Today’s author is Prince of Peace member, Paul Sponheim.
We’ve got some problems with the concepts we use to communicate faith’s content. Imagine a cocky but bright college freshman going after the concept: “omnipotence”-”all (the) power”. Then the creatures have none, right? But people of faith talk a lot about being called. A response, AN ACTION, is being sought from hearers who have no power. How can you defend such an incoherent faith?
Well, the basic Christian claim is that God is a God of love. The profound Danish writer, Soren Kierkekaard, fills out the concept by asking us to consider a contrast. On the one hand, we have a noble king who is swept off his feet by a lovely Danish maiden. But he arranges to have them meet under apparently equal terms by pretending to be a SERVANT BOY. It works well and the palace awaits the maiden. BUT THERE IS A CATCH: THE KING CAN ALWAYS CHANGE HIS MIND. With Jesus, on the other hand, things are different. He IS STUCK WITH US, THE HUMAN RACE. Here is Kierkegard’s eloquent summary:
. . . unlike that NOBLE KING, he (Jesus) does not have the possibility of suddenly disclosing that he is, after all, the king-which is no perfection with the king (to have this possibility) but merely manifests his impotence and the impotence of his resolution, that he actually is incapable of becoming what he wanted to become. (Philosophical Fragments, Hong, 54)
KIERKEGARD explicitly tells his readers that this business of God becoming a servant in Jesus happens “by the omnipotent resolution of his omnipotent love”. So, that’s what omnipotence is about: the qualitative uniqueness of God’s will to be our servant.
Omnipotence is not about how different God is FROM us, but it is about how decisively God is FOR us. As I used to say in class: If you don’t want God to love you, Good Luck! We’ve got the logos sarx egeneto-The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
We have some reforming to do. (See Oord, The Death of OMNIPOTENCE AND THE Birth of Amipotence.) LET’S BE SURE It’s clear that when we use the term omnipotence we are not denying the central Christian claim that God loves us, Systematic theologians manage this by emphasizing that God is the “continuing” CREATOR. Thus the faith has a God powerfully at work in every creational situation.
LET US PRAY:
Of the Father’s love begotten,
Ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega,
He the Source, the Ending He,
Of the things that are, that have been,
And that future years shall see
Evermore and evermore!
Amen.