Who is God to Me?

By Mike Rans

An amipotent God is free to love. If we can imagine God like this, then so are we.

There are many questions I’ve heard people ask about God and many of them begin with the word why. Why did God create me? Why did God let that happen? Why me? The remainder are questions like the following. What does God want of me? How can I do what God wants? Where do I fit into God’s plan? When can I be sure that I’m on the right path? It’s understandable to me because those are the kind of conundrums I’ve struggled with as a Christian and many more besides. It’s been two millennia since Jesus’s death and resurrection. Yet we still wrestle and seem little closer to convincing answers.

I was an atheist for many years and had much to ask then too. Why am I here? What am I supposed to do and how can I do it? Where do I go from here and when will I arrive? I hoped when I became a Christian that I’d have solutions. No one ever told me that instead what would happen is a reframing of age-old questions with a few new ones thrown in for good measure. At first it was disorienting. After a while, you become comfortable living in a grey zone. Well, perhaps not really comfortable, but you learn to accept it. There just don’t seem to be good answers to some really vexing puzzles in life. That’s not to say that scholars and clergy haven’t given it their best shot. They have come up with incredibly intricate and elaborate attempts to make sense of things. But most of what you hear seems to me to be some sort of rehashing of the same tired ideas that leave me depressed, confused or both.

Luckily for us all, there are a small but growing number of plucky visionaries challenging the status quo. They’re bringing new concepts to the table; they’re ruffling feathers and they’re giving me hope. Prominent among these rebels is Thomas Jay Oord. He’s painstakingly built up a set of proposals that are like a light in the fog. His work has encouraged me to search for answers to the old questions by asking a new one, this time one that starts with who. Who is God or more precisely who is God to me?

It’s oddly refreshing to approach life’s big issues from this angle. Not only does it feel more personal, but also by bringing in a relational component, it gets to the core of who I am. After all, we aren’t independent of everything around us. We rely on each other to varying degrees and none more so than God. In God, we live and move and have our being. So expanding my understanding of the Divine can’t help but deepen my knowledge of myself.

As a brief aside, I want to clarify that I only use the masculine for God when raising arguments from those who typically refer to God in a gendered way. My view is that God does not fit into human categories. To force God into these boxes is not only illogical but damaging.

What do the revolutionaries I mentioned previously bring to the table that’s different to what’s gone before? In a word, love. You might think that there are reams of pages about God’s love in general and for humanity specifically. The reality is that these writings always add another word. Sometimes they do so openly but usually with subtlety, unintended or otherwise. That word is “But.” God loves us. But His Holiness demands…God loves us. But His Justice prevents…God loves us. But His Righteousness compels…But His Immutability means…But His Sovereignty requires…There’s always a qualification that makes Divine love less than what we’re called to have for God and for each other according to Jesus’ great commandments.

What happens if we remove the but? I’m reminded of a cartoon by David Hayward in which a man is holding a laying on a hospital bed but holding a sign that says “God loves you BUT…” The Trinity is acting as physicians, and the Father says, “We’re going to have to remove your BUT!”

If we’re prepared to listen carefully to the Bible, it’s possible to hear the voices that inspire us to drop the qualifications. This is what these visionaries have done. They’ve heeded those Scriptural calls and put God’s love front and center where it should be. And what a beautiful image of God that gives us!

What does this simple and yet radical approach mean for how we understand God? Transformative doesn’t do justice to the change this brings. Many theological dominoes fall, but Oord identifies the key one right there in the title of his groundbreaking work “The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence.” At the heart of the faith of most believers seems to be the assumption that God can do anything He wants. After all, they claim, if God can’t do anything He wants, then He wouldn’t be God. God is by definition they say, omnipotent. What happens if we take away that foundation? Does the whole house come crashing down? Let’s find out.

