Archives: Book Chapters

We have examined how, one by one, elements of the Augustinian superstructure have crumbled away under the assault of competing ideas. God’s immutability has been disputed by the preferability of a divine nature that is open to, and responsive to, new developments, in continuity with the biblical witness. God’s stoic apathy under the doctrine of divine impassibility has been supplanted by a strong endorsement of a God who suffers, championing the very heresy of patripassianism. God’s overwhelmingly masculine qualities have been brought to heel by the additional understanding of a post-patriarchal affirmation of a fuller and more complete divinity. The diminishment of the vital importance of love as an essential aspect of the being of God has been widely repudiated by a return to the New Testament conviction that God is none other than Love itself, with resulting challenges to the established doctrine of divine omnipotence.

There remains but one further component to be brought to light before the edifice collapses of its own unsupportable weight. And that is the critical importance of relationality for God, not just in an eternal innertrinitarian relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit but also, and essentially, in God’s constitutive relationships with God’s creation.

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To that I now turn, by introducing the contributions of scholars who have seen the possibility of a fresh way of understanding reality under the influence of the visionary philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.

Whitehead entitled his explosively original “essay in cosmology,” Process and Reality.¹ The title led to a subsequent emphasis on a way of thinking called “process thought,” or “process theology,” among those who came under his towering influence. That accurately reflects his seminal shift of attention from the ancient and enduring focus on “being” and substance and permanence to the more helpful category of “becoming,” particularly in light of scientific advances in the twentieth century that recognized the essentially fluid character of what we call reality.

But a second mode of revolutionary thinking also found a foundational presence in Whitehead’s “exercise” in “imaginative thought,”² namely, the emphasis on relations as internal to and constitutive of all that becomes and is, including the very reality of God. Therefore, more recently, his followers in the theological arena typically name this orientation “process-relational” thought. Both of these aspects of his work are important here, but especially the latter.

I begin with attention to the philosophical underpinnings, not only in Whitehead but also in Charles Hartshorne, and then move to those who have built on this work to bring forth their own vital theological appropriations that inform the focus of this book.

PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERPINNINGS: WHITEHEAD AND HARTSHORNE

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD: THE GOD OF CAESAR AND THE GOD OF THE GALILEAN

A. N. Whitehead (1861–1947) retired in 1924 from an academic career in England in the fields of mathematics and education and promptly accepted an invitation to join the faculty in philosophy at Harvard University, where his work took off in a totally unexpected direction. His objective was to accomplish a philosophical foundation for the various sciences to be able to talk with one another. He gave the Lowell Lectures in 1925, which were published that same year under the title Science and the Modern World. Strikingly, he added two chapters before publication, [218] and these are the only places in the book where the subject of God is addressed. It became clear that, for Whitehead to bring his cosmological vision to completion, he needed to posit a source for the becoming of novelty,³ and he found no better name for that reality than “God.”⁴

My very brief overview of Whitehead’s interpretation of the cosmic process is drawn from throughout the pages of his Process and Reality. Every single moment of becoming is impacted by its inheritance of all that has gone before, some influences highly significant, the vast majority of them quite negligible. It is in this way that the world of the past weighs heavily on the becoming of the new, typically bringing about a resistance to the actualizing of genuine novelty. Similarly, every occasion of experience, once it has completed itself, becomes in turn an influence on that which follows after it.

In Whitehead’s vision, God is by no means inactive in this becoming. God provides for each new occasion its “initial aim,” the maximal good that this occasion can accomplish as it actualizes itself. But God does not determine what this actual occasion will do with that aim. In its fundamental freedom—true not just for the becoming of each moment of the human consciousness but for all of creation—everything that emerges into a new present is not bound either by its past (fatalism) or by God (determinism). It modifies what is given to it in the combination of past pressure and divine lure. And, in Whitehead’s fully encompassing cosmology, God also receives and is influenced by that occasion’s act of becoming.

Therefore two complimentary “natures” are posited for God: the “Primordial Nature,” that aspect of God which is, indeed, totally beyond change, and the “Consequent Nature,” that aspect of God which is perfectly receptive of change because of its openness to whatever the moments of creation have done with God’s maximal proposals. The Primordial Nature is God’s eternal envisagement of pure possibility, not unlike Plato’s “forms.” The Consequent Nature is that aspect of God’s supreme relatedness in which nothing that transpires in all of creation is lost to God’s indefatigable receptivity. So Whitehead could write inthe next-to-the-last paragraph of his magnum opus:

What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. [219] By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.⁵

Finally, one additional dimension of this philosophical vision must be clarified. Relations are not incidental to that which becomes, nor are they external aspects. Rather, relations constitute becoming. To become is to relate to all, including God, in just this particular way and not in any other. A freely constituted decision to respond to the past’s weight and the divine lure is no other than the particular emergence of a complex bundle of relatedness.

Whitehead insisted that God cannot be an exception to the ontological categories but must be their supreme exemplification. Therefore he was able to conclude that what is true for all that becomes throughout creation is absolutely true for God as well. Not only is God not secure in God’s own being apart from all that transpires. God is who God is precisely in the manner of God’s relations with what God has set into motion but not circumvented with impositional restrictions. God proposes. The becoming occasion disposes. God receives the result, and is forever after affected by that.

With this as structural background, what did the mature Whitehead have to say specifically about divine power?

When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of Western theology was edited by his lawyers . . . The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly . . . The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.⁶

Whitehead saw in traditional theology three dominant ways of thinking about God: as imperial ruler, as moral energy, and as ultimate philosophical principle, but he did not favor any of them.

There is, however, in the Galilean origin of Christianity, yet another suggestion which does not fit very well with any of the three main strands of thought. It does not emphasize the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover. [220] It dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love.⁷

Clearly Whitehead’s understanding of the passion of God to offer ever new possibilities of becoming locates love at the center of God’s eternal becoming. Love “involves deep feeling of an aim in the Universe, winning such triumph as is possible to it.”⁸ So could he say, God “is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.”⁹

CHARLES HARTSHORNE: THE MAXIMAL POWER OF DIVINE RELATEDNESS

The American philosopher of religion Charles Hartshorne (1897– 2000) was already pursuing patterns of thought along lines similar to Whitehead when he arrived at Harvard for post-doctoral work in 1925 and became Whitehead’s teaching assistant. Hartshorne went on to become the center of a cluster of scholars in Chicago—including Bernard Loomer and Daniel Day Williams—that introduced process thought to a new generation of theologians.

Hartshorne had grown up in a family milieu that led him early to the perception that God is love.¹⁰ As he wrote in his Preface to Man’s Vision of God (1941), “a magnificent intellectual content—far surpassing that of such systems as Thomism, Spinozism, German idealism, positivism (old or new)—is implicit in the religious faith most briefly expressed in the three words, God is love.”¹¹ He pointed out what has subsequently begun to become obvious but which was still a fresh insight back then:

We say, God is holy, not that he is holiness. Only “love” is an abstraction which implies the final concrete truth. God ‘”is” love, he is not merely loving, as he is merely righteous or wise . . . It is not an accident that love was the abstraction least often appealed to in technical theology, though frequently suggested in the high points of Scripture and other genuinely religious writing.¹²

Reinforcing in advance the claim I have put forth at the end of Part Two, Hartshorne went on to point out: “Just as the Stoics said the ideal was to have good will toward all but not in such fashion as to depend in any [221] degree for happiness upon their fortunes or misfortunes, so Christian theologians, who scarcely accepted this idea in their ethics, nevertheless adhered to it in characterizing God.”¹³

Regarding the relationship between love and power, Hartshorne began by stating that “the real trouble is not in attributing too much power to God, but in an oversimple or too mechanical conception of the nature of power in general.”¹⁴

The dilemma appears final: either value is social [relational], and then its perfection cannot be wholly within the power of any one being, even God; or it is not social at all, and then the saying “God is love,” is in error.¹⁵

God’s power can be understood as “perfect” in that it is “unsurpassable”: “No conceivable being could do more with us than God can.”¹⁶ But it remains a power unique in its capacity to absorb all creaturely responses to that gift of power. He expressed this throughout his book on The Divine Relativity (1948). One passage sums up that understanding:

The notion of a cosmic power that determines all decisions fails to make sense . . . Instead of saying that God’s power is limited, suggesting that it is less than some conceivable power, we should rather say: his power is absolutely maximal, the greatest possible, but even the greatest possible power is still one power among others, is not the only power.¹⁷

Nearly half a century on, in his wittily entitled Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (1984), Hartshorne reviewed two meanings of “all-powerful”: the traditional, of course—the (benevolent) tyrant ideal of absolute, all determining, irresistible power¹⁸—and what he previously had identified as the greatest possible power in a universe of multiple centers of power: “The only livable doctrine of divine power is that it influences all that happens but determines nothing in its concrete particularity.”¹⁹ And this he characterized crisply: “God’s power simply is the appeal of unsurpassable love.”²⁰

Hartshorne’s primary concern was to explode the classic notion of divine perfection as something self-contained within an unchanging, unaffected deity, and to posit instead a much larger God who is perfect [222] precisely in including the encompassing scope of God’s relatedness to all that becomes. In that regard, he developed a position he called “dipolar” theism, parallel to Whitehead’s distinguishing of the Primordial and Consequent Natures in God. For Hartshorne, to conceive of God only as perfectly self-contained would be to conceive of half a God—the half championed by traditional theism. A truly unsurpassable deity is one who is simultaneously transcendent to all else that is—the “absolute” pole—but also maximally responsive to all that is not-God—the “relative” pole. This dipolarity in God is what enabled Hartshorne to see love at the heart of the divine being and becoming—an unchanging love that reliably underlies the very essence of God, an ever-interacting love that is capable of receiving into God that which creation does in response to it.²¹ So he named one of the chapters in The Divine Relativity, “God as Absolute, Yet Related to All.”²²

A PROCESS THEOLOGY OF LOVE: DANIEL DAY WILLIAMS

Daniel Day Williams (1910–73) joined Hartshorne on the faculty at Chicago Theological Seminary in 1939 but he was no stranger to that milieu, having done pre-doctoral work there in the early thirties. He became, for a time, part of a notable group of scholars who advanced the perspectives of process philosophy into the theological arena. Distracted by other projects, and always gracious to the demands of others on his time, he did not complete what came to be recognized as the first systematic theology shaped by process thought until 1967. He named it The Spirit and the Forms of Love.

Accepting the biblical understanding of love as central to any human concept of the divine is at the heart of Williams’ enterprise, directly challenging the Augustinian formulation as a corruption of this.²³ Love is “spirit taking form in history.”²⁴ Since God’s being “is love itself,” God is always “the Holy Spirit, the spirit of unqualified love.”²⁵ Love is “the very being of God in an eternally outgoing, creative life.”²⁶

Furthermore, to love is to facilitate the freedom of the one loved “with all its consequences, even for God.”²⁷ Love necessarily involves suffering, which may well occur when one allows the consequence of [223] being acted upon by the other, wherefore Williams wrote of the “suffering love of God”:

The disclosure of who God is has come through…his self-identification with the suffering of the world for the sake of love: God does not surrender his deity, his everlastingness, the perfection of his power and love. God remains God . . . God is revealed in Jesus’ suffering because in him suffering is the authentic expression and communication of love.²⁸

Freedom to love in response to God’s loving of us calls for “a revision of the traditional view of the exercise of the divine sovereignty.”²⁹ God risks the refusal of love.

What the analogy of causality excludes from the doctrine of God is his exercise of sheer power to create without becoming involved with the creature, and without being subject to the suffering which follows upon the creature’s freedom. Causality without involvement is incompatible with love . . . a will which allows no effective power to any other cannot be a loving will.³⁰

Williams conjoined divine power and love in a way that does not violate the notion of what love is while assuring that power truly is an aspect of God’s being as love. The power of God:

is not that of absolute omnipotence to do anything. It is the power to do everything that the loving ground of all being can do to express and to communicate and fulfill the society of loving beings. God’s power expresses his love, it does not violate it. Therefore it is the kind of power which holds the world together in one society, setting limits to the freedom of the creatures without destroying that freedom.³¹

He then utilized terminology that for decades informed the basic stance of process theology on the nature of true power, though, as we shall see, that is open to challenge: God “persuades the world by an act of suffering with the kind of power which leaves its object free to respond in humility and love.”³² Persuasion is affirmed as a positive alternative to coercion or compulsion, surrendering the illusion of control and intending not to violate the freedom of the one being persuaded.

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In a posthumously published volume, The Demonic and the Divine, written in 1973 but only made available in 1990, Williams contrasted the notion of divine power with “the demonic”:

The demonic feeds on the divine power of being and distorts it . . . [It] always moves toward final self-destruction. It cannot destroy the creative good, though it can destroy particular structures of good . . . The divine power outlasts every power that in any way blocks it.³³

The notion of “outlasting” echoes the modest reassurance in John 1:5, that “the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it.” It is not a claim that darkness was conquered by the light of the Word become flesh. It is that this light of God is indefatigable; it cannot be extinguished. It “outlasts” all assaults on its illuminating power.

Therefore Williams explicitly repudiated the validity of the inherited tradition of classic Christian theism.

If genuine freedom involves risk and loss, then traditional theology leaves us unfree. If genuine creativity involves the uncertainty of not knowing the outcome beforehand, not having it guaranteed, then traditional theology takes away from God the creator’s greatest dignity and glory, which is not absolute power to make everything come out right, but absolute love that involves God in the risks of an unfinished and suffering world.³⁴

Love entails risk. God embraces the vulnerability of risk, in being true to the divine nature as Love. The only assurance is that God’s love, ultimately, cannot be cancelled out by forces that oppose it. History is the arena of the conflict between love and not-love, with all the pain that this has entailed.

UNILATERAL AND RELATIONAL POWER: BERNARD LOOMER

Bernard Loomer (1912–85) became dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1945, only three years after finishing his doctoral dissertation. He did not publish extensively, but his essay on “Two [225] Conceptions of Power” in the journal Process Studies (1976) became a pivot around which considerable reflection turned.

Loomer distinguished between “unilateral” (or “linear”) power, which is understood to move only in one direction, with a capacity to influence another without in turn being influenced, and “relational” power, about which much more will be said shortly. Neither “type” actually exists in its purity,³⁵ but power when it is conceived as unilateral is a “truncated” view, “demonic in its destructiveness.”³⁶ And in a “competition of power, our relative strength or size can be ascertained by the degree to which the freedom of the other is curtailed. The reduction of freedom is an attenuation of power.”³⁷

When love is contrasted with power, we need to be aware that “it is the linear [unilateral] conception of power that is regarded as the antithesis of love.”³⁸ In fact, “the god of unilateral power . . . is a demonic god.”³⁹

Loomer is mistakenly credited with having surfaced a distinction between “persuasive” and “coercive” power, but this does not represent the thrust of his argument.

The issue between love and linear power is not finally the issue between persuasion and coercion . . . In some interpretations of love, especially Christian love, it would appear that love is as unilateral and nonrelational in its way as linear power is in its way. The interpretation of divine love, as being a concern for the other with no concern for itself, may be the ultimate instance . . . this kind of love, like this kind of power, needs an alternative conception.⁴⁰

In pursuit of this, Loomer moved on to his analysis of relational power, “the ability both to produce and to undergo an effect. It is the capacity both to influence others and to be influenced by others. Relational power involves both a giving and a receiving.”⁴¹ To explain what he has in mind, Loomer introduced the category of “size,” which involves “the enlargement of the freedom of all the members to both give and receive.” In other words, the greater the extent of freedom is experienced in the recipient of relational power, the larger the size. The more the freedom of the other is curtailed, size shrinks.

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[In a] competition of power, our relative strength or size can be ascertained by the degree to which the freedom of the other is curtailed. The reduction of freedom is an attenuation of power,⁴²

Under the relational conception of power what is truly for the good of any one or all of the relational partners is not a preconceived good. The true good is not a function of controlling or dominating influence. The true good is an emergent from deeply mutual relationships.⁴³

This analysis provides a significant foundation for comprehending the superiority of an understanding of power that is other than controlling, dominating, “almighty.” In Loomer’s view, pure “unilateral” power does not even exist. There is always some counter-influence, however miniscule. But to be able to see that maximal power is the power to offer greater, not less, freedom to the other—in short, to empower—is the hallmark of power that involves a mutuality of relatedness.

Loomer’s explorations challenge the widespread conviction that power is a “zero-sum” game, characterized by the coupling, “the more, the less”: The more power I have, the less you have. The pie is of finite size and must be divided up. This was, indeed, the very issue that led Nietzsche to proclaim the death of a God who limits God’s creatures in precisely this way. Loomer’s reflections on “size” clearly point in the opposite direction. Relational power—power that, in my preferred term, is empowering—results in a coupling of “the more, the more.” The more my actions empower you, the greater the amount of power now present in the room. The more God acts effectively upon me, the freer I become. This will be unpacked more thoroughly in the final chapter.

GOD AS CREATIVE-RESPONSIVE LOVE: JOHN B. COBB, JR.

John Cobb (b. 1925) grew up in pre-war Japan as the son of Methodist missionaries. He did his doctorate at the University of Chicago where he discovered the philosophy of Whitehead through his own teachers, Charles Hartshorne and Daniel Day Williams. Thus has the tradition been transmitted, now spilling out globally from Claremont where Cobb primarily taught before retirement.

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Cobb published God and the World in 1969, pointing out to his students what readers and critics alike tended to miss: that the word “and” in the title was specifically italicized. It is the interrelationship between the two that he finds crucial.

Quoting Nikos Kazantzakis’ imaginative rendering of the “Cry” in Report to Greco, Cobb identifies God centrally as the One Who Calls us forward,⁴⁴ “the One Who Calls us beyond ourselves to the more that is possible,”⁴⁵ allowing for a “sense of movement into the open future” whereby “God as understood in this way is not a repressive force but a liberating one.”⁴⁶ The problem of evil, therefore, loses much of its force.

The world is not seen any longer as embodying an omnipotent sovereign’s will but rather as responding ever anew to a possibility offered. That the response is imperfect does not imply the imperfection of what is offered. There is no world that does not reflect the influence of God’s past agency, but there is also no world that is the product of that agency alone.⁴⁷

Cobb’s conviction is “that the proper conception of divine power holds the key to the Christian solution of the problem of evil.”⁴⁸ As long as power is conceived in the conventional sense of “the ability to determine what is to be and how it is to be . . . there can be no satisfactory explanation of the evil in the world that does not reject the power of God,”⁴⁹ not simply the omni-power of God but any power of God at all. So, “we need a basic reconception of what is meant by power.” Cobb finds this to be present in the work of Hartshorne. If God is “omnipotent in the sense of being the only power there is . . . where there is not competing power, omnipotence means little . . . The power that counts is the power to influence the exercise of power by others.”⁵⁰

Cobb calls this “persuasion”; God “exercises the optimum persuasive power in relation to whatever is.”⁵¹ In his discussion of how both God and world operate upon a becoming occasion, God always is working with the “given,” that is, the actuality of past decisions for good or for ill and all qualities inbetween. So what God can offer is always conditioned by past actual decisions made in response to God’s past offers of an optimal becoming.

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Cobb and his colleague (and former student) David Griffin co-wrote Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition in 1976, where the identification of God as “creative-responsive love” appears.⁵² To say with the New Testament that God is love requires, in their estimation, the further clarification that God is love both creatively, in the way in which God offers an opening to new emergence in the unfolding moment, and responsively: “God enjoys our enjoyments, and suffers with our sufferings. This is the kind of responsiveness which is truly divine and belongs to the very nature of perfection.”⁵³ A dynamic and interrelational God receives into Godself whatever response we have made to the divine lure (Whitehead’s initial aim), thus being enlarged by it.

Cobb later summed up his assessment of the attributing of love to the being and becoming of God in an unpublished essay in 2006, on “The Contribution of Process Thought to Reflection on Love.”

I believe that in its broadest and most general meaning love is central to all reality and order, and that it is grounded in the very nature of reality. I also believe that God is the supreme instance of the love that is to be found everywhere. Of course, just as human love is far transcendent of the attraction of quanta to one another; so God’s love is far transcendent of anything we can actually experience as love. But that does not entail that the word “love” is not literally applied to God. As Charles Hartshorne used to say, it is only to God that it can be applied literally. That is, all our emotions and motives are so mixed that to call any of them “love” is not truly accurate. Yet we are not lacking in an idea of what love in its purity would be. It is that ideal love that we Christians attribute to God. It is to that purer and all inclusive love that we aspire.⁵⁴

In the same paper, commenting on the final pages of Process and Reality, Cobb wrote “some of us think, following Whitehead here, that John’s assertion that ‘God is love’ is a profound metaphysical truth.”⁵⁵ As do I.

A GOD WHO IS OMNI-AMOROUS: CATHERINE KELLER

Catherine Keller (b. 1953) represents here the current generation’s leadership among process-relational theologians. She studied with Cobb [229] at Claremont and now teaches at Drew University. A wide range of publications in feminist thought preceded her God and Power in 2005 and On the Mystery in 2008. Of these two works I wish to concentrate attention on the first of these, God and Power.

Keller scathingly rejects Calvin’s defense of an omnipotent God who controls all, untouched by all that we experience on Earth as injustice: “the logic-defying logic of omnipotence twinned with good/ness ultimately sanctions every injustice as the will of God.”⁵⁵

A theology of omnipotence electrifies the halo of American domination. Where then does the idolatry lie—in the fact that the United States plays God or, as I would put it, in the fact that it imitates a false God? Does the idolatry lie in our emulation of a divine superpower or in our confusion of God with omnipotence in the first place?⁵⁶

Over against an impotent God, “another alternative discerns at the heart of the universe a wisdom of open ends, a strange attractor amid indeterminacy and its complex determinations.”⁵⁷ Calvin got it half right. God is there in every event—but participating rather than controlling.

Why reduce the mystery to an all-too-human, all-too-masculine, and all-too-imperial idol of power? Why turn a humbling mystery into a mystification of injustice? . . . [We can see] on the one hand a manic will to power called omnipotence and on the other a depressive sentimentality called love. For the classical fusion of goodness with omnipotence creates in fact not unity but a profoundly conflicted entity . . . To heal the internally contradictory religious combination of love and power, power itself first needs recoding.⁵⁸

This is the project underway here. The “recoding” of power so that an understanding of it becomes consistent with, not opposed to, essential love is precisely the unfinished but well pursued task at hand. Reaching back to the original biblical understanding of creation involving the increasing emergence of order out of chaos, Keller writes:

Let the hierarchical universe of unilateral and omnipotent sovereignty fade into a more wildly democratic cosmos of [230] unpredictable and uncontrollable—but never unordered— interrelations. God is called upon not as a unilateral superpower but as a relational force, not an omnipotent creator from nothing, imposing order upon chaos, but the lure to a self-organizing complexity, creating out of the chaos.⁵⁹

Three years later, Keller defined power as “the energy of influence.”⁶⁰ It is reciprocal and interactive, as we have been encountering. It is a “power made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9), a power that “does not overpower but empowers.”⁶¹ Keller invites the displacing of our love of power with what she has represented as the power of love, combining eros and agape: the divine Eros attracts, calls, invites; the divine Agape responds, receives, feels our feelings compassionately.⁶²

It is in light of the foregoing that Keller dares finally to state what should have been obvious for two millennia but was never explicitly articulated: that the “omni” that most fully identifies what is “all” in God is none other than omnilove, or what she calls a God who is omni-amorous.⁶³

TRANSITION: FROM CHALLENGE TO RECONSTRUCTION

The thesis directing the content of these pages can be stated succinctly. The biblical witness brought forth a way of thinking about the nature of God as a living and interacting God who is predominantly and even essentially love. The prevailing structure of theological interpretation in the West lost that vision, replacing it with static categories of divine completedness necessitating a view of absolute omnipotence. The edifice thus erected and defended for twenty centuries gradually has been seen to crumble to ruins under the multi-directional assault against a theism unable to sustain its own dead weight. Therefore the question arises: How are we to move forward to a fresh synthesis of God as Powerful Love that builds on the criticisms of Augustinian theism that we have observed? In a phrase, it is by identifying what is meant when one proclaims God as Empowering Love. The task of explicating what that can mean is now what lies ahead.

