Search Results

The psalms and prophecies where God’s victory over primordial sea monsters is recalled or invoked are characterized by situations of suffering or distress. Speakers recall to God His own past acts of power and salvation to induce their repetition in the present. It is argued that the standpoint of the speaker, and the urgency of the appeal are crucial for appreciating how each recitation or reference to the combat myth renews its actuality and truth in the present. Focus is given to matters of genre and form, as well as language and imagery to facilitate a comparative analysis of texts.

It is widely claimed in recent years that science and theology can and do interact harmoniously. This chapter, however, explores some areas of potential conflict. Specifically, it asks whether the relationship between science and metaphysical naturalism is sufficiently close to cause trouble in the marriage of science to theistic religion, trouble that supports a decision to divorce even if it does not logically require it. Several popular positions about “methodological naturalism” are examined. While metaphysical naturalists claim there are no supernatural entities, methodological naturalists claim only that, when scientists attempt to explain natural phenomena, they should do so without appealing to any supernatural entities. One popular position about methodological naturalism is that it cannot be reconciled with the traditional theistic view of divine action in the world. A second position is that God’s power and wisdom or God’s faithfulness or even God’s generosity makes divine intervention in the world unlikely at best and thus supports methodological naturalism. A third position is that methodological naturalism can be justified by an appeal to the nature or goals of science. Powerful objections can be raised to all three of these positions. Of course, if neither the nature of God nor the nature or goals of science support methodological naturalism, then it is tempting to conclude, as many conservative Christian thinkers do, that the commitment of contemporary science to methodological naturalism is grounded in a prior commitment, perhaps even an irrational one, to metaphysical naturalism. The chapter ends by rejecting this conclusion in favor of the view that the past success of both non-scientists and scientists in discovering natural causes for natural phenomena justifies a modest methodological naturalism and at the same time provides significant support for metaphysical naturalism.

What reason is there to think that something of enduring religious importance happened in the case of Jesus? In the Christian tradition, the most striking claim for Jesus’ importance is that he was “raised” from the dead. But although belief in Jesus’ resurrection has always been central to Christian belief, it turns out that the resurrection claim can mean many different things. This chapter begins with two minimalistic accounts of resurrection, the symbolic theory and the exemplary theory. A stronger claim, the participatory theory, claims that the resurrection established a new mode of divine-human relationship. Only this last approach allows one to speak of an ongoing influence of “the Spirit of Christ” beyond the first century. Yet, although this claim is much stronger than the first two options, it remains consistent with the constraints on divine action established in earlier chapters.

Martin Heidegger identifies three presuppositions in relation to the question of being that the ancient world understood with regard to the category of being: the universality of the concept of being, that being is indefinable, and that the concept of being is self-evident. It is remarkable that ontological terminology in Christian theology uses words that were understood primarily in a materialistic sense in the ancient world. The word ousia officially comes into the vocabulary of the Church with the use of homoousios in the creed of the Council of Nicaea. Its use was contested at the Council as much for its materialistic overtones as for any other reason. Tertullian had used substantia when referring to the Godhead, which may be said to be the Latin equivalent of ousia. This chapter explores the category of being and the views of John Calvin and Karl Barth regarding divine action and fellowship. Barth's concept of being-in-act in the Church Dogmatics is also discussed, along with the question of being in the thought of John Zizioulas.

This chapter engages the work of Augustine on divine grace and human freedom in salvation. It works through the types of divine action seen in Augustine’s writings on grace in the Pelagian controversy as well as his work on baptism with respect to the Donatists. The author also examines a precursor to Augustine, Cyril of Jerusalem, and his work on catechesis and divine action. He considers what these theologians had to say about divine action in grace, baptism, forgiveness, and in the experience of salvation. Considering Augustine’s theology of grace, the author notes the perennial problems in reconciling divine causation of grace with human freedom in salvation.

