Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I: Exploring and Evaluating the Debate [1 ed.] 0198786506, 9780198786504

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Divine Agency and Divine Action

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I: Exploring and Evaluating the Debate William J. Abraham

Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780198786504 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786504.001.0001

Divine Agency and Divine Action Orientation William J. Abraham

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198786504.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords 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. Keywords:   action, concept, divine action, analytic philosophy, history of philosophy, theology

The fundamental problems that have arisen over the last half-century in treatments of divine action in the Christian tradition stem from a persistent failure to come to terms with the concept of action in its openness and in its complexity.

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Divine Agency and Divine Action Theologians and philosophers have assumed that we can have a closed concept of agency on a par with, say, 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. Moreover, philosophers and theologians have assumed that once we secure an appropriate concept of action, we can solve the challenges thrown up over the last fifty years or so. This too is an illusion. Work on the concept of action can provide an initial and utterly indispensable orientation in work on divine agency and divine action. It cannot, however, resolve fundamental questions about what God has really done; nor can it illuminate the particular actions of God (general or special) that are so important in theology. For that we need to turn in the end to theology proper, that is, to work in historical and systematic theology. Once the full force of these considerations is recognized and internalized, Christian theology is set free to explore the full gamut of divine action with enthusiasm and flair. The aim of this volume is to articulate and defend this liberating agenda. If we are to think through what is involved in claims about divine agency and divine action, we cannot do so until we clear the decks of the muddles and dead-ends that bedevil the discussion; the crucial initial task is to clear space and indicate how genuinely fruitful future work can proceed. In this opening chapter my goal is to offer an orientation to the debate as a whole. I want to provide an initial sense of the issues that have garnered our attention in the debate about divine action, indicate the breadth of the terrain that has opened up, and set out in broad terms the scope and direction of the work as a whole.

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Divine Agency and Divine Action (p.2) Despite a rich discussion about divine agency and divine action over the last fifty years, there is little consensus as to how best to identify the core issues to be addressed. Worse still, there is no agreement on the most promising way to address them. There is a strong sense that divine agency and divine action are absolutely central concepts for understanding the varieties of theism that exist; that there are a nest of crucial problems related to these concepts and the material claims advanced by theists; and that the extensive work done on the concept of human agency and action is vital in making progress on these problems. However, entering the arena is like entering a field where the level of confidence is remarkably high and the level of agreement remarkably low. The confidence stems in part from the sheer elegance and simplicity of our topic. The topics of divine agency and divine action give us a sense that we have on hand a relatively well demarcated field of investigation; they roll off the tongue effortlessly; it should, therefore, be easy to pin down what questions we need to pursue and set about answering them with the skills that the questions themselves evoke. The level of agreement is low because the range of topics and the range of research they require are daunting. Once you touch one hem of this garment you stumble into a whole wardrobe of clothes; some of it needs to be discarded; much of it needs to be sent to the laundry to be sorted and cleaned. A survey of the literature confirms these judgments.1 The longer one lingers in the material available and thinks about the topic, the more bewildered one is likely to become. Divine agency and divine action take off in a host of directions, and there is no unified map on which to place them. To change the metaphor, it is very easy to find oneself in treacherous waters once one begins working through the issues. This, of course, may not be peculiar to issues raised by discourse about divine agency and divine action; there are in the end no shallow waters in philosophy and theology. Yet in this instance the complexity reaches wider and deeper than usual, so much so that we need to ask why this is the case and seek a compelling explanation for this surprising state of affairs. I shall supply a fitting explanation when the time is ripe. We can only achieve this goal, however, if we have before us a relatively clear account of the kind of issues that need attention. We shall see in due course that the issues are in turn conceptual, metaphysical, and epistemological.

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Divine Agency and Divine Action (p.3) It is worth pausing immediately to illustrate the confusion and complexity. Most commentators agree that the concept of action necessarily involves intentionality on the part of the agent. Thus actions are distinguished from happenings or events by the criterion of intentionality. To quote one fine contribution by Robert Ellis, “intention is what makes an action an action, rather than a happening.”2 In making this claim Ellis rightly notes the crucial place of intentionality in the concept of action in the relevant philosophical literature.3 Once this premise has been secured, divine actions are to be construed as analogous to human actions in that all divine actions are thought to be intentional in nature, with appropriate qualifications being made to take care of, say, the transcendent character of divine agency. Yet by the end of Ellis’ paper, we are given no less than fifteen theses about action that are to be applied to the idea of divine action. It is clear that there is much more to the grammar of human action on his account than simply intentionality. Should we now expand our list of the necessary and sufficient conditions for action? More seriously one cannot but worry about the consistency of Ellis’ analysis of the concept of action. Thus Ellis notes that “an act may be voluntary but not intentional if no thought is given to the act, for example, doodling.”4 Here we have a vision of action in which intentionality has disappeared. Something appears to have gone wrong here at the heart of this project. Suddenly the critical condition of intentionality —whatever we may make of that complex notion—has been abandoned with alacrity in the light of an obvious counter-example. What we all took to be a necessary if not sufficient condition of action has been summarily dismissed; what started out as relatively simple has grown into a vast network of commentary with a stark contradiction visible within it on immediate scrutiny. Ellis’ project is representative in that the whole operation is, I suspect, predicated on the following assumptions: we can have an account of the necessary and sufficient conditions of action in the case of human agents; these conditions can be applied analogously to God; thereafter the central task of the philosophical theologian is to execute a program of analogical predication comprehensively.5 These assumptions have effectively governed the debate about divine agency and action over the last generation. Intuitively these assumptions look exactly right in their conception and in their promise for fruitful results. Most especially it draws on the critical place of analogy in our understanding of all predicates as applied to God. While we need not agree with the details of Aquinas’ account of analogy, univocity, and equivocation, the deployment of analogy is surely critical in understanding divine agency (p.4) and action. So the common strategy of executing a program of analogical predication has immediate attraction in sorting through the problems that arise in our understanding of divine agency and divine action.

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Divine Agency and Divine Action Yet none of these assumptions has been the subject of careful investigation. While there are important gains from this research agenda, I shall indicate that many of the hopes it has engendered are illusory.6 They are illusory, moreover, because we have been subject to certain kinds of mental cramp that have created pseudo-problems for theology, have ruled out options that are entirely respectable, and prevented the kind of piecemeal progress on particular, specifically identified instances of divine action that is available in the wake of a more deflationary kind of enterprise. It is not that the vast literature on human action and agency has failed us in explicating and illuminating divine action and agency; it is that we have too often approached that literature in a dogmatic fashion and failed to deploy its resources in the most fitting manner. Consequently the early debate that animated the discussion fifty years ago abruptly stalled; hopefully a revisiting of the issues from a different angle will allow us to make fresh progress. Or so I shall argue. By looking again at the nature of action and agency and unpacking both the richness and limitations of our conceptual work, we can both explain why so much of the discussion stalls and make positive progress in both theology and philosophy. This may disappoint those committed to developing a certain kind of vision of action and agency, but perhaps the problem stems from the search for the wrong kind of vision of agency and action in the first place. If there is no tidy, unified picture of human action and human agency then it is highly unlikely that we can develop a tidy, unified vision of divine action and divine agency. I can put this same point more simply: if there is no single concept of action, or if the concept of action can be instantiated in significantly different ways, then this has deep consequences for the debate about divine action. My sympathies are with the former option (there are no tidy, closed concepts of action), but this cannot and should not be resolved at this stage of the discussion. I shall address these alternatives at length in due course. Either way, explicating the options is helpful in explaining why so many of our efforts to make progress have been stymied.

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Divine Agency and Divine Action The first kind of issue that naturally arises in investigation into divine agency and divine action is conceptual.7 We would like, for instance, to know the necessary and sufficient conditions for action discourse as a whole. Once we have an account of human action in hand, it is conjectured, we can (p.5) proceed to make sense of divine action. Not surprisingly, this conceptual enterprise has started with the exploration of what it is to speak of human action. This move fits aptly with the initial thrust of analytic philosophy in its emphasis on conceptual analysis as a vital first step in philosophical work. The standard initial work in the field quickly isolated intentionality as a necessary feature of action.8 This then grew into work on neighboring concepts like motives, desires, and reasons, and their relation to action;9 and extended further into study of the nature of explanation as applied to action.10 More recently much attention has been given to the place of reasons in causal explanations of action. Broadening the discussion, it became clear that the concept of causation occupied neighboring territory. Indeed one important suggestion, developed with characteristic freshness by R. G. Collingwood, was that our concept of causation was parasitic on our concept of intentional action as experienced firsthand by human agents.11 Clearly both action and causation are interrelated in that they seem to involve the basic idea of “bringing about something.” At first sight this looks like a logically primitive concept inherent in our ideas of action and causation.

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Divine Agency and Divine Action Two other questions bled into this conceptual work when it was taken up and applied to discourse involving divine action. There was the prior question as to how language about God more generally was to be understood. Should talk about divine action be construed as factual, literal, figurative, symbolic, or expressivist? Could one deploy discourse about divine action to make assertions, to describe reality, to deliver explanation of events in the cosmos, in history, in the church, or in personal experience? Clearly the level of generality in play here is very broad indeed; there is behind this a quest for a general theory of religious discourse. Related to these questions but more particular and distinct was the question of the role of analogy in moving from language about human action to language about divine action. All agreed that analogy was crucial, but precisely how should we think of analogical predication in this context? Did the heavy reliance on analogy mean that there were no instances of discourse about divine action which were literal? What if a special divine action, notably the incarnation, was the primary term and was then used analogically to apply to human agents, as for instance, when someone claims (p.6) that Hitler was the devil incarnate? Does this not suggest that we need to broaden the inquiry to include exploration of metaphor, the figurative, the symbolic, myth, and the like? The first of this run of questions is pretty much resolved, so we do not need to spend too much time on it. I shall not argue other than indirectly for the claim that religious discourse generally, and divine action discourse more particularly, can be used to make assertions. There is no such phenomenon as religious language governed by a single network of speech acts; in religion and theology we can use language to perform a host of speech acts. The second raft of questions remains thoroughly contested with very important implications for the debate about divine agency and action as a whole.

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Divine Agency and Divine Action It is tempting to dismiss the network of conceptual issues that revolve around action discourse as passé. Philosophy has moved on since the great heyday of linguistic analysis. There is the additional worry that conceptual analysis may harbor hidden cultural, political, and ideological agendas that beg important theological and philosophical questions or that operate to distract from the deeper issues that need to be addressed. The turn to ordinary language, it was and is feared, may harbor hidden conservative sensibilities. While ordinary language may not harbor the metaphysic of a savage, as Bertrand Russell once quipped, it is bound to reflect the background beliefs and values exhibited in the samples chosen. What if these beliefs and values are oppressive and poisonous rather than emancipatory and salutary? Anyone acquainted with the moral ferocity of liberation theology in even its more measured expressions will know what I mean. So there is room for caution and skepticism about the appeal to ordinary language. However, such a judgment best comes towards the end of our inquiries or at least well into them; it should not be allowed to settle the issue in advance; otherwise it runs the risk of being a dogmatic prejudice that cuts off vital resources for theological reflection.12 We need to wait and see what can be garnered from conceptual analysis. We shall, in fact, see that there is much illumination in store for us on this front. More importantly, there are two substantial reasons for taking conceptual issues very seriously. First, many of the disputes about divine action often look very much like verbal disputes which can be diminished if not resolved by careful attention to the concepts in play. Folk simply talk past one another because there is equivocation or fundamental disagreement on the terms in which the issues are expressed. The track record of conceptual analysis from Plato onwards should strengthen our hopes that this will be the case with divine action. Worries about abstraction or objections that make much of the distraction if not irrelevance of fine distinctions have their place; but they (p.7) can be readily dissolved. There is no escaping the hard work of conceptual analysis; there is a place for standing back and paying careful attention to the concepts we use to think and speak of divine action.

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Divine Agency and Divine Action Second, it is very clear that the conceptual apparatus in and around talk of action has a history. Aristotle has a very rich vision of causation that was put to use by many Christian theologians, yet it does not exactly map more recent ways of thinking about action and causation. Aquinas, to take a later example of a theological genius who readily deployed Aristotelian categories, uses the idea of “act” in a way that is very strange to contemporary ears. He held that God should be construed as “Pure Act.” This is not an easy concept of God to understand, yet it remains a concept that shows up regularly in efforts to make sense of divine action. To take a very different example, if R. G. Collingwood was right on the origination of our causal discourse, it may well be that our standard use of “cause” was invented by extending the use of “action” as applied to human agents to its use in the natural world. Conceptual excavation may, therefore, turn out to be pivotal in untying the kind of intellectual cramp we readily experience when it comes to divine action.13 When added to the deployment of more recent work in action theory, we have very good grounds for insisting on the critical significance of conceptual work. Such work enables us to name the problems we face, to identify crucial errors that recur, to spot blind alleys that have led us astray, and to find ways to make progress in our understanding. It is clear, however, that conceptual analysis very quickly spills over into deeper metaphysical inquiry. Analysis dovetails in the end with how we see the world as a whole or how we see crucial elements within the world as a whole. Human actions are performed by human agents; so we cannot avoid getting into theories of human agency once we try to think about human action. This comes through immediately in one of the seminal exponents of linguistic analysis as applied to the language of human action. Thus J. L. Austin’s work was in part driven by dissatisfaction with those visions of human action which saw action as both determined and free at the same time.14 What was at stake was a theory of human agency which saw agency as fully determined by the preceding necessary and sufficient conditions. The motivation behind this was obvious: human agents were at bottom no different from the kind of natural agents that were the subject of ordinary empirical and scientific description, explanation, and possibly prediction. The proposal that Austin set out to demolish was not simply an observation about action discourse; it (p.8) involved a theory (or family of theories) which has enormous ramifications for human freedom, human responsibility, human resentment,15 and the host of topics that swirl around these notions. His own alternative, however underdeveloped, had equally robust ramifications.

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Divine Agency and Divine Action In addition, once one looks carefully at the language in which action discourse is lodged, one quickly runs into such topics as intentions, desires, volitions, passions, motives, sensations, consciousness, and the like. These clearly involve reference to the inner workings of human agents that take one deep into theories of human nature; they were a serious problem for purely behaviorist or quasi-behaviorist accounts of human agency, as Gilbert Ryle discovered in the response to his seminal work on actions and volitions in The Concept of Mind.16 We are off into a world of anthropology and metaphysics;17 we may even find ourselves reaching into the world of literature, narrative,18 and hermeneutics to make progress. It would obviously be unwise at this point not to follow wherever our inquiries lead us. These observations are readily confirmed when we enter the world of divine action and divine agency. In the early days of the discussion one of the first problems to be resolved was that of the coherence of the very idea of divine action. Given that many believed that action requires bodily movements to be coherent as actions, the idea of divine action could not get off the ground because God was incorporeal. It was relatively easy to dispose of this worry without taking the drastic step of proposing the world as God’s body,19 even though that option is still alive and well. However, the interesting point is that the critics were appealing to certain features of the divine nature to make their case. The issue was as much about the nature of God as it was about the logic of action discourse. The material nature of the dispute became even clearer when Schubert Ogden and others fixed on “classical theism” as the real elephant in the room when it came to resolving problems of divine action. It quickly emerged that Ogden and many others believed that the only intellectually responsible way forward was to develop a solution to the problem of (p.9) divine action by using the resources of Process metaphysics.20 Even then it was not always clear how far the issue was conceptual and how far ontological or metaphysical. This move to mine the resources of Process philosophy is also still very much alive today. In this instance there can be no ignoring the move into metaphysical inquiry as inescapable. Precisely how deep we should go into metaphysics and in what manner we should deploy its resources are clearly very important issues.

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Divine Agency and Divine Action We can approach our topic from a different angle. In speaking of divine action we naturally want to know which divinity is being invoked. Who is the God of divine action? One can put this as an issue of meaning and reference. What is the referent for the subject of divine action verbs? Can we successfully pick out the referent for the divine agent who acts? Many worried that the necessary conditions for securing reference to God were violated because God did not have a body. It was assumed that some kind of ostensive practice, like pointing, was the only way to secure reference. So we were right back with the problem of embodiment, or the lack thereof. Again, this issue as applied to God has been discussed at length in recent philosophy of language.21 There is, however, another issue in the neighborhood: who is the God who acts? Is it the God of mere theism? Or is it the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Or is it the Triune God of Christianity? Where in all of this should we place the God of classical theism or the God of Process theism? Once we pose these questions, then we are forthwith landed right into the heart of theology proper. In addition, if we identify God as the Triune God, what do make of the role of the three Persons in divine action? Even more puzzlingly, what do we do with recent suggestions that the actions of God, say, in the kenosis of the incarnation, are mirrored in eternity before the foundations of the world? Do the actions of the economic Trinity reflect an even deeper network of actions in the immanent Trinity, as Hans Urs von Balthasar has provocatively argued?22 (p.10) It can readily appear that we have once again lost our conceptual bearings in that the agency involved in the case of God is so radically different from human agents that the language of action simply cannot apply in this case. We feel we are falling into a severe case of conceptual and intellectual vertigo.

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Divine Agency and Divine Action The peculiar problems that arise within Christian theology with respect to divine action do not end with queries of how we should think about the action of the Triune God. Theologians and philosophers have for centuries discussed the topic of miracles. The worries this time have been both conceptual and epistemological. Should we, with David Hume, think of miracles as “violations of the laws of nature”? Do claims about miraculous divine action pose special problems that do not arise in the case of other divine actions, like God creating and sustaining the universe? In the recent discussion this line of inquiry has been generalized into a debate about the legitimacy of special acts of God. These special acts of God might include miraculous acts, but they need not be confined to miraculous acts in that they may involve special providential acts where God acts in, with, and through ordinary natural or human activities or acts. Think of the particular providence where God works through the evil actions of Joseph’s brothers in sending him to Egypt in order to preserve Israel later from extinction.23 This is surely a case of special divine action but it is not miraculous in the stricter sense of that term. Even if we exclude the miraculous in that class of actions we identify as special divine action in specific events, there is still a whiff of the old language of divine intervention that makes us head for the nearest exit. Strenuous efforts have been made to isolate special divine action and either eliminate it in a deflationary manner as redundant or rehabilitate it defensively as a live option for the contemporary theologian.24

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Divine Agency and Divine Action By now we have shifted into a third cluster of issues. We have moved from the conceptual, to the metaphysical, to the epistemological. The most acute worry that we encounter in this arena is the compatibility of belief in divine action with the critical assumptions that have been at the heart of the Enlightenment and modernity. The focus of the concern is negative: how do we reconcile claims about divine agency with both the methods and results of critical inquiry in history and natural science? Can we be serious historians of the biblical record and of church history and really countenance the kind of substantial role that has been given to divine activity in the relevant sources? (p.11) Equally, how can we think of divine agency if we take seriously what we know about nature and the methods we deploy to expand our knowledge in this pivotal field of inquiry? Even if we rightly acknowledge there are many Enlightenments rather than one, and even if we believe that the Enlightenment in all its incarnations is a spent force, the general worry about the compatibility of really substantial claims about divine action still haunts the discussion. In the case of science, we have a towering effort reflected in a five-volume series on divine action in scientific perspective sponsored in part by the Vatican Observatory.25 This is a magnificent venture. In the case of history and related topics, inspired in part by one of the true geniuses of twentieth-century theology, Austin Farrer, there has been significant excitement around the possibility of double agency in which God works in and through human agents.26 The general aim throughout has been to provide a credible vision of divine action that would be truly compatible with contemporary critical sensibilities.

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Divine Agency and Divine Action Credibility is, however, only one desideratum in any serious commitment to epistemology; at its most minimal it permits belief in divine action in the contemporary world. However, we also want to know positively how claims about divine action might meet our standards of warrant and justification. How do we provide a positive account of intellectual commitment to divine agency? Initially this will take us into the traditional territory of natural theology. Thus the argument from design can be framed as an argument from apparent purposiveness and intentionality visible in the natural order. Taking a more recent instance of natural theology, the appeal to conspicuous sanctity can accurately be framed as an argument from the presence of divine grace in the lives of the saints.27 The probabilistic problem of evil can be framed as an effort to exploit the theist’s inability to render intelligible God’s intentions (at the very least) in permitting the vast amount of natural and moral evil we find in the world. This issue has been extended and reframed more recently in terms of the hiddenness of God. Are we barred from knowing the secret intentions of God in creation and providence because of our human epistemic conditions? And does this alleviate the pressure from the existence of evil for the theist? More recently the language of divine hiddenness has been given a truly original new lease of life in terms of divine silence.28 What do we make of the failure of God to disclose his secrets to the world? Should we think of this as a case of divine silence in the face of suffering and woe? And does our (p.12) encounter with the action of God in Scripture and in liturgy provide significant resources for addressing vital elements in the challenge of evil?29 The natural entry into issues of natural theology is but half of the story, however, as far as epistemology is concerned. Whatever our assessment of the merits of natural theology, the topic of divine revelation has been inescapable in most serious forms of theism. Immediately, we encounter a perplexing conundrum. How can we support claims about divine action by appeal to divine revelation when the appeal to divine revelation is itself an appeal to divine action? Is this whole enterprise not patently circular? Moreover, if we leave that aside for the moment, how do we secure the positive identification of divine revelation? The appeal to miracle has run its course, or so it would seem. So we are thrown back on how we might provide significant backing for claims to perceive or recognize divine action. Shifting to the language of recognition in fact is a promising development, for it permits us to look afresh at the possibility of perception of the divine as a route to securing the justification of claims of divine action. Even then recognition of the divine is not a merely human endeavor; it arises because of the action of God in grace. This move in turn opens up the possibility of divine action in our own lives (and the testimony supplied by others) as a source of warrant in theology. More generally, it draws us into the place of grace in coming to believe, for it is a commonplace in Christianity that the action of God is central in coming to faith.30

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Divine Agency and Divine Action Thus far I have suggested that the debate about divine agency and divine action can usefully be seen as clustering networks of questions that are conceptual, metaphysical, and epistemological in nature. We may begin with puzzles about the concept of action, but this soon spills over into claims about reality as a whole, and once God shows up in the debate questions of credibility quickly arise. I have been at pains to avoid insisting that there is something like “the problem of divine action.” This runs counter to what one often finds in the discussion. There is sometimes a strong sense in the literature that somehow there is essentially one crucial problem here. If we could only solve this one central problem by means of conceptual analysis, or by way of metaphysical innovation, or by taming special divine action in the world, or by finding a way to make sense of God’s general activity in the world, then we could resolve the other issues that deserve attention. We would also be in good shape to tackle the epistemological challenges that relate to claims about divine action. (p.13) I confess that this was once implicit in my own thinking. I long believed that if we could get genuine clarity on the necessary conditions of action then with appropriate adjustments for divine action we would have solved the crucial problem at the core of our manifold disputes. Understanding action in its most general sense was the critical desideratum. Others have taken this in a more ontological direction. Develop an ontological or metaphysical theory of one divine action (say, creation ex nihilo, providence, or incarnation), plug that theory into the system, pull up any divine action on the screen, and the job was effectively finished. What the foregoing makes evident, however, is that there is no one problem of divine action or divine agency; there is a cluster of issues that overlap in complex ways and that require both careful delineation and reintegration if we are to make progress. As I mentioned earlier, we need to avoid mental cramp. Equally, we need to keep our nerve and not allow the wide range of issues that crop up to undermine our confidence. Keeping our nerve is far from easy because the conventional boundaries between disciplines or between sub-disciplines have been transgressed in the discussion on divine action. No doubt one reason for pinning our hopes on conceptual analysis stemmed from the hope that this terrain was sufficiently isolatable and sufficiently neutral to yield results that would be more or less universally agreed. We now know that this is not the case. Linguistic analysis has morphed into metaphysics; metaphysics takes us into theology. Philosophy of religion morphs into philosophical theology; philosophical theology transitions naturally into analytic theology. For some this is a sorry state of affairs; philosophy has been robbed of her virginity and forced into a shotgun wedding with theology; the offspring are naturally illegitimate. Somewhat different fears show up in theology. Theology is colonized by alien philosophical dogma, loses her own voice, and runs the risk of idolatry by sacralizing alien secular intuitions, assumptions, and even dogma. I do not share these assessments and their concomitant fears. Page 15 of 22

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Divine Agency and Divine Action It is patently clear that philosophy, say, in the medieval period is thoroughly theological, and it is none the worse for that. Equally, current work in medieval philosophy is proving a rich vein for philosophical reflection. I have argued elsewhere that the understanding and teaching of modern philosophy, most especially in modern epistemology, has been impoverished by failure to attend to the pivotal theological issues that motivated and often governed its constructive agenda.31 On the epistemological front I am convinced that the time is ripe for the creation of a new discipline in the boundaries between philosophy and theology that can felicitously be identified (p.14) as the epistemology of theology.32 Most of all, I welcome the recent development of analytic theology as an extremely important research program for both philosophy of religion and for theology proper.33 We need much more not less work in the borderlands between theology and philosophy which will be beneficial to both endeavors. This volume belongs squarely in the intersection of theology and philosophy. My ultimate goal is unapologetically theological. I am interested in exploring the rich history of reflection on divine agency and divine action in the history of theology. I seek in time to articulate as a theologian a rich vision of divine action that runs from conversion back to creation and forward to the eschaton. I also aim to take up a network of old and new problems that are sparked by commitment to divine action. However, before we can achieve these ambitious goals, it is crucial to sort through the debate about divine action that has been in play since the early 1950s. The issues cannot be sorted out without exploring the philosophical issues that have very naturally been introduced. Ironically, I shall argue that when it comes to divine action, there has been too much talk and not enough action. While much has been said and written about divine action, we are often no wiser about what specific claims about divine action are on offer and how we might think of the grammar that genuinely illumines them. I shall be explaining why this judgment applies to the network of diverse research programs that have been in play since the 1950s. The work as a whole falls into three parts, excluding this introduction and a conclusion. The first part, running from Chapters 2 through 4, will review the first round of efforts to identify and solve “the problem of divine action.” I shall begin in Chapter 3 with the seminal contribution of Langdon Gilkey and work through the efforts to solve the challenges he posed by Schubert Ogden. I shall, in Chapter 4, take up a similar challenge that arose independently within analytic philosophy and was addressed by I. M. Crombie.

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Divine Agency and Divine Action In the shorter second part I will step back in Chapter 5 and develop a narrative of the debate that highlights the Achilles’ heel of the discussion: the presumption that we can have a closed concept of action. Interestingly, this mirrors a standard mistake that also shows up in the debate about the justification of religious belief. In Chapter 6, I shall argue that the concept of action is an open concept, not a closed concept; as applied to theology this discovery requires that we identify with some care the relevant stratum of (p. 15) action discourse on which we are drawing. This is pivotal in coming to terms with intentional action as predicated of God. In the third part I shall take these considerations on the road and explore a second round of efforts to make sense of divine agency and divine action. I shall argue in Chapter 7 that William Alston, despite his intentions to the contrary, leaves us with a hopelessly sparse account of divine action. In Chapter 8, I shall argue that the Process tradition, as exemplified in the work of David Ray Griffin, ends up undermining any worthwhile commitment to either divine action or divine agency. In Chapter 9, I shall show that the concerted effort to find special divine action in the indeterminism of quantum physics fails for a host of reasons. In Chapter 10, I shall contend that a band of contemporary Neo-Thomists retain a robust canon of divine action but lose the concept of God as an agent. In Chapter 11, I shall argue that recent work appealing to the grammar of Christian discourse effectively masks a partisan material project in theology that cannot avoid the need for relevant metaphysical work that it officially appears to eschew. In the concluding chapter, Chapter 12, I shall round off my constructive proposals by indicating my take on the metaphysics of agency, displaying why it should rightly be shaped by genuinely theological considerations, and call for a radical change of direction in all future work on divine agency and divine action. In the end claims about divine action are first and foremost theological claims. For far too long theologians have been intimidated by faulty philosophical assumptions about agency and action; they have acted as if they had been secretly given a contraceptive pill by philosophers which has prevented a robust account of divine agency and divine action from coming to birth. They need to come off the pill, recover their nerve, have fresh intercourse with their own rich traditions of reflection on divine action, and bear fresh witness to the wonders God has performed in creation and redemption.

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Divine Agency and Divine Action Some readers may be curious about how this work relates, first, to my earlier work on divine inspiration and divine revelation,34 and, second, to my more recent work on canon and canonical theism.35 As to the first of these, there is a deep continuity between this project and the work I did on divine inspiration and divine revelation. I first became interested in divine action because of the pressure from certain accounts of historical investigation that called into question central claims about divine action in the Christian tradition. In order to address this challenge I found it essential to focus on particular claims (p.16) about divine action, that is, on divine speaking, divine incarnation, and miracle. My aim was to explore what was at stake in abandoning these claims, and more specifically, whether they should be abandoned because of the logic of historical inquiry. Necessarily, this proved to be an exercise in deck-clearing or deckreplacement, in that the drift of the argument had been that the scaffolding of Christian claims about divine action had collapsed and that a whole new beginning was imperative. My work on the divine inspiration of Scripture was much more positive, deploying a vision of analogy to sort through both negatively and positively earlier theories of divine inspiration. My later work on divine revelation was intentionally epistemological in nature, seeking to unpack the nature of revelation as an epistemic concept and relating that to the recent debate on the justification of Christian belief. All through this work, my thinking about divine action and divine agency was tacit. It was certainly not idling, but it was thoroughly implicit and even ad hoc. I had a strong sense of the crucial importance of these topics, and I had wellformed intuitions about what was needed, but I had only the faintest idea of what to do with these convictions. For a time I harbored the illusion that a short book could take care of the relevant philosophical and theological problems. So what I am doing here is picking up on the background music that has been in play for some time in my earlier work and printing up the complex set of scores that have emerged.

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Divine Agency and Divine Action The relation of this project on divine agency and divine action to my more recent work on canon is less direct than its relation to my work on inspiration and revelation. The latter clearly involve significant reflection on divine action in that inspiration and revelation are obviously species of divine action. Both ideas have long been associated with the idea of canon. Indeed it is common to treat canon as a synonym for criterion and to argue that Scripture should be treated as a criterion precisely because it is constituted as a primary form of divine revelation and because it is brought into being through divine inspiration. Thus the authority of Scripture as conceived in much traditional theology has been intimately related to the idea of divine action. There is then an obvious connection historically between canon and divine action. I have argued at length that it is a mistake to construe canon as a criterion; it is better thought of as an approved list, say, of books, or of doctrines. Hence I reject the way in which divine inspiration—and even more so, divine revelation—have been used to shore up a criteriological concept of Scripture and tradition. However, this does not at all mean that I reject the divine inspiration of Scripture or that I deny a real connection between divine revelation and Scripture. We need to explore these notions independently of their role in shoring up a failed account of the authority of Scripture for Christian theology. As to the relevance of this work to canonical theism, it suffices to say that what I argue here focuses in part on precisely the kind of robust theism that (p.17) was canonized by the church when it canonized the varied canonical materials, persons, and practices that constitute its canonical heritage. However, I can make my case without those assumptions being in play here, even as they remain on the outer horizon. The present work is a project that digs deep into a host of theological or philosophical proposals; I hold that it is a serious mistake for any church to overcommit itself canonically or officially on many of these matters. In that respect this work reflects the whole spirit of canonical theism. However, for the most part the virtues and vices of canonical theism are not of primary concern here; the fundamental moves I make should be of interest to all varieties of theism. In other words, the primary target of attention is the topic of divine agency and divine action. The central problems that have arisen in Christian theology over the last two generations around these ideas are in turn conceptual, metaphysical, and epistemological. They arise because of worries about the concept of action, because of a desire to chart the place of the divine in a comprehensive worldview, and because of cognitive dissonance with the requirements of intelligibility and credibility. The aim of this project as a whole is to work through these worries, to develop a constructive account of divine agency and divine action, and to explore the philosophical ramifications of commitment to divine agency and divine action. In doing so I shall situate this work initially in the theological and philosophical developments of the twentieth century. To these developments let me now turn. Page 19 of 22

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Divine Agency and Divine Action Notes:

(1) For helpful surveys see Owen C. Thomas, “Introduction,” in God’s Activity in the World: The Contemporary Problem, ed. Owen C. Thomas (Chico, CA: Scholars’ Press, 1983), 1–14; Owen C. Thomas, “Recent Thought on Divine Agency,” in Divine Action: Studies Inspired by the Philosophical Theology of Austin Farrer, ed. Brian Hebblethwaite and Edward Henderson (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1990), 35–50; Robert John Russell, “Introduction,” in Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature, ed. Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, and C. J. Isham (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory and Berkeley, The Center for Theology and Natural Sciences, 1993), 1–32; Wesley J. Wildman, “The Divine Action Project,” Theology and Science 2 (2004): 31–75. (2) Robert Ellis, “God and ‘Action’,” Religious Studies 24 (1988), 465. (3) Ibid., 464–7. (4) Ibid., 466. (5) This is the position developed in his Oxford DPhil thesis (1984). (6) Thomas Talbott, “God, Freedom, and Human Agency,” Faith and Philosophy 26 (2009): 378–97. (7) In what follows I shall focus on action but what I say can apply for the moment mutatis mutandis to agency. (8) G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957). (9) Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion, and Will, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1979). (10) Readings in Theory of Action, ed. Norman S. Care and Charles Landesman (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1968). (11) R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 285–343. (12) For an interesting first step that has not been picked up in the subsequent discussion on liberation theology see Jeffrey Eaton, “Divine Action and Human Liberation,” in Divine Action, ed. Hebblethwaite and Henderson, 211–29. (13) “Causes,” in Reflective Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology by Austin Farrer, ed. Charles Conti (London: SPCK, 1972), 200–17. (14) “A Plea for Excuses,” and “Ifs and Cans,” in J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). (15) P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” in his Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974). Page 20 of 22

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Divine Agency and Divine Action (16) Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949). (17) Leslie Stephenson, Ten Theories of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). (18) As happens in the essays by F. Michael McClain, “Narrative Interpretation and the Problem of Double Agency,” and Thomas F. Tracy, “Narrative Theology and the Acts of God,” both in Divine Action, ed. Hebblethwaite and Henderson, 143–72 and 173–96 respectively. We can sometimes learn more about human agency from a great writer like Dostoevsky than we can from philosophical literature on human agency. (19) See, for example, Terence Penelhum, “Divine Action and Human Action,” in Antropolgia et Filosofia della Religione, ed. Albino Babolin (Perugia: Benucci, 1982), 23–47; David Kelsey, “Can God be an Agent without a Body?” Interpretation 27 (1973): 538–62. (20) I shall take up this topic at some length in Chapters 3 and 8 in this volume. (21) Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). (22) Bruce D. Marshall, “The Unity of the Triune God: Reviving an Ancient Question,” The Thomist 74 (2010): 1–32.secundum quod Deusfrompp. 26–7 (23) Genesis 37–50. (24) Vernon White, The Fall of a Sparrow: A Concept of Special Divine Action (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1985).concept (25) See Chapter 9 in this volume. (26) See the relevant essays in Divine Action, ed. Hebblethwaite and Henderson. (27) Basil Mitchell, “The Grace of God,” in Faith and Logic, ed. Basil Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957). (28) Michael Rea, “Narrative, Liturgy, and the Hiddenness of God,” in Metaphysics and God: Essays in Honor of Eleonore Stump, ed. Kevin Tempe (London: Routledge, 2009), 60–75. (29) This is central to Rea’s proposals. (30) See Diogenes Allen, “Faith and the Recognition of God’s Activity,” in Divine Action, ed. Hebblethwaite and Henderson, 197–210. Note, however, that we are back with the conundrum just identified: how can we appeal to divine action in grace to provide warrants for the action of recognizing and responding to divine action in divine revelation? Page 21 of 22

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Divine Agency and Divine Action (31) William J. Abraham, Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology: From the Fathers to Feminism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). (32) William J. Abraham and Frederick D. Aquino, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). (33) Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea, eds., Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). (34) William J. Abraham, The Divine Inspiration of Holy Scripture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981)Divine Revelation and the Limits of Historical CriticismCrossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation (35) Canon and Criterion in the Christian TraditionWilliam J. Abraham, Jason E. Vickers, and Natalie Van Kirk, eds., Canonical Theism: A Proposal for Theology and the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008).

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Entering the Whirlwind

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I: Exploring and Evaluating the Debate William J. Abraham

Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780198786504 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786504.001.0001

Entering the Whirlwind Biblical Theology and Divine Action William J. Abraham

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198786504.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords In the 1960s, Langdon Gilkey raised several philosophical issues regarding divine action in his paper “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language.” This chapter engages Gilkey’s paper, and argues that philosophy can be applied to the initial efforts to deal with divine action in the debate which erupted in the wake of the Biblical Theology Movement that followed Gilkey’s paper. Enthusiastic advocates of divine action in the movement were attacked for failing to attend to the full range of divine action. This chapter indicates how and why efforts to develop a robust vision of divine action in the Biblical Theology Movement fell apart. The author focuses on the specific difficulties in the Biblical Theology Movement with respect to its claims about divine action, and positions this debate in a way that highlights the broad range of divine activity that anyone interested in divine action must attend to going forward. Keywords:   Biblical Theology Movement, Langdon Gilkey, language, divine action, concept, metaphysics

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Entering the Whirlwind A very wise philosopher from New Zealand once noted that philosophy is like lawn-mowing or shaving: the same old growths keep reappearing and have to be cut back every day.1 What A. N. Prior noted about philosophy can be applied to the initial efforts to deal with divine action in the debate which erupted in the wake of the Biblical Theology Movement in the 1960s. Enthusiastic advocates of divine action ironically found themselves being attacked for failing to attend to the full range of divine action that needed attention; despite their enthusiasm for divine action they had unwittingly ignored whole tracks of divine activity, not least those which caused acute difficulty. They had botched the lawn-mowing by avoiding or ignoring the outer perimeters of God’s overgrown backyard. I have three distinct aims in this chapter. First, I shall indicate how and why efforts to develop a robust vision of divine action in the Biblical Theology Movement fell apart. In the end, the hopes of evoking a whole new vision of systematic theology centered on the mighty acts of God in history disintegrated. Aside from the initial stage setting made available, this chapter will have the additional advantage of providing important background historical data for understanding the ensuing debate about divine action. Second, I shall zero in on the specific difficulties that cropped up in the Biblical Theology Movement with respect to its claims about divine action. Given the host of objections that were lodged against the Biblical Theology Movement, it is very important to distinguish the objections to divine action from the other difficulties that theologians encountered in their work more generally. Philosophers typically worry about conceptual, metaphysical, and epistemological issues in their reflections on agency and action; not surprisingly theologians have additional worries that are not prima facie philosophical (p. 19) in nature. My second aim is to identify the worries about divine action that beset theologians, indicating where they do and do not overlap with the kind of concerns that preoccupy philosophers. We shall see that they dovetail nicely with the range of questions I developed in the previous chapter. Third, I shall write up the debate in a way that highlights the broad range of divine activity that deserves attention if we are to do justice to the data before us. I shall show that friends of divine action, even though they are tempted to cook their accounts by proclaiming a narrow range of the acts of God in their theologies, cannot hide their cost-cutting measures even from themselves. Their critics, of course, destroyed their advertising ploys in part by zeroing in on their omissions. Together, the friends and critics of divine action bring out the range of divine action in play in Christianity and begin to expose the deep significance of these claims for Christianity.

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Entering the Whirlwind The Biblical Theology Movement is now but a distant memory for most contemporary theologians;2 new generations of students know little or nothing about it, even as in some cases they are dependent on some of its central claims.3 The name signals an effort to return to the Bible after a period dominated by the great Liberal theologies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 Few books captured the call to return to the Bible more powerfully than George Ernest Wright’s God Who Acts.5 Wright was exceptionally well placed to lead the charge. He had been trained as a historian and archaeologist in the school of William Albright, he finished his distinguished career as a teacher and scholar at Harvard, and he was an ordained Presbyterian elder, knowing first-hand the inner tensions in the wider church scene. (p.20) He thus spanned the life of the church and the academy; while well known as a specialist in archaeology, he also keenly felt the difficulties facing systematic theology as it related to the Christian life and to the everyday life of the church. None of this spared him the hammering that he got from the hands of his critics. His work became the graveyard of a whole way of thinking about the Bible, about Christianity in the modern world, and about divine action. Modern Protestantism has long had difficulty in appropriating its constitutive commitment to Scripture. Scripture, one is tempted to say, has been a millstone around its neck, in that the goal of developing a theology properly based on Scripture has proved to be an elusive affair. The challenges are both material and formal. On the material front, biblical theology as a sub-discipline within biblical studies was invented because of the difficulty of figuring out what Scripture actually says about the host of issues that detain the systematic theologian. On the formal front, the failure to reach agreement on the content of Scripture raised the more fundamental epistemological problem of the adequacy and even legitimacy of Scripture as a norm for theology, much less the norming norm of theology. Liberal Protestantism developed the most radical solution to these challenges by abandoning Scripture as a norm of theology and replacing it with the appeal to experience. This in turn meant that the full resources of other religions and of philosophical speculation represented by Idealism were now available to the theologian. The most telling change came in the disposition towards claims about divine action: the network of divine action represented by special revelation in Scripture, by divine incarnation in Christ, and by the host of miracles associated with the life of Christ, with Scripture, with the history of the church, and with the Christian life, were simply eliminated, rejected as legendary and hagiographical, or reworked as symbolic and figurative. The goal was to develop a vision of divine action that would be real, universal, and discernible, but would avoid the host of problems associated with miracle and divine intervention. It was no accident that working through this agenda alone merited the creation of a whole new period of Christian theology.

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Entering the Whirlwind It was equally no accident that the success of Liberal Protestantism precipitated a crisis whose effects live on in contemporary theology. Liberal Protestants called into question the central claims of Scripture and tradition. Put differently, the emergence of the Liberal Protestant experiment precipitated fallout outside and inside Christianity in Europe and North America. It was the occasion for the invention of agnosticism and fresh forms of atheism, for the development of Fundamentalism and various forms of conservative Protestant reaction, and for the creation of Pentecostalism.6 Most interestingly, it (p.21) precipitated the move to shore up the fortunes of the appeal to Scripture by new work in Roman Catholicism climaxing with the canonization of papal infallibility at Vatican I. In an irony of ironies, the office of the papacy and the magisterium of the Western Catholic Church became the great protector of the appeal to Scripture; the pope became the exotic embodiment of a new version of Protestantism across the Tiber. This makes it a lot easier for troubled Protestants to swim across it in our own day; in a real sense many of them are going home in order to shore up their commitment to sola scriptura. The Biblical Theology Movement was yet one more attempt to find a way forward for a serious version of Protestantism. At its core it was an effort to bring back a fresh appropriation of the content of the Bible into theology and the life of the church. Wright’s God Who Acts embodied this project in a powerful manner. The book itself is short and pungent. It begins with a dramatic opener: The purpose of this monograph is to describe the special and characteristic nature of the Biblical presentation of faith and to defend the use of the word ‘theology’ for it. This means, however, that the term must be rescued from the exclusive and private use of the systematic theologians. To most of them, or to most others, it has meant propositional dogmatics, stated as abstractly and universally as possible and arranged in accordance with a preconceived and coherent system.7 The alternative theology on offer was “a theology of recital or proclamation of the acts of God, together with the inferences drawn therefrom.”8 This project would “suggest a way out of the current dilemma of the Church and its scholars who seek to relate the historical and theological disciplines in Bible study so that the Bible may play its proper role in the revival of evangelical theology.”9 From the beginning the stakes were high.

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Entering the Whirlwind Wright’s initial strategy was a bold one. He tackled the perennially difficult place of the Old Testament in the church, arguing for its use as a bulwark against contemporary neo-paganism and for the deployment of its form and content as the foundation for the future of systematic theology. Thus he made a virtue of difficulties which have been acutely felt both by Christian scholars and ordinary church members. This then paved the way for the exposition of theology as a theology of recital, which in turn naturally led into a resounding declaration of what God has actually done. The primacy of the recital of God’s acts was then nicely illustrated by showing that any Christian theology that did not start with divine action would falter in its doctrine of human beings; theological anthropology was to be grounded in an account of the human response to the mighty acts of God. The book ended by working out how this (p.22) new theology of recital could hold its own as an exercise in contemporary systematic theology. It could be presented not as the wooden, dogmatic repetition of what the Bible says but as a presentation of the Christian faith “in a logical, coherent, reasoning, and reasonable form.”10 This was the big picture. In itself the Biblical Theology Movement as represented by Wright was bound to create ripples simply because it operated on so many different levels in delineating its agenda for the academy and the church. It gored too many neighboring oxen grazing in the same meadows. It bridged the gap between church and academy; it integrated the concerns of both the historian and the theologian. It charted a way forward beyond the hard choices of Liberal Protestantism and Fundamentalism; and it dovetailed with developing appropriation of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner as a replacement for the Liberal Protestant experiment in theology. It spoke to the piety of liberal evangelicals; and it threw down the gauntlet to systematic theologians by taking up the agenda of the founding father of biblical theology, Johann Philip Gabler, in a fresh way and insisting on Scripture as the foundation for all Christian theology.11 It provided cover and protection from the onslaught of the prevailing doctrines of analytic philosophy by creating a protected space which at once acknowledged the criticisms and then dismissed them by aggressive appeal to exactly the language that philosophers rejected as meaningless. Given that theology depended on faith, it was to be expected that unbelieving philosophers would find its discourse meaningless. Above all it gave the Bible back to Protestantism; and it did this in part by making the acts of God both a household idea and a pain in the brain for the rest of twentieth-century theology.

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Entering the Whirlwind As to the more exact proposals that Wright and the movement as a whole laid before his readers, it is easy to summarize them. There was a fresh recovery of the theological dimension of the Bible, giving a new lease of life for new commentaries on Scripture. There were new proposals on the unity of the Bible, solving a dilemma that has been around from the time of Marcion in the second century. The idea of revelation was rehabilitated in a way that either rejected or sidelined the preoccupation with natural theology, and which repudiated the crudities of propositional revelation. Faith was not to be seen in opposition to reason; rather, it transcended reason, giving knowledge of God that did not depend on the assessment of a host of rickety propositional arguments as developed by philosophers. Much was made of a distinctive Hebrew mentality contrasted with a Greek mentality and contrasted with the ancient environment of the Old Testament, enabling and encouraging theologians to stick to their canon of texts without worrying overmuch about ancillary (p.23) material. The fresh ideas of story and narrative were introduced, providing a ready haven for later if somewhat secretive heirs of the movement. Above all, the content of theology had a new center of gravity: the recital and exploration of the acts of God. The particularity of the actual acts of God to which appeal was made is important. The emphasis, to put it mildly, fell on the mighty acts of God in the Exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt and in Jesus Christ. These were contrasted with the activity of God in creation and in nature and with the activity of God in personal experience of God. The former were dismissed as a species of paganism; the latter were dismissed as mysticism. The acts of God in history were also contrasted initially with any word of God given in propositions. When God spoke, it was through God’s actions. Hence revelation was seen as exclusively given in and through historical events rather than through creation, prophesy, or personal experience. Theology then became a matter of drawing out the relevant inferences for the various doctrines that were to be taken up by the systematic theologian.

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Entering the Whirlwind The attack on the central claims of the Biblical Theology Movement was manifold, generally accurate, and devastating. Every single claim was undermined: its avowals to represent the content and scope of the biblical writings, its claim to integrate the requirements of faith, reason, and history, its arguments to the uniqueness of Israel in its environment, its vision of divine revelation, its messianic pretension to provide a third way between Liberal Protestantism and Fundamentalism, and its optimistic strategies to develop a realistic way of coping with the challenges of contemporary society. The drive to inspire a whole new departure in systematic theology went off the rails.12 Even the hopes for a deep renewal of Protestantism as a live option in the mid-to-late twentieth century were dashed.13 The movement flourished from the end of World War II to the early 1960s and lingered on in various evangelical and conservative corners of the church, but its fate was sealed by a series of scholarly interventions that were at times ferocious in their response.14 (p.24) Our interest here is governed in the end by the response to the claims about divine action. So now we come to the second goal of this chapter, the goal of getting clear on the difficulties that arose in the claims about divine action as they became all too visible in the Biblical Theology Movement. It would be tempting to overlook the problems generated by these claims in a review of the demise of the Biblical Theology Movement. When the ship has been torpedoed from several directions at once, it is easy for the engines to fail without receiving a direct hit; so we feel we can forget about the engines and stick to the surrounding damage. As it happened, the engines—the appeal to the acts of God—did suffer a direct hit not from the enemy without but from one of the decorated officers committed to the welfare of the ship. While Langdon Gilkey was not the first to spot the problems, it was his analysis that caused the most trouble for the Biblical Theology Movement theologically.15 It appeared in an article entitled “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language.”16 As Childs noted, the article “carried a tremendous force.”17 It was the work of a sympathetic insider and could not be dismissed as one more lament from the side of Liberal Protestantism. Barr rightly drew attention to the fundamental equivocation that Gilkey identified as one of the core problems that bedeviled the movement.18 Equally, Barr was perceptive in noting that Gilkey’s arguments fitted with a trajectory in which systematic theologians no longer believed in or wanted to have any kind of biblical theology as a prolegomenon to their endeavors.19

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Entering the Whirlwind (p.25) In fact, Gilkey began his famous article by expressing misgivings about the intelligibility not of divine action but of biblical theology. “This is a paper on the intelligibility of some of the concepts of what is called ‘biblical theology,’ or sometimes ‘the biblical point of view,’ or ‘the biblical faith.’”20 His target was the work of Wright and of Bernard Anderson, two of the most influential biblical scholars of his generation.21 The opening summary of his thesis is clear and to the point: My own confusion results from what I feel to be the basic posture, and problem of contemporary theology: it is half liberal and modern on the one hand, and half biblical and orthodox on the other, i.e. its world view or cosmology is modern, while its theological language is biblical and orthodox.22 Already in the reference to worldview and cosmology we are within earshot of issues that impinge on divine action. Gilkey frames the issue with his own account of the contrast that generated his own acute dissonance with talk of divine action. He presents the issue initially as a contrast between Orthodoxy and Liberal Protestantism; his lengthy comments take us to the core of his concerns about divine agency in the history of modern Protestantism.

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Entering the Whirlwind Our problem begins with the liberal repudiation of orthodoxy. One facet of this rejection was the rejection of the category of ‘revelation through the special activity of God,’ what we now call ‘special revelation’ or ‘Heilsgeschichte,’ or more popularly ‘the mighty acts of God.’ Orthodoxy, taking the Bible literally, has seen this special activity in the simple twofold pattern of wondrous events (e.g. unexpected children, marvelous victories in battle, pillars of fire, etc.), on the one hand, and on the other hand, a divine voice that spoke actual words to Abraham, Moses, and to their prophetic followers. This orthodox view of the divine selfmanifestation through special events and actual voices offended the liberal mind on two distinct grounds: (1) In understanding God’s speech literally and univocally, the orthodox belief in special revelation denied the reign of causal law in the phenomenal realm of space and time, or at least denied that that reign of law had obtained in biblical days. To the liberal, therefore, this orthodox view of revelation represented a primitive, prescientific form of religion and should be modernized. (2) Special revelation denied that ultimately significant religious truth is universally available to mankind, or at least universally in continuity with experience shared by all men. On these two grounds of causal order and universality liberalism reinterpreted the concept of revelation: God’s acts ceased to be special, particular, and concerned with phenomenal reality (for example, the stopping of the sun, a visible pillar of fire, and audible voices). Rather the divine activity became the continual, creative, immanent activity of God, an activity which (p.26) worked through the natural order and which could therefore be apprehended in universal human experiences of dependence, or harmony or value—experiences which in turn developed religious feeling and religious consciousness…The immanent divine activity was now consistent throughout experience, and whatever special activity there was in knowledge was located in the uniquely gifted religious leader or culture which possessed deeper insight and so discovered deeper religious truth.23

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Entering the Whirlwind If we leave aside for the moment the accuracy of this description historically, we can see that Gilkey put his finger initially on five questions relevant to any discussion of divine agency and divine action. First, how are we to think of divine action conceptually? Should we think of action discourse as applied to God as literal and univocal or in some other fashion? Second, how can we think of divine action metaphysically, so that it can be reconciled with a scientific vision of causality? Does our commitment to divine action contradict what we assume and believe about the world as a whole when we engage in science? Third, how are we to deal epistemologically with the stark particularity of claims to divine action that restrict access to truth and knowledge of God to a very limited network of recipients? Does our commitment to specific, particular divine action rule out its credibility as a ground for our truth claims about God? Fourth, how can we reconceive the concept of divine action so that it can be construed as both universal and special? Can we divide up the universal and the special in divine activity by making the former a matter of the scope of divine action and the latter a matter of the sensitivity of the recipient? Gilkey also noted a fifth question, albeit tacitly and indirectly. How can we explain in a morally satisfactory way God’s intentions and purposes in restricting his revelation to Israel and the church? And within that arena, how do we explain some of the horrendous commands God is supposed to have given, for example, in the slaughter of innocent people? With this kind of music playing in the background, Gilkey had no difficulty pinpointing the precise problems that cropped up in Wright and others in their claims about divine action. We can begin with this problem: biblical theologians “have not repudiated the liberal insistence on the causal continuum of space time experience.”24 The “assumption of a causal order among phenomenal events and therefore the authority of the scientific interpretation of observable events”25 remain intact in the Biblical Theology Movement. Given this, it is unsurprising that a vast panoply of apparent instances of divine action are no longer regarded as having happened and treated as symbols rather than real events. “…when we read what the Old Testament seems to say God did in biblical times, we find a tremendous difference: the wonder events and the verbal divine commentaries, commands (p.27) and promises are gone.” Put in semantic terms, “we deny the univocal understanding of theological words. To us, theological verbs such as ‘to act,’ ‘to work,’ ‘to do,’ ‘to speak,’ ‘to reveal,’ etc., have no longer the literal meanings of observable actions in space or time or voices in the air.”26 When we use these terms we use them analogically rather than univocally, and because we conceal this from ourselves and fail to think through how the relevant analogy is being used, we end up guilty of equivocation.

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Entering the Whirlwind Expressed more formally, Gilkey attacked Wright and his colleagues on the following grounds: they were guilty of bad faith in that they stood in greater continuity with Liberal Protestantism than they avowed; while speaking volubly about the mighty acts of God in history, they systematically denied whole swathes of divine action in Scripture, not least the divine actions of commanding and promising. Worst of all, they were evasive and equivocal in their talk about divine action when it came to the details. One of the great strengths of Gilkey’s intervention was that he then proceeded to show how this played out in detail in the Biblical Theology Movement. Thus, the divine activities grandly identified as the mighty acts of God were cut back to one crucial event, the Exodus–covenant complex of occurrence. The rest were treated as parables expressive of the human faith of the Hebrew people. Worse still, when we look closely at the Exodus event and ask “What exactly did God do?” the answer is hopelessly elusive. The event turns out to be entirely naturalistic in character, for there are no miracles involved, and when we press hard on the details we are told that all we have are the interpretations of the Hebrew faithful. [T]he one remaining objective event, the Exodus, becomes on analysis ‘the East wind blowing over the Red Sea,’ that is, an event which is objectively or ontologically of the same class as any other event of space and time. Now if this event is validly to be called a mighty act of God, an event in which he really did something special—as opposed to our just believing he did, which would be religious subjectivism and metaphysical naturalism— then ontologically this must in some sense be more than an ordinary runof-the-mill event. It may be epistemologically indistinguishable from other events to those without faith, but for those of faith it must be objectively or ontologically different from other events. Otherwise, there is no mighty act, but our belief in it, and God is the God who in fact does not act. And then our theological analogies of ‘act’ and ‘deed’ have no referent, and so no meaning.27 The best that Gilkey will allow in this instance is that the mighty act of God at the Exodus has been transposed into an inward divine incitement of a religious response to an ordinary event within the space–time continuum. But this, he (p. 28) believes, takes us right back into the tradition of Schleiermacher’s Liberal Protestantism.

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Entering the Whirlwind The very same problems show up in the proposals about divine revelation in history. If we have a genuine covenant relationship with God, with the correlative revelation that establishes it, then we can proceed to interpret our ordinary experience in the light of this. If we already know God, we can begin to see all sorts of events through the lens of our knowledge of God. However, we cannot apply this analysis to the originating revelation; we assume this original relationship in our encounter with God in the world; without the originating revelation the whole system collapses. Yet this is precisely what Wright and others jettisoned, reducing the interpretation of the originating revelation to various naturalistic events and hypothesizing divine action as an explanation of their experience. They were landed immediately in the world of human insight, subjective experience, and natural theology. Once again the grand talk about divine action—this time about divine revelation—had melted into thin air without Wright and his cohorts realizing what had happened. The language had become empty, abstract, and self-contradictory.28 It is not the least of the merits of Gilkey’s famous essay that it highlighted the crucial place of philosophical reflection for tackling the problems that emerged in the wake of the Biblical Theology Movement. These were the desiderata he identified. We need, he proposed, a proper theory of analogy to replace the literal or equivocal way of speaking that inhabited the landscape. We need, he insisted, to give our attention to issues of cosmology and ontology. We also need to come to terms with the distance between the biblical world and our contemporary world. Above all, we need to develop, first, a vision of how God acts in ordinary events before we can unpack what we mean analogically when we speak of God acting uniquely in this or that event or of speaking of this or that event as a special act of God. Taking these desiderata as a whole, we cannot avoid entering the whirlwind of philosophical theology and start again from scratch.29

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Entering the Whirlwind I have taken the trouble to lay out Gilkey’s criticisms of the Biblical Theology Movement in detail for several reasons. First, they highlight the (p.29) fundamental problems that arose initially in the debate about divine action two generations ago. While both Barr and Childs, for example, acknowledge the significance of Gilkey’s work, they quickly ignore it in their own deliberations. In both cases the deep legacy of Barth in the repudiation of natural theology took its toll. Childs provides a rival vision of Biblical Theology inspired by Barth that continues to be a fertile theological and exegetical research program for biblical scholars. There is little or no curiosity in the kind of issues identified by Gilkey. Barr devoted his Gifford lectures to the possibility of natural theology, showing that it was entirely in keeping with significant trajectories within the biblical sources, but he himself displayed no positive interest in this enterprise whatsoever.30 Not unnaturally many complained that he was an incurable gadfly, who was more interested in showing where others had gone wrong than in providing constructive solutions.31 Gilkey was useful as a short-term ally in the competing theological campaigns of Childs and Barr to destroy what they saw as the pernicious intellectual and theological effects of the work of the Biblical Theology Movement. It was all too easy to dismiss his contribution to the discussion once the taxi he was driving had reached the cherished destination. Gilkey’s limousine is not leaving, however, until the full philosophical fare has been paid.

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Entering the Whirlwind Second, Gilkey allows us to identify the more precise questions that claims about divine action in the Biblical Theology Movement generated and thus to demarcate them from the other problematic commitments in which they were embedded. His questions are inherently philosophical in nature in that they involve precisely the kind of conceptual, metaphysical, and epistemological issues that naturally arise when we begin to look carefully at claims about divine action. Hence what I argued in my first chapter concerning the range of issues evoked by discourse about divine agency and divine action is amply borne out by Gilkey’s observations. We are not imposing an alien set of questions on the data; these questions are precisely the kind of questions that theologians themselves articulated with great force. We can understand why theologians may want to set them aside. They are interested in what to do with Scripture as canon, on how best to interpret typology across the Old and New Testaments, in sorting out how to relate biblical studies to systematic theology, in dissolving the ecclesiastical wars between warring factions in the church, and in cleaning up the theological baggage inherited from the distant and recent past, and so on. These issues have their own integrity and deserve attention in their own right. However, they cannot be used to evade the kind of (p.30) questions Gilkey put on the table about divine agency and divine action. These questions strike at the very core of the Christian tradition; they are not simply directed at a passing fad in mid-twentieth-century biblical studies. They arise entirely naturally from within biblical studies and theology without prompting from alien outsiders. Moreover, Gilkey has highlighted the complex range of divine action that requires attention; we cannot cherry-pick our examples in order to escape criticism; we must take into account the full canon of divine actions that confront us. We have now arrived at my third goal for this chapter, namely, highlighting the full range of divine activity that deserves attention. I can pursue that issue here by looking afresh at the work of Wright in God Who Acts. There is no denying the cumulative effect of the criticisms directed at his work. However, a fresh reading over sixty years after its publication provides useful hindsight that is worth recording. Wright was unfortunate in that his work was lumped together with others, who were then named as the Biblical Theology Movement and attacked from all sides. In reality this was a construction created in part for demolition purposes; it allowed the critics to provide their own architecture of a movement and set it up for deconstruction. Now that the demolition is complete and the stakes are not as high, we can look again and pick up interesting clues as to what is happening below the surface of Wright’s work. What is especially interesting is that Wright, while he does indeed focus on the Exodus nexus of events, agrees with Gilkey that we cannot restrict our vision to this narrow range of divine activity.

