As a Reformed Christian I am often confronted by people who think God’s power in such a way that it might not be possible to distinguish their notion of divine power from the notion operative for the classical Hellenic philosophers, and their conception of actus purus. This is where I push back with absolute gumption; as a Reformed Christian I am committed to the Protestant Scripture Principle, as such I am concerned with maintaining and articulating a notion of divine power that is attested to and disclosed by Holy Scripture—particularly as that is revealed by God’s Son, Jesus Christ.

Martin Luther was concerned with confronting the brute conception of divine power, in his day, propounded by the Nominalists simpliciter. Nominalists operated with a notion of divine power that understood God to be potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata. In other words, they maintained that God, in the heavenlies, might be different than the God revealed; that the absolute power (potentiality) of God could be utterly different than God’s ordained (or economic, if you will) power as that is disclosed in and through His Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. To this both Karl Barth and TF Torrance shout a resounding Nein! This is the sort of thinking, whether it be from the Nominalists or even the Aristotelians, that both of these theologians, respectively, sought to challenge with the phrase: ‘there is no God behind the back of Jesus Christ.’ And it is this that classical Calvinists and Lutheran orthodox cannot seem to wrap their heads around. They are so committed to repristinating and retrieving the past ‘classical’ tradition, that they cannot see both the formal and material problems associated with engaging in this practice. They fail to recognize, ostensibly, that the past was one episode within the greater drama of the total oeuvre of God’s doctrinal development in the ongoing ecclesial history. In other words, they can’t seem to grasp that to be ‘classical’ is not inherently to be ‘orthodox,’ per se. We ought to appreciate, with great earnest, what the orthodox Christian past, and her thinkers, were attempting; in their day. But to become ossified by their day, and then reject any attempt to constructively engage with the theological material they produced as that is given shape by the orthodox present; this seems to me to be a fool’s errand.

I digress, to an extent. God’s power is thoroughly important to understand, since it will determine the way we think He operates in a God/world relation. If we suppose that we can think God’s power in abstraction from God’s triune person as that is revealed in Jesus Christ—first born witness to by the prophets of old—then we will think God, and His ways, through a distorted prism. A prism, indeed, that has no necessary correspondence to its stated source of light. In other words, it is one thing to assert that the way we think God’s power comes from God’s Self-revelation, but it is another to prove this as that is evinced in our respective theological methodologies and their material productions. TF Torrance was wont to emphasize: there is an order of being to knowing; viz. if we think God, in the negative, from an abstract ground of knowing in ourselves, then we will think God from a projection of ourselves. On the other hand, if we think God from a concrete ground within God, as that is gifted for us in Jesus Christ, then we will think God from the actualization of Himself for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. This latter way of thinking God, particularly as that is applied to God’s power, is evinced most elegantly in Karl Barth’s conniving in regard to God’s power. Barth writes (at length):

It is best to begin here too with the decisive statement that we are not dealing with any kind of power, or power in itself, or even omnipotence in itself and in general. On the contrary, we have to do with the power of God, and in this way and to this extent with omnipotence, with real power. Here, too, the forgetfulness which would lead us to define the subject by the predicate instead of the predicate by the subject would lead to disastrous consequences. It is just at this point that it would become especially clear how wrong a method this is at every point. More clearly even than the definition of God by the abstract concepts of the infinite, the simple, the immovable, etc., to define Him in terms of power in itself has as its consequence, not merely a neutralisation of the concept of God, but its perversion into its opposite. Power in itself is not merely neutral. Power in itself is evil. It is nothing less than freedom from restraint and suppression; revolt and domination. If power by itself were the omnipotence of God it would mean that God was evil, that he was the spirit of revolution and tyranny par excellence.

This leads, of course, to a conclusion which has already presented itself on more than one occasion. The infinite, simple or immovable in itself, provided (contradictorily enough!) potency and dynamic are also attributed to it, provided it is now suddenly to be understood as power impotence, is not really so harmless and neutral as appears at first sight. The final thing has not been said about it when it is declared that it is not God. If it is really that which is powerful, indeed the all-powerful in itself, we must say of it, not merely that it has nothing to do with God, but also that it has a great deal to do with the devil, or at least with what the devil would like to be and to have.

But Holy Scripture and the revelation to which it bears witness do not lead us on this dangerous path. In it, it is God who is revealed as full of power and therefore as omnipotent. It is not power or even omnipotence which is revealed there as divine in itself. If we are to continue our previous course, and understand God’s omnipotence too in accordance with Scripture and therefore by the standard of Gods’ self-revelation, we must in all circumstances understand it in this way, refusing to reverse subject and predicate.

Already in the creed the omnipotentem [almighty] is not to be separated from the Deum patrem [God the Father] nor is the latter to be explained by the former. The omnipotence of which the creed speaks is the omnipotence of God the Father, the omnipotence of the God and Father who reveals Himself to be God and Father in accordance with the remaining content of the creed, and is therefore of one essence with the Son and the Holy Spirit. It is not a matter of our already knowing by ourselves what omnipotence is and then learning from God’s self-revelation that He is this and acknowledging the One defined as omnipotent in this way as our Father. What we by ourselves can think we know as power and omnipotence can be only that evil power in itself. It is blasphemy to ascribe power of this kind to God; and to require men to call a God of this kind “Father” is a piece of sentimentality which reveals with remarkable clarity the vicious and fundamentally cruel irony behind all sentimentality. On the other hand, the revelation of God the Father is itself the revelation of the divine omnipotence. This is the source from which we have to learn basically what power and omnipotence is, in opposition to every preconception. “The Almighty” in abstracto [in the abstract] has probably more to do with that revolutionary and tyrannical spirit than with God. The constitution of the Swiss Confederacy is right when it begins with the words: “In the name of God, the Almighty.”[1]

TF Torrance identifies the sort of order of knowing God that Barth details as epistemological inversion, or as a kata physin (according to the nature) mode for thinking and knowing God. It is where the ‘subject determines the predicate,’ and not vice versa. But the ‘classical’ way for thinking God’s power, at least as that has largely taken shape in the Western mold, with particular instantiation during the medieval period, does just the opposite. It thinks from ‘two-books’ of revelation wherein the natural order ostensibly has the built-in capacity to ‘reveal’ God, writ large. But to think this is already to allow the predicate (the creature) to determine the subject (God); vis-à-vis a God/world relation. And if we do this, particularly as Protestants, we are no longer allowing Scripture’s res (reality), who is Jesus Christ, to determine our knowledge of God; we instead are flipping that on its head. When we do this we must now think God’s power under the terms of our projection of what that looks like; we end up with a decretal God who is a brute, and thus can only relate to His creation based upon the immobility that we attribute to Him, rather than the mobility He has demonstrated for us ‘in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.’

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[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §31: Study Edition Vol 9 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 88-9.