The fundamental problems that have arisen over the last half-century in treatments of divine action in the Christian tradition stem from a failure to come to terms with the concept of action. Theologians and philosophers have assumed that we can have a closed conception of agency on a par with the concept of knowledge. On the contrary, the concept of action is a general concept like “event,” “quality,” or “thing.” It is an open concept with a great variety of context-dependent criteria. Recent work on the concept of action can provide an initial and utterly indispensable orientation in work on divine agency and divine action, but it cannot resolve fundamental questions about what God has really done; nor can it illuminate the particular actions of God that are so important in theology. For that we need to turn to theology proper, that is, to work in historical and systematic theology.

This chapter carries forward the discussion of Chapter 3 by considering the idea that both places and God exercise a narratively mediated agency, and both are implied in any existentially dense specification of the identity of individual human beings. For example, the history of a place can make a difference to our assessment of which behaviours are fitting at the place. In this sense, the place can exercise a narratively mediated agency: its storied identity can shape how we behave there, by fixing the prospective meaning of our behaviours (by helping to determine which action is constituted by a given stretch of behaviour). Analogously, the stories of creation, reconciliation, and redemption can fix the narrative identity of the meta-place which is the world, and thereby inform judgements about what sort of human behaviour is appropriate, or congruent with this storied context.

The idea that hope is a virtue is found in the Bible. The case for hope as a virtue was argued by Thomas Aquinas and by the medieval Jewish philosopher Joseph Albo. This chapter explores Aquinas and Albo's teachings about hope. In Aquinas's case, he initially counts hope among the passions, treating it, in his Aristotelian way, as a natural response of the pre-rational soul to pleasurable or desirable future objects. But Aquinas also develops a different account of hope: hope as a virtue that links us, in virtuous perfection, to the divine. To move from passion to virtue is to rise, for Aquinas, both in reason and in grace. Aquinas's account describes a complex interrelation between passion and reason, on the one hand, and an interrelation of human action and divine action, on the other. It is both rational and virtuous to hope, as it is to have faith and charity. Albo's thesis is remarkably similar, although articulated within a Jewish idiom.

In this chapter the author argues that a closed concept of human action is not available. Nearly all the thinkers under consideration in the previous chapters have subtly assumed that a closed concept of human action is needed for understanding divine action. Instead, the author argues that the concept of action is an open concept, that is, that while there are various sufficient conditions there are no necessary conditions for actions. The concept of action is more like the concept of “event” or “thing” than it is like the concept of a triangle or a chair. The author sketches the implications of this change in perspective for understanding divine action.

In this chapter, the author engages recent proposals about the nature of divine action among those involved in the interface of theology and science. He first looks at the broad agenda involved and its goals, canvassing the overall structural character of the conceptual claims on offer with respect to divine agency and divine action. Then the author interacts with the core claims of the work of Robert John Russell. Attention to Russell’s work gives the chapter more specificity since Russell is an exemplary figure in the debate. The author concludes by arguing that the move to look at quantum physics for help on divine action is limited at best, and a dead-end at worst.

One of the most important philosophers who applied a concept of intentional action to God was William P. Alston. In this chapter, the author engages Alston’s proposals, and argues that even a robust notion of intentional action predicated of God yields very little when it comes to understanding claims about divine action that are of prime importance to the Christian tradition. The author also begins to query the concept of God as an acting agent. The author also indicates again how most philosophers commit themselves to a thin version of a doctrinal tradition even without explicitly stating it, and that the debate about divine action is better served by thick engagement with the Christian doctrinal tradition.

Recent philosophical work on divine action has been undertaken carefully and in a sustained manner by Process theologians. Thus the central aim of this chapter is to articulate and evaluate the salient options on offer with respect to divine action and agency in the Process tradition. Though Chapter 3 dealt with the work of Schubert Ogden, a key player in the Process tradition, Ogden did not draw upon the foundations of the Process tradition in his account of divine action. The author engages the work of David R. Griffin, who has provided one of the more thorough accounts of divine action in the Process tradition. He examines how Griffin handles the issue of divine action, and argues that the Process tradition faces formidable difficulties conceptually and theologically in that matter.

