Silent, Still and Sweet Attraction
By Michael W. Brierley
Early-twentieth-century British theology anticipates amipotence and adds to the cogency of the doctrine.
In a series of publications, Thomas Jay Oord has developed the concept of ‘amipotence’, that is to say, the idea that God’s power is that of love, in contradistinction to classical notions of omnipotence, which tend to regard God as having the ability to do anything that God chooses.[1] This brief essay identifies three British theologians of the early twentieth century—Clarence Rolt, Lily Dougall and Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy—who foreshadowed Oord’s interpretation of divine might, in order to see how their stances enhance a sense of the power of the love of God in a way that is helpful for faith today.
Clarence Rolt
Clarence Rolt was the incumbent of Newbold Pacey in Warwickshire, and then of Watermillock in the Lake District, before his untimely death in 1918 at the age of 37.[2] Generally known for his posthumously published translation of Pseudo-Dionysius’s The Divine Names and Mystical Theology—the standard edition until the 1980s—he wrote a substantial work of theology himself, The World’s Redemption (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1913), as well as a quirkier manuscript which was unfinished when he died, The Spiritual Body (ed. W. J. Sparrow Simpson, SPCK and Macmillan, 1920).
Rolt was convinced, in the words of a refrain that occurs throughout The World’s Redemption, that ‘God is love, and nothing else than love.’ Indeed, ‘God is Love’ is the epitaph on his gravestone in Watermillock churchyard. God’s power, far from being other than or isolatable from God’s love, was, for Rolt, to be identified with it. As another of Rolt’s refrains puts it, ‘God’s power is itself nothing else than love.’ The opening chapters of The World’s Redemption, entitled ‘The Omnipotence of God’ (drawing on material which Rolt had published in 1911 in the English Church Review), present a forthright case for understanding the power of God not in terms of coercion, but as ‘silent, still and sweet attraction’. ‘The truth is that the conception of an omnipotence consisting in a kind of infinite brute force is immoral, irrational and anti-Christian, and from this fruitful source have sprung some of the worst travesties of the Christian Faith which have ever hindered the Gospel of God.’ God’s power cannot control or crush; it can only endure and suffer: ‘it cannot drive and compel; it can only hope and wait.’ This, according to Rolt, was how Jesus conceived of God, and the character of God which Jesus’s own life revealed. The fact that Oord independently formulated a revision of omnipotence so strikingly similar to that of Rolt, over a century later, points to the ongoing difficulties of the inherited classical version and the logical coherence of this alternative.
Lily Dougall
Lily Dougall was a Canadian novelist who moved permanently to England in 1903, where she spent two decades writing liberal theology and convening at her home at Cumnor, near Oxford, conferences of progressive thinkers which generated jointly-authored theological works.[3] Her book The Practice of Christianity (Macmillan and Co.), like Rolt’s The World’s Redemption (published in the same year), stated that authentic power operates by attraction rather than compulsion.[4] After the First World War broke out, she argued that human violence was fueled by misguided conceptions of power, and that the reformation of doctrine held the only possibility for peace.[5] Following the conflict, she went on to claim, with Cyril Emmet, in The Lord of Thought (Student Christian Movement, 1922), that Jesus saw God as influencing the world through the positive draw of goodness rather than by the dictates of wrath or legalism, and that therein lay Jesus’s significance. ‘The time has come,’ she wrote in one of her group-books, ‘when we must halt no longer between two opinions about God.’[6] The fact that Dougall clearly discerned two separate views of divine power at stake, is again testimony to the pertinence of Oord’s approach a hundred years later.
Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy
Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy was one of the best-known British army chaplains of the First World War. He acquired the nickname ‘Woodbine Willie’ for handing out cigarettes along with New Testaments to troops in France, and is commemorated in the Church of England calendar for his ministry.[7] His book The Hardest Part (Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), which has been described as one of the first works of pastoral theology for its reflections on experience of ‘battle conditions’, is an extraordinary diatribe against the God who sends calamities on the world from the distant comfort of heaven.[8] ‘I want to kill the Almighty God and tear Him from His throne.’[9] In nature, history and scripture, Studdert Kennedy detected the spirit of God accomplishing goodness not by fiat from afar but by painstaking struggle near at hand, and this, for him, was confirmed by Jesus. Christ ‘finally tears the Almighty God armed with pestilence and disease from His throne, and reveals the patient, suffering God of love Who endures an agony unutterable in the labor of creation, but endures on still for love’s sake to the end.’ This was Studdert Kennedy’s ‘master-theme’: ‘If the Christian religion means anything, it means that God is Suffering Love.’
There are remarkable parallels here with the theology of Rolt. Where Rolt wrote, ‘Love is, in fact, the only real power, and force is not power at all,’ Studdert Kennedy wrote, ‘There is, and can be, only one Power, and that is Love. For that purpose force is not power, it is weakness.’ Where Rolt wrote, ‘God is Love, and this Love is itself His power’ (Rolt’s emphasis), Studdert Kennedy wrote, ‘God is Love, and all power belongs to Love.’ There is no evidence that Studdert Kennedy read Rolt; ironically, they seem to have passed like ships in the night—Rolt left Newbold Pacey in the diocese of Worcester to be instituted at Watermillock on 20 May 1914, a week before Studdert Kennedy moved from Leeds into the diocese of Worcester to take up the incumbency of St Paul’s in the Blockhouse.