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Entering the Whirlwind Gilkey is mistaken to claim that Wright and others reduced the mighty acts of God to the Exodus–covenant occurrence in the history or Israel. This completely ignores the much wider range of activity that Wright explicitly not only mentions but refuses to dislodge from the canon of divine action. Thus he makes note of the following: divine creation,32 divine providence,33 divine sustaining of the universe,34 divine election of Israel,35 divine covenant,36 divine giving of the law to Israel,37 divine raising up of David,38 divine promises,39 and divine forgiveness.40 He also insists on a whole raft of divine action in and around the life of Jesus. Thus he accepts the following: God’s inauguration of a new age in Christ, through his ministry, death, and resurrection,41 God’s exaltation of Christ to his right hand as Messianic Lord of Israel,42 and God’s sending of his Holy Spirit to all who repent.43 He even goes so far as to acknowledge the activity of God in speaking, especially through the prophets;44 and at one point he allows for God’s giving inner revelation.45 It is (p.31) therefore inaccurate to say that Wright reduces the complex array of divine action to the Exodus event.46 It is also important not to miss the epistemological hints that appear in Wright. It is easy and indeed proper to draw attention to the heavy emphasis on inference-drawing that shows up. The impression given by Gilkey is that Wright is exclusively committed to some kind of argument to the best explanation in inferring various divine actions from events in history. But this is by no means the whole story, for Wright also mentions the possibility of recognition,47 perception,48 and immediate awareness of the divine.49 Even though he does not develop the idea, Wright makes the very interesting epistemological point that “God is made known through what he does.”50 My aim here is not to salvage Wright’s agenda.51 What is interesting is that in his exposition of the acts of God he is not at all willing to restrict himself to the Exodus material. There is a vast array of divine activity in play, including divine forgiveness, divine speaking, creation, and providence. Moreover, while his epistemological comments are thin and amateurish, they are not entirely monolithic in structure. Awareness of God, perception of the divine, revelation through the word of God, and inner revelation make an onstage appearance. Wright is not fishing for epistemic warrants for his claims, but they show up naturally nonetheless.

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Entering the Whirlwind (p.32) Looking back it is easy to see that Wright was caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, he wanted to highlight the central place of divine action in the scriptural traditions and in the Christian tradition; on the other hand, he did not have the conceptual or philosophical resources to bring his wares to the table.52 The philosophical climate was rigorously hostile in that it had no place for any kind of assertions about divine action. Nobody had as yet worked out what to do with the challenges that the analytic philosophy of the day presented to theology in its theories of meaning. Equally, the philosophical climate was handicapped by a pervasive mental cramp that had no place, say, for awareness of God, or perception of the divine, or inner revelation. As in the case of Childs and Barr, these were not really live options for Wright, in part because the legacy of Barth had cut off serious engagement with philosophy beyond its own restrictive and epistemological commitments on divine revelation. It was not exactly a propitious time to be trumpeting divine action even if one was convinced that divine action was constitutive of the Christian tradition. The best one could do was to insist on the pivotal significance of various divine actions and run for cover.53 It was no surprise then that when the attack against the Biblical Theology Movement hit in the early 1960s a whole generation of brilliant theologians, who were schooled within it or who were sympathetic towards it, quickly abandoned ship and began heading for the lifeboats of secular theology and the death of God. The deep and abiding significance of divine action in the Christian tradition is made visible in this: when its central claims about divine action are attacked from within, the whole tradition is in deep trouble. Divine action cannot be confined to the mighty acts of God in history; but if even these are undermined the very future of Christianity is at stake. It was no accident that theologians fed on a strict diet of divine revelation and divine action abandoned ship virtually overnight; they were following out the logic of the loss of divine action in the cognitive structure of their faith. The most bizarre proposal, of course, was that God had died in the death of Christ; God had committed suicide and emptied himself into the secularity of the world; so the only serious option was to live in a God-forsaken (p.33) world. Divine incarnation had brought an end to divine action. We might speak in this case of the arrival of apocalyptic in secular costume.54

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Entering the Whirlwind Even where we do get extensive engagement with philosophy in this period, as happens immediately in the extensive efforts of Gilkey in the aftermath of his famous paper,55 it is clear that theologians were disposed to throw in the towel early on in the game. The Liberal Protestantism of the nineteenth century was beginning to look a lot more attractive; in shedding those difficult particular acts of God in, say, direct divine communication or miracle, it looked as if they were on the right lines in their deliberations on divine action. Theologians, caught in a climate of attack from without by hostile philosophers and defection from within by those who had announced the death of God, would be more than happy to find some kind of pervasive divine activity throughout the cosmos.56 The more particular and troublesome activity of God, often cast as special divine action, could either be refigured or transposed into a doctrine of reception. By insisting that we must first sort out how to think about universal divine action in all events before we can look at the particularities of divine action, Gilkey was beginning his own journey into the neo-liberal agenda of a whole generation. He had shifted the scene of his inquiry to what looked like a more promising site; and he was turning to the metaphysical proposals of Process philosophy for apt resources.57 In this respect Gilkey was a methodological methodist in a way that parallels methodism in epistemology. In epistemology, methodists bet the store on finding the right method for sorting, say, truth from falsehood, rather than working up from representative samples of putative and particular instances of knowledge.58 Thus Gilkey wanted to secure a proper method for detecting universal divine action before he could proceed to claims about particular divine action or activity. The immediate problem with this approach is that it assumes that we have access to such a fitting method. Moreover, even if we have the right method to hand, we will then be tempted to search for the proper method for determining the right method, and so on ad infinitum. By far the more serious problem, however, is that it runs the risk of excluding a host of possible divine actions as live options before we even begin. Hence the whole operation runs the risk of being question-begging and reductionist.

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Entering the Whirlwind (p.34) While Wright was sorely tempted to reduce divine action to the Exodus and to divine action in Christ, that is, to divine action in history, happily he failed miserably in yielding to this temptation. One can pounce on this as a serious inconsistency; or one can read it more generously. What is really happening is that the particularities of divine action cannot be tamed in so easy a fashion; they keep reappearing even when struck from the record. They are pervasive across the board in Christianity and Christian theology. I noted earlier that philosophy is like lawn-mowing or shaving: the same old growths keep reappearing and have to be cut back every day. When it comes to divine action in theology maybe we should abandon this aphorism; perhaps we should let the lawn become a luscious meadow; maybe we should learn to appreciate long beards. In the chapter to come, however, we will meet a busy band of barbers who do not like long beards; they will cut them off, albeit for a hefty fee. Notes:

(1) A. N. Prior, Logic and the Basis of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), x. (2) Brevard S. Childs in Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970), 13–87. (3) This last observation applies notably in the central place given to narrative in narrative theology and in the crucial place given to the Exodus event in liberation theology. (4) I deploy the big “L” in Liberal theology to signify the raft of theologies that arose in the wake of Schleiermacher, that migrated to the United States in the late nineteenth century, and that took as their primary calling the updating of Christian theology to meet the intellectual challenges of the day either by rejecting significant traditional material or by translating that material into the favored idiom of Christianity’s more sophisticated critics. This should not be confused with the use of small “l” liberal in liberal theology which is used to signify a raft of intellectual virtues (clarity, readiness to attend to and follow relevant evidence, fairness to alternatives, and the like) that are not the exclusive possession of any party or movement within Christian theology. In the current scene, given the hammering that much Liberal theology in various ways has taken from its critics, there is a tendency for those who stand in continuity with Liberal theology to prefer the term “Progressive” theology, an adjective that suffers from the same ambiguity (and is chosen for precisely that reason). (5) George Ernest Wright, God Who Acts (London: SCM, 1952).

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Entering the Whirlwind (6) In reality, Pentecostalism was both a continuation of the concerns of Liberal Protestantism in its efforts to experience the kingdom of God here and now and a reaction against its rejection of substantial claims about divine action. Happily, scholars are now beginning to take the measure of Pentecostalism both as a global phenomenon and as an exceptionally interesting theological experiment in its own right. (7) Wright, God Who Acts, 11. (8) Ibid. (9) Ibid., 12. (10) Ibid., 108. (11) Ibid., 33. For my own take on Gabler see William J. Abraham, “The Place of Scripture in Christian Theology,” in The Bible and the University, ed. David Lyle Jeffrey and C. Stephen Evans (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), 40–58. (12) The one theologian who took this possibility seriously was Gordon Kaufman in his Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective (New York: Scribner, 1969). He abandoned it in due course. For his replacement systematic theology see his In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). (13) This was not the only movement that inspired much hope for the renewal of the church and then failed. One thinks of the wonderful work being done around the same time in France in the development of la nouvelle théologie. The churches around Lyon where this was birthed are not exactly flourishing.

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Entering the Whirlwind (14) The works of James Barr and Brevard S. Childs stand out in this respect. For Barr the deep issue was the failure to come to terms with the actual text of Scripture; he was deeply opposed to the ideologizing of Scripture from any angle because this prevented Scripture from being heard on its own terms. This is especially clear in his most famous essay on the Biblical Theology Movement, “Revelation through History in the Old Testament and Modern Theology,” Interpretation 17 (1963): 193–205. For Childs, the crucial problem revolved around the failure to come to terms with the nature of Scripture as canon and the hermeneutical reverberations of this claim as he constructed it. It would be neat but misleading to say that Barr’s worries were mainly historical, while those of Childs were theological. Both were brilliant historians; and both cared deeply about the integrity and fate of theology. Their subsequent and very harsh disagreements make visible the deep rupture that continues to rattle around in contemporary Protestantism about the nature and scope of Scripture. One might say that Childs picked up and developed the agenda of Karl Barth and put it to work creatively in the study of Scripture, while Barr eventually picked up and extended the program of Liberal Catholicism as brilliantly developed of late by David Brown. Thus he integrated Brown’s sophisticated program with his own brand of evangelical piety. Barr’s marvelous magnum opus, The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999) ends with an appreciative appropriation of the work of Brown. Brown is important in this story because he executes a program that shines through the Barr corpus again and again, namely, careful attention to the historical and theological developments that appear within the history of Israel, the early church, and on into the whole sweep of tradition to be found inside and outside of Christianity. Happily, Brown’s work is now getting the attention it deserves. (15) Winston L. King, “Some Ambiguities in Biblical Theology,” Religion in Life 27 (1957–8): 65–95. (16) Langdon B. Gilkey, “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language,” Journal of Religion 41 (1961): 194–205. (17) Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis, 65. (18) James Barr, The Scope and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981), 140 (19) Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology, 240–1. (20) Gilkey, “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language,” 194. (21) Anderson’s Understanding the Old Testament (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1957) was the standard introduction for many to biblical scholarship.

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Entering the Whirlwind (22) Gilkey, “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language,” 194. (23) Ibid., 194–5. (24) Ibid., 195. (25) Ibid. (26) Ibid., 196. (27) Ibid., 200. (28) Winston King would have added that it is also circular. “I have great difficulty with the following statement of Wright’s: ‘the inference [to God’s activity] was an interpretation of an event, which to Israel became an integral part of the event and which thus could be used for the comprehension of subsequent events’. When an inference (that it was God acting) becomes ‘part of the event’, which because of what this interpretive event tells of God, enables us to forecast the future and interpret it, we seem to be moving in a circle.” See King, “Some Ambiguities in Biblical Theology,” 98–9. (29) God’s Activity in the World, ed. Owen C. Thomas (Chico, CA: Scholars’ Press, 1983). (30) James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). (31) He turned his guns in succession against the Biblical Theology Movement, canonical criticism, Fundamentalism, the Barthian opposition to natural theology, and postmodern criticism. He did come around to constructive work, but this involved a heavy reliance on the work of David Brown, as already noted earlier. (32) Wright, God Who Acts, 71. (33) Ibid., 48, 64, 104. (34) Ibid., 89. (35) Ibid., 26, 51, 54, 55. (36) Ibid., 54. (37) Ibid., 113. (38) Ibid., 76. (39) Ibid., 25, 26.

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Entering the Whirlwind (40) Ibid., 22. (41) Ibid., 68. (42) Ibid., 61, 68, 81. (43) Ibid., 68. (44) Ibid., 59, 62, 83. (45) Ibid., 55. (46) James Barr was especially emphatic in attending to the place of divine speaking in the biblical materials: “direct communication is, I believe, an inescapable fact of the Bible and of the Old Testament in particular. God can speak specific verbal messages when he wills, to the men of his choice. But for this, if we follow the way in which the Old Testament represents the incidents, there would have been no call of Abraham, no Exodus, no prophecy. Direct communication from God to man has fully as much claim to be called the core of the tradition as has revelation through events in history.” See his “Revelation through History in the Old Testament and Modern Theology,” 201. He later returns to the challenge this poses: “In considering this matter of direct verbal communication from God, which has much interested me recently, I have been struck by the meagerness of the help afforded by discussion from modern dogmaticians. The same is true if we try to work from the wisdom literature. But the gap seems to me to be most troublesome at the point of one of the most important of all Old Testament elements, namely, prophecy itself. On this subject traditional theology spent a lot of thought, most of it laughable as it seems to us now, but modern theology has failed to give us any lead along lines that come near to the Biblical interpretation of the matter.” See Barr, “Revelation through History in the Old Testament and Modern Theology,” 202. (47) Wright, God Who Acts, 46, (48) Ibid., 90, 126. (49) Ibid., 23. (50) Ibid., 84.

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Entering the Whirlwind (51) I think that the whole attempt to develop a biblical theology is a delusion both empirically and theologically. More radically, I reject the epistemological vision of Scripture on which it is built, and I hold that we need a totally different way of identifying both the meaning and scope of canon in the Christian tradition. This is not to say that I did not benefit enormously from exposure to the Biblical Theology Movement as a student through some of my best teachers. Moreover, I entirely endorse Wright’s desire to develop a systematic theology that will be existentially alert in its first-order discourse about God. This does not mean, however, that the best way forward for theology is by means of translation, a term that signals Gilkey’s perceptive judgment that at times Wright is really a Liberal Protestant in orthodox garb. On his commitment to translation as the core task of theology see Wright, God Who Acts, 108. (52) This comes out in his efforts to deal with the challenge of Rudolf Bultmann’s famous proposals on myth and demythologizing. See Wright, God Who Acts, 119– 28. He does his best to keep his proposals afloat but in the end can only fall back on his work as an Old Testament scholar to address the challenge. He is equally at sea in dealing with the challenge of naturalism. See Ibid., 117. His efforts to sort through relevant distinctions between, say, symbols, metaphors, and stories leave a lot to be desired. See Ibid., 121–2. (53) I recall a vivid conversation with Bernard Anderson in the early 1970s when I asked him how he managed to insist so strongly on the importance of divine action when the philosophical climate was so hostile. He told me that his only way to meet the challenge was to ignore the analytic tradition and garner what help he could from existentialism. (54) The leading figure in this development was Thomas Altizer. (55) See his Naming the Whirlwind (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), and Reaping the Whirlwind (New York: Seabury, 1976). (56) This comes through very poignantly in the work of Albert Outler’s Who Trusts in God: Musings on the Meaning of Providence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). Outler detests the arrival of the radical theologians of his day, but his own efforts to find a way forward collapse and he ends up deploying his magnificent rhetorical skills to try and save the day. (57) This is well brought out in the final section of Reaping the Whirlwind. (58) Roderick M. Chisholm, “The Problem of the Criterion,” in The Foundations of Knowing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 61–75.

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Demythologizing Divine Action

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I: Exploring and Evaluating the Debate William J. Abraham

Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780198786504 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786504.001.0001

Demythologizing Divine Action William J. Abraham

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198786504.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords 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. Keywords:   history, divine action, Schubert Ogden, Process theology, Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Heidegger

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Demythologizing Divine Action In his seminal work on divine action in the Biblical Theology Movement, Langdon Gilkey touched a raw nerve in modern Protestantism. The issue was not that the idea of divine action was incoherent. On the contrary, wide tracks of divine action represented by creation and providence were thought to be in good working order. The trouble only arose with what came to be called special acts of God. For Gilkey the list included the six days of creation, the historical fall in Eden, Noah’s flood, “Abraham’s unexpected child, the many divine visitations, the words and directions to the patriarchs, the plagues visited on the Egyptians, the pillar of fire, the parting of the seas, the verbal deliverance of covenantal law on Sinai, the strategic and logistical help in the conquest, the audible voice heard in the conquest, and so on…”1 When it came to the activity of God in Christ, the list included events such as the virgin birth, the nature miracles, the voices and the dove at the baptism, exorcism, the transfiguration, the resurrection, the ascension, and the incarnation of the Son of God in history. It was these kinds of acts of God that caused acute cognitive dissonance. Let us summarize briefly why modern theologians were so assured that the problem of divine action could be reduced to the problem of God’s special actions as outlined above. Why were special divine actions thought to be so problematic? At the lowest level the appeal was an appeal to what was culturally unacceptable: “we moderns” can no longer believe in special divine action.2 At another level the appeal was to the logic of science and critical history: special divine action is incompatible with the methods and results of both science and history.3 At yet another level the appeal was to the concept of causation as a general category for understanding all of human experience: all (p.36) experience is filtered through a screen of causation that is comprehensive and closed. These represent the general, run-of-the-mill objections to special divine action in the sense that they presupposed no positive theological agenda. However, theologians understandably objected to special divine action on theological grounds as well. In this instance the crucial claim is that special divine actions are somehow unworthy of God,4 or that they presuppose an illegitimate concept of God, or that they involve an inappropriate way of thinking about the nature of religious language, or that they entail a false rendering of the Gospel, or that they stand in the way of evangelism by putting unnecessary intellectual stumbling blocks in the way of faith. Within theology, it is clearly not enough to rattle off a catalogue of woe; it is also essential to provide a way forward that will avoid the objections commonly made inside and outside of theology.

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Demythologizing Divine Action Schubert Ogden was one of the first to tackle the challenge of providing a positive vision of divine action. Not the least of the advantages of his work is that, while dense, it covers some of the central issues in play in the initial debate about divine action forthrightly and succinctly.5 In this chapter I shall chart and evaluate his efforts, keeping an eye on the methodological assumptions that govern his work as a whole. Ogden lays out his position with characteristic care in his essay, “What Sense Does it Make to Say ‘God Acts in History?’” His position is especially interesting because he does not have a problem with affirming that God acts in history. The theologian, qua theologian, is committed to the idea of divine action in history; the challenge is not whether God acts in history but rather in what sense God acts in history. So the problem is cast initially as a conceptual problem. Given that we speak of God acting in history, and given that there are serious difficulties with traditional ways of thinking about divine action in history, how should we conceive of such action? At this point Ogden casts aside the older worries about verifiability and falsifiability, insisting that the more recent work in linguistic analysis directs us to attend to the specific (p.37) function of the actual usage of religious language rather than laying down the law in advance by privileging the language of science and mathematics and relying on a distaste of metaphysics.6 This frees up the theologian to take up the question of what sense it makes to say “God acts in history” with genuine freedom and integrity. Ogden initially goes in search of an answer by exploring the work of the distinguished New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann. The reason for so doing is that no Protestant theologian had given so much attention to the meaning of theological statements in the earlier part of the twentieth century with the central problems that discourse about divine action had generated. He summarized Bultmann’s starting point in this way:

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Demythologizing Divine Action Bultmann maintains that the language of Christian theology, both in Holy Scripture and the Church’s tradition, is for the most part and in its central elements ‘mythical’ or ‘mythological language.’ By this he means that the statements in which theology has usually spoken of God and his action in history have the same ‘objectifying’ character as the statements of empirical science. Although the ‘intention’ of such mythological statements —or as the functional analyst would say, their ‘use’ or function—is quite different from that of scientific statements, their linguistic form is essentially the same. Like ‘scientific’ statements they ‘objectify’ the existential reality of which they speak and thus represent it in terms of space, time, causality, and substance—or, in a word, the Kantian form of sensibility and categories of understanding that Bultmann takes to be determinative for all empirical knowledge. The result is that God and his action are represented as though God were but one more secondary cause in the chain of secondary causes and his action but one more action alongside those of other causal agents.7 We can see already the worries that both Ogden and Bultmann bring to the table: traditional understanding of discourse about divine action misreads the surface grammar of such language. It treats talk about divine language as if it were on a par with the objectifying discourse of scientific discourse. It violates (p.38) the Kantian rules that govern the form of sensibility and categories of understanding, and it involves a vision of God that treats God as just one more cause among other causes thus speaking unworthily of the divine.8 Ogden was especially worried about the impact of science on the traditional reading of divine action: because mythological statements have the linguistic form of scientific sentences, they are open to scientific criticism, with devastating results. Given the thoroughgoing development of scientific thinking as we find it in the method of modern natural science, mythology seems to be merely a primitive attempt to think scientifically which is no longer credible or relevant. The scientist, as Laplace said, has no need of the ‘God hypothesis’ to perform his particular task. His continuum of secondary causes does not include the cause as represented by myth as God, nor does he reckon with the action of such a being in his scientific explanations. Because this critical attitude towards myth has come to determine our whole contemporary consciousness, the problem inevitably arises—for those of us who share in this consciousness—how the statement ‘God acts in history’ makes any sense.9

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Demythologizing Divine Action In this quotation Ogden repeats his claim that the standard way of thinking about divine action is undermined by the method of natural science, adding the culturally relative claim that his (and Bultmann’s) reading of the impact of science on theology now determines our contemporary consciousness. Thus, to share the older view is to be ignorant of the impact of science on theology and to be committed to a primitive way of thinking. However, this only covers the general worry “moderns” have about divine action; there is also the much deeper worry that should be entertained by the serious theologian. The traditional way of thinking about divine action fails because it misrepresents the content of the Christian tradition. Thus it distorts a proper account of divine transcendence by obscuring faith’s understanding of God’s act as creator and redeemer. [T]he mythological way of speaking of God as the Creator represents his creative act as though it were simply the temporally prior action of God in the whole series of causal actions. Myth thereby obscures faith’s understanding that God’s act as Creator is presupposed by all actions in the series, including the temporally first, if, indeed, there ever was any first action. Similarly, the mythological representation of God as the Redeemer or Consummator (in the manner, say, of apocalyptic eschatology) pictures his action as though it were the temporally last in the causal series. Myth thus fails to make clear that God’s redemptive action fulfills or (p.39) consummates all actions, including the temporally last, insofar as one may meaningfully speak of a last action.10 It is not exactly clear what creation or redemption means here. We are told that divine action in creation is presupposed by all other actions in the series; but both remain obscure: what does “creation” really mean here? And, what does “all actions in the series” mean? What does God really do in creation? We are also told that “redemption” means that God “fulfills or consummates all actions.” But what does God really do in redemption? What do “fulfill” and “consummate” mean here?

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Demythologizing Divine Action We can see what these predicates mean, says Ogden, by registering the proper intention of theological statements as developed by Bultmann. The true meaning of theological statements is not scientific but “existential,” as developed in the existential conceptuality worked out by the early Martin Heidegger. The cash value looks something like this: the function of theological statements is “to express an understanding of man’s existence as a historical being who must continually decide how he is to understand himself in the world.”11 Put in more precise theological language: the statement that God is creator is “to affirm the utter dependence of one’s self and one’s [his] world on the existential reality of God’s power and love, which are the ultimate ground of all created things.”12 To speak of divine redemption is “really to affirm an understanding of one’s existence in which one renounces every attempt at self-contrived security and utterly open one’s self to the security of God’s love, wherein all things find an ultimate security.”13 Ogden’s strategy then is to turn to a leading New Testament scholar of his day who has provided a precise rendering of the real meaning and intention behind the language of creation and redemption. However, in itself this is not enough; or better still, Bultmann has not fully followed through on his insights on the true meaning of theological discourse. What is missing here is any direct reference to God or divine action. What we have is the “existential” consequence or significance of uttering theological statements rather than the meaning of those utterances themselves when they speak more directly of divine creation and redemption. We end up in danger of speaking about ourselves rather than about God. Happily, Bultmann does not rule out such direct discourse about divine action, even though he fails to carry out his program rigorously.14 More happily still, he points us in the right direction: what we need is to attend to the analogical rather than mythological character of theological discourse. “Analogy…represents God’s actions as analogous to human action and the relation between God and man as analogous (p.40) to the relation of men to one another. In this way, analogy, unlike mythology represents him as ‘a personal being acting on persons.’”15 How should we take “analogy” in this context? Not in terms of classical theories of analogy but in a way suggested by Charles Hartshorne, namely, we should conceive of God in strict analogy with the human self or person, and in turn this means that God’s “action must be understood in strict analogy to the action of man.”16 Now there is an ordinary meaning to a human act; we think of a human act as a human word or deed whereby through the instrumentality of our bodies and its members we carry out particular purposes or projects. However, this stays on the surface of action discourse; this is not the only or primary meaning of action discourse.

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Demythologizing Divine Action Behind all its public acts of word and deed there are the self’s own private’s purposes or projects, which are themselves matters of action or decision. Indeed, it is only because the self first acts to constitute itself, to respond to its world, and to decide its own inner being that it ‘acts’ at all in the more ordinary meaning of the word; all its outer acts of word and deed are but the ways of expressing and implementing the decisions whereby it constitutes itself as self.17 Applied to God, this is what the formula furnishes: the primary meaning of God’s action is the act whereby, in each new present, he constitutes himself as God by participating fully and completely in the world of his creatures, thereby laying the ground for the next stage of the creative process. Because his love, unlike ours, is pure and unbounded, his relation to his creatures and theirs to him is direct and immediate. The closest analogy—and it is only an analogy—is our relation to our own bodily states, especially the states of our brains. Whereas we can act on other persons and be acted on them only through highly indirect means such as spoken words and bodily actions, the interaction that takes place between our selves or minds and our brain cells is much more intimate and direct. We respond with virtual immediacy to the impulses that come from our brains, and it is over our brains (or their individual cells) that our decisions as selves or minds exercise a virtually direct power or control…the interaction between God and the world must be understood analogously to this interaction between our minds and bodies— with the difference that the former interaction takes place, not between God and a selected portion of his world (analogous to our brain cells and central nervous system), but between God and the whole world of his creatures. Because his love or power of participation in the being of others is literally boundless, there are no gradations of intimacy of the creatures to him, and so there can be nothing in him corresponding to our nervous system or sense organs. The whole world is, as it were, his sense organ, and his interaction with every creature is unimaginably immediate and direct.18 (p.41) We can now get a glimpse of the specific meaning of divine creation and redemption. To say that God acts as creator

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Demythologizing Divine Action is to say that the ultimate ground of every actual state of the universe is not just the individual decisions of the creatures who constitute its antecedent states, but rather those decisions as responded to by God’s own decision of pure unbounded love. In a similar way, to say that God acts as Redeemer is to say more than that I now have the possibility of that radical freedom from myself and openness to the world that constitutes the authentic existence of love. It is also to say—and that directly—that the final destiny both of myself and of all fellow creatures is to contribute ourselves not only to the self-creation of the subsequent world of creatures, but also the self-creation of God, who accepts us without condition into his own everlasting life, where we have a final standing or security that can nevermore be lost.19 Already, we can detect the radical consequences of the new vision of God that is coming into view: human agents get to contribute to the self-creation of God. Ogden does not shirk from the consequences of this vision of divine action for his understanding of the person and work of Christ. It is obvious that he has eliminated any notion of a unique act of God in Jesus Christ for the redemption of the world. He makes this clear in his reaction to Bultmann’s insistence that human agents cannot attain the freedom that God wills for them through their own efforts and actions; for Bultmann authentic human existence can come only through the unique act of God in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the representation of that act in the witness of the church. For Ogden this keeps in play the mythological concept of divine action that Bultmann himself has eliminated. In this specific case, God enters human history and acts as one more agent alongside other agents. So can we think of divine action in Christ at all at this point? Has not Ogden eliminated all talk of an act of God in history and replaced it with an account of the activity of God through all creation and all history? Has not God’s act become timeless and unhistorical? Once again, Ogden reaches for his doctrine of analogy. Given the strict analogy with the human self, God is in a real sense a temporal and historical being. God is the living, dynamic God of Holy Scripture, to whom the temporal distinctions of past, present, and future may be properly applied and whose being is the eminent instance of historical being. And yet, because God’s historicity is an eminent historicity, it must never be confused with the historicity of man or of the other creatures. God acts, and he acts in the strict sense of the word, but his action is his action, and it cannot be simply identified with the action of ordinary historical beings.20

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Demythologizing Divine Action (p.42) This certainly heightens the dilemma. God’s action cannot simply be identified, we are told, with the action of historical agents. How then can God act in history at all? Ogden has two answers to this question. In a weak sense, we can legitimately say that the actions of human creatures are God’s act because they reflect back or express God’s prior creative activity. Just as the actions of our bodies are also our actions as selves, so each creature is, by analogy, to some extent God’s act. However, we can go deeper than this. Human beings are uniquely creatures who possess consciousness and selfconsciousness; they are uniquely creatures of meaning. As logos human agents can grasp the logos of reality and bring it to speech and action. Because of this unique capacity, human agents can represent and speak for the divine in a more apt way than, say, volcanoes or squirrels.21 Insofar as what comes to expression through his speech and action is the gift and demand signified by God’s transcendent action as Creator and Redeemer, he re-presents not only his own understanding of God’s action, but, through it, the reality of God’s action itself. As a matter of fact, one may even say that, in this case, man’s action actually is God’s action—just as in our case, our outer acts of word and deed may be said to be ours just because or insofar as they give (or are understood to give) expression to the inner actions whereby we constitute our actions as selves.22 Once we have an account of human actions as divine actions, it takes but little to connect this to God’s action in Christ. The bridge is this: some of the actions of an agent clearly represent the self of an agent better than others. Our relationships are shot through with judgments in which we take certain actions of others as more representative and revelatory of whom they are. Ogden’s understanding of his wife and of his relationship with her was based upon certain of her words and deeds rather than on everything that she said and did. Hence, some of an agent’s acts are seen to be more characteristically their acts than are other acts. “Because certain of our actions give peculiarly apt expression to what we are (or are rightly or wrongly believed to be by others), these actions are our actions (or are believed to be our actions) in a special sense.”23

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Demythologizing Divine Action The analogy applies to God: “Wherever and insofar as an event in history manifests God’s characteristic action as Creator and Redeemer, it actually is his act in a sense in which other historical events are not.”24 Given the human agent’s unique place in creation as a creature of meaning, acts that express the ultimate meaning of our existence are the prime candidates for divine action in this sense. The decisive act of God will be that human act or event in which (p. 43) the ultimate truth about our existence before God is normatively represented or revealed. It will have the power to decide between all the conflicting claims to reveal the divine logos or meaning everywhere discernible to our experience. It will be the revelation of revelations. As such it will be received subjectively as decisive for our self-understanding. But it is not the subjective reception that determines its status; the event discerned as the revelation of revelation must objectively be so. The form and structure of the self-understanding expressed must in fact be the true or authentic selfunderstanding of human existence. This is precisely the claim made by the Christian community about Jesus. His preaching and acts of healing, his fellowship with sinners, and his death on the cross are symbolically an understanding of our existence coram deo. “They are a single witness to the truth that all things have their ultimate beginning and end solely in God’s pure unbounded love and that it is in giving ourselves wholly into the keeping of that love, by surrendering all other securities, that we realize our authentic life.”25 The issue can then be stated succinctly: if this understanding of existence that Jesus re-presents is true, if we really are created and redeemed by God’s sovereign love, then, in a real sense, Jesus himself, is God’s decisive act in human history. For in him, in the word that he speaks and is, God’s action as Creator and Redeemer is expressed with utter decisiveness; and this can only mean…that he actually is God’s decisive act.26 Given that Ogden confesses the truth of the antecedents, he also affirms the consequent: Jesus actually is God’s decisive act.

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Demythologizing Divine Action We can sum up Ogden’s achievement by noting that it is a package deal with several elements. It has a theory of the function of religious language; it rests on a series of arguments against traditional commitments to special divine action; it sets forth a positive alternative to traditional accounts of divine action; it builds its case on an analysis of human agency and action; it deploys a vision of analogical predication that bridges the gap between divine agency and divine action; it spells out the meaning of the predicates “create” and “redeem” as applied to God; and it offers a substantive account as to how Christians may legitimately say that Jesus is God’s decisive act in human history. In expressing the summary in this manner, I have avoided larding it with the figures who show up prominently in the sources of Ogden’s thinking, notably Bultmann and Charles Hartshorne.27 In this way we can avoid distractions that readily evoke charges of guilt (or honor) by association. We can see both the depth and originality of Ogden’s proposals on divine action. (p.44) I am not persuaded by Ogden’s position. Let me begin with a brief catalogue of problems. There is no such entity as the function of religion or religious language; in religion and theology we deploy language to perform a host of tasks. Hence it is unconvincing to claim that the function of religious and theological discourse is one function which we can then use to unpack theological discourse about divine action. It is false to claim as a matter of actual usage that the function of religious language is to present a certain possibility for human understanding, much less to present the possibility made available in existential philosophy. Furthermore, many of the arguments against the traditional view of special divine action are not at all compelling, least of all the appeal to the royal “we” of modern man. The claim that special divine action is incompatible with the methods and findings of science and history rests on metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that are not in themselves the deliverance of science and history; they are philosophical through and through.28 Indeed, this whole line of argument is in danger of proving too much, for it is not at all clear how either science or history has room for any reference to divine action, whether general or special. The appeal to Kant to settle the issue of causation cannot settle the debate either about the meaning of causation or its scope across all creation. Even more so in this case, the vision of causation in play presents severe difficulties for the whole idea of human action and freedom that are absolutely critical for Ogden’s whole agenda.

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Demythologizing Divine Action On the theological side, it would be premature to resolve at this point the worry as to whether a more robust account of divine action can accommodate the transcendence of God. This applies too to the problem of whether so-called traditional visions of divine action distort the claims of the Christian tradition. We can look at these in due course. It is Ogden’s constructive theological moves that are really engaging. They turn crucially on the way he takes up the issue of human action and analogically applies it to discourse about God. It is important to keep our eye on the two crucial propositions that are essential to his case. There is, first, the account he offers of human action; and there is, second, the way in which he deploys the idea that some of an agent’s actions are more revelatory of an agent than other acts. This latter claim is surely entirely correct. We often treat various individuated acts of an agent as epistemologically privileged in reflecting on their character or their intentions and purposes. In these cases we do indeed say that these acts are more their acts than others are. This is a hallmark of what Christians have said about Jesus and much ink has been spilt on how to spell out how this is to be unpacked. (p.45) The immediate question that arises is whether this analogy really holds once we ponder Ogden’s more general account of divine action. It is important to distinguish Ogden’s position at this point from others that have had a prominent place in the debate. Thus Maurice Wiles and Peter Baelz have both proposed that we can take care of special divine action by focusing on the intensity of religious response to various events in nature and history as the way to unpack God’s special acts.29 Thus Christians generally perceive, say, a sunset rather than a snail as more truly revelatory of God’s creative action, even though they posit no special act of God distinguishing sunsets from snails.30 Equally, they can look to Jesus rather than Paul as truly their redeemer without positing any special divine act in Jesus. The acts of God are picked out by the depth of response, not by some theory about the role of divine action. And the depth of response registered is not just in the lives of individuals but in communities that gather around great figures like Jesus. This move is problematic in at least two ways. First, it gets the relationship back to front. It is because Christians have taken Jesus to be God incarnate and has, say, atoned for our sins, that they respond so deeply.31 Second, and more importantly, this proposal runs the risk of turning talk of divine action into subjective talk about human response. What we are really talking about is ourselves rather than God. It is exactly this move that Ogden rejects in his critique of Bultmann. He is right to insist that the response should prima facie reflect an objective difference in God’s relation to the world; his analysis of human action as a genuine expression of real divine action is meant to meet this requirement. Does this move succeed?

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Demythologizing Divine Action It only succeeds if the background move on the analogy between divine action and human action works. The crucial difficulty with it is this: for Ogden a human act is not the ordinary acts that humans perform, it is somehow the deeper act of the self to constitute itself, to respond to its world, and to decide its own inner being. Let’s call the ordinary acts “Acts A” and the deeper acts “Acts B.” All the outer acts (Acts A) are ways of expressing and implementing the decisions (Acts B) whereby the self constitutes itself as a self. It is precisely (p.46) this move that is the problem. What we have here is not an analysis of the concept of human action but a mysterious theory of the human agent as developed within an important strand of modern philosophy.32 One can, of course, make some sense of this both psychologically and historically. I suspect it reflects the emphasis on decision that emerged in Pietism and Methodism and other forms of modern Christianity that were developed by the Christian forerunners of Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger. In the latter tradition it was secularized and made critical for a certain vision of human agency. In both traditions, the stress on decision reflected a searing dissatisfaction with impersonal forms of narrow, scientific rationality; we are thrown into the world and have to face up to the prospects of death and forgo hiding from the stark decisions that have to be made once this is realized. It would be unwise to deny that reflection of this nature has brought to light significant insights about the self that deserve extended pondering. However, what we note is that we have long left the analysis of the concept of human action and plunged into the murky depths of early existentialism. We have too speedily left the world of conceptual analysis (Acts A) and substituted the world of existentialist anthropology (Acts B).33 This shift away from conceptual analysis is fully confirmed when we look at the extended account of divine action explored by Ogden. He intentionally picks up the vision of God articulated by Charles Hartshorne to fill out his account of divine agency. God is construed strictly as analogous to a vision of human agency developed in the early Heidegger and transmitted via Bultmann. Ogden further proposes that the original analogy that hinges on Heidegger’s vision of human agency can be illuminated by the analogy of the relation between the mind and the brain. The difficulty here is not that this suggests some kind of dualism, for Ogden does not commit himself either way (p.47) on that complicated issue;34 the problem is that his understanding of the relation between our mental acts and the workings of our brains is underdeveloped, if not completely opaque. It looks as if we are building the obscure on the doubly obscure.

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Demythologizing Divine Action Perhaps we might rescue the proposal in this way as applied to Jesus. All our outward first-order actions reflect a deep, second-order act to live life in a certain way, that is, to carry out continuously a network of intentions and purposes. This second-order decision in the case of Jesus is to live in total obedience to the Father. All that Jesus does is done in obedience to God the Father to a superlative degree; more significantly his obedience to the Father reflects an intimacy with the will of the Father in which the loving interaction with the Father evokes the obedience of Jesus; so the obedience is called forth by the Father. Consider an analogy. A son develops a deep relationship with his father in which the love and creative gifts of the father become so much a part of the life of the son that a particular act of the son reflects both the agency of the father and of the son. Suppose that they are both great musicians, and the father has a characteristically brilliant way of playing a particular piece of music. On a great occasion, the son plays the same piece; the intimate participation of the son in the father’s playing is reflected in the son’s playing. Those who know both of them think to themselves: “That act of the son was a decisive reflection of the playing of the father, so much so that it is natural to say that we were listening to the playing of the father. The playing of the son was the playing of the father.” I am not sure if this analogy does justice to what Ogden is proposing. If it does, it fails for three reasons. First, the sense in which the son’s playing is the playing of the father, is a very weak sense indeed. It is not strong enough to match the weight carried by the claim that Jesus is the decisive moment in the divine redemption of the world. Second, the cash value of the verbs that Ogden deploys is equally thin when it comes to describing what Christ is said to have actually done for the redemption of the world. Jesus decisively re-presents (presents again in a decisive way), it is said, the redemptive love of God that is universally present and at work everywhere. This falls far short of the network of saving as opposed to revelatory acts regularly predicated of the work of Christ. Third, it is hard to see how this specific action can be predicated of God. So once we specify the act that God is supposed to have done in Jesus, it is not really an act of God at all. At best it looks as if it is an act of God. Once these objections do their work, they demolish the use of the analogy of husband and wife that Ogden relies on so heavily. We readily accept that a husband can speak of some acts (Acts A) being more the acts of his wife (Acts B) than other acts (Acts A) because they really are the particular, intentional (p. 48) activity of his wife (Acts A). They are not some kind of universal action of his wife (Act B); they are the specific, particular acts that can be named and pondered (Acts A). But it is precisely the whole idea of specific, particular acts of God (Acts A) that has been eliminated by Ogden; there is no analogue for these kinds of acts in his analysis.35

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Demythologizing Divine Action At one level Ogden’s work confirms the observation that conceptual analysis very readily transitions into anthropological and metaphysical proposals. This allows Ogden to continue on his way, noting that in this respect his work is no worse off than what others will furnish. At least, he will say, he has been upfront and clear about his own metaphysical commitments. The most I am entitled to conclude is that those who do not share his anthropological and metaphysical commitments will not be able to buy into the conceptual analysis of human action he offers. The disagreement goes all the way to the bottom. Our conceptual analysis will reflect our metaphysical commitments, which will then determine our theological vision of divine action. So be it, he will continue; this is the way it goes in philosophy and theology. What we really have here is not an undermining of Ogden’s claims; all we have is a promissory note to develop an alternative vision where the same objections will arise from those who do not share the relevant conceptual and metaphysical commitments. We are at an impasse. That is certainly one lesson we should take away from the argument to date. The conceptual bleeds into the metaphysical and vice versa. However, it is only of limited value in defense of Ogden, for it does not really address the specific objections developed above. We can agree for the moment that the best way forward in thinking about divine action and divine agency should begin by giving attention to the concept of human action and by exploring how it might legitimately be applied to God. We can also allow that conceptual analysis can readily spill over into metaphysical commitment. But the devil is in the details, and the details depend on the broader methodological assumptions at work below the surface. At this point, we can press the issue harder. First, we cannot assume that metaphysical investigation should come into play either as quickly or in the material form deployed by Ogden. There is an unseemly haste both in the conceptual analysis deployed and in the reach for a favored metaphysical (p.49) ontology. We need more work on the concept of action before we should propose that any other account will be no better or worse than that offered by Ogden. Moreover, it is clear that the Christian faith may well have its own ontological commitments derived in part from precisely the kind of special action that Ogden rejects. So the appropriation of the Process tradition does not have a privileged position at the starting grid.

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Demythologizing Divine Action Second, we cannot assume that deeper work on the concept of action and, correlatively, on how it can be applied to discourse about divine action, will not change the whole picture dramatically. If Ogden’s working assumptions in this domain fail, then the whole project collapses. Ogden’s account suffers from mental cramp on both counts. He is locked into the idea that we can have a relatively straightforward analysis of the concept of human action; and he thinks that the way to work analogical predication is to go straight from a general account of human action to a general account of divine action. It is that cramp that I intend to relieve in due course. Neither of these assumptions, I shall argue are secure. There is another way to prepare for what lies up ahead. Consider these distinctions. It is one thing to develop an analysis of the concept of human action. In this instance we are looking for an account of the conditions governing our use of action predicates. It is another enterprise to develop a theory of human agency and human action. In this case we may favor, say, dualism over physicalism. It is yet another operation to understand a particular human act. Here we are in search of the explanation of a specific action or activity in terms of the intentions and purposes of the agent. Apply these distinctions to divine agency and divine action. It is one thing to set out to provide an analysis of the concept of divine action. In this case we want to know how action predicates work in the case of God. It is another to develop a theory of divine action. Perhaps we want a theory of double agency, or a theory of primary and secondary causation, or an occasionalist rather than a concurrence theory. It is quite another operation to understand any particular act of God. In this case we want to know, say, why the death of Christ atones for the sins of the world. If we run these together too hastily, we will end with all sorts of confusion. Moreover, as we ponder these distinctions, we need to keep our sights on the full range of actions predicated of human agents and of God in the Christian tradition. Doing so may well relieve the mental cramp that is visible in the work of Ogden and that shows up again and again in the discussion about divine action. Notes:

(1) Langdon B. Gilkey, “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language,” Journal of Religion 41 (1961): 196. (2) M. B. Foster, “‘We’ in Modern Philosophy,” in Faith and Logic, ed. Basil Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 194–220. (3) Van Austin Harvey, The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief (New York: Macmillan, 1969). (4) What was once considered to the glory of God in his great acts of salvation suddenly turns out to be an embarrassment.

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Demythologizing Divine Action (5) The Understanding of Christian FaithCanon and Criterion in Christian TheologyMaurice Wiles, “In What Contexts Does It Make Sense to Say, ‘God Acts in History’?” in Witness and Existence: Essays in Honor of Schubert M. Ogden, ed. Philip E. Devenish and George L. Goodwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 190–9.God’s Action in the World (6) Journal of ReligionReligious Studies“Theology and Falsification in Retrospect: A Reply,” in The Logic of God: Theological Verification, ed. Malcolm L. Diamond and Thomas V. Litzenburg (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), 290– 7;Theologische Zeitschrift (7) Schubert Ogden, “What Sense Does It Make to Say, ‘God Acts in History’?” in The Reality of God and Other Essays (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1992), 166–7. It is clear from the outset that Bultmann and Ogden are using “myth” and related terms in an idiosyncratic fashion. It stands neither for a literary genre nor for “untrue” but for a material theological position on claims about divine action. This is one reason why Wright’s response falls so far short of addressing the issue on the table. See George Ernest Wright, God Who Acts (London: SCM, 1952), 123–8. Waxing eloquently using other concepts of “myth” simply misses the mark. (8) Paul Gwynne, Special Divine Action: Key Issues in the Contemporary Debate (1965–1995) (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1996), (9) Ogden, “What Sense Does It Make to Say, ‘God Acts in History’?,” 167. (10) Ibid., 169. (11) Ibid., 169. (12) Ibid. (13) Ibid. (14) This is the burden of his work in Christ Without Myth (New York: Harper, 1961). (15) Ogden, “What Sense Does It Make to Say, ‘God Acts in History’?,” 171. (16) Ibid., 176. (17) Ibid., 177. (18) Ibid., 177–8. (19) Ibid., 178–9. (20) Ibid., 180. Page 17 of 19

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Demythologizing Divine Action (21) These examples are mine, not Ogden’s. (22) Ogden, “What Sense Does It Make to Say, ‘God Acts in History’?,” 181. (23) Ibid., 182. (24) Ibid. (25) Ibid., 186. (26) Ibid. (27) The Process tradition becomes pivotal for Ogden at this point, but the main focus of this essay is the issue of the meaning of an act of God, something which deserves attention in its own right. Reference to Bultmann’s work is critical to Ogden’s vision of meaning, hence I have included it here. (28) Alvin Plantinga, “What is ‘Intervention’?” Theology and Science 6 (2008): 369–401. (29) See Maurice Wiles, “Religious Authority and Divine Action,” in God’s Activity in the World, ed. Thomas, 188–9. Peter Baelz’s views can be located in his Prayer and Providence: A Background Study (London: Epworth, 1968), 81–2. (30) Austin Farrer, A Science of God? (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1966), 17. (31) Compare the witty comment of Basil Mitchell after a tour of houses in Dallas. “Outside Dallas, houses are expensive because they are valuable. Inside Dallas, houses are valuable because they are expensive.” (32) Maurice Wiles shares my unease at this point. He writes: “I have not found it so congenial to distinguish those inner decisions whereby we constitute our own selves and regard them as the primary form of human action.” See Wiles, “In What Contexts Does It Make Sense to Say, ‘God Acts in History’?,” 192. (33) Chapter 9Lionel Rubinoff, ed., Faith and Reason: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion by R. G. Collingwood (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), 232. (34) Thomas F. Tracy, “Enacting History: Ogden and Kaufman on God’s Mighty Acts,” Journal of Religion 64 (1984), 22

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Demythologizing Divine Action (35) The same fate befalls the effort by Gordon Kaufman to develop the concept of divine action by deploying the idea of master-acts and sub-acts. Kaufman proposes that we can resolve the problem of divine action by interpreting “an act of God in its primary and widest meaning, as designating the overall movement of nature and history towards God’s ultimate goal…” Gordon Kaufman, “On the Meaning of ‘Act of God’,” in God’s Activity in the World, ed. Thomas, 152. However, we end up without any genuine sub-acts on the part of God to enact the larger master-act in that the former are rejected for the strongest reason possible, namely that they are inconceivable. For criticism along these lines see Tracy, “Enacting History: Ogden and Kaufman on God’s Mighty Acts,” 26–7.

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I: Exploring and Evaluating the Debate William J. Abraham

Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780198786504 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786504.001.0001

Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy William J. Abraham

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198786504.003.0004

Abstract and Keywords In this chapter, after indicating how analytic philosophers developed a keen interest in the debate about divine action, the author explores the seminal work of analytic philosopher I. M. Crombie. The author contends that Crombie provided an elegant way of naming two critical questions about divine action; but he failed to develop a satisfactory answer to either of them. The problems he discussed quickly became the site of a concerted attack on the whole idea of divine action. The author shows that this attack fails, even as it prompted theologians to resort to paradox to keep divine action afloat as a serious option for theology. Keywords:   I. M. Crombie, divine action, paradox, concept, agent, person, action, analytic philosophy

Theologians often treat philosophers like doctors who make house calls; they are glad to get whatever medicine is available for their ailments; they are also glad to see them leave. However, once doctors show up, they start insisting on regular check-ups; they do not hesitate to identify cancer and other killer diseases.

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy In this chapter, after indicating how analytic philosophers developed a keen interest in the debate about divine action, I shall explore the seminal work of I. M. Crombie. Crombie provided an elegant way of naming two critical questions about divine action; but he failed to develop a satisfactory answer to either of them. The problems he discussed quickly became the site of a concerted attack on the whole idea of divine action. I shall show that this attack fails, even as it prompted theologians to resort to paradox to keep divine action afloat as a serious option for theology. The theologians who initially worried about special divine action in the middle of the twentieth century were not worried about the viability of the concept of divine action in and of itself. On the contrary, they felt it was in good working order, that it already had a clean bill of health. Their challenge was what to do with the network of special acts of God that they had inherited from Scripture and tradition. In sorting out this dilemma they kept alive general notions of divine action in creation, providence, and even redemption. They did so by deploying recognizable philosophical resources. In the meantime, they were relaxed about the viability of the idea of divine action as a coherent notion. They also made use of the concept of human action, assuming that it too was in good shape. The challenge was to identify what concept of action they were using and how best to work out the analogical application to God. Once they had sorted out these issues, the task was to provide an interpretation of the Christian faith that would reflect the progress they had made in this arena. They were effectively involved in a research program that would be faithful to the constitutive content of Christianity, that would think through that content across the standard loci of systematic theology, and that would give an account (p.51) both of the meaning and rational justification of their constructive proposals to the culture at large. They wanted a theology that would be authentic, coherent, credible, and apt in contemporary Western culture.

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy The proposals developed by theologians like Schubert Ogden were not merely academic issues. On the one hand, they made a real difference to ordinary Christians who were their ultimate if not primary audience. They dealt with themes and practices that are integral to the life of faith, like salvation and prayer. So it should not surprise us that ordinary believers become charmed or alarmed with the work of theologians like Ogden. On the other hand, the proposals on offer on special divine action were bound to make a difference to the churches which appointed their authors to serve as scholars and teachers. Churches characteristically have canonical teaching; they provide official formulations of their beliefs and practices. These formulations are not bolts from the blue; they are the deposit of earlier research and judgments, they involve ecclesial decisions and not just academic decisions, and they shape and inform the life of faith communally in a host of ways. One way to think of theologians is to see them as the Research and Development Department; their job is to keep the teachings of the church in good working order. In this respect their work has social and political dimensions that make life much more tumultuous and interesting than for other academics. To outsiders, if truth be told, it looks as if the theologian is hopelessly constrained by past tradition, by current church dogma, or by threats of ecclesiastical censure. Even when theologians are lauded for their revisionism and rewarded for their defiance of church teaching and ecclesiastical tradition (as often happens nowadays), this perception dies hard. Philosophers, it would seem, are under no such constraints. They are free to follow the evidence wherever it leads. They live in ivory towers and need not worry about the everyday significance of their proposals, they can invent new dogma to their heart’s content, and they can believe whatever they like without having to worry about censure. When they turn their critical eye on theology, they do not need to assume that any of its concepts are in good working order. They may insist that the initial presumption is that the theologian must show that the concept of divine action is in good working order; the concept is guilty until proven innocent.1 This is precisely how many philosophers approached examination of the concept of divine action; many of them were convinced on reflection that the concept of divine agency was incoherent. If they are correct about this, the theologian faces a much deeper crisis than that presented by special divine action; the whole enterprise collapses, including the carefully (p. 52) constructed revisions of Liberal Protestantism. If not just this or that special action of God is in trouble, but the very idea of divine action itself turns out to be unworkable, then the disease is fatal.

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy Given this threat, it is very tempting for the theologian to look for a cannon that will take out the philosophical opposition with one good shot. The obvious canon to reach for is the Bible; so theologians call in their colleagues in Biblical Studies and invite them to fulfill their duties and execute the opposition. This is not an effective strategy. Their cannon has no ammunition unless it comes loaded with divine revelation. After the demise of the Biblical Theology Movement, it was difficult to find biblical scholars who would acknowledge that they were dealing with divine revelation; those who thought they possessed divine revelation had no intention of risking their lives in a fresh battle with philosophy. Even then, the whole operation was doomed from the beginning. This kind of ammunition, no matter who fires it, will not work in philosophy because what is at stake is the very preconditions of any appeal to divine revelation. To speak of divine revelation is to speak of divine action; so the appeal to divine revelation turns out to be useless as a way to solve logical problems with the idea of divine action. On hearing this, some of the theologians and their philosophical friends regroup and decide to try a more therapeutic approach. They invite the philosophers to the local bar at Fiddler’s Hearth in South Bend and offer them some strong spirits. One can deploy the divine revelation of the Bible, they say, so long as it is accompanied by the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, who either tells you that the Book is truly divine revelation (and therefore you can trust what it says), or who, as you read it, convinces you inwardly that whatever the Bible actually says is true, or both. The philosophers are not fooled: to talk about the witness of the Holy Spirit is again to assume that the concept of divine action is in good working order. At this point many of the theologians gave up on the whole enterprise, pleading that their subject matter had its own unique object of study, its own unique language, its own unique theory of meaning, and its own unique intellectual grounding. They were like the motorist who, having tried out a host of rental car companies which charged exorbitant prices for insurance premiums, and whose cars constantly veered into the ditch without warning, had at last decided to get her own license and drive her own car. When the accidents and insurance became even more expensive, she found a chauffeur with excellent references and cheerfully resigned herself to safer travel in the backseat. Other theologians worried that the choice of chauffeur was ultimately much too risky; there were too many self-referentially ostentatious recommendations which on inspection turned out to be fake. They noted that the deliberations of their colleagues on the quality of the references depended crucially on all sorts of philosophical claims about the boundaries of the discipline, the nature of language, and the status of religious belief. (p.53) Sooner or later, the philosophical dimensions of these topics would come back to haunt them, and they might well be ill-equipped to deal with them.

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy More importantly, philosophy has been and is rightly interested in how best to understand a host of crucial concepts that are pervasive in both everyday life and theology. Theologians readily deploy a host of concepts, like causation, agency, explanation, meaning, intention, belief, perception, proof, plausibility, justification, and knowledge in the claims about divine action. Prima facie, it looks as if they depend on either implicit or explicit analyses of these concepts; they cannot, therefore, ignore what philosophers have to say about these concepts. To be sure, the current exposition of these notions might not be congenial to theology; in the case of debates about agency and action, they initially appeared to be fatal. However, as J. O. Urmson, the Oxford philosopher, once quipped, to utter the words “I agree” in response to a philosophy paper is generally taken as an insult. So disagreeing with the current consensus about divine action is not some kind of original intellectual sin; it might turn out to yield important results that could help unlock the secrets of divine action in wholly unexpected ways. It might even restore that network of special divine action that had been abandoned with such good intent but with such devastating consequences for the fortunes of Western Christianity. Perhaps having been killed off by theologians, even special divine action and not just general divine action could be raised from the dead by philosophers to give new life to the church and the world. In the light of this possibility it is helpful to look at the philosophical discussion on divine action that emerged independently of worries about the fate of the Biblical Theology Movement. The worries about divine action in analytic philosophy arose in an oblique fashion; the initial worry centered on the cognitive status of all theological claims. The latter was clearly the focus of attention in the two most important sets of papers that launched the revolution in philosophical theology in the 1950s.2 The presenting problem was straightforward: central theological claims appeared to be factual in nature, they were intended to convey information, yet they failed to satisfy the conditions for cognitive discourse in that theologians refused on principle to specify under what conditions they could be either verified or falsified. Given the assumption that such conditions were constitutive of cognitive discourse, the theologian was faced with a narrow set of options. She could reject verifiability or falsifiability as necessary conditions of factual discourse; she could deny the cognitive status of theological discourse and find some other way to construe such discourse (as moral discourse, as the expression of (p.54) various attitudes, as poetry, as disguised exhortations, and the like); or she could hold her ground and find some way to uphold the potentially informative character of central theological assertions. It was in the context of developing the latter defense that salient problems about divine agency and divine action readily surfaced. Happily, it is not necessary to rehearse once again this well-trodden terrain; it will suffice to drain the bog and focus on the interesting wheat and tares that can be found flourishing in the fertile peat. Page 5 of 22

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy Ian M. Crombie’s contribution to the discussion is especially important for our purposes. His essays readily take us to the critical questions that surfaced.3 The initial problems can be neatly identified by thinking of them as a set of epistemological queries about the subject and the predicate of statements about God. Take the expressions, “God loves us,” or “God created the world.” The two queries that arise are these. There is first the issue of why we say and what we mean when we say “loves” and “created”; there is second the issue of what these predicates are about, the question of their referent. Crombie tackles these issues by introducing an arresting word-picture. In its logical structure religious belief has two parents; and it also has a nurse. Its logical mother is what we might call undifferentiated theism; its logical father is particular events or occasions interpreted as theophanic, and the extra-parental nurse is provided by religious activity.4 The mother comes into view as we ponder those elements in our experience that lead us to belief in God. Examples of these are: our sense of contingency, our moral experience, the beauty and order of nature, and various religious and mystical experiences. These phenomena naturally find a place in natural theology where we reach for an explanation in terms of the activity of God. What is at issue here is not a matter of deductive or inductive logic; it is a matter of trying to make the best sense of these elements in our experience. In interpreting them as he does the informed theist is convinced that he is in some sense facing them more honestly, bringing out more of what they contain or could be done by interpreting them in some other way. The one interpretation is preferred to the other, not because it is thought to be irrefutable on paper, but because it is judged to be unconvincing in the light of familiarity with the facts.5

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy In developing these interpretations, however, we find ourselves saying things that we cannot literally mean. Thus to speak of a sense of contingency is to use (p.55) the word “contingency” in a way that is different from its use as applied to statements. Words are not used in their ordinary sense; so the challenge is to spell out how they are used. Usually we spell out what we mean by contrasting their proper application from their improper application. In the case of “contingency” this is not an option because the word applies in all situations in which we find ourselves. The only solution is to say that the relevant contrast is that of a necessary, self-existent being, a first cause or a creator. The problem, however, is this: while the believer may find such language appropriate, it is subject to devastating criticism on the content of the predicates as applied to God in order to secure reference. The believer wants to say that the interpretation is appropriate; but she has no real idea what such concepts as “necessary,” “self-existent being,” “first cause,” and “creator” mean. The logical mother to religious belief—natural theism—turns out to involve the distortion of our ordinary ways of using the relevant language. In herself she is an honest woman; and if sometimes she is bedizened in logical trappings, and put on the streets as an inductive argument, the fault is hardly hers. Her function is, not to prove that God exists, but to provide us with a ‘meaning’ for the word ‘God’. Without her we should not know whither statements concerning the word were to be referred; the subject in theological utterances would be unattached.6 However, the logical father of religious belief comes to the rescue at this point and moves the believer from the condition of merely possessing the concept of the divine to active belief in God. The relevant data consists at this point in the interpretation of certain objects, events as manifestations of the divine. Without the notion of God we could interpret nothing as divine; without concrete events that we were convinced should be interpreted as divine, we could not know that the notion of divinity had any application to reality. Given both, we can interpret various events as divine action; and critical in this circle of interpretations is the interpretation of the life of Christ as revelatory of the divine. Once we get to that point we have an authority we can rely on for figuring out what we mean when we speak about God.

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy Appeal to the authority of Christ works in this fashion: it gives us the clue to how to interpret what we say about God. We should take theological statements as parables. Following the lead of the Bible we should allow one of its central genres to illuminate the logical nature of Christian belief. In parables we see that their words are used in their ordinary senses but, as the parable is applied, say, to God, we do not assume that predicates can be strictly true in (p.56) their application. It is not enough in thinking of divine activity to put it on a scale in which we move from the inanimate at the bottom to the human at the top and, after seeing the direction in which they point, pare away from the human activity what it has in common on the scale below it. This will leave us with the ghost of a concept standing for the meaning of divine activity. “But such ghostly and evacuated concepts are clearly too tenuous to be called the meanings of the words we use.”7 To think of God thus is to think of him as not in our own image, but in the rarefied ghost of our own image…What we do, then, is in essence to think of God in parables. The things we say about God are said on the authority of the words of Christ, who spoke in human language, using parable; and so we speak of God in parable—authoritative parable; knowing the truth is not literally that which our parables represent, knowing therefore that now we see in a glass darkly, but trusting, because we trust the source of the parables, that in believing them and interpreting them in the light of each other, we shall not be misled, that we shall have such knowledge as we need to possess for the foundation of the religious life.8 At this point Crombie takes us back to the logical mother of religious belief, to natural theology, and specifically to the experience of contingency. In this instance, as already noted, we work with the contrast between the contingent and the necessary, the derivative and the underivative, the finite and the infinite, the imperfect and the perfect. The contrast terms, “necessary,” “underivative,” “infinite,” and “perfect” give us a direction for our thinking. However, and here we immediately hit a snag, we do not know that to which they refer. “The expression ‘God’ is to refer to that object, whatever it is, and if there be one, which is such that the knowledge of it would be to us the knowledge of the unfamiliar term in the contrast between infinite and finite.”9 What we have in the end is a term which has communication value but not descriptive value.10 (p. 57) When we couple this gain with the material made available from divine revelation given by Christ in parables, we are able to fill out the contours of meaning to which the challenge to provide an account of the informative character of theological statements has been directing us.