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ENDNOTES

1. Originally published in 1929; Corrected Edition edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1978).
2. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 5.
3. Whitehead challenged the conventional ontological question, “Why is there anything rather than nothing at all?” with what he considered much more penetrating: “Why is there ever anything new?”
4. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1926), viii. Lewis Ford writes that Whitehead “studied theology exhaustively for eight years in the 1890s, then sold off his entire theology library out of dismay over the failure of theologians to resolve the problem of God’s omnipotence and the presence of evil in the world.” Ford, The Lure of God: A Biblical Background for Process Theism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 2.
5. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 351, emphases mine.
6. Ibid., 342.
7. Ibid., 343.
8. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933); 288 (page reference from the Mentor edition of 1955).
9. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 346.
10. See David Griffin’s summary regarding the influence of Hartshorne’s parents on his worldview, in “Charles Hartshorne,” A New Handbook of Christian Theologians, ed. Donald W. Musser and Joseph L. Price (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 200.
11. Charles Hartshorne, Man’s Vision of God (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), ix.
12. Ibid., 111f. Late in his very long life, Hartshorne came to an awakening of his inappropriate use of gender-specific terminology and expressed the wish that he could rewrite everything he had put into print in order to eliminate that unintended bias.
13. Ibid., 116.
14. Ibid., xv.
15. Ibid., 14.
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16. Ibid., 294.
17. Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 138.
18. Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 11.
19. Ibid., 25, emphases mine.
20. Ibid., 14.
21. See David Griffin’s summary of this aspect of Hartshorne’s position in A New Handbook, 209–12.
22. Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity, chapter two.
23. Daniel Day Williams, The Spirit and the Forms of Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), chapters III and V.
24. Ibid., 3.
25. Ibid., 4.
26. Ibid., 36.
27. Ibid., 162.
28. Ibid., 167.
29. Ibid., 127.
30. Ibid., 128.
31. Ibid., 137.
32. Ibid., 138, emphasis mine.
33. Williams, The Demonic and the Divine (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 36.
34. Ibid., 34.
35. Bernard Loomer, “Two Conceptions of Power,” Process Studies 6:1 (1976), 8.
36. Ibid., 6. David Griffin has incisively investigated the genuine reality of “demonic power” in chapter eight of his Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action (Louisville: WJK Press, 2006).
37. Loomer, op. cit.,11.
38. Ibid., 15.
39. Ibid., 32.
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40. Ibid., 15f.
41. Ibid., 17.
42. Ibid., 11.
43. Ibid., 19.
44. John B. Cobb, Jr., God and the World (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969), 61, 45.
45. Ibid., 64.
46. Ibid., 63f.
47. Ibid., 64.
48. Ibid., 87.
49. Ibid., 88.
50. Ibid., 89, emphasis mine.
51. Ibid., 91f.
52. John B. Cobb, Jr., and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976), the title of chapter three. The initial draft of this chapter was written by Griffin, according to the Preface, but both signed off on all the chapters.
53. Ibid., 48.
54. Cobb, “The Contribution of Process Thought to Reflection on Love,” unpublished essay, 2006, 10. Available at the Center for Process Studies.
55. Ibid., 1.
56. Catherine Keller, God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys (Minneaspolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 17.
57. Ibid., 29.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid., 30, first two emphases original, final emphasis mine.
60. Ibid., 31.
61. Ibid., 81.
62. Ibid., 85, emphasis mine.
63. Ibid., 99.
64. Ibid.

Impulses for developing a theological understanding that is liberating for victims of a variety of types of oppression burst on the scene almost simultaneously. Three that came to prominence in the 1970s were the struggles against patriarchal oppression of women, racial oppression of Blacks in the United States, and economic and political oppression of the underclass, especially in Latin American countries. The first of these has already been covered in the chapter on a post-patriarchal theology. It is time now to focus on the remaining two.

Mary Daly published Beyond God the Father in 1973. The English translation of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation was published by Orbis in the same year. James Cone had brought out A Black Theology of Liberation a year before the original Spanish edition of Gutiérrez’s work. The Medellín Conference of Latin American Catholic bishops, oficially known as the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM II) took place in 1968 in Medellín, Columbia. Puebla (CELAM III) did not follow until 1979. The official statement from Puebla included the famous reference to God’s “preferential option for the poor.” Impetus can be clearly traced to the liberating atmosphere of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. Gutiérrez was already at work in 1964 in starting to develop the notion of theology as “critical reflection on praxis.”¹

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I begin here with an examination of James Cone’s work as highly influential and indicative of the direction Black liberation theology took, then turn to key representatives of Latin American theology of liberation. At the end of this exploration, I ask the paired questions: How fruitful has this effort turned out to be, and what limits its potential impact?

A BLACK THEOLOGY OF LIBERATION: JAMES CONE

When James H. Cone (b. 1938) shocked readers by announcing that God, and Christ, are “black,” he was only doing what women theologians were also examining at the time: that the way to get beyond a narrow understanding of God as male, or white, is to conceive God as the opposite of that, as black, or female (“She Who Is”). We can move beyond a God of specific “color” only after inherited and implied notions of a White God have been punctured by concentration on a Black God, which Cone provided.

White theological critics initially overreacted to Cone out of fear, I think. Cone did not invent Black Power. He was merely interpreting to whites an already-existing and rather threatening movement by identifying that struggle with the Gospel. Except for his unquestioning dependence on the very white theologians who needed deconstructing, I think he hit the nail squarely on the head.

In 1969, Cone fired his opening salvo with Black Theology and Black Power. Jesus, he announced, “is God himself coming into the very depths of human existence for the sole purpose of striking off the chains of slavery, thereby freeing man from ungodly principalities and powers that hinder his relationship with God . . . Jesus’ work is essentially one of liberation.”²

Cone then went on to ask how it is possible to reconcile this focus on Black Power, and on emancipation at any cost, with Christ’s message of love.

For God to love the black man means that God has made him somebody. The black man does not need to hate himself because he is not white . . . hrough God’s love, the black man is given the power to become, the power to make others recognize him.³

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In other words, blacks cannot even begin to consider loving their white oppressors until they can experience a love of self and other blacks that flows from God’s freely given agape.

Therefore the new black man refuses to speak of love without justice and power. Love without the power to guarantee justice in human relations is meaningless. Indeed, there is no place in Christian theology for sentimental love, love without risk or cost. Love demands all, the whole of one’s being. Thus, for the black man to believe the Word of God about his love revealed in Christ, he must be prepared to meet head-on the sentimental “Christian” love of whites, which would make him a nonperson.⁴

Repudiating utterly the notion that God directs the flow of history whatever twists and turns it may take, Cone asserted emphatically that Black theology “refuses to embrace any concept of God which makes black suffering the will of God.”⁵

In his subsequent publication of A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), Cone traced his position back to the liberating activity of Yahweh in the Old Testament and expanded his understanding of blackness to an ontoloigical symbol of all who are oppressed: Blackness “stands for all victims of oppression who realize that their humanity is inseparable from man’s liberation from whiteness.”⁶ Furthermore:

The blackness of God means that God has made the oppressed condition his own condition . . . the liberation of the oppressed is part of the innermost nature of God himself. This means that liberation is not an afterthought, but the essence of divine activity. The blackness of God then means that the essence of the nature of God is to be found in the concept of liberation.⁷

In regard to this liberating activity in God, love is essential to God’s nature. But because of violations of God’s intentions among the oppressor, love must include the dimension of divine wrath.⁸ At this point, Cone really began to push the limits of understanding:

Black theology cannot accept a view of God which does not represent him as being for blacks and thus against whites . . . black [204] people have no time for a neutral God . . . There is no use for a God who loves whites the same as blacks . . . What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors, here and now, by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.⁹

Clearly this represents an awkward interpretation of the all-embracing quality of divine love, though it is not entirely beyond the pale of the scathing indictments by the Old Testament prophets concerning those who violate the covenant with God.

Cone affirmed the doctrine of divine omnipotence, but with a twist. “Omnipotence does not refer to God’s absolute power to accomplish what he wants . . . God’s omnipotence is the power to let black people stand out from whiteness and to be.”¹⁰

In God of the Oppressed (1975), Cone finally got around to addressing directly the issue of theodicy, expanding on the problem of a presumably all-powerful God. “The persistence of suffering seems to require us to deny either God’s perfect goodness or his unlimited power.” He began by observing that taking an either/or stand regarding God’s power and God’s “goodness” is unacceptable: “It is a violation of black faith to weaken either divine love or divine power.”¹¹ Cone acknowledged that, in fact, his position is “in company with all the classic theologies of the Christian tradition,” though, of course, with a different point of departure: the plight of the oppressed.¹² Biblically, he focused on the redemptive suffering of Jesus (coupled with his resurrection as a defeat of suffering) and expressed the eschatological point that God has in fact defeated the powers of evil even though we still encounter them and are called to fight against them, “becoming God’s suffering servants in the world.”¹³

“God’s power and judgment,” Cone insisted, “will create justice and order out of chaos.”¹⁴ The question, of course, is: How? What is the actual nature of God’s liberating power? The problem for Cone was that he was too dependent upon the traditions of the very White theology he was seeking to repudiate, finding no way to reconceive the nature of divine power that matched the vigor with which he challenged [205] conventional notions of the purposes to which God directs that power. Discussions in the chapter previous to this have shown how that impasse has already begun to be surmounted.

GOD’S PREFERENTIAL OPTION FOR THE POOR: LATIN AMERICAN VOICES

It is almost treasonous to deal with Latin American theologies of liberation by lifting up individual thinkers who successfully wrote for publication. At its heart, the movement that undergirds these written reflections arose out of the gatherings and shared reflections of the oppressed poor themselves, in groups called comunidades eclesiales de base—communities of the Christian wretched who met together to study scripture in light of their own impoverished situations and reflect on how each one informs the other (praxis).¹⁵ But our access to their groundbreaking work is through the printed page, and so I proceed with a full awareness that the persons under consideration here are as much reporters as originators.

GOD’S LOVE FOR THE OPPRESSED

Our Idea of God was originally published in 1968, shortly after CELEM II in Medellín. It is a transitional work, recognizing the growing importance of the issues liberation theology would deal with but still developed as a theology from the groves of academe, not from the barrio. Its author, the Uruguayan Jesuit Juan Luis Segundo (1925–96), was particularly concerned with rejecting North American death-of-God theology, but already present were the beginnings of an awareness that the church needs to lend its resources not to the reinforcement of society and its present (repressive) values but to its liberation.¹⁶

Segundo focused his attentions sharply on God as trinitarian, but he recognized that the Christian conviction that God is love starts in the interrelationships of the Trinity but hardly ends there.¹⁷ God’s love toward us is, indeed, liberating: “The poor, the sick, the marginal people do construct the future earth, if they expend their forces to the limit in the work of liberating love . . . in the history we share with God no love is lost.”¹⁸ Segundo emphasized that any “conception of God, which [206] views him solely as some immutable, self-sufficient nature without any real interest in what he himself brought about, is nothing but the rationalization of our own alienated societal relationships.”¹⁹

On the relationship between love and violence, Segundo was insightful:

Love and violence are the two opposite poles of any interpersonal relationship. To love is to give something to a person. To do violence is to obtain something from a person. To love is to make that person the center of our action. To do violence is to make that person an instrument for obtaining something.²⁰

Gustavo Gutiérrez (b. 1928) is a Dominican from Peru who is widely regarded as the initiator of Latin American liberation theology. Although his premiere work, A Theology of Liberation,²¹ appeared originally in 1971, it is to two later works that I turn for a clearer picture of his key contributions: The Power of the Poor in History (in Spanish: 1979) and The God of Life (in Spanish: 1989).

Jesus Christ “is the full manifestation of the God who is love: the Father.”²² In fact, Jesus “is precisely God become poor.”²³ This points Gutiérrez in the direction of where God as love is to be recognized in our presence: “To believe in the God who reveals himself in history, and pitches his tent in its midst, means to live in this tent—in Christ Jesus—and to proclaim from there the liberating love of the Father.”²⁴

A decade later, Gutiérrez offered up a series of riffs on key biblical passages that extensively spell out the background perspective on God that informs his earlier explorations into liberation theology. Part One is entitled “God Is Love” and begins with the 1 John 4:8 quote, specifically tying this understanding of God as love to Jesus’ proclamation of God as Abba, Father—actually, “papa” or “daddy.”²⁵ Quoting Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Hosea, he lifted up the God of tender love, womb love.²⁶ On the basis of these reflections, Gutiérrez sharply criticized his church’s Thomistic predominance, based on the philosophy of Aristotle, that finds it “difficult to say that God is love.”²⁷

His overview of God’s fundamental concern for the poor and the suffering is summarized powerfully in this later book:

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God’s preferential option for the poor, the weak, the least members of society, runs throughout the Bible and cannot be understood apart from the absolute freedom and gratuitousness of God’s love . . . Universality and preference mark the proclamation of the kingdom. God addresses a message of life to every human being without exception, while at the same time God shows preference for the poor and the oppressed . . . It is not easy to preserve both universality and preference, but that is the challenge we must meet if we would be faithful to the God of the kingdom that Jesus proclaims—namely, to be able to love every human being while retaining a preferential option for the poor and the oppressed.²⁸

GOD’S EMPOWERING OF THE OPPRESSED

In words that will find strong support further along in this study, Juan Luis Segundo offered a very provocative notion at the very end of his book.

God is a continuing summons in our lives to a never-ending search for authentic solutions, for sincere solutions that are not a mixture of good and bad but a discovery of the good in all its purity . . . God is the unrest in us that does not allow us to be tranquil and content, that keeps prodding us toward the better course that remains ahead of us. It is in this unrest, in this anxious desire to arrive a authentic solutions, pure values, and uncompromised agreements, that we gradually come to know and recognize the God in whom we believe.²⁹

This proposal that God “prods” us forward, generates “unrest” in us, seems to me to offer up a key element in the manner in which divine love works on us and in us to generate effective consequences, without overwhelming or overpowering us at the same time. I intend to “unpack” this more thoroughly to examine just how that process can be explained as an empowering one.³⁰

One year after Segundo’s work appeared, the young Brazilian Protestant Rubem A. Alves (1933–2014) appropriated Jürgen Moltmann’s theology of hope for his constituents. Writing in Portugese but also fluent in English, with a Ph.D. from Princeton, he and his work [208] were perhaps less well known in Spanish-speaking Latin America than they should have been.

The central issue for Alves is the “freedom to create history.”³¹ And “the creation of history is possible only through power.” Therefore, language about God becomes “a language about events, their power and their promise.”³² In regard to the Israelites of the Old Testament, “where the events were expressions of liberating efficacy ‘in spite of ’, there was their God.”³³ The Gospel is understood as “the annunciation of the historical reality of the ongoing politics of God, which expressed itself . . . as a power that invades history.”³⁴

As the messianic events of liberation in the Old Testament were not a result of human efficacy but rather a gift, an act of power that transcended the given possibilities of history, the Christian communities saw in Jesus an act of God’s freedom . . . the power that creates a new future is something new, it is freedom from beyond history that is freedom for history. Only thus do the messianic power and hope for history remain as such.³⁵

Moving marginally beyond Moltmann, Alves represented God as a presence of the ultimate Future putting pressure on the present to move toward the “new tomorrow” that is, in fact, “the sole determination of the present.”³⁶

Alves seems conflicted on just what sense it makes to speak of God’s love as a powerful force moving the present toward its intended future. On the one hand, love cannot serve as a principle for liberating transformation. But, on the other, “Love is what God does in order to make man free.”³⁷ Regarding, then, the interplay between power divine and human:

If action is the midwife of the future, then human activity can add the new to the world. It can indeed be an act of creation. God’s grace, instead of making human creativity superfluous or impossible, is therefore the politics that makes it possible and necessary. That is so because in the context of the politics of human liberation man encounters a God who remains open, who has not yet arrived, who is determined and helped by human activity. God needs man for the creation of his future.³⁸

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Thus the future “is not simply a future created by God for man, but by God and man, in historical dialogical cooperation.”³⁹

Three years later, in Tomorrow’s Child, Alves contrasted “the love of power” that characterizes the predominant theme of our times with “the power of love,” and went on to state:

Love looks for effectiveness. Love demands power. The gifts of the future enjoyed in community must function like the preliminaries of love: they must create the excitement that prepares one for the great experience still to come. They are its sacrament, the aperitif of the absent, of the possible, of that which does not yet exist. And therefore they contain the ethical and political imperative of creative love.⁴⁰

Gutiérrez picked up on this theme in an unresolved manner, stating that “God is a love that ever transcends us,” manifesting Godself as a “God of might” but most especially as “a God who dwells in the heart that can love.”⁴¹ Reaching into the Old Testament, he accepted equally that “God manifests himself in awe as a God of power (Exod. 19:18) or makes himself heard gently and discreetly in a breath of the wind (1 Kings 19:12).”⁴²

In the final analysis, Gutiérrez could only acknowledge “the transcendence of God and the utter freedom with which God loves,” whereby “God will act, utterly freely, if it pleases God to do so.”⁴³ There is no external conditioning of the activity of God in creation and history: “God’s reign is universal, over the cosmos . . . and over history.”⁴⁴ But he did not stop there. The lack of a consistent resolution of the problem of how God acts is seen explicitly in an extended analysis of the dilemma of Job. Even though Job himself recognizes God as “all-powerful” (42:2), God’s “power is limited by human freedom . . . God’s love, like all true love, operates in a world not of cause and effect but of freedom and gratuitousness.”⁴⁵

Unfortunately, it is clear that Gutiérrez was unable to move consistently away from traditional notions of the nature of God’s power. His alteration of focus was essentially in regard to those on whose behalf that power is wielded in history, namely, the poor and the oppressed. The dynamic of love/life/liberation and power remained insufficiently explored.

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José Míguez Bonino (1924–2012) was an Argentinian Methodist who wrote Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Setting in 1975 and Toward a Christian Political Ethics eight years later. His key contribution to this inquiry is his understanding that the Reign of God in and over history is “a pressure that impels.”⁴⁶ We speak of “‘love’, ‘liberation’, ‘the new man’ as the signs which allow us to identify the active sovereignty of God in history.”⁴⁷

The Christian faith has always claimed that power belongs to God. But Míguez Bonino insists that omnipotence, as that has typically been understood, is not specifically present in the Bible and is never affirmed in the abstract. God is conveyed as an active presence who acts, in history and in creation, in faithfulness to humankind. God’s power “is the power that prevails over the chaos, that sets limits to the onslaught of the forces of destruction and ensures the conditions needed for human life and prosperity . . . God’s power is his ‘justice’ in action,” as exemplified particularly in the Magnificat.⁴⁸

But two other features emerge in this biblical portrait:

God’s righteous power is affirmed in the midst of conflict. God is engaged in a struggle—his power is manifest in this struggle and is the guarantee of the final triumph of that righteousness of God which is disclosed and presently active in ‘the mighty acts’. Second, such acts are related to human agents . . . human mediation is the way in which God’s power operates in history.⁴⁹

However, this mediation always eventually oversteps itself, absolutizing itself and negating justice. “Jesus understood his mission . . . as one of incarnating in a paradigmatic way God’s just and liberating rule.”⁵⁰

The audacity of Leonardo Boff (b. 1938), a Brazilian Franciscan, in writing Church: Charism and Power (1981), got him in trouble with ecclesiastical authorities. It was so critical of the Roman Catholic Church’s use of ecclesial power that he was summoned to Rome and, for a time, silenced. Eventually he left the Franciscans and resigned his priesthood. He has worked since as a Catholic lay theologian.

Boff provides us with a perceptive historical overview of the church’s misuse of power. The early established church, after Constantine, did not abolish the existing order and the modes of power that sustained it; [211] instead the church itself adapted itself to that order. The key category is potestas, power. The church simply appropriated secular expressions of power from the Roman world and gave them a stamp of divine approval, a sacralization.⁵¹ This culminated in the eleventh century with Pope Gregory VII (Dictatus Papae, 1075), who instituted the ideology of the absolute power of the papacy.

Support for this was not the figure of the poor, humble, and weak jesus but rather God himself, omnipotent Lord of the universe and sole source of power. The Pope was to be understood as the unique reflection of divine power in creation, God’s vicar and representative . . . the Church’s exercise of power followed the patterns of pagan power in terms of domination, centralization, marginalization, triumphalism, human hybris beneath a sacred mantle.⁵²

Boff’s contribution on this topic penetrates beyond what we have witnessed up to now in regard to the abandonment of all traces of sovereign divinity as classic omnipotence:

Jesus did not preach the Church but rather the Kingdom of God that included liberation for the poor, comfort for those who cry, justice, peace, forgiveness, and love . . . he did not call others to be rulers but to be submissive, humble, and loyal. He liberates for freedom and love that allow one to be submissive yet free, critical, and loyal without being servile, that call those in power to be servants and brothers free from the appetites for greater power. Fraternity, open communication with everyone, solidarity with all people, with the little ones, the least of the earth, sinners and even enemies, goodness, undiscriminating love, unlimited forgiveness are the great ideals put forth by Jesus. . . . The exousia, that is, the sovereignty, that appears in his attitudes and words in not power in terms of human power. It is the power of love . . . It is the power of God. . . . What is the power of God? . . . Power is the power to love. The power of love is different in nature from the power of domination; it is fragile, vulnerable, conquering through its weakness and its capacity for giving and forgiveness.⁵³

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In refusing to use divine power to alter his own impending death, Jesus “de-divinized power . . . It is in weakness that the love of God and the God of love are revealed (1 Cor 1:25; 2 Cor 13:4; Phil 2:7),”⁵⁴

I find that Boff has gone the furthest in repudiating all vestiges of conventional power in lifting up the liberating work of God. He does not delve into the nagging question of how fragile and vulnerable love is powerful over against the forces of domination, but he sets us firmly on the right track. In that respect, he moves beyond the conceptual limitations that burdened his colleagues.

Elizabeth Johnson has observed perceptively that, with the work of the theologians of human liberation, “Naming God the liberator does not just craft one more symbol to add to the treasury of divine images. It puts a question mark next to every other idea of God that ignores the very concrete suffering of peoples due to economic, social, and politically structured deprivation.”⁵⁵

By and large, however, it seems to me that the weakness in these proposals is that they do not challenge the conventional theistic notion of God’s power as that which ultimately will prevail. They merely—and this is a big “merely”—shift the focus of that power to divine activity on behalf of the black, the poor, the oppressed in history and in concrete historical settings. As we saw, Alves wrote of “the pressure of the spirit, of freedom, as it seeks its goal, [which] can never be stopped,”⁵⁶ and Míguez Bonino wrote of a “pressure that impels.”⁵⁷ The question remains whether, in their vision, this pressure ever slides over into the notion of irresistibility.

Except for Boff, I find the work of these dedicated individuals unsatisfying on this key point. There is certainly comfort to be found in the expectation that the work carried on in the midst of crushing oppression contributes to the intentionality of God to fulfill for all the promises to God’s chosen ones in the Exodus. But any assurance of a final outcome overtrumps the perception of the vulnerability of God’s empowering love.

ENDNOTES

1. Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff, Introducing Liberation Theology, tr. Paul Burns (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1987), 66ff.
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2. James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: The Seabury Press, 1969), 35.
3. Ibid., 52.
4. Ibid., 53f.
5. Ibid., 124.
6. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippencott Co., 1970), 28.
7. Ibid., 121.
8. Ibid., 130.
9. Ibid., 131f.
10. Ibid., 150.
11. Cone, God of the Oppressed (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), 163, both quotations.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 177.
14. Ibid., 9.
15. See Elizabeth Johnson, Quest for the Living God, 73, and all of chapter four.
16. Juan Luis Segundo, Our Idea of God, vol. 3 of A Theology for a New Humanity, tr. John Drury Barr (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1973), 131–33.
17. Ibid., 66.
18. Ibid., 46.
19. Ibid., 133.
20. Ibid., 164. A few years later, Paulo Freire would observe: “Every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression, is by definition violent, whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to things—the former dehumanized by an excess of power, the latter by a lack of it. And things cannot love.” Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness, tr. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: The Continuum Publishing Co., 1973), 10–11, footnote.
21. Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and [214] Salvation, tr. Sr. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1973).
22. Gutiérrez, The Power of the Poor in History, tr. Robert R. Barr (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1983), 12f.
23. Ibid., 13, emphasis original.
24. Ibid., 16.
25. Gutiérrez, The God of Life, tr. Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1990), 1f.
26. Ibid., 42–45.
27. Ibid., xiii.
28. Ibid., 116f.
29. Segundo, op. cit., 181, emphases mine.
30. I recast this perspective in my final chapter, 18, page 242, utilizing categories drawn from the philosophy of A. N. Whitehead.
31. Rubem A. Alves, A Theology of Human Hope (Washington: Corpus Books, 1969), 12.
32. Ibid., 90.
33. Ibid., 91.
34. Ibid., 92.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 94.
37. Ibid., 126, emphasis mine.
38. Ibid., 144, emphasis mine.
39. Ibid.
40. Alves, Tomorrow’s Child: Imagination, Creativity, and the Rebirth of Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 203, emphases original.
41. Gutiérrez, The Power of the Poor in History, 209.
42. Ibid., 19,
43. Gutiérrez, The God of Life, 80.
44. Ibid., 108.
45. Ibid., 161f.
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46. José Míguez Bonino, Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 143, emphasis mine.
47. Ibid., 138.
48. Míguez Bonino, Toward a Christian Political Ethics (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 96.
49. Ibid., 97.
50. Ibid., 98.
51. Leonardo Boff, Church: Charism and Power: Liberation Theology and the Institutional Church, tr. John W. Diercksmeier (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1986), 50f.
52. Ibid., 56.
53. Ibid., 59, emphases mine.
54. Ibid., 60.
55. Elizabeth Johnson, Quest for the Living God, 86.
56. Alves, A Theology of Human Hope, 94.
57. Míguez Bonino, Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation, 143.

