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This chapter focusses on Peter Martyr Vermigli’s anthropology. It shows that in his commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics and in selected scholia from his Old Testament commentaries, Vermigli sometimes thinks of divine agency as in synergy with human agency, particularly when dealing with themes of divine providence and teleology in creation. This presupposes a participatory metaphysics, insofar as God is present in and through the creature’s actions as the giver of existence. This is not true of other elements of Vermigli’s thought in the same sources, such as when he considers the effects of sin and the Fall. Here, he construes God’s influence as concurring or sometimes competing with human actions, in such a way that Divine and human agency both work on the same ontological plane, contributing different elements to the same effect.

This chapter rejects reductive materialism (in favour of moderate materialism), as are various kinds of dualism. It discusses the correlation of the mental with the physical, together with the qualia problem, which seems to support dualism. This provides the positive case for moderate materialism. Even if it is rejected, a philosophical theology based upon it remains of interest because of the current popularity of materialism. In addition there is a serious dilemma for dualists who are theists: either the psycho-physical laws are exceptions to the way in which the laws of nature are the result of God's choice, or these laws undermine the precedent that human agency sets for the postulate of divine agency.

In this chapter, the author explores the severe criticism directed at those who would talk of God as a being, or a person, and therefore also as an agent. The author engages the work of Thomist philosophers of religion Brian Davies and Herbert McCabe, and concentrates on their claims about divine agency and divine action. He argues that their criticisms against conceiving God as an agent fail for a variety of reasons. He further argues that these Thomists lose the concept of divine agency in their philosophical work, despite the fact that they need it to sustain their theological commitments. Finally, he argues that they are also guilty of confusion and equivocation in their account of the relation between divine agency and free human acts.

This chapter’s argument centers on a conundrum. Cyril espouses a very traditional theology of the Son making the Father known, emphasizing the agency of the Son as revealer, which initially appears incompatible with Cyril’s robust account of the inseparability of all Trinitarian operations, a hallmark of pro-Nicene thought. This chapter argues that it is Cyril’s nuanced understanding of Trinitarian operations that enables him to offer a pro-Nicene account of the Son as revealer in Trinitarian perspective. He holds that the Son reveals the Father in the Spirit. In other words, divine revelation comes from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit, with the pattern of divine agency mirroring the order of divine relations. Moreover, the fact that the Son is consubstantial with the Father whose words he speaks ensures that God is truly as he shows himself in revelation, since it is God who reveals himself.

The book of Psalms is replete with lament and complaint over suffering. Even so, it is also full of beatitudes and happy- (or ʾašrê-) sayings so that it can be seen as a “guide to the blessed life.” How these two sides of life combine in the psalms indicates that happiness is no simple matter according to the Psalms. At times happiness comes via human agency, sometimes via divine agency, and sometimes via a complex mixture of both. Among other things, this suggests that happiness cannot be simplistically “pursued,” but is most often only received: snatched from the jaws of affliction. Happiness in the Psalms must therefore be read from the perspective of pain seeking understanding.

Building on the work of the previous chapter, where it was shown that Athanasius held that actions make manifest the identity and nature of the agent who performs them, the author turns to the theology of the Cappadocian Fathers and their work on the identity of the Holy Spirit. Just as Athanasius’ maxim that action manifests identity and nature contributed to our understanding of Christ’s divine nature and identity, so also does the maxim play out in the Cappadocians with respect to the Holy Spirit, among whom the conclusion is that the Holy Spirit is divine and not a creature. The author then thinks through several implications of this position.

This introduction forms the bridge between the first and second volumes. The author points us back to his argument in Volume One that a central mistake in debates about divine agency and divine action is that one must use a general concept of divine action to understand the particular network of divine actions in creation and redemption that are at the core of the Christian faith. Even if one finds necessary and sufficient conditions for a concept of divine action, that concept will not inform us in any meaningful way about what God has actually done on our behalf. The author proposes that a careful, critical investigation of the Christian tradition will best supplement the intellectual malaise among Anglophone analytic philosophy on divine action. By careful attention to specific divine actions in the Christian tradition, one will find fresh ways of thinking about divine action in the contemporary debate.

Agential-being models of ultimate reality affirm that ultimate reality is an aware, agential being. The Central Result of the scientific study of religion—that human beings will spontaneously create anthropomorphic supernatural agents to believe in, and to make religious use of, whether or not those agents actually exist—erodes the plausibility of any belief in supernatural agents, without proving such beliefs false, so it imposes a heavy burden on proponents of agential-being theism to show that the agential-being God hypothesis is plausible in light of all relevant information, and convincingly superior to competitor views. Agential-being ultimacy models resist the Rational Practicality and Narrative Comprehensibility dimensions of anthropomorphism to some degree but continue to employ the Intentionality Attribution dimension of anthropomorphism, resulting in a strategy of judicious anthropomorphism. Variations, strengths, and weaknesses of the agential-being class of ultimacy models are discussed.