This chapter offer some grounds for re-introducing the concept of ‘emergence’ into the interpretation of naturally occurring, hierarchical, complex systems constituted of parts which themselves are, at the lowest level, made up of the basic units of the physical world. It denotes this position as that of emergentist monism. Meanwhile, much of the discussion of the relation of higher- to lower-levels in hierarchically stratified systems has centred on the mind-brain-body relation, on how mental events are related to neurophysiological events in the human-brain-in-the-human-body. The discussion here proposes a model based on the recognition that the omniscient God uniquely knows, over all frameworks of reference of time and space.

In this chapter, the author engages another stream of recent theology similar to the analytic Thomism in Chapter 10: the theology of Kathryn Tanner. Tanner casts her proposals on divine agency and divine action largely in terms of a debate about the grammar of Christian discourse, a trope that has its provenance in the history of twentieth-century analytic theology. This chapter thus supplements the previous one, but develops its central concerns in two ways. First, the author attempts to show that Tanner’s work, despite appearances to the contrary, pursues the same themes of the Thomist tradition seen in Chapter 10. Second, he seeks to show that the proposals under review do not proceed only from the doctrine of creation, but also the attempt to resolve the problem of freedom and grace stemming from the work of Augustine in the Western tradition.

In this concluding chapter, the author provides a narrative of the argument laid out so far, and then takes up two contrasting objections to the role of conceptual analysis in debates about divine action. The first argues that the general disposition of analytic philosophy with respect to this debate is inappropriate; the second objection argues that the author has underestimated the resources available in analytic philosophy. In reply, the author argues that any theory of agency or action has inescapable limitations, and that the way forward involves a radical turn to theology: “theological theology.” The author contends that only such a turn will help us better understand divine agency and divine action.

In this chapter the author provides a retrospective glance on the material reviewed thus far, and suggests a deeper history of the debates about the nature of divine action among both theologians and philosophers is needed. The author demonstrates the complexity of the debates and the assumptions brought to the table, particularly those assumptions tacit in philosophical queries into the justification of religious belief. He suggests the contours of this particular debate colored the debate on divine action. Following I. M. Crombie, the author argues that theology proper can inform how one thinks about divine actions. Moreover, he argues that theologians and their proposals ought to be considered in the ongoing debate about divine action on their own terms, rather than to be thought secondary to explicitly analytic philosophical arguments and terms for debate.

Theologians of many stripes in the last century reacted negatively to the notion that God acts in history. Some have argued that the concept of divine action is inapposite to the findings of modern science, and others eschewed the language of special divine action on the grounds that it is unworthy of God, among other concerns. In this chapter the author engages one of the first theologians to tackle these objections head on: Schubert Ogden. He evaluates Ogden’s efforts, with an eye to his methodological assumptions that govern his work as a whole. He argues that Ogden’s account is deficient in its assumptions about the nature of action in general and divine action in particular.

In this chapter, the author engages what Paul of Tarsus says about divine agency and divine action in his letters and in the book of Acts. Attention is given to the types of divine actions Paul identifies, whether he identifies God as an agent of various actions, and his comments about whether we have access to divine agency and divine action. The author identifies particular divine actions seen in Paul’s writings, like the work of God in his own life and in his calling as an apostle, personal revelations from Christ, and divine action in the church that brings about unity.

This book focuses on the Renaissance reinvention of epic divine action. This reinvention involved the adapting of an originally polytheistic literary genre to a European culture that was officially monotheistic. This book also argues that the Mosaic distinction constitutes the single most important difference between classical and Renaissance epic. In the epic poetry of the Renaissance, the Mosaic distinction operates in conjunction with a range of political differences that combine in as many ways as there are poems. The syncretism of classical artistic models and Christian religious norms is addressed. The chapters in this book evaluate the classical polytheistic model and then five Renaissance epics, each of which illustrates a different approach to the problem of monotheistic divine action: Francesco Petrarch's Africa, Marco Girolamo Vida's Christiad, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso, Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. Finally, an overview of each chapter is provided.