Escape from dogma: Omnipotent?

 

Paolo Cugini

I always find it difficult to answer young people's questions about the omnipotence of God, or God's foreknowledge. Certainly, I know very well that the creed says: "I believe in God, the Father Almighty." Nonetheless, I feel embarrassed, a certain discomfort at this adjective, whose meaning I do not understand, not the etymological sense, but the existential and spiritual sense, especially within the current postmodern culture. The Church Fathers of the early centuries taught us that the message of Jesus always needs to be inculturated. They did so in their preaching and mystagogy, taking concepts from the Greek culture they lived in and returning words and speeches in which the same Greek philosophical concepts were transformed to give substance and voice to the new message of the Risen Lord. Philosophical concepts which today, in a cultural and social context, really struggle to express what evangelizers would like to announce. We lean on, we cling almost desperately to that very deep conceptual apparatus, but today incapable of convincingly and engagingly telling the mystery of God manifested in Jesus Christ. Among these ancient-tasting concepts, which once went a long way but now struggle to assert themselves in the new cultural context, is precisely that of omnipotence.

So, we might ask: what is the use of knowing that God is omnipotent? Who does it serve? How did we come to such a definition? Do men and women today need the omnipotence of God to live, or something else? These are questions that enter the mind when we meet people burdened with their problems, seeking advice, a helping hand to move forward. In these cases, it is difficult to propose the omnipotent God. Another one comes to mind, though, the one who did not care about his omnipotence, did not display it, at least not as the authorities expected, or as the world expected, as we all expect, constantly seeking a God who replaces us in the problems of life, a God, as Bonhoeffer would say, a “gap-filling God.” In this regard, we might recall that God decided to manifest his omnipotence in his Son Jesus: by making himself a servant, taking the last place, washing the disciples’ feet. It’s omnipotence upside down, that which Jesus manifested, omnipotence in reverse, omnipotence not found in power that crushes empires or enemies, but in the free gift of self, in dying instead of, in giving oneself for us. If this is the case, instead of calling Him omnipotent, the God of Jesus Christ could have been called love, humility, mercy.

"Then," some say to me, "if God already knows everything, in what sense are we free?" How do you answer such a question? Omnipotence is the power to do everything, without any limit. What is the use of a God like that, who does everything, who knows everything in advance? What do we do with the omnipotence of God? Even St. Thomas recognized the difficulty in understanding divine power, finding it hard to explain in what sense God’s omnipotence consisted. The medievals had a field day with this theme, seeking to understand whether God can do whatever He decides to do or whether God can do whatever is logically possible for Him. We might ask: what kind of problems are these? How can you think of God in these terms? Such reflections probably arose in certain cultural contexts, in monasteries far from reality or among hermits in the desert. A God thought about, more than encountered; a logical God, more than a feeling; a reasoned God more than passion, a God to be contemplated with a full belly, rather than an empty one. In fact, if your belly is empty, if you haven’t eaten all day, you don’t think of an Omnipotent God: you think about and seek Him in another way. If one is weakened by hunger, by the injustices of the world, one has no strength to think, to elaborate deep definitions of God, but only to invoke something that feels close, near. And so, the Omnipotent God terribly resembles our homes full of everything, and very little those of the poor, full of nothing. The Omnipotent God is the projection of the strength of those who are well-off, who have no problems, who live carefree, who, when they get up in the morning, can open the fridge and find something to eat and drink, who have energy to spare. The Omnipotent God greatly resembles the lord of armies, the God who destroys enemies, the God of the powerful on earth, who, to create peace in the world, leave trails of blood and destruction behind them.

Very different is the action of the weak God, manifested in the cross of Jesus. He, in fact, as the apostle Paul taught us, created peace between two divided peoples, not by destroying one in favor of the other, but by absorbing their hatred upon himself, on his own flesh, defeating hatred with love. The God of Jesus, whom he revealed to us with his lifestyle, with his way of Being, is weak and not omnipotent, because, as Paul always teaches, it is in weakness that God’s power is manifested. Jesus is the Emmanuel, the God-with-us, who does not live among the clouds of heaven, but came to dwell among us, and his Kingdom, which is not of this world, he created among us, within us. So we feel the Omnipotence of the God of Jesus Christ not in the abstract concepts of philosophers, but in the simple gestures of the poor, the excluded, all those who are daily robbed by an unjust economy or, to use Pope Francis’ words, by the economy that kills, the economy generated by the worshippers of the Omnipotent God.

The God of Jesus Christ also manifests his Omnipotence whenever he listens to his interlocutors, helping them to understand reality, helping them above all to escape from the confusion of a world that lives only in illusions. It is not an omnipotence that is manifested from above, that puts the one who turns to it into a listening position, a one-way manifestation. The Omnipotence that comes from Jesus’ style upends the situation, because He is the one who listens, He is the one who stimulates the interlocutor to open up. The model of this dialogical style of Jesus is undoubtedly the dialogue with the disciples on the road to Emmaus. It is the Risen Lord who appears to the two sad disciples fleeing Jerusalem without understanding what happened. Jesus, the Risen One, manifests his power to them by approaching discreetly, by listening, by allowing them to share their frustrations, with patience and gentleness. In the Risen One’s response there is nothing assertive, nothing of absolute truths that descend from above like a slab of cement that flattens everything—feelings, emotions, subjective experiences. On the contrary, the Word of the Risen One rests on them like a balm, a Word perceived as true by the two disciples because it is embedded in their personal experience of the Lord. A truth, therefore, intuited, gently given, grafted onto the listeners’ lives. It is in this sense that the Word of the Risen One becomes the Omnipotence of meaning that gives life and strength to lives defeated in their existential frustrations, to dead bodies because locked in their small spiritual failures.

Omnipotence of the Risen One, of the One who, before rising again, had walked with men and women, lived with them. This is the Incarnate Omnipotence that we need, this Omnipotence made history, which is not recognized by external manifestations, but by the way it acts differently in the company of men and women. The other, that omnipotence of arrogant lords, sitting in five-star restaurants talking about other people’s lives; that conceptual omnipotence for respectable, ethically upright people, we leave to you.

What miracle did Elijah perform in the house of that poor woman? Elijah was hungry and wanted to be fed. Does it make sense to work a miracle, demand a miracle, lower the heavens to demand a piece of bread? Isn’t it that typical arrogance of the delirium of omnipotence that wants to bend everything to itself, even God? Where did Elijah learn such presumption? He had set out on his journey so docile, so humble and simple—how did he change so much, and in so little time?

Becoming overbearing, arrogant: it’s the path one slides into in false religion. When God is only useful to the extent that He answers our desires, then, my friend, we’re in trouble