One significant divine action borne out in the pages of the New Testament is the divine inspiration of Scripture, attested most clearly in 2 Timothy 3:16. The author asks what set of divine actions best describe the production of Scripture, and investigates what the early Christians thought about the divine production of Scripture. The author then interrogates the work of Irenaeus of Lyons and Origen of Alexandria, and concludes that their concerns with Scripture were not with developing a theory of inspiration. Then the author argues that modern debates about the divine authorship of Scripture confuse the action of speaking and the action of inspiration, when the two realities are distinct. He thus concludes that the divine inspiration of Scripture should be distinguished from divine authorship.

The author briefly examines why “special” divine action came under fire in the modern period, and suggests that the problems with the contemporary debate about divine action in analytic philosophy rest upon core mistakes made during the modern period resulting from a disconnection with the Christian tradition. He raises again the need to engage with the Christian tradition to see what dividends it might pay for the contemporary debate. After giving a retrospective of the contributions of each chapter in this volume, he calls for theologians to take up the project of the epistemology of theology while maintaining their theological boldness.

This chapter argues that theological claims about humanity can open up a new realm of thought for anthropology. This point is illustrated by considering Lutheran theological discussions of the role of passivity in shaping the gift relationship and indicating ways in which they could enrich anthropological debates around this classic disciplinary topic. In particular, I suggest that theological ideas of passivity profoundly challenge standard anthropological accounts of the role of the obligation to receive in the theory of the gift. The final part of the chapter uses the notion of passivity to initiate a consideration of some ways the disciplines of anthropology and theology are likely destined not to reach agreement through interdisciplinary dialogue: most notably on the issue of the distribution of passivity and agency between the human and the divine. Arguments about the nature of the gift are developed through discussion of materials from Papua New Guinea.

According to the traditional doctrine of divine universal causality (DUC), God directly causes all being distinct from himself, with the implication that God directly causes all creaturely actions. Prevailing opinion holds that, if God causes our actions, then they cannot be free in the libertarian sense. This chapter argues to the contrary, showing that, given a certain account of divine agency, God’s causing our actions is perfectly consistent with libertarian freedom. It shows, moreover, that DUC, together with some common theistic assumptions, actually precludes those accounts of divine agency on which libertarian freedom is ruled out by God’s causing our actions.

This chapter illumines the old problem of the relation of human freedom to divine grace by looking at it from the perspective of God as an agent. The traditional problem of freedom and grace is this: if we allow room for human action in the economy of salvation, then we are committed to justification by works. But if salvation is all of grace and therefore does not allow for any serious causal role of the human will in salvation, then we are committed to determinism. The chapter throws light on this problem by looking at causation in in different respects, particularly how it bears on divine and human action, drawing on the work of J. R. Lucas, Paul Helm, and St. Augustine.

Chapter 7 presents and discusses narratives relating to the origin and emergence of dancers and priests involved in the performance of jāgars. This chapter also contains an ethnographic account of a young woman possessed by a goddess. As in previous chapters, the question of divine embodiment is reexamined while suggesting a theoretical framework defined by instrumental agency. The notion of instrumental agency is closer to an emic understanding of possession that is an indication of divine rather than human agency. In this chapter the author also develops the idea of the “swirl of worlds” that points to the dynamic, conversation-like merger of different perspectives, scholarly and nonscholarly, that together create the reality of divine embodiment.

Chapter 5 uses interview and participant observation data to demonstrate how Sikh women uphold and resist exclusionary inclusion in religious community. Sikh women often struggle to escape contradictory gendered norms that essentialize women as inferior, polluted, and suspect. Yet, for some women, membership in Sukhmani Seva Societies (devotional organizations) is an unexpected resource for active citizenship, where they sometimes reinforce but sometimes also resist socially prescribed gender roles. These women enact their citizenship rights through acts of devotion, which upends long-standing assumptions about religious space as inherently undemocratic. Sikh women envision and enact more egalitarian interpersonal and community relations through their devotional practices, which understand gender equality and minority rights as coexisting and human and divine agency as interdependent. Their experience suggests that religious practices can be understood as a form of active citizenship that can potentially challenge exclusionary inclusion and negotiate between state, community, and gender in new ways.

The conclusion considers what the limits to transformative dialogue set by different theological and anthropological understandings of human and divine agency suggest for the future of the relationship between the two disciplines. Examining recent anthropological and wider discussions of the secular with an eye to this issue, and considering current anthropological attempts to rethink the role of divine agency in its theoretical agenda and ethnographic practice, the chapter explores some fundamental differences that remain between anthropology and theology in order to specify the ways in which dialogue between them may be fruitful even if, or perhaps precisely because, it cannot take as its goal a move toward disciplinary identity in relation to this key issue.

This chapter defines the parameters of the concept of resurrection in early Judaism and charts its reception within various literary genres. Within a diverse conceptual environment of attitudes toward death and human existence, resurrection made bold and selective claims about divine agency, the characteristics of embodied life, and the location of human existence within the larger spatial arena of the cosmos. The representation of resurrection in early Jewish literature is increasingly strong across a variety of literary genres and works of regionally diverse origins. The chapter criticizes the myth, however, that it was somehow dominant within early Judaism. Instead, resurrection emerged as a controversial theodicy within a larger conceptual arena in which attitudes toward death and the body became matters of intense dispute among competing scribal circles within the Hellenistic era.