So likewise the Father is almighty, the Son almighty, the Holy Spirit almighty

The Text

The rule is set; now the creed runs power through it. Similiter — “in like manner” — signals that verses 13–14 are not a new argument but the established grammar of verse 11 applied to a fourth attribute: almightiness. The persons are each omnipotens; there are not three almighties; there is one Almighty.

But the moment the creed says omnipotens Filius — the Son is almighty — it has set off the hardest pastoral charge in the entire litany. The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds attach “almighty” to the Father, the maker of heaven and earth; we are used to it there. The Athanasian Creed, obeying its own qualis … talis rule, will not let “almighty” stay with the Father alone. It is equally the Son’s. Which means the one who is omnipotens is also the one who was scourged, nailed up, and buried. The verse forces a question it does not here answer and the rest of this entry must: what is divine power, if the one who holds all of it dies on a cross? The creed’s refusal to exempt the Son from omnipotence is, in the end, its refusal to let us define power by anything other than the God who actually has it.

Translation Notes

similiter — “likewise.” The connective is doing logical work: it tells the reciter that verses 11–12 were a rule, not a remark, and that the rule now governs omnipotens exactly as it governed aeternus. The creed is teaching by drill: same form, new word, same “and yet.”

omnipotens — “almighty,” and which “almighty.” The Latin renders the Greek Pantokratōr and behind it the Hebrew El Shaddai and YHWH Sabaoth (the Lord of hosts). The biblical word is not primarily the philosophers’ “able to perform any logically possible action.” Pantokratōr means the all-ruling, all-holding One — the one in whose hand all things are upheld and governed. Revelation’s “the Lord God omnipotent reigneth” (19:6) is the register: not abstract maximal capacity but actual, exercised, universal dominion. Omnipotens in the creed carries that ruling-and-upholding sense, which is why it can be sung as easily as it is argued.

omnipotens Filius — the load-bearing phrase. Under verse 7’s qualis … talis, the Son is omnipotens in the identical sense the Father is. The creed will not appropriate almightiness to the Father in a way that leaves the Son a lesser power. This is the anti-Arian point (a creature cannot be omnipotent) and the cruciform point at once: the Son who is omnipotens is the Son who was crucified, so the cross cannot be read as the moment the Almighty’s power failed; it must be read as the moment it was most fully shown.

non tres omnipotentes, sed unus omnipotens. The grammar is verse 11’s, exactly: the adjective predicated of each person, the plural substantive forbidden. Three persons, each almighty; not three Almighties; one Almighty.

Historical Context

Pantokratōr, said and seen. “Almighty” entered the creeds through the Septuagint and the Apocalypse, where Pantokratōr is a throne-word: the one who rules and sustains all. The East made omnipotens Filius visible. The icon of Christ Pantokratōr — Christ Almighty, right hand raised in blessing, the book of judgment in the left, gazing down from the dome of the church — is verse 13 in paint: the Son, almighty, exactly as the Father is almighty, ruling the cosmos from the architecture’s highest point. When the Athanasian Creed says omnipotens Filius, it is confessing in Latin what the Eastern church confesses in the dome.

The anti-Arian edge. A made Son cannot be the Almighty; omnipotence is incommunicable to a creature. So omnipotens Filius is, like every line of the litany, a wall against Arius — and the creed builds the wall not by separate argument but by the relentless similiter: whatever the Father is, the Son is, including this.

Power defined by the cross. From the start the church had to hold omnipotens together with crucifixus. Paul had already done it: “the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Cor 1:25); “my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). Athanasius read the incarnation as the Word’s power, not its suspension — only the Almighty could take mortality into himself and not be destroyed by it. Augustine’s Enchiridion added the decisive refinement: omnipotence means God “does whatever he wills” and is so completely Lord that “he would not allow any evil to exist unless he were able to bring good out of it.” Divine power is not the prevention of all suffering; it is the sovereignty that can turn even a cross into salvation.

The scholastic guard. The Schoolmen distinguished potentia absoluta (what God could do, considered in abstraction) from potentia ordinata (what God has actually willed and ordained), partly to keep omnipotens from collapsing into divine arbitrariness — God is not less than able to do all, and not a tyrant who does anything; he is the Almighty whose power is one with his wisdom and goodness.

Lines of Interpretation

The deity of the three persons is uncontested. The disputed question is what omnipotence is — and, downstream of it, whether an almighty God can be reconciled with the world’s evil, or whether the creed’s omnipotens Filius is itself the reconciliation.

Patristic

Tradition: the Pantokratōr of Scripture and liturgy; Athanasius, On the Incarnation; Augustine, Enchiridion 96, 100

The Fathers read omnipotence through providence and the cross: the Almighty is the one who can take evil up into a greater good, supremely at Calvary. Power is exercised dominion ordered to redemption, not raw force.

