God's Power: Not the Kind of Power We Wish He Had

I highly recommend Doug Frank's book, A Gentler God. He presents ways of understanding God that are wonderful and that cut across the grain of some of the church's ways of seeing God. His main point is that we need to move away from the idea of "the Almighty" to understanding that God is like the human man Jesus. The following are quotes from this book that, to me, are worth taking the time to consider and to ponder:

"Occasionally...I reach for...some kind of explanation for or defense of the ways of God...Sooner or later, they all force me to choose among five dubious alternatives: 'there is no God'; 'the Almighty is not good'; 'the Almighty could prevent evil, but it would cost us our freedom'; 'Satan causes evil'; or 'trust God, his ways are unfathomable.'

"An answer that makes more sense to me is: 'God is small - a child, like Jesus said. God simply does not have the kind of power we ourselves crave and project onto him - the power that could fix our lives by tinkering with the laws of the universe. In that sense, God is a child.

"Which does not mean that the God whom Jesus is revealing to us does nothing at all...Such a God would not only be powerless, but unresponsive and uncaring. No - God acts, but in the only way that pure love can act: God is continually present in the world, a living spirit that invades reality at every moment and at every place, that speaks as love does - in whispers, unceasingly - into each and every human heart. God's whispers may be heard in our dreams, in the voices of our friends and enemies, in the cries of our hearts, in deep silence...

"If God cannot straightforwardly micro-manage human events so as to rescue the abused child, the tortured prisoner, the cancer victim, neither can God rescue God's very own self, incarnated in Jesus...God can and will hang on the gibbet in utter solidarity with the son, helplessly receiving the cruel blows rained down on the naked, dying flesh of the beloved.

"There is a kind of power in God's whispers. But it is the power of powerlessness. It changes things, but invisibly, unpredictably, unaccountably and, from our point of view, unreliably. It is not the kind of power we imagine, or wish, God to have."