Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume IV: A Theological and Philosophical Agenda 0198786530, 9780198786535

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Introduction Orientation

This volume represents the final in a tetralogy devoted to a network of issues in and around claims about divine agency and divine action in the Christian tradition. As I send it forth, I find the following comment of Austin Farrer exceptionally pertinent. Those who draw their swords for the Lord are aware that they face the Gideon predicament. 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. We know, surely, that the acknowledgement of God involves a sharpening and stirring of the conscience, and an acceptance of unqualified claims. The acceptance may be forced upon us in more ways than one: through our being thrown into situations which bring the weight of such claims to bear on us; through the example of others; through verbal persuasion.¹

The first volume reviewed the debates about divine action that cropped up at Oxford and Chicago in the middle of the last century. Both theologians and philosophers worried that somehow the way in which divine action had been handled presented acute problems for contemporary theology. One set of questions arose because of the challenge presented by the very idea of divine action and whether it involved a category mistake; the other focused on the failure of the Biblical Theology Movement to say exactly what God was supposed to have done in his mighty acts in history. Interestingly, scholars sought to solve “the problem of divine action” by looking for a general conception of divine action which could then be taken on the road to solve the problem of “special acts of God.” I argued that this whole enterprise was a dead end because there was no fixed conception of action, say, in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, that was available. Moreover, even if it was available, it threw no light on the meaning of specific acts ¹ Austin Farrer, “A Starting-Point for the Philosophical Examination of Theological Belief,” in Basil Mitchell, ed., Faith and Logic: Oxford Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1957), 26.

Divine Agency and Divine Action Volume IV: A Theological and Philosophical Agenda. William J. Abraham, Oxford University Press (2021). © William J. Abraham. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786535.003.0001

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of God for it would be much too general to be helpful, say, in distinguishing divine inspiration from divine revelation. In the end we had to come to terms with the particularities of divine action. However, that meant we had to come to terms with theology proper, for particular acts of God from creation to eschatology are the meat of theology. In the second volume, I provided a network of soundings in the premodern traditions of Christian theology. Thus, after working through Paul, I went on the road and looked at figures from Irenaeus to de Molina, picking particular acts of God for attention and exploring what were the problems our forebears thought significant and how they sought to resolve them. The aim was to get out of the bubble of modernity and postmodernity and immerse myself in the deep ruminations of some of the great theologians of the past. This also represented an effort to avoid the ahistoricism that bedevils the conversation in much analytic philosophy of religion, and, until more recently, in analytic theology. This was not a move to evade, say, the challenges of Kant, but to set aside the contraceptive pill handed out by him and by many others which prevented detailed, material proposals about divine action from being conceived much less brought to birth. In the third volume, I turned to theology proper, offering my own normative account of the great loci of systematic theology. This involved setting relevant epistemological issues to one side and getting on with speaking directly and faithfully about God and all he has done for us. It also involved a defense of the use of the loci in systematic theology, securing it as a natural follow through from catechesis, as we can see in the great founders of systematic theology like Origen. Thus, I wanted to provide a single-volume presentation of Christian theology that would build on, rather than be a rejection of, one’s initial formation in the Gospel and in the church. Thus, I construed systematic theology as post-baptismal, university-level catechesis. While this is a deflationary vision of systematic theology, I think it deserves a hearing in both the church and the academy. Within this I also sought to connect theology to the life of faith in a constructive and positive way. Theology is unique, as I see it, in that it seeks to foster deep love for God and neighbor. This is a very demanding goal in doing theology; I only wish that I could have done better on this front; but I am grateful for any progress made. It quickly becomes clear from all the earlier volumes, but especially from the volume in systematic theology, that doing theology raises deep metaphysical questions about the central concept or concepts that we use as our starting point in our thinking about God. For me, the crucial move at this point is to construe God as an agent. Yet, it is not exactly clear how this conception of God should be articulated. In doing theology, most of the time we use our fundamental semantic machinery informally. However, sooner or later we need to step back and take a hard look at the wider horizon within which we work conceptually. This work comes naturally to the philosopher; we are interested in the central concepts, like meaning, agency, causation, explanation, and so on, which we

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tacitly use, but which can readily lead to all sorts of mental cramp if we do not step back and examine them. Sorting out how to think through the claim that God is an agent is the starting point of this fourth and final volume. As I proceeded, I quickly discovered that going beyond this starting point meant undertaking a research agenda that then became the central goal of the exercise. Once we take seriously the idea of God as an agent, the various strands that constitute this way of thinking of God become the backdrop for looking at a whole network of interesting questions that arise in doing systematic theology, but which require further attention in their own right. We are given a fresh angle of vision, say, on the relation between freedom and grace, or on divine action in liberation theology, that helps us sort through and critically examine what is on offer. Equally important, we can look afresh at those conjunctive debates, say, between theology and history, or theology and apparent design in nature, that make theology both so difficult and so fascinating once we dig deeper into our formation as theologians. I could readily have expanded the list of issues to take up, but I am happy to provide the initial vision of God as an agent and a diverse sampling of interesting issues. It is this vision together with a network of theological issues where attention to divine action is the first desideratum that holds the current volume together. In time I hope others will expand the conversation and take it to topics and levels that escape me. A glance at the table of contents will make clear that after the opening two chapters which set the table, the others belong together as explorations of the significance of divine action for theology. Some of the chapters that follow naturally fall into a unit and can be fruitfully read together. However, readers are free to roam as they think fit and allow each chapter to stand on its own feet.

1 On God as an Agent The move to conceive of God as an agent has lumbered around in philosophy and theology for close to a century but it is virtually impossible to find a careful articulation of what this might mean. The idea of God as “The One who Acts” came to the fore in biblical studies in the Biblical Theology Movement after the First World War but those who championed this way of thinking did not spend time to spell out what this might mean. Their interest lay in rehabilitating the biblical narratives of what God had done in Israel and in Jesus of Nazareth. Karl Barth deployed the notion at times, a feature of the history that gave it a boost, but Barth’s interests and extraordinary skills lay elsewhere. Analytic philosophers at the time were generally dismissive of any discourse about divine action. Thomists were interested in expounding the concept of God as Being and sometimes dismissed the notion as a quirk of modern Protestantism seeking to get beyond the strictures of its liberal Protestant phase. When theologians and philosophers took the matter seriously by the 1960s and beyond, their primary concerns centered on debates about how to handle those special acts of God that seemed to be incompatible with the logic of science and the logic of historical investigation. Yet the proposal that God is best construed as an agent laid dormant, buried in the basement or hidden away in the attack of the Christian tradition. It is a delight to note that the great Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley put the issue with stark simplicity when he once asked: “And is not God an agent, a being purely active?”¹ However, given his radical Idealism, Berkeley has always been seen as something of a brilliant outlier, more important for his proposals in epistemology than in metaphysics. His suggestion that we should construe God as an agent has essentially gone under given his rejection of material objects as an illusion. He worried that adopting materialism was but halfway to atheism, a claim that can be turned upside down to become the claim that all thinking about personal agents, both human and divine, is simply the afterglow of a discredited theistic metaphysics. The central thesis of this chapter is that Christian philosophy and theology should conceive of God as an agent. I shall proceed in the following manner. First, I shall very briefly delineate the territory within which this thesis is lodged. ¹ George Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philinous (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1979), 65.

Divine Agency and Divine Action Volume IV: A Theological and Philosophical Agenda. William J. Abraham, Oxford University Press (2021). © William J. Abraham. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786535.003.0002

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Second, I shall indicate schematically the content of the claim that God is an agent. Third, I shall indicate what motivates the move to think of God as an agent both theologically and philosophically. Fourth, I shall enter a caution about the philosophical status of my basic orientation. Finally, I shall take up an important network of objections which deserves attention and rebuttal. The claim that God is best construed as an agent is first and foremost a claim about the fundamental categories that should be deployed when we speak of God in the Christian tradition. We are interested in the best conceptual resources that we should use when we think of God. Over the centuries Christians have proposed an extended list of the most fundamental categories we should use. Consider the following: First Cause, Being, Being Beyond Being, Perfect Being, Pure Act, the Absolute, Absolute Spirit, the Whence of the Whole, the Infinite, the True Infinite, Process, Creative Serendipity, and the like. The aim in all these instances is to find a concept that will be the primary horizon in which we think about God. The category deployed is like the house we inhabit or the ocean in which we swim. Precisely because they are so fundamental such developments have evoked a host of protests on various fronts. Consider the following worries. These concepts replace the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with the god of the philosophers; they fail to do justice to the scriptures; they systematically distort the structure and content of the Christian faith; they are spiritually disastrous in that they involve idolatry. The number and intensity of these objections reveal that we are entering very precarious territory where the stakes are very high. I confess that I find none of these categories satisfactory; later I shall indicate one of the main philosophical reasons for this judgment. Here let me indicate how one might naturally baulk at a category like Being or Being Beyond Being as applied to God. In being initiated into the Christian faith, one may not at first know what categories do or do not fit aptly in thinking about God. Of course, one’s initiation may include reference to God in precisely these terms; but this is relatively rare, and most certainly this was not my experience. I was introduced to the Gospel in preaching; I read the scriptures; I heard gracious testimonies; I learned the great hymns of Wesley and their companions in my Methodist community; I became immersed in Wesley’s canonical sermons. In this relatively informal manner, I found my way into the central elements and practices of the Christian faith. My dissatisfaction with most of the standard philosophical concepts that were supposed to fix the meaning of the term “God” arose because they did not square with my informal sense of how to think of God, that is, the God tacitly assumed in my journey into the life of faith. There was simply too much cognitive dissonance. So over time I shelved the issue until I began a systematic study of the issues that swirl around claims about divine agency and divine action. It is in this context now that I venture forth with the proposal of this chapter. How new it may be, I leave to the judgment of historians.

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Let me offer a first shot at delineating what I mean in speaking of God as an agent. To think of God as an agent is to think of God irreducibly and ontologically as a logically distinct entity constituted by various capacities or powers that may or may not be exercised. God is an agent who acts or exerts power, as distinguished from a patient or an instrument. God is the One Who Acts rationally and intentionally. This does not confine God to actions in this domain, for not all personal actions are done intentionally and it would be an obvious blunder to limit the range of divine actions to the kinds we can identify in the case of human agents. In everyday discourse and life agents come in a great variety of forms. Consider this informal taxonomy. There are animal agents, like tigers and snakes, which kill their prey. There are vegetable agents, like cauliflower and tomatoes, which nourish the human body. There are mineral agents, like copper and iron, which conduct electricity. There are physical agents, like electricity, that light up our homes. There are medicinal agents, like chloroform and aspirin, which suppress pain. There are angelic agents, who operate as messengers; and demonic agents that possess and seek to destroy human agents. Most important, there are human agents. These can act as individual agents, say, ambassadors or senators. They can act as corporate agents, like nations and universities. They can act as legal agents, like banks or the British parliament, or as social agents, like the Republican Party or the African-American caucus in Congress. One of the more recent developments is to speak of agents in the world of computers where an agent generally can mean a program that performs a task such as information retrieval or processing on behalf of a client; or more specifically an agent is a program set up to locate information on the internet on a specified subject and deliver it on a regular basis. Like the concept of action the concept of an agent and agency is an amazingly open concept that defies any easy move to work out the necessary and sufficient conditions of its usage. Not surprisingly philosophers readily seek to ease their cognitive dissonance by reaching for precision. My own disposition is deflationary and relaxed at this point. We can find our way around the terrain relatively well without having in hand the kind of precision we may find, say, in epistemology or philosophy of mathematics. Not surprisingly we resort to stipulation and operational distinctions that provide initial roadmaps. The most obvious distinction is that between personal and impersonal agents. Even then, some philosophers hesitate in that they find the whole idea of personal agents puzzling precisely because it does not fit the ontological primacy given to impersonal agents. Others have focused on personal agents construed fundamentally along the lines of rational and intentional agents as fundamental; they take the idea of impersonal agency to be an extension of the idea of personal agency. These are helpful distinctions to make but they are by no means exhaustive or comprehensive. It is a form of personal agency that is in the neighborhood when I speak of God as an agent. I am thinking of agency in terms of one who operates in a particular

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direction, who produces an effect rationally but is not causally determined to produce that effect. For those who cannot move beyond personal agency without thinking of this exclusively as a form of intentional agency, I allow that intentional actions are sufficient to secure the idea of personal agency. However, I am extremely skeptical that intentional action is a necessary condition of personal agency. These are not just matters of conceptual rigor and sensitivity; they also involve sensitivity to the radical ontological diversity that is essential to understanding life in all its complexity and diversity. With that qualification in place, I want to speak of God initially as a mysterious, transcendent personal agent with superlative powers which may or may not be exercised. I want also to speak of God as a mysterious, transcendent Triune agent with superlative powers and attributes who is the primary agent in a genuine cosmological and historical narrative stretching from creation, through freedom and fall, to redemption, and then on to perfect liberty. Hence, what I propose can be adopted either by the mere monotheist (if there are any), by Jews and Muslims, and by robust Christian monotheists. One point of entry into speaking of God as an agent can be found in the notion of agent causation. I consider the idea of agent causation to be both conceptually irreducible and ontologically fundamental. The classical account of agent causation in the modern period was developed by Thomas Reid.² Reid developed his vision of agency in reaction against the skepticism of Hume with respect to causation.³ Famously, Hume noted that when we look 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 some kind of 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 between night and day. Reid’s diagnosis of Hume’s error was simple: our ordinary ² For a recent exposition of Reid’s position see Maria Alvarez, “Thomas Reid,” in Timothy O’Connor and Constantine Sardis, eds., A Companion to the Philosophy of Action (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2010). In what follows I am indebted to 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. ³ 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.

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conception 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. There are a variety of ways of spelling out how causation might be construed.⁴ Some recent work in metaphysics has thought of causation in terms of the exercise of the dispositions and properties of various entities.⁵ Here is how this might be spelled out in terms of the interaction of two material objects. [Mass] is a disposition that manifests itself in the mutual attraction of massy objects. The presence of another mass acts as a stimulus on m (and conversely) for the manifestation of the disposition in terms of mutual acceleration. As soon as there are at least two massive objects in a world, that disposition is triggered. It is essential for the property of gravitational mass to manifest itself in the mutual attraction of the objects that instantiate this property. That’s what gravitational mass is—the property that makes objects accelerate in a certain manner.⁶

Koperski notes three objections to this way of thinking as it applies to theories in natural science. First, it does not work, say, in the case of the center of mass in the solar system. Second, it marks a return to an Aristotelian framework, the rejection of which was crucial to the history of modern science. And third, it is much too vague and incomplete. Be this as it may, Reid was more of a traditionalist in his understand of causation in that he wanted to retain the notion of natural law, but natural law as lodged within his vision of God as a lawgiver. So, Reid held 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, avers Reid, 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, what Reid called “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.”⁷ Hence we need a deeper conception 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.” It was this notion that Hume missed. Reid is positing that

⁴ For a splendid exposition as it applies to the idea of the laws of nature see Jeffrey Koperski, Divine Action, Determinism and the Laws of Nature (New York: Routledge, 2020), chapter 5. ⁵ For a fine articulation of this view see Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjun, Getting Causes from Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). ⁶ Quoted in Koperski, Divine Action, Determinism and the Laws of Nature, 91. ⁷ Thomas Reid, Essay on the Active Powers of Mind, ed. B. A. Brody (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 46.

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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. Here we hit the jackpot. 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.⁸

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 lawgiver; or event causation somehow trades on the idea of agent causation as a kind of background music. In the latter case, natural law is a story of events abstracted from a wider story of agent causation. 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.⁹ 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 ⁸ Ibid., 268. ⁹ This clearly opens up the possibility of occasionalism, namely, the doctrine that between my willing and my arm raising, other agents or instruments may be at work. For a cogent defense of Reid against the charge of being committed to an infinite regress, see Timothy O’Connor, “Thomas Reid on Free Agency,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 32 (1994): 319–41.

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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. In performing this or that action, Reid claims that 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. Human agents 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 motive 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 actions. 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. We do not need to buy into all the details of Reid’s account of agency and action to note that the crucial elements that should interest the theologian are these. 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. 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 the agent and the results of his actions.¹⁰ Fourth, agent explanations involve the citation of relevant motives, reason, 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. ¹⁰ I am following Maria Alvarez here in stripping Reid’s account of the commitment to volitions. See Alvarez, “Thomas Reid,” 511.

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This in turn will inescapably take one into the world of narrative, of biography, and of autobiography. Given this sketch of agents and agent causation, we have to hand an 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. Nor is the argument here that Reid provides some sort of foundational argument for God as an agent. Rather I am appealing to Reid because his work represents a splendid way into working our way into thinking as clearly as we can of personal agency. We might capture the issue as follows. In thinking of God as an agent, I am not taking the idea of a human agent and then constructing a vision of God by adding, say, a list of properties to it. Rather, standing before the living God as depicted in the Gospel, articulated with circumspection in the scriptures and wider canonical heritage of the church, deploying the limited but real intellectual faculties given to us, I am looking for an apt way to think and speak of this incomparable, beautiful Reality who stands in need of nothing and no one. It is not as if we have a genus, personal agent, within which the Living God stands; rather, we find ourselves seeking for an image, a concept, a verbal icon, by means of which we can both speak of God and express our thanks and praise. Reid gives us the scaffolding; once it is in place, we kick it loose and do what we can to use the concepts he gives us to depict and adore the God of Israel revealed in Christ and present among us in the Holy Spirit. 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.¹¹ Equally, it fits with the claims that human beings are morally accountable for what they do before God; often they have genuine freedom 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

¹¹ This is nicely indicated in the narrative of Genesis 1.

