Archives: Book Chapters

Titanic: adj., “pertaining to . . . enormous size, strength, power.”¹ That the God of Christian theism we have been encountering could be characterized as “titanic” would seem obvious. That this is also the name bestowed on a doomed ocean liner is a provocative coincidence. For me to suggest that much of what followed right into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is not intended to be dismissive of intellectual giants whose efforts far outstrip my own. It is rather to contend that their attempts to shore up the sinking ship of traditional theism were finally to no avail. The ship of Augustinian theism, alas, still sank.

Let us examine a selection of the more important voices.

A CONSCIOUSNESS OF ABSOLUTE DEPENDENCY: FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER

In the sixteenth century, Nicolaus Copernicus initiated the novel idea in astronomy that the planets and the sun and the stars do not revolve around the Earth but that the planets, including our own, revolve around the sun. Fearing personal consequences once word got out about [88] his revolutionary theory, he delayed publication of his work, reportedly seeing it first in print only on his deathbed in 1543. Two and a half centuries later the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in the “Preface to the Second Edition” of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787), appropriated this “Copernican Revolution” in thought for his own shift from the presumed objectivity of what we know to the act of conscious knowing itself.² It remains a contestable assessment because the movement is precisely in the opposite direction: After Copernicus, we humans are no longer understood to be in the center of the universe, whereas Kant concentrated precisely on the subjectivity of individual knowing. Even so, Friedrich Schleiermacher mirrored Kant in the axial shift in his way of approaching theological issues.

Kant had found no access to God through the utilization of pure reason, shifting instead to a moral route through the utilization of “practical reason.” In his The Christian Faith (2nd ed. 1830), Schleiermacher made a similar but quite different move, concentrating on the human self-consciousness, which he determined to be characterized by “the consciousness of being absolutely dependent, or, which is the same thing, of being in relation to God.”³ This point of departure required, furthermore, that “any proclamation of God which is to be operative upon and within us can only express God in His relation to us,” not God as God is in and of Godself.⁴

Even so, Schleiermacher surrendered very little, and his own consciousness’s appropriation of God’s being, “in relation to us” of course, included and emphasized the traditional attributes of omnipotence, eternity, omnipresence, and omniscience.⁵ And for him, “immutability” is already contained within the notion of God’s eternity.⁶ Causality within the entire system of nature can be exhaustively accounted for by God’s causal activity.⁷ Following the lead of Aquinas, Schleiermacher declared that there is no distinction between potential and actual in God.⁸

What is decidedly disappointing here is the entire lack of any really fresh probing into the categories of thinking about God that Schleiermacher inherited. The shift to the human consciousness, or “feelings,” resulted in no concomitant shift in thinking about the object of those feelings. Might one just as readily experience a “consciousness of [89] absolute belovedness” as an initial point of departure for probing God’s relation with us? Schleiermacher was unable to move there. Not even a brief appendix on other divine attributes includes the consciousness of God as love.⁹ Only at the very end of the enterprise is the notion of the divine love introduced, under the category of “the divine attributes which relate to redemption.”¹⁰

The most curious and distressingly undeveloped notation offered here at the last is an acknowledgment, in commenting on 1 John 4:16, that, indeed, love alone can be understood to be that attribute of God that is in fact an expression “of the very essence of God.”¹¹ This is a wholly unexpected concession. Had Schleiermacher begun here and unpacked this instead of tossing it off as a tantalizing bon mot, his work would have been truly revolutionary.

GOD WHO LOVES IN FREEDOM: KARL BARTH

Karl Barth (1886–1968) and Paul Tillich (1886–1965) were exact contemporaries, having been born in the same year, dying only three years apart.¹² Although their approaches to theology and the conclusions at which they arrived were vastly different from one another, I will treat both of them under this rubric of a failure to right the theistic ship.

Barth’s theological output concerning the reality of God, especially in his vast, multi-volume Church Dogmatics (1936-1962 ), is rich, verbose, complex, and complicated. But at its core is a simple, straightforward declaration: that God is most basically to be defined as “the One who loves in freedom.”¹³ This freedom is not conditioned in any way by anything other than Godself: “God loves because he loves; because this act is His being, His essence and His nature . . . God’s loving is necessary, for it is the being, the essence and the nature of God,” but this is a necessity grounded in God’s freedom and nowhere else.¹⁴

“God’s act is His loving . . . ‘God is’ means ‘God loves’.”¹⁴ That is a refreshing assertion, given the lack of central attention love as a key aspect of God’s identity has typically been afforded in the tradition. Even so, this stops short of 1 John 4:8, 16, where God is not merely One who loves, but is love.¹⁶

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It is also possible to speak of the “multiplicity, individuality and diversity of the perfections of God”¹⁷ as aspects of the one true undivided God. In traditional theology these “perfections” are known as divine “attributes.” Barth paired these perfections according to a distinction between God as He is in Himself and God as He is for us,¹⁸ such as righteousness and mercy, or unity and omnipresence. One such pairing is understood to be constancy and omnipotence.¹⁹ But Barth also distinguished between the perfections of the divine loving and those of the divine freedom, and treated power under the latter as, for example, in Dogmatics in Outline: “Thus God’s power might also be described as God’s freedom.”²⁰

Anna Case-Winters offers a telling critique of Barth’s discussion of the interlocking relationship between God’s freedom, power, and love:

At times freedom and power seem almost to be interchangeable terms for Barth. Much of what Barth says concerning power is repeated in his position on freedom. At some points he even seems to reverse things and make freedom a subset of power.²¹

She goes on to assert:

Barth’s location of the discussion of omnipotence under the perfections of freedom rather than the perfections of love proves significant in yet another way. His unfolding development of the doctrine seems more concerned with illustrating divine freedom than with illustrating divine love. The all-determining notion of power which Barth in fact develops demonstrates divine freedom well enough but sometimes makes divine love and even the possibility of genuine divine relationship with a real “other” more difficult to conceive. He does not seem to allow “love” to shape, define, and constitute what power means in the same way that “freedom” shapes, defines, and constitutes the meaning. When it comes to omnipotence, Barth’s use of the phrase “the One who loves in freedom” stresses “freedom” more than “love.”²²

This is a real sticking point. Omnipotence has not been allowed to be redefined by Love. God remains “all-powerful, with power over everything that He actually wills or could will,”²³ and Case-Winters [91] notes that, for Barth, power “is still being conceived as the ability to dominate and control.”²⁴ In a somewhat confusing combination of proposals, Barth maintained simultaneously that “God and God alone has real power, all the real power,”²⁵ but also God “allows what is outside Himself to have power.” God’s power is “free power over all, the power over all powers.”²⁶ The only way to hold these two statements together would be to acknowledge that all powers other than God’s are not, in the final analysis, real.

Barth has opened a door, regarding the centrality of love in his defining of the being of God, but it is a door through which he did not fully walk, alas. He insisted that “to define the subject [God] by the predicate [power] instead of the predicate by the subject would lead to disastrous consequences,”²⁷ and that is, of course, correct. Redefining power as God’s power, rather than allowing traditional notions of power to control how we understand God, is precisely the step that Barth was not able to take; God’s being as love (the subject) has not been allowed to redefine what is meant by the power (the predicate) of God.²⁸

With regard to related matters, Barth preferred the term “constancy” to the traditional “immutability” because of his key emphasis on God’s essential freedom but that finally amounts to a distinction without a real difference. God, the living, “constant” God, “is not Himself subject to or capable of any alteration.”²⁹ Concomitantly, God’s omniscience is not subject to alteration by what occurs in time: “God’s knowledge, as omnipotent knowledge, is complete in its range, the one unique and all-embracing knowledge.”³⁰ God’s “knowledge of all things is what it is in eternal superiority to all things and eternal independence of all things.”³¹

Barth’s efforts came so close to resolving the power/love relationship in God, particularly in his focus on the implications of Jesus’ crucifixion. Commenting on 1 Cor. 1:24 he wrote: “it is Jesus Christ the Crucified who is Himself the power of God,”³² and later he reflected on the Corinthian theme of God’s power in weakness (1 Cor. 1:18).³³ But he failed to allow these concessions to impact his fundamental stance on divine power. Sheila Greene Davaney expresses the problem cogently:

Although divine power is revealed through powerlessness and passion, this is not the same as identifying God’s power with [92] this impotence and passivity . . . God’s power is so unique and so great and superior that it transcends and encompasses what for humanity are so often the oppositions of activity and passivity, power and powerlessness . . . divine power is active in powerlessness but is not to be merely equated with weakness and impotence.³⁴

We are left with a sense of deep appreciation for the depths Barth plumbed in his endeavors to place the correlation of divine power and divine love on a new footing, but unfortunately he simply did go far enough to allow the implications of his very own searching to lead him to empowering breakthroughs beyond theism’s impasses. The traditional synthesis was still breaking apart in the turbulent sea.

GOD AS BEING-ITSELF: PAUL TILLICH

For Paul Tillich, God does not exist. Even so, Tillich wrote and spoke about God throughout his adult life. This is not the contradiction it would seem to be. To “ex-ist” is to stand out from, to have reality apart from and alongside other similarly “ex-isting” entities. God, rather, is no Supreme Being among beings but that which underlies and holds together all that is separated. In short, God is to be comprehended as the “ground of being” or, equally, “being-itself.”³⁵

That is the famous revolution in theology that flourished in Tillich’s work. With this critical distinction between finite beings and the infinite God as being-itself, Tillich tried to refloat the whole conceptual enterprise on a new hull. How well did he carry it off? Let us investigate that noble prospect.

The crucial ontological statements Tillich made about God were intended to be non-symbolic,³⁶ in contrast to everything else we try to convey with human words. God as being-itself includes “the power of resisting nonbeing.” God is “the power of being in everything and above everything, the infinite power of being,”³⁷ When we speak of God as “living,” however, or “personal,” we have vacated the non-symbolic premises. God now becomes “the ground of everything personal,” the ground of all life.³⁸ Similarly, for God to be understood to be “in [93] relation”—“external relations between God and the creature”—characterizes a symbolic statement only.³⁹

Omnipotence as the power of a “highest being,” once again, is rejected. Omnipotence is rather “the power of being which resists nonbeing in all its expressions and which is manifest in the creative process in all its forms.”⁴⁰ But once again, omnipotence is another symbolic term, though it is retained as an expression of our ultimate courage to have faith in “a victory over the threat of nonbeing.”⁴¹ Tillich’s non-symbolic statement is simply God as “the power of being.”⁴²

Following this thread, God as eternal relates to temporality not within it or above it but as the ground of time. “Eternity is the transcendent unity of the dissected moments of existential time.”⁴³ Unaffected by time’s passage but underlying it, it would appear to be clear that changelessness is a reliable characteristic of being-itself vis-a-vis changeable, existing beings.

What is to be said of the ground of being as love, or as loving? Tillich actually had a great deal to say about this matter. “Love is an ontological concept . . . And, since God is being-itself, one must say that being-itself is love . . . The process of the divine life has the character of love.”⁴⁴ But this acknowledgment then has to be qualified: “As is the case of life and spirit, one speaks symbolically of God as love. He is love; this means that the divine life has the character of love but beyond the distinction between potentiality and actuality. This means therefore that it is mystery for finite understanding.”⁴⁵

How are divine power and divine love interrelated, especially in regard to the demands of justice and the “conflict between the divine love and the divine wrath against those who violate justice”?

It is not the divine power as such which is thought to be in conflict with the divine love. The divine power is the power of being-itself, and being-itself is actual in the divine life whose nature is love.” When justice and therefore love are violated, “judgment and condemnation follow. But they do not follow by a special act of divine wrath or retribution; they follow by the reaction of God’s loving power against that which violates love. Condemnation is not the negation of love but the negation of the negation of love. It is an act of love without which nonbeing would triumph over being.⁴⁶

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Tillich pursued this relationship further three years after the first volume of his Systematic Theology, in a slim volume entitled Love, Power, and Justice (1954). The distinction of power and force is meaningful only for human beings: “there is indeed a compulsory element in the actuality of power. But this is only one element, and if power is reduced to it and loses the form of justice and the substance of love, it destroys itself.”⁴⁷

Love and power are often contrasted in such a way that love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. Powerless love and loveless power are contrasted. This, of course, is unavoidable if love is understood from its emotional side and power from its compulsory side. But such an understanding is error and confusion.⁴⁸

Further along, Tillich offered a telling insight with the observation that “Love is the foundation, not the negation, of power.”⁴⁹

But all of this comes with a serious caveat. How can being-itself be said to act? Agents act. God is no existing Prime Agent. Symbolically we may speak of God’s loving activity but how is this more than an aspect of human yearning for the assurance of the reliability of the ground of being against the encroaching threat of non-being? An apparent shift from Aristotle’s unmoved Mover and the One I have identified in Aquinas as an unchanged Changer now becomes the essential Ground of existence that underlies the human “courage to be” by simply being. And if God as essentially Love does not actually do anything, how can God meaningfully be endowed with the term “love,” even if only symbolically?

Nels F. S. Ferré summed up his critique of Tillich on this point in this way:

Tillich had only a word for a solution without proper correspondence in truth. Power works because in some sense it is. If it is not limited static being, then it must be being in some form of dynamic reality . . . If the power is and works on and in the world, it must be related, but then according to Tillich it cannot be called unconditional and therefore not transcendent or unconditional. Thus Tillich in fact had no solution. His solution was pseudotheological. Within his own presuppositions he failed to offer a theological ultimate that could stand the light of full analysis.⁵⁰

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GOD AS THE POWER OF THE FUTURE: WOLFHART PANNENBERG

The German Lutheran Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) was a remarkably young man when he first burst on the scene in the mid-1960s. He spent time in his formative teaching years in the company of Jürgen Moltmann at Wuppertal, where both shared an intense interest in the impact of the future on the present, although they subsequently went their separate ways in determining what that impact means. His work initially became a major stimulus on the tasks of theological construction, though the sense of its importance has more recently been on the wane.

Pannenberg tantalized American readers in 1969 when he announced in Theology and the Kingdom of God, in the midst of the debate over the presumed death of God, that, strictly speaking, “God does not yet exist.”

Jesus proclaimed the rule of God as a reality belonging to the future. This is the coming Kingdom. The idea was not new, being a conventional aspect of Jewish expectation. What was new was Jesus’ understanding that God’s claim on the world is to be viewed exclusively in terms of his coming rule. Thus it is necessary to say that, in a restricted but important sense, God does not yet exist. Since his rule and his being are inseparable, God’s being is still in process of coming to be.⁵¹

This was a tantalizing proposal, at the time. It suggested a certain open-endedness that seemed to undergird human freedom of response to the divine initiative by pushing the fullness of God’s being ahead to our ultimate future, in the definitive arrival of the eschatological basileia tou theou.

The primacy of the future of God is explicitly a corollary of the primacy of the power of the future, which is none other than God in the manifestation of God’s Reign. God does not appear as one being among others. God has being explicitly as “the power of the future.”⁵²

Pannenberg went on, however, to clarify his intentions in a direction that showed this way of resolving the power and freedom dilemma to be only a chimera. From our perspective within history, it appears God [96] is out there ahead of us. But from God’s own perspective, the end of history is simply the point at which we encounter the reality that was true all along—that God is indeed eternally and self-consistently God but manifests Godself to history only as its forward flow is terminated. What Pannenberg has done, in fact, is stand Augustine on his side: God timelessly embraces our past, present, and future but now is seen to do so ahead of us rather than above us.⁵³

The key in Pannenberg’s formulation is his notion of God as the all-determining power. If he were to mean by this that God finally wraps up all the determinations of meaning that we have brought into existence by our human activity, that would be a proposal worth pursuing. But that falls short of Pannenberg’s true position. He has insisted that, in light of the ultimate future ahead of us, it is the case not only that God is the all-determining power but is, in fact, the only true power. Omnipotence means not the highest power over other expressions of power but sole power.⁵⁴

Pannenberg has never been reluctant to acknowledge explicitly that the power of God disclosed in the life and message of Jesus is essentially characterized by love. “However, if this love were powerless, then it would not be God, and if it were only one power among others, then it would not be the one God from whom and to whom are all things and who alone can in all seriousness be called God.”⁵⁵ But even this awareness is qualified by the insistence that the power of God can be understood as one that “dominates all” and is “master over all,”⁵⁶ leading to the realization of “the complete dependence of everything real upon God.”⁵⁷ The consequence of this understanding is the adopting of a position that I have termed “hard determinism,” controlling every element in creation, in contrast to “soft determinism,” in which God’s final victory gives definitive shape to all that we have provisionally worked out by our own exercise of freedom along the way.⁵⁸ It is what finally renders Pannenberg’s attempt to defend Augustine by shifting God from Eternal Present to Ultimate Future an unsuccessful effort to resolve the issue of theodicy.

I conclude, once again, that herculean efforts at reconceptualizing theology’s quandary over the interrelatedness of God’s power and [97] love simply have not brought sufficiently fresh insight to the task. The conundrum concerning how Ultimate Being can manifest both love and power in a fully interconnected and fully realized way persists. The biblical witness to a living God whose power is shown forth precisely as a facet of essential love and not vice versa still remains alien to these and numerous other reworkings of the historic theistic synthesis, the detailing of which would finally prove redundant. One further issue will be addressed in the next chapter, before shifting our attention to the output of those who successfully attacked the inherited tradition and laid the groundwork for a recasting of the pivotal issue at hand.

ENDNOTES

1. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Random House, 1969).
2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 22, 25 ft.
3. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 2nd ed., tr. and. ed. By H. R. MacIntosh and J. S. Stewart (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 1:12.
4. Ibid., 1:52.
5. Ibid., 1:201f., spelled out in detail in 203–28.
6. Ibid., 1:206.
7. Ibid., 1:211f.
8. Ibid., 1:214.
9. Ibid., 1:228–32.
10. Ibid., 2:727–32.
11. Ibid., 2:731f.
12. Barth and Tillich were the theological giants who dominated the scene in my years of initial theological formation, in the 1960s.That has changed. No giants bestride the current landscape of multicultural particularity and fragmentation of focus. Nor did either generate a school called Barthianism or Tllichianism, although Tillich’s influence could be seen in departments of Christian education and church school curricula [98] in mainline U.S. Protestant congregations for decades. A sense of the long-term importance of both has greatly receded in more recent times, and not so much for formulating the wrong answers as for failing to raise the right questions.
13. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, tr. and ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936–1962), Vol. 2, Part 1, 257, 322, et al. (Henceforth: CD.)
14. Ibid., 2:1, 279f.
15. Ibid., 2:1, 283.
16. In a later volume of his Church Dogmatics, Barth, in discussing the humanity of God in Jesus, did go on to affirm that “the statements ‘God is’ and ‘God loves’ are synonymous,” and that John’s assertion that God is love is “a genuine equation.” (4:2, 755f.) Had he dared to develop the implications of this acknowledgment for his doctrine of God, he could not have been included in this chapter on the sinking of the theistic synthesis.
17. Ibid., 2:1, 332.
18. Ibid., 2:1, 346.
19. Ibid., 2:1, 490–607.
20. Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, tr. G. T. Thompson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), 47.
21. Anna Case-Winters, God’s Power: Traditional Understandings and Contemporary Challenges (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), 100. See Barth, CD 1:2, 674: “Freedom means ability, possibility, power–power in its illimitability or its equality over against other powers.”
22. Case-Winters, 100f.
23. Barth, CD 2:1, 522.
24. Case-Winters, 97. 25.
25. Barth, CD 2:1, 531.
26. Ibid., 2:1, 543.
27. Ibid., 2:1, 524.
28. Sheila Greene Davaney also calls attention to this critical point, to wit, that Barth made the correct claim, “that we cannot begin with any [99] general or universal idea of power and then apply it to God in some superor preeminent manner,” but then failed to execute it. Davaney, Divine Power: A Study of Karl Barth and Charles Hartshorne (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 31.
29. Ibid., 2:1, 491.
30. Ibid., 2:1, 552.
31. Ibid., 2:1, 559, emphasis mine.
32. Ibid., 2:1, 607.
33. Ibid., 4:1, 186f., 191f.
34. Davaney, op. cit., 56.
35. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951–63), 1:235.
36. Ibid., 1:238.
37. Ibid., 1:236, for both quotes.
38. Ibid., 1:245.
39. Ibid., 1:271.
40. Ibid., 1:273.
41. Ibid.
42. E.g. Tillich, Systematic 1:272.
43. Ibid., 1:274.
44. Ibid., 1:279.
45. Ibid., 1:280, emphasis original.
46. Ibid., 1:283 (both quotes).
47. Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 8.
48. Ibid., 11.
49. Ibid., 49.
50. Nels F. S. Ferré, “Tillich and the Nature of Transcendence,” in Paul Tillich: Retrospect and Future (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1966), 15, emphases original.
51. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God (Philadelphia: [100] The Westminster Press, 1969), 56.
52. Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology, Vol. II, tr. George H. Kehm (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 242.
53. See my extended analysis of this position in my On the Way to God: An Exploration into the Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1989), 249–70.
54. Ibid., 270–80. See also my “The All-Determining God and the Peril of Determinism,” in Carl E. Braaten and Philip Clayton, eds., The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1988), 152–68.
55. Pannenberg, “Response to the Discussion,” in James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb, Jr., eds., Theology as History (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 232, ft. 10.
56. Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God, 55.
57. Pannenberg and Lewis Ford, “A Dialog about Process Philosophy,” Encounter 38, 1977, 320.
58. See my “The All-Determining God and the Peril of Determinism,” 160–62.

