WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE OMNIPOTENT?
Photo from Unsplash.
If you hear religious people talk about God, you’re going to hear them talk about power. Specifically, about God being all-powerful. All of the Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) and many non-Abrahamic religions agree that God has extraordinary power over our lives, our world, and the whole cosmos. This conviction is so widespread that we’ve come up with a ten-dollar theological word to describe it: omnipotence.
This gives some folks pause, since the word “omnipotent” doesn’t appear in the Bible. But that doesn’t mean the concept isn’t there! Over and over again, biblical characters praise God’s power. In fact, the angels in heaven repeatedly sing this hymn glorying God’s all-powerful nature: “Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come” (Revelation 4:8). (1) God is almighty – able, in other words, to do not just a great deal more than humans can, but able to do whatever can possibly be done.
But God isn’t just able to do whatever She (2) wishes. God delights in using that power in unpredictable and extraordinary ways to help us. When his disciples despaired of being saved from their sins, Jesus comforted them by reminding them of God’s power: “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). When the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary to tell her that she would become pregnant with Jesus despite her virginity, he assured her that “nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37).
Over and over again, the Bible tells us that there is nothing that can ultimately stand in the way of Her plans. God has the power to ensure that divine plans always come to fruition. And since God’s plan is to save us, bless us, and bring us into endless joy, Her omnipotence is very good news indeed.
We only need to add one caveat to this, which is that God cannot do things that are logically contradictory. God cannot, for example, create a square circle.
But wait, you may be thinking. You just said that God could do anything. Now it sounds like you’re saying there are some things that God can’t do!
It’s a common objection, and the answer is somewhat complicated. God can create any single thing. God cannot create square circles because square circles are literally not a thing.
Here’s what I mean: the idea of a square circle contains a logical contradiction. A square has four straight sides; a circle has zero straight sides. All points of a circle are the same distance from its center; a square, by definition, has some points that are further away from its center than others. So God’s inability to create a square circle isn’t due to a lack of power on God’s part – it’s because the very idea of a square circle is nonsense. When you examine the idea closely, you’ll eventually realize that it’s not an idea at all – just a meaningless series of words, like “married bachelor,” “glimmering flibbityflab,” or “hortly whatsyellow.” C. S. Lewis put it well: “You may attribute miracles to [God], but not nonsense…meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ‘God can’.” (3)
This is the answer, by the way, to the logical paradoxes that some people use to show that God cannot be omnipotent. You’ve probably heard the most famous example: Can God make a rock so big that even He (sic) cannot move it? The idea of this paradox is that whether you answer yes or no, you have said there is something God can’t do, and therefore God is not omnipotent. The nonsense here is a bit more subtle than in the case of square circles, but it exists nonetheless.
Whatever God creates depends on God for its existence. Since God creates every aspect of a creature, She has complete power over every aspect of its being—its size, shape, and location in space. Consequently, the idea that God would not be able to change the properties of something She has complete power over – say, by moving it – is nonsensical. God’s “inability” to create a rock that even God cannot move is no more a limitation of God’s power than my inability to be a bachelor and a married man at the same time.
Why is this exception important? Because it helps explain why we live in a world with so much evil despite God’s omnipotence. God created human beings with free will, including the freedom to choose good or evil. While God fervently wants us to choose good over evil, there is no way for Her to force us to freely choose goodness. It’s a logical contradiction for a free being to be forced to do the right thing – to be forced is not to be free! So God could either create a world full of robotic, unfree people who always did the right thing but only because they were forced to, or a world full of free people who have the potential to choose good on their own, but at the risk of allowing them to choose evil. God judged the value of freedom and authentic goodness to be worth the risk.
Alright, I understand why the world might have some moral evils, like murder, theft, and deception, you might say. But why are there so many of them? Couldn’t an all-powerful God have designed a world where bad things happen less often? Plus, there are a lot of bad things out there that have nothing to do with free will! What about natural disasters? What about disease and death? Those things have nothing to do with our free will. If God really is all-powerful, why doesn’t God get rid of them?
