The Panarchist Politics of Amipotence
By Matthew Baker
Amipotence redefines divine power as love, merging with pantheism and anarchist politics to envision a world of shared, relational freedom.
“Once God is considered to be a name for the boundless, then no sovereign boundary between it and the unfolding manifold of creatures will hold.” —Catherine Keller
Just as the desire for God persists after the death of God, so too does the reality of power remain after the desire for it has passed. What becomes of power in the wake of an amipotent God? Part of any answer will certainly entail a reconception of power radically reconceived as the power of Love, leaving us with a God who, for the sake of creaturely freedom, cannot unilaterally intervene in the affairs of humankind no matter how abhorrent or destructive. On the persistent question of power, Oord writes “Christian theology has been unduly influenced by Greek metaphysics and Roman views of sovereignty.”[1] Such influences may be regrettable, but they are nonetheless historically significant, evidenced by Christianity’s imperially-inflected proclamations since nearly its inception.
This admission is of special importance when considering how in the modern period divine sovereignty came to be transferred to the State. “Seeing God as omnipotent affects how believers think about political leaders and social policies,” says Oord, who goes on to remind us that “Carl Schmitt, the progenitor of political theology, argues that humans build political systems from assumptions about divine sovereignty. ‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.’”[2] Given the important correlation between theology and politics, what political thrust can amipotence provide? Are we, as good liberal subjects, simply to accept the sovereignty and power of the State as divinely ordained, as somehow immune from the very criticisms theologians have enthusiastically directed toward the God of sovereignty and power? What are the politics of amipotence?
Few have studied and written about Love as extensively as Thomas J. Oord. Over the course of his career as a theologian, Oord has authored dozens of books and articles, solidifying his position as a leading authority on the subject. In recent years, Oord has focused on a particular issue which carries significant implications for understanding the nature of God. Theodicy, commonly referred to as ‘the problem of evil,’ is often stated in the form of a simple proposition: If an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good God exists, then evil should not exist. However, since evil does exist, God cannot be simultaneously all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good.
Given the profound challenge the problem of evil seems to pose for divine omnipotence, one may be surprised to discover that sustained critiques of the doctrine are not more prevalent in the theological record. Such criticisms are, however, not altogether absent. Long before the advent of Christianity, the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BCE) questioned the coherence of a benevolent, omnipotent God in the face of evil, arguing that divine omnipotence and omnibenevolence cannot logically coexist. In more recent history, thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard (Philosophical Fragments, 1844), William Ellery Channing (Likeness to God, 1828), and Alfred North Whitehead (Process and Reality, 1929) have each advanced various arguments against omnipotence. Additionally, American process theologian Charles Hartshorne delivered a landmark critique in his work Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (1984). Hartshorne argued that the traditional notion of omnipotence is not only logically flawed but also theologically unsustainable in the modern world, asserting that “the only livable doctrine of divine power is that it influences all that happens but determines nothing in its concrete particularity.”[3]
Drawing from this critical tradition, Oord, in his 2023 book The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence, outlines the numerous logical, scriptural, and philosophical shortcomings of omnipotence and coins the term amipotence. By combining the Latin ami, meaning love, with potence, meaning power, amipotence emphasizes that God’s nature is inherently loving, and that divine power is persuasive, relational, and non-coercive. Oord asserts “omnipotence is not born of scripture and dies the death of a thousand qualifications,” ultimately proclaiming “an omnipotent God does not exist.”[4]
There are many good reasons to affirm Oord’s conclusion, especially considering how one’s theological imagination influences their understanding of suffering, evil, human freedom, sexuality, politics, environmental stewardship, etc. Still, while Oord succeeds in absolving God of moral culpability by claiming God is incapable of intervening to prevent evil and suffering, he does so by attributing total responsibility to creatures; authentic freedom, so the story goes, necessitates total freedom from the tyranny of divine intervention. The result is a moral scheme that tends toward reducing complex and often systemic issues to personal moral failures. Oord’s clear insistence on the primacy of love is clear.
However, framing evil and suffering as a result of failing to adequately respond to God’s initial aim risks demonizing those seen to be misaligned with a specific vision of the Good. This, in turn, has led many within the faith to attempt to correct or redeem “bad actors” through harmful or coercive forms of intervention. In short, Oord’s theology risks trivializing the systemic and structural dimensions of evil, leaving unaddressed the complexities of power, coercion, and oppression that significantly shape human choices and experiences.
Critiques aside, we want to be completely clear in our affirmation of Oord’s concept of amipotence as there can be little doubt it represents a considerable advance beyond the problematic theology of omnipotence, that Whitehead aptly described as the “idolatry that gives unto God the attributes of Caesar.” Oord’s constructive proposal should go a long way toward rehabilitating a God that has increasingly come to be seen as an ethically monstrous and alien force detached from the everyday (and ultimate) concerns of most people. Nevertheless, when Oord goes on to claim, “the death of omnipotence is not the death of God”[5], this marks for us a significant point of theological divergence worth further exploration. While Oord acknowledges ‘death of God’ theology is multivalent and therefore elides any single definition, to the limited extent the radical theological lineage indicates the inexistence of a divine Lawgiver, Leader, Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer, Companion, Healer, or Source-of-All-Good[6], we confess to be more readily aligned with Caputo’s now well-known maxim “God does not exist; God insists”.[7]The distinction, central to Caputo’s weak theology, emphasizes the transformative, ethical insistence of God, suggesting God is not an entity that exists in the conventional sense, but rather an event or call that insists upon responsible human action.