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into genuine personal relations and union with others and with God. They act with genuine freedom, 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 can surely build on this basic, logically primitive, and rich conception 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. Agent causation also provides a fitting platform for developing a doctrine of God as 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? 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 does 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.¹² It would be on a par with asking a human agent to identify the ¹² 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

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causal joint needed to think a thought or raise an arm. The plumber may need a “causal joint” to fix the toilet; when he finds a “causal joint” he will not need a causal joint to hook it into place; he just hooks it into place. Likewise God simply acts directly in the physical universe. Consider one further argument for thinking of God as an agent. It is obvious that significant theological work centers on thinking through the explanations as to why God acts as specified in the Christian tradition. Thus, thinking through the problem of evil looks to finding plausible reasons why God would create a world with so much evil in it. Resolving disputes about atonement require careful consideration as to why this or that theory, say, penal substitution or ransom theories, provides an apt explanation that would be in keeping with solving the problem of sin and alienation. Or think of the debates about the place of incarnation in the economy of divine action. Should we think of incarnation happening whether or not there was a need to redeem us from sin? If not, what is the divine rationale for thinking in this way? None of these enterprises make sense if we do not think of God as an agent doing this or that action for certain intentions and purposes. Hence, agency is not a peripheral or secondary concept in our thinking of God; it is utterly central and non-negotiable. Without the concept of agency and the wider conceptual framework in which it is lodged, these enterprises collapse forthwith. These are, then, compelling arguments for deploying a subtle and suitably adjusted conception 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. 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. Yet others find it incompatible with the findings of modern science or what is often referred to as “the scientific worldview.” I find none of these observations compelling. However, while theologians are at liberty to take up this conception 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 conception of agency—as the conception of action governing our everyday usage—I would reject the created order see Chris Doran, “The Quest for the Causal Joint,” The Journal of Faith and Science Exchange 4 (2000): 161–70.

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it outright because I think that the concepts of agency and action are open rather than closed concepts. 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 significant place of theology in developing the relevant metaphysical categories needed to develop a rich conception of divine agency and divine action. Second, this kind of resource does nothing to tell us what God really did or why God acted as specified. My proposal 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. The what and the why require us to spell out the specific actions we plan to predicate of God in theology. 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 others we may deploy. Note immediately that I am not construing God as a moral agent in the sense that we can stand in judgment over what God does, rather than God standing in judgment over what we do.¹³ Sorting out this move is not one I will take up here. However, I am claiming that God is an agent and this will sound not just odd but idolatrous in many ears. The worry is that I am conceiving God as just one more item in the universe alongside other agents. This, it will be said, is simply a form of idolatry. It involves an obvious anthropomorphic vision of God that puts God in competition with other agents for space in the universe and eschews a properly apophatic caution about all our discourse about God. While we may allow such a conception of God for those who need it, say, bog-Irish Pietists who have not benefited sufficiently from their exposure to Heidegger or to Meister Eckhart or to an accurate reading of Thomas Aquinas, we should keep all such discourse within a wider context where we think more purely and accurately of God as Being or Being Beyond Being. Lowering the temperature, it will be said that we need some such designation if we are to preserve the transcendence of God, adopt fitting dispositions in our worship, and preserve a proper distinction between God and creation. God as Being or as Being Beyond Being succeeds here because, some insist, the distinction between the Creator and the creature is greater than any distinction between creature and creature. Perhaps it is something along these ¹³ See Brian Davies OP, “Is God a Moral Agent?” in D. Z. Phillips, ed., Whose God? Which Tradition? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 97–122.

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lines that notions such as Pure Act, the Absolute, Absolute Spirit, the Infinite, the True Infinite, and their near relatives are meant to keep in place. The worry that thinking of God as an agent has evoked another objection that shows up in the neighborhood. Thus Michael J. Dodds worries that the kind of position embraced here involves adopting a doctrine of univocity with respect to the semantics of divine action and treats God on a par with other items in the universe. Taken together the claim is that God is being construed as “a univocal cause.”¹⁴ We are saddled with “a univocal understanding of divine causality.”¹⁵ Drawing on his exposition of Thomas Aquinas, he states the matter formally as follows. Univocal cause. An efficient cause that acts with another efficient cause of the same order to produce some effect. Since they belong to the same order, their effect belongs only partly to each, and one may interfere with the causality of the other. When two men carry a table, for instance, they act as univocal causes. Each is only partly responsible for the motion of the table, and the causality of one may interfere with the causality of the other. The more weight one lifts, for instance, the less weight there is for the other to lift . . . In a second sense, “univocal cause” means a cause belonging to the same species as its effects, as a parent and its offspring in biological reproduction.¹⁶

In response, first, let me clear the decks by making it transparent that the issue here is not whether we should affirm an apophatic dimension to all our talk about God. I affirm that without reservation. The issue is whether we have taken with radical seriousness the cataphatic dimension of out discourse about God. My worry here is that there has been a semantic overdose on the apophatic which has lost its carefully guarded place in the economy of the faith. It is the cataphatic content of Christianity that is at stake here; no serious theologian can sacrifice it in the name of the proper qualifications that can and should be made. Speaking of God as Being or Being Beyond Being undercuts this and we lose our bearings on all fronts. Likewise, clearly if we think of God as a “univocal cause” we are in danger of the opposite error by reducing God to a bigger and better version of human agents. Second, it is surely much too quick a move to bring up charges of idolatry. Charges of idolatry are commonly made against analytic philosophy. The charges strike me as odious and inappropriate. For one thing charges of idolatry are very serious indeed; these are not casual asides. More importantly, we should not elevate radical philosophical differences about the semantics of our discourse about God

¹⁴ Michael J. Dodds, Unlocking Divine Action: Contemporary Science and Divine Action (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 2012), 118. ¹⁵ Ibid., 137. ¹⁶ Ibid., 266.

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into the high-octane charge of idolatry. They are what they are: serious differences in semantics and metaphysics. Let them be kept at this deflationary level. Third, let me highlight precisely why I reject the main alternative encapsulated in the language, say, of Being or Being Beyond Being. According to some of its proponents, the difference between the Creator and the creature is greater than any difference between a creature and creature. Aquinas puts the issue as clearly as anyone at this point: “Although it may be admitted that creatures are in some way like God, it must in no wise be admitted that God is like creatures . . . A creature may be spoken in some way like God; but not that God is like a creature.”¹⁷ Consider a scale of differences at this point. Think of the difference between a table and a motorcar. Now think of the difference between a table and human being, between a table and a symphony, between a table and the plot of a novel, between a table and the complex mathematical equation that Andrew Wiles invented to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem, and so on. As we progress through the series, I completely lose any grip on how to think of the difference. Now, if the difference between Creator and creature is off this scale, even more so I totally lose any grip on the concept of God and how such concepts as action can be predicated of God. This is silence with a vengeance. And there is a price to pay: we are condemned to utter darkness in the life of faith. Moreover, we cannot build this concept of God out of the idea of creation ex nihilo because, however difficult this notion may be, it clearly assumes we can think of God as our Creator, that we can genuinely predicate the action-predicate “creation” of God. Furthermore, I cannot see how this can for a moment be reconciled with the Gospel where we announce the good news of what God has done for the salvation of the world. Here my pietism of a lower order is simply non-negotiable. Fourth, and coming closer to the issue in hand, it is simply an obvious error to disallow the option that is in play here on the grounds that I am working with an account of predication which is committed either to univocity or to treating God as one more item in the universe. I leave open for now the issue of how to deal with the longstanding option on freedom and grace that has real difficulty in allowing for any human action in the doctrine of salvation. Synergism which allows for genuine co-operation between God and the human agent, as opposed to monergism which does not find any deep role for human agency, is prima facie a live option. The crucial points to register at this stage are simple. To begin, the deployment of the language of causation as applied to God operates with a doctrine not of univocity but of analogy; we are building on our concept of action as predicated of human agents to apply it to divine action. We do this when we think of God as like a Father, or a Good Shepherd, or a Savior, and the like. Against Aquinas we do

¹⁷ Quoted in ibid., 161n5. Emphasis mine.

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indeed say that there are highly appropriate ways in which God can be spoken of as like creatures. Furthermore, we are not at all treating God just like one more item in the realm of ordinary causes because God is the Creator who uses his causal powers to create every other creature in the universe. Thus, we can allow for a radical distinction between the Creator and creature in which there is an asymmetrical relation of dependence. This is more than enough to sustain the claim that God is not simply one more item in the universe. In addition, the real difference in play here arises in the end because we have two radically different research agendas in play. On the one hand, there are those who find that agent causation has metaphysical possibilities that need to be exploited. This is the project in play here. On the other hand, there is the massive effort to retrieve and defend a fresh appropriation of the Thomistic tradition in metaphysics. The latter is like a vast maze of systematic intuitions, technical concepts, metaphysical distinctions, and metaphysical speculations that can readily capture the imagination. From within this it is all too easy to cut corners by failing to take the measure of and avoid a pejorative interpretation of the more modest alternative on offer here. This is nothing new in philosophy and theology. Given the radical differences in perspective that are inevitable in theology I take solace in the comments of a Thomist of an earlier generation whose work I have long admired. Thus, W. Norris Clarke, in developing a Thomistically inspired metaphysics, has this to say. It is one of the paradoxes of intellectual history . . . that St. Thomas and the other medieval scholastics did indeed develop a remarkable notion of the person in use of their theological explanations of the Trinity. But for some reason they did not exploit this remarkable intellectual achievement for the philosophical explanation of the person. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger . . . takes St. Thomas—and other scholastic thinkers—to task rather sharply for not developing this relational notion of the person within Christian philosophy but instead slipping back into the traditional Boethian definition of a person as “an individual substance of a rational nature.” And so St. Thomas failed to recognize that in the relational notion of the person developed within the theology of the Trinity “lies concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substances is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality . . . and it is made apparent how being that truly understands itself grasps at the same time that in its self-being it does not belong to itself; that it only comes to itself by moving away from itself and finding its way back as relatedness to its true primordial source.”¹⁸

¹⁸ W. Norris Clarke, Explorations in Metaphysics: Being, God, Person (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 212. Emphasis as in the original.

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I do not find the rejection of the notion of substance here and its replacement by “the relational” at all convincing. However, Clarke is drawing attention to a deep tension within the thinking of Aquinas that has not been resolved, namely, the formal conception of God as found in his metaphysics and the informal conception of God needed for theology proper. The primordial mode of thinking that is needed when we think of God is that of God as an agent; this is indeed a revolution in our way of thinking of the world, and it begins with the difficult but revolutionary notion of agent causation. As we move to conclude it is worth dwelling briefly on an objection that has been lodged against this whole way of thinking by the distinguished Jewish scholar David Patterson, an objection which is shared by many who find the very idea of reaching for metaphysical help for theology a snare and a distraction. To put the issue mildly, the problem for Patterson is not just the mistake of seeking to find concepts to articulate our thinking about God, but that this very process and its accompanying implications constitutes deicide and leads to the elimination of the Jews. It is hard to think of a more dramatic objection to the kind of project attempted here. My aim here is not to engage the broader elements in his proposal, but to respond to one crucial element in his work. Patterson’s objections are set forth as follows. My argument is that in this case anti-Semitism stems not from the theology as such but from the theological longing to conceptually possess God, to presume to know the judgment of God, and thus to be as God. In its efforts to determine the judgement of God from the content of doctrine, dogmatic theology conceptualizes, thematizes, and thus appropriates God; as Emmanuel Levinas states it, “in thematizing God, theology has brought him into the course of being, while the God of the Bible signifies . . . the beyond of being.” In a word the God of the Bible is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.¹⁹ Once comprehended and turned over to a concept, the God of theology is no longer a persona, no longer a Who with whom we enter into a relation and from whom we conceive a commanding revelation; rather, the conceptualized God is a What, an object to be seized and an authority to be invoked when attempting to justify what is otherwise unjustifiable.²⁰ The drive to establish such a dogmatic theology is rooted in anti-Semitic longing to be as the God of history, not only knowing good and evil but holding the keys to the kingdom that awaits humanity when Christ returns at history’s end.²¹

¹⁹ David Patterson, Anti-Semitism and Its Metaphysical Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). ²⁰ Ibid., 57. Emphasis as in the original. ²¹ Ibid., 64.

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. . . when Christians lose the law, they lose love: the suppression of Judaism is a suppression of love. It is true that the Christian Scripture invokes the importance of faith, hope, and love, declaring that “the greatest of these is love” (I Corinthians 13: 13). But when Christian theology goes dogmatic, the formula is faith, hope, and dogma, and the greatest of these is dogma, whose dogma determines the creed that unlocks the gates of paradise.²²

For the moment let’s distinguish between what is going on intellectually in the formation of creeds from the move to think of God in terms of agency as I have argued heretofore. It is clearly the latter that gets us off on the wrong foot initially, so let’s tackle Patterson’s objection head on. First, it is interesting that in deploying the work of Levinas he invokes the very language that I rejected at the outset of this chapter and applies it to God. Thus, the God of the Bible, we are told, signifies “the beyond of being.” So, we are after all attempting to thematize the divine even though I find the whole notion of Being Beyond Being unintelligible. Second, Patterson himself deploys concepts to depict the divine when he tells us that God is “a persona,” a “Who” with “whom we enter into a relation and from whom we receive a commanding revelation.” Third, Patterson is also very clear that he is prepared to predicate various actions of God. Thus, God has made a covenant with Israel, has revealed himself at Mount Sinai, gives commands, and will send a Messiah who will bring an end to the exile of the Jews and somehow lead all of humanity to realize the oneness of the human-to-human and the human-todivine relationships. It would be cheap and easy to point out that Patterson is now hoist by his own petard, for after all he is now seeking to possess God and has set his foot on the road to anti-Semitism. The more serious objections to his position are these. First, the real dispute initially is a dispute about what God is said to have done in Israel and whether that includes the possible activity of God in Jesus Christ in fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel. This is a theological dispute and there is no point in running away from theology into a distracting contrast between belief and doing if we are to deal with it adequately. Second, it is surely plausible to argue that anyone committed to any narrative of divine action will need to explore the crucial concepts in play as we do so. In turn this will naturally lead, depending on the narrative invoked, to efforts to specify more comprehensively what God has done and why. Third, the whole point of pursuing the option of thinking about God as an agent is precisely to preserve the claim that God is a Who and not a What, and thereafter to use our God-given powers of reflection to see where that leads us. It is nonsense to explain this kind of work as some kind of effort to possess God, or to be as God, or to deliver judgments as to who is or is not in God’s kingdom.

²² Ibid., 65.

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Moreover, it is equally nonsense to think that this per se is the source of antiSemitism. Patterson is right in his broad rendering of the horrendous history of anti-Semitism; and he is right in many of the other criticisms he lodges against theologians. However, he is equally right to commend those who are challenging the long reign of supersessionism from within the heart of Christian theology itself. In making this commendation he is in fact calling not for less but for more theological reflection. Indeed, one feature of his work that I find deeply attractive is the unapologetic and bold stance he takes in insisting on a metaphysical account of the origins of anti-Semitism. In reality Patterson’s project is theological rather than metaphysical. Given his rejection of theological work as he understands it, this is not surprising. The only space left over in the academy when we jettison theology is perhaps a stammering use of the term “metaphysical.” However, the argument as a whole is a theological argument. It can be summed up as the claim that anti-Semitism stems from a native human rebellion to acknowledge the reality and revelatory action of the God of Israel. This is a refreshing position to adopt and to develop with the erudition and brilliance on display in Patterson’s work here and across the years. This is in fact the beginnings of a move into a theological theology which refuses to be confined to the categories that have developed various vetoes in order to keep us tongue-tied and embarrassed. So may Patterson’s tribe increase and flourish. In time may they join with the rest of us who take with radical seriousness claims about what the God of Israel has done for the welfare of us all. Finally, on a positive note, one way to think of my claim is to see it as what emerges when we stand inside the canonical heritage of the church and seek to indicate the fundamental category in play when we think and speak of God. Nothing less than construing God as an agent is sufficiently felicitous. I would say exactly the same about the doctrine of the Trinity. Indeed, I think that one advantage of thinking about God as an agent is precisely that the concept of agent is a sufficiently open enough concept to be stretched to include a Tri-Personal Agent who is the object of our adoration and service. Looking back almost a century, I think that the Biblical Theology Movement was not wide of the mark when it proposed that we think of God as the One Who Acts. The movement as a whole was riddled with problems, not least visible in its lack of philosophical sophistication and its hostility to systematic theology, but it was on the right track. That right track is its basic intuition that in the Jewish and Christian tradition God is best understood as an agent.

2 Divine Agency, Divine Freedom, and Divine Suffering The use of agent causation to spell out the metaphysics of divine agency is an exciting enterprise; it can also be a precarious one. The theological rationale for this proposal is straightforward. Human agents are made in the image of God; to use a daring phrase recently attributed to Anselm, we share in a measure in the aseity of God.¹ God in making us has bestowed on us the capacities and powers needed to care for creation. More significantly, God in the Person of the Son became one of us, living a full human life even to the point of death by crucifixion. Rather than see this as a puzzle to be resolved, we built it into our very conception of divinity. God became incarnate in Christ; therefore, there is an entirely proper kinship between the divine and the human. I want to locate that kinship under the rubric of agent causation. From the philosophical side, conceiving God along the lines of human agency is in keeping with the long-standing practice of using human discourse to depict the divine by means of analogy, as when we use a host of human analogies to portray what God is like. We can do this informally without a precisionist calculus, making the necessary adjustments as we work our way into the highways and byways of Christian teaching. It is important to grasp our mode of thinking here. We are not starting out with some vision of the human agent and then adding a network of great-making properties in order to come up with a bigger and better version of human agents. Nor are we projecting a superlative image of ourselves on to the universe. We are seeking as best we can to articulate what we encounter and see once we immerse ourselves in the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and go on to stand within the deep, canonical faith of the church. This happens initially in Christian initiation and then in the work of systematic theology. Beyond that we are in search of an apt conception of the divine that can help us negotiate our intellectual conversion and that will provide appropriate background assumptions in our systematic theology and in our worship and service to the Living God. In traditional terms we are still working in the mode of faith seeking understanding. Even with all this in place, there is plenty of room for acute pain in the brain. We now want to know what this vision of divine agency involves with respect to

¹ Kathryn Rogers, Anselm on Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 91.

