The Universe of God’s Dynamic Love
By Ilia Delio
The new science returns to the biblical God who is revealed in mutual relationships of love.
When Thomas Jay Oord published his book The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence, I did a little dance. Finally, someone had the courage to challenge the long-standing belief that God is all-powerful and in control. Where did we ever get such a view of God?
The Old Testament is certainly filled with images of an angry God, a jealous God, a demanding if not petulant God, but these Old Testament images of God are complemented by descriptions of God as compassionate, unconditional love, a faithful and caring God who knows us in our darkness and understands our fears (cf. Ps 139). Even when life turns us upside down, God does not abandon us, for God’s love is an everlasting love (Jer 31:3).
The God of the Old Testament shows up in the person of Jesus as the face of love, a daring love that scandalizes the nitpickers of the law: Jesus ate on a sabbath, healed lepers, and forgave a woman caught in adultery. The New Testament is filled with stories of radical love. God is not revealed as a force to reckon with but as a humble, human person. Jesus shows us that God is personal love, and love marks the new divine covenant: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (Jn 13:34).
In Jesus, love reveals truth because truth does not reside in abstract ideas or blind beliefs but in the very act of loving another. To make the manifestation of God into a purely speculative act or a juridical norm creates confusion. Rather, to have faith is to make God manifest by orienting ourselves toward an encounter through love. Love becomes a conceptual determination at the junction of belief and practice. Truth, therefore, takes on a performative sense, one that is transforming for the subject. Knowledge through love puts in motion the dynamic presence of God.
If the life of Jesus is one long act of compassionate love, it is in the mystery of cross that we see the truth of God’s power. In his book, The God of Jesus Christ, Walter Kasper states that divine omnipotence is the divine capacity for love beyond all human comprehension. God’s omnipotence is God’s capacity to enter into love with all its costs. We usually think that God’s omnipotence means God can do absolutely anything–a power without limits of any kind. But this is not the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Kasper describes the cross as the full disclosure of God in history. “On the cross the incarnation of God reaches its true meaning and purpose,” he writes. “The cross is the utmost that is possible to God in his self-surrendering love; it is that than which a greater cannot be thought; it is the unsurpassable self-definition of God.” He continues:
The cross is not a de-divinization of God but the revelation of the divine God.…God need not strip himself of his omnipotence in order to reveal his love. On the contrary, it requires omnipotence to be able to surrender oneself and give oneself away; and it requires omnipotence to be able to take oneself back in the give and to preserve the independence and freedom of the recipient. Only an almighty love can give itself wholly to the other and be a helpless love.…God on the cross shows himself as the one who is free in love and as freedom in love.[1]
The power of God’s love in the New Testament is revealed as a power of persuasion that pulls us through the impossible on toward more life. However, the power of love was forgotten in the early Church, as politics and patriarchy prevailed.
Omnipotence took on new meaning after the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, as Greek philosophy was used to define Christian doctrine. Divine essence became understood in terms of unity, power and immutability. Coupled with a new emphasis on patriarchal power, the doctrine of original sin played a significant role. The idea of fallen and weak human nature instilled a perpetual fear of God and a sense of unworthiness. The reason for Jesus Christ, according to Anselm of Canterbury, was the debt of sin owed to God. If Adam had not sinned, Christ would not have come.
In the Middle Ages, Franciscan theologians challenged original sin as the reason for the incarnation by reorienting the place of sin in relation to the love of God. Bonaventure looked to the incarnation as a distinct Christian understanding of God and identified God’s being as God’s goodness, based on the Gospel of Luke: “No one is good but God alone” (Lk 18:19). Goodness is relational, personal and self-communicative, and the highest good is love. Bonaventure spoke of love as the essence of God whereby the fountain fullness of love (the “Father”) overflows in love to one who perfectly expresses the Father, namely, the Son/Word; the bond between these divine persons in love is the Holy Spirit. Hence God is a Trinity of love who is self-giving, personal and relational. God’s ultimate reality cannot be located in substance (what God is in Godself) but only in personhood, what God is toward another. Love causes God to be who God is. God exists as a Trinity of persons in communion and only in communion can God exist at all.
