]. Jonas, “The Concept of God after Auschwitz,” 9.
[10]. Jonas, “The Concept of God after Auschwitz,” 9-10.
[11]. Jonas, “Immortality and the Modern Temper,” 17, 20.
[12]. Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 37.
[13]. Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, 41.
[14]. For a more extensive treatment of Heschel, Jonas, and Raphael on the subject of omnipotence, see my essay “Challenging the Ideal of Divine Omnipotence: Jewish Voices and a Christian Response” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 57 (Summer 2022), 411-431.