Limits of God’s Power
Brandon Ambrosino’s a theologian who teaches at Villanova University; journalist who’s written for Politico, The Atlantic and other venues; and former student at Liberty University, bastion of the Christian Right, where he left just shy of his degree after coming out as gay, but received encouraging responses from some of his professors. He’s also a dancer.
His upcoming book Is It God’s Will?: Making Sense of Tragedy, Luck, and Hope in a World Gone Wrong (Morehouse Publishing, Sept. 9) arose from Ambrosino’s discomfort with explanations of tragic and troubling events as reflective of God’s intentions. For example, he heard a friend tell her young daughters that the sudden death by heart attack of her husband, their 44-year-old father, was because “God just wanted to be with Daddy so much that he took him to heaven.”
Similarly, Ambrosino was disturbed by assertions of divine providence in Donald Trump’s survival of the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt in Butler County, Pennsylvania. “God spared him for the purpose of calling our nation back to its Judeo-Christian foundation,” said pastor Robert Jeffress to his congregation at First Baptist Dallas the next day. That idea was echoed at Trump’s second inauguration: “Look what God has done!” said Franklin Graham. Trump agreed: “Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”
Ambrosino considers assumptions underlying such statements, such as “God is all powerful, in control of everything that happens, and takes a special interest in US politics,” and “God is capable of intervening in human affairs in a way that can determine the next president of the United States while simultaneously respecting the free will of the voters.” He then contemplates: “How exactly did God save Trump’s life from a bullet?” such as by causing the candidate’s head to move, the bullet to swerve, or the shooter to twitch.
This opens further questions, such as why God allowed one of the shooter’s bullets to kill firefighter Corey Comperatore. And: “If God is capable of saving someone from gun violence, then what is God doing when a shooter breaks into an elementary school? If God can perform lifesaving miracles, why is any child anywhere dying of disease? If God can change the outcome of political elections, why did he not prevent homicidal dictators from ever coming to power?” I’d query, also, whether God favors beatings and sexual assault.
While reading an advance copy of Is It God’s Will?, I attended a panel discussion on math and jazz, and asked a computational mathematician afterward whether there’s an element of “improv” in his own techniques; he agreed there was. I also spoke to a cosmologist about whether the universe itself might exhibit something like improv, as in quantum indeterminism, and he said the early universe seemingly was totally random, like “white noise.” This was food for thought as I contemplated Ambrosino’s further arguments.
Ambrosino draws on points made by theologian Thomas Jay Oord, who writes, “Omnipotence is not born of Scripture,” and even is contradicted by the Bible, which shows people and creatures exerting evidently independent power. Omnipotence, according to Oord, also suffers a philosophical “death by a thousand qualifications,” with limits such as God’s inability to create logical contradictions, like a two-sided triangle, or act in ways deemed contrary to his own nature, such as willing himself into non-existence.
Central to Ambrosino’s thinking is Psalm 82, in which God issues judgment upon a powerful council, saying its members have neglected responsibilities to the needy and vulnerable. Whether this council consists of humans or something else is debated, as the Hebrew word Elohim can refer to God, gods, fallen or unfallen angels, or human rulers. Ambrosino’s interpretation veers toward polytheism, albeit with the other gods losing their status for failing to implement their duties. Ambrosino: “They are behaving like non-Gods, and God—the God who becomes The One God—will not tolerate that.” God’s “very being is constituted by his concern for the widows and orphans. If he stops being concerned for them, he will suffer the same fate as the deities whose death the psalm narrates.”
In Ambrosino’s view, God doesn’t have omniscience, knowing everything including about the future. Jesus’ crucifixion wasn’t part of a divine plan, but rather “a summing up of the tragic history of humanity”; yet God “gets to choose how he will respond to it,” and “the Easter event assures us that this world-gone-wrong has a future.” Moreover, the “resurrection of Jesus confirms that God is an expert improvisational artist.”
Drawing on ideas of Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), who saw God’s creation as an ongoing process manifest in evolution, Ambrosino sees evil as reflecting the incompleteness of the world. Sometimes using “world” as a verb, Ambrosino writes: “After all, the world worlds on by chance and probability and luck. What the world will look like when it reaches wholeness, the perfection of its being, when it worlds the way God wants it to, is an open question because ours is an open universe.”
In this thought-provoking book, Ambrosino wisely doesn’t give specifics as to what God’s powers and limits are, as these seem unknowable, but writes evocatively from his own experience: “The very moment I am tempted to write off God as a projection of human ambition, I find this word welling up from a deep corner inside of me. ‘Arise!’”
—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky