We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Redefining Omnipotence
Traditional, classical theology has equated divine power with God causing and determining all things to exist. God supposedly acts on everything as their cause, but nothing in any way acts on him. Yet, these assumptions about how God causes things to exist starts in the wrong place. If we start with reason, it causes us to conceive of God as absolute power. However, if we start with the crucified Christ, we arrive at a conception of God as absolute love.
Indeed, in the absolute love revealed on the cross we are given an entirely different conception of power. The theologian Hans Urs Von Balthazar goes so far as to assert that “in the powerlessness of the Incarnate and Crucified One” we see “the shining forth of God’s omnipotence.”[1] Yet, Paul teaches that what looks powerless and foolish to natural reason is actually “the power” and “wisdom” of God (I Cor 1:18). When God puts his omnipotence on display, it appears as the foolish and weak omnipotence of self-giving love.
If we think about divine causation in terms of self-giving love rather than determining power, we would not assume that God causes agents to exist by exhaustively determining them. I submit that we should rather conceive of God “loving [agents] into existence” by making space for them. More specifically, since a loving relationship is only possible between agents that are distinct from one another and who have the power to choose the relationship or not, I submit that we should conceive of the power of God’s self-giving love refraining from determining agents precisely so they can exist distinct from him and be invested with their own morally-responsible causal power, the power of self-determination.
And, finally, I submit that this suggestion is confirmed in the fact that Jesus came as one who perfectly loved people who were distinct from him as well as in the fact that the biblical narrative consistently depicts humans as existing over-and-against God and as possessing the power of free choice.
[1.] H. U. von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter, trans. A. Nichols, U.P. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1990), 34
Photo credit: solsken via Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-SA
Category: General
Tags: Cross, Love, Omnipotence
Topics: Attributes and Character
Related Reading
The Lego Movie & Free Will
Last week Greg tweeted about two movies that have themes related to human free-will and God’s control of the world. They were: @greg_boyd: Does God want a permanently frozen “perfect” world or an open-ended world filled with wildly imaginative people? Watch “The Lego Movie”! @greg_boyd: Meantime, me & some peeps are going to watch (again!)…
What About the Harsh Words of Paul? A Response to Paul Copan (#4)
This post is my fourth response to a talk given by Paul Copan at the Evangelical Theological Society in November in which he raised a number of objections to Crucifixion of the Warrior God. A major part of Copan’s critique centered on my claim that the love of God that is revealed on the cross,…
The Cross in the Manger
There has been a strand within the Western theological tradition—one that is especially prevalent in contemporary American Evangelicalism—that construes the significance of the cross in strictly soteriological terms. The cross is central, in this view, but only in the sense that the reason Jesus came to earth was to pay the price for our sin…
The Sine Qua Non of the Kingdom
In contrast to the habit of judgment which I challenged in the previous post, God calls his people to love the way that God loves. But what exactly does this mean? People have a lot of screwy ideas about “love” today. We use the word “love” to mean a lot of different things, from sexual…
The Distinctive Mark of Jesus Followers
Jesus’ teaching to love our enemies was understandably shocking to his original audience—just as it is to us today. Jesus expected much, which is why, after telling his audience to love their enemies he added that if we only love those who love us and do good those who do good to us, we’re doing…
Living Into the Future
Why didn’t God create a “perfect world”? Here’s Greg’s response to that question. See more at The Work of the People.