In the fourteenth century, the Franciscan theologian, Duns Scotus, formulated the doctrine of the primacy of Christ, essentially replacing original sin with original love. Scotus said that God is love and, from all eternity, God willed to love a creature to grace and glory. Whether or not sin ever existed, Christ would have come because Christ is first in God’s intention to love. In order for Christ to come there must be humans and for humans to exist there must be a creation. The reason for Jesus Christ is not sin but the fullness of love. This view is consonant with the Scriptures where the Letter to the Colossians states that Christ is the firstborn of creation (1:15) and in the Letter to the Ephesians the author writes that Christ is “the mystery hidden from all eternity” (3:9). What God intended from all eternity was to share God’s life with a finite creature so that Jesus Christ is present from the beginning of the universe. Scotus did not reject original sin, but he saw it as last reason for the incarnation. The first reason for the incarnation is love.
The emphasis on the primacy of love complements the new universe story today. We do not live in a fixed, geocentric universe where fully-formed humans fell into suffering and death. Ours is a big bang universe which is approximately 13.8 billion years old. It is a dynamic, expanding universe in which spacetime and matter are constantly coming into existence. We humans emerge out of a long process of unfolding life.
This new universe story impelled the Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to describe a core energy of love at the heart of cosmic life. Love orients matter toward more life because love is unitive energy. He wrote: “In any domain—whether it be the cells of a body, the members of a society or the elements of a spiritual synthesis—union differentiates.”[2] The openness of love to more being-in-love drives conscious material life toward greater complexity. “Love,” he wrote, “is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces…the physical structure of the universe is love.”[3] Love-energy is present from the Big Bang though indistinguishable from molecular forces. “Even among the molecules,” he wrote, “love was the building power that worked against entropy, and under its attraction the elements groped their way towards union.”[4] Love draws together and unites, and in uniting, it differentiates. Cosmic life is intrinsically relational because it is grounded in love.
Teilhard’s universe, shaped by the energy of love, is consonant with the New Testament revelation that God is love (Jn 4:13). Creation is not a demonstration of divine power; rather creation expresses the dynamism of divine love. God does what God is –what is true to God’s nature and thus what is divine. Because God is love, divine life is essentially creative and actualizes itself in inexhaustible abundance. God is not divine substance controlling creation but the radical subject of everything that exists. God loves the world with the very same love with which God is. God’s love fills up each being as “this” particular expression of love.
Since no one finite being can adequately express the fullness of divine love, the excess of God’s love spills over everything that exists, as its future. Teilhard calls this power of attractive love, Omega. Because God is the fecundity of love, another name for God is “ever newness in love.” If divine love is the root reality of all that exists, then suffering, violence and death cannot ultimately destroy life; rather, suffering and death are taken up and transformed into what is enduring and everlasting, the beauty of ongoing, creative divine love. If the word “power” means the ability to persuade, then the most persuasive power is love because God is simply uncontrollable love.
BIO: Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD, is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, and an American theologian specializing in the area of science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology. She authored more than twenty books, including her most recent, The Not Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole (Orbis Books).
OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE
Ilia Delio begins her exploration of amipotence with scripture, arguing that its language and stories reveal a God of love rather than omnipotence. She briefly surveys Christian history through this lens but centers her focus on how love aligns with today’s emerging universe story. Drawing from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Ilia affirms that divine love—not control—is at the heart of reality. When God is understood as love, the divine becomes an inexhaustibly creative and abundant force. This God does not dominate creation but animates all things as their deepest source. I am profoundly moved by the vision Ilia offers.
For more on Oord’s view of God creating through love, see this article.
* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.
[1]. Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Crossroad, 1984), pp. 194—195.
[2]. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 262.
[3]. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Human Energy, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 72.
[4]. Thomas King, S.J. Teilhard’s Mysticism of Knowing (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 104-05.