Night of the Living Words
By Charles Bakker
People may be just as warranted in believing that God is omnipotent as others may be in believing that God is amipotent.
When Jesus was wandering around Galilee teaching and healing the sick, the vast majority of humans alive at that time would have had no idea that the Creator of the universe had become incarnated as their conspecific. Thus, after Jesus’ death and resurrection, there would have been those in Galilee who were warranted in believing that God had indeed become one of us, and there would have been those elsewhere in the world who would have been equally as warranted in believing precisely the opposite. Different people can have equal warrant for believing opposing things about the same person or object, depending on what their relation is to the person or object in question.
The question I want to ask is whether one person can be as warranted in believing that God is omnipotent as another person can be for believing that God is amipotent, depending on how each relate to God? In this paper, I shall argue that they can be.[1]
I want to define the term “omnipotent” as meaning that something is all-powerful, but as Thomas Jay Oord recounts in the second chapter of his book, The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence, given the many different ways in which this term tends to get qualified, it is unclear what, exactly, it actually means to say that something or someone is omnipotent. Oord, or as I prefer because he is one of the most loving people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing personally, Tom, argues that “Based on the enormous number of necessary qualifications… theists should stop saying, ‘God is omnipotent.’” (74) In its place, Tom urges us to instead consider using the term “amipotent” when describing that aspect of God’s essential nature which has to do with power.
“Amipotence,” as Tom defines it, “is maximal divine power in the service of love.” (123) In an effort to interpret this as charitably as I can, I think that what Tom means by this is that, since amipotence describes God’s loving essence, God cannot help but always utilize God’s finite yet unsurpassable, non-coercive influence on all of creation to intentionally respond to creation’s own influence and developmental trajectory in that or those ways which will promote the maximal potential for creation’s well-being. For this is just what it means for God to be God. Importantly, and precisely because creation has a non-negligible amount of say-so in its own development, not all of God’s actions will actually result in an increase to our well-being. Nevertheless, this is not due to any failure on God’s part.
I take it that if “omnipotence” has become so variously qualified as to now be almost meaningless, the same would have to be said for “amipotence,” should it too become so variously qualified in this way some day. For we ought to be fair in our criticisms. However, it seems to me that this way of equating clarity of definition with warrant for use is a weakness in Tom’s argument for why we should use “amipotence” in place of “omnipotence” when thinking about God’s power.[2] From what I can tell, many philosophers, following Wittgenstein, have moved away from thinking that words and concepts can be adequately defined in terms of fixed sets of necessary and sufficient conditions.[3] In part, this is because of our continued failure as (Analytic) philosophers to pin down sets of these conditions which everyone can agree on. But also in part, this is because we have begun to see that part of what makes words and concepts so useful is the flexibility with which they can be used in many different ways and across many different contexts.[4]
Not coincidentally, it is also my belief that what has made the Bible so incredibly enduring as a sacred text is precisely the flexibility which its interpreters have had over the last three plus millennia to creatively find meaning in it that is applicable to their own situations. (I know there are others who think the same, but I am here speaking only on my own behalf, so I shall not implicate them here.) Thus, if the notion of love in scripture lacks a single, definitive meaning, as Tom acknowledges in his Pluriform Love,[5] then why could we not say the same thing about the notion of power in scripture?
Sure, I grant that confusion breeds chaos, so it is important that we be clear about what we mean when we use a term. Yet there is a difference between saying, “This is what I mean by “love,” or “power” or “omnipotence” or “amipotence.” and saying, “This just is what “love,” or “power” or “omnipotence” or “amipotence” means.” The former can be an act of love. It can be a way of being honest and vulnerable and open to critical feedback from one’s beloved. The latter is often imperious, and if we have learned anything from the Epistemic Injustice literature, it can even be coercive.[6]
This approach to thinking about language fits well with my pragmatism and pluralism. For my evidence-based belief that words do not denote essences, or Platonic forms, or Russellian universals coincides with the fact that I no longer worry about discerning whether a given belief is “objectively and/or timelessly true.” My interest lies instead with discerning whether, in virtue of how the epistemic agent relates to their environment, a given belief is useful for guiding embodied action successfully.[7] Thus, I can readily concede that a Pantheist, or an Atheist, or a Calvinist might be equally as warranted in believing whatever it is that they variously believe about God, in their own circumstances, as I am in believing that God is amipotent, in my own circumstances. What matters to me is not determining which of these views of God is or is not “objectively true,” but only, which view is most useful for guiding each person’s actions successfully in their own circumstances.
