Tom Oord writes this book to answer questions readers asked after reading God Can’t and to affirm God’s love when they have experienced “tragedy, abuse, and other evils” (3). In the introduction, he outlines five points, some of which catch people off guard because they are unfamiliar with a theology of love - they are: 1) God can’t prevent evil, 2) God feels our pain, 3) God works to heal, 4) God squeezes good from bad, and 5) God needs our cooperation. Christians have deep intuitions about love and God that should provide a foundation for our understanding of what God can and can’t do; God has been revealed in scripture, nature, as well as through each other.
God doesn’t unilaterally work miracles to help people, whether it be from sickness or grief or pain. To unilaterally affect someone’s life is to create something from nothing, which God can’t do for a couple reasons: 1) scientifically God creates out of a chaotic stuff that takes time and an evolutionary process, and 2) love doesn’t coerce, or take away from free-will. Oord suggests, “love comes logically first in God’s nature” (16). His answers are based on God is love, affirmed by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; this means that everything Christians know about God has been ultimately revealed in Jesus, in this self-emptying sacrifice, Oord uses a term essential kenosis to explain the manner in which God has limitations essential to the definition of love. Therefore, God doesn’t cause nor does God allow evil. Real evil exists, and God suffers with his creation when anyone experiences real evil.
God experiencing reality with us gives more reason to pray, not less as some might suppose. They think that because God can’t control events that God must be weak, and therefore not worthy of worship, but Oord would suggest quite the opposite: God is drawing people into perfect relationship, and in that understanding, prayer means experiencing the atonement (that is, a relationship made possible by Jesus’ resurrection). Oord says, “our prayer in one moment influences what is possible in the next” (29). This isn’t meant to challenge God’s sovereignty or omniscience; God is sovereign in God’s love and omniscient in knowing that which is knowable - God would have to guess at the diet of a unicorn because a unicorn’s diet can’t actually be known, neither can the future, which might scare some of you, but nothing compares in majesty, power, love, knowledge, etc. It might mean Christians redefine God as almighty to God is most mighty, but that image of God allows for perfect love and freedom, whereas if God was controlling, then God would arguably be culpable for the evil that people experience. Oord goes on to say that “prayer controls others” nor does “prayer guarantee the results we want” (29).
Oord answers questions about the nature of love and creation, miracles, evil, and how to read the violent passages and stories of the Bible that seem ordained or condoned by God. Oord agrees with Eric Seibert that there is a christocentric lens by which readers can understand the violent scriptures, an understanding that is more responsible and if applied, could help Christians better live out “loving God and loving others.” This argument makes sense in all of the other ways in which we see God work with and through people. As a friend recently wrote to me, God uses the losers (see any Bible story for details: David’s conspiracy to murder, Noah’s drunkeness, Gideon’s doubt, etc.) to be the “hands and feet” of God, including risking allowing the story-tellers to miss certain details and aspects; however, revealing a loving God thematically demonstrated throughout thousands of years of collected storiesm which Oord might suggest is more powerful compared to manipulating the fingers and mouths of the story-terllers. In this sense, I would encourage you to consider your own testimony of God, or the testimony of any witness in any situation, the truth exists, but the facts are not always told in the correct order or detail. This further reveals a loving God because God is willing to lovingly take risks for our sake rather than for God’s perfect sovereignty.
God can’t prevent evil single-handedly, “God is a universal spirit without a localized body” (75). Oord provides a coherent answer as to how God creates, rejecting the classical idea that God creates from nothing because God should always create from nothing, if God doesn’t then God necessarily allows evil to occur when it could have been prevented, but it is not our experience to see things created spontaneously. Instead, Oord says that God creates from creation, this might make you take another look at Genesis and you’ll see the Spirit hovering over the waters or chaos. This is primarily why God invites us to co-create and procreate.
Oord encourages readers to enter into and develop an authentic relationship with the trinity that even transcends the pages of scripture. David was inspired to write about God’s love because he experienced God’s love. This book works as an apologetic for the nature of God, but it isn’t about that, the thesis is that God wants to be the good we see in the world, to paraphrase Gandhi. God desires our cooperation to thwart evil and to love through divine empowerment to love not only our neighbors, but our enemies as well. According to Oord, God desires a relationship with all creation.
The most helpful affirmation is that God “squeezes good from bad” as Paul writes in Romans 8:28. It is cliche and incorrect to say that “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle” - instead God empowers us to handle what we are given, which is why we should pray, rely on each other, read scripture, eat healthy, and even sleep well. In many ways, Oord is simply stating the obvious that we have otherwise complicated with problematic perspectives of a non-loving God.
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Top reviews from other countries
Sandra Hainstock
A must read if you've read God Can't
Reviewed in Canada on March 13, 2021
Just David
Not convinced by the premise
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 25, 2023