Themes that have been surfacing in the myriad of challenges to the Augustinian synthesis known as Christian theism overlap and interlock. The mystics’ deity was more fully identified by love than by power. A God not hemmed in by a doctrine of immutability becomes open to the adventure of divine love. A God who is not apathetic is a God who suffers in love. The God beyond patriarchy is a God for whom love is at the center of the divine identity.

Thus we come to a focus that has already occupied a major amount of attention throughout these previous chapters but now becomes the direct object of our present concern. We come to a century and a half and more of rekindled and illuminating contributions to a God whose love can no longer be sacrificed on the altar of God’s overwhelming power.

Reaching back into the eighteenth century, we encounter John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who wrote in his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, regarding 1 John 4:8: “God is often styled holy, righteous, wise, but not holiness, righteousness, or wisdom in the abstract as he is said to be love: intimating that this is . . . his reigning attribute.”¹ So could his brother Charles sing of “love divine, all loves excelling,” and of Jesus, “thou art all compassion; pure, unbounded love [172] thou art.”² And early in the nineteenth century, the Scottish American churchman Alexander Campbell wrote in his The Christian System (1839), “God and Love [are] two names for one idea.”³

The grand principle, or means which God has adopted for the accomplishment of this moral regeneration, is the full demonstration and proof of a single proposition addressed to the reason of man. This sublime proposition is THAT GOD IS LOVE.⁴

For Campbell, “it is in the person and mission of the INCARNATE WORD that we learn that God is love.”⁵

In addition, Frederick W. Faber, an Anglican turned Roman Catholic, a theologian and hymn writer who composed “Faith of Our Fathers” and “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy,” observed in 1857 in his The Creator and the Creature: “Love is tantamount to the whole of God, and is co-extensive with him . . . Love is the perfection of the Uncreated in Himself.”⁶

These were the forerunners, along with other voices we have already been listening to. Let us now give more extended attention to their conceptual companions, the number of whose voices worthy of being heard is sizeable indeed. I have tried to bring order into this array of insightful scholarship by grouping them according to certain predominant themes, even though they merit attention each in their own right—and some prominently so.

RECLAIMING THE INSIGHT THAT GOD IS LOVE

D. Z. Phillips asked perceptively, “What if religion means what it says, that God is love, no more and no less? It would follow that God does not have two separate attributes, power and love, but that the only power God has or is, is the power of love.”⁷ Richard Garnett “the Younger,” “Keeper of Printed Books” in the library of the British Museum where he toiled for forty-five years, engagingly announced at the beginning of his De Flagello Myrteo (1905) that “Love is God’s essence; Power but his attribute; therefore is his love greater than his power.”⁸ And Elizabeth Johnson recently has observed that if it were possible to sum up the [173] rediscoveries of recent theologizing, “it would be the classic Christian belief that ‘God is Love’ (1 John 4:16).”⁹

The absence of this recognition in the classical expressions of Christian theism has been strikingly reversed in theological reflections reaching back a century and a half. The selections that follow here each makes its own helpful contribution to the recovery of this vital conviction.

SØREN KIERKEGAARD: GOD’S PASSION TO LOVE AND TO BE LOVE

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) wrote in Danish under a variety of pseudonymns and published his explicitly anti-Hegelian tracts at his own personal expense—dying, at it turned out, just as the money, and presumably everything important that he had to say, ran out. In the twentieth century he came to be hailed as the father of Christian Existentialism.

“This is all I have known for certain,” he wrote in his journal in 1850, “that God is love. Even if I have been mistaken on this or that point, God is nevertheless love.”¹⁰ And in a much earlier entry from 1839, he observed—correctly, I think—that “it is really remarkable that whereas all the other qualifications pronounced about God are adjectives, ‘love’ is the only substantive, and one would scarcely think of saying ‘God is lovely.’ Thus language itself has expressed the substantive character of love implied by this qualification.”¹¹

The notion that God is love, is the One Who Loves, is “unchanged love,” “infinite love,” pervades Kierkegaard’s writings. God is no less than “the love which sustains all existence.”¹² There is no systematic rendering of this notion because he rebelled against the very idea of systems of thought that betray the incarnational scandal of particularity. Chapter Two of his aptly named Philosophical Fragments (1844) is entitled “The God as Teacher and Saviour: An Essay of the Imagination.” It is the now-familiar narrative of God, moved by love for humanity, wishing to reveal Godself but not in an overwhelming, overpowering way. So Kierkegaard imagined a king loving a humble maiden who, out of love for her, takes the form of a servant to disclose his great love. “Love is exultant when it unites equals, but it is triumphant when it makes that which was unequal equal in love.”¹³ And thus it was that God disclosed Godself to humankind in Jesus of Nazareth.

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God can therefore be understood to be “like a poet,” not “consenting” to all that happens among the characters in a poem but allowing it:

poetically he permits everything possible to come forth . . . God’s wanting to work as a poet in this fashion [discloses] God’s passion to love and to be loved, yes, almost as if he were himself found in this passion, O, infinite love, so that in the power of this passion he cannot stop loving, almost as if it were a weakness, although it is rather his strength, his omnipotent love. This is the measure of his unswerving love.¹⁴

Kierkegaard wrestled throughout his pseudonymous writings with how to reconcile this centrality of God as Love with the doctrine of divine omnipotence, and specifically with holding onto both omni potence and human freedom. He expanded upon the motif of God’s reaching out unintimidatingly by claiming:

For this is the unfathomable nature of love, that it desires equality with the beloved, not in jest merely, but in earnest and truth. And it is the omnipotence of the love which is so resolved that it is able to accomplish its purpose . . . This is the God as he stands upon the earth, like unto the humblest by the power of his omnipotent love.¹⁵

So we encounter already here the theme of the next section, divine power as the “power of omnipotent love.” In a journal entry in 1846, he wrote:

Only omnipotence can withdraw itself at the same time it gives itself away, and this relationship is the very independence of the receiver. God’s omnipotence is therefore his goodness. For goodness is to give oneself away completely, but in such a way that by omnipotently taking oneself back one makes the recipient independent . . . Only a wretched and mundane conception of the dialectic of power holds that it is greater in proportion to its ability to compel and to make dependent.¹⁶

But Kierkegaard could not finally answer the question of whether the omnipotence of love assures a blessed outcome at the end, overcoming all residual opposition.¹⁷ There is an “immutability” to God’s [175] love that is a matter of assured constancy,¹⁸ but no certain conclusion of what power God’s love has in reserve to confront intransigence non-compellingly.

ALBRECHT RITSCHL: THE ULTIMATE REIGN OF GOD’S LOVE

Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89) is noted for his concentration on the divine intent to usher in, with human contributions, God’s eventual Reign— understood as an ellipse with two foci, as both gift and task. At the center of this expectation is the assurance that love constitutes the very nature of God and of God’s coming Reign. The goodness of God:

is embraced in the specific attribute of the Divine Fatherhood; or, in other words, the truth that He has revealed Himself to the Christian community as love. There is no other conception of equal worth beside this which need be taken into account . . . the conception of love is the only adequate conception of God.¹⁹

He went on to insist that this “conception of love . . . is the key to the revelation of God in Christianity,”²⁰ and the “character” of the divine will is only to be understood under the rubric of love.²¹

When God is conceived as love . . . He is not conceived as being anything apart from and prior to His self-determination as love. He is either conceived as love, or simply not at all.²²

Such love, as any valid loving, “aims at the promotion of the other’s personal end, whether known or conjectured.”²³

Ritschl combined “freedom of action” and “dependence upon God” by maintaining that freedom is present only when our actions are directed toward the Reign of God as final end of our aspirations. Freedom is defined as “permanent self-determination by the good end,” or, in Christian terms, “by the Kingdom of God as final end.”²⁴ But this whole notion works only if dependence on God is interpreted in a way other than on the absolute power of God. The power-freedom dichotomy is not yet resolved. The not-yet of God’s impending Reign is no way guaranteed, so long as human resistance is not futile.

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A. M. FAIRBAIRN: AN ETHICIZED DEITY

The Scotsman Andrew Martin Fairbairn (1838–1912) was Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford. Lectures that he delivered at the end of the nineteenth century in the United States at Yale and at Union Seminary became The Place of Christ in Modern Theology (1903) in print.

Over against deism and pantheism, Fairbairn promoted what he called an “ethicized Deity.”²⁵ His work was marred by a distinction between God and “Godhead”: “God is deity conceived in relation, over against the universe, its cause or ground, it law and end; but the Godhead is deity conceived according to His own nature, as He is from within and for Himself.” This “Godhead” has “completely ethicized the conception of God.”²⁶ It is not that the former is elusive while only the latter is accessible to us. Rather, the Christian revelation is of the Godhead itself, as distinctly trinitarian.²⁷

Thus the very God who is in relation to God’s creation is love,²⁸ “not the eternal possibility but the eternal actuality of love.”²⁹ Creation itself has arisen by virtue of the eternal love:

since God is according to His essence love, He could not but be determined to the creative act . . . creation is due to the moral perfection of the Creator, who is so essentially love that He could not but create a world that He might create beatitude.³⁰

Fairbairn went on to observe that “God does not love because He created, but He created because He loved.”³¹

Fairbairn’s work is instructive to us only as an additional indicator of how widespread the centrality of love was becoming over a century ago for understanding the divine nature, even though he did not address in any helpful way how this challenges traditional understandings of divine power.

NELS F. S. FERRÉ: LOVE IS THE POWER OF BECOMING

Nels Ferré was born in Sweden in 1908 and emigrated to the United States by himself at the age of thirteen. His life of prolific scholarship was spent in this country. He was strongly influenced by Edgar Brightman, and at Harvard he served as a graduate assistant to the [177] process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, whose work we will encounter two chapters from now. Ferré died in 1971.

Ferré’s The Christian Understanding of God (1951) is the primary source for our focus here. He came to the notion of Love as ultimate being/becoming not from a biblical perspective but from the starting point of philosophical theology.³² Love, for him, is “the ultimate category.”³³ Love is “the form of being which acts out of complete concern not only for all, in all dimensions of life, and the conditions which sustain, promote and enhance life, but also for ever new life and new conditions of life.”³⁴ God as love is “self-existing and self-directing. God as love, moreover, is both actual and potential. God is subject; and a subject is capable of both loving and being loved.”³⁵ And the very nature of the ultimate as love is, precisely, “to have relations.”³⁶ Gary Dorrien concludes that, for Ferré, “theology is about the transformation of the world through the love-transforming power of God’s Spirit.”³⁷

God can in no way be perceived as static, as perpetual being without change. Rather, “only by becoming can being become what it is. God as reality both is and becomes by nature, for He is love.”³⁸

If love is the principle and power of becoming, the very nature of love is to share His being. To love is to give. To love is to create. To love is to keep fulfilling. To love is to be by becoming.³⁹

Ferré recognized that the divine love/power conundrum cannot be resolved from the power side,⁴⁰ but all he was able to put forward is that “He who is love by nature expresses Himself by sharing His power with us . . . Power is the capacity of love to effect its end.”⁴¹ But there is no real resolution, and Ferré even continued to use such terms as “sovereignty” and divine “control” positively.⁴² Not only is the ultimate future of God’s creation assured, because of the sovereign nature of God’s love, but the ultimate victory of that love is “total.”⁴³ If God “is sovereign love, the question as to the outcome [of history] is completely closed. Love will win unconditional surrender from all that is not love.”⁴⁴

Essentially, Ferré represents no real advance over the internal conflicts in Ritschl’s thought, in that love is understood to be a power other than controlling and yet love’s ultimate victory is somehow assured at [178] the end. It is similar to the unresolved tension we have seen also in Moltmann.

What we have encountered among the pioneers in this section is a clarion call to reclaim the New Testament’s bold assertion, in 1 John, that love itself is no mere divine attribute but characterizes the very being of God. That is indeed a giant leap forward from theism’s attempts to “shoehorn” love into the essential being of a God who is omnipotent Lord of all. Where efforts were seen here to reconstitute the Love/Power relationship, very little significant progress is visible. But that work was going on as well. To a selection of those breakthrough efforts I now turn.

THE POWER OF OMNIPOTENT LOVE

CLARENCE EDWIN ROLT: LOVE IS GOD’S POWER

Born in 1880, the British theologian C. E. Rolt studied at Oxford and went on to a life of promising scholarship cut short by death from a lingering illness, only months before his translation into English of the major works of pseudo-Dionysius appeared in print, in 1917. He was 37 years old. His own masterpiece, The World’s Redemption,⁴⁵ came out in 1913, shortly before war broke out all over Europe. It fell pretty much into obscurity until the German theologian of hope, Jürgen Moltmann, gave it serious attention in his The Trinity and the Kingdom⁴⁶ in 1980. Much of Rolt’s most important insight into the power and love of God might well have been developed more probingly, had he lived long enough to accomplish it.

Rolt began his study with a rejection of the traditional understanding of power as compulsion or “brute force,” which leads to the realization that “the mind is brought at last to One Who is yet stronger than the universe itself, and Who . . . by the act of an almighty will, which nothing can resist, bends all things to His purposes and compels the whole material system to obey His irresistible commands.”⁴⁷ In such a perspective, God’s power “consists of infinite force.”⁴⁸ Rolt went on to spell this out in richly metaphoric detail.

This conception of the nature of omnipotence is accepted by most Christians as a part of the Divine revelation. It is firmly [179] embedded in all popular theology, and unhappily finds a place in most theology that claims to be philosophic. True, the philosophic theologian does his best as a rule to explain it away so far as he can with much talk about God’s “self-limitation” or the necessity of His obeying the laws He has Himself made for His universe. Nevertheless the fact remains that this conception of despotic force is for him, as for the generality of mankind, the only conception of Divine Power. He may, in practice, treat it as a piece of lumber, but he regards it in theory as a piece of necessary lumber, however useless and inconvenient. And therefore he allows it to remain blocking out the light and air in his theological edifice, instead of boldly throwing it out of the window. And hence when he becomes vaguely conscious that it does not harmonise with the main lines of the building it occupies or with the rest of the furniture around it, instead of turning the useless thing out and casting it on to the rubbish-heap, he contents himself with raising a dust of words which serve, for the moment, to disguise its hideous outlines and hide them from his sight.49

By way of contrast, Rolt insisted that this way of conceiving of divine power is “immoral, irrational and anti-Christian,” from which have sprung some of the most egregious travesties in the Christian faith.⁵⁰

Rolt’s initial answer is very pessimistic: since God’s power cannot be expected to “crush opposing forces,” it can only be “bent and broken and yet remain unconquered . . . it can only hope and wait.”⁵¹ But the breakthrough is coming: it is “love, at its truest”⁵² that suffers patiently:

Hence it would seem that the omnipotence of God . . . is therefore nothing else than love itself. It consists in love, and has no other quality whatsoever. Love is, in fact, the only real power, and force is not power at all . . . To say that God has infinite love, and that to this love is added infinite power, is totally and utterly false. He has nothing besides that perfect Love which is Himself. God is Love, and this Love is itself His power, nor can we truly conceive of Him as possessing any other power besides.⁵³

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So, Jesus’ depiction in the Gospel story is that of “a God Whose omnipotence consisted not in coercive force but in enduring love.”⁵⁴ The secret of the “essential power of Christ” was simply “love made perfect through suffering.”⁵⁵ Ergo, “God is love, and love alone; and this is the sum total of His power.”⁵⁶

Rolt correctly recognized that creation, both initially and ongoingly, is a process of order being wrestled out of chaos. Evil, the resistance to love’s power, is not so much an aspect of divine action but a manifestion of the chaos still being overcome.⁵⁷

The tragedy is that Rolt did not live long enough to investigate more deeply the dynamics of love as powerful. What he did produce is a tantalizing fillip crying out to be expanded upon. Precisely how love wields the only power at God’s disposal is the issue demanding elaboration. That task is still underway.

GORDON KAUFMAN: A HISTORICIST COUPLING OF DIVINE POWER AND LOVE

Gordon Kaufman (1925–2011) grew up in a Mennonite household and served as a conscientious objector in World War II. His pacifist morality was of one piece with what emerged in his initial reflections about the nature of God’s power. The “early” Kaufman is the part of his work that interests us here, even though he was already moving away from his conclusions in Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective (1968) before it was published. Although much of what he wrote about God’s power and love is continuous with what we have just seen in C. E. Rolt, Kaufman did not indicate any awareness of Rolt’s work.

In his early—and subsequently rejected—phase, Kaufman focused on what can be known about divine matters by reflection on matters historical. And God’s acting in history “has a very specific character: it is an act of love . . . This God, then, is one whose purposes are characterized by lovingkindness.”⁵⁸ God, in accordance with God’s love, is willing to sacrifice God’s “absolute power.”⁵⁹ When we speak of the power of God, “our ordinary conceptions may be very misleading.”⁶⁰ But even so, he believed that God “modulates” his power when dealing with free beings as opposed to his coercing others to conform to the divine will. Consequently, we are to understand that God’s power is:

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the power to give, the power to love, the paradoxical power of “weakness” . . . God’s power is thus much greater than the compelling force of a tyrant who makes others submit against their will . . . his power is sufficient to transform a willful person from self-centeredness to love, without destroying or even violating the tender plant of freedom.⁶¹

When we talk about omnipotence, etc., “we must always make certain that it is to this reality, and not some other, that we are referring . . . Too often in Christian history this simple but all-important rule has been forgotten.” So any notion of God’s omnipotence “must be seen as the omnipotence of God’s love.”⁶² Kaufman’s ringing conclusion is that the “first cause” of the universe itself “is no abstract, empty concept of God but God’s all-powerful love.”⁶³

Not literally, of course, but analogically, and symbolically, the power of God is treated as the “second” of the perfections of God’s freedom.⁶⁴ It is rather apparent that Kaufman attempted, unsuccessfully, to have it both ways. On the one hand, he contended, correctly, that it is as love that God is powerful.⁶⁵ But on the other hand, God’s power remains undeconstructed. It is “power over,” “all-powerful in the world.”⁶⁶ He rightly observed that God “is omnicompetent, that he can appropriately deal with any circumstance that arises; nothing can ultimately defeat or destroy him,”⁶⁷ but he believed this is only a working out of the inherent meaning of omnipotence while, elsewhere, he gave that word its far more classical tonalities.

There are many reasons why Kaufman went on to “de-reify” God and surrender his conviction that God is any reality other than a dimension of “our interpersonal relationships with our fellow humans.”⁶⁸ But clearly his inability or refusal to decouple divine power from all vestiges of its inherited meaning as power-over crippled the long-term benefit

of his early insights.

GEDDES MACGREGOR: THE POWERFUL LOVE OF A KENOTIC GOD

The work of Geddes MacGregor (1909–98) is strikingly prescient, though insufficient attention was paid to his 1975 work, He Who Lets Us Be.⁶⁹ Originally from Scotland, he spent most of his long academic career in the United States.

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MacGregor pursued a theology of kenosis, God’s sacrificial self-emptying. He boldly endorsed Patripassianism and regarded the doctrine of God’s impassibility as one of the crucial errors of orthodoxy: “the One whom we call God must be par excellence dynamic, not impassible.”⁷⁰ He observed that Christian theologians from the beginning “seem to have been reluctant to take ‘God is love’ seriously as a theological proposition.”⁷¹ He wrote that “a profound misunderstanding of the nature of both the power and the love of God has radically distorted the traditional view of the situation.” The power of God is not “the ability to do everything (omnipotere) or to control everything (pantokratein)” but rather “the infinite power that springs from creative love,” and “sacrificial love . . . The divine almightiness consists…of unlimited capacity for creative love.”⁷² Further along, he explicitly affirmed that “the omnipotence of God is the power of love . . . To say that God is omnipotent can only mean that nothing diminishes his love.”⁷³

In moving beyond kenotic christology to kenotic theology, MacGregor called God “kenotic Being” and considered kenosis to be “the root principle of Being.”⁷⁴ In this regard, his position was limited to identifying how God exercises power differently, rather than seeing how the very nature of God’s power is to be reinterpreted (reconstructed) through the lens of God as love. Kenosis becomes a matter of God’s self-abnegation of a mode of power that God wills not to utilize. In that respect, MacGregor could still hold on to an assurance of God’s “providential intervention.”⁷⁵

EBERHARD JÜNGEL: THE POWER OF LOVE IN WEAKNESS

Eberhard Jüngel was born in Germany, in 1934, on what eventually became the “wrong” side of the Iron Curtain, but managed to study under Karl Barth and the New Testament scholar Ernst Fuchs before the Wall went up. His facility in matters both theological and biblical contributes significantly to his subsequent work. In the Foreword to the First and Second Editions of his God as the Mystery of the World (originally, 1976), he wrote: “Basically the intent of all the studies in this book is nothing else than to exposit consequently this one statement from First John: God is love (1 John 4:8).”⁷⁶ Indeed, “To think God as love” is no less than “the task of theology.”⁷⁷

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Drawing out insights from the last writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jüngel rejected the notion of a “worldly necessity of God” on the grounds that:

The God who is necessary in the world is always conceived of as God the Lord. And it appeared that there was general agreement as to what a lord is. God’s lordship was discussed in the sense of his exercise of omnipotence. The God who is necessary in the world was understood as the almighty Lord whose love and mercy appear to be fundamentally secondary and subsidiary to his claim to lordship. This is the earthly way of thinking of a lord: first he has all power and then perhaps he can be merciful—but then again, perhaps not. God’s lordliness and lordship are thought of in the same general way. He is mighty, able, and free to love or not to love . . . one must not conclude that freedom or power is superior to love, while the love of God becomes a secondary attribute. The thesis of the worldly nonnecessity of God is directed precisely against this view of God according to which God, as the almighty Lord who can be differentiated from his love, is necessary to the world.⁷⁸

So Jüngel was driven to reverse this way of thinking that “lordship” can be said to define adequately the essence of God. Starting with the understanding that God is love, he concluded: “Thus, godly power and godly love are related to one another neither through subordination nor dialectically. Rather, God’s mightiness is understood as the power of his love. Only love is almighty.”⁷⁹

The self-determination of God to be love is particularly discerned by us in the cross, but it does not first become the truth about God in that event. That conclusion would represent a “self-distortion” of God. “What happened on the cross of Jesus is an event which in its uniqueness discloses the depths of deity. The special eschatological event of the identification of God with the man Jesus is at the same time the innermost mystery of divine being.”⁸⁰

Jüngel found in Paul’s words on power in weakness, reflected in the cross (1 Cor. 1:18ff.), a “stringent rejection of all deification of self-willing power”⁸¹ and an affirmation of its obverse:

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love does not even fear its own weakness. The one who does not want to share in the weakness of love is basically incapable of love. For the strength of love consists of the certainty that love can be helped to victory only by love. To be sure, when opposed by everything which is not love, it is totally unprotected and vulnerable . . . But it is the very power of love which implies its weakness against everything which is not love. For love does not assert itself in any other way than through love. And that is both its strength and its weakness. Since love asserts itself only lovingly, it is highly vulnerable from outside, but inwardly it is profoundly indestructible. It remains within its element, and it radiates in order to draw into itself. It cannot destroy what opposes it, but can only transform it.⁸²

There may well be earlier theological reflections on Paul’s assertion that God’s weakness is more powerful than what we typically understand as power, but I have not surfaced them. I think Jüngel’s dual role as theologian and biblical scholar stood him very well in calling attention to the importance of this insight in the biblical narrative.

THE TRANSFORMING POWER OF LOVE: TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was a Jesuit paleontologist who developed an evolutionary vision of God and God’s universe that was so far removed from conventional Roman Catholic thinking that he was prohibited from publishing this aspect of his work during his lifetime. That meant, of course, that he could not benefit from peer review. He wrote without the rigor of academic theology and never attempted to organize his work into systematic shape. Nevertheless, the originality and depth of his imaginative proposals warrant careful attention.

