The Interwoven Fabric of Christian Faith
By David Fergusson
Despite the gains of amipotence, a commitment to the love of God shorn of power will undermine faith in creation, the resurrection of Jesus, and eschatological fulfilment. In turn, this will necessarily impact Christian praise, thanksgiving, hope, and worship.
In his famous essay The Two Dogmas of Empiricism, the philosopher W. V. O. Quine argues that our beliefs face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but as a totality.[1] Some of these beliefs have a constitutive significance in framing others. For example, a commitment to medium sized objects enduring in space and time seems a categorial feature of much of what we believe about the world. No doubt this can be unpacked and scrutinized, but as an intuitively held belief it shapes the way we think and act. Such deep beliefs are interconnected and display close conceptual links with one another.
The doctrines of the Christian faith function in a similar way. Each is freighted with a set of commitment that interlock with several other claims. These frame the ways in which we experience ourselves and the world. The purpose of the earliest form of the creeds was to educate new converts in the range and unity of doctrinal claims, most notably with respect to a single economy of creation, salvation and eschatological consummation. While I wish neither to overstate the immobility of belief nor to deny a diversity that is often ignored by the guardians of ‘orthodoxy,’ this holistic aspect of doctrine needs to be recognized.
Described as ‘amipotence,’ the heavily revisionist position outlined by Thomas Jay Oord in a sequence of recent publications deserves our close attention. In lecturing each year on the problem of evil to first-year students, I find that many are intuitively attracted to this way of thinking. Its principal benefit is that it can resolve the problem of evil by denying one of the premises of the old Epicurean dilemma. If we reject divine omnipotence, then divine goodness is compossible with natural and moral evil. As seemingly ineluctable features of the world in which we live, these set the conditions for both divine and human action. God can influence and persuade through the indwelling of the Spirit, but the prior conditions that give rise to evil in its different manifestations are neither caused nor willed by God. Hence the question of why God permits evil is not so much solved as dissolved.
As Oord notes, there are some obvious pastoral gains in adopting this approach. We can unequivocally affirm that God does not will earthquakes, famines, cancers, and fatal accidents. Too much theological history is littered with attempts to make sense of these, as if they are directly willed by God for the fulfilment of a particular intention. The Westminster Directory of Public Worship advises clergy upon visiting the sick to enquire whether their illness might be the result of the Almighty’s displeasure at their failings. This assumes a view of divine agency which for most of us generates manifold difficulties with respect to its causality, morality, and pastoral utility. Those who have felt the oppressiveness of this theological tradition may justifiably experience the concept of amipotence with a sense of liberation.
Furthermore, in outlining the agency of the Spirit, Oord has furnished us with ways of thinking about God which might make better sense of petitionary prayer. If God exercises a spiritual influence upon the world to which our prayers can make a difference, then we can conceive prayer in terms neither of prompting occasional and sudden bursts of divine activity nor of reducing it to modes of attunement or contemplation. The work of the Spirit as an indwelling influence has featured too little in our ways of thinking. With its chronic fear of Pelagianism, the western theological tradition has inclined too much to determinist patterns of thought, thus ignoring the more synergist themes in Scripture and the Christian life. Oord has helped us to think more clearly about how and why this is important.
But is influence the only form of divine activity? Formidable problems arise if we restrict God’s action to one modality only. I offer three examples of ways in which the works of God are constitutive of faith.
First, there is dependence. We often introduce children to the idea of God in terms of causality. God made the world and everything in it. Or, to put it more technically, everything that is not God is dependent upon a self-existent God for its being. This sense of God as the unconditioned ground or source of everything else has strong Scriptural, philosophical, and spiritual roots. That God is the maker of heaven and earth is axiomatic to Hebrew claims about God’s identity. And this conviction calls forth our praise and thanksgiving. In a more philosophical idiom, later writers argued that God is the most plausible explanation for the existence of the world. For Augustine, the only satisfactory reason for the world is the love of God which calls it into being from nothing and sustains it in every moment of its existence. To abandon this conviction is to lose much that is central to Christian praise and confession. The religious consciousness of God as source and ground must also be relinquished or at least subjected to significant modification, while the doctrine of creation will lose most of its explanatory power.
A second consideration concerns the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. A study of the gospels and epistles suggests that this is a pivotal event for Christian faith. Without this strong conviction, the church would not have come into being. Instead, the Jesus movement might have continued along similar lines to that of John the Baptist. We are told moreover that it was God who raised Jesus from the dead. Admittedly, there are different ways of constructing the resurrection, and apologetic attempts to demonstrate its veracity from gospel narratives invariably fall short. Yet it is attested as an integral component of faith, especially in 1 Corinthians 15, the earliest surviving testimony. The resurrection is viewed as a kind of down payment on a fuller reality that awaits us by the grace of God. Christ is the first fruits of a new age in which we will all share. This is closely linked to an abiding confidence in the love of God, as the closing section of Romans 8 indicates.
Wittgenstein once said that it is love that believes the resurrection. Paul’s confidence in God’s love is shaped by a knowledge of the resurrection and the work of the Spirit in his life (Romans 5–6). These are part of the same conceptual framework in which Christian faith is realized and expressed. Without the language of resurrection and indwelling, the apostolic commitment to the love of God must look quite different. This might conceivably flourish on different soil, but its detachment from these other concepts will result in something that looks very different in form and content.
Finally, we should consider eschatology. Since the resurrection of Jesus is closely linked to a belief in the general resurrection of the dead, an eschatological ingredient is also baked into the earliest forms of Christian faith. This has often been overplayed with too much attention devoted to the end times and the conditions of heaven, hell, and purgatory. Faith needs to focus on more proximate hopes, especially those signs of the kingdom that Jesus already discerned as breaking into God’s creation. Here Oord’s account of divine agency can assist us. Yet it is hard to envisage faith without an eschatology, an expectation of love beyond the grave and a proper excess of hope. As the subject of creation and the resurrection of Jesus, God is the one alone who can promise that all things will be brought to their appointed end. The fulfilment of divine love requires eternal life, perhaps for every creature. Yet a God whose power is restricted to influence and attraction can only aspire to this; no promises can be made.
As the first and the last, God directs everything to its end. This is an expression of both divine power and love. These cannot be pulled apart without the imposition of a significantly altered conceptual scheme that drifts from the original framework of belief that has historically moored Christian faith. I do not wish to make the doctrines of the church immune from revision or diverse expression—these have been constant features of ecclesiastical history—and we should recognize that Christianity may still be in its early stages. But the doctrines of the faith tend to stand or fall together. I remain unclear on what basis the love of God is to be affirmed if detached from specified notions of sovereignty. How else can we sing our hymns of praise, thanksgiving, trust, and hope?
Bio: David Fergusson is Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge, having previously held the Chair of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh (2000–2021). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He also serves as Dean of the Chapel Royal in Scotland.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
David Fergusson worries that my proposal undermines God’s creating, the resurrection of Jesus, and eschatological fulfillment. This affects Christian praise, thanksgiving, hope, and worship. Fortunately, I do not remove power from God. I only deny that God can control. David rightly sees that my proposal does not support traditional ways of thinking about God creating, resurrecting, and eschatology. But many of those traditional ways don’t fit scripture or align well with God‘s love. So I propose alternative ways in which an amipotent God creates, resurrects, and, through relentless love, provides eschatological fulfillment. Readers can find those proposals in my other books.
For how God creates through uncontrolling love, see this essay.
For how God might resurrect Jesus through uncontrolling love, see this essay.
For how God can bring eschatological fulfillment through relentless love, see this essay.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1]. Willard Van Orman Quine, From a Logical Point of View (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 20–46.