One of God’s attributes — omnipotence — generates all sorts of ideas, many of them mistaken. That’s why the Collect from last Sunday’s Mass (26^th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C) provides an eye-opening perspective: O God, who manifest your almighty power above all by pardoning and showing mercy… God’s omnipotence is demonstrated by forgiveness — by taking evil seriously, not by dismissing it, not by hollowing it out, not by ignoring it, but by forgiving it!

As regards the moral life, the role of God’s omnipotence is often misunderstood, especially by nominalism. What is nominalism? Nominalism was an erroneous philosophy of the late Middle Ages, usually attributed to William of Ockham. Unlike the mainstream of Catholic thought, nominalism got what makes something good or evil backwards. Does God call Y “evil” because it’s bad? Or is Y “evil” because God called it bad? The Catholic answer is the first. Nominalism inverts that cause-effect relationship because of its focus on omnipotence. An Almighty God can do whatever He wants, and whatever He wants therefore constitutes an act as either good or evil. Good and evil, then, are not inherent qualities. They are labels that an all-powerful God affixes at will to acts. An Almighty God could have made a world the exact opposite of the Ten Commandments, i.e., one in which lying, cheating, stealing, or killing could be good. Catholic theology and philosophy would answer the nominalists by saying that, yes, God is omnipotent, but He is at the same time omnibenevolent (all-good), omniscient (all-knowing), all-wise, etc. There are no contradictions in God.

St. John defines God as “Love” (1 Jn 4:8). St. John writes “God is Love.” Note the verb. St. John does not say “God loves” (though He does that). He says God is Love. When the verb “is” enters the picture, it means what is on one side and the other are identical: the subject and predicate nominative are the same. God is Love and love has a definite content. The Gospel fills us in: the God who “is Love” is also “Truth and Life” (Jn 14:6). A God who is Love cannot make a world in which lying is permissible, without denying Himself as “Truth.” Such a Deity cannot create a world in which killing is allowed without denying Himself as “Life.” Truth and Life, Faithfulness and Rights: these are all attributes of God that cannot be in contradiction.

Nominalism denies all this. Seizing upon God’s omnipotence, it runs with it to the exclusion of other divine attributes. An all-powerful God, in William of Ockham’s thought, could do whatever He wants and that would make it moral. Ockham’s thought gained a lease on life through Protestantism, because Martin Luther was a nominalist. Nominalism warped his theology of grace, for example. Grace ceased to be something that changed the sinner; all it did was change how God looked at the sinner. Sinful man was corrupt, like a pile of feces. Grace was like snow. It covers the feces, but it doesn’t change what lies underneath it. Justification, in the Protestant tradition, is not a change in the sinner; it is only a change in how God regards the sinner. Man remains a sinner, but God simply does not hold that sinfulness against him.

Nominalism might in theory work as long as an omnipotent and omniscient God runs things. With man’s loss of faith in God, however, who was going to affix the labels “good” and “evil” to actions? Man steps in, taking God’s place. Except God is omniscient, and man isn’t. But when man acts like the nominalist God, affixing labels of “good” and “evil,” you’re on a direct trajectory to the dictatorship of relativism, to “my good” and “your good.”

Catholic theology, however, speaks of “the good.”

Sunday’s Collect that praised God for His “almighty power” by “pardoning and showing mercy,” rejects nominalism. God’s “almighty power” does not redefine good and evil. It takes good and evil seriously, as objective and real and not merely labels. God does not pretend good is evil or evil good. Good remains good and evil, evil. When God forgives, He affirms what is good and what is evil, and He pardons the evil the contrite person is ready, under impetus of God’s grace, to give up. But that requires us to take responsibility for the evil we choose, which means taking accountability for being sinners. It means bringing our true selves before God who, in His “almighty power” offers us forgiveness — not pretending that the moral order is fungible.

How often do some “Christians” pretend that there’s some split between the moral order and God? That the Commandments say X but God really doesn’t mean it? That “love” means whatever the culture says (because “love is love”) without regard to — or in contradiction to — truth, life, fidelity, and justice?

Sometimes the failure to reckon with real good or evil also manifests itself in the problem of evil, the problem of theodicy. The existence of evil is a problem for many. How can an all-powerful God allow evil to exist? Shouldn’t an omnipotent God eliminate evil?

Such questions evade one basic truth: That it is not God but man who is the author of evil. As long as that is true, freedom (and the consequences that flow from it) collides with omnipotence. Does an omnipotent God respect human freedom, even when used wrongly, or does He destroy that freedom by using His omnipotence to eliminate its consequences? Put more bluntly: Does invoking God’s “omnipotence” serve as an excuse to deny human moral responsibility?

Both nominalism and the dodge of somehow trying to implicate divine omnipotence in human sin and the suffering it causes are expressions of what modern popes have warned against: the loss of a sense of sin. It’s the loss of a sense of sin by trying to diminish the full, objective reality of sin as a human product, seeking instead somehow to treat it as arbitrary divine labels or insufficiently prophylactic divine omnipotence to overcome its effects. These are false feints.

Divine omnipotence faced with the objective reality of human sin expresses itself by emptying itself into “the form of a slave” (Phil 2:7) so that, out of love for sinful man, the God of the Universe takes on humanity to free man from sin, not by denying but by overcoming — by forgiving — it. (For more, see here.) Omnipotence expresses itself in Incarnation “for us and for our salvation.” Sunday’s Collect sets the record straight: a God who treats moral responsibility seriously exercises His omnipotence not by pretending evil does not exist or by destroying the consequences of that freedom, but by pardoning that evil when man truly takes responsibility for it. This is perhaps why, in contrast to Ockham’s exaggerated focus on omnipotence, there is truth in the private revelation of Jesus to St. Faustyna Kowalska, that “mercy is the greatest attribute of God” (Diary, 301). Mercy rooted in, not ignoring, truth. Reconciling omnipotence with responsibility is found in the forgiveness of sins.