The Question of Omnipotence

The statement recently made before the New York Ministers' Conference, that "It is a mistake to say God is omnipotent; He is not omnipotent; He is constantly thwarted and harassed; there are many things He cannot do," has awakened very little protest. And this may be explained by the statement in one denominational weekly that, "perhaps this is only putting into words the difficulty that many of us feel when we try to follow out to its logical results the doctrine of God's sovereignty." We venture to say that this difficulty is entirely due to the popular theological belief that evil is real, and so long as evil is believed to be real the difficulty will remain, because to be consistent with it we must deny God's omnipotence or make Him responsible for the creation of evil.

Some have tried to evade the issue by taking the ground that although God is not the creator of evil, He, for some wise purpose, permits its existence. This does not solve the difficulty at all, but simply accentuates the inconsistency. In fact, the man who takes the ground that God is not omnipotent, is more consistent than the one who attempts to beg the question in this way. Who honors God most, the Christian Scientist who insists that God is omnipotent, and who declares that evil is unreal because inconsistent with all the attributes of Deity, or he who is compelled by the inconsistency of his logic to believe that God permits evil? The declaration of God's permission of evil, is of itself an utter denial of His omnipotence.

The following quotations from "Message to the Mother Church, June, 1901" by Rev. Mary Baker G. Eddy express the teachings of Christian Science which alone gives a logical explanation of evil without denying the omnipotence of God.

"Evil is neither quality nor quantity: it is not intelligence, a person or a principle, a man or a woman, a place or a thing, and God never made it. The outcome of evil, called sin, is another nonentity that belittles itself until it annihilates its own embodiment: this is the only annihilation. . . . Sin can have neither entity, verity, nor power thus regarded, and we verify Jesus' words, that evil, alias devil, sin, is a lie—therefore is nothing and the father of nothingness" (pp. 19, 20).

"Do Christian Scientists believe that evil exists? We answer, Yes and No! Yes, inasmuch as we do know that evil, as a false claim, false entity, and utter falsity, does exist in thought; and No, as something that enjoys, suffers, or is real. Our only departure from ecclesiasticism on this subject is, that our faith takes hold of the fact that evil cannot be made so real as to frighten us and so master us, or to make us love it and so hinder our way to holiness. We regard evil as a lie, an illusion, therefore as unreal as a mirage that misleads the traveler on his way home" (p. 21).

"The evil-doer receives no encouragement from my declaration that evil is unreal, when I declare that he must awake from his belief in this awful unreality, repent and forsake it, in order to understand and demonstrate its unreality. Error uncondemned is not nullified. We must condemn the claim of error in every phase in order to prove it false, therefore unreal" (p. 23). M.

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