#164 The Omnipotence Conundrum
Last time we talked, I began to tell you the story our our famous excursion for supplies from Camp in the south of Portugal to Lisbon and back again. And I left it, as is oft done by the writers of stories, hanging in the middle with a promise of more. And since then, I have been scolded more than once for leaving you with such a cliff-hanger. Which,, of course, cannot but please me; such sincere complaint is often the best kind of compliment.
We – my mom, my teenage sisters Lyn, and Debbie and me, who still qualified as kids – were on a day-long mission to the city, fetching supplies for the Bible camp where we spent our summers. We had briefly visited our winter home, and were now off on a tangled tour of various points in the city, of which I remember very little except that the car slowly filled until it was loaded, and overloaded, with boxes, bales, bundles, sacks and packages.
I don’t remember, either, what any of those were except for two, a heavy carton of sweet butter, and two large sacks of fresh oranges. What I can tell you is that by mid-afternoon, when we were ready at last to depart on our return journey, there wasn’t a cubic inch of space left in that car to fill. We ‘lil ‘uns in the back seat had our feet resting on sacks of rice, and we were uncomfortably aware of the towering edifice which loomed, and even overhung, right behind our heads. The car knew it too; station wagon though it was, it wasn’t sprung for this lot and it lumbered like a loaded freighter.
But that was okay, we expected it. What we hadn’t planned on was the heat. Did I mention it was hot? By this time it was nearing 100 degrees, and there was no such thing in those days as air conditioning. Opening the windows didn’t help much either. And as we bumped and swayed southward, inevitably things began to happen to our load.
The first thing we were aware of was a peculiar odor. It wasn’t unpleasant, not at first, and we thought maybe it was the oranges. But as time passed the smell got worse instead of better, and now we were sure it was the oranges.
There was absolutely nothing we could do about it. We weren’t about to stop and unload to get at them; it wouldn’t do us any good if we did because there was nowhere to dispose of them. All we could do was go on, noses twitching, and hope nothing worse would happen.
But it did. I don’t remember if it was Debbie or me who first noticed something warm and gooey dripping down the backs of our necks. You guessed it; all that butter was, quite literally, losing its cool.
At this point the path of wisdom might have been to stop somewhere and deal with the problem, but by this time we were perhaps a little beyond wisdom. We were hot and tired and messy and miserable and, and we just wanted to get this trip over with and get Dad to deal with it all. And so on we went, enveloped in a thickening fog of spoiling oranges and rancid butter, while the big box, now thoroughly saturated, slowly collapsed under its own weight, and rivulets of liquid grease ran hither and yon through the rear of the car.
And that, by rights, ought to be the end of the story. How could it possibly get worse? But sure enough, it did. We were perhaps an hour short of the promised land, had left the “main” road behind and were deep into the countryside, when suddenly there was a loud “crack”, and everything seemed to go blank. Mom swerved and we skidded to a stop, glad to be alive and wondering what had just happened.
It wasn’t hard to figure out. An oncoming truck had hit a rock just wrong and shot it neatly at the exact middle of our windshield. There was only a small hole, but the entire surface had shattered into a billion pieces and was now opaque and sagging.
We sat there, just breathing, until eventually Mom stirred and took charge. We kids were banished to a neighboring field while Mom and Lyn dug out the Car Blanket. I don’t know if your family has, or had, one of these, but for us it was a family fixture which lived in the car and was used for picnics or to comfort chilly children.
In this case, though, it was for once put to a less glamorous use. They arranged the blanket as best they could over the dashboard and front seats, and then, clutching rocks as big as their fists, they began grimly to pound to bits what was left of our windshield.
This took time, and Debbie and I watched with fascinated enjoyment. And we littles weren’t the only ones to get a kick out of it; by the time our elders had completed their macabre task, they were giggling too. Clearly our day had gone from the sublime, through the ridiculous, and had now attained the bizarre. It was to laugh or to scream, and they chose to laugh.