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy The upshot of this strategy is subtle. On the one hand the religious believer supposes he knows what he means by his statements, but when challenged he interprets them anthropomorphically. When asked searching questions about this interpretation, the believer “retreats rapidly backwards into complete agnosticism.”11 At this point the believer makes two provisos. The agnosticism is real: the religious believer does not know what his statements mean; he knows what they mean within the parable, and that it is right to use the parable; the Christian falls back upon the person of Christ and the concrete realities of the Christian life. The logical mother comes to the rescue of the logical father; and both rely on the help of the extra-parental nurse.12 What stands out in this exposition of Crombie is how quickly his efforts to deal with the epistemology of Christian belief have opened up queries about how to interpret claims about divine action. In the course of answering the challenge of falsification, Crombie has fallen into a dark, deep bog-hole.13 His framing of the issue is simple and elegant. We want to know how to make sense of both the subject and the predicate in such statements as “God created the world,” and “God revealed himself uniquely in Christ.” As laid out by Crombie, we want to know how to pick out the referent for “God,” and we wish to know how to interpret such terms as “create” and “reveal” as predicated of God. His answer to the first is to appeal to such notions as “first cause” and “creator.” However, these deploy exactly the kind of language which shows up in the predicates, that is, discourse about divine action. When we turn to the predicates, we are referred to the use of relevant parables authorized by Christ who operates as an authority under the description of a “divine revelation.” We are right back with exactly the kind of language that was a problem in the first place. The whole operation is hopelessly circular. We do (p.58) not really know what these predicates mean, and we do not know how to pick out the subject to which they apply. The result is indeed agnosticism and ignorance. Moreover, it is a very special kind of ignorance. It is not ignorance of the epistemic status of claims about divine action; it is the much more radical ignorance of how to identify the referent for “God” and how to interpret the predicates applied.14 It was precisely this network of objections which were developed in the subsequent debate and which became the lynchpin of arguments against the coherence of the concept of divine action. While Crombie did not at first fully register how devastating they might be, it is surely to his credit that he stumbled onto them and provided a way to name them so succinctly. It is worth reviewing some of the ways in which the objections to the concept of divine action have been articulated.15 Most of them have been framed in terms of the incoherence of the concept of an incorporeal person.16 For a useful point of entry, consider the following comment by John Gaskin:

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy in the historically dominant and all but irreducible understanding of what God is (and must be) to a Jew, Christian or Muslim, God is always spoken about, and spoken to, as a sort of person; a person moreover who is emphatically not pure mind, but also acts; who is an agent without a body (‘without body, parts, or passions in the Anglican formula’); and who is always about to do anything anywhere. The tension is obvious. Body acts are carried out by persons acting with their bodies: PK [psychokinetic] acts, if there are any, are carried out by embodied persons. All that a person can do or bring about in the physical world consist in, or is an indirect act, resulting from, such direct acts. The absence of a body is therefore, not only the factual grounds for doubting whether a person exists (There’s no one there!). It is also grounds for doubting whether such a bodiless person could possibly be an agent.17 Gaskin’s worry constitutes but one of a network of objections against the coherence of the idea of divine action. I shall proceed by showing that none of the standard objections in favor of the incoherence of the concept of divine action succeed. My aim here is not to provide a comprehensive rebuttal; nor is it my aim at this point to resolve the difficulties that Crombie has so splendidly articulated; it is enough to show that the challenges fail as things currently stand. My ultimate goal is to note how all of these arguments depend on an unexamined methodological assumption on how to analyze the concept of (p. 59) agency and action. It is only as we work beyond that assumption that I can begin to resolve the issues before us. For now, let me examine the standard objections against the coherence of the concept of divine action. The first objection revolves around the problem of how we acquire concepts like “agent” and “person.” According to the critic, our concepts of agent and person are learned by attending to agents and persons as we encounter them in the everyday world. Given that such agents and persons are embodied, it is hard to see how we can even begin to acquire such notions as incorporeal agent and incorporeal person. Let us call this the semantic objection to the idea of incorporeal agent and person. In one famous version, as developed by Peter Strawson, the argument is that the idea of person is that of a being where in learning how to apply P-predicates (“is angry,” “works hard”) we are always pointed to things which take M-predicates (“weighs 120 lbs,” “is bald”).18 If Mpredicates cannot apply, then P-predicates cannot apply.

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy The fundamental problem with this move is that it assumes that we are locked into the initial ways in which we may learn the meaning of terms like “agent” and “person.” Thus it rules out the possibility of stretching and transforming our concepts to apply to situations which are radically different from our initial learning. This is a common practice in science where ordinary terms are stretched to be given new meanings, or where new technical terms are developed to capture features of the world that go beyond our preliminary understandings. Another way to make the point is this. Strawson is very clear that his project is that of descriptive metaphysics; he is interested in tracking the fundamental concepts that govern our current way of thinking about the world. However, this does not rule out the possibility of revisionary metaphysics where we explore other ways of thinking about the world. Of course, the theologian needs to spell out with some care how the language is being stretched, or what metaphysical moves are being made. However, we cannot rule these out of court by stipulating in advance how such language is developed or learned; to do so simply assumes a theory of learning and meaning that may be prima facie secure but on reflection becomes thoroughly dubious. The second objection builds on the assumption that bodies are essential to the individuation and identification of agents and persons. If there are no bodies, then there can be no identification and enumeration of incorporeal agents and persons. The arguments in this case tend to operate in terms of elimination. Applied to human agents, here is how Terence Penelhum pursues the point: we need some way of understanding the identity of the embodied being through various post-mortem stages, and some way of understanding the statement that (p.60) some such being is identical to one particular postmortem being rather than another. We shall not be able to understand either unless we can also understand the notion of numerical difference between one such disembodied being and another one.19 There are essentially two and only two ways to secure personal identity, either by memory or by bodies. Given that memory cannot serve as the basis for personal identity, the only real alternative is that of the body. So we know that X is the same person as Y not because Y remembers being X, but because there is continuity of body between X and Y across the relevant stretch of time. However, this cannot apply to God in that God does not have a body. Thus there is no way we can identify incorporeal agents or enumerate them. This raises serious questions for the practice of worship. If God is incorporeal, how can his worshippers identify him to refer to, or in particular, to address, if one assumes an unwillingness to identify him with ancillary objects such as altars that are present when some acts of worship are being performed? For he cannot exist at one point rather than another.20 Page 11 of 22

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy The same general argument from elimination was made with characteristic rhetorical panache by the early Antony Flew. Expressed in modern terms, there is no possibility of giving an account of the self-identity and individuation of incorporeal collections of experiences in terms of their memory capacities…But what positive characterization can we give to these postulated incorporeal substances? Can we say anything to differentiate such an incorporeal substance from an imaginary, an unreal, a non-existent substance?21 How might we respond to this objection? For one thing, it is not at all clear that we can reidentify bodies without relying on our memories as to how bodies appeared to us at the various times in which we saw them across time. At least our own memories are indirectly vital for the practice of identifying other people’s bodies. Second, if this argument is correct and our bodies are constitutive of our identity, we become different persons every six years or so, because it is a fact that the cells that make up our bodies are replaced every six or seven years or so. Thus we end with the absurd conclusion that across a span of sixty years or so, we are not one person but six persons. Third, it is clear that in my own case I do not rely on my body in order to secure my identity across space and time. How I do this may be a mystery in search of theory, but so be it. Fourth, the deep trouble here may be that we are confusing (p.61) the epistemological conditions under which we sometimes identify agents and persons with the metaphysical issue of what constitutes personal identity. At the end of the day, as many have argued, it may well be that the identity relation may be brute and unanalyzable.22 Certainly, until this has been ruled out and the other relevant arguments just cited undermined, the objection as developed by Penelhum and Flew is unsuccessful. The third objection focuses on the impossibility of incorporeal action in the world, given certain assumptions on how agents acquire information and knowledge. As human agents we acquire information about the world through causal interaction through the senses. Using the term “perception” in the broadest sense (seeing, tasting, touching, hearing, smelling), it is obvious that if you remove the causal apparatus through which we interact with the world (eyes, tongues, hands, ears, noses), it is not clear how anyone could continue to perceive what is happening in the world. Our knowledge of the world is intimately related to our embodiment, and such knowledge is in turn intimately related to our actions. Thus a disembodied agent in principle cannot satisfy certain crucial conditions for action. This applies in cases of post-mortem existence for human agents; and it applies to God. Of course, an incorporeal deity might have knowledge of its own mental states by some kind of introspection, but such a deity could not have the relevant mental states for taking action in the world. This might work in the case of an indifferent Aristotelian deity but not in the kind of deity of interest to the theologian. Page 12 of 22

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy Perhaps the psalmist was responding to this kind of worry when he wrote: He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that forms the eye, shall he not see? He that chastises the heathen, shall he not correct? He that teaches man knowledge, shall he not know?23

It is also worth noting that there is a long tradition of appeal to the spiritual senses in the Christian tradition that cannot be dismissed out of hand. The appeal to perception of the divine has received extensive articulation and defense over the last generation, so it is not at all obvious that our knowledge should be confined to the narrow range of options favored, as in this case, by a very strong version of empiricism.24 There is this additional, decisive consideration. To make the argument succeed, the critic must rely on a causal theory of knowledge. This is by no means the only option available to us at present. (p.62) Thus one alternative would be to deploy a version of reliabilism which insists that what matters in the case of knowledge is not the specification of the mechanisms in the acquisition of knowledge but that the relevant perceptions count as reliable guides about what is happening in the world. Again, I am not here claiming that the issue is settled; I am making the more modest claim that the argument from acquiring relevant information will have to be radically reworked to succeed. The fourth objection insists that the idea of incorporeal action presupposes a discredited form of Cartesian dualism. The core of this argument is that the whole idea of incorporeal agent is a hangover from a time when it was natural to believe that substance dualism was the best way to go in order to make best sense of our identity as persons and of the mental life that we know subjectively through introspection.25 However, nobody has given a satisfactory account of how souls are to interact with bodies. In the wake of this it is more promising to pursue a vision of the human agent as material through and through; we can then find a way commensurate with our best science to make sense of the concepts we use to speak of agents, persons, and their actions. The more we make progress on this research program, then the more bizarre all talk of “soul” appears to us. And the more the language of “soul” becomes bizarre to us, even more so does the concept of a divine agent modeled on that of a human “soul.” As Daniel Dennett puts it, “dualism is not a serious view to contend with, but rather a cliff over which to push one’s opponents.”26 In the wake of this situation a chorus of theologians and philosophers has sought to work through the implications of the attack on dualism for Christian theology.

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy It is important to keep our eye on the ball at this point. The core issue is whether there are really decisive arguments on the table that undermine the coherence of the idea of divine action. Whether we can or cannot survive without some dualist account of human agency is another matter which can be parked for the moment. The crucial issue can be named by allowing for the moment a fullblown materialist account of the human person. Whether this proposal is true or not, it is a contingent claim about the nature of human agents; it is not a necessary truth about the meaning of terms “agent” and “person.” Thus it cannot be the premise for an argument to the incoherence of the idea of divine agency or divine action. To be sure, non-dualist accounts of human agents are no easy attainment. They require extensive work in the philosophy of mind and action that go way beyond anything that contemporary science actually tells us. Moreover, the obituary notices (p.63) on the death of dualism may well be premature; there are robust defenses, for example, of versions of interactive dualism that cannot be dismissed without entering deeply contested philosophical disputes.27 However, the issue does not stand or fall with the good or bad fortunes of dualism. The coherence of divine agency and divine action can survive the death of dualism as applied to human agents. One could, at this point, sweep all these arguments aside by proposing that all of them presuppose a basic kind of anthropomorphism in which the relation between God and the world is construed in terms of concepts derived from the relation between one item in the created order and another item in the created order. However, the difference between God and creatures is vastly more different than any relation within the created order. The God of the “classical” Christian tradition differs far more radically from all creation than any difference we may find within the created order. As all of these arguments construe God as an agent to be modeled on some account of the human agent, they simply miss the mark altogether. This is the whole point, as we noted, in Crombie’s exposition, of the appeal to God as “necessary,” “self-existent being,” “first cause,” and “creator.” These concepts as applied to a transcendent deity cannot be assimilated to the anthropomorphic concept of God deployed in the target statements developed in the four arguments noted above. Hence they are hopelessly wide of the mark, and can be dispatched as irrelevant.

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy I shall set this move aside for the moment, for three reasons. First, if the predicates “first cause” and “creator” are going to be used at all here, then we are back once again with the problems of reference and predication identified by Crombie. At the very least we are off again on a search for the meaning of “cause” and “creator.” Second, those who take this route cannot help themselves to the language of divine revelation or the content of divine revelation without some account of how this fits with their account of God as self-existent, nonderivative being. Third, it is surely an open question in the debate about divine action whether this way of identifying God is to be given a privileged position at the outset. It is best to hold that commitment at bay for the moment and see if there is another angle of approach to the theme of divine agency and divine action. We can return to this issue again at an appropriate time.28 As a way into this, consider what it is at stake if these arguments were to succeed. What it would mean immediately is that we have a new disproof for (p. 64) the existence of God. We might call this a conceptual disproof (or network of disproofs) of the existence of God. This surely suggests that we have proved too much; there is a serious intellectual over-reach. Moreover, historically speaking it is striking that over the history of philosophy worries about the coherence of the concept of divine action and agency are virtually non-existent. We could readily line up a set of star witnesses from Plato to Aquinas to Descartes to Locke to Hume to Wittgenstein, and the like, who clearly found the concept entirely coherent. Hume, for example, held that there could never be any good arguments in favor of a miracle, but it does not appear that he had any conceptual problems with the idea of miracle, namely, a violation of a law of nature brought about by a god or other invisible agent. Indeed the whole enterprise of natural theology and natural atheology depends upon the coherence of the idea of divine action. So too does the long-standing debate about the problem of evil. All of these debates assume that it is coherent to think of divine agency and divine action. Classical natural theology operates with the putative assertion that God created and designed the universe; one way to state the problem of evil is to ask why it is that a good, all-powerful deity permits so much moral and natural evil in the world he has created.

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy It could, of course, be the case that all the philosophers who have debated these issues have missed a serious incoherence buried in the concept of divine action. We should, as it were, commit all this material to the flames at the first opportunity. The more likely explanation, surely, is that there is a serious flaw in the way the whole issue is being explored; there is a hidden assumption that needs to be identified and brought to the surface. My deep intuition is that is exactly what is at stake. The relevant assumption is this: we have to hand a clear and distinct idea of human action which can be applied univocally (or with appropriate analogical footwork) to the concept of divine action. Thus the way to solve “the problem of divine action” is to develop an account of the necessary conditions of human action; the debate then proceeds by figuring out how far this concept does or does not fit the case of divine agency and divine action. Consider at this juncture the claim that the concept of divine agency involves the deliberate commission of a category mistake. This is the route taken by Crombie. A category mistake is a semantic or ontological error in which a property is ascribed to something which could not possibly have that property.29 For example, someone asks: “The Prime Minister is in London, and the Foreign Secretary is in Paris, and the Home Secretary is in Bristol, but where is the Government?” The Government is not another person alongside the members of the Cabinet. We are speaking of “government” in categories only appropriate to something of a radically different kind. Thus in the case of God, Crombie sets out to speak of God as “spirit” in categories initially (p.65) applicable to ourselves as human agents, seen from the inside rather than from the outside as external observers. There is an obvious problem. It looks as if we are reifying an aspect of what it is to be human into the name of a distinct kind of being. We are committing a category mistake by making “spirit” a common noun like “mouse” rather than seeing it as an abstraction or an aspect-word. This is true, comes the response, but we are not saying that we really know nothing about the meaning of “spirit.” “How the word is used…in the theological sense is by the commission of a deliberate category mistake under the pressure of convictions which require us to depart from normal language practice.”30 “The notion of God as a spirit is indeed a category mistake, or category transgression, but one deliberately made to express what we antecedently feel; and if we antecedently feel something, the category-transgression we deliberately commit to express that feeling has some meaning—that, namely, which it is designed to express.”31 You can only object to this if you can show that there are never good grounds for committing categorytransgressions and that there are no “meanings” which do not correspond to clear and distinct ideas. No compelling argument, he notes, has so far been given for these two general principles.

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy Crombie is moving towards the worry I want to isolate. Is it the case that we have a clear and distinct idea of the concept of action, such that it can be used to rule out the idea of divine action? Do we have a closed “category” of action that can do the work that both the defenders and critics of divine action think it can do? If we do not have such a concept then this whole enterprise is doomed from the outset. There is another worry that has kept surfacing. Is it the case that our account of the concept of action (however we treat it) can be readily isolated from the metaphysical and epistemological commitments we bring to our work in conceptual analysis? I suggested earlier that it is good to do what we can to keep these enterprises logically distinct. However, in practice this is easier said than done. The importance of this observation in the present context is that the hard drive against the concept of divine action is best explained along these lines. Those who have objected to the idea of divine action have been motivated at a deep level by the conviction that human agents are best seen as material beings and by epistemological commitments that look to science to provide the ultimate truth about the world. It is much too crude to say that we are facing here the shadow of Logical Positivism as an epistemological research program. However, it is fair to say that the debate about the concept of human action takes place in a world (p.66) where scientific naturalism is the default position in philosophy. Certainly, this default position is often the motivating force behind outright disdain for any form of dualism as a solution to the mind–body problem. Consequently, we should not be surprised if the whole idea of divine action looks like a lost cause to many theologians trying to make their case in the world of recent analytic philosophy. In this context, it can be a useful intellectual strategy to confound the critic by resorting to talk of deliberately committing a category mistake. In more traditional terms, we can make the same point by deploying the rhetoric of paradox. Tertullian played this card brilliantly in his response to those who in his day found the claims about divine action advanced in the Gospel as ridiculous nonsense. In the twentieth century this move was deliberately embraced with gusto in his own inimitable way by Karl Barth and his early disciples.32 We usually think that resort to paradox is a sign of weakness; those who use paradoxes are often, in fact, in a position of strength. In general people do not utter absurdities; so when they do it looks as if they may be something important. When the critic points out the absurdity or the paradox, they can look stupid precisely because all they are doing is repeating what everybody knows. Paradoxes are paradoxes. In Tertullian’s case the issue was in the neighborhood of our current inquiry. Marcion had objected to the whole idea of the incarnation on the grounds that it was both impossible and shameful for Christ to be born of the flesh. In response to the first objection, Tertullian insisted on the generalization that “nothing is impossible for God except what he does not wish to do.” As to the second he is even more dramatic: Page 17 of 22

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy Take this away, too, Marcion, or rather these: for what is more worthy of God, more shameful, to be born or to die?…answer me this, you butcher of truth. Was not God truly crucified? And as he was really crucified, did he not really die? And as he really died, did he not really rise from the dead?… Is our whole faith false?…Spare what is the one hope of the world. Why do you destroy an indignity that is necessary to our faith? What is unworthy of God is what will do for me…the Son of God was born; because it is shameful, I am not ashamed: and the Son of God died; just because it is absurd, it is believed; and he was buried and rose again; it is certain, because it is impossible.33 (p.67) The deployment of paradox in the teeth of philosophical claims about the impossibility of divine action is not accidental. The stronger the assertion of the paradox is, the more unnerving the effect. As Bernard Williams perceptively notes with reference to the case of Tertullian: He not only prevents the critics answering, but makes them feel in some mysterious way he is in a better position than they are; he is rather like a normally well-dressed man who appears at a function in a black tie and tails: the others present can’t mention it to him, they can’t overlook him, and they feel uneasy about their own turn-out. Or, again, he is something like a man who firmly closes a door in one’s face: not only preventing one from going on, but making one feel one has no right to.34 The man who closes the door needs to show that he has ownership of the property. In the next chapter I shall step back and provide a wider historical narrative of the debate as a whole. I will then be in a position to make my initial mortgage payments on the household of agency and action. My goal in this chapter has been to examine the case against the concept of divine action. This was taken for granted by those who sought to preserve the idea of divine action after they had given up on the particularities of special divine action. They did not anticipate, nor in fact, address the challenges to divine action which emerged out of early analytic philosophy. Moreover, insofar as there were more general problems with divine action, this initially arose in attempts to secure other desiderata. Thus, as we have seen in the case of Crombie, it emerged in his proposals to secure both the informative character of theological statements and a preliminary sketch of their justification in the case of Christianity. This became the backcloth for examining a raft of objections to divine action, which, if any of them succeeded, would have become a new disproof for the existence of God.

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy All these objections, however, turned out to be unpersuasive. They signify an atmosphere in which theologians were operating in a world which had become increasingly hostile to the claims of Christianity. The theologians wanted to embark on a serious journey to God, but as soon as they arrived at the desk in the airport their baggage was embargoed and put through multiple checks. When they presented their tickets, they were told that all they had was their itinerary; what they needed was a real ticket and a confirmation number. By this stage, they were becoming more and more defensive. Some started resorting to miracles; and others took to speaking in strange tongues. The wise among them began to wonder if the computers at the arrival desk had been infected with a virus that blocked their original reservation. Notes:

(1) This was the fundamental strategy adopted by Antony Flew both in early editions of God and Philosophy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966), and in God, Freedom, and Immortality: A Critical Analysis (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Press, 1984). (2) Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, eds., New Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Macmillan, 1955); Basil Mitchell, ed., Faith and Logic (Boston: Beacon, 1957). For a fine overview of developments see James F. Harris, Analytic Philosophy of Religion (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), chap. 2. (3) Crombie took two shots at resolving the matters that faced the theologian in the 1950s: “(ii) Arising from the University Discussion,” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Flew and MacIntyre, 109–30; and “The Possibility of Theological Statements,” in Faith and Logic, ed. Mitchell, 31–83. (4) Crombie, “(ii) Arising from the University Discussion,” 111. (5) Ibid. (6) Ibid., 116.a labyrinthine process of intellectual twisting and turningNew Essays in Philosophical Theology (7) Crombie, “(ii) Arising from the University Discussion,”, 122. (8) Ibid. (9) Ibid., 124.

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy (10) Crombie proceeds to examine how far theological statements thus understood are subject to falsification and verification. On the former, he is clear that certain states of affairs would count decisively against theological statements: “suffering which was utterly, eternally, and irredeemably pointless.” Ibid., 124. On verification, he distinguished between two senses: first, the sense (a logical stipulation) in which there must not exist a rule of language which precludes testing the statement; and, second, the sense (a communication stipulation) in which for a person to fully understand a statement that person must know what a test of it would be like. Theological statements can satisfy the first; there is prima facie incompatibility between the love of God and pain and suffering. On the second, one can satisfy the condition inside the parabolic discourse, but not if we step outside it. Thus within the parable of the Prodigal Son we know that whenever we come to ourselves and return to God, he will come to meet us. It will encourage us to return and make us alert to the signs of the divine presence, “but it will not lead us to presume to an understanding of the mind and heart of God. In talking we remain within the parable, and so our statements communicate; we do not know how the parable applies, but we believe it does apply, and that one day we shall see how.” Ibid., 127. (11) Ibid., 128. (12) Crombie does not in the essay under review give a detailed account of the extra-parental nurse (Christian practice) that accompanies the work of the logical mother and father of theological statements. I have omitted it here because it is not germane to the issue before us, namely, the coherence of discourse about divine action. He does provide an exceptionally illuminating account of the place of Christian practice in coming to understand the meaning of claims about divine action in grace in “The Possibility of Theological Statements,” 74–7. I shall pick these insights up later in this volume. (13) On the precise issues related to the falsification debate, it is clear that Crombie has more than adequately addressed Flew’s challenge. If falsification is a sufficient condition of cognitive discourse, then it can readily be met. Basil Mitchell takes a similar line in his response to Flew. See New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Flew and MacIntyre, 103–5. I extend this line of argument in An Introduction to Philosophy of Religion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985). (14) It is interesting that Paul Tillich found himself in great sympathy with the position of Crombie. See Ronald Hepburn, “Demythologizing and the Problem of Validity,” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Flew and MacIntyre, 239. (15) Neil A. Manson, “God as Incorporeal Person,” Appraisal 6 (2006): 1–6.

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy (16) For the moment I shall not dwell on how this shift of terminology from agent to person might alter the way the debate is framed. I shall state the issues in terms of agency rather than person. (17) John Gaskin, “Guest Article,” Philosophical Writings 13 (Spring 2003). (18) P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959). (19) Terence Penelhum, Survival and Disembodied Existence (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 68. (20) Ibid., 108. (21) Antony Flew, “Is There a Case for Disembodied Survival?” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 66 (1972): 140–1. (22) Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 119. (23) Psalm 94:4. (24) William P. Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity (25) The most radical response to this worry is that provided by Grace Jantzen in her God’s World, God’s Body (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1984), where she argues for the idea of the world as God’s body. (26) Daniel Dennett, “Current Issues in the Philosophy of Mind,” in Recent Work in Philosophy, ed. Kenneth G. Lucey and Tibor R. Machon (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983), 157. (27) For a lengthy defense of dualism that takes up the relevance of it for our concept of the divine, see Charles Taliaferro, Consciousness and the Mind of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Compare Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). For an important earlier essay, see J. R. Lucas, “The Soul,” in Faith and Logic, ed. Mitchell, 149– 76. (28) I shall take up this topic as it is developed in a popular version of Thomism in Chapter 8. (29) It was introduced famously by Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949), chap. 1. (30) Crombie, “The Possibility of Theological Statements,” 60. Page 21 of 22

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Divine Action and the Challenges of Early Analytic Philosophy (31) Ibid., 61. For a discussion of this aspect of Crombie’s strategy see Philip Bashor and Arifa Farid, “Deliberate Commission of a Category Mistake: Crombie vs. Ryle,” Philosophy of Religion 21 (1987): 39–46. (32) Consider the comment of A. N. Prior: “The idea that nonsense may be given sense by an act of sheer omnipotence is repeated again and again in his Prolegomena to Church Dogmatics. On this miracle, for him, the very possibility of a science of theology depends. And on this miracle alone, Barth refuses explicitly and absolutely to try and justify his ‘nonsense’ by criticizing or qualifying or revising the laws of thought (like Hegel; and Modernist; and perhaps even Kant, to whom Barth is obviously close). Nor, however, does he consider it any part of his business to affirm or accept their validity. The Miracle is his one standing-ground.” See his “Can Religion be Discussed?,” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Flew and MacIntyre, 7 n.8. Emphasis as in the original. (33) Bernard Williams, “Tertullian’s Paradox,” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Flew and MacIntyre, 189–90. (34) Ibid., 190.

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Reviewing the Terrain

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I: Exploring and Evaluating the Debate William J. Abraham

Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780198786504 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786504.001.0001

Reviewing the Terrain Finding Blood for Ghosts William J. Abraham

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198786504.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords 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. Keywords:   Maurice Wiles, subject–predicate sentences, history of philosophy, analytic theology, divine action

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Reviewing the Terrain The discussion of divine action that I have reviewed thus far has been conducted against a backcloth of disparate interests and concerns. Given that they occupy two different fields, theology and philosophy, it is easy to lose one’s bearings and thus end up with a set of unrelated, disconnected queries. One way to avoid these pitfalls is to stand back and develop a richer narrative of developments within theology and philosophy. At first glance it looks as if we have two different streams that run parallel to each other. In reality the streams spill over into each other at crucial points for they share a similar vision of the relation between theology and philosophy. Moreover, the two streams approach the debate about divine action with common assumptions even though those assumptions are played out in different ways. By providing a richer narrative of the history we can achieve several goals simultaneously. We can get a fresh sense of what the problems were when the debate began, and how they were transposed over the course of a generation. In particular we can see how the debate about divine action played second fiddle to the debate about the justification of religious belief. Towards the end of this chapter I shall draw attention to the ways in which the impasse on divine action mirrors structurally an impasse on the justification of religious belief. Just as the discussion about justification gets locked into a debate about mere theism and a concomitant, narrow vision of justification, so too the discussion about divine action gets locked into a discussion about mere divine action and a concomitant, narrow concept of action. The debate began when a network of prominent biblical scholars overreached in the claims about the mighty acts of God. They equivocated when it came to the specific claims they advanced. In the church they were enthusiastic, say, about God delivering the Israelites from Egypt; in the study under pressure from historical investigation they talked about entirely naturalistic and human events which omitted any robust mention of divine action. So people began to wonder: “What did God really do in the Exodus event?” For (p.69) the biblical scholar it was easy to take this as an exegetical question about how best to understand the text of Exodus and its subsequent appropriation in the Bible. For those in the Biblical Theology Movement it was also a theological issue because they were proposing both a descriptive analysis of what theology was in the Bible and a prescriptive proposal as to how Christian theology should proceed today. They were deeply unhappy with the state of theology more generally. It was the latter prescriptive proposal that naturally caught the attention of theologians in the Protestant tradition. On the one hand, as Protestants they held in some sense to the authority of Scripture, so they were committed to receiving help from their colleagues in Biblical Studies. On the other hand, as theologians they were sensitive to the call for radical reform of theology; given their sense of theology as a normative discipline committed to speaking responsibly about God today, they could not ignore what their colleagues in Biblical Studies were saying.

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Reviewing the Terrain The problem was at one level identified as one of equivocation. It was quickly reidentified as a problem on how to think about direct divine action in the world, as represented by God’s splitting the waters of the Red Sea. The biblical theologians could, however, have responded readily to this challenge. They could have replied that in fact in this case God worked providentially by acting in, with, and through the forces of nature to clear a path for the Israelites. Prima facie, this was surely a serious possibility. One simply took the claim about the relevant divine action to be similar to the claim that God worked in, with, and through the agents involved in the life of Joseph to save his people and thus uphold his covenant promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The idea of providence—in this instance, providence without divine intervention—is a commonplace in the history of theology; it was lying there to hand; but somehow it was idling. A further reason why the doctrine of providence did not get deployed was because the example of the Exodus triggered reflection on a much wider list of divine acts. Thus it raised questions about how to think of divine speaking, say, to prophets. Wright and others vehemently rejected any idea of “propositional” revelation, a move that threatened to undermine the whole idea of the authority of Scripture. Divine speaking was clearly present in the texts related to the Exodus. In fact the whole narrative of the Exodus begins with the call of Moses, the appointment of Aaron as his agent, and a host of verbal instructions from God as to what to do to leave Egypt. More importantly, it brought to mind a whole series of acts of God that were deemed to be extremely problematic. Thus for Langdon Gilkey the list included the six days of creation, the historical fall in Eden, Noah’s flood, Abraham’s unexpected child, the many divine visitations, the words and directions to the patriarchs, the plagues visited on the Egyptians, the pillar of fire, the strategic and logistical help in the conquest, and so on. Clearly these acts cannot be readily subsumed under a doctrine of general providence.

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Reviewing the Terrain (p.70) At the same time that Gilkey was raising a red flag about what to do conceptually about these acts, similar questions were cropping up around the activity of God associated with Christ. In their most acute form these were pressed home by the distinguished New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann. Given the privileging of German theology in the United States, these could not be ignored. In this instance the list of troublesome acts included the virgin birth, the nature of miracles, the voices and the dove at the baptism, exorcism, the transfiguration, the resurrection, the ascension, and the incarnation of the Son of God in history. It is highly likely that many in the Biblical Theology Movement subscribed to the doctrines of the incarnation and to a robust vision of the resurrection of Christ. If they did so, it is clear that deploying a doctrine of providence where God works in, with, and through ordinary events will not cover most if not all of these divine actions. These kinds of divine actions were “miraculous” in character; they involved much more divine involvement in nature and history. Thus it was natural to bring them together in a set called “special divine action” and the challenge for theology in the wake of Gilkey was what to do with these actions. It was as if Gilkey woke up one day with a cold, sniffing our problems in claims about the Exodus event. This quickly developed into a bad case of pneumonia, where he began coughing at the mere mention of divine action. The developing medical crisis called for immediate attention. By this point nobody really cared what the Biblical Theology Movement had to say, about, for example, divine action in Christ; their medicine chest was empty. What they believed about divine action in Christ could be left for future historians of theology to sort out at their leisure.

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Reviewing the Terrain Gilkey was a professor at the Divinity School in the University of Chicago which has long been interested in philosophical issues related to theology. Schubert Ogden was a graduate student there who did his doctoral dissertation on Bultmann but who came equipped with a keen interest in metaphysics. Hence it was natural for him to turn to the resources available in philosophy to solve “the problem of divine action.” However, given his positive vision of the constructive relation between theology and philosophy, he was also beginning to take note of the new developments in analytic philosophy. Hence he initially argued that religious language had its own logic or function. Religious language arises in boundary situations where we ask fundamental questions about why there is a universe, whether we should be moral, and whether we can have a meaningful life in the face of finitude and death. Religious language arises in order to provide reassurance. It seeks to re-assure, to assure again, when we lose confidence. It does so by the re-presentation of a confidence already somehow present. Religious assertions are not so much the cause of our general confidence as its effect. When we lose confidence in the meaning of our existence, what is needed is a re-presentation of the original grounds of our confidence, of that original faith which evoked our initial confidence. The (p.71) primary function of the word “God” is to provide a designation for whatever it is about the experienced whole of existence that calls forth and justifies our original and inescapable trust.1 The claim that “God acted in Christ” means, in turn, that Jesus, as attested in the apostolic witness, is the decisive re-presentation of God in the sense that through him the meaning of God for us is made fully explicit. We are confronted with the truth which is implicit in our basic confidence in the significance of our daily existence. Ogden can get to this because he has already in hand a certain account of the concept of action. He is working analogically off the claim that “acts” means, not what we take it to mean in everyday discourse, but something supposedly much deeper. For an agent to act is for that agent to constitute itself, to respond to its world, and to decide its own inner being. There is a kind of originating act behind or beneath our everyday acts that is the model for divine action. Indeed to take our everyday acts as the model for divine action would be a serious category mistake and would lead us to ask the wrong kind of questions about divine action. To look for explanations of the sort that show up in ordinary cases would be to take the wrong kind of stance towards them. [T]he standpoint from which such claims [about divine action] are made is not that of an observer interested in explaining things, whether scientifically or personally, but that of the participant interested in leading his or her own unique life as a person together with others in relation to the whole.2

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Reviewing the Terrain Ogden was very sure that he was doing justice both to a proper understanding of human action and to action as applied analogically to God.3 If one were to take first-order human acts as the model on which to look at divine action, then one had missed the real meaning of such discourse because one had ignored that the fact that our ordinary acts are the manifestation of a deeper act in which the self is constituted. Equally, when we read discourse about divine action in Scripture and tradition, we have already entered the hermeneutical circle. We have already deployed implicitly an account of how such (p.72) language functions. One is already bringing a general theory of divine action discourse to bear on the texts rather than developing one justified by the texts. There is, then, no neutral ground here on which to stand. One is already committed, first, to an account of the meaning of theological discourse as found in Scripture and tradition; second, to an account of how one should understand action discourse; and third, to a certain reading of action discourse as predicated of God. What this means, in effect, is that in any effort to challenge Ogden there really is no successful way to appeal to ordinary language. First, for Ogden, our ordinary language about action has to be taken as involving a deeper continuous act of self-constitution. This is the concept of action, he insisted, we should rely on in understanding discourse about divine action. Second, when we interpret divine action in Christianity we are already committed to some theory as to how this language works and whether it should be taken as offering, say, personal explanation, or whether it should be seen as operating existentially to re-present the ultimate grounds for our assurance of the meaning of life in the face of finitude and death. Ogden, in reality, had worked out a vision of divine action that sought to achieve reflective equilibrium between these two domains of inquiry, between ordinary language philosophy and existentialist inquiry. The whole operation involved an interpretation of human and divine action that was governed by metaphysical and epistemological assumptions. The former—the metaphysical—reflected Ogden’s commitment both to existentialism and to Process philosophy. The latter—the epistemological—reflected his conviction that theology could only appeal to considerations that were universally available, so there could be no appeal to special divine revelation. It also reflected his conviction that special acts of God represented a “mythological” mind-set that was incompatible with the methods and results of science and history. It was not so much that they were ruled out a priori but that they were simply no longer plausible as real explanations.4 They got in the way of better explanations supplied by historians and scientists.

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Reviewing the Terrain Not everyone was prepared to accept that an analysis of our ordinary concept of action as applied to human action should be seen as somehow reflecting a deeper concept of action as supplied by existentialism. Maurice (p.73) Wiles, for example, agreed that we now had better explanations for events in nature and history that were originally understood in terms of divine action. The gaps which had been filled in by divine action had been replaced by scientific and historical explanations which made appeal to divine action redundant. Yet Wiles continued to interpret divine action on analogy with ordinary ways of thinking about personal action. He was deeply skeptical of the kind of discourse about action deployed by Ogden. It was simply not clear that “act” should be understood in the way it had been worked out by the early Heidegger as mediated through Bultmann. Equally, Wiles showed little interest in the metaphysical proposals worked out within Process philosophy. On Wiles’ view, Ogden has left the world of ordinary language and gone off into his own world with its own logic and metaphysics. He has taken his marbles and gone home; he can no longer play the game. In this respect Wiles reflected the sensibility of analytic philosophers in Britain in the middle of the twentieth century. Wiles began his career as an Evangelical with a deep interest in biblical studies. He then became one of the leading patristic scholars of his generation, providing exceptionally illuminating accounts of the development of doctrine in the great formative period of Christian theology. In time, he became convinced that early Christian doctrine was worked out within a conceptual framework which had become obsolete in the modern period. Here his sympathies were with the great Liberal Protestant experiment initiated by Frederick Schleiermacher. He switched to work in systematic theology in the final phase of his illustrious career at Oxford.5 In that work he showed the kind of extreme caution (to put the matter mildly) towards existentialism and Process philosophy that prevailed in philosophical circles at Oxford and in Britain more generally.6 He also was much more prepared than Ogden was to allow for a place for the appeal to religious experience that is characteristic, if not unique, to Christianity; there was caution about appealing to some kind of universal human experience.

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Reviewing the Terrain We might say the following at this stage about the debate about divine action within theology. First, it began with worries about biblical material on (p.74) divine action as interpreted by biblical scholars. Second, it focused on an isolated class of divine action identified as “special divine action.” Commitment to this kind of special action was considered to be no longer credible for various reasons, but most especially because it had been replaced by better scientific and historical explanations. Third, those involved in the debate were convinced that one could still speak of general divine action. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the concept of divine action. Fourth, the loss of special divine action for whatever reason was not fatal for Christian theology; it simply called for a fresh interpretation of Christianity that would be more credible to the modern world. Fifth, the debate within theology as it developed had to come to terms with the new horizons of analytic theology; indeed it was thought possible to draw on the initial insights of analytic philosophy to fix the problem thrown up by special divine action. Generally speaking, the assumption in play here was that there could still be a harmonious and constructive relationship between theology and philosophy. The debate about divine action in analytic philosophy arose at a point where the relationship between philosophy and theology had broken down. The situation was radically different in three respects. First, the theologians and philosophers involved did not share the intellectual worries about “special divine action” that we have seen among revisionist theologians like Ogden and Wiles. They were mostly Christians committed to a traditional account of the Christian faith, as summed up in the Apostles’ Creed. Intuitively they were convinced that special divine action mattered, but that was not the focus of their attention. Second, they were not particularly interested in the Biblical Theology Movement and the noisy background music in the United States represented in disputes between Fundamentalists, Barthians, and Liberals. They took Scripture very seriously, but were not really interested in debates about Biblical Theology and its problems. Third, they really had their backs to the wall in that they were something of a minority voice within the analytic philosophy of the period. They were living at a time when philosophers genuinely believed that theology was a pseudo-subject.

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Reviewing the Terrain We can track the development behind this in terms of a much longer story with three phases. In the first phase theologians and philosophers were agreed that there were good arguments for the existence of God and for the identity of special revelation. The classical arguments represented by the ontological, cosmological, and teleological proofs for the existence of God secured belief in God; miracles secured special revelation. In this arena there was no particular problem with the concept of divine action; and miracles required commitment to special divine action in the world. These arguments were thought to have been systematically undermined by David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Hence this concept of the relationship between theology and philosophy was systematically destabilized. If that relationship was to continue (p.75) as a positive one, a new way of thinking through the relation between philosophy and theology had to be constructed.7 In the second phase, philosophers provided an initial metaphysical vision as represented by Idealism which took the place of the older arguments for the existence of God.8 Idealists were interested in answering very general questions about the nature of things. The philosopher was a kind of conspicuously wise seer who went beyond the appearances to explore ultimate reality. What they saw was a matter of considerable dispute. Many insisted that ultimate reality was an impersonal Absolute. In this case there was real conflict between Idealism and theology.9 If the referent for ultimate reality was cast in terms of, say, “Absolute Spirit” or “Mind,” that is, with notions more amenable to personalistic description, then life was a lot easier for the theologian. “Absolute Spirit” was seen as a placeholder for God; theologians filled out the description of the Absolute in terms of the material given in special revelation. This cozy relationship between philosophy and theology was shattered with the arrival of Logical Positivism at the beginning of the third phase of our story on the relation between philosophy and theology. Logical Positivists challenged the whole enterprise of metaphysics, seeing it as an intellectual scandal which needed to be rooted out and destroyed by showing that the kinds of claims represented by Idealism were not true or false but uninformative. They were not verifiable by sense experience, thus they were not cognitively meaningful. The most influential form of this critique was provided by A. J. Ayer in his Language, Truth and Logic.10 For him a statement to be meaningful must be either analytic (true by definition) or empirical (verifiable in sense experience). The first class included the propositions of logic and mathematics, together with definitions; the second class consisted of scientific hypotheses and the statements of common sense. The former were empty of content and said nothing about the world; they recorded our use of certain symbols. The second class alone imparted information. Since the propositions of metaphysics, ethics, and theology fell into neither of these two classes, they were (p.76) pseudopropositions. They did not have cognitive meaning; they were neither true nor false; they could not be informative.11 Page 9 of 25

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Reviewing the Terrain Given the previous relationship between theology and philosophy, this challenge could not be ignored, at least not in England where it was aggressively reiterated. When Antony Flew presented his famous little parable on falsification,12 he believed that, rather than supporting the Positivist attack on religious discourse, he was actually destroying the Positivist approach to the question of cognitive meaning.13 He held that the Positivist position was much too narrow and dogmatic; the challenge to the cognitive status of religious language needed to be stated in such a way as to allow theologians and philosophers who were Christians to meet it. Hence he shifted the challenge to that of falsification. It is clear that not many understood Flew’s intentions; his position was taken as a restatement rather than a repudiation of the Positivist position. The ensuing debate took on the challenge in terms of both verifiability and falsifiability. When the issue is taken up in terms of verifiability, then it immediately also becomes a question about how to justify theological claims. Verification is a species of justification. If one offered a proposal that sought to show how theological claims could be verified, ipso facto one was showing how they might be justified; at the very least, one was beginning to develop a case for the truth of Christianity.14 Even when the issue was cast as one of falsifiability, the response readily moved forward to begin (p.77) the work of showing why one should believe. It was not enough to establish that theological statements could be true or false; one wanted to explain why one thought they were true. This was exactly what was happening in the work of Ian Crombie and others in the informal group at Oxford known as “The Metaphysicals.”15 In responding to Flew, Crombie and his colleagues were beginning a concerted effort to develop a case for Christianity on the basis of various features of human experience and divine revelation. In Crombie’s case, the argument mirrored the two-step procedure that had been in play in the earlier phases of the relationship between theology and philosophy. One first sought an explanation for the sense of contingency that had originally been the ground for the cosmological argument. Indeed, “God” became the placeholder for whatever it was that would explain the sense of contingency. Once this was secured, one then turned to divine revelation in Scripture and in Christ to fill out the rather inchoate description (First Cause, Necessary Being, and the like) with which one started.

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Reviewing the Terrain It was in the process of pursuing this project that Crombie inadvertently stumbled into a nest of problems about divine agency and divine action that he neatly captured in terms of difficulties about both the subject and predicate of sentences about divine action. Take the simple sentence, “God created the world.” In the case of the subject one wanted to know the referent for “God”; and in the case of the predicate, “created the world,” one wanted to know how to interpret “create” as applied to a transcendent reality. Crombie got caught between a rock and a hard place. In working on the referent he ended up either appealing to a transcendent reality of which we knew nothing; or he moved towards thinking of God as “First Cause” or “Creator” which now passed the question on to the problem of the predicates. But in answer to that question—the question of how to understand the action predicates attribute to God—he appealed to the idea of special divine revelation, a notion that clearly presupposes rather than unpacks the concept of divine action. In reading Crombie carefully, one is tempted to offer him help by suggesting that we might well get a grip on the concept of agency and action by recourse to analogy with human agency and action. Surely, it might be said, you need the idea of “revelation” as applied to human agents to provide some idea of what you mean by “revelation” as predicated of God. Crombie, however, for the most part steered away from this suggestion. He came close to this line of thinking in his remarks on the notion of God as “Infinite Spirit.” He considered the possibility that the word “spirit” comes to have (p.78) specific meaning for us by being connected with particular characteristics of, or events, in human beings. We distinguish ‘spirit’ from ‘influenza’ by showing to which aspects of men these words severally refer. ‘Spirit’ derives from ‘spiritual’ and ‘spiritual’ acquires specific meaning by correlation with thinking and other activities which only occur in our experience, as activities of human beings.16 However, he rejected this whole line of thinking precisely because it will lead one to think of “spirit” as a distinct kind of being when it really signifies an aspect of the activities of human beings on a par with “digestion” or “smiles” or “bad temper” rather than an abstract noun like “man.” Thus he bit the bullet and insisted that we go ahead and use the notion of God, and do so knowing that this is a category mistake deliberately committed.

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Reviewing the Terrain When other analytic philosophers turned their attention to the logic of divine action discourse, they were not prepared to engage in category-transgression. They assumed that divine action discourse must be analogous to human action discourse and proceeded to show that the necessary conditions for action discourse ruled out the application of such language to God. The idea of divine action really was in the end incoherent, or it depended on possibilities that could not be attributed to an incorporeal agent. Action predicates can only be learned if they are used of agents with bodies; proper use of the language of action required that the agent who is the subject of action predicates must have a body if the agent is to be identified; action predicates depend upon knowledge predicates and knowledge in turn requires that there be causal interaction with the world through the bodily senses; the whole idea of incorporeal action presupposes a discredited notion of Cartesian dualism that was no longer helpful in understanding human agents. The arguments against the very idea of divine action were manifold and persuasive to many. The cost of committing a category mistake was just too high; doing so deliberately was not an option. In their context most of these arguments were enshrined in an intellectual and philosophical culture that deployed them as a means of showing that theological statements were false. While cast in the form of the analysis of the concept of divine action, they were also intended to discredit belief in divine action. If they worked, they constituted a new disproof of the existence of God.17 They belonged in debates about the justification of religious belief as (p.79) much as they belonged in the work of linguistic analysis. They were ground level moves in a revolution within recent analytic philosophy of religion in which the debate about the justification of religious belief took center stage. The analytic work of sorting out how to understand discourse about divine action was subordinate to the more interesting and more exciting challenge of the epistemology of religious belief. It was not that work on divine action ceased; it simply tended to get a hearing insofar as proposals on divine action either hindered or helped in the debate about justification and warrant. Even where divine action became the primary focus of attention, the primary worry was that of credibility. The exceptions proved the rule at this point.18

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Reviewing the Terrain I can secure my main point that divine action was a secondary issue by looking at the follow-up to the epistemic suggestions of Crombie. These are clearly visible in the pioneering work on the justification of religious belief by Basil Mitchell in The Justification of Religious Belief, a work that emerged out of his deep involvement in “The Metaphysicals.”19 Crombie had implicitly begun to develop a cumulative case argument for belief in God based on the experiences of contingency, moral experience, and the beauty and order of nature.20 Mitchell, representing a long trajectory in epistemology within the Anglican tradition, made explicit what was implicit and underdeveloped in Crombie. En route to this Mitchell disposed of the worries that had cropped up on divine action. He treated the arguments against divine agency as an effort to disprove the existence of God. He agreed that divine agency (p.80) had to be understood on the analogy of human agency, but marshaled a brief set of arguments that rebutted the claim that bodies are constitutive of human action. The question is whether our concept of action is such as to render intelligible all talk of incorporeal agency. It is worth noting, to begin with, that the language in which we describe actions is logically distinct from that in which we describe physical movements. It presupposes a conscious agent with intentions and purposes which he attempts to realize in his environment as he sees it. Actions may be done through the agency of others, and events which are not physical, such as concentrating and deciding, may be regarded as actions. Moreover, there is a good deal of research into telekinesis, the alleged power to alter events such as the fall of a dice by simply ‘willing’. Whether or not telekinesis actually occurs, it does not seem difficult to specify the conditions under which we should be prepared to admit its occurrence. If the dice were to fall with a certain number upwards whenever a particular individual was asked to bring it about and not otherwise, we should conclude that he had the power to cause physical changes without bodily movement. Bodily movement on the part of the agent is normally a reliable guide as to whether an occurrence is an action or not, and, if so, whose; but we could, in principle, settle both questions without recourse to this criterion, if the other indications were clear enough.21 Mitchell went on to clarify what criteria are to be applied to identify divine action. What are these [indications of action]? A combination of the following: (i) The unlikelihood of the event’s occurrence apart from the intervention of some agent. (ii) The event contributing to some purpose. (iii) The agreement of that purpose with the independently known character and purposes of the putative agent.22

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Reviewing the Terrain Prima facie, this looks very much like an account of the criteria which govern our use of “action” in contrast to “occurrence.” However, this is misleading. If applied rigorously it would not cover such divine activity as “creation” or “sustaining the universe.” What other cases of divine action it might fit would require careful attention to particular specifications of divine action. Moreover, Mitchell’s proposal already presupposes access to a divine revelation as a means whereby we develop an account of the character and purposes of God. It is more an account of the signs of divine action and a suggestion as to how to support a case for the presence of divine action in history and the world than an account of the meaning of divine action as predicated of God. Better stated, it is a signal as to how to provide a justification for a claim that God had intervened in the world and in history.23 The context is that of the epistemology of religious belief. (p. 81) Negatively, Mitchell is dismantling a disproof of the existence of God on the grounds that theism is logically inconsistent when it presupposes the possibility of incorporeal action. Against the claim of incoherence, he cites various counterexamples where embodiment is, arguably, not essential to action. Positively, he is indicating how certain kinds of claims about divine action—those that involve divine “intervention”—may be justified as worthy of rational belief. Mitchell’s project as a whole made an interesting assumption about how the debate about the justification should proceed. Reflection on this assumption will, I suggest, help us see what has also been emerging in the review of the debate about divine action. At its core Mitchell’s strategy involved the claim that there was a common measure or standard to which good arguments must conform.24 His unique contribution to the debate on justification has not received the attention it deserves, in that it has been understandably overshadowed by the extraordinary body of literature which has since appeared on the epistemology of religious belief. Mitchell proposed that arguments for and against “traditional Christian theism” should be seen as similar to the kind of arguments that show up in exegetical and historical studies. They take the form of informal cumulative case arguments and are not much the worse for that. Given that cumulative case arguments represent a common measure that independently have secure epistemic status, they provide, if genuine, appropriate justification for Christian theism. If we were to identify the relevant criteria in play here we might cite something like the following: internal consistency, accuracy, simplicity, the epistemic weight of each element in the cumulative case, explanatory power compared to rival explanations, scope, fruitfulness, and mutual reinforcement. There is no algorithm here, no form of strict deductive or inductive argument, and no way of avoiding the use of good judgment.25 Yet there is also no special pleading in that the form of argument deployed is not confined to debates between theists, atheists, and agnostics; it represents a common measure in epistemology according to which one can adjudicate the truth or falsehood of theological claims. Page 14 of 25

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Reviewing the Terrain (p.82) Mitchell’s strategy here is the instantiation of a more general strategy which shows up regularly in debates about the viability of theological claims. That general strategy involves essentially three steps. First, work out a general concept of justification, warrant, knowledge, or some other favored epistemic desideratum. Second, bring to the table the favored concept of theism that is up for adjudication. Third, evaluate its performance according to the criteria for justification, warrant, and the like. The fruit of this standard strategy in the history of recent philosophy of religion (not to speak of its earlier instantiations) has been astonishing. In Mitchell’s case he resurrected a form of argument in everyday life, in theology, and in philosophy, that has too often been dismissed as wistful whistling in the dark. Moreover, Mitchell rightly noted that what really interests the serious believer is not some bare-bones version of theism identified as mere theism but the much more substantial form of theism which in his case he named “traditional Christian theism.” We should question this whole way of thinking about justification, warrant, and the like, as applied to the adjudication of theistic proposals. I do so for at least three reasons.26 First, we should think more deeply about the object of our inquiries when it comes to the epistemology of theology. Second, we should make sure that we have taken into consideration the principle of epistemic fit, that is, that the way we seek to determine the truth or falsehood of theistic claims should fit the actual claims on offer. Third, it is far from clear anymore that we have any agreed account of justification, warrant, knowledge, and the like, that we can take for granted as secure in its own right. To put these points in other words, I suggest an alternative strategy, expressed in terms of the epistemic desideratum of “justification.” Before embarking on the search for justification, it is crucial to have a logically prior sense of what precise claims we are seeking to justify. Equally, we need some sense of the appropriate way to begin adjudicating them, so that any method we use actually fits the subject matter under review. Finally, we should reckon with the radical possibility that there is no single concept of, say, “justification” available in the first place.27

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Reviewing the Terrain Recent philosophy of religion has operated too often as a sophisticated game in which the philosophers simply pick up whatever referee’s uniform is lying around in the dressing room, gallop onto the field without bothering to identify what rules should be followed, and help themselves uncritically to a common scoreboard. Thus we have a standard topic (“theism”), standard (p.83) alternatives (“naturalism” and “otherism”28), and a standard strategy (figure out in advance of looking at what is on offer what constitutes a good argument [internal coherence, simplicity, explanatory power, coherence with science and history, and the like], and then measure any argument that shows up by these criteria). The debate has become an impersonal spectator sport in which the referee is supposed to stand aloof from the outcome; and where any kind of engagement would be considered fatal for a fair adjudication. Moreover, the whole debate has been conducted back to front. Crucial considerations are set aside and the outcome resolved without sufficient attention to the real live options that should concern us. As a result it has descended into an exercise in the evaluation of this or that argument for or against theism and naturalism. Given the stalemate that has emerged, it is no surprise that we have reached an impasse where the returns on this research agenda have become thinner and thinner. To use the language of Austin Farrer: we are dealing with bloodless ghosts; we need “to give ghosts the blood first, surmising that, until they have drunk it, they will not speak to us.”29 It should surprise no one at this point if the theologians have gone looking for blood transfusions in order to get on with their work.

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Reviewing the Terrain The theological worries that arise are worth identifying at this juncture. First, theologians believe that philosophers are insensitive to the complexity and historical development of theological proposals. They simply pluck their favored theological propositions from their context and inspect for truth or falsehood. Second, they are suspicious that the cool (if not cold-blooded) analytic style is inappropriate given the significance of theological claims for human existence. It is off tune to speak of God as if God were just one more object in the universe, to be inspected and described like the placement of a comma in a well-formed sentence. Third, they are unconvinced that theological issues can be captured by the kind of clarity and rigor that has been the hallmark of much recent analytic philosophy. There seems to be no space for essentially contested concepts or for concepts whose contours cannot be captured in terms of a list of necessary and sufficient conditions, or for arguments that cannot be delivered in a formal calculus. The kind of distinctions philosophers draw are well and fine, but it is an open question how far they can be carried over neatly to deal with issues in theology. Fourth, in some cases the theologians are convinced that the very concept of God privileged or developed by philosophers just is not the God of the tradition. It is a god invented to fit a prior philosophical agenda worked out to deal with atheistic critics, a god who looks very much like one more item in the universe, a god who is an idol rather than the true God (the transcendent (p.84) Creator of all that is). Fifth and finally, there is the suspicion that many Christian philosophers now in the field have their own theological commitments and are using philosophy as an apologetic weapon not just against atheists and agnostics but against any theology that does not fit their own not-so-hidden theological agenda. These are worries that need not be resolved here. The risk that the theologian takes if she walks away at this point, however, is that departure may well be premature. Exiting the debate about divine action may also be unwise for this reason. The question I posed above on the debates about the existence of God can also be raised about the discussion on divine agency and divine action. Have we reached a similar impasse in the discussion on divine action? If we have, then at the very least the theologian should wait and see what emerges.

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Reviewing the Terrain In the debate about divine action there has also been a standard strategy. Assume that there is a single closed concept of action as worked out in the case of human action which is then applied to a very generic idea of God and divine action; this matches the standard assumption in philosophy of religion that the subject matter under review is mere theism. The next step in the analysis of divine action is to measure the adequacy of the concept of divine action against that developed for human action and, if things become difficult, figure out a way to make the standard analysis fit the divine case by using such devices as parable, metaphor, analogy, or whatever. This matches the evaluation of minimalist theistic claims by measuring them according to the favored form of standard argument. The final step is to make sure that radical questions are not asked about the possibility of a single concept of action. This matches the readiness to allow our traditional concept of justification (or other epistemic desiderata) to remain intact. In both cases the fatal flaw is to leave the fundamental assumptions governing the whole debate secure and unexamined. The actual claims that really matter to the mature believer and the serious theologian are parked until the one big proposition (“God exists,” or “the concept of divine action is coherent”) has been settled. The hidden assumption here is that the favored single proposition is seen as a kind of primary proposition that stands alone as a bare postulate without which the whole edifice collapses. Knock these out—or secure these from objection—and the rest can be taken up another day at leisure. This is a wholly artificial way to proceed. Christian believers and theologians are not committed to some bare theism isolated for inspection. Likewise, they cannot pretend to enter the debate without a wide canon of divine action that is central to their commitments. More importantly, just as it is crucial to ask if there is a common measure to adjudicate the radically diverse assertions on offer, so it is critical to ask if there is a common measure for adjudicating the commitments in play about divine agency and divine action. (p.85) To be sure, these are controversial moves to make both in our thinking about the epistemology of theology and in our attempts to grapple with the idea of divine action. I am not arguing at this stage that acceptance of the first entails the acceptance of the second or vice versa. Maybe one could hold to the first and reject the second, and vice versa. All that I am suggesting at this point is that there may well be a structural similarity in the problems that have arisen on both fronts.

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Reviewing the Terrain My own initial intuition, however, is that there is a deep connection between the two in that the kind of theism that really matters to the theologian involves a rich narrative of the activity of God in creation, in Israel, in Jesus Christ, in our own lives, in the church, and in the future. This is not the kind of claim that can be picked up and adjudicated by taking each item and testing it seriatim, say, one a week, according to some common epistemic measure. We face here, moreover, a journey of assent to truth, a diachronic form of epistemic practice growth that is governed by spiritual development. Hence it may well be that our understanding of divine action may depend on our own engagement with divine reality. Crombie was reaching for this when he insisted that religious activity operated as a kind of extra-parental nurse who nurtured those who were seeking to make sense of and embrace claims about divine action. He left that aside in his first essay but picked it up in the second one. Consider, as an example, how we might grow in our apprehension of predicates like “love” as applied to God. This is how Crombie thinks things may go. First, we begin with the ordinary meaning of these predicates, and then explore how they function within the narrative and parables provided by Christ and Scripture. In everyday discourse, we know well how concepts like “love” and “anger” work. We then explore how these are enriched and corrected by the biblical material, taking the latter as a divinely authorized account of how they apply when predicated of God. By working off the parables, you do not get a literal account of God’s love, but you know that in following them you will not be misled about the underlying reality. Thus we come to see an analogy between divine and human love. We believe in the analogy, but we do not use the analogy to give a sense to, say, “love” as predicated of God. We do not, however, use analogy as an excuse for fending off or ignoring objections to the claims advanced about God. On the contrary, because the initial move is to start with the ordinary sense of these predicates, there is legitimate room for the critic to draw attention to states of affairs, like suffering, which genuinely pose a problem for the believer. The real issue here, however, is not suffering but irredeemably pointless suffering. Rather than running away from the tough cases, the believer needs to stay the course and grapple with the challenge. (p.86) In fact, coming to terms with suffering is an occasion for spiritual growth in understanding.

