Thomas Oord’s 'Amnipotence'

A Reflection on the Power of Love at Work in the World

I’m an appreciator of Thomas Oord’s work. To the extent that Western Christianity has underwritten a violent retributive God, aligned God’s sovereignty with this view power, I’ve appreciated Oord’s efforts to unwind that interpretation of the Bible. Thomas Oord’s description of God’s power at work in the world via ‘Amipotence’ does that. There’s an overlap between his work on God’s power as love, and my own work in the same area.

But I also have differences with Thom’s work. And so I accepted the invitation to write a brief essay on Thom’s Amipotence for a book of essays on Oord’s book of the same name. It gave me a chance to appreciate his work as well as differentiate my own work from his in the area of power and God. It was short (I actually ran over the given word count limit - sorry). There’s much more to be said. But if you like this essay, I encourage you to buy many more essays like it in the book HERE. And Thom promises to engage all the essays over time on his own site. And of course, you buy my own treatment of God’s power HERE Much blessings to Thom on this good work in furthering our understanding of God and His power at work in the world.

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If Love is Power, “I Want to Know What Love Is”

Thomas Oord’s Amipotence is a disruption to the standard account of power. It pushes us to question power. It moves us (in the words of the Foreigner song) to “want to know what love is.” And for this we should be grateful.

The standard account of power, as I see it, defines power as a force exerted “over” a person or social group in order to achieve an outcome as pre-determined by the person or group exercising the power. Power is “power over”, and, according to the standard account, it is just the way the world works, and so there is no getting around using “power over.” As such we have no choice but to go to work and get “the good guys” in control of this power and use it for God’s justice and righteousness in the world.

American evangelicalism, as well as Protestantism, has been under the spell of the standard account of power. The result has been Christian celebrity pastors falling into heinous abuse scandals, or Christians, in the name of Jesus, pursuing the powers of the state to install a Christian Nationalism to accomplish their cultural aims. It all speaks to a church drunk on power, the “power over” justified by the standard account.

Oord’s Amipotence puts a wrench into this machinery of “power over”. In my own view of power, I contend that there are two distinct kinds of power at work in the world. There is worldly power, which exercises power “over” persons/groups in autonomy from God, and God’s power, which always works “with” and among people inter-relationally, forgiving, healing, connecting, persuading, convicting, reconciling, and transforming. Worldly power is control via manipulation or coercion of some kind. God’s power is the way of love, non-violence, mutuality, non-coercion, inter-relationality. God’s power will not coerce so it requires a giving up control of worldly power. It requires persons and social groups to open space for God’s power to work, discern God’s power, and cooperate with God’s power. This all sounds much like Oord’s case for God’s power as love in Amipotence which is why it such a disruptor of the ideological hold of the standard account upon the imagination of present-day Christians, and for this we should be grateful.

Scripture and the Limits of What We Can Know

Having said all this, Oord and I come at the nature of God’s power differently. I come suspicious of metaphysics. Oord comes more friendly to metaphysics. I have read too much Barth, and maybe Derrida too, to be free from the worry that metaphysics allows us to project onto God our own wants, understandings and fallen proclivities. Oord reads metaphysics more positively as a part of the ways we understand God. I fear metaphysics is the gateway, in the words of Karen Kilby, to filling out our understandings of God “with notions borrowed from our own experience of relationships and relatedness” to name what is not understood. We then are made subject to these notions in our worship and moral lives as Christians.

This suspicion of mine explains why I so appreciate the first chapter of Amipotence. The chapter deconstructs the ways and the histories by which the West has done this very thing: project the standard account of power from our fallen world onto our reading of God’s power as narrated in Scripture. Whether it is the culprits of Greek Metaphysics, Roman views of sovereignty, or Christian theologians of the West, Oord helps us see how the ideas of “Almighty God”, “omnipotence”, “able to do anything” get adopted within a stream of interpretation importing a view of God’s power onto the Bible. (40) These meanings of power however do not match up with the God revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ and the history of God in Scripture. Omnipotence, as traditionally defined, reads into God our own human desires “for a King like the Gentiles have” (I Sam 8:5), and speaks more to what we want in power from God than who God actually is. Amipotence is masterful at showing us how “omnipotence is not born of Scripture.” (40)

But I Still Want to Know What Love Is

But are there places where Oord opens himself up to projecting onto God’s “love” our human wants and fallen understandings ala metaphysics? Has Oord done to God’s “love” what he claims Western Christianity has done to God’s “power”?

In this regard, I have three short queries for Oord that expose the potential in Amnipotence to make “love” into an amorphous concept or principle sufficiently nebulous for us as humans to project our most wanted and perhaps deficient notions of love. In each case, Oord leaves us wanting (with the 80’s rock band Foreigner) “to know what love is”?

First, Oord defines love as “God’s eternal and unchanging nature” (121). He argues that “divine love comes prior to sovereign choice” (126). God’s nature of love determines what God does.

