The Meaning of God is to Love and Be Loved
By James McLachlan
Thomas Jay Oord is part of an important tradition in theology that asks: “Isn’t love more important than fear and power?”
Thomas Jay Oord coined the term Amipotence to stress the priority of love over power when thinking about God. Among theists Omnipotence has long been regarded as an essential if not the essential characteristic of God’s perfection. Oord is correct to declare the worship of power has done much to distort the vision of love. Consider this searing critique for Mark Twain.
“Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy, and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!”
I know that is a long quote to begin a short essay, but it is one of the most searing critiques of absolutist theism I’ve ever read. This bleak and blistering indictment of theism from The Mysterious Stranger powerfully lays out the problem. The question here is less whether one can, as apologists from Augustine to Alvin Plantinga have attempted, show that it is logically consistent to believe that such a being as an omnipotent being who created the world ex nihilo could exist, but why would anyone, except perhaps out of fear and awe for the tremendous power of such a being want to worship, let alone love, such a Tyrant? Isn’t it better to rebel? To dream better dreams? The Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev called the idea of a God with the who creates a world full of suffering and ending in Hell for many, “The profound moral source of atheism.[1]” Oord joins an important, but unfortunately minority, tradition in theology that asks: “Isn’t love more important than fear and power?” I will mention three philosophers who share this view with Tom: Nicolas Berdyaev, Alfred North Whitehead, and Henri Bergson.
There have been many defenses of God’s omnipotence.[2] Theologians often try to eliminate the problem of suffering by claiming horrendous suffering is only apparent. It’s not ultimately real, and, if we could see how hell and burning children work into the totality of Being we would understand everything happens for the best. For example, many theists follow the Plotinus who likens God to a great artist. The world is His canvas. When we complain of the suffering of creatures in the world, “We are like people ignorant of painting who complain that the colors are not beautiful everywhere in the picture: but the Artist has laid on the appropriate tint to every spot.[3]” Augustine followed this analogy and declared from God’s point of view there is no evil because all fits in beauty of God’s creation. In The Confessions, evil does not exist from God’s point of view because from the “eternal perspective” it is all good. It is better than there be a great diversity in existence. This would include the lower as well as the higher and by implication hell and the damned.
“To thee there is no such thing as evil, and even in thy whole creation taken as a whole, there is not; because there is nothing from beyond it that can burst in and destroy the order which thou hast appointed for it. But in the parts of creation, some things, because they do not harmonize with others, are considered evil. Yet, those same things harmonize with others and are good, and in themselves are good… I no longer desired a better world, because my thoughts ranged over all, and with sounder judgment I reflected that the things above were better than those below, yet that all creation together was better than the higher things alone.” [4]
In De Ordine Augustine promises us that if we remain faithful we will receive a vision of beauty that will answer all our questions about the injustice and suffering of this world. “I shall say no more, except that to us is promised a vision of beauty… Whosoever will have glimpsed this beauty. … that in the intelligible world, every part is as beautiful and perfect as the whole.”[5] This is the message of great deal of theistic writing from Augustine to Dante to Bunyan, to our time.
In this tradition, the eternal trivializes the everyday events of life and its most momentous struggles, and even love itself. What happens here has little import. If anything, the purpose of life is to escape the world.” No earthly love can compare with the glories of the perfect heavenly realm. At the end of his journey Dante arrives in paradise and is greeted by his earthly love Beatrice, but when he gets to the highest point in paradise, he turns from her as she turns from him and contemplates the perfect beauty of God. Dante, enraptured by the beatific vision proclaims: “O light eternal, who alone abidest in Thyself, alone knowest Thyself, and, known to Thyself and knowing, lovest and smilest on Thyself!”[6] Berdyaev thought this was more the description of a horrible narcissistic tyrant, than a loving God. I think Tom Oord would agree. If God’s eternal perfection is the only thing of ultimate worth why bother with the rest? We Humans are just Pilgrims wandering through this wearisome land, and the sooner we are out of it the better. This is the point of John Bunyan’s Christian classic Pilgrim’s Progress the pilgrim begins his journey by forsaking his family and running toward the eternal city.
“Then said the Evangelist, If this be thy condition, why standest thou still? He answered, because I know not wither to go. Then he gave him a Parchment Roll, and there was written within, Fly from the wrath to come.
