By Greg Hoover
For many people today, belief in God does not collapse under science or skepticism. It collapses under moral pressure.
The traditional image of an all-controlling God becomes ethically difficult to defend when placed beside the suffering of the world. If God can prevent abuse, violence, and catastrophe but chooses not to, then the word love loses its meaning. If suffering is permitted for hidden reasons or deferred benefits, then goodness itself becomes morally confused.
Open and relational theology begins precisely here. It does not attempt to rescue inherited doctrines of power. Instead, it asks a more fundamental question: What is love, really, and what does its reality imply about the nature of the universe?
What if love is not merely a divine attribute, but the strongest evidence for God’s existence?
Love as a Feature of Reality, Not an Illusion
Love is not a vague feeling or a social convenience. In open and relational theology, love is understood as relational responsiveness, mutuality, concern for the good of the other, and openness to being affected. It is not an abstraction. It is a lived force that shapes real lives and real histories.
People choose forgiveness over revenge. They risk themselves for strangers. They commit to care that brings no advantage. They grieve losses that logic says they should simply accept.
These actions routinely contradict self-interest. Love expends energy without guaranteed return. It persists even when it costs more than it gives back.
Open and relational theologians argue that this persistence matters. If love were merely an evolutionary accident or emotional side effect, its authority would be hard to explain. The universe would more reliably reward domination than compassion. Yet again and again, human beings recognize love as the highest value, even when it works against survival or status.
The simplest explanation is that love is not accidental. It is woven into the grain of reality itself.
Evolution and the Shape of Love
Evolutionary theory can explain some forms of altruism. Kin selection, reciprocal cooperation, and group cohesion shed light on why certain caring behaviors emerge. But they struggle to explain self-sacrifice for non-kin, compassion toward enemies, moral commitments that override survival, and the sense that love is not just useful but obligatory.
Open and relational theology does not oppose evolution. It absorbs its insights and presses them further.
Process thinkers from Alfred North Whitehead to John Cobb have argued that evolution is not driven by competition alone. It also depends on cooperation, symbiosis, mutual responsiveness, and the creative advance of relational complexity. Life flourishes where relationships deepen.
From this perspective, altruism is not an anomaly. Cooperation is not a glitch. Compassion is not a mistake. Love is evolution’s most successful strategy.
If evolution trends toward richer relationality, then love is not opposed to nature. It is nature’s deepest impulse.
Love as Non-Coercive Power
At its highest expression, love does not control.
Parents learn this the hard way. Control may produce obedience, but it never produces maturity. Partners discover that being overly controlling damages intimacy. Friends learn that force cannot be imposed without breaking trust.
Charles Hartshorne argued that divine perfection must include the greatest conceivable love. A God who rules by coercion would be morally inferior to the best forms of love human beings already know. If coercion contradicts love at its highest level, then coercion cannot be the ultimate power of reality.
Open and relational theology takes this insight seriously. It rejects the idea that power means unilateral control. Instead, it understands divine power as relational influence that always honors the integrity of others.
This is not sentimentality. It is explanatory. It aligns our understanding of God with the way love actually works.
Why Love Points Beyond the World
If love is real, non-coercive, and value-oriented, then something must ground it.
Love does not arise from nothing. It is awakened, learned, sustained, and deepened through relationship. Even human love depends on being invited into existence by something beyond the isolated self.
Philosophically, value implies a valuer. Relationality implies a relational source. Possibility implies a calling toward the good.
Whitehead described God as the source of possibility itself, present to every moment as an invitation toward what is better. John Cobb emphasized God’s unwavering commitment to creative transformation rather than fixed outcomes. Catherine Keller speaks of God as relational depth, not dominating force. David Ray Griffin argued that a persuasive God makes better sense of both science and moral experience than a coercive one.
Thomas Jay Oord brings these strands into sharp focus by naming what open and relational theology has long implied.
Essential Kenosis and the Nature of God
Oord’s key insight is simple and radical. If God is love, then God cannot coerce.
God does not occasionally restrain divine power. God has never possessed coercive power at all. Love is not one attribute among others. Love is God’s essence.
According to Oord, this means God cannot override freedom, manipulate outcomes, or unilaterally prevent all suffering. Not because God is weak, but because God is uncontrolling love.
Evil does not occur because God allows it. Evil occurs because God cannot prevent it without ceasing to be love. And God never ceases to be love.
This resolves the problem of evil without sacrificing either divine goodness or genuine freedom.
A World Still Oriented Toward the Good
Critics often assume that a non-controlling God would be passive or ineffective. But the world itself tells a different story.
Despite chaos and cruelty, reality is not morally flat. People experience conscience, compassion, and a persistent pull toward what is better. Even in broken systems, courage and kindness continue to surface.
These patterns make sense if the universe is relational at its core and if divine love is continuously offering possibilities that creatures may accept or resist.
God does not guarantee outcomes. God guarantees presence.
This is not a weak God. It is a God whose power operates the way love actually operates.
Prayer as Participation
In open and relational theology, prayer is not an attempt to persuade a distant ruler to intervene. It is participation in divine love already at work.
Prayer aligns human intention with God’s ongoing call toward healing and justice. It increases the likelihood that love will take concrete form in particular situations.
Prayer matters because people matter, and people matter because God never stops inviting them into the work of love.
Jesus and the Credibility of Love
For Christian open and relational theologians, Jesus is the clearest revelation of this God.
Jesus refuses coercion even when violence would save him. He heals without dominating, forgives without controlling, and loves without guarantees. His life does not merely illustrate uncontrolling love. It reveals the way divine action operates in the world.
The cross is not a divine strategy to achieve victory through suffering. It is what uncontrolling love looks like in a violent world.
Resurrection, in this view, is not proof of domination over death. It is God’s refusal to abandon love even in the face of it.
Jesus does not contradict the argument. He embodies it.
Conclusion: Love as Proof
Open and relational theology does not offer a deductive proof of God. It offers something more persuasive.
If love is real, then reality is not indifferent. If love is non-coercive, then ultimate power is relational. If love persistently calls the world toward healing, then something loving must be calling. If evolution tends toward cooperation and compassion, then love is not an accident but a direction.
The existence of love is not a problem for belief in God. It is the strongest evidence for God we have.
This God does not control the world. This God never causes suffering. This God never abandons creation.
In a world increasingly suspicious of power, a God defined by uncontrolling love is not a retreat from faith. It is faith finally made morally credible.