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Reviewing the Terrain [T]he Christian is committed to believing that there is no such thing [as irredeemably pointless suffering]. Because he must believe this, his faith will be continually tortured by what he sees around him, and in this process of torture his faith should be purified and his understanding of life deepened. In the process of testing faith against experience one is to grow in the understanding of each by the reaction of the one to the other. This is only possible because we know what the words in the predicates of theological statements mean, and this we know because we take these statements as human images of divine truths.30 Such growth in understanding will be enhanced by meditation on those doctrines and persons where there is a prima facie chance of deepening one’s apprehension of God’s action, namely, those related to the work of grace, to the presence of Christ, in our lives. Such meditation will initially involve reflection on ourselves and on others as human agents, starting from the bottom up, and probing where we might expand our understanding to encompass the possibility of what spiritual agency and presence might be. Having come to an enriched and reformed vision of human agents, we can then try to match the activities predicated of God with appropriate happenings and developments in, say, conversion, in the journey of faith, and in the lives of the saints. Correlatively, we must try to practice the Christian life, so that we may come to experience better what we are trying to understand. Hence there is a growth in understanding given to us in wrestling with the particularities of Christian doctrine that dovetails with the purification emerging from our wrestling with the challenge of suffering. In the former case, “it is in reading theology, not meta-theology, that one can come to understand how theological statements work, and thus to believe that they work.”31 We need not agree with all this to see that Crombie is on to something extremely important. He is groping towards an account of a dynamic process wherein the religious practice of meditation involves a growth in understanding which dovetails with experience in such a way that both understanding and apprehension of the truth of what is believed interrelate in a subtle dialectic. This is not the way we come to understand the meaning and truth about common everyday objects or the more refined objects of the natural world as determined in natural science. This is not a situation where we can stand back and take a stance as a mere spectator calculating how well an argument for or against mere theism stacks up against some agreed measure of success. We have to come to terms with the rich particularities of claims about divine action, especially divine action in grace, if we are to get access to the truth about God. If this is the case, then it will be disastrous to limit ourselves (p.87) at the outset because of unfounded strictures about the concept of action, or because we have rigged the game by limiting ourselves to a canon of divine action which eliminates the very divine actions that may turn out to be the life blood of theology. Page 20 of 25

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Reviewing the Terrain This is no excuse for intellectual laziness when it comes to thinking about divine action and the concepts we employ in our thinking. What I am probing once again is the proposition that we may have unwittingly developed a debilitating form of mental cramp from which we have to be liberated to make progress. The mental cramp, to repeat, is this: we have assumed that there is a single concept of action that can be gleaned by focusing on cases of human action; we have thought that by reflection on that concept we can understand divine action. If I am on the right track here then we can reconnect the work of the theologian and the philosopher in a mutually affirming manner. The theologian should be free to enter the discussion without being limited to the crumbs that fall from the philosopher’s table. Theologians have their own food, their own menus, and their own cutlery. The philosopher cannot ab initio dismiss them and insist that they eat only from the food cooked in the philosopher’s kitchen. This was what “The Metaphysicals” sought to avoid; they wanted to do justice to both the theological and the philosophical issues that confronted them in the middle of the twentieth century. What they did deserves to be better known in our own day. We need to update what they were doing with the tools that have be come available since then. Beyond that we may agree with Crombie that it is in reading theology, not meta-theology, that one can come to understand how theological statements work, and thus to believe that they work. If Crombie is correct, this is a critical principle in coming to terms with divine action. However, it will take a massive shift in our thinking about the concept of action and—correlatively—of divine action to underwrite this change of direction. This is exactly what I intend to supply in the next phase of the discussion. Notes:

(1) I provide the warrants for this reading of Ogden in Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 401–3. (2) Schubert Ogden, “‘Divine Agency and Divine Action’: A Response to William J. Abraham,” given at the Evangelical Theology Event at Perkins School of Theology, February 20, 1985. These are simply false alternatives. However, Ogden is led into this trap because in the end he abandoned our ordinary uses of action discourse and substituted for it his own Heideggerian–Bultmannian concept of action. Once we abandon the latter and return to reality, the options do not preclude a position which allows for divine action both as a description and explanation of events in our lives and as a call to deep existential reorientation of our whole existence.

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Reviewing the Terrain (3) This came out very clearly in both formal and informal conversations with Ogden at Perkins School of Theology where we were colleagues together. He was morally very certain that he had taken care of the concerns of the analytic tradition. I was equally sure that he was importing his own existentialist and metaphysical agenda and failing to take the full measure of how religious discourse was actually being used. (4) Austin Farrer, “A Starting Point for the Philosophical Examination of Theological Belief,” in Faith and Logic, ed. Basil Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 24–5. (5) Wiles was one of my supervisors for a time as a doctoral student at Oxford. One of the lecture courses I attended involved his taking earlier statements of Christian doctrine and, after expounding them, reflecting on how they might be restated on the other side of the conceptual change from an ancient to a modern perspective. He was a first rate teacher, critic, and supervisor. (6) The exception to the rule here is John Macquarrie whose work as a theologian was heavily indebted to Heidegger. While at Oxford I attended in the same term sets of lectures given by both Macquarrie and A. J. Ayer. After about three weeks, I complained to a friend that I found Macquarrie’s lectures obtuse and opaque. He chided me and I sheepishly agreed to stay the course. Two weeks later, as a joke, I said to my friend on leaving Macquarrie’s lecture: “If I have a choice between heaven with Macquarrie and hell with Ayer, I am going to hell.” Immediately he replied: “I am coming with you!” (7) In the current scene all these issues are back on the table; the legacy of Hume and Kant has been overturned and the options they supposedly undermined have come back, albeit with radically changed presuppositions. (8) The Idealist agenda shows up clearly in Frederick Schleiermacher and Ernst Troeltsch, most especially in the account of the God–world relation. I am ignoring here two other ways of responding to the collapse of the first phase as represented by Søren Kierkegaard and John Henry Newman. Broadly speaking, Kierkegaard accepted an antithesis between faith and reason, and took a fideist line which opted for faith over against reason. This line of response clearly shows up in Barth and his successors. John Henry Newman rejected the concept of reason on offer, rethought its structures, and found a way to rehabilitate a robust vision of the Christian tradition. This tradition remained alive and well at Oxford and shows up prominently in the work of Basil Mitchell. (9) This comes out most clearly in the work of F. H. Bradley. (10) A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936).

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Reviewing the Terrain (11) This did not mean that they could not have some other sort of meaning, say, emotive or poetic. In fact much effort was directed to solving the challenge Ayer posed by resorting to non-cognitive accounts of the meaning of religious discourse. By the late 1960s, these options were generally seen as dead-ends. I recall vividly as an undergraduate student a tutorial session with Professor Alan Milne, then a lecturer in moral and political philosophy, in which he readily deployed the principle of verifiability to challenge the cognitive character of theological discourse. When I pointed out that he did not make that move in his moral philosophy, he immediately proposed that it could still be used as a heuristic device. The double-standard in play was an emblem of the continuing use of the Positivist critique long after it had been undermined. (12) Antony Flew, “Theology and Falsification: (i) From the University Discussion,” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 96–9. (13) Language, Truth and LogicRoy Abraham Varghese, There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 24–5. (14) This can readily be shown in the appeal to experiences beyond death which are offered as confirmation for claims about divine action. If they do confirm these claims, then this raises the issue of confirmation here and now and not just after death. (15) The name was deliberately chosen as a challenge to the Positivist atmosphere of the period. (16) I. M. Crombie, “The Possibility of Theological Statements,” in Faith and Logic, ed. Mitchell, 31. What Crombie needs here is a more robust concept of human agents rather than that of “spirit”; however, once he makes “Infinite Spirit” the placeholder for God, then he naturally turns to the idea of “spirit” as the appropriate analogy. (17) It is worth noting here that the theologians who had shown initial interest in questions about divine action are off farming elsewhere at this point. Thus Ogden, Kaufman, and Wiles were developing systematic theologies without any special divine action. The whole idea of salvaging special divine action, most especially within analytic philosophy, did not seem particularly promising.

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Reviewing the Terrain (18) This observation applies especially to Thomas Tracy, God, Action, and Embodiment (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984). Tracy’s first rate study sets out to secure the possibility of a vision of divine agency that argues that lack of embodiment is a great virtue for God in that God can then transcend human limitations to achieve perfect freedom, unity, and power as an agent. Tracy’s work is intended to pave the way “for a fuller doctrinal theology that will reflect on God’s acts and so display the knowledge of God which stands out against our ignorance.” Ibid., 154. In this respect this project and that of Tracy complement each other. The purpose of this volume is to pave the way for detailed reflection on the particularities of divine action by articulating the initial methodological moves that will guide this operation. The goal is to get to a robust theological account of the range of divine action that I deem to be central to the Christian faith as a whole. (19) Basil Mitchell, The Justification of Religious Belief (New York: Seabury, 1973).The Justification of Religious BeliefA Companion to Philosophy of Religion (20) See Ian M. Crombie, “Theology and Falsification: (ii) The University Discussion,” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Flew and MacIntyre, 111. It is interesting to compare how the ambivalence in Crombie shows up in the work of Maurice Wiles in contrast to the work of Mitchell. Wiles picked up on the more agnostic side of Crombie and narrowed the base of argument to experience; Mitchell picked up on the positive side and extended the base of the argument considerably. (21) Mitchell, The Justification of Religious Belief, 7–8. (22) Ibid., 8. (23) Mitchell maintained a commitment to divine intervention in his interesting exchange with Maurice Wiles. (24) Frederick D. Aquino, Communities of Informed Judgment: Newman’s Illative Sense and Accounts of Rationality (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004). (25) Robert Prevost, Probability and Theistic Explanation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). (26) Crossing the Threshold of Divine RevelationPaul K. Moser, The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). (27) Two recent books on justification are Richard Swinburne, Epistemic Justification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), and William P. Alston, Beyond “Justification”: Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). Page 24 of 25

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Reviewing the Terrain (28) “Otherism” stands for whatever option that is not covered by theism and naturalism. I owe this category to Paul Draper. (29) See n.4 earlier in the chapter. (30) Crombie, “The Possibility of Theological Statements,” 72. (31) Ibid., 77.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I: Exploring and Evaluating the Debate William J. Abraham

Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780198786504 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786504.001.0001

Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians William J. Abraham

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198786504.003.0006

Abstract and Keywords 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. Keywords:   closed concept, open concept, divine action, epistemology, metaphysics, Donald Davidson, philosophy

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians In the material discussed to date, several assumptions have been central in the debate on divine action. First, in order to understand divine action we need a closed concept of action. More particularly, we need an account of the property or set of properties that are essential to action, and thus provide the criteria for distinguishing actions from other phenomena. Second, we can derive the closed concept of action we need from an analysis of human action. “Action” as predicated of God involves an interpretation of “action” that begins with “action” as predicated of human agents. Third, divine action is to be understood as analogous to human action. The proper relation between divine action and human action that enables us to understand divine action is that of analogy. Fourth, once we have all these in hand we can then use the semantic apparatus developed to understand token divine actions. We can move from a general analysis of what it is to be an action to understand this or that divine action. In this chapter I shall argue that the crucial desideratum, a closed concept of human action, is not available, nor is it likely to become available; hence this project fails. Over against this I shall argue 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. Towards the end of the chapter I shall sketch the implications of this change in perspective for understanding divine action. Philosophers have been interested in a network of issues in their discussion of agency and action. Robert Audi’s summary is worth quoting at length. The territory of action theory may be conceived in relation to four major problem areas, each encompassing a number of subsidiary topics. The first is the nature of action. One question here is conceptual, concerning what action is and what sort of analysis of action is best; another central question is metaphysical, concerning the ontological category to which action belongs. A second major problem is to account for the explanation of action, particularly for explanations which appeal (p.89) to motivational and cognitive elements in the agent, such as desires, intentions, and beliefs. A third problem is the issue of free will, which concerns the nature of free action and, especially, whether, if determinism is true, we can be either free in performing actions or morally responsible for those we have performed. Insofar as moral responsibility is a normative notion, for instance by implying that a certain kind of assessment is warranted, the problem of free will belongs to the normative theory of action…The central question in that domain indicates the fourth major area of action theory: the nature and grounds of rational action.1

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians No one can begin to master the literature related to these topics; even assembling a good bibliography would be a daunting if not impossible task. Happily, my purposes here do not require either of these impossibilities. It will suffice to make a persuasive case for challenging the claim that we have a closed concept of action serviceable for work on divine action. This does not at all mean that work on the concept of action is a dead-end for illuminating divine action; it means we have to rethink the kind of gains available to us in thinking about divine action. I shall identify that payoff in due course. Audi’s felicitous summary of the field initially confirms this judgment: when we pursue conceptual questions about the concept of action we readily find ourselves exploring very interesting metaphysical and epistemological proposals, whose answers bleed back up into our conceptual ruminations. The trouble begins at the outset when we reach for the relevant sample of actions that will be the benchmark of our deliberations. Conceptual work on action proceeds like other conceptual work by seeking to work out the grammar of our ordinary usage. We want to know the rules that govern such crucial notions as explanation, causation, event, and the like. In the case of action, the stock starting point is often the distinction between an action and an occurrence. Raising an arm at an auction is an action; my arm being raised by a gust of wind or by a knock on the elbow by a neighbor is an occurrence. We have a case of action—maybe a paradigm case of action—and so we begin trying to work out the difference between an action and an occurrence. We begin the hunt for an account of the necessary and sufficient conditions of action. This was the strategy that lay behind the work of analytic philosophers who went on to develop the manifold attack on the concept of divine action which I have already reviewed and rejected. The claim was a radical one: the concept of divine action was incoherent. In the rebuttal at that point I was content to let stand the quest for a concept of action, arguing from within the circle of evidence that was permitted. However, the problem runs much deeper; it is worth noting this, as it enriches Audi’s felicitous comments about action (p.90) theory. The critic had already cooked the books in advance in the way in which he or she had deployed the appeal to ordinary language. To put the issue sharply: any analysis of the concept of action must include in the initial data set to be considered putative cases of divine action. In terms of ordinary usage only philosophers and theologians in the grip of an a priori theory could rule that the concept of divine action is incoherent. Ordinary usage is littered with the idea of divine action, not to speak of demonic action. These cannot be treated as guilty until proven innocent. Any theory that ends up with denying the possibility of divine action must be mistaken; it is undermined by a host of counter-examples which cannot be ignored or willed away or treated as suspect.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians The following examples are respectable examples of ordinary language: “God created the universe,” “God inspired Mother Teresa,” “God judges me for the evil I do,” “God loves the world,” and “God guides the Church.” They are not on a par with: “That reddish potato voted democratic,” “Greenness is a terribly bitter fruit that should be cooked at a low temperature,” or “The black cat on the mat won the Nobel Prize for Literature.” To be sure, many people may not believe any of the aforementioned propositions about God; and they may be totally confused if asked to demarcate the necessary and sufficient conditions for the use of these expressions. However, these are irrelevant considerations. If ordinary language is to be the standard, then the issue of their coherence is resolved. We can press this further. Extensive research in cognitive psychology involving sophisticated cross-cultural studies makes clear that children actually believe in divine agency from a very early age.2 This in turn means that they have the concept of divine action and can readily use it. Again the issue here is not whether they are justified in believing in divine action; all that is needed for the argument to succeed is the fact that they use the concept. The more one ponders both the phenomena of ordinary language, the results of current cognitive psychology, and the widespread deployment of the concept of divine action in philosophical circles until the recent past, the more one wonders if something has gone wrong with ordinary language philosophy. Anyone interested in the concept of action must take into account, it would seem, divine action in any effort to work out the logic of the concept of action. Yet nobody does so.3 The explanation for why this does not happen is signaled by Audi when he notes that conceptual work on action centers not just on the contours of the (p.91) concept but also on the nature of action, on what action is, that is, on the ontological category to which action belongs. Given that this is a very general investigation open to philosophers with different metaphysical commitments then it is natural for the philosopher to focus on the category of human action. There is enough trouble already with the concept of human action without bringing in metaphysical options opened up by theological commitment.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians In reality the whole debate about action has been about the concept of human action rather than the concept of action simpliciter. Once we see this, it is an easy journey from conceptual questions to the debate about the role of desires, intentions, and beliefs in the explanation of action, to the nature of free action, to the nature of moral responsibility, and finally to the epistemological question of the nature and grounds of rational action. We are by now embarked on fullscale metaphysical and epistemological investigations which take us deep into the central questions of modern philosophy. They also trigger fundamental questions about the nature of philosophy. As a consequence, we find ourselves in the Gideon predicament: every step forward involves the reduction of the number of those who will follow.4 Some want to start with epistemological commitments. Only entities that can be accounted for in terms of scientific concepts, evidence, and explanation will be permitted. In this instance the ontology can become exceptionally sparse, with language about beliefs, intentions, desires, and the like being dismissed as folk psychology. At best they can remain in play as pragmatic, heuristic instruments for relating to the world; they carry no ontological or explanatory freight. Some allow for a richer epistemology permitting whatever entities that are covered by common sense to be factored into our range of concepts, evidence, and explanations. This will allow ontologically for the possibility of personal agents, intentions, desires, beliefs, and the like. Common sense is not exactly a neat category, so there is plenty of room for disagreement on where to draw the line. At the bottom end, there are those who will allow beliefs, desires, intentions, and the like to stand so long as these can be fitted into an account of the world that is still recognizably scientific. Others will allow them as anomalies that cannot in the nature of the case be fitted into nomic generalizations. Yet others will see this as involving a deterministic concept of human agents that leaves no room for genuine human agency. So at the top end of the options, they will take common sense to involve a rejection of determinism and see it as mandating that personal agents, desires, intentions, and beliefs be given a more robust role in their understanding of the human world.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians Our epistemological commitments tend to run parallel to our metaphysical commitments, and vice versa. We try as best we can to develop reflective (p.92) equilibrium between the two. Thus we could just as easily start with a set of metaphysical intuitions about human nature, derived from introspection. Perhaps our intuitions convince us that human agents are different from other ontological categories, like cats and dogs, or tables and chairs.5 Perhaps we think that we have a unique kind of freedom, captured in traditional talk about free will and grounded in our experience of deliberation and of free action. If so, we will see efforts to interpret human agents exclusively, say, in terms of evolutionary biology as distortions. Even more so, we may hold that the whole drive to develop a physicalist account of human agents is even more distorted. It is like treating the misidentification of a person and a tree on a par with the misidentification of a car and a truck. Moreover, if retaining our robust vision of human nature requires the adoption of an epistemological pluralism where different kinds of subject matter require different sorts of concepts, evidence, and explanation than those available to the hard sciences, then we will not hesitate to take up epistemological pluralism and reject epistemological monism. For some stretches of reality we happily deploy scientific type explanations; for others we insist on personal agency type explanations.6 These considerations do not mean that we necessarily abandon conceptual analysis. It does mean, however, that we should not be surprised to find that some philosophers reject the idea that ordinary language should be taken seriously as an independent variable in the debate. Ordinary language, it will be said, reflects the ghosts of past metaphysical and epistemological theories. Thus, it may need to be revised or even rejected to fit our new and better understanding of the world. Richard Rorty captures this disposition nicely in his treatment of an analogous case in an early publication: The absurdity of saying ‘Nobody ever felt pain’ is no greater than that of saying ‘Nobody has ever seen a demon,’ if we have a suitable answer to the question ‘What was I reporting when I said I felt a pain?’ To this question, the science of the future may reply ‘You were reporting the occurrence of a certain brain process, and it would make your life simpler for us if you would, in the future, say “My C-fibres are firing,” instead of saying “I’m in pain.”’7 As Rorty saw it, talk of sensations and pains would simply go the way of witches and demons as science progresses. Being a charming, nonchalant postmodern, he was wonderfully relaxed about the prospects. There was no (p.93) point in engaging in a polemical sword-fight with common sense and theology; in time folk would come around and learn the new concepts and how they applied to our everyday experience. The same could be said mutatis mutandis to the idea of divine action.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians Others have been much less sanguine, urging a wholesale rejection of religious notions and ridiculing any idea of theology as an intellectual discipline. Richard Dawkins insists that there is no need to make any inquiry into divine action, for belief in God is on a par with belief in leprechauns. He puts the issue with admirable candor: “Would you need to learn volumes on Leprechology before disbelieving in leprechauns?”8 The wider context of Dawkins’ rhetorical question makes visible another dimension of discourse about divine action, namely, the political dimension. Noting that many of the church-goers he meets are not simple-minded Fundamentalists, Dawkins continues: Unfortunately they are heavily outnumbered, especially in the most powerful country on Earth where nearly half the population believes the universe began after the domestication of the dog, and a slightly smaller proportion yearns for a Middle East Armageddon when they’ll be raptured out of their clothes and ‘up’ to Heaven. These people have the vote and we all live with the consequences, which are made all the more dangerous by the equally simple-minded fundamentalists of the Islamic world.9 Clearly, Dawkins is concerned about the political ramifications of claims about divine action. The mere mention of divine action can trigger a polemical tirade on the political danger lurking in the wings. In these circumstances the idea of appealing to ordinary language to move things forward looks ludicrous. Epistemology, metaphysics, and political commitments have stolen the show. It is very tempting at this point for theologians to walk away and get on with our work as theologians. Austin Farrer captured the issue sharply: “If the canon is laid down that nothing is to be accepted for philosophical consideration but what is at least virtually contained in the flattest common sense and that the homme moyen sensuel is to be the measure of all things, the Christian argument has nothing to say.”10 The Christian theologian simply gets on with the job of doing theology and pulls out of the conversation. The whole debate has to be conducted in the court of the Gentiles who keep insisting that the kind of robust claims about divine action and the assumptions that come with them must be set aside as illegitimate. The urgent imperative is to exit the court of the Gentiles and (p.94) operate securely from the inner sanctum of Jerusalem. Put in terms of classical imagery, the theologian should leave Athens and go back to Jerusalem.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians We are back in familiar territory on the proper relationship between theology and philosophy. Farrer has surely moved much too fast in dismissing the work of conceptual analysis. We can immediately note that the Gentiles are not without light and wisdom; their objections and queries are such that believers can feel their force and benefit from attending to them, so we need to stay in the conversation rather than terminate it. Moreover, the resources of Athens may well be necessary in working through to a better way of thinking about divine action. Farrer may have booked the wrong hotel in the court of the Gentiles; there are better ones in which to lodge. The theologians should spend more time in Athens before going home to Jerusalem. Coming to the material content of his worry, common sense need not always be flat and vulgar, so it is premature to walk away in despair. Recognizing the limitations of common sense, we can still lean on it as an ally as a first step in the protection of human agency from the shrill assaults that have become commonplace in the name of ideological bigotries dressed up in the name of science and now commonplace in the public square. Common sense carries in its bosom a host of insights about agency that are by no means dead and buried.11 It is a happy discovery that physicalist and materialist concepts of human action stand in deep tension with common sense. Moreover, these reductionist accounts of human agents cannot be ordered by email from the nearest scientific laboratory. They have to be ordered from the philosophy department, and they can readily disintegrate in the delivery van on the way to their destination. So significant interpretations of human agency and action are inescapably philosophical in nature, they often contradict common sense. For that very reason their prospects of success in the long run may well be very low. Theologians can and should make common cause with many who occupy the court of the Gentiles. We may get the initial help we need not by racing back to Jerusalem but by plundering the Athenians. Moreover, common sense carries not just the wisdom of the past, but a host of illuminating distinctions that were rightly the quarry of conceptual analysis. It is imprudent for the theologian to forget this. The theologian can recognize that work on conceptual analysis has turned out to be much more complex than was thought in the heyday of analytic philosophy in the mid-twentieth century, but it is important to avoid the mental cramp that readily comes with recent work in action theory. We get the appropriate therapy for the mental cramp involved not by abandoning work on action but by examining the (p.95) crucial assumptions that have constrained that work to date and then reaching for a better account of action discourse.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians In developing a better perspective on the concept of action the first step is to realize that the concept of human action is not a closed concept.12 A closed concept is one where we can define its “essence”; where we can list a definitive set of properties shared by all legitimate members of the class of human actions. A closed concept of action is one which is governed by a definitive set of necessary and sufficient criteria which correspond to a definitive set of necessary and sufficient properties. The claim that the concept of action is not a closed concept is a meta-claim about the concept of action; it insists that this is a misleading way to think about action discourse. It is not a rejection of discourse about action; it paves the way for a reordering of our thinking about action discourse. The claim that the concept of action is a closed concept is a radical one. We can approach it initially by noting the importance of open-textured concepts. The latter term was initially coined by Frederick Waismann, a close friend of Wittgenstein.13 Waismann was interested in ordinary empirical concepts and argued that these were open in the sense that their boundaries were porous and could not always be pinned down by a set of clear-cut rules. There were no absolute rules that could be applied, say, to the concept of a cat or a friend. What should we do if we came across an animal with all the normal features of a cat but which had other properties that did not fit our normal concept? Suppose it grew to a gigantic size or suppose it could be revived from death where normal cats could not? Should we count it as a cat or a new species? Suppose we met a friend who suddenly seemed to appear or disappear? Which experience should we treat as veridical or delusional? Should we say that we had indeed met our friend or that the disappearance and reappearance of our friend were delusional? In these instances our rules were unstable and open.14 The most famous example of an open concept was furnished by Wittgenstein’s remarks about the concept of a “game.” In these instances we can begin with (p.96) paradigm cases and then move to consider anomalous cases as they relate to the paradigm cases. Thus in the case of games we can move along a continuum in which we can detect a family resemblance even though the first and the last in the series may be radically different. We can think of standard cases, unusual cases, and borderline cases.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians It is very tempting to apply this analysis to the concept of action. Thus we can begin with an account of the necessary and sufficient conditions as they are instantiated by a paradigm case and move outward to look at unusual cases and borderline cases. However, a much more radical proposal is to say that “action” is a much more open concept in that while there are sufficient conditions there are no substantial or informative necessary conditions. The difference between these two options may be one of degree, that is, it hinges on how we plan to cope with the range of counter-examples that can be marshaled against what is taken to be the paradigm case of action. Put differently, the issue can be identified in terms of whether we allow a significant number of paradigm cases of action or whether we think that all cases of action should be assembled around one paradigm case. For reasons which will become clear I favor the more radical thesis. The more radical thesis sets a substantial bar as to what is to count as a necessary feature of actions. It is not enough to cite trivial conditions as necessary conditions; they need to be informative conditions.15 This stricture rules out solving the problem by appeal to negative conditions or by appeal to circular reasoning. Thus we might try and say that it is a necessary condition of “action” that it is “not a mountain” or that “actions are necessarily performed by agents.” Neither suggestion shows up in the literature and for good reason. The first is uninformative in that it does not enable us to pick out actions from other phenomena (there are lots of phenomena that fit the necessary condition of “not being a stone”); and the second is circular in that we pick out agents in terms of those entities that perform actions. We need a necessary criterion that is genuinely informative. The challenge is also to find a necessary condition that will apply to the range of examples that we generally allow as counting as actions. The chief difficulty, of course, for the claim that there are no necessary conditions for action is a daunting one: it involves establishing a negative proposition. Critics can readily respond to this by insisting that with more time and effort they can eventually come up with a necessary condition that fits all cases. In the end, it becomes a matter of judgment; there comes a point when the whole enterprise simply looks (p.97) bleak. This is exactly where I stand. I want to make the case for this stance drawing together five strands of argument. The first rests on a much neglected review of action theory. In my judgment, the initial case against “action” as a closed concept has been persuasively made by Morris Weitz.16 He does so by a careful review of the leading attempts by philosophers to delineate the necessary and sufficient conditions that identify genuine human actions. He then shows that the proposed account of action fails to do justice to significant counter-examples. He works his way systematically and carefully through the leading theorists of action in the heyday of action theory. Two examples will illustrate how the argument is structured.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians For Charles Taylor, human actions are fundamentally a type of purposive behavior, that is, behavior intentionally directed to a goal.17 More precisely, for anything to be a human action, it must be goal directed; it must be intended, and hence caused by an agent or person who is free and is responsible for what he does; it must be intentional in the sense that it involves the idea of an intended goal; and the intention must be a non-contingent, sufficient condition for the goal, bringing it about. This means that Taylor must rule out behavior that is neither goal-directed nor intended, like blinking, sneezing, and doodling, as actions. These only count as actions in a loose sense. More importantly, cases where the behavior is purposive but not intentional cannot count as action. So if I kill someone in a fit, I kill him unintentionally; therefore this is not an act. Thus Taylor ends up offering a stipulative, restrictive account of action. Likewise, falling in love could not be an action in Taylor’s analysis. This is not an action, like making love, or a state, like being married, but it is something that a person does. At best what Taylor has offered is a sufficient condition of something being an action. He has not secured a necessary condition for something being an action. By contrast Donald Davidson approaches the issue of divine action out of an interest in the role of reasons in explaining human action.18 It had been common, following the influential work of A. I. Melden, to argue that the relation between reasons and action could not be causal.19 Citing a reason, say, for moving one’s arm, was logically related to the action of raising one’s arm; hence it could not count as being causal in the appropriate sense. The argument ran as follows. The reason cited in the explanation cannot be identified logically without reference to the action performed. However, if reason was a cause of the action, on the standard account of causation, the (p.98) reason would have to be identified independently of its effect. As this cannot be done, the reason cannot be the cause of the action. Davidson challenged this line of argument by providing a different analysis of reasons when they feature in explanations of actions. So suppose we say A did x. X is picked out, described, or redescribed, and rationalized by naming as its cause A’s pro-attitude to x and/or A’s beliefs about x. When the reason given why A did x under a certain description of x consists of A’s pro-attitude towards actions with a certain property and of A’s belief that x, so described, has the property s, the reason is the primary reason why A performed x.20 Davidson then proposes that a primary reason is necessary and sufficient for the rationalization of an action and that the primary reason causes the action. In turn this means that actions are what we do when what we do is caused by our particular pro-attitudes and beliefs.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians The central problem in this instance is that Davidson does not show that reasons are causes or that they function as causes; more importantly, his account of action cannot account for obvious cases of actions and their explanations. The most promising cases for a reason as a cause involves those cases in which the cause of my action is a particular want or desire in conjunction with a related belief about how to satisfy it. Although desires and beliefs are dispositional, the onslaught of a desire or belief is not. The latter are mental events; and these can serve as an identifiable antecedent of an action. Suppose you anger me and immediately I have a desire to hurt you. I also form the belief that if I insult you, I will hurt you. So I proceed to insult you. How should we explain this action? “Why did you insult me?” we ask. The explanation according to Davidson will have to be: “I insulted you because you hurt my feelings.” This answer implies a pro-attitude towards retaliation in cases where people hurt my feelings and a belief about how to retaliate in this kind of situation. Together these constitute the primary reason for my insulting you; this is the cause of my action. However, this does not actually fit the case before us. The cause of my insulting you is not something in me (pro-attitudes in conjunction with beliefs) but your angering me.21 Your angering me is the cause of my desire to hurt you and of my action of insulting you. However, for Davidson your action cannot be a cause of my action because all that can be the cause of my action is my pro-attitude and my belief towards actions like (p.99) yours. Thus we can see that a crucial case of action cannot be fitted into Davidson’s account of actions.22 These two examples, of course, do not constitute a refutation of the claim that action is a closed concept, but they do illustrate the salient difficulty in all attempts to develop an account of the essential property or properties of human action. The challenge is multiplied in Weitz’s account of other early leading theorists of action. As things stand, I have found no account of action that has succeeded in producing a necessary condition of action. Second, Weitz’s review makes manifest the vast variety of situations in which we can legitimately speak of human actions. Thus one crucial reason why we cannot agree on the necessary conditions of action is that the range of examples is so diverse. We can finesse the challenge this poses for a closed concept of human action by various strategies, but in the end the variety must be kept constant in any elucidation of the concept of a human action. He makes this point eloquently:

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians if we keep before us as many of the clear, undeniable cases of human action as we can, it does look as if their vast variety does defeat any putatively necessary property. What, one must ask, is the common denominator of the following haphazard list of actions, none of which can be repudiated without arbitrarily limiting the range of use of the concept of human action? Moving one’s finger for no reason at all; putting on the left shoe before the right; driving to work; raising one’s arm to signal; polluting the atmosphere by driving; forgetting to clear the iced walk; refusing to vote on polling day; stopping at the store for tobacco; convening an important meeting; reading a report with the assigned task of making a recommendation regarding future action, with the intention of sorting out all the issues, whether painful or not, with the motive of enhancing the welfare of the institution, and with the goal of making a better university; getting married; filing for divorce; falling in love; resigning one’s job; writing a letter of resignation; quitting one’s job; turning on the wrong tap; scalding Watkins; killing a man unintentionally, impulsively, by accident, mistakenly, or inadvertently; stalking a bird; hunting a lion; shooting a rabbit; missing the target; looking for a needle in a haystack; finding a needle in a haystack with or without looking for it; shaking hands; brushing elbows; greeting one’s friends; murdering someone, etc., etc., etc.23 (p.100) The problem with treating action as a closed concept is that it involves offering a necessary criterion for a concept whose use and conditions of use reveal that the concept has no such criterion. To persist in claiming that it does have a necessary criterion is to violate the logic of a concept which can perform its assigned role only under the second-order condition that it is governed by a multiple, diverse set of firstorder criteria, some of which are sufficient but none of which is necessary.24 Third, the best way to think of the concept of action is that of an open concept. Taken on its own, “action” is an open concept, on a par in everyday discourse with the concept of “thing” or “event.” It operates as a kind of place-holder for a host of things we want to say about human agents and what they do. The point was made with exemplary clarity by J. L. Austin.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians The beginning of sense, not to say, of wisdom, is to realize that ‘doing an action’, as used in philosophy is a highly abstract expression; it is a standin used in the place of any (or almost any?) verb with a personal subject, in the same sort of way that ‘thing’ is a stand-in for any (or when we remember for almost any) noun substantive, and ‘quality’ a stand-in for the adjective. In a similar way, less commonly recognized even in these semisophisticated times, we fall for the myth of the verb. We treat the expression ‘doing an action’ no longer as a stand-in for a verb with a personal subject, as which it does no doubt have some uses, and might have more if the range of verbs were not left unspecified, but as a selfexplanatory, ground level description, one which adequately brings into the open the essential features of everything that comes, by simple inspection, under it.25 Fourth, if we are to get a grasp of the ways in which the concept of action operates we have to provide some sense of the context of the relevant action discourse, or we have to specify the action involved, or both. Suppose I say “Mulligan was performing an act” last night. Initially, we have no idea what that means. The notion is much too general; and its meaning depends crucially on the context. Even if I specify the context as a philosophical context, say, a (p.101) seminar on the philosophy of action, then the expression is an awkward one. Think of an expression which is a close relative. “Mulligan was acting last night.” Suppose we are eating out in a Dublin restaurant; and suppose we already know that Mulligan works in the Abbey Theatre as an actor. We know immediately what this expression means. It means that he was on stage acting in a play. There is another way to reach a similar conclusion. This time we frame the question as “What was Mulligan doing last night?” In this instance we need a specification not of the context but of the action. “He was back again in Murphy’s pub getting drunk.” “He was working on a job application.” “He was listening to his favorite Bono album.” Until we have either a specification of the relevant context or a naming of the action performed we are in the dark as to what is meant. In this sense, the concept of action is radically open. So we might say initially that action as an open concept has the following features: (a) it is open-ended in its meaning; (b) it calls for the specification of its context if it is to be clarified; (c) it requires specification in its content if it is to be understood.26

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians Fifth, and finally, we can approach the concept of action from another angle. What stands out in our use of action discourse is the great variety of contrasts that show up when we look closely.27 We have a host of paradigm cases of action that can be identified by way of various contrasts. We can begin with the favorite contrast of philosophers, that between action and mere happenings. “I moved my finger,” is an action. “My finger moved,” is mere happening. But this is only one of the contrasts we draw. There are at least seven other contrasts. There is the contrast between action and words. “Let’s not just talk, let’s act and get something done.” There is the contrast between action and ideals. “Our action falls short of our ideals, our counsels of perfection.” There is the contrast between action and thought. “Now that we have thought about what to do, let’s move on to the action phase of our work.” There is the contrast between action and omission. “You just sat there and did nothing, failing to take action to stop the crime.” There is the contrast between (p.102) action and bodily movement. “Action is what you get when you subtract ‘My finger moved’ from ‘I moved my finger.’” There is the contrast between intentional action and unintentional action. “I walked over the wrinkled carpet.” “I tripped over the wrinkled carpet.” There is the contrast between actions and accidents. “Sir, it was an accident when my tank took off and ran into the front of our bank. I was not engaged in the action of robbing your bank.” Finally, there is the contrast between action and passion. “Get over your feelings about what happened and take action about the situation.”

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians These contrasts, and the range of examples they reveal under examination, explain afresh why it is so difficult to find a necessary condition that will fit all cases of action. We do not have here a case, say, of family resemblance that will allow us to take into account all instances of action by thinking in terms of standard cases, unusual cases, and borderline cases. Moreover, if we look at the counter-examples that are involved in the debate they differ in kind; we can see that a counter-example to one strand of usage will not be a counter-example to another. We have a wide range of different uses of action discourse rather than different senses of action. In addition, using the technique of paradigm cases will not work because the counter-examples are not such that they can be accommodated; they are clear counter-examples, not fuzzy ones. The rich literature on action serves to describe the richness of action and the streams of life in which action discourse is embedded. There is a variety of paradigm cases in the stream of life; and it is not always easy to identify these paradigm cases in a neat and tidy fashion or to bring them all under one set of necessary and sufficient conditions.28 Thus there is no agreed theory of action; we have piecemeal descriptions of various aspects of our usage and the world to which it relates. The theories we do have can be exceptionally illuminating but they end up being stipulative; they invariably work with one or two contrasts and ignore the rest. In other words, the criteria for actions turn out to be extremely varied; they may even conflict with each other. It is best to conclude that there are no necessary conditions for the proper use of the concept of action. This does not mean that the concept is hopelessly ambiguous, fishy, arbitrary, purely stipulative, or otherwise defective.29 We generally know perfectly well how to use the concept of action and deploy it with ease in the host of (p.103) ways that show up in ordinary discourse. We intuitively and naturally know the strata to which a particular usage may belong; and we can informally follow the rules governing its varied usage across a rich tract of predication.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians The temptation at this point is to suggest that the absence of a closed concept of action means that we should shut down the debate about divine action and find other work to do. If there is no closed concept of action to deploy in our understanding of divine action, it will be said, then the subject is simply closed. To draw this conclusion is to display how deeply our minds have been infected by the standard way of approaching the topic of divine action. We are simply making the quest for a closed concept of action a necessary condition for any discussion of the meaning of divine action. However, the two stand and fall together. Once we reject the quest for a closed concept of action, we should immediately drop it as a condition for serious work on divine action. Giving up on the quest for the holy grail of a closed concept in describing action discourse opens the door to better ways of thinking about action and divine action. We have been emancipated from the mental cramp that has prevented us from making progress on divine action. Disposing of a closed concept of divine action rather than shutting down our inquiries gives them a whole new lease of life. We can now begin looking at how an open concept of action can provide a different strategy for understanding claims about divine action. Deploying an open description of action discourse radically alters our approach to questions about divine action. As a point of entry into this it is helpful to note the limitations that appeal to a closed concept of action involved in understanding divine action. The hope behind looking for a closed concept of action in theology was to provide the crucial resource for understanding any and all particular cases of divine action.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians Suppose we did have an agreed concept of action, and that the concept involved was a closed one. What would that give us? Suppose we were to say that the property that makes an action irreducibly action is intentionality. Suppose we fill this out and say that the criteria for picking out actions are the following: goaldirectedness, personal agency, and responsibility. What would that give us in our analysis of divine action? Presumably, we would then claim that the property of a divine action would also be intentionality. The criteria for picking out divine action would involve the same or a similar list of criteria. Suppose we grant all this. Would this take us very far in making sense of divine inspiration, or divine forgiveness, or divine providence, or divine promising, or the divine healing of a blind man? Surely the whole discussion leaves us at such a level of generality that we do not know what to say about these specific acts or activity of God that is more than minimally illuminating, if even that. Perhaps it suggests we can genuinely ask of any action of God what was the intention involved, or what purpose was served. These are indeed important kinds of questions to ask about divine action. However, we can only press this (p.104) kind of question once we specify what action of God is involved. We need to understand the strata in which our particular instantiation of divine action discourse is located. The mere mention of divine action is not enough. Moreover, if the concept of action is not closed, then we may completely miss other uses of action discourse that are pertinent in understanding the full range of actions we may want to predicate of God. The initial lesson, then, is a negative one. Even if we did have a closed concept of action, the payoff for understanding divine action is extremely thin.30 The positive lessons from our competing analysis of action discourse are manifold. First, if we are to understand divine action, specifying the particular acts of God is a critical first step in making progress. To say “God acted” is to say next to nothing. We need to know what God did or is doing; that means we have to begin naming the specific actions we want to understand. To say “God acted” is as opaque as “Murphy acted” until we know what actions we have in mind. Thus we cannot get far in understanding divine action without getting deep into theology proper, for much of theology proper is precisely an exposition of the whole sweep of divine action in creation and redemption. Second, we welcome the richness of discourse about action and expect a corresponding richness in our deployment of action as predicated of God. Suppose we are interested in the idea of divine inspiration. It is clear that in the case of human agents, inspiration is a polymorphous activity. In this respect it differs from monomorphous activity, like raising a hand or making a bid at an auction. One inspires someone in, with, and through what one does. So a saint inspires others to feed the hungry through a host of activities which she performs. We should apply this to talk about divine inspiration. God inspires us through his varied activity as we encounter it in the Gospel and in the lives of his saints. There are other divine actions like this, for example, teaching and revelation. Page 18 of 27

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians Third, once we specify the divine actions that interest us, then we can begin to explore potential analogies for divine action that fill out what is meant. It is, in fact, at this level that analogy becomes really interesting and helpful. Thus to tell a parable like that of the Prodigal Son as a way of depicting the love that God has for us is far more important than deploying some generic (and bogus) concept of action and thinking up how it might possibly apply to God. We are thinking of God as analogous to the waiting Father in the story of the Prodigal Son. Even then exploring the role of analogy is a mere first step in exploring the full range of linguistic tools that may be at our disposal. The likelihood is that we have a far greater range of semantic devices at our disposal than analogy. Given the richness of action discourse we should expect a corresponding (p.105) richness in the range of tools at our disposal. We need to work through the distinction between literal and non-literal as applied to divine action discourse. We will have to look at a whole range of tropes: analogy, metaphor, image, myth, allegory, typology, and the like. Beyond these three initial suggestions I want to make two further points at this juncture. The first relates to how one paradigm of action discourse signals an obvious way in which we may map our queries about claims about divine action as we find them in theological materials. The second provides a way of thinking about the ordering of our inquiries into divine action.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians Clearly one very important paradigm of action discourse focuses on what we broadly identify as intentional action. The paradigm case is where we do something to achieve certain intentions and purposes.31 We go to the shop to buy bread; we assemble a complex dossier of materials in order to make a job application; we throw a party to celebrate a child’s birthday. Actions like these can be understood if we ask the following questions. First, who is the agent? Who is the referent for our action predicate? Second, what specific action have we identified as being performed by the agent? How should we rightly individuate what has been done? Third, how did the agent perform the specified action? Was there a master act which can then be broken down into sub-acts? Can we divide what happened into basic acts and non-basic acts? Fourth, how do we explain the action or actions individuated? What intentions, purposes, motives, reasons, can we cite to make sense of what has been done? Fifth, what evidence can we cite to back up any of our foregoing claims about the action performed? How do we meet challenges which call into question our claims about divine action? Sixth, what epistemological story do we tell in order to underwrite our claims about justification, confirmation, or knowledge when it comes to claims about the performance of this or that action? What warrants do we cite when asked to explain why we think our claims about divine action are true rather than false? Seventh, what metaphysical commitments show up in our claims about human and divine action? For example, how do we construe agency, freedom, and power as predicated of human agents and of God? What ontological distinctions do we want to maintain in order to secure an appropriate difference between the Creator and the creature? Eighth, what linguistic strategies are deployed to explicate divine action? How is meaning constituted, expressed, and received in our discourse about divine action?

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians (p.106) I am not offering at this juncture some kind of rigid system for thinking about human action or about divine action. Nor am I making the banal claim that philosophical work on divine action is difficult. Clearly we operate in our everyday lives perfectly naturally without bringing some kind of intellectualist regime into play; we go about the business of understanding divine action informally and effectively. So I am not at all saying here that someone who speaks of divine action need keep any of these considerations in mind. Nor am I claiming that we should always approach particular claims about divine action as if this raft of questions can or should be explored. However, it is helpful to unpack the kind of questions we ask in seeking to understand divine action. Having some sense of what these questions are and how we respond to them can be helpful when we become puzzled about divine action. It may enable us to clarify where we want to go and what dead-ends we do well to avoid. We do this in the case of human action; I propose we do the same for divine actions. If we want to explore how the language of divine action is used by an author or in a particular text, or if we are puzzled by what is being said in speaking of divine action or in explaining what is said, then it may help to keep this list of questions in mind. Yet we should do so recognizing the open character of the concept of action, acknowledging that this sort of inquiry fits one paradigm of action discourse and may not fit others, and constantly reminding ourselves of the potential difference between the divine and the human when it comes to any claims about divine action. The ordering in which I have assembled my list of questions for intentional action above may be important. Thus I put the epistemological, ontological, and semantic questions that crop up last rather than first. I did so because I think that Christians from very different traditions can and should wrestle with a relatively robust canon of divine action rather than precluding, say, special divine action at the outset on epistemological, metaphysical, or semantic grounds.32 In addition, I think that our philosophical proposals about divine action can and should be tested by appeal to more generally agreed putative cases of divine action. What J. L. Austin noted with respect to ordinary language in the case of human action should be kept in mind when we look at divine action: “Certainly, then, ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember it is the first word.”33 Indeed, it may well be that our theories about divine and human action with respect, say, to the debate about grace in salvation, have been stymied because the participants have (p.107) locked into a general account of divine agency much too prematurely. Standing back and looking carefully at how the language of agency (and in this case causality) has been interpreted may well prove exceptionally fruitful. At the very least it can provide signposts for dead-ends in our research programs. I say this without in any way wanting to set aside the importance of epistemological, ontological, and semantic considerations. Page 21 of 27

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians We can see the importance of these considerations when we ponder the following axiom and its ramifications. Our concept of action invariably builds on our concept of human action. However, the theologian does not enter the conversation without his or her own vision of human agents. At a minimum, human agents will be seen as made in the image of God, so that our conceptual move should work off this as a starting point. This feature of the debate explains why so much of the discussion has revolved around the debate about dualism. For some, a dualist account of the human agent gets in the way of proper analysis and needs to be set aside in favor of a better account of human agency. For others, a rigorous defense of dualism must be the starting point of the discussion because without it we have a wrong view of human action and agency. Our views of human agency mirror our views of divine agency. Equally our views of divine agency shape our views of human agency. So some will prefer to begin with an account of ourselves as persons and adjust this notion to fit what we want to say about the agency of God. For others, this is absolutely the wrong place to start because it already privileges a certain modern view of persons that ignores the radical difference between the Creator and the creature and thus sets us off in the wrong direction at the outset.34 In addition it treats the language of “person” as applied to God in a totally inappropriate manner, say, as compared to “Person” as used in the doctrine of the Trinity. So the alternative strategy requires us to start with our metaphysical commitments and then proceed creatively from there. There is no obvious way to resolve this minor methodological dispute. I have already provided my reasons for preferring the first option, that is, for not moving too quickly to metaphysical and epistemological questions. Foremost among these is the conviction that attending to the kind of concepts we are using and how they might apply to God is critical to understanding what Christians may want to claim about divine action. Moreover, my deflationary option also embodies the informed intuition that the canonical commitments of the church were rightly wary about full-blown epistemological and metaphysical commitments. To put the matter simply: becoming a Christian—being initiated into the faith in baptism—does not involve as a matter of primary commitment this or that disputed epistemological or metaphysical position. (p.108) In addition, when it came to epistemological and metaphysical speculation, the church tolerated a wide set of options. Hence Christian theologians and philosophers down through the ages have been able to embody the faith in a wide variety of metaphysical possibilities. One could be committed to the core Christian convictions on the relevant divine actions that were critical, say, to creation and salvation without being committed to this or that metaphysical schema. Reversing this order strikes me and—I think—much of the tradition across the ages as an innovation that should be resisted.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians What we really need is a set of soundings across the tradition which will allow us to think with the church across the ages on what has been proposed about divine action. This is how I shall proceed in the volume which follows. I shall interrogate the tradition as found in a network of texts and movements that deserve our attention in the quest for our own constructive account of divine action. We all need to go to school in the tradition of the church. This may go some way to meeting the adherent of other strategies for thinking about divine action at least half-way. It will also dovetail with the claim that in the end one cannot reflect in any substantial way about divine action without attending to specific theological claims about what God has done. Divine action involves serious, detailed speech about what God has done. This is simply another description for theology proper. As we have already seen, attending to theology proper is what an open account of the concept of action mandates. However, it would be premature to settle for this conclusion at this stage in our inquiries. To date I have confined the discussion to the first round of efforts to resolve the problems so dramatically identified by Gilkey and so assiduously explored independently in the analytic tradition. We need to look at the second round of efforts to think through the central questions that have arisen around the topic of divine action. This will allow us to catch up with the rich recent discussion and to road test the conclusions developed in this chapter. Notes:

(1) Robert Audi, Action, Intention, and Reason (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 1–2. (2) Justin Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (London: AltaMira, 2004). (3) Timothy O’Connor and Constantine Sandis, eds., A Companion to the Philosophy of Action (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), (4) Austin Farrer, “A Starting Point for the Examination of Theological Belief,” in Faith and Logic, ed. Basil Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 26. (5) This comes out very clearly in the early work of John MacMurray, where he takes the initial steps to develop a robust notion of human agency. See his Interpreting the Universe (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996). This text sounds like a voice crying in the wilderness. (6) James R. Noland, Imagination and Critique: Two Rival Versions of Historical Inquiry (New York: Springer, 2010). (7) Richard Rorty, “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories,” Review of Metaphysics 19 (1965): 50.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians (8) Richard Dawkins, “Do you need to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?” The Independent, September 17, 2007. (9) Ibid. (10) Farrer, “A Starting Point for the Examination of Theological Belief,” 26. (11) William P. Alston, “Self-Motivation and the Structure of Motivation,” in The Self: Psychological and Philosophical Issues, ed. Theodore Mischel (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1977), 67–8. (12) In what follows I shall speak simply of action to stand for human action. (13) The term was actually first suggested to Waismann by William Kneale as a translation of the Porosität der Begriffe. See F. Waismann, “Verifiability,” in Logic and Language, Second Series, ed. Antony Flew (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), 119. Waismann also takes up the topic of open-textured concepts in “Language Strata,” in Logic and Language, First Series, ed. Antony Flew (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), 11–31. (14) Richard J. Sclafani, “‘Art’, Wittgenstein, and Open-Textured Concepts,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 29 (1971): 331–41. (15) For the claim that there are no criteria for identity over time, see Trenton Merricks, “There Are No Criteria of Identity Over Time,” Noûs 32 (1998): 106– 24. Two other papers worth consulting that provide interesting arguments relevant to the provision of necessary conditions for identity are Bas C. Van Fraassen, “‘World’ is not a Count Noun,” Noûs 29 (1995): 139–57; and Ned Markosian, “Brutal Composition,” Philosophical Studies 92 (1998): 211–49. I am grateful to Michael Rea for bring these to my attention. (16) Morris Weitz, The Opening Mind: A Philosophical Study of Humanistic Concepts (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977). (17) Charles Taylor develops this position initially in The Explanation of Behavior (New York: Humanities Press, 1964). (18) Donald Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” in his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 3–19. (19) A. I. Melden, Free Action (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964). (20) Weitz, The Opening Mind, 170.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians (21) A full unpacking of what is at stake here in speaking of “the cause” of my action would take us into a more nuanced account of the natural use of this designation. In circumstances like the one under consideration we can speak of many causes including those that are articulated by Davidson; however, when we speak of “the cause” we are deliberately picking out one cause as by far the most significant cause. The crucial point here is that your insulting me falls out of Davidson’s causal story altogether. (22) This analysis of Weitz can be confirmed by looking at Davidson’s summary statement on what counts as an action in his paper, “Agency,” in Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, 59: “We must conclude, perhaps with a shock of surprise, that our primitive actions, the ones we do not do by doing something else, mere movements of the body—these are all the actions there are. We never do more than move our bodies: the rest is up to nature.” The immediate counterexamples that come to mind are those involving mental acts like calculating, ruminating on a problem, composing the outline of a letter, and the like. These are clearly cases of action; and, whatever the relation between the mental and the physical, these examples obviously suggest that the class of actions we predicate of human agents cannot be confined to never doing more than moving our bodies. (23) Weitz, The Opening Mind, 185. (24) Ibid., 186. In developing this position Weitz rejects other ways of characterizing action as an open concept. Thus he agrees with H. L. A. Hart, Stuart Hampshire, and Ludwig Wittgenstein that there is no real theory or real definition of action. “…there is no such theory; there cannot be; and there need not be.” Ibid., 142. However, he disagrees with Hart’s claim that we can have necessary but not sufficient conditions (it is defeasible); with Hampshire’s claim that the concept of action is essentially debatable (there are no undebatable criteria); and with Wittgenstein’s claim that different uses display family resemblance (a disjunctive set of non-necessary, non-sufficient set of conditions). Weitz does not consider the possibility that action might be an essentially contested concept, a move that would come close to the position of Hampshire. Even a brief look at this possibility will quickly rule out that option as a serious possibility. On essentially contested concepts see the seminal essay by W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” in his Philosophy and Historical Understanding (New York: Shocken Books, 1968). (25) J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 126–7.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians (26) A similar line of thinking arises in a very different philosophical trajectory in the work of Franz Rosenzweig. Opposing an essentialism that mirrors the quest for a closed concept of action he writes: “Necessarily there can be only one substantial mark setting apart the multiplicity of things. What else is there in reality to make us realize that this act is our act? Precisely this experience of such an act as a consequence of our past life and an anticipation of the future as its outcome! A thing receives a character of its own within the flow of life. The question, ‘what is this actually?’, detached from time, deprived of it, quickly passes through the intermediate stage of the general term and comes into the pale region of the mere ‘thing.’ Thus emerges the concept of the one and only substance, the ‘essential’ nature of things. The singleness and particularity [Eigenheit] of the subject detached from time is transformed into a statement of its particular essence [Eigentlichkeit des Wesens].” See his Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 41. The emphasis is as in the original. (27) I am indebted in what follows from what I learned by attending a set of lectures given by Julia Annas on action theory when I was a graduate student at Oxford. (28) The obvious list of paradigm cases that comes to mind immediately are these: intentional action, legal action, moral action, social action, physical action, mechanical action, mental action, and speech acts. The use of the term “speech acts” rather than “speech action” raises the interesting issue as to whether there are relevant differences between “action,” “act,” and “activity.” I suspect there are real differences in play here, but we have enough on our hands as it stands dealing with the concept of action. Much attention has been given to speech acts in recent work; and there is a growing interest in legal action that goes right back to the work of J. L. Austin. (29) This point is well made by Morris Weitz. See Weitz, The Opening Mind, 186. (30) This observation is confirmed when we look at the work of William P. Alston in Chapter 7. (31) Alfred Merle, “Intention,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, ed. Timothy O’Connor and Constantine Sandis (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 108– 13. (32) There is a loose parallel here with the dispute between particularists and methodists in epistemology. Methodists want to have a method at the outset for distinguishing between, say, knowledge and opinion. The particularist wants to test any method of this sort against particular claims to possess knowledge. (33) Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” 133.

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Exiting the Court of the Gentiles by Plundering the Athenians (34) Brian Davies, “Is God a Moral Agent?” in Whose God? Which Tradition? ed. D. Z. Phillips (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 97–122.

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I: Exploring and Evaluating the Debate William J. Abraham

Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780198786504 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786504.001.0001

Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy William J. Abraham

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198786504.003.0007

Abstract and Keywords 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. Keywords:   William Alston, religious life, divine action, metaphysic, intentional action, functionalism, agency

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy In the preceding chapter I argued that the concept of action is an open concept rather than a closed concept. While there are sufficient conditions for the predication of action discourse, and while there are various strata of action discourse, there is no set of necessary conditions that all action predicates must satisfy. The efforts to develop an essentialist concept of action fail, and they fail not because of lack of ingenuity on our part. They fail because the concept of action is a very general concept like that of “thing” and “event”; they fail because every closed concept proposed thus far is subject to counter-examples, so much so that attempts to develop a closed concept must finesse the problem in various ways; and they fail because the host of contrasts in play when we speak of “action” cannot be assimilated to a single axis of usage.1 I also argued that even if we did have a closed concept of action, the payoff for providing illumination for understanding divine action is very thin indeed. All it would do is to provide a set of the necessary conditions governing any action of God, and these conditions would be very formal. It would furnish a rule of the following kind. Given that property “x” is essential to action, then property “x” will apply to any action predicated of God. However, given the purely formal character of this rule, its use in helping us to understand, say, the (p.110) difference between divine inspiration and divine speaking, would be absolutely nil. Hence it will not help us once we specify or individuate the action or activity of God that forms the meat of theological claims about divine action. Thus it does not help us to deal with the original question that set off the debate in the criticism of the Biblical Theology Movement. It does not answer, for example, the question: “What did God actually do?” in liberating Israel from Egypt. The upshot of this is that after two decades of much huffing and puffing on the concept of action, we are right back where we started. Yet the work was not all lost, at least in this respect, in that we now have a better handle on how to proceed in working on action predicates as applied to God. We must be aware as best we can of what stratum the action may occupy. Thus if we are interested in divine intentional action, then it will be appropriate to pursue such issues as how the action was performed, why it was performed, what explanations can be given, and the like. However, prior to this we need to specify what action we have in mind. Are we thinking of, say, God’s action of atoning for our sins in Christ, or God making promises of eternal life, or God raising Jesus from the dead, and so on? This in turn will allow us to think through what analogies may best serve at this level to make sense of the specific divine action under review. In this respect, we can leave in play the role of analogy. Clearly, those who insisted that divine action should be thought of analogously to human action were correct to flag this insight, even though the work as a whole was vitiated by a failure to notice that this actually becomes most illuminating after we specify the divine action that is under review.

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy Once we embark on specification we are knee deep into theology, because we now have to look at the specific theological claims that, say, the Christian tradition makes about what God does and what this implies for any general account of divine action. Indeed some theologians have suggested that all the central doctrines of Christianity are either claims about divine action (creation and redemption) or they depend crucially on claims about divine action.2 The former claim is much too restrictive. It cannot accommodate, say, the kind of comprehensive reflection on the doctrine of the Trinity that has been offered by theologians. However, the general point still stands. Claims about divine action are pivotal to Christian theology; hence analysis of divine action will become inescapably theological once we move beyond the initial formalities of a certain kind of conceptual analysis. Substantial conceptual work on specific divine actions will require attention to theological reflection on the meaning of, say, creation, atonement, grace, incarnation, forgiveness, and the like. At this point any distinction between philosophy and theology simply dissolves. (p.111) There is a second reason why the distinction between theology and philosophy has dissolved by this stage in our inquiry. Once we allow for intentional agency on the part of God—once we allow for this stratum of action discourse—then we have to deploy some notion of God as an agent in order to make sense of what God does. Intentional-action predicates are not detached from the subject of the verbs in which they occur. When we use intentionalaction predicates of human agents, they are generally referred to in terms of the name of the agent (“my sister Ann”) or a referring expression (“the tallest man in China,” “the jockey who won the third race on May 3rd at the Curragh,” and the like). The same applies to intentional-action predicates as applied to God. We need to signal how we are picking out the referent for the subject when we speak of God intentionally acting to create the world, sustain it in being, forgive us our sins, deliver us from evil, promise us eternal life in the world to come, and the like. We encountered this issue earlier in the work of Crombie and, having noted the difficulties he failed to address, we will flag the issue of referent again in this chapter.

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy In this chapter I want to test within a new horizon the central diagnostic conviction that the whole debate about divine action has been bedeviled by the idea that a general concept of action is the key to unlocking any effort to understand particular divine action predicated of God. The importance of this issue surfaces afresh with characteristic clarity in the work of William P. Alston on divine action. As we work our way through his proposals, the primary aim is to explore how one leading analytic philosopher develops a concept of intentional action and applies it to God. I shall show that even a robust notion of intentional action as predicated of God yields next to nothing when it comes to understanding the claims about action that are of prime importance to the Christian tradition. Secondarily, we shall begin unpacking the crucial notion of God as an agent. This is by no means a casual decision on our part. As we shall see in a chapter to come, the very idea of God as an agent has been greeted with aggressive hostility by those who see its deployment as an idolatrous intrusion into contemporary theology foisted upon us by analytic philosophy. Beyond these aims I shall begin the work of updating our review of more recent work on divine action. Alston’s work provides one of the most incisive treatments of divine action in recent analytic philosophy.3 His work is appropriate here for four reasons. First, he is interested in a robust canon of divine action in the Christian tradition. Thus he does not initially rule out “special” acts of God as a first step in his treatment of the issues. Second, he is well aware of the relative (p.112) openness of the concept of action, but rightly insists on the importance of intentional action for any treatment of divine action. Third, he is also clear that one cannot come to terms with discourse about divine action without presupposing some account of the nature of God. Thus he deals with the issue of the material referent, of how to think of God’s nature as the subject of intentional-action discourse, head on. Fourth, he is one of the few who recognized that even if we deploy a relatively closed concept of intentional action, the yield for understanding divine action is meager. Examining in some detail his account of how to enrich the work on divine action so as to get beyond the thinness involved will allow us to reiterate the initial methodological moves made in the previous chapter. The central goal of Alston’s work on divine action is to work through questions of second intention, that is, to discern the kind of concepts we are able to form of divine action. Initially this depends on how we construe the nature of God. His answer to this implicit query is straightforward: God is to be thought of as a being who is immaterial, infinitely perfect, and timeless. To speak of God doing x is to speak of an immaterial, infinitely perfect, timeless being doing x. At this point Alston has selected a set of attributes that uniquely pick out God from other possible referents for God in any and all sentences that speak of God acting.4 The attributes involved have been central in traditional concepts of God in the theistic traditions; they provide crucial information on the nature of God for Alston. Page 4 of 23

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy How then are action predicates to be applied to God? Not surprisingly, we begin with a familiar move: “Our thought about God as agent is clearly modeled on our understanding of human agency.”5 We begin with human action concepts and see how far they can apply to God. For Alston there is partial overlap between action concepts as applied to God and to human agents.6 Applied more particularly to the issue in hand, the issue becomes (p.113) how far our thinking about human intentional action can function when used with reference to divine intentional action.7 Human intentional action in turn initially involves two components: a psychological component (represented by intentions, desires, attitudes, beliefs, and the like) and a physical component represented by bodily movements. Informally we can say: S intentionally brings about a state of affairs B only if there is a state of affairs, A, which might or might not be identical with B, for the sake of which S is doing the bringing about of B. Using the language of Donald Davidson, we can say: S intentionally closes a door just in case S performs the overt movements that lead to the door being closed because S has a pro-attitude towards a state of affairs A and a belief that the door’s coming to be closed either is, or is likely, to lead to A. Applied to divine action, we can then ask how far these two conditions (the physical and the psychological) can be carried over into talk of divine action. The physical condition is resolved by positing that God can bypass the need for bodily movement by deploying basic actions. A basic action is an act an agent does straight off without doing any other act. In the human case we close the door by pushing it with a hand, pressing it with a foot, and the like. We do x by doing y; we close the door by moving our hand. But we do not do anything to move our hand; this is a basic action we do directly. Thus in the case of God we can think of God closing the door by doing so directly, without doing something else to close the door. Of course, God could close the door by ordering someone to close the door; but the ordering would either be a basic act or would involve a basic act. So given the nature of God and his agency, God can bypass the need for bodily movement; God can bring about external results directly.8

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy Alston gives much more attention to the psychological as opposed to physical conditions identified as essential to human intentional action. Essential to action at this level is a psychological structure with two elements: a goal-setting state (the “pro-attitude”) and an information guidance system that supplies relevant information on how the goal may be reached. In the human case the former consists of such factors as wants, desires, aversions, longings of various sorts, scruples, commitments, and the like. As applied to God, these effectively fall out of the picture. There is no basis for discriminating these in the divine nature; God is not a biological agent with various cravings; God does not pursue goals in sudden gusts of passion or uncontrollable longing; (p.114) and “since He is perfectly good He wants nothing that runs contrary to what He sees to be the best, and so there is no discrepancy between what He wants and what He recognizes to be right and good.”9 On the level of the information guidance system, we can posit that God acts on the basis of knowledge rather than beliefs in that God has complete knowledge of everything knowable. So the core of the psychological structure is a generic pro-attitude and relevant knowledge of how to achieve the goal(s) of the relevant intentional action. Can these concepts (“pro-attitude” and “knowledge”) legitimately be applied to God? Let us focus on the issue of “attitude,” taking up the issue of “knowledge” more or less as a relevant aside as we proceed. Suppose we say God has a pro-attitude to our being sanctified. Does “having a pro-attitude” mean the same as it does when we say that we “have a pro-attitude” to winning a race? Clearly, we cannot assimilate the details of the divine psychology to that of human psychology. But is there here a common core that covers both the divine and human case? The answer to this depends on what we think God is like, what we think human agents are like, and what it is to speak of a pro-attitude in either case. Attitudes in the human case are appropriately seen as the realization of intentional psychological states. How we treat intentional psychological states will in turn set the scene for how we are to apply these states to God. Some (Brentano and Chisholm) construe intentionality as a basic unanalyzable feature of psychological states. Intentionality is a bedrock primitive notion that cannot be explained in more basic categories.10 A positive attitude (taking x to be desirable, gratifying, attractive, worthwhile, a good thing, and the like) is simply a basic, underivative feature of our mental life. So for God to “have a proattitude toward p” has the same, univocal meaning as predicated of human agents. “If taking a state of affairs to be a good thing is a basic, unanalysable relation of an intelligent agent to a (possible) state of affairs, there is nothing in the concept to limit it to an embodied, finite, imperfect, or temporal agent.”11 The concept of a pro-attitude can literally be applied to God.