The “Dark Ages” were anything but dark insofar as ongoing theological inquiry is concerned. While following Augustine’s lead, new threads were woven into the fabric of his tapestry, including both a refined understanding of the character of God’s power and fresh reflections on the nature of God’s love. All of that came to a head in the rediscovery of Aristotle in the West and the work of the second great synthesizer of Christian faith, Thomas Aquinas. This was followed by the challenges wrought by the Protestant Reformation and especially by the formulations of the lawyer-turned-theologian John Calvin, who “updated” Augustine’s work with a vengeance.

It is also worth remembering here that feudal society in the Middle Ages was characterized by a descending hierarchy of greater and lesser lords, all the way down to tenant serfs. Much that was articulated in this period was considerably conditioned by this social context.

A LOVE SO GREAT: RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR

In his Proslogion (1078), Anselm of Canterbury defined God as “a being than which none greater can be thought”¹ and went on to perceive that [73] greatness in terms of ultimate power: “O Lord God, thou art more truly almighty just because thou canst do nothing through lack of power, and nothing has power against thee.”² God is understood here as “at once [both] compassionate and impassible,” but also both compassionate and not compassionate! How? “Thou art compassionate according to our sense, but not according to thine . . . we feel the effect of thy compassion, but thou dost not feel emotion.”³ So once again the unqualified championing of impassible divine power limits the scope and meaning of divine love. We bask in God’s love, but that love does nothing to augment God’s being. It is, as it were, disinterested love.

Richard of St. Victor, a century later, offered a propitious correction to Anselm. In his On the Trinity (ca. 1170), he argued that God loves with a love “so great that nothing greater can exist and . . . of such a kind that nothing better can exist.”⁴ Richard, however, remain locked in an Augustinian framework that negated the force of his observation, turning it inward upon the relational Trinity: “A divine person, then, could not have the highest charity toward a person who was not worthy of the highest love . . . no person could be wholly deserving of the love of a divine person if he were not God.”⁵

Even so, there are hints of an understanding that can move us forward. Denis Edwards notes that:

Richard lived in a century that was marked by the discovery of romantic love and by an intense interest in friendship in the new monastic movements. Richard’s unique contribution was in his application of reflection on Christian friendship to the central mystery of the Trinity . . . Richard’s trinitarian theology suggests that relationships of mutual love are the foundation of all reality. It argues that all creation springs from this dynamism of mutual love. Relationality is the source of creaturehood.”⁶

This recognition of the supreme importance of the mutuality of love is clearly a propitious move in the right direction. It remains to be spelled out, however, beyond the innertrinitarian being of God into the fullness of relations between God and God’s creation.⁷

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THE NEW ARISTOTELIAN SYNTHESIS: THOMAS AQUINAS

The “Dumb Ox”⁸ of the thirteenth century may have been shy and quiet and slow, preferring the solace of his books and his writing to the demands of oration and teaching, but his effect on all subsequent theologizing was profound and rather all-encompassing, particularly insofar as the Roman Catholic Church is concerned. Thomas Aquinas⁹ (1225–1274) did not reintroduce Aristotle to Western theology. That had already been occurring from the time Muslims, who had kept his writings alive in Greek and Arabic, conquered Sicilty and Spain and the work of translation into Latin ensued. But Aquinas was surely the one who brought Aristotle’s philosopy into a fresh new synthesis that rivaled the output of Augustine eight and a half centuries before.

The basic contrast between Aristotle and his mentor Plato is that Plato taught that the search for true knowledge involved turning from the senses inward to truths known by the soul. Aristotle taught that all knowledge begins with sense observation. Certainly Aquinas traded Platonic notions for Aristotelian ones, but that unfortunately may be seen to have been merely a different route to the same flawed destination, arriving at almost identical conclusions clothed in a different philosophical language. I now turn our attention to that development insofar as the relationship between divine power and divine love is concerned.

ACTIVE AND PASSIVE POWER

Even before he finished his comprehensive Summa Theologica (1265–72), Aquinas articulated his key understanding of God as actus purus, “pure act.”¹⁰ In On the Power of God (Quaestiones disputatae de potentia, 1266), he argued that God’s existence and essence are identical,¹¹ wherefore there can be no admixture in God of both action and potentiality.¹² Equally, as pure act, God cannot be “composite” but must be “utterly simple.” True perfection is possible only of that which is simple (“void of all composition”).¹³

“God is called almighty [omnipotent] because he can do all things that are possible in themselves.”¹⁴ This quality is identified as “active” [75] power, the capacity to act on another. Its corollary, in Aquinas, is “passive” or receptive power, the capacity to be acted upon.¹⁵ As pure act, God is active only. “Is God really related to the creature so that this relation be something in God?” Aquinas answered unequivocally in the negative.¹⁶ Such receptive capacity would be a violation of God’s essential and eternal completeness. God impacts the world totally. The world impacts God not at all.

Aquinas extended this focus in the Summa Theologica, answering Question 25 on the Power of God. God’s essence, God’s action, and God’s power are not distinct from one another.¹⁷ In his Reply to Objection 4, he wrote:

Power is predicated of God not as something really distinct from His knowledge and will, but as differing from them logically; inasmuch as power implies a notion of a principle putting into execution what the will commands, and what knowledge directs, which three things in God are identified. Or we may say, that the knowledge or will of God, according as it is the effective principle, has the notion of power contained in it.¹⁸

And this “active power” is, of course, infinite, unqualified by any power outside itself.¹⁹ The only qualification allowable regarding God’s omnipotence is that which involves self-contradiction.

This phrase, “God can do all things,” is rightly understood to mean that God can do all things that are possible; and for this reason He is said to be omnipotent . . . God is called omnipotent because He can do all things that are possible absolutely . . . everything that does not imply a contradiction in terms, is numbered amongst those possible things, in respect of which God is called omnipotent: whereas whatever implies contradiction does not come within the scope of divine omnipotence, because it cannot have the aspect of possibility. Hence it is better to say that such things cannot be done, than that God cannot do them.²⁰

Clearly any inclusion of passive power in God would constitute a denial of this understanding of God’s omnipotence.

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Furthermore, God is understood by Aquinas to be “in all things, innermostly . . . by His power, inasmuch as all things are subject to His power.”²¹ God’s omnipresence is a facet of God’s all-encompassing omnipotence.

Finally, passive power in our own selves is what enables our receptivity toward actualizing our potentiality in the direction of perfection,²² in sharply defined contrast to God’s existence as without any unrealized potentiality.

THE UNCHANGED CHANGER

Underlying all these reflections is Aquinas’ modification of the doctrine of divine immutability through his appropriation of Aristotle’s definition of the Highest Being as the “Unmoved Mover.” His first argument for the existence of God is oriented toward “motion,” but Timothy McDermott’s translation of the Summa Theologica brings the pattern more sharply into focus by shifting the discussion in English from motion to “change.”

Some things in the world are certainly in the process of change. This we plainly see. Now anything in the process of change is being changed by something else . . . Moreover, this something else, if in process of change, is itself being changed by yet another thing; and this last by another. Now we must stop somewhere, otherwise there will be no first cause of the change, and, as a result, no subsequent causes . . . Hence one is bound to arrive at some first cause of change not itself being changed by anything, and this is what everybody understands by God.²³

Aquinas concentrated his attention on the doctrine of divine immutability in Question 9, repeating there that God is “first being” and “pure act, without the admixture of any potentiality.” Because to be subject to change is to be open to previously unrealized potentiality, it is obviously the case that “it is impossible for God to change in any way.”²⁴

God’s immutability is also underscored in regard to the relationship of the eternal God to temporality. “Eternity differs from time by virtue of being “simultaneously whole . . . eternity is the measure of a permanent being, while time is the measure of movement.”²⁵ Therefore God as the [77] One who is not subject to change is the One who is not subject to time either. Eternity is not an infinite progression of temporal moments but that which embraces and encompasses all of time without being subject to before and after.

Can “life,” then, be attributed to God? Aquinas answered in the affirmative, in that, “since a thing is said to live in so far as it operates of itself and not as moved by another, the more perfectly this power is found in anything, the more perfect is the life of that thing.” And certainly, “a more perfect degree of life is that of intelligent beings, for their power of self-movement is more perfect.” Obviously God’s “power of self-movement” surpasses that of all others, wherefore “in Him principally is life.”²⁶ But this claim is not augmented by any exploration on Aquinas’ part as to what sense can be made of a life that is not dynamic or interactive, the life of an ultimate being characterized by simplicity. Life in God would seem to be something limited to the eternal interrelationships of the members of the Trinity, though that is not explicitly spelled out.

BUT WHAT OF LOVE?

In the non-composite simplicity of God as actus purus, it is perfectly feasible for Aquinas to utilize a wealth of expressions equating God with God’s power, as realized action; God’s will, as unopposable intentions; God’s wisdom or knowledge, as transtemporal comprehensiveness. The orientation shifts subtly when the focus is on divine love; the question now becomes “whether love exists in God,”²⁷ not at all whether love itself characterizes the being of God as surely as act and will and power do. Quoting 1 John 4:16, “God is love,” Aquinas answered his posited objections by affirming that “in God there is love, because love is the first movement of the will and of every appetitive power.”²⁸ Love:

regards good universally, whether possessed or not. Hence love is naturally the first act of will and appetite; for which reason all the other appetitive movements presuppose love as their root and origin . . . in whomsoever there is will and appetite, there must also be love . . . Now is has been shown that will is in God. Hence we must attribute love to Him.²⁹

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Love is but an “attribute” of God, as a subset of will. This is, however, necessarily a love that is without passion,³⁰ because for it to be otherwise would deny God’s immutability and impose on God illegitimately an aspect of passive (receptive) power.

But Aquinas did exceed Augustine’s limited definition of the nature of love by recognizing that “to love a person is to will good for that person.”³¹ In that regard, “God does not love some things more than others, because He loves all things by an act of the will that is one, simple, and always the same.”³²

On the other hand, this perspective was curiously applied when it came to defining the relationship between God’s love and God’s predestining some to eternal salvation and allowing others to suffer their just desserts of God’s “abandonment.”³³ The full explication by Aquinas is worth our attention:

Predestination presupposes election in the order of reason; and election presupposes love . . . Whence the predestination of some to eternal salvation presupposes, in the order of reason, that God wills their salvation; and to this belong both election and love:—love, inasmuch as He wills them this particular good of eternal salvation; since to love is to wish well to anyone, as stated above:—election, inasmuch as He wills this good to some in preference to others; since He reprobates some, as stated above. Election and love, however, are differently ordered in God, and in ourselves: because in us the will in loving does not cause good, but we are incited to love by the good which already exists; and therefore we choose someone to love, and so election in us precedes love. In God, however, it is the reverse. For His will, by which in loving He wishes good to someone, is the cause of that good possessed by some in preference to others. Thus it is clear that love precedes election in the order of reason, and election precedes predestination. Whence all the predestinate are objects of election and love.³⁴

It would seem clear here that the power of God is all-encompassing whereas the love of God is not, because that love does not result in the effective saving of all of God’s human creatures from eternal damnation. Although God has been said to love all equally, that is not so. Some are [79] elected and therefore predestined—but not all. John Hick has observed cogently that “if there are finally wasted lives and finally unredeemed sufferings, either God is not perfect in love or He is not sovereign in rule over His creation.”³⁵

The conclusion seems unavoidable: Aquinas has expanded Augustine’s definition of love in a useful direction, but the fundamental problem limiting the meaning of God’s love by virtue of God’s essential immutability and transtemporality has not been surmounted. Here, also, passive/receptive power has been helpfully introduced, but as something foreign to God. Power as the unopposable actualization of the divine will overtrumps Love as the essential nature of the divine life. The fundamental dilemma has not been resolved.

POTENTIA ABSOLUTA, POTENTIA ORDINATA: WILLIAM OF OCKHAM

One additional debate in the late Middle Ages is worthy of notice, and that is the attempt to distinguish within God an “absolute power,” potentia absoluta, and an “ordained power,” potentia ordinata. The terms were not original to William of Ockham (ca. 1285–1347), but he was the one who did the most to explicate their meaning.

Sometimes we mean by God’s power those things which he does according to laws he himself has ordained and instituted. These things he is said to do by ordained power [de potentia ordinata]. But sometimes God’s power is taken to mean his ability to do anything that does not involve a contradiction, regardless of whether or not he has ordained that he would do it. For God can do many things that he does not choose to do . . . These things he is said to be able to do by his absolute power [de potentia absoluta].³⁶

The notion of God’s absolute power is a way of defending God’s total freedom of action. In other words, God is not bound by God’s own orderly way of overseeing the flow of historical events. Gordon Leff summarized the distinction in this way:

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God’s absolute power (potentia absoluta) . . . differed from His ordained power (potentia ordinata) in denoting God’s omnipotence purely and simply. It was outside all space and time in that it was uncommitted to upholding any set order in the universe. Freedom to will was its only raison d’être. In contrast, God’s ordained power was directed to sustaining this world; it constituted God’s law of creation, the eternal ordinance by which everything was governed. As given expression in the Bible and interpreted by the Church, it was immutable and irrevocable. Thus while God’s ordained power applied less to His own nature than to His creatures, His absolute power referred to Himself, and so, in the final analysis, it could override His ordinances.³⁷

This freedom of God to act withput any constraint certainly explained what believers perceived as miracles. But acknowledging the reality of potentia absoluta led to a “radical indeterminacy” in which all ordinary assurances about the proper order of things were tossed out the window. “Thus any switch from God’s ordained to His absolute power involved throwing all certainty, morality, and indeed probability into the melting-pot: in their place anything could emerge.”³⁸

This was the real heart of skepticism in the period leading up to the Reformation. God is freed from reason; experience is freed from faith. “Where probability simply questioned, God’s absolute power destroyed. Where reason ended, God’s potentia absoluta began.”³⁹ Because of the potential arbitrariness of God’s absolute power, theology was placed beyond reason’s reach. Here, attention to the potentially unchecked capacity of God the All-Powerful to direct the affairs of the world reached its conceptual zenith. Love has to fend for itself as best it can; it might be discernible in God’s potentia ordinata, but it has nothing to do with defining (limiting, directing) the ultimate power of God.

GOD’S DEFENSE ATTORNEY: JOHN CALVIN

In examining the views of the Protestant Reformers I do not find it especially cogent to deal with both Martin Luther and John Calvin. In very many respects, on matters relevant to this inquiry, their theological reflections overlap. But the one who pushed the conceptual envelope [81] to the maximum was Calvin (1509–1564). Therefore it is to his work that I now turn.

It is not coincidental to his corpus of work that Calvin, before he became a reforming theologian, was a lawyer. Bernard Cottret has observed that “Calvin the theologian would be to the end Calvin the jurist. His thought remained permeated with the rigor, the geometry, the fascination, and the memory of the law.”⁴⁰ He rigorously and without reservation presented and defended all the seemingly radical implications of a God of predestination whose will is absolutely omnipotent.

It was the absolutely unlimited and unchallengable sovereignty of God that Calvin was concerned to pronounce, at all costs. Everything else is sacrificed to that overriding proposition. All the quibbling about protecting free will and perceiving double causes in creation’s forward movement went by the wayside. Early on in his monumental Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536, 1559), he wrote:

God’s providence, as it is taught in Scripture, is opposed to fortune and fortuitous happenings . . . all events are governed by God’s secret plan. And concerning inanimate objects we ought to hold that, although each one has by nature been endowed with its own property, yet it does not exercise its own power except in so far as it is directed by God’s ever-present hand. These are, thus, nothing but instruments to which God continually imparts as much effectiveness as he wills, and according to his own purpose bends and turns them to either one action or another.⁴¹

This admits of no diminution of divine omnipotence. It is absolute and all-encompassing.

And truly God claims, and would have us grant him, omnipotence . . . a watchful, effective, active sort, engaged in ceaseless activity. Not, indeed, an omnipotence that is only a general principle of confused motion . . . but one that is directed toward individual and particular motions. For he is deemed omnipotent . . . because, governing heaven and earth by his providence, he so regulates all things that nothing takes [82] place without his deliberation . . . there is no erratic power, or action, or motion in creatures, but that they are governed by God’s secret plan in such a way that nothing happens except what is knowingly and willingly decreed by him.⁴²

Divine foreknowledge is understood to be divine foreordination, from our earthbound point of view.⁴³ What is emerging here is the most explicit indication to date that God’s power is perceived to be the only power. Omnipotence admits of no other powers at all; they are mere chimeras. We say or do nothing whatsoever apart from the power of God to produce such effects. All human conditions, rich and poor, lordly or oppressed, are “divinely assigned.”⁴⁴

Nothing happens by chance. We judge events “fortuitous” because the true cause of events, i.e., God, is hidden from our eyes.

[God is] the ruler and governor of all things, who in accordance with his wisdom has from the farthest limit of eternity decreed what he was going to do, and now by his might carries out what he has decreed. From this we declare that not only heaven and earth and the inanimate creatures, but also the plans and intentions of men, are so governed by his providence that they are borne by it straight to their appointed end.⁴⁵

So, in regard to “double predestination,” God does not merely “permit” the “wicked” to perish, but “wills” it.⁴⁶

Calvin’s attempt to maintain that God’s providence “does not relieve us from responsibility” failed abysmally inasmuch as his effort to posit “secondary causes” fails the test of common sense. The human will is simply in no way independent of God’s all-embracing providential causality.⁴⁷ “As far as men are concerned, whether they are good or evil, the heart of the Christian will know that their plans, wills, efforts, and abilities are under God’s hand; that it is within his choice to bend them whither he pleases and to constrain them whenever he pleases.”⁴⁸ The consequent perception that God is ultimately the One responsible even for all evil is “conspicuous.”⁴⁹

Calvin dismissed Old Testament passages that speak of God “repenting” by maintaining that these are to be taken figuratively, and yield [83] to our weakness of understanding: “neither God’s plan nor his will is reversed, nor his volition altered; but what he had from eternity foreseen, approved, and decreed, he pursues in uninterrupted tenor, however sudden the variation may appear in men’s eyes.”⁵⁰

The rigorous lockstep of a universe totally under the control of one sole Power continued into Book II: God “bends and turns men’s wills even in external things; nor are they so free to choose that God’s will does not rule over their freedom . . . your mind is guided by God’s prompting rather than by your own freedom to choose.”⁵¹

This selective summary has been decidedly one-sided. I have traced Calvin’s championing of a divine omnipotence that is absolute and unqualified, without any vestige of external contribution whatsoever. Nothing has been developed here regarding Calvin’s focus on divine love. That is hardly accidental. In a rather exhaustive eighty-page subject index for the Institutes, one finds Calvin writing about divine love only in four paragraphs.⁵² In four columns of citations concerning “Christ,” only a single one involves love, God’s loving act in Christ.⁵³ And at no point in his extensive scriptural references did Calvin even deal at all with 1 John 4:8, 16.

Total power. Questionable love. Anna Case-Winters has tellingly perceived that the primary metaphors Calvin used for God—Father, Lord, King—are all power metaphors. Even fatherhood was conceived in terms of “a sovereign Father upon whom we are always dependent,”⁵⁴ not the intimate Abba of the Lord’s Prayer.

So the essential architecture of what would come to be known as Christian theism is now fully in place. God is absolute Lord of all, eternal, immutable, passionless. To affirm God equally, if not primarily, to be Love has become conceptually impossible. Love must be “shoehorned” in somehow, as a mere attribute of God Almighty. It is truly revealing in that in the whole history of discussion of the nature of God, nowhere is the prefix “omni” applied to love! God is said to be omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and so forth. Where is the notion that God is “omnilove”? It will take centuries before that seedling takes root and begins to sprout and blossom. In the meantime, footnotes continued to be written to the Augustinian theistic consensus. To that continuation we now turn.

