by Jesus, the Son of God incarnate, before his human judges, and in his acceptance to be crucified by them in absolute weakness. The power of sin and death, which in this world expresses itself in the power to dominate others by coercive force of one kind or another, is overcome by the greater power of love (John 14:30–31, 16:33): Jesus freely and humbly lays down his life for the world (John 10:17–18; Phil 2:5–8), gives himself up to God to be made sin for our sake (2 Cor 5:21), absorbs in his person the worst that man can do to man, and then is raised up by God through the power of the Spirit of holiness (Rom 1:4; Phil 2:9). Life, which is greater than death, works by the holiness of love, which is greater than material power. Life/Love/Holiness conquers death/power/corruption and redeems, just as, in the beginning, life/love overcame chaos and the formless void and created. This is the supreme manifestation of divine omnipotence and the definitive judgment of sin under the form of perverted human power.
If God did not judge sinners in this life and in the final judgment in the fullness of time of which the Scriptures speak, justice would be absent from the world and evil would triumph; and if he were not gracious, if he did not show mercy to the penitent—to those who hunger for mercy and who show mercy to others—love would be absent and evil would triumph. Both justice and mercy are present in the world, of course, woven into its structures; and they are present, ironically, in some of the actions of the same human beings who desecrate them.45
Made in God’s image, we are not bereft of these qualities, though we regularly pervert both. But because of this moral doublemindedness we cannot redeem ourselves or fundamentally reform our behavior. In Christ, God’s very image incarnate, who was like us in every way except that he was without sin and loved God and all his human neighbors with an undivided heart, the Lord God has undertaken to do this on our behalf. That is the meaning of the cross. The Messiah took upon himself freely the judgment and penalty for the sins of mankind, condemning condemnation itself to the grave and so manifesting supremely God’s omnipotence and his essential nature of love and opening the way to resurrection and the triumph of life.
Two other aspects of omnipotence remain to be pointed out. We spoke above of God’s immanence in connection with his mysterious plurality. Here I want to suggest that his immanence is an aspect of his omnipotence. He is omnipotent as he is immanent in his creatures since in some way every one of them, from the smallest particle upward, will reflect him, its Creator, and be sustained in being by him. Surprisingly to us, perhaps, God’s omnipotence, in implying immanence, may thus be said to involve intimacy and intrinsic involvement with his world. This truth underlies the possibility of incarnation, where God in Christ comes amongst us as one of us and then sends the Holy Spirit actually to live within us, in what the Bible calls our hearts, in a real and not just symbolic sense.
Secondly, omnipotence must never be dissociated from goodness, inherent in God’s love. God is limited by his character: as good, he cannot do or endure evil; as love, he cannot act unjustly or cruelly; as rational, he cannot act irrationally or arbitrarily; as faithful, he cannot break his word or alter his purpose; as merciful, he always seeks to give us grace. But these limitations in no way detract from divine omnipotence; rather, they qualify it and disclose its inner moral dynamic.
The concept of omnipotence is in itself impossible for finite mortals to grasp. The idea of the sheer act of creating ex nihilo or of raising another from the dead may give us a hint of what we designate by this concept, but even that idea is quite beyond our intellectual reach. All we can say about such an act is that the power to do it must be unlimited (except as suggested above), altogether beyond any analogy with power as we experience it within the creation. What we may be sure of, on the basis of revelation and of the structures of the natural world, is that the fruit of divine omnipotence is, as goodness, the opposite of chaos, and becomes manifest in order, beauty, and redemptive love.46
It is, finally, as noted above, God’s redemption of mankind through the cross and resurrection of Jesus that provides the ultimate manifestation of omnipotence within the confines of history. The power to overcome death and bring forth a new creation within history—first Jesus the Christ, then those who long for him in their hearts (whether they know it or not) and so will be raised with him in the life to come—is equivalent to the power that brought forth light and matter out of nothingness “in the beginning.” Creation and new creation—manifestations of sovereign love—are the work of the omnipotent God.
XI
The God Revealed in Jesus Christ—the Creator—is Purposeful; the Purposefulness of Organic Entities and Systems; Teleology in the Universe, as Focused in Humanity; Human Self-transcendence and its Perversion
God the Creator is also revealed to be purposeful. Obviously, purposefulness is implicit in the concept of creation, as its opposite is implicit in the concept of chance.47 As, starting with the rise of deism in the seventeenth century, the concept of autonomous nature gradually displaced that of God-dependent creation, and as the Creator God, disconnected from his handiwork, receded from the human mind and finally disappeared over the horizon of unbelief, teleology was extruded from science and replaced entirely by the schema of cause and effect. Most unreasonably, yet wearing the mask of reason, impersonal chance (plus time) was called in to assume the mantle of the personal Creator God; as surrogate divinity, chance became the causal agent of the universe. The absurdity of this, in the light of the wondrous complexity and order of this universe, is only now beginning to be recognized by honest thinkers.
The biological and biochemical discoveries of the last century, combined with the astrophysical discovery of an evolving universe, should lead to a reconsideration of the place of teleology in the physical universe. Purpose is inherent in order and beauty. This affirmation which, empirically speaking, we may make initially on the basis of the phenomenon of life and, supremely, of human life, may be projected backward retrospectively and made with reference to the inorganic universe as a whole, in view of the fact that life has emerged out of this universe and cannot therefore be altogether in discontinuity with its principles. If purpose is to be found in living beings, we are entitled to infer that it is inherent in nonliving beings insofar as they are part of a larger, coherent context and are characterized respectively by their own forms of order.
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