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy Others, including Alston, prefer a functionalist account of intentional states. On this reading psychological states are type individuated by their distinctive role within the perceptual conditions and behavior of systems and organisms. So a belief, an intention, an attitude, and the like, are construed as a particular “job” done by the psyche, just as the concept of a loudspeaker is the concept of what performs the function of converting electronic signals to sound. Suppose you perform the action of carrying your umbrella to the office. Your belief that (p. 115) it is now raining is a state that interacts with an intention to go outside, a desire to remain dry, and a belief that carrying an umbrella is the best way to stay dry to elicit the behavior of carrying an umbrella. There may be all sorts of other beliefs in play, and a complete analysis is well-nigh impossible, but the contour of the general functionalist account of intentional states is relatively clear. Because it was originally associated with a physicalistic account of human agents, it may seem odd in the extreme to use this to analyze intentional states as applied to God. However, this is misleading in that a functionalist account can be applied to entities that have radically different natures such as computers, biological organisms with various physical and chemical properties, and even to angels. Univocity of meaning carries across these differences so long as the relevant sort of function is being performed. To be sure, there are radical differences between the divine and human psyche, and in the case of God there is no need to posit either receiving information through sense perception or any kind of bodily movement to connect up to the world. Nor should we think of God as some kind of system or organism. Given that there is no input, we can think of psychological states in the case of God as type individuated by their distinctive role within a complex of states that gives rise to action. Attitudes, beliefs, and the like are now construed in terms of the way in which intentional action stems from them; even as an intentional action is to be understood in terms of the way in which it stems from attitudes, beliefs, and the like.

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy The upshot for divine action thus can be summarized as follows. In the case of the divine motivational structure we can think of it as made up of (i) attitudes towards various (possible) states of affairs, and (ii) complete knowledge. Divine action then arises from a pro-attitude towards some goal state plus the knowledge that the action in question will realize that goal state. Where God realizes his purpose directly—in this limiting case—the action in question is just the bringing about of that goal state. On this simple model, a divine pro-attitude towards G is, at least in part, the sort of state that combined with knowledge that doing A is the best way of achieving G, will lead to God’s doing A. Knowledge that doing A is the best way of achieving G is the sort of state that combined with a pro-attitude towards G, will lead to God’s doing A. The circularity here is patent; and Alston is well aware of this. Before we catch the significance of this, however, we have to deal with some additional complexities. These will not disrupt the basic story that Alston has to tell about intentional divine action, but they are important nevertheless if we are to do justice to his analysis. The complexity introduced by Alston to do justice to divine action involves four distinct considerations. First, because God will have pro-attitudes to mutually exclusive states of affairs, we have to qualify the move from pro-attitude plus relevant knowledge to action by saying that having a pro-attitude to a state of affairs is best captured by saying that it has a tendency to bring (p.116) about that state of affairs to action. Second, the relation of tendencies to action must be construed in such a way as to preserve divine freedom. This can be done by noting that God has the capacity to refrain from performing an action whatever the strength of the tendency that issues from his attitudes and knowledge. God can, given his nature, be counted on to act for the good, but God’s free choice is interposed between any tendencies issuing from his nature and his activity. Hence God’s activity is the activity of a free agent in the most unqualified sense. Everything God does is a matter of agent causality rather than event causality; no exercise of his powers as an agent is determined by any states, not even states of himself. Third, attributing this kind of agency to God means that we have to recognize an internal act of the agent (an act of will, volition, or the like) that can control the gates to the external world. In the case of God we may speak of volitions (intentions that do not dissipate over time) as leading from the field of tendencies to the action done. Fourth, in more complex cases we should think not of a singular, particular action done as the object of the relevant proattitude; rather we should think of an action plan that involves a mental representation of the complex action intended as the object of our pro-attitude. Thus God may restore the kingdom of Israel by means of doing a number of things that lead up to it; this would then be represented by an appropriate action plan as the object of God’s intention as the relevant psychological determinant of overt activity.

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy With these qualifications in hand, Alston summarizes the resulting analysis as follows. Attitudes and cognitions are to be understood in terms of the way in which they interact to engender action tendencies. Tendencies, in turn, are to be understood partly in terms of this origin and partly in terms of the way they interact with each other to either determine executive intentions or to influence volitions, as the case may be. Finally executive intentions and volitions are to be understood in terms both of their background and of the way they determine overt action. This whole functionalist contribution to our concepts of such states can be thought of as deriving from conditionals like the following. 1. If S has a pro-attitude toward G, then S will have a tendency to do whatever S takes to be a way of attaining G. 2. If S has a tendency to do A, then if this tendency is not successfully opposed by a stronger tendency or by an act of will, S will do A, if the external world cooperates in the right way.12 With characteristic sensitivity to the conceptual issues involved, Alston is well aware that he has moved beyond the standard functionalist account of psychological states. He has introduced the idea of free acts of will, drawing on an (p.117) irreducible concept of agency. He has introduced the idea of agentcausality. We have, he says, the concept of an agent’s directly bringing something about, where this something is to be explained in terms of the agent’s exercise of its powers, rather than by any sort of event or state as a cause, and where the activity on the part of the agent is not causally determined by anything, not even its own states, though it may well be influenced by them.13 This notion of agent causation cannot be given a functionalist account. What is directly brought about by agency, the volition, can partly be construed in functionalist terms, but it cannot be explicated in functionalist terms. We are here faced with the irreducible concept of an agent’s bringing something about; we either allow this or we do not; we cannot go further by way of analysis.

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy By this stage a circularity involved in a functionalist account of divine action is clear for all to see. On the one hand, divine action is what results from a certain motivational background. On the other hand, the motivational background ends up being construed in terms of the way in which it leads to action. We might avoid this by insisting that we can ignore pro-attitudes, tendencies, and cognitions and simply say that divine actions are those that issue from divine acts of will or volitions. However, Alston wants to keep in play the role of these factors in influencing and thus partially explaining volitions. At this point Alston robustly acknowledges the circularity, but he notes that the same problem breaks out when we think of human agents. Even in the human case we are stuck with the circularity. However, the circularity is to be attenuated by resisting a fully reductionist functionalist account of intentional concepts; and we keep the functionalist account in play because it highlights the interrelation of actions and psychological states and thereby sheds considerable light on their nature. The goal in all this is to indicate how psychological and action concepts can be applied to God in the case of intentional action and thus track a commonality between our concept of human action and motivation and our concept of divine action and motivation. “In both cases an action can be thought of as a change that is brought about by a volition or intention, where that is formed against the background of action tendencies that are formed by the interaction of attitudes and cognition.”14 There are of course all sorts of significant differences between the divine and human cases. The form of the interactions may be different. In the human case there will be causal and temporal relations between attitudes and cognitions that do not apply in the case of God. Human agents exhibit a host of cognitive and conative states that are not matched in the divine psyche. Human intentions and volitions depend (p.118) crucially on embodiment in a way that does not apply to God. Human firmness of belief will make a difference to the tendencies of human agents but belief is not strictly applicable to God at all. Omniscience more generally will make a difference to the way in which inferential interrelations function in the divine case. But despite all these differences, there is a basic commonality in the way in which attitudes combine with cognitions to determine action tendencies, and the way in which action tendencies are related to the final active volition or executive intention. There will be crucial conditionals in common…In both cases, e.g., if the agent has a pro-attitude toward G and a cognition that doing A is a way to realize G, then the agent will have a tendency to do A.15

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy This analysis applies even in the tough case where God is construed as a timeless being. We can proceed by envisaging a model of a physical system (mechanical, electromagnetic, or thermal) in which the values of some variables are a determinate function of other variables at the same time. This supplies the idea of simultaneous subjunctive or counterfactual dependence over against a dependence that relies on one set of states preceding another in time. In the physical model other factors play a role. The values of a variable at any particular time will have depended on prior temporal processes within the system, and its relations of contemporaneous dependence will be subject to relevant laws of nature. These features of the model do not apply to a timeless deity. However, these are not conceptual or necessary truths about contemporaneous relations. The latter can logically be distinguished and appropriately applied to God. In the case of God there is no succession in the divine life; we are to think of God as realizing a complex structure of attitudes, knowledge, tendencies, executive intentions, and volitions in the “eternal now.” To take a putative instance, it is true eternally of God that he wills that the church be inspired by the Holy Spirit to develop the doctrine of the Trinity because he has a pro-attitude towards the church’s making explicit the most fundamental truths about himself. We of course will experience what is true eternally of God in terms of temporal succession; at this level we are dealing with the external aspects of divine activity. “Thus although His will to choose Israel and His will to become incarnate are embraced without temporal succession in the eternal now, it does not follow that the results brought about in the world by these volitions are simultaneous.”16 What should we make of this ambitious effort to explicate the concept of intentional action as applied to God developed by one of the foremost pioneers of analytic philosophy of religion? Alston himself provides a remarkably candid account of the significance of his work which I shall pick up (p.119) shortly. As we move towards his self-evaluation, we should note the following in order to keep our eye on the ball of divine action. First, let us park for the moment Alston’s concept of God as a timeless being, together with all the implications of this for his thinking about divine action. We can do this because Alston himself is prepared to allow for the possibility of a different relation between God and time and to make the requisite adjustments in his thinking about intentional action as applied to God. Hence his most fundamental moves on divine action do not require that we think of God as a timeless being, even though he is drawn to this account of the relation between God and time.

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy Second, it is important to note again that Alston’s focus is on intentional action, not action simpliciter. In my terms he is working on a critically important stratum of action discourse that many have taken to be either the paradigm case of action or the exclusive instantiation of action discourse. Alston does not go down that exclusionary road, even though he may appear to come close to doing so at times. Thus he cannot be criticized on the grounds that he ignores the second-order claim that the concept of action is an open concept. Moreover, within the domain of intentional action theory, Alston clearly prefers a functionalist account of the pro-attitudes or psychological states and volitions that combine with knowledge to eventuate in divine action. Yet he alters the functionalist account in a radical way by introducing the idea of volitions and agent causation; and he expresses reservation as to whether a functionalist account of pro-attitudes will really work even for human intentional action. There is a complexity here (some might say a dark complexity) that should be honored. All that said, what is amazing is that when Alston looks back at what he has achieved, he finds the dividend less than satisfactory. Whatever the good news, there is significant bad news. The concepts I have been adumbrating are very thin. All we have are concepts of positions in a structure of mutual dependence, ‘counterfactual dependence,’ to use a currently fashionable phrase. God’s being favorably disposed toward G and God’s doing A are the sorts of things that are related to each other, and to other states and activities, in the ways we have been laying out. God’s having a pro-attitude toward the rejuvenation of Israel is the sort of state that is such that if God knows that giving a certain commission to Ezekiel is the best way to bring this about, then God will have a tendency to give that commission to Ezekiel. And that tendency is the sort of state that is such that an agent that has it will give the commission to Ezekiel unless sufficient interferences are present. Among such interferences is the decision not to give the commission to Ezekiel. And what is a divine decision (not) to do A? It is a state such that…and so it goes. I have laid out a certain structure of what depends on what in what way, but as to what it is that stands in these relations of dependence I have said virtually nothing. There are only two places at which this system of mutual dependencies gets anchored in (p.120) something outside it: (i) For any proposition p, p entails that God knows that p, as well as vice versa; (ii) for any p, God’s willing that p entails that p, but not vice versa. But this makes little contribution to our grasp of the nature of the internal states that stand in the specified relations.17

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy The account that I have offered of concepts of the divine psyche and divine activity leaves them quite sparse. Even if we help ourselves to the unanalyzed conception of personal agency, we are still left with only a tenuous conception of the knowledge, attitudes, and volitions of the divine agency.18 Note that this conclusion holds, even if we give Alston a pass on several crucial issues in his analysis. There is, in fact, a network of problems in his account of intentional action. One immediate problem that can be quickly repaired is his claim that for any p, God’s willing that p entails that p, but not vice versa. This is surely false. That God wills that we live free from sin does not entail that we actually live free from sin. Most Christian theists would accept this correction despite worries on the part of some Calvinists that whatever God wills will come to pass.19 Much more significantly, there is a deep circularity at the core of his functionalist account of pro-attitudes. The idea of pro-attitudes is used to explicate his idea of action, but the notion of action shows up in at least two places in his explication of pro-attitudes. Thus he introduces both the notion of volitions or acts of will, and that of agent causation, the idea of an entity which possesses certain powers which it can decide or not to decide to exercise whatever the preceding conditions. At this point he can, of course, abandon a functionalist account of pro-attitudes and retreat to the position of Brentano and Chisholm and construe intentionality as a basic irreducible feature of our psychological states. However, his commitment to a functionalist account of intentional states is given pole position in the race to success. In addition, it is clear that Alston’s analysis may work for the simplest of intentional actions, leaving him to gesture as to how we might fill out his account to cover more complex cases. The advantage here is that potentially it permits him to get at core features of intentional agency. In this respect his work is a paradigm of one strain of analytic philosophy. The disadvantage is that one worries that he has cherry-picked his cases of intentional action and left it as a matter of faith and hope that it will cover the full range of cases that we should include under the umbrella of intentional action. Even the concept of intentional action may be much more open and much harder to pin down than he allows. The effort to get at the necessary and sufficient conditions of intentional action, to delineate the essence of intentional action, becomes more and more brittle as one proceeds through his analysis. On the human (p.121) level it works for simple cases like opening doors or striking golf balls; but we are left wondering about the multifaceted actions that involve extremely complex webs of social and communal relationships.20 On the divine level it can be applied to God commissioning Ezekiel and inspiring the church to adopt the doctrine of the Trinity, but prima facie it is not clear how it can cover the wider canon of divine action that Alston himself is committed to as a Christian believer.

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy Back of this concern is an additional worry. As Alston notes, a functionalist account of human agency arises as part of a wider program to develop a physicalist account of human agents. He fends off this worry by suggesting that the problem here is mostly one of its associations. There is nothing in the core of the functionalist account that would limit it in terms of meaning to merely physical phenomena. Functionalism can be instantiated in a variety of mechanisms or agents with very different natures. Technically Alston is correct here. However, it is not that easy to keep our ontological commitments from surfacing in our conceptual commitments. The debate about action is as much about the ontology of actions as it is about the concept of action. Thus the picture of human agents in play here, given its original home in current work in the philosophy of mind as developed in the world of contemporary, secular departments of philosophy, is highly likely to be exceptionally sparse and thin. If we begin from a more highly ramified theological concept of human agents, with all the richness that shows up in the Christian tradition,21 then it is natural and proper to wonder if Alston’s assumed account is adequate as an account of human agents. The vision we deploy in order to work up our concept of human action is not a neutral affair; it would help if this were more fully acknowledged at the outset. The way in which ontological commitments begin to show up in Alston’s story of human action comes out most clearly when he drops into talk of the divine psyche and psychology. No doubt, as Alston is well aware, many will cringe at the effort to think our way into the divine psyche or psychology. While they may welcome his clear and upfront confession that he identifies the referent for God as “a being who is immaterial, infinitely perfect, and timeless”; and while they may applaud his acute sensitivity to the radical difference between divine agency–action–motivation and human agency–action–motivation; they still fear that crucial elements of transcendence are lost and that God’s nature turns out to be much too anthropocentric. In (p.122) addition, they may see a corollary to his anthropocentric doctrine of God in his drive to maintain a univocal, literal core to speech about divine action and in his deep distrust of metaphor and symbol.

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy We need to tread carefully at this point. There are ambiguities in his account of religious language in this essay on divine action. On the one hand, one can read his proposal as one where one takes his theory of “partial univocity” as a version of analogical predication. He is at great pains to point out the differences between the concept of intentional action as applied to God and as applied to human agents. In this case “partial univocity” means, perhaps, that every concept applied to God has both a common core of meaning and a relevant difference. The motivation behind his use of the language of univocity is twofold. On the one hand, he wants to avoid sliding into a flatfooted literalism; on the other, he wants to make sure that when we speak of “purpose” and “intention” in the case of God, these are not taken so metaphorically and symbolically that we do not know how to interpret them. The alternative is to insist that there is genuine continuity in meaning between the application of “purpose,” “intention,” and “action” as predicated of human agents and their application to God. This certainly sounds like a doctrine of analogical predication. On the other hand, one can read his notion of “partial univocity” as the idea that some concepts apply literally to God and others are to be taken as analogical, metaphorical, symbolic, and the like. My sense is that in his treatment of divine action, Alston leans towards this latter interpretation. He is certainly very nervous of any talk of the metaphorical or the symbolic as applied to divine action. Important as all these worries may be, my concern is simpler and more direct: have we made progress on delineating the particular actions and activities of God that are of concern to the theologian? We at least know the referent for God. At this point Alston has identified God by helping himself to a slice of the unique descriptions of God that show up in philosophical treatments of God in the theistic traditions. Moreover, we have been given a general account of the necessary and sufficient conditions for any intentional action of God. We are told that divine intentional action is constituted by pro-attitudes towards certain goals (p) plus knowledge of relevant states of affairs (q) plus divine volitions (r) plus agent causation (s). Divine intentional actions are marked by features p + q + r + s. Presumably, we can slot this into any predicate of divine action that we encounter. However, if philosophers and theologians rightly found fault with adherents of the Biblical Theology Movement for failing to answer in detail what God has really done and how we should understand the specific actions predicated of God, then these issues have not been addressed. It is legitimate to ask of Alston: what has this God (the being identified as immaterial, infinitely perfect, and timeless) really done specifically and in particular? What precise actions have we predicated of God? How far does this (p.123) conceptual work on divine action help us make progress on understanding these particular actions? On this front we are no further forward.

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy To be sure, in philosophical terms, this work is not at all meager and sparse; it involves in its own way a rich account of the concept of intentional action; it is the fruit of extensive philosophical reflection in the analytic mode. The mere fact that it involves extensive debate in philosophical circles shows that we are not dealing here with common platitudes. Brought over into theology, presumably these characteristics apply to all cases of divine intentional action. However, this operation tells us next to nothing about what to make of particular acts of God like creation, providence, forgiving us our sins, making atonement for our sins, promising us eternal life in the world to come, and on and on. Nothing in Alston’s analysis helps us differentiate these actions, much less get a grip on what they might mean. This is not accidental. In the very nature of the case, this kind of analysis of the concept of action is not just meager and thin, it is utterly barren when it comes to the particularities of divine action. We are not told what God has done, why he may have done it, how best to explain what he has done, and so on. As in the case of human action, we need to specify who the agent is, individuate what the agent has done, explore why he or she did it, and so on. On this important set of questions, that is, the questions that were let loose in the wake of the claims of the Biblical Theology debacle, we are left entirely in the dark. On this score, on the problem of particularity, this kind of analytic philosophy has run out of gas in a big way; worse still, it looks as if there is no gas available at this gas station. It is very important to sit down and think through Alston’s own response to the thinness of his analysis. He does not spell out the nature of the thinness involved in any detail, but I trust that the preceding captures the issue accurately and succinctly.22 If I am on target here, he gestures towards several distinct ways of responding to the problem of particularity. First, he plays a weak apophatic card. We have no right, he says, to expect a satisfactory theoretical grasp of the divine nature and doings. Well and good; but does our grasp have to be this formal, thin, and meager when it comes to the specific actions of God that interest the theologian? Surely this move is a red herring; everybody agrees that there are profound mysteries if not about human agency then certainly about divine agency. Alston’s own worries about thinness are not removed by citing this platitude. Second, he draws a distinction between the theoretical and the practical, and exploits this distinction in an interesting way to deflect the dilemma his work exhibits. Ironically, he even provides an incisive rendering of the acute (p.124) difficulties this distinction engenders in his own exposition. Speaking of the religious life he asserts: “There is the need for guidance, direction, inspiration, assistance in gaining salvation, in leading the kind of life and becoming the kind of person God intends us to.”23 He then frankly acknowledges that a grasp of the divine psyche and activity in terms of austere conditionals does not look very promising in understanding what this discourse means and thus in addressing these needs. This is not the way it goes, he says, in the theistic religions. Page 16 of 23

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy If you think of the Bible and, more generally, of practically oriented religious literature, it is at once apparent that God is represented as deliberating, forming purposes and intentions in the light of developing events as they occur, acquiring knowledge of events as they transpire, exhibiting features that attach only to temporal, imperfect agents. It may be said that those who write, and those who read with approval, such works simply do not share the same conception of God. I have been dealing with the ‘God of the philosophers,’ while theirs is the ‘God of the Bible,’ or the ‘God of the simple believers.’24 In responding to his own worry, Alston is really digging himself into a deeper hole. His account of the nature of God, he says, is in line with and was developed by those who shared the interest in Scripture and pious literature that is cited here. They also took the Bible as authoritative so their credentials in taking seriously the “God of the Bible” are secure. So he is in good company; the potential critic has no monopoly on the “God of the Bible” or the “God of the simple believer.” However, this line of thinking surely simply repeats the problem in another guise. We now want to know why extending the range of those who share Alston’s problem comes within shouting distance of a solution. We have a deep divide at the very core of our theism: the practical does not line up with the theoretical. The appeal to past tradition does not solve the dilemma; it simply exhibits its historical depth. Furthermore, Alston thinks that the needs of the religious life seem to lead us to a much more concrete way of thinking about God and divine action. For the practice of the religious life, we need to think of ourselves in genuine interaction with God: in prayer, in the action of the Holy Spirit within us, in God’s providence for our needs, in seeking enlightenment from Him, and so on. But the conception I have offered of a timeless ‘personal system’ of functionally interrelated psychological states simply does not present anything with which we can coherently conceive ourselves to be in dynamic personal relations of support, love, or instruction…Thus it seems to be a practical necessity of the religious life to represent God as much more like a created, imperfect, temporal agent than what I am taking to be a sound theology will allow. We must for devotional and edificatory purposes, think of God as finding out what happens as it occurs and (p.125) forming intentions to deal with developing situations as they develop, even though an omniscient being, whether timeless or not, would know everything about the future at any given time.25

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy The really subterranean dilemma, then, is that Alston’s analysis opens up a deep divide between his account of divine action arrived at on philosophical grounds and the presuppositions of divine action that seem to be essential to Scripture and the life of faith. The theoretical and the practical have come apart at the seams. How should we deal with this dilemma? One option, he suggests, is to abandon the vision of God with which we started and delete divine timelessness and knowledge of the future from the doctrine of God. Put more robustly, we make minimal adjustments in our doctrine of God and take the more concrete descriptions of divine action found elsewhere in the Christian tradition as literal. The problem then becomes the more wide-ranging issue of what general theory of theological predication we prefer. At this level of analysis, the alternative to this first option is to deny that any predicates apply literally to God and opt for some theory of analogy, metaphor, symbol, and the like. For his part, Alston sticks with the constraints inherent in his initial vision of God and settles for a doctrine of partial univocity where there is an abstract core of predicates that are literally true of God. On this option, we kick the problem upstairs into the philosophy of religious language. We hold firm to the literal core and hope that the acute dissonance between our philosophy and working theology will be taken care of by visiting “somewhere in the general territory of metaphor and symbol.” For the religious life, “we need to go beyond that [a hard literal core] in ways that launch us into the still not sufficiently charted seas of the figurative and the symbolic.”26 This is an astonishing move for someone as sensitive and rigorous as Alston. Consider the difficulties that immediately crop up. First, we really have no fix on what is involved in charting these uncharted seas. Even if we had the relevant charts, we are given no sense as to how these will bridge the gap between the “theoretical” and the “practical.”

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy Second, the very distinction between the “theoretical” and the “practical” sends a clear signal that the former is privileged over the latter. There is a Kantian ring to Alston’s distinction, but it is best to keep that at bay. It is better to ask: what does the “practical” really refer to here? We could take the “practical” to mean something along the lines of the personal, the devotional, and maybe even the moral dimensions of Christianity. This does not take us very far. In context, it would appear to mean a lot more. It refers to the reading of Scripture, to the practices of worship and prayer, to the use of creeds and other canonical material, to seeking God for guidance, and the like. What in (p.126) fact lies under the cover of the “practical” is nothing less than the primary, first-order speech and religious activity of the Christian community. These are not secondary matters; they involve all sorts of deep assumptions about divine action in the past and in the present. Any attempt to leave these aside to be dealt with after the “theoretical” heavy-lifting has been already carried out is bound to be misleading. The “practical” presupposes the concept of God as an agent with whom one can relate in a person-relative manner; we are dealing with an agent who performs particular actions like answering prayer, guiding the church into truth, providing for our needs, directing, making genuine decisions in calling particular prophets like Ezekiel, inspiring, acting within us by the Holy Spirit to purify our passions, forgiving, supporting, loving, and instructing. In and of itself, the division between the “theoretical” and the “practical” cannot be sustained in the way envisaged by Alston. Furthermore, his comments on what is at stake in practice are injudicious in the extreme. On the one hand, he thinks that in the “practical” arena we should think of God as one among many, imperfect temporal agents. God, he thinks, is conceived as “a created, imperfect, temporal agent.” This is bizarre in that it cuts Christian practice loose from the web of doctrine and thought in which it is embedded. This vision of God is surely not what attentive Christians hold when engaged in Christian practice. On the other hand, he seems to think that action predicates applied to this agent are somehow read as literal by those engaged in Christian practice, or that this is the way they are likely to read them. In other words, ordinary believers are so incompetent in their linguistic skills that they do not know how to use action predicates when they speak of divine action. Equally, if they engage in second-order reflection, they are uniformly incompetent and fall for an inappropriate literalism. Worst of all, Alston proposes that the best way to sort out divine action discourse as it shows up in the “practical” is to treat it as metaphorical and symbolic. Given that these are the lowest of the low in his scale of meaning compared to the literal and the partially-univocal, he has in fact gutted the first-order discourse of the Christian tradition of any serious content.27 We are now right back in the liberal world of the Biblical Theology Movement with a vengeance. We can be sure that this was far from anything he intended; it is, however, exactly where his account of divine action lands us. Page 19 of 23

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy The initial challenge here is to give the ordinary believer both a more salient place at the table and a real philosophical break on what he or she may inchoately think about divine agency and divine action. On the latter front, the ordinary believer who engages in the robust practices of the canonical faith of the church (reciting the Creed, worshipping, receiving the sacraments, (p.127) reflecting on the lives of the saints, and the like) is already deploying tacit concepts of divine agency and divine action. We must beware of imposing our favored theoretical schemas on their usage. The standard strategy of working out a generic concept of action and then using it to unpack the meaning the primary language of faith is radically incomplete. The ordinary believer has a place at the table precisely because we need to test our theories about the meaning of claims about divine action at least in part against the usage that is characteristic of the manifold practices of the church. We need to save divine action from the highhanded conceptual imperialism of salient forms of philosophical analysis. We should abandon the whole project of looking for the kind of generic, precise, essentialist account of action (including, perhaps, even intentional action) as the way to grasp what is at stake in talk of divine action. However well such proposals may answer certain interesting philosophical questions, they are at best incomplete and at worst seriously misleading when it comes to understanding the particularities of divine action. Thus Alston’s work on divine action underscores my claim that even the most carefully constructed closed concept of intentional divine action yields little of value in debates about divine action.

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy This observation also applies to the dividends Alston’s work furnishes on our understanding of action predicates as applied to God. I have said little about the success or failure of the concept of God he uses to fix the referent to which action predicates are attached. Recall that God refers to that being or agent who is identified as immaterial, infinitely perfect, and timeless. This language is effectively shorthand for the God of mere theism. Therefore it does not invoke the name of God as that occurs in the canonical practices of the Christian tradition, where God is named as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Clearly, there are even deeper differences between human agency and divine agency than those charted by Alston once we put that identifying description of God in play. My aim here is not to add fuel to the fire when it comes to questions about divine agency and divine action. I simply want to highlight how, in referring to God as he does, Alston is already operating within a tradition that works from a relatively rich description of God even though it does not match the characteristic way of identifying God in the Christian tradition. He is, as he himself notes, working from the angle of the “God of the Philosophers.” For him this is a matter not just of good philosophical practice but also of “sound theology.” Within this tradition, he is happy to speak of God as “a being.” More importantly, he is happy to speak of God as “an agent.” Moreover, in his account of action he deploys the controversial idea of agent causation, an idea that when applied to God, would permit us to think of God as a supreme agent with a network of attributes and powers that may or not be exercised depending on God’s free decisions. This is surely an extremely interesting if not fertile proposal on the nature of God and divine agency. (p.128) We have once more transgressed the boundary between philosophy and theology in the sense that the philosopher in working on divine agency and action has implicitly or explicitly committed himself to a very particular doctrinal tradition. However, we may also have transgressed another boundary in a more radical sense. Some will see in this the fatal introduction of an anthropocentric vision of God into the very heart of theology under the guise of a philosophical platitude about the concept of God in Christian discourse about divine action. For many contemporary philosophers and theologians, to think of God as “a being” or as “an agent” is the cardinal sin of much analytic philosophy. In a chapter to come we shall explore in detail this charge and the ramifications involved for thinking about divine action. Divine action can very readily be thrown overboard in the storm-stressed ship of analytic philosophy; we shall see shortly that the same fate applies to divine agency in the storm-stressed ship of a very different stream of the current philosophical landscape. Notes:

(1) doJohn MacMurray, The Self as Agent (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 88–9. (2) Theodore von Haering, The Christian Faith: A System of Dogmatics, vol. II (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913), 514. Page 21 of 23

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy (3) In what follows I shall not deal with the full range of issues about divine action that Alston addresses. I shall not at this point evaluate his account of the semantics of action discourse (his views on literality and how formally to secure sameness of reference) nor his account of the potential relation between divine action and the laws of nature. (4) William P. Alston, Divine Nature and Human Language: Essays in Philosophical Theology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 178–96. (5) William P. Alston, “Divine and Human Action,” in Divine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism, ed. Thomas V. Morris (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 258.Divine Nature and Human LanguageDivine Nature and Human LanguageDivine Nature and Human Language (6) Alston refers to this position as that of “partial univocity.” He contrasts this with “wholesale univocity,” “analogy,” and “figurative” or “symbolic” theories. It is not clear to me how Alston’s position differs from a straightforward theory of analogy where there is both continuity and discontinuity of action terms as predicated of human agents and of God. (7) Alston clearly thinks there is more to action than intentional action, but he does not go into this issue in any detail. (8) Note here that Alston is not speaking of any mechanism on God’s part; he is unpacking the possible conceptualization of God doing something. Notice that this observation would apply in the case of the idea of human basic acts. What is at stake is a conceptualization of action rather than a mechanism of human action. In fact to think of a mechanism in this case would be to miss the whole point of talking about a basic act. (9) Alston, “Divine and Human Action,” 262. (10) This move leaves open whether each of the various forms taken by intentionality (believing, hoping, fearing, or desiring that p) is basic or whether some can be taken as more basic and the others explained in terms of them. (11) Alston, “Divine and Human Action,” 264. (12) Ibid., 271. (13) Ibid., 272. (14) Ibid., 273. (15) Ibid., 274–5. (16) Ibid., 276.

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Saving Divine Action within Later Analytic Philosophy (17) Ibid., 276–7. (18) Ibid., 279. (19) There would be something inherently wrong with the divine will being thwarted. (20) One can surely query the highly intellectualist thrust of Alston’s account of human intentional action. Much of our creative activity involves a combination of deliberation and action-planning and a standing back and allowing ideas and proposals to simmer up passively. We face a problem and step back, resolving not to think about it for a period and see what emerges. Alston’s picture is much too high-brow and planning oriented. (21) Think, for example, of the language of heart, spirit, soul, and conscience that shows up regularly in theological accounts not just of human agents but of human persons. (22) No doubt Alston is worried that philosophically speaking the central notions he deploys are also philosophically and not just theologically thin. They leave a lot of concepts underdeveloped: volitions, cognitions, agent causation, and the like. (23) Alston, “Divine and Human Action,” 278. (24) Ibid., 278–9. (25) Ibid., 279. (26) Ibid., 280. (27) For Alston’s full dress view of metaphor and the literal see his “Irreducible Metaphors in Theology,” in his Divine and Human Language, 17–38, and “Can We Speak of God Literally?,” in Divine and Human Language, 39–63.

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I: Exploring and Evaluating the Debate William J. Abraham

Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780198786504 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786504.001.0001

The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology William J. Abraham

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198786504.003.0008

Abstract and Keywords 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. Keywords:   David R. Griffin, Process theology, divine action, Alfred North Whitehead, metaphysics, Thomas Oord

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology In recent work on divine agency and divine action few have given it more careful and sustained attention than theologians in the Process tradition. One of the great merits of this work is that it deals forthrightly with both the subject and predicates of discourse involving divine action, that is, it provides a rich concept of God and of action as predicated of God. Or at least that appears to be the intention. Given that the Process tradition is now well into its third iteration, one of the challenges before us is that of doing justice to the complexity of the tradition. The Process tradition is complex in its originating sources in Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, in the technical language deployed, and in its appropriation within Christian theology. Hence it is far from easy to do justice to its comprehensive character and claims. My central aim in this chapter is to articulate and evaluate the salient options on offer with respect to divine action and divine agency. Happily this allows us to keep the exposition of the Process tradition to manageable proportions. We have already encountered a version of the Process tradition in an earlier chapter on the work of Schubert Ogden. The justification for another look is simple. In his account of divine action, Ogden draws primarily on the work of the early Heidegger as mediated through Bultmann; the turn to the Process tradition on his part dovetails with this move, but it does not draw initially and foundationally from the Process tradition when it comes to his account of divine action. Hence it is only right and proper to look afresh at work in the Process tradition for potential insight on divine agency and divine action. In particular I shall look at the work of David R. Griffin, who has provided one of the more thorough accounts of divine action available in the Process tradition.1 I shall begin by looking at how Griffin handles the issue of (p.130) divine action and then turn to the topic of divine agency. I shall argue that the Process tradition faces formidable difficulties conceptually and theologically with respect to its account both of divine action and of divine agency. Contrary to the repeated affirmations of its champions, the tradition has come to the end of its tether in its treatment of divine action and divine agency.

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology Griffin’s discussion on divine action opens up with a rejection of the familiar distinction between primary and secondary causation. As creator and sustainer of the universe God, it is often said, is the primary cause of everything that happens. Divine action is a necessary condition of everything that happens. However, primary causation is not the same as direct causation because God operates through the instrumentality of natural causes. God works in, with, and through the agency of natural agents; thus God works by secondary causation. The ordinary, this-worldly or natural causes that we encounter in everyday life are real and genuine, yet they only operate because they are created and sustained by the primary causation of God. The great attraction of this well-worn distinction, aside from its capacity to link divine causation comprehensively to all that happens, is that it allows our intellectual inquiries to proceed as if God does not exist. We can explain what is going on in terms of natural events and causes without invoking the divine; claims about primary causation are complementary to claims about natural causation; primary and secondary causation are not competitive. It is not that God is being excluded or that the theologian is being evasive; primary causation operates at a different level from secondary causation. Miracles in this scheme are easy to entertain from a conceptual point of view: they represent special acts of God in which God acts over and above what is given in secondary causation. So too with acts of special revelation; they are constituted by divine action over and above what is given in secondary causation. Objectively, revelation is not simply our taking an event to be a divine revelation; it is the proper recognition of an event as divine revelation. If revelation is an achievement verb, then, to be sure, there is no revelation without the event in question being received as a revelation. However, revelation is not constituted by its being received; certain events are properly received as divine revelation because they are constituted objectively as special acts of God in which God acts over and above secondary causation. We might say that in these cases, that of miracle and special revelation, God acts directly (p.131) in the natural or historical order. Not unnaturally this position is often designated as supernaturalism.

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology Griffin and Process theologians generally eschew any form of supernaturalism. They naturally construe the divine actions involved as otiose, seeing them as inappropriate forms of divine intervention or divine interruption. Such acts intrinsically reflect badly on the character of God; they reveal a God who is either incompetent, or immoral, or lacking in appropriate foresight, or all three together. They are especially intellectually otiose in that they undercut the naturalistic presuppositions of science and history. The temptation to fall back on a purer and more comprehensive vision of primary and secondary causation is acute at this point. Why not simply say that all the theologian needs is the claim that all divine action is captured by the distinction between primary and secondary causation? So let the natural scientist and historian describe the world in terms of secondary causation; the theologian is still free to play the primary causation cards and keep intact a robust commitment to divine action. The latter are constituted by appropriate religious response to various features of the universe and of personal experience; divine causation or action remains uniform, the response varies. Modern Liberal Protestantism championed this way of thinking about divine action and divine revelation.2 Griffin, however, will have none of this.3 Such a move leads to a relativistic doctrine of divine revelation in which divine revelation is constituted not by objective divine action but by the human response to ordinary natural and historical events. There is nothing in the “revelatory” event itself to warrant the continued response, say, to Jesus of Nazareth, which was central to earlier forms of Christianity. Metaphysically speaking, there is no way to pick out this event as more revelatory than that event; it is all left to the eye of the beholder. In short, Liberal Protestants are not the hard-headed rationalists and objectivists they purport to be; whatever their avowals to the contrary, they are unredeemable relativists.4 It is precisely to meet this problem that Griffin turns to the (p.132) resources of the Process tradition for help in providing a better version of Liberal Protestantism and to avoid any kind of retreat to otiose forms of supernaturalism. His proposals on divine action are central to his reconstruction of Liberal Protestantism and to the wider defense of Process theology.

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology How might Process metaphysics repair the damage done to Liberal Protestantism due to its explicit or covert commitment to the distinction between primary and secondary causation and its consequent loss of the idea of special divine action? The central conceptual moves are supplied by the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Consider initially his bedrock metaphysical proposal: “…the world is made up of momentary processes or events”5 called “actual occasions.” If we want to know the ultimate stuff of reality, the constitutive elements that make up reality, then we need to think of these as experiential rather than simply material. As Whitehead noted: “Actual entities—also termed actual occasions—are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real…The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent.”6 Actual occasions are organismic unities, which are spatial and temporal extensions that cannot be exhaustively expressed in terms of distributions of matter at an instant. Some suggest that there are trillions of actual occasions in one quark.7 Each of these actual occasions is a partially self-determining synthesis of data received from all other events in its environment, including the data supplied by God who is the environment for all events that take place. There are no enduring substances in this vision of the universe; all reality is constituted by a cascading relationalism constituted by actual occasions which arise and perish at every level of existence. In this world causation is constituted by the influences flowing from God, from neighboring actual occasions, and from the self-determining actual occasion itself. This scheme applies all the way from the top to the bottom of creation; everything is constituted as an actual occasion and every actual occasion is subject to this nexus of causality. God’s role is event- or occasion-specific; for each event God provides an initial impulse or “ideal aim” which can then be taken up or not taken up as the subjective aim of each actual occasion. Hence there is genuine self-determination in every actual occasion that occurs. Each actual occasion is (p.133) free to receive or reject the data supplied by all other causal influences related to it, including the ideal aim provided by God. We might say that the world is constituted by innumerable processes of persuasion; the world is not a world of static being but of noncoerced becoming constituted by innumerable actual occasions.

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology To be sure, in the case of low-grade events like electrons the divine influence is so limited that there is little possibility for much if any self-determination on the part of particular actual occasions. As a corollary, there is little room for the initial divine aim to stimulate anything extraordinary; so there is not much need to speak of an “act of God” in any robust sense. God operates as the ground of order for low-grade events. However, once we move up the scale of being, say, to cells, to chimpanzees, and to the events of conscious human choice, things change, for God now operates not just as the ground of order but of novelty. God systematically lures high-grade events towards new possibilities that go beyond the provision of order and each actual occasion is free to receive God’s ideal aim or to reject it. At this metaphysical level we have logical and material space for a degree of divine influence that opens up the real possibility of special divine action in the world. At this level divine persuasive influence is sufficiently strong to call for divine action as a genuine but partial explanatory factor. Hence in Process metaphysics the world is so constituted that it is entirely natural to think of divine action within it, depending on the degree of divine influence received by each actual occasion. This is radically different from the idea of primary and secondary causation and from the idea of direct divine intervention or interruption of the natural and historical order. How far we can speak of divine action for each actual occasion is a matter of degree, for self-determination means that genuine resistance to the divine is possible; at the end of the day non-divine actual occasions are self-determined; their prehensions and choices are not determined by God. There is genuine reciprocity between God and the actual occasions to which God relates. In each moment God constitutes himself by responding to the previous worldly events in such a way as to formulate initial aims for the next stage of the world. This self-constituting response to the world’s efficient causation upon him is an act of ‘final causation’ on God’s part, since he is determining himself at the moment in terms of his general purpose. After God has thus determined his momentary state, replete with initial aims for the succeeding stage of the world’s advance, the succeeding events of the world prehend that divine event in terms of those initial aims. This is divine activity in the sense of efficient causation…God’s effectiveness as an efficient cause is dependent upon the responses to his initial aims.8

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology (p.134) Such reciprocity does not undermine the idea of real, objective divine actions in the world. All that is essential for the latter is for actual occasions to respond positively to the divine lure, so that the actual occasion reflects to an appropriate degree the initial aim supplied by God. We might think of it in this way. God has basically two general policies in presenting actual occasions with initial aims for prehension and choice: (a) a policy of increasing value in the world, and (b) a policy of acting in a manner that is non-coercive and persuasive. These are always in the background for the selection of initial aims. As Donald Viney elegantly states, “God informs the world with new ideals (new aims), customized for each actual entity, for what can [could] realistically be achieved.”9 If God’s initial aims are positively received; if the divine lure is picked up and incorporated into the synthesis of the actual occasion; then the occurrence of that actual occasion will better reflect the subjective aim supplied by God than an actual occasion which does not respond positively to the divine lure. Thus these actual occasions will objectively reflect a degree of divine influence that warrants the relevant event being designated a special act of God. We also have warrant for a much better vision of divine revelation. This can be captured by means of analogy. In some situations, the particular purposes we entertain and strive to actualize are quite far removed from our basic life purpose. Someone who correctly understood our particular aims of the moment would not understand very much about our general aim in life. But in other situations, our momentary subjective aims rather directly reflect our longterm aim, e.g., when the person whose general life aim is to achieve security through fame strives for recognition in a public gathering, or the person whose general aim is to be of service to others performs a helpful deed. Someone who took those particular acts as clues to the general aims of the persons would be receiving genuine ‘revelation.’ And these particular acts in themselves, since they were based upon particular aims that directly reflected the persons’ general aims, would be ‘special acts’ of the person in question.10 It is likewise with God. In those events which determine themselves such that their subjective aims conform highly to the received initial aims given by God, these events can meaningfully be called God’s special acts. These events, while they would not happen without human response, are constituted not simply by that response but by a high degree of divine causation represented by the high degree of divine influence. Thus we can avoid both the relativism of the older Liberal Protestant deployment of the primary–secondary causation distinction and the otiose vulgarity of divine intervention proposed by the (p.135) supernaturalist. We have cases of genuine divine action and divine revelation that objectively reflect the activity of God in the world.

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology I have deliberately laid out the core elements of Griffin’s account of divine action in a very focused manner because it is easy to lose sight of them in the labyrinth of technical conceptuality in which they are embedded and in the ancillary claims that show up in the exposition.11 Once one seeks to dwell on his claims about divine action in a single-minded way, it is, contrary to the recurring complaints of analytic philosophers, relatively easy to begin to grasp what is on offer. Moreover, these core elements are critical for appreciating the more general claims that are rightly associated with Process theology and which are so often the target of criticism. Thus they fit nicely with the commitment to panentheism, the denial of creation ex nihilo, belief in the eternity of the world, the rejection of impassibility and the advocacy of divine passibility, the temporality of God, the worries about omnipotence and eternity, and the elimination of divine foreknowledge of contingent events. We can also see why the Process tradition has proved to be recurrently attractive to many evangelical theologians, even though the more famous and rigorous advocates of Process theology look to it to salvage the waning fortunes of Liberal Protestantism. Especially as presented in tough polemical rhetoric as an alternative to “classical theism” and “supernaturalism,” it provides a metaphysical home to those who are in search of a more humane vision of the divine as reflecting in the writings of the prophets, the suffering of Christ, and the literature of personal piety. The broad metaphysical orientation and the nonspecific generalities about divine action appear on the surface to allow for the kind of robust claims about divine action and passion that are commonly associated with the Gospel; they do not require such claims, but they do not rule them out either. Everything hinges at this point on a more careful look at the goods on offer. An immediate problem arises once we begin to think about the central analogy in play in Griffin’s account of divine revelation. It is certainly true that some acts of an agent are more revelatory of an agent than another. For this to work, however, it is crucial that the acts appealed to are actually the actions of the agent in question. In the case of God in Griffin’s scheme this crucial element is missing because the most that God does is influence an actual occasion to move towards novelty; God does not perform the self-determining choice of the actual occasion. Consider the case where a teacher inspires a student to write a first rate paper or where a team captain so influences the best player on the team to score a winning goal in a decisive game. We can say that (p.136) in both cases the influence of the teacher and captain are reflected in the actions of the student and player; but we would not at all say that they are the actions of these agents. Thus Griffin has overreached in concluding that we should think of divinely influenced occasions as the actions of God. At the most we have divinely influenced human actions. This being the case Griffin does not, as he supposes, provide us with a serious vision of divine action and mutatis mutandis of divine revelation.12 Page 8 of 21

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology There is a second problem in the neighborhood. Consider the fundamental action predicates that show up materially in the Process tradition accounts of divine action. We are told that God “lures,” “influences,” “stimulates,” “persuades,” and the like. These clearly are a very restricted set of actions; the divine repertoire is severely limited, to put it mildly. More importantly all of these actions are polymorphous actions. Thus, to take a favorite example, one agent influences another by performing a host of other actions through which the activity of influencing operates. So a teacher influences a student by a host of specific actions like lecturing, Socratic dialogue, suggesting reading material, providing appropriate feedback, and the like. However, nowhere does Griffin specify the actions through which God influences actual occasions. To take another example, we have no real clue as to what “lure” means as predicated of God. Griffin assumes that we have a grip on such a notion. He already presupposes a certain vision of action predicates that are left hopelessly opaque. Does God lure in the way a spider lures a fly into a web, or a prostitute lures a client to her seedy motel room, or a fisherman lures a fish onto his bait? On the conceptual level the specific action predicates that are repeatedly applied to God are left hanging in mid-air. We can develop this line of argument when we look at the way in which a more theologically conservative Process theologian actually attempts to unpack a specific divine action, namely, that of God raising Jesus from the dead. To be sure, most Process theologians have no interest in the resurrection of Jesus;13 but my point here is strictly conceptual. Here is how Thomas Oord proposes we should think of the resurrection of Jesus.14 We are to think of the resurrection of Jesus as involving essentially three different elements: the body of Jesus, the divine aspect of Jesus, and God. All three have to be involved. So we are to think of the actual occasions that constitute the body of Jesus (p.137) agreeing to the body being reanimated; equally the actual occasions that constitute the divine aspect of Jesus have to be lured to agree to resurrection; finally God has to make the choice to raise Jesus. When all three networks of actual occasions coalesce in their choices then Jesus is raised from the dead. It is very tempting to use one word to describe this scenario: preposterous. Just think of the extraordinary alignment of decisions on the part of a host of actual occasions that would have to take place.15 More prosaically, if this is what is involved in the resurrection of Jesus, one can understand why most Process theologians are uninterested in the application of Process categories to render credible the divine action of raising Jesus from the dead. However, what this example shows is that when we try to apply the technical language to specific claims about divine action, the results are not reassuring. We can imagine similar bizarre stories emerging to cope with other cases of divine action when we look at them in detail. It is no doubt pleasing to believe that God is wonderfully intimate in every event that takes place from the top to the bottom of creation; it is quite another story when we consult the fine print. Page 9 of 21

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology Process theologians, of course, make much of the fact that God interacts intimately with the world, most especially with the suffering of the world. God actually feels the pain and joy of his creatures when they suffer or experience joy. In the case of suffering, it is not that God empathizes with or understands the suffering of his creatures; nor is it that God enters into the suffering of his creatures in the suffering of the Son in the incarnation; God actually participates directly in their suffering. Initially it is not at all clear what this really means for in the standard Process metaphysics there is a metaphysical gap between the divine and the creature; while there is genuine interdependence between God and the creature, there is no identity. We can express the issue simply: if God does not actually prehend and perform the choices of each actual occasion, then it is far from clear how God might also experience the pain or joy of the creature. If the choices are off limits to the divine, surely the pain and joy are also off limits. Even if we set that worry aside, it is surely even more difficult to conceive of how God participates at one and the same time in all the joy and all the pain that can be predicated, say, of human agents. This claim is not a minor feature of the Process tradition. That God feels the feeling of every individual in the world and preserves forever the values inherent in these experiences is a mark of divine perfection. As Hartshorne succinctly states, “God literally feels our feelings, our desires become elements of desires in him.”16 Think for the (p.138) moment of the sum of human misery in any major city of the world; now add the sum of human happiness in the same city. God knows these phenomena not by description but by acquaintance. Does it really make sense to claim that any agent can literally experience both of these at the same time? I suggest not. To take a simple example, what are we to make of all those who come to the end of their lives and fear death? Does this mean that God now fears death, and not just once, but multiple times over and over again? We face at this point not a failure of ingenuity or of imagination; we face a massive incoherence in which we are asked to think of God simultaneously participating directly in innumerable experiences of horrendous agony and pain and in innumerable experiences of exquisite happiness and joy. Conceiving of God in this fashion is strictly unthinkable. Appealing to some kind of superlative transcendence on the part of God does nothing to alleviate the difficulty.17 Thus far I have focused on trying to make sense of the action predicates with respect to God that show up in the Process tradition. I have left intact the underlying conceptuality. In reality, it is extremely difficult to see what sense can be made of action predicates once they are applied across the board at every level of existence.

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology Process theologians like Griffin profess to begin with our ordinary ways of speaking and thinking about action. They tend, rightly in my judgment, to construe the ideas of action and of agency in very general terms, assuming but not arguing for an open concept of action. This allows for a lot of opacity and latitude in speaking of divine action as modeled on human action. However, as they proceed to expound their views they also tend to think of action in terms of intentional action, as the deployment of the revelatory analogy developed by Griffin displays. It is the deployment of intentional action discourse to all actual occasions that surely evokes the initial puzzlement that most readers exposed to the Process tradition initially report. It is no surprise that ordinary readers and analytic philosophers shake their heads and turn the other way; they cannot see how the grammar of intentional action discourse can be stretched to cover the world of actual occasions. They are not being stubborn or parochial. The difficulty is felt by Griffin himself when he (p.139) notes that God does not lure electrons towards novelty; God simply operates as the ground of order. It proves almost as difficult to get a grip on how intentional action discourse is to be applied at other levels of actual occasions. It is easy to miss this because Process thinkers drop the language of actual occasions and predicate actions of cells, events, chimpanzees, conscious human agents, and God in order to communicate to a wider audience. Strictly speaking these are not actual occasions where the crucial metaphysical operations take place; these are societies of actual occasions. When we restrict ourselves to actual occasions, then talk of receiving data, prehending, making choices, feelings, fears, hopes, expectations, self-determination, acting for reasons, fulfilling various intentions, and the like, does not compute. The application of these concepts belongs naturally in the field of intentional action where we predicate action of agents who are constituted as logically primitive entities with various capacities and powers who can choose to exercise them on the basis of this or that intention, motive, reason, and the like, or simply for the sheer delight in doing so. Once we lose this background music, we lose the melody. The application of action discourse to actual occasions only works if we keep this as a kind of soft music in the background; we unconsciously envisage actual occasions as innumerable instantiations of agents. However, in terms of the Process metaphysics, this is strictly false. Actual occasions, as the very language suggests, are not agents in any serious sense of the term as applied to intentional agency.18 The further we move away from the more robust melody, then the softer the background music becomes, and eventually what we hear at the lower levels of reality is hopelessly off key.19

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology We are fooled at this point because we keep the older melody playing in the background. We keep our language of agency as general as possible and limit the specific actions predicated of God to a minimum; we avoid the really robust action predicates that show up in the canonical texts of the Christian tradition; and we keep repeating that this way of thinking about divine action is somehow an improvement on Thomism and supernaturalism. Once we strip away the alternatives and insist that the Process claims stand on their own tub, however, we find that at bottom the minimal conditions that govern the language of intentional action have been abandoned. If we are paying (p.140) conceptual attention, we realize that we have lost our bearings and the stark cacophony of our discourse about action is self-explanatory: what we are saying makes no sense. We have lost any idea of intentional agency; and the effort to insert divine action into the narrative of reality dissolves with it. Once we cut through to this conclusion, we then make the startling discovery that there are no enduring agents either human or divine in the Process vision of ultimate reality. It is not just that divine action has been dissolved; even if there were any, there are no real agents to perform any actions. Actual occasions are not enduring entities; they constantly come to birth and perish; hence our action predicates lack ownership. At best the self is a series or train of actual occasions in which earlier occasions are prehended by later ones to form a causal nexus. There is no stable agent running through all members of the chain; the self is a derived unification of momentary selves.20 Aside from the question as to what this might mean, say, for theories of punishment, the critical problem is a basic one for the debate about action and agency.21 There are no enduring agents who perform actions in this worldview.22 This observation applies to divine as much as it does to human action. God is not exempt from the basic metaphysical principles and categories that constitute reality. Whitehead put the matter famously: “God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.”23 Thus the divine reality is constituted by the birth and perishing which are the defining features of all actual occasions.24 As Griffin acknowledges, “God is a ‘living person,’ an everlasting (p.141) series of occasions of experience.”25 Some Process scholars have been aware of this problem as applied to human action. Few have noticed that this is a problem not just for human agency but for divine agency, for the Process tradition needs the concept of a human agent as a model of its vision of divine agency.26

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology Given the internal difficulties that readily show up in Process theology, it is not at all surprising that more recent iterations of the Process tradition have dropped crucial elements in the program. Thus David Pailin has come to acknowledge the acute difficulties in the panpsychism involved; it is as if good, old fashioned English common sense has been awakened.27 Moreover, Mark Johnston in his recent remarkable articulation of panentheism has essentially rejected both any idea of robust theism and any substantial commitment to human agents as selves, minds, or any other kind of enduring entity.28 It is time for a summary of the criticisms I have assembled. Insofar as the Process tradition has been deployed to deal with problems about divine action and divine agency, the results are not encouraging. As seen in the work of Griffin, it can speak in general terms of divine influence on the decisions of actual occasions, but it cannot provide an account of divine action sufficient to carry a doctrine of objective divine revelation. It provides no substantial analysis of the central actions predicated of God, such as “influence,” “lure,” “stimulate,” “evoke novelty,” and the like. When its basic conceptuality is applied to specific divine actions, such as God raising Jesus from the dead, the results are preposterous. Contrary to its repeated avowals, its claim to provide a coherent account of divine passibilty is bogus. Its deployment of the language of intentional agency to actual occasions is unsuccessful. At bottom it has no concept of an agent, human or divine, so even if its desire to keep intact (p.142) the idea of divine action was satisfied, the whole project fails because it lacks any robust notion of either human or divine agency. Given that the Process tradition cannot really provide space for specific divine action or for divine agency, it is worth asking why it has fared so well in recent theological circles, especially in Protestant circles. I hinted earlier as to why this was the case when I noted the surprising attraction of Process theology to some strains of American evangelicalism, but the question deserves a broader answer at this point.

