Claim
SMM teaches that God’s omnipotence is constrained — by the principles He Himself established, and ultimately by love itself, to which “even God is absolutely obedient” (211-75). The constraint is not ontological inability (God cannot in the absolute sense) but principled self-binding (God will not violate His own law). The picture distinguishes UC theology from voluntarism (where God’s will is the only law) and from Process Theism (where God is bound by external metaphysical necessity).
Reasoning
csg-gods-omnipotence-operates-within-principle establishes the structural claim: God is “the first to follow, absolutely, the laws He has established” (166-99). The constraint is double: (a) the laws are God’s own, (b) the constraint preserves rather than diminishes divine dignity. God-as-voluntarist (free to do whatever He pleases at any moment) would be God-as-tyrant; God-as-self-bound is God-as-modeling-what-He-asks-of-creatures.
csg-even-god-is-absolutely-obedient-to-love adds the deeper layer: love itself is the highest principle, above God’s other attributes. “However all-knowing and all-powerful God may be, He absolutely obeys true love” (211-75). The pedagogical reason is explicit: “If God were to tell His sons and daughters to absolutely obey true love without doing it Himself … God, who occupies true love, would become a dictator” (211-84).
Ch 4 makes the constraint concrete. csg-god-bound-by-own-law argues God must listen to Satan’s accusations because He authored the law that grounds the standing. csg-god-could-not-function-as-god argues the Fall left God functionally incapacitated — He cannot govern unilaterally because the principle of human responsibility prevents Him from overriding human choice. csg-god-is-prisoner-confined-by-love frames God as “like a prisoner — confined in heart because His ideal of love was stolen.”
The position has sharp consequences: theodicy is resolved by structural constraint (God could not unilaterally prevent the Fall) rather than by free-will-of-creatures-alone. The cross was necessary not because justice demanded it but because divine self-binding to law required indemnity to satisfy Satan’s accusation rights.
Counter-argument
Classical theism holds God can do anything that does not involve a logical contradiction. Aquinas’s Summa Theologica Ia.q.25 a.3 (Aquinas 1265) is the canonical statement: God is omnipotent because “He can do all things that are possible absolutely.” Aquinas restricts only what is intrinsically contradictory (a square circle, a stone too heavy for God to lift); everything else falls within divine power. The phrase “God cannot punish Satan” — central to SMM’s argument — would be, for Aquinas, simply false: God can do whatever is logically possible, and punishing a finite created being is logically possible.
Voluntarism (Ockham, Scotus) presses the point further: God’s will is the moral law. Whatever God commands is right because He commands it; there is no antecedent standard (love, justice, principle) to which God submits. Ockham’s potentia absoluta / potentia ordinata distinction (Ockham, Quodlibetal Questions, c.1322) lets God order the world by His freely chosen law (ordinata) while reserving the absolute power (absoluta) to do otherwise. SMM’s “God absolutely obeys love” would be, for Ockham, a category error — God defines love; love does not constrain God.
Alvin Plantinga’s contemporary account ((Plantinga 1974)) refines: God’s omnipotence is compatible with necessary truths God cannot violate (2+2=4; God’s own essential goodness) but those necessities are internal to God’s nature, not external constraints. The standard worry about a self-binding God: how do we distinguish “God chooses not to act otherwise” from “God cannot act otherwise”? The Plantinga move is to locate the constraint in God’s nature, not in a separable principle “above” Him.
Response
Three distinctions clarify SMM’s position against the counter-positions.
(1) Cannot in SMM is principled self-binding, not ontological inability. SMM does not say God cannot in Aquinas’s logical-impossibility sense; SMM says God will not violate His own law. The framing is closer to Plantinga’s “necessities internal to God’s nature” than to voluntarism’s “God-above-the-law.” But SMM goes further than Plantinga in one specific claim: love is the highest principle, and God’s other attributes (omnipotence, omniscience) are subordinated to it.
(2) Against voluntarism: SMM’s position is that voluntarism is the picture of God we should chase away (csg-throne-judge-god-incoherent §7.1). If God can do whatever He pleases, God is arbitrary — and arbitrariness is incompatible with the parent-child relationship God claims as His central relation. The voluntarist God can love or not love at will; SMM’s God loves because love is what God is, and the constraint preserves the meaningfulness of God’s love.
(3) Against Process Theism: SMM’s “love is above God’s attributes” does not externalize the constraint. Love is not a metaphysical principle God discovers or is bound by from outside; love is God’s nature, in the sense that God’s other attributes are intelligible only through it. The self-binding is to one’s own essence, not to an external standard.
The deepest unresolved point: SMM’s specific claims about Satan’s accusation rights and God’s inability to unilaterally punish push beyond Plantinga’s framework. Plantinga’s God is constrained by His own goodness but retains full agency over creation; SMM’s God is structurally beholden to a legal mechanism that creates rights for Satan. The legal-mechanism framing is sharply at odds with Aquinas, and Plantinga has no clear analog for it. Still wrestling — the distinction between “God’s love nature prevents arbitrary punishment” (Plantinga-compatible) and “God’s law confers standing on Satan to demand indemnity” (Ch 4’s stronger claim) needs DP’s full account of the providence of indemnity to develop.