The Power of God (from “Life In Abundance”)

Excerpts from “Life In Abundance” by Father Francis Baur, OFM, late Professor at the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley when it was part of the Graduate Theological Union:

Adapted from Chapter 6: The Power of God: Coercive and Suasive Power:

We have stressed beforehand that the only religiously coherent way to understand the reality of the God who is love is to affirm that the only relationships possible for a loving God are the relationships of love. This is not to take away any prerogatives from god or to set limitations on the power of God. But, if as we assert, God is wholly and solely love, then what exactly would be meant by the power of God and in what fashion would this power be exercised?

As has been pointed out, the religious significance of the revelation that God is love is to remove God irrevocably from the status of an idol…..Of all the relationships which we manage to engender within our human enterprise, the relationship of love is that unique one which cannot be utilized for further ends—love is for the sake of loving, and for nothing else. This ineradicable feature of the nature of love entails the non-instrumentality of our relationship to God.

What is difficult to comprehend is how those who stood rooted in the gospel tradition could so comfortably hold in balance the God of unfathomable love and the God of unfathomable power. The God of love seems to have great homiletic power, but the God of Power served as the ultimate explanatory principle which defined the relationships of the universe. [note: some have suggested here that emphasis on a God of Power is the result of our own human experience which tells us that power is the ability to produce effects, to control the world around us, and specifically, to control others. It is why the ancients were so taken with the unique powers their Gods possessed, and rarely held those Gods to a standard of loving behavior. In addition, speaking in the name of those Gods, the leaders could effectively regulate human activity so that it did not become lawless and chaotic.].

Our prayers were addressed to the God of love, but our theology was formulated in terms of a God of power. This very improbability was invoked for religious purposes: on the one hand, God loved us with infinite and infallible love; on the other hand, failure to respond to the love of God would result in God’s damnation of the sinful soul. While our most supreme ideals were set forth in terms of the love of God, the final and coercive motivation was not inspired by the selfless response to love, but rather the selfish fear of punishment or hell. The God of supreme love was also the God of infinite power, and what God’s love failed to accomplish, his power could more than make up for. This is not merely religiously false; it is spiritually destructive. ….perhaps we will be compelled at some point to admit that our deepest motivation or a relationship with God was a manipulation of power….

God was useful…..

God was worth loving because he could do many things for us and to us. This is coercive power. we meet it and celebrate it in everyday life because it gets things done, and keeps the unruly and evil under some sort of control. We have come to believe that a certain amount of coercive power is the price for the social good. Both princes and popes were spoken of as having “power over” their subjects, and in each case it was a power that could be enforced. The freedom of the children of God which was our inalienable Gospel heritage was understood as the freedom to obey rather than the freedom to create our own lives. We find it nearly impossible to eradicate our catechism-level assertion that God is that being who can do anything at all (except a contradiction); everything is within the power of God. God is therefore that being worth respecting, honoring, and obeying, simply because of the awesome and unpredictable power which could on one had create us and on the other hand destroy us. Some questions emerge: Are we committed to the service of God motivated by fear of the power of God? Do we see the inherent worthwhileness of the God-relationship in the fact that God has the power to supply for our weakness, that God can do for us those things which we cannot do for ourselves? Are we interested in God because of what God can do for us or to us?

The major theme of this entire exposition has been that it is at the cost of our very souls that we forsake the one unique biblical claim which stands at the foundation of our identity and which can put us in relationship to the source and end of our very being: God is love. Here we must be intrepid enough to stand unflinchingly with the same conventional faith: God is love and nothing else. We dare not foul our good news with our own inadequacies and insecurities. We cannot afford to claim that God is love and then, as if love were somehow insufficient, add to that claim that God is many lesser things besides. No. God is love—period. God is not supreme coercive power. God is not threat. God is not reward and punishment, God is not the security of the righteous. God is not law and order. God is not on the side of any cause whatsoever. God is not the wreaker of vengeance. God is not the validation of moral opinions. God is love—and nothing else.

While we readily proclaim in homily and prayer that our God is love, in the concrete practicalities of worldly affairs we are both unwilling and fearful to trust the lovely and tender quality of love itself. The proper way to run a world, we cannot help by think, is to have love supported by power. What love cannot do, surely power can accomplish. Thus it is that with possibly the noblest of intentions and yet with the most foolish of motives we could no surrender the all too human notion that God must have coercive power to reinforce his love. Because coercion by power has become such an established part of our lives we unwittingly prostitute the good by submitting it to force. Is the God of love indeed so weak that he must also resort to coercion to achieve what is of supreme good to both God and ourselves? Could a God of coercion possibly remain unsullied by the means of coercion?

The story of the cross is not so much attribute to the forbearance of God who in his infinite patience would not use his power to annihilate such evil. The cross is, rather, a timeless testimony to the absolute faithfulness of God to his very being, which is love. Because love is founded on freedom it can be ridiculed, rejected and betrayed. It is the cross which reveals what kind of a response is possible for God in the face of such betrayal. The only response is love--suasive, kindly and forgiving. Beyond the suasive force of God’s inherent and infinite lovableness there is no other power, nor need there be any.