Crucially, this does not mean that I will agree with Calvinists in thinking that God is in fact objectively omnipotent. For not only would this amount to my worrying about the “truth” of these beliefs as opposed to their usefulness, but I have good reason to think that employing Calvinist beliefs in my own situation would not prove to be very useful for guiding my own actions. I can be a pluralist without being an unprincipled, global relativist because the evolution/development of my own environment, in many respects, does not depend in any way upon what I believe about it. It is this belief-independence of my surroundings which provides the epistemic friction needed to show me where my beliefs about those surroundings are unfruitful for guiding action.
As a pragmatist, I also subscribe to the claim that what it means to understand what a thing is amounts to being able to specify how that thing can affect and be affected by other things, including myself.[8] This entails that on my view, all properties of all real things are specifiable only as relational properties-with-respect-to one or more other things.[9] Should a given property, such as a putative “hidden essence,” be such that it cannot be interacted with, even in principle, then I deny that I have any good reason for positing the existence of that property.
Nevertheless, I do think it is possible for God to be essentially amipotent. In such a case, every possible physical system in the universe would need to stand in the same (multiply realizable) relation with God, such that, from all possible perspectives, God would have the demonstrable property of being amipotent, however this term might be variously defined. But then, since I believe that God’s amipotence involves God lovingly influencing every part of our universe, it would follow from this that God does stand in exactly this kind of (multiply realizable) relation with every possible observer. Now, in my view, it would have to be pragmatically useful for each of these agents to believe that God is essentially amipotent for this belief to be universally warranted. But these are two separate things. I can personally find it useful to believe that God is essentially amipotent yet also find it useful to concede that there may be many for whom such a belief is not (yet) warranted.
I am not sure that Tom can say the same thing. It seems to me that in his laudable effort to be clear concerning what the notion of amipotence amounts to, he may open himself up to the same critique he levels against the notion of omnipotence. Given that Tom is loving, I know that he would be averse to imposing his definition of amipotence on others as being the “right” or the “best” one. Yet, as soon as he might allow that others could (eventually) come to understand this term differently, as suits their needs, he will have to further allow that the concept of amipotence, just like the concept of omnipotence, lives precisely because it is sufficiently flexible to be used in many different ways. But then, if my friend Tom does concede that both scripture and individual words can be flexible in this way, it is no longer clear that he has successfully killed “omnipotence.” For this is no Sunday School picnic. It is the night of the living words.
Bio: Charles Bakker is first and foremost a follower of the Way. That means he is learning to love God and others as he loves himself. Sometimes this involves studying philosophy and science at the University of Western Ontario. But most of the time it involves spending time with his wife and four children.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Charles Bakker thinks that what matters isn’t whether omnipotence or amipotence is objectively true, but which concept best guides people’s actions in their unique circumstances. He worries that I impose my definitions of God’s power and love as the “right” ones. Charles need not worry: my views are proposals, not claims of absolute truth. I could be wrong—likely so, in some ways. Language is flexible, and creaturely perspectives will differ. Despite this, I offer these proposals because I find them the most compelling. And I believe God’s power, rooted primarily in love, is more likely to yield positive outcomes.
For more on Oord’s view of God and humility, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1]. I am of course open to the possibility that others might be equally as warranted in denying this.
[2]. This strain of thinking also shows up in the first two chapters of Tom’s earlier book Pluriform Love: An Open and Relational Theology of Well-Being.
[3]. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. 4th edition. trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. ed. P. M. S. Hacker & Joachim Schulte. (Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 1953/2009).
[4]. See: Michael Tomasello, Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Revised Edition. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). This flexibility makes sense given the close connection between language and action production, and given the importance of flexibility in the task-dependent soft-assembly of synergies in the latter. For more on this connection, see: Michael Anderson, After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014). And for a fantastic exploration of the intersection between cognitive linguistics and theology, see John Sanders, Theology in the Flesh: How Embodiment and Culture Shape the Way We Think about Truth, Morality, and God. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016).
[5]. Thomas J. Oord, Pluriform Love, (Grasmere: SacraSage Press, 2022), 21-23.
[6]. For an excellent introduction to this burgeoning literature see: Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Kidd et al. ed., The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. (London: Routledge, 2017).
[7]. I continue to endorse this way of thinking precisely because I find it useful to do so.
[8]. In particular, I endorse William James’ version of Pragmatism. See William James, Pragmatism, ed. Bruce Kuklick (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1907/1981) as well as Alan Malachowski, “James’s holism: the human continuum.” in The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism. ed. Alan Malachowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 36-54.
[9]. While I draw this from James’ Radical Empiricism (See: William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed. Ralph Barton Perry (Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 1912/2003), the clearest explication of this way of thinking about relational properties might actually be found in Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution.