Omnipotence Justifies Leadership Abuse
By Tom Rundel
Omnipotence justifies power abuse by Christian leaders seeking to emulate a God who holds all power; amipotence makes love the primary doctrine.
A.W. Tozer famously said in his book, The Knowledge of the Holy, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”[1] My understanding of this quote has shifted over the last 20 years of my pastoral experience, as did the theologies that I have emphasized as most important. It seems that we tend to expect from other people what we believe God expects out of us, and we treat other people the way we perceive God is treating us. Growing up in a charismatic, fundamentalist, Evangelical space, we emphasized holiness, expressed in certain behaviors and abstaining from other behaviors. I’ve been alive long enough to see these expectations and demands change multiple times.
In conversations on my podcast with minorities, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ individuals, a question seemed to be repeated among them, “Who gets to decide which rules, behaviors, theologies, we are emphasizing this season?” It most certainly was not their communities. This is when I started to see the damage that Christian supremacy was doing upon this world, by buttressing up authoritarian leadership styles seeking to emulate the God they believed was “all powerful” and “omnipotent.” Christian supremacy believes not merely in the supremacy of Christ, which is quite biblical, but in the supremacy of our certain brand of Christianity at the exclusion of other cultures, beliefs, religions, and values. And our western Eurocentric Christianity has been a dominating force shaping these expectations.
To illustrate, let me share an interaction I had. I was asked to do a funeral for a family that lost a young man to cancer. This family was not religious. I always respect the family’s religious views, even if it is non-religious. So, during the service I did not pray, or mention God or faith or religion; I did not give a sermon, and I did not quote the Bible. What I did was celebrate the life and memories of their beloved son; I told them what grief was going to do, and how to process it. I encouraged them to seek one another when times get hard. Essentially, I gave them a very holy space to name their grief, name the injustice of death, to cry and laugh and remember.
As my friend Father Kenny said, there are holy things that belong to every human being. They are given to us by God. The doctrine of the incarnation tells us that whatever it is to be a good human is also what it means to be like God. Because God became human in the person of Christ. Some of these universals are things we agree are good, like compassion, honesty, justice, respect, courage, wisdom, responsibility, loyalty, gratitude, and humility. This is not an exhaustive list. Christian supremacy says that these things are only to be found in pure form within Christian circles. This makes them very uncomfortable sharing power and authority with those outside of their faith expression because they have the Truth with a capital T that they received from a God who is omnipotent. But there is something very holy about human universals that fundamentalists miss because it doesn’t fit into their paradigm of an omnipotent God granting them permission to be the sole judges of human values. And one individual from this funeral missed the holy moment.
The week after the funeral I received a phone call from a pastor who thought it wise to criticize my method and judge my intentions. I reflected upon the words he said to me for a few days, and I started to see behind these words, to the high control narcissism that infests so many of our churches today. But we don’t feel the courage to question it directly because they hold positions of religious authority granted by a God who holds all power. And they don’t seem to have a hard time wielding this authority in such violent ways because they represent a God who is all powerfully omnipotent.
He said to me, “I’m just really disappointed that you didn’t present the gospel, pray, or mention God.” I noticed with this statement that he was claiming a patriarchal authority over me, like a Dad that I’m responsible to please. But this is the kind of God he serves, so he is also demanding it from me. He only assumes he has this authority because he is a pastor and representative of an almighty God. I told him that I say the same thing at all my funerals, sometimes I put religious language on it, and sometimes I don’t. Each funeral is a unique expression of God’s image and each person who has passed on is my teacher. I do not go in as the sole arbiter of truth dispensing all the things that they ought to know and do and believe. That is violence that we emulate when we believe that God is omnipotently powerful as a primary trait, instead of all loving.