“So I saw in my Dream, that the Man began to run; now he had not run far from his own door, but his Wife and children perceiving it, began to cry after him to return: but the Man put his Fingers in his Ears, and ran on crying, Life, Life, Eternal Life: so he looked not behind him, but fled towards the middle of the Plain.”[7]
I don’t see how this squares with love. We love God, who we haven’t seen, but give up our brothers and sister (and dogs and trees) who we have (1 John 4:20-21). For Oord’s philosophical predecessor, A. N. Whitehead, the history of Christianity is a tragic failure precisely because Christian theology apostatized from its Galilean origins and forsook love for power. It saw God as the divine despot imposing laws on the world. For such theologies God is a coercive power that takes the form of a Monarch of the universe. Whitehead claimed the whole of Christian theology, with the possible exception Quakerism, valued power and totality over goodness. Christian theology conceived God as a coercive power in the form of a Roman emperor or Byzantine Bazeleaus.[8] Atheists like Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre saw God as the projection of human power fantasies. This is why Sartre famously said, “Hell is other People.” We can’t control them so we create a fantasy of a God who can control their freedom and their love. This God just happens to think like we do. This God is dead. He never lived.
In his last great work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion Henri Bergson discussed omnipotence and came to a similar conclusion to Oord’s. It doesn’t square with love. Bergson thought omnipotence is a pseudo-idea, and the foundation of religion should be loving and being loved. It is possible for the philosopher to sit in the privacy of his study and devise apologies for omnipotence, but what could he do before the woman who has just lost her child? Could he say that child was just a part of a single gesture by a great creator making a beautiful painting? Suffering is a terrible reality, and it is an unwarranted optimism to make it an a priori lesser good.[9] Love is a relation between beings and therefore not omnipotent. Both sides of the relation bring something to the table. Omnipotence places God outside a totality, unaffected by it. It is like an artist beyond the picture he has created. But even the artistic analogy makes no sense. Artists aren’t outside their world. They create in a medium and within a tradition. This is the problem with notions where we try to describe something beyond possible experience. Omnipotence is about a God that no one has experienced. We experience great power, burning bushes, still small voices, faces, but never omnipotence. Thus, are confronted with an idea of what God should be and when the idea makes no sense and doesn’t match experience, we don’t believe in God. Nietzsche’s “death of God” may just be the death of a bad idea of God. As Tom Oord says it is not the “death of God” but “the death of omnipotence.” If we approach God from the experience of the God, of love we come to Amipotence, an energy that keeps producing, the power of creating and loving that seems endless. God is love and the object of love.[10] Bergson uses the experiences of mystics as examples of the experience of God as love. He says they are unanimous that God needs us just as we need God![11] Grace Slick’s lyrics apply to God and us: “Don’t’ you need somebody to love.” God seeks to create creators worthy of love who can respond to the call of God’s offered love and love others (1 John 4:19-21).
Bio: James McLachlan is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Religion at Western Carolina University. He earned a Ph. D in Religious Studies from the University of Toronto. His research centers on French religious thought, particularly Bergson, Levinas, and Sartre and philosophical and literary approaches to the problem of evil. He co-founded the Mormon Studies Group at the American Academy and is Co-Director of the Levinas Summer Seminar. He loves classic movies, especially film noir and loves to watch and talk about them with his best friend, Carrie.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Jim McLachlan rightly recognizes that my proposal begins with love when addressing God’s perfections. I especially enjoy how he employs Mark Twain to critique absolutist theology. I am glad to stand in a minority tradition alongside thinkers such as Nicholas Berdyaev, Alfred North Whitehead, and Henri Bergson. With Jim, I object to the omnipotent-oriented theologies of Augustine, Dante, and John Bunyan. I especially like Jim’s statement that “omnipotence is about a god that no one has experienced.” Beginning with divine love naturally leads us toward affirming amipotence, or something very close to it.
For more on why omnipotence leads to atheism, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1]. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, tr. Natalie Duddington (New York: Harper and Row 1960) 32.
[2]. To name just a few: Aquinas, Thomas. On Evil. Trans. Jean Oesterle. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. Adams, Marilyn McCord. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Adams, Marilyn McCord, and Robert Merrihew Adams, eds. The Problem of Evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love. Revised Edition. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978. Plantinga, Alvin. God, Freedom, and Evil. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Swinburne, Richard. Providence and the Problem of Evil. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.
[3]. Plotinus, The Enneads: Third Ennead: Second Tractate: Section 11, http://www.sacred-texts.com/
cla/plotenn/enn197.htm (accessed August 7, 2016).
[4]. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Henry Chadwick, tr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 7:13.
[5]. Augustine, De Ordine, Chapter 19, Robert P. Russell, tr., in Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns eds. Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Reading in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964) 185.
[6]. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, III Parodiso, tr. Charles Singleton,(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975 Canto XXXIII: 123, p. 379.
[7]. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962) pp. 13-14.
[8]. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (Detroit: The Free Press, 1961) 164-166.
[9]. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1977) 261.
[10]. Ibid., 252.
[11]. Ibid., 255.