Every Sunday at Mass the Church normally makes her confession of faith in the Nicene Creed, and it begins with a claim about power: Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem cæli et terræ — I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth. The word is placed almost immediately, before anything else is said. Whatever else the Christian believes, he begins by saying that God can do all things.
What omnipotence means
Omnipotence does not mean that God is very strong, as a great king or a great engine is strong. It means that there is no power anywhere that is not derived from him, and no limit set upon him from outside. Everything that exists is held in being by him at this moment; withdraw that, and nothing remains to resist him. This is why Scripture never portrays God as struggling. He speaks, and it is done.
Deus autem noster in cælo; omnia quæcumque voluit, fecit.
But our God is in heaven: he hath done all things whatsoever he would.
Psalm 113 (115) · 11
St Thomas Aquinas gives the classic formulation: God is called almighty because he can do all things that are absolutely possible (Summa Theologiæ I, q. 25, a. 3). The measure is not what we can imagine, but what is genuinely capable of being.
The things God cannot do
It sounds like a contradiction to say that the almighty cannot do certain things, but the list is illuminating rather than embarrassing. God cannot lie. God cannot sin. God cannot cease to be God, or fail, or contradict himself, or make the past not to have happened.
Impossibile est mentiri Deum.
It is impossible for God to lie.
Hebrews 6 · 18
None of these is a weakness. Each is a way of saying that God is perfectly himself. A God who could lie would be less than one who cannot: the inability is the integrity. In the same way, God cannot make a square circle — not because the task is too hard, but because those words do not describe a task at all. They describe nothing, and nothing is not a thing that power applies to.
The stone too heavy to lift
The old puzzle asks whether God can make a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it. Either answer, it is said, defeats omnipotence. But the puzzle assumes that “a stone an almighty being cannot lift” names a possible object. It does not. It is a contradiction dressed as a request, in the same family as a married bachelor. Omnipotence extends to everything that can be; it does not extend to phrases that cancel themselves out. As Aquinas said of contradictions in general, it is better to say that such things cannot be done than that God cannot do them.
How Scripture speaks of it
What is striking in the Bible is that omnipotence is almost never discussed in the abstract. It is announced to particular people at moments when something has just been declared impossible. To Abraham and Sarah, far too old for a child: numquid Deo quidquam est difficile? — is there anything hard to God? To Mary, told she will bear a son: non erit impossibile apud Deum omne verbum. To Job, ruined and arguing, God answers not with a defence but with a tour of creation, question after question, until Job says the only thing left to say.
Scio quia omnia potes, et nulla te latet cogitatio.
I know that thou canst do all things, and no thought is hid from thee.
Job 42 · 2
Power and goodness together
Power alone would be a terror. The Christian claim is not simply that God is almighty but that the almighty is good — that the same one who laid the foundations of the earth counts the hairs of a head, and that the height no one could climb came down of its own accord. The Cross is the strangest thing ever said about omnipotence: that God’s power is shown most fully in what looks like its opposite.
This is why the Church has never let the word omnipotens stand alone in her Creed. It is joined at once to Patrem — Father: Patrem omnipotentem, the Father almighty. The power is the power of someone who is for you.
The verses behind all of this are gathered on the page of Bible verses on the greatness of God, and the same movement — from the whirlwind to the whistling of a gentle air — is walked through in the meditation.
Last reviewed for accuracy on , against the Douay-Rheims Bible and the Church's own documents.