The danger here, as I see it, is that Oord makes God’s love into a notion which can be defined separate from God’s actions. Because “love comes prior to” God’s choices and actions (123-128), love is now a stand-alone concept into which we can now import our own frail human understandings This, I suggest, opens us up to project onto God what love is, as opposed to allowing his actions to define what God’s love does for us.

Differing from Oord, I prefer to define love as an indelible attribute of God’s character. This means God chooses to act out of His character in love towards the other. This makes God’s love concrete, born out in and defined by God’s actions as an extension of His love. The meaning of that love is revealed in His actions, and His actions are always aimed towards His purposes.

John 3:16 illustrates my point. The text begins with God’s love: “God so loved the world.” God is moved (via His character) by His love to conduct an action, “that he gave his only Son”, an action which reveals what love means: to give up of oneself for the other (John 15:13). This love is aimed towards God’s purposes of goodness and flourishing for the other, so “that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” His love therefore has real content. It not only affirms, not only forgives, but love, through His power guides, moves, empowers and transforms persons (as well as social worlds) towards his purposes of righteousness, goodness, and justice.

Second, this leads to Oord’s description of what God can do as the amipotent God. Oord describes wonderfully how God is at work in creation, how the Spirit is universal “present to all creation and always lovingly influences everyone and everything.” (140)

But where Amipotence fails is in helping us to discern the work of God in the world and for that matter in our own lives. Oord says things like “whatever is good in the world emerges because of the Spirit and creaturely responses” (142). But he also knows that “whatever is sinful, evil and promotes ill-being derives from the failure of creatures or creation to cooperate with God.” (142). How do we discern between the two?

It appears that for Oord we cannot be specific. We “cannot say “God is acting here but not there.” (138). And so, God acting in the world is again all rather amorphous. When faced with discerning an activity of God in our lives, we are left to discern based on our understandings of love? We’re left again wanting to know what love is. Love, in Amipotence, has become amorphous separated from God’s actions and purposes in the world?

My own solution to this puzzle is that God works through His presence in the world. From God’s presence in the garden, to the tabernacle, to the coming of “Emanuel God with us,” to the new heaven and the earth when God shall dwell with all humanity (Rev 21:1-2), presence is the way God works in the world. And the logic of God’s presence, the logic of the incarnation in the Son, runs through the whole narrative of the way God works in the world. It is true that God is omnipresent over the whole of creation, but down through the history of Scriptures God’s presence becomes manifest viscerally, visually among and through a people, moving, healing, transforming us.

To discern God’s presence God has given us practices through Jesus where He promises to be “with us.” These practices, known as sacraments in the Catholic church, have been practiced down through the centuries in various forms by all churches, not only on Sundays, but in the streets of towns, and villages where Christians live. There’s no space here to outline this theology, so it must suffice to say, that these practices compose a whole way of life, in all the circles of life, by which the people of Jesus (in the words of Oord) “cooperate with God.” (142) and His presence, and where His power, His love become manifest among us. These practices help us discern God and His power at work in love.

Third, Oord’s Amipotence is extraordinarily helpful in explaining why God allows evil in the world. God often does not intervene in human affairs preventing evil because he will not coerce and usurp the agency and self-hood of persons. And there are many other ways this interplays in the manifestations of evil in our world. On this, Oord and I agree.

Where I differ with Oord is that I prefer to make any limitations on God to be part and parcel of His choosing, out of his character, rather than God being limited by an a priori essence of His nature. God, in Scripture, chooses again and again in a way that is always consistent with His character of love. This is evident in the life of Jesus (John 10:18) and Scripture. The danger in Oord’s metaphysic is that God and his activity can get subsumed into a world as pre-determined by a metaphysics that is highly speculative. We are then once again back to projecting what love is and how it limits God to what He can and cannot do.

When I look at Scripture however, when I survey the history of the churches down through centuries, I see miracles and interventions of sundry kinds. God did raise Jesus physically from the dead by the power of the Spirit and God will raise us likewise (Rom 8:11). Theologian Greg Boyd shows God withdrawing His presence from people’s lives in Scripture, and allowing the unleashing of the consequences of sin. This too is a dramatic intervention of God’s love into the circumstances of people and even nations. I could go on and on.

Saying “God chooses out of His love” takes nothing away from the explanatory force of Amipotence regarding the problem of evil. The insight holds that God’s love moves him to never coerce and impose unilateral action over people and therefore God will not prevent evil in many cases in the world.

And so I see nothing gained and plenty lost by limiting God’s power via an amorphous a priori essence. For we know, with the apostle, that in Christ being raised from the dead, God has unleashed power that is of immeasurable greatness, among us who trust in (come under) his authority (Eph 1:19). God is capable of more than “we could ask or imagine” (Eph 3:20). And so, in terms of describing the limits of this power, I prefer to heed the chidings of the apostle Paul and Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” and remain open to the unimaginable power of God at work in the world.