Superabundant Capacity of God: a Reformed Perspective
In considering the concept of superabundance, I see an initial hurdle: the overuse and misuse of the term “super” in modern American society. These days what passes for super is usually at best ordinary. Ironically, this may be a good place to start, as this misuse implicitly points out the propensity for humanity to misjudge ourselves, a central theme of the Reformed perspective.
With our common usage of the word “super,” the word superabundance has the risk of sounding meaningless. However, in connecting superabundance to classically Reformed depictions of both God and humanity, we can claim a more accurate perspective on what superabundance is supposed to mean.
Human Capacity–Certainly Not Superabundant
Reformed theology emphasizes human propensity for sin. According to John Calvin, in Institutes of the Christian Religion, the problem is reflected in part in our tendency to overestimate ourselves. “So long as we do not look beyond the earth, we are quite pleased with our own righteousness, wisdom, and virtue; we address ourselves in the most flattering terms and seem only less than demigods.”1
Then, in contrast, Calvin writes that it is in accurate understanding of ourselves as prone to sin that we are “not only urged to seek God but…led as by the hand to find him”.2 In other words, we cannot gain perspective on God until we understand ourselves. Or to the point of this article, we have no hope of understanding a God of superabundant power, grace, and love until we understand our own limits.
Ineffability of God: The Mysteriously Superabundant Power of God in Scripture
In Calvin’s view, gaining understanding of God ironically also means grasping that God is beyond our ability to understand. We need to see God’s capacity as beyond measure–in other words, as superabundant.
Eph 3:20 contains a Biblical view on superabundance : “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask for or imagine” (NRSV). The New Greek-English Interlinear New Testament translates the Greek (uperekperisou)as “superabundantly (above).” 3 Eph 3:20 comes at the end of a prayer for the church in Ephesus and expresses confidence in God’s ability to, as the NRSV footnotes say, “perfect the church through the Spirit.”4
The idea here is not only that God can do what we cannot do, but also that God can do “far more” than we can ever imagine. Superabundance points toward an infinite, mysterious, and ineffable understanding of God, whose power is beyond our ability to comprehend. This is a notion which is central to Scripture and thus also central to the Reformed tradition. As Benjamin Farley writes, in The Providence of God in the Reformed Perspective, “A God that was not ineffable, a God that was entirely knowable as an object, a thing, or a datum, would not be the God of Scripture.” 5
Providence and Sovereignty of God: Superabundant Power from the Beginning
John Leith, in Introduction to the Reformed Tradition, writes “Reformed theology has resisted every effort to get control of God, to fasten the indefinite and indeterminate God to the finite and determinate…God is free, and God acts and speaks when and where he chooses.”6
The Bible consistently points to God as being in control. Second Isaiah, in order to rebuild the confidence of the exiled Israelites in Yahweh, re-orients the Israelites back toward the God of creation, helping them see that the God who punished them, is the same God who will redeem them and is the same God who has been in control from the beginning of time.
One of the prophet’s key ideas is that God was in control in ways that the Israelites could not understand, in control even when it did not seem that way. Second Isaiah, reflecting basic Reformed theology, is depicting a God of superabundant capacity, who is deeply invested in and active in history.
Faith in the Grace of God: Human Confidence in God’s Superabundant Power
For Christians, the greatest example of God’s superabundant power is found in the redemption of humanity and the world in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. God’s redemption in Christ was a miraculous act of superabundant grace that is intelligible through faith, a notion that is at the core of the Reformed tradition.
The modern perspective leaves little room for the miraculous. We have been conditioned to trust what we can see, touch, or quantify. As Farley writes, “Science and modern philosophy emphasize the necessity of verification. This is absolutely essential.” But then he adds, “However, the whole phenomenon of faith transcends this data-hungry preoccupation of our time…”7
Hebrews 11:1 says, “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” It seems to me that when many of us get on our knees to pray, we are at least implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, showing hope and trust in God’s ability to deliver miracles. In this respect, prayer can be seen as an act of faith in God’s superabundant capacity to do more than seems possible. In prayer, we show trust that God both wants to and can help us.
God’s Covenant of Grace: Superabundant Love Wins Out
Seen broadly, the Bible is the story of both God’s effort to instill righteousness in humanity and God’s love for humanity despite our failures to live up to God’s expectations. Repeatedly throughout the Biblical narrative, humanity fails to live up to the covenant God made with us. Yet, also repeatedly throughout the Bible, God’s love tempers God’s pronouncements of judgment. God withholds judgment time and again. In this sense, God’s covenant throughout the Bible is a covenant of grace, the ultimate expression of which is in Christ.
Reflecting the Reformed ideal of the unity of God’s covenant of grace throughout the Bible, Karl Barth points out that the “Noahic covenant…is already a covenant of grace…the free and utterly unmerited self-obligation of God to the human race which had completely fallen away from Him…also the promise of the future divine coming…”8 In this respect, Biblical covenants reveal grace and love as God’s predominant characteristics.
This God of justice has high expectations. However, because of superabundant love and grace, God seemingly can’t help but find ways to forgive and give second chances.
The world often seems random and dangerous. Whether we recognize it or not, humanity is indisputably prone to the same mistakes over and over, sometimes with disastrous consequences. My sense is that many of us turn to the Bible and come to church looking for and hoping for some way for this all to make sense and be made right, hoping for something beyond what we see in the world.
For this hope to have grounding, the one in charge needs capacities that are far beyond what we expect from ourselves and others in this world: the capacity to make life with all its complexities, injustices, and finitude both meaningful and just. For this hope to make sense, the Reformed perspective indicates that we must look to a God who has the superabundant capacity to do what humanity cannot do: save ourselves.
One of my favorite Bible verses comes toward the end of the Book of Job (from chapter 38). In the passage, Job, who has lost everything, and whose friends have besieged him with accusatory advice as to how to make things right, finally turns to God with his own accusatory diatribe. In essence, Job pleads for an answer as to why an unfair disaster has befallen him.
God does not directly address Job’s questions. Instead God responds with a series of blunt and seemingly unsympathetic questions. By my count, God peppers Job with 79 questions, the essence of which is: where were you when I created the world?
A former colleague of mine was asked to sum up the Bible in a single sentence. His response: “I am God, and you are not.” That is essentially what God is saying to Job. And yet, this appears to help Job, as he seemingly calms down and accepts what God is saying. In his acquiescence, Job appears, despite his own personal difficulties, to implicitly be showing trust that God knows what God is doing. Job seems to be showing faith that, despite not getting the precise answers he (and all of us) wants, somehow it will be OK.
This is a profound depiction of a human being responding in humility to the creator of the world. The Reformed perspective lifts up this same creator as the one whose heart is revealed in the recreating work of Christ, and whose acts of creation and recreation are possible because of a superabundant capacity to love and to save. This captures why I so often turn to the Bible and go to church.
Notes
1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1989) 38.
2. Calvin, 38.
3. JD Douglas ed, trans. By Robert Brown & Philip Comfort, The New Greek-English Interlinear New Testament, (Carol Stream: Tyndale House Publishers, 1990) 675.
4. The New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha,(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) 324 New Testament.
5. Donald McKim, ed., Major Themes in the Reformed Tradition, (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1992) 90.
6. John Leith, Introduction to the Reformed Tradition, (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981) 74.
7. McKim, 89-90.
8. McKim, 114.
