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. 

They’ll Know We are Christians by Our ??

In this last blog post before Christmas, I am writing about the central message of Christmas and also writing about what I want both those of you who are Christians, as well as those who are not, to read and think about deeply.

Christmas is the celebration of love. This past Sunday was the fourth Sunday of Advent, and the theme for that last Sunday before Christmas was love.

There are various Advent traditions and practices, but according to the Christianity.com website, the selected Bible passage for Dec. 18 was the third chapter of John, with those best-known words of the Bible, 

The longstanding practice of giving Christmas presents is largely rooted in the gifts of the Magi who came from afar and presented gifts to baby Jesus. But the first and greatest Christmas gift was none other than God’s loving gift of Jesus himself to humankind.

Christians were long known for their love. “They’ll know we are Christians by our love,” is one title given for a gospel song written in the 1960s by Peter Schottes, a Catholic priest.

In the 1970s and ’80s, I enjoyed singing that song with Christian friends and fellow church members in Japan. Here is its second verse and the chorus:

We will walk with each other, will walk hand in hand,
We will walk with each other, will walk hand in hand,
And together we’ll spread the news, that God is in our land

And they’ll know we are Christians,
By our love, by our love.
Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.*

The lyrics of that gospel song are loosely based on words of Jesus as recorded in the Gospel of John: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (13:35, NIV)

In addition, though, until perverted by its alliance with political power, Christianity from its beginning was a religion of love for all people—and it still is when it is faithful to Jesus Christ.

Some Christians are now known for their hate. In my Dec. 10 blog post, I introduced Octavia Butler and her two dystopian novels. I have just finished reading the second of those, Parable of the Talents (1998).

In that prescient book, the U.S. elects a new President in 2032, a man who is an ardent advocate of Christian nationalism. In fact, he formed a new denomination, the Church of Christian America (CA).

The most alarming characteristic of that new church is its horrendous persecution of those considered to be “infidels.” Lauren, the protagonist of both novels, experiences unthinkable suffering at the hands of fanatical CA believers. They, indeed, were “Christians” known for their hate.

Perhaps you have seen the recent news stories about a restaurant that refused to serve a Christian group because of what they deemed was the “hatred” of that anti-gay group toward their employees.

Metzger Bar and Butchery in Richmond, Va., posted on Instagram (here) that they “denied service to the group to protect its staff, many of whom are women or members of the LGBTQ+ community.”

After reading about that happening, I came across a YouTube video titled “Hate Preachers: Bigotry and Fearmongering by Extremist Christian ‘Leaders’.” That video includes several clips of preachers saying almost unbelievable things, especially about LGBTQ people.**

Posted on YouTube eight months ago, that video has had 117,000 views, and when I accessed it last week, the first of the more than 1,600 comments said, “I simply don’t have enough hatred in me to be a Christian.”

How exceedingly sad that this is how some people view Christians now!

During this Christmas week, my plea for all of us is that we will fully accept the love of God manifested on that first Christmas and broadly implement that love. And, indeed, may all of us Christians be increasingly known by our love for all people.

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* Here is the link to a YouTube video with those words being nicely sung.

** Some of these are affiliated with New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist churches, a relatively new organization you can read about here. 

TTT #8 God Loves All of Creation

Everyone has heard much about God’s love. But do we sufficiently comprehend the extent of that love? Probably not. This article about God’s love is adapted from the first section of the eighth chapter of Thirty True Things Everyone Needs To Know Now (TTT), available in its entirety by clicking this link.

God’s Love Is Not Just for Humans

To begin with, it is important for us to realize that God’s love is not just for human beings. Perhaps Christianity through the centuries has been the most anthropocentric of all of the world’s religions.

There are, however, many references to God’s concern for nature in the Hebrew Bible that Christians call the Old Testament, and Christian environmentalists have increasingly called attention to those passages. For example, Psalm 145:9 declares, “The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made.” But have we really thought what it means for God to love all creation? Probably not sufficiently. 

Emphasis on God’s Beloved Creation

To address the lack of adequate concern for the natural world, back in 1983 at the Vancouver Assembly, the World Council of Churches (WCC) encouraged member churches to commit publicly to addressing environmental concerns as part of a common effort to promote Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation. That became known as the JPIC process. (The image below was the logo of that Assembly.) 

Then in 1990, the WCC sponsored the World Convocation on Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation in Seoul, Korea. One study unit in this program was called “Creation as Beloved of God.”

Creation, the physical universe in its entirety and not just human beings, is loved by God. That was the important emphasis of the WCC in the 1980s and 1990s.

There has been a similar emphasis in the Catholic Church: Pope John Paul II’s message for New Year’s Day 1990 was titled “Peace With God the Creator, Peace With All of Creation.” Reflecting upon that important message, Elisabeth A. Johnson, a noted Catholic theologian, wrote in 2001 about “God’s Beloved Creation.”

God’s Love and Our Love for Creation

Most people seem to have long thought that the purpose of the natural world—the purpose of all the plants, animals, and minerals in the world of nature—is primarily to supply the needs of human beings.

The creation story found in the first chapter of Genesis certainly does sound as if humans are the “crown of creation.” When the first human couple was created, “God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion . . .” (1:28).

The English words subdue and have dominion, however, may not be the best to convey what the Biblical writer really had in mind. To grasp that maybe we need to consider more fully the implication of these words: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them” (1:27).

The idea of humans created in the image of God has nothing to do with how we look; it has everything to do with our capacity to be loving and caring as God is. If God loves the physical world—and certainly God does—then we humans created in the image of God must love and care for the world also.

Since God loves all of creation—which includes the physical world, the world of sticks and stones, of plants and animals, the whole world of nature—it is incumbent on us human creatures to love/care for the natural world also.

My fear is that we are failing in that sacred task.