Strengths

• Holds omnipotens and crucifixus together from the outset — the cross is power’s revelation, not its failure
• Augustine’s rule (“would not allow evil unless able to bring good from it”) is a usable theodicy frame, not a mere assertion

Weaknesses

• “Brings good out of evil” can be deployed glibly at the bedside, where it wounds rather than heals
• The patristic confidence assumes a providential frame many modern hearers no longer share

Scholastic

Tradition: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q. 25; the potentia absoluta / ordinata distinction

Aquinas defines omnipotence precisely: God can do all that is intrinsically possible; that he “cannot” actualize a contradiction (a square circle, a done-and-not-done deed) is no limit, because a contradiction is not a thing to be done. The absoluta/ordinata distinction keeps power wedded to wisdom — God is able to do all, and freely orders what he does.

Strengths

• Dissolves the classic “omnipotence paradoxes” cleanly — they trade on treating contradictions as feats
• Binds power to God’s nature, foreclosing the picture of an arbitrary deity

Weaknesses

• The precision can leave the impression that omnipotence is mostly a matter of what God cannot be tripped up by
• Potentia absoluta, in late-medieval hands (Ockham), drifted toward exactly the arbitrariness the distinction meant to prevent

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, Heidelberg Disputation (the theology of the cross); the genus maiestaticum

Luther’s theologia crucis is the most powerful reading of omnipotens Filius. God’s power is revealed sub contrario — under its opposite. The Almighty is most almighty precisely where he looks most defeated: the cross is not the eclipse of omnipotence but its definitive form. The Lutheran communication of attributes presses further: the omnipotence is genuinely communicated to the man Christ, so that the crucified one is, in person, the Almighty.

Strengths

• Refuses every triumphalist idol of power; locates God’s omnipotence exactly where the suffering can find it
• Makes omnipotens Filius pastorally luminous: the Almighty is the one on the cross, not a force that stood by

Weaknesses

• Sub contrario, overstated, can sound as if power and weakness are simply identified, dissolving the “almighty” into paradox
• The genus maiestaticum remains contested across the Reformation divide (see [[athanasian-creed/uncreate-and-immeasurable]])

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes I.16–18; Heidelberg Catechism QQ. 26–28; Westminster Confession chs. 2, 5

The Reformed bind omnipotens tightly to providence. The Heidelberg Catechism’s treatment is the pastoral high point: because the almighty Father governs all things, “all things come not by chance but by his fatherly hand,” so that nothing — not illness, not poverty — can separate the believer from his care. Omnipotence is preached as comfort: the power is exercised, total, and paternal.

Strengths

• Turns the attribute directly into consolation — an almighty God whose power is fatherly providence
• Refuses deism: the Almighty is not a retired engineer but an active governor

Weaknesses

• Comprehensive providence sharpens the theodicy question rather than easing it — if nothing is by chance, what of the worst things?
• Pressed without the cruciform center, “his fatherly hand” can sound like an answer the suffering cannot yet hear

Modern / Ecumenical

Tradition: process theology and open theism (Hartshorne, Griffin; Pinnock, Sanders) versus the classical defense; Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God

The modern pressure point is theodicy. Process theology and open theism limit omnipotence — God persuades but cannot coerce, knows possibilities but not the settled future — precisely to clear God of responsibility for evil. Moltmann instead drives the question into the Trinity: the cross is an event between the Father and the Son in the Spirit, so that the almighty God does not stand outside suffering but takes it into his own life. The classical retrieval (Sonderegger, Webster) replies that only an omnipotent God can finally redeem, and that the creed’s omnipotens Filius is already the answer the modern revisions are reaching for.

Strengths

• Process and open theism take the horror of evil with full moral seriousness and refuse a glib providence
• Moltmann recovers the cross as the place where omnipotence and suffering meet within God — a profound reading of omnipotens Filius

Weaknesses

• A God who cannot finally overcome evil cannot finally be trusted to; the comfort of the attribute is precisely what limiting it forfeits
• Moltmann, pressed, risks making suffering constitutive of God’s being; the creed says the Son is omnipotens — the cross is power’s form, not God’s victimization

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley held omnipotence whole and added a distinctively Wesleyan qualification — not to God’s power but to its manner. In Sermon 67, On Divine Providence, and across the sermons on grace, Wesley insists that the Almighty governs moral creatures not by overwhelming them but by a power that woos: prevenient grace is real, sufficient, and resistible. God could compel; he omnipotently chooses to persuade, because he wills the love of free creatures, and forced love is not love. This is the Wesleyan center of gravity against the Reformed: not a smaller omnipotence, but an omnipotence that, of its own sovereign freedom, makes room for the creature’s “yes.” Wesley would have rejected open theism’s limited God as firmly as he rejected determinism; his God is omnipotens and, almightily, gentle.

The Methodist Articles of Religion, Article I, confesses God “of infinite power”; Wesley never qualifies the quantity. And his soteriology depends on omnipotens Filius in the cruciform sense: the Son who saves is the Almighty, or the cross is a noble tragedy rather than the world’s redemption. Wesley’s revival preaching of providence is Heidelberg’s comfort with a Wesleyan warmth — the almighty hand is a Father’s, and it is bent on actually saving, not merely ruling.

