Are There Things God Can’t Do?

Thanks to my good friend Fred Herren, last year I became acquainted with theologian Thomas Jay Oord. God Can’t (2019) is the only one of his many books that I have read in its entirety, and initially I was “put off” by the book’s title. After reading it, though, I mainly agreed with Oord’s main points. 

Thomas Jay Oord was long a pastor and theologian in the Church of the Nazarene. Born and raised in Washington state, Oord (b. 1965) graduated from Northwest Nazarene College (now University, NNU) in Idaho in 1988.

After serving as a pastor of a Nazarene church for several years in Washington state, he enrolled in Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, graduating with a Master of Divinity. While in seminary, he was a pastor in nearby Lenexa, Kansas.

After earning his Ph.D. degree at Claremont Graduate University in California, he taught theology at Eastern Nazarene College in Massachusetts and then for sixteen years taught at his alma mater (NNU). Since 2020, Oord has been directing doctoral programs of the online Northwind Theological Seminary.*¹

God Can’t, Oord’s thought-provoking book, is about theodicy, the attempt to resolve the problem of evil that arises when all power and all goodness are simultaneously ascribed to God. If God can prevent all evil, why doesn’t a loving God do that? That is a basic problem for traditional theology.

Oord explains his reason for writing God Can’t: “I wrote this book for victims of evil, survivors, and those who endure senseless suffering. I wrote it for the wounded and broken who have trouble believing in God, are confused, or have given up faith altogether” (3).

His book, though, is also of considerable help for all of us who know people who have trouble believing in God's existence because of the suffering in their own lives or that which they see starkly in the world around them.

Oord insists that “God loves us all, all the time.” He goes on to assert, “Every idea I advocate in this book assumes God is loving” (11-12). This leads him to reject belief in God’s omnipotence and to emphasize what he terms God’s amipotence.*²

According to Oord, “God’s nature is uncontrolling love.” Thus, “God’s love is inherently uncontrolling” (26). That is why God “can’t prevent evil singlehandedly. God’s love governs what God can do” (27). So, here is Oord’s “Belief #1”: “God Can’t Prevent Evil Singlehandedly” (44).*³

How could God be considered all-loving if God could unilaterally prevent evil but didn’t do so? By substituting amipotence for omnipotence, though, Oord concludes, “I can whole-heartedly adore my uncontrolling Creator, knowing God neither causes nor allows the evil I’ve experienced or know” (183).

And then he leaves these final words: “The Lover of the Universe empowers and inspires us to live lives of love. Let’s cooperate with this uncontrolling God of love!” (186).

Much more needs to be said about Oord’s challenging book, but I will mention just one more important thing I realized afresh from reading it. Much of what Christians have said about prayer is based on an erroneous view of God. So often God is asked to do what an uncontrolling God cannot do.

Back in August 2016, I wrote about this in connection with reports that Jimmy Carter was “cancer free” after being diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 2015. I encourage you to (re-)read that post (here).

I realize more fully now that it is simply “wrong” to pray for God to heal anyone or to perform other “miraculous” deeds. Yes, I believe in prayer, but not prayers that seek to change God or to “beg” God to do things that God could not do.

So, yes, given the loving, noncontrolling nature of God, there are some/many things God can’t do. But rather than that decreasing our devotion to God, such realization should cause our faith in God to deepen and to strengthen our determination to work with God for the betterment of the world around us.

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*¹ For more detailed information about Oord, see his website at https://ThomasJayOord.com. That site includes this recent news: “In 2024, Oord was taken to trial in the Church of the Nazarene for being queer affirming. The verdict was the removal of his ministerial license and membership in the denomination.” Last August, my friend Brian Kaylor interviewed Oord about his expulsion from the Church of the Nazarene. You can  hear that interview here.  

*² In April 2023, Oord published a new book under the title The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence. He coined the latter word, which means all-loving, to use in place of the former word, which means all-powerful. Christian theology has often talked about God as being omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. Those are not biblical terms, however, and Oord firmly believes that the latter term should be replaced by his new term, amipotence.

*³ Oord’s other basic beliefs articulated in this book: #2, “God feels our pain”; #3, “God works to heal”; #4, “God squeezes good from bad”; and #5, “God needs our cooperation.”

Note: Thinking Friend Anton Jacobs reminded me that Rabbi Harold S. Kushner’s bestselling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1991) presents ideas quite similar to Oord’s. I read Kushner’s book back in the 1990s but didn’t remember that similarity while reading Oord, who does not mention Kushner.