Divine Agency and Divine Action Volume IV: A Theological and Philosophical Agenda. William J. Abraham, Oxford University Press (2021). © William J. Abraham. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786535.003.0003

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what we might call the material and ontological substance of the proposal. How far can we deploy our conventional thinking about personal agency in thinking more deeply about the agency of God? Of course, there is no agreement on how to interpret conventional thinking about personal agency. Think for a moment of the debates about freedom and determinism. Or think of the puzzles that arise when we use such concepts as motives, emotions, passions, affections, intentions, desires, inclinations, and reasons. So, it is to be expected once we dig deeper into agency as predicated of God that we are going to run into a host of extra puzzles, not least because we want to preserve a radical distinction between the Living God and human creatures of flesh and blood. Our inquiries are both enriched and handicapped by the work of our predecessors. They are enriched in that we do not have to start from scratch. There is a wealth of splendid biblical, theological, and philosophical material already in play. They are handicapped in that the West has taken its cues on many of the issues involved from Augustine and Aquinas, both of whom are solidly lodged as canonical theologians in both Catholicism and Protestantism. For many the default position is to take these figures as having effectively solved the relevant problems; so, the task is essentially one of exposition, defense, and enrichment. Hence there is a default stance in which a range of concepts such as Pure Act, impassibility, atemporality, and simplicity form a tightly coordinated system of thought that is taken to be normative and definitive. If one thinks that this research program is the way to go, then well and good. If one does not, the weight that it has in the current landscape is so great that it is very easy to be drawn so deep into it that it inhibits the articulation of a better way forward. Even critics in search of an alternative find themselves inadvertently driven by its agenda. I shall proceed in this chapter in the following manner. First, I shall indicate the grounds for holding to a strong, material account of agency as applied to God. Thus, I shall argue that we cannot avoid predicating such concepts as choice, mercy, rational deliberation, love, suffering, wrath, and long-suffering patience to God. Let’s call this the agent account of divine agency; to give it a more formal name, let’s call it agentism.² In the course of my exposition I shall respond to some standard objections that are readily available. Second, I shall argue that the central claims of agentism are incompatible with one prevailing theological paradigm, namely, Thomism, which has long been one of the most sophisticated options in

² I was inspired to develop this designation from the use of the term “actionistic providence” deployed by Simon Maria Kopf in his fine doctoral dissertation, Divine Providence and Natural Contingency: New Perspectives from Thomas Aquinas on the Divine Action Debate, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Oxford, 2019. I prefer it to, say, personalism, a term which has too much baggage attached to it for present purposes. In working through the challenge of delineating what I mean here I have found Reinhard Feldmeier and Herman Spieckermann, God of the Living: A Biblical Theology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011) exceptionally stimulating.

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the West.³ Third, I shall argue why I do not find the alternative Thomistic agenda at all persuasive. Finally, I shall indicate some of the issues that naturally arise but which I will leave to others to pursue in the future. I shall take note of the crucial elements involved in a rich research agenda which seeks to think of God in terms of agent causation. As a point of entry to my account consider the following pivotal text from the book of Exodus. Years passed, and the King of Egypt died, but the Israelites still groaned in slavery. They cried out, and the appeal for rescue from slavery rose up to God. He heard their groaning, and remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; he saw the plight of Israel, and he took heed of it.⁴

Shortly thereafter in the dialogue with Moses, the text goes on to say: The Lord said, I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard their outcry against the slave-masters. I have taken heed of their suffering, and come down to rescue them from the power of Egypt, and to bring them up out of that country into a fine, broad land . . .⁵

If we think of the agency of God implicit in these texts then we can say that God has certain beliefs that constitute knowledge, that he has empathy for the people in their suffering, and that he is responsive to their suffering. Put more formally, God has certain mental states and certain emotions. We can add that God acts in time and that he deliberates about the best way in the circumstances to keep covenant with Israel, which is threatened by genocide at the hands of Pharaoh. We can also add that God has memories in that he remembers his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God also has desires in that he desires to set his people free. More broadly, we might say that God has an enduring character or nature, that is, one of faithfulness to his chosen people, and because of their acknowledgement of that nature, the people have until this point trusted in his promises to give them a land. Moreover, it precisely this promise and the character that it expresses that has been called into question by the actions of Pharaoh, for if Pharaoh succeeds then the covenant with Abraham is a sham. Put differently we might say that God has certain enduring dispositions that may or may not be exercised. Equally God has various capacities, say, to make covenants, to speak to Moses, to be aware of the

³ There are, of course, other options, notably the proposals developed in Process theology and Open Theism, proposals that I do not find persuasive. In any case, given the revival of Thomism, I do not think there is anything to match the depth and care that this tradition articulates relative to my project here. ⁴ Exodus 2:23–5 (New English Bible [NEB] translation). ⁵ Exodus 3:7–8 (NEB).

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plight of slaves being ill-treated by their masters, to rescue his people from Egypt, and presumably these capacities may or may not be exercised. So, we have a package of characteristics that we can now quickly identify in terms of memories, beliefs, desires, emotions, dispositions, and capacities. God is a dynamic agent with many of the qualities we find in ordinary human agents. Yet, if we broaden our observations to take into account the wider biblical canon, we discover that this is no ordinary agent. This agent is also the Creator of the universe and is worthy of trust and worship. This agent is not visible to the physical eye, acts inside and outside Egypt and across all space, and endures across time. So, God is spiritual and transcends space and time, for his actions are not constrained by space and time. As God is omnipresent in creation his actions reach across all space and time. This agent enters into enduring, genuine relationships but cannot in any way be reduced to some kind of sentimental agent who is to be taken for granted or treated as a pious, super-friendly labor-saving device. For this is an agent who judges us and takes our decisions seriously. This agent has transcendent knowledge, for God knows the future actions of human agents, say of Pharaoh, including what Pharaoh would do if he were in different circumstances. Where human agents have comprehension, can speculate, and can make predictions, God has super-comprehension that reaches as far as every aspect of future human actions.⁶ In the case of human agents, it is clear that their actions are sometimes determined and not just influenced by the actions or presence of other agents. It is also clear that at times human agents are so overcome by their emotions and inclinations that they do things that are no longer constrained by reason. Normatively, however, human actions are held to be genuinely free when they are not determined to act by others; and when they are not at the mercy of their passions. In addition, it is clear that human agents not only have empathy for others and thereby suffer but also suffer in the more direct sense of enduring great pain and mental anguish. So, it is natural to ask in what sense God has freedom, is governed in his actions by emotions and passions, and may or may not endure

⁶ Thomas Flint dismisses this possibility noted by Louis de Molina as “murky and unhelpful.” See Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 56n26. Yishai Cohen agrees with this observation: “[I]t is difficult to see, among other things, why one must infinitely surpass some person in intellect in order to know certain truths about that person. At any rate, until we are given a contemporary defense that appeals to metaphysical and epistemological concepts with which we are at least familiar, our credence in the doctrine of supercomprehension should be low.” See his “Counterfactuals of Divine Freedom,” forthcoming in the International Journal of Philosophy of Religion, 12, emphasis mine. Cohen allows for the coherence of the notion. Moreover, I agree it would be helpful to be able to connect divine super-comprehension with our ordinary ideas of comprehension. The deeper question here is whether we should limit God’s access to truth to the modes of access that are normative for human agents, a notion that is itself highly contested. It may well be here that, as the reference to the difficulty of “seeing” makes clear, we are dealing with radically different intuitions. Cohen’s paper is an outstanding exercise in detached, precisionist analytic philosophy that captures many of the issues at stake.

 ,  ,   

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suffering. How do our answers to these questions figure in the account of divine agency I am seeking to articulate here? As for freedom, the crucial initial observation is that by freedom I mean that it is up to God what God does. So, God is the source of his own actions. His actions involve the voluntary exercise of the relevant capacities. Put in other words, God enjoys complete self-determination. This means that in some circumstances God could do otherwise. So, for example, there was no necessity that God create the universe; it is a spontaneous act of sheer creativity akin to the creativity of an artist. Moreover, in his acts of particular providence, God could achieve his purposes in more than one way. So, God could create human beings otherwise than by the process now generally agreed within the biological sciences, that is, by evolution.⁷ I see no good reason not to apply this conception of freedom, the freedom to do otherwise, in certain circumstances to God. However, this is not the only conception of free actions available to us. Consider Jolene, who has a mentally handicapped child called Penelope. She was advised during the pregnancy by her doctors to have an abortion. She consulted with friends and the father of Penelope and it became clear that, while she could have done otherwise, her conscience did not allow her to do so. There was a real sense in which she could not do otherwise. We can call the necessity involved here not a physical or metaphysical necessity but a moral necessity. Moral necessity comes in degrees. As Jolene lovingly takes care of Penelope, it becomes clear that a deeper moral necessity develops such that when she looks back, she finds it abhorrent that she ever even considered an abortion for Penelope in the first place. Moreover, if given vast sums of money or threatened by some radically evil person to engage in harming Penelope in any way, she would insist that this was utterly impossible to do. Her enduring love for her child prevented this from even becoming an intellectual option. God help her, she could do no other. This sort of love is exactly the kind of love the saints develop through grace.⁸ For them their love for God and for others has reached the point where a whole range of actions are off the table. Moreover, they insist that the expressions of that love in various actions are profoundly free even to the point where the very idea of being able to do otherwise is silly if not otiose. They do, of course, in expressing their love for God and neighbor, make decisions which could have been otherwise, for there is more than one way to love God and neighbor. In making these decisions they deliberate by considering various alternative; and in weighing the alternatives they consider various beliefs about the world and various reasons, but these beliefs and reasons are not causes in the sense that they determine the outcome in the way the movements of billiard balls causally determine the movement of ⁷ I shall take up the proposals represented by the Intelligent Design Movement in chapter 10. ⁸ I shall take up the role of grace in such actions in chapter 3.

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other balls on the table.⁹ There are no covering laws that fit so that we can predict the outcome of the exercise of reasons in the case of the saints. The beliefs and reasons operate like advice to a friend; and they provide explanations which render intelligible the actions carried out by the agent. These explanations are discerned by other personal agents; they are not the result of some kind of scientific form of reasoning. There is an inescapable element of spontaneous selfdetermination; it is up to the agent to call the shots, as we say; we explain their actions causally by means of explanations in terms of dispositions, reasons, beliefs, and the like.¹⁰ Just as freedom in the sense that one could have done otherwise can be applied in certain cases of divine action, like creation, so too can this deep conception of freedom and action rightly be applied to God per se. God’s character as represented by compassion, long-suffering patience, and appropriate judgment is marked by this kind of freedom and necessity. We might even say that there is a superabundance of love eternally within the tri-personal agency of God. This is not something gained by way of habituation or practice. What human agents attain by grace God has by nature. There is no possible world in which God is not gracious, merciful, discerning, powerful, and all-seeing. God has these dispositions and capacities eternally. To be sure, human agents come to know about these truths from below through divine revelation and sanctified reflection. God has no need of such modes of access to the truth about his own nature; God knows himself comprehensively and directly. On our part we cannot know God’s essence in the sense that we can know what it is to be God; in that sense we can say that the essence of God is inaccessible to us and will forever remain so given our human capacities.¹¹ Yet we know in a real way the essence of God through the acts which reveal the everlasting nature of his character. We love God because we know that he has first loved us though the gifts of the Son and the Spirit. So, we know that when God acts in his covenant relations with us that those acts are the necessary but not determined expressions of his love toward us. We can also say, in order to avoid any kind of naïve sentimentality, that God acts for ⁹ We have been deeply misled at this point by Aristotle’s account of four causes, none of which are in reality what has often been named as efficient causality in the philosophical literature. Thus, to take but one element in his analysis, the goal of an action is not in a deterministic sense the cause of an action, it is a consideration that an agent takes into account in performing an action. The relation is not one of causality at all; it is a relation of dependence. The specified goal enters into the explanation of the action; it is not a cause, which together with other causes (the formal, the material, and the “efficient”) determines the outcome of the agent’s exercise of his powers. ¹⁰ For this reason, I am not a compatibilist in the debate on the relation between freedom and determinism. It is no accident that determinists either ignore or can find no sense in the idea of agent causation. Genuine agents in any robust doctrine of determinism are reduced to constellations of causes that operate by strict necessity even though these actions are described as voluntary. ¹¹ Here I side with Palamas against Aquinas in claiming that even in the life to come we will never fathom the essence of God as if we could know the essence of God as God knows himself.

 ,  ,   

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the sake of his honor, reputation, holiness and glory. But let’s stay with the example of love for a moment. There is a real sense in which God at this level cannot do otherwise; he cannot but love the lost sheep that have gone astray; like the waiting father whose son has gone astray, he cannot but throw lavish parties for the prodigal who returns. There is joy in heaven over one sinner who repents and has discovered his true destiny as a child of God. This love and joy are a spontaneous expression of the everlasting love and joy that is at the very heart of the Triune God. God’s love is not just a generic love, but a network of loving actions providentially directed to each person and tailor-made for each person’s character and situation. As such they are an ingenious and comprehensive response to the actions of the human agent. In this instance God has freedom of choice as to how he acts; but he does not have freedom of will of the kind beloved by certain philosophers of freedom. With this initial picture of the divine emotions in place we can now formally describe the nature of impassibility as applied to God. God acts in keeping with, or as an expression of, such emotions as compassion and apt judgment, but is in no way at the mercy of an inappropriate expression of those emotions. Thus, being impassible does not mean being apathetic or indifferent. Given that these are often confused with impassibility, it would be great to have an alternative designation for what is at stake. However, we can proceed at this point by way of stipulation. By impassibility I mean here that God has no disordered desires; that the expression of his emotions is always morally constrained and ordered by the divine mind; that there is no sense in which God can become a slave to such negative emotions as anger, hatred, resentment, envy, and the like. It was precisely for these reasons that the term impassibility was first introduced in patristic theology. The aim was to eliminate any association with the wayward passions of the pagan gods of the ancient world.¹² We are also now in a position to take care of the predication of suffering as applied to God. Three points need to be made. First, it is obvious that God does not endure any physical pain, given that God is a spiritual agent without a physical body. Second, it is entirely proper to speak of God entering into the suffering of the created order by means of empathy. This was classically captured in the work of Abraham Joshua Heschel in terms of the importance of divine pathos.¹³ Third, and at a more complex level, there is the question of how to handle the suffering of Christ in the incarnation. Traditionally, this has often been understood in terms of only the human nature of Christ suffering. However, this is surely questionable in that it calls into question the unity and integrity of Christ as a person with two ¹² For a splendid treatment of this topic and other issues relative to this paragraph and the paragraph which follows see Paul Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). ¹³ See his seminal treatment of this topic in Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 2001), especially part 2.

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natures. It is not just the human nature that suffers, as if the human nature is an additional agent in its own right alongside the agency of the divine nature and somehow connected to a third agent in the Person of the Son. Thus, we have a fresh iteration of the three-agent problem that was so deftly cleared up by Maximus the Confessor in the two-wills controversy. It is surely more apt to say that the Son of God suffers in the incarnation, an experience unique to the Second Person of the Trinity. How this is shared with the other Persons of the Trinity can then be identified as a distinct problem worthy of extended treatment in its own right. Suffice it here to suggest that the other Persons of the Trinity share in the unique once-for-all suffering of the Son, analogously to the sharing of the actions of the Persons of the Trinity relative to the unique actions appropriate to each. In fact, we can express the issue in terms of divine action. If the Father and the Holy Spirit are uniquely involved in the action of the Son for the redemption of the world, part of what is involved is that they share in the suffering of the Son that actually occurs during the incarnation of the Son, most especially in his suffering for the sins of the world on Golgotha. I have sketched heretofore a robust account of the metaphysics of divine agency. Building on the work of the last chapter where I argued for the propriety of using the language of agent causation to capture crucial formal features of God as an agent, I have sought to move to a more material, ontological level by proposing that it is entirely in order to speak of God as having beliefs, reasons, intentions, motives, and emotions. Within this I have proposed that we can develop a complex vision of the freedom of God, a substantive account of the divine emotions, and a strong vision of divine suffering both in terms of empathy and in terms of the suffering endured by the Son in the incarnation. I have also proposed that we identify the position articulated here as agentism. It is astonishing to me that it is virtually impossible to find a version of agentism in the relevant literature. Clearly, some of the building blocks have long been available for such a development; but I know of no effort to pull these blocks together into a building worthy of attention in its own right. I hope that this sketch is more than enough to provide the essential ingredients for this vision of God as an agent. Undoubtedly one of the reasons for this state of affairs stems from the deep worries that have been lodged against it from within various versions of Thomism across the centuries. We met with some of these worries in the last chapter when we dealt with the objections that conceiving God as an agent somehow was guilty of idolatry and required a doctrine of univocity. I suggested that the former charge, aside from being otiose in converting a difference in philosophical commitment to that of idolatry, did not construe God as one more item in the universe. As Creator, God could not be a part of the universe that somehow created the non-divine part of the universe. God created the whole of the universe. Moreover, in creating human agents in his own image, he condescended to share

 ,  ,   

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certain properties with human agents, but these properties were to be understood in terms not of univocity but of analogy. The Thomists that interest me in this discussion may be happy to speak of God as an agent when they deal with the great themes of Christian theology from creation to eschatology. In technical terms they insist that God is a concrete universal and this is required to make sense of what has to be said about God in the narratives of scripture.¹⁴ They may, therefore, agree that it is appropriate in some contexts to speak of God as an agent with causal powers that may or may not be exercised. So, God is free to create or not to create the universe.¹⁵ However, they insist that this is but half the story. Once we begin to think through all that needs to be said about God, then we need a deeper set of categories to capture the truth about God, either because certain claims of scripture require it or various doctrines, say, of divine perfection, derived appropriately from scripture, require it. This development, they insist, has long been instantiated in both Catholic and Protestant forms of Christianity. In conventional terms it has been a central element in what has been termed “classical theism.” The task of articulating the various ingredients and inferences that constitute classical theism is a significant research agenda in its own right. Like most living research agendas, it has a lot of unfinished business. There is a vast literature pro and con that I have no intention of reviewing in any detail here. It will suffice to identify here some of the crucial concepts that show up and that would appear prima facie to be incompatible with the competing research agenda that I prefer.