God or Nature, and the Ontology of Love
In his posthumously published philosophical masterwork The Ethics, 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza identifies God with Nature, inaugurating the possibility of a radically pluralistic pantheism wherein the bringing together of God and Nature, rather than flattening out into an undifferentiated unity, presents for the observer a parallax view within which the sacred and profane appear alternately as intensified and distinct realities. Gor or Nature, however, are not superfluous; Spinoza is neither offering his readers a choice between two incommensurate realities, nor is he providing his readers the possibility of a simple semantic conjoinment. Rather, the or in God-or-Nature conveys an inseparable linkage characterized by an immanent relationship at once mutually constitutive and non-hierarchical.[8]
The theological implications of Spinoza’s revolutionary philosophical innovation cannot be overstated. The result is a total annulment of any ontological difference between Creator and creation such that divinity becomes an infinitely distributed series of attributes and modes which do not merely participate in the divine reality but are rather constitutive and expressive of it. Consequently, whereas the aforementioned ontological interpretation of the death of God frames this distribution as an historical event, as an opening of heaven’s storehouse, Spinoza, writing nearly three hundred years earlier, achieved a similar outcome by different means. In either instance, the result is a dissolution of ontological difference that effectively refuses the “traditional metaphysical divisions of theism and atheism, God and world, spirit and matter, and indeed science and religion – divisions that manage, regardless of the camp one chooses, to consistently privilege light over darkness, male over female, and a carefully circumscribed ‘humanity’ over everything else.”[9]
Oddly enough, Spinoza’s concept of God-or-Nature bears a remarkable formal resemblance to St. Paul’s assertion that God is Love. While certainly the idea that God is Love has been a perennial source of inspiration for many, it has also discomfited theologians of a more orthodox vintage. Their anxiety is not without warrant. If God and Love are not merely coextensive but synonymous, they are also therefore potentially reversible, thereby exposing the well-defended and clearly legible ontological line of demarcation as a potential site of vulnerability, threatening to violate the integrity of the Infinite with the riotous incursions of finitude. This strategic rereading of Paul’s theology engenders a radical rethinking of Love understood neither as above, beyond, or even within the world, but as an immanent and omnipresent reality.
God-Nature-Love. Whichever we may select from this manifold, freeing our conceptions of ultimacy from lingering anthropomorphic residues not only enables us to envision a path beyond problematic notions of divine kingship, but it can also help us to understand our humanity more generously, as a shared experience with both non-human and more-than-human communities. But what is that shared experience exactly? Such reflection is beyond our present scope. However, were one to tentatively accept the premise that there exists some minimal shared experience between humanity and hummingbirds, between stars and stones, could it be that what we hold in common could become the basis for an expanded commons, or a more terrestrially animated common sense? Considering our indictment of anthropomorphism, such speculation might seem contradictory or fanciful. The ancient claim ‘man is the measure of all things’ is the confession of an intractable limit; it is extraordinarily difficult to think beyond the boundary of our own skulls.
This is why the inescapable pull toward anthropomorphism is best understood as a constraint that challenges us to think out of bounds, with a fuller awareness of the operation we are never not performing. Part of what it means to theologize with a hammer is to take responsibility for our imagination, to know which end of the hammer to use, when, and for what purpose. Congealed moral economies and ideologies hinder this kind of icono-plastic theological method,[10] preventing us from adapting to the dynamics of the present moment. By allowing our thinking pass beyond the bounds of mythic origins and the pronouncements of a teleocratic order, Love can become a transformative power that neither abolishes, nor fulfills, but suspends the Law, making space for a world where freedom, creativity, and mutual flourishing are not so much utopian visions as they are matters of course—a mobile autonomous zone where life and community are continually brought into being through an ethos of experimentation and mutual care.
Amipotent Panarchism
In her book on philosophical anarchism, Catherine Malabou, reflecting on the thought of Martin Heidegger, suggests “there is an isomorphism between metaphysics and politics, between ontology and military command.”[11] In a related passage, she writes “ontological difference is nothing but a version of the relation between commanding and obeying and consequently remains prisoner to an archic totality.” By bringing attention to the way ontological difference legitimates political ontologies that lend themselves to forms of domination and power, Malabou thus helps bring our question into greater focus. Whatever a politics of amipotence might mean or afford, it must begin with a strident disavowal of ontological difference. And, as we’ve already had occasion to suggest, this erasure of the ontological line of demarcation aligns most closely with the theological vision of pantheism.