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ENDNOTES

1. Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, ch. 2. This and subsequent quotes are from Eugene R. Fairweather, ed. and trans., A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham (The Library of Christian Classics, Vol. X) (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1956).
2. Ibid., ch. 7 (Fairweather, 77).
3. Ibid., ch. 8 (Fairweather, 77f.).
4. Richard of St. Victor, On the Trinity, III.2. This translation is by Grover A. Zinn in his Richard of St. Victor (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 375. It is superior in its parallel with Anselm to the translation of the lines in Fairweather, op cit., 330.
5. Ibid. (Fairweather, 330).
6. 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.
7. For a move in that direction initiated by Bonaventure, a medieval mystical theologian of the following century who was influenced by Richard, see my coverage of his contribution herein in the chapter on the Mystics’ God.
8. “You call him a Dumb Ox; I tell you that the Dumb Ox will bellow so loud that his bellowing will fill the world.” So said Albert the Great of his modest and most retiring student. See G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1956), Image Books edition, back cover.
9. Scholars are divided in deciding whether to refer to him in shorthand as “Thomas” or as “Aquinas.” Certainly his followers are known as Thomists, and “Aquinas” simply designates his origin in the Italian town of Aquino, near Naples. So strictly speaking, he could well be known as “Thomas of Aquino.” Even so, because of the distinctiveness and ready recognition of “Aquinas,” that is the nomenclature used here.
10. See, e.g., Thomas Aquinas, On the Power of God (Quæstiones Disputatæ de Potentia Dei), Question 3, article 1, paragraphs 12,17; tr. Fr. Lawrence Shapcote (Three Books in One) (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1952). Online at dhspriory.org/thomas. Aquinas’ defense of this [85] point is also found in his Summa Theologica, Question 3, articles 1–3.
11. Aquinas, On the Power of God, 7.2.
12. Ibid., 3.1.17.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 1.5.7.
15. Ibid., 7.9
16. Ibid., 7.10.
17. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 25, art. 1, in Anton C. Pegis, ed., Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1945).
18. Ibid., 25.1, Reply to Obj. 4.
19. Ibid., 25.2.
20. Ibid., 25.3.
21. Ibid., 8.1,3.
22. Ibid., 9.2.
23. Ibid., 2.3, in the translation by Timothy McDermott (London: Blackfriars, 1964), as quoted in William C. Placher, A History of Christian Theology (Louisville: WJK Press, 1983), 154.
24. Ibid., 9.1, from the Pegis translation.
25. Ibid., 10.4.
26. Ibid., 18.3.
27. The focus of Question 20, emphasis mine.
28. Ibid., 20.1, emphasis mine.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 20.1, Reply to Obj. 1.
31. Ibid., 20.1, Reply to Obj. 3.
32. Ibid., 20.3. Aquinas went on to modify this somewhat in Art. 4 in proposing that God “loves better things more.”
33. Ibid., 23.3, Reply to Obj. 1: “God loves all men and all creatures, inasmuch as He wishes them all some good; but He does not wish every good to them all. So far, therefore, as He does not wish this particular [86] good—namely, eternal life—He is said to hate or reprobate them.”
34. Ibid., 23.4, emphasis mine.
35. John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), 340.
36. William of Ockham, Quodlibeta VI, q. 1, as quoted in Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 38. Aquinas had briefly called attention to the distinction in Summa Theologica, 25.5.1, Reply to Obj. 1.
37. Gordon Leff, Medieval Thought from Saint Augustine to Ockham (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1958), 288.
38. Ibid., 289.
39. Ibid., 290.
40. Bernard Cottret, Calvin: A Biography, tr. M. Wallace McDonald (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000), 21.
41. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.16.2, tr. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), 198f.
42. Ibid., I.16.3 (200f.).
43. Ibid., I.16.4 (202).
44. Ibid., I.16.6 (204f.).
45. Ibid., I.16.8 (207).
46. Ibid., III.23.8, emphasis mine (956).
47. See ibid., I.17.3, 9 (214–17, 221f.).
48. Ibid., I.17.6 (218).
49. Anna Case-Winters, God’s Power: Traditional Understandings and Contemporary Challenges (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), 71. Calvin used Isaiah 45.7 as a scriptural basis for this.
50. Calvin, Institutes, I.17.13 (227).
51. Ibid., II.4.7 (315).
52. Ibid., I.16.1–4.
53. Ibid., II.16.2.
54. Case-Winters, op. cit., 49.

The early fourth century CE saw a tectonic shift in the fortunes of the oppressed but ever growing Christian community: The emperor Constantine handed over the reins of religious leadership in his empire to the church.

One might readily surmise that the course of that century would bring forth significant theological developments demonstrating the connection between the power of God reigning in heaven and imperial power being wielded on earth. But that was not the case.¹ The two overriding issues occupying the attention of the church’s theologians were the definitive formulating of a doctrine of the Trinity and the resolving of christological issues deriving from that. At the same time, the new official status of the church allowed an imposing of orthodox positions against all the losing sides, backed by imperial Rome. The time for freewheeling explorations into alternative theological possibilities of understanding was now in the past.

This chapter presents and evaluates the relevant contributions of two champions of this victorious theological synthesis: the Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa in the East, and the brilliant but flawed work of perhaps the West’s greatest theologian, Augustine of Hippo.

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TRINITARIAN CONSOLIDATIONS IN THE EAST: GREGORY OF NYSSA

Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 334) was the younger brother of Basil of Caesarea and a good friend of another Gregory, of Nazianzus, the three together known in history as the Cappadocian Fathers. All three being elevated to bishoprics, Basil was the abler administrator, and the Nazianzen was the more eloquent orator. But the Nyssen was by far the most outstanding theologian of the three, wherefore it is to his work that I wish primarily to direct our attention.

The Cappadocian Fathers crystallized the trinitarian debates that followed the Council of Nicaea with formulations that found wide favor in ensuing epochs. Their fundamental position can be readily summarized from the Five Theological Orations (ca. 380)of Gregory of Nazianzus.² There he affirmed the absolute unity of God’s essence (ousia), discerned by us in an interlocking trio of distinct but equal relations,³ identified as hypostases or “persons.” This dance of internal divine relations—accessible to us only by virtue of the incarnation of God in Jesus the Christ and the subsequent witness of the church to the gifts of God’s enlivening Spirit—is between the unbegotten Father and the begotten Son, but also equally and essentially including the Holy Spirit who “proceeds” from the Father. In this understanding, there is no “before” of God that does not entail this Trinity of divine relations.

Does this positing of a unified God impacting us and the world in a Trinity of relations provide helpful insights into the subject of this inquiry, the relationship between God’s power and God’s love? The first point that must quickly be conceded is that whatever may be said of the attributes of one person in the relational triad must be affirmed of all three. The Father alone is not powerful, even in initial creation, which occurred according to John 1:3 as in and through the Word (Son). The Son alone is not loving, and so on.⁴ “Christ,” Gregory of Nyssa affirmed in An Answer to Ablabius (ca. 380), “is the power of God,” but by this same principle, “power is a unity in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”⁵

Gregory then went on to maintain that “the divine nature is unlimited and incomprehensible . . . altogether infinite,” and that “infinity entirely transcends limitation.”⁶ His explorations surrounding this claim [55] center on divine activity and the power by which that activity is operative. Infinite power, by extension, utterly transcends limitation.

Does this also apply to love? Does God’s infinite love utterly transcend limitation? That focus is absent from the discussion here, but it receives attention elsewhere, where Gregory tried to integrate these two aspects of divine reality. In his Address on Religious Instruction some three years later, he recognized the self-limiting dimension of God’s unlimited power:

It is universally agreed that we should believe the Divine to be not only powerful, but also just and good and wise and everything else that suggests excellence. It follows, therefore, in the plan of God we are considering, that there should not be a tendency for one of his attributes to be present in what happened, while another was absent. For not a single one of these sublime attributes by itself and separated from the others constitutes virtue. What is good is not truly such unless it is associated with justice, wisdom, and power . . . Power, too, if it is separated from justice and wisdom, cannot be classed as virtue. Rather it is a brutal and tyrannical form of power.⁷

God’s inherent goodness is a far more typical emphasis in Gregory (and in these early centuries overall) than God’s love. Even so, the conjoining of power and love explicitly is identified several paragraphs later. In the Gospel story, Gregory wrote,

the union of power with love for man is displayed. In the first place, that the omnipotent nature was capable of descending to man’s lowly position is a clearer evidence of power than great and supernatural miracles. For it somehow accords with God’s nature, and is consistent with it, to do great and sublime things by divine power. It does not startle us to hear it said that the whole creation, including the invisible world, exists by God’s power, and is the realization of his will. But descent to man’s lowly position is a supreme example of power—or a power which is not bounded by circumstances contrary to its nature.⁸

In these reflections, Gregory saw the love of God displayed rather particularly in God’s activity through the Son to grant eternal salvation [56] beyond our mortal life on Earth by virtue of the “superabundance of Omnipotence” displayed in the resurrection.⁹ But this activity in no way affects God’s own being, which is eternally perfect and therefore not subject to change.¹⁰ This doctrine of divine immutability denies any interactivity on the part of God’s love (except internally, in the relations of the Trinity), which led him to conclude: “in order that the Supreme Being may not appear to have any connection whatever with things below, we use, with regard to His nature, ideas and phrases expressive of His separation from all such conditions; we call . . . that which is unreceptive of change, or sufferance, or alteration, passionless, changeless, and unalterable.”¹¹

And therein lies the rub. The full-blown championing of Greek categories of static supremacy has denied utterly the biblical witness to a God sublimely interactive with the cosmic forces God set in motion. Fundamental convictions have been stood on their head: God cannot appear to have any connection with “things below” that would reflect back on God’s utter self-sufficiency. Power flows only in one way, outward from the divine. Love, similarly, flows only one way, outward from a “passionless” God who is not all affected by what and whom God loves because that would necessarily diminish God’s unalterable perfection.

What we have seen bubbling to the surface in the previous centuries of Christian thought has now resulted in a distillation of pure uncontaminated divinity: power without real opposition,¹² love without real interactive engagement. One recalls the old quip about the farmer being asked directions to a traveler’s destination and replying, “Well, you can’t really get there from here.” That’s the dilemma the church set for itself. It so defined the nature of power, divine power, that one can no longer move from that place to a destination that includes any meaningful understanding of the full nature of divine love. The church, and the Western world, suffered for centuries from that wrong turn.

THE VICTORIOUS SYNTHESIS: AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO

There is no denying the astonishing breadth, depth, and brilliance of Augustine’s body of work. He was the one who put it all together in a [57] way that the church in the West has had to live with, and write footnotes on, ever since. The simple equation is that the Bible/Gospel + Plato = Augustine. The devil, of course, is in the details.

Born in 354, Augustine came late to Christian faith (age 30), as he spelled out in his Confessions (398). His was an intensely philosophical mind, and he struggled with the dualism and essential corporeality of Manichaeism before finding conceptual liberation in the neo-Platonism of Plotinus, who enabled him for the first time to envision a sublime reality unaffected by material corruption.¹³ Apart from a few years in Italy in the 380s, he lived his life chiefly in Tagaste, Hippo (where he served as bishop), and Carthage on the Mediterranean coast of northern Africa, adjacent to today’s city of Tunis. By the time he died in 430, the barbarians had sacked Rome twenty years earlier and would capture his own city shortly after his death.

In regard to the vast body of original resources available to us, Augustine recognized and called attention to his own tendency toward excessive verbiage—an exhaustiveness that itself is exhausting to the reader—in the prayer with which he closed On the Trinity: “I am not silent in thoughts, even when silent in words . . . set me free from such multitude of speech.”¹⁴ Of all that is varyingly valuable in the corpus of Augustine’s insights, it is essential here only to lift up those components that contribute to his attempt to reconcile convincingly God’s power and love. The task is not unlike that of Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective Sherlock Holmes, who repeatedly observed the necessity of separating what is of critical importance (i.e., to our inquiry) from what is merely interesting or incidental. Much that is vitally interesting in Augustine will not receive attention here. I propose that we embark upon four intersecting avenues of exploration, with a concluding caveat.

A TRINITY OF EQUAL RELATIONS

The understanding of a triune God is at the very heart of Augustine’s reflections on divinity. He did not substantially advance the Cappadocians’ formulation of the doctrine of one divine essence in three “persons” or hypostases, nor was his grasp of the Greek language all that strong,¹⁵ though he did champion emphatically the overarching significance of the unity of the three. His major contributions seem [58] to lie in the numerous summations he penned but also in the way in which he defended the absolute equality of Father, Son, and Spirit in their relations to one another and the co-reality of all God’s attributes in each member of the Trinity.

In regard to the latter, “whatsoever is said of each in respect to themselves, is to be taken of them, not in the plural in sum, but in the singular,” so that it must be said, concerning greatness, or goodness, and so forth, “not three greats, but one great . . . not three goods, but one good . . . So the Father is omnipotent, the Son omnipotent, and the Holy Spirit omnipotent; yet not three omnipotents, but one omnipotent.”¹⁶

In regard to the former, Augustine’s lack of facility with Greek terminology allowed him to concentrate on the trifold distinctions within the unity of God as a matter of internal divine relations as opposed to the positing of three distinct “persons.” At the very outset of his treatise on the Trinity, he championed both the Son’s equality with the Father as well as the equality of the Holy Spirit with both. We teach, he said,

this doctrine, that the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit intimate a divine unity of one and the same substance in an indivisible equality; and therefore that they are not three Gods, but one God; although the Father hath begotten the Son, and so He who is the Father is not the Son; and the Son is begotten by the Father, and so He who is the Son is not the Father; and the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son, but only the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, Himself also co-equal with the Father and the Son, and pertaining to the unity of the Trinity.¹⁷

He insisted emphatically that there can be no subordination of Father over Son, reading all scriptural indications of the Son’s varied limitations—e.g., John 14:28, “the Father is greater than I”—as having only to do with the human aspect of the divine-human Jesus.¹⁸

Further along, Augustine returned to this theme with a renewed emphasis on the internal relationships of the Holy Spirit: “So also the Holy Spirit is one with them, since these three are on . . . for the same Spirit is not without reason said to be the Spirit both of the Father and of the Son . . . For the Spirit of God is one, the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, the Holy Spirit, who worketh all in all.”¹⁹

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A TRINITY OF UNCHANGEABLE TIMELESSNESS

God’s triune immutability stands at the very forefront of Augustine’s pilgrimage of faith. His extended flirtation with Manichaeism had led him to struggle with the corruptibility of all substantial reality, which became a dilemma for him. He poured out his confusion to God in his Confessions:

with all my heart I believed You incorruptible and inviolable and immutable, for though I did not see whence or how, yet I saw with utter certainty that what can be corrupted is lower than what cannot be corrupted, that the inviolable is beyond question better than the violable, and that what can suffer no change is better than what can be changed . . . I could not but think of You as some corporeal substance, occupying all space . . . Yet even at this I thought of You as incorruptible and inviolable and immutable, and I still saw those as better than corruptible and violable and mutable.²⁰

The breakthrough came for Augustine when he read “some books of the Platonists translated from Greek into Latin.”²¹ He found himself liberated to a non-corporeal understanding of this divine incorruptibility, “and there was from that moment no ground of doubt in me.”²²

This became a pivotal conviction from which Augustine would not waver for the rest of his life and is the conceptual axis around which Western theology has been spinning ever since. In the corpus of Augustine’s works the subject is not so much argued, through logical procession, as posited, through a myriad of analogies presumably demonstrating the superiority of immutability over being subject to change.

The strongest presentations of this theme are to be found in Books 4 and 5 of On the Trinity (400–428). “For the essence of God, whereby He is, has altogether nothing changeable, neither in eternity, nor in truth, nor in will; since there truth is eternal, love eternal; and there love is true, eternity true; and there eternity is loved, and truth is loved.”²³ Necessarily, then, “that is not properly called eternal which undergoes any degree of change.”²⁴ Truth itself, in true neo-Platonic understanding, “remains immortal, incorrupt, unchangeable.”²⁵ The [60] ultimate conclusion follows: “He who is God is the only unchangeable substance or essence, to whom certainly being itself . . . most especially and most truly belongs.”²⁶

Out of this central proclamation arises the corollary of God’s essential timelessness. Time, of course, is the arena in which change continually occurs. But if God were subject to the sequentially of time, would God not then be subject to change? Absolutely: “nothing happens accidentally to God in time, because He is incapable of change,”²⁷ Augustine affirmed in his magisterial City of God (413–426). Rather, God is outside of and, of course, not affected by time, working “visible miracles” consistent with “his unchanging counsel, in whose plan all future events are already present. For he moves events in time, while himself remains unmoved by time. He knows what is to happen as already having happened.”²⁸

It is only our faulty perspective that subjects God to the vagaries of time. We experience creation by a triad of memory, awareness, and anticipation or will. Not so for God. God’s triune eternity is in no way circumscribed by three modes of relating to the passing of time. Rather, God “sees all without any kind of change” and “comprehends all . . . in a stable and eternal present” that simultaneously embraces all of time’s finite flow.²⁹ “There was no time before times began . . . that which begins to be spoken of God in time, and which was not spoken of Him before, is manifestly spoken of Him relatively; yet not according to any accident of God.”³⁰

So the Father is Father and the Son is Son and the Spirit is Spirit in a timeless eternity of unchanging relationships that affect all of time without being affected by any of time, wherefore God is not in any way liable to “passions” insofar as that involves God’s timeless essence.³¹ The triune God “lives” unchangingly in the sufficiency of the divine interrelations.³²

Finally, here, it is relevant to note that Augustine affirmed rather curiously the doctrine of God’s simplicity: “There is then one sole Good, which is simple, and therefore unchangeable; and that is God.”³³ Immutability and simplicity clearly go hand in hand. “What is meant by ‘simple’ is that its being is identical with its attributes . . . The reason why a nature is called simple is that it cannot lose any attribute it possesses, that there is no difference between what it is and what it has.” [61] Accordingly, he concluded, “the epithet ‘simple’ applies to things which are in the fullest and truest sense divine, because in them there is no difference between substance and quality.”³⁴

GOD’S UNOPPOSABLE OMNIPOTENCE

I have already had occasion to quote Augustine’s statement that “the Father is omnipotent, the Son omnipotent, and the Holy Spirit omnipotent; yet not three omnipotents, but one omnipotent.”³⁵ This theme is a repetitive drumbeat in his City of God, where he asserted that, regardless of our finite sense of historical developments occurring under the sway of merely human forces:

It is therefore this God, the author and giver of felicity, who, being the one true God, gives earthly dominion both to good men and to evil . . . he gives in accordance with the order of events in history, an order completely hidden from us, but perfectly known to God himself . . . he is himself in control, as the master of events, and arranges the order of things as governor.³⁶

We must attribute to the one true God alone the power to direct the fortunes of empires. It is none other than God who “rules and guides these events, according to his pleasure.”³⁷

We recognize that God is called “Almighty” for the very reason that God’s unopposable omnipotence entails the power to do whatever God wills,³⁸ without obstruction or counterpotency. The immutable God is unchangingly in control of all that comes to be, without qualification.

Writing about initial creation, Augustine affirmed that God is “the one Creator, by whose unspeakable power it comes to pass.”³⁹ When creation began, time began. When creation reaches its end, time will cease. And all that creation is composed of cannot be out of God, which would make God mutable, and it cannot be out of other pre-existing components, which would set up an eternal co-existent with God.⁴⁰ Therefore creation can only be comprehended as ex nihilo, “out of nothing.” And it is God alone who created from nothing all things both spiritual and corporeal.

In that creative activity, God has bestowed on humans a freedom of the will to choose between the good of God and the lack of good [62] not of God. Without such a freedom, there is no meaning in any divine action of condemning us for our waywardness. But is this nothing more than a chimera? Augustine endeavored valiantly to hold free will and God’s omnipotence in union, particularly in regard to God’s unlimited foreknowledge of what, from our time-bound perspective, is yet to occur but from God’s eternal perspective does not truly possess the character of a “not yet.”

we confess his [God’s] supreme power and foreknowledge. We are not afraid that what we do by an act of will may not be a voluntary act, because God, with his infallible prescience, knew that we should do it.⁴¹

God foreknew, of course, that we would sin; God “knew beforehand how evil the man would become whom God himself had created good; he also knew what good, even so, he would bring out of man’s evil.”⁴²

Evil men do many things contrary to the will of God; but so great is his wisdom, and so great his power, that all things which seem to oppose his will tend towards those results or ends which he himself has foreknown as good and just.⁴³

In spite of all the inherent tensions, Augustine could not surrender an insistence that, although God is eternally powerful over everything and knows from a timeless perspective all decisions arising within creation, we and not God are nonetheless responsible for our own misdeeds. It is a curious logic that has bedeviled the church for centuries.