His response was, “Wow, how heavy is that millstone?” This was a passive aggressive attempt to shame me into conformity, with a reference to a passage in the bible stating that it would be better to have a milestone tied around my neck than cause a little one to stumble. So I am leading people astray and am guilty, and better off dead. This statement wrote me off and condemned me without any attempt to try to understand. But when your God is all powerful, and you represent him with the capital “T” Truth, you don’t need to understand, but to convince others who are not like you that they are wrong. As Thomas Merton once said, it’s like making religious faces at yourself in the mirror, and believing that your experience of yourself is an experience of God.[2]
He then said the only thing I agreed with, “You preached humanistic spirituality which has no bearing on eternity.” I think that this phrase is a confession that his theology is out of touch with humanity. He has spiritualized the Gospel out of its human roots in order to maintain control over a small little world of spiritual ideas of his own making. This mirrors how they perceive an omnipotent God operates, one who creates a world over which he is positioned with all power, but forgetting to emulate the act of this God who creates, also lovingly handing authority of that world over to the creation.
I find it interesting that one of our primary dogmas is the Incarnation of Christ, the humanization of God. Fundamentalists can’t control universals, and they love control, because they serve a God who has full control. So they reject human universals for an abstract idea of God that they can dispense out to those they deem worthy. It props up their ego with a false authority, while heaping religious loads upon people they are not willing to carry. Fundamentalist Evangelicals tend to spiritualize the tangible human things of faith that Jesus taught so that they can maintain control over those things in other people’s lives and hand out spiritual solutions that they themselves fabricated.
His theological concepts of God were not equipped to take on the very real loss and grief of this family; that was obviously within his sphere of family. As a friend of mine said, “Where was he when this family was in need? They obviously did not pick him to walk them through this time of loss.” I’m wondering how much of their ambivalence toward religion is the fault of oppressive fundamentalism’s belief in an omnipotent God who wields power in order to get conformity at the expense of their individual humanity.
Often, this belief in God is a display of violence with a smile; a friendly exterior with a core of dead iron, immovable, un-shapeable, unfeeling, and cold. It disturbed me, but also it was a gift to concretely see what it is that I am not, and why. It was a gift to not let this man take authority over my soul, to let him speak his peace, say mine, and part ways without returning the violence back to him, though I wanted to afterwards. His failure to get conformity out of me was a challenge to his very being and he wasn’t sure what to do with it. He was used to having the omnipotent God’s authority behind him, bullying people into agreeing with him, or fighting with them, and I did neither. He was confused. I hope that he remembers that for a long time and that maybe one day he will soften and regret, like I do in my old fundamentalist ways, and use it to fuel more of a humble and merciful presence in the world.
Thomas Jay Oord’s concept of amipotence is a helpful contrast to the Christian supremacy that justifies authoritarian leadership abuse, because it centralizes love instead of power. Under authoritarian leadership that emphasizes power, the people, who cannot seem to live up to the religious expectations, wind up either wearing religious masks which hide from view the areas that do not match, or leaving the community and/or faith altogether. But when love is the central dogma of the community, it allows room for authenticity, growth, and community. This can lead to a loving presence within the broader neighborhood these communities are found within.
The omnipotent God is a contextualization of the Medieval world’s feudal lord in the tower who mostly soaked up the resources of the land at the expense of the people. We need a new contextualization of God for the modern world, one that emphasizes the uncontrolling love of God in place of the manipulative power of God. Thomas Jay Oord’s doctrine of amipotence is a great container to hold such a needed recontextualization of God in the modern age.
Bio: Tom Rundel is the Pastor at First Congregational Church in Laingsburg, Michigan. He earned his D.Min. from Portland Seminary in Leadership and Spiritual Formation. Tom is also the host and curator of conversations for the Liminal Living Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@liminalliving and loves hanging out with his family, woodworking, and antique shopping.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Tom Rundel rightly argues that belief in divine omnipotence can justify abuse by Christian leaders. If an omnipotent God causes or allows abuse, it must somehow be for the greater good—thus, abuse becomes theologically justified. Tom emphasizes that amipotence rejects this logic by affirming that pain, suffering, and death are not part of God’s will but contrary to God’s desire for flourishing. I agree with Tom’s observation that omnipotence fits a medieval view of a feudal Lord who dominates people. In contrast, the God revealed in Jesus is not overpowering but is the empowering, uncontrolling Lover who seeks healing for all.
For more on Oord’s view on open and relational leadership, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1]. Tozer, A. W. The Knowledge of the Holy. United Kingdom: HarperCollins, 1978. p1
[2]. Merton, Thomas. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. United Kingdom: HarperCollins, 2004. Paraphrase of longer quote on pp. 2-3