For Teilhard, the whole of reality is continuously evolving toward its final destiny, a cosmic “Omega point” that includes the dynamic participation of a God who is anything but static or fully complete already in Godself.⁸³ God is Omega, the eschatological end of history and of all of creation.⁸⁴[185]

The theme of love is completely at the heart of Teilhard’s cosmic reconceptualizing. Love “is undoubtedly the single higher form towards which, as they are transformed, all the other sorts of spiritual energy converge.”⁸⁵ Therefore Teilhard uses his term “amorization” to identify the evolutionary direction in which all reality is moving.⁸⁶

As early as 1920, in an essay entitled “The Modes of Divine Action in the Universe,” Teilhard guardedly called into question traditional notions of divine omnipotence. The decision to create a soul surely places constraints on divine power no more and no less restrictive than the physical impossibility of creating a square circle,⁸⁷ wherefore “the supreme miracle of the divine power . . . consists in being able, through a deep-reaching and all-embracing influence, incessantly to integrate, on a higher plane, all good and all evil in the reality which that power builds up by means of secondary causes.”⁸⁸

He went on to conclude in 1931 that “Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces.”⁸⁹ Love, like thought, “is still in full growth in the noosphere . . . (It demands to be released, so that it may flow irresistibly toweards the true and the beautiful. Its awakening is certain.”⁹⁰ And another six years later he pondered upon “not force but love above us; and therefore, at the beginning, the recognized existence of an Omega that makes possible a universal love.”⁹¹

As his ideas continued to develop, he wrote in an essay on “The Rise of the Other” in 1942:

In its most general form and from the point of view of physics, love is the internal, affectively apprehended, aspect of the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world, centre to centre . . . Love is power of producing inter-centric relationship. It is present, therefore (at least in a rudimentary state), in all the natural centres, living and pre-living, which make up the world; and it represents, too, the most profound, most direct, and most creative form of inter-action that it is possible to conceive between those centres. Love, in fact, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis. Love, again, is centric power.⁹²

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And in 1951, four years before his death, he identified God specifically as “love-energy.”⁹³

The year before, Teilhard wrote an autobiographical essay in which he depicted the process of how he arrived at his overall vision. It became the title essay in the collection entitled The Heart of the Matter:

it is only in the Christo-centric area of a noogenetic Universe that it [love] is released in the pure state and so displays its astonishing power to transform everything and replace everything . . . A current of love is all at once released, to spread over the whole breadth and depth of the World; and this it does not as though it were some super-added warmth or fragrance, but as a fundamental essence that will metamorphose all things, assimilate and take the place of all.⁹⁴

And here is precisely the crux of the problem that characterizes Teilhard’s unfulfilled promise. In the end, Love has to prevail, otherwise the culmination of all in Omega does not transpire. And if Love must prove successful in the end in overcoming all lingering resistance, then does it not cease to maintain its own essential qualities? There remains, in other words, a vestige of compulsion in Love’s deployment of power that renders the whole picture suspect. As radical as Teilhard’s thought was, it was not truly radical enough to break through all the way to an all-encompassing vision of Love being the only mode of divine power.⁹⁵

LETTING LOVE FULLY REDEFINE POWER

WILLIAM H. VANSTONE: LOVE PRECARIOUS AND VULNERABLE

A chapter in William Vanstone’s The Risk of Love,⁹⁶ originally published in Great Britain in 1977 under the title Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense: The Response of Being to the Love of God, led to the Templeton Foundation’s sponsoring of a conference of theologians and scientists at Queens’ College, Cambridge, in October 1998, with a follow-up in New York City the following year, the results of which are in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis.⁹⁷ Born in 1923, Vanstone died between these two meetings, in March of 1999.

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Turning down numerous offers of teaching posts, Vanstone was a canon in the Church of England and not a formal academician. Even so, his reflections on the nature of love and what that implies for the nature of God are truly trailblazing. What he embarked upon was a thoughtful inquiry into what a “phenomenology of love” would reveal. What he found were what he determined to be three marks of authentic love: without limit, without control of the one loved, without detachment.⁹⁸ Therefore authentic love is to be understood “as limitless, as precarious, and as vulnerable.”⁹⁹

With regard to the second “mark,” love is “distorted by the assurance of possession or control.” There is “no assurance or certainty of completion . . . each step that is taken, whether it ‘succeeds’ or ‘fails’, becomes the basis for the next, and equally precarious, step which must follow,.”¹⁰⁰

Love aspires to reach that which, being truly an ‘”other,” cannot be controlled. The aspiration of love is that the other, which cannot be controlled, may receive; and the greatness of love lies in its endless and unfailing improvisation in hope that the other may receive. As aspiration, love never fails; for there is no internal limit to its will to endeavour, to venture and to expend. But as specific achievement, love must often fail; and each step it takes is poignant of the possibility of failure.¹⁰¹

Regarding the third mark, love gives to its object power over itself. “To that which is loved power is given which it would not otherwise possess and which otherwise would be unaccountable.”¹⁰² This creates a new vulnerability in the one who loves—not in the sense that it can be diminished or destroyed.

But love is vulnerable in and through the beloved in the sense that in him its issue is at stake—its completion or frustration, its triumph or tragedy. He who loves surrenders into other hands the issue and outcome of his own aspiration . . . Where there is no such surrender or gift of power the falsity of love is exposed.103

Vanstone then extended these reflections, into what seemed to him the unequivocal nature of love phenomenologically, into the very being [188] of God. If God is indeed, as we consider God to be, essentially love, then what has just been identified also characterizes love in God. The “activity of God in creation must be limitless creativity.” There is no superabundance of divine power held in reserve. “From His self-giving nothing is held back; nothing remains in God unexpended.”¹⁰⁴ The activity of God in creation must also be precarious:

Its progress, like every progress of love, must be an angular progress—in which each step is a precarious step into the unknown; in which each triumph contains a new potential of tragedy, and each tragedy may be redeemed into a wider triumph; in which, for the making of that which is truly an “other,” control is jeopardised, lost, and, through activity yet more intense and vision yet more sublime, regained; in which the divine creativity ever extends and enlarges itself, and in which its endeavour is ever poised upon the brink of failure. If creation is the work of love, then its shape cannot be predetermined by the Creator, nor its triumph foreknown.¹⁰⁵

The presence of evil in creation must be understood as a consequence of the precariousness of God’s creative activity.¹⁰⁶

If the creation is the work of love, its “security’” lies not in its conformity to some predetermined plan but in the unsparing love which will not abandon a single fragment of it, and man’s assurance must be the assurance not that all that happens is determined by God’s plan but that all that happens is encompassed by His love.¹⁰⁷

And finally, and perhaps most critically, the activity of God in creation must be vulnerable.

We know only that God is love. We know only the activity of God. We know that God is vulnerable only in the sense in which the activity of love may be said to be vulnerable . . . The power which love gives to the other is power to determine the issue of love—its completion or frustration, its triumph or tragedy. This is the vulnerability of authentic love—that it surrenders to the other power over its own issue, power to determine the triumph or the tragedy of love. The vulnerability of God [189] means that the issue of His love as triumph or tragedy depends upon His creation. There is given to the creation the power to determine the love of God as either triumphant or tragic love. This power may be called “power of response”: upon the response of the creation the love of God depends for its triumph or its tragedy.¹⁰⁸

I have quoted extensively from Vanstone’s work because I think it is not widely known and is worthy of considerable attention. The two key marks of love as precarious and vulnerable set the discussion of God’s powerful love moving in an entirely new direction. There is no holding back, no antiquarian retaining of a residue of non-precarious, non-vulnerable power on God’s part. I remain deeply indebted to his insights. He closed his book with a reprinting of his “A Hymn to the Creator.”

Here are the final three stanzas:

Drained is love in making full;
Bound in setting others free;
Poor in making many rich;
Weak in giving power to be.

Therefore He Who Thee reveals
Hangs, O Father, on that Tree
Helpless; and the nails and thorns
Tell of what Thy love must be.

Thou art God; no monarch Thou
Thron’d in easy state to reign;
Thou art God, Whose arms of love
Aching, spent, the world sustain.¹⁰⁹

WENDY FARLEY: LOVE’S POWER AS EMPOWERMENT

The work of Wendy Farley (b. 1958) is so inclusive that it could well be presented in at least three different places in this treatise, embracing a post-patriarchal God, a God who suffers, as well as the God of essential love. I have chosen to give attention to her writings here, because they particularly reinforce the directions we have just been exploring.

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Similarly to Vanstone, in her Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion (1990), Farley explores a “phenomenology of compassion.”¹¹⁰ She sees the key issue in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to be a matter of how the power of domination corrupts even the most benevolent attempt to use it.¹¹¹ Compassion is “a power [that] cannot coerce.”¹¹² Compassion represents “a fundamentally different kind of power than the power of coercion.”¹¹³ Compassion, as redemptive power, “gives power to someone else: it is empowering rather than controlling,.”¹¹⁴

Her recognition of the positive virtue of the role of empowering is an extremely vital step, in my estimation. When I first surfaced this notion in an essay in 1973,¹¹⁵ it was typically dismissed by confusing it with enabling, a negative action relating to the inappropriate support of persons suffering from various addictions. That the idea has since received significant traction is a very positive development.

In her chapter on “A Phenomenology of Divine Love,” Farley insists, rightly, that love and power cannot be juxtaposed as “two alien entities.” Recognizing the reluctance of theologians to ascribe love to God,¹¹⁶ she goes on to observe: “As a noncoercive form of power, love creates the possibility of evil by leaving freedom and the future undetermined.”¹¹⁷

Farley distinguishes “the power of love expressed in creation (eros)” and the power present “in providence (tragic love),” which are complimented by “the power of redemption. Compassion is divine power in a new guise the guise of redemption.”¹¹⁸ She goes on to explain:

Eros is the power of God to bring being from nothingness; tragic love is providential care for a cosmos immersed in inevitable suffering and conflict. Compassion immerses itself in evil in order to struggle against it . . . Tragic love cares for the world, but it is compassion that mediates redemptive power. Redemptive love presupposes sympathetic knowledge of suffering. But in compassion this sympathetic participation in suffering is accompanied by power that struggles to transform evil into a locus of healing . . . According to Christian theology, God’s knowledge of suffering is radicalized in the incarnation. The immediacy of knowledge of suffering and evil is here again, accompanied by transforming power . . . Compassion is the intensity of divine being as it enters into suffering, guilt, and [191] evil to mediate the power to overcome them. As human beings and communities apprehend the presence of divine compassion for them and with them, they experience power to resist the degrading effects of suffering, to defy structures and policies that institutionalize injustice, and to confront their own guilt . . . the compassion of God empowers. Divine compassion is not a form of paternalistic charity but a more radical love that offers liberating power.¹¹⁹

Divine compassion, then, is understood as God’s “empowering presence.”¹²⁰ “It is the risk and folly of the power of love to create that over which it has only relative control,” thus disclosing “the nonabsolute power of God.”¹²¹

No guarantee can be provided for a final victory by God over the forces that oppose God. “The problem of theodicy is history’s power to reject God.”¹²² Any meaningful theodicy “can only hope to illuminate the radical love of God that is not overcome by evil, that is poured out inexhaustibly over all creation.”¹²³

I merely ask, how does God as love, as compassion, empower? How does love as empowerment actually make a difference in how the ongoing creation continues to unfold, filled as it is with unspeakable acts of depravity? How is God actually acting in an empowering way? “Through interhuman compassion and justice, the reality and power of God are present to resist evil in history.”¹²⁴ I still wish to probe deeper for an explanation of how this happens in a way that is more than human resilience.

THOMAS JAY OORD: LOVE THAT EMPOWERS WELL-BEING

Having studied process theology under David Griffin at Claremont, and working extensively with the Templeton Foundation on the “science” of love, Thomas Oord (b. 1965) brings an investigative mind to his stance with the “open theology” group of Evangelical theologians.¹²⁵ Almost all of his scholarly output focuses in one way or another on the topic of love divine and human.

An encompassing definition of love underlies all of Oord’s treatments of the subject: “To love is to act intentionally, in sympathetic/empathetic response to God and others, to promote overall well-being.”¹²⁶ The key [192] components of this definition are the centrality of action as opposed to mere passion or emotion, the responsive interrelationship between the lover and the beloved, and the goal of promoting well-being—the biblical notion of “shalom.”

Oord is in company with those, over against Anders Nygren,¹²⁷ who recognize the key role of eros for God, not just agape, championing the importance, contrary to Augustine, of desire as a valid component of divine love.

To the tradition speaking of God as perfect and thus without need, adherents of divine eros argue that maximal perfection involves perfect desiring and receiving. Our conception of a maximal human lover is not of someone detached and without desire; a great lover is someone who desires appropriately and who is appropriately influenced by others. The maximally perfect lover must be a maximally perfect giver and maximally perfect receiver, say advocates of divine eros theology.¹²⁸

Oord also carries through consistently on the critical necessity of absolving God of any and all residual power that is not the power present in divine love. He challenges the kenotic approach we have already surfaced, denying that to be love God emptied himself of all non-loving power. Rather, love characterizes the nature of all the power God ever has, without some presumed act of divine self-limitation: “noncoercion is an essential feature of how God lovingly relates to creation . . . Self-giving love is part of God’s very nature, not an arbitrary divine choice.”¹²⁹ This, of course, legitimates the genuine reality of human freedom to accept or refuse God’s offer of a love that empowers: “God’s essential love relations with the cosmos entails that God cannot fail to offer, withdraw, or override the power for freedom that creatures require in their momentby-moment life decisions.”¹³⁰

It is The Nature of Love (2010) where Oord shines most brightly in aiming a laser beam at the power of divine love. “The gift of Godself to creation is essential to what it means to be God. God necessarily relates with and gives to creatures, because God necessarily loves us.”¹³¹ God “empowers” rather than “overpowers.”¹³²

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God always exerts almighty power in love. A steadfastly loving God exerts maximal power and yet never entirely controls others. We best understand God’s power through the lens of God’s love, not vice versa.¹³³

The consequence of these reflections is the full recognition that to have been created in God’s image means, for human beings, that we are created in the image of God as Love.¹³⁴ That has all-encompassing implications for the way in which we are invited to exercise power in our relationships with one another and with all of creation on our home planet. The highest form of power is found in so relating as not to diminish in any way the power of the recipient of our actions.

I am greatly indebted to Tom Oord for the penetrating work he has accomplished. Proposals for explicating the empowering love of God that appear in the final chapter of this book are continuous with the orientation he has brought forward.¹³⁵

ENDNOTES

1. As quoted in Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, A Theology of Love: The Dynamic of Wesleyanism (Kansas City, Mo.: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1972), 93f.
2. First published in a collection of Charles Wesley’s hymns in 1747.
3. Alexander Campbell, The Christian System, 2nd ed. (Pittsburg: Forrester & Campbell, 1839), 92. Online: www.mun.ca/rels/restmov/texts/ acampbell/cs/
4. Ibid., 220, emphasis original.
5. Ibid., 222, emphasis original.
6. Frederick W. Faber, The Creator and the Creature (1857), 176, as cited in Nels F. S. Ferré, The Christian Understanding of God (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), 253, note 7.
7. D. Z. Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 199, emphases original.
8. Richard Garnett, De Flagello Myrteo: 360 Thoughts and Fancies on Love, 3rd ed. (London: Elkin Mathews, 1906), 10.
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9. Elizabeth A. Johnson, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007), 17, emphasis original.
10. Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard, 1834–1854, ed. and tr. Alexander Dru (London: Fontana Books, 1958), 194.
11. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 7 vol., ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967–1978), vol. II, 90f.
12. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, tr. Howard and Edna Hong (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 280.
13. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 2nd ed., tr. David Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 33.
14. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, vol. II, 147 (from 1854).
15. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 39f., emphases mine.
16. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, vol. II, 62f.
17. See, e.g., Arnold B. Come, “Kierkegaard’s Ontology of Love,” in Robert L. Perkins, ed., Works of Love: International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 16 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1999), 118.
18. See Kierkegaard’s sermon on “The Unchangeableness of God,” tr. David F. Swenson, in Robert Bretall, ed., A Kierkegaard Anthology (New York: The Modern Library, 1946), particularly 470–78.
19. Albrecht Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The Positive Development of the Doctrine, tr. H.R. Mackintosh and A.B. Macauly (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1900; republished in 1966 by Reference Book Publishers, Inc., Clifton, NJ), 273f.
20. Ibid., 276.
21. Ibid., 279.
22. Ibid., 282.
23. Ibid., 277.
24. Ibid., 293.
25. Andrew Martin Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 403–06, 415, 417 et al.
26. Ibid., 439.
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27. Ibid., 385.
28. Ibid., 394.
29. Ibid., 410.
30. Ibid., 413.
31. Ibid., 417.
32. Nels F. S. Ferré, The Christian Understanding of God (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), 6–10, 15–29.
33. Ibid., 45.
34. Ibid., 15f. This focus on novelty is no doubt an influence from Whitehead.
35. Ibid., 17f.
36. Ibid., 19.
37. Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony and Postmodernity, 1950-2005 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 42. See Dorrien’s excellent summary of Ferré’s life and thought, op. cit., 39–57.
38. Ferré, op cit., 23.
39. Ibid., 26.
40. Ibid., 98–101.
41. Ibid., 101.
42. Ibid., chapter 5.
43. Ibid., 219.
44. Ibid.
45. Clarence Edwin Rolt, The World’s Redemption (New York: Longman’s, Green, 1913).
46. Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 31–34.
47. Rolt, op. cit., 12.
48. Ibid., 13.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 14.
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52. Ibid., 15.
53. Ibid., 16, all emphases my own.
54. Ibid., 27.
55. Ibid., 35.
56. Ibid., 37.
57. See ibid., 124–26, and Moltmann’s comment on Rolt in The Trinity and the Kingdom, 34.
58. Gordon D. Kaufman, Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), 88, emphasis mine.
59. Ibid., 89.
60. Ibid., 91.
61. Ibid., 92.
62. Ibid., 92f., both quotes; emphasis mine.
63. Ibid., 113, emphasis mine.
64. Ibid., 151–54.
65. Ibid., 152.
66. Ibid., 152, 154.
67. Ibid., 153, emphasis mine.
68. Kaufman, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 333, emphasis original.
69. Geddes MacGregor, He Who Lets Us Be: A Theology of Love (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975). The unreconstructed identifying of a God of masculinity surely did not help MacGregor’s cause.
70. Ibid., 5.
71. Ibid., 11.
72. Ibid., 15, all quotes after preceding footnote.
73. Ibid., 128.
74. Ibid., 107.
75. Ibid., 161; see also 127, and all of chapter 9 on “Providence and Prayer.” MacGregor’s focus on kenosis can also be seen in the work of many of the current theologians who are interacting productively with [197] scientists in pursing a shared vision. See, in particular, the essays in the volume edited by John Polkinghorne, The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001). The problem is the same in both places: Kenosis appears to speak of a willful act on God’s part to “give up” power-over for the sake of power-with, but that still entails that God’s (unexercised) power includes that possibility. My investigation pursues an alternative understanding, that this in no way characterizes the power of God in the first place.
76. Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, tr. Darrell L. Guder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), x.
77. Ibid., 315.
78. Ibid., 21.
79. Ibid., 22, emphasis mine.
80. Ibid., 220.
81. Ibid., 206.
82. Ibid., 325, emphases original.
83. This summary sentence is based on numerous passages in Teilhard’s writings. See, in particular, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Human Energy, tr. J. M. Cohen (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 145; and The Heart of Matter, tr. René Hague (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 53: God “in some way ‘transforms himself’ as he incorporates us . . . All around us, and within our own selves, God is in process of ‘changing’, as a result of the coincidence of his magnetic power and our own Thought.”
84. Emile Rideau, The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin, tr. René Hague (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 147–50.
85. Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and Evolution, tr. René Hague (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 186.
86. Teilhard de Chardin, Science and Christ, tr. René Hague (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 171.
87. Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and Evolution, 32f.
88. Ibid., 34.
89. Teilhard de Chardin, Human Energy, 32.
90. Ibid., 129.
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91. Ibid., 152.
92. Teilhard de Chardin, Activation of Energy, tr. René Hague (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 70f.
93. Ibid., 280.
94. Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of the Matter, 51.
95. Teilhard’s vision is being powerfully presented in the early 21st century by the Franciscan scholar Ilia Delio, whose most recent work champions and elaborates on his relevance for today. See her The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), especially chapter three.
96. William H. Vanstone, The Risk of Love (New York: Oxford Univ., Press, 1978).
97. John Polkinghorne, ed. The Work of Love, x. The book was dedicated to Canon Vanstone’s memory and each chapter begins with a quote from The Risk of Love.
98. Vanstone, The Risk of Love , 42–54.
99. Ibid., 53.
100. Ibid., 46.
101. Ibid., 49.
102. Ibid., 51.
103. Ibid., 52.
104. Ibid., 59f.
105. Ibid., 62f.
106. Ibid., 63.
107. Ibid., 66.
108. Ibid., 67.
109. Ibid., 119f.
110. Wendy Farley, Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion: A Contemporary Theodicy (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990). See chapter three, especially pp. 75–81.
111. Ibid., 89–92.
112. Ibid., 93.
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113. Ibid., 97.
114. Ibid., 94, emphasis mine.
115. David P. Polk, “Empowering Love,” Lexington Theological Quarterly, April, 1973 (vol. VIII, No. 2), 60–67. The biblical witness to Jesus proclaims “not simply that God is love, but that God’s love is powerful— and that God’s power is characterized by love! . . . The majesty of Jesus’ vision of God’s truth is that God’s love is not something extraneous to [God’s] power but the very nature of it” (63).
116. Farley, op. cit., 96.
117. Ibid., 98.
118. Ibid., 111.
119. Ibid., 111f.
120. Ibid., 114.
121. Ibid., 124.
122. Ibid., 125.
123. Ibid., 133.
124. Ibid., 114.
125. See Thomas Jay Oord, ed., Creation Made Free: Open Theology Engaging Science (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2008), for a helpful overview of this orientation.
126. Oord, The Nature of Love: a Theology (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2010), 17. A slightly different, earlier variant appeared in his Science of Love (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2004), 9: “To love is to act intentionally, in sympathetic response to others (including God), to promote overall well-being.”
127. The massive undertaking of Anders Nygren in his Agape and Eros has not received individual attention in this overview for two primary reasons: He did not actually address in any cogent way the relationship between love and power in God—“power” is not even an entry in the extensive subject index—and his assessment of the unreality of eros in God has been subsequently determined to be unacceptably one-sided. See the whole of chapter two in Oord’s The Nature of Love for a helpful summary of Nygren’s position and the problems it contains.
128. Oord, “Divine Love,” in Thomas Jay Oord, ed., Philosophy of [200] Religion: Introductory Essays (Kansas City, Mo.: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 2003), 103.
129. Oord, Science of Love, 17f.
130. Ibid., 18. Oord also maintains that this aspect of God did not begin with the Big Bang but was eternally true of God all along (18f.). “The creation of this universe did not entail divine coercion. The Big Bang suggests that God’s creative energy would have been extremely influential at the origin of our universe. But divine influence, even in the Big Bang, would not have been strictly coercive” (20).
131. Oord, The Nature of Love, 125. Although this appeared in print only in 2010, it is a revision of Oord’s doctoral dissertation at Claremont.
132. Ibid., 126.
133. Ibid., 128, emphasis mine.
134. Oord, Defining Love: A Philosophical, Scientific, and Theological Engagement (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2010), 179.
135. Many other contributions on the subject of this chapter that were made toward the end of the twentieth century have not been included here not because they are not relevant but because of space limitations and a sense that they present ideas already dealt with here. They nevertheless merit mention: Daniel Migliori, The Power of God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983), and its later revision, The Power of God and the gods of Power (Louisville: WJK Press, 2008). Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Vincent Brümmer, The Model of Love: A Study in Philosophical Theology (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993). George M. Newlands, God in Christian Perspective (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), and his earlier but less helpful Theology of the Love of God (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1980). Edward Collins Vacek, S.J., Love, Human and Divine: The Heart of Christian Ethics (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1994). Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ed., Nothing Greater, Nothing Better: Theological Essays on the Love of God (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001).

We have entertained responses to traditional Christian theism that proclaim the liberating death of such a deity, or at least the death of the supreme masculinity of that God. These are one way to challenge the hammerlock hold that divine omnipotence has held over its adherents. Another path was also available, taken by some, that endeavored to strike down the very notion of God’s unlimited power itself, opting instead for a perception of the divine that its critics would disparage as an apparently impotent God. That option is now to be examined here.