Charles Wesley made the paradox sing. “And can it be that I should gain / an interest in the Saviour’s blood? … that thou, my God, shouldst die for me” is omnipotens Filius on the cross, set to a tune a congregation can weep through. “Hark! the herald angels sing … veiled in flesh the Godhead see, / hail the incarnate Deity” — the Almighty in the manger. And “Ye servants of God, your Master proclaim” sings the omnipotent Lord’s reign over every earthly power. Where John guarded the attribute and qualified its manner, Charles did what the Wesleys always did: he turned omnipotens into the congregation’s own astonishment that the Almighty died for them.

Hymnody

Almightiness is one of the most-sung words in English hymnody, because it is a throne-word and the church sings best at the throne.

“Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!” puts omnipotens in its first line and its last; the whole hymn is verse 13 at worship — and it keeps verse 14’s rule, ascribing the one “Almighty” to the “God in three Persons.”

“A mighty fortress is our God” (Luther) is omnipotens as the believer’s defense — and, true to Luther’s theology of the cross, the victory is won by “one little word,” not by force majeure. “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation” is the Pantokratōr in full doxology. “Crown him with many crowns … the Potentate of time” crowns the almighty Son. “Christ the Lord is risen today” sings omnipotens Filius over the grave.

The Wesleyan corpus carries the cruciform paradox: “And can it be” and “Hark! the herald angels sing” both confess the Almighty precisely in his weakness — the Godhead veiled, the God who dies. The icon’s painted answer is the hymnody’s sung one: the One enthroned in the dome is the One who was nailed up, and the church praises him as both in a single breath.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

This verse is the site of the most common and most serious pastoral assault on the whole creed, and it usually comes not as an argument but as a sentence said at a bedside or a graveside: if God is almighty, why this?

Refuse to defend the wrong God. The God the question imagines — a being of raw force who could have stopped it and chose not to, the cosmic power that hands out outcomes and withheld this one — is not the God of the creed, and the pastor should not waste a syllable defending him. That God is the omnipotent vending machine of the prosperity gospel and of folk religion: power as leverage, almightiness as the management of results. The verse does not give us that God. It gives us omnipotens Filius — and the Almighty so named is the one on the cross. Christian power is not the absence of the wound; it is the God who entered the wound, took it the whole way down to death, and came up through it. The pastoral word at the graveside is not “God is strong enough to have prevented this and had his reasons.” It is “the Almighty you are angry at is the one who was crucified — he did not watch your grief from a safe distance; he has been inside it, and he is not finished.” That is a God the suffering can be furious at and still hold onto, because he is holding on from the inside.

Name the idol on both sides. The verse refuses two reductions at once. It refuses the genie — power as the thing we operate by faith or technique to get what we want. And it refuses the absentee clockmaker — a power so withdrawn it explains nothing and comforts no one. Omnipotens Filius is neither: an almightiness that is fully exercised (the universe is held in that hand) and fully cruciform (that hand was pierced). The modern temptation is to escape the theodicy problem by quietly shrinking God — making him not-quite-able, so he can be excused. The creed will not let us. It keeps the full omnipotens and relocates the answer from God’s quantity of power to the form his power took: a Son, almighty, crucified, risen, reigning.

Let the Table teach it. The congregation confesses this verse every Eucharist without naming it. At the Sanctus they sing “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of power and might” — Pantokratōr, the whole creed’s omnipotens — and then, in the same liturgy, they take into their hands the broken body of the One who is that might. Power and the broken bread are set down on the same table on purpose. The pastor does not need to win the theodicy debate on its own terms; the pastor needs to point, once, at what the people are doing — singing almighty and then receiving the crucified — and say: this is what the church means by power. Not force that spares us everything, but the Almighty who was broken for us and is not done raising the dead.

Further Reading

• Genesis 17:1 — I am God Almighty (El Shaddai)
• Job 38–42 — the LORD answers out of the whirlwind
• Jeremiah 32:17, 27 — is anything too hard for me?
• Matthew 19:26 — with God all things are possible
• 1 Corinthians 1:18–25 — the weakness of God stronger than men
• 2 Corinthians 12:9–10 — my power is made perfect in weakness
• Revelation 1:8; 19:6 — the Lord God omnipotent reigneth
• Athanasius, On the Incarnation
• Augustine, Enchiridion 96, 100; City of God XXII
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q. 25
• Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation (1518), theses 19–21 (the theology of the cross)
• Heidelberg Catechism (1563), QQ. 26–28; Westminster Confession (1647), chs. 2, 5
• The Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church (1784), Article I
• John Wesley, Sermons, Sermon 67, “On Divine Providence”
• Charles Wesley, “And can it be”; “Hark! the herald angels sing”; “Ye servants of God”
• Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (SCM, 1974)
• John Sanders, The God Who Risks (IVP, 1998), with the critical response of Bruce Ware, God’s Lesser Glory (Crossway, 2000) — read together
• Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Fortress, 2015)