What’s Love Got to Do With It?

By Anson Laytner

With its focus on human responsibility, amipotence stands in good company.

The most humorous line in Thomas Oord’s The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence comes near the start of his chapter on amipotence: “We need a plausible account of who God is and what God does.”(119)

For an iconoclastic, radical monotheist like me, this sentence says everything that is wrong with theology: the desire to talk rationally about a subject we know truly little about. Theologians like to talk about God as if they really know something about God. Rather, I hold that when we talk about God, we’re talking about what we think God is or would like God to be. In other words, we’re talking either about genuine human perceptions of the divine or simple projections and wish-fulfillment. As a theologian, Oord demonstrates a theologian’s common presumption to know God’s reality and to talk knowingly about what he presumes to know.

By contrast, all I can say about God is that God Is. I know this because, like millions, perhaps billions, of other human beings down through the ages, I have experienced a taste of what we call “God.” Everything else is commentary—feeble efforts by limited creatures attempting to communicate to other limited creatures about something ineffable.

Nonetheless, given this important qualification, I think that Oord is right on target when he aims to kill the misguided concept of omnipotence. (The forced marriage of Greek philosophy and Hebrew theologizing should have been annulled from the start.) For me, Oord’s strongest argument against omnipotence comes from the experience of suffering, whether natural or man-made. If God is omnipotent, then God shares at least some of the blame for human suffering—and in the case of suffering brought about through natural causes, all of it. It is far better, and it makes much more sense, to hold, as Oord advocates, that God can’t control everything.

The term Oord has coined in opposition to omnipotence is “amipotence.” While I like what he posits about the divine in this regard, I can’t agree with his presumption to speak with such certainty. In fact, I embrace his perspective even as I acknowledge the chutzpah of our all-too-human presumption to speak about God.

If we think about God as amipotent, we are imagining a Being that cares for all creation and that uses its loving power to promote loving, life-affirming behavior by human beings. According to Oord, such a God evinces care and concern about, but never control over, the affairs of this world. The latter is our realm to manage, for better or for worse.

It would be comforting to know that there is a God actively participating, in some divine way, in our struggle to do good, but I, for one, cannot know this for certain. I do hope that this is so, but it would require me to take a leap of faith, a long jump (or perhaps a high jump) from where I currently stand theologically.

But our theologizing is beside the point because, for both Oord and me, the result is the same. As soon as one frees God from the bonds of omnipotence, one also frees up the power of human agency in our world. The two are related. So, let me focus on the human behavior that should accompany divine amipotence.

It is here that Oord is most constructive.

Probably because he is a Christian, Oord bases his theology on “love,” a favorite term ever since Paul but one all too rarely put into practice when it comes to interacting with non-Christian (and deviant Christian) people. Nonetheless, I’m willing to grant him the use of the word because, after all, it is an ideal. Oord writes: “love comes first in God, and this priority matters for understanding divine power. God always acts in loving ways, but divine love never controls” (7).

Oord describes how humanity exists in a relationship with this loving God, the one influencing the other, and the two interacting down through the ages. But the key point is that God is loving, and this love fills all existence. In Jewish terms, we would say that when God pronounced each day of Creation as “good,” we are saying much the same thing: God’s goodness fills the world.

And when Oord explains that, because love is relational, if we fail to respond in love, then God’s love may not get actualized. In other word, God’s goodness (or love) is omnipresent, but it is wholly within our power to implement it, utilize it, and magnify it, or to decline to use it and thus oppose it and contract its influence. This principle can apply both to an individual and to whole nations. The onus is on us.

This too is an ancient Jewish concept, going back to Avraham, when God says that he and his descendants “shall keep the way of YHVH by doing what is just and right” (Ber./Gen.17:19), meaning that we are intended to implement God’s way by the way we conduct our lives. What we do, according to the Torah, matters to God.

Later Jewish writings confirm this sense of partnership. “When Yeshayahu/Isaiah says, ‘You are my witnesses, says YHVH, and I am God’ (43:12). That is, when you are my witnesses, I am God; and when you are not my witnesses, I am, as it were, not God.” (Pesikta de Rav Kahana 102b). In numerous places, the sages pointed out that, when we behave as we should, we become partners or co-workers with God. In the Jewish mystical tradition, when we observe the commandments, we help God in repairing the world (tikkun olam) in order to return it to its primordial perfection.

Lastly, in this regard, I must mention the modern American Jewish theologian Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement, who described his sense of God as “the power that makes for good in the world.” The major difference between Kaplan and Oord is that, for Kaplan, God is an impersonal force while Oord’s understanding of God (still) retains an aspect of personality. (Or so it seems to me.)

And just as Oord is in good Jewish company when he talks about God’s loving omnipresence and humanity’s partnership with God to help the good triumph in this world, he also has allies among the adherents of humanity’s other religions.

What Oord and Christianity call “love” or “agape,” we Jews identify as “hesed,” often translated as “steadfast love,” but which I translate as “lovingkindness.” Muslims may call it “rakhma” and Hindus “daya” and Buddhists “karuna,” but love, lovingkindness, compassion, etc., all describe the same sort of attitude that God supposedly has and which we, according to the best teachings of our respective faiths, are supposed to emulate. These are the closest things we have to a universal religious value. They represent religion at its best. Our challenge has always been to put into practice what we preach when we preach our best.

It really is all about love.

Bio: Anson Laytner is a retired liberal rabbi, living in Seattle, whose career in nonprofit and academic settings focused on fostering positive interfaith and interethnic relations. He is the author of Arguing with God, The Animals’ Lawsuit Against Humanity, Choosing Life After Tragedy, and a novel The Forgotten Commandment. Visit his website at: www.ansonlaytner.com.

OORD’S RESPONSE

Anson Laytner objects to the idea that we can talk rationally about a God about whom we know so little. But he agrees with me that omnipotence should be rejected. Unfortunately, Anson thinks I’m certain that God is amipotent. But I don’t make such a strong claim. Rather, I’m offering a speculative proposal, not a certainty.

I’m grateful to Anson for outlining the many ways in which my proposal for amipotence corresponds with various Jewish ideas. I was aware of some of these similarities, but not all of them. As I see it, the Greek word agape and the Hebrew word hesed have important similarities, despite differences. I address some of these in my book called Pluriform Love.

Again, I’m grateful to Anson for his strong essay.

For more on Oord’s view of the various loves in scripture, see this link.