The Still Birth of Amipotence
By Gabriel Gordon
Amipotence is built on a way of doing theology which is rooted in fundamentally mistaken assumptions.
I’ve known Thomas Jay Oord since 2017, when he graciously sent me a free pdf of one of his books. Since then, I have invited him to speak at churches, conferences, and universities. I’ve always found him to be quite gracious and down to earth. There is much to commend him. I even consider him a theological mentor. And yet, as you will see shortly, I fundamentally disagree with him on a number of points. While I assume Tom will disagree with my criticism, I imagine he’s just happy that others are engaging with his work. There is something much more insulting than criticizing a scholar’s work—namely, ignoring it. Non-engagement is the worst form of insult because it says your work isn’t worth engaging. I hope Tom can take solace in the reality that some of us take his work seriously.
Tom’s general methodology and way of doing theology includes at least three pillars: The first is a strictly literalist reading of Scripture informed by German historical criticism, the second a divorce of Scripture from Tradition; and the third an affirmation of German Lutheran Adolf von Harnack’s thesis of Christianity’s Hellenization.[1] These assumptions which serve to build the edifice by which Tom goes about doing constructive theology I would contend are a fundamental mistake. These three pillars of his approach to theology, namely a literal reading of Scripture, the divorce of Tradition from Scripture, and his affirmation of Harnack’s thesis, serve as unstable foundations for doing theology. Faulty assumptions lead to faulty conclusions. While I disagree with his rejection of omnipotence, which has come to be rejected largely if not entirely by Northern European Christianity and that which has been colonized by its influence, the focus of my critique here will be with his overall orientation to theology rather than amipotence itself. In other words, I am going to focus on the how of amipotence, not the what of amipotence.
Now to begin, for Tom, and many in Western modernity, Scripture is separated from Tradition by a distant past which can only be transcended by the historical critical method which then allows one to comprehend what Scripture meant before Tradition corrupted it. This is the modern version of the Sola Scripture principle. The Western dualism that is Sola Scriptura is the product of Luther and early modern Northern Europeans. For 1,500 years, Christianity (and Judaism to this day) had no such notion because the first Jewish Christians of the 1st century had no such concept of a 16th century German fabrication. Sola Scriptura, maybe not coincidentally, arose at the same time as colonialism was beginning to take shape and then attempted to replace the old view which came out of Africa and Asia. The innovations which came out of Northern Europe and have since attempted to oust the older non-Europeans approaches to Scripture simply have no legitimacy to do so, other than claims to white supremacy, explicitly stated or otherwise.[2] Furthermore, such an approach assumes a colonial Northern European location of truth, namely in the past, rather than a sacramental view of truth, which locates it in the eternal now. This is what underlies the restorationist idea that we just need to get back to the Bible because the Tradition corrupted it.
His approach to the LXX [Septuagint][3] is an example of this.[4] Yet even if one were to assume the modernist location of truth, namely that it’s in the past, it’s possible the LXX is closer to the original text of Scripture given that the manuscripts we have from the LXX are often older than what we have from the Hebrew manuscripts. Moreover, the Eastern Orthodox affirm the LXX as the authoritative version of the faithful witness of Israel [i.e. the Scriptures]. In light of this, a case needs to be made for why the Northern European Tradition of Christianity is superior to the Eastern Mediterranean Tradition of Christianity; in other words, why does Protestantism get to decide which Scriptural manuscript tradition is authoritative?[5] Indeed, a further complication is the reality that we only have access to the Scriptural texts through the received Tradition. In reality, there is no way to know for certain what was is in the minds of the authors of a historical context whose reconstruction is good guess work at best.
