All Encompassing; All Nurturing
Fr. Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians
June 1, 2021
In the Creed we say, “We believe in One God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.”
The Almighty: we often think that this epithet of God means all powerful, overwhelming in strength. But it comes from the Latin Omnipotens “the all-powerful,” which in turn translated the Greek Pantokrator “the one who hold all things in hand.” It, in turn, is the regular Greek rendering of one of the Hebrew names for God, El Shaddai, “God of the two mounds.” This term did not refer so much to autonomy and power as to Mystery or Sustaining Comfort. In its most ancient meaning it referred to God of the mountaintops or God of the nourishing breasts.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes the following about what it means to call God “The One Who Holds All Things”: “[N]owhere [is God] absent, powerless, or irrelevant; [in] no situation in the universe [is God] at a loss. … [in] no situation [is God] not to be relied upon...” For Rowan, to say “Almighty” is not a great wish-fulfillment “my god is stronger than your god” fantasy, rather it is “a way of saying that God always has the capacity to do something fresh and different, to bring something new out of a situation—because nothing outside of himself can finally frustrate his longing” (p. 16, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief.)
The image here is not of a God disjoined from and disinterested in creation, but intimately urging it on to its best result. Instead of a divine clerk taking applications for favors when hearing prayers, putting some petitions into a pile marked “grant” and others into a pile marked “deny,” God here is “more of a steady swell of loving presence, always there at work in the centre of everything that is, opening the door to a future even when we can see no hope.”
Rowan uses an idea of St. Augustine and applies it to Jesus’ miracles, which were, he says, “really just natural processes speeded up a bit, ‘fast-forwarded.’” Thus God’s action is always at work around us, always ‘on hand’, always behind and within the universe, and not bifurcated into ‘nature’ and ‘supernatural or divine intervention.’ The technical term for such belief is panentheism, to be distinguished from pantheism, the doctrine that the whole universe is God. This latter view has always been seen as heresy, while the former lies behind the deep spirituality of most Christian mystics over the ages.
“But what if there were times when certain bits of the world’s processes came together in such a way that the whole cluster of happenings became a bit more open to God’s final purposes? What if the world were sometimes a bit more ‘transparent’ to the underlying act of God?” (pp. 44-45)
One of the major parts of Jesus’ ministry was healing, whether of mind or of body. The gospel stories of Jesus healing the sick tell us that the ultimate purpose of God does not include disease, suffering, and death. Jesus’ ministry of announcing the in-breaking of the reign of God focused in large part in healing physical and mental suffering. This tells us that God doesn’t like horror and disappointment for us any more than we do.
God the All-encompassing is always at work, but that work is not always visible. God the All-loving is always at work, but sometimes the world’s processes go with the grain of God’s final purpose and sometimes they resist. After all, this universe is created, and God had to “contract” a bit to make space for it.
But things can come together in the world at this or that moment, and the ‘flow’ of this created world can be eased and more directly linked with God’s final purposes. On occasion, perhaps a really fervent prayer or a particularly holy life can help the world can open up a bit more to God’s final good purpose so that unexpected things happen. These we call miracles, not because they intrude upon and overturn nature, but because we marvel at such occasional glimpses of God’s final purposes.
Thanks be to God.
Fr. Tony+
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