Something is happening in theology. This week, these four writers Sheri Kling, Ilia Delio, Thomas Jay Oord, and Tripp Fuller have each, from their own angle arrived at a similar message. The human project cannot survive on the terms it has been operating. And these are not the only voices I have heard this week with a similar message. Their diagnosis might not be unique or surprising. The prescription isn’t necessarily unique either, but seems almost unattainable in our current global environment. What is required is a revolution of orientation. The revolution they are describing is love as the actual structure of reality and the only viable basis for human civilization going forward.
This is is a metaphysical, therapeutic, and political claim.
Ilia Delio says: “New transcendentals are forming beyond the One, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful of the classical tradition. AI invites us to consider creativity, experience, and complexity as the transcendentals of a noospheric age—though these three alone will not hold. They cohere only when held by a fourth: communion, love as relational wholeness, the integrating force without which any symbolic container eventually splits under its own weight, as the mid-century container did. The mind urged on by the heart, and the heart kindled by an ineffable power of love: this is what allows a noosphere to hold.”
Thomas Jay Oord says: “The Ever Creator theory, by contrast, says God can’t prevent evil singlehandedly. This God isn’t omnipotent, at least not in the usual meanings of that word. I call the Ever Creator’s power “amipotent,” which is the power of uncontrolling love. Through uncontrolling love God always creates out of or alongside creatures and creation.”
Sheri Kling says: “In a relational, evolving world, questions of war and justice cannot be answered by control and domination, but only through the lens of love, relationship, and what makes life possible.”
Tripp Fuller says: “This matters enormously for the nonviolence argument. The incarnation is not God overriding the world from outside. It is God’s patient, persuasive, self-investing love arriving at its most concentrated historical expression. The mode of the incarnation is itself a form of nonviolence. God does not coerce the world into producing Jesus. God invites, accompanies, sustains, and finally meets the world in the one whose faithfulness makes that meeting visible. What is disclosed in the incarnation is not an exception to the metaphysical structure of the cosmos. It is its intensification.”
To me, these four voices form something like a diagnosis and a prescription that cannot be separated. The diagnosis: we are living inside cosmological, political, and spiritual frameworks that were built on the assumption that reality is fundamentally about power, control, domination, and the management of competing forces. That assumption is at best incomplete and at worst just false. The prescription is love. Love as the framework. Love as the relational medium in which genuine existence becomes possible at all.
The word radical is needed here. Radical means going to the root. What these theologians seem to be saying is that the root of reality is love, and that any civilization, any theology, any politics that is not organized around a radical commitment to love is building on sand and the water is already rising.
This is not comfortable theology. Oord’s amipotent God will disturb everyone who has used divine sovereignty as a way of deferring human responsibility. Delio’s noospheric vision will disturb everyone who wants to inhabit the old containers without the relational integration that alone keeps them from shattering. Fuller’s incarnation-as-nonviolence will disturb every Christian tradition that tries to make peace with redemptive violence. Kling’s insistence that war itself is a failure of relational imagination will disturb anyone still betting on domination as a path to security.
Disturbing people is what prophets do. Prophets are always radicals.
What would it mean to take these voices seriously? These can’t be interesting theological proposals, we need a kind of urgent reckoning their language implies. It means asking, what does love as the structure of reality require here? Not love as simple compassion. Love as the architecture. Love as the epistemology. Love as the politics. Love as the only honest account of how a universe built by an amipotent, relational God is actually held together and co-creating where it is going.
We are being urged, from multiple directions at once, that this is the moment to experience what love actually is.
Because our very lives depend on it.