The supratemporal reality of God’s unchanging essence required Augustine to champion the apostle Paul in insisting that whatever our post-mortal fate may turn out to be has been predestined by God from all eternity. It is, once again, God’s unopposable omnipotence that underlies the argument.

[God] promised not from the power of our will but from His own predestination. For He promised what He Himself would do, not what men would do. Because, although men do those good things which pertain to God’s worship, He Himself makes them to do what He has commanded; it is not they that cause Him to do what He has promised. Otherwise the fulfillment [63] of God’s promises would not be in the power of God, but in that of men.⁴⁴

So, in regard to the “two societies of human beings” that Augustine named the City of God and the City of Man, one “is predestined to reign with God for all eternity, the other doomed to undergo eternal punishment with the Devil.”⁴⁵

The dilemma is of colossal magnitude. We have earned our own damnation through our perverted utilization of our God-given free will, but God in God’s ineffable mystery not only knew of our corruption from all eternity but even ordained it in the exercise of God’s all-embracing power. Albert Outler has summarized this problematic enigma in a helpful way:

Against all who minimize grace or who assert man’s abilities and power, after the Pelagian fashion, he [Augustine] opposes a harsh doctrine of God’s omnipotence, which allows not the slightest qualification, or even paradox. In this ‘polemical mood’, Augustine declares that God’s grace is irresistible and inexorably effectual in accomplishing the divine purposes. Salvation is a sheer miracle wrought by God’s inscrutable will on behalf of a part of ruined mankind and is in no way congruent with human action or ability. Damnation is, likewise, sheer justice wrought by the same inscrutable will. God’s mercy and justice are both alike beyond human questioning. The elect rejoice in God’s mercy; the damned must acknowledge His justice. Both take their destiny from His choice and by His fixed decree.⁴⁶

I will return to this issue in the next section, in raising once again the question of how this understanding of divine power is coordinated with divine love. First, however, one remaining topic merits our attention here, and that is the matter of how the overarching power of God is not at all responsible for the existence of evil.

Augustine’s position, like that of Gregory of Nyssa,⁴⁷ is that evil is nothing in itself, nothing at all substantial, but is conceivable only as a privation of the good, an absence of something rather than anything real—and therefore, it is in no way a component of God’s creative activity. To God, Augustine wrote in his Confessions, “evil is utterly not.”⁴⁸ [64] An apt analogy would seem to be that blindness is not some substantial reality but an absence of sight.

Although “theodicy” as a conceptual term only arose in the eighteenth century with Gottfried Leibniz, the issue it identifies is certainly as old as the Book of Job, to wit, how can God be perceived as both good and powerful if evil exists? Augustine essentially swept the ground out from under theodicy’s moorings by maintaining that evil in fact has no independent existence at all. To the extent that we experience evil, that is due to the perversion of our wills in our failure to actualize God’s intentions for us⁴⁹—which of course, unsatisfyingly, leads us right back to the previous threads of the omnipotent God’s foreknowledge and predestination. The enigma remains.

GOD AND LOVE

Over a century ago the German scholar Otto Sheel recognized that, for Augustine, “the idea of absolute causality and omnipotence is raised to a position of greater importance than the Father’s love.”⁵⁰ There are understandable reasons for that. Augustine read his Bible in a Latin translation and was not directly conversant with the Hebrew and Greek terms hesed and agape. He had to rely on what was available to him in his native Latin, primarily, caritas, from which the English “charity” is derived, but which for Augustine contained the meaning of “desiring.”

In one of his earliest works, On Christian Doctrine (397), Augustine proposed that God can love us in only two possible ways: by enjoying us (frui), or using us (uti). This seems to be an unfortunate distortion of the biblical meaning of love as willing—and acting for—the well-being of the beloved. But for Augustine:

If He [God] enjoys us, He needs some good of ours, but no sane person would say this. For every good of ours either is God or comes from God . . . Therefore He does not enjoy us but uses us. For if He did neither, I cannot see how He could love us.⁵¹

But God, being utterly impassive and wholly self-contained, truly has “no use” for us either, after all. God, strictly speaking, needs only God.⁵² As Thomas Oord has concluded, regarding Augustine’s view, [65] “God has no desires we could possibly satisfy. We do not contribute to a God who has all value eternally in God’s unchanging person.”⁵³

In searching for a clear path through this conceptual morass, we return to the centrality of focus with which this section began, God’s Trinity of equal relations. God as trinitarian is eternally “One [the Father] who loves Him [the Son[ who is from Himself, and One [the Son] who loves Him [the Father] from whom He is, and Love itself [the Holy Spirit].”⁵⁴ Accordingly, Augustine maintained that the Holy Spirit is none other than “the bond of love that exists between the Father and the Son,”⁵⁵ and the “person” within the Trinity to which we are indebted for the gift of God’s love outward to us and to all of creation.⁵⁶ “Therefore the Holy Spirit, of whom He hath given us, makes us to abide in God, and Him in us; and this it is that love does. Therefore He is the God that is love.”⁵⁷ But the gift of love we receive from the Holy Spirit is not so much God’s love of us as it is our own God-derived ability to love. As is expressed in 1 John 4:16, “We love because he [God] first loved us.”⁵⁸

Augustine could pen eloquent paeans to this facet of God. In his sermon on 1 John 4, he waxed poetic:

I do not know whether love could be commended to us more magnificently than in the words, ‘God is pure love’. Brief praise and great praise! Brief in word and great in meaning. How quickly one says it: ‘God is love’. And this is brief: if you were to count it, it is one thing; if you were to weigh it, how substantial it is!⁵⁹

Would that he had stayed true to this insight. But because God in God’s self-sufficiency desires nothing from us and has no constitutive use for us, affirming any substantial meaning to the notion that God “loves” us becomes problematic. There is certainly a component of love in God’s sanctifying grace that saves (some of) us from eternal damnation. But nothing within creation can be worthy as a recipient of God’s perfect love because that love can have as its true object only that which is also perfect—namely, God’s trinitarian self.

The key implication is an obvious one, discerned by many: The only valid object of God’s love . . . is God! And that is because only God is truly and perfectly worthy of God’s love. John Burnaby saw rightly [66] that “Augustine in his zeal for the divine self-sufficiency is too fearful of representing the loving will of God as a real seeking of our human love. Perfect love must be eternally in the Holy Trinity.”⁶⁰ God’s love of anything and anyone not God can only be a wholly disinterested love,⁶¹ which renders the meaning of such love problematic. Oord concludes that for Augustine, “God ceaselessly loves Godself in contemplation and enjoyment in the Trinity’s inner life.”⁶² It is only the understanding of the threefold interrelationship of persons within the Trinity that allows Augustine barely to escape the charge that his position amounts to a sort of divine narcissism.

POWER AND LOVE: THE PERILOUS FLAW

Augustine erected the conceptual edifice that dominated the landscape of Christian thinking for a millennium and a half, with doctrines reaching far beyond the select focus presented here. But in this critical arena of the relationship between God’s power and God’s love, he established a structure of thought that proved problematic to the extreme. In his overarching concentration on God’s absolute immutability, the living God of the biblical witness “lives,” now, only in a timeless eternity of trinitarian interrelatedness, sans passion, sans timely interaction, sans any affect creation can have on God.

In particular, Augustine’s position on predestination, necessitated by his championing of God’s unopposable omnipotence, gives one pause. Did God create us out of love? Why, then, are most souls damned to eternal Hell by the justice of God while only some are saved by the grace of God? What kind of God deliberately creates subjects that are foredoomed to be the eternal victims of God’s powerful and righteous wrath? For Pelikan, the “sovereignty of divine power and divine grace” was the double focus of Augustine that led to his presenting his doctrine of double predestination, which protected the absoluteness of God’s power while denying the absoluteness of God’s love!⁶³ And Burnaby saw that “Augustine never realized that his own conception of grace required nothing less than a revolution in his thought of the divine omnipotence.”⁶⁴

Power has triumphed. Love has been truncated, soaring flames reduced to mere ash. Must it ever be so? Let us explore how this [67] theological architecture held up or was extended and modified over the ensuing centuries.

ENDNOTES

1. The doctrine of the divine right of kings, for example, was not explicity promulgated until the reign of James I of England in the seventeenth century.
2. See The Library of Christian Classics, vol. III: Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. Edward Rochie Hardie (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1954), 113–214.
3. This critical emphasis on internal triune relatedness in God is explicitly spelled out in Oration 3:16 (LCC III, 171).
4. Gregory of Nyssa, An Answer to Ablabius, LCC III, 262.
5. Ibid., 263. All subsequent references to “Gregory” in this chapter are to Gregory of Nyssa.
6. Ibid., 264.
7. Gregory of Nyssa, An Address on Religious Instruction, LCC III, 296 (sec. 20).
8. Ibid., 300f. (sec. 24), emphasis mine. He went on to say: “God’s transcendent power is not so much displayed in the vastness of the heavens, or the luster of the stars, or the orderly arrangement of the universe or his perpetual oversight of it, as in his condescension to our weak nature . . . We marvel at the way the Godhead was entwined in human nature and, while becoming man, did not cease to be God” (301).
9. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and Resurrection, in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds., A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd Series (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1893), 5:465. Available online in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at www.ccel. org/ccel/schaff/npnf205.toc.html
10. See particularly Gregory’s presentation of this notion in his Against Eunomius, in Schaff and Wace, op. cit., sections 1:22 and 2:2.
11. Gregory of Nyssa, Answer to Eunomius’ Second Book, in Schaff and Wace, op. cit., 5:308, emphasis mine.
12. Gregory denied that evil has any positive existence. Understood as [68] the absence of the good, it is therefore not anything God created or is in any way responsible for. See An Address on Religious Instruction, LCC III, 282, 285 (sec. 7, 8).
13. See Augustine’s Confessions, the whole of Book 7.
14. Augustine of Hippo, On the Trinity, tr. Arthur West Haddan, in Philip Schaff, ed., A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Vol. 3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1886), Book 15, Ch. 28, Para. 51. Available online at www.ccel.com.
15. Ibid., 3. Preface.
16. Ibid., 5.8.9.
17. Ibid., 1.4.7.
18. Ibid., 1.11-12.
19. Ibid., 4.20.29. See also the preceding paragraphs in this chapter.
20. Augustine, Confessions, 7:1. This and subsequent quotes are from the translation by F. J. Sheed, The Confessions of St. Augustine: Books I–X (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1942); here, p. 107.
21. Ibid., 7:9 (Sheed, 116). See also 7:20: “Now that I had read the books of the Platonists and had been set by them towards the search for a truth that is incorporeal” (Sheed, 123.)
22. Ibid., 7:10 (Sheed, 118).
23. Augustine, On the Trinity, 4.Preface.
24. Ibid., 4.18.24.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 5.2.3.
27. Ibid., 5.16.17.
28. Augustine, The City of God, X.12. The translated quotes are by Henry Bettenson in the Penguin edition (Baltimore: 1972), 390f. Toward the end of this massive tome, Augustine challenged the biblical narratives on God’s having a change of mind or will by affirming that “it is the people who change, rather than God; and they find him, in a sense, ‘changed’ in their experience.” Whatever we perceive as new from our perspective within history “has been prepared from all eternity in his [God’s] unchanging will.” XXII.2 (Bettenson, 1023, 1025).
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29. Ibid., XI.21 (Bettenson, 452).
30. Augustine, On the Trinity, 5.16.17.
31. Ibid., 5.8.9.
32. See Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 1.8; tr. J. F. Shaw, in Philip Schaff, ed., A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church , Vol. 2. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1886). Online at www.ccel.org.
33. Augustine, The City of God, XI.10 (Bettenson, 440).
34. Ibid. (Bettenson, 440–42, ital. original).
35. Augustine, On the Trinity, 5.8.9. (Footnote 16, above.) See also The City of God, XI.24.
36. Augustine, The City of God, IV.34 (Bettenson, 176). Augustine interpreted God’s activity in relation to the sack of Rome by Alaric and his Goths. “God’s providence constantly uses war to correct and chasten the corrupt morals of mankind.” Ibid., I.2 (Bettenson, 6).
37. Ibid., V.22 (Bettenson, 215f.)
38. Ibid., XXI.7 (Bettenson, 977).
39. Augustine, On the Trinity, 3.9.17.
40. See Augustine, Confessions, 12.7-8. See also Scott MacDonald, “The Divine Nature,” in Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 84; and William A. Christian’s cogent discussion on Augustine’s doctrine of creation out of nothing in his essay on “The Creation of the World,” in Roy W. Battenhouse, ed., A Companion to the Study of St. Augustine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 332–36.
41. Augustine, The City of God, V.9 (Bettenson, 190).
42. Ibid., XIV.11 (Bettenson, 568).
43. Ibid., XXII.2 (Bettenson, 1023).
44. Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints, X.19, tr. Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, tr. rev. Benjamin B. Warfield, in Philip Schaff, ed., A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church , Vol. 5. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1886). Online at www.ccel.org.
45. Augustine, The City of God, XV.1 (Bettenson, 595).
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46. Albert C. Outler, “The Person and Work of Christ,” in A Companion to the Study of St. Augustine, 360.
47. See ft. 12, above.
48. Augustine, Confessions, 7:13. So also, in The City of God, XII.7, he wrote: “The truth is that one should not try to find an efficient cause for a wrong choice. It is not a matter of efficiency, but of deficiency; the evil will itself is not effective but defective” (Bettenson, 479).
49. Augustine’s position on God and evil is insightfully spelled out by John Hick in his Evil and the God of Love, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), chs. 3-4, 8, cogently summarized by Tyrone Inbody, The Transforming God (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 40–42.
50. Otto Sheel, Die Anschauung Augustins über Christi Person und Werk, 145, as quoted (and translated) by Jaroskav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 1:295.
51. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Bk 1, Ch. 31, tr. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1958), 27.
52. Ibid., 1.32: “That use which God is said to make of us is made not to His utility but to ours” (Robertson, 27).
53. Thomas Jay Oord, The Nature of Love: a Theology (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2010), 68.
54. Augustine, On the Trinity, 6.5.7.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 15.18–19.
57. Ibid., 15.17.31.
58. See, e.g., Augustine, Ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John, 7.6, tr. H. Browne, in Philip Schaff, ed., A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church , Vol. 7. Online at www.ccel. org. John Burnaby saw perceptibly that when Augustine wrote of the love of God, he meant our love of God, not God’s love of us. But this is, indeed, “God’s own love which is ours by His gift.” Burnaby, Amor Dei: a Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1938), 99.
59. Ibid., 9.1.
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60. Burnaby, op cit., 166.
61. Ibid., 167.
62. Oord, The Nature of Love, 69, referencing Augustine, On the Trinity, 9.2.
63. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 1:297.
64. Burnaby, 230. So also, Daniel Day Williams noted that Augustine’s “determination to keep all time and becoming apart from God led to disastrous consequences for the understanding of God’s love,” particularly including the loss of genuine human freedom. See The Spirit and the Forms of Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 75.

“What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?” Tertullian famously queried around the turn of the third century CE (Prescription Against Heretics, 7).¹ The question might just as well be turned on its head: What has Jerusalem to do with Athens?

The early encounter of the Christian witness with prevailing Hellenistic philosophical notions about the nature of God was of crucial importance in establishing the universal relevance of the Judeo-Christian story about God’s dealings with humanity. To confirm its credibility, the message had to move beyond its initial eastern Mediterranean ghetto by engaging the broader social context into which it was continually expanding. That this interaction between biblical testimony and Greek philosophy occurred could therefore be considered a critical, even necessary, development. How it turned out can be seen to have corrupted essential elements of the biblical vision, especially the central notion of a dynamic, living deity for whom love is at the core of divine manifestations of power. And that, in turn, spun out unfortunate consequences that have held sway for two millennia.²

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The focus of my investigation here was not of paramount concern to early Christian theologians and apologists. Their primary objective was to establish God’s relation to Jesus, or rather, how Jesus could somehow be both visibly and fully human yet fundamentally divine, which led eventually to the development and refinement of a doctrine of the Trinity. At the same time, there were concentrated efforts to confirm God as “uncreated creator” of all that is, to recognize God’s lordship over all that God has created, and to defend God’s power over death by virtue of Jesus’ resurrection. The climate was one of ferment and conflict, so that corrupting alternatives, such as Marcionism and other dualisms, were ardently opposed. To this short list, Jaroslav Pelikan would add the protecting of God’s “otherness,” particularly in regard to God’s “sovereign independence.”³

It seems at first glance that understanding God as love was simply a given, not requiring any special defense, because that love was so clearly manifest in the person of Jesus Christ as well as in the grace of redemption. But Robert Grant half a century ago took notice of how difficult it was for early Christian theologians “to make sense of the basic affirmation that God is love.” Although, according to Grant, what characterizes the God of the gospels is “all-inclusive love,” the theme of love was one that philosophical theologians treated “only with difficulty”; after the New Testament, we encounter “relatively few references to God’s love” in the early Christian literature.⁴ The subject of God’s power, however, is an altogether different matter.

THE ASSURANCE OF DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE

EARLY EFFORTS TO CHARACTERIZE GOD’S POWER

A defense of God’s absolute and unopposable omnipotence over all that God has created came to dominate non-canonical Christian theologizing from early on, even though other avenues were available to be pursued. Writing early in the second century CE, Clement of Rome identified God as the “Master of the universe” (1 Clement 8:2) who oversees without dissension or opposition the divinely ordained orderliness of all that transpires in creation (20:1–12). “Nothing is impossible to God except [39] for lying . . . By his majestic word he established the universe, and by his word he can bring it to an end” (27:2, 4) God “will do everything when he wants to and as he wants to” (27:5).⁵

Aristides of Athens, ca. 125, appears to have been the first to articulate this for Christians in specifically philosophical form. Drawing on Aristotelian tradition, Aristides wrote: “I perceived that the world and all that is therein are moved by the power of another, and I understood that he who moves them is God, who is hidden in them, and veiled by them. And it is manifest that that which causes motion is more powerful than that which is moved” (Apology, sec. 1). And later on he observed that Christians take from their Jewish forebears the understanding that God is “one, the Creator of all, and omnipotent” (14).⁶

A generation passed without any explicit reinforcement of a doctrine of divine omnipotence. Writers struggled to frame their understanding in more ambiguous terms. Justin Martyr lifted up the Logos of God as the means, or bridge, by which an absolute and unchanging deity can have relations with the created order. Jesus Christ is presented as the “first Power after God the Father and Master of all” (1st Apology 32). But this is not unlimited: Humans have “free choice” and “power of choice,” within the embrace of God’s perfect foreknowledge (43f.). So also, Justin’s onetime pupil Tatian restricted the phrase “all power” to God’s initial creative activity; God’s creation, especially humanity, is not without power altogether but simply is not “of equal power with God” (Address to the Greeks, 5).

In his A Plea for Christians (177 CE), Athenagoras employed philosophical abstractions to identify God through negations of observable features of creation: God is “uncreated, eternal, invisible, impassible, incomprehensible, illimitable” (sec. 10). In respect to divine power, all Athenagoras could posit is that it is “indescribable” (10). He then went on to acknowledge that “there are other powers which surround matter and pervade it,” but nothing is opposed to God to such an extent that it can obviate God’s intentions: “if anything did manage to set itself up against God, it would cease to exist. It would fall to pieces by the power and might of God” (24).

So far, this appears to be the championing of divine power as superior to, though not exclusive of, all other centers of power. That is found [40] also in the contemporaneous Apology that Theophilus of Antioch wrote To Autolycus (180 CE), where he identified God as “in power incomparable” (1.3), and “more powerful than man” (2.4). To illustrate that relationship more vividly, Theophilus drew attention to the heavenly bodies: “For the sun is a type of God, and the moon of man. And as the sun far surpasses the moon in power and glory, so far does God surpass man. And as the sun remains ever full, never becoming less, so does God always abide perfect, being full of all power . . . But the moon wanes monthly” (2.15).⁷

UNQUALIFIED OMNIPOTENCE: THE CONTRIBUTION OF IRENAEUS

It is only when we turn to Irenaeus of Lyons that we encounter full blown a philosophical defense of divine omnipotence, but precisely in Irenaeus we are dealing with a leading Christian thinker of his time whose influence was extensive.⁸

When he became bishop of the church of Lyons, in Gaul, Irenaeus saw as his primary task the championing of legitimate Christian doctrine against the corruptions of Gnostic thought, primarily by attacking the errors of Valentinus and his followers. Valentinus was active ca. 120–160 CE, from Alexandria to Rome. Irenaeus summarized Valentinus’ basic position in Against Heresies (2.11.1) as particularly full of intermediate entities between a perfect God and this world’s creation, who constitute a “Pleroma” of secondary but powerful beings that account for the far less than perfect state of creaturely affairs.