This objection is referred to as the “problem of evil,” and it is one of the million-dollar questions in Christian theology. The church’s greatest minds have disagreed over how to solve it, and even whether it should be (or can be) solved at all! Some have considered it a relatively easy problem, (4) some think it solvable but difficult, (5) and others are convinced that justifying all of God’s decisions to our finite human minds is not only impossible, but unspeakably arrogant to attempt. (6) Some modern theological schools, especially process theology and open theism, go so far as to reject omnipotence altogether in order to solve the problem. Interestingly, the popularity of theodicy (that’s the ten-dollar theological word for attempts to solve the problem of evil) tends to wax and wane over time. When a society’s imagination is gripped by an especially terrible catastrophe, thinkers tend to view fully functional theodicy as a pipe dream. Theodicy has been at a low ebb in popularity since the mid-20th century, when the horrors of Auschwitz were revealed to the world.
This is not the place to flesh out solutions (or the lack thereof) to the problem of evil. But I do want to offer up a few ways that Christians have thought about God’s power and its relationship to evil in the world, regardless of their opinions on the theodicy problem.
First, God isn’t done responding to events that cause evil and pain—even events that have already happened. The Bible assures us that God is going to bring about heaven on earth at the end of history, and that when that happens, God will “wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4). In other words, God’s plan is to eradicate all evil, and to provide its victims the healing and comfort they need. But that plan is still in progress. We shouldn’t assume God isn’t acting simply because everything has not yet been set right. The medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich had a lovely way of talking about this. She experienced a vision of Christ while she was very sick, and in that vision she received an understanding of God’s plan for redeeming the world:
But I also understood this: that deeds are done which appear so evil to us and people suffer such terrible evils that it does not seem as though any good will ever come of them. And when we consider this, we sorrow and grieve over it so that we cannot find peace in the blessed beholding of God as we should…
I saw that there is a Great Deed which the blessed Trinity shall do in the last day… but when this Deed shall be done and how it shall be done is unknown to all creatures under Christ, and shall be unknown until it is done…and by this Great Deed, he shall make all things well. For just as the Holy Trinity made all things from nothing, so the same blessed Trinity shall make well all that is not well (emphasis added). (7)
In other words, God has planned something so fantastic for the end of time that it will show all of human history, even its most horrific moments, in a new light. All will be made well, even for those whose sufferings seem most unredeemable.
Second, God has personally borne the brunt of natural and human evil by becoming incarnate in Jesus Christ. While we don’t know exactly how God will handle evil at the end of history, we do know how God has handled it within history: by expressing solidarity with, and suffering with, its victims.
This is important because it demonstrates God’s compassion and love for victims. But it’s also important because God’s suffering in Jesus is not like ordinary human suffering. God, you see, is the only source of all life, joy, and beauty. For Christians, to be joyful or full of life is to be close to God by definition, (8) since all of those things come from God alone. By suffering, God creates a new point of contact between divinity and humanity. When we suffer, we are not alone; in fact, in our sufferings we are now close to God in a new way. And if we are close to the source of all joy and comfort, then our suffering need not have the last word. If God is with us even in our most horrific sufferings, then so are possibilities of joy and new life—even in the midst of a frightful and death-dealing world.
Third, and most simply, we should admit that we don’t know the full story from our finite vantage point. We certainly see plenty of horrendous evil in the world, but we cannot possibly see all the ways that God is already addressing it, or all of the goodness that God is bringing to pass. The biblical book of Job, a parable about why suffering happens even to good people, ends with God showing up in a whirlwind and emphatically reminding all the characters that they cannot hope to understand the mysteries of creation (Job 40-42). Interestingly, God reserves the harshest judgment for those characters who, assuming they know the full story, blame the victim for his own suffering—a fact that we could all stand to be reminded of more often.