Studdert Kennedy not only represents a further example of the theological conclusion reached in due course by Oord; he also distinctively augments Oord’s theological position. A key question for proponents of ‘amipotence’ is how, if almightiness is not the power to do anything that God wishes, salvation can be guaranteed. Does not the ‘restriction’ of God’s might to the lure of love undermine the certainty of eschatological victory over the principalities of evil and chaos? Is it not feasible that God’s appealing love will be refused? Studdert Kennedy’s answer resides in what might be called a doctrine of divine ‘persistence’: God’s love presses on until it achieves a loving response. God is everlasting, and so time is, as it were, on God’s side. God has all eternity in which to ‘overcome all obstacles, solve all problems, and endure all pain.’ To use a phrase from a novel of H. G. Wells written during his wartime theistic phase, God’s power is the power to ‘see it through.’[10] So Studdert Kennedy regarded God not only as struggling, striving and suffering, but also as unbeaten, insuperable and unconquerable. ‘I see [the Spirit] thwarted, hindered, baffled in its task, but never stayed or stopped; always it begins again, always it persists.’ God is ‘ever active;’ Christ ‘forever descends to the depths to seek and to save that which is lost.’ ‘The essence of the Christian revelation is that revelation of God as a coming God, a seeking God […] a Love that never ceases, and by its nature never could cease.’ It is in the ceaselessness of divine love, its limitless persistence, that its triumph is assured. God has all eternity in which to win creation round; there is no tragedy which, given God’s infinite love, can remain unredeemed. Here is the counter to potential criticism that God’s love-as-power is in any sense a diminishment or impoverishment of divine ability. Quite the reverse: as the contemporary theologian Sam Wells has written, ‘what humanity needs is a love that abides, perseveres, remains present to us whatever happens, however bad things are, for however long it takes;’ ‘God’s action, it seems, is not to make bad things not happen. God’s glory is revealed in that God does not leave us alone when they do.’[11]
Conclusion
The British theologians who were reinterpreting divine power before, during and immediately after the First World War are not the only thinkers to have suggested revisions of omnipotence during the course of the twentieth century. Process theists, and those influenced by them, have also contributed to this train of thought.[12] Oord refreshes this tradition clearly, accessibly and persuasively for the contemporary church and world. The early twentieth-century British revisers of omnipotence, in highlighting God’s ‘silent, sweet and still attraction,’ indicate the recurrent necessity of challenging the classical view, and also develop an axiom about divine persistence that can helpfully strengthen the case for ‘amipotence’ by responding to the possible objection that its God is less than powerful. On the contrary: the power that infinitely and patiently persists would seem to be the most effective, winsome and honorable power that there is, and in pointing to such a model of the divine, early twentieth-century British theology shows itself to be a rich doctrinal resource.
Bio: Michael Brierley taught liturgy, church history and modern doctrine
at Ripon College Cuddesdon, and is a member of the faculty of theology and religion at the University of Oxford. He is the editor of Public Life and the Place of the Church (Ashgate, 2006), Life after Tragedy (Cascade, 2017) and A Way of Putting It (Sacristy, 2023).).
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
I’m unsure if the three British theologians Michael Brierley mentions would frame God’s power and love exactly as I do, but the overlap seems significant enough to make any differences minor. I was particularly intrigued by Kennedy’s doctrine of divine persistence, which aligns closely with my belief in divine relentless love. God’s goals for salvation are never coercive, but because God never stops loving, we can hope that this love will eventually overcome all obstacles. Michael’s essay also made me reflect on how many voices for love remain unheard. I appreciate Michael introducing me to these important and inspiring theologians.
For more on Oord’s view of God’s relentless love in the afterlife, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1]. Thomas J. Oord, Open and Relational Theology: An Introduction to Life-Changing Ideas (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage Press, 2021), 67–88; Pluriform Love: An Open and Relational Theology of Well-Being (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage Press, 2022), 169–72; and especially The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage Press, 2023). See my review of the latter in Modern Believing 65, no. 3 (2024): 294–95.
[2]. See further, and for the references that follow, Michael W. Brierley, ‘Commemorating C. E. Rolt (1881–1918)’, Theology 121, no. 5 (2018): 348–56.
[3]. See further, Michael W. Brierley, ‘Lily Dougall (1858–1923): Novelist, Modernist and Theological Collaborator’, Modern Believing 64, no. 4 (2023): 390–98.
[4]. [Dougall,] The Practice of Christianity, 243.
[5]. [Dougall,] ‘Human Goodness,’ Present Day Papers 1 (1914): 100–103, 130–32, 164–66, 194–97, 230–34, 261–64, 301–4 and 357–59, at 301 and 303–4.
[6]. Lily Dougall, ‘Power: Human and Divine,’ in God and the Struggle for Existence, ed. Burnett H. Streeter (London: Student Christian Movement, 1919), 110–56 at 151.
[7]. See further, Michael W. Brierley, ‘Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy: A Brief Life,’ in Life after Tragedy: Essays on Faith and the First World War Evoked by Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, ed. Michael W. Brierley and Georgina A. Byrne (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017), 19–34.
[8]. Thomas J. J. O’Loughlin, ‘The Man, the Padre and the Theologian,’ in Geoffrey A. Studdert Kennedy, The Hardest Part: A Centenary Critical Edition, ed. Thomas J. J. O’Loughlin and Stuart A. Bell (London: SCM Press, 2018), xiii–xxx at xiv.
[9]. For references to quotations, see Michael W. Brierley, ‘“There Ain’t No Throne”: Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy and the Doctrine of God,’ in Life after Tragedy, ed. Brierley and Byrne, 75–96.
[10]. H. G. Wells, Mr Britling Sees It Through (London: Cassell and Co., 1916).
[11]. Samuel M. B. Wells, A Nazareth Manifesto: Being with God (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 244 and 213.
[12]. See, for example, Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984), 10–26, and Anna Case-Winters, God’s Power: Traditional Understandings and Contemporary Challenges (Louisville, KY: Westminster / John Knox Press, 1990). See also, from a personalist perspective, John A. T. Robinson, Thou Who Art: The Concept of the Personality of God (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), 153–81.