This supplies the context for Ireneaus’ unequivocal insistence on the all-encompassing omnipotence of the true God of Christianity. God is “the Omnipotent” (AH 2.5.4), free and independent, “the Lord Omnipotent” (4.17.3,5).⁹ And this is especially reflected in God’s act of initial creation. For Irenaeus, in contrast to his heretical opponents, God worked with nothing already extant when God began to create. The “raw materials” were of God’s own formulating. “God, according to His pleasure, in the exercise of His own will and power formed all things . . . out of what did not previously exist” (2.10:2). “God (being powerful, and rich in all resources) created matter itself ” (2.10:3). God “Himself called into being the substance of His creation” (2.10:4). So [41] therefore, if God the Creator “made all things freely, and by His own power, and arranged and finished them, and His will is the substance of all things, then he is discovered to be the one only God who created all things, who alone is Omnipotent” (2.30.9).¹⁰

The manner in which Irenaeus attempted to integrate God’s omnipotence with God’s love was essentially limited to God’s redemptive activity through Jesus Christ: The love of God is manifest in that God does not leave us to our just desserts but ultimately saves us from the folly of our ways. In that respect, by far the most extensive references in Irenaeus to divine love name not the Father but the Son; the one who is “a most holy and merciful Lord, who loves the human race” is precisely the Savior (3.18.6). Even so, one passage does tie the two foci together: It is explicitly through God’s “love and power” that God “shall overcome the substance of created nature” (4.38.4). The distinction that later follows this is that the Creator “is, in respect to His love, the Father; but in respect to His power, He is Lord” (5.17.1).

THE FLOWERING OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL DIALOGUE AT ALEXANDRIA

For Clement of Alexandria, writing toward the end of the second century CE, philosophy is “the handmaid of theology,” given to the Greeks as preparation for Christ in a manner similar to the Law being given to the Hebrews (Stromata, 1:5). In this perspective he was following a trail first blazed by a fellow Alexandrian a century and a half earlier, the Jewish philosopher Philo, a contemporary of Jesus who attempted to clothe the Septuagint in amenable patterns from Greek philosophy, particularly Platonism.¹¹ His synthetic effort is echoed throughout the corpus of Clement’s writings, which are far less systematic in approach than one would wish; the Stromata (“Miscellanies”) is less an orderly treatment of theological topics than a series of notes woven into a tapestry whose warp and woof are difficult to discern.¹²

Concerning God, Clement pursued two fundamental principles: that God is beyond the reach even of abstract human language and therefore must be identified by what God is not, but that, at the same time, God must be understood as “the omnipotent God” (Stromata, 1.24): “Nothing withstands God, nothing opposes Him: seeing He is [42] Lord and omnipotent” (1:17). This is cogently articulated in a passage meriting quotation at length because of how it summarizes in one place the relationship of these two basic affirmations:

This discourse respecting God is most difficult to handle. For since the first principle of everything is difficult to find out, the absolutely first and oldest principle, which is the cause of all other things being and having been, is difficult to exhibit. For how can that be expressed which is neither genus, nor difference, nor species, nor individual, nor number, nay more, is neither an event or that to which an event happens? No one can rightly express Him wholly. For on account of His greatness, He is ranked as the All, and is the Father of the universe. Nor are any parts to be predicated of Him.

For the One is indivisible; wherefore also it is infinite, not considered with reference to inscrutability, but with reference to its being without dimensions, and not having a limit. And therefore it is without form and name.

And if we name it, we do not do so properly, terming it either the One, or the Good, or Mind, or Absolute Being, or Father, or God, or Creator or Lord. We speak not as supplying His name; but for want, we use good names, in order that the mind may have these as points of support, so as not to err in other respects. For each one by itself does not express God, but all together are indicative of the power of the Omnipotent. (5.12)

The crux of the matter is that God is conceived to be beyond division or parts, beyond dimensions, beyond individuation, beyond form, not properly identified by any name—but wholly power without qualification or limitation.

A PHILOSOPHICAL COUNTERPOINT

ORIGEN AND THE LIMITS ON DIVINE POWER

Clement’s successor and theological superior at Alexandria was Origen, who began teaching at the tender age of eighteen when his tutor had to flee to avoid the latest round of persecutions. He eventually penned the [43] systematic treatise that his teacher had aspired to but never completed, entitled On First Principles. In it, toward the outset (1.2.10), Origen offered an extended analysis of the nature of divine omnipotence. Since there was never a time when God was not almighty, and since God must have something over which to exercise power in order to be deemed omnipotent, then God already contained the universe somehow within Godself. Quoting Psalm 104:24 that “’thou has made all things in wisdom’,” and identifying that wisdom with the Christ, Origen could maintain that “wisdom, through which God is called Almighty, has a share even in the glory of omnipotence. For it is through wisdom, which is Christ, that God holds power over all things.” So the omnipotence of Father and Son “is one and the same,” and Jesus as Lord is “glorified as being the effluence of omnipotence.” And what is this “glory of omnipotence”? It is God the Father holding “dominion over all things,” a dominion he “exercises through his Word.” Thereupon Origen concluded by asserting: “this is the purest and brightest glory of omnipotence, that the universe is held in subjection by reason and wisdom, and not by force and necessity.”¹³

This implicit modification of divine omnipotence, subjugating it to divine “reason and wisdom,” hints at the direction in which Origen was moving. Sheer exercise of power somehow does not get at the heart of what characterizes God’s activity. “This blessed and ruling power,” he went on to declare, “is the good God and kindly Father of all, at once beneficent power and creative power, that is, the power that does good and creates and providentially sustains . . . these powers which are in God, nay, which are God.”¹⁴ Therefore, divine omnipotence does not compel or overpower. God “has so ordered everything that each spirit or soul . . . should not be compelled by force against its free choice to any action except that to which the motions of its own mind lead it.”¹⁵ With all these caveats against unqualified omnipotence being laid down like stepping stones to a new horizon of view, Origen finally arrived at a provocative conclusion: “we must maintain that even the power of God is finite, and we must not, under pretext of praising him, lose sight of his limitations.”¹⁶ Therefore he warned toward the very close of his treatise, “let no one take offence at the saying, if we put limits even to the power of God.”¹⁷

[44]

A PATH NOT TAKEN: PERSUASIVE POWER IN PLATO’S TIMAEUS

Origen’s mental wrestling with the qualified character of divine power already had a close kinsman in Plato in the dialogue known as the Timaeus, from the sixth century CE. The work was in wide circulation among the philosophically minded Christians of the period under discussion here, although I have found no indication that Origen drew on its intriguing propositions.

Plato presented two orders of existence: that which is, i.e., being, which is unchanging and eternal and is “always real” (e.g., the Platonic forms), and that which becomes (génesis) “and is never real.”¹⁸ He then introduced a concept of initial creation of “that which becomes” that echoes closely the insights of Genesis 1:1–2 far to the south in Judea: creation as an act of bringing order out of chaos. “Desiring, then, that all things should be good and, so far as might be, nothing imperfect, the god [Demiurge] took over all that is visible—not at rest, but in discordant and unordered motion—and brought it from disorder into order.”¹⁹

We have already seen how defending God’s omnipotence required the development of a doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in Theophilus and Irenaeus, a notion not at all explicit in Genesis 1:2 where, when God began to create, all was “a formless void.” The terms Plato used are very different: “Reason” and “Necessity.” Necessity is responsible for that which arises by chance, “at random and without order.”²⁰ In a very real sense, it is the “given” upon which the Demiurge worked his “rational” activity of bringing order out of chaos. Thereupon Plato wrote: “the generation of this universe was a mixed result of the combination of Necessity and Reason. Reason overruled Necessity by persuading her to guide the greatest part of things that become toward what is best; in that way and on that principle this universe was fashioned in the beginning by the victory of reasonable persuasion over Necessity.”²¹

This focus on divine power as persuasive, not coercive or controlling or overpowering, is harmonious with what we have already observed in the biblical witness, though it is a path not trod by any but a few of the early Christian synthesizers of Hellenistic philosophical thought. The one place where the exception is clearly visible is in the anonymous Letter to Diognetus from the mid-second century CE, where [45] God’s use of persuasive and not coercive power is affirmed in regard to how God leads wayward humanity to salvation: The invisible God, the Ruler and Creator of all, sent “the Designer and Maker of the universe himself, by whom he created . . . like a king sending his son who is himself a king. He sent him as God; he sent him as man to men. He willed to save man by persuasion, not by compulsion, for compulsion is not God’s way of working.”²²

“WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT”²³—DIVINE IMPASSIBILITY

OPENINGS TOWARD THE RETENTION OF GOD AS LOVE

Nowhere in the biblical witness do we find an assertion that “God is power.” Power is certainly something that God wields, as we have encountered from the very outset. But 1 John does contain the bold proclamation, “God is love” (4:8,16), as we have seen. And the everlasting love that God has for God’s covenant people, articulated throughout the Old Testament, comes to fruition for Christians in the embodiment of divine love manifest in Jesus Christ. What, then, became the fate of this key element of biblical understanding when his followers attempted to incorporate the insights of Hellenistic philosophy into their worldview? Did it remain at the center of the being and activity of a dynamic, living deity, or did it become reduced to something quite otherwise?

Let children be taught that love itself has power, Clement of Rome proposed (1 Clement 21:8). He went on to sing love’s praises (49, 50) with phrases that echo 1 Corinthians 13, observing that “the bond of God’s love” (49:2) is what unites God and us, so that “you see, brothers, how great and amazing love is, and how its perfection is beyond description” (50:1). A very soft expression is found in Aristides of Athens who observed that Christians “know the loving-kindnesses of God toward them” (Apology, XVI). And the writer of the Letter to Diognetus noted that God gave up God’s Son “to show at last his goodness and power. O the overflowing kindness and love of God toward man!” (9:2).

Intriguingly, the most extensive assertions of the preeminence of God’s love seem to have been made by those whom the church came to vilify as proponents of heresies. Hippolytus of Rome, early in the third [46] century CE, referenced the gnostic Valentinus as having followed 1 John in naming God as “wholly love,” in relation to which “love is not love unless there is something loved.”²⁴

The case of Marcion is somewhat complex. He was active early in the second century CE and is well known for having posited not one but two Gods, one represented in the Old Testament and seen as responsible for the world’s creation, the other encountered only in the New Testament in the teaching of Jesus and specifically in the theology of Paul. Our access to his work is essentially through the writings of those who opposed him, most extensively in Tertullian’s Against Marcion.

Over a century ago, Adolf von Harnack interpreted this contrast in terms of “the good God of love” over against the creator God.²⁵ But Harnack also noted that Marcion’s recurring Latin expression for the former was “solius bonitatis,”²⁶ that is, “only good.” Are “goodness” and “love” synonymous terms? Jaroslav Pelikan is more cautious, recognizing that Marcion’s God of “simple goodness,” per Tertullian, is characterized by “serenity and mildness”²⁷ and not by any active expression of powerful love. Even so, Marcion clearly tried to lift up a God of sublime benevolence for the alternative church he founded, but he was able to do so only by sacrificing the essential unity between love (his Supreme God) and power (his unloving Creator God).²⁸

THE HEAVY BURDEN OF THE DOCTRINES OF GOD’S IMMUTABILITY AND IMPASSIBILITY

The prevailing winds that blew through the doctrinal formulations of the early centuries of the church were jarring nor’easters insofar as any biblical insight into a dynamic and interactive God of love is concerned. Conceptual wreckage was left in their wake. This is especially apparent when questions of change and passion were raised concerning the essential being of God.

The issue arose early.²⁹ Justin wrote of the “impassible God” in his First Apology (sec. 25). The Greek word is apathes, akin to the English “apathetic,” conveying an absence of passion, an unfeeling indifference. Athenagoras, as we saw earlier, echoed this in his identifying of God through negations of the known world (A Plea for Christians, sec. 10). Irenaeus championed this understanding explicitly: “The Father of all” [47] is no less than “He who is impassible” (Against Heresies, 2.12.1).³⁰ For Clement of Alexandria, this is true both for the nature of God (Stromata, 2.16) and for the highest achievable good of those who would truly embody the divine image: “Endurance also itself forces its way to the divine likeness, reaping as its fruit impassibility” (2.20). In sharp contrast to the Old Testament testimonies to the wrath of God and the yearning of God for the covenant people to mend their ways, Clement wrote, “God is impassible, free of anger, destitute of desire” (4.23).

We have concentrated here on impassibility but that theme is tightly interlocked with its companion, immutability, i.e., changelessness. That God is constant in God’s purposes goes without saying insofar as the biblical narratives are concerned. But we have had occasion to observe the frequency of testimony that God “changed God’s mind” about this or that. So what is at work here in insisting on applying abstract philosophical concepts of immutability and impassibility to the Christian’s God?

For the Greeks, change was problematic and ephemeral, less than “truly real.” That can readily be discerned in Plato’s notion of the eternal Forms or Ideas, which come to be varyingly embodied in passing moments but which themselves are unchanging and unaffected by how the world momentarily incarnates them. We have encountered this already in Plato’s Timaeus.

A very close corollary has to do with how the attribute of perfection can be applied to divine reality. Capacity for change is impossible to a Being characterized as perfect for the simple reason that movement would necessarily occur from the less to the more perfect, or the converse. But either direction would deny any constancy of absolute perfection.

Thus, the trap the integrators of Bible and philosophy set for themselves: Inasmuch as God can never be properly conceived as less than perfect, all the qualities of ongoing dynamic interaction of God with God’s creation got subsumed under categories of pure thought. Any tinge of affectedness or alteration on the part of God must be dutifully rejected. And, it was.

So, what does love have to do with it, insofar as God is concerned? A kernel remains, but stripped of its satisfying richness. God’s love has [48] been reduced to a stance God takes unswervingly toward the creation and fallen humanity, bereft of passion and particularity, an eternal and unchanging love utterly unaffected by the responses of the beloved. The question remains: Is that truly love?

ANOTHER PATH NOT TAKEN: INSIGHTS OF THE LATER ORIGEN

Once again, an alternative avenue of possibility presented itself to the church as a way of breaking through this conceptual logjam. Toward the end of his long career, Origen apparently experienced a change of heart of major proportions. In his Homily on Ezekiel, he wrote:

What is that affection whereby on our account He [Christ] is affected? It is the affection of love. The Father Himself, too, the God of the Universe, long suffering, and of great compassion, full of pity, is not He in a manner liable to affection? Are you unaware that, when He orders the affairs of men, He is subject to the affections of humanity? . . . The very Father is not impassible [Ipse pater non est impassibilis], without affection. If we pray to him, He feels pity and sympathy. He experiences an affection of love. He concerns himself with things in which, by the majesty of His nature, He can have no concern, and for our sakes He bears the affections of men. (6.6)³¹

This rejection of apatheia as not an appropriate stance for God or for God’s people was sadly bypassed as the church’s thinking continued to move onward through time. The “affection of love” held insufficient appeal to those whose heads had been irreversibly turned toward idealized abstractions. Origen, for this and other idiosyncrasies such as his universalist doctrine of apokatastasis,³² came to be identified not as orthodox but heterodox by the church’s official leadership. His time would have to come later.

WHAT HAS BEEN LOST?

Colin Gunton has astutely observed that “the Christian doctrine of God is for much of its history a hybrid of two organisms,” namely the biblical understanding of God as living and dynamic, and the Greek categories [49] of absolute perfection. The doctrine of divine attributes “has often been approached using the wrong method; developing the wrong content; and even when that has not been entirely the case, treating things in the wrong order,” resulting in a “tangled web” of relations between Hebrew and Greek notions.³³ This was certainly true in those initial centuries of conceptual reflection.

Wolfhart Pannenberg concluded his incisive overview of the period with the observation that one must “spare the Christian doctrine of God from the gap between the incomprehensible essence and the historical action of God, by virtue of which each threatens to make the other impossible,” and went on to state that “in the recasting of the philosophical concept of God by early Christian theology considerable remnants were left out, which have become a burden in the history of Christian thought.”³⁴

What we have seen in this chapter is a critical loss of any incipient uniting of divine power and divine love that the biblical record endeavored to convey, with overwhelming power coming to the fore and love being reduced to something less than its biblical richness of insight and imagery. An absolutely powerful God for whom love is but one attribute among many is neither palatable nor biblical. The establishment of the doctrine of divine omnipotence has set the stage for problematic attempts to shoehorn love back into the portrayal of divinity without doing injustices either to the notion of love or the understandings of power. As we shall have occasion to see, those attempts were doomed from the start.

ENDNOTES

1. Quotations from the original sources in this chapter are taken from the huge trove of English translations on the easily accessible website “www.earlychristianwritings.com.”
2. Wolfhart Pannenberg has rightly pointed out that Christian theology cannot subsume Christian motifs into a status of mere illustrations of a philosophical idea of God. The task of the theologian, he contends, is to engage philosophy with its own “assimilative, transforming power.” “Christian theology can link up with the philosophical idea of God only [50] by breaking through it at the same time . . . Theology must push on to the basic elements of the philosophical idea of God and transform those elements in the critical light of the biblical idea of God.” (“The Appropriation of the Philosophical Concept of God as a Dogmatic Problem of Early Christian Theology,” in Basic Questions in Theology, Volume II, trans. George H. Kehm [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971], 140, 139.) My pivotal question is indeed whether, in those initial formative centuries of theological reflection, it was rather the core of the Christian witness itself that became transformed, to its ongoing detriment. As Daniel Day Williams expressed it, “the fusing of Christian faith with Greek metaphysics was, if not a disaster, a wrong turn from which theology has yet to recover.” (The Spirit and the Forms of Love [New York: Harper & Row, 1968], 17.)
3. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. I: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), 52.
4. Robert M. Grant, The Early Christian Doctrine of God (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1966), 2–4.
5. Although the technical term is nowhere used by Clement, Pannenberg—correctly, I believe—calls this “the freedom of God’s active omnipotence” (op. cit., 175f.).
6. Aristides characteristically named the deity as “God Almighty”—theos pantokrator, in the Greek. Pantokrator explicitly means “ruler of all.”
7. Theophilus neglected to push the analogy further in the direction that the moon (humankind) has no light/power of its own but shines only with the reflected light/power of the sun (God).
8. Pannenberg praises Irenaeus’ attempts at a Christian philosophical synthesis as superior even to the Alexandrians (Clement, Origen) who followed (op. cit., 178f.).
9. For an insightful critique of Irenaeus’ theology of God’s power, see Richard Norris, “The Transcendence and Freedom of God: Irenaeus, the Greek Tradition and Gnosticism,” in William R. Schoedel and Robert L. Wilken, eds., Early Christian Literature and the Classical Intellectual Tradition: In Honorem Robert M. Grant (Paris: Editions Beauchesne, 1979), 87–100.
10. Colin Gunton identifies Irenaeus as the first explicitly to expound the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, in Act and Being: Towards a Theology [51] of the Divine Attributes (London: SCM Press, 2002), 26. Certainly he was the first to give it extensive emphasis, although the notion may well have been “in the air” in the latter half of the second century CE. Already Theophilus, far to the East in Antioch, wrote around the same period of time that “the power of God is manifested in this, that out of things that are not He makes whatever He pleases” (To Autolycus, 2.4).
11. Philo’s body of work is available in English translation at www.earlyjewishwritings.com/philo.html. See also the Philo entry in the “Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy” at www.iep.utm.edu/philo/.
12. See Justo Gonzalez, A History of Christian Thought (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1970), 1:196f.
13. The quotations here are from Origen, On First Principles, tr. G. W. Butterworth (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), Book 1, chapter 2, paragraph 10, found on pp. 23–25. The emphasis is mine.
14. Ibid., 1.4.3 (p. 41). Again, the emphasis is my own.
15. Ibid., 2.1.2 (p. 77).
16. Ibid., 2.9.1 (p. 129). This wording is found only in an original Greek manuscript; Rufinus altered it in his Latin translation.
17. Ibid., 4.4.8 (p. 323). This so scandalized Rufinus that he omitted the passage altogether.
18. Francis M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato translated with a running commentary (London and Henbley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1937), 27D-28A (22).
19. Ibid., 30A (33).
20. Ibid., 46E (157).
21. Ibid., 48A (160), emphasis mine. Cornford recognized that Plato’s Demiurge is anything but omnipotent (36f., 165). “The creation of the world—said Plato—is the victory of persuasion over force,” according to Alfred North Whitehead in Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 90. Plato “does finally enunciate without qualification the doctrine of the divine persuasion” (170).
22. “Letter to Diognetus,” tr. Eugene R. Fairweather, 7.2,4, in Cyril C. Richardson, ed., Early Christian Fathers, vol. I of The Library of Christian Fathers (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953), 218f.
23. The quote is the title of a song written by Terry Britten and Graham [52] Lyle (1984) and made famous by the singer Tina Turner.
24. Hippolytus, Against All Heresies, 6.29.6. See Grant’s brief discussion in The Early Christian Doctrine of God, 35.
25. Harnack, Adolf, History of Dogma, tr. Neil Buchanan (NY: Dover Publications, 1961), I:272.
26. Ibid., 272, ft. 2.
27. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, I:74, quoting Tertullian, Against Marcion, 1.25 (see also AM 1.6). See Pelikan’s excellent summary of Marcion’s theology, I:71–81.
28. Tertullian’s own position over against the errors of Marcion was the championing of the one God who is both “wholly goodness” and completely “omnipotent . . . able both to help and to hurt.” Such a God is both “perfect father” and “perfect master: a father in His mercy, a master in His discipline; a father in the mildness of His power, a master in its severity; a father who must be loved . . . a master who must needs be feared” (AM 2.13). This is wholly alien to the observation in 1 John 4:18 that “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”
29. See the brief summary of this topic in Grant, The Early Christian Doctrine of God, Appendix II, “The Impassibility of God,” 111–14.
30. See also AH 2.18.6 Even though he acknowledged that Christ truly suffered (AH 3.18.6), Irenaeus found himself having to affirm that the Logos, consistently with the Father, “must be perfect and impassible” (2.17.7) as well.
31. This will come back onto play only in the late twentieth century, particularly in the work of Jürgen Moltmann.
32. This is the doctrine of the universal restoration of all in God’s creation that has fallen from grace. A shorthand way of expressing it is that, in the end, “even the Devil will be saved.” It is a provocative but propitious point of view because it asserts, in essence, that anything less can be understood to be a denial of the all-encompassing power of God’s love!
33. Gunton, Act and Being, 2, 8.
34. Pannenberg, BQT II:181f.