This chapter proceeds by reversing the usual order of progression. I begin not with the earlier manifestations of proposals that solve the love/power riddle by negating divine omnipotence, thence to move forward in time. Rather I start with the 1981 publication of a book by an American Jewish rabbi that rocked the sensibilities of Christian pastors across the U.S. and initiated an exciting new dialogue on the problem— in traditional Jewish and Christian thought—of theodicy, and then look back at other earlier contributions along a similar track, concerning a possibly limited God.

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WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN: HAROLD KUSHNER

Adam Kushner was born with a rare genetic disorder called “progeria,” which causes rapid aging. Adam died at the age of fourteen, looking like a wizened old man. His father, Rabbi Harold Kushner (b. 1935), agonized over his son’s innocent suffering and fate, and wound up dealing with it by writing a bestseller that, at first, no publishing house wanted. He called it When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1981).

Kushner drew on the sufferings of Job and the Holocaust, as well as his own family’s suffering, in trying to make sense out of the senseless. He recognized that the Genesis story of creation emphasizes the emergence of order out of chaos and saw that as a process that is still underway.¹ So where is God in the unresolved chaos still rearing its ugly head in creation?

He came to recognize that “Christianity introduced the world to the idea of a God who suffers,” and went on to confess that “I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it, more easily that I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die, for whatever exalted reasion.”²

So Kushner refused to accept the idea that God causes human misfortune: “tragedy is not God’s will.”³ But “If God does not cause the bad things that happen to good people, and if He cannot prevent them, what good is He at all? . . . How does God make a difference in our lives if He neither kills nor cures?”⁴ Kushner’s answer: “God inspires people to help other people who have been hurt in life . . . God, who neither causes nor prevents tragedies, helps by inspiring people to help.”⁵ “God may not prevent the calamity, but He gives us the strength and the perseverance to overcome it.”⁶

In short, Kushner found himself on the horns of a dilemma. Either God has power over our misfortunes and chooses not to prevent them, or God cares about us in our misfortunes but is powerless to prevent them. His stance affirms the view of Archibald MacLeish in J.B., that there is no justice, only love.⁷ In the end, out of love, we are called to forgive God for not being perfect!⁸

This hearkens back to the late medieval discussion about the duality of God’s absolute power and God’s ordained power. The latter assures [165] that the world flows forward according to God’s immutable laws concerning the proper order of things. The former provides the option that God’s “power in reserve” is perfectly capable of overturning one or another of those laws whenever and however God so chooses. This is the distinction that allows for so-called “miracles.” It also stands behind the understanding of an “interventionist” God who may upset the normal order by contravening what would otherwise naturally happen. Prayer to God often takes the form of pleading with God to intervene in the natural course of events and alter the outcome. Rabbi Kushner’s pleas went unanswered. Adam died. The Holocaust and many other horrendous calamities in history are the cosmic extension of that, writ large.

So we have a God who has neither died nor been killed, but a God whose power is perceived to be unavailable except as an “inspiration”—the hint of an impotent God, who would not really be God at all. This way of resolving the seeming absence of God’s power in the world was hardly original with Kushner. Let us trace it back to its earlier manifestations.

EARLIER PREDECESSORS IN THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION

Deism arose on the continent and in England toward the beginning of the Enlightenment. It does not designate a school of thought, and perspectives of the deists varied widely. The most prominent representatives of English deism were John Toland, author of Christianity not Mysterious (1696), and Matthew Tindal, whose Christianity as Old as Creation (1730) is often called the Bible of deism. It was published three years before his death; the only copy of a subsequent manuscript was burned by a bishop of the Church of England as being too hot for the faithful to handle.

Deism, generally, promoted an all-wise, all-good God who once in the deeply distant past set matters in motion and provided the laws by which the universe operates, but does nothing at all by way of interference in the natural course of the created order. Thus every notion of a providential role on God’s part is emphatically negated. Deists therefore considered God to be power-less to alter the course of natural and human events.⁹

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In 1759, four years after the devastation of the Lisbon earthquake, the French philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) wrote his Candide, a hilarious puncturing of Leibniz’s claim that things are for the best in this best of all possible worlds. The adventures and misadventures and calamitous misfortunes of Candide and his friends convey bitingly the utter nonsense of that point of view. Even the philosopher Pangloss comes to the realization that he still maintains that view, “without believing it.”¹⁰ Voltaire did not present his views on God in a straightforward manner but seems to have come to the conclusion, particularly regarding the effects of the Lisbon earthquake, that he would rather worship a limited God than an evil one. James Collins concluded that:

Voltaire even speculates about whether the necessity of the divine action may not betoken some limitation upon God’s power. The divine power may be relatively supreme, in that it is not subject to any foreign agency, and yet it may also be limited in an internal way to what can be done in accordance with Newtonian mechanical laws. Thus the benevolent God can be regarded as infinite in durational existence, yet finite in power, knowledge, and presence.¹¹

Similarly, a century later, John Stuart Mill (1806–73), in the third essay of his Three Essays on Religion (1874, posthumously), insisted that “natural theology can point only to a Creator with limited, not unlimited power.”¹² He wrote of “the impossible problem of reconciling infinite benevolence and justice with infinite power in the Creator of such a world as this,”¹³ and concluded: “the notion of a providential government by an omnipotent Being for the good of his creatures must be entirely dismissed.”¹⁴ Only if the power of God is limited is there “nothing to disprove the supposition that his goodness is complete.”¹⁵

We have previously met Dostoyevsky’s Karamazov brothers.¹⁶ Following Ivan’s rejection of a God who is seen to be responsible for the suffering of the innocent, he goes on to narrate his tale of Jesus Christ coming again during the time of the Spanish Inquisition, and promptly being thrown in prison by the aged Grand Inquisitor. The Inquisitor eventually comes to visit him in his cell, mocks him, berates him, denounces him for his failure and the failure of the ideas of love [167] and servanthood and the exaltation of human freedom that he brought. The Inquisitor understands that the church has adopted the ways of Rome and the sword of Caesar. The Prisoner remains silent throughout, answering him, at the end, only with a kiss.¹⁷ It is no less than the supplanting of power with love, poetically rendered.

And finally, the American philosopher and psychologist William James wrote in his A Pluralistic Universe (1909) that “there is a God, but . . . he is finite, either in power or in knowledge, or in both at once.”¹⁸ His explorations in this direction influenced the man we are about to meet.

A GOD OF LIMITED POWER: EDGAR BRIGHTMAN

Edgar Brightman (1884–1953) was an American Methodist scholar who followed in the train of Borden Parker Bowne in the philosophical school known as “Boston personalism.” His most important work relevant to this exploration was his 1930 publication entitled The Problem of God.

For Brightman, “the expansion of God into an omnipotent being” restricted God’s benevolence, even though classical theism asserted both “with equal assurance.”¹⁹ He found the traditional combination of the two to be “superficial.”²⁰ Omnipotence is “derived predominantly from abstract thought.”²¹ It is not based on experience alone, whereas benevolence is more plainly rooted there. Moreover, “it is religiously much more essential that God should be good than that he should be absolutely all-powerful.”²²

A God whose purpose it is to develop a society of free persons must forego some knowledge [foreknowledge] and some power if he is to attain his purpose. Expansion in either direction necessitates contraction in the other.²³

Brightman’s solution was to propose a God who is limited both by Godself (that which is within God’s nature, the “The Eternally Given”), and that in relation to which God is at work and toward which God is in some respects “passive” (in contrast to God’s “active will”), i.e., the free choices of other persons.²⁴

All of this finally leads Brightman to say that worshiping a limited God elicits “belief in a finite God.”²⁵ Even so, he still wanted to maintain [168] that the active element in God is still in control, though it maintains that with “struggle and pain.”²⁶ Raising motifs we are encountering throughout this exploration into the challenges to the Augustinian synthesis, Brightman recognized the vital importance of the love of God and the presence of suffering in God. “God is not simply a happy, loving Father; he is the struggle and the mysterious pain at the heart of life. He is indeed love; but a suffering love that redeems through a Cross.”²⁷

It is far more reasonable to deny the absolute omnipotence of the power manifesting itself in the world than to deny its goodness. On our view, God is perfect in will, but not in achievement; perfect to derive good from all situations, but not in power to determine in detail what those situations will be.²⁸

The problem with Brightman’s heroic effort to limit God’s power for the sake of being able to worship a God of supreme goodness shows its face on the final page of the book. Even after all he willingly surrendered, he still maintained at the very end that God is “the controlling power of the universe, guiding it through all struggles and delays toward an ever-enlarging value.”²⁹ What restrains God’s omnipotence, it seems, is something given within God, something in God’s nature which necessitates God’s working out of God’s plans in relationship to creation and within time, but it still remains God who is working it out.

Because there is no fresh rendering of the meaning of power, all the expressions of limits on that divine power come to be cancelled out in the end. Justifying God as a God of well-intentioned benevolence by placing boundaries around the triumphant omnipotence of God finally collapses under the weight of its own insufficiently conceived alternative. How is a God who manifests barely an inkling of impotence even a God at all?

ENDNOTES

1. Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 51f.
2. Ibid., 134.
   [169]
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 138f.
5. Ibid., 139f.
6. Ibid., 141.
7. Ibid., 145, referencing MacLeish, J. B., 151.
8. 8. Ibid., 148.
9. The deists were influential well beyond the theological arena by virtue of the fact that a large number of this country’s Founding Fathers were Deists, whether closeted or openly. Jefferson’s “self-evident” truths were deistic ones: The pursuit of happiness is understood to be what God intended for humans from the creation, in contrast to traditional Christianity’s understanding of the pre-eminent importance of glorifying God.
10. Voltaire, Candide, tr. Lowell Bair (New York: Bantam Books, 1959), 117.
11. James Collins, God in Modern Philosophy (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1959), 148.
12. John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Religion (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1874)
13. Ibid., 186f.
14. Ibid., 243.
15. Ibid., 252.
16. See above, ch. 11.
17. Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 292–314.
18. William James, A Pluralistic Universe (New York : Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 311.
19. Edgar Sheffield Brightman, The Problem of God (New York: The Abingdon Press, 1930), 96.
20. Ibid., 97.
21. Ibid., 98.
22. Ibid., emphasis mine.
23. Ibid., 102. This is the choice that must be made, I insist, when one does not reconceive the nature of power whenever that power is wielded [170] and defined by love.
24. Ibid., 113, 124, 127.
25. Ibid., 127, emphasis mine.
26. Ibid., 135.
27. Ibid., 137, emphasis mine.
28. Ibid., emphasis mine.
29. Ibid., 193, emphasis mine. In regard to God’s eventual conquering of evil, Brightman wrote, God “may delay, but he cannot fail” (122).

From the 1970s, female scholars began to unveil what should have been obvious all along but had not been: that the champions of traditional theism were males championing a one-sidedly male image of the divine. Genesis 1:27 may have proclaimed that God created humankind in God’s own image, and created us “male and female,” but somehow the word failed to get around that both male and female were created in God’s non-gender-specific image. The God who transcends distinctions of gender was nevertheless burdened with characteristics that were predominantly male.¹

So we move directly from a consideration of the death of God overall to inquiries into the demise of a God of strictly male qualities, whose obituaries point the way forward to a more encompassing grasp of the fullness of Who God Is. A vast body of work has emerged from women theologians, often though not always termed “feminist” thinkers, and reaching far beyond the specific focus of this chapter on supplanting male-dominated understandings of God with more fecund investigations into the divine mystery of power and love. Thus it has been necessary here, in the selection process, to omit many voices perhaps equally deserving of attention.²

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THE UNMASKING OF PATRIARCHY’S DOMINANT SWAY: MARY DALY

Mary Daly (1928–2010) provided important pioneering work in her Beyond God the Father in 1973, calling attention to the fact that indeed the God who had been pronounced dead was precisely God the Father.³

The symbol of the Father God, spawned in the human imagination and sustained as plausible by patriarchy, has in turn rendered service to this type of society by making its mechanisms for the oppression of women appear right and fitting. If God in “his” heaven is a father ruling “his” people, then it is in the “nature” of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male-dominated.⁴

A tremendous portion of Daly’s work was aimed at surfacing the consequences of male-dominated thinking about God for women’s day-to-day experience.

The widespread conception of the “Supreme Being” as an entity distinct from this world but controlling it according to plan and keeping human beings in a state of infantile subjection has been a not too subtle mask of the divine patriarch.⁵

Out of her own experience of diminishment by males, she unflinchingly wrote of “castrating God” and “cutting away the Supreme Phallus”⁶ as an important part of the process of transforming the collective imagination.

Daly’s counterproposal was to de-objectify God as a being, following Tillich, and render God instead as a “verb”:⁷ “the God who is power of being acts as a moral power summoning women and men to act out of our deepest hope and to become who we can be.”⁸ God endlessly unfolds, and develops. God is “a power of being which both is, and is not yet.”⁹

The re-creative work that followed Daly essentially assumed the clarion call of the traditional Father’s death, so that the rest of this chapter will pursue the work of her female colleagues in developing evocative and propitious insights into the God who rises from the ash-heap of patriarchy. This activity has come to be known collectively as “feminist” [155] theology; it is, of course, so much more than just that. Many of the developments to be addressed here will also be seen in later chapters on love and relationality, since these themes both recur with refreshing frequency. So this is but a foretaste of what lies ahead.

TOWARD A GOD OF MUTUAL RELATIONS: CARTER HEYWARD

Carter Heyward (b. 1945) blazed trails in American Protestant circles equal to those of the initially Roman Catholic Mary Daly. Heyward was one of eleven women whose ordination in 1974 paved the way for the recognition of women priests in the Episcopal Church. Her fundamental challenge to the dominance of patriarchy has been to move the issue of God’s relations to others to front and center in reconceiving the being of God. God is identified at the very beginning of Heyward’s first book, The Redemption of God (1982), as “power in relation” and “the power of relation,”¹⁰—or, as her subtitle implies, “the power and intimacy in mutual relation.”¹¹ This was actualized, “in-carnated,” in Jesus as dunamis (power).¹² Jesus’ exousia (authority) derives from his dunamis, not the other way around.¹³

Seven years later, following on the heels of Rita Nakashima Brock’s initiating of the theme of “erotic power,”¹⁴ Heyward observed that “to speak of the erotic or of God is to speak of power in right relation,”¹⁵ defining “erotic” as “the sacred/godly basis of our capacity to participate in mutually empowering relationships.”¹⁶

Our power is erotic because it is about embodying relational connections. This power is sacred because it is shared. It is transforming because it is creative. And our power is liberating because it moves the struggle for justice. By this power, in this power, and with this power, we find ourselves-in-relation, breaking out of the isolation imposed by silence and invisibility.¹⁷

Mutuality is a central focus for Heyward, critiquing the patriarchal God for having mutual relations only internally, in the interactions among the persons of the Trinity. She defines mutuality as “sharing power in such a way that each participant in the relationship is called [156] forth more fully into becoming who she is—a whole person, with integrity.”¹⁸

Two modes of being powerful are contrasted: power-with, and powerover. “Power-with serves to further empower all persons in a relationship. Power-over serves to further empower a few and disempower others.”¹⁹ This is an absolutely vital insight. To discern explicitly how divine power can come to be perceived as divine empowerment is absolutely central to the thesis of my exploration.

Heyward wraps up her revisionary understanding with a statement that is refreshing in its insight.

God is our relational power—our power in mutual relation. It is from this God that you and I draw our power to be in life in the first place, and to sustain our lives in relation. In sustaining and becoming ourselves in relation, we are giving birth to more of this same sacred power who needs us, her friends, to bring her to life and help nourish her life on the earth. She is being born among us, and yet she is seldom fully present, fully herself. To that extent, she is not yet but becoming. Where there is brokenness, fear, despair, or violence, the power may not be—yet. But with our help, she is becoming . . . It is a paradox: God is becoming our relational matrix insofar as we are the womb in which God is being born. This may be easier to comprehend if we substitute the word “love” for “God.”²⁰

Switching the pronoun for God from “he” to “she” is liberating. It is part of the process of completing the obituary for the patriarchal God. It is not that God is “she” only, but that God is “she” also, in a way that gets to the very heart of God’s true identity. To call attention to the “womb” of God is not to lead us in the direction of a matriarchal replacement; it is rather to challenge us to find all the helpful female symbology for characterizing God that overcomes the previous patriarchal one-sidedness.

EROTIC POWER: RITA NAKASHIMA BROCK

As the latest move in a highly varied and richly textured career of passionate scholarship, Rita Nakashima Brock currently serves as founding co-director of the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity School in Texas. [157] Her award-winning first book, Journeys by Heart (1988), essentially blew the work of Anders Nygren on Agape and Eros out of the water by reversing the terms: God’s love is not agapic, but erotic.

Brock identified agape love with the wrong direction of classical (patriarchal) theism in championing “disinterested” love, “dispassionate” love that includes no dynamic interrelationship between Lover and beloved and leaves God utterly unaffected by the creaturely response to God’s love.²¹ Erotic love, by contrast, “connotes intimacy through the subjective engagement of the whole self in a relationship.”²²

But what Brock really wished to do with this emphasis was to shift how we understand the nature of power: God’s power is erotic power, as the subtitle of her book proclaims. “Erotic power is the power of our primal interrelatedness.” It is an ontic category; “all other forms of power emerge from the reality of erotic power.”²³ She went on to say: “Erotic power is the fundamental power of existence-as-a-relational-process . . . Connection is the basic power of all existence, the root of life. The power of being/becoming is erotic power.”²⁴ This does not aim toward control, but connectedness. In fact, “erotic power denied and crushed” is precisely what generates dominance and control,²⁵ as power perverted.

SHE WHO IS: ELIZABETH JOHNSON

The day after Elizabeth Johnson was born in 1941, Pearl Harbor was bombed. Perhaps that was something of an omen in the work of a Roman Catholic woman theologian who challenged the priorities and perspectives of a male-dominated world of achievement by force and “might makes right.” In her trailblazing She Who Is (1992), the title boldly confronting the reader like a 100-point headline on the front page of a newspaper, Johnson identified the death of patriarchy’s God emphatically.

Classical theism emphasizes in a one-sided way the absolute transcendence of God over the world, God’s untouchability by human history and suffering, and the all-pervasiveness of God’s dominating power to which human beings owe submission and [158] awe. Is this idea of God not the reflection of patriarchal imagination, which prizes nothing more than unopposed power-over and unquestioned loyalty? Is not the transcendent, omnipotent, impassible symbol of God the quintessential embodiment of the solitary ruling male ego, above the fray, perfectly happy in himself, filled with power in the face of the obstreperousness of others? Is this not “man” according to the patriarchal ideal?²⁶

Johnson’s insights overflow extensively into other aspects of divine reality being explored throughout Part III. Her supplanting of masculine ways of thinking about God delve quite consequentially into the issues of divine suffering, the importance of relationality over against self-sufficiency, and the centrality of divine love.

From a feminist perspective the denial of divine relation to the world codified in the highly specialized scholastic language reflects the disparagement of reciprocal relation characteristic of patriarchy in its social and intellectual expressions. If the ideal is the potent, all-sufficient ego in charge of events and independent of the need for others, then to be connected in mutuality with others introduces “deficiency” in the form of interdependence, vulnerability, and risk. Genuine mutuality threatens any form of domination, including the paternalistic ordering of things. Thus it is not accidental that classical theism insists on a concept of God with no real relation to the world, even when this is interpreted as an affirmation of divine transcendence. Unrelated and unaffected by the world, such a theistic God limns the ultimate patriarchal ideal, the solitary, dominant male.²⁷

She critiques classical theism for modeling divine being on the root metaphor of motion derived from the non-personal physical world. “A different interpretation becomes possible when the root metaphor is taken from personal reality that is constitutively relational. Then the essence of God can be seen to consist in the motion of personal relations and the act that is love.” Suffering now becomes not a movement from potentiality to act but “an expression of divine being insofar as it is an act freely engaged in as a consequence of care for others.” Divine suffering is now interpretable as “Sophia-God’s act of love freely overflowing in compassion.”²⁸

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Love is absolutely central. “She Who Is” is “the dark radiance of love in solidarity with the struggle of denigrated persons.”²⁹ Furthermore, “The being of God that we are speaking of is essentially love. God’s being is identical with an act of communion, not with monolithic substance, and so is inherently relational.”³⁰ God manifests a “power of suffering love to resist and create anew.”³¹ God is perceived as a “suffering SophiaGod of powerful compassionate love.”³²

So also, the title is intended to signify “the creative, relational power of being who enlivens, suffers with, sustains, and enfolds the universe.”³³ Johnson’s proposal for a feminist reshaping of the notion of omnipotence occupies only a page and half. “We seek an understanding that does not divide power and compassionate love in a dualistic framework that identifies love with a resignation of power and the exercise of power with a denial of love. Rather, we seek to integrate these two, seeing love as the shape in which divine power appears.”³⁴ What is absent, however, is any investigation into how this reformulation can be constitutively understood, beyond notions of “power-with” and such phrases as “a vitality, an empowering vigor that reaches out and awakens freedom and strength in oneself and others . . . an energy that brings forth, stirs up, and fosters life,” a transforming of people.³⁵

Johnson is cautious about overemphasizing the value of love because of “the attention traditionally devoted to agapaic or self-giving love,” without sufficiently equal regard for self-affirmation. Even so, “set within an inclusive context and continuously regulated by the value of relational autonomy . . . love may yet serve as a crystallization of the relational essence of God’s being.”³⁶ She offers a formidable twist on Anselm in suggesting that God is no less than that one “than whose power of love nothing greater can be conceived.”³⁷

This moves decisively in the direction my exploration desires to take us, toward a new unification of love and power at the very center of God in which love is allowed to redefine power. Johnson is pursuing “a resymbolization of divine power not as dominative or controlling power, nor as dialectical power in weakness, nor simply as persuasive power, but as the liberating power of connectedness that is effective in compassionate love. We can say: Sophia-God is in solidarity with those [160] who suffer as a mystery of empowerment.”³⁸ This points excitingly toward an understanding of a wholly other way of being powerful, for God. It blazes new trails into a wilderness of the reflective imagination that we are are invited to explore further.

ENDNOTES

1. Is it a coincidence that what we have been observing, that love has taken a backseat to power in traditional interpretations of God, reflects the dismissing of a “soft,” receptive side of God for the sake of a harder, all-sufficient, self-contained, overpowering side of God?
2. For a brief but excellent overview of relevant resources, see Elizabeth
   1. Johnson, Quest for the Living God (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007), 110–12.
3. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 12, and all of ch. 1.
4. Ibid., 13.
5. Ibid., 18.
6. Ibid., 19.
7. Ibid., 33ff.
8. Ibid., 32.
9. Ibid., 36.
10. Carter Heyward, The Redemption of God: A Theology of Mutual Relation (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982), 2.
11. Ibid., 11, emphasis original.
12. Ibid., 31f. 41.
13. Ibid., 41–43.
14. Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1988). See the section on Brock, below.
15. Heyward, Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 3, emphasis mine.
16. Ibid., 187.
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17. Ibid., 21.
18. Ibid., 191. We will visit this theme more extensively in the chapter on “Overtures to a Relational God.” The conjoining of these two foci, feminists’ and “process” theologians’ understandings of power as relational, arises in the work of such scholars as Anne Carr, who wrote: “Feminist understanding of power in relational terms, as empowerment of the other, corresponds to process theology’s distinction between two kinds of power, coercive power and persuasive power . . . God’s liberating action occurs through human power and action that imitates the persuasive, nonviolent power of God, a power that, as human experience teaches and the symbol of the cross reveals, all too often fails in sinful human history. While women’s experience underscores the compassion and so the gentle power of God, a power in the world that is apparently helpless without human cooperation, it also heightens awareness of human freedom and responsibility.” Anne Carr, Transforming Grace: Christian Tradition and Women’s Experience (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 151f.
19. Heyward, Touching Our Strength, 192.
20. Ibid., 24, emphases mine. The last sentence here was expanded that same year in a collection of Heyward’s essays and sermons: “God is revealed as Lover and Beloved and as the creative, liberating, and sanctifying Spirit that draws us together in right relation.” Heyward, Speaking of Christ: A Lesbian Feminist Voice, ed. Ellen C. Davis (New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1989), 69.
21. Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1988), 40.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 26, both quotes. Brock derived this notion from HaunaniKay Trask, Eros and Power: The Promise of Feminist Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 92-93: “In the feminist vision, Eros is both love and power.” (Quoted by Brock, 25.)
24. Ibid., 41.
25. Ibid., 36.
26. Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 21. See also Johnson’s later summary of this critique in her Quest for the Living God, 14–16, [162] and all of ch. 5 (90–112).
27. Johnson, She Who Is, 225.
28. Ibid., 265, all three quotes; emphasis original.
29. Ibid., 244.
30. Ibid., 238, emphasis mine.
31. Ibid., 271.
32. Ibid., 272.
33. Ibid., 13, emphasis mine.
34. Ibid., 269.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 265, both quotes.
37. Ibid., 268.
38. Ibid., 270, emphasis mine.