All we have is the faithful witness of Israel as received by the Tradition. For most of Christianity, and for most of Judaism, such a clean divorce between Scripture and Tradition was not possible. The way the Tradition reads the Scripture is in some sense Scripture itself. To call upon an original meaning of Scripture written between 2,500 to 3,000 years ago relies on the false Western dualism which divorces Scripture from Tradition and says one must choose one above the other. Until the Reformation, and even well after the Reformation, such a choice between two opposing options was inconceivable. One might respond to that by stating, “well we know more now than we did back then.” The problem with that line of reasoning as a post-colonial lens will make clear, is that in this case the people who know more are the Northern Europeans, i.e. Protestantism, and Liberal Protestantism at that, over and against the majority of Christian Traditions throughout history whose roots were in Southern Europe, North and East Africa, Southwest, Central, and East Asia.
This same criticism could be launched toward Tom’s restorationist approach, namely that the first people to recognize the corruption of the Tradition, a Tradition birthed out of Israel and held to by the whole world, were the colonizers of Northern Europe. Why is it that the people to come and rescue and restore Christianity are the very people who used Christianity to colonize much of the world? The “white man’s burden” of the colonizers was to civilize the backwards world, and this seems very much in keeping with such attitudes, even if not explicitly stated.
Furthermore, Tom does theology from the assumption that Christianity was Hellenized, a thesis formulated by the German Lutheran Adolf von Harnack, whose Jesus was “…altogether a modernist and philosopher, the Jesus of the liberal anti-Jewish Germany of the early twentieth century.”[6] Why the racist Germans are given such authority and status in scholarship should be questioned more. In the field of Historical Theology, however, Harnack’s thesis has been discredited for at least the last 20 years, and Robert Louis Wilken was already critiquing this thesis in the 1970s. Besides the fact it was born out of one of the most racist times and places in world history, there are numerous problems with Harnack’s thesis, one being that it assumes the assumption of Luther that Scripture was less corrupted than Tradition and therefore was a better witness. It also fails to realize that influence isn’t always positive. I’ve spent years around Southern Baptists and yet their influence did not make me more like them but less.
Furthermore, simply because many Christians, but certainly not all, utilized Greek philosophical concepts and language does not mean the substance of their theology was Greek rather than Jewish. The incarnation itself, as well as the decision of the Jewish elders of Jerusalem and the Holy Spirit in Acts 15 implies that the substance of the faith can be communicated and formulated into various structures, and languages. It just so happened that for many that language in which the substance was incarnated, translated, and carried forward was that of the Greeks. Yet many of the Syriac Christians in Asia, who arrived in India by the end of the 2nd century, and China by the 7th century, used the language and structures of Indian culture and Chinese culture. Likewise, Ethiopians by the 4th century were also formulating the Jewish substance of the faith in their own culture, language, practices, and modes of thought.
The Nicene creed was not the triumph of Hellenistic culture, a final emptying of the Christian substance of any of its Jewish vestiges, but rather in contrast it exemplifies just how Jewish Christianity remained. It was heretics such as the Gnostics of the 2nd and 3rd century or the Arians of the 4th century who were changing the substance of the faith according to Hellenistic philosophy.[7] That the bodily resurrection and the incarnation became reaffirmed at the council of Nicaea is a testament to this. Both doctrines are thoroughly Jewish as they embody a Jewish affirmation of the physical world. Even the Trinity, which is often thought of as a Greek philosophical concept, might have been discussed in the Greek philosophical language, but the actual substance of the doctrine has its origins not in the Greek world, but in the ancient Israelite/Canaanite world.[8]
Indeed, many of the Church Fathers may have known more about this connection than many moderns, in that they believed that the Greeks actually borrowed from ancient Hebrew culture.[9] Historically scholarship hasn’t taken this seriously but there may soon come a time when that changes. What this means is first, the substance of the faith remained and has continued to remain Jewish, despite Greek language and philosophy being used to describe, articulate, and reflect upon that Jewish substance which remained unchanged; and two, that Greek philosophy may have possibly been positively influenced by ancient Israelite/Canaanite culture, so that while distinctions certainly remain, Greek and Hebrew culture may not be as different as we once thought.