The writers of the New Testament followed the precedent of the Greek translators of the Old Testament some 250 years earlier. “In classical Greek the meaning for agape was broad,” Bernard Brady reminds us. It “was used to suggest a variety of loves, such as affection, fondness, and contentedness. The translators [of the Septuagint] probably chose this term because its use was less common and its meaning more unspecified than either philia or eros. The irony here is that a classic Greek word with a relatively unspecified meaning becomes the most well-known Greek word in the Christian vocabulary.”¹

It is not possible simply to collate hesed and agape into a single understanding, even though they are closely interrelated—and even though the New Testament language of agape clearly owes more to the meanings of love in the Old Testament than to the ordinary meanings of the word in the Hellenistic environment. Much of what is said about God’s agape is consistent with the Old Testament notion of God’s hesed, even as we notice that the scope of the covenant has been radically altered and expanded, with a new basis in the work and words of Jesus. And what we have uncovered in the depictions of God’s hesed is given significantly new dimensions in reflecting on the role of the crucifixion in comprehending [27] God’s power and love—no longer just a basis for power “to the weak,” as we will see, but now a focus on power in weakness itself.

New Testament language for “power” is less anthropomorphic than what we have previously encountered. The “mighty hand” of God recedes into the background. The Greek word most commonly used to denote power is dunamis, from which the English word “dynamic” is derived. The dunamis of the “Most High” coming upon Mary generates her conception of Jesus (Lk 1:35). Jesus challenges the Sadducees that they know neither the scriptures nor the dunamis of God (Mt 22:29). The disciples are bidden by their risen Lord to remain in Jerusalem until they are clothed with dunamis “from on high” (Lk 24:49). Paul states that believers live in the dunamis of God (2 Cor 6:7; 13:3). And in Mt 26:64, dunamis is even identified as synonymous with God: “you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power.”²

The second term, exousia, is slightly ambiguous, bearing the meaning both of power and of authority. Whoever receives Jesus receives from him the exousia to become his child (Jn 1:12), i.e., both the authority to be such but also the power so to live. Jesus granted his twelve disciples the power/authority, exousia, to “cast out demons” (Mk 13:15).

The conjunction of divine power and divine love that we saw emerging in the Old Testament witness comes to fruition in the New. Constants in the manner in which God is perceived in the Old are, according to Fretheim, “unsurpassably exemplified” in the New, and specifically “in the life and death of Jesus Christ.”³ Jesus is the image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15), reflecting the glory of God and bearing the very stamp of God’s nature (Heb. 1:3), having become Emmanuel, God With Us (Mt. 1:23). In his uncompromised transparency to God’s will, Jesus becomes the embodiment of that which was lost to humankind in the fall from innocence. Jesus is the imago Dei uncorrupted, so that John’s Gospel can insist that, for Jesus, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9).⁴ In light of this realization, three provocatively new foci will occupy our immediate attention: the proclamation of the impending arrival of the basileia tou theou; the significance of the crucifixion (and resurrection) of Jesus for understanding the nature of divine power; and the Johannine conviction that love characterizes the very essence of God.

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THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF GOD’S INBREAKING REIGN

A significant element in the background to the Gospel accounts of Jesus is the tradition of apocalyptic literature in which God has come to be viewed as temporarily absent from the current flow of history. The prevailing Synoptic Gospel focus in Jesus’ teaching⁵ on the inbreaking of God’s powerful and empowering reign on earth cannot be fully understood without this conceptual backdrop. Jesus shatters this theme of divine withdrawal with both a message and a lifestyle that proclaims God’s intimate nearness⁶ and participates in a “prolepsis”⁷ of what is yet to come in fullness: The outcast is brought back into the fold, the physically impaired are made whole, the eschatological banquet of inclusivity is experienced here and now.⁸ And yet, these are only foretastes.

Luke echoes Hannah’s prayer in his recounting of Mary’s song of praise, the “Magnificat,” but with significant new nuances. Hannah had observed that “the LORD makes poor and makes rich; he brings low, he also exalts” (1 Sam. 2:7). Mary makes the reversal of exalted and lowly, powerful and powerless, far more explicit:

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty. (Lk 1:52–53)

It is as much promise as past fact, and its scope is far wider than what Mary is experiencing about her own radically reversed situation.

This reversal is at the heart of her son Jesus’ ministry. His parables frequently end with a “punch line” that presents a challenge to conventional expectation: the scorned Samaritan is the “good” one who proves neighbor to the victim on the Jericho Road; those who come to work late at the harvest are provided the same reward as those who toiled all day; the wayward prodigal son is the one who is feasted; the prayer of a repentant sinner is more acceptable to God than that of a righteous Pharisee.⁹ Shorter sayings make the same point: A camel could pass through a needle’s eye more easily than a person of great wealth can enter into God’s inbreaking realm (Mt 19:24).

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The Synoptic Jesus’ focus on the urgency of human readiness to receive God’s promised basileia on earth is a subject of much scholarly debate regarding the tension between the signs of its arrival—the blind see, the crippled walk, as proleptic manifestations of Jesus’ mediation of God’s rule here and now—and the promise of a fullness of that reign yet to be consummated. In my perspective, it is not all that complicated. It is a matter of both/and, not either/or. In Jesus’ message and activity, God’s powerful and empowering reign of love is already making itself felt, but only in the midst of ongoing conflict between God’s power of love and the forces of chaos widely at work to thwart it. On the one hand, Luke can present Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth as proclaiming Isaiah’s prophecy of release to captives, liberation of the oppressed, recovery of sight, as already fulfilled in him (Lk 4: 16–21). But, on the other hand, Mark’s Jesus maintains that some within his hearing will still be alive in the near future when the basileia arrives en dunamei, “with power” (Mk 9:1), a promise unsurprisingly not repeated in the somewhat later texts of Matthew and Luke.

I have resisted using the English word “kingdom” here. I do not regard that as an adequate term for doing justice to the full meaning of basileia. I prefer to use “reign” or even “realm” because I believe they more fully embody the basic thrust of Jesus’ teaching. If the power as well as the presence of God has been seen to be missing from the ongoing historical drama in the apocalyptic writings, there is now a concentration on this reclaimed power and presence in a strikingly novel way. It is elusive. It cannot be pinned down. It can be “lived out” symbolically in Jesus’ activity in feasting with sinners, and in repudiating conventional emphases on earthly power (e.g., Jn 14:30). But it does not hold full sway. That remains but a promise. And, as we will see, Jesus’ fate threatens to cancel out the validity of the promise.

Specifically, I consider it fully appropriate to characterize this inbreaking manifestation of God’s power as an offer, embodied in Jesus, of the possibility that the love of God can be received in an empowering way by those open to it. It is the conjoining of power and hesed once again, but now in the form of an invitation to participate in God’s reign of love by saying “yes” to it and being empowered to live “as if ” that [30] reign were all-in-all even though it is not.¹⁰ Love is what is expected of the recipients of God’s offer: loving one another as a new covenantal commandment (Jn 13:34), love that is so embracing that it even includes one’s enemies (Mt 5:43–44).¹¹

POWER IN WEAKNESS

And the promise of the arrival of God’s reign of empowering love all comes crashing down, so it would appear, in Jesus’ ignominious and seemingly impotent fate. He dies the death of an enemy of the state, horribly crucified at the hands of the occupying Romans.

The vital importance of the New Testament witness about Jesus’ resurrection is an insistence that the work of destruction does not have the final word. God overtrumps the opposition. I cannot presume, as so many theologians do, to be able to read God’s mind and insist that the cross was God’s plan all along. In fact, I refuse to endorse a doctrine of divine child abuse. An early instance of the church’s attempt to make sense of all this was to set forth a striking contrast of powers at work: Peter twice offers testimony in Acts that “they put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day” (10:39–40, emphasis mine; see also 5:30). Powers of control act; God counteracts.

Attention must be paid to the telling reversal of ordinary concepts of power that Paul presents in his first letter to the church at Corinth. Daniel Migliore has expressed this very cogently:

Among the New Testament writers, it is Paul who ponders most deeply the way in which Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection redefine the power of God. Paul knows well and takes with utmost seriousness the violent powers of this world. . . . In the light of the cross of Christ, however, Paul declares an even greater power. God has shown his power in a completely unexpected form. This man Jesus, crucified in weakness, is the Lord. What to human eyes is shameful, weak, and ineffective is God’s own glory and strength. In a startling phrase, Paul proclaims ‘God’s weakness’ (1 Cor. 1:25). This is an unprecedented way of speaking of the power of God, and it yields a highly paradoxical account of true power.”¹²

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The key texts are these: For those who are being saved, the cross is “the power of God” (1:18). Jesus Christ himself is both “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1:24). And most critically of all, “God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1:25). This is echoed later in the second letter to Corinth in Paul’s remark that “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9).

I am disappointed in most critical exegetical work on these passages that tends to gloss over the revolutionary character of Paul’s insight. One exception is Victor Furnish’s claim that “for Paul the saving power of God revealed in the cross is the power of God’s self-giving love (cf. 2 Cor. 5.14; Rom. 5:8),” and that “in proclaiming that the cross is the place of God’s definitive self-disclosure he [Paul] has identified the power that is proper to God’s own being as the saving power of love.”¹³ That is, at least, a good start.

Finally, in this section, one further Gospel text merits comment. On Golgotha the leaders mocked the dying Jesus, taunting him: “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one” (Lk 23:35). But that is precisely the nature of the point being made here. The power of God flowing through Jesus is not something to be turned inward upon his own assurance of well-being. As Migliore has noted, “the conception of power held by those who mock Jesus is exactly the bondage from which he wants to set them free.”¹⁴ God has surrendered the illusion of over-powering control. We are still learning so to do.

“GOD IS LOVE”

John’s Gospel is the one that highlights most extensively the character of God as love. It is the entire world that God loves that is understood to motivate God’s having given to the world “his only Son” (3:16). “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you” (15:9), Jesus tells his disciples. The prayer of Jesus in the Upper Room culminates in a drumbeat of repetitions concerning “the love with which you [God] have loved me” (17:26; cf. 23–25). The Father not only loves others by loving the Father’s Son, but also directly “loves you” (16:27), i.e., the disciples, the ones who abide in Jesus’ love.

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The high point of this uniting of God and God’s love comes in the first epistle attributed to John, specifically in the pronouncement in the fourth chapter that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8, 16, emphasis mine). Indeed, the identity between God and love is so strong that John can maintain that we only have a capacity to love because of a sense of having first been loved by God (4:19). Love, in John’s understanding, is original with God, derivative with us.

I have encountered no stronger advocate of the importance of these statements than C. H. Dodd, who insisted in light of 1 John that the Gospel is the proclamation “of God himself as love.”¹⁵ He concluded that:

to say “God is love” implies that all His activity is loving activity. If he creates, He creates in love; if He rules, He rules in love; if He judges, He judges in love. All that He does is the expression of His nature, which is—to love. The theological consequences of this principle are far-reaching.”¹⁶

I find Dodd persuasive on this point. To pass over this witness as irrelevant for theology is highly suspect, although much of the history of Christian theology betrays just this oversight.

I wish to wrap up this section by returning once again to Paul, and specifically to the tantalizing depiction in 1 Corinthians 13 of what love is and how love operates. Among other things, love is patient. Love “rejoices in the truth.” Love “endures all things.” And perhaps most importantly of all, love “does not insist on its own way” (13:4, 6, 7, 5).¹⁷ This last proposition cannot be overlooked. If, indeed, God is love and God’s power is characterized above all by being a power of love, then we can begin to discern that God does not insist on God’s own way! That is not how God’s power operates. It can only be seen as invitational, not impositional; offering, not controlling; undergirding, not dominating; and finally, empowering, not overpowering.

How well did the church, over the centuries, maintain this key element of the biblical witness to a living, loving, empowering God? As we shall see, not well at all.

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ENDNOTES

1. Bernard Brady, Christian Love (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2003), 54. Brady points out that agape along with its other forms occurs 341 times in the New Testament, in every single book, philia seldom, eros not at all. But he is mistaken on one key point: The translators of the Septuagint more often chose the Greek word eleos, “mercy,” not agape, for the rendering of hesed. Having said that, it is also true that most New Testament uses of agape reflect hesed more than they reflect the other Old Testament words for love, such as the verb ‘ahav and the noun ‘ahavah. (From an email to the author from Jon Berquist, 2 Feb. 2012.)
2. Mk 14:62: “the Power.” Lk 22:69 spells it out in full: “the power of God.”
3. Fretheim, The Suffering of God, 5.
4. Pannenberg insists as a theologian that “as Christians we know God only as he has been revealed in and through Jesus. All other talk about God can have, at most, provisional significance,” and “if God is revealed through Jesus Christ, then who or what God is becomes defined only through the Christ event.” Jesus—God and Man, tr. Lewis L. Wilkens and Duane Priebe (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1968), 19, 140. I contend that this is a perspective worthy of continuous attention as these investigations proceed. It is often lost sight of, even by those who promote it.
5. No attempt is intended here to establish a “historical Jesus” behind the church’s telling of the Jesus story in the New Testament texts. My concern at this juncture is with the biblical witness itself, as crucial springboard for—and basis for judgment of—subsequent developments in the church’s theologizing.
6. Consider the centrality of Jesus’ address of God as “Father,” as in the Lord’s Prayer, Mt 6:9. In Mk 16:34, when Jesus is praying in Gethsemane, the original Aramaic term, abba, is kept in the Greek text. And abba is a child’s way of addressing a father, as intimate as the English word “daddy.”
7. A prolepsis is a sort of “happening in advance.” For both Pannenberg and Moltmann, as we will encounter later, it is a “breaking in” of God’s future into our present.
8. For a more extended analysis of the apocalyptic context of Jesus’ [34] relationship to the basileia, see my On the Way to God: An Exploration into the Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1989), 187–96, 215–20.
9. See Lk 10:29–37; Mt 20:1–15; Lk 15:11–32; Mt 18:9–14.
10. Walter Wink writes of the future of God’s reign as an invitation to live in God’s “domination-free order” in contrast to the “domination system” to which we fallen mortals are typically in thrall, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 46f.
11. George Johnston noted in his IDB article on “Love in the NT” that in the Synoptics, Jesus never explicitly states that God loves. But the implication of that is widely discernible. Jesus’ observation that God cares for the lowly sparrow and that the very hairs on our head are numbered (Lk 12:6-7) “is not quaint, poetic hyperbole so much as a tender declaration of the universal and intimate character of the divine love as Jesus knew it.” Vol. K–Q:169.
12. Migliore, The Power of God and the gods of Power, 53, ital. orig.
13. Victor Furnish, The Theology of the First Letter to the Corinthians (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 74, 118. See also Hans-Ruedi Weber, in Power: “The scandal, weakness and folly of the cross turn upside down all the traditional concepts of wisdom and power,” constituting a “radical reinterpretation of what true wisdom and power are” (85, 86).
14. Migliore, The Power of God and the gods of Power, 52.
15. C. H. Dodd, The Johannine Epistles (The Moffatt New Testament Commentary, vol. 14) (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1946), 112.
16. Dodd, 110, ital. orig. See also 109, 116.
17. Furnish writes of this chapter: “the agape Paul commends in chapter 13 is nothing else than the enduring reality of God’s own love, which the apostle understands to be revealed in the cross as God’s saving power. For the apostle, this love is the reality that is proper to God’s own being, and therefore an eschatological power that belongs to an order of reality which is utterly different from the passing realities of this present age” (103).

TESTIMONY TO GOD’S POWER

High up on the slopes of Mount Carmel, the conflict is joined. Two factions are present: the numerous representatives of Baal, and a single proponent of Yahweh by the name of Elijah. The issue to be decided is a simple but far-reaching one: whose god has power—which means, of course, whose god is really God?

As the story is recounted (1 Kings 18:20–40), Elijah proposes a contest: prepare two sacrificial bulls as burnt offerings, but let God provide the fire. The challenge is accepted. But the intense and extensive efforts of the prophets of Baal prove to be of no avail. After half a day of the best they can muster, the result of their pleading is “no voice, no answer, and no response” (18:29).

Then Elijah takes center stage. Obstacles are piled on by the narrator—jars of water soaking the wood to the core, poured on not once but three times. At last, the time of resolution is at hand.

At the time of the offering of the oblation, the prophet Elijah came near and said, “O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that [2] I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your bidding. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, so that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back.” Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering, the wood, the stones, and the dust, and even licked up the water that was in the trench. When all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, “The Lord indeed is God; the Lord indeed is God.” (18:36–39)

This notion that the god who is truly God is the one who manifests power is hardly original to the Israelites. It is widespread, and ancient. As Wolfhart Pannenberg has observed, it is generally recognized that “the being of the gods is their power.”¹ That is our point of departure for evaluating the biblical witness to God, but it is only that: a jumping-off point.

Immediately after this incident, the biblical record provides us with another and startlingly different divine/human encounter. God’s prophet has had to flee from the wrath of the king’s wife, his life now in jeopardy. At Mt. Horeb Elijah experiences the powerful and empowering presence of God in an unexpected manner.

[God] said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. (19:11–12)

The key phrase is also translatable as “the sound of a soft whisper” or, in the RSV, “a still, small voice.” The narrative provides stirring testimony that convictions about God’s power conveyed in the literature of the Old Testament move well beyond what the ancient Israelites inherited from their cultural surroundings. Let us begin with that inheritance before moving on to what is distinctive about the hebraic testimony.

VIEWS OF GOD’S POWER ADOPTED FROM ISRAEL’S NEIGHBORS

That the biblical witness to God’s power includes notions common to the religious environment of the day is widely recognized. In writing [3] specifically about creation accounts, Terence Fretheim takes notice of “a widespread fund of images and ideas upon which Israel drew.”² I regard that as more broadly applicable in regard to other notions of God’s power as well.

The power to create. “Ah, Lord God!” Jeremiah proclaims, “It is you who made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm!” (Jer 32:17).³ What is narrated at the very beginning of the biblical record, God’s creating of all that is, also pervades the subsequent literature down through the prophets and the Wisdom tradition.⁴

I made the earth,
and created humankind upon it;
It was my hands that stretched out the heavens, and I commanded all their host. (Is 45:12)

So far, what we are encountering is a raw manifestation of God’s unilateral power, the absolute might to bring into being—and impose order on—an unresisting cosmos. The object of God’s activity, the “creation,” is purely passive and receptive. This is in common with creation myths present throughout the ancient Middle East. But as we shall see shortly, that only begins to scratch the surface of Israel’s own understanding of God as Creator.