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology We can begin by noting that for many theologians the Process tradition represented a welcome relief from the positivism that seemed to be the only serious alternative partner in philosophy in the English-speaking world for much of the twentieth century.29 Certainly when the latter drove some theologians to assert the death of God, this was a bridge too far for many. In this context the Process tradition provided an attractive alternative in that it gave a clear place to God in a comprehensive vision of the world. The Process tradition had been developed by a distinguished mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, whose early career was marked by singular contributions to mathematics and to science. It was an additional virtue that Whitehead was able to inspire a research program headed up by his assistant at Harvard, Charles Hartshorne, whose long-lived enthusiasm and polemical brashness won a steady stream of converts and collaborators. That research program was embedded in several seminaries in the Methodist tradition, one of which provided the site for an assertive Center for Process Studies.30 Its advocates effectively colonized important academic sites and used them effectively to advance what can legitimately be described as an aggressive Process ideology. Membership in the Process tradition brought with it the thrill of insider status complete with initiation into a special technical vocabulary, a set of interesting problems that cried out for attention, a congenial club mentality, and an esoteric sensibility. For those Christians who were looking for a metaphysical home in which to bring together commitment to God, to science, and to reason, the Process tradition looked extremely attractive compared to the impersonal, static deity of “classical theism,” the intellectual isolation of Barthian fideism, the vulgarity of “fundamentalism” and “supernaturalism,” and the spiritual barrenness of analytic philosophy.31

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology (p.143) To insiders it looked as if the Process tradition provided promise of a fresh start for Christian theology in the modern world. Here was the possibility of a form of Christianity that could be credible to intelligent outsiders and to intellectually troubled insiders. Bernard Meland went so far as to suggest that Whitehead might become nothing less than what Aristotle, Plotinus, and Aquinas had been for previous centuries.32 Furthermore, as already indicated, Process philosophy gave fresh vigor to a new incarnation of Liberal Protestantism. At this level the continuity with the Idealism of the nineteenth century which was so important to Frederick Schleiermacher and his disciples provided a common background. The Process vision of reality brought God back into the world; it eliminated any idea of an absentee deity who interrupted the natural and historical order by miracles. It provided theological warrants for taking science and history seriously. Much was (and is) made, for example, of the fecundity of Process theology for dealing with new developments in quantum physics. It made love and compassion the core of its vision of God; this in turn worked itself out ethically and pastorally. In the latter case, the stress on the suffering of God was lifted up as a vital element in responding both to the problem of evil and to the psychological challenges of human suffering. Given the freedom of actual occasions, it was not possible for God to eliminate evil; yet God fully participated in our suffering as a fellow sufferer. Especially at a time in American culture when mainline Protestantism seemed stuck in self-satisfied security while everything else in the culture was changing rapidly, Process theology seemed like a splendid way to bet on a better future and win.33 As it happens, the bet was a bad one. No Protestant denomination has been more influenced by the Process tradition than United Methodism.34 Yet its fortunes have been steadily dwindling and the promise of Process theology to provide a credible version of Christian theology has not been fulfilled.35 At one level, as Malcolm Diamond perceptively noted, the claim that a marriage with Process philosophy would upgrade the credibility of the theology on offer was (p.144) risky from the outset. “The buttressing of one questionable enterprise (theology) by means of an appeal to the insights of another questionable enterprise (Whiteheadian metaphysics) is not likely to compel attention from thinkers who are not already involved in one or the other of them.”36 At another level the problem is a simple one: the privileging of Process metaphysics constantly runs the risk of treating Christian doctrine as a malleable entity that can be reconstructed at will. William Christian, one of the ablest expounders of Whitehead, put the matter aptly:

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology No doubt some theologians will go on adapting Whitehead to their purposes without understanding his problems and his solutions. This way of despoiling the philosophers, as the ancient Hebrews despoiled the Egyptians, taking jewels of silver and gold, and raiment, is an old theological habit. But often jewels are displayed in bad taste and the raiment does not fit. When theologians appropriate and make use of speculative theories, they do less than justice both to speculative philosophy and to their own discipline. Augustine did not make use of neoplatonism. He was a neoplatonic philosopher who had become a Christian theologian. (‘I had sought strenuously after that gold which thou didst allow thy people to take from Egypt, since whatever it was it was thine’ Conf. VII, ix, 15). Aquinas did not make use of Aristotle. He was a Christian theologian who was also an Aristotelian philosopher.37 Furthermore, the stress on the suffering of God readily morphs into a pious sentimentality, say, at funerals, which is pathetic at best and obnoxious at worst. Interestingly, Process theology succeeded in gaining an audience in part by concealing the virtues of the earlier version of Liberal Protestantism to which it looked for intellectual inspiration. Where the older Liberalism looked to metaphysical speculation as folly compared to the simple message of Jesus that had been obscured by Greek metaphysics, the more recent version reveled in high-brow metaphysical speculation with gusto.38 Not surprisingly, the latter version became the home of networks of progressive clergy who took pride in their intellectual sophistication; few laity could make much sense of it. As often happens in the history of theology, it was the moralism of Process theology—in this case the thin moralism of love—that really interested laity. If I am broadly on track in my criticisms of the Process tradition on divine action and divine agency, then the game is over. The Process tradition has forfeited any robust commitment to divine action and has discarded the idea of God as an agent. Conceptually and existentially Process theology had the (p.145) appearance of great promise; in reality it was and is fool’s gold on both fronts. No doubt it will continue to win its devotees; but as a resource for securing clarity and credibility for talk about divine action and divine agency, it is now exhausted and empty. The Process tradition as applied to theology belongs firmly in the history of the pathology of recent theology; it is a serious intellectual disease in search of a cure. Some of its advocates have turned to science at this point for help. The turn to “scientific” perspectives on divine action represents a whole new chapter in the debate about divine action. It is time to see if the significant efforts in that domain have anything of value to offer in sorting through the debate about divine action. Notes:

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology (1) David Ray Griffin, “Relativism, Divine Causation, and Biblical Theology,” in God’s Activity in the World: The Contemporary Problem, ed. Owen C. Thomas (Chico, CA: Scholars’ Press, 1983), 117–36. For views on divine action similar to Griffin see W. N. Pittinger, God’s Ways with Men (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1969), 130, 141; John Cobb, “Natural Causality and Divine Action,” Idealistic Studies 3 (1973): 207–22; Charles Birch, “What Does God Do in the World?” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 30 (1975): 76–84; Burton Cooper, “How Does God Act in Our Time? An Invitation to Dialogue between Process and Liberation Theologies,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 32 (1976): 25–35; Sharyn Boyd, “Is Whitehead’s God the ‘God Who Acts’?” Perspectives in Religious Studies 9 (1982): 157–70. For an important general essay on divine action in the Process tradition see Daniel Day Williams, “How Does God Act? An Essay in Whitehead’s Metaphysics,” in Process and Divinity: The Hartshorne Festschrift, ed. William L. Reese and Eugene Freeman (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1964), 161–80. (2) Truth be told, the primary–secondary causation distinction is a distinction beloved by Calvinists, not least Calvinist historians who are leery of positing any kind of special divine action in history. In this respect it has been something of a godsend, for it permits Christian historians to posit exactly the same kind of causal processes as their secular colleagues. Thus in dealing, say, with the history of Pentecostalism, its many claims about direct divine action can be systematically ignored or side-stepped. I owe this insight to conversations with Professor Mark Noll but I do not hold him responsible for its validity. (3) David R. Griffin, “Schubert Ogden’s Christology and the Possibilities of Process Philosophy,” in Process Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Delwin Brown, Ralph E. James, Jr., and Gene Beeves (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), 347–61. (4) This is precisely what we saw in the case of Schubert Ogden earlier. In the light of this observation, it is not at all surprising that modern Liberal Protestants have been supplanted by the kind of relativism that is so readily championed in the name of postmodernism. (5) Griffin, “Relativism, Divine Causation, and Biblical Theology,” 125. Griffin is not here using “event” in its normal sense to mean the kind of phenomena available to sense experience like storms, sunsets, or battles. In Whiteheadian terms, the latter would be constituted by a whole nexus of actual occasions. I will note the significance of this shift later, in that it masks important problems lying below the surface. (6) Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), 18.

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology (7) A quark is an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. They combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. (8) Griffin, “Relativism, Divine Causation, and Biblical Theology,” 136 n.7. (9) Donald Viney, “Process Theism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, . (10) Griffin, “Relativism, Divine Causation, and Biblical Theology,” 128. (11) Griffin is convinced, for example, that his vision of divine action takes care of worries about the particularity of divine revelation, about the nature of historical investigation as applied to sacred texts, and about the problem of evil. These are important claims but everything hinges on whether his core ideas on divine action are satisfactory. Hence I set them aside here. (12) His position is an improvement on that of Ogden in that he does posit objective divine action; however, not only do we need an account of objective divine action, we also need a specification of the divine actions which constitute divine revelation. God luring actual occasions towards novelty is much too general and vague to fit this requirement. We need access to God’s specific initial aims for specific actual occasions. (13) David R. Griffin, A Process Christology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975), 12. (14) Thomas Jay Oord, The Nature of Love: A Theology (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2010), 151–2. (15) Joseph M. Hallman, “The Resurrection of the Human Jesus,” Process Studies 8 (1978): 253–8. (16) Charles Hartshorne, “Whitehead’s Idea of God,” in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, 2nd edition, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (New York: Tudor, 1951), 553. (17) George W. Shields, “Hartshorne and Creel on Impassibility,” Process Studies 21 (1992): 44–59.feel

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology (18) The very concept of “actual occasion” is dubious. We know perfectly well what “occasion” means in everyday language. So we can think of a wedding or a birthday celebration or a political event as a great “occasion.” The relevant grammar dissolves when we use it in the manner of Process philosophy to apply to the atomic events which make up ultimate reality. Adding “actual” simply gives the whole notion an air of spurious reality. It would be easy to fix this by deploying the older language of monads or by developing a fresh vocabulary. However, this would forfeit the specious air of veracity locked into the idea of “occasion.” (19) L. Bryant Keeling, “Feeling as a Metaphysical Category: Hartshorne from an Analytic Point of View,” Process Studies 6 (1976): 51–66. (20) The consonance with certain Buddhist views of the self has long been noted by Process thinkers. (21) For a telling network of criticism see J. P. Moreland, “An Enduring Self: The Achilles’ Heel of Process Philosophy,” Process Studies 17 (1988): 193–9. Moreland provides an incisive exposition of the epistemological problem Process philosophers face given their account of the self. Compare the discussion provided by Albert Shalom and John Robertson in “Hartshorne and the Problem of Personal Identity,” Process Studies 8 (1978): 169–79. It is no accident that Whitehead in dealing with the challenge of personal identity at one point speaks of “miracle.” “The confusion of variety is transformed into the coordinated unity of dominant character. The many become one, and by this miracle achieve a triumph of effectiveness—for good or evil.” See Alfred North Whitehead, “Immortality,” in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Schilpp, 690. Emphasis added. (22) Charles Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (London: SCM, 1970), 181. (23) Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 521. (24) There is a major division of the house at this point within the Process tradition. Whitehead took God to be a single actual entity, whereas Hartshorne took God to be technically a “society,” that is, a collection of actual entities extended in time, each member of which shares a defining characteristic passed along from one moment to the next. Griffin follows Hartshorne in the view that Whitehead was mistaken on this critical issue; Whitehead’s position was nothing less than Whitehead’s greatest blunder. It is tempting to construe the Hartshorne and Griffin vision of deity as one of serial polytheism. (25) Griffin, “Relativism, Divine Causation, and Biblical Theology,” 136 n.5.

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology (26) The important exception at this point is provided by Royce Gordon Gruenler in The Inexhaustible God: Biblical Faith and the Challenge of Process Theism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1983). Gruenler picks up the serious problem that the Process tradition has with any idea of an enduring human agent; however, he goes well beyond this in exploring how far the Process tradition has the resources to provide any substantial concept of God as an agent or person. See especially, “Introduction,” 17–21, and chapter 2, “Whitehead and the Problem of God as Person,” 45–56. Gruenler identifies three problems in the Process claim with respect to the ontology of divine agency. First, the concept of divine agency is built on the concept of human agency; but there is no enduring human agent in Process metaphysics. Second, the primordial nature of God requires that God be a conscious agent, but this is systematically denied by Process philosophers. This problem shows up in the conceptual wobbles one finds in and around the concept of “feeling.” Third, he hints at the problem of how God can be an enduring agent over and above the atomic parts of the universe. “There is no substantial self that unifies all processive occasions of experience, but only the processive occasions themselves.” See Ibid., 54. (27) Darren J. N. Middleton, “David Pailin’s Theology of Divine Action,” Process Studies 22 (1993): 215–26. (28) Mark Johnson, Saving God: Religion after Idolatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009),Surviving Death (29) For a splendid exposition of this attraction see Malcolm Diamond, “Contemporary Analysis: The Metaphysical Target and the Theological Victim,” in Process Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Brown et al., 143–70. (30) Claremont School of Theology. (31) David Burrell, “Does Process Theology Rest on a Mistake?” Theological Studies 43 (1982): 125–35. (32) Bernard Meland, “God, the Unlimited Companion,” The Christian Century 59 (October 21, 1942): 1289–90. (33) For the reiteration of that bet see Philip Clayton, “God Beyond Orthodoxy: Process Theology for the 21st Century,” a paper presented at the Center for Process Studies at Claremont School of Theology, September 9, 2008.

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The Dissolution of Divine Action and Agency in Process Theology (34) I once asked the late Albert Cook Outler why Schubert Ogden had been appointed to Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, and he immediately replied that, aside from his obvious intellectual rigor and passion, it was anticipated that the conversation between the Process tradition and the Barthian tradition represented by John Deschner (appointed as the counterpoint to Ogden in systematic theology) would provide a fertile future for Methodist theology. (35) Schubert M. Ogden, “Christology Reconsidered: John Cobb’s ‘Christ in a Pluralistic Age’,” Process Studies 6 (1976): 116–22. (36) Diamond, “Contemporary Analysis: The Metaphysical Target and the Theological Victim,” 169. (37) William C. Christian, “Current Issues in Christian Theology,” Christian Scholar 50 (1967), 315. (38) Van A. Harvey, “The Alienated Theologian,” in The Future of Philosophical Theology, ed. Robert A. Evans (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), 113–43.

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I: Exploring and Evaluating the Debate William J. Abraham

Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780198786504 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786504.001.0001

Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action William J. Abraham

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198786504.003.0009

Abstract and Keywords 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. Keywords:   theology and science, Robert John Russell, divine action, quantum physics, Divine Action Project

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action The turn to science as the solution to fundamental problems related to divine action appears at first sight like intellectual suicide on the part of the theologian. Historically, the relation between theology and science has been a stormy one. Even after one has made allowances for exaggeration, the old debates about Galileo and Darwin have left mainline theologians wary of getting their fingers burnt yet again. The faintest whiff of relying on a God of the gaps—a God whose actions fill in the holes of our scientific ignorance—is enough to send the theologian scurrying for cover. As one distinguished Oxford sociologist once put the issue sharply, “Theologians are so worried about being kicked in the ditch by scientists that they readily jump into it to avoid such an indignity.”1 More importantly, a century of discussion has made it clear that theology and science are radically different enterprises. To take the most obvious difference, theologians do not rely on experiments to test their theological proposals. Moreover, the natural sciences succeed precisely because they limit themselves to those dimensions of nature that can be captured by mathematical symbols; theology succeeds insofar as it captures who God is and what God has done. To be sure, one can find significant analogies between the two. They both make use of metaphor and models; they both prize a network of intellectual virtues; they may both involve complex research programs requiring social collaboration. However, we do not look to theology to solve scientific problems. Even the highly controversial Intelligent Design program, whatever its theological origins sociologically or psychologically, eschews appeal to theological warrants for its claims; indeed it makes much of the criterion of irreducible complexity—a philosophical concept—as its base for empirical claims about teleology in biology. Generally speaking, those who have turned to science for help on divine action would not be seen dead supporting the Intelligent Design Movement. (p.147) Even so, the turn to science as a way to resolve fundamental queries about the nature and scope of divine action has been deliberate, well resourced, and pursued with enthusiasm and persistence.2 Our first order of business is to look at the broad agenda and its goals. We do not need to cover every nook and cranny of the terrain; it suffices to identify the overall structural character of the conceptual claims on offer with respect to divine agency and divine action. I shall then unpack the core claims of the work of Robert John Russell.3 This will keep the exposition from being overly generic and vague. Beyond that I shall argue that the move to look to quantum physics for help on divine action is limited at best, and a dead-end at worst.4

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action (p.148) We begin by noting that there is no desire among those who appeal to quantum theory to repeat the mistakes of the past. There is no interest in filling in the gaps of scientific ignorance with divine action, only to find later that good scientific explanations render theological alternatives redundant and obsolete. At one level, the intention is to find a vision of divine action that will complement what we know about creation from the best science available. For this reason, the Divine Action Project has looked at the relation between divine action and the varied range of scientific work in physics, biology, and neuroscience. Some are happy to develop theological commitments that are coherent with science; others are committed to integrating science and theology. At another level, the aim is to secure an intellectually responsible theology of nature. In this instance the goal is to articulate a vision of how God works in nature, rather than, say, history.5 If these goals were all that were sought, then the challenge can readily be met. One can simply wheel out the standard distinction between primary and secondary causation and apply it in a relevant manner. Thus, we can develop an evolutionary account, say, of the origins of life, and argue that this gives us an adequate account of the secondary, instrumental causes used by God, the primary cause. God makes natural agents that over time evolve into more complex agents according to specified laws (individual variation, natural selection, and the like). There is no need to invoke any kind of special divine action. Even if we do not know the full causal story, the story is a scientific one and not a theological one; we can leave it to science to expand or revise the existing theories, or come up with new revolutionary causal accounts to take care of current anomalies and gaps. Such divine action as there is remains hidden, operating generally through natural causes; this is all that the theologian in search of a responsible vision of creation needs. Looking for more is looking for unnecessary trouble. Yet a generation of theologians has not been satisfied to abandon the possibility of a richer account of divine action. At this point we come to the deep motivation for turning to science as a resource for theology. Theologians and a small network of remarkable collaborators from the natural sciences have a clear and persistent intuition that they can find a solution to the problem of special divine action in the space opened up by revolutionary developments in physics. It may be well and dandy to stick to the concept of general divine action in the conversation with science; but theologians are also committed to special divine action. Hence relying on the distinction between primary and secondary causation does not go far enough; we need additional conceptual resources. The challenge is to find resources that do not run afoul (p.149) of natural science. If the relevant conceptual capital could be constructed by means of a positive dialogue with science, then there would be cause for much rejoicing. As already indicated, Robert John Russell provides an elegant invitation to join the effort to secure this coveted prize. Page 3 of 23

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action For Russell the problem of special divine action arises for the simple reason that the standard kind of claims about special divine action in the Christian tradition are no longer credible given the cumulative effects of a network of interlocking developments. First, discovering the vastness and secularity of a universe that is fifteen billion years old challenges any differentiated idea of creation. Second, the reductionist, materialist, and determinist philosophy of nature presupposes a closed causal web that undercuts an integrated understanding of human or divine action in nature. Third, the diversity of truth claims across world religions undermines the epistemological privileging of any of them, including Christianity. Fourth, the destructive consequences of patriarchal concepts of power require a renewed emphasis on divine immanence and the inclusion of feminist language about divine action. Fifth, the potential for immense human and natural evil made available by unimaginable technological developments shows that the standard theological options leave us in an intellectual ghetto.6 These are very different kinds of material to lump together; prima facie, the last three having little or nothing to do with the relation between theology and science.7 In broad terms, however, they represent the runway for the quest for an intelligible account of special divine action made possible by new work in the metaphysics of causation, in epistemology, and most importantly in contemporary physics. Russell’s quarry is a credible vision of special acts of God. This is not to say that he restricts his theological commitments to special acts of God. “Along with creation, sustenance, providence, and continuing creation, any acceptable theory of divine action must allow for objective special acts of God.”8 For him “the problem of divine action lies at the heart of the doctrine of providence.”9 For many in the past providence has seemed to require a doctrine of divine intervention. This was natural in a period committed to mechanistic physics and reductionist philosophy. If the physical world is causally closed and all reality is reducible to physical reality, then the action of free agents—human or divine— must entail a violation of the natural processes. Objective special (p.150) providence under these conditions required divine intervention. If retained, divine intervention leads to a clash with science; if rejected, it means the loss of special divine action. The only serious alternative has been to relocate special divine action in human response to those events which somehow call forth talk of special divine action but which do not involve any divine action above and beyond general providence. However, this alternative leads to a privatized theology or substitutes subjective response for objective reality.

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action Divine intervention has become something of a swear word in the discussion, so it is worth pausing again to note why so many seek to avoid it in polite culture. Initially, it looks like a pejorative term designed to scare off the intellectually fainthearted; it has all the appearance of a persuasive definition aimed at inhibiting strong claims about direct divine action in the world. Nobody really thinks that the term is incoherent, as if one were mouthing a contradiction. Philip Clayton captures the worry in graphic terms. The inherited tools and concepts are not adequate to make sense of divine action in an age of science. The theologian seems to be faced with a forced choice between two alternatives: either God acts as the Divine Architect only, creating a finely tuned machine and leaving it to function in a consistent manner expressive of a designer, or God becomes the Divine Repairman, whose imperfect building of the machine in the first place requires him to return from time to time to fix errors he made the first time around. Though perhaps not impossible, it is certainly difficult to develop an alternative perspective that allows one to speak of a ‘different but epistemically equal’ system of divine causes, alongside the network of physical events in the world.10 Russell’s aim is to develop an account of divine providence that will avoid both the Divine Repairman deity and the reduction of objective special divine action to our subjective response. Given scientific advances in quantum physics, genetics, evolution, and neuroscience, and given philosophical advances in philosophy that reject reductionism and embrace whole–part and top-down causal analysis, “we can now understand special providence as the objective acts of God in nature and history, to which we respond, and we can understand these acts in a non-interventionist manner consistent with science.”11 Success in this project, suggests Russell, will at long last fulfill Langdon Gilkey’s dream of developing a theory that sanctions belief in at least some of the mighty acts of God in history.12 He is very clear that it provides a much better account than those furnished by Thomism and Process theology. (p.151) Neither neo-Thomism nor process theology seems strongly equipped to meet the challenge. The former is less interested in the problem [of special providence] when the domain is nature, and the latter offers a metaphysical system that may be significantly outmoded by developments in physics since Whitehead’s work in the 1920s.13

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action Taken in the round, Russell’s proposals can be tracked by noting three interrelated moves. First, he proposes that we should see nature as consisting of a hierarchy of emerging phenomena. Beginning from the quantum levels, higherorder entities emerge which possess their own causal powers. We begin with bottom-up causality at the quantum level; this is the crucial building block of nature. Through evolution, higher-order agents develop; once in place, they have their own potential to operate causally on the lower-order realities out of which they emerge. The higher-order phenomena have causal effects on the lower-level phenomena. The former supervene on the latter, so the former are not reducible to the latter. Thus Russell adopts a vision of non-reductive physicalism which rejects any idea of a substantial soul but which retains the idea of mental agency and free will.14 Second, Russell reviews and then adopts the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. He succinctly outlines the story of the revolutionary developments in physics running through the work of Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Irwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, and P. A. M. Dirac, fully recognizing that there is no agreed account on how to read what is really going on at the subatomic level.15 The critical issue here is what to make of the “indeterminism” that created such a crisis for classical physics over the first thirty years of the twentieth century.16 One way to capture the issue is by (p. 152) noting the significance of the collapse of the wave function or the reduction of the wave packet. Put technically, a superposition of different eigenstates appears to reduce to a single one of the states after interaction with the observer. The physical possibilities are condensed into a single occurrence, as seen by the observer. The standard illustration is often expressed in terms of the wave/particle duality. When a photon passes through a double-slit apparatus, it behaves like a wave. Yet, when observed, the non-local wave is collapsed into a single localized particle. At this level, we no longer have strict deterministic laws; we have statistical probabilities. Thus we seem to have the possibility of genuine indeterminism at the subatomic level.

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action At this point, we move from exact science to the interpretation of the scientific data.17 Some, not least Albert Einstein, look upon these results as epiphenomena; they represent our take on reality; the underlying reality remains deterministic; there are hidden variables that are beyond our ken, or, our results reflect our perspective on the world rather than reality itself. Russell accepts the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. On this reading the results of our best experiments and scientific reflection are accurate; we are faced with genuine indeterminism and chance at the most fundamental level of physical reality.18 Russell sees this option as permissible on the grounds that it is consistent with the data available, fits with a critical realist vision of natural science as a whole, and can be integrated neatly with other relevant scientific results within physics. He is fully aware of the tentative and fallible nature of this move. From a theological point of view, he rightly thinks that it is entirely legitimate to work with a feasible if contested account of quantum mechanics; certainly we can and should move beyond the older classical physics; and any other interpretation we might accept is not without (p.153) its critics. It is the next theological move that takes us to the heart of his claim that quantum theory provides the foothold for developing a theory of special divine action. Third, in the wake of quantum theory, the theologian is entirely within his epistemic rights to make two critical claims about divine action. “…(1) we can view God as acting, in general, at the level of quantum physics, to create the general characteristics and properties of the classical world.”19 At this point he holds that the ultimate source and absolute ground of the world is God. The universe as God’s creation had a beginning; as God’s creation the universe depends absolutely and at every moment of its history on God for its sheer existence; and the universe is the locus of God’s continuing activity as creator. Thus he is committed to the doctrines of creatio ex nihilo and creatio continua.20 More importantly, given the vision of emergence already noted, he holds that the ordinary world available to our senses is effectively constituted by what God does at the quantum level. God does not create order out of chaos; rather one way God creates order is through the properties of chaos; what was described by classical physics is a description at a higher epistemic level of quantum chaos. The higher-level phenomena are sustained by means of action at the quantum level. The laws we use to describe the behavior of macro-level entities are the indirect though intended consequences of God’s activity at the quantum level; and they are descriptive rather than prescriptive. Following Murphy, “… the uniformity of nature is a divine artifact.”21 From this angle of vision, divine action at the quantum level is the locus of all divine action in the universe for Russell.

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action This claim dovetails nicely with his second. “…(2) in addition we can view God as acting, in particular quantum events, to produce indirectly a specific event at the macroscopic level, one we call an event of special providence.”22 “Nature” produces the necessary causes, but God’s action together with “nature” constitutes the sufficient cause of the occurrence of the event. At the quantum level, there is not some extra push or additional force; there is no manipulation of the subatomic particles as a quasi-physical force. There is the realization of a potential quality. God activates one or other of the quantum entity’s innate powers at particular instants; these events are not possible without God’s action. They fall within the predictable probabilities and have macroscopic effects over and above contributing to the stable properties of macroscopic entities. Thus indeterminism at the subatomic level creates space for God to act according to the laws of nature; no laws of nature are broken at this point because there are no deterministic laws to break; hence there is no intervention. God makes a real though hidden difference to how things turn out. Expressed hypothetically, if God did not act directly, then the empirical (p.154) outcome would be different. Given quantum indeterminism, we do not have a sufficient explanation of what is happening; science itself shows that there are gaps; the warrants for these gaps are not derived from theology; the gaps show up at the quantum level given the best scientific account we have to date of the phenomena. So we are finding God in what we know, not in our ignorance and in what we do not know. Without appeal to divine action at this point our explanations are necessarily incomplete. Yet what God does at this level is direct, intentional, and genuinely free. For Russell these resources furnish us with a robust vision of providence in which God acts directly and objectively at the quantum level. When joined with “nature” these special acts of God are amplified to take effect potentially at all levels of reality; God’s action at the microscopic level makes its way up to the macroscopic. To use the hackneyed example, what God does may trigger the functional equivalent of the death of Schrödinger’s cat. In this instance the occurrence of a quantum event—a radioactive decay—triggers a Geiger counter and leads to a life or death effect on the cat. This may be good or bad news for the cat. The good news for theology is that we can responsibly posit direct action without collecting the costs of divine intervention and without mortgaging theology to the speculative and scientifically outdated proposals of Process theology.

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action The work of Robert Russell and his colleagues in the Divine Action Project is one of the most impressive research ventures related to divine action that has occurred to date. It represents a whole new phase in the conversation between theology and science. Given the strident claims advanced by figures like Richard Dawkins, this work can be read as an exceptionally sophisticated response to major trends in Western culture. In this regard, we can expect that it will receive extended attention for years to come. My interest is limited and focused. I am interested in what new light it throws on the challenge to robust claims about divine action that has been in play for the last half century. As many have noted, theologians are reluctant to join the debate. I share that reluctance. One cannot but be wary of trying to understand much less articulate the technical, scientific issues that crop up in quantum physics. On this score alone, it is out of place to complain that theologians do not take developments in science more seriously; it is a mark of proper intellectual humility to refrain from claims that lie outside one’s competence. Everyone agrees, including the scientists who work in physics, that we have entered a really weird, counterintuitive world. In this respect, one cannot but admire and applaud the amazing band of scientists who have trained as theologians and set to work with such diligence and enthusiasm. We should welcome any help we can get as theologians from scientists. However, the theologian does have a responsibility to inspect the theological gifts that are offered. It is clear from our journey to date that the debate about divine action is strewn with potential hazards. The theologian has every (p.155) reason to be wary of fool’s gold, even if it is proffered with the best of intentions and delivered with culturally privileged credentials. Divine agency and divine action are not marginal themes; they are at the very core of theology. The essential desiderata go well beyond the quest for an intrinsically intelligible account of the concept of divine action and the goal of arriving at material proposals about divine action that are compatible with what we know about the natural world. It is also crucial that the general canon of divine action that is constitutive of the Christian tradition be taken with the utmost seriousness. This desideratum is widely acknowledged; it is central to the Divine Action Project. Unfortunately the theologian who insists on this requirement is often seen at this point as reactionary or defensive. In both high and popular culture, science is epistemologically privileged; theology no longer has any money in the bank. Perhaps one reason for the move into theology by scientists is that they think that their epistemic reserves will genuinely help.

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action I do not share this pessimism about the epistemic status of theology, nor about the viability of the industrial strength version of Christianity that I and others have presented elsewhere.23 I have argued for my optimism in detail both in terms of rebutting standard objections mounted in the name of historical criticism against divine revelation24 and in terms of providing a relatively full account of the epistemological commitments that undergird my commitment to canonical theism.25 I come to the table grateful for any help that may be secured on divine action even as I hold the giver to higher expectations than they may themselves entertain. It is those high expectations that lead me eventually to conclude that the work of Russell and those who share his vision of special divine action do not represent the breakthrough for which many had hoped. Needless to say, there are a host of general objections that have arisen in and around the appeal to quantum physics as the most important site for the resolution of contemporary queries about divine action. One can argue that the overall interpretation is premature either on epistemological or material grounds. Hence one can argue against a critical realist vision of natural science, preferring an anti-realist instrumental account.26 Or one can argue that quantum physics does not entail indeterminism; it entails the loss of precise predictions, but strong probabilistic determinism is still determinism; in this latter case chance is not incompatible with a softer version of (p.156) determinism.27 Taking a less general tack, one can argue that despite protests to the contrary, we are still working here with a version of divine intervention, in that God acts directly at the subatomic level.28 The aim in this instance is the same as the older doctrine of intervention where the goal was to supply an explanation, an account of the full, sufficient conditions, for certain events in the world. In fact the older version of intervention had at least this merit, namely, that the effects of special divine action were generally visible in the natural or historical order. Water, say, was turned into wine, and those who drank it knew it was of high quality, and presumably some of them got tipsy. On the newer version, while God objectively and directly acts, the effects are utterly undetectable. Thus it looks as if Russell will have to fall back on our subjective response as the criterion for picking out special acts of God in providence.

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action More worryingly, it is not clear what we should claim with respect to divine action at the higher level of reality. We do not have direct divine action at that level at all; we have the consequences of direct divine action at the subatomic level. Perhaps, we might think of some kind of causal chain analysis. Act A is an act of God, if it can be traced back to an earlier direct act of God, B, at the subatomic level. We might think of B being the cause of A; or more simply we might think of action B being action A, where B was performed with the direct intention of achieving A. So touching the dry wood with a lighted match is the cause of the fire burning and can be construed as my lighting the fire, even though there are lots of other causes in play (the dryness of the wood, the presence of oxygen in the air, and the like). So I can speak of my touching the wood with a lighted match as my lighting the fire, even though, strictly speaking, the relevant action is one element—the critical intentional element—in the relevant causal chain. I perform the act of lighting the fire by striking the match and touching the wood. Likewise, God causes the water to turn into wine, even though the relevant action really took place earlier when God acted directly at the subatomic level by bringing about the collapse of the wave function so that we find a particle here rather than there with this rather than that motion. This was amplified in the appropriate way by “nature,” by God’s general sustaining action in preserving the causal order of the universe. The crucial problem now is that we have no clear account of the relevant causal chains involved; indeed, in principle we cannot identify the functional equivalent of my striking a match and touching the dry wood in the case of God. The relevant divine action is in principle undetectable. It would not be inaccurate (p.157) to describe Russell’s proposal as obscurantist. This problem is especially acute if God is universally at work performing special action at the quantum level. Cutting more precisely, one can argue that the divine anticipations required for divine action at the subatomic level require extraordinary calculations on the part of God if they are to work. So much so that it becomes strained to think of God responding to, say, the specific prayers of the believer. In order to answer this or that prayer, God will have to have already anticipated the prayer and then prepared for the relevant changes up the line in the world from the direct action at the quantum level long before the prayer is in fact made.29 Furthermore, it will not do at this point to appeal to some kind of top-down causality or whole– part causality. In this latter instance, we would be appealing to higher elements in the hierarchy of being, those entities that have emerged in the course of world history whose activity supervenes on lower levels of reality. We would not be referring to the relevant agent, namely God.

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action Notice that in all of this, there is no effort on Russell’s part to resolve the general question of whether we should take the concept of divine action as coherent in and of itself. Indeed, Russell already presupposes that the concept of divine action is in good working order. He speaks at one point of setting out to show that special divine action is “intelligible, consistent, and coherent with [such] secular scientific inquiry.”30 These look like two different desiderata. “Intelligible” and “consistent” suggest that he plans to show that the idea of divine action is free from internal contradiction; “coherent” here can be taken to mean that in speaking of special divine action in the way he proposes, he does not contradict a viable interpretation of quantum physics. The most he has on offer in fact is the second; he does not at all argue for the general intelligibility of divine action. Indeed, without this assumption there would be little point in looking for coherence with the best science, for a proposition that is internally inconsistent, or one that fails by way of intelligibility, can cohere with any body of information. Internally contradictory propositions cannot cohere with any designated proposition or set of propositions. The issue, however, goes much deeper than this. Russell’s proposal involves a crucial equivocation that has cropped up again and again in the discussion to date. He fails to distinguish in a fitting fashion when he is using action as an open concept and when he is using it to refer to intentional action; and he fails to fill out in any detail the specific actions that appeal to quantum theory is supposed to underwrite. It is entirely legitimate to speak of divine action as a general category without tying ourselves down to a set of precise criteria of identification. Indeed no precise criteria exist at this level. So we can speak of general divine (p.158) action simpliciter; or we can speak of divine action generally in creation and providence. In this instance we are not saying nothing. Positively, we are saying that God is a relevant causal agent who is at work in the production of various events; negatively, we are claiming that any description and explanation of the relevant events that omits reference to divine action is insufficient to account for those events. In conversations with an atheist or an agnostic, these are by no means trivial assertions. The term “action,” like the term “event,” has its own, general, all-purpose function that we understand and accept without thinking about its grammar. The crucial point to register is that when used in a very general way, it remains just that: general, open, unspecified, and vague. To report that there is divine action going on does not begin to tell us what God is doing or why God is doing what he is said to be doing. Compare the proposition, “There was action on the part of the President of the United States yesterday.” This tells us next to nothing until we have much greater specification and explanation. We are simply deploying action here as an open concept, leaving it to be filled in from the context or by further comment.

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action We can then go on to narrow the domain in which we speak of divine action and speak of objective, direct, special action of God. We have now entered the domain of intentional agency and action. It is now even more legitimate to ask what specific action the agent performs, and then to follow up with all sorts of questions about motives, intentions, reasons, purposes, and the like. To be sure, we may not always know how to answer these questions; at times our explanations and answers may be partial; but pursuing them is critical to any serious investigation of the actions performed. What specific direct actions does Russell predicate of God? In reality all we have on offer is that God collapses the wave function so that we find a particle here rather than there with this rather than that motion. This is not just a very restricted set of specific divine actions;31 it provides little information on what God is really doing. Moreover, when we ask for the explanation for what God is doing in collapsing the wave function, we are faced with total silence. We have no idea what to say about motive, intentions, reasons, purposes, and the like. The end result is that we are no closer to answering Gilkey’s famous question about what God is really doing in his mighty acts in history than we were when Gilkey first asked it. This time the equivocation is not lodged in the equivocation between divine action discourse (“God split the Red Sea”) and entirely naturalistic, secular discourse (“There was a strong East wind that split open the Red Sea”). The equivocation is in fact twofold: first, it rests in the sliding back and forth between an open concept of action and action conceived (p.159) as direct, intentional action; and, second, in the utter thinness and absence of explanatory grammar as it relates to intentional action. Can we really say that we have made serious progress on identifying what God really did, compared to where we were when Gilkey launched the debate? I suggest not.

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action This is not to say that Russell’s project is a waste of time.32 At its best, it is working up a model of how God may generally act at the quantum level and how that action might have effects throughout creation. In this respect, it may help in the development of a viable theology of nature.33 What it does not do, however, is provide a general defense of the idea of divine action against charges of incoherence; on the contrary it presupposes that the idea of divine action is coherent. Nor does it really make much progress in developing theologically a full dress theory of providence. The latter involves not just an account of God’s general action in sustaining the world (sending rain on the just and the unjust), but also in particular events (the fall of a sparrow), and those events where God works through evil human actions (“You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good”). Most importantly, the project does not begin to address what to make of such divine actions as God speaking to prophets, raising Jesus from the dead, forgiving us our sins, promising eternal life, bearing witness with our spirits that we are children of God, and the like. What do we gain in understanding these divine actions by speaking of God at the level of quantum theory? I suggest absolutely nothing. If the project was supposed to tell us what God really does in history or in our lives, we are right back where we started. How should we read this generally gloomy assessment of Russell’s work? Nicholas Saunders has reached similar conclusions in a work which has received a very warm reception, despite its negative conclusion. He writes: “Would it be correct to argue on the basis of the foregoing critique that the prospects for supporting anything like the ‘traditional understanding’ of God’s activity in the world are largely bleak? Largely the answer to this question must be yes. In fact it is no real exaggeration to state that contemporary theology is (p.160) in crisis.”34 Lydia Jaeger is also unconvinced of the promise of the appeal to natural science as a way forward in the discussion about divine action. She persuasively argues that all the versions on offer are vulnerable to damaging criticism on scientific, philosophical, and theological grounds. The proposals generally are “pseudo-solutions built on illusion.”35 The project, as she sees it, is essentially sterile. If this is the case, then Saunders’ claim that contemporary theology is in crisis is wide of the mark. The crisis, if there is one, lies elsewhere; it lies in the presuppositions of the whole project. There is one unchallenged presupposition in most current models of divine action: it has to comply with the picture which science, and more specifically physics (perhaps suitably perfected in the future), offers us of the world. Against the intentions of most of those who defend such models, this comes down to an idolization of physics…No theologically satisfactory account of God’s action can be found along these lines.36

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action This is an especially strong statement that deserves serious attention. As such it can explain Saunders’ doom and gloom about a crisis in contemporary theology. Saunders appears to assume that the traditional theologian is dependent on the crumbs that fall from the scientist’s table for survival. Unfortunately, there are very few crumbs, hence the crisis for contemporary theology on his terms of reference. Jaeger’s criticism can be expressed in a more qualified way by noting the subtitle of the five volumes produced by the Divine Action Project. That subtitle is: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action. The assumption seems to be that scientists are in a position to make significant, material contributions to theology, not least, to resolve crucial theological questions about divine action. This is patently false, given the constraints and limitations of scientific investigation. The best we might hope for is that science—in the current case, physics—offers constraints on what the theologian can offer in accounts of God’s relation to the world. This need not involve an idolatrous relation to physics; it can simply mean that we are given crucial information about the world from science and the theologian should take that information into account in thinking of divine action in the world. A robust doctrine of creation, for example, should be developed bearing in mind our best empirical understanding of the universe. It is the theologian’s task, however, not the physicist’s, to resolve questions about divine agency and divine action. Jaeger’s criticism might be more felicitously captured by saying that the discussion about divine action is handicapped by privileging science and its (p. 161) modes of inquiry and thought even when it comes to full dress theological investigation. In short, theology fails to draw on its own resources and warrants in doing its own proper work on divine action. In this respect, the wells are being poisoned at the outset by inappropriate epistemological deference to science. Put differently, we are faced with an epistemic category mistake: we are asking physics and its modes of inquiry to resolve questions that belong in an entirely different domain. We would not for one moment think of allowing this in the case of, say, history, or aesthetics, or ethics. It is sheer intellectual prejudice and imperialism to commit this category mistake in the case of theology.

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action One way to underwrite the rejection of this line of argument is to defend a version of scientism, that is, the view that the truth about reality is to be resolved only and exclusively by the methods of natural science. This is clearly not in play in the turn to science in the debate about divine action, so there is no need to chase that red herring here. There is, however, a more subtle form of “methodism” that is often visible in the discussion, that is, the assumption that the theologian and the scientist share a common set of epistemic commitments. “Methodism” means here that the goal of epistemology is to find the single form of inquiry that governs all our cognitive endeavors; thus, whatever the apparent differences between theology and science, they constitute a single intellectual landscape. Given that in the end there is only one form of inquiry, and given that science will be privileged as the paradigm case of that inquiry, the turn to science to resolve theological questions is well-nigh irresistible. If something like this is the case, then we can understand why theologians are bending over backwards to get help from science. It is precisely at this point that the real crisis we face has to be identified and resolved. Consider again the Repairman worry that we encountered earlier. The turn to science is driven by the desire to avoid at all costs any idea that God intervenes in the natural order.37 Special divine action, if it occurs at all, cannot involve the violation of any law of nature; and the place to look for such a possibility is in those scientific holes where we might legitimately speak of indeterminism and chance. Strong claims about special divine action are disallowed if they cannot be accommodated to this constraint. Hence claims about the incarnation, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the virginal concept of Jesus, turning water into wine, God speaking directly to us, and the like, are under a cloud of suspicion. They are to be treated as guilty until proven innocent. Claims like these are given interesting descriptions when they are classified in the standard predicate-schemas that classify divine action: they involve “interruption,” “violation,” “manipulation,” “arbitrary (p.162) interference,” “irrational intrusion,” “magic,” and the like. Given these action predicates, God is seen as the incompetent Cosmic Repairman.

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action There is an obvious explanation beyond the use of pejorative rhetoric why such language is chosen: it betrays elementary ignorance about the plain grammar of intentional action discourse. Suppose we take the claim that God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. The agent involved is the one and only Creator of the Universe who has revealed himself to his people, Israel. Having created the world ex nihilo and continuing to sustain it, God has the power to raise Jesus from the dead. If we do not understand this, we need to go back to school and think about the content of the proposition. Furthermore, this act fits certain specific intentions and purposes: it vindicates the life and ministry of Jesus; it confirms his life as an act of atonement for the sins of the world; it provides a sign of new death beyond sin and alienation for those who put their faith in him. Ironically, it is not impious to say in this context that God is a Cosmic Repairman; the theological term for this is “Savior.” Only someone in the grip of prejudice against divine action or ignorant of the grammar of intentional action discourse would even begin to entertain the kind of descriptions that flood the landscape on special divine action. This is not a case of magic, irrational intrusion, arbitrary interference, manipulation, violation, or interruption. Special divine action, as exemplified in the resurrection of Jesus, is not in competition with God’s general action in creation. It is the happy occasion of the redemption of a created order that is alienated from God and in bondage to sin. If we do not get hold of this picture and the grammar of intentional agency it instantiates, we have not begun to understand divine action. Nothing like this is available at the level of quantum theory; it is silly even to look for it. If we cannot attend to special divine action in theology, we will be endlessly frustrated; special divine action will not be found lodged in the mysteries, gaps, and chaos of modern physics. It would be better to declare theology a bankrupt enterprise than to bail it out with quantum theory.38 Special acts of God like the resurrection of Jesus are also constitutive of a narrative of revelation which epistemically gives us access to the mind and (p. 163) character of God. It is no accident that the turn to science as the paradigm of knowledge runs in tandem with the loss of special divine action. Given that agents reveal themselves in and through what they do, if special divine action disappears, so too does the epistemology it embodies. This is why turning to science, or to theology refigured in the epistemic image of science, for fundamental help on special divine action is a dead-end. It reflects a massive failure of nerve on the part of the theologian. It is not too strong to say that it is a form of intellectual suicide, for it abandons the critical epistemic resources that are at the heart of theology.

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action When Peter confessed that Jesus was the Son of God, he was not making probability judgments about the identity of Israel’s Messiah; he was engaged in a form of perception that was inspired by the Father. When the disciples recognized the risen Lord on the Road to Emmaus, they were not engaging in making hypotheses about the identity of their lost friend. Nor was Paul trying to figure out what relevant hypotheses to conduct in order to figure out what was happening to him when he had his Christophany on the Road to Damascus; he was seeing by means of spiritual senses a reality in the person of Jesus that had completely eluded him to date. Theology has its own epistemology that cannot be reduced to other modes of inquiry: it minimally involves spiritual perception, general and special revelation, and spiritual wisdom. To be sure it can deploy standard forms of logic, arguments to the best explanation, informal reasoning, and the like. It does not, however, characteristically use mathematics or experiments, considerations sufficient to falsify any claim to make it a science. The move to drag it away from its own terrain and force it to play on foreign territory is at the core of the failure of the turn to science to find out what God really is up to in nature and history. We are facing a concealed failure of nerve and of logic, of faith and of love. Clearly, I cannot argue for a theological recovery of epistemic nerve here. My aim is to highlight that the debate about divine action cannot avoid making tacit epistemological commitments. If theologians are deprived of the critical resources without which they cannot do their work, then, there is no hope of recovery. In my judgment, the last thing the theologian should do is resist crossing over into the new world opened up in the church by divine revelation. It is precisely within that world that we are introduced to a wide-ranging canon of divine action that is central to identifying, describing, and explaining who God is, what God has done, and why God has acted and acts as he does. It is one of the tasks of the theologian to step into that world with its own magnificent inheritance of commentary and reflection and get on with the business of articulating who God is and what he has done. We have had enough formal analysis and detours.

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action To be sure, stepping into that world calls forth our best endeavors to make sense of the epistemology involved. In doing this we break with the epistemic shibboleths to be found in most contemporary departments of philosophy, (p. 164) whether analytic or non-analytic. The likelihood of getting past cries of arbitrary fideism, slavery to authority, bondage to ecclesiastical authority, and irrational emotionalism is thin; as thin as the calls to think for ourselves, to grow up intellectually, and to come into the modern world of science and history, are shrill. So be it. A radical break from the shibboleths of our time on the part of the theologian is both necessary and feasible. Just as important is the urgent imperative to develop the ontology of agency and action that will undergird the extraordinary range of divine action, general and special, in which we are immersed. Theologians are entitled to develop their own modest metaphysical resources on agency and action in order to come to terms with who God is and what he has done. This enterprise is not for the fainthearted. Perhaps I have already made a serious mistake in so readily speaking of God as an agent who can be interrogated in terms of what actions are being performed and why. This looks as if I am treating God as one more agent alongside other agents and thus committing idolatry. Or maybe I am missing something about the grammar of our discourse about divine creation and about the radical transcendence of God that should be explored at this point. I direct attention to these sets of worries over the next two chapters. In the last chapter I shall, among other things, take up what is at stake in thinking of God in terms of the kind of concepts we deploy in thinking of human agents, most especially the concept of agent causation. Notes:

(1) Personal conversation with Professor Bryan Wilson. This reflected the situation in the mid-1970s.

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action (2) The most important project began in 1988 and ran until 2003. Known as the Divine Action Project, it was co-sponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and Natural Science in Berkeley. The result was a wonderfully designed and orchestrated network of meetings and conferences that led to the publication of five volumes of research. The five volumes were: Robert J. Russell, Nancey Murphy, and C. J. Isham, eds., Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, and Berkeley: The Center for Theology and Natural Sciences, 1993); Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, and Arthur Peacocke, eds., Chaos and Complexity (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, and Berkeley: The Center for Theology and Natural Sciences, 1995); Robert John Russell, William Stoeger, and Francisco J. Ayala, eds., Evolutionary and Molecular Biology (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, and Berkeley: The Center for Theology and Natural Sciences, 1998); Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, Theo C. Meyering, and Michael A. Arbib, eds., Neuroscience and the Person (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, and Berkeley: The Center for Theology and Natural Sciences, 1998); Robert John Russell, Philip Clayton, Kirk Wegter-McNelly, and John Polkinghorne, eds., Quantum Mechanics (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, and Berkeley: The Center for Theology and Natural Sciences, 2001). All of these volumes have the significant subtitle Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action. For an exceptionally incisive summary and critical review of the whole project see Wesley J. Wildman, “The Divine Action Project,” Theology and Science 2 (2004): 31–75. A full-scale critique of the Divine Action Project can be found in the important work of Nicholas Saunders, Divine Action and Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). (3) Robert John Russell, “Does ‘The God Who Acts’ Really Act?” Theology Today 54 (1997): 44–65. (4) mutatis mutandisSteven D. Crain, “Divine Action in a World of Chaos: An Evaluation of John Polkinghorne’s Model of Special Divine Action,” Faith and Philosophy 14 (1997): 41–61. (5) A notable instance of this can be found in Alister E. McGrath’s fine Gifford lectures, published in A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009). (6) Russell has in mind here Kantian, existentialist, neo-orthodox options. He also rejects any move to reduce faith to personal or social praxis/liberation. See Russell, “Does ‘The God Who Acts’ Really Act?,” 44. (7) John Polkinghorne, “Where is Natural Theology Today?” Science and Christian Belief 18 (2006): 169–79. (8) Russell, “Does ‘The God Who Acts’ Really Act?,” 62.

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action (9) Ibid., 48. (10) Philip Clayton, “Natural Law and Divine Action: The Search for an Expanded Theory of Causation,” Zygon 39 (2004): 618. (11) Russell, “Does ‘The God Who Acts’ Really Act?,” 45. (12) Ibid., 49. (13) Ibid., 64. (14) Russell does not develop this latter claim in any great detail. He relies at this point on the work of Nancey Murphy. There are severe problems related to the coherence of the idea of non-reductive physicalism and to the compatibility between causal determinism and free human agency. Happily, we do not need to resolve these here to evaluate the central claims about divine action. (15) Ibid., 54–5 n.29. (16) Paul Ewart, “The Physical Sciences and Natural Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology, ed. Russell Re Manning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 425. (17) There are no less than eight possible interpretations of the data, four of which accept the collapse of the wave function, and four which do not. (18) Ewart’s summary is worth citing at this point. “According to the commonly accepted ‘Copenhagen’ interpretation of quantum theory, knowledge of ‘reality’ is limited to mathematical manipulation of symbols and the calculation of probabilities, defined by a ‘wave function’. The act of measurement results in the ‘collapse’ of the wave function randomly into one of a set of allowed values. Thus nature allows us to know only the probability of finding a particle ‘here rather than there’ with ‘this rather than that motion’. Between any observations at two different positions we can have no definite knowledge of any continuous path between them…Thus the uncertainty in knowing whether an entity is a wave or a particle, or in determining simultaneously its position and momentum, is not due to our ineptitude in measuring these things but is inherent in the nature of reality at the quantum level. The uncertainty is ontological not epistemological. The ontological randomness in the outcome of measurements breaks the chain of continuity and causality and seriously undermines determinism. It was this probabilistic aspect of quantum mechanics that so disturbed Einstein leading him to declare that, ‘God does not play dice’.” See Ewart, “The Physical Sciences and Natural Theology,” 425. (19) Russell, “Does ‘The God Who Acts’ Really Act?,” 58. (20) Ibid., 48 n.13. Page 21 of 23

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action (21) Ibid., 62. (22) Ibid., 58. (23) William J. Abraham, Jason E. Vickers, and Natalie van Kirk, eds., Canonical Theism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008). (24) William J. Abraham, Divine Revelation and the Limits of Historical Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). (25) William J. Abraham, Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006). (26) See, for example, the work of Mary Hesse, Nancy Cartwright, and Bas van Fraassen. (27) Nicholas Saunders takes this line. See his Divine Action and Modern Science. (28) Russell is clearly sensitive to this worry. See his “Does ‘The God Who Acts’ Really Act?,” The distinction between God acting directly by means of special act and divine intervention strikes me as verbal. (29) Timothy Sansbury, “The False Promise of Quantum Mechanics,” Zygon 42 (2007): 111–21. (30) Russell, “Does ‘The God Who Acts’ Really Act?,” 58. (31) Wildman, “The Divine Action Project,” 38. (32) Ibid., 35.theory (33) Paul Ewart, “The Necessity of Chance: Randomness, Purpose and the Sovereignty of God,” Science and Christian Belief 21 (2009): 111–31. (34) Saunders, Divine Action and Modern Science, 215. Emphasis as in the original. (35) Lydia Jaeger, “Against Physicalism-Plus-God: How Creation Accounts for Divine Action in Nature’s World,” Faith and Philosophy 29 (2012): 295–312, (36) Ibid., 304. (37) For this reason there is no serious engagement with the issue of miracle in the Divine Action Project.

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Tumbling the Subatomic Dice with Divine Action (38) It is tempting to think that much of the excitement about quantum theory stems from the illusory hope that at long last we can escape the shadow of Immanuel Kant’s influential synthesis of Newtonian science and Humean evidentialism. Kant insisted that we must now give science (together with its universal claims to explain all events by cause and effect) full throttle in our understanding of the world. The problems that this presented for Kant for human freedom, divine causality in creation and in history, and morality are well known. To his lasting credit he wrestled valiantly as a revisionist Christian philosopher with these issues in his later career. Quantum mechanics cracks open the closed universe of classical physics; hence the theological glee. However, it is clear from the outset that theological claims do not entail indeterminism and chance; to speak of divine action is to speak of divine causation. Appealing to indeterminism and chance is not a solution when one comes at the problems from the theological side; it simply adds to the issues to be addressed in the encounter with modern science.

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I: Exploring and Evaluating the Debate William J. Abraham

Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780198786504 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786504.001.0001

Divine Agency and Contemporary NeoThomism William J. Abraham

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198786504.003.0010

Abstract and Keywords 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. Keywords:   theology, grammar, divine action, divine agency, Herbert McCabe, Brian Davies, Creator– creature distinction, Thomas Aquinas

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism Statements about divine action naturally divide into two parts: the subject and the predicate. The predicates take the form of various verbs; the subject is God. Much of the debate about divine action has focused on what to make of action predicates as applied to God. This is natural given the fact that the initial objection against the Biblical Theology Movement was that it equivocated on what God really did in his mighty acts in history. Neither its adherents nor their critics were much interested in dealing with the referent for God in claims about divine action in history. It was tacitly assumed that the relevant referent was something like, “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” or “The God of Israel,” or “The God of the Covenant.”1 This neglect of the reference for “God” is further explicable in the light of the enormous attention that has been given to the idea of action in phenomenology, in existentialism, and most especially in analytic philosophy. Yet it is obvious that if we are to understand discourse about divine action we cannot ignore how we are construing the referent for God. It comes as no surprise that this issue shows up initially in the work of I. M. Crombie and more recently in the work of William P. Alston. It is exactly the kind of problem that analytic philosophers are likely to take up in the long run if not in the short run. As already indicated, the issue can be flagged by noting that action predicates belong to agents who do things, who perform acts, who engage in activities. It is not, say, numbers, events, nouns, concepts, relations, functions, or propositions. To be sure, it is often said that it is individuals or persons who act. Once we put this observation to work, it is natural to think of God as a being, an agent, or a person. Something along these lines seems not just apt but necessary, if we are to make sense of talk about divine action. We need some concept of the divine to play the proper role of subject in statements about divine action. In the context of discourse of divine action, the most obvious (p.166) placeholder for God is surely that of agent. The God who acts is most naturally identified by way of picking out the unique agent that God is. We might put this in terms of a default thesis: we should think of God in the Christian tradition as an agent unless we have good reason to believe otherwise. Intuitively obvious as this may seem, it is not what one generally finds in the literature. On the contrary, there is great reluctance in some circles to go down this road, and one suspects there are deep reasons for this disposition that need to be unearthed and examined.

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism We can see immediately why worries begin to multiply. First, thinking of God along the lines of a being or a person or an agent raises the question as to whether God is being conceived as simply a bigger or better version of human persons, thus calling into question crucial relevant differences between the Creator and the creature. Second, this move could potentially pose deep problems for the doctrine of the Trinity, where God is construed as three Persons in one substance. Third, thinking of God as a being poses the question whether this involves a radical departure from an earlier tradition that refused to think of God as a being, a person, or an agent, and posited God along the lines represented by Crombie, that is, as Being or even as Being beyond Being. The language of Being clearly echoes elements in the patristic and medieval tradition which in some instantiations drew heavily on Neo-Platonism in its concept of the divine; it also dovetails with a heavy emphasis on mystery and the apophatic, with a correlative commitment to safeguarding the hiddenness of the divine ontology.2 Fourth, taken together, these objections suggest that it is inappropriate and deeply misleading for analytic philosophers who think of God as a person to claim that they represent the Christian community across the ages. The irony is obvious: in the name of defending traditional Christianity, philosophers end up abandoning or revising a critical element of traditional teaching on the nature of God; in claiming to speak for the Christian community they became vulnerable to the charge that they not only misrepresent the tradition but undermine it from within.3 In this chapter I want to explore the severe criticism directed at those who would think of God as a being, or as a person, and therefore also as an agent. Given that the epicenter of the criticism is provided by a network of exceptionally interesting and fertile Neo-Thomist philosophers of religion,4 I shall use (p.167) this term as shorthand for the theologians involved. Within the material cited I shall concentrate on issues related to divine agency and action.5 I shall argue that the criticisms against conceiving God as an agent fail for a variety of reasons. As a relevant counterclaim I shall argue that NeoThomists lose the concept of divine agency in their philosophical work, despite the fact that they need it to sustain their theological commitments. I shall also argue that they are guilty of confusion and equivocation in their account of the relation between divine agency and free human actions.

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism The deep unease that talk of God as a being, a person, or an agent leads to an anthropomorphic and therefore idolatrous concept of God arises initially from the starting point of the Neo-Thomist project. For them, belief in God is first and foremost a response to the sheer mystery of the universe, a mystery that logically cannot be dispelled by deploying standard empiricist or scientific modes of explanation. What is at stake, they say, is really rigorous thinking about theistic explanation and how it works. On this score the biblical image of God as an individual person is clearly inadequate. For Herbert McCabe this image of God as an individual person may be a necessary image “…for biblical purposes… but images, even biblical images are no substitute for hard thinking, as the disastrous and intellectual evasions generated by what used to be called biblical theology have shown.”6 Hard thinking is constituted by noting that the claim that God exists begins with reaching a limit to our normal way of explaining what happens. Once we see this, we shall also see that it is inappropriate to think of God as an agent. McCabe provides a characteristically vivid way into the logic of Neo-Thomism. Suppose we are interested in why Fido exists. The answer is given by noting that he is the offspring of Rover and the promiscuous mongrel down the road. Suppose we now want to know why Fido is a dog rather than a giraffe. The answer is that his parents were dogs and only dogs beget dogs. We have shifted from the query about an individual dog Fido to a query about the dog species. Suppose we now want to know how the dog species came to exist. In this case we have moved to the level of genetics and natural selection; we are (p.168) interested in the origins of a biological community. We can then ask the same question all over again: “Whence the varied biological communities?” Answering how they come to be will involve, say, work in biochemistry. Beyond that level we can then go deeper and look for explanations in terms of physics. The explanation in each case involves reference to another state of affairs which might have been otherwise. As we proceed down this road, we are driven to a yet deeper question. Now our ultimate question is not how come Fido exists as this dog instead of that, or how come Fido exists as a dog instead of a giraffe, or exists as living instead of inanimate, but how come Fido exists instead of nothing, and just as to ask how come he exists as a dog is to put him in the context of dogs, so to ask how come he exists instead of nothing is to put him the context of everything, the universe or world. And this is the question I call the God-question, because whatever the answer is, whatever the thing or state of affairs, whatever the existing reality that answers it we call ‘God’.7

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism “How come there is something rather than nothing?” is an entirely intelligible question. It was famously hinted at by Wittgenstein when he noted: “Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.”8 We can, of course, in reply say, with Bertrand Russell, that it is just a brute fact that the world exists as it is. However, the question is askable; indeed many people ask it; and it seems arbitrary to call a halt and refuse to answer it. However, it is also very unsettling to ask why there is something rather than nothing in the context of thinking about everything. Normally, we have a boundary when we conceive of something; so we can say that this animal is a sheep rather than a giraffe because there are boundaries within the world. But to say everything is bounded by nothing is to say that it is not bounded by anything. We are now deploying concepts (“everything,” “anything,” and “nothing”) which are no longer relative but absolute. These concepts are not available to us in the sense that notions of sheep or scarlet or savagery are available to us. Thus in asking why there is something rather than nothing our ordinary linguistic tools begin to break down; we have to stretch them beyond what we can comprehend. We have crossed a boundary into the incomprehensible. This has radical consequences for our answer to such questions as “Why is there something rather than nothing?,” or, “How come everything?” When we answer these questions in terms of “God,” we cannot be thinking of something that is comprehensible in the ordinary sense that has been in play heretofore. (p.169) God cannot be included in the range of phenomena we include within the “everything.” If God were so included, we would not be answering our question but simply adding God as one more item to the world. If “God” is to function as an answer to our cosmic question, then “…evidently he is not to be included amongst everything. God cannot be a thing, an existent among others. It is not possible that God and the universe should add up to make two.”9 We can now begin to see why Neo-Thomists are nervous about thinking of God as “a being.” To speak like this is to make God one more item in the universe on a par with dogs, giraffes, colors, savagery, estate agents, and any other item within creation that we care to mention. The theological name for this is idolatry. We do not escape this charge by thinking of God as “a person,” for all we will be doing is taking our concept of ourselves as persons, magnifying that concept to infinity, and adding that Infinite Person to the number of persons in the universe.10 Moreover, we will then be driven to look for an explanation for that universe; we will not have addressed the originating wonder and mystery that drove us to conceive of God in the first place. Mutatis mutandis, the same considerations will apply to the move to think of God as “an agent.”