Eventually we piled back into our oddly altered vehicle and proceeded on our way, slowly and with wind in our faces. Eventually we reached our own village and drew stares as we sailed through the village square, and after bumping down our own rutty lane, we turned in at last at the gate of the camp.
Naturally we were late; it was getting dark, and Dad was worried and on the lookout, and he heard us coming. He emerged from the kitchen door and met us as we rolled up the driveway, and Mom, in a spirit of wicked fun, thrust her arm through the missing windshield and gaily waved.
And it was that moment which made the entire adventure worth having, because in all my long life I had never seen an expression of such transfixed astonishment as on my dad’s face as Mom, grinning like a Cheshire cat, braked to a gentle stop before him. For we returning wanderers it was a triumphant homecoming; we felt like heroes and it almost made up for our terrible, awful, horrible, no-good, very-bad day.
* * * * * *
The Christian faith is and has always been founded on the astonishing proposition that the god of the Bible is a personal one. We take our stand on that truth, because the Bible says it. But is that enough to make it a real thing to we common joes? Is God a person to you, or to me? And of course we hasten to say yes to that question because we have to because our Bible tells us to, but the sad truth is that when we do, the truth of our claim is often more theoretical than visceral.
Among the religions of the world, the Christian God is the only one who claims to be personal. It’s a claim which is unique to the Christian god. There’s a reason for that; it’s because the world didn’t invent him. The folks who penned the pages of the Bible were as “from here” as you and I are, but what they wrote down for us is not. Everything we know about this god of ours comes, through those pages, from “out there” in the Great Beyond, where he is and we’re not and where, therefore, our human information-gathering capabilities are not able to reach.
That being so it’s no surprise, or it shouldn’t be, that our worldly preconceptions, even the vocabularies we use, regarding the natures of gods are apt to fall down on the job when it comes to this one. We “believe” what the Bible tells us because we’ve taken a stand that it’s truth, but we often have a dizzy time internalizing the remarkable things it says, because we’re from here while they are from Out There.
And the most difficult of them all, the one which boggles our human imagination, is that God is a person. There’s a reason for that, and it’s so simple that it can be distilled into a single word, attributes. The sad fact is that for we who believe, God’s attributes, real and true though we believe them to be, often get in the way.
Why is that? After all, attributes aren’t unique to God. You have them and so do I, and we still manage to get along on a personal levvel. But in God’s case it’s different, or so so it seems to us; those attributes of his often function as an effective roadblock to personal relationship.
What attributes are we talking about? There are lots of them that can be distill from the text of the Bible, and they grow more numerous as we drill down; professionals get paid to debate them. But among them all are the Big Three, the ones about which almost no one bothers to disagree. We’re so fond of them that we’ve given them names; God, we love to tell one another, is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. This trio is so ubiquitous that, for my own convenience, I’ve lumped them together as The Omnis.
And, let me hasten to say, I mean no criticism; there’s nothing wrong with any of those, they’re true enough. The attributes of God are real and their description of him is an accurate one. But, do they portray a personal god? Oh please. Quite the contrary; they’re apt to get in the way.
How do they do that? In a word, it’s because they are superlatives. A superlative is a thing which isn’t just bigger or most or best, it’s the biggest and mostest and bestest that is or can be. Superlatives are things we can recognize and name, but only from a distance because one thing they don’t describe is us. Limited as we are to the senses and capacities included into our meat-suits, superlatives are to us theoretical, not real. They may be true, but not to our perception. They are outside our frame of reference because none of us, and nothing we can see or hear or touch, is ever 100% of anything. We can talk about them, and do, but for us they are abstract, not tangible.
And that effectively makes God abstract too, not personal. That portentous trio works just fine on an intellectual level; it’s useful when the theologs do their thing, but it does little to make God approachable. Quite the contrary; it makes him alien. Persons, as we know them, are not like that; superlatives may describe God but they don’t don’t describe people.