¹⁴ The issue is especially important in the work of Eleonore Stump. See, e.g., her The God of the Bible and the God of the Philosophers (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2016). However, it is not clear how deep a concept of agent is in play at this point. Moreover, some have argued that once Aquinas’s position is explored it moves from the possibility of God as an agent to God as a set of activities. Consider the following from Fergus Kerr. “Clearly Thomas is unwilling to collapse the concept of an agent into that of action (S.T. 1.13.8). Yet once the concept of the divine substance is subject to the appropriate negative analysis, and is determined as esse subsistens, it surely means that God’s nature is activity—though activity with a certain ‘subsistency.’ God is not a substance with accidents, a subject with properties, an agent capable of activities that occasionally express but never totally realise himself (as agents like us). In God, being, knowing, loving and creating are identical (the doctrine of divine simplicity); yet this activity has at the same time something of the character of a substance. In short, the risk for Thomas is not to reify God as a static and motionless entity, but rather just the opposite, to make so much of the divine essence as activity, denying the distinction between agent and agency, that God becomes sheer process, perpetuum mobile. Thomas’s God is more like an event than an entity.” See Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Visions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 189–90. The deep ambiguity also shows up in the work of D. Stephen Long: “What image of God does Holy Scripture present? The Christian God has agency; God acts without being constrained by it. But to make God a character in a story is to misread Scripture. It is, again, to use the indefinite article to speak of God that cannot but make God an entity among entities. A sign that theology has gone wrong is when the language of ‘a being’ is used for God. A better way forward is to speak and think of God not as a character in a story but as its Author.” See D. Stephen Long, The Perfectly Simple God: Aquinas and His Legacy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016), 214. This is surely very confusing. How are we going to think of God as the Author of a story if God is not an agent? ¹⁵ However, the problem of divine freedom in the creation of the world is an acute one for Thomists, so I am not at all sure they will allow that God has causal powers in the sense with which I am working.

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The crucial elements are the doctrines of simplicity, immutability, impassibility, atemporal divine action, and God as Pure Act.¹⁶ The doctrine of divine simplicity can be spelled out by reflecting on the claim that God is not composed of parts, whether of bodily parts, or substance and accidents, or matter and form, or essence and existence, potentiality and actuality, and the like. It follows from this that all the attributes of God are identical with one another. So divine omnipotence is identical to divine love, and divine knowledge is identical with divine omnipresence. While the meaning we may attribute to these attributes differs in our minds, the reference in all cases is the same. Thus, the evening star is different in sense from the morning star but the two are identical in reference. The summit of the mountain as identified as the top of the mountain from the eastern slope is different in meaning from the summit as described as the top of the mountain from the western slope, the reference in both cases is the same. The doctrine of immutability is the doctrine that God does not undergo change of any sort whatsoever. Thus, in the case of God, absolutely nothing could have been otherwise. If some property were to be added to God, then this would mean that God suffered from some kind of diminution and thus was imperfect. Immutability also means that there can be no potentiality in God. If God had the potential capacity to create the universe and then proceeded to do so, there would be change in God from potentiality to actuality; so, to preserve the immutability of God, God is actuality without potentiality. God is pure act in whom there is no potentiality whatsoever. The doctrine of impassibility is closely related to this in that if God had the capacity for emotion, then that emotion might or might not be expressed depending on God’s response, say, to the actions of human agents. Thus, God would be subject to change. Passibility would mean, moreover, that something external to God made a difference to the being of God, and thus compromise his absolute independence from any causal influence outside himself. This does not mean that God lacks life and action; on the contrary God is identical with his life and actuality. There is no ontological gap between God and his actions for he is identical with his actions; and being identical with his actions God possesses radical liveliness. If God were impassible like a rock or a chair, then, of course, God would lack life and action. However, God is so full of life and action, so dynamic in being, that nothing can make him more act. He is act, pure and simple; he is actus purus. Thus, we arrive again at the claim that there is no potentiality in God.

¹⁶ I have found James E. Dolezal, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God’s Absoluteness (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011) very helpful in working through the summary that follows.

 ,  ,   

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Similar considerations lead to the claim that God is eternal in the sense of being atemporal. If there is any chronology in the life of God, then God undergoes change, and this undermines any commitment to divine immutability. Suppose God promised Abraham numerous progenies and then fulfilled that promise later. This would mean that God acts within time, and we could say that in performing the action of keeping his promise God necessarily underwent temporal succession. In order to preserve both immutability and simplicity, it is necessary then to think of God as above all temporal limits and succession of moments. There cannot be a before and after in the life of God. So, eternity as predicated of God means the whole simultaneous and perfect possession of a boundless life. A certain part of time as we conceive it is present to the divine eternity, but divine eternity is not constituted by adding up the parts of time as we know them in terms of past, present, and future. If God is simple and is therefore identical with his acts, and his acts in turn are identical with one another, then it is clear that we need a way to speak of divine action that preserves these doctrines. That is exactly what we find. The proposal is straightforward: there are no distinct acts of will in God, for God wills everything in one simple act. There are two distinct moves in play here. First, this one simple act of God is essentially an act within the Godhead. God wills in one simple act all non-divine things by willing the goodness of his essence. The divine act is done for the sake of goodness, but goodness is in turn identical with God. Second, if there were more than one act of will in God, say, a volition to create the world and a volition to become incarnate within it, then this would introduce composition into the being of God. In order to avoid this, we must think of divine action in a radically different way. So, God wills himself and wills all other things in a single act of will. In this way God’s act will not be contingent and uncertain. It is in no way dependent on the creatures he has made. Hence, what we identify in our minds as a particular act of God, say, creation, over against another act of God, say, incarnation, is really the effect of the one simple act of God in eternity. I have nothing new to add to the body of ingenious argument that has emerged of late for and against this network of proposals. Taken with the wider elements to be found in Thomism broadly conceived, they represent an amazing body of metaphysical and theological commitments. It is no surprise that they have attracted the attention of philosophers, who find in theology the kind of puzzles that run as deep as anything they have come across in sorting through the claims of science.¹⁷ In one case, careful attention to the central claims of this research agenda have led one leading philosopher to abandon the priesthood of the

¹⁷ I have in mind the work of Richard Gale, who late in his career turned to philosophy of religion as a source for philosophical scrutiny and reflection. See Richard H. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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Catholic Church and find a home in agnosticism.¹⁸ It has won the allegiance of some of the finest philosophers of the last and current generation.¹⁹ It is tempting to take note of this research agenda and move on. However, given that its adherents see no serious incompatibility between this agenda and the deep faith of the church, it is appropriate to register why I hesitate to get on board. After all, what is on offer is a well-tested set of metaphysical proposals which are said to be required by the internal requirements of Christian theology. So, it seems churlish and ungrateful not to accept the gifts that are offered. Let me see if I can explain why I am not persuaded. I begin with the most significant issue and one that cuts to the very heart of the project. Classical theism as I have identified it requires that divine action in history be understood as the effects of the one divine act that is willed atemporally by God. This is surely odd in the extreme. The incarnation of God is not an effect of one simple divine act of God; it is an act of God simpliciter, an astonishing act of revelation, mercy, and grace, carried out once and for all at a particular time in history. This is enough to give one pause, for the vision of divine action as one simple divine act is not a minor element in the package on offer; it is an integral element that if challenged calls for skepticism about the other elements in the package. In response it might be said that I have taken the notion of “effect” much too literally. I am suggesting that the incarnation is an effect of some other act of God which is still to be individuated. However, this is not the case. It is an effect not of some other act of God but of the one simple act of God. Thus, my objection is based on a serious misreading of the original claim. However, we are now landed with a further worry. This rejoinder merely repeats what we already know; it does nothing to relieve the cognitive dissonance. We have, moreover, the additional worry that the language of “effect” has lost its meaning, even if we allow for an analogical reading of “effect.” I can only confess that I have no idea what to make of this claim if we are given no serious analogies to help make sense of it. To date, no serious analogies are on the table. We can come at the issue from another angle. All acts of God in history, it will be said, are somehow present in the originating singular, simple act of God. This means that the incarnation can now be predicated of God as eternal in the very being of God. The divine actions in the divine economy are now identical with the one, simple act of God. So too is the divine act of atonement and the sending of the Spirit at Pentecost and the calling of Moses. These are now eternally present in God. However, there will be no way of individuating these acts in the Godhead

¹⁸ See Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Being (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002) and A Path from Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). ¹⁹ I have in mind the splendid work of Eleonore Stump, Paul Helm, Barry Miller, Paul Davies, Alexander Pruss, and many others.

 ,  ,   

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because they are all identical with each other and in turn identical with the being of God. We will be told, no doubt, that all this is merely the case from a human perspective; from within the divine perspective governed by divine simplicity they are all identical. However, aside from the intelligibility of the claim, we now begin to have serious worries about the gap between what we think and say about God and what is true of God. We readily find ourselves saddled with an unknown God who lies behind the God we encounter and know in the faith of the church. Let’s pursue our quarry a little further. In speaking of any particular act of God, it is appropriate, I have argued to date, to think of God as having various motives and reasons for, say, becoming incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. He did so, say, to reveal his true nature to us. We can also say that God has desires, capacities, and dispositions. These clearly factor in the explanations in that God desires to reveal himself and has the capacity and disposition to reveal himself. So, now we want to know if these features of divine action can be accommodated within the ontology of one simple divine act. Clearly, different actions will have their own unique explanations, and differentiating these is crucial to understanding what God has done, say, in raising Jesus from the dead. However, if all God’s properties are identical, then the property of having reason A to do B and reason X to do Y will mean that reason A and reason Y are identical in the Godhead. Frankly, this is absurd. However, we know the response that will be made. These distinctions only apply within our human perspective; in the Godhead they do not apply. But then, we cannot but lose our grip on any robust sense of understanding God. The gap between an unknown God and the God we think we understand and love becomes so large that reflective faith in God is bound to falter. Incidentally, it is also strange to think of such phenomena as reasons, motives, capacities, and dispositions as parts of God. If I have a reason to call the doctor because I have a pain in my arm, only someone in the grip of a metaphysical theory would think of my reason as somehow a part of me. Hence, the standard charge that such talk commits us to a denial of the unity of either the human agent or of God should strike us as implausible. We need a conception of the divine unity that allows for God to have reasons, capacities, dispositions, and the like. This is much too embedded in our discourse about God and in our spiritual lives to be treated as mere appearance from a human point of view. The conceptual bank is too big to fail. Moreover, we most certainly need the notion of a divine capacity to make sense of such divine actions as creation and incarnation. We have in these and many other cases the possibility that God may or may not exercise a particular capacity. God is free to create or not to create.²⁰ To use the technical terms on offer, God has the potential to perform these actions but is free not to exercise that potential. To ²⁰ Dolezal is well aware that the problem of freedom is an acute one for divine simplicity. See Dolezal, God without Parts, chapter 7.

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think of God in terms of Pure Act cannot allow for this possibility in that the claim is that there are no potentialities in God. Again, close attention to the particularities of divine action, in this case the explanations for divine actions, turns out to be incompatible with the Thomistic story. I have no illusions that any of these considerations are likely to be construed as an insuperable problem for those committed to the doctrines under review here. The impasse involved deserves consideration as we move to the end of this chapter. What may well be at stake in the discussion is not just radically different intuitions about complex philosophical theses, but different conceptions of the nature of theology and different views as to the place of metaphysics within theology. Thus, Thomists generally show next to no interest in the historical revolution that has radically altered the way we may handle the biblical text. With Thomas they tend to start with the biblical text as given directly by divine inspiration and then simply move from that to various philosophical conclusions. Thus, they read that God is love in 1 John 4:8 and immediately take this as a statement about the ontological identification of love with God. Or they appeal to Exodus 3:14 where we are told that God speaks to Moses as “I am that I am” and then proceed to see this as a proof text for taking God ontologically to be Pure Act. Beyond that, if they are conservative Protestants, they may construct an elaborate vision of biblical theology, which in turn will be identified as systematic theology, and thereafter they will argue that various metaphysical doctrines, say, simplicity, are required to make sense of the moves made in systematic theology. On the Catholic side, the tendency is to take on board a perfect-being vision of theology and proceed to work out the consequences of this vision for, say, divine impassibility. My own approach is much more deflationary in that I do not share the account of biblical authority in play. Nor am I confident that either the biblical texts or human ingenuity can secure any kind of well-grounded biblical theology, as much as work under these auspices is often extremely valuable. With respect to perfectbeing theology, it is surely an important point of entry to serious thought about God, but it assumes a capacity for understanding divine perfection that leaves me highly skeptical. I am less confident about arriving at inferences from the notion of divine perfection than I am at arriving at claims about God from below by immersion in the divine actions given in the canonical tradition of the church. We can, of course, add any number of other elements that show up in the full package, like doctrines of unconditional predestination, or accounts of grace and freedom, that I find thoroughly implausible. It is not always easy to know the deeper formation and grounding which may lie behind the intuitions that are in play. For example, once doubts crop up about the viability of the whole enterprise, it is not difficult to find historical reasons why such doctrines as simplicity, pure act, and impassibility became so central within Christian theology. Thus, it is common knowledge that there is a deep borrowing

 ,  ,   

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from the Greek philosophical tradition represented by neo-Platonism and this strikes one as the imposition of alien philosophical categories that are likely to distort the central doctrines of the faith. This is not an example of the genetic fallacy because it presupposes that one has good reason to reject the philosophy on offer; finding a historical source in the ancient world then confirms in a soft but genuine sense that the doubts that generated the rejection should be taken more seriously than otherwise. For those already convinced about divine simplicity, this soft move will carry no weight; the relation to similar claims within Greek philosophy will be seen as a gift of common grace. I can approach the issue of the status of the metaphysical doctrines in play from another angle. In the introduction to his fine study Dolezal makes the following comment: Historically the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) has been regarded as indispensable for establishing the sufficient ontological condition for the divine absoluteness . . . It is the contention of this study that to forfeit the doctrine of divine simplicity is to jettison the requisite ontological framework for divine absoluteness. The classical doctrine of simplicity, as espoused by both traditional Thomists and Reformed Scholastics, famously holds the maxim that there is nothing in God that is not God. If there were, that is, if God were not ontologically identical with all that is in him, then something other than God himself would be needed to account for his existence, essence, and attributes. But nothing that is not God can sufficiently account for God. He exists in all his perfection entirely in and through himself.²¹

This is an extremely interesting observation because it makes clear the basic structure of the vision in play. It isolates one property of God, “absoluteness,” derived from the Westminster Confession of Faith, and then seeks by way of a transcendental argument to establish a host of other properties. The argument involves a quest for an ultimate explanation that will provide a ground for the central claims about God that are advanced. The term “God,” in fact, is constructed by way of stipulation as essentially that which will be the “absolute,” namely that beyond which there cannot be any other explanation. It is surely fair to say that fundamental strategy at this stage has become philosophical to the core. The project is driven in part by a vision of divine perfection worked out according to a version of contemplative theology that eschews the work of biblical theology; but it depends crucially on a vision of perfection worked out philosophically. Dolezal is so sure of his ground at this point that he claims that “[t]heistic

²¹ Ibid., xvii.

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mutualism, when consistently developed, will burn through a whole host of divine attributes traditionally confessed of God.”²² I prefer a much more relaxed approach to any metaphysical proposal that is developed to provide illumination for puzzles evoked by the deep faith of the church. I am committed to a version of metaphysical pluralism at this level. As already indicated, what I am calling agentism is such a metaphysical option. It represents an alternative research agenda to that found in classical theism. We begin first with the Gospel, then initiation into the Kingdom of God and the church, and then proceed to a deflationary vision of systematic theology. In the course of this work we inevitably make various philosophical assumptions, including metaphysical assumptions. These need to be taken up and explored with care. However, they are down the line from the work of theology proper and need to be considered adiaphora rather than central elements in the Christian faith. That said there are plenty of issues that need attention in the agenda I am seeking to identify and advance. First, there is need for significant work on thinking though the range of biblical texts which speak of divine action, especially those that clearly challenge any vision of divine action that takes scripture seriously. The obvious example is the remarkable material which shows up in Exodus 32–4, which speaks of God changing his mind after the remonstrations of Moses. It is much too easy to dismiss this material as a mere accommodation to our limited human perspective. More generally there are those texts which speak of divine repentance and which attribute universal scope to the action of God, notably, Romans 11:36. Think of what is involved in this translation: “Source, Guide, and Goal of all that is—to him be glory for ever!” Such work does not depend on ignoring the complicated results of historical investigation; on the contrary, it needs to take such work seriously rather than looking for proof texts which are taken as obvious premises for arguments, as one finds in the medieval tradition and in some contemporary evangelical circles.²³ Second, we need to pursue current efforts by philosophers to engage the biblical material with a view to reflecting on them with an eye on their epistemological, metaphysical, and political features. This is at present very underdeveloped; but there are happy signs on the horizon. Jon Levison’s fine review of the work of Kenneth Seeskin²⁴ is an outstanding example of the kind of collaboration that

²² Ibid., 35. Theistic mutualism covers a family of positions committed to the rejection of divine simplicity and to securing what we might call a more illuminating account of the divine-creationhuman relation than that favored by Dolezal. I make no claim to embracing any of the versions of theistic mutualism often insightfully criticized by Dolezal in this fine polemical study. ²³ The work of Terence Fretheim is especially significant. See his Exodus: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010). ²⁴ Kenneth Seeskin, Thinking about the Torah: A Philosopher Reads the Bible (Lincoln, NE: The University of Nebraska Press, 2016).

