Suffering and the Amipotent God
By Catherine Keller
God forsakenness does not mean God has abandoned your world but that the world has, in that instance, forsaken God.
Eloi, eloi, sabachthani: the last words of one whose life’s challenge to Power brought on his execution.[1] There remains perhaps no simultaneously more cruel and more familiar symbol of the powers that be, that were, than punishment by crucifixion.
In the face of this and any horrific suffering smolders the question of theodicy: How could a loving God let this happen—let alone directly, or indirectly, cause it? Therein lies the theological heart of the problem of power vis-à-vis the God of love.
The question of theodicy has long found in process theology a key if controversial and open-ended answer. David Ray Griffin crystallized the logic of the problem and of its resolution a half century ago in God, Power and Evil: A Process Theodicy.[2] The operative syllogism: if “God” is both (A) all-controlling and (B) all-good; and (C) there is real evil; then there is no God. You can have either A or B with C, but not both, and still have “God.” A God of all-controlling power cannot be truly good, indeed loving, and “let” evil, or needless suffering, happen. However: If God’s power is not by nature controlling but works by persuasion and cooperation, then it does not contradict God’s love. Ergo, in the face of whatever traumas, God could just possibly exist. But a God with another kind of power.
In The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence,” Thomas Jay Oord offers an alternative. He suggests that “amipotence replaces omnipotence.” The neologism “combines two Latin words, ami and potens.”[3] The omni transmuted into ami, friend, makes for a dramatic shift of meaning. In this amicability, however, God has not turned powerless: “Amipotence is the maximal power of love.”[4] So it retains energetic potency, this amity, this love. Love’s power, however, is uncontrolling, and “the Spirit’s synergy with creation is uncontrolling love at all times and all places.”[5]
In Oord’s sense of uncontrol and revealed in the title of God Can’t, God cannot just intervene, step in and stop the horror, give the world’s dictators either a heart or a heart attack, convert the capitalists to saving the work of those days of Genesis 1, of those billions of years evolving the dazzling plenitude of life on earth.[6] That’s not how it all, nor how the God of it all, works.
So a divine amipotence carries another meaning of power, of potential. It galvanizes potentiality, a potentiality manifest in every moment of every creature of the creation’s life. This is God’s power: to offer possibility for creaturely actualization; not a direct action that intervenes, but a directed possibility for change. The divine tilts the abstract infinity of pure possibilities toward the real potential for particular becomings.
Here process theology develops the pure possibilities, Whitehead’s “eternal objects,” as the timely content of the divine lure the “initial aim” in its individuated appeal to each becoming occasion. The lure of those possibilities initially aims the creature toward self-actualization, indeed, toward a better actualization than that of its antecedents. In its interdependence with fellow creatures, the creature responds—cooperating with the divine lure or not, a little, or a lot. It feels the others as potentialities of its own moment, and it may—or may not—be persuaded to collaborate with them in becoming. In this open-ended cosmological creativity, process theology pretends to no ghost of all-determining power.
David Griffin made clear that God is rightly named “perfect.” And such a God, as perfect also in power, lacks any monopoly on that power. God’s sort of power cannot be equated with omnipotence, with all the power there is, or with a power to control all that is. Griffin reflects with Charles Hartshorne that “the ideal or perfect agent will enjoy the optimal concentration of efficacy which is compatible with there being other efficacious agents.”[7] As Griffin crystallizes the operative logic, “Such a view greatly alters the problem of evil. Even a being with perfect power cannot unilaterally bring about that which it is impossible for one being unilaterally to effect.”
To be a perfect agent means sharing the world with other agents, creatures whose actions make a difference in that world. For to be a being at all is to exercise power. As Plato put it, “Being is power.” To be is to affect one’s universe. “And it is impossible for one being unilaterally to effect the best possible state of affairs among other beings. In other words, one being cannot guarantee that the other beings will avoid all genuine evil. The possibility of genuine evil is necessary.”[8]
Griffin underscores he is not saying that it is genuine evil that is necessary, but its possibility. (Let that distinction sink into our theodicy.) The creator has called forth not a world predestined to evil but a universe in which evil must be a possibility. To put that more invitingly: Creative freedom and with it the freedom to err is crucial to an actually good creation.
On this basis, then, Griffin can offer a distinctive form of omnipotence. He calls it “C omnipotence,” C standing for “coherent” and “creationistic.” We might add “cooperative.” That differs dramatically from the conventional creationism of God’s absolute power over a world “He” created ex nihilo. Creation in the process model unfolds in a vibrational field with no absolute beginning or end.[9] C-omnipotence signifies the omnitude of power that a being in a world of beings—where being is power, not dominance—can have, can be, can exercise. I find the language of omnipotence automatically misleading, but in contexts where it is rhetorically important to affirm God’s omnipotence, Griffin’s definition lets us do so without contradicting the love.
In some contexts, we may have the chance to offer Oord’s amipotence, which, of course, in no way counters Griffin’s argument for C-omnipotence. Amipotence can deploy its logic in those relatively amicable contexts where such vocabularic play is possible. Either way, we can retain a syllogism in which God’s power and God’s goodness do not contradict each other in the face of real evil. This is not a coherence of mere logic. It is a liberation from the power/love contradiction of theodicy—with its possibly theocidal effect. It has, it emits, a force of amicable attraction. The liberation is affective and therefore effective. It lets God live, for us and in us. By whatever names and namelessness.