Coming soon...

Let us now turn back the pages of time and visit another kind of challenge to the theistic consensus that has accompanied what we have just been observing, as a concomitant undercurrent—namely, that the God of unqualified and opposable omnipotence is, in fact, not the living God of scripture at all but is, for all intents and purposes, no less than dead. It is one thing to assert that such a God never had true being in the first place. It is altogether another to recognize that such a God had tremendous power over the minds and faith of Christians for two millennia but has now ceased to wield such clout. Mourners of this celebrated demise have not exactly been clothed in black. Might one rather say, “rejoicing over a dead God”?

We begin in the nineteenth century with two influential philosophers and a Russian novelist, then move forward to the “radical” decade of the 1960s and the rewriting of theology in the light of the Holocaust.

A PROJECTION OF HUMAN WISHING: LUDWIG FEUERBACH

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) adopted G. W. F. Hegel’s understanding that the cosmos is the “objectification” of Absolute Spirit and took it [142] one step further: God became for him the objectification of the human spirit writ large. In his groundbreaking The Essence of Christianity (1841), Feurbach observed that Christianity (and religion in general) represents the projecting of humankind’s most desirable attributes onto an Other, named “God.”¹

The fundamental claim that Feuerbach made is that “the qualities of God are nothing else than the essential qualities of man himself.”² Specifically, they are projected onto an externalized God by the desires of humans for the image of perfection: “Man—this is the mystery of religion—projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself thus converted into a subject.”³ Therefore, in God, we have only ourselves and our own activity as an object;⁴ in religion, we contemplate our “own latent nature.”⁵

What I find truly fascinating is that Feuerbach concentrated a great deal of energy on love, not on power, as being at the heart of this projective activity. He discussed omniptence in the contexts of God’s providence and of prayer,⁶ and then later in the sections in Part II on the false, or “theological,” essence of religion. But I have found him minimally making what seems the obvious statement to be explored, namely, that the doctrine of omnipotence is the projection onto God of the wish for absolute, controlling power among human beings. A passage from his The Essence of Faith According to Luther (1844) must suffice: “Omnipotence confirms the divine promises.” It is based not on specific wishes but rather “on the unspecific over-all wish that there be in general no natural necessity, no limitations, no opposition to the human being and to human wishes; it is based on the wish that everything be only for men and nothing against men.”⁷

One relevant assertion maintains: “Creation out of nothing is the highest expression of omnipotence; but omnipotence is nothing else than subjectivity exempting itself from all objective conditions and limitations, and consecrating this exemption as the highest power and reality.”⁸

Love, on the other hand, occupies the very center of Feuerbach’s thesis.

Love is God himself, and apart from it there is no God. Love makes man God and God man . . . What the old mystics said [143] of God, that he is the highest and yet the commonest being, applies in truth to love, and that not a visionary, imaginary love—no! a real love, a love which has flesh and blood, which vibrates as an almighty force through all living.⁹

“God is love” means essentially, for Feuerbach, that love is God for us.¹⁰ The divine love “is only human love made objective, affirming itself.”¹¹ This image of love becomes perverted when

God appears to me in another form besides that of love; in the form of omnipotence, of a severe power not bound by love . . . So long as love is not exalted into . . . an essence, so long there lurks in the background of love a subject who even without love is something by himself, an unloving monster, a diabolical being, whose personality, separable and actually separated from love, delights in the blood of heretics and unbelievers,—the phantom of religious fanaticism.”¹²

It is a chilling reminder of just why Feuerbach as well as others could come to regard this understanding of God as an enemy to be done away with.

So, finally, “the imperative of love has infinitely more power than that of despotism. Love does not command . . . The imperative of love works with electro-magnetic power; that of despotism with the mechanical power of a wooden telegraph.”¹³

“God is love,” Feuerbach avowed, “is the sublimest dictum of Christianity.”¹⁴ The death of a controlling deity external to human projections provides a basis for Feuerbach’s intriguing reversal of 1 John 4:8,16, whereby it became possible for him to proclaim the obverse, that love, in fact, is God: “Love is not holy because it is a predicate of God, but it is a predicate of God because it is in itself divine.”¹⁵

Eberhard Jüngel raised the telling question: “Is not Feuerbach right when he fears that theology is more interested in the ‘absolute power of God’ and in the ‘hidden God’ (potentia dei absoluta, deus absconditus) than it is in the truth that God is love?”¹⁶ But the direction in which Feuerbach took his challenge to the conventional notion of God is finally not all that helpful, given that the projections are toward those of an Ideal Human who has no real existence. We are left with a void, after all is said and done.

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“RETURNING THE TICKET”: FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

I interrupt this parade of Christian theologians (and a philosopher) to take a brief detour sideways to the insight of a Russian novelist of note, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81). In The Brothers Karamazov (1880), in the section immediately preceding his powerful narration of the Grand Inquisitor and the returned Jesus, Dostoyevsky has Ivan Karamazov relate to his brother Alyosha a number of incidents involving the utterly unimaginable suffering visited upon innocent children, and then states, in regard to the promise of eternal bliss:

I can’t accept that [eternal] harmony . . . I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tormented child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to “dear, kind God!” It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? . . . I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.¹⁷

The theme of truth masked in fiction is not so much that God is dead but that God has become the enemy, the One to be rejected—a theme we have previously noticed. If such a God as tradition champions reigns in eternal bliss, then give my ticket to Heaven to someone else, Ivan pleads.

That vision of an inimical god had been cryptically presented nearly a century earlier in the apocalyptic poetry of William Blake in his Jerusalem (1804):

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Satan: Worshipd as God by the Mighty Ones of the Earth . . . such is the way of the Devouring Power.¹⁸

Blake’s vision of omnipotence turned evil was strongly highlighted by another scholar to be encountered shortly in this chapter, Thomas Altizer.¹⁹ But first, the wish was strong to rid humankind of a deity whose unchecked power wreaked havoc on the lives of the innocent, and this option was seized exuberantly by our next challenger.

“WE HAVE KILLED GOD”: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

The German scholar Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was an intellectual prodigy whose career in teaching and writing was foreshortened by the severe onset of mental illness, the cause of which has been debated ever since. Even though his writings were characterized by often bewildering flights of the imagination, I find no justification for regarding them as inflicted with mental disability. His was simply a genius difficult to categorize.

The most well-known of Nietzsche’s imaginings is encapsulated in his tale of the madman who went about the marketplace loudly proclaiming that God had died and that we, God’s minions, have performed the fatal deed. Even given its familiarity, I believe it merits citing here at length.

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Have he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we [146] doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.”

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars— and yet they have done it themselves.”

It has been further related that on that same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: “What after all are all these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”²⁰

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Nietzsche penned the paradigmatic obituary for the classic conception of God as essentially omnipotent over all. He wrote in The Antichrist (1888):

That we find no God—either in history or in nature or behind nature—is not what differentiates us, but that we experience what has been revered as God, not as ‘godlike’ but as miserable, as absurd, as harmful, not merely as an error but as a crime against life. We deny God as God. If one were to prove this God of the Christians to us, we should be even less able to believe in him.²¹

For Nietzsche, God has to die in order for Übermensch, “overhuman,” to be born. That is the essential direction in which his provocative project of thought ran. Overhuman is not some projected aspect of contemporary humanness at its most actualized. Rather, the human race itself is merely a bridge between apes and overhuman,²² who is the only alternative for Nietzsche to nihilism. If value is not received from the divine, it must be self-created. We in our present state are not equipped to achieve that. So the transvaluation of values awaits the coming of the overhuman for its full accomplishment.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–85), Nietzsche repeated his proclamation that God is dead²³ and proceeded immediately to follow that with the proposal, “I teach you the Superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed.”²⁴ The death of God has freed humankind to reach forward toward its own true destiny. It is therefore a liberating death, freeing humans (the overhuman) to take on the responsibility of defining good and evil, right and wrong.

In this respect, Nietzsche seemed to take no interest in Feuerbach’s elevation of love as the most important aspect of our projection of ultimate perfection. Quite to the contrary, his passion was for an unchecked “will to power,” the title of his published notebooks edited after his death by his devoted sister Elisabeth.²⁵ One can readily read out of this objective the sense of a power struggle that Nietzsche’s madman and prophet gave voice to: a power struggle between God and humankind. And for him, God’s death is the necessary outcome of that struggle.

Certainly the later Nazi obsession with an Über-race that stood conventional notions of morality on their head and brought about massive [148] human destruction can be characterized as a perversion of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. But the very fact that overman is something toward which we are moving, rather than an aspect of the present human scene, is an indication of how perilous the negative potential in Nietzsche’s vision is. The will to power among mere mortals who are not overman can be devastating to the point of demonic. The outcome here, alas, is that power has won out over love even as the God of absolute omnipotence has been seen to have expired.

GOD’S SELF-ANNIHILATION: THOMAS J. J. ALTIZER

It was the “cool” thing to be part of the announcing God’s demise in the decade of the ‘60s, the presumed event even gracing the cover of Time magazine.²⁶ For Thomas J. J. Altizer (b. 1927), the reality driving his intellectual output was anything but a temporary fad. It was deadly serious.

Although his work penetrated more deeply into the issue of transcendence over against immanence, Altizer was joined in his quest by other scholars and particularly by the American Jewish educator Richard L. Rubenstein, who maintained that “after Auschwitz,” the title of his book on this subject,²⁷ it was no longer possible to entertain the idea of a Judeo-Christian God presiding over the affairs of humankind. The horrors experienced by some six million Jews and others in the Holocaust simply shattered all conventional claims that God will somehow “make it all right” in the end. Eventual heavenly bliss cannot be seen as a justification for unrelenting suffering on Earth.

We live in the time of the “death of God.” This is more a statement about man and his culture than about God. The death of God is a cultural fact . . . I am, however, a religious existentialist after Nietzsche and after Auschwitz. When I say we live in the time of the death of God, I mean that the thread uniting God and man, heaven and earth, has been broken. We stand in a cold, silent, unfeeling cosmos, unaided by any purposeful power beyond our own resources.²⁸

For Rubenstein, “God really died at Auschwitz.”²⁹ For Altizer, however, God really died, first, on Golgotha. He writes in The Gospel of [149] Christian Atheism (1966) that in the crucifixion, but even in the incarnation itself, God ceased to “exist or to be present in his primordial form.” God “abandoned or negated his transcendent form.”³⁰ This entails “an understanding of a fully kenotic Christ” with the concomitant “emptying of the power of God,” a movement theologians have heretofore been unwilling to acknowledge.³¹

A “metamorphosis of the sacred into the profane . . . negate[s] its original identity, thereby passing through the death of its original form . . . Christianity, and Christianity alone, proclaims the death of the sacred.”³² The Word becoming flesh in Jesus “is only truly and actually real if it effects the death of the original sacred, the death of God himself.”³³ But this God whose death Altizer is proclaiming is precisely theism’s God, the classic God-image that represents the triumph of power over love, a God “known as transcendent and impassive . . . a primordial deity who is unaffected by the processes of time and history.”³⁴ Chapter 4 is entitled “The Self-Annihilation of God,” where Altizer states that “to confess the death of God is to speak of an actual and real event . . . a historical and a cosmic event, and, as such, it is a final and irrevocable event.”³⁵

God’s dying into total immanence is not an end in itself but is the necessary precursor to the eventual dawning of an apocalyptic fulfillment of human potentiality. The explanation shows Altizer’s affinity for the apocalyptic poetry of William Blake that we observed above.

When the reality of God is eschatologically identified with his dawning Kingdom, then God can be known only as an active and apocalyptic process that even now is becoming all in all . . . This is precisely the function of a poetic apocalypse. Accordingly, such an apocalypse must be an imaginative disclosure of a universal and kenotic process that moves through an absolute and total negation to reach the epiphany of a divine and human Totality that thereby becomes all in all.³⁶

Altizer goes on in History as Apocalypse (1985) to interpret Blake’s final apocalyptic vision in Jerusalem 96 that God, who is love, dies precisely in order that the human being, who is love, may be fully actualized. “The ‘Divine Image’ dies in Jesus so as to abolish the solitary and transcendent [150] God who is the source of judgment and bring about an apocalyptic union that is a full coming together of God and man.”³⁷

Altizer’s program is bold and unflinching. It is an attack on divine transcendence that shares with his predecessors a veritable celebration of the death of the traditional God of theism. But is it genuine, and is it necessary? If God is conceived differently than tradition has presented and elevated, if the transcendent God is simultaneously the immanent God who is perennially with us and not over against us, if God’s being is first love, after which power comes to be defined within the implicates of love, then such a God would be one whose death truly would be mourned. The question at the funeral is quite obviously: Which God, whose God, died?

ENDNOTES

1. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, tr. George Eliot (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 14.
2. Ibid., 19f.
3. Ibid., 29f.
4. Ibid., 30.
5. Ibid., 33.
6. Ibid., chs. 10, 12.
7. Feuerbach, The Essence of Faith According to Luther, tr. Melvin Cherno (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 59 (both quotes).
8. Feuerbach,The Essence of Christianity, 101f.
9. Ibid., 48.
10. Ibid., 52f. See ibid., 64, where Feurbach defended the proposition that “Love is God, love is the absolute being.”
11. Ibid., 55f.
12. Ibid., 52f., emphasis mine.
13. Ibid., 125f.
14. Ibid., 263.
15. Ibid., 273.
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16. Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 316.
17. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, tr. Constance Garnett (New York: Random House, 1950), 290f., emphasis original.
18. William Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 29 [33], lines 17–18, 24, in David V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, newly revised edition (New York: Random House, 1988), 175.
19. Altizer notes that Blake understood how our worship of a God of ultimate and absolute power turns God into its obverse, Satan, “the way of the Devouring Power.” “The closing pages of Jerusalem record a vision of a coming apocalyptic coincidentia oppositorum, revealing how the final union of God and man will annihilate the God who alone is God by resurrecting him as ‘The Great Humanity Divine’.” Altizer, “William Blake and the Role of Myth in the Radical Christian Vision,” in Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1966), 191.
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Bk. 3, #125, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), 181f. This was a part of the first edition, published in 1882.
21. Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1954), 627, emphases original.
22. “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss.” Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Prologue 4, tr. Thomas Common, in The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York: Random House, n.d.), 29
23. Ibid., Prologue 2 (27).
24. Ibid., Prologue 3 (27), emphasis original.
25. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, tr. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967).
26. Time, April 8, 1966, the cover asking the question, “Is God Dead?”
27. See Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1966).
28. Ibid., 151f.
29. Ibid., 224.
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30. Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1966), 44.
31. Ibid., 43.
32. Ibid., 51.
33. Ibid., 54.
34. Ibid., 43.
35. Ibid., 103.
36. Altizer, “William Blake and the Role of Myth,” op.cit., 187.
37. Altizer, History as Apocalypse (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1985), 204.

God’s immutability and God’s impassibility as apatheia are two sides of one coin. If God is beyond change, then it is not possible for God to be affected by what is other than God, wherefore God can be said to be “apathetic.” True, God could change in some ways and still be beyond affectations. But the notion that began to gain traction, in the midst of the twentieth century’s horrors piled one on top of another, that God truly suffers, becomes possible only when the illusion of divine immutability is shed. Therefore I turn immediately to this topic before pursuing others than may have initially arisen in history at an earlier date.

THE “HARDEST PART”: G. A. STUDDERT-KENNEDY

We have already met Geoffrey Anketell Studdert-Kennedy. Of Irish extraction, he was an Anglican vicar of a very poor parish in Worcester at the beginning of the war, then became a chaplain to the British forces in 1915.

He went through a good deal of fighting, and the brutal realities of war brought him face to face with the problem of reconciling belief in the love of God with the omnipotence of the [131] Deity . . . These pages express the thoughts which came to the writer amid the hardships of the trenches and the brutalities of war. It is literally theology hammered out on the field of battle.¹

Studdert-Kennedy spelled out the nature of his situation vividly in his own Preface to the 1925 second edition:

If the doctrine of the sovereign Kaiser-God was impossible to hold on the battle-fields of Flanders and of France, it is even more impossible in the Europe of to-day. That God is dead, as dead as cold mutton, and even deader, because He can be no longer used as food even for the poor, Even the most poverty-stricken in mind and spirit have in these days learned to spew out any teaching about God which makes Him less good than Jesus.²

With irony dripping from his pen, he went on to concede: “Of course the book won’t satisfy theologians, but then it’s not written for them to read but for the man who has to earn his bread in the sweat of his brow.”³

Studdert-Kennedy’s writing is colorful, vivid, and highly contextualized (right in the middle of the blazing guns). “One needs a Father, and a Father must suffer in His children’s suffering. I could not worship the passionless potentate.”⁴ His agonized bluntness is embodied in the poem he wrote for the title page of the book, from which its title was taken:

The sorrows of God mun be ‘ard to bear,
If ‘e really ‘as Love in ‘is ‘eart,
And the ‘ardest part i’ the world to play
Mun surely be God’s Part.⁵

His dissatisfaction with the inherited notion of a God-in-charge, a God ultimately over everything and in control of everything, fairly screams from the printed page. “I don’t know or love the Almighty potentate—my only real God is the suffering Father revealed in the sorrow of Christ.”⁶

Nothing makes much odds. God Himself seems non-existent— the Almighty Ruler Whom all things obey. He seems to have [132] gone to sleep and allowed things to run amuck. I don’t believe there is an absolute Almighty Ruler. I don’t see how anyone can believe it. If it were a choice between that God and no God, I would be an atheist.⁷

And so he proclaimed rather “God, not Almighty, but God the Father, with a Father’s sorrow and a Father’s weakness, which is the strength of love; God splendid, suffering, crucified.”⁸

Behind the vast history of effort he could see “a will” but “not an absolutely omnipotent will that knows no failure and no strain.”⁹ Either “God is helpless to prevent war, or else He wills it and approves of it.”¹⁰ Christians in the past have affirmed the latter. If God is indeed omnipotent, we are inevitably “driven to the conclusion that war is the will of the Almighty God. If it is true, I go morally mad.”¹¹ Therefore Studdert-Kennedy concluded: “God, the Father God of Love, is everywhere in history, but nowhere is He Almighty.”¹² “If the Christian religion means anything, it means that God is Suffering Love, and that all real progress is caused by the working of Suffering Love in the world.”¹³

War is the crucifixion of God, not the working of His will. The cross is not past, but present. Ever and always I can see set up above this world of ours a huge and towering Cross, with great arms stretched out east and west from the rising to the setting sun, and on that Cross my God still hangs and calls on all brave men to come out and fight with evil, and by their sufferings endured with Him help to lift the world from darkness into light.¹⁴

What was then known simply as “the War” challenged theology to give up time-worn declarations of the sublime power of God. J. K. Mozley observed, after reviewing Studdert-Kennedy’s contributions: “as the War sounded the doom of absolute monarchy upon earth, so we must abandon the idea of such power as vested in God.”¹⁵ Clearly, the collapse of an apathetic God untouched by human suffering is a fierce blow to the traditional doctrine of divine omnipotence, leaving open the question of just what kind of power could be attributed to God at all.

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TRAGEDY IN GOD: NICOLAS BERDYAEV

Nicolas Berdyaev, born in Kiev, Russia, in 1874, was a Marxist who was also a Christian and an anti-totalitarian who was expelled from his homeland in 1922 because of his opposition to the Communist regime. He eventually settled in Paris where most of his important books were written prior to his death in 1948. His religious writings occupy the boundary of theology with philosophy.

Berdyaev identified freedom as the essential will of God for God’s creation. “Freedom is not created because it is not a part of nature; it is prior to the world and has its origin in the primal void. God is All-Powerful in relation to being but not in relation to nothingness and to freedom.”¹⁶ So freedom is a given for God, leading to an understanding of a self-chosen tragedy in God: God’s love of what God has created, and especially the other dearest to God, the one bearing God’s image—i.e., humans—is the origin of God’s suffering. God expects freedom from us; God waits for our free response to the divine call. And this response cannot be compelled. Compulsion and constraint mark the absence of freedom.¹⁷

If the destiny of freedom’s availability is tragic, in its misuse, how is that fate overcome?

How, in a word, can freedom be separated from the evil it brings in its train except by the destruction of freedom itself? To this universal problem there is no solution save in the coming of Christ . . . The grace of Christ is the inner illumination of freedom without any outward restraint or coercion . . . The mystery of Christianity, the religion of God made man, is above all the mystery of liberty.¹⁸

The mystery of the cross conveys, once again, the mystery of “a crucified God,”¹⁹ wherefore the topic of love enters the discussion.

Truth crucified possesses no logical nor juridical power of compulsion and it made its appearance in the world as infinite love, and love does not compel; rather it makes man infinitely free . . . In the suffering of the God-Man willingly endured, which sets men free, there lies hidden the mystery of Christian love.²⁰

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“God is infinite Love, and Love cannot rest shut up within itself; it is always moving out to others.”²¹ The third person of the Trinity is “the Spirit Who is Love realized. The kingdom of Love in freedom is the kingdom of the Trinity.”²² Again, the reign of God cannot be built “by force; it can only be created in freedom.”²³ In that coming realm, “all power and all autocracy, whether individual or collective, are limited, for there only the power of truth and justice are recognized . . . God will be all in all and freedom will triumph over force.”²⁴ Of course, the obvious question remains: How? What is the nature of the power-in-freedom that prevails over compulsion?

Redemption, we are led to see, is understood as a divine “work of love,” which is no less than a suffering love: “the sacrifice of a divine and infinite love, not a propitiatory sacrifice . . . God himself longs to suffer with the world.”²⁵ In the passion enacted on Calvary, “freedom becomes the power of divine love.”²⁶ All of this leads Berdyaev to conclude that Christianity is no less than “the religion of the suffering God.”²⁷ This isn’t patripassianism, Berdyaev insisted. The interpenetration of the three persons of the Trinity causes Berdyaev to say that God, not just the human aspect of Jesus on the cross, suffers. Aquinas was wrong, Berdyaev contended: God is not a static constant. The cross discloses to us “a process in God, a divine tragedy.”28

The phrases are provocative. Human freedom is not cancelled out because God exercises power as love that leads but does not compel. Rather than curtailing our exercise of freedom, God enters into our tragic condition of self-inflicted suffering that has arisen through freedom’s abuse. The concession to divine suffering is an empowering acknowledgment. It does not, by itself, however, solve the riddle of how power that is defined by love is to be understood, in contrast to traditional understandings of power.

VOICES FROM EAST ASIA: KAZOH KITAMORI AND JUNG YOUNG LEE

Born in 1916, Kazoh Kitamori was a pastor and professor in his native Japan through the devastating years of World War II. His book on [135] Theology of the Pain of God was first published in the year after the war ended, and translated into English in 1958 after going through five editions. Ironies abound. This is one of the earliest examples of nonWestern theology but almost all the dialogue is with the West; the Japanese tradition of tragedy comes into the discussion only on a few pages.²⁹ It was written during World War II and published a year after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet seems blissfully unaware of any of this context. The author champions the “pain of God” yet distances himself, unconvincingly, from patripassianism—unconvincing because, e.g., “the pain of God is neither merely the pain of God the Son, nor merely the pain of God the Father, but the pain of the two persons who are essentially one.”³⁰

The title phrase was triggered by Kitamori’s reflection on Jeremiah 31:20 (“I am deeply moved for him [i.e., Ephraim],” NRSV; “my heart yearns for him,” NIV). Kitamori understood the Hebrew verb (hamah) to mean “to be in pain.”³¹

The theology of the pain of God does not mean that pain exists in God as substance. The pain of God is not a ‘”concept of substance”—it is a “concept of relation,” a nature of “God’s love.”³²

In God, there is a unity of “love rooted in pain.”³³ Jesus “is the very pain of God.”³⁴ Kitamori was finally led to conclude: “The concept ‘love rooted in the pain of God’ expresses the whole of God’s love.”³⁵

In 1974, Jung Young Lee published God Suffers for Us at a publishing house in the Netherlands. A Korean who studied and taught in the USA, his work has been pretty much ignored in scholarly dialogue. That is unfortunate. The heart of his position is encapsulated in the following passage.