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism Not surprisingly, the Neo-Thomists insist that we need a radically different category in which to express our idea of God. We should think of God, not as a being, but as Turner suggests, as “wholly other (as Derrida would say) and ‘notother’ (as Nicholas of Cusa would say), or (as the pseudo-Denys says) as ‘beyond similarity and difference’.”11 We need, he continues, to follow the lead of Bonaventure. For Bonaventure, the proper study of being is God. But though ‘being’ is properly speaking the name of God, this ‘Being’ is not an object of our knowledge, which it eludes. For ‘Being’, God, is not a being; it is beings which are the natural objects of our knowledge. However, Being is the light in which we see beings. But the light in which we see beings cannot itself be seen, for if it could be, then it would be represented only as another object to be seen—and God cannot be in the same sense an object of thought since God is not a being.12 (p.170) Interestingly, Neo-Thomists do not generally make this argument in terms of agents; they do not propose explicitly that it is wrong to think of God as an agent; there is a deafening silence at this point in the discussion.13 This is not surprising in that they answer their cosmic question in terms of the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Thus they immediately speak of God causing everything to exist, think of God as Creator, and interpret the world as a created world. Clearly we are in the neighborhood of the language of agency; so it is best to stay clear of the language of agency when such discourse is being deployed. Even more importantly, they readily help themselves without a bad conscience to the fulsome language of the canonical faith of the church as illustrated by claims about divine speaking and redemption. All of this discourse deploys the language of agency and action; if we call into question the idea of God as “an agent,” then we clearly cannot help ourselves to this way of speaking of God without extensive explanation. It is, of course, much easier to miss the tension in play here if the divine is understood in terms of “a being” or “a person”; neither signal the idea of agency and action in the way that speaking of “an agent” does. Once we realize this, it will require us to go back to the philosophical and theological workbench and do some more hard thinking. Happily the Neo-Thomists gladly oblige on this score. One way to pick up the development of the Neo-Thomist argument is to focus afresh on their answer to the question as to why there is something rather than nothing. In reply they immediately take up the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. For them there is a natural fit between asking, “How come there is something rather than nothing?,” and answering, “God created the world out of nothing.” The latter claim does not mean that God made the world on a par with what it is for a human agent to make something. Rather God creates out of nothing. The appearing of “nothing” is the bridge that links talk of creation to the question to which God is the answer. Page 6 of 28

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism The invocation of creation ex nihilo looks entirely platitudinous and innocent until we begin exploring the implications of the framework in which NeoThomists make their appeal to the doctrine of divine creation ex nihilo. If divine creation ex nihilo is really the answer to the question, why there is something rather than nothing, then, says the Neo-Thomist, the constraints governing any answer to that question will have to apply to God. There will be necessary constraints on how we are to think of God, if the project is to (p.171) succeed. These are thought to fall out naturally once we come to terms with the full implications of the idea of creation ex nihilo. Once we think through what is involved in creation out of nothing along these lines, for example, we see immediately that there is a radical ontological difference between the Creator and the creature. This is perhaps the most important difference to bear in mind. If God is truly Creator of all that is, then, given a true understanding of what it is truly to be Creator, we must think of that difference in truly radical terms. A fitting way to capture this is to insist that the difference between Creator and any created reality is greater than any differences internal to creation. Clearly this immediately qualifies any knowledge we can have of God. At the very least, it makes the via negativa an indispensable element in any epistemology of theology. There are other relevant differences that can be spelled out in a variety of ways. Brian Davies, drawing on a reading of Aquinas, puts one set of differences this way: If God accounts for the world at all…then God is (a) not something material, (b) not to be thought of as belonging to a class of which there could be more than one member and (c) not something dependent for its existence on something distinct from itself…. as Aquinas himself says, the claim that God is the source of the universe implies that ‘God is to be thought of as existing outside the realm of existents, as a cause from which pours forth everything that exists in all its variant forms.’14

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism It might appear here that in speaking of God as “a cause” we are willing to think of God as simply a bigger and better instantiation of the ordinary causes we meet in the world. However, this is not the case. Whenever we speak of God in such positive vein we must be careful not to attribute to him anything which is essentially creaturely. We must sustain the radical ontological difference between the Creator and the creature. God is strictly incomprehensible. Knowing God cannot mean knowing in the way in which we normally know, as illustrated, say, by conventional empirical theorizing.15 Moreover, we cannot suppose that God is part of the world of space and time. Equally important, we cannot think of God as subject to the kind of limitations and changes which affect spatial and temporal realities. Nor can we think of God passing through various stages, being first like this and then like that. Furthermore, God cannot change in the sense that other things can have an effect on him. Creatures cannot do anything to modify God, like inform him or cause him pain. In addition, we cannot say that God has a character in any sense we can understand. Thus it will be wrong to assert that (p.172) God is an ‘individual’—in the familiar sense of ‘individual’ where to call something an individual is to think of it as a member of a class of which there could be more than one member, as something with a nature shared by others but different from that of things sharing natures of another kind, things with different ways of working, things with different characteristic activities and effects. To conceive of God as the reason why there is any universe at all is to conceive of him as the source of diversity and, therefore, as the source of there being classes with different members, classes containing things with characteristic activities and effects. Or, as we may put it, who God is cannot be something different from what God is. Mary and John are both human beings. But Mary is not John and John is not Mary. They are individual people. And, though they are human, they do not, as individuals, constitute human nature. Along with many others, they exemplify it. Suppose we express this by saying that they are not, as individuals, the same as their common nature. Along with others, they exemplify it. Then, so, I am arguing, who God is and what God is are not distinguishable. We cannot get a purchase on the notion of a class of God or on the notion of God in a class.16

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism Taking our reflection on creation ex nihilo one step further, we cannot think of God interfering in the universe. For the idea of “interfering” assumes that God is somehow alongside the world and then acts within it.17 If God is the cause of everything, there is nothing that he is alongside. Moreover, God cannot be the source of some things and not others. And the dependence of all creatures on God is total; whatever is real in creatures derives from him. What there is and what things do both derive from God. In the language of Aquinas, God “causes everything’s activity inasmuch as he gives the power to act, maintain its existence, applies its activity, and inasmuch as it is by his power that every other power acts.”18 God as Creator “exists within everything, not as part of its being but as holding it in existence.”19 God “is at work without intermediary in everything that is active.”20 As Davies understands this proposition, it applies to human free choices: “…it cannot be true that any human choice can be uncaused by God.”21 By now it looks as if the concept of human action is under strain. If God is the cause of my free actions, am I really an agent? To use the language in play here, if God is the cause of my actions, how can I be the cause of my actions? Do we now have two causes for my actions? And if we reject genuinely free action, do we not undercut the natural appeal to free will in response to the problem of evil, and thereby surrender an important resource in the debate against atheism? (p.173) McCabe takes up this challenge with characteristic intensity and skill. He rejects the idea of human freedom common among those analytic philosophers who appeal to freedom to deal with the existence of evil in the world. In this latter project it is very clear that God is not the cause of the free actions of human agents in that “free action” means actions brought about by human agents and not brought about by God. Thus the evil in the world is due not to divine action but to human agents exercising their freedom to do or refrain from doing this or that act. There is a very strong sense in which God does not cause us to do evil acts; we have the power to go against what God wills us to do and perform a host of evil actions; and we do so readily. Thus runs the standard free will defense of analytic philosophy in response to the problem of moral evil. We can see that this is totally at odds with the Neo-Thomist account of divine action. Not surprisingly, McCabe vehemently rejects this way of thinking about the relation between God and evil.

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism [T]his whole position involves a false and idolatrous picture of God. The ‘God’ here is an inhabitant of the universe, existing alongside his creatures, interfering with some but not others. If what I have been saying is true then we must conclude (I) that since everything that exists owes its existence to God, since he is the source of anything being rather than nothing, he must also be the source of my free actions, since these are instead of not being: there can be no such thing as being independent of God, whatever my freedom means it cannot mean not depending (in the creative sense) on God, but (II) this kind of dependence on God is not such as to make me an automaton.22 Clearly, holding together these two propositions is going to require some delicate philosophical explanation, especially as that pertains to issues of divine and human action. However, let’s not move too fast. Let’s step back and sketch afresh the bigger picture; and let’s evaluate the initial moves made by the NeoThomist before tackling their claims about the relation between divine action and human action. The Neo-Thomist project as whole is not empirical in character, in that the answer to the cosmological question that drives it is not to be found by positing another finite cause alongside other causes. The question as to why there is something rather than nothing arises at the limit of the sequence of why questions that do drive empirical investigation; precisely because it is at the limit, it must transcend empirical forms of inquiry. Furthermore, this question is both legitimate and childlike: legitimate in that one can rationally seek out an appropriate answer; and childlike in that it is an expression of deep wonder about the existence of the world. Moreover, the question is genuinely theological in that it does not involve the imposition of alien categories on (p.174) theology; indeed it deploys a form of rationality that at a critical level involves the operation of divine grace. Significantly, it is presupposed as a legitimate theological question in the canonical teaching of the Roman Catholic Church as indicated by the teachings of Vatican I and by the relevant background philosophical tradition it captures, most especially in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas.23 Moreover, in a real sense, the intellectual procedure in play has a quasi-sacramental character in that its enactment says what it signifies.24

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism The rationality involved is not the common ratiocination of scientific inquiry or of philosophical reasoning as understood in terms of demonstration, inductive argument, or intuition. What is at stake is the operation of intellectus, understood as a reasoning that participates in the light of God. Reason’s power is pushed to the limit; at that limit reason opens up the territory of intellectus. In the proofs deployed, “reason self-transcends, and by its self-transcendence becomes ‘intellect’.”25 In this arena there arises an inevitable apophaticism that is represented both in the cool, dry discourse of Aquinas and in the exorbitant rhetoric of Meister Eckhart. Aquinas plainly insists propositionally on the inadequacy of language as applied to the divine nature; Eckhart enacts the unknowability of the divine nature by the very use of the language he deploys. Turner captures this aspect of Neo-Thomism brilliantly: Thomas says: all theological language fails. Eckhart’s rhetoric gets theological language itself to fail, so that its failure says the same. Thomas says: all theological language breaks down. Eckhart gets the breakdown of language to say the same: the rhetoric says what he and Thomas both say in it. The material voice of the rhetoric speaks theologically at one with the formal significance which it utters.26 This analysis of theological discourse dovetails with themes in contemporary analytic theology as represented by Wittgenstein and in contemporary postmodern theology as represented by Derrida. Yet it presses on beyond mere wonder at existence (in the case of Wittgenstein) and it avoids the iteration of deferral (in the case of Derrida). However, it is entirely consonant with the strain in biblical thought that highlights the mystery of the divine reality, as illustrated, say in the famous designation of God in Exodus 3:14 as “I am that I am.”27 (p.175) As already indicated, it is no surprise that the complex network of conceptual, metaphysical, and epistemological doctrine on display in this rich Neo-Thomist program has serious repercussions for discourse about divine agency and divine action. We can now see why the Neo-Thomist has enormous difficulty speaking of God as an agent. This way of thinking about the divine will transgress the apophatic restrictions placed on all talk about God. Put differently, it will undercut the radical difference between Creator and creature, in that to speak of God being an agent will involve taking crucial language about creatures (that of agency and agent) and applying it to God.

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism How should we respond to this crucial objection to discourse about divine action? Clearly, one might respond by digging in and insisting that any theory which purports to make sense of and defend Christianity must be wrong somewhere if it ends up developing a position that undermines its basic discourse about divine agency and action. Construing God as an agent is logically essential if we are to speak of divine action; divine action is constitutive of Christianity; hence the Neo-Thomist agenda is self-referentially incoherent as an account and defense of Christianity in that it must reject the idea of God as an agent. Effective as this rebuttal is, it is too abrupt, too quick and easy. It simply pits a sense of the indispensability of the idea of God as a divine agent against the carefully constructed epistemological and metaphysical theory developed by the Neo-Thomist. There are, in fact, very strong independent considerations for rejecting crucial elements of the Neo-Thomist project. I shall rely on these in developing my rebuttal to the central Neo-Thomist worry about God as a divine agent. There are serious general difficulties in the Neo-Thomist proposals about divine action; these undercut their case as a whole and leave space for construing God as an agent. I shall also argue that their identification of divine action with free human actions depends on confusion and on equivocation.28 Let’s begin by pressing the apophatic consequences of the claim that only an incomprehensible God, a God to whom no creaturely predicates can apply, will answer the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” One interesting way to state this claim is to say that any distinction between Creator and creature is greater than any distinction between creature and creature. If this is so, then, think of the following. There is a radical distinction between a computer and the set of even numbers between ten and one hundred. However, if the distinction between Creator and creature is greater than a distinction of this magnitude, then it is unclear how we can know (p.176) anything positive about God. The appropriate response should be one of radical agnosticism. In all seriousness we should say nothing about God. The danger at this stage is that the Neo-Thomist will equivocate on the incomprehensibility of God and say that what we really mean is that there are dimensions of the divine nature that are utterly beyond our knowledge. If we make this move, we have substituted a truism for the bolder thesis that is at the heart of the Neo-Thomist project.29

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism The Neo-Thomist might respond to this in the following manner. This objection, she might say, is fortunately wide of the mark in that it misreads the grammar of the claim that any distinction between Creator and creature is greater than any distinction between creature and creature. Perhaps some uninformed NeoThomists are tempted to say this; but this is a mistake because it presupposes some sort of scale in which the distinction between Creator and creatures is greater than that between creature and creature. However, this misunderstands the radical character of the claim. There is no such common scale; the distinction is so radical that it cannot be captured at all in this fashion; we need to posit a further negation of the negation. As Turner puts the claim with apt clarity: “‘Greater’ and ‘lesser’ cannot come into it logically speaking.”30 However, once this move is made the Neo-Thomist is in even greater trouble, for the agnosticism is now doubly transcendent. This reformulated claim amounts to a meta-transcendence that puts any idea of God even further beyond our range. It should come as no surprise at this point that Neo-Thomists formally refuse to speak or think of God as an agent. Their aversion to such discourse shows up in their unease about predicating causality of God. There is a real loss of control, they say, in our use of such language; so much so as to make it irrelevant what kind of causal conceptuality is in play. Turner makes the point with admirable clarity. It may well be true that, as Swinburne says, the divine causality is best understood on the model of human, intentional, ‘agent’ causality, rather than on the model of efficient, natural, causality; and it may well be true that, as Kerr says, Thomas’ model of efficient causality is in any case nearer to our contemporary conceptions of ‘agent causality’ than to that of a post-Humean efficient causality. But either way we would have to enter the same apophatic reserve in ascribing causality to God—and here Mackie appears to agree with Thomas. As he says, it is only by ‘ignoring such key features [of human intentional activities as their embodiment, as their being fulfilled by way of bodily changes and movements which are (p.177) causally related to the intended result, and so as to have a causal history] that we get an analogue of the supposed divine action.’ By the time you have performed the necessary apophatic surgery on this ‘agent causation’ as predicated of God, there is no more left than is the case of any other causality in need of surgical reduction as predicated of God. Indeed, the same is left, whatever one’s causal model, namely whatever is the answer to the causal question, ‘Why anything?’ Whatever our model of causality, we know that we do not know in what way God is ‘a cause’. We know this not because we understand what kind of cause God is, and so know that God is not a cause in any ordinary sense. On the contrary, it is because we know only what kinds of cause there are in creation that we have to concede the mind’s defeat in respect of divine causality.31 Page 13 of 28

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism This surely is a fatal defeat; yet Turner is only drawing out the full consequences of the Neo-Thomist’s radical apophaticism. No appeal to what Aquinas or anyone else does in making concomitant appeal to the Bible and church tradition can fix this; there is a radical incoherence at the core of the Neo-Thomist program. Second, we can press the same kind of claim when the Neo-Thomist makes creation ex nihilo the core of their answer to the cosmological question that drives the whole enterprise. How can the Neo-Thomist help himself to the concept of any idea of creation? Either we take the radical apophatic strictures seriously and give up all talk of creation ex nihilo; or we retain talk of creation ex nihilo and abandon the apophatic strictures on discourse about creation ex nihilo.32 The assumption here is that we get a grip on the language of creation, including creation ex nihilo, by attending to the way in which this is applied to creatures, that is, to human agents, and stretching it appropriately to fit discourse about God. Again, we can equivocate and begin qualifying how far the strictures apply; if we do then we face the problem of equivocation in a new guise.33 Third, it is not clear why the particular action predicate of creation ex nihilo should be given a privileged place in working out how action predicates more generally should be applied to God. To be sure, it is not difficult to see that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is a pivotal doctrine both historically and materially in the exposition of Christian theology. It implies a radical ontological difference between Creator and creature. It captures a vital dimension (p.178) of the dependence of all creatures on God. Neo-Thomists have been singularly helpful in driving home the importance of this theme. However, these insights do not in themselves signal that we should erect a robust theory of predication on the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, especially as that applies to agency and action discourse as applied to God. Here is why. In its full dress form, the doctrine did not arise until relatively late, that is, until the encounter with Gnosticism in the second century.34 Thus a host of action predicates were already in play long before this vision of divine creation was developed. These are already up and running well before the idea of creation ex nihilo. While creation ex nihilo has significant roots in various strata of biblical material, it is best seen as a genuine theological development that assumes the legitimacy of claims about divine speaking, various divine acts in history, and other relevant divine action. The conceptual understanding of these divine actions did not depend on a prior vision of divine creation ex nihilo and the inferences drawn from it. In addition, even Aquinas (the inspiration for NeoThomism) insisted that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo was to be preferred to a doctrine of eternal continuous creation on the basis of divine revelation. Thus its warrants in the Thomistic tradition already trade on the idea of divine action as tacitly assumed in the idea of divine revelation in its defense of the doctrine of divine creation ex nihilo.35 Page 14 of 28

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism The upshot of these observations is that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo should not be given some kind of epistemic priority in thinking through how agency and action predicates should be applied to God.36 Beyond that, this proposal provides no indication how the specific, particular action predicates are to be unpacked or given an illuminating interpretation. There are hints here and there, as when Denys Turner rightly notes that we should not think of divine creation as analogous to action taken to achieve some calculated end but more along the lines of an action of simple enjoyment or aesthetic delight.37 However, we are given no general account on how our thinking about specific divine actions should proceed.38 (p.179) Fourth, given the way in which Neo-Thomists unpack the language of causality and dependence as applied to human action, there is an obvious problem in understanding what it is for God to directly bring about all human actions and how this generalization is to be squared with the reality of sinful human actions. The initial problem is one of understanding the claim before us. The claim begins with a restatement of the doctrine of creation in terms of dependency: all human actions are dependent on God. Given that initial premise, we are required to assert, says McCabe, that “God brings about all my free actions and that this does not make them any less free.”39 “A free action of Fred’s, for me, is one that is caused by Fred and not caused by anything else; and yet I also want to say that it is caused by God.”40 So the crucial thesis is that a robust doctrine of creation entails that we think of human actions as both caused by God and caused by human agents; these propositions are somehow compatible with one another. This claim sounds familiar. It appears to be a theological version of the compatibilism common among those who attempt to reconcile a supposedly scientific view of the universe where everything is determined, including human actions, with the intuitively attractive claim that human actions are free because they are done voluntarily. Free actions are those that are caused in a certain way, that is, not by coercion, but inwardly by the dispositions, beliefs, motives, reasons, and desires of the agent. Thus understood, determinism and free will are compatible. This alternative, however, is a misleading analogy. McCabe rejects this kind of determinism. It is not as if factors like motives and dispositions are treated as causes of human action, and then God has a hand in bringing these about; to say that would be to treat God as one more cause within the universe alongside other causes. Hence McCabe’s claim is a more radical claim: God directly causes the actions.

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism The idea is clearly not an easy one to grasp but it runs something like this. In creating human agents God brings into existence creatures with certain capacities and powers; they have a human nature. So just as rocks have one kind of nature that God gives them in creation, and just as sheep have a different kind of nature that God gives them in creation, so too do human agents have a nature given to them by God. When sheep act as they do, it is not just a matter of sheep acting on their own independently of God; they are acting as God intended them to act. It is the same, say, with lions; they are created with a nature, a nature that is constituted by their capacity and desire to eat sheep. They do not act on their own; they are acting according to the nature given to them by God. A serious doctrine of creation provides the warrant for this vision of creatures; they are dependent on the originating and (p.180) sustaining power of God; their causal power is given to them by God. Humans too have a nature. They have a unique nature different from that given to rocks, sheep, or lions, so that when they act as God created them to act, they are most fully human and thereby most fully free. So when I act freely, I operate by the causal power that makes me what I am as a human agent. Of course, I act according to certain motives and dispositions but neither motives nor dispositions are causes of actions; it remains that a free action is one which I cause and which is not caused by anything else. It is caused by God…. this is not the paradox that it seems at first sight, for God is not anything else. God is not a separate and rival agent with the universe. The creative causal power of God does not operate on me from outside, as an alternative to me; it is the creative causal power of God that makes me me.41 I am free in fact, not because God withdraws from me and leaves me my independence—as with a man who frees his slaves, or good parents who let their children come to independence—but just the other way round. I am free because God is in a sense more directly the cause of my actions than he is the behavior of unfree beings…God brings about my free action…not by causing other things to cause it, he brings it about directly. The creative act of God is there immediately in my freedom. My freedom is, so to say, a window in God’s creating; the creativity of God is not masked by immediate causes. In freedom we have the nearest thing to a direct look at the creative act of God (apart, says the Christian, from Christ himself, who is the act of God).42

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism This is certainly a robust doctrine of divine determinism: the free actions of human agents are brought about directly by God. Perhaps we should also call it a doctrine of double agency: a human act is at one and the same time an act of the human agent and an act of God. The identification is direct in both cases: it is directly an act of the human agent and directly an act of God. The psychological factors that might be involved at this point (desires, dispositions, motives, and the like) are strictly irrelevant. These are not causes; the relevant causes are the human agent and God. The inference that follows is clear: what human agents do, God does. To repeat what I quoted earlier: God “is at work without intermediary in everything that is active”; “it cannot be true that any human choice can be uncaused by God.” There is, of course, an immediate problem. What are we to make of the evil actions of human agents? If all human actions are directly brought about by God, then the “all” here, if it means anything, means that the evil acts of human agents are also brought about by God. It is hard to think of a more disastrous theological consequence for the vision of divine agency and divine action offered by the Neo-Thomist. (p.181) McCabe is fully aware of the danger and moves expeditiously to resolve it. His denial is forthright: “…when it comes to evil acts, to sin, these are not brought about by God at all. God brings about everything that is good but he does not directly bring about anything that is evil.”43 The warrant for this sudden stoppage of inference takes us back to the doctrine of creation: creation is never a failure on God’s part. When human agents act freely in sinning they are not fulfilling the nature that God gave them. When they act against the will of God for them, the real evil involved is self-inflicted. They are created to be good, just, and compassionate; when they act contrary to this, the primary harm done is to the agent. Their humanity is diminished; they are defective in their humanity. This may have bad effects on others, but this is secondary evil compared to the evil done to themselves. “An action may be morally wrong because it does harm to others, but what we mean by saying that it is morally wrong is that it damages the perpetrator.”44 Therefore, evil human actions as compared to good human actions cannot be attributed to God. [S]ince there is no good act at all, except incidentally, in a morally evil act, in evil done, there is nothing created there, hence no action of God. A morally evil act as such is an absence of something, a failure on my part to live as humanely, as intensely as I might have done. Evidently God does not bring about failure as such, for failure is not there, it is an absence…. here there is sheer failure on my part, not brought about by the fulfillment of some outside agent, but simply allowed by me. So God has no hand in it at all.45

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism Given that “God does not make absences, non-beings, failures”46 it cannot be the case that God does evil. Our vision of human freedom must begin from the premise that we are dependent on God; we are not independent of God even though we are independent of other creatures. On the positive side, when we perform good actions we reflect our nature as created by God. Anything we do is then both our action and divine action operating within us. “In fact God could have made a world in which nobody ever sinned at all and everyone was perfectly free.”47 There is an asymmetry, however, when it comes to our evil actions. When we do evil actions, these actions are not actions of God because they reflect a diminishment of our creaturely nature as human agents. As failures these cannot be brought about by God; God as Creator does not bring about failures. God does not fail to cause us to choose the good; he permits us to choose the evil even though he could have caused us to choose the good. Thus in the case of evil actions, it is not a case of God doing evil; rather it is a case of diminishing ourselves by choosing to do evil; and God does not bring about such acts because they constitute a failure to seek our true happiness and fulfillment. (p.182) It is not essential for my purposes here to provide a full-scale critique of this account of the relation between divine and human action; nor is it necessary to resolve long-standing puzzles about human freedom and sin. It is enough to point out that this proposal rests initially on a fatal confusion on the nature of dependence that has damaging consequences for any robust concept of human agency. Beyond that, it involves equivocation on the nature of human agency and human freedom. The confusion involves a transition from thinking of creation understood as God providing the standing conditions of human action to thinking of creation as God being the cause of a human action. It is one proposition to say that, given my dependence on God, I cannot do anything, good or bad, without God creating and sustaining me; it is quite another proposition to say that such dependence means that God causes what I do. God’s creating and sustaining activity is a necessary condition of all that I do; it is not a sufficient condition for doing what I do. We can perhaps see the confusion more clearly when we identify the precise actions predicated of God. When I mow my neighbor’s lawn, I can only do so if God has created me and sustains me in existence. But this neither means nor entails that when I mow the lawn to help out my neighbor, then God mows the neighbor’s lawn. The crucial and radial role that God has as Creator and sustainer of me and my activity does not mean that God does what I do.

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism The potential source of this confusion is twofold. First, given that the concept of action is an open concept, we can readily think of God being the cause of this or that human action only so long as we fail to specify the relevant actions actually performed. Within detailed specification of what God is doing, we are in no position to understand what is at stake here. We are off on our conceptual bicycles free-wheeling on the concept of action. Second, there is also the great danger of a false piety lurking in the background in which denying that God is the cause of this or that free action is seen as taking away from the glory due to God in creation. Somehow we are being less pious if in any way God is not seen to be the direct cause of every good human action.48 If we press the case that dependence on God licenses the claim that God directly causes my free action, then the human agent can readily disappear altogether and the false piety is unmasked for what it is: a rejection of the wonder of God in creating genuine human agents. Not surprisingly, Davies in unpacking the significance of his notion of dependence endorses the view of (p.183) Catherine of Siena and Jonathan Edwards when they conclude that human agents are nothing. He writes: Catherine of Sienna, whose thinking is governed by the notion of God as source of everything, repeatedly says that only God is and she herself is not. In similar vein, Edwards explains that creatures are, in a sense, ‘empty’. ‘By the creature being thus wholly and universally dependent on God’, writes Edwards, ‘it appears that the creature is nothing, and that God is all’.49 Having unpacked a fatal confusion at the heart of the Neo-Thomist project, let me now turn to the problem of equivocation. The crucial equivocation turns on the meaning of freedom as predicated of human action. At one level the NeoThomist means by free actions those actions chosen by the human agent in order to fulfill certain intentions and purposes. In this instance to assign a cause or reason for the action is to analyze the action itself. Thus, to take a colorful example from McCabe, suppose I eat my left sock because you have given me a devious chemical or because you have hypnotized me; then I am not free because I do not have a reason for doing it that is truly mine. The reason is truly mine if I eat my left sock, say, because in doing so the host at the Halloween party assures me that I will be rewarded with a sum of money that I can give to charity. In this case the action is free because I can (and do) own the reason for performing it. The contrast here is with performing an action because someone else caused me to do so. Let’s call this kind of freedom of action, F-A.

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism This sense of freedom, however, is entirely different from the sense of freedom in which freedom means acting according to my nature as God intended me to be, that is, as a creature who can, and only can, find fulfillment and happiness in living according to virtue rather than vice, in harmony with the divine will rather than in rebellion against the divine will. A truly free act is one in which I act according to what I am created to be. The contrast in this case is with an act in which I act against my nature and decide to operate, say, as a beast of the field or as some sort of disembodied angel. I set out to be sub-human or some kind of Übermensch and deliberately choose to engage in actions that reject the purposes of God for me as a creature dependent on God for the fulfillment of my destiny as a human agent. Let’s call this kind of freedom F-B. In this latter case (F-B) I am not free because I act against my better nature; in the former case (FA) I am not free because someone else is bringing it about that I act as I do. Notice now what happens when the Neo-Thomist is confronted with the problem of human evil and sin. This problem arises because the human agent appears to exercise precisely the kind of agency and freedom (F-A) that occurs in cases when she performs good actions. In both cases one can look at the (p.184) agent and see that they operate on the basis of this or that reason. So I freely insult the referee because I want to embarrass him, not because I have been administered some drug or been hypnotized. This is as much my free action as when I applaud the referee for his calling the game as fairly and judiciously as he did. If God directly brings about the latter action (a good act), then he directly brings about the former action (a bad act). There is nothing in this concept of action to block the inference. This can only be done by shifting to a quite different concept of free action, namely, where free action means an action that positively reflects my destiny as a human agent created to live a life of virtue and happiness in right relation to God. If I perform an action that is not free in this second sense (F-B) then my action is not free even though it may be free in the first sense (F-A). I then infer that because it is not free in the sense of F-B, then it is not really an action, so there is no free act for God to cause and God is off the hook. However, the Neo-Thomist has equivocated, leaning now on the one sense of freedom (F-A) and introducing the second sense of freedom (FB) when commitment to the first creates serious difficulty.

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism There is another way to get at the equivocation which is at stake here. On the one hand, the Neo-Thomist is drawn to rejecting any idea of agent causation when he is unpacking the consequences of his doctrine of creation ex nihilo. The vision of radical dependence developed tends to knock the legs out from under any serious notion of causality as applied to human agents. Once the topic of human agency arises there is a grand display of reserve; human agency creates trouble because it provides a potential analogue for divine agency, and once this happens the apophatic character of discourse about God is threatened. So human agency has to be surgically removed to preserve the radical apophatic character of language about God. Human agents are nothing; they are empty of causal powers. On the other hand, a relatively robust concept of human agency emerges when the Neo-Thomist unpacks the kind of causality that God bestows upon human agents as contrasted with, say, rocks, sheep, and lions. In this instance human agents are created and sustained in being in that they have a nature; they have genuine capacities and powers and in exercising these capacities they have real freedom of choice. The Neo-Thomist toggles back and forth between denying and affirming human agency. This denial and affirmation shows up again when we think through the problem of sin and evil. When the Neo-Thomist is thinking of good human actions, God is clearly the crucial agent in bringing about the good. Real though human action may be, there is little mention of the human agent as a genuine causal power exercising freedom of choice. The more the latter is brought up, the harder it is to say that God is the cause of good human actions, for genuinely free actions are those brought about by the agent acting freely, and therefore not subject to the agency of any other agent. Once the picture of dependency is pressed in all seriousness all the way to the bottom of (p.185) human action, however, the divine element is in real trouble. So conveniently the divine agency and action drop out, for it looks as if God is on the hook for sinful human actions just as much as God is credited with being the direct cause of good human actions. At this point, while God disappears from the scene of the crime, the human agent is brought back from emptiness and nothing to fill the space vacated by God and to get God off the hook.

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism This newly summoned human agent has to be sufficiently robust to be the cause of his actions, only this time the action is no longer free, not because he does not have reasons to perform the action (for he can and does), but because it does not involve his fulfillment as a creature of God. In the case of sinful human action, we no longer have any free actions in this latter sense. There are no truly free sinful actions; hence there are no sinful acts for God to cause. Free actions would have to mean free in the sense of fulfilling what humans are meant to do when they act; but this is not the case because they involve actions which harm the agent and do not represent the fulfillment of human agents as God has created them to be. So a strong concept of human agents, is needed to get God off the hook; but midway through the recall, a linguistic miracle has been wrought in which the freedom he now possesses is not the freedom that counts in the case of good acts but only the freedom that counts in the case of evil acts. He is an agent strong enough to do evil and thus eliminate God as the cause of his actions; yet he is an agent who fails to perform genuinely free actions when he does evil. He is an agent who is not really an agent. It is time to summarize what has been achieved in this chapter. I suggested at the outset that we should take as our default position the claim that God is best construed as an agent whenever we meet claims about divine action. This claim runs up against the strong competing claim, developed by contemporary NeoThomists, that this whole way of thinking about God is fundamentally idolatrous. They reject any idea of God being an agent, a being, or a person on the grounds that these concepts treat God as one more item in the universe. We should, they argue, look upon God as incomprehensible Being, for nothing less than something like this will do justice to the claim that divine creation is creation ex nihilo. Creation ex nihilo in turn is grounded in a version of natural theology which sees “God” as whatever answers the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism My counter-argument made the case against the Neo-Thomist, not on the grounds that their natural theology is necessarily flawed, but on grounds that focused on their competing claims about divine agency and divine action. Their radically apophatic approach to discourse about divine action as required by the logic of their natural theology means that they are barred by their own concept of God from speaking constructively of God in general and from speaking about divine creation in particular. I also argued that they provide no good reason for privileging the language of creation ex nihilo in (p.186) developing an account of how action predicates are to be understood as applied to God. Finally, I sought to show that when Neo-Thomists develop their own account of divine action in creation, they fall into serious confusion and equivocation. Insofar as Neo-Thomists retain their apophaticism, they lose any idea of divine agency. Insofar as they deploy the idea of divine action in creation, it runs counter to their apophaticism; worse still, when they bring divine action into relation to human action, they readily fall into confusion and equivocation. If the default position is that we should think of God as an agent unless we have good reason to think otherwise, then the Neo-Thomists have not provided good reasons for abandoning the idea of God as an agent. One other point deserves mention in closing. As in the case of Alston, we have seen again in this chapter that the idea of agent causation readily crops up in discussions about agency and action. Thus human agents are sometimes understood as distinct ontological creatures with unique capacities and powers which they can freely exercise in order to achieve intentions and purposes. McCabe may even unintentionally have suggested that in this kind of human agency we come close to the agency of God. “My freedom is, so to say, a window of God’s creating…In freedom we have the nearest thing to a direct look at the creative act of God…” Yet this is clearly a very fragile notion in that articulating and sustaining this concept of human agency is precarious both philosophically and theologically. Even when something like it appears, as is manifest in the difficulties exposed here, it can just as quickly disappear. Clearly, this notion may well have potential as an analogue for divine agency. If it does serve as an analogy, then its value for understanding the meaning of action predicates as applied to God may prove very fruitful; but this will only work if we bear in mind the limitations argued for heretofore.

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism If the notion of agent causation does work as an analogue for God, then NeoThomists are right that any articulation and defense of a robust vision of human agency will need to preserve a radical distinction between the Creator and the creature. Perhaps it is in exactly the context of a robust doctrine of divine creation that it can be most lucidly developed. It may well have been no accident that the idea of agent causation was resurrected in modern philosophy by Thomas Reid within a confessional Christian tradition where it was lodged within the arena of pneumatology. If human agency mirrors in some sense divine agency, then, as in the case of the Neo-Thomists, we should argue this case as much on theological grounds as on philosophical grounds. It may even be that only a robust account of divine agency truly preserves a really dense, discriminating, and worthy account of human agency. Lose the concept of human agents as ontologically robust creatures made in the image of God and in time agents end up being complex configurations of chemistry and physics. Notes:

(1) For G. E. Wright, God was most certainly not the “abstract” God of the philosophers arrived at by means of natural theology. (2) In the classical Thomist tradition, a doctrine of analogy has also been an essential ingredient of the full package of developed theory. (3) Paul Helm in “Anthropomorphism Protestant Style” in Whose God? Which Tradition?, ed. D. Z. Phillips (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 137–57. (4) This is not the happiest of names given that Neo-Thomist has been used to identify other groups of Thomists in the modern period. Following the witty suggestion of Denys Turner, it is tempting to use the phrase “Herbertical Thomists.” The covert reference here is to the profound influence of Herbert McCabe on the group of contemporary Thomists I shall be considering. See Denys Turner, “How to be an Atheist,” New Blackfriars 83 (2002): 239. To avoid confusion I simply stipulate here that Neo-Thomist refers to the theologians under review here. Stephen Mulhall has coined the term “Grammatical Thomism” to designate the work of McCabe and his associates. See Stephen Mulhall, The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Readers should feel free to substitute this designation in what follows. (5) Thus I shall not comment on whether the work of the Neo-Thomists reflects accurately the ideas of Thomas Aquinas. My interest is in a current reappropriation of Aquinas. (6) Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), 15.

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism (7) Ibid., 5. This argument is elegantly elsewhere restated by Brian Davies and by Denys Turner. See Brian Davies, “The New Atheism: Its Virtues and its Vices,” New Blackfriars 92 (2010): 18–34; “Letter from America,” New Blackfriars 84 (2003): 371–84; “Aquinas on What God is Not,” in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae: Critical Essays, ed. Brian Davies (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 129–44. See Denys Turner, “How to be an Atheist,” and Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). (8) McCabe, God Matters, 5. (9) Ibid., 6. (10) Neo-Thomists display extensive distaste, if not contempt, for Richard Swinburne’s approach to natural theology that argues inductively to the existence of a divine Person. They are not interested, say, in showing why his arguments are unsound or invalid; it is enough that he argues to the existence of God as a divine Person, which merits the charge of idolatry. It is to be regretted that philosophical differences on how to think about the concept of God are so readily transformed into charges of idolatry. Idolatry is surely not a casual charge to make; happily, stoning is no longer the preferred punishment. Punishments now would seem to involve the practice of shunning the writings of the designated idolators, except to pick up gobbets to be used in quick and easy dismissal. (11) Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, 227. (12) Ibid., 27. (13) When they do think of God as an agent, one of their deep worries is that God might be construed as a moral agent, subject to moral obligations and subject to human evaluation. Thinking about God as moral agent is problematic because it makes God morally subject to something more ultimate than God; the latter is otiose because it is human agents who are subject to searching divine evaluation rather than vice versa. This set of worries takes us into the relation between divine agency and morality. Interesting and important as this topic is, I shall not take it up here in that my interest is in the prior question of whether we can think of God appropriately as an agent. I shall pursue this in the final volume of this series. (14) Brian Davies, “Is God a Moral Agent?,” in Whose God? Which Tradition? ed. Phillips, 111. (15) The empiricist strain is represented, say, by conventional cosmological arguments; and the rationalist strain by the ontological argument. (16) Davies, “Letter from America,” 376. Page 25 of 28

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism (17) “What we mean by the miraculous action of God is indeed simply the nonpresence of natural causes and explanations. A miracle is not God intervening in the world—God is always acting in the world—a miracle is when only God is acting in the world.” McCabe, God Matters, 33. (18) Davies, “Letter from America,” 376. (19) Ibid. (20) Ibid. (21) Ibid. (22) McCabe, God Matters, 11. (23) Fergus Kerr, “Knowing God by Reason Alone: What Vatican I Never Said,” New Blackfriars 91 (2010): 215–28. (24) This is a central claim in the work of Turner, as is his claim that the logic in play here replicates the logic on display in the high Christology of Chalcedon. His more general aim is to show that there is a natural consonance between the deep truths of divine revelation and the legitimacy of natural theology as developed in the Thomistic tradition. Thus he is providing a rejoinder to the work of Barthians and the adherents of the Radical Orthodox Movement who insist that any appeal to natural theology is illegitimate from a theological point of view. (25) Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, 87. (26) Ibid., 105–6. (27) Note that Turner does not claim that this move is required by exegesis of Exodus; more modestly he is claiming that his position is consonant with the language of Exodus 3. (28) I shall not take up the interesting epistemological and metaphysical moves that are central to the Neo-Thomist agenda. Clearly if these flounder, then the project has additional problems to face. However, I think that the difficulties surrounding the Neo-Thomist claims about divine agency and divine action are so severe that no amount of epistemological or metaphysical advantages that the project might otherwise have can make up for the acute problems that have to be addressed with respect to divine agency and divine action. (29) Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, 79–80. (30) Ibid., 79–80.

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism (31) Ibid., 252–3. Turner has misread Mackie’s objection to Swinburne here. Mackie is entirely happy to treat discourse about God acting as literal; his objection to Swinburne is epistemological in that he thinks that the arguments assembled for the cosmological argument are weak. See J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 1, 100. (32) Much hinges on the appeal to creation ex nihilo positively in the NeoThomist program. For a fine exposition see Davies, “Aquinas on What God is Not,” 135–6. Thus, he argues that Aquinas derives the following from the doctrine of creation: God is alive, God is good, God is omnipresent, and God is eternal. (33) Turner may well have yielded to temptation at this point: “Negative theology does not mean that we are short of things to say about God; it just means that everything we say of God falls short of him.” See Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, 212. (34) The idea shows up in 2 Maccabees 7:28. “I beseech thee, my son, look upon the earth and heaven, and all that is therein, and consider that God made them of things that were not; and so was mankind made likewise.” However, theologically the issue is not taken up in a serious fashion till much later. (35) Claims about divine revelation and divine guidance are also in play in the epistemic status accorded to the Fourth Lateran Council in its articulation of creation ex nihilo. (36) It would be interesting to take an entirely different divine action, the speaking in tongues at Pentecost, and ruminate on the significance of this for understanding discourse about God; but that must await another occasion. (37) Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, 32. (38) Interestingly, Turner downplays the importance of analogy for Aquinas. Analogical predication crops up in medieval theology in the context of the proper form of proofs for the existence of God. What matters to Aquinas, on Turner’s reading, is that the transition from premise to conclusion can legitimately be made without equivocation. (39) McCabe, God Matters, 11. (40) Ibid., 12. (41) Ibid., 13. (42) Ibid., 14. (43) Ibid., 36. Page 27 of 28

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Divine Agency and Contemporary Neo-Thomism (44) Ibid., 35. (45) Ibid., 36. (46) Ibid., 36. (47) Ibid., 37. (48) There is also risk of another form of false piety in play here in which taking credit for what we do appears to take away the credit due to God for what is done and attributes merit to the human agent. What lies in the background here are doctrines of grace with respect to salvation that are radically misunderstood because of a serious misreading of how the language of agency and causality works in this context. I shall take this up in a later volume. (49) Davies, “Letter from America,” 382. Emphasis mine.

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I: Exploring and Evaluating the Debate William J. Abraham

Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780198786504 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786504.001.0001

Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action William J. Abraham

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198786504.003.0011

Abstract and Keywords 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. Keywords:   Kathryn Tanner, grammar, theology, creation, human freedom, divine transcendence, divine action

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action The argument developed in the previous chapter is planted firmly in a contemporary vision of Thomism that has gained enormous currency among theologians. That currency is a great tribute to the fecundity of the Thomist tradition across the centuries. For the most part I cast my exposition of the relevant arguments in terms that were hostile to the ethos of contemporary analytic philosophy and that displayed its Thomistic footprints. Thus the exposition made clear the epistemological and metaphysical legacy that was in place. Beyond the treatment of the doctrine of creation it did not, for instance, say much if anything about the specific theological disputes that might potentially also be in play behind the scenes. However, there is another version of the central claims advanced in the previous chapter which takes a less hostile attitude to the work of analytic philosophy and which provides a separate stream for their presence in much contemporary theology. I have in mind the work of Kathryn Tanner. Tanner, to be sure, does not hesitate to draw on the work of Aquinas; her use of Aquinas is essentially illustrative. However, she casts her proposals more generally in terms of a debate about the grammar of Christian discourse, a trope that has had a long innings in the history of twentieth-century analytic theology. This fits snugly with her self-placement within the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy, even though she has a deft way of laying claim to similar proposals, say, in the work of Derrida. She also operates self-consciously from within the Protestant tradition, no doubt one reason for her well-deserved impact on the contemporary scene. Thus she provides an additional site of investigation that supplies a very substantial challenge to the project that has animated this volume up to the end of Chapter 10.

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action Reviewing her proposals allows me to supplement the arguments already canvassed in the previous chapter. However, it also brings out two further features of our situation that will be made explicit in the next and final chapter. Thus, it seeks to show that Tanner’s work, despite appearances to the contrary, really does require the pursuit of the grand metaphysical themes that show up (p.188) in the Thomist tradition. In addition, it seeks to show the proposals under review do not simply take their cue from the doctrine of creation; they are also driven by the massive effort to resolve the problem of freedom and grace that stems from the work of Augustine and that have been exceptionally significant for understanding debates about divine agency and divine action in the Western tradition. Thus Tanner’s project brings out the extent to which her project, while cast in terms of the grammar of theological discourse, is inescapably entangled in a very particular set of material theological proposals that need to be identified and brought to the surface. Rather than resolve crucial worries about divine action, they actually perpetuate a material set of theological proposals that should be called into question. Moreover, it becomes clear that Tanner will have to deal with the tangled metaphysical issues her account displays, as the subsequent debate makes clear. Despite these reservations, Tanner draws attention to a crucial feature of our work as theologians that should be preserved as we move forward. Happily that insight can be distinguished and excised from the deeper and more problematic elements within which it is embedded. One way to think of Tanner’s project is to think of it as insisting that the divine action of creation holds the key to thinking about issues related to divine agency and divine action. Prima facie, this seems semantically odd. For one thing, divine creation is but one of a host of actions predicated of God across the Scriptures, the tradition of the church, and personal piety. We surely need good reasons for insisting that reflection on divine creation will be pivotal for understanding, say, God forgiving us our sins, or God making a covenant with Israel, or God appointing Paul as the apostle to the Gentiles compared to the appointment of Peter. For another thing, it is obvious that the predication of creation to God is radically different from predicating, say, making a covenant with Abraham to God. Creation and making a covenant are significantly different actions. It is not clear that sorting out the meaning of the first will be either sufficient or necessary for sorting out the meaning of the second. We can well imagine an Israelite of old having a relatively firm grasp of God’s covenant with Abraham without having even thought about God creating the universe in which she and Abraham exist. This may well have been the situation in ancient Israel. Indeed she may well have come to understand the second before coming to understand the first.

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action To be sure, if one believes that the God who made a covenant with Abraham is the same God who created the world, one may then go on to think of the covenant with Abraham in new and rich ways. Thus one may come to think of the agent who makes the covenant with Abraham as also the creator of the world. However, that story can also be run the other way. One could start out with thinking and believing that God created the world and then come to think that this same God made a covenant with Abraham. Clearly, this would make a difference to how one then thought about the creator of the world. In (p.189) the first case one starts with God engaging in an act of covenant making and discovers that God also created the world; in the second one starts with creation and discovers that God made a covenant with Israel. Semantically speaking, there is no need to think of creation as somehow primary or privileged in understanding divine agency and divine action. Of course, in thinking as a whole about God these additional discoveries will be revolutionary; however, at the semantic level they stand or fall together. To express the matter in another idiom: if I have difficulty understanding the concept of God making a covenant with Abraham, it will not help me to be told to consult the concept of God creating the universe. The difficulties I have with the first will simply reappear when I consult the second. Or so it will appear. It was partly because of this appearance that many sought to figure out how to understand language about this or that divine action by reaching for a generic concept of divine action that could fruitfully be used in understanding any divine action predicate under consideration. Yet Tanner clearly thinks she is offering not just material theological help but extensive semantic assistance when she insists that creation has a privileged place in understanding divine agency and divine action more generally. The signal that this is so is clearly manifest in her insistence that she is making a critical contribution to understanding the grammar of Christian discourse about divine action. To speak of grammar is to speak of public rules that govern our speech and thus to provide help in understanding the meaning of our discourse. More generally, as already indicated, her work embodies the linguistic turn in both analytic and continental philosophy that emerged in the twentieth century. Thus she endorses the slogan of Quine in his invitation to make the semantic ascent from direct talk about the object of our language to the language in which we talk about the objects of our language. So rather than talk about God, the world, and eternal life, we shift to scrutiny of our language about God, the world, and eternal life. Her own sympathies on the whole lie with certain specific versions of the linguistic turn; she is drawn to a more pragmatist and functionalist edition of the linguistic turn that tends to be wary of referentialist strains that would take one relatively quickly into questions of truth and epistemology. The focus is on linguistic performance, on linguistic behavior, and the forms of life in which these are embedded. Page 4 of 23

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action This focus on language means that the theologian must pay careful attention to the actual linguistic practices of a relatively well-defined Christian community. Christians are those who have been initiated into the linguistic practices of their community; they learn the rules governing Christian discourse as it is embedded in the life of the community and in their own lives. They have been exposed to and picked up the grammar of Christian discourse just as they have been exposed to and picked up the grammar of their native language. This observation provides a crucial clue to the work of the theologian. (p.190) The end point as well as the starting point of theological speculation is the given practice of Christian behaviours and beliefs. A theological grammar of Christian linguistic competency is acceptable only to the extent that its principled reflection matches the intuitions of competent Christian speakers about well-formed statements and offers an ordering of the variety of such statements without oversimplification or distortion.1 Note here how Tanner ties our theological endeavors to considerations about the grammar of theological discourse. Theological speculation is needed because Christian discourse begins to sputter. This may happen for at least four reasons: because Christians mis-speak; because they may deploy well-formed Christian sentences inappropriately; because they are unsure how to speak in novel situations; and because they fail to see how well-formed statements are compatible with one another. The way forward in such circumstances is to set the linguistic practice of Christians back on its feet by principled reflection on Christian linguistic competence. Returning to the role of semantic ascent in theology, Tanner sums up her position this way. It makes sense then to recast the ‘material mode’ of a theologian’s statements about God and world into a ‘formal mode’ whereby they express recommendations for talk about these matters. Statements about God and world become rules for discourse, proposals about what should be and should not be said.2

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action Applied to debates about divine agency in relation to the world, questions about divine agency in relation to the world should be reformulated as an invitation to think about these questions in terms of the language in which we talk about divine agency in relation to the world. The promise is that this strategy will yield fresh ways of resolving disputes about divine agency and divine action that otherwise remain intractable. It is in the context of this more general strategy that Tanner proposes that understanding the rules governing discourse about divine creation is crucial for future work on divine action. Attention to divine creation is not just a point of entry to understanding divine action more generally; it is the foundation for understanding divine action. As David Burrell captures the point: “creation is the very paradigm for any and all divine activity that we know of…”3 Put differently, if we grasp the meaning of what it is to say that God created the world, we can then go on to understand every other action predicate as applied to God. By understanding one divine action, we have the clue to understanding all divine action. Or at least, this (p.191) seems a plausible way to read the proposals developed by Tanner and those who follow her. This is a bold claim indeed. Tanner enumerates her contribution with an elegant if dry simplicity. Speaking of the general or abstract principles underlying her systematic vision of the Christian faith, she identifies two crucial themes: “…firstly, a non-competitive relation between creatures and God, and secondly, a radical interpretation of divine transcendence. The second principle…is the precondition of the first.”4 The point of our starting with these themes is that they capture the crucial slogans that have become second nature to many theologians in search of help on problems that relate to divine agency and divine action. It is failure to understand the non-competitive nature of divine action in relation to creatures and failure to understand the radical nature of divine transcendence that prevents progress and becomes the source of confusion and error. Somehow, if we really got hold of these two notions we will be in the clear. Indeed grasping the import of these two concepts (non-competitive divine action and radical divine transcendence) will resolve a network of crucial problems across the contours of systematic theology, most notably problems related to providence, Christology, pneumatology, and grace.5

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action The principle of radical transcendence is the precondition of the principle of non-competitive divine action, so let’s begin there. What is at stake in talk of God’s radical transcendence? What is at stake is essentially a non-contrastive concept of transcendence. Consider our normal way of making contrasts. We take one item of the universe and compare it with another. So we contrast tables with chairs, apples with oranges, odd numbers with even numbers, dogs with cats, princes with commoners, politicians with journalists, and so on. We can see in this case that we have various series which belong together in one world. When we speak of God’s transcendence with the world, that is, how God differs from the world, we need to think of this very carefully. Suppose we run the contrast as the contrast of God and the world. If this is taken as similar to the contrast just enumerated then we are thinking of God and the world belonging to the same universe. We think of the world and then add God to it to get another universe of world plus God. We now have two items in a single universe that are contrasted, just as in earlier cases we have two items in a single universe. However, if we really understand the rules governing our discourse about God this is a grammatical howler. For we have conceived the God–world relation along the same lines as relations that hold when we contrast one item with another item in the same world. This is clearly not a non-contrastive concept of transcendence. To achieve that we simply need to contrast the God– world relation as radically different from any contrast we (p.192) make of items within the world. God’s difference from everything else transcends any difference we care to make when we make comparisons of items within the world. If we ignore this we make God one more item in the universe and have radically misunderstood the proper designation and use of the work “God” as deployed in properly formed Christian discourse. The principle of radical transcendence dovetails very nicely with the doctrine of creation as expounded by Tanner. Divine creation is creation ex nihilo. This minimally means that the divine is radically unlike creation as we deploy it in our ordinary discourse where we think of an agent creating something from something else. This is not what creation means when it is predicated of God. In this case the world itself comes into existence without any intermediaries. This is clearly a radical doctrine of creation akin to the radicality of divine transcendence. In her early work Tanner is relatively sparse in what she has to say initially about the meaning of divine creation. However, the core of her claim is perfectly transparent. God’s agency must be talked about as universal and immediate,… conversely, everything non-divine must be talked about as existing in a relation of total and immediate dependence upon God.6

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action …according to our rule for talk of God as an agent God’s creative powers must be said to extend to all created existence, including presumably any power or efficacy that created beings themselves have. God’s creative agency must be said to found created being in whatever mechanical causality, animate working or self-defining agency it might evidence. A created cause can be said to bring about a certain created effect by its own power, or a created agency can be talked about as freely intending the object of its rational volition, only if God is said to found the causality of agency directly and in toto—in power, exercise, manner of activity and effect.7 Combine the two principles and we have a neat way of avoiding certain common ways of thinking about divine agency and divine action. We can understand this connection between a contrastive transcendence and a limited divine agency in the following way. Divinity characterized in terms of direct contrast with certain sorts of being or with the world of non-divine being as a whole brought the world down to the level of the world and the beings within it in virtue of their opposition: God becomes one being among others within a single order. Such talk suggests that God exists alongside the non-divine, that God is limited by what is opposed to it, that God is finite as the non-divine beings with which it is directly contrasted. A cosmology influenced by such suggestions will characterize a divine agency in the terms appropriate for a finite one. Like that of a finite agent, God’s influence will be of a limited sort; it may not extend to (p. 193) everything, it may presuppose what it does not produce, it may require the intervening agencies of others.8 Consider a second articulation.

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action The Christian theologian therefore needs to radicalize claims about both God’s transcendence and involvement with the world if the two are to work for rather than against one another. Primary Christian practice already includes apparently extreme assertions of the latter sort in talk of God as the source of all that is. If Christians make such affirmations and do not want to identify God with any part or whole of the world, they must radicalize their claims for that divine transcendence, as well, in a noncontrastive direction. Only that sort of transcendence prevents transcendence and creative agency from becoming competitive. If Christians presume that God is somehow beyond this world and is therefore not to be identified with part of it in part or in whole, the theologian in the interest of Christian coherence adds that this non-identity not amount to a simple contrast. The insistence upon a non-contrastive characterization of God’s transcendence forces, in turn, Christian talk of God’s creative agency to be worked out in a genuinely radical way: God must be directly productive of everything that is in every aspect of existence. Anything short of that supposes, I have argued, a diminished divine transcendence.9 As Tanner herself makes clear these remarks are inescapably general and abstract. One is not quite sure where to go next. Suppose we grant them for the moment. Suppose we allow her claims about divine creation to stand as they are. Do these claims help us to understand other action predicates like divine forgiveness, or God making a covenant with Abraham, or God promising eternal life in a world to come? To return to the language of Burrell, if “creation is the very paradigm for any and all divine activity that we know of,” how might this help us understand any and all divine activity? It is tempting to reply: it helps not one iota. However, that is surely mistaken, or at least it is premature. Consider two possibilities that come to mind. First, whenever we unpack any action predicate as it applies to God, we should make sure that these two principles are kept in mind. Any account of this or that action as predicated of God should never undermine these two principles; if they do, our theological language is sputtering and needs to be corrected. And second, attention to these two principles could well unlock worries about claims about divine action that show up in the Christian tradition. Thus long-standing debates about, say, theological anthropology, or Christology, or freedom and grace, may not be just illuminated but addressed in a whole new productive fashion. More dramatically, we have to hand an agenda for the future of systematic theology. Given these two observations we can immediately register not just the crucial (p.194) role they could play in a new vision of theological method; we can also understand the excitement that Tanner’s work has elicited over the last generation.

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action Consider at this point her account of divine action in the debate about freedom and grace, a debate which in the Catholic tradition of the West is known as the de Auxiliis or divine assistance controversy, but one which has also raged within the magisterial Protestant tradition for centuries.10 The debate can readily be identified in this way. How do we hold together the claim that salvation is entirely of God and the claim that human beings remain significantly free in their participation in the salvation given by God? All too often protagonists in the debate came to understand the first-order language of nature and grace or freedom and grace in terms of two dualistic orders where emphasis on the first order—grace—meant that the second order—genuine human action or freedom —had to be sacrificed. The more one insisted on the reality of divine action in salvation then the less one could attribute to human agency. Divine action as represented by God’s acts of salvation in Christ through the Spirit had to be pitted against human action represented by repentance, consent, and efforts towards obedience. Conversely, the more one insisted on the crucial role of human action in salvation, then the less one could attribute to God. The former move will lead to a hardline vision of the divine and of divine grace in which God turns out to be coercive if not tyrannous; the latter move will lead straight to Pelagian doctrines of human works and merit. Thus Christian discourse leads to stark internal incoherence. The problem properly diagnosed is not that both sides fail to take account of the material mode of discourse in the Christian tradition. Both start out from firstorder claims about divine agency and human agency in salvation. They want to uphold the claims that God is the author of our salvation and that human beings minimally perform the action of consent in relation to divine salvation. The problem is that they fail to observe the proper rules of grammar represented first, by a non-competitive relation between creatures and God, and second, by a radical interpretation of divine transcendence. Ordination to God which is our supernatural finality becomes a superimposed template over what appears to be a properly human order existing in naturalistic dependence on God. If both sides of the de Auxiliis controversy assume the naturalistic structure of discourse, they will also share a subversion of our rules for discourse. Once these rules are subverted traditional theological discourse about God’s sovereignty and the power and freedom of the creature is no longer coherent. An either/or option between the traditional affirmation about God and human freedom will result: (p.195) the theologian can affirm the creature’s freedom and power at the expense of God’s sovereignty or affirm God’s sovereignty at the expense of the creature’s freedom and power.11

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action The first option involves a vision of human freedom from God, a move that goes back all the way to Pelagius. The second option involves a vision of divine sovereignty that posits a dependence on God that effectively eliminates the human agent. The problem is that both have broken two cardinal rules of linguistic performance in the Christian tradition: they have thought of divine action as action that is to be contrasted with human action in a competitive manner; and they have forgotten that the divine creative action in salvation goes all the way to the bottom both immediately and directly so that it includes the free actions of human agents. Once we deploy the strategy of semantic ascent we can effectively dissolve the problem by attending afresh to the two cardinal rules governing our grammar of discourse about God. On the one hand, the rule related to non-contrastive transcendence vetoes the move to put God and human agents into one order of reality, and thus treat divine agency as one more form of agency in the world; we have two levels of discourse that are being confused. On the other hand, our rule on the radical nature of divine creation vetoes the move to pit divine and human action in competition with one another. Expressed grandly, divine action in salvation reaches all the way into the free actions of human agents without undermining human agents as genuine agents with all the necessary apparatus that secures human freedom. Expressed more prosaically in first-order theological discourse, we can say that God creates the free actions of human agents in salvation. Tanner does not say this straight out; but this is clearly the import of her proposal on the problem of freedom and grace.

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action Tanner is sparing and modest in her explicit assessment of what she has achieved. She notes that what she has done is uphold a tradition represented across the centuries by Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. Thus she secures a footing in the great tradition of theology. She has upheld a way of speaking about divine and human agency that runs deep into past performances of Christian theology. She also provides a handy diagnosis of both the etiology and harm done to the Christian tradition in the modern period. Modernity is in part an effort to uphold the referential character of theological discourse and thus to decontextualize our reading of traditional theological discourse. Theologians miss the way previous formulations functioned in the particular circumstances of earlier communities and focus on the internal contradictions thrown up by the dualistic way of thinking between divine sovereignty and human freedom. God tends to be depicted as a “tyrant—one who acts only to keep down and defy.”12 In reaction, in order to preserve the freedom of human (p.196) agents, other theologians “…who refuse for their own reasons to concede human power are forced to take the stance of irreligious humanism.”13 In further reaction more conservative theologians reach for doctrines of intervention which alter the course of the creature’s activity on its own. Hence there is an unfortunate tendency to reify the distinctions of abstract analysis and end up in dead-ends where no exit seems possible. Once we reinstate the two cardinal rules we come to see that we need both sets of affirmations and that they cohere with each other, even though the priority must be given to the claims related to divine sovereignty precisely because of the place of creation as the foundation of Christian theology.14 Nowhere does Tanner claim to have resolved the long-standing problem of grace in freedom in the Christian tradition. This is in fact very puzzling. For Tanner does not hesitate to insist that it is perfectly in order to claim, as I put the issue earlier, that God has created the free human actions of human agents. If this claim holds, then the Pelagian–Augustinian controversy has been resolved. Perhaps bringing that claim front and center exposes a raw nerve in the whole enterprise. Perhaps the reticence is a byproduct of her modesty as an intellectual; perhaps it stems from a revisionist perspective where it is not possible to have stable, consensual commitment to any Christian doctrine.15 Perhaps this arises in turn from her wariness about the referential function of theological discourse that fits with her vision of the linguistic turn in twentiethcentury philosophy. Yet nowhere is there the standard hand-wringing about an insoluble mystery or insoluble tension that shows up, say, in a figure like Karl Rahner. She insists, not entirely emphatically but certainly persistently, that it is the case that God creates free human actions. Moreover, this first-order theological claim is on her analysis entirely coherent given her account of crucial elements in the grammar of Christian discourse.16

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action (p.197) While there are developments in Tanner’s project, it is clear that she has not abandoned her central claims on how to proceed in thinking about claims about divine agency. The stress on a radical doctrine of creation and a non-contrastive vision of the contrast between God and the world remains intact. Thus in a recent article on creation ex nihilo she returns to these familiar themes.17 Therefore it is only right and proper to return to my earlier question and ask afresh what light her work throws on resolving semantic questions about divine agency and divine action. Recall that she pitched her work within the domain of the linguistic turn in philosophy, a turn that clearly focused on sorting out the meaning of our discourse rather than heading straight away to think about the objects of our discourse. In this domain one of her central claims was that attention to the activity in divine creation offered an indispensable platform for thinking through other divine actions like, say, salvation and providence. I simply press the issue further by asking if her strategy can help us in thinking through the meaning of other action predicates, like, God’s making a covenant with Abraham, God forgiving us our sins, God raising Jesus from the dead, and so on. What is immediately obvious is that Tanner supplies little or no help on this front. In fact, despite what she says about the unfortunate abstraction of the work of others, her own work is pitched at a high level of abstraction. Moreover, while it claims to provide a grammar of Christian discourse that has to be rooted in Christian speech performance and practice, it looks as if she has very limited interest in the full range of action predicates that show up all over the place in Scripture, Christian liturgies, personal piety, and the like. She takes a reading of the divine action of creation, adds in a rule about non-contrastive transcendence, and seems to think this is all we need. Now, while we need not question the potentially crucial place of the action of creation ex nihilo across the board for Christian theology, it is surely exaggerated to claim that somehow this is the key to unlocking the meaning of divine action in the Christian tradition. As I pressed the issue earlier, if I am not sure how to interpret the divine action of God making a covenant with Abraham or (p.198) forgiving us our sins, it is not really going to help to ask me to ponder the meaning of divine creation ex nihilo.