What then of Godforsakenness? Would Jesus have felt more God-trust at that gruesome moment if he’d had the benefit of process theology? I am not interested in committing such anachronism. Nor am I claiming that the effect of forsakenness can be once for all dispatched by the countering amicable affect. But the alternative theologic of a process theodicy does really undo the logic of divine controlling power, from the monopolizing omnipotence that bears no resemblance to Jesus’s God to that God’s basileia to start with.
Godforsakenness may therefore mean in the gospels: the real evil in the world at certain moments intensifies suffering so fully that the possibility of the better world seems to vanish. Then divine power seems altogether obstructed, contradicted not by its own goodness but by the world’s power. And when that contradiction cuts close, despair bleeds from the wounds of hope.
And yes, according to the Christian story, the despair is more than healed within a couple of days. But it matters that two gospels actually retained the crucified outburst in their narratives. Surely it teaches us not to repress the grief, the pain, not to deny the sense of disappointment, even of betrayal. Letting ourselves feel it may be the condition of overcoming it. So we might let that Godforsakenness echo in our guts when we confront instances of systemic power’s evil. Of imperial weapons of war ever ready for mass destruction, of hunger in a time of plenty, of garish economic disparities, of a neo-imperial economy melting the glaciers, warming the oceans, storming the shorelines, extinguishing the species, poisoning the earth, wasting the future…The point is not to blame God. But to recognize and to grieve the horror.
So do not block that feeling of godforsakenness. Perhaps without it, we do not rise up. Naming it may let you then remember that it is not a matter of a supreme power withholding itself for whatever just or just mysterious reasons. Perhaps the Godforsakenness means not that God has abandoned you or your world—but that the world has in that instance forsaken God. Who may therefore suffer with us our forsakenness. Who therefore needs us to rise up…in whatever medium or scale of materialization proves possible.
Even as our world faces new Good Fridays, we might—with no triumphalist illusions— live into the resurrection energy. Redemption as love-work remains an unpredictably and perilously entangled process. God cannot unilaterally save us from ourselves and our God-forsaking systems. Nor can we unilaterally do the saving. Grieving our grief, feeling our godforsakenness—and sensing afresh our god-relatedness—we may nonetheless begin again. And again.
The feeling of godforsakenness will not permanently disappear, I suspect, for any honest theist. But the griefwork can take place in trust, pistis, that what we call God doesn’t reduce to pathetic impotence, fade into flat nonexistence, or coldly give up on us or on our world.
In this disclosure, the old problem of theodicy, with the transmutation of omnipotence into a power of cosmic ecocreativity, works for us, not against: If God is C-omnipotence, their power is loving, the power is love, the love is powerful. Amipotence. I see no reason not to let Griffin’s C-omnipotence collaboratively converge with Oord’s amipotence. The divine willingness to suffer the consequences of every creature’s process is inseparable from the divine love of it all. And that love, perhaps infinitely different from ours, does not signify any indifference to outcomes, nor any pleasure in the pain, like a nonconsensual sadomasochism, but rather a feeling with, a com-passion, that folds the suffering of the evil into a complex potentiality for good. If not—if we do not have faith that from the worst suffering evil in our lives, individual and collective lessons can be learned and better futures realized—how could we hope to resist and heal at all?
The unavoidable tensions between the suffering of genuine evil and the enjoyment of the good seem to have materialized in the uber-intense contrast of cross and resurrection. The joy of Easter was not then, nor is it ever, assured. A gift has nothing in common with a given; a promise is no guarantee. What in the meantime, no matter how mean it gets, must not be avoided, will be the moment—the impermanent moment— of godforsakenness.
Bio: Catherine Keller is Professor of Constructive Theology at Drew University‘s Graduate Division of Religion. As a constructive theologian, Keller’s work is oriented around social and ecological justice, poststructuralist theory, and feminist readings of scripture and theology. Her work in process theology draws on the relational ontology of Alfred North Whitehead, fielding it in a postmodern, deconstructive framework.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Catherine Keller’s work has significantly shaped my theological journey. Her reflections on suffering through the lens of an amipotent God illuminate the vital roles of divine love and empathy. She insightfully connects my thought with that of my doctoral advisor, David Ray Griffin. I deeply appreciate her treatment of despair, especially how it sheds light on belief in a God who suffers but does not control. Catherine affirms that God’s co-suffering love embraces the consequences of every creature’s experience. Her linking of this to the cross and Easter reminds us that even Jesus’ sense of abandonment can birth hope amid despair.
For more on Oord’s view of Jesus and divine relationality, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1]. This is an excerpt of a paper was originally delivered at a conference organized by Thomas Oord, “Power and the God of Love,” in Napa, California, in November 2022. It is now forthcoming as “Power, Apocalypse and the God of Love,” in From Force to Persuasion: Process-Relational Perspectives on Power and the God of Love, ed Andrew M. Davis, Cascade’s Perspectives in Process Studies Series (2024). I was glad to be able to dedicate the talk to process theologian David Ray Griffin, who died in that same November.
[2]. David Ray Griffin, God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004).
[3]. Thomas Jay Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence (Grasmere: SacraSage Press, 2023), 120.
[4]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 140. Also: “No creature is equal to or greater than an amipotent God. But the efficacy of amipotence requires creaturely collaboration. Love involves God and creation” (141).
[5]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 148.
[6]. Oord, God Can’t.
[7]. Charles Hartshorne, “Omnipotence,” in An Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Vergilius Ferm (Philosophical Library, Inc., 1945), 545. as Cited in David Ray Griffin, God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1976), 268.
[8]. Griffin, God, Power, and Evil, 268–269.
[9]. See my Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003) for creatio ex profundis as more scripturally faithful and existentially compelling than the ex nihilo.