 ,  ,   

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could prove fruitful.²⁵ The work in this instance can begin from the side of philosophy rather than strict exegetical and historical work. Third, it is clear that while there is much in common between the Eastern and Western branches of Christendom, we have not sufficiently wrestled with the potential differences between the East and West. The obvious contrast between Aquinas and Palamas on divine agency makes this abundantly clear. David Bradshaw has done exceptionally important pioneering work in this domain.²⁶ So, there is much work to be done on the historical front. I suspect that we are not bound by the standard position that has dominated the airwaves for centuries. The alternatives to this option are not restricted to current expositions of Process theology and Open theism. Fourth, there is fresh theological work on how to deal with the doctrine of appropriations as it has been applied to the doctrine of the Trinity. One way to put the central question is as follows: How do we secure the unity of divine action once we acknowledge, say, that the divine action of incarnation is predicated of the Son but not of the Father and the Spirit? For an extremely important contribution see the work of Adonis Vidu.²⁷ Fifth, and finally, much still needs to be done to think through the articulation and defense of the concept of agent causation, its contours, and its implications, say, for debates about freedom and determinism. In this there are important historical and normative claims that require attention. Timothy O’Connor has done sterling work recently in this domain.²⁸ Looking outside the analytic tradition, the work of Maurice Blondel is exceptionally insightful.²⁹ So, I return to my opening comment. The use of agent causation to spell out the metaphysics of divine agency is both an exciting and precarious enterprise. It naturally swells into a significant research agenda that is not for the faint of heart. I shall now take up a more material theological element within it by tackling the long-standing problem of grace and freedom in the doctrine of salvation. In the chapter beyond that I shall attempt to provide a rich if startling account of particular providence. ²⁵ Jon D. Levison, “Is the Torah a Work of Philosophy?” Mosaic (January 3, 2017). While faulting Seeskin in various ways, Levinson calls not for less philosophical engagement with scripture but for better philosophical engagement. I could not agree more. ²⁶ It would be fascinating to look at Gregory of Palamas’s distinction between essence and energies in the Godhead and its reception across the centuries. On the last issue there is a fine point of entry in David Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chapter 9. ²⁷ Adonis Vidu, The Same God Who Works All Things: An Exposition and Defense of the Doctrine of Inseparable Operations (Eerdmans, MI: Eerdmans, 2021). ²⁸ See, for example, his Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Earlier volumes of note are the following: R. G. Collingwood, An Essay in Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940); D. Gasking, “Causation and Recipes,” Mind (1955): 479–87; J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); G. H. von Wright, Causality and Determinism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975). ²⁹ Maurice Blondel, Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).

3 Divine Action, Grace, and Human Agency Alan Donagan, following the lead of J. L. Austin, was one of the most astute exponents of agent causation in the twentieth century.¹ Late in his career he wrote a provocative paper asking why some folks come to accept the truths of the Nicene Creed. Part of his answer addresses the historical reliability of the New Testament; in pursuing this he argues against the standard skeptical reasoning he had himself once embraced. He then adds this interesting comment. When they [converts from pre-Christian and post-Christian cultures] learn what Christianity teaches, they judge it, if true, to be a remedy for their condition. In comparing it with the alternatives, their verdict is, like Peter’s when Jesus asked him, “Will you also go away?” “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life” (John 6:67–68). Still a fiction may be unrivaled and still a fiction. The rest of the answer is that they judge, and reasonably judge, that, from the Pentecost after they allegedly occurred, the Apostles taught the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus. Unless they were insanely deluded, the Apostles were in a position to know the facts, and either reported them truthfully or lied. What they reported is from a contemporary naturalist point of view incredible. Yet from a contemporary naturalist point of view much that we all reasonably believe about ourselves is unexplained, and the misery of the condition in which serious inquirers take themselves to be would be no remedy. In this situation, faith may seem to inquirers possible, and not irrational. And then, by some means they do not understand but which the church teaches is the operation of grace, it may become actual.²

Donagan’s final comment on grace is entirely salutary. The whole quotation serves as an apt bridge into the current chapter in that anyone committed to a robust role for human agency runs head on into the long-standing problem of grace and freedom in theology. If we allow any room for human action, then we seem to be committed to justification by works. We can then claim credit and merit before ¹ See Alan Donagan, Choice: The Essential Element in Human Action (Abingdon: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987). For the relevant source in J. L. Austin, see Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in Philosophical Papers, 3rd ed., eds. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 175–204. ² Alan Donagan, “Can Anyone in a Post-Christian Culture Rationally Believe the Nicene Creed?” in Reflections on Philosophy and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 32. Emphasis mine.

Divine Agency and Divine Action Volume IV: A Theological and Philosophical Agenda. William J. Abraham, Oxford University Press (2021). © William J. Abraham. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786535.003.0004

 , ,   

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God. If salvation is all of grace and does not allow for a serious role for human action, then it seems we are committed to a doctrine of divine determinism. In this chapter, I plan to throw light on this problem by deploying some elementary considerations about causation as it relates to human and divine action.³ The debate about the tension between grace and freedom did not really take off until the late fourth century. It was dominated initially by the dispute between Pelagius and Augustine even though it was joined by a network of other theologians who over time shaped the official teaching of the church that later became normative. Like most other debates, the discussion became entangled in neighboring disputes related to sin, ascetism, infant baptism, the authority of the bishop of Rome, predestination, and cultural differences between East and West. In the end the various synods and councils which took up the issue settled for a relatively modest set of conclusions compared to those that had been more fully worked out by Augustine. It is the Second Council of Orange (529) that provides the relevant affirmations. It is very clear that the Council seeks to hold together a firm commitment to the need for divine assistance from beginning to end in salvation and a resolute vision of human freedom. Canons 6 and 7 give us a felicitous rendering of what is at stake. Canon 6. If anyone says that mercy is divinely conferred upon us when, without God’s grace, we believe, will, strive, labor, pray, keep watch, endeavor, request, seek, knock, but does not confess that it is through the infusion and inspiration of the Holy Spirit that we believe, will, or are able to do those things that are required; or if anyone subordinates the help of grace to humility or human obedience and does not admit that it is the very gift of grace that makes us obedient and humble, one contradicts the apostle, who says: “What have you that you did not receive?” [1 Cor 4:7]; and also: “By the grace of God I am what I am” [1 Cor 15:10]. Canon 7. If anyone asserts that to be able by one’s own natural strength to think as is required or choose anything towards one’s eternal salvation or to assent to the saving message of the Gospel without the illumination and inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who gives to all ease and joy in assenting to the truth and believing, one is deceived by the heretical spirit and does not understand the word said by God in the Gospel: “Apart from me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5) or the [word] of the apostle: “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our sufficiency is in God” (2 Cor 3:5).⁴

³ In doing so I shall be drawing extensively on the work of John R. Lucas, who made the crucial breakthrough needed to get us beyond the impasse that has bedeviled the debate for centuries. ⁴ Heinrich Denzinger, Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2012), 136.

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I noted that these affirmations are relatively modest. For that very reason they have at times been pressed into service to defend much more robust claims about divine grace that leave the reader skeptical about the reality of genuine human action in response to grace. Indeed, it is relatively easy to become entangled in a host of distinctions about grace that make the head spin. So, we hear of uncreated and created grace, of prevenient grace, of justifying grace, of sanctifying grace, of persevering grace, of habitual grace, of actual grace, of special graces, of efficacious grace, of sufficient grace, and so on. As a result, little or no attention is given to the actual human actions in terms of the human agents involved. It is pleasing to see the canons begin to identify these actions with some care. Thus, they speak of believing, willing, striving, laboring, praying, keeping watch, endeavoring, requesting, seeking, knocking, thinking, choosing, and assenting. As to divine action we hear of infusion and inspiration, both of which are attributed to the Holy Spirit. We could also say that these affirmations are minimalist. Even read along with the rest of the canons of the Council of Orange, they leave a host of questions unanswered. Hence, there is plenty of room for elaboration, and once that process begins we quickly land ourselves back in the thicket of doctrines, say, of sin, baptism, and predestination that were in the neighborhood in the original discussions that first gave rise to this decision. Moreover, it is not at all clear what to make of such notions as infusion and inspiration, the crucial verbs that mark out the divine role in salvation here. As a result, the debate very quickly returns to the issues marked out by Augustine, picked up by Aquinas, and continued on into the present. It is clear that virtually all protagonists want to preserve important affirmations about both divine action and human action as these relate to salvation. Thus, we want to say that we are saved by grace alone; and we want to say that in some sense salvation does not take place without human consent. Beyond this, protagonists want to preserve that salvation is a gift, that it is by grace alone that God desires the salvation of all, and that human agents can in no way take credit for any role that they play by way of response. If need be, we should give up on the role of human action in order to preserve a robust doctrine of grace. This is a rare development in the tradition, one that is associated with Luther, who dismissed the will as hopelessly enslaved and in bondage. It has been much more common to allow for a place for human action but then work out a sophisticated vision of determinism which is compatible with human freedom. One other dimension which has not received the attention it deserves is the worry that the deliberate withholding of divine grace casts serious doubt on the goodness of God. On my account it will come as no surprise that I aim to look upon God and human agents in terms of agent causation. Thus, I am construing God as an agent who has certain powers and capacities that may or may not be exercised in the process of salvation. God makes genuine decisions, say, to save by way of grace

 , ,   

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and faith rather than works; these decisions represent the love, mercy, and generosity of God towards sinners. The actions that God performs reflect these capacities and dispositions. They involve a whole network of specific actions including revelation, incarnation, atonement, and the working of the Holy Spirit in our hearts and minds. They also involve those mediating actions that concern the work of God through his servants in the writing of scripture, in the proclamation of the Gospel, in the invitation to respond, in the human actions that are needed to administer the sacraments, and so on. God can and does perform all these actions because God is an enduring substance with the relevant powers to perform them. To speak of the grace of God, then, is a way of capturing the beauty and bounty of these divine actions; they display the generosity and power of God to save sinners and are therefore identified as a matter of the grace of God. The grace of God is shorthand for speaking of the generosity and power of God at work in salvation. Given such a vision of grace we can make sense of the language of “infusion” and “inspiration.” “Infusion” is represented by those divine actions that God performs in our hearts and minds, drawing us, speaking to us in our hearts, convicting us of sin, bearing witness inwardly to his love displayed in Christ, helping us think through the issues, fostering proper understanding of ourselves and the Gospel, and the like.⁵ “Inspiration” is a polymorphous act wherein one agent inspires another in, with, and through other specific acts that he or she performs. Likewise, God inspires us to do things way beyond our normal capacities by performing a host of other specific actions. These acts can be the external acts performed by God in history, by the saints, in the preaching of the Gospel, in the invitation to repent, and the like; or they can be the inward acts of the kind I identified under the banner of “infusion.” I am also construing human agents in terms of agent causation. Thus, I am thinking of human agents in terms of enduring substances who have certain capacities and powers. Thus, human agents when it comes to salvation make genuine decisions and they engage in a network of genuine actions. In standard cases of conversion, I take the following actions to be especially significant. First, the convert has to hear and pay attention to the message of the Gospel. This involves serious effort to understand what it is being proclaimed and its significance for his or her life. This in turn may also involve dealing with various objections, as is clear from the paper by Donagan who works his way through the standard objections against Christianity that he had picked up in his education across the years. It may also involve dealing with environmental factors like opposition from family, cultural hostility to Christianity, and the negative effects ⁵ “Infusion” in Aquinas takes its cue from Romans 5:5: “Such a hope is no mockery, because God’s love has flooded our inmost heart through the Holy Spirit he has given us” (NEB). I am grateful to Jared Brandt for bringing this to my attention.

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of experience at the hands of the church. The details here are person-relative; the crucial point is that faith comes by hearing, and hearing involves paying serious attention to what is proclaimed either in oral or written form. Second, the convert has to connect the message intellectually with a sense of need that is not met elsewhere and come to understand that this need is truly met in coming to Christ. This sense of need and its resolution can be identified in a variety of ways. How this is played in real life is once again person-relative. However, working through to a minimal understanding involves coming to see that in broad terms the problem of sin and alienation from God is solved by coming to faith in Christ. Third, it is no accident that we find in the neighborhood that the convert has to repent and confess Jesus as Lord and Savior. If there is opportunity, unlike the thief on the cross, then the convert will show up for baptism, take on board the requirements of discipleship, become a member of the church, and begin a life of participation in the sacraments and practices of the church. Fourth, the convert will commit to taking up the cross and living a life of self-denial. This will involve struggling with sin, bearing the public cost of following Christ, and whatever else fits the description of self-denial. Why should we bother with this kind of catalogue of actions? For at least two reasons. First, it is wholly absurd to reduce these actions to mere passivity or consent on the part of the human agent. These are robust actions; one can readily imagine a person not just hesitating to perform these actions, or even actively resisting them, but out and out refusing to do them. Some people clearly do and are not afraid to say so. These actions involve real decisions all down the line. These are not events which happen and then can be merely passively accepted or even intentionally received by way of positive consent; they are non-trivial, indeed highly momentous, actions involving the exercise of human powers and capacities. Second, it makes no sense to say that these are actions that are performed by God. It is not God who brings about the hearing of the Gospel, or who thinks through how the message matches an identified need, or who repents and confesses that Jesus is Savior and Lord, or who commits to live a life of self-denial. It is the human agent who performs these actions. Nor does it make sense to say that God performs part of these varied actions and the human agents the other part, like two men carrying a table across a room together. The actions are brought about by the human agent; it is the human agent who is the author and none other. Nor does it make sense to say by means of some sort of theory of noncompetitive double agency that the action is wholly an act of the human agent and wholly an act of God. To take but one example, God does not perform here an act of repentance. In fact, it is absurd to even think of this. It is hard to see how this observation can be blocked. The only act under review is that of repentance; according to this double-agency theory, it is this act that must be wholly an act of

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God; so the act of repentance must be wholly an act of God; there are no other actions in play at this point; but this is simply absurd. Moreover, whatever act we choose we will find that, given the double causality involved, the specified act is overdetermined. We might get around this by claiming that some kind of special causality is involved here, say, a unique kind of causality that applies only to God. But, if this is the case, we have gone off into causal la-la land and we should refuse to climb into that metaphysical bus. Equally, it is absurd to think of the situation where we can invoke a distinction between primary and secondary causation. It is not like the situation where Murphy takes, say, a stick and moves a stone. In cases of primary and secondary causation, we can say both that Murphy moves the stone and that the stick moves the stone. Human agents are not to be confused at this point with material objects like sticks; unlike sticks and stones, they are causal agents with capacities and powers that they may or may not exercise. So, the primary/secondary causation schema offers no help whatsoever. Of course, we can try to adjust the primary/ secondary distinction and claim that in the case of human actions the agency of God is carried out in a way that somehow respects the genuine agency of the human agent. Divine causation is so transcendent that it can bring it about that human agents perform actions freely. Once again, I propose we should refuse to climb on the metaphysical bus. It now looks as if I have boarded a theological bus that is quickly going to stall once it starts out on its journey afresh. In enumerating the relevant human actions involved in salvation I have given a highly significant role to the human agent in salvation. So, it will be said, I have abandoned any serious doctrine of sin, have caved in to a doctrine of justification by works, and have now opened the door for the human agent to take credit for salvation. Perhaps worse still, I have to set aside all those wonderful biblical texts that attribute salvation exclusively to God. “What have you that you did not receive?” asks Paul. We know the answer: we have nothing that we did not receive. And John hammers home the message: “Apart from me you can do nothing.” Let’s keep our nerve at this point. It is true that I have not adopted a textual Augustinian doctrine of sin. There is no commitment to a literal Adam; no doctrine which says that our first parents were not able to do good in their natural state and thus needed a supernatural gift of grace in order to do any good act; no doctrine of immediate physical as opposed to spiritual death when they fell into sin; no doctrine of original guilt because we were all somehow present in Adam as their federal head, participating in his original sin; no doctrine of the transmission of sin by means of the concupiscence involved in the sexual act of procreation; and no doctrine of the transmission of original guilt passed on from one generation to another. However, there is also no commitment to the hopelessly thin doctrine of sin and the doctrine of divine assistance by instruction that we rightly associate with Pelagius, who was roundly defeated by Augustine and his merry band of

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followers across the ages. To be sure, if we stipulate that the Augustinian doctrine of original sin is taken in the broad sense now common in theological circles, there is no problem, even though, if we are limited to slogans, I much prefer the more deflationary notion of ancestral sin. As I argued in an earlier volume, I am committed to a deep, multifaceted vision of sin and its effects. Within this I stand with Augustine and the tradition in deploying a dense reading of the early narratives in Genesis as one very effective way to articulating what is at stake. Indeed, I hold that Augustine and the tradition do not go deep enough in sounding the depths of sin, for the bottom of that murky pool is represented by demon possession, a topic I shall take up in a separate chapter. Now it looks as if my theological bus has crashed ignominiously once it turned round the corner for home, in that I have committed to a very robust doctrine of sin which is the presupposition for the doctrine of grace and the challenge it poses to any robust account of human action in salvation. Moreover, I have given no account of how to handle those startling comments of Paul and John noted now twice in this chapter. It is precisely at this point that we need to take a second look at the language of causation and how it should be understood when we attribute salvation to grace rather than works. There are many sources I could turn to at this point but this comment by David Daube can get us started in the right direction. “Whodunit” is the question asked when a crime has been committed and the identity of the criminal is unknown. But the question may arise where the identity is known and all other facts are clear. Suppose all the archives pertaining to the First and Second World Wars are open and we ask: who caused the wars? Or, I am run over and killed by a skidding car. Is it the driver who causes my death, or the manufacture of the tires that were defective, or the person who asked me to lunch, but for whom I should not have been there? If my aunt on hearing the news gets a temperature, is wrongly treated, and dies, who or what has caused her death? We confront the problem of causation.⁶

There are, of course, many problems related to causation, but Daube has highlighted a crucial feature that has long been recognized but which he is happy to leave for others to sort out. John Stuart Mill was fully aware of the issue. Thus H. L. A. Hart and A. M. Honoré in their classical study of causation in the law, note that one element in Mill’s account of causality can be summarized in this way. Mill distinguished a ‘philosophical’ or ‘scientific’ notion of cause from ‘the common notion’. According to the former only the whole set of conditions ⁶ David Daube, The Deed and the Doer in the Bible, vol. 1 (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008), 3.