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action What is emerging at this point is obvious. The phrase, “understanding the meaning of divine action,” is ambiguous. Drawing it into the domain of linguistic analysis and offering to provide a grammar of Christian discourse would appear to promise a way to unravel the meaning of any action predicate. However, this is not at all what Tanner ends up doing. She offers us a rendering of the divine action of creation ex nihilo and then, with her rule about divine transcendence, provides an extremely robust account of what that means in terms of the relation between God and the world. When taken on the road this strategy then provides a hearty account of the relation between divine sovereignty and human action in which it is claimed that God creates free human actions. What we have, in fact, is a material set of theological proposals presented under the guise of a grammar of Christian discourse. Once we pull away the mask of the analogy with grammar, we can see what is actually being presented. Grammars in fact do nothing to tell us what to say when we learn a language. Tanner is right to say that grammar gives us the revisable public rules that govern what we can say in the linguistic community under review. They do not tell us what to say; it is human agents who do the talking. To use her language, it is not Christian discourse that sputters; it is Christian speakers who sputter. And one class of speech acts they perform is precisely to tell us straight up what to say about divine creation or the host of other actions predicated by Christians about God. Tanner does precisely this in her ruminations on creation and in the claim that God creates the free human actions of human agents.18 Moreover, the Christian tradition is not a linguistic community of the kind needed to shelter a grammar of theological discourse. The claims advanced by theologians are not just “grammatically incoherent” (whatever that may really mean); they appear at times to be logically incoherent. They also appear to be patently false and unjustified, two features which drive the quest for truth in theology and the correlative quest for adequate epistemological backing, precisely the features that Tanner eschews in her appropriation of one family of versions of the linguistic turn in recent philosophy.

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action (p.199) Returning to the phrase, “understanding Christian claims about divine action,” this can mean something along the following lines by way of a series of requests. Tell me what God has actually done. Help me understand how God works in the human agent in grace so that I can affirm the standard doctrine of justification by grace through faith as compatible with genuine agent causality as applied to human agents. Assist me in making sense of divine action in atonement given its apparent moral difficulties when cast in terms of a theory of penal substitution. This is just old-fashioned theology at work. Tanner is in reality entering the lists at this level of engagement, not at the level of providing a conceptual account of creation as “the very paradigm for any and all divine activity that we know of.” A paradigm, when dressed up in the language of a grammar, sounds like the provision of a rule for understanding all action predicates as applied to God. Thus, if I learn the paradigm for feminine nouns in Latin, I can use this to understand any feminine noun. The appeal to a paradigm as transferred to theology is at best confusing and at worst seriously misleading. Much the same can be said about her principle of radical transcendence. She is correct to note that her proposal on this front has a long-standing place in the history of theology. Her way of expressing it has the great merit of making this vision of divine transcendence felicitously clear and succinct. However, it is surely not the only way of unpacking the concept of transcendence as applied to God. Indeed we can think of divine transcendence exactly in terms of the allpervasive reach of divine action in creation without accepting her way of running this all the way to the bottom to involve the creation of the free actions of human agents. However, my point here is that presenting her vision of divine transcendence in terms of the grammar of theological discourse is again at best confusing and at worst seriously misleading. By making the issue one of grammar she can tell the student to go to the back of the class until she relearns her grammar. Again a substantial theological proposal—one about how to understand the attribute of divine transcendence—has been smuggled into the conversation under the guise of linguistic propriety. It would be wonderful if our disputes about this contested divine attribute could be resolved so easily. Once we embark on the task of understanding divine action as actually performed by Tanner it is no accident that we are landed right back in the thick of conceptual debates about our concept of God, about our concepts of causality and agency, about determinism and freedom, about modality, and indeed about a whole range of metaphysical issues that have long been explored by philosophers and theologians; these are now back on the table after the harvesting of the gains and losses made available in the various linguistic turns that are familiar. Tanner shifted to debates about the nature and impact of culture, an entirely understandable development given her own account of what is at stake in the linguistic turn. However, we must also take (p.200) into account the counter-revolutionary return to metaphysics that has also happened over the last generation. Page 15 of 23

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action The latter development—the turn to metaphysics—is nicely picked up in the reception of Tanner that has been deftly documented in the recent work of R. J. Matava.19 Matava rightly situates Tanner’s work in a raft of theologians and philosophers who have revisited the debate about grace and freedom and taken up the complex semantic and metaphysical questions it rightly evokes. It is especially interesting that his own positive contribution is to gather together a raft of dense, interlocking theses and arguments that defend the claim that it is logically coherent to say that God creates free human actions. Matava correctly locates the claim that God creates human free choices in the debate about de Auxiliis noted earlier. He walks us through the thicket of proposals and counter-proposals represented on the one side by Domingo Báñez and on the other by Louis de Molina. He brings the debate up to date by an examination of the work of Bernard Lonergan and then circles back to a fresh reception of Thomas Aquinas. In the final chapter he provides his own attempt at a way forward that might break the logjam that has been around in the West for centuries. Central to his positive account is a semantic thesis developed by James Ross in which the core constituents of reality are represented by actual entities rather than states of affairs. God’s primary action is the action of making be. What God makes are actual entities like “God chooses Peter to do A.” States of affairs, like “Peter doing A,” are parasitic on the actual entities; they are mere shadows on the things God makes to be. “God wills the whole reality of a human person’s free choosing, including the particular determination of the person’s choice.”20 Here is how Ross spells out what is at issue. States of affairs are not, except analogously, parasitically and loosely, caused at all. There is only one kind of causation that God exerts as Creator and that is to cause being. In consequence, the contingent states of affairs obtain. But this is parasitic causation. God ‘determines’ the universe by making the things that do what they do, including all the free things able to do otherwise.21 Matava sums up his own position as follows.

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action God’s causation of Peter’s choice of A can be understood as a feature of the total reality of Peter which God makes to be. But how God causes the total reality of Peter (including Peter’s free choice of A)—or anything else for that matter—remains mysterious. It is true that an account of how God causes some contingent things (states of affairs, etc.) to be can be given in terms of secondary causes when (p.201) what he makes to be results from secondary causes. In the case in hand, the secondary causes that account for Peter’s choice of A are Peter and Peter’s (non-determining) reasons for acting. And there is no other created reality than Peter himself that accounts for his choices being this rather than that. But it is impossible in principle to give an account of the inner workings by which God immediately brings about what he does (including that certain effects issue from secondary causes) such as, that Peter freely chooses. This is no liability however, because it is impossible in principle to explain divine action on the very grounds one has for positing it. One can infer about God from what he has made no more than whatever he is in himself and however he makes whatever else there is, he is in himself what he has to be to account for what he has made…Divine creation is not relevantly like creaturely causation and the limits of our knowledge of what divine causation is like block the judgment that it is incompatible with human freedom, while the very existence of any contingent reality (including any creaturely act of choice) calls for the affirmation of divine causality…The transcendence and incomprehensibility of God’s nature and operations preclude the judgment that it is impossible for a human act of choice to be free simply because it is caused by God.22 Clearly, we are off to the races towards a vision of natural theology, apophaticism, divine simplicity, evil as the privation of good, and the like. My point here is not to expound in detail or to evaluate Matava’s strikingly comprehensive contribution to the debates he engages but rather to note that he is correct to place Tanner’s work in a network of scholarship that cannot avoid not just first-order claims about divine action in creation and grace but also semantic, metaphysical, and epistemological issues that naturally crop up and require attention.

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action I also want to draw attention to the crucial role of the de Auxiliis debate at the intellectual foundations of recent work on divine action. It is no accident that while this is not necessarily center stage in the work of Tanner, it is a crucial topic which she takes up. It is clear that certain specific claims about what God does in salvation have long been considered a problem in that they run headlong into tension with claims about human freedom. The Western tradition as a whole has readily sacrificed human freedom in efforts to overcome the tension. Tanner’s recurring worries about God being perceived as a tyrant and theologians in response opting for a thin or thick Pelagian gruel of liberal humanism are prominent features of her work. She clearly thinks that modernity is bedeviled with the downstream effects of these disastrous alternatives. Matava picks up this theme when he suggests that the effects of the debate about grace are visible in modern attitudes to religion and in the development of secular humanism. He also cites the reactions of Feuerbach and Nietzsche who were convinced that genuine human freedom could only be achieved after the (p.202) death of God. We might add that similar forces are at work in contemporary French philosophy represented, say, by Sartre, Foucault, and Barthes. In my own tradition in Methodism I am struck by the extent to which students immediately reach for the themes of prevenient grace as a way to counter claims about predestination that threaten their native views on human freedom.23 I found the same themes cropped up again and again in conversations with Albert Outler and in his papers. It never struck me until recently how far debates about divine action circle round again and again to this particular theological locus. Reading Tanner has awakened me from my historical and dogmatic slumbers at this point. It is this problem—the problem of the interaction between divine action and human action in salvation—that has been under our theological skins in much of the discussion about divine action. The recent move to revisit the doctrine of creation which is pivotal in the work of Tanner is in part simply an effort to resolve this particular riddle.24 Her effort to turn it into a question of linguistic performance and grammar is a perfectly natural one. She is right to recommend that we practice semantic assent and see where that takes us. If I am right in my analysis and assessment, the outcome of her version of this linguistic turn takes us right back into the thicket of ancient, medieval, modern, and now contemporary theology. She may have made a postmodern turn towards practices and culture, but this is a strategy of evasion if it inhibits the kind of work that her material proposals on the immediate relation between divine agency and divine action inescapably evokes. Perhaps the quest for an understanding of divine action has at bottom been an effort to solve the age-old problem of freedom and grace. It has little or nothing to do with conceptual inquiry related to how we should understand action predicates as applied to God.25 Page 18 of 23

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action However, we should not take our leave of Tanner so abruptly. We do indeed need to attend to our language of agency and action. We should be more assiduous in attending to the actual claims about divine action that we encounter in Scripture, in the Christian tradition, and in Christian piety. Divine creation is but one of these actions. The catalogue is wide and deep and includes divine speech acts, divine incarnation, divine inspiration, divine action in raising Jesus from the dead, divine assistance in coming to faith, divine sanctification, and on and on. The rules governing one of these actions are not the same as the rules governing another; otherwise we could never individuate (p.203) one from another. I have argued at length heretofore that the quest for a single concept of action derived from supposedly paradigm cases of human action is a chimera. Attention to the specific claims and discourse we encounter is surely the first word even though it cannot be the last word precisely because in exploring the discourse of the Christian community we find ourselves reaching for concepts of agency and causality that take us into deep semantic and metaphysical waters. There is an almost bottomless entanglement between our first-order discourse and our second-order discourses. So be it. However, Tanner is correct that our theories should respect the place of first-order discourse in our deliberations. More aptly, she is right that the rough and ready ground of our first-order discourse can act as one criterion of adequacy in our accounts of divine agency and divine action. Permit an analogy with moral discourse and the way in which it both generates and acts as a platform for moral theory. David Wiggins has captured the situation nicely in drawing attention to the way in which our moral claims generate a deep interest in exploring what morality is and the problems it spawns. In the opening chapter of his Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality he speaks of four kinds of concerns that arise in our moral lives. First,…is there not something altogether remarkable in the strength and variety of our primitively prohibitive aversions—our aversion to wounding, injury, murder, plunder, or pillage, the abhorrence that we experience against neglect or abuse of children or other defenseless persons, the horror we feel at the slaughter of the innocent or the repaying of good with gratuitous evil? Here are acts whose awfulness we take for granted, acts that shock and surprise us when we see them done and appal us when we consider them as acts we might find ourselves engaged in. Drawing on our intuitive shared grasp of moral matters, a moral phenomenologist needs to register the strength and persistence of these responses and inhibitions associated with them. However provisionally, let us put these first, and resolutely postpone all anxieties about the self-selection that precedes this reference to the us who participate in these aversions of ours and share in the responses to which we are provoked by the outrageous events that are constantly reported—mostly, we always hope, from elsewhen or elsewhere.26 Page 19 of 23

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action He then moves on to a second set of concerns where we enumerate the issues that arise from primitive fellow-feeling and interest in others and our willingness to enter into cooperative relations with others. Third, he invites us to look at those concerns that are proper to public spirit, to devotion to the general interest, or to humanitarian causes. Then, fourth and finally, he invites us to turn to our preoccupations with justice, or veracity, or fidelity to promises. The challenge in part is that concerns of the first two kinds collide with concerns of the last two kinds. This collision is one of the sources of rigorous reflection on (p.204) morality. However, it is the initial work of phenomenology or cataloguing of the wide range of acts of moral judgment that he insists will prove fruitful. In the final chapter Wiggins turns to a range of heavy-duty concepts like objectivity, subjectivism, relativism, and truth. He introduces the discussion with two quotations that bring home the importance of attending carefully to the complex concepts that show up in theories of morality. The first is from William Hamilton and runs as follows. “A country may be overrun by an armed host, but it is only conquered by the establishment of fortresses. Words are fortresses of thought.”27 The second is a quotation about Hamilton by P. T. Geach. “[It] was the Edinburgh logician Sir William Hamilton who said that a good new term is like a fortress to dominate the country won from forces of darkness. But these forces never sleep and will strive…to recover lost territory.”28 In sorting out how to think about divine action we begin afresh, I propose, with the full range of our discourse about divine action in all its complex specificity as we find it in Scripture, in the tradition of the church, and in our own lives. We need to go back to the territory that has been surrendered too readily in the more recent past in proposals to solve “the problem of divine action.” We also need to pay very careful attention to the concepts we deploy when we experience mental cramp and cognitive dissonance in the speech we learn in becoming Christians. This is one reason for spending so much time early on in this project in sorting through what we can legitimately say about the concept of action. To be sure, there are significant differences between the agreement we find in our moral discourse and claims, as outlined by Wiggins, and in our theological discourse and claims, as we find them in our Christian communities. However, these initial observations in theology carry their own weight and integrity and should be respected. They should act as our initial compass. Then with Aristotle and with Wiggins we should seek to save as many appearances as possible. With Hamilton and Geach we should develop such words as will become fortresses that will protect us from those forces that never sleep or strive to deprive us of the treasures of divine action given to us with such abundance and generosity.29 Notes: Page 20 of 23

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action (1) Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 15. (2) Ibid., 12. (3) David Burrell, “Divine Action and Human Freedom in the Context of Creation,” in The God Who Acts: Philosophical and Theological Explorations, ed. Thomas F. Tracy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 105. (4) Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 2. (5) Divine action related to predestination is clearly lurking in the neighborhood. (6) Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology, 84. (7) Ibid., 86. (8) Ibid., 46. (9) Ibid., 47. (10) J. Martin Bac, Perfect Will Theology: Divine Agency in Reformed Scholasticism as against Suarez, Episcopius, Descartes, and Spinoza (Leiden: Brill, 2010). (11) Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology, 144. (12) Ibid., 156. (13) Ibid. (14) Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), (15) Serene Jones, “Afterword,” in The Gift of Theology: The Contribution of Kathryn Tanner, ed. Rosemary P. Carbine and Hilda P. Koster (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 348. (16) Happily, Tanner also refrains from the polemical charges of idolatry that sometimes crop up in the literature. She does readily play the Pelagian card, a point brought out nicely in the telling criticism of William Hasker. See his “God the Creator of Good and Evil,” in The God Who Acts, ed. Tracy, 137–46. (17) ex nihiloKathryn Tanner, “Creation ex nihilo as Mixed Metaphor,” Modern Theology 29 (2013): 138.

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action (18) George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984). (19) R. J. Matava, Divine Causality and Human Free Choice: Domingo Báñez, Physical Premotion and the Controversy de Auxiliis Revisited, Brill Studies in Intellectual History 252 (Leiden: Brill, 2016). (20) Ibid., 284. (21) Ibid., 285–6. (22) Ibid., 292–3. (23) Most of them are blissfully unaware that John Wesley has a robust doctrine of double predestination. (24) When I revisited the Augustinian–Pelagian controversy in volume II of this series I was naïve in thinking of it as just one more site of investigation. I have now come to see that for Western theology its significance cannot be overestimated. (25) Thus she shows no awareness of or deep interest in the important conceptual considerations on the problem of freedom and grace developed by J. R. Lucas. See her passing comment on Lucas, Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology, 164. (26) David Wiggins, Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 11. (27) Ibid., 356. (28) Ibid.

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Unmasking the Grammar of Divine Agency and Divine Action (29) Serene Jones provides a fascinating comment on what she found at Yale when she went there to study. “My own initial work with Kathy occurred in the intellectual world of the Yale Religious Studies Department and Yale Divinity School in the 1980’s and 90’s. In those early days, our professors spent a great deal of time showing us that we did not need to find an all-purpose ‘methodological map’ to journey as we journeyed through the theological canon. We should just start walking, they told us, and see what truths would reveal themselves if we followed the curve of the land. It was an attractive model because it encouraged the kind of creative abandon that the theological academy at that time desperately needed. But it was not long before that abandon was tamped down by the realization that our map-less teachers were holding compasses in their hand. Frei was not as interested as the others in finding the path, but the threads of meaning that language and stories and novelistic characters drew were for him a clue as to where his foot should fall. George Lindbeck was the most adept mapmaker, even when he did not intend it. History and eventually cultural anthropology provided the support he needed. David Kelsey found his way by following an existential, analytic map—closer to architecture than to economics.” See Jones, “Afterword,” 349–50 n.2.

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The Turn to Theological Theology

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I: Exploring and Evaluating the Debate William J. Abraham

Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780198786504 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786504.001.0001

The Turn to Theological Theology William J. Abraham

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198786504.003.0012

Abstract and Keywords 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. Keywords:   systematic theology, analytic philosophy, theory of action, theological theology, divine action

It is tempting to believe that the debate about divine action in the twentieth century began not in a manger but in an Irish pub before the Irish government introduced the ban on smoking. The background music was great but it could be loud; the crowd were generally well behaved but at times became rowdy; there were exceptionally unpleasant odors in the air, and their effects still linger on in the current work on divine agency and divine action.

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The Turn to Theological Theology In this chapter I shall first provide a narrative of the argument to date. I shall then take 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 is inappropriate; the second argues that I have underestimated the resources available. Noting the inescapable limitations involved in any theory of agency and action, I shall finish by urging that the way ahead requires a radical turn to theology if we are to make material progress on how best to understand divine agency and divine action. We need to turn in the end to theological theology.1 The crucial originating challenges to claims about divine action were these. The central concepts deployed by biblical theologians were unintelligible as they stood; and when we consulted the fine print we were never told what God had really done in his mighty acts in history. It was the first of these that became the intense focus of attention. When the conceptual discussion got underway, the deep antagonism in the air was fueled by nasty disputes over the relative merits of Anglo-American analytic philosophy over against the continental commitment to phenomenology. Within the Anglo-American scene, all talk about God was generally treated as nonsense. When attention shifted to ontological or metaphysical matters, such discourse was treated with contempt by the leading philosophers of the analytic tradition. Meanwhile, theologians in the Barthian tradition eschewed the topic because they were convinced that any kind of alien material from philosophy meant that theology was not grounded properly in (p.206) its own foundations in divine revelation and thus ran the risk of idolatry and corruption. Even then, there was the fallout from the spiteful dispute between Karl Barth and Emil Brunner over the possibility of natural theology. When the discussion took an epistemological turn within philosophy as opposed to theology, the forms of radical empiricism in place left theologians embarrassed; theologians knowledgeable of this tradition were at odds on how best to respond to the challenges posed by the linguistic turn in the work of G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and A. J. Ayer.2

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The Turn to Theological Theology The situation in North America was exacerbated by the development of Fundamentalism. The issue came up again and again in the assessment of the Biblical Theology Movement. Thus Winston King3 and Frank B. Dilley,4 in papers which operated as sandwich boards for the famous paper of Langdon Gilkey,5 hammered away at the possibility that G. E. Wright and his cohorts were flirting with Fundamentalism, even though under the surface they were wearing the sweatshirts of Liberal Protestantism. At the very least, they were furnishing resources that Fundamentalists could readily exploit. James Barr’s broadsides against the Biblical Theology Movement were taken by some as providing succor for Fundamentalism, for he had insisted on the crucial significance of divine speaking in understanding the biblical materials. Divine speaking has always been the darling of Conservatives in their vision of Scripture; hence he was handing out free ammunition to Fundamentalists in their fight against Liberalism. As a result Barr spent a large period of his career attacking Fundamentalism, even though he himself was a moderate Evangelical, a tidbit of biographical information that went unnoticed by those who used his work to attack Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism.6 Aside from fulfilling his interest in securing proper attention to Scripture, attacking Fundamentalism was one way for Barr to fend off the charge that he was aiding and abetting the enemy within the gate. There was one more source of contention in the neighborhood. What should we do with the methods and results of historical criticism as applied to Scripture? (p.207) For many this was where the debate was truly joined. On the one hand, historical investigation was even more important than science in that Christianity was a historical faith that made claims about the past. It could not, therefore, escape critical historical scrutiny. On the other hand, historical study of Scripture was absolutely pivotal to hermeneutics and to unpacking the treasures of the biblical text. Many complained, of course, that the results on this score did not turn out as promised; the Bible had been stripped of its theological content and reduced to a kaleidoscope of voices. This left the faithful bewildered and left the theologian with constantly contested results. Yet, the great promise of the Biblical Theology Movement was that by linking revelation with the mighty acts of God in history it restored a theological dimension to the study of Scripture; and by engaging in rigorous but constructive historical investigation it restored confidence in the results of historical criticism.

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The Turn to Theological Theology The collapse of the Biblical Theology Movement opened up old wounds within Protestantism, especially in North America, where many felt that the only way forward was to take up the mantle of the revisionists of the nineteenth century and seek to develop a vision of divine action which would be authentic, credible, and apt for the new situation in which theology operated. As a result it was not always easy to detect what exactly was being rejected and why. On the one hand, there was a tendency to deploy the slogans and war cries of earlier battles to win the day; on the other hand, there was the recurring temptation to assume that the arguments of an earlier generation were sufficiently sound, so much so that one did not need to unpack the exact logic of the argument for a new day. Over time it was clear that the problem (singular) of divine action was simply the problem of figuring out what to do with special divine action. Little or no attention was given to the prior question of how the term “special” functioned here. To speak of “special” divine action leaves opaque the respect in which “special” is to be understood. Should we simply distinguish “special” from “nonspecial” and see where that takes us? Clearly, not very far. Does it mean “special” in contrast to “extra-special”? Or does it mean special in contrast to “ordinary” or “general” or “normal”? We were not told. Perhaps the distinction is best captured by speaking of the “indirect” over against the “direct” activity of God. In the neighborhood, we find a distinction between the “mediated” as opposed to “immediate” activity of God.7 These are certainly interesting distinctions; but they needed extensive unpacking if we were to make progress. Sometimes the problem was cast in terms of the problem of “particular” divine action. In this instance the contrast would seem to be “general” divine action. Hence the issue was posed in terms of the problem of “particular” providence over against “general” providence. Even then, the (p.208) contrast to “general” need not be “particular” but “specific.” In some contexts, we very naturally moved from dealing with the general activity of an agent before spelling out the specific action taken by an agent. Sometimes, the problem of divine action was posed in terms of worries about divine actions that somehow involve divine “intervention” or divine “intrusion.” This suggested that the real problem was really the problem of miraculous divine activity over against non-miraculous activity. Despite this lack of clarity, theologians in the wake of Gilkey generally felt that certain stretches of divine action were fundamentally non-problematical. Hence, it did not really matter what terms one used to capture the remaining network of divine action that cropped up in Christian theology.8 They had no difficulty with talk of divine action in creation and general providence; it was all the divine actions over and above these that were thought to be problematic. Indeed it was generally held that by working out a vision of divine action that fitted these cases one could then go on to deal with the rest either by means of elimination or by reinterpreting them according to the grammar worked out for creation and general providence. Page 4 of 23

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The Turn to Theological Theology Initially, it seems odd to think that the ideas of divine creation and general providence are in good working order as opposed to the rest of the actions that are predicated of God. From a purely theoretical point of view, it would not seem that the idea of, say, divine speaking or divine forgiveness is better or worse off than divine creation or divine superintendence over all of creation. If one allows such action predicates as “create” or “superintend,” then why not allow “divine promising” or “the divine act of raising someone from the dead”? Put more positively, there is nothing in the concept of divine action, as it is reflected in ordinary usage, which would prima facie permit one and not the other. The default position for theologians should surely be that they critically consider in detail the full canonical range of action predicated of God unless they have good theoretical grounds for excluding them. If we are really interested in the concept of divine action, then it is not very wise to begin by carving up divine action into the general and the special and approaching the latter with a hermeneutic of suspicion. We should not be surprised if the suspicion goes all the way to the bottom to include creation and general superintendence. What begins as objections to special action of God can readily be deployed to undermine the general activity of God.9 This is exactly what happened in the debate within early analytic philosophy. (p.209) If we think God exists, it is surely equally wise to let God set the agenda for what he does; it is doubtful if we are in a position to decide in advance what God should or should not do. Presumably, if God acted above and beyond creation and general providence, then God might have very good reasons for doing so. In this instance, so-called problematic special divine action would be entirely intelligible in the sense that such actions execute the varied intentions of God. Intellectual humility would at a minimum require reserve on the range of actions. We are in no position to dictate a priori what God may or may not do; the rush to exclude certain divine actions looks terribly hasty and premature. Perhaps it is even idolatrous: we are telling God in advance what he is or is not permitted to do; we are setting ourselves up as the creator of the universe, deciding what is and is not appropriate to happen. There is, in addition, the danger of disguising personal and moral worries as sophisticated intellectual worries. We find it annoying that God might engage in actions that upset our theories about how the world really works; or more simply, we find it objectionable that God should do things that challenge the way we want to live. With Nietzsche, the issue becomes one of personal taste and morality rather than intellect. We should not forget, moreover, that it is not uncommon for religious people to develop criteria of divine action that fit all too well with their own interests and desires; in such instances when God sends prophets or other agents there is a strong tendency to persecute and kill them. It would be strange to think that theologians might not lend a helping intellectual hand.

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The Turn to Theological Theology The story of the debate about divine action over the last half century has essentially been one of conceptual muddles and dead-ends. This observation is an exaggeration, but there is more than a grain of truth in it. On the one hand, much of the discussion assumed that we could have a closed concept of action. Over against this hasty presumption, we have seen that it is far from easy to secure a closed concept even of intentional action. Worse still, no concept of action will provide the resources to spell out what God really did. The payoff from conceptual analysis is meager and thin as far as the material content of theology is concerned. This should not surprise us for philosophical analysis is not theology; it is merely the handmaiden to theology. It is theology that furnishes us with substantial claims about what God has really done. In this arena it is an illusion to think that a general theory of providence, what God does universally, will provide us with a method for figuring out what God does in his special acts, say, in redemption, in our personal lives, and in the church. The absence of a closed concept of action is in one sense very good news for the theologian committed to an industrial strength version of Christianity. It shows that efforts to demythologize the Christian tradition are destined to fail, for these tortuous efforts rest not just on contested but also thoroughly implausible accounts of human action. Rejecting a closed concept of action also undercuts the attempts to develop a new disproof for the existence of God under the guise of conceptual analysis. Philosophers, least of all analytic (p.210) philosophers who take ordinary usage seriously, are in no position to lay down the linguistic law. It turns out in fact that conceptual analysis relieves the pervasive mental cramp that bedevils the discussion. It provides a diagnosis of what has gone wrong and opens up a constructive and fruitful way forward. The crucial diagnosis is that they wrongly assumed that a closed concept of action was available; they believed that a closed concept of action plus analogy would yield all that we needed for a theory of divine action. The fruitful way forward is to work with an open-textured concept of action, and deploy the doctrine of analogy in an apt way by exploring the relevant language strata in play and by working from specific instances of divine action discourse. The central questions initially posed by the rich discourse of divine action are elegant. First, how do we secure the referent for “God” in talk about divine action? Second, how should we understand the action predicates ascribed to God? Once we allow that we can secure reference by means of definite description, the first collapses into the second. The referent for “God” can be secured by such expressions as “The one and only Creator of the Universe.” This clearly requires us to speak of divine creation. Once we get clear on how to unpack the action predicates, the first question has already been resolved.

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The Turn to Theological Theology The simplicity is, of course, deceptive. Intentional actions require an agent who performs them. Contemporary Neo-Thomists get into trouble when they reject the idea of God as an agent; they retain divine actions and lose divine agency. Happily, they forget this when they shift gears into positive theology and when they take up the resources of revealed theology. Process theologians are in worse shape, for they dissolve both divine action and divine agency within the mists of speculative philosophy. As a reincarnation of Liberal Protestantism, Process theology lacks the critical resources of Scripture and tradition, except insofar as they can be redeemed within the constraints of Process philosophy. Analytic philosophers generally retain a substantial concept of divine agency; they are more likely to lose the robust content of claims about divine action by relegating the specifics of divine action to the margins of a thin vision of metaphor. The intentions are often orthodox; the results as far as theological content is concerned are so modest that one is tempted to side with those theologians who rail against the arrogance of analytic philosophy. Some scientists turned theologians have bet the store on finding special divine action in the loopholes of quantum theory and chaos theory. These turn out to be empty promises that fail philosophically, scientifically, and theologically. It is not a good idea to gamble the future of special divine action on the dice of quantum mechanics and chaos theory. I have picked up a rumor from a distinguished professor of physics at Oxford that the next bad bet will be on quantum information theory. The simplicity is also deceptive at another level. While it is salutary to pay close attention to our concepts, our deployment of action discourse does not (p.211) take place in a vacuum. It readily spills over into metaphysical and epistemological proposals that are themselves deeply interrelated. We saw this very clearly in our analysis of the work of Tanner; her work has been overtaken by the need to explore the full ramifications of the claim that God creates the free actions of human agents. This means that conceptual claims are never as clean as they may initially seem to be. Disputes about crucial concepts like action, causation, intention, explanation, motive, reason, and the like are difficult enough to resolve in themselves. When the discussion extends into disputes in metaphysics and epistemology, then we have an incredibly wide range of issues on our hands. We can also express this backwards, as it were. Our epistemological commitments drive us to metaphysical commitments which in turn have a bearing on the intelligibility of our concepts. There is no escaping these webs of entanglement. This judgment dovetails with the obituaries that have been written in the last generation for both Logical Positivism and early phenomenology. Both schools of philosophy sought to bracket epistemological and metaphysical questions and get back to pure experience. Certainly the debate about the concept of action in analytic philosophy and its impact on debates about divine action shows that the conceptual waters are deep and treacherous. Page 7 of 23

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The Turn to Theological Theology This is bad news for theology in that throughout the modern period it has generally been assumed that theology is at best the lowest of the low in terms of epistemological ratings. In the early twentieth-century positivist philosophy, theology went to the same graveyard as metaphysics more generally. The chances of taking seriously the unique metaphysical and epistemological resources of theology were non-existent. Things have changed dramatically on both fronts, for the older constraints and strictures have been relaxed by radical changes over the last generation. However, the possibilities opened up for theology remain for the most part unacknowledged and underexploited. The good news is that systematic and sustained efforts are now underway to restock the theological larder with serious material content and to make available a very rich network of philosophical reflection. Harry Frankfurt has even surmised that analytic philosophy itself may find a new lease of life by attending to religion.10 Even so many will still worry that the disposition and methods of analytic philosophy cannot cope with the content of claims about divine action. If analytic philosophy restricts itself exclusively to the articulation of closed concepts, I entirely agree. However, this represents only one strain of the analytic tradition. It does not at all fit with the kind of analytic philosophy (p.212) represented by the essays developed by the “Metaphysicals” at Oxford.11 Moreover, it restricts itself to a narrow canon of philosophers. I am not here ruling out the critical importance of the search for closed concepts; I am simply insisting on a wider range of options within analytic philosophy itself. However, I do not consider this at all a serious dispute; it is a disagreement within analytic philosophy that is fruitful in its own way.12 The deeper worry is that analytic philosophy addresses the issues involved in a coldblooded, insensitive manner. It stands back from the subject matter and treats divine agency and divine action in the same way it would look at the concepts that govern our understanding of dry, medium-sized cornucopia. The analytic philosopher deliberately decries any kind of emotional involvement, working dispassionately and with an air of imperious neutrality. While privately the issues may matter enormously, professionally the separation of the private from the public is considered the first desideratum of serious investigation. Not surprisingly, it is not at all unnatural for many theologians to find the whole exercise boring in the extreme. God has been stripped down to size, crucified by the logic of distance and indifference. In this process, the content of claims about divine action may not have been abandoned; they have been rendered safe and boring. More particularly, the tendency in the discussion about divine action to make much of the universal in order to make sense of the special, to displace the extraordinary with the ordinary, and to find the personal in the impersonal, may unwittingly wreak havoc on the life of faith. Consider at this point the searing comment of E. M. Cioran, the exiled Romanian writer. Page 8 of 23

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The Turn to Theological Theology Mankind has lived without God ever since it stripped him of his personal characteristics. By trying to widen the Almighty’s sphere of influence, we have unwittingly put him beyond the pale. Whom shall we address if not a person who can listen and answer? Having gained so much space, he is everywhere and nowhere. Today he is at most the universal Absentee. We have alienated God by magnifying him. Why have we denied his heavenly modesty, what immeasurable pride has prompted us to falsify him? He has never been less than he is today, when he is everything! Thus we are punished for having been too generous with him. He who has lost God the person will never find him again, no matter how hard he searches for him in other guises. By trying to help God, we exposed him to human jealousy. Thus, having tried to mend a cosmic error, we have destroyed the only priceless error.13 (p.213) Brought up in the home of an Eastern Orthodox priest, Cioran writes as a passionate atheist. He would much prefer that we curse God rather than that we analyze theology to death by chipping away at revisions to the concepts we use. We encounter here, of course, the core of the whole existentialist tradition, a tradition haunted by the loss of the divine in its later phases. One can well understand his intemperate outburst. The young Hegel makes the same point with gusto in one of his earliest essays, where he draws a sharp distinction between the objective and the subjective. Objective religion is the fides quae creditur [the faith that is believed]; understanding and memory are the powers that do the work, investigating facts, thinking them through, retaining and even believing them. Objective religion can also possess practical knowledge, but only as a sort of frozen capstone. It is susceptible to organizational schemes; it can be systematized, set forth in books, and expounded discursively. Subjective religion on the other hand expresses itself only in feelings and actions… Subjective religion is…alive, having an efficacy that, while abiding within one’s being, is actively directly outward. Subjective religion is something individual, objective religion a matter of abstraction. The former is the living book of nature, plants, insects, birds, and beasts living with and surviving off each other—each responsive to the joys of the living, all of them intermingled, their various species everywhere together. The latter is the cabinet of the naturalist, full of insects he has killed, plants that are desiccated, animals stuffed or preserved in alcohol; what nature had kept totally apart is here lined up side by side; and whereas nature had joined an infinite variety of purposes in a convivial bond, here nature is ordered to a single purpose.14

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The Turn to Theological Theology If truth be told, similar worries have cropped up in work on the concept of human action. Richard Taylor, an important figure in the debate about action theory, abandoned analytic philosophy in the latter part of his career and turned to “issues that matter.”15 It used to be complained that analytic philosophers had swallowed the dictionary and were suffering from the serious onset of verbal indigestion. As applied to conceptual analysis of action, folk worried that something deep and important was being ignored or suppressed. One had to turn to the continental tradition, or perhaps to psychoanalysis and varieties of Marxism, if one wanted a deep understanding of human agency and action. This applied more generally if one wanted to deal with the big questions that often bring students into philosophy in the first place. Some managed to bridge the great divide, but they were the exception that proved the rule. While analytic philosophy remains a thriving enterprise, (p.214) one comes across acute dissonance from time to time. It is not surprising that many in the younger generation are keen to find conversations with other disciplines that will take them back into the real world. This in part explains the turn to cultural studies as the crucial conversation partner for theology. Moreover, much that passes for epistemology and metaphysics comes across even to insiders as an exercise in which the rigorous formalities of the arguments correlate with loss of interesting content. My general response to these complaints is a relaxed one. Four comments are in order. First, it is altogether a good thing to be able to diagnose what has gone wrong in a debate that has lasted over half a century and has reached a stalemate. The resolution of muddles and the identification of dead-ends are great gains. These are the goods that are promised initially within analytic philosophy; and these are the goods delivered. Furthermore, it is adolescent to ask analytic philosophy to provide more than it can deliver. Developing deflationary expectations in this domain is a good thing in itself. It is no small thing to have gained a greater measure of clarity on the central concepts that show up in our discourse about divine human action and agency.

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The Turn to Theological Theology Second, conceptual work on divine agency and divine action does indeed involve standing back and examining the crucial concepts that govern our descriptions of reality and our reflection. There is an appropriate “objective” cast to such endeavors. Properly done, such work can enable one to see more clearly what is involved in claims about divine action; and such seeing can be important in developing a right response to what God has done. Believers can readily get profound mental cramp that prevents them perceiving all that God has done. They can end up constantly subjecting their first-order discourse to a hermeneutic of suspicion. Until this is relieved—until the fly is let out of the bottle—they can go round and round in circles. Thus analytic philosophy can in its own way be a form of intellectual and spiritual therapy, indirectly contributing to the life of faith. In this arena analytic philosophy has its own register and genre; it is foolish to look to it to provide the kind of linguistic register we find, say, in hymnody or sermons, that rightly evoke a much more direct response. Third, in my judgment there is no one right way to tackle philosophical issues; deep diversity and conflict is inescapable. It is best to make a virtue out of this necessity. I have always been astonished at the ability of theologians to turn philosophical water into wine; the source of the water is a secondary matter. The gains available through conceptual investigation in the analytic tradition will not be enough to satisfy the Hegelians or devotees of postmodernity in our midst. However, the latter tribes have to make good on their own promises; the distinctions Hegel makes, for example, between objective and subjective, are by no means secure, as Hegel himself would have been the first to acknowledge. In any case, it is simply stupid to refuse whatever good gifts other philosophical schools may bring to the theological workbench. (p.215) The analytic philosopher and theologian, if she is wise, should not continue the fruitless polemic that has marked the discussion through most of the twentieth century. Fourth, it is crucial to observe afresh that conceptual analysis cannot be confined to some spare practice of mere linguistic clarification. I have already indicated that we cannot avoid contested metaphysical and epistemological commitments in exploring the concepts of action and agency. The good news for theology is that theologians are free to bring their own concerns and insights to the table. In the long run it is surely to be expected that the theologian will show up with radically different commitments and resources than that of, say, a Buddhist or a materialist. This is one reason why Lydia Jaeger is right to insist that we should expect more from theologians than “physicalism-plus-God” in the discussion on divine action.16 Theologians who restrict themselves to the secular options of our time are sure to come up short theologically sooner or later. They may also miss out on securing a sufficiently robust concept of human action and agency. The bottom line is that there is no metaphysically and epistemologically neutral concept of action and agency.

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The Turn to Theological Theology Consider the issue as it is articulated in terms of the concept of persons. Here is how Hud Hudson summarizes one way to think of one prevailing option. Physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, and geology all point to a picture of the origin of life and to the emergence of consciousness (and personhood) that is utterly grounded in the material. Differences of abilities between space fillers that are persons and space fillers that are nonpersons need not be explained by any mysterious reference to an immaterial mind or soul—any more than differences in the capacities of my chalk require these objects to sport immaterial parts to help them perform their characteristic functions. The reasons my fridge keeps my beer cold and not chalky, and the reason my chalk whitens the board rather than damaging it, and the reasons that I cognize are all (in the end) to be cashed out in terms of microphysical parts, their parts and arrangements, their environments, and laws of nature. We, like the rest of the furniture of the world, are material objects through and through.17 It is patently obvious that someone who holds this “sophisticated world view” and the scientistic epistemology that undergirds it will arrive at a very different concept of action and agency than one who does not. Try as they may, a theologian who tries to fit their concept of human agency into this will have lots of tricky work to do. A pantheist might well rely on it to work out a vision (p. 216) of divine agency; a robust Christian theist will not. Metaphysics, epistemology, and conceptual analysis stand or fall together. At this point, it is important to consider a second objection. Surely piling on the complexity as you have done here by dragging in contested metaphysical and epistemological theory, it will be said, is much too extreme. This way of speaking is altogether much too fideistic and tradition relative. We have to hand precisely the concept of agency and action that the theologian needs, namely, the concept of agent causation. William P. Alston more than hinted at this option in his work on divine action, when he incidentally helped himself to the concept of agent causation.18 This certainly looks like an attractive option, so let’s see where adopting it takes us. When I began to think seriously about action, I was pretty much convinced that this intuition was correct; perceptive readers will have detected my sympathy for it throughout this volume, for I have been making use of it at various points in the argument. However, we need to test out intuitions critically before we make any final commitment on this score.

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The Turn to Theological Theology The classical account of agent causation in the modern period was developed by Thomas Reid.19 Reid developed his vision of agency in reaction against the skepticism of Hume with respect to causation.20 Famously, Hume noted that when he looked at what we ordinarily take to be a causal relation (heating the water causes the water to boil) we find no “impression,” no sensory experience, which stands for the relevant causal relation. All we really have is constant conjunction between, say, heating water and boiling water. Given his empiricism this left Hume with a puzzle about causality, for we ordinarily think that causation is something more than constant conjunction; there is a necessary relation between heating water and boiling water. Clearly there are immediate problems here for Hume’s reduction of causation to constant conjunction. For one thing, this would mean that we could never perceive a causal relation when it happened for the first time. For another, this would mean that night is the cause of day, for there is constant conjunction (p.217) between night and day. Reid’s diagnosis of Hume’s error was simple: our ordinary concept of causation is not derived from our impressions; it is not a copy of a sensation. We have to go back to first principles. How then should we think of causation? Initially, consider physical causation. In this case we say that one event causes another event when they are conjoined by means of natural law. Discovering the relevant physical laws between events is a matter of science and ordinary reflection. However, this is but a first step in understanding causation. Even if we had a full and comprehensive account of all the laws of nature, we would still not have reached what we really need, namely, the notion of efficient causation. The laws of nature are the rules according to which the effects are produced; but there must be a cause which operates according to the rules. “The rules of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house.”21 Hence we need a deeper concept of cause, that of efficient causality. “In the strict and proper sense, I take an efficient cause to be a being who had power to produce the effect, and exerted that power for a purpose.”22 It was this notion that Hume missed. Reid is positing that causation involves the ability to see to it that an event occurs and to make an effort to ensure that it does occur. Causation ultimately requires reference to agents with active powers. Thus we come to one of Reid’s central convictions about what is involved in our ordinary notion of causation. The name of a cause and of an agent, is properly given to that being only which, by its active power, produces some change in itself, or in some other being. The change, whether it be of thought, or of motion, is the effect. Active power, therefore, is a quality in the cause, which enables it to produce the effect. And the exertion of the active power in producing the effect, is call action, agency, efficiency.23

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The Turn to Theological Theology What Reid is insisting on here is that the notions of agent and action are logically primitive; they cannot be reduced to events and to event causation. Indeed the latter is parasitic on the former. It is only because we have the notion of agents and agent causation that we really understand the idea of event causation. Event causation is a matter of natural law; but natural law, while it provides a legitimate form of explanation, is not itself ultimate; beyond natural law, it is appropriate to press on to explanations in terms of personal agents and their actions. In this instance, either the notion of natural law presupposes the idea of a genuine law-giver; or event causation somehow trades on the idea of agent causation as a kind of background music. In the (p.218) latter case, natural law is a story of events abstracted from a wider story of agent causation.24 Reid filled out his vision of agent causation in several controversial directions. Thus any agent who has the power to do action A has other interrelated powers: the power not to do A, the power to try to do A, and the power not to try to do A. He also claims that agents with the power to do A must believe that they have the power to do A. Reid appears also to have held that in order to move our bodies, we first exercise various volitions, leaving him vulnerable to charges of an infinite regress. In order to raise my arm, he thinks that I first have to will to move my arm, thus exerting the power to determine my will, thus causing a volition that my arm raise. Hence the crucial action here is not the raising of my arm but the volition to raise my arm. Immediately we are faced with the question whether I need to have a volition to have a volition to raise my arm, and so on ad infinitum.25 Furthermore, Reid argues that in order to act, the agent must have understanding and will. Ordinary material objects like tables and chairs, strictly speaking, do not act. Only entities with minds have the power to act. So if we think that every event in nature is efficiently caused, everything in nature is directed towards an end. Given his wider ontology, all events are caused either by God or by human agents.

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The Turn to Theological Theology In performing this or that action, agents act according to various motives. But motives are not causes in the sense that they follow various psychological laws and are predictable if we know the relevant initial conditions. To act according to the strongest motive is not to be physically necessitated to act. The influence of motives is like that of advice or exhortation. Humans have animal motives— appetites and passions—which immediately influence the will. However, they also have rational motives, motives directed to their judgment which present an action under the description of our duties or of something that will contribute either directly or indirectly to our good. Whatever the motives, it is still up to the agent as to what he or she does. Whatever the motivation, we are still at liberty to act or not to act. We can readily discern the strongest animal motives by noting the conscious effort to resist them; we detect the strongest rational motive by noting what most contributes to fulfilling our duties or gaining happiness. Citing motives clearly provides a causal explanation of what we do; we are explaining the causes of various action. However, what is at issue here are the factors which influence the agent; motives are not causes in the sense that they necessitate what the agent does. (p.219) We do not need to buy into all the details of Reid’s account of agency and action to identify the crucial elements that should interest the theologian. First, the notions of agents and agent causation are logically primitive. Agents are not reducible to events; and the explanation of actions cannot be reduced to that of event causation. You either understand them or you do not; you either go with them or you do not. Second, agents are essentially distinct ontological entities who possess certain active powers, which they are free to exercise or not exercise. There is nothing more metaphysically ultimate behind or beyond them to which they can be reduced. Third, agency involves a direct causal relation with the mental or physical changes they bring about; the agent causation relation is not between an agent and his actions but between agents and the results of their action.26 Fourth, agent explanations involve the citation of relevant motives, reasons, and intentions; these are not deterministic causal explanations but furnish their own intelligible account of what is going on and why. Physical causation is a matter of natural law. In cases of physical causation one explains an event “x” as the cause of event “y” by predicting that event “y” will happen if event “x” occurs and relevant natural laws joining “x” and “y” are available. In personal causation one explains the actions of an agent by providing an illuminating account of why the agent performed the actions that they did because of various reason, motives, intentions, and the like. This in turn will inescapably take one into the world of narrative, of biography, and of autobiography.

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The Turn to Theological Theology Given this sketch of agents and agent causation, it might appear that I was premature in insisting that we do not have to hand an illuminating and attractive account of agents and actions that can be appropriated by the contemporary theologian in search of resources for understanding divine agency and divine action. Reid has attempted to unpack our ordinary notions of agency and action; there is nothing essentially theological about them, as is indicated by the fact that Reid provides no theological warrants for his arguments and by the fact that his vision has been defended by secular philosophers. To be sure, Reid was a Presbyterian minister who in his day subscribed to the standing creeds and confessions. However, to ascribe his proposals on agency and action to his theological location would be to commit the genetic fallacy. His arguments stand independently of any theological origination they may have had psychologically. Moreover, the idea of agent causation dovetails beautifully with the theological doctrine that human beings are made in the image of God, that is, they are endowed with the kind of active powers that are essential to exercising sovereign care over creation.27 Equally, it fits with the claim that human beings (p.220) are morally accountable for what they do before God; that they are given genuine liberty to act otherwise than what they actually do; and that they are not reducible to physics and chemistry. Human agents are unique in creation; they are ontologically distinct creatures equipped with consciousness, minds, consciences, souls, hearts, and the like. They are agents who can become saints and sinners; they can enter into genuine personal relations and union with others and with God. They act with genuine liberty, voluntarily but not of necessity acting this way rather than that. Whatever features they share with animals and material entities, they are not merely trousered apes or complicated computers decked out with consciousness. The warrants for these complex convictions are not merely exegetical or doctrinal. They involve our inward sense of our own personal reality and identity, of our own freedom and of the meaning of what we do, the values we entertain, and the destinies we fulfill. They also involve the crucial place of narrative in understanding human action, the uniqueness of historical investigation and the explanations it utilizes, and the sheer mystery and complexity of what it is to be human. The theologian, it will be said, can surely build on this basic, logically primitive, and rich concept of agency and action. She will not, of course, be confined by this picture; it can readily be transfigured by the resources of spiritual experience and theological reflection; but it provides a fitting place from which to start a theologically robust anthropology. It provides an apt metaphysics of agency and action.

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The Turn to Theological Theology Agent causation also provides a fitting platform for developing a doctrine of God as an agent. We are no longer dependent on a metaphysics of substance and accidents, of Being, of The Power of the Future, of Actual Occasions, and the like. We can avoid the nonsense of claiming that divine actions fail to be owned by an agent. We can stretch our notion of agents to refer to a divine Agent who is constituted by various active powers, by genuine freedom to create and redeem, and by unceasing compassion. Thus we can readily distinguish God ontologically from creation; the world is not divine; nor is the world essential to divinity; it is ontologically distinct yet causally dependent on divine creation ex nihilo and on providential activity. We can also naturally conceive of God as immanent in all creation by the exercise of his universal providential action even as God also transcends it. Beyond that, we can readily conceive of God acting in a special way within the world to redeem it, knowing that such action is in no way competitive with the best interests of human agents and what they do. We can even take care of the so-called problem of “the causal joint.” The problem arises when we ask two simple questions: “How can God interact with physical reality? How can we explain those cases of double agency where God works in, with, and through human agents?” In both instances the quest is for some sort of mechanism or model of divine action that would allow God to be connected to the world and to human agents. The problem, it will be said, does (p.221) not need to be solved but dissolved. The very term “causal joint” is misleading here. Its usage puts God into the world of physical causes on a par with a plumber looking for a causal joint he might use to fix a toilet. Once we think of God as a genuine agent, with a host of active powers (direct and indirect), which may or may not be exercised straight off, the whole idea of a causal joint evaporates. Invoking the idea of a “causal joint” involves a category mistake which reduces divine action to the level of physical causation within the universe and fails to reckon with the radically different ideas of agency and action which are at stake.28 It would be on a par with asking a human agent to identify the causal joint needed to think a thought or raise an arm. There is an immediate action on matter. The plumber may need a “causal joint” to fix the toilet; when he finds it he will not need a causal joint to hook it into place by moving his hands. These are compelling arguments for deploying a subtle and suitably adjusted concept of agent causation in thinking about divine agency and divine action. It provides an attractive array of concepts for answering basic questions about the meaning of divine agency and for sorting out how to find one’s way around in dealing with divine action. These are in the neighborhood of my own informed intuitions about agency and action. However, it is important we register carefully the status of these claims. It is foolish to think that this network of concepts is secure philosophically; it is even more foolish to think that they will provide all that is needed for a theology of divine agency and action. Let me explain why. Page 17 of 23

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The Turn to Theological Theology First, in reality, the whole idea of agent causation is a minority report in contemporary analytic philosophy of action. Some find the whole idea mysterious; others find it outright incoherent. I find neither of these observations compelling. However, while theologians are at liberty to take up this concept of agency and explore its explanatory power both as the core to a theology of divine agency and as the platform for understanding divine action, there is no consensus within philosophy that it is the only or the best way to think about agency and action. If it is put forward as a closed concept of agency —as the concept of action governing our everyday usage—I would reject it outright for reasons given earlier in the volume. If proposed as an illuminating way of tracking a crucial stratum of agency and action, then I am on board. This is as far as I am prepared to go. Moreover, the theologian at this point should reserve the right to enrich the core ideas involved from his or her own resources in the tradition. Hence, there is nothing here that undermines the (p.222) significant place of theology in developing the relevant metaphysical categories needed to develop a rich concept of divine agency and divine action. Second, as we have noted again and again, this kind of resource does nothing to tell us what God really did or why God acted as specified. It simply provides a formal conceptual framework that signals how we might fruitfully proceed in thinking about divine agency and divine action. To get to the level of material claims we need to specify what we think God has done and set about understanding what may be involved by way of genuine agent-oriented explanation. In and around this investigation we can then tackle the whole raft of issues that crop up in debates about divine action. In this respect we encounter once again the gains and limitations that come from philosophical analysis of agency and action discourse. These apply as forcefully to this way of thinking about agency and action as any other we may deploy. At this point it is worth repeating the exceptionally perceptive observation of I. M. Crombie over fifty years ago when analytic philosophers first took up the challenge of divine action: “it is in reading theology, not meta-theology, that one can come to understand how theological statements work, and thus to believe that they work.”29 Crombie was speaking in this instance quite precisely about divine agency and divine action; he was not just making a universal claim about all theological statements. I propose we draw out the implications of this simple aphorism both negatively and positively.

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The Turn to Theological Theology Negatively, the days of the philosophical veto are over. It is time to turn the tables firmly and unapologetically. We should veto any and every effort to approach discourse about divine agency and divine action with a hermeneutic of suspicion. The veto business has run out of capital; it is time to shut it down and get on with the work of theology. The problems that have been hailed as unanswered or insoluble have been answered or seen to be pseudo-problems. The attempt to argue that the idea of divine action is incoherent is a spent force. The language of divine action may be false, but it is not inherently incoherent: even a child can use it. The reiteration of the claim that special divine action is incompatible with science and history is the reiteration of an error. Science can supply defeaters about silly claims about a six-day creation; it cannot and does not tell us what God has done. Given that God is the author and sustainer of the universe, theologians can negotiate the details of how to think about God’s action in the world in the course of a normal day’s work. Generic metaphysical and epistemological objections invariably beg the crucial questions at issue by means of dogmatic stipulation or by sleight of hand. As to so-called special divine action, if God is the creator and sustainer of the universe, it is risible to limit what he can do to achieve his good purposes. Justifying such claims requires the application of the maxim of appropriate (p.223) epistemic fit; we cannot decide in advance how this is to be done, as if we have to hand some secure generic, mono-thematic epistemology. Positively, we must make a full turn to theology proper. Theology proper did not start yesterday or the day before yesterday; from the beginning theologians have been reflecting on divine action and how to understand what God has done and is doing. Specific divine action has been the joy and agony of believers from time immemorial. We must begin again by going back to school and listening to the conversation that has long been in play. Because of the long night of darkness we have been in for many centuries, we have marginalized immersion in the very materials and practices that are vital to understanding divine action. It is easy to read everything upside down because of this. The shrill new atheism displays all too well how far the tragic deprivation and ignorance of even a minimal reading of God’s action in creation and redemption has seeped out of the church and into Western culture more generally. Consider again a provocative morsel from E. M. Cioran.

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The Turn to Theological Theology The more shocking a paradox about God is, the better it expresses his essence. Curses are closer to God than theology and philosophical meditation. Aimed at men, they are vulgar and of no consequence. One swears at a man’s God, not at the man. The latter is the source of error and sin. Adam’s fall was a divine calamity in the first place. God realized in man all his capacities for imperfection and corruption. We were made to save divine perfection. All that was ‘existence’ in God, temporal infection and decay, was rerouted through men, while God salvaged his nothingness. We are his dump into which he has emptied himself. Since we carry God’s burden, we feel entitled to swear at him. God suspects this, and if he has sent Jesus to relieve us of our pain, he has done so out of remorse, not pity.30 Clearly Cioran has totally lost the plot of the Christian narrative of creation and redemption. He is at least one step ahead of much of the work we have reviewed in this volume. He instinctively knows that serious engagement with divine action must go beyond formal conceptual analysis and get to the level of specific divine actions and narrative explanation. One can only wonder at the incompetence of the church in catechesis and basic instruction or at his narrow if wonderful imaginative stupidity. He has no clue on how to read the relevant narrative. In the new narrative, curses are indeed appropriate because the whole story has been turned upside down. In these circumstances, theology and philosophical meditation are indeed under a cloud; they do not fit with reality. (p.224) Elsewhere Cioran rails against theology on very different grounds. Theology is the negation of divinity. Looking for proofs of God’s existence is a crazy idea. All the theological treatises are not worth a single sentence for Saint Teresa [of Avila]! We have not gained one certitude since the beginning of theology until today, for theology is the atheist’s mode of believing. The most obscure mystical mumbo-jumbo is closer to God than the Summa theologiae, and a child’s simple prayer offers a greater ontological guarantee than ecumenical synods. All that is institution and theory ceases to be life. The church and theology have made possible God’s endless agony. Only mysticism has given him life once in a while. Theology would be valuable were we to have a theoretical relation to God, which is easier than a physiological one. The poor maidservant who used to say that she believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.31

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The Turn to Theological Theology Cioran in this instance is proposing that one point of entry into serious theology is the lives of the ordinary believers and saints as they pray and meet God. Note, however, that Cioran knows nothing of a narrative of divine action in the life of the church and in theology itself. Perhaps he thinks this is a distraction, an abstraction, or some other hoary reality. In this he shares the sensibility of many contemporary theologians, not sparing those who have written a lot on divine action. I do not see theology proper in this way. I read it as the extraordinary deposit of description and reflection on the activity of God. Our first task is to sit down with that deposit and think both sympathetically and critically with those who knew the living God across the centuries. Taking apt soundings within the history of reflection on divine action is one way to go back to school and regain our bearings. It fulfills Crombie’s wise aphorism: it is in reading theology, not meta-theology, that one can come to understand how theological statements work, and thus to believe that they work. Hopefully we will then be able to add our own feeble voice to the conversation and tackle with better resources the many philosophical puzzles that crop up. Notes:

(1) I borrow this provocative designation form John Webster’s inaugural lecture as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford, 1987. (2) Basil Mitchell, Looking Back: On Faith, Philosophy and Friends in Oxford (Durham: Memoir Club, 2009). (3) Winston L. King, “Some Ambiguities in Biblical Theology,” Religion in Life 27 (1957–8): 65–95. (4) Frank B. Dilley, “Does the ‘God who Acts’ Really Act?” in God’s Activity in the World: The Contemporary Problem, ed. Owen C. Thomas (Chico, CA: Scholars’ Press, 1983), 45–60. (5) Langdon Gilkey, “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language,” Journal of Religion 41 (1961): 194–205. (6) James Barr, “The Problem of Fundamentalism Today,” in The Scope and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1980), 81. (7) Jerry H. Gill, “Divine Action as Mediated,” Harvard Theological Review 80 (1983): 369–78. (8) Alvin Plantinga, “What is ‘Intervention’?” Theology and Science 6 (2008): 372.

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The Turn to Theological Theology (9) This applies to the deployment of Kant’s views on causation as an effort to block special divine action; his strictures would surely apply to the notion of general providence. This notion involved God’s causal superintendence through the whole created order. How exactly does this fit with the idea that the only causes allowable are finite causes within the spatio-temporal world? (10) He argued this case over against the importance of artificial intelligence and neuroscience in his Dewey Lecture at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting in Boston in December, 2010. (11) Basil Mitchell, ed., Faith and Logic (Boston: Beacon, 1957), (12) See my “Turning Philosophical Wine into Water,” Journal of Analytic Theology 1 (2013): 1–16, available at . (13) E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 72. (14) G. W. F. Hegel, “Religion is One of our Greatest Concerns in Life,” in G. W. F. Hegel: Theologian of the Spirit, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 43. (15) John Donnelly, Reflective Reason: Richard Taylor on Issues that Matter (Buffalo: Prometheus Press, 1989). (16) Lydia Jaeger, “Against Physicalism-Plus-God: How Creation Accounts for Divine Action in the World,” a paper presented at the Logos Conference on Divine Action—God, Chance, and Causation, May 13–15, 2010, Rutgers University, 5. (17) Hud Hudson, “I Am Not an Animal,” in Persons: Human and Divine, ed. Peter van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 216. (18) See Chapter 7 in this volume. (19) For a recent exposition of Reid’s position see Maria Alvarez, “Thomas Reid,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, ed. Timothy O’Connor and Constantine Sardis (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). In what follows I am indebted to Ryan Nichols, “Thomas Reid,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published online, August 28, 2000, with substantive revision February 29, 2009. See Ryan Nichols and Gideon Yaffe, “Thomas Reid,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, . I am also indebted to extended personal conversation with Professor Nichols.

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The Turn to Theological Theology (20) It is tempting to dismiss Reid from the outset by claiming that he is inventing a “modern” notion of agency and action which is bound to be misleading when deployed within theology. This would be a mistake. Reid can rightly be read as retrieving Aristotle’s notion of efficient causation after crucial elements in and around the idea of efficient causation had been deconstructed in the early modern period. (21) Thomas Reid, Essay on the Active Powers of Mind, ed. B. A. Brody (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 46. (22) Thomas Reid, “Letter to Dr. James Gregory,” in The Works of Thomas Reid, D.D., ed. Sir William Hamilton (Edinburgh, 1895), 65. (23) Reid, Essay on the Active Powers of Mind, 268. (24) Lydia Jaeger, “Nancy Cartwright’s Rejection of the Laws of Nature and the Divine Lawgiver,” Science and Christian Belief 22 (2010): 81–6. (25) Timothy O’Connor, “Thomas Reid on Free Agency,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 32 (1994): 319–41. (26) I am following Alvarez here in stripping Reid’s account of the commitment to volitions. See Alvarez, “Thomas Reid,” 511. (27) This is nicely indicated in the narrative of Genesis 1. (28) For a fuller discussion of the problem of the causal joint see Vincent Brummer, “Farrer, Wiles and the Causal Joint,” Modern Theology 8 (1992): 1–14. On the discussion of the causal joint as it relates to the created order see Chris Doran, “The Quest for the Causal Joint,” The Journal of Faith and Science Exchange 4 (2000): 161–70. (29) Ian M. Crombie, “The Possibility of Theological Statements,” in Faith and Logic, ed. Mitchell, 77. Emphasis mine. (30) Cioran, Tears and Saints, 111. (31) Ibid., 76.

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