Is God Omnipotent?

If God is all-powerful, why did he allow Hurricanes Katrina and Rita? Or the Asian tsunami? Or September 11? Or the Holocaust? Or bubonic plague?

Whenever incomprehensible, seemingly random tragedy affects us, we humans try to make sense of it--which is why, as we deal with the wreckage of Katrina and Rita, we ask about God's role. We wonder: If God is all-powerful, couldn't he have prevented the hurricanes? But since he didn't prevent them, what kind of vindictive God is that? (And who wants such a God?)

Then the next thought swirls to the surface: If God isn't inherently cruel, is it possible He isn't actually omnipotent? In other words: God can be good, or He can be powerful, but He can't be both. The fact of random human suffering has always been the thorniest problem for theologians and great thinkers to reconcile with the belief in an all-powerful, benevolent personal deity--the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

And so, as Katrina's wreckage became increasingly clear early in September, evangelical theologian Tony Campolo took up this question, vehemently rejecting the suggestion that God was somehow punishing people with a hurricane. "When the floods swept into the Gulf Coast, God was the first one who wept," he wrote. "Perhaps we would do well to listen to the likes of Rabbi Harold Kushner, who contends that God is not really as powerful as we have claimed. Nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures does it say that God is omnipotent." Basically, Kushner and Campolo argue that God is doing the best He can, but lacks the power to do more. He is infinitely resourceful, just not utterly sovereign.

Many Christians and Muslims reject these ideas, however. "These are roads we dare not take, for the God of the Bible causes the rising and falling of nations and empires, and His rule is active and universal. Limited sovereignty is no sovereignty at all," writes R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of Southern Baptist Seminary. "We will either take our stand with God's self-revelation in the Bible, or we are left to invent a deity of our own imagination."

Mohler believes the Bible "categorically" reveals that God is omnipotent and omniscient. "The sovereignty of God is the bedrock affirmation of biblical theism," he writes.

Muslims hold a similar position, always describing Allah as all-powerful. Some examples from the Qur'an: "Unto God belongs the sovereignty of the heavens and the earth and all that is therein, and it is He who has power over all things" (Chapter 5, verse 120); "He is the All-mighty, the All-wise. To Him belongs the Kingdom of the heavens and the earth; He gives life, and He makes to die, and He is powerful over everything. (Chapter 57, verses 1-6)

Then how to explain evil and suffering?

"We cannot understand why God would allow sickness and suffering, but we must affirm that even these realities are rooted in sin and its cosmic effects," writes Mohler.

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