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jointly sufficient for the production of the effect is the cause, whereas it is characteristic of the latter that one of these is ‘selected’ or ‘singled out’ as the cause, though it is in fact related to the effect in precisely the same way as the other set of constituents in the set. The selection is made on principles which vary with the context and purpose of the particular causal statement.⁷

It is precisely this common notion of “cause” and its contrasting alternative that we need to heed in thinking through how to dissolve the tension between claims about grace and freedom. Happily, the crucial application has already been laid out with characteristic clarity by J. R. Lucas.⁸ I shall state it here mostly in my own words. The goal is to show that we can stand by the central claims of the Council of Orange and avoid the pitfalls which arise if we ignore the distinction between the two senses of “cause” that are now before us. When we speak of God as the cause of our salvation it is very tempting to think of cause here in the all-embracing sense of God providing all the preceding conditions which together are necessary and sufficient to explain what happens when we come to faith. God, and God alone, we say, is the cause of our salvation. We readily fit the relevant texts of scripture that come to mind into this framework. What have we that we did not receive? Nothing. Who gets the credit for our salvation? God, and God alone, has acted for his own glory and honor. How are we justified before God? Not by human actions, lest anyone should boast. Can we claim credit for what has been done? Of course not, for nothing in my hands I bring, simply to the cross I cling. Can we claim merit? No, for any merit there is belongs to God alone. Hence the concept of grace, a placeholder for the catalogue of mighty acts done by God out of generosity and mercy, becomes the central concept in a vision of causation where human action cannot but be excluded. This follows if we take cause in terms of the necessary and sufficient conditions of salvation. We then are forced to do what we can to find room for human action and develop the metaphysical resources to make the role of human agents seem plausible. The mistake is that we have ignored the alternative conception of causation that is available to us and lying in plain sight. On the alternative, we often select or pick out one of the set of causes involved and insist that this is “the cause” of what happened. Without ignoring the other factors involved, we make our selection “on principles which vary with the context and purpose of the particular causal statement.” This is precisely what is happening when we pick out God and his grace as the sole cause of our salvation. We do so because, given all that God does ⁷ H. L. A. Hart and A. M. Honoré, Causation in the Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 20. Emphasis mine. The authors draw attention to the difficulties that Mill had in integrating this proposal into the other elements in his account of causation but these need not detain us here. ⁸ J. R. Lucas, “Freedom and Grace,” in Freedom and Grace: Essays (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976), 1–15.

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for our salvation, it is obviously the case that he is, in the relevant sense, the cause of our salvation. It is God who deserves our thanks and praise. To make our own actions the cause of our salvation is silly and morally otiose. As we grow in understanding of how deep the problem of sin runs, this practice becomes all the more appropriate. “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” asks Paul. He rightly replies: “Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” However, the indicatives he uses to describe the mighty acts of God in our salvation in no way undermine the host of imperatives that litter his correspondence. Once we note the common concept of causation introduced here, there is no longer some grand problem to be solved. Lucas helps us to take this analysis further by noting that converts often feel as if they have no choice at all in their salvation. They have been hunted down by the hound of heaven until they relent and give in to the pressure from divine grace. Moreover, conversions do indeed seem to the subject to be sudden, out of the blue, totally surprising.⁹ However, even in these cases there are all sorts of unseen causal factors that come into play; what sometimes happens is a massive restructuring of the convert’s cognitive horizon due to realignment of desires, beliefs, and actions. For many, however, this kind of story does not fit at all. Some people have no sense of seeking for or being sought by God, because they have always known him and always trusted him: people brought up from their infancy as Christians, who have grown up in faith, and though they have had their temptations and their failures, have never had serious doubts, and never been separated from the body of Christ. Such people cannot know the persistent pressure of God’s will, because they have not resisted it enough.¹⁰

Moreover, it is very tempting for such folks to take their own actions as the crucial cause of their salvation. The old Adam in us will lose no opportunity of congratulating himself on his spiritual excellence in saying Yes, where the stiff-necked had refused to signify assent: the weakest link takes credit for not actually breaking, while the story of God’s redemption is taken as read.¹¹ Lucas also nicely captures how the logic of agent causation enters the picture. If men have free-will, then complete explanations of these their decisions cannot be given. This does not mean, as some philosophers seem to have persuaded themselves, that free decisions are arbitrary. If we want to know why a man decided as he did, we can give reasons, so that his actions are not arbitrary.

⁹ This was one reason why Wesley took Calvinism so seriously as an option. ¹⁰ Lucas, “Freedom and Grace,” 8. ¹¹ Ibid., 11.

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But what we cannot give is the reason why he is in fact reasonable, and decides in favour of the most reasonable rather than some other course. Reasons by themselves do not—could not—necessitate a man’s decision in any determinist sense, nor do they afford the type of complete explanation we are tempted to demand . . . And this, the fundamental fact of freedom, seems mysterious. Two men in the field, one shall be taken and one left. It is a mystery. Two people may have the Gospel preached to them in the same way, and have the same opportunities of hearing God’s call for each, and one may harken and the other harden his heart. We ask ‘Why?’ No answer can be given except that one decided to and the other did not. This is the point where there has to be an end of answering.¹²

Yet some remain intellectually dissatisfied. So, they press on and ask why the person chose as he or she did. Why were they reasonable and why did they act on the reasons that informed their decision to say yes or no? Puzzled, they reach for a further answer: “I suppose I must have been made that way.” And the Christian, having to hand the elastic concept of grace, and being predisposed to ascribe everything to the Almighty, goes further and says, ‘God made me the sort of person who would do this’ or simply ‘God, by grace, made me do it’. But this is wrong . . . That we can come to know God and love him, through the rationality with which he endowed us, through the saving actions of his Son and the activity of the Church, and through the particular counsel and support vouchsafed by the Holy Spirit on various occasions, are all matters of grace, marks of divine favour, for which we owe no thanks to ourselves at all, but to God only: but the final decision, the final right of refusal, he has vested in us, and we, not God, are answerable for the answer we return.¹³

None of this will satisfy the strict Augustinian.¹⁴ Paul Helm suggests we need a stronger account of conversion than we are proposing at this point. The convert is not in some neutral position where they can say yes or no as they please. “Perhaps the position is more serious than that, not a position of neutrality, but of indifference or hostility, not of being able to say either Yea or Nay but of invariably saying Nay until inclined by grace to say Yea.”¹⁵ This is an important objection because it rightly takes much more seriously than Lucas does the situation of the sinner before God. We do not live in neutral territory as if our spiritual lives were a matter of weighing up the rational considerations for and against the Gospel. There are deeper considerations about human nature that have to be taken seriously.

¹² Ibid., 13–14. ¹³ Ibid., 14–15. ¹⁴ See Paul Helm, “Grace and Causation,” Scottish Journal of Theology 32 (1979): 101–12. ¹⁵ Ibid. 112. Emphasis mine.

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Suppose Seamus has been wrestling with the call of the Gospel, has overcome all the factors which stand in the way of his saying yes, and is ready to repent, confess Jesus as Savior and Lord, be baptized, and take on the challenge of bearing the cross for Christ’s sake. Let’s agree that this has involved a host of divine actions, external and internal, as well as a host of person-relative human actions. He is now on the brink of saying yes. How should we describe this situation? Let’s think of the situation in terms of Seamus’s capacity to say yes or no. So, we have before us now a capacity. What remains at this critical juncture is the exercise of that capacity. The crucial question is this: Does Seamus have the capacity to say yes? Theologians generally have no difficulty in saying that he has the capacity to say no, but they hesitate to say he has the capacity to say yes. Prima facie, we surely want to say that having the capacity to do “x” means that Seamus can indeed now exercise that capacity. Seamus is not a knife which has the capacity to cut the bread, but the capacity is not realized unless the person holding the knife uses it to cut the bread. Seamus is not merely a material object but a genuine agent with various causal powers. The capacity of the knife is merely realized; the capacity of the knife holder is exercised. So, the more natural thing to say is that having a capacity in the human case means precisely that the agent can exercise that capacity. If, other things being equal, a person is not able to exercise a capacity, we withdraw the claim that he had the relevant capacity. This is how I am tempted initially to assess the current case. Seamus does look as if he has the capacity to say yes. He does not need to wait for some extra act of grace, say, an act of divine concurrence, to do so; he needs to exercise his agency and say yes. However, this is too simple. Surely, we can add that God can and will provide assistance where needed in exercising this capacity; this applies because, given the effects of sin, it is not always easy to exercise this capacity. This is, I think, what Helm wishes to preserve. Notice how he describes the action of divine grace. He says that we will unvaryingly say nay “until inclined by grace to say Yea.” This is absolutely crucial. The relevant divine action is not “determined to say Yea” or “made to say Yea.” It is the much weaker notion of “inclining to say yea” that he deploys. This is all that is needed to secure the position adopted here. So, we can agree with Paul: “You must work out your own salvation in fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you, inspiring both the will and the deed, for his own chosen purpose.”¹⁶ We can accurately fill out the relevant assistance in various ways in terms, say, of inclining or inspiring. But providing assistance in terms of inclining and inspiring is not determining, so we can keep intact the genuine freedom of the human agent. There is a line here that needs to be preserved. Interestingly, it is one that Augustine upholds.

¹⁶ Philippians 2:13 (NEB).

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Someone will say to me: “So we are directed and do not direct; we are acted on and do not act.” My reply is: You both direct and are directed; you act and are acted on; and you direct your life well when you are directed by that which is good. For the Spirit of God who acts on you is helping you in your acting. The very word ‘helper’ shows that you are an agent.¹⁷

However, I suspect that many actually cross over the line between assisting and determining and treat the specific divine action involved as making it certain and infallible that Seamus will say yes. In these circumstances those who say no are in the unfortunate condition of not being subject to the relevant act of concurrence. God simply withholds this act of grace. Many take this line in order to avoid the doctrine of double, unconditional predestination to be found in Calvin. God does not intentionally predestine the damned to eternal judgment; he simply passes them by and refrains from providing the crucial additional, concurrent act that would ensure their salvation. The obvious worry that crops up now is the shadow this casts on the moral character of God and on the widely accepted proposition that God desires all to be saved. We can capture this worry in terms of the framework developed here. Divine acts of omission rather than divine acts of deliberate rejection become the cause of the fate of the damned. This in turn raises the fascinating metaphysical possibility that acts of omission are causes.¹⁸ We are also driven to pursue further questions about how damnation was due to the voluntary acts of the sinner rather than to the divine act of omission. Should we consider the voluntary acts of the sinner the cause of their damnation? These are issues that I leave aside here even though my initial intuitions are that acts of omission can indeed be causes and that the notion of voluntary action in play is not enough to secure human responsibility. Thus, I think that this worry deserves further attention in order to eliminate the shadow that is cast on the character of God once we appeal to divine acts of omission.¹⁹ It is very tempting at this point in our reflections to stop the bus and head home for the evening. The goal of our journey has been reached in that I have offered a way to resolve the long-standing tension if not contradiction between grace and freedom. I have provided a way to make deep sense of the deftly stated affirmations of the Council of Orange where we can champion the reality of both divine grace and human action in an entirely natural way. We have done this by drawing attention to features of causation that are readily missed and that were initially ¹⁷ Augustine, Sermon 156.9.9–13 (on Romans 8:13–15) [PL 38, 854–7], quoted in Maurice Wiles and Mark Santer, eds., Documents in Early Christian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 123. ¹⁸ For a challenge to this option see Helen Beebee, “Causing and Nothingness,” in J. Collins, N. Hall, and L. A. Paul, eds., Causation and Counterfactuals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 291–308. ¹⁹ This worry was undoubtedly one reason why John Wesley was such an aggressive theological opponent of Calvinism and why he tended to see that prevenient grace was universal in its range and effect.

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brought to light by the seminal work of J. R. Lucas. We have also articulated the issues in such a way that allow us to repeat the fundamental meaning of agent causation. It is, however, fitting to conclude by drawing attention to the significance of the proposal as a whole. First, we are now in a position to provide a much more natural home in our theology for a robust emphasis on human agency and human action in our relationship with God. We no longer have to keep looking over our shoulders worried that human action takes away from the glory and honor due to God for all he has done for our salvation. The host of imperatives that show up in the scriptures are not secondary; they really matter. There is no need any longer to apologize for an activist vision of Christian discipleship. Pelagius was right about the importance of appropriate exhortation in his account of the moral life. Second, it is a conceptual error to look upon such actions as somehow securing the love and mercy of God for us as found in standard doctrines of worksrighteousness. The debate about works-righteousness was originally one narrow option in which folks appealed to works of the law in order to secure their relationship with God. This was clearly the problem that confronted Paul from within certain narrow circles of first-century Judaism. It may well have been dear to his own heart before his Damascus Road experience. It was not, however, the mainstream position within the Jewish tradition. One entered the covenant with God because of mercy; one stayed in by engaging in a whole range of significant actions. As the problem shows up in Christian circles it takes the form of appealing to works of piety and works of mercy to secure the love of God. This too is to be resolutely rejected, for it is the root of much spiritual bondage, as can be seen in the spiritual struggles of Luther and a host of Christians across space and time. However, it is absurd to say that engaging in various human actions like repentance is a work in the relevant sense. It is a response to the gracious action of God in redemption, not an effort to earn the generosity of God. Third, we can see here how conceptual work drawn from a broad conception of analytic philosophy can make a real contribution to the work of theology. This may well be one case where philosophical work can actually solve a long-standing problem in the doctrine of salvation. Initially, it may seem that it is foolish to think that something as simple as a distinction between two senses of “cause” can be this fruitful in theology. Somehow the tools used to do the work are trivial compared to the depth of the problem that has to be solved. However, we learned a century ago that the way of semantic ascent is indeed a fruitful way to tackle all sorts of problems. By the way of semantic ascent, I mean that rather than stare at the elements in the problem as if they were some kind of insuperable metaphysical mystery, we translate the problem into a problem related to the language in which it is expressed. This is not at all a trivial pursuit. Getting clear about the central concepts in philosophy and theology is critical to figuring out what the problem is

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and thus critical in arriving at a solution. Of course, the merits of this kind of approach can be exaggerated; we are not just interested in how we talk about the issue in hand; we also want to know how our talk maps on to the world in which we live, and move, and have our being. We need to move from the de dicto to the de re. So, I recognize the limits of this enterprise, even though I think that the results in this particular case are deeply illuminating. In fact, close, disciplined, demanding attention to our language in this case makes clear that we are engaged in deep metaphysical inquiry that cuts to the very core of what it is to be human. Our common conception of cause, contrasted with other conceptions of cause, requires us to take the notion of agent causation with radical seriousness. To be a human agent is something glorious and magnificent, for we are enduring agents with an astonishing array of capacities and powers which we may or may not exercise. We can see this when we stop and observe, say, a brilliant historian at work, or a brilliant musician, or a brilliant computer engineer. We can also see this when we observe everyday acts of sacrifice in the line of duty, or in spontaneous acts of kindness, or when we read a first-rate historian wrestling with a difficult topic. So, attention to central concepts like causation are nor abstract philosophical exercises; they bring home to us crucial features of our existence that we intuitively embrace but often fail to understand. This is precisely the case when we stop and ponder the tension between grace and freedom. Fourth, and finally, in the opening quotation from Alan Donagan I deliberately omitted to draw attention to a line that may at first sight seem puzzling. Donagan notes that “from a contemporary naturalist point of view there is much that we all reasonably believe about ourselves that is unexplained.”²⁰ He devotes a whole section of his paper to the challenge posed by a materialist conception of human agents, drawing on the famous debate at Oxford between C. S. Lewis and Elizabeth Anscombe. He does not resolve the acute problems that are in play, but it is very clear that he does not find standard materialist conceptions of the human agent satisfactory. In other words, he does not think that explanations in terms of material phenomena and of scientific modes of causation capture what is at stake in being an agent in the personal sense. This, no doubt, is one of the reasons why he was drawn to the idea of agent causation as a much better alternative. It is this consideration that lies behind his claim that from a contemporary naturalist point of view there is much that we all reasonably believe about ourselves that is unexplained. It is clear that he found the alternative conception of causation and agency to be much more at home in a Christian vision of human agents made in the image of God. I suspect that this was one of the reasons why he decided to become a Christian.