I have spent a lot of time treating some of the questions and problems that arise from the doctrine of divine omnipotence. This may seem like an odd way to proceed, but I have done so for two reasons. The first is that lively debate sharpens the mind. I find I learn a doctrine best by understanding the reasons why the church has come to hold it, and the challenges it has faced. But the second is more important: it highlights the paradoxical character of God’s omnipotence.
God may be all-powerful, but if there’s one thing that everyone agrees on, it’s that God doesn’t use it the way we might expect.
God built a universe that runs according to natural laws of extraordinary precision and grace. But occasionally, God chooses to interrupt those natural laws to make some miraculous display, only to withdraw again and allow those laws to take their course for centuries.
God created the entire universe from nothing and chooses to sustain it in existence every moment thereafter. Yet God entered creation not as a triumphant king or warlord, but as a humble teacher of modest means from a backwater province of an occupied imperial territory, submitting to all kinds of mockery and abuse from those very creatures that he created.
God promises to ultimately overrule all the forces of evil and pain that work against the divine plan, but delays until the end of history what She could accomplish with a single snap of the divine fingers. For now, God chooses to labor alongside us finite creatures—cajoling, warning, pleading, guiding, comforting, and strengthening us on the long journey towards eternal happiness.
That may be the most important lesson for us. If almighty God doesn’t use power as a cudgel to browbeat people into righteousness, then neither should we. Christians and non-Christians alike have fallen into the trap of authoritarian thinking all too often. If we could just make people try things our way, then they would see how right we are! Then all of our problems would be solved! But it simply isn’t so. God is utterly uninterested in using power solely to get Her own way. God opted for a universe of inherently uncontrollable free beings over a world populated by soulless automatons. God chooses to redeem that universe not through one singular decree of power, but through an agonizingly long process of persuasion, self-giving, and loving promise.
It seems that, for God, omnipotence is less about being able to do whatever one wants, and more about being able to bear whatever one needs. God’s omnipotence means that She can afford to play the long game, patiently enduring whatever obstacles and slights creation throws in Her way, knowing that at the end of it all, the good purposes of Jesus Christ, God-in-the-flesh, will triumph.
That’s what divine omnipotence looks like: almighty, invincible, understated, paradoxical, gentle, and loving. I don’t expect to ever fully understand it in this life. But I do expect that, in my deepest agonies and most exulted joys, it will always be good news.
All Bible quotations are from the NRSV.
Surprised to see a feminine pronoun used for God? We usually use masculine pronouns for God, but there’s good reason to use female pronouns too. The Bible describes God as a mother many times (Deuteronomy 32:18, Isaiah 66:13, Hosea 13:8, Matthew 23:37, and Luke 13:34, for starters). I like to mix up my use of pronouns for God, and I’ve decided to go with feminine pronouns for this piece – in no small part because we are way too quick to associate power with men, and weakness with women!
Lewis, Problem of Pain, 18.
For example, Martin Luther, the German Reformer and founder of Lutheranism, once said that the problem of evil was solved by simply remembering that heaven existed. Since there was an eternal life of cosmic bliss waiting for us on the other side of death, God would look at whatever evils we had suffered in this world and give us some extra heavenly joy as compensation. Heaven is God’s promise to right our earthly “balance sheets,” if you like.
The most famous example is G. W. Leibniz, a 17th century philosopher whose book on the topic, Theodicy, remains a classic treatment of the problem of evil to this day. Among modern thinkers, Marilyn McCord Adams’s book Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology is an excellent example of this approach – it takes the problem quite seriously, but is also optimistic that a solution can be found. Some early Christians adopted unusual solutions to the problem of evil that also fall into this category. Some thought that natural disasters and diseases were caused by free will – but by the free will of demons, rather than Christians.
Most thinkers writing today fall into this category. One good example is found in David Fergusson’s recent book, The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach.
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Ch. 32
This doesn’t mean, of course, that you have to be conscious of God to be happy! You can experience joy listening to a beautiful piece of music, or appreciating nature, or making love without ever thinking about God. There’s nothing wrong with that. All that Christianity says is that in such moments, God has drawn near to you, even if you aren’t consciously aware of it.
