Delivered on Sunday 05 November 2006 in St George's Chapel

Jeremiah 32:17-27

In the very opening verse of the Old Testament reading this morning, we heard these prayerful words: "Ah Lord God! It is you who made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you." And the conclusion of the reading mirrored that sentiment: "See, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh; is anything too hard for me". This is a thought that is not peculiar to the Old Testament but can also be found in the New, as when Jesus says "For God all things are possible". The claim here is the same and it is not trivial. In fact it would be hard to overestimate just how important the claim is. Throughout the Old and New Testaments, God made promises to his people, grand promises concerning election, salvation and eternity. Now if he is perfectly good, we know he will endeavour to keep his promises. But unless he is sufficiently powerful, we cannot be confident that he will succeed. To have created the world out of nothing and to keep promises relating to salvation and eternal life requires immense power on an almost inconceivable scale. But the promises that God has made with his people are such that whether or not something is too difficult for him, is not a matter of sheer speculation; it impinges on our vital human religious concerns and the way we think about ourselves and our future.

So it is that theologians have sought to describe the magnitude of divine power by saying that God is omnipotent. And as you might expect with theologians, a great deal of effort has gone into trying to explain precisely what it means to be perfectly powerful. The most common attempt to explain just how powerful God is, is to describe the range of things an omnipotent being can do. When it comes to describing a person's abilities - or perhaps range of skills - we might say 'Peter is physically strong, he can lift his own body weight' or 'Jane is musical, she can play even the most difficult of Mozart's piano sonatas'. So also, the theologians and philosophers have set about explaining exactly what it is that an omnipotent being can do.

In the seventeenth century Descartes argued for the simplest possible explanation. Surely it is the case, he said, that "God can do everything". This is clearly a straightforward proposition and Descartes produces a strong defence but is he right? If 'everything' includes the logically impossible then surely we have found something that God cannot do. For example, even God cannot create square circles or married bachelors. Why? Because these things are logically impossible; it is not that they don't exist, but they cannot, by definition, exist.

But there will be those of you who say that to talk of square circles and married bachelors is to talk nonsense. Maybe. There are, however, statements that are clearly not gibberish and yet also clearly false. Let me give you a famous example. It is by no means nonsense to claim that 'God can bring it about that in Windsor there lives a barber who shaves all the men of Windsor, except those who shave themselves'. It is not a nonsense but neither is it possible. God cannot bring this about. Why? Well, does the barber shave himself? If he does shave himself, he is not to shaved by the barber, that is, himself; if he doesn't he should be shaved by the barber. It appears that both he does and does not shave himself. And quite obviously God cannot bring such a barber to life. Whether it is nonsense or not, it would seem that God cannot bring about the logically impossible.

Alright, perhaps we need to make a small modification. With just a little tweak we can, along with the medieval theologian Aquinas, assert that "God can do everything logically possible". Now, this sounds much more promising. But it isn't. Even though we no longer need to worry about the logically impossible, there are still things that God cannot do. In the Epistle to the Hebrews it clearly states that God cannot break his word. If God were not to keep his promises he would be acting out of character and that would be a sheer impossibility for a being that is perfectly good. In everyday language we can say that it is impossible for God to act out of character.

It looks like we will need, once again, to modify our claim; it is not good enough to say that "God can do everything logically possible". Instead we shall try "Anything which it is logically possible for God to do, he can do". That caters for all our problems so far. But - as you have probably guessed - that too will simply not do. With all our modifications we have now made it possible that God might, in any number of ways, exhibit weakness. For example, it is possible that God's character could be such that he could not perform a miracle. That might sound a strange view - and it is in contemporary theology - but in the 1960's it was a garden variety interpretation. God created the world but once set up could not interfere with it. If you believe in the Resurrection, of course, then this view cannot be right. So with our current modification we left open the possibility that God might have certain weaknesses, and that is not acceptable. We could try to make further modifications, but let us stop. For, to the best of my knowledge, no philosopher or theologian has ever managed to begin where we began and end up with a clear argument in defence of God's omnipotence. Does this mean God is not omnipotent? Certainly not! It just means we have to start from some place else.

Instead of setting out by thinking about the range of things God can do we could, instead, think about the powers God possesses. The most basic fundamental power that God possesses is to create ex nihilo (to create out of nothing); the sheer power to bring about things not by merely rearranging previously existing things but by causing things to be. The power to create out of nothing is a fundamental power possessed by God.

You will understand that I am using the word 'power' in a rather specific sense. I am not using it in the sense of a 'skill', as, for example, if I say 'Jack has the skill to play chess' or 'Mary has the skill to drive a car'. Neither am I using it in the sense of 'opportunity', as, for example, if I say 'Fred has the opportunity to marry' or 'Susan the opportunity to fly to Paris'. Instead I am using the word 'power' to describe a fundamental possibility. We, as humans, have the power to act on the world; that is perhaps the first thing a child delights in learning. Other fundamental human powers might include legal power, political power, military power - these are all fundamental powers of human social activity. But while these notions are fine when talking about people, they won't do at all when talking about God. Divine power is so totally other than human power that it is in another league. In fact, we might want to say that God has all powers consistent with the characteristics of a divine being. And when put that way, Jeremiah was right.

"Nothing", Jeremiah prayed "is too hard for God". Does he have the power create out of nothing? Certainly! Does he have the power to hold all knowledge? Certainly! Does he have the power to love? Most certainly! And does he have the power to elect ... to save ... to bring us to eternal life. Yes. It is for this reason that we are both sensible and accurate when we address our prayers to Almighty God.