²⁰ Donagan, Reflections on Philosophy and Religion, 32.

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I make these observations about the significance of agent causation in order to circle back to the claim that the idea of agent causation is a minority report in much contemporary philosophy. And I additionally suggested as a matter of principle that theologians should not bet the store on any metaphysical proposal whether it be a majority or minority one. I now add two further observations. First, it may well be that the resistance to the idea of agent causation is derived from a prior commitment to the privileging of natural science in understanding the universe and ourselves within that universe. For my part I have always been more interested in the philosophical significance of historical investigation than in that of science.²¹ And I am morally certain we need the concept of agent causation to do justice to the concept of causation in history. Equally, we may well need agent causation to do justice to the concept of causation in theology. So, it is no surprise that it is a minority report in an intellectual culture where philosophers take their cue from science. Second, while the case can be made for agent causation without appeal to any version of theism, the reality of agent causation finds a natural home within Christian theology. As Irenaeus once noted: “Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his action.”²² Thus, those committed to agent causation may well find that the Christian doctrine of creation offers them greater explanatory power in understanding themselves than the options to be found in various naturalistic visions of the human person. Conversely, those who abandon the Christian faith may feel a deep sense of loss if they commit to a purely scientific worldview. The issues are far from trivial; they are spiritually momentous.

²¹ I find it interesting that both Donagan and I have spent a lot of time working through the work of R. G. Collingwood, an astute philosopher of history who was also committed to the idea of agent causation. ²² Quoted in Donagan, Reflections on Religion and Philosophy, xx.

4 Particular Providence and Divine Actions As a pietist of the lower order, let me begin with two stories from a common source that pinpoint the challenge I want to take up in this chapter. For security reasons the identity of the human agents involved will remain anonymous; however, I can vouch for the veracity of the material I am about to share. The testimony is for me unimpeachable. My goal is once again to display how attention to divine action, in this case the details of divine action, can throw light on long-standing theological problems. So, here is story one. My friend Magnus was recently invited to speak at a public meeting in a northern European city to an immigrant audience on why one should come to Christ. As he was fully launched in his presentation, a man in the audience began to heckle. Puffing arrogantly on a cigarette, he proceeded initially to deploy a series of old chestnuts familiar to many who are hostile to the Christian faith: “Where did Adam find wives for his sons?” “Do you really believe that the sun stood still [drawing on Joshua 10:12]?” “Did Jesus turn water into wine?” Given that Magnus asserted that he did indeed do this, the man added mischievously: “He could have started a profitable tavern.” Then events took a turn for the worse. At this point, [the heckler] placed his hand on his groin—an exceedingly offensive gesture . . . It was clear to me that the man’s intention was not illumination but disruption. He was there to subvert and sabotage the objectives of that gathering. I was there to foster faith and he was there to spread doubt. Who he was and how he had come into the congregation, I was not certain. Neither did I know how to stop him high-jacking the meeting. He was working hard to provoke an angry response from me. So, when he made that offensive gesture, I was grieved and felt embarrassed. I bowed my head and, in my heart, I prayed, “Father, the spirit of your adversary has come into this meeting to dishonor your holy name. It is not me who is being mocked. He is mocking you. I am only your servant trying to sow the seed of belief; he is sowing the seed of unbelief. Please help me.” As I lifted my eyes from my Bible and sternly looked at him, smugly puffing on his cigarette, he once again placed his hand on his groin as a gesture of defiance and insult. However, this time, no sooner had he done that, when suddenly a long burst of fire jetted out from between his legs. It was as though a rocket engine had been fired off from between his legs, shooting out flames. People around him leapt out of the way to avoid catching fire amidst gasps of

Divine Agency and Divine Action Volume IV: A Theological and Philosophical Agenda. William J. Abraham, Oxford University Press (2021). © William J. Abraham. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786535.003.0005

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     shock. He himself flew off his chair, and as he stood up hopping, fire was jetting out from his front and forming a pig-tail like flame from his behind. In seconds, his entire mid-section was engulfed in flames. Several of the men huddled around him and covered him with their jackets to quench the flames. He was taken to a hospital. Later we learned that apparently, the cigarette lighter in his trousers’ pocket had begun to leak. And when he put his hand on his groin, the cigarette between his fingers had ignited the lighter fluid and caused the burst of flame shooting from underneath of his legs from the opening of the cigarette lighter. It was extraordinary that his injuries were minimal.¹

Let’s for the moment take this example as a case of particular and special providence. We can contrast this with general and ordinary providence and with extra-special providence represented by miraculous intervention made visible by a violation of a law of nature. I do so because it depicts a situation where prima facie God answers a prayer in order to meet a very specific need of one of his servants yet there is no miraculous intervention, even as the divine action involved is not best captured by speaking of God merely sustaining the laws of nature and preserving human agents in being. The action of God is particular and special rather than simply generic and ordinary yet it is not miraculous in the proper sense of that term. Moreover, by providence in this instance I am assuming the following three conditions. First, there is the active power of God at work in the world; so, God is intimately involved in nature and history. Second, there is the foreknowledge of God; so, God acts taking into account what will happen up ahead. Third, God acts in order to further the good purposes of God either in judgment or in salvation; so, God acts prudently to provide for future circumstances and eventualities. For the record, I think that this was how it was interpreted by my friend Magnus even though he might not be interested in the second-order analysis I have just supplied. Thus, he rounds off his testimony in this fashion. Once we reassembled together, numerous jokes followed. Many in the audience believed that the Lord had kindled a fire under him to shut his mouth. But some dismissed what had happened as coincidence. For me there was no question who had set the pants of that discourteous, insolent scoffer on fire. I learned early on in my faith that it is a perilous and terrifying thing to ridicule the Lord or His servants since one runs the risk of becoming an object lesson of God’s sense of humor or His wrath. The Lord immediately blessed the meeting organized by my friends in Hamburg; and after the meeting several people in that audience committed their lives to Christ.²

¹ Personal communication, December 2018.

² Ibid.

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The first option represents the action involved as a miracle; the second as a mere coincidence, that is, nothing above and beyond the ordinary working of the laws of nature and human agency; the third, as the very specific action of “the Lord setting pants on fire,” that is, as an act of special provision in a situation of great need that results in part in the blessing of the meeting and the conversion of unbelievers. Aside from the delightful humor buried in this testimony, many Christians are naturally reluctant to accept this theological reading of the whole episode. It is rare to hear examples of what our ancestors used to call the “awful providence of God.” Our ancestors, however, readily saw the providential hand of God in judgment and not just in God bringing about positive good out of evil or good out of good. Furthermore, our ancestors had the theological courage to tackle the host of questions that these commitments evoked. They wrestled with the relevant issues of foreordination, predestination, divine determinism, freedom, contingency, human agency, responsibility, theodicy, causality, divine sovereignty, and divine glory that naturally came from following through on the first-order language of theology and piety. It is a mark of the richness and fecundity of contemporary theology that these issues are now back on the table.³ My aim is to zero in on one and only one dimension of the ensuing discussing, namely, can we tackle the challenge of specifying the more precise actions of God involved in cases of particular and special providence? In order to make the issue as vivid as I can I turn now to my second story. This time my friend Magnus was in northern Europe, planning to spend a day teaching the Bible in a refugee housing center. He writes: A friend of mine had offered to drive me there since it was a few hours away. Usually, before I go to these camps, I buy some fruit, some pastries, meat and bread to ensure that we will have a meal together and make the occasion more enjoyable for the refugees. In the morning, he came. As we were driving to the store, the engine light in my friend’s car came on. He said, “I don’t think it will be safe to drive this car. I have to take it to a mechanic’s shop. I will not be able to go with you. Can we postpone going today?” I explained that I didn’t have many days left. I had promised these folks to be with them and to cancel would deeply ³ Two recent collections of essays are worthy of note: Francesca Aran Murphy and Philip G. Ziegler, eds., The Providence of God (London: T&T Clark, 2009) and Paul Kjoss Helseth, William Lane Craig, Ron Highfield, and Gregory Boyd, Four Views on Divine Providence (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011). Useful earlier discussions are available in Maurice Wiles, ed., Providence (London: SPCK, 1969) and in Jacob Viner, The Role of Divine Providence in the Social Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). Charles W. Wood, The Question of Providence (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2008) and Michael J. Langford, Providence (London: SCM Press, 1981) provide useful clarification of the issues involved. Genevieve Lloyd, Providence Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) provides a fascinating cultural history related to the doctrine of providence. For a fine recent treatment see David Patterson, Divine Providence: A Polyphonic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

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     disappoint them. Therefore, I told him to take me to the grocery store and then attend to this car. I would take the train afterward. He dropped me off in front of the store and left. Once I had finished shopping, I went to the cashier to pay. As I reached in my coat pocket, I realized I did not have my wallet. I had left it next to my bed in my room. That meant I could not buy my train ticket, or bus ticket to the train station, or pay for the food I had just selected. I would have to put the food back on the shelves, walk for 30–40 minutes to the apartment to get my wallet, take the bus to the shop and then to the train station. That meant a significant delay. I was aggravated with myself. I apologized to the cashier and told her that I had forgotten my wallet. I offered to put the things back on the shelves. As I turned around with my cart, a tall man with white hair and striking, big blue eyes was standing right behind me. He said, “Will you allow me to pay?” I profusely thanked him and said, “I have forgotten my wallet. I need to go to my apartment and to get it since I also need money for other things this morning.” He said: “I know!” I was puzzled as to what he meant but my mind was irritated and distracted by my absent-mindedness. He repeated, “Please let me pay and I will take you to where you need to go.” I thanked him and agreed that on one condition I would let him pay, that he would let me pay him back as soon as we were at my apartment. He nodded. He paid for the food items and walked me to his car in the garage. I gave him the address where I was staying. He looked at it and said, “OK.” But then, rather than driving in the direction of the apartment, he drove to the train station. He stopped in front of the station and said, “I won’t be long.” A few minutes later, he came back and handed me two tickets—one for going exactly where I needed to go and one for coming back. With the tickets, he also gave me 50 Euros and said, with great emotion and emphasis, “Christ is with you! God bless you, dear friend!” Before I could say anything, he handed me my two grocery bags, waved good-bye and drove off. As he drove away, I was certain I had just encountered something out of the ordinary. How did he know that I was planning to take the train that morning? How did he know where I was going? He had not asked, and I had not told him. He did not know who I was and what I was doing. In a secular nation, why would he say, “Christ is with you! Bless you, dear friend!”? I went to the platform to catch my train but I was in a daze with regard to the encounter. There were too many inexplicable details!⁴

We now have before us two stories which instantiate cases of particular and special divine providence over against ordinary, general providence and over against extra-special, miraculous providence. The question to be posed now is this: Can we be more precise here? Can we legitimately speculate about the specific divine actions that may be involved in cases of providence like these? Note that

⁴ Personal communication, December 2018.

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I am looking here for far more than a set of criteria for demarcating cases of particular and special providence in contrast both to generic, ordinary providence and to extraordinary miraculous intervention. In very general terms these special acts of God exhibit a distinctive purposiveness visible to the outsider as coincidences and interpreted by the believer as acts of God. My question takes us deeper by asking if we can further specify the more precise divine actions that might be in play and then suggesting that this resolves the challenge of the compatibility between particular providence and human freedom. The motivation behind this deeper move is twofold. First, I think that specification is at the heart of really robust doctrines of divine action. This follows from the conceptual point that “action” is a very general concept like “happening” or “event.” Much work on divine action ignores this crucial feature of the grammar of action discourse, eagerly hoping that, say, spelling out the grammar of general action discourse will provide the foundation for all talk about special acts of God.⁵ Second, by reversing this way of thinking and beginning from below with the specific action predicates given to us in scripture, in tradition, and in piety, we can test our proposed accounts of particular, special providence.⁶ Such providence characteristically involves cases where God works in, with, and through human actions, that is, human actions which are good and human actions which are evil. Traditionally, one of the deep worries is how we can preserve a vision of intimate divine action and genuine human freedom. Attending to the details of divine action, I suggest, permits us to resolve this dilemma. A widely canvassed theory of double agency does not help us at this juncture. I mean by this a theory (whatever its conceptual and metaphysical ingredients) where every human act is interpreted both as a genuinely human action and as a genuinely divine action. Specification is crucial at this point. The human agent in story one set about mocking God, disrupting the meeting, fully intending to do so. It is simply incoherent to turn around and describe this set of actions as divine actions where God mocks God, disrupts the meeting, fully intending to do so. We are misled at this point by deploying the surface grammar of action discourse whether applied to human agents or God. We fail to see the glaring contradiction because we fail to specify what precisely the relevant action is in the pertinent context under review. Given the radical openness of the concept of action, we somehow think we are being conceptually and theologically profound by insisting that we can see the same event from two different angles, or by claiming that we have two different orders of causality, or by claiming that there is no competition between divine and human action. All these dodges evaporate

⁵ I deal with this issue at length in Divine Agency and Divine Action, vol. 1: Exploring and Evaluating the Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). ⁶ I assume here that if our vision of providence does not deal with instances of particular, special providence then our account is radically incomplete.

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once we specify what the human agent is doing. We cannot with a straight face say that God mocks God, disrupts a meeting where the Gospel is being preached, and does all this and more deliberately. To be sure, once we become aware of the obvious conceptual and moral difficulties involved, we naturally reach for theories of privation, have resort to unnecessary paradox, or run to take refuge in divine mystery. However, these simply introduce a whole new set of dodges that hide the obvious mistake of thinking of God mocking God, of God disrupting the meeting, and so on. Nor will it do to suggest, as David Bentley Hart has recently done, that a doctrine of creation ex nihilo interpreted in terms of a theory of transcendental causality will somehow take care of the business. Hart is at pains to deliver us from thinking of causality in terms of mechanical causality. The divine order of causality as exhibited in creation ex nihilo somehow involves a radically different order of causality; creation ex nihilo somehow takes us into a world of transcendence and is constituted by agency and action which is beyond the realm of the determined and determining. Truth to tell, to speak of creation ex nihilo is an aporia which remains forever imponderable once we try to translate it into causal terms. We are not to think of God as an Agent who can stand in the same order of human agents. God knows the good and evil acts of his creatures and reacts to neither. If we were to think in these terms, then we reduce God to a being among lesser beings, a force among lesser forces. We must place divine causality altogether beyond the finite economy of created causes. To be sure, Hart does not entirely give up the language of causality. Thus, he keeps intact a distinction between primary and secondary causality; he resolutely insists on the possibility of divine permission over against the language of absolute divine determination; and he deploys some kind of doctrine of analogical predication. However, we should not be misled by these concessions, for they are carefully housed within an obscurantist vision of the divine “who is transcendently present in all beings, the ever more inward act within each finite act.”⁷ If we take the latter head on, then we face a disjunction: either this is simply one more instance where the theologian is trading on the open concept of action and has not really said anything of consequence; or, it leads us straight back into a doctrine where the primary and critical primary act in each finite act is brought about by God; so, God, after all, is the crucial Agent in the evil acts of the mocker in story one. Frankly, we have gone off into causal la-la land in an effort to avoid the standard problems in deterministic doctrines derived from Aquinas and Calvin.⁸ ⁷ David Bentley Hart, “Providence and Causality: On Divine Innocence”, in The Providence of God, Francesca Aran Murphy and Philip G. Ziegler, eds. (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 35. ⁸ Hart is scathing in his rejection of the standard theories on offer at this point. He holds that any strict doctrine of omnicausality is false because it cannot deliver on the authenticity of genuine freedom. It will not do to say that if God had supplied the relevant efficient grace then evil human acts would not have occurred and that this is sufficient for genuine human freedom. If God could have

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Hart in fact is working with false alternatives. He thinks our only options are some kind of mechanical causation (what is often called efficient causality) or some kind of transcendental causality that cannot be accommodated within our thinking about finite, creaturely causes. It is little wonder that if these are our only alternatives then we will be driven to think of divine causality in terms of some kind of mechanism which enables God to interact with nature and history. Finding none, Hart opts for the transcendentalist alternative. What is missing here is the obvious possibility of causality understood as personal agency; it is precisely this notion that is in play when we think of analogical predication as applied to divine action. Just as human agents take prudent action by anticipating the future to the best of their knowledge and provide for various contingencies, so God acts prudently on the basis of his foreknowledge to provide for various contingencies. There is no need to get into a logical lather about such discourse; it is clearly analogical and we know instinctively how to make the analogical adjustments. Here the language of causality is much too crude to help; indeed, with a host of thinkers I am convinced that our standard notions of causality are ultimately derived from our own experience and conception of human personal action where we perform a host of varied actions as creatures made in the image of God. To be sure, the logic of personal agency and causation remains contested but we know enough about its contours to make headway in the challenge presented by that range of providential acts where God acts intimately in human affairs without infringing on the genuine freedom of human agents. Before I turn to this, let me clear the decks with respect to Hart’s muddled commentary on creation ex nihilo. The crucial move to make here is that this particular, specific act of God is a basic act.⁹ It is done straight off akin to the way in which human agents do things straight off without performing other acts. Once this is in place we can then proceed to explore if we can get a handle on why God created the universe. Perhaps God did it as an act of sheer generosity, just as an artist creates a magnificent work of art; or God creates it to provide a place for the incarnation of his Son; or God creates it in order to create a space for the whole panoply of creaturely reality that we discover every day before our eyes. Exploring the logic of creation rather than taking us off into an obscurantist metaphysics of transcendental causality take us right into the logic of everyday accounts of human agents

halted the exercise of the capacity to do evil either by an act of physical promotion or by an act of infallible, efficient concurrence, then God is clearly implicated in evil in a way that is morally unacceptable. I share Hart’s judgments at this point, even as I find his dismissal of Molina unpersuasive. ⁹ The seminal essay on this topic is Arthur C. Danto, “Basic Actions,” American Philosophical Quarterly 2 (1965): 141–8.

