182 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
tutes, to my mind, not only a sad impoverishment of the Chris-
tian picture of God, but in fact a logical disaster. God then is
reduced to "a god," like Zeus or Odin. To me, this seems utterly
preposterous at the most basic philosophical level (but I have
discussed that at length in my book The Experience of God, and
there is no need to rehearse all the issues here in any event).
Perhaps, however, the free will defense requires just such
a mythical sort of God. Because, if God really is "God" in the
classical acceptation of the word-the transcendent plenitude
of all reality, as well as an infinite act of consciousness and
love- then all these concerns about discrete personal agency
and autonomy of the will must vanish as just so many category
errors. Christian philosophers as sober and respected as the
Catholic thinker Eleanore Stump and the Reformed thinker
Alvin Plantinga have argued that it does not lie in God's power
to assure that all will be saved, for the salvation of each person
is contingent on his or her free choice, and God cannot com-
pel a free act and yet preserve it in its freedom. In the words of
Stump, from an article of 1986, "It is not within the power even
of an omnipotent entity to make a person freely will anything."
In one sense this is true, of course, but mostly because the very
concept of an "omnipotent entity" is contradictory. Real om -
nipotence would require a power coterminous with the whole
of being, from its innermost wellsprings and principles to its
outermost consequences and effects; it would even require
possession of the power belonging to the deepest source of
all the acts of every rational will, without operating as a rival
force in contest with those movements-the power, that is, of
the one who is, as Augustine says, not merely superior summo
meo (higher than my utmost), but interior intimo meo (more
inward than my inmost). None of that would be possible for
an "entity," a particular discrete contingent being among other