Power over the forces of nature and over human and animal behavior. This is an explicit example of Pannenberg’s observation. God not only brings the cosmos into being but continues to exercise power, even control, over all that is within it. Isaiah proclaims that:

the Sovereign , the Lord of hosts,
will lop the boughs with terrifying power . . .
He will hack down the thickets of the forest with an ax. (Is. 10:33f.)

Second Isaiah’s God, who “formed the earth and made it,” and “did not create it a chaos” (Is. 45:18), uses Cyrus, king of Persia, as a tool to effect God’s goals (45:1, 13), generating weal as well as woe (45:7). The psalmist’s God:
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covers the heavens with clouds,
prepares rain for the earth,
makes grass grow on the hills.
. . . gives to the animals their food,
and to the young ravens when they cry. (Ps. 147:8–9)

God asks Moses the rhetorical question, “Is the LORD’ power limited?” (Num. 11:23), with the very clear implication that it definitely is not. Even as they reflect the particularities of Israel’s covenantal relationship with Yahweh, these passages bear the clear imprint of borrowed notions about God’s unchallengeable sway over the whole of creation.

Power to dictate the outcome of struggles and warfare. This is a subset of the preceding theme. Understanding God as triumphant in battle was a fundamental conviction throughout the ancient Near East. God may seem opposable in the short term but not in regard to the eventual outcome. Israel is reminded by the chronicler that “God has power to help or to overthrow” in battle (2 Chr. 25:8). The psalmist reassures the faint of heart that God “will shatter kings on the day of his wrath” and “execute judgment among the nations, filling them with corpses” (Ps. 110:5–6). The narrative of Gideon bringing only three hundred warriors into battle against the combined might of the Midianites and Amalekites, blowing trumpets that resulted in God setting “every man’s sword against his fellow” among the enemies’ army (Judges 7:22), is a colorful expression of God’s capacity to shape the result of any human conflict.

God as divine monarch. Although there are particular ways in which the notion of God as divine monarch takes on a distinctive character with Israel, its roots can readily be traced throughout the ancient Near East, from Egypt to Babylonia. In Egypt, the sun god Amun-Re was regularly conceived as the true heavenly lord and father of the reigning pharaoh.⁵ In Babylonia the human ruler was understood to be “the earth-bound bearer of the heavenly dignity, a mortal container of the immortal kingly essence.”⁶

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The Gideon story culminates in a refusal of the Israelites’ offer of kingship: “I will not rule over you, and my son will not rule over you; the LORD will rule over you” (Judges 8:23). King David’s hymn of praise at the conclusion of 1 Chronicles echoes this theme.

Yours, O Lord, are the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty; for all that is in the heavens and on the earth is yours; yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all. Riches and honor come from you, and you rule over all. In your hand are power and might. (1 Chr. 29:11–12)

Isaiah’s call vision sees God as the heavenly king sitting on his throne (Is. 6:1,5). Psalms 93–100 have as their common theme YHWH malak, “the LORD reigns,” “the LORD is king.”⁷ God is the king everlasting, robed in majesty (Ps. 93:1–2), “a great King above all gods” (95:3).

Say among the nations, “The Lord is king!
The world is firmly established; it shall never be moved. (96:10)

The LORD is king! Let the earth rejoice;
let the many coastlands be glad! (97:1)

Mighty King, lover of justice,
you have established equity;
you have executed justice
and righteousness in Jacob. (99:4)

God is king not only of all the earth but specifically “over the nations”; the “shields of the earth,” i.e., the means of defense of earthly realms, are none other than God’s very own property (Ps. 47:7-9).

Personal power. “To some degree or other,” Bernhard Anderson has observed, “anthropomorphism appears in all circles and periods of OT tradition.”⁸ God walks in the Garden in the cool of the evening (Gen. 3:8). God’s “voice” is “powerful . . . full of majesty” (Ps. 29:4).⁹ God’s mighty “hand” (yad) is typical language for expressing the exercise of God’s power, in examples far too numerous to bear mentioning. The Old Testament [6]

unhesitantly and consistently views Yahweh as a distinct person. . . . Anthropomorphism is indigenous to a faith which views God in terms of historical actions and relationships rather than in terms of natural power or impersonal being. . . . [To Yahweh] are ascribed the characteristics of personality: wisdom, will, purpose, love, anger, anguish, patience, hatred, jealousy, joy, etc.¹⁰

This is hardly unique to the biblical record. The anthropomorphizing of God and of God’s power was a common notion readily available for appropriating. But Israel separated this out from the equally common tendency to envision God in animal form, especially prevalent in ancient Egypt. And as we will see, the notion of divine personal power takes on a very particular character in the context of the Mosaic covenant.

VIEWS OF GOD’S POWER DISTINCTIVE TO ISRAEL

To observe what the people of the Old Testament shared with their varied religious environment in regard to the concept of divine power constitutes no more than a prelude to the full symphony of ideas yet to be encountered. In some respects, the biblical witness took existing notions and gave them a distinctive character all its own. In other respects, it brought entirely new understandings into focus. To both of these I now turn.

God’s power is exercised in the context of a divine/human covenant. “Constantly present behind all the testimonies to Yahweh’s marvelous power is one particular presupposition,” Walther Eichrodt insisted half a century ago. “This power is the power of the God of the covenant.”¹¹ In God’s covenant with Moses and, through Moses, with the people of the exodus, the being of God acquired “an explicitly personal character”¹² that countered anthropomorphizing tendencies “primarily through the experience of the infinite superiority of the divine nature to all merely human attributes and capacities—an experience which marks every encounter with the divine in the Old Testament.”¹³

The heart of this covenant is found in the promise, “I will take you as my people, and I will be your God” (Ex. 6:7). Commitments are verbalized on both sides: God is “the faithful God who maintains [7] covenant loyalty with those who love him, and keep his commandments” (Deut. 7:9). So, obviously, human faithfulness and loyalty are fully expected in return. Deut. 28 details blessings that flow upon those who are obedient to God’s precepts as well as curses unleashed upon those who are not.

Walter Brueggemann’s perspective on Israel’s core testimony is “that it is Yahweh’s sovereign power and covenantal solidarity that mark the God to whom Israel bears witness. . . . What is important is the recognition that for Israel, power and solidarity are held together, and that both are crucial for Israel’s normative utterance about Yahweh.”¹⁴

God is a single center of power. The Old Testament is chock full of references to other gods, to Yahweh presiding over a council of gods.¹⁵ Explicit monotheism clearly arrived on the scene only belatedly. Whereas the Decalogue begins with the prohibition that “you shall have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20:3, Deut. 5:7, emphasis mine), it remains for Second Isaiah to insist that there simply are no other gods, period. The gods to whom Israel’s neighbors (and enemies) pray are “a delusion,” their accomplishments “nothing,” their images “empty wind” (Is. 41:29). A typically recurring phrase in Isaiah is simply, “I am God, and there is no other” (46:9; 45:5, 6). It is this God and this God alone who is “mighty in power, great in strength” (Is. 40:26). So also does Jeremiah maintain that the gods of the other nations “are no gods” at all (Jer. 2:11), and Hezekiah prays to the God of Israel that “you are God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth” (2 Kings 19:15).

God’s powerful creative activity is ongoing. “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old,” God is heard to say by Second Isaiah. “I am about to do a new thing” (Is. 43:19). Terence Fretheim is by no means alone in maintaining that this is more than just the divine oversight of the created order. God’s ongoing work of creating involves “the emergence of genuinely new realities in an increasingly complex world.”¹⁶

This is already implicit in the opening text of the biblical witness. Creation is not simply the “making” of a cosmos and its contents. It is the bringing of design out of formlessness, order out of chaos (Gen. [8] 1:2). And this process is hardly finished when the initiating acts of creating are over. Chaos threatens even the tranquility of the Garden in the disrupting antics of the serpent (Gen. 3:1). Chaos in the form of raging waters, originally contained and restrained (Gen. 1:6), is allowed to overwhelm the earth as prelude to a fresh start with Noah and his descendents (Gen. 6–8). The rainbow signifies a divine promise, but it does not negate the ongoing capacity of the forces of chaos to subvert the tenuous emergence of greater and more complex order. It is rather an assurance that God’s power cannot and will not be defeated by chaos. Psalm 104, which Brueggemann calls “perhaps the fullest rendition of creation faith in the Old Testament,”¹⁷ appropriates the Hebrew word for original creation, bara’, for the activity of continuing creation. According to Bernhard Anderson: “Creation is not just an event that occurred in the beginning, at the foundation of the earth, but is God’s continuing activity of sustaining creatures and holding everything in being.”¹⁸

This capacity to continue to create the genuinely new is a significant motif in the testimony of Second Isaiah (e.g., 41:17–20), culminating in his disciples’ envisioning of the creation of “new heavens and a new earth” (65:17; cf. 66:22), holding within itself the promise of the eventual championing of divinely intended order over all that threatens to inhibit it.

Divine power is conjoined with righteousness. “I am the Lord” says God to Jeremiah in the prophet’s testimony; “I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth” (Jer. 9:24) The identity of Israel’s God is explicitly characterized here by qualities of absolute reliability. This is no god of arbitrary power and capricious action, as Israel’s neighbors repeatedly resorted to. The Psalms ring with assertions of God’s steadfast righteousness (7:9–11; 11:7; 116:5; 119:137), which, like God’s hesed,¹⁹ “endures forever” (111:3).

There is no question but that Israel’s understanding of the righteous power of God is distinctly developed within the context of the covenant God has established with God’s people. Zechariah makes that point with unmistakable clarity, in words that echo the covenant’s very foundation: “They shall be my people, and I will be their God, in faithfulness and in righteousness” (Zech. 8:8).

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God exercises power in a manner that invites participation by those whom God’s power has created. Terence Fretheim has dug deeper than anyone else in bringing this theme to light. The first divine words to human beings (Gen. 1:28, exercise “dominion,” radah), he has written, “constitute a sharing of the exercise of power (dominion). From the beginning God chooses not to be the only one who has or exercises creative power. . . . God establishes a power-sharing relationship with humans.”²⁰

In this regard, then, Fretheim understands God’s power as portrayed in the Old Testament to be fundamentally interactive and essentially, not coincidentally, interrelational, a conviction that thoroughly pervades his God and World in the Old Testament.²¹ God so enters into relationships:

that God is not the only one who has something important to say . . .
that God is not the only one who has something important to do
and the power with which to do it . . .
that God is genuinely affected by what happens to the relationship . . .
that the human will can stand over against the will of God . . .
that the future is not all blocked out.²²

That “God will take into consideration human thought and action in determining what God’s own action will be” is what Fretheim calls the “divine consultation.”²³

The first creation story in Genesis dares to proclaim that human beings are created “in the image of God” (Gen. 1:27). I regard this as critical for comprehending the scope of God’s sharing of power. As God is powerful, so are we—who bear God’s image—expected to exercise power. The language of Gen. 1:26–27, explicitly occurring only here in the Old Testament, is a fundamental shift of orientation, a “democratizing,” of the ancient Near East’s notion of the earthly ruler as being God’s image on earth.²⁴ The history of attempts to embody this democratized notion shows how easy it is to get it wrong. If God’s power is perceived to be all controlling, dominating, impositional, so will humans aspire to be controlling and dominating over others in God’s name, imposing their own will on others on the understanding that they are only fulfilling their God-given destiny. The thesis undergirding this book is that this behavior actualizes a false notion of the power of the God in whose image we are created, with calamities both large and small the result.

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One final note remains to be offered. If the original but also continuing act of creating is one of bringing increasing order out of the swirl of chaos that threatens to engulf it, then it is surely clear by now that this is an ongoing creative process in which human beings are actively, and powerfully, invited by God to participate. We are not merely passive. We contribute, substantively.

God’s power is a liberating power that empowers the weak and the powerless. Heschel observed that according to the Roman historian Tacitus “The gods are on the side of the stronger.” To the contrary, Israel’s prophets “proclaimed that the heart of God is on the side of the weaker. God’s special concern is not for the mighty and the successful, but for the lowly and the downtrodden, for the stranger and the poor, for the widow and the orphan.”²⁵

This is first encountered definitively in God’s leading of the descendents of Abraham out of bondage in Egypt. God’s covenant with Israel and God’s “surprising liberation of a poor and oppressed people”²⁶ are intimately linked. Moses sings of God’s terrifying displays of power, hazaq, in destroying the Pharaoh’s military might (Ex. 15:1–18).

When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power. (Deut. 26:6–8)

Divine power undergirding the powerless is visible in tales as varied as the deliverance of the baby Moses in the waters of the Nile and the reversal of odds in David’s conquest of Goliath. It is particularly emphasized in the Old Testament passage that prefigures Mary’s Magnificat, the prayer of Hannah.

The bows of the mighty are broken
but the feeble gird on strength . . .
[The Lord] raises up the poor from the dust;
he lifts up the needy from the ash heap,
to make them sit with princes
and inherit a seat of honor. (1 Sam. 2:4, 8)²⁷

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God exercises power in a manner that leaves God at risk and vulnerable. A God who shares power with others is a God who relinquishes the illusion of control for the sake of an openness in regard to what transpires within the cosmos. This engenders, according to Fretheim, “a divine vulnerability, as God takes on all the risks that authentic relatedness entails.”²⁸

This is clearly a controversial notion, but it appears to follow from what has previously been examined about the understanding of God’s power in the Old Testament. Fretheim states that “the future of the created order is made dependent in significant ways upon the creaturely use of power,” and how Israel responds to the divine lure contributes even also to “the future of God,” not just to its own future.²⁹

But Fretheim is by no means the first or only biblical scholar to become cognizant of this motif. Heschel was aware that God is “moved and affected by what happens in the world, and reacts accordingly. . . . This notion that God can be intimately affected, that he possesses not merely intelligence and will, but also pathos, basically defines the prophetic consciousness of God,”³⁰

Furthermore, in the divine encounter with Moses at the burning bush, God discloses God’s name: “I AM WHO I AM” (Ex. 3:14). In the traditions of Israel’s era, to have a name for someone is to have some degree of power over that individual. In that understanding, then, God’s revealing of God’s name to Moses represents God’s willing relinquishment of invulnerability. This correlation of naming and divine vulnerability has been widely recognized for some time.³¹

Human beings can challenge God’s exercise of divine power and accuse God of abusing that power. When the wanderers in the wilderness lose faith in their Deliverer and mold a golden calf to worship in God’s place, God’s wrath waxes hot against them and God expresses to Moses the intent to consume them utterly (Ex. 32:1–10). But Moses dares to intercede on the people’s behalf.

“O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was [12] with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people.” (Ex. 32:11–12)

Job rails against the manner in which divine power has been directed explicitly against his wellbeing (Job 6–7, 16–17).

I will not restrain my mouth;
I will speak in the anguish of my spirit;
I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. (7:11)

The testimony of the Book of Job is a troubling one because there is in fact no satisfactory resolution of Job’s challenges at all. In the end, God simply overwhelms Job—in essence, shouts him down, reversing the text just quoted: “I lay my hand on my mouth” (40:4). But the challenge itself remained in the canon for all to read and take note of.

The most extreme instance of a challenge to God’s power in the Old Testament is no less than the charge of rape and defilement made by Jeremiah. The language in Jer. 20:7, “O LORD, you have enticed me . . . you have overpowered me,” utilizes the terminology (patah) of “manipulative or violent sexual exploitation.”³² The point of the testimony is not that God is a manipulative or deceiving deity; it is that it is not beyond the pale of possibility to accuse God of so behaving. That is but one more expression of the consequences of the power-sharing relationship between God and world.

God is capable of a change of mind. Fretheim has called attention to nearly forty references to “divine repentance” in the Old Testament.³³ This is now more typically translated from the Hebrew as having a “change of mind” (e.g., Ex. 32:12 quoted above). The theme is a continuation of the preceding section: The consequence of a challenge to how God exercises power can indeed be a reversal of intent on God’s part.

And so the culmination of Moses’ reminder of how much Yahweh has already invested in the children of Abraham is that “the LORD changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people” (Ex. 32:14). In the Jonah narrative, it is not the prophet but the outsider, the king of Ninevah, who surmises, “Who knows? God [13] may relent and change his mind” about destroying the city, and, indeed, God does just that (Jonah 3:9–10). The writings of Jeremiah are replete with instances where God changes God’s mind about disasters God had intended to bring about (Jer. 18:8, 10; 26:3, 13,19).

The underlying conviction in this pair of themes is that the God of the Old Testament is a living, dynamic power who interacts with creation often in fresh and direction-reversing ways. This is not a static power “locked in stone,” a mindless supracosmic force grinding inevitably toward its intended ends. God’s power is one that is ever interactive specifically with what emerges day to day in response to what God has initially set into motion.

God’s interactive power is not defeated by human wrongdoing but finds unexpected ways to wring the good from out of the bad. In the extended Joseph story that brings Genesis to a close, a fascinating interpretation of events emerges. Joseph’s brothers have sold him into slavery in Egypt, intending great harm to befall him. When they meet again, Joseph is hardly a slave. He has become essentially the Pharaoh’s vice-regent. And he tells his brothers that he sees the hand of God in shaping the preceding course of events (Gen. 45:4–9).

A simple way of unpacking this would turn God into the divine puppet-master and Jacob’s children merely puppets unknowingly carrying out the divine intent. An alternative understanding that is more faithful to the biblical witness overall is that this is one poignant instance of God’s capacity to turn what humans intend for evil into something empowering. Gerhard von Rad considers this “the primary subject of the whole story: God’s will to turn all the chaos of human guilt to a gracious purpose.”³⁴

God’s power can also be experienced as destructive, as a manifestation of God’s wrath. Brueggemann is one who has given extended attention to Israel’s “unsolicited” testimony that the God who creates is also a God who can and does wreak destruction.³⁵ Beyond the wholesale destruction brought on by the Great Flood comes the devastating of Sodom and Gomorrah and all their inhabitants (Gen. 19:24–25) and the unleashing of a host of plagues against all of Egypt, guilty and [14] innocent alike (Ex. 7:14–12:32). One way of receiving this testimony is to observe Israel’s absolute resistance to the notion that any divine power other than Yahweh’s is ever at work in destructive events. But it is also an acknowledgment that Yahweh’s wrath is fierce and can have vivid consequences. The prophecies of Isaiah begin with this jolting reminder:

Hear, O heavens, and listen, O earth;
for the Lord has spoken:
I reared children and brought them up,
but they have rebelled against me . . .
Therefore says the Sovereign,
the Lord of hosts, the Mighty One of Israel:
Ah, I will pour out my wrath on my enemies,
and avenge myself on my foes! (Is. 1:2, 24)

The prophets proclaim God’s wrath to be the consequence of Israel’s failure to live faithfully within the covenant. It is the flip side of God’s love, the result of the recipients of that love failing abysmally to live up to their part of the covenantal bargain. Even so, Patrick Miller observes the “priority of the Lord’s compassion” as the context in which divine wrath is presented. “The intercession of the prophet works precisely because it is grounded in the character of God who is bent toward mercy and compassion, not toward anger and punishment.”³⁶ And Second Isaiah assures his readers that wrath does not have the last word; it shall eventually cease.

Thus says your Sovereign, the Lord,
your God who pleads the cause of his people:
See, I have taken from your hand the cup of staggering;
you shall drink no more
from the bowl of my wrath. (Is. 51:22)

God may elect to withhold power until it is to be exercised at some later time. Apocalyptic visions supplanted prophetic hearings toward the end of the Old Testament period and on into the Intertestamental era. They show up in Daniel and Ezekiel and elsewhere, and even put in an early appearance in the collection of oracles in Isaiah 24–27. The [15] collapse of prophetic voices interpreting God’s work among the people leads to the psalmist’s lament:

We do not see our emblems;
there is no longer any prophet,
and there is no one among us who knows how long.
How long, O God, is the foe to scoff?
Is the enemy to revile your name forever?
Why do you hold back your hand;
why do you keep your hand in your bosom? (Ps. 74:9–11)

The “holding back” of God’s “hand” clearly expresses a sense that somehow the mighty hand of God can no longer be discerned in the course of human events. Among the welter of specific and often conflicting details, this is an overarching theme of the apocalyptic point of view: God has withdrawn. God can no longer be counted on in making sense of what is happening.

But this is understood to be only a temporary lapse. There will eventually come the “day of the Lord” (Joel 1:15; 2:11, 31; Eze. 30:3; Zep 1:7) when the power of God is promised to return, to overtrump all earthly adversity. That understanding is a significant part of the background to the Gospel witness in the New Testament.