The Agape of the Cross implies the inclusive unity of both the depth of divine love and that of divine possibility. Thus, it is neither the depth of divine love alone nor the divine possibility alone, but combination of the two which manifests itself as the depth of divine empathy to participate in the world. . . . the redemptive love is always love with suffering. Neither love without suffering nor suffering without love is redemptive. . . . If love is really to be redemptive, it must be a suffering love, that [136] is, the Agape of the Cross. Agape is not redemptive unless it is also suffering. To deny the suffering of God is to deny the redemptive work of God.”³⁶

Empathy was a central tenet for Lee: “in the empathy of God, God fully participates in us” without losing God’s godness (my word) and without our losing our essential humanness.³⁷ “Love directs the course of divine movement.”³⁸ In that regard, Lee posited God’s self-limitation, deriving from the divine empathy, as the reason for God’s non-omnipotence.³⁹

THE GOD WHO SUFFERS WITH THE SUFFERING: DOROTHEE SÖLLE

Dorothee Sölle (1929–2003) was a German theologian who wound up spending much of her teaching career at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. She unflinchingly blasted “the omnipotence of a heavenly being who decrees suffering”⁴⁰ as a manifestation of either “Christian masochism” (the calamities we accept as somehow God’s will) or “Christian sadism” (the calamities we inflict on others in God’s name), or both.⁴¹ There is “no way to combine omnipotence with love.”⁴² Christian sadism took an extreme form in Calvin:⁴³ “There is little doubt that the Reformation strengthened theology’s sadistic accents.”⁴⁴

The key section of Sölle’s attack is found in ch. 2 of Suffering (1975), on “The Christians’ Apathetic God.” “Apatheia is a Greek word that literally means nonsuffering, freedom from suffering, a creature’s inability to suffer.”⁴⁵ The “apathetic” God “fulfills the ideal of one who is physically beyond the reach of external influences and psychologically anaesthetized—like things that are dead . . . This apathetic God became the God of the Christians, although he was a contradiction to the biblical God, with his emotions and suffering.”⁴⁶ This leads to the realization that “the stoic concept of suffering triumphs over a Christian concept” of the divine.⁴⁷

The almighty Lord, who ordains suffering or frees one from it has . . . lost his all-surpassing significance. Whoever grounds suffering in an almighty, alien One who ordains everything has to face the question of the justice of this God—and he must be [137] shattered by it. Then all that remains is either total submission to God’s omnipotence, together with a renunciation of the question about his justice, as Job did at the last, or else rebellion against this God and the awaiting of another deliverer.⁴⁸

Wherever we are confronted with senseless suffering, “faith in a God who embodies both omnipotence and love has to waver or be destroyed.”⁴⁹

So what is the alternative, to the extent that Sölle presents one? Is God now simply Love, bereft of all Power? To wit: “Our oneness with love is indissoluble. To learn to suffer without becoming the devil’s martyrs means to live conscious of our oneness with the whole of life. Those who suffer in this way are indestructible. Nothing can separate them from the love of God.”⁵⁰ Certainly God is not the one who brings the suffering but the one who sides with us in our suffering, who remains with us.

Sölle took Elie Wiesel’s story of a boy’s lingering death on the gallows⁵¹ and christianized it.

The decisive phrase, that God is hanging “here on this gallows,” has two meanings. First it is an assertion about God. God is no executioner—and no almighty spectator (which would amount to the same thing). God is not the mighty tyrant. Between the sufferer and the one who causes the suffering, between the victim and the executioner, God, whatever people make of this word, is on the side of the sufferer. God is on the side of the victim, he is hanged.⁵²

She then went on to conclude: “God is not in heaven; he is hanging on the cross. Love is not an otherworldly, intruding, self-asserting power— and to meditate on the cross can mean to take leave of that dream.”⁵³

So what Sölle finally dared to do was take Jesus’ statement in John 10:30 that “I and the Father are one” and, essentially, reverse it: “The essence of Jesus’ passion history is the assertion that this one whom God forsook himself becomes God.”⁵⁴ The cross is “neither a symbol expressing the relationship between God the Father and his Son nor a symbol of masochism which needs suffering in order to convince itself of love. It is above all a symbol of reality. Love does not ‘require’ the cross, but de facto it ends up on the cross.”⁵⁵

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Sölle then went on to quote the Russian poet Konstantin Simonov: “There is no alien sorrow, we are all a part of it, we share in it.”⁵⁶ So in the final analysis she came to regard God not “as an alien superior power but as that which occurs between people” in their living through, and not only enduring, but sometimes even triumphing over, a suffering that can only be fully shared.⁵⁷

This is the most thoroughgoing analysis I have encountered of the difficulties that emerge when God is identified as being on the side of those who cause suffering rather than its victims. Sölle was scathing in her attacks on theological masochism/sadism. But to understand God to be truly on the side of those of suffer, to the extent of being able to proclaim God’s own co-suffering, only pointed up the problem, without resolving at all how a God of pathos and suffering love remains with any meaningful power at all.⁵⁸ That is yet to be uncovered.

ENDNOTES

1. Geoffrey Anketell Studdert-Kennedy, The Hardest Part (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1918; 2nd ed., 1925), from the Preface by W. Moore Ede, xiif.
2. Ibid., ix.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 9.
5. Ibid., iii.
6. Ibid., 10.
7. Ibid., 11.
8. Ibid., 13.
9. Ibid., 23.
10. Ibid., 32.
11. Ibid., 33.
12. Ibid., 39.
13. Ibid., 41, emphasis mine.
14. Ibid., 42.
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15. J. K. Mozley, The Impassibility of God, 159.
16. Nicolas Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit, tr. Oliver Fielding Clarke (London: Geoffrey Bles: The Centenary Press, 1935), 160.
17. Ibid., 126f.
18. Ibid., 135.
19. Ibid., 140.
20. Ibid., 141.
21. Ibid., 138.
22. Ibid., 139.
23. Ibid., 154.
24. Ibid., 157.
25. Ibid., 174, emphasis mine.
26. Ibid., 178, emphasis mine.
27. Ibid., 192, emphasis mine.
28. Ibid., 193, emphasis mine.
29. Kazoh Kitamori, Theology of the Pain of God (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1958), 134-36.
30. Ibid., 115.
31. Ibid., Appendix, 152–53.
32. Ibid., Preface to the Fifth Edition, 16.
33. Ibid., 39.
34. Ibid., 34.
35. Ibid., 117.
36. Jung Young Lee, God Suffers for Us: A Systematic Inquiry into a Concept of Divine Possibility (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 60.
37. Ibid., 13.
38. Ibid., 19.
39. Ibid., 43f.
40. Dorothee Sölle, Suffering, tr. Everett R. Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 25.
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41. Ibid., ch. 1, 9–32.
42. Ibid., 25.
43. Ibid., 23, 26.
44. Ibid., 22. Sölle critiqued Moltmann in The Crucified God for not going far enough in his attempt to move beyond this tradition. (26f.)
45. Ibid., 36.
46. Ibid., 42.
47. Ibid., 43. Cf. above, ch. 6.
48. Ibid., 134.
49. Ibid., 142.
50. Ibid., 141.
51. Elie Wiesel, Night, tr. Stella Rodway (New York: Hill & Wang, 1960), 70f.
52. Sölle, Suffering, 148.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., 147.
55. Ibid., 163.
56. Ibid., 172f., the last phrase being Sölle’s.
57. Ibid., 173.
58. See my subsequent chapter on “Inklings of an Impotent God,” where Sölle’s contributions might also be seen to belong. Other voices that merit attention here include Paul Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), and Wendy Farley, Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion: A Contemporary Theodicy (Louisville: Westminster/ John Knox Press, 1990). Farley’s work will be reviewed instead in the chapter on “Breakthroughs to a Loving God.”

J. K. MOZLEY’S SURPRISING DISCOVERY

The earliest direct attack on the Augustinian synthesis of Christian theism is to be found in those bold individuals who dared to question the doctrine of divine immutability. That underlies pretty much everything else that followed. In the early 1920s, leaders in the Church of England asked one of their own, John Kenneth Mozley, to prepare a report on how theologians were dealing with the doctrine, particularly as the British were coming to grips with the implications of massive human waste in the World War just concluded. His discoveries, published in his The Impassibility of God (1926), were surprising. The questioning had already been underway for quite some time. Mozley’s summary was that a fresh emphasis on God as Love was the motivation for calling into question the traditional doctrine of God’s impassibility. And the cross pointed inward into the very heart of God.¹

Mozley found his earliest kindred spirit in the American Horace Bushnell, whose The Vicarious Sacrifice was first published in London in 1866. Bushnell recognized the importance of love as a key aspect of God’s reality and affirmed that “love is a principle essentially vicarious [125] in nature.”² And this love that is God’s is distinctly seen in the event of Jesus’ crucifixion: “There is a Gethsemane hid in all love.”³

For Bushnell, this holds far-reaching implications for how we make sense of God’s reality.

It is as if there were a cross unseen, standing on its undiscovered hill, far back in the ages, out of which were sounding always, just the same deep voice of suffering love and patience, that was heard by mortal ears from the sacred hill of Calvary.⁴

In his vicarious sacrifice, Jesus “was God, fulfilling the obligations of God . . . There is an eternal cross in his [God’s] virtue itself, and the cross that he endures in Christ only reveals what is in those common standards of good, which are also eternally his.”⁵

The whole point of Bushnell’s bold presentation is that “vicarious sacrifice” is eternally at the very heart of God, not just by happenstance or uniquely in Jesus’ earthly fate: “there is a cross in God before the wood is seen upon Calvary.”⁶ For Bushnell essentially to adopt the historic heresy known as patripassionism—namely, that the Father in the Trinity also suffered when Christ was crucified—opened the way to a fresh understanding of what a new orthodoxy might be able to embrace. And it knocked the props out from under the inviolability of God’s transcendent immutability.

Simultaneously in Denmark, Hans Martensen, the Lutheran bishop of Seeland, was moving on a parallel track. In his Christian Dogmatics, also first published in 1866, in German, he continued to swear allegiance to God’s omnipotence⁷ but offered hints of a challenge to it. In discussing God’s love Martensen recognized that God’s “blessedness must be conceived of as conditional upon the perfecting of His kingdom; because divine love can satisfy itself only as it is bliss-giving.” This is seen as a “contradiction,” which he resolved by presenting the notion that “God has a twofold life—a life in himself of unclouded peace and self-satisfaction, and a life in and with His creation, in which He not only submits to the conditions of finitude, but even allows His power to be limited by the sinful will of man.”⁸

Among several writers in the pre-war era whom Mozley identified, the Scottish scholar A. M. Fairbairn stands out. In lifting up the [126] centrality of the statement that “God is love,”⁹ he explicitly proclaimed: “Theology has no falser idea than that of the impassibility of God.”¹⁰ In 1906, Charles Allen Dinsmore introduced Bushnell’s vision to the British isles, mirroring him in the claim: “There was a cross in the heart of God before there was one planted on the green hill outside of Jerusalem.”¹¹ He went on to say that “the Christian doctrine of God would be inferior to that of the Greeks, did it not supplement this teaching of the infinite passibility of God with the assertion that the Almighty abides in perfect felicity,”¹² whereupon “the revelation of the cross is the persuasive power which brings all men to God.”¹³

The most powerful voice wrestling with the question of, if God be God, how in the name of all that is holy can “the War” be comprehended, I find to be that of Geoffrey Anketell Studdert-Kennedy. A scholarly man and a chaplain in the trenches, he agonized over just that issue, insisting that God had to “bind Himself with chains and pierce Himself with nails, and take upon Himself the travail pangs of creation.”¹⁴ “The true God is naked, bloody, wounded, and crowned with thorns, tortured, but triumphant in His love.”¹⁵ The denial of immutability leads immediately to the denial of impassibility, the direct consequence, though sometimes that runs in exactly the opposite direction to the same result. These indicators are but a foretaste of a lengthier encounter with Studdert-Kennedy when we turn later to the subject of God and suffering.

JÜRGEN MOLTMANN’S CRUCIFIED GOD

The German “theologian of hope” Jürgen Moltmann, many decades later, gave grudging recognition of his dependence on these early pioneers, developing his pivotal The Crucified God (orig., 1972) without explicit indication of the derivative quality of many of his key insights, and only acknowledging his quoting of Horace Bushnell, in his later The Trinity and the Kingdom (orig, 1980), in footnotes. His other major sources for challenging God’s immutability and apatheia were G. A. Studdert-Kennedy and the Jewish biblical scholar Abraham Heschel.¹⁶ Even so, he significantly advanced the discussion.

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God (himself ) suffered in Jesus, God himself died in Jesus for us. God is on the cross of Jesus “for us,” and through that becomes God and Father of the godless and the godforsaken . . . God became the crucified God so that we might become free sons of God . . . The cross of Jesus, understood as the cross of the Son of God, therefore reveals a change in God, a stasis within the Godhead: “God is other.” And this event in God is the event on the cross. It takes on Christian form in the simple formula which contradicts all possible metaphysical and historical ideas of God: “God is love.”¹⁷

Accordingly, Moltmann fully rejected classical theism because of its insistence on divine dispassionate immutability.¹⁸ He understood atheism to be, in fact, a rejection of and protest against theism’s doctrine of a God aloof from, and yet somehow responsible for, suffering.¹⁹

This, then, spilled over into Moltmann’s rejection of the traditional doctrine of God’s omnipotence: “a God who is only omnipotent is in himself an incomplete being, for he cannot experience helplessness and powerlessness.”²⁰ So, in regard to another challenge to the conventional that we will visit later, he could write: “Without liberation of the crucified God from the idols of power, there is no liberating theology!”²¹

Without fully developing the correlation between God’s real power and God’s identity as love, Moltmann nevertheless did champion 1 John 4:8, 16. “God is unconditional love.” Love’s “might is powerful in weakness and gains power over its enemies in grief, because it gives life even to its enemies and opens up the future to change.”²²

Both divine love and divine power assure, for Moltmann, the eventual, eschatological consummation of God’s intentions for God’s creation. “God is present in the way in which his future takes control over the present in real anticipations and prefigurations. But God is not as yet present in the form of his eternal presence. The dialectic between his being and his being-not-yet is the pain and power of history.²³” The future that is God’s is “a power which already qualifies the present— through promise and hope, through liberation and the creation of new possibilities. As this power of the future, God reaches into the present.”²⁴

There is a very real sense here that Moltmann, like his contemporary Wolfhart Pannenberg, varied essentially from Augustine’s stance [128] on God as Eternal Present, beyond temporality, in shifting the locus of God’s eternity—from our perspective, as it were—from Eternal Present to Eternal, or Ultimate, Future. The future of the novum ultimum is the point at which the creation encounters God in God’s powerful fullness. In this eschatological assurance, it is clear that Moltmann has not truly qualified the ultimate nature of God’s omnipotence. As was clear in the previous paragraph, God always retains the capacity to “take control” over creation’s destiny, when and as God chooses. In this respect, he retains the same dilemma that we saw in Pannenberg, although Moltmann did succeed in pushing the envelope on God’s mutability and pathos, and the identifying of God with essential love.

ENDNOTES

1. John Kenneth Mozley, The Impassibility of God: A Survey of Christian Thought (London: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 175–77.
2. Horace Bushnell, The Vicarious Sacrifice, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883), 42. See, also, 46, 51-53, 59, 68.
3. Ibid., 47.
4. Ibid., 69.
5. Ibid., 58.
6. Ibid., 73. See the whole discussion, 69-73. Some of Bushnell’s phrases anticipate what will later be encountered in the work of the German “theologian of hope” Jürgen Moltmann, to be investigated below, but Moltmann was vividly aware of that, even quoting Bushnell explicitly as we will see.
7. Hans Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, tr. William Urwick (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1878), 95f.
8. Ibid., 101, both quotes. Emphasis mine.
9. Andrew Martin Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 394. We will visit Fairbairn more extensively in the chapter on “Breakthroughs to a Loving God.”
10. Ibid., 483.
11. Charles Allen Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life (London: [129] Archibald Constable & Co., 1906), 232.
12. Ibid., 233, emphasis mine.
13. Ibid., 234, emphasis mine.
14. Studdert-Kennedy, Geoffrey Anketell, The Hardest Part (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1918; 2nd ed., 1925), 24.
15. Ibid., 67.
16. See Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, tr. Margaret Kohl (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), 25–36.
17. Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, tr. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 192f., first emphasis mine, second emphasis original.
18. Ibid., 214f.
19. Ibid., 220–22.
20. Ibid., 223.
21. Moltmann, The Experiment Hope, tr. M. Douglas Meeks (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 83, from ch. 6, “The Crucified God and the Apathetic Man,” first appearing in Theology Today, April, 1974. On the last phrase, see the chapter on “Hunger for a Liberating God.”
22. Moltmann, The Crucified God, 248f.
23. Moltmann, Religion, Revolution, and the Future, tr. M. Douglas Meeks (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 209; essays from 1967-68 in the USA. First and third emphases original; second emphasis, “takes control over the present,” mine.
24. Ibid., emphasis mine.

The prevailing understanding of the subordination of Love under the dominant role of divine Power that we have been encountering in the history of western Christian thought not only failed to resolve what the philosopher Leibniz termed the “theodicy” problem but, in fact, explicitly gave rise to it. It is precisely in the context of a God whose power is omnipotent and is uninfluenced by any factors outside Godself that the conflict between the reality of God and the sometimes horrific suffering that occurs within God’s creation becomes a barrier to belief, a conflict succinctly captured in Archibald MacLeish’s J.B.:

I heard upon his dry dung heap
That man cry out who cannot sleep:
“If God is God He is not good,
If God is good He is not God;
Take the even, take the odd,
I would not sleep here if I could.”¹

The allusion to the biblical Job can easily be recast thus: If God is Power, God is Not Love; if God is Love, God is not Power. That is the dilemma with which twenty centuries of predominant theological construction has left us.

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What follows here are a number of investigations into deconstructive activity that varyingly challenge the inherited consensus with what I am calling the church’s counter-testimony. Only after that survey has been accomplished are we in a position to visualize an alternative synthesis that returns to the central theme of the biblical witness, of a living God whose love is preeminently powerful as love, not an overpowering God whose love is one divine attribute among others and often in contradistinction to that power.

Structurally, Parts I and II have proceeded according to historical chronology. Part III departs from this orientation, proceeding topically but with some degree of chronology also present, while attempting to surface the varying challenges with attention to when they first arose.

I begin with luminaries in the arena of Christian mysticism—both male and, especially, female.

THE PRIMACY OF LOVE: DIONYSIUS AND BONAVENTURE

DIONYSIUS, EARLY SIXTH CENTURY

The written work of Dionysius “the Areopagite” became the primary source behind almost the whole of Christian mysticism for centuries. Originating early in the sixth century,² and now often referred to as “pseudo”-Dionysius to distinguish it from any earlier period, the writings convey a “Godhead” that is, strictly speaking, absolutely beyond all possible distinctions. Dionysius’ Godhead, in bringing the world into being, participates in an “emptying process of Differentiation.”³ The Supreme Godhead “is One in an unchangeable and super-essential manner, being neither a unit in the multiplicity of things nor yet the sum total of such units.”⁴ The Godhead embraces and maintains all unity and plurality, yet in itself is beyond that distinction—as, of course, beyond any other. Dionysius the mystic wished to limit all perceptions of God to the fundamental conviction about God as undifferentiated. Dionysius the rational thinker was not bound by that. He proceeded to talk indeed about God as differentiated—Trinity, divine attributes, creativity, etc. The value of unpacking “divine names” is that they variously inform our feeble efforts to stumble toward the all-encompassing Ineffable. [111] Although never genuinely true in any explicit sense, they nevertheless point us in helpful directions.

In that spirit, then, Dionysius could affirm that love, as applied to the Godhead, “means a faculty of unifying and conjoining and of producing a special commingling together in the Beautiful and Good . . . and holds together things of the same order by a mutual connection, and moves the highest to take thought for those below and fixes the inferior in a state which seeks the higher.”⁵

[God] moves and leads onward Himself unto Himself. Therefore on the one hand they call Him the Object of Love and Yearning as being Beautiful and Good, and on the other they call Him Yearning and Love as being a Motive-Power leading all things to Himself, Who is the only ultimate Beautiful and Good—yea, as being His own Self-Revelation and the Bounteous Emanation of His own Transcendent Unity, a Motion of Yearning simple, self-moved, self-acting, pre-existent in the Good, and overflowing from the Good into creation, and once again returning to the Good.⁶

So God moves creation not through any direct or conscious activity on God’s part but by the power of attraction that Love actualizes.

As we have encountered elsewhere, evil is identified here as the absence of the Good, having no existence in and of itself.⁷ Dionysius enthusiastically surpassed Augustine in his attack on evil’s substantiality:

Unto evil we can attribute but an accidental kind of existence. It exists for the sake of something else, and is not self-originating . . . Thus evil is contrary to progress, purpose, nature, cause, principle, end, law, will and being. Evil is, then, a lack, a deficiency, a weakness, a disproportion, an error, purposeless, unlovely, lifeless, unwise, unreasonable, imperfect, unreal, causeless, indeterminate, sterile, inert, powerless, disordered, incongruous, indefinite, dark, unsubstantial, and never in itself possessed of any existence whatsoever.⁸

Dionysius elevated the centrality of love for God without really integrating this in some way with God’s power, though he did offer reflections in that direction. The Godhead “transcends and exceeds every [112] mode of Power however conceived.”⁹ How that is so, he did not elucidate, beyond the following observation:

God is Power because in His own Self He contains all power beforehand and exceeds it, and because He is the Cause of all power and produces all things by a power which may not be thwarted nor circumscribed, and because He is the Cause wherefrom Power exists whether in the whole system of the world or in any particular part. Yea, He is Infinitely Powerful not only in that all Power comes from Him, but also because He is above all power and is Very Power, and possesses that excess of Power which produces in infinite ways an infinite number of other existent powers.¹⁰

Dionysius did comment at one point about something he called “the omnipotent goodness of the Divine weakness,”¹¹ but he did not elaborate on the implications of this insight.

All in all, his provocative notion of love as a power of attraction, engendering in that which emanates from God (or is created by God) a desire for reunification—the mystic’s goal—is intriguing but insufficiently fulfilling. Love is no purposive activity on the part of a God who is beyond all entanglements of interrelationship.

BONAVENTURE, 1221–1274

Dionysius was one of the major influences on Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, as was Richard of St. Victor whom we met earlier. Denis Edwards credits Bonaventure with having developed a trinitarian theology that is fully dynamic and relational—both within the Trinity and toward creation.¹² He was the first to speak of a circumincessio, a “mov[ing] around one another” that brings to mind the image of a “divine dance . . . of unthinkable intimacy and mutual love” that overflows into the universe.¹³ More recently, he has become a major focus in the writings of the Franciscan theologian Ilia Delio, whose interpretive work aids the summary undertaken here.

Bonaventure could use “love” as the name for the third person of the Trinity,¹⁴ Pairing this with God’s essential goodness, he saw God and God’s love to be “self-diffusive,” a key concept; God diffuses Godself [113] throughout creation: “The pure actualization of the principle of Charity” pours forth “free and due love, and both mingled together, which is the fullest diffusion according to nature and will.”¹⁵

This understanding starts in the interrelationships of the persons of the Trinity but then constitutively flows out from there. As Ilia Delio has expressed it:

Love cannot exist in isolation or autonomously because love shares itself with another. Love requires a lover and a beloved, a giver and a receiver. It is the receptivity of love that makes it a gift. The Father who is the fountain fullness of love is always moving toward the Son in the sharing of love, and this sharing of love is the Spirit . . . If we really believe that God is love and this love is the love of the Father for the Son united in the Spirit, then we must also believe that we are part of this wonderful, awesome, incredible relationship of love.¹⁶

This diffusion of love is powerfully expressed in Bonaventure’s second “Sermon on the Nativity of the Lord”: “‘The Word was made flesh’ [John 1:14]. These words give expression to that heavenly mystery . . . that the eternal God has humbly bent down and lifted the dust of our nature into unity with his own person.” Because we are finite creatures, God “bends over in love to embrace us.”¹⁷ The God who is “Most High” is the God who is “most intimately related to us.”¹⁸ Delio concludes:

What Bonaventure points out is that the cross reveals the mystery of God’s overflowing love. Unlike finite human love that draws up conditions for its wants and needs, God’s love is unconditional and totally self-giving . . . In Bonaventure’s view, the mystery of cruciform love leads us into the very heart of the mystery of God.”¹⁹

What we have encountered here, in both Dionysius and Bonaventure, is a turning away from God the powerful to God the loving, without actually attempting any fresh explanation of the relationship between these two facets of God’s being. But it is an important step in the right direction, correcting the prevailing overemphasis on power and introducing us to an alternative begging to be explored further.