Lastly, Tom’s method of doing theology includes a literalist reading of Scripture. By literalist I simply mean that the plain sense of Scripture is taken as the only meaning of Scripture. There are different kinds of literalism, what most people think of when they hear the term are 6-day creationists who believe Genesis teaches the world was created in six literal days, or who believe that the history depicted in the book of Joshua in which the Israelites conquer Canaan is straight forward history, despite the fact the archeological record doesn’t support it as such.[10]
However, there is another kind of literalism, namely that of the historical critical method, in which the true meaning is the original meaning as situated in its original historical, cultural, and linguistical context. Both of these are literalist readings in that they take the surface meaning or plain reading of the text to be the only meaning of Scripture. For most of Judaism and Christianity, namely prior to the 18th and 19th century invention of the historical critical method by mostly Germans, readers or rather hearers of the faithful witness of Israel assumed that while the literal meaning existed and was important, there was always a second spiritual, allegorical, or sacramental meaning that lay within the literal words and meanings. Indeed, for many, the Messiah sacramentally present in the text was the spiritual meaning. All types of literalism are problematic for various reasons, but one blaring issue is summed up in the question: Why do the Germans get to tell us how to read the Jewish Scriptures?
These three points I have brought out are the structural bridge by which Tom drives his theological car, which leads him to various destinations, including that of Amipotence city. As I have tried to show very briefly, each of these assumptions are deeply flawed for various reasons and should be discarded. If they were to be discarded, his rejection of the Jewish and Christian doctrine of Omnipotence in exchange for his own doctrine of Amipotence would probably not be possible.
Bio: Gabriel Gordon is an Indigenizing and Decolonizing Jewish Episcopalian. He earned his MATS in biblical studies from Portland Seminary and a bachelor’s in anthropology and missiology from Oklahoma Baptist University. He is currently a graduate student at Marquette University, where he studies historical theology. He lives with his wife, Hannah, and their dog, Karl Barth, in Milwaukee.
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Gabriel Gordon raises several critiques of my view. First, he claims my theology requires a “strictly literalist reading of scripture.” But this is inaccurate—most critics say I’m not literal enough. He also argues that I separate scripture from tradition. He’s partly right, as I believe some aspects of tradition have misinterpreted scripture. My views still align with some parts of the broader tradition. Gabriel further suggests I affirm the Hellenization thesis. He’s mostly correct, because I join many scholars in believing Greek philosophy has negatively influenced Christian theology. While I appreciate Gabriel’s critiques, I don’t find them strong or entirely accurate.
For more on Oord’s view of open and relational theology and scripture, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1]. See footnote 39 in Thomas Jay Oord, The Death of Omnipotence, 22. See also Oord, Pluriform Love, 112-113, 149
[2]. It should be clarified here that for the majority of the Protestant reformers, except maybe the Anabaptists, the goal of their theological reforming project was not to simply “get back to the Bible,” but they were, at least as they saw it, trying to retrieve a more catholic (catholic meaning the original undivided Church, not the Roman Catholic Church) understanding of Christianity. Their version of Sola Scripture was much more mellow that what would later develop.
[3]. The LXX or Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.
[4]. See chapter one Thomas Jay Oord, The Death of Omnipotence.
[5]. It should be noted here that the Syriac Tradition has its own authoritative Scriptural manuscript tradition which is written in Syriac rather than Hebrew. The Catholic Tradition has the Latin Vulgate, the Ethiopian Tradition also have their own authoritative version written in their language. The same question above could be expanded to include all of these traditions and probably more.
[6]. Joseph Klausner in Colin Brown, A History of the Quests for the Historical Jesus, 373.
[7]. See Mark Kinzer, the stones the builders rejected, 15-39.
[8]. Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, 135-136.
[9]. The Samaritan Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria both make this point.
[10]. In reality, it supports the conclusion that Israel was already in the land of Canaan, namely that the Israelites were Canaanites. See Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God.