All of these individual subthemes are expressions of the power of a living God. The various aspects of Israel’s testimony to the power of God in the Old Testament can hardly be boiled down to one all-encompassing statement. But this much can be observed: They all witness to the understanding of a God who is dynamically alive. “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God,” says the psalmist (Ps. 42:2); “my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God” (84:2). “But the LORD is the true God; he is the living God,” Jeremiah proclaims (Jer. 10:10). It is this characteristic of God’s being that we must be wary of losing sight of as we continue our conceptual journey.

TESTIMONY TO GOD’S LOVE

Hosea is outraged. The covenant people of the northern kingdom have proven unfaithful. The monarchy is in chaos. The powers that be, such as [16] they are, continually attempt alliances with foreign nations, be it Egypt or Assyria. Into such a morass steps the earliest of the “writing prophets” of the Old Testament with a trio of extended metaphors that warn of God’s visitation of wrath but culminate with an incredible and wholly unexpected reassurance: God’s love will triumph!

The first two metaphoric narratives in chapters 1–3 are probably parallel versions of the same symbolic event. Hosea understands himself to be called to take as wife a woman of ill repute—a whore, an adulteress—by whom he fathers three children with symbolic names: the Punished One (Jezreel), No Mercy (Lo Ruuhamah), and Not My People (Lo Ammi) (1:6–9). The allusions are obvious ones: So have God’s liberated covenant-partners behaved. They have gone whoring after other gods (1:2; 9:1). The covenant has been violated to the degree that the relationship seems forever severed: “for you are not my people and I am not your God” (1:9, emphasis added; also 1:10).

The terms of the metaphor in chapter 11 shift from faithful husband and faithless wife to dismayed father and rebellious child.

When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.
The more I called them,
the more they went from me . . .
I led them with cords of human kindness,
with bands of love.
I was to them like those
who lift infants to their cheeks.
I went down to them and fed them. (11:1–2, 4)

The intimacy of these verses is striking. God’s tender love in the exodus and the wilderness years is akin to the actions of a nurturing, nursing mother. But God’s people have now turned away, and the consequences in terms of the execution of God’s terrifying wrath are sure to be catastrophic.

They shall return to the land of Egypt,
and Assyria shall be their king,
because they have refused to return to me.
The sword rages in their cities,
[17]
it consumes their oracle-priests,
and devours because of their schemes.
My people are bent on turning away from me.
To the Most High they call,
but he does not raise them up at all. (11:5–7)³⁷

However, Hosea’s understanding of God is far too complex simply to let divine anger and wrath have the final say. On the way to a resolution, there is, as it were, a pause, to ponder the scope of God’s vexation. It is as though, for Hosea, God is wrestling with Godself, is almost agonizing over how to find the right way forward.

Shall I ransom them from the power of She’ol?
Shall I redeem them from Death?
O Death, where are your plagues?
O She’ol, where is your destruction?
Compassion is hid from my eyes. (13:14)

It does not stay hidden. Hosea’s witness in the midst of all this turmoil is the bold affirmation that the hesed of God is finally going to prevail above all else.

How can I give you up, E’phra·im?
How can I hand you over, O Israel? . . .
My heart recoils within me;
my compassion grows warm and tender.
I will not execute my fierce anger;
I will not again destroy E’phra·im;
for I am God and no mortal,
the Holy One in your midst,
and I will not come in wrath. (11:8–9; cf. 14:4–9)

Hosea contrasts God’s steadfast hesed with human love, which is variable and unreliable, saying to the people, “Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes away early” (6:4), whereas the first story of Israel as faithless wife culminates with the husband-God expressing the intent to “take you for my wife in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy” (2:19).

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The most important Hebrew word for love, hesed, is typically translated into English with the qualifier “steadfast.” But that adjective alone hardly exhausts the scope of its meaning. This is particularly an understanding of God’s love that is rooted in the covenant, so that it may also be identified as “covenant love.” In the very ancient Song of Moses, this is quite clear. “In your steadfast love you led the people whom you redeemed” (Ex. 15:15). God’s loving relationship with God’s people in the covenant is so vital that this aspect of God alone is offered up as a resolution to the mystery of “why.” Why this people? Why the children of Abraham? The Deuteronomist’s answer is that Israel was chosen simply “because the LORD loved you” (Deut. 7:8; see also 10:15).³⁸

And so we see that, from God’s side, hesed is love that endures through all adversity. It is the overarching context within which the merely temporary consequences of God’s righteous wrath are experienced.³⁹ In contrast to the behavior of the covenant people, it is love that is not fickle or transient. And it is surely a love that is not dependent upon the lovability, or lack of it, of the one who is loved.

Hesed is also understandable as the fundamental motive in the act of creation itself. The unflagging endurance of hesed becomes the staccato refrain punctuating the recital of God’s creating and liberating activity in Psalm 136. The theologian Jürgen Moltmann is the one to whom I’m indebted for using the phrase creatio ex amore, “creation out of love.”⁴⁰ I regard this as an avenue of thought well worth pursuing, and I consider it a far more biblical notion than the traditional creatio ex nihilo, which misinterprets Gen. 1:1–2. It is not at all inappropriate to see God’s hesed as underlying the very act of initial as well as continuing creation. And so God’s hesed is also “creative love.”

It is no doubt within that context that we can appreciate the testimony of the psalmists that “the earth is full of the steadfast love of the LORD” (Ps. 33:5)⁴¹ The psalmists and others speak of the “abundance” of God’s hesed throughout the lands (Ps. 106:45; Neh. 9:17; Lam. 3:32). Although rooted for Israel in the experience of covenant, God’s love flows out from there into the whole of God’s cosmic realm. It is boundless.

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THE CONJOINING OF GOD’S POWER AND GOD’S LOVE

The Psalms abound with intentional juxtapositions of divine power and love.

Once God has spoken;
twice have I heard this:
that power belongs to God,
and steadfast love belongs to you, O LORD. (Ps. 62:11–12)

So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
beholding your power and glory.
Because your steadfast love is better than life,
my lips will praise you. (63:2–3)⁴²

Psalms 98 and 100 particularly integrate the kingly power of God with God’s hesed. The hymns to God’s mighty deeds are not limited to past and present actions: “with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem” (Ps. 130:7). Edwin Good went so far as to conclude, concerning such passages as these, that for the Old Testament witness and for the psalmists in particular, “love is the character of God’s judgment and is the mode in which he exercises his power.”⁴³

Walther Eichrodt went further than any other recent Old Testament scholar in focusing on this important interrelationship of power and love. He saw that Hosea lifts up admirably “the quite irrational power of love as the ultimate basis of the covenant relationship.”⁴⁴ For Hosea, “love is part of the perfection of Yahweh’s nature and a basic element in holiness. . . . in the end, it is the incomprehensible creative power of love which marks Yahweh as the wholly ‘other’, the one whose nature is in complete contrast to that of the created cosmos.”⁴⁵ Eichrodt utilized provocative but undeveloped phrasing to identify this union, writing of Hosea’s “vision of love as the ultimate and decisive power”⁴⁶ and insisting that “Love is the effective power in the saving stipulations of the covenant.”⁴⁷ Eichrodt never unpacked this coupling to characterize any understanding of how God’s love itself is also power. But I am indebted to him for daring to articulate the notion as part of his analysis of the Old Testament witness.

[20]

More recently, Walter Brueggemann has pushed the conceptual envelope with his commentary on two parallel formulae that assert Yahweh’s “incomparability”: “Who is like you?” (e.g., Ex. 15:11), a rhetorical question addressed to Yahweh, and the echoing answer, “There is none like you” (Ps. 86:8).⁴⁸ Bruegggemann considers the divine incomparability to be a fundamental uniting of power and solidarity, and maintains not that it is expressed throughout the Old Testament but “only that it is Israel’s most extreme witness about God,” assumed though not verbalized everywhere in Israel’s testimony.⁴⁹

I would maintain that the formula is equally expressible as a union of power and hesed. Consider the wording of the first text Brueggemann puts forth in support of his analysis, a portion of the Song of Moses:

“Who is like you, O LORD, among the gods?
Who is like you, majestic in holiness,
awesome in splendor, doing wonders?
You stretched out your right hand,
the earth swallowed them.
In your steadfast love you led the people whom you redeemed;
you guided them by your strength to your holy abode.” (Ex. 15:11–13)

The explicit terminology of God’s love does not appear in the next two texts he identifies (Ps. 35:10, 113:5–8), though that is implied in the delivering of the weak and needy, the raising of the poor from the dust. It does return, however, in the final text, Micah 7:18–20, where God is promised to “again have compassion on us” (Mic. 7:19).

The conjoined language of power and love occurs once again in two of the three texts Brueggemann discusses in regard to the second formulaic expression, “There is none like you,” absent only from Jer. 10:1–16 (specifically, 10:6). Power is the prevailing theme in this hymn of praise; solidarity with Israel is mentioned only at the end (10:16). But it is explicit in Solomon’s prayer of dedication: “O Lord, God of Israel, there is no God like you in heaven above or on earth beneath, keeping covenant and steadfast love for your servants who walk before you with all their heart” (1 Kings 8:23). And the conjunction is strong also in Psalm 86:

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There is none like you among the gods, O LORD,
nor are there any works like yours . . .
For you are great and do wondrous things,
you alone are God . . .
For great is your steadfast love toward me. (Ps. 86:8, 10,13)

In my estimation, Brueggemann’s work on the paired formulae provides a vital key to understanding the Old Testament’s witness to God’s power and love. Power is not divine power unless it is characterized by hesed. Love is not divine love unless it is potent, efficacious. The two are essentially inseparable.

One very important consideration yet remains. The multiple meanings of hesed have not yet been exhausted. The still unexplored one could only surface after hesed’s vital conjunction with God’s power has been presented. The God of covenanting, creating, enduring love is the God who “gives power and strength to his people” (Ps. 68:35). Micah is “filled with power” to proclaim God’s justice (Mic. 3:8). Second Isaiah expresses this in soaring poetry:

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not fait or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint. (Is. 40:28–31, ital. mine)

Such passages as these lead me to the inescapable conclusion that the hesed of God in the Old Testament is understandable as no less than empowering love.⁵⁰ We do not have to await the life and message of Jesus [22] of Nazareth to encounter this fundamental theme. The New Testament, and Jesus in particular, do not strike out in a radically new direction in regard to the juxtaposition of God’s power and love, but bring a number of Old Testament tendencies to integrated completion. The seeds have already been sown.

ENDNOTES

1. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969), 55.
2. Terence E. Fretheim, God and World in the Old Testament (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005), 65 (hence, GWOT).
3. See also Jer 10:12, 27:5, 51:15. The Hebrew language did have words for the abstract concept we name “power,” namely, koch; hazaq, generally translated as “be strong”; and me’od, “strength.” But anthopomorphized language is more prevalent, such as “God’s outstretched arm” and “God’s mighty hand” (Jer 21:5.) I am indebted to Jon Berquist for this information.
4. The exposition of these texts forms the structure of Fretheim’s GWOT.
5. Martin Buber, Kingship of God, tr. Richard Scheimann (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 87f.
6. Buber, 89.
7. See James Luther Mays, “The God Who Reigns,” in The Forgotten God, ed. A. Andrew Das and Frank J. Matera (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 31f.
8. Bernhard Anderson, “God, OT Views of,” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, vol. E-J:417–30 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962), 423 (hence, IDB).
9. Cf. the creation story in Gen. 1, where “God said . . . and it was so.”
10. Anderson, 423.
11. Walther Eichrodt,Theology of the Old Testament, tr. J. A. Baker (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1961), 231.
12. Eichrodt, 206.
13. Eichrodt, 213, ital. orig.
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14. Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 143, ital. orig. The conjoining of power and solidarity will be addressed further, below.
15. This is seen particularly in Gen. 1:26 where God addresses the divine council, saying “Let us” create humans in “our image, according to our likeness,” though the language shifts to the singular in the following verse.
16. Fretheim, GWOT, 7.
17. Brueggemann, 155.
18. Bernhard W. Anderson, From Creation to New Creation: Old Testament Perspectives (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 89.
19. See below.
20. Fretheim, “The Book of Genesis: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections” (The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. I) (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 345f. See also GWOT, 49.
21. See esp. 13-22 for crucial summary statements. Abraham Heschel, in his trailblazing work on the prophetic literature, already lifted up this theme in Old Testament analysis half a century ago in his The Prophets, 2 vol. (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). “What the prophets proclaim is God’s intimate relatedness to man” (1:219). God does not reveal godself to the prophet “in an absolute abstractness, but in a personal and intimate relation to the world” (2:3). God is “moved and affected by what happens in the world, and reacts accordingly. . . . This notion that God can be intimately affected, that he possesses not merely intelligence and will, but also pathos, basically defines the prophetic consciousness of God” (2:4).
22. Fretheim, GWOT, 22f. The numerous biblical texts that undergird these statements are provided there.
23. Fretheim, The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 49.
24. Fretheim, “The Book of Genesis,” 345.
25. Heschel, The Prophets, 1:167. See, e.g., Is. 40:29: “He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.”
26. Daniel L. Migliore, The Power of God and the Gods of Power (Louisville: WJK Press, 2008), 43. The original is italicized.
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27. Similarly Psalm 35 proclaims: “O Lord, who is like you? You deliver the weak from those too strong for them, the weak and needy from those who despoil them” (35:10). See Hans-Ruedi Weber’s helpful analysis of these texts in his Power: Focus for a Biblical Theology (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1989), 125-31.
28. Fretheim, The Suffering of God, 76.
29. Ibid., 74, 47. See also 55, 75.
30. Heschel, The Prophets, 2:4.
31. See, e.g., Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, 207; Walther Zimmerli, Old Testament Theology in Outline, tr. David E. Green (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1978), 18: “Those who are named are vulnerable.”
32. Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 360.
33. Fretheim, The Suffering of God, 17.
34. Gerhard von Rad, God at Work in Israel, tr. John H. Marks (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1980), 32. See the culminating statement in Gen. 50:20: “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.” See also Fretheim’s helpful discussion of this theme in “The Book of Genesis,” 646.
35. Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 534–51.
36. Patrick Miller, “’Slow to Anger’: The God of the Prophets,” in A. Andrew Das and Frank J. Matera, eds., The Forgotten God: Perspectives in Biblical Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 43f. Heschel emphasized that same point: God’s wrath is an aspect of God’s continual care: “God’s heart is not of stone.” God’s intent (so Isaiah 27:3) is to have no wrath. (The Prophets, 2:73f.)
37. See also Hosea 2:9–13; 4:5–10; 5:1–15; 8:7–14; 10:13–15.
38. See Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 414–17, on God’s “originary love for Israel.”
39. See Ex. 34:6–7, where God is “abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,” whereas God’s anger over iniquity and sin is held only through four generations.
40. Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God (Gifford Lectures, 1984-85), tr. Margaret Kohl (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 75f., where he quotes Dante: “From the Creator’s love came forth in glory the world” (Inferno, I:39f.). [25] Thomas Oord proposes his own modified version in The Nature of Love: a Theology (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2010), 133–38.
41. See also Ps. 36:5; 119:64; 145:9.
42. See also Ps. 89:1–14; 106:7–8.
43. Edwin M. Good, “Love in the OT,” IDB, vol. K-Q:167, ital. mine.
44. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, 251, ital. orig. See also 253.
45. Eichrodt, 281, ital. orig.
46. Eichrodt, 253.
47. Eichrodt, 256. He continued there: “As distinct from the prophetic conception, in which the love of God is pressing forward to a completely new world order, that love is here understood as the power which upholds the present order, and which maintains the covenant in the character of a restauratio, not a renovatio omnium. . . . Such love shines forth unalterably like the sun in heaven and constitutes the inner strength of the eternal divine order.” (ital. orig.)
48. Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 140–44.
49. Brueggemann, 143.
50. Fretheim takes note of the theme of “divine empowerment” in The Suffering of God, 75.

I begin at Dachau.

At Buchenwald. Bergen-Belsen. Auschwitz. Anne Frank, who did not make it home. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed days before the liberation. Elie Wiesel’s father. So many millions more.

The classical Christian synthesis of the power of God and the love of God—forged in those formative years of contact with Greek philosophy, hammered out by Augustine and Aquinas and other giants of Christian thought, fractured by the critiques of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche and their comrades in intellectual arms—was smashed to pieces by the overwhelming human devastation that was the Holocaust. No longer could any reflective person in the church pretend that the God of power in the traditional sense was truly loving—or that a God of love had any significant power in the world we actually live in. One or the other, it seemed—or the very being of God—had to go.

This is, of course, the issue addressed on a more personal level in Rabbi Harold Kushner’s highly popular When Bad Things Happen to Good People, reassessing a conflict at least as ancient as the biblical Book of Job. It seems that more and more people are taking Kushner’s option of choosing a good and caring God, who does not control events, over the traditional God of power. It is almost as though the God of power was tried for over two thousand years and found wanting, so now we are trying the God of love instead.

This book is an assertion that the choice between God’s love and God’s power is one that we are not required to make.

The prevailing voices in two milennia of Christian tradition asked, “How is an all-powerful God loving?” They answered in a variety of unsatisfying ways, but essentially the problem is that they asked the wrong question. I am asking, instead, “How is an all-loving God powerful?” or “How is God, who is essentially love, powerful?” Therein lies all the difference. I maintain we must allow love to redefine power, rather than allowing power to redefine love. Similarly: To ask how God’s power is loving, and how God’s love is powerful, is not to ask the same question in two different ways; it is to ask two different questions.

I contend that God has all the genuine power that God can possibly have without ceasing to be Love. That is the heart of the issue. And it leads me to affirm the central thesis of this extended exploration into the history of theological debate: that the God we worship and try to comprehend is no other than a God who is Empowering Love.

My initial foray in Part One is into the biblical witness to One characterized very explicitly as a “living” God, tracing the dynamic interrelationship between God and God’s creation, God’s people, through the Old Testament into the New. The centrality of hesed in the former and agape in the latter gives us a handle on understanding the God powerfully at work in us and among us in ways we still struggle to grasp.

Part Two covers the initial encounter of biblical content with the widespread influence of Greek intellectual ideas in the milieu of the Roman Empire, leading to accommodations to the biblical message that proved problematic. What became the predominant synthesis of Christian theism in Augustine of Hippo can be seen to have endured through ensuing centuries down to the present, with subsequent modifications but no essential alteration of the fundamental position on God’s power and love initially formulated. Absolute power won out over love. Love, wherever and however possible, had to be “shoehorned” in, somehow.

In Part Three, I introduce multiple challenges to the Augustinian synthesis that eventually brought about its collapse, ranging from the mystics’ elevation of divine love to a questioning of God’s immutability and essential apathy, including the call for a post-patriarchal understanding of a God who is more than merely male, and arriving eventually at a renewed witness to the absolute importance of elevating love to the center of divine reality and determining this to involve God in essential relationality not just with Godself, through the Trinity, but with all that comes into being under God’s impetus.

The final part of this book is a reconstructive one, the objective toward which all that precedes has been aiming. There, I attempt to explicate the precise meaning I have in mind when I name God the God of Empowering Love.

I fully perceive that there is nothing even remotely final or definitive about this reconstructive effort. Every human construct of thought is subject to deconstruction as a step on the way to a new reconstruction. This is offered as a step in that ongoing process, with no claim greater than perhaps it proves informative and helpful to others who are wrestling with the same problem I am concerned with. I fully expect others to make important advances over what I present here, and that is how it should be.

I also do not deny for one moment that my own perspective is shaped by my social situation. The reach for objectivity is always limited by the reality of one’s own very specific subjectivity. I am a European American male, a Protestant, of some considerable years. My writing is colored by my contextuality. That can only be acknowledged, not surmounted. But I hope that the reflections offered here are expandable into other formulations by those with different cultural settings that inform them.

I have made a conscientious effort to let the voices of the Christian tradition speak for themselves in their own—though often translated— words, rather than interpose my own paraphrasing that can introduce unintentionally a personal bias. Even so, I acknowledge two clear aspects of subjectivity: my particular selection of quotations, and my lifting of them out of their original context. That is, obviously, unavoidable. My claim to fairness is justifiable only by appeal to the reader to delve further into those original sources on your own, should you so choose. My limited attempt to overcome my subjective particularity is to be found only in the range of voices to which I have tried to listen as attentively as possible.

The project for which this book is a culmination had its beginnings four decades ago, when I first published a short essay defining and exploring what I called a “Gospel of Empowering Love.” This is finally a putting to rest of notions that would not let go of me for forty years.

I offer it here as a gift.