It’s a dilemma of sorts. God is personal, and so are we. But God is superlative while we are not. How is this not a contradiction in terms? What can we do to reconcile those two assertions? And the simple answer is that to do that, we need a better understanding of what superlatives are; of how they work and what they do – and don’t do.
That’s a question you’ll rarely hear asked, and the reason for it is that when it comes to the Big Three, we’re apt to think we already know. That’s because even while they present to us as more theoretical than real, they are yet apt to our imagination. We may not understand the Omnis very well, but we don’t have a problem picturing to ourselves what it might be like to possess such god-like capacities.
And of that Big Three, the one which really fires our imagination, the one that’s nearly always listed first, is the O-word, omnipotence. We may not easily grasp all the implications of being all-powerful, but we are ever eager to imagine ourselves having more power than we do – and once having done that, we naturally proceed on to top that imagining with yet more power, and so on… The sky’s the limit.
In practical terms, omnipotence speaks to our condition in a way the other two do not; it’s the one we can’t leave alone. That’s because it’s about power, and power is a thing every human being wants and imagines having – and the more the merrier. To our worldly minds, the tale the Bible tells is more easily understood as a success-story if it’s told in terms of God’s power.
It’s a thing every human soul dreams about; it speaks to our condition in a way that God’s other attributes do not. That’s because for us, power is more than a want, it’s a core need. Like God, we need power to be what we are; without it we would cease to be human. But unlike God, our power supply is strictly limited. Therefore power, more than any other attribute – the power we have, what we don’t, the power we can get, and how – is constantly on our radar.
Not that the other core needs that we have are less needful, but in our human perception power is different, it’s in a class by itself, because this is the only one where, in our imagination, the sky is the limit. We are never satisfied; no matter how much power we have or can get, we can always picture ourselves with more, and long for it.
Let’s be silly for a moment, and look at omnipotence in the light of those other two Omnis. For example, omniscience: Is knowledge a need? To be sure it is; without it we wouldn’t last long. But there’s a practical limit to how much we need or even want to know. Learning and education and so on can be useful and great fun, but we have no need to know everything. Omniscience holds little appeal for us. If God has it, he’s welcome to it.
Or, omnipresence: Mobility is a need too because without it we die. We most of us like to travel; seeing new places is informative and entertaining. But do you really want to be everywhere at once? I don’t. Omnipresence is a thing which, in our imagination, we can cheerfully leave to God.
But… omnipotence? Now, that’s different! Show me someone who doesn’t want more power, no matter how much they already have, and I’ll show you one who’s selling a story. There isn’t one of us who hasn’t had dizzy dreams of god-like power.
Why do we so want power? Not because we’re powerless, we’re not. But we do feel powerless much of the time. That’s because what power we possess is measured, it is vulnerable, contingent; it grants us freedom to do and to be some things but not others; certainly not all that we can imagine or desire. Hence our love affair with power, and hence too our relational estrangement from the god who has all of it.
Because, we know quite well that he doesn’t have to live in the same cage of limitations that we do – we know it, and are apt at times to grind our teeth because of it. In every human soul is a yearning to be what he is, to have limitless power like he does, to be God. I can feel it, and so can you.
When we swivel our gaze toward God, then, and his omnipotence, it’s through that filter that we tend to do it. God appears to us alien, incomprehensible, an immutable force of nature – anything but a person. We agree he is one, because we have to or call the Bible a liar, but it’s not a proposition we can sink our teeth into in the same way that we might with, say, one another. It’s a conundrum we live with constantly, but mostly without knowing it because it’s a thing we rarely put into words.
But now we have – put the problem into words, that is. Great. Wonderful. Now what? Is there a way out of this dilemma? Of course there is, and the path from here to there leads through yet another attribute of God’s – although it might not seem so at first; it might appear rather to further complicate the mess than clear it up. But it doesn’t, it won’t; it’s the key. What is it? Just this: God is the God of Love.