Oord’s insistence on the ontological distinction between Creator and creation encodes, and thus tacitly endorses a specific set of metaphysical commitments that subtend perennially gendered and racial discriminations. Feminist thinkers have for decades noted how the Creator/creation division upholds the kind of dualistic thinking that historically associates the ordinal terms (male, white, straight) with reason, purity, and authority, while relegating the subordinate (female, black, queer) to the realm of irrationality, corruption, and subjugation, thus perpetuating and legitimizing social hierarchies and contributing to the enduring marginalization of women, people of color, and other oppressed groups whose suffering is conveniently attributed to their own supposed failings, or the inevitability of their subordinate status within the created order.
Amipotence combines love and power, creating a concept where love is understood, according to Oord, as “acting intentionally, in relational response to God and others, to promote overall well-being.” We would add to this that love is a transformative power capable of creating a world where care, empathy, and solidarity are freely given and received, where the autonomy of each individual is honored, and where the bonds between people are forged not through power or control, but through genuine connection and shared values. In this sense, love is an active practice and a guiding principle that can serve as the basis for an ethic rooted in relationality and response that emphasizes the well-being of others. In other words, when we begin to articulate what love looks like in real terms, it ends up looking a lot like political anarchism.
Amipotence thus finds a natural ally in anarchist principles while giving us the possibility of an ontologically grounded ethic of love. Both seek to create a world where individuals are free, autonomous, and relationally connected, promoting overall well-being and dismantling oppressive structures. But one might ask, “isn’t anarchy synonymous with chaos?” No. “Rejecting universal arbiters like morality and the State doesn’t mean falling into ‘chaos’ or ‘total relativity.’ The space beyond fixed and established orders, structures, and morals is not one of disorder: it is the space of emergent orders, values, and forms of life.”[12] By centering amipotence as the basis for an identifiable political vision, we can begin to create a society that is both just and compassionate, where power is shared, and every individual is valued. In light of the multiple crises we face today, such reflection on the potential of love might seem like courting naive optimism. But “durable bonds, agonistic or affirmative, are neither a reprieve nor an escape. Rather, they are the very means of undoing the coercion, divisiveness, and domination expressed in the theopolitical vision of sovereignty, and power.”[13]
If God is love, and if love is the very texture of the world’s relational becoming, then the vision we pursue must be one that embodies amipotence in every aspect of life. By bringing together pantheism, amipotence, and political anarchism, we discover the possibility not just for a new theological proposition but a living praxis—an amipotent panarchy that suspends the Law to reveal a zone where the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, and between Creator and creation, dissolve into a boundless relational matrix where ethics is first philosophy. Within this Panarchic vision, power is no longer the province of sovereign states or transcendent gods but is redistributed through the fabric of existence itself, where love, as the indwelling principle, animates every act of care, resistance, and creation. It is a vision where the divine is not above or beyond, but within and among—an immanent divinity that insists upon justice, nurtures creativity, and calls for the flourishing of all beings. The ontology of love, as Panarchism reveals, is an ontology of shared power, of mutual becoming, and of a world at once “presently passing away,” and continually lured into new forms of life and community.
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God.” This Pauline conviction finds full expression in a panarchist politics of amipotence. Here, we encounter the divine not as a distant ruler or sovereign exception, but as the ever-present insistence of love—a love that calls us to the work of liberation, the practice of solidarity, and the creation of a world where freedom, creativity, and mutual flourishing are not mere ideals but the very ground of our being. This, we believe, is the promise of Panarchism: a sacred anarchy that insists, always and everywhere, that things can be otherwise—as indeed, they already are.
Bio: Matthew Baker is a change management and learning & development professional with over a decade of experience in user-centered instructional design and project management. He co-hosts and produces ‘War Machine,’ a podcast dedicated to the intersection of radical theology, philosophy, and western esotericism. entheosdesigns.net
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Matthew Baker finds much value in my proposals. But he expresses concern that my theology “risks trivializing the systemic and structural dimensions of evil, leaving unaddressed the complexities of power, coercion, and oppression shaping human choices.” He offers “Amipotent Panarchism” as an alternative and leans toward pantheism, arguing that distinguishing creator from creation fosters everyday discrimination. I’m concerned about Matthew’s pantheism, as it risks undermining genuine otherness. Following Levinas, I prefer to maintain otherness between creatures and between God and creation, while ensuring God’s otherness isn’t so extreme that it makes God utterly unlike creation or incapable of genuine relational connection.
For more on Oord’s view of systemic evil, omnipotence, and atheism, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1]. Thomas Jay Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage Press, 2023), 3.
[2]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 80.
[3]. Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 25.
[4]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 3.
[5]. Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 80.
[6]. Oord uses various capitalized terms across several of his books, including The Nature of Love: A Theology (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2010); The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence (Grangeville, ID: SacraSage Press, 2023); and The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015).
[7]. John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 13.
[8]. Daniel Colucciello Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-secularism and the Future of Immanence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 41–43.
[9]. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 149.
[10]. By icono-plastic, I mean to synthesize the breaking of icons, the fabulation of icons, and a preference for plasticity and openness to change.
[11]. Malabou, Catherine. Stop Thief!: Anarchism and Philosophy. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2023.
[12]. Carpenter, Carla, and Nick Montgomery. Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times. AK Press, 2017.
[13]. Ibid., 30.