Christians have always claimed God is omnipotent; He is omni- (all-) potent (powerful). Holy Scripture testifies to this in both the Old and New Testaments. “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” the heavenly visitor asks Abraham (Gen. 18:14), after Sarah laughs at his statement that she, a 90-year-old woman who has never been able to conceive, will soon bear a son. And when the angel Gabriel reveals to Mary that she is going to conceive the Son of God while remaining a virgin, he concludes, “For nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37). Psalm 115:3 says simply, “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.” This is a very practical doctrine, because it assures us that whatever God has promised (or threatened!) to do, He can.
But no doctrine is so straightforward that you can’t complicate it with theoretical questions. Could God have created a world with unicorns and fire-breathing dragons, or where things fall up instead of down, or where living creatures need no sustenance? More difficult, could He have created a world where the laws of logic were fundamentally different? Could He have created a world in which theft was not a sin? Could He have redeemed the human race by another method than sending His Son to be a man and die for us?
Greek philosophy, especially its most influential branches (Platonism and Aristotelianism), tended to answer “no” to such questions. How the world was, was how the world had to be. Thus we could reason back to how God has to be. To Aristotle, God was the Prime Mover, a Principle of absolute perfection that was therefore absolutely necessary, and exerted an influence on all lower things that could not be different from what it was. To the Pagan Neoplatonists, God was the One out of which all Being naturally unfolded—too perfect to have something as arbitrary as a “will” or “options.” Ancient Christianity (the Church Fathers) took a big step back from this attitude in the light of biblical revelation. They didn’t speak of God as being bound by necessity. They saw Him as personal, and free. So when they set out to explain His actions, they didn’t say what God had to do, but rather what would be fitting for Him to do as the all-powerful, all-good Creator and Benefactor of His people. They wanted to show how He was worthy of love and reverence. Their subject wasn’t “what God has to do,” but rather, “how we should think about what He does.”
In the Middle Ages, the Scholastic theologians organized this question by distinguishing between two different kinds of divine power: potentia absoluta (absolute power) and potentia ordinata (ordained power). The former category is everything God could have done, and the latter is everything He has decided actually to do. This distinction allowed them to trace the creation back to the Creator, and discover Him as the Source of all things, like the Platonists and Aristotelians, but at the same time to assert that God is more than what can be deduced from the world. He didn’t have to make everything this way, or to make anything at all, for that matter. He created freely. And the answer to all those strange questions in the first paragraph was, “Yes, probably. He has all power. But that was not His will, so we don’t have to concern ourselves with it.”
Earlier Medieval Scholasticism, from Peter Lombard (died 1160) to its peak in Thomas Aquinas (died 1274), focused on explaining things rationally in the realm of the ordained power, making sense of the way that God had chosen to order the world, both in the order of nature (creation) and the order of grace (the work of Christ and the life of the Church). This was philosophically Realist, explaining how the world flows naturally from an underlying Reality in God.
Later Medieval Scholasticism, beginning with Duns Scotus (died 1308) and gathering steam with William of Ockham (died 1347), put a lot more emphasis on God’s freedom, and His absolute power. How can you be so confident that this aspect of creation, or that aspect of morality, flows naturally from the Creator’s nature, if He could have chosen to make things in a completely different way? This was philosophically Nominalist, refusing to seek for causes and rationales, and saying instead, “This is just the way He made it.” Many of Martin Luther’s teachers were Nominalists.
This influence made it easier for him to believe that God might create a new reality freely, just by speaking. For example, He might make a person righteous simply by declaring him righteous for the sake of Christ, instead of working with him in Purgatory for thousands of years until he was righteous on the inside, and only then rewarding him with Heaven. But Nominalism was dangerous. The speculations about what God could have done, in His potentia absoluta, were just as likely to undermine the Gospel as they were to free it from Realist assumptions about “justification” being only for those who have already become just. William of Ockham infamously claimed “that God’s becoming man… was so little meaningful and necessary ‘in itself’ that God, if He had wished, might just as well have assumed the nature of a stone, a tree, or an ass.”1 Surely that obscures the whole logic of the Atonement as Scripture presents it to us! It wasn’t stones or donkeys that had sinned against God. The Nominalists also interpreted the need for Christ’s grace as an arbitrary requirement demanded by God in His radical freedom, rather than as the necessary result of deep, inborn human sinfulness.
A Classical education naturally favors the Realist side of the Medieval question, the heritage of Plato and Aristotle, a world that makes sense because it was created by the very Thought and Word of God Himself, the Logos who “was in the beginning with God, and… was God” (John 1:1). A Lutheran education privileges the Word that God spoke through the prophets and through His Son (Heb. 1:1-2) over the words that gave shape to the universe, because in them we have not only the surest guide to the most important rules of the universe (God’s Law), but also the forgiveness of our sins, and the promise of a New Creation. That emphasis falls more on the Nominalist side, but the Realist roots of Classical Lutheran education help to ground it in the potentia ordinata of God, the things He has actually done and commanded and promised, not far-flung human speculations about what could have been.
1 Josef Pieper, Scholasticism: Personalities and Problems of Medieval Philosophy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960) p. 148 (referring to Ockham’s Centilogium theologicum, concl. 6).
