Attributes of God
For those who are familiar with discussions of the attributes of God (God’s goodness, love, power, etc.), it might seem unusual to place this discussion within the larger treatment of the Father/Son relationship. Often, discussions about the attributes of God are considered quite independently of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ (except when events such as the crucifixion are used to demonstrate God’s love and the resurrection to demonstrate God’s power). However, as should be clear from the entire last chapter and the discussion so far in this chapter, if Jesus is really of one being with the Father and that there is no God other than the God revealed in Jesus Christ, we cannot consider any part of God, even his attributes, apart from what we actually see in Jesus.
This rigorous examination of the attributes of God in light of the Incarnation reveals that often times, when we do not do this, we tend to think of God in ways that owe more to the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition than to the actual Biblical witness and, once we have started this way, we tend to twist Biblical quotations to fit our preconceived view of God rather than allowing our concept of God to be reshaped by the actual data. The real problem is to think of God’s attributes by asking questions like, “What might God do or be like,” or “What can God do” rather than “What has God actually done?” What follows will be a series of short reflections on various attributes of God, exposing unhelpful tendencies where appropriate, but aiming primarily to articulate a faithful understanding of the attributes in question. No attempt will be made to discuss every attribute, but rather to pick those that are central to the faith or which need particularly to be reformulated in light of Christ. It is hoped that such a treatment will set a pattern for interpretation rather than be exhaustive in its discussion.
Omnipotence
We begin with omnipotence because it is the attribute which has most commonly been thought out more in light of secular philosophy (particularly rigid causal categories) than from God’s self-revelation in Christ and will help to illustrate both the concerns and the revisions that a radically Christocentric, that is, centered in Christ, study of the divine attributes involves.
Classically, divine omnipotence is expressed in the phrase, “God can do anything.” While this statement is faithful to many places in scripture which take up the question of God’s power, it must be interpreted in light of what God has done rather than in light of the question, what can God do. Failure to condition our reflection on what God has actually done has caused omnipotence to become, all too often, a matter of sheer speculation, which generates difficult and sometimes silly questions that have no bearing on Christian faith.
The question, “Can God create a rock so big he cannot move it,” is asked, either to show that God’s almightiness is indeed limited (by those who are hostile to Christian faith) or to show that God is bound by logic and can therefore not make a rock he cannot move because it would be a logical impossibility. As a side note, some have posed the answer, “Yes he can make a rock that is so big he cannot move it…and then he’d move it anyway.” This answer is trying to preserve God’s omnipotence and free their thinking from rigid logical and causal categories. However, in my judgment, it would be better to simply dismiss the question as poorly formed and unhelpful. Framing the question in terms of what God can do is already to import a way of thinking that does not come from the gospel.
It is important to notice that Christian faith is not the only worldview that affirms an omnipotent God. Others do as well, most notably classical theism (a philosophical system that affirms the existence of a God). Classical theism tends to understand God primarily in terms of omnipotence and more specifically as the “Unmoved Mover.” The meaning of this phrase comes from the Newtonian worldview where the entire universe is a closed system of cause and effect. Everything that happens is seen as nothing more than an “effect” that was “caused.” If we were able to trace backwards through the chain of causes, we would eventually come to something that set the causal system going but was not caused itself. That, for the classical theist, is God. Such a view of the universe does not require (and indeed, does not allow) God to interact with the world once this chain reaction is set into motion. Such a view often lies behind the idea of “God as cosmic watchmaker.”
The reason why this way of understanding divine omnipotence is problematic can be more or less covered in two points. First, it forces the theological conclusion that absolutely everything happens because God has “caused” it, whether directly or indirectly. This has the effect of eliminating any sense of tragedy, which, as was discussed in the last chapter, is a disastrous consequence. Nothing can finally be bad because everything finally comes from God (and is thus good). This can be maintained by someone who is seeing God bringing good out of their cancer or other illness, but when we begin to say that people dying in freak accidents, kidnappings, murders, and any of a number of truly evil things are finally not bad because “God never gives us more than we can handle,” we end up denying any sense that the world is not as it should be.
The other major reason that it is not helpful as Christians to try to think about God in exclusively or primarily causal terms is because this way of thinking has its roots outside of the Christian tradition. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who lived in the fourth century B.C. developed a rigorous and (in the opinion of him and his followers) comprehensive system of causality where there were four distinct kinds of causes. To give an example, we might ask the question, “What caused this marble statue?” We could say that it was caused (in different ways) by the sculptor, the chisel, the marble itself, or the patron. However, the Bible never speaks in terms of Aristotle’s causes. To argue about who “causes” salvation as if it was merely an “effect” of a divine “cause” is to read Aristotelian thought into the Judeo-Christian tradition. To interpret divine omnipotence as “omni-causality” is to impose a secular conceptual framework onto the gospel.
Now that so much has been said in disagreement with one particularly strong tradition, it is appropriate to consider what the actual revelation of God shows us about God’s omnipotence. When we see God asserting power over the evil that has taken hold of the world, what do we see? We see God becoming a human being, an infant in the manger. God did not simply snap his fingers or wave a magic wand and do away with evil in a pure abstract act of brute force. Instead, God enters into the brokenness of the world in an intensely personal way, taking fallen human nature upon himself and overcoming it from the inside out from within the very being of God. We do not see a God who simply “causes” sin to go away, but one who does what we would not expect if we were to predict what God would do and enters into our lowly estate.
We see God’s power over evil most clearly in the cross. This is also the most surprising act of power, because we would have expected God to prevent the crucifixion, to say “no!” to the powers of evil, overcoming them with his power. Instead, we see God allowing human evil to run its course, to be provoked to its very heights, and to suffer its wrath in its fullness, thus demonstrating God’s love and power in a more amazing way than we ever would have expected. God is so powerful, he can achieve victory through suffering love. God’s power is the power of the slain lamb, not the insecure power of humanity, that feels the need to assert its dominance by a display of force.
When we see God’s almightiness in light of Christ, we see that our very concept of “power” is radically transformed. Even though God’s use of power is so very different than our use of it, he does not abandon the word, but transforms it in light of himself. Any time we think about God’s power as separated from the actual activity of God in Christ, we will tend to introduce a split in our doctrine of God. Jesus does one thing (interacting with us in a personal and dynamic way), while we claim that God actually behaves rather differently (as the Unmoved Mover and arbitrary user of power). If we try to reconcile these two views, often, our philosophical understanding of God trumps the actual example of Christ. Instead of the God of love that is born witness to on every page of the Bible, we end up with a dark, unknowable deity of whom we can only be afraid.
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