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REPRESSED VOICES: THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF WOMEN MYSTICS

Had male theologians paid serious attention to the recorded visions and voices of the women mystics of the High Middle Ages, Augustine’s folly might well have been overturned centuries ago. Their writings were never systematic in nature, so that hints and allusions without conceptual integration abound. For today, that remains both their tantalizing charm and their incompleteness. There are six who merit inclusion here.

HILDEGARD OF BINGEN, 1098–1179

Hildegard was a visionary prophetess and not so much a mystic per se. Serving as a prophet was a safe way for a woman of that time to share her theological insights out loud. Barbara Newman writes in her introduction to Hildegard’s Scivias (1141–51), “If Hildegard had been a male theologian, her Scivias would undoubtedly have been considered one of the most important early medieval summas . . . it is a prophetic proclamation, a book of allegorical visions, an exegetical study, a theological summa.”²⁰

For the most part, Hildegard was quite traditional. In every cosmic development “God continues immovable, without any change of any mutability in His power.”²¹ God is “Omnipotent God.”²² “No weak, mortal sinner can understand the serenity and beauty of the power of God or attain a likeness to it, for God’s power is unfailing.”²³ God’s omnipotent power is “incomprehensible.”²⁴

In contrast to this traditional supremacy of God’s immutable power, Hildegard went on to take a sharp right turn. In The Book of Divine Works (De operatione Dei, 1163–73), at the very end of her commentary on her second vision, of the cosmic wheel, she entitled section 46: “On love as the vital power of the universe.”²⁵ The first of three figures in Vision 8 is “Love, the splendor of the living God.”²⁶ Love speaks of the second figure, Wisdom, as one whom “nothing can resist . . . Out of her own being and by herself she has formed all things in love and tenderness.”²⁷ “The bubbling source of the living God is the purity in which God’s splendor is revealed.”²⁸ “Everything God has made has been made in love, humility, and peace.”²⁹

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There is, alas, no real wrestling with any conceptual integration of divine love and power here. God the Almighty is still comprehended in traditional terms of omnipotence and total foreknowledge. Love and wisdom are seen as significant female attributes of a God who remains, in the final analysis, decidedly male. Hildegard represents but a beginning in a retrieval of the theme of love as central to the being of God. Deeper insights were to follow.

HADEWIJCH OF ANTWERP, ACTIVE 1220–1240

Very little is known about the life of Hadewijch. She lived in the Netherlands and wrote in Flemish. She was a beguine, a member of a woman’s religious community but without taking a nun’s vows. A contemporary of Aquinas, she was very committed to the works of Augustine.

Hadewijch was a poetic mystic. According to Bernard Brady, she was “consumed by love.”³⁰ The word she used for love was minne, “the dynamic love of a person for God,”³¹ giving one the impression that Hadewijch took the medieval tradition of courtly love and spiritualized it.

In her Letters, Hadewijch wrote of “omnipotent Love.”³² God orders the world properly, from the indigent to the commoner to the noble knight to the peer of the realm. God is “powerful and sovereign above all power.”³³ Love is “God himself by Nature.”³⁴

Hadewijch continued, in her poetry, to juxtapose without integration or explanation the themes of love and power in God.

For Love’s rich power
Is new and indeed friendly.³⁵
Love “renews itself in all.”³⁶
Oh, Love is ever new,
And she revives every day!³⁷

Were anyone ready in Love’s service,
He would receive from her a reward:
New consolation and new power;
And if he loved Love with the power of love,
He would speedily become love with Love.³⁸

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“Love’s nature . . . conquers all powers . . .
Love’s nature is . . . powerful in its activity . . .
In it is all the power of God.”³⁹

The phrases are tantalizing and provocative. Even in their lack of full integration they dance in the mind with promises of possible conjunctions not hitherto observed. They leave the reader with the question, “Yes—but how so?” It is precisely the question of how love is powerful in God, in contrast to traditional understandings of the nature of divine power, that continues to whet the theological appetite.

GERTRUDE OF HELFTA, THE HERALD OF DIVINE LOVE, 1289–1302

Gertrude of Helfta was a German Benedictine nun who wrote, mostly for the benefit of her younger monastic sisters, as the result of the experiencing of numerous visions. Of the five books of the surviving The Herald of Divine Love, only Book Two was actually written by her.

God, for Gertrude, is love above all else. Indeed, her visions often took the form of a spousal mystical union with the Son in the Trinity, as Bride of Christ. And this love is characterized, once again, as qualifying the nature of God’s power: “Not that you, Divine Omnipotence and Eternal Wisdom, gave unwillingly, as though compelled by some sort of necessity, but rather that you freely bestowed your love, out of the boundless flood of your loving generosity, upon an unworthy and ungrateful creature.”⁴⁰ In an earlier paragraph she recited her inference of what God had disclosed to her:

How would my infinite power be extolled if I did not reserve to myself the power, in whatever place I might be, of keeping myself to myself, so that I might make myself felt or seen only in the way that is most fitting according to places, times, and persons? For from the beginning of the creation of heaven and earth, and in the whole work of the Redemption, I have employed wisdom and goodness rather than power and majesty. And the goodness of this wisdom shines forth best in my bearing with imperfect creatures till I draw them, of their own free will, into the way of perfection.⁴¹

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Love, then, as we have observed previously, appears to be an “attractive” power, drawing God’s creatures godward of their own free will. But so much remained undeveloped that we can only thank Gertrude of Helfta for her visionary insights and probe further into their underlying implications.

CATHERINE OF SIENA, 1347–80

Catherine was the second woman to be named by the pope a doctor of the church, in 1970, though she was earlier than the first, Teresa of Avila. Refusing marriage but not becoming a nun, she lived an active, engaged life outside a convent’s walls as a Dominican laywoman, even interceding on Pope Gregory XI’s behalf to end his exile in Avignon and return to Rome. She was said to have had her first vision of God at age six. She had no formal education in matters theological and, in fact, did not learn to write until late in life, even then writing in her own Sienese dialect and not in the Latin of the church’s scholars.

Other than her collected letters and prayers, Catherine’s body of work consists of a running conversation between her and God, simply entitled The Dialogue (1377–78). Very often the “I” as well as the “you” of the text is understood to be the God Catherine is “hearing” in her meditating. And the central theme that runs all through this recorded experience is none other than love. It puts in an appearance on almost every page, whereas power appears hardly at all.

Catherine’s notions about divine power break no new ground. But she waxed enthusiastic, with vivid imagery, about the centrality of love in God’s way with us. God can be said to be “drunk with love,”⁴² “madly in love” with us.⁴³ It is an “immeasurable” love,⁴⁴ a “gratuitous” love,⁴⁵ an “unimaginable” love. It constitutes the “why” behind God’s act of creation: “With unimaginable love you looked upon your creatures within your very self, and you fell in love with us. So it was love that made you create us and give us being just so that we might taste your supreme eternal good.”⁴⁶

The work of Catherine of Siena contains little of interest to add to our discussion with the singular and very important exception that she is in that select number of early voices to counsel the church to consider, in [118] its theology, what it means to take seriously the biblical notion that God is love. It has taken a long time for that counsel to bear fruit, but the bestowing of her “doctor of the church” status gives added ecclesiastical weight to her contribution.

JULIAN OF NORWICH, REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE, 1373–74

Julian was an English anchoress who, at the age of thirty and before entering a convent, suffered a nearly fatal illness. While apparently on her deathbed she experienced sixteen intense visions of Jesus Christ, and wrote down her recollection of them immediately after her recovery. That initial transcription is known as the “Short Text” and is the earliest surviving instance of a woman writing in the English language. The “Long Text,” not used here, was completed twenty years later with further reflections on the initial visions.

Once again we encounter emphases on the pivotal role of love in God’s relations with us. God is “the maker, lover, and keeper.”⁴⁷ God is “almighty, all wise, and all loving . . . every created thing has been made for love, and is sustained by that same love.”⁴⁸

But this understanding of love is extremely complex. There is in Julian a touch of spiritual masochism, in her mystical union with Christ in his sufferings. “God freely gives pleasure when he chooses, and other times he leaves us in pain. Both are done for love.”⁴⁹

Why does the good God allow sin to occur? It is to manifest to human beings the great love of God, poured out for us in the passion of the Christ, so that we will be led to love God in return and not take God’s love for granted.⁵⁰ Jesus tells her in her visions, “I shall make all things well . . . All shall be well.”⁵¹ In other words, the power of God’s love is manifest in the saving, for the bliss of eternity, of all those souls whose “natural will” never actually “assented to sin.”⁵² “When it comes to our salvation, God is as eager as he is powerful and wise . . . Thus we can see that he is love itself.”⁵³ “The love of God is so great that he considers us to be partners in his good deed.”⁵⁴ God takes pleasure in our willing (in prayer, especially) what God already desires and intends.

This overarching focus on divine love has not entered, thus far, into any inquiry into how this relates to divine power. But Julian had one [119] final surprise in store for her readers. As she reflected on her visions, at the very end, she had this to say:

Many men and women believe that God is all mighty and may do all, and that he is all wisdom and can do all; but that he is all love and will do all—there they stop . . . Of all the properties of the blessed trinity, God wants us to feel the greatest confidence and pleasure in love, for love makes power and wisdom humble before us.⁵⁵

This is a very strong statement. For love to make power humble is a bold assertion indeed. But it requires further unpacking if it is to be helpful.

Sheila Upjohn summarized her perceptive study of Julian in these words:

But the fact that Christ became man, so that God could know evil by experience, and not only intelligence, means that every sorrow, every grief, every agony has been experienced by God himself—and that there is no place so dark and painful that God has not been there before us and stays there with us. And the fact of the resurrection means that there is no evil so bad that he cannot turn it into good.⁵⁶

Upjohn goes on to say: “the God who can lack nothing—who has everything, is in everything, does everything—is shown to be the God made needy by love.”⁵⁷ Reasons for the recovery of the importance of Julian of Norwich for contemporary theology are obvious, given the powerful direction in which her interpretation of her visions pointed.

TERESA OF AVILA, 1515–82

Teresa appeared on the historical scene two centuries later in Spain, in the midst of the sometimes bloody and repressive Catholic Counterreformation that included the Inquisition. Her own work unquestioningly accepted the absolute omnipotence of God: God is “all-powerful” and can do whatever God wills to do.⁵⁸ The final chapter in The Book of Her Life includes reflections on God’s “majesty and power”⁵⁹ as “all-powerful Lord.”⁶⁰ And in the Soliloquies, she expressed to God: “O Lord, I confess Your great power. If You are powerful, as [120] You are, what is impossible for You who can do everything? . . . I firmly believe You can do what You desire.”⁶¹

Her focus on God’s love is present though less developed. It is also hardly benign. “Oh, powerful love of God, how different are your effects from those of the world’s love!”⁶² The great love of God comes to undeserving sinners in a transforming way that is piercingly painful as well as spiritually soothing. In one instance she shared a vision in which an angel is holding “a large golden dart” with a fire blazing at the end of the iron tip. “It seemed to me this angel plunged the dart several times into my heart and that it reached deep within me. When he drew it out, I thought he was carrying off with him the deepest part of me; and he left me all on fire with great love of God.”⁶³

The six women mystics reviewed in this section punctured the prevailing limitations on the full nature of divine love, although there does not appear to have been any concomitant focus on how this might help redefine divine power. A major facet of the contributions of the medieval women mystics is their daring to lift up aspects of the being of God that are unabashedly characterized as more feminine than masculine in character, a direction that will be pursued heartily in the fresh voices of women theologians in the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first. The initial lack of fulfillment of that “opening up” of the being of God is seen in not taking the further step, of reclothing male virtues of power and control and implacability in new alternative understandings.

ENDNOTES

1. Archibald MacLeish, J.B. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Riverside Press, 1956), Prologue, 11. The words are spoken by the character Nickles, representing Satan.
2. The first recorded reference to Dionysius is from the Council of Constantinople of 533 CE.
3. Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names, 2.11, tr. CE. Rolt (Berwick, Maine: Ibis Press, 2004; orig. pub. 1920), 79. The translator is the same Clarence Edwin Rolt whom we will encounter later in the chapter on “Breakthroughs to a Loving God.” Rolt’s footnote to this topic a bit further on is apropos: God “creates the world as being the [121] Object of its desire. He attracts it into existence.” (Rolt, 87, ft. 1.)
4. Ibid., 2.11 (Rolt, 79).
5. Ibid., 4.12 (Rolt, 105.) In an earlier footnote regarding this subject, Rolt wrote that, for Dionysius, “Love is the most perfect manifestation of God. Yet God is in a sense beyond even love as we know it. For love, as we know it, implies the distinction between ‘me’ and ‘thee’, and God is ultimately beyond such distinction.” (Rolt, 57, ft. 2.)
6. Ibid., 4.14 (Rolt, 107).
7. Ibid., 4.19-20 (Rolt, 111–17).
8. Ibid., 4.32 (Rolt, 127).
9. Ibid., 8.1 (Rolt, 155).
10. Ibid., 8.2 (Rolt, 155).
11. Ibid., 3.2 (Rolt, 84).
12. Denis Edwards, “The Discovery of Chaos and the Retrieval of the Trinity,” in Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, and Arthur R. Peacocke, eds., Chaos and Complexity: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action (Berkeley: The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1995), 160.
13. Ibid., 161.
14. Bonaventure, Journey of the Mind into God, 3.5. Online: www.crossroadsinitiative.com/library_article/666/journey_of_the_Mind_into_ God_St._Bonaventure.html
15. Ibid., 6.2.
16. Ilia Delio, The Humility of God: a Franciscan Perspective (Cincinnati: Franciscan Media, 2005), 41, 44.
17. Ibid., 51, emphasis Delio’s, quoting from What Manner of Man? Sermons on Christ by St. Bonaventure, tr. Zachary Hayes (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1989), 57.
18. Ibid., 52.
19. Ibid., 54.
20. Barbara J. Newman, “Introduction,” in Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, tr. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), 23, 25.
21. Hildegard, Scivias, Book I, Vision 2, Para. 1 (73 in Paulist Press ed.).
    [122]
22. Ibid., I.3.2 (94).
23. Ibid., I.6.5 (141).
24. Ibid., II.1.1,6, (150, 152). See also III.1.11 (316f.).
25. Hildegard of Bingen, Book of Divine Works, ed. Matthew Fox, tr. Robert Cunningham (Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Co., 1987), Appendix, 395.
26. Ibid., 8.2 (204).
27. Ibid., 8.2 (206).
28. Ibid., 8.2 (207).
29. Ibid., 8.3 (208).
30. Bernard V. Brady, Christian Love (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2003), 141.
31. Ibid., 141.
32. Hadewijch, Letters, 1, 18, in The Complete Works, tr. Columba Hart (New York:Paulist Press, 1980), 48, 87.
33. Ibid., L18 (85).
34. Ibid., L19 (89).
35. Hadewijch, Poems in Stanzas, 7.1, in The Complete Works, 144. This novelty is asserted in striking contradiction to God’s essential immutability.
36. Ibid., 7.2 (145).
37. Ibid., 7.3 (145).
38. Ibid., 8.1 (147). This renders poetically an understanding in process theology, in the twentieth century, of how our openness to God’s initial aim for us moment by moment empowers us for further and greater responses to even higher aims. This will be pursued in later chapters.
39. Hadewijch, Poems in Couplets, P10, in The Complete Works, 336f.
40. Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, 2.19, tr. and ed. Margaret Winkworth (New York:Paulist Press, 1993), 120.
41. Ibid., 2.17 (118).
42. Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, ch. 17, tr. Suzanne Noffke (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 55.
    [123]
43. Ibid., ch. 25 (63).
44. Ibid., ch. 4 (31).
45. Ibid., ch. 64 (121).
46. Ibid., ch. 13 (49).
47. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, ch. 4, tr. Frances Beer (Rochester, New York: D.S. Brewer, 1998), 30.
48. Ibid., ch. 5 (Beer, 31).
49. Ibid., ch. 9 (Beer, 37).
50. Ibid., chs. 13–18 (Beer, 43–50).
51. Ibid., chs. 15–16 (Beer, 45f.).
52. Ibid., ch. 17 (Beer, 47).
53. Ibid., ch. 18 (Beer, 50), emphasis mine.
54. Ibid., ch. 19 (Beer, 52).
55. Ibid., ch. 25 (Beer, 58f.), emphases mine.
56. Sheila Upjohn, Why Julian Now? A Voyage of Discovery (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1997), 93.
57. Ibid., 94f.
58. Teresa of Avila, Spiritual Testimonies, 29, in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, tr. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriquez (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications; Vol. 1, 2nd ed. rev., 1987; Vol. 2, 1980), 1:401.
59. Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life, 40.3, in The Collected Works, 1:355.
60. Ibid., 40.4 (1:356).
61. Teresa of Avila, Soliloquies 4.2, in The Collected Works, 1:447.
62. Ibid., 2.1 (1:444), emphasis mine. Were it not for this remark, Teresa would probably not appear at all in this chapter.
63. Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life, 29.13 (1:252).

The debate has long been waged as to which Greek philosophical system most extensively underlies the development of Christian thought in the West: the Platonism and neo-Platonism appropriated by Augustine or the Aristotelianism reshaped by Thomas Aquinas. With regard to an understanding of the power and love of God, I contend that neither was victorious. The actual philosophical model that became dominant in this particular respect was, in fact, Stoicism.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF STOICISM

The title of this philosophical movement comes from the Greek philosopher Zeno’s habit of lecturing formally on the Stoa Poikile, the “Painted Porch,” in Athens around 300 BCE. The “late Stoics” are represented in Rome by the ex-slave Epictetus (ca. 50–138 CE) and the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180).

It is not the Stoics’ doctrine of God itself so much as the ethic of stoicism imposed upon the divine that has been utilized: to be utterly tranquil, unaffected by external exigencies, nonattached, disinterested— in short, apathetic (apatheia). [102]

Live according to the benevolence and orderliness of the universe. The consequence of such a life is apatheia, or euthymia, spiritual peace and well-being . . . Having achieved this ultimate goal, one’s life is as autonomous, as uniform, and as benevolent as God himself.¹

In underscoring the inclusion of pathos as a valid aspect of the witness of the biblical prophets, Abraham Heschel traced the avoidance of this concession back to the influence of the fundamental Stoic stance:

The Stoics regarded passion, impulse, desire—the emotions in the widest sense—as unreasonable, unnatural, and the source of evil. To live rightly was to dominate the emotional life by reason, and so to act by will. Pathos was considered to be the chief danger to the self-determination of man, whereas “apathy”—the subduing of the emotions—was believed to be the supreme moral task.²

Heschel quotes Zeno as having defined pathos as “a movement in the soul contrary to reason to the soul’s very nature.”³

Marcus Aurelius observed in his Meditations (170–80) the importance of “keeping the divinity within us free from violence and unharmed, superior to pain and pleasure . . . not feeling the need of another’s doing or not doing something; and, furthermore, accepting all that happens and all that is allotted us, as coming from the source, wherever it is, whence it itself came.”⁴ There is here, of course, a definite touch of determinism, of simply “going with the flow”: “Love only that which happens to you and is woven with the thread of your destiny.”⁵ But the relevancy of these observations is the notion of not becoming attached to anything outside oneself, so that Aurelius can finally propose: “Wipe out fancy; check desire; extinguish appetite; keep your ruling faculty in control.”⁶ In short, achieve an attitude of sublime indifference toward everything outside your own being.⁷ Be benevolent toward others, certainly, but without any expectation of your benevolence making any difference in the flow of the universe.

[103]

A STOIC THEOLOGY

I am by no means the first to observe this dominant role of the Stoic ethic in how the theistic synthesis came to be expressed in the theologians I have been analyzing up to this point. Well over half a century ago, Charles Hartshorne offered this observation:

Just as the Stoics said the ideal was to have good will toward all but not in such fashion as to depend in any degree for happiness upon their fortunes or misfortunes, so Christian theologians, who scarcely accepted this idea in their ethics, nevertheless adhered to it in characterizing God.⁸

And more recently, on this same point, Nicholas Wolterstorff concluded:

the Augustinian God turns out to be remarkably like the Stoic sage: devoid of passions, unfamiliar with longing, foreign to suffering, dwelling in steady bliss, exhibiting to others only benevolence. Augustine fought free of the Stoic (and neo-Platonic) vision when it came to humanity; when it came to God, he succumbed.⁹

Jürgen Moltmann appears to be the one who has devoted the greatest amount of attention to this matter. His overall contribution to our subject will be examined in a later chapter, but it is pertinent here to lift up his evaluation of the role Stoic ideas played in the established view on God’s love and power.

In The Crucified God (originally, 1972), an intentionally provocative title, Moltmann saw clearly that traditional Christian thought tried to resolve the tension between God’s love and God’s self-contained immutability by championing the Stoic elevation of apatheia as a way of characterizing a divine love that is no in way affected by the recipient of that love. Agape was translated into apathetic love:

What Christianity proclaimed as the agape of God and the believer was rarely translated as pathos. Because true agape derives from liberation from the inward and outward fetters of the flesh (sarx), and loves without self-seeking and anxiety . . . apatheia could be taken up as an enabling ground for this love and be [104] filled with it. Love arises from the spirit and from freedom, not from desire or anxiety. The apathic God could therefore be understood as the free God who freed others for himself. The negation of need, desire and compulsion expressed by apatheia was taken up and filled with a new positive content.¹⁰

Clearly the elevation of non-pathos was not limited to Stoic writings; it permeates much of ancient Greek philosophy in general. But it is so explicitly at the heart of Stoicism that I claim justification for the thesis of this chapter. This comes with the strong conviction that the process of undoing the bondage of biblical witness to unhelpful philosophical categories will necessarily include this reversal as a key component of challenge and reconstruction. Apathetic love is not biblical love. A more satisfactory way of comprehending divine love may well pave the way to a more viable way of reconceiving divine power.

MOVING FORWARD BY GOING BACK

Gordon Kaufman (1925–2011) has called attention to an overemphasis on “God’s tyrannical omnipotence” that offended many sensitive and thoughtful humanists who found it impossible to worship or believe in such a deity.

The horrendous evils in human society, especially as these have come clearly into view in the twentieth century, suggest that only a terrible monster-God could have been responsible for our world. If God is indeed omnipotent, the one whose will is being realized in our history, God is not one whom we should serve but rather one whom we should loathe and despise and against whom we should struggle with all our strength. Worship of such a being could, in fact, evoke from devotees harsh and authoritarian attitudes and actions similar to those attributed to God.¹¹

It seems hardly coincidental that the term in English for those who reject the reality of God is “atheism.” That becomes understandable, to me, specifically as a-theism, much more the rejection of theism’s God than of a God more accurately conceived. Atheism is never the denial [105] of God in general. It always takes the shape of the denial of a particular way of conceiving of God.¹² The Stoic God of classical Christian theism has become a problem to be resolved.

How do we move beyond the impasse? Many voices have not been heard up to now. The voices to which I wish to pay extensive attention are those that might be called “counter-testimonies.”¹³ Challenges to the Augustinian synthesis can be found as far back as the Middle Ages themselves, but they become stronger and more widespread only in more recent times, continuing emphatically into the present. The variety of concerns and issues finding expression in these counter-testimonies contributes each in its own way to chipping away at a crumbling and increasingly uninhabitable edifice, suggesting valuable alternatives that merit consideration as attempts at a new resolution are explored. To these we now turn.

ENDNOTES

1. Philip P. Hallie, “Stoicism,” in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1967), 8:21.
2. Abraham J. Heschel The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 2:32.
3. Ibid., 2:33.
4. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2:17, tr. Charles Long, rev., in Marcus Aurelius and His Times (Roslyn, New York: Walter J. Black, Inc., 1945), 25.
5. Ibid., 7:57 (Long, 76).
6. Ibid., 9:7 (Long, 93). See also 3:6 (Long, 29).
7. See, e.g., ibid., 11:16 (Long, 119).
8. Charles Hartshorne, Man’s Vision of God (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), 116.
9. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Suffering Love,” in Thomas V. Morris, ed., Philosophy and the Christian Faith (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 210.
10. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the [106] Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, tr. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 269f. See 267–78 for his full discussion of the topic, particularly as it applies to Jewish tradition and responses to the Holocaust.
11. Gordon D. Kaufman, The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept of God (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1981), 42.
12. As a quick illustration of this point, consider the frequent remarks of Bill Maher on his HBO weekly television show.
13. I am indebted to Walter Brueggemann for this term, in the title of Part II of his Theology of the Old Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 315.