First, we need to understand what we mean by omnipotent. Surprisingly how people understand it is not as universal as it seems. A few say God exerts all power. Some think that God can do absolutely anything. Most believe that God can choose to control everything. The funny thing is that even here, it doesn’t take long for the “but” card to come out. God exerts all power. But humans exert some. There is nothing that God can’t do. But God can’t contradict Himself. God controls everything that happens. But humans are free to choose to sin.

There are some amusing logically impossible “buts.” The most famous is probably that God can’t make a rock so big that God can’t lift it. I’m sure you could spend hours coming up with similar ones. I want to highlight one that is widely accepted and yet clearly sinks the omnipotence ship. God can’t alter past events. To me if God really can do anything and is timeless as many suggest, changing the past should be a cinch.

More eye opening to me than the qualifications is what Oord unearths about words commonly assumed to mean omnipotent in Scripture. There are three words translated as “almighty.” “Pantocrator” concerns the sustaining of all, “shaddai” is about nourishment and protection, and “sabaoth” is typically used in the context of Divine leadership. None of them refer to total power or control. In any case, when you look at events in the Bible, it’s pretty clear that they don’t always turn out as God hoped. That’s not what you’d expect from an omnipotent deity.

The final nail in the coffin of omnipotence is the existence of evil. Pain and hurt, personal or witnessed in others, have caused many to doubt, often in secret, and some to give up faith. It’s a struggle with which I’m all too familiar. Most believers assume that evil is part of or at least compatible with a Divine plan and consistent with omnibenevolence. God allows or even causes evil directly, or with the aid of Satan, as a penalty for sin, to build character or for some greater good because God loves us. These arguments crumble for all but the most hard-hearted when you consider horrors like genocide or child sex trafficking. Alternatively, some suggest that evil is a byproduct of human freedom given out of love. Again, you don’t have to look far to find real life scenarios that challenge that premise. What stops God from intervening when there’s an earthquake or pandemic? Why shouldn’t God challenge the authority of a dictator? I have a test case that sets a high, but I think reasonable bar for attempts to explain suffering. Why doesn’t an all-powerful God step in to save three million children who starve to death each year (some of whom are Christian if that makes any difference)?

Of course, it’s easier to collapse a house built on the shifting sands of omnipotence than to invent a plausible alternative. I’m thankful for countless hours of research expertly summarized in a series of accessible books. I’m grateful to Thomas Jay Oord for giving me the firm foundation I’ve been seeking. I’m delighted at the coining of a new and refreshing term: amipotence. Imagine a God in whom love comes before power. That would be a God that guides rather than commands, that relies on inspiration not domination, that heads a team instead of acting solo. Now that’s an uplifting idea!

I’m now ready to answer the question I posed earlier: who is God to me? God is the love of my life. My amipotent partner acts intentionally in relational response to myself and others to promote overall wellbeing. My ally sustains, nourishes, protects and leads, empathizing with my and others’ suffering. As a universal Spirit, my friend exerts a loving influence everywhere at all times. That continual work to bring healing and squeeze good from the bad can be inferred from what occurs all around. Although there’s no one more loving or powerful, my partner doesn’t control and needs my help to stop evil. I am invited and empowered to participate in the ongoing Divine work of love and so are you.

Bio: Mike Rans is a data science consultant with the United Nations based in New Zealand. He studied engineering and computing at Oxford University and has lived in Denmark and the UK. Having discovered an amipotent God later in life, Mike now runs [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/groups/cruciform) and [reddit] (https://www.reddit.com/r/cruciformity/) groups on cruciform theology.

OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE

Mike Rans explores questions of God’s creating and power with refreshing honesty. I enjoyed his first-person reflections, which gave insight into his background and personal journey. I am encouraged that the idea of amipotence has been helpful as he rethinks beliefs about God. Like Mike, I often meet people who affirm God’s love but quickly add qualifications. I agree with him that we should begin with love and then reconsider divine power in that light. When we affirm God as perfectly loving and uncontrolling, God becomes the unreserved lover with whom we can worship and joyfully cooperate.

For more on Oord’s view that theology should start with God’s love rather than God’s power, see this article.

* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.