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and actions. Hart’s unhappy disjunction eliminates this way of thinking by intellectual bluster and sheer fiat.¹⁰ John Webster is much more on track when in typical fashion he admonishes us to keep the kind of proposal canvassed by Hart at arm’s length. Given that both Webster and I take theology to be constituted in a deep way by reflection on divine agency and divine action, I find his work on providence profoundly illuminating initially but ultimately unsatisfactory.¹¹ We are both pulling the same rope, a rope that goes back at least as far as the work of Karl Barth. The deft illumination, aside from his cautionary methodological suggestions, is that he insists that our doctrines of providence take as its subject matter reflection on what he terms the primary material of all theology, namely, the doctrine of God as triune. We might call this Webster’s platitude.¹² One way to think of this is to see this move as a reminder: The Agent involved in providence is not the god of the philosophers, or the god of the various versions of liberal Protestantism but the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So, treatments of providence must be rooted and grounded in the doctrine of the Trinity. “God’s immanent triune perfection is the first and last object of Christian perfection and governs all else. And that perfection is abundant, giving life and sustaining what is not God, and which is the object of economic reflection.”¹³ Put in an apt way in respect to providence, he then notes that the necessary conceptualities we deploy can only bear some of the weight needed to do our work. In the doctrine of providence, the language of causality and agency is a matter in point, because refinement of such language is sometimes thought to be essential to successful exposition. The doctrine cannot, of course, manage without such language—all theology is borrowed from elsewhere. But good dogmatics will be keen to retain a sense that the borrowing is ad hoc, not principled, and to let the

¹⁰ To be fair to Hart, he brilliantly notes that the omnipotence of God is depicted in the amazing act of creating genuinely free creatures. Thus, speaking of human autonomy, he writes: “It is in his power to create such autonomy that God’s omnipotence is most abundantly revealed; for everything therein comes from him: the real being of agent, act and potency, the primordial movement of the soul towards the good, the natural law inscribed in the creature’s intellect and will, the sustained permission of finite autonomy; even the indetermination of the creature’s freedom is an utterly dependent and unmerited participation in the mystery of God’s infinite freedom; and, in his eternal presence to all time, God never ceases to exercise his providential care or to make all free acts the occasions of the greater good he intends in creating.” See Hart, “Providence and Causality: On Divine Innocence,” 45. ¹¹ I am grateful to Fellipe do Vale for bringing this to my attention. I have never been persuaded by Webster’s sterling account of scripture nor by his wonderfully nuanced recovery of the Reformed tradition, but I share his passion to develop a genuinely theological theology that takes divine agency and divine action as its central concern. ¹² Formally we might capture this as a rule for interpreting divine actions: For every action “y” performed by “X,” then the Triune God and only the Triune God counts as “X.” ¹³ John Webster, “On the Theology of Providence,” in Francesca Aran Murphy and Philip G. Ziegler, eds., The Providence of God (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 159. Compare: “God’s external acts are in accordance with his inner nature; his providence expresses his omnipotent holiness and goodness and wisdom, his infinite resourcefulness in being for us.” Ibid., 168.

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real work best be conducted as an exercise in biblical reasoning, a conceptual, schematic representation of what theology is as told by the prophets and apostles.¹⁴

Materially then, the doctrine of providence must above all else satisfy this condition: Its subject matter will be God’s immanent triune perfection. [God’s] works ad extra, though indivisible, manifest the properties of the persons to whom they may especially be appropriated. The Father determines the course of created time; the Spirit causes creaturely causes; and the Son intervenes to draw back creation from ruin so that it may attain its end.¹⁵

So, our analytic powers must be subservient to our deployment of and governance by the Christian doctrine of God and its economic entailments; “only in this way can the identities and agents of the history of providence, their modes and ends, be protected from formalization.”¹⁶ Webster provides here a salutary warning. In any treatment of the host of divine actions that crop up in theology proper, the identity of God is crucial. All the actions of God are actions of the Triune God; this is the right way to identify the agent involved. The case of providential acts of God is no different from other actions like creation ex nihilo, the election of Israel, the atonement in Christ, baptism in the Spirit, and so on. However, precisely because it is a theological platitude that is crucial to the exposition of all divine action it cannot but remain utterly general. It is something we need to repeat to ourselves when we are tempted to lapse into making the relevant subject the God of generic theism, or the household god of Being borrowed from ancient metaphysical speculation, or the First Cause of degenerate natural theology, or the Rambo god of much liberation theology. However, Webster’s platitude will not help us in coming to terms with the kind of cases of providence that are our quarry in this paper. Nor will it help to be sent off to do more dramatic-historical description of biblical texts because the stories that mirror the contemporary examples I cited provide us with next to no guidance on how to proceed.¹⁷ They pose exactly the same kind of theological puzzlement that my examples do. Thus, it will come as no surprise ¹⁴ Ibid., 161. ¹⁵ Ibid., 167. Webster’s proposal requires extensive work on the doctrine of appropriations but I am skeptical that this will take us very far in providing careful description of the particular divine actions at the heartbeat of theology proper. ¹⁶ Ibid., 162. And theology’s initial method will be of fresh exposition of scripture or more specifically of dramatic-historical description. Its first task is “an analytic-expository task, in which it attempts orderly conceptual representation of the content of the Christian gospel as it is laid out in the scriptural witness,” ibid., 161. ¹⁷ The classical case is that of Joseph and his brothers as developed in Exodus. For my treatment of this example, which follows the logic developed here, see Divine Agency and Divine Action, vol. 3: Systematic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 153–5.

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that, when it comes to the actual details of his doctrine of providence, Webster retails those standard Thomistic and Reformation themes that have been around for centuries.¹⁸ It is time to shift our perspective and lean fully into the language of personal agency, even if in the end we should keep such discourse at arm’s length in order to stay close to the rough ground of scripture, creedal confession, and personal piety. So, here is my speculative proposal as regards my two stories. Take story two first. In this instance God provides my friend Magnus with the crucial financial resources needed to take a trip to spend a day with Christian converts in a refugee housing estate. Think of the divine action this way. In very general terms God sends along a total stranger who provides the necessary funding. However, this is much too generic. After all, the funding could have come from an anonymous donor responding to a fund-raising letter. What is striking is that the stranger shows up at exactly the right time, offers graciously to help, knows the exact place to which Magnus is traveling, buys the tickets needed, throws in an extra 50 euros for good measure, and identifies Magnus from the outset as a Christian. We can agree with Webster that the divine action is that of the all-sufficient Trinity who acts freely and abundantly out of his endless resources. But this does not begin to tell us how to interpret this instance of providential care. So, think of it this way. The stranger is a man of devout faith, someone who lives in intimate fellowship with his Lord and Savior, and who daily offers his life to God. He shows up in the grocery store and encounters my friend enmeshed in a small-scale but highly significant crisis as far as his ministry is concerned. Surely the relevant detail with respect to divine action is that God tells the stranger by means of person-relative revelation who Magnus is, the city to which he is headed, and the amount of money he will need.¹⁹ Given the submission of the stranger to the divine will, it is a small thing for God to motivate and prompt him to supply the need involved.²⁰ However, in order for this to happen we have an act of special and particular providence: God is actively involved in our lives, God foreknows the future contingencies, and God acting on that foreknowledge provides for the relevant need. So, God is actively involved in the lives of both ¹⁸ See his treatment of secondary causality, “On the Theology of Providence,” 169–71. It is interesting that the more recent work on providence takes us straight back into the divisions that have been central in work on providence across the ages. ¹⁹ Efforts to eliminate this element of divine speaking are doomed to failure at this point. See for example the interesting work of Vincent Brümmer, “Farrer, Wiles, and the Causal Joint,” Modern Theology 8 (1992): 11–12. Brümmer is skeptical about being able to identify the relevant speech acts of God and holds that immersion in the tradition of the church is sufficient to enable us to read events in terms of divine action. Formation in the tradition is indeed important; and in many cases tradition provides sufficient paradigms and parallels to serve as the relevant resource. However, the tradition itself depends on being able to identify the speech acts of God; and his skepticism is unpersuasive. ²⁰ In the case of truly deep believers we can think of them possessing through the work of the Spirit the very mind of Christ (Romans 12:1–3) so that they naturally and automatically read the world and perform their actions without needing any kind of fresh input from the divine.

    

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Magnus and the stranger; God foresees the breakdown of the car and foreknows that my friend will forget his wallet; and God prompts the stranger to show up, informs him of what is going on, and motivates him to take care of the need. Take this one step further. Is the stranger free with respect to his actions in this instance? Think of it this way. Suppose that the stranger wakes up and noticing that he needs groceries decides to go to the store and buy groceries. He freely forms the intention to buy groceries. However, there are many ways to execute this intention. He can go to various stores, decide on the best time to go, get in line at a certain moment, and so on. There is no one way to achieve his intentions and perform the action of buying groceries. We might formally say that the execution of the action is radically underdetermined. It is precisely this open space in the expression of his intentions and execution of his actions where God can intervene by prompting, providing relevant information by revelation, and by apt motivating inspiration. So, this can truly be an action where there is synergism and cooperation between God and the free human agent. The human agent gets to buy his groceries and help a fellow believer in crisis; and God brings it about that my friend’s acute problem is solved. We can even speak of genuine double agency that preserves freedom. The provision of need is both an act of the stranger and an act of God. What about my first story? Think of it this way. The heckler hears about the meeting where my friend is speaking and decides to attend. While there he acts deliberately to disrupt, to make life difficult for the speaker, and ultimately to mock God. He also decides to puff arrogantly on his cigarette. All this he does freely and deliberately. He could have done something else that evening but this is what he chose to do of his own free will. The effect on my friend is predictable: after answering the fake questions as best he can, he bows his head in prayer when the visitor proceeds to mock God by grabbing his groin. The rest is now familiar; the visitor’s cigarette lighter begins to leak, the gas is lighted by the cigarette, and fire shoots out from between his legs. The tables are turned. God mocks the mocker by setting him literally on fire. We have an act that is an act of awful providence, an act of divine judgment carried out in public. This is how my friend describes it, drawing on his formation in the faith and on the vast experience of his relationship with God through a whole series of ordinary and sometimes hairraising events. So how might we explore this further? Apply the same logic as I have just done in the case of story two. The visitor hears about the meeting, decides to show up, and freely decides to mock the servant of God. He forms the intention to mock God. However, this intention and action can be carried out in a host of ways. He could have persisted in asking awkward questions; he could have started a public row with the folk in his row of seats; he could have started singing in a loud voice; he could have told lewd jokes to his neighbors. As he thinks through the options he considers various ways, thinking informally rather than according to some formal calculus, as we do all the

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time in performing purposive actions. In the range of options open to him, he can go this way or that way in executing his intentions and doing what he voluntarily decides. However, God is also present in the meeting; and God has his particular plans for the meeting. Anticipating what is going to happen, some of the executions of the visitor’s intention fit better with God’s intentions than others. Suppose we think of God intending to bless the address, persuade folks to come to faith in Christ, protect my friend from humiliation, and the like. It is clear that some of these intentions can be carried out when the visitor acts this way rather than that way to achieve his particular intentions. Thus, God prompts the visitor to carry out his intentions by placing his cigarette next to a leaking lighter with the predictable result that fire will shoot from between his legs. Here again we have a case where the mocker gets what he intends and God gets what he intends. Put in terms of providence, God is not absent from the lives of his rebellious creatures as they are wont to think; he foreknows what their intentions and plans are; and he acts in a hidden manner without miraculous intervention to see to it that the execution of those intentions and plans fit with God’s intentions and plans to ensure that all things work together for good for those who love God. What I have done here is simply draw on aspects of the logic of personal, purposive agency to throw light on one dimension of any robust doctrine of particular providence, that is, those cases where God acts to bring good out of good and to bring good out of evil. I have not sought to deal with other kinds of providential acts represented by the preservation of creation, or by direct miraculous intervention, or by God sending rain on the just and unjust, or by God causally connecting disobedience with disaster.²¹ My aim is strictly limited. But the class of providential acts I have in mind is not marginal; clear examples show up in scripture and personal experience; and they have long been identified as cases of particular and specific providence. At one level my analysis is deflationary. We do not need to get lost in theories of primary and secondary causality, or theories of “caused causes,” or proposals about God somehow creating the free actions of creatures, or grand theories of necessity and contingency, or apophatic accounts of transcendental causality where we lose our semantic bearings, or meaningless notions like impossible possibilities. Yet the analysis has real substance and provides a clear way to provide a vision of those providential acts where God works to achieve his ends without undermining the free actions of human agents. Let me conclude by dealing briefly with two objections to my proposal, one theological and one philosophical. First, does my proposal not commit me to a vision of God as a cosmic snooper and manipulator and thus undermine any robustly Christian vision of God as holy, loving, and righteous? The answer to this ²¹ This is a standard theme of the Deuteronomistic histories of the Old Testament challenged with noble ferocity by the book of Job.

    

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is quite simple. As Webster has rightly emphasized, the agent in all divine action discourse is the Triune God of the Gospel. The objection simply ignores this platitude and smuggles totally unworthy conceptions of God as the relevant agent into our deliberations. On the contrary, what my proposal secures is an account of God who is resolutely ingenious in acting in our lives and in human history. God does not sit on the sidelines; rather, God finds ways to use even rebellious sinful actions to further his good purposes as revealed in Christ. Perhaps the issue here is that we baulk at predicating judgment of divine providential action, for few would want to say that the action of God in story two can be described as a cosmic snooper and manipulator. If this is the case, then my response is that a God who does not truly judge us fails to maintain any distinction between good and evil and leaves us in a sorry predicament as far as human evil is concerned. What strikes me in the divine response to evil is the extraordinary restraint and mercy depicted in scripture. I have a long list of folks whom it would be pleasure to see bumped off by God, say, by sleep apnea, or a heart attack in the middle of the night; happily, divine judgment is in God’s hands not ours; we can safely leave it there.²² Second, some may be uneasy about the place of person-relative revelation I have introduced in story two. My proposal commits me to a very robust vision of possible divine speaking and thus opens up a raft of epistemological questions about how we might provide warrants for such a claim. The answer to this is also relatively simple. First, this chapter is not a contribution to the epistemology of theology; it is an exercise in theology proper understood broadly as a deflationary account of divine agency and divine action. Within this, I am focusing on the constructive as opposed to the apologetic task of systematic theology. Second, conceptually I have long been convinced that without robust forms of divine speaking we are doomed to agnosticism in our claims about divine agency and divine action. It is not enough, as some have suggested, to reduce divine speaking either to the intensity of our response to wondrous events or to projections of our desires on to the mind of God. The fatal flaw here is that these options cannot account for the specific propositional content of the relevant revelation in story two; we need genuine divine impartation of specific information without which the story becomes incoherent. To be sure, it would be useful to talk to the stranger and hear his side of the story on what God did; but that is not essential, even though it opens up a path for further phenomenological investigation of the life of faith. To repeat, without authentic divine speaking the stranger could never have done what he did to further the purposes of God for my friend Magnus. Most believers are content to read what happened as a wonderful act of special divine providence; we do not need to know exactly how God worked behind the scenes.

²² For me this introduces a radically different problem in theodicy from the standard problems covered in the literature. The problem can be expressed this way: Why does God not act more decisively to remove appalling acts of moral evil from history?

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However, if we fail to do the philosophical and theological work that is our happy vocation, we will fall prey to a raft of abstractions about causality and a host of other topics, as is common in discussions of providence, ancient and modern. We may even be tempted to shift from being pietists of a lower order and become pietists of a higher order who give away the store.

5 Salvation, Baptism in the Holy Spirit, and Experience of God Francis Asbury (1745–1816) was the undisputed leader of early Methodism in North America. Aside from being an astute bishop, he was a shrewd administrator, an extraordinary evangelist, and commonly recognized as a saint. Herbert Asbury, his great-great-great nephew, was in his own terms “a man gone to the devil.” He provided a witty, if overheated, account of his spiritual journey in a memoir entitled Up from Methodism.¹ He provides a salutary account of how treatments of divine action in the Christian life can go badly astray. In this chapter I shall begin by charting briefly his account of his failed conversion. This will pave the way for a review of two classical attempts to provide a taxonomy of divine action in the Christian life. Problems in those attempts will in turn lead to the search for a better way to think through the role of divine action in the Christian life. It will also touch on the ecclesial actions related to both divine action and the action of the human subject in search of salvation. The crucial problem that lies beneath the surface is this: Given the diversity and range of claims about divine action in the Christian life, how might these be mapped phenomenologically on to the lived experience of Christians and to the human actions which are characteristically involved? Thus, it is obvious that the Christian life involves such divine actions as regeneration, justification, the witness of the Holy Spirit, baptism in the Spirit, sanctification, holiness, theosis, union with Christ, and the like. Such actions are clearly divine actions that touch the experience of the believer. How should we envisage such relationships? Is there a normative chronology or pattern in play? Equally, divine action characteristically involves human action in terms of the action of the church and the action of the human subject. So, how are these to be factored into a coherent account of divine action in the transformation of the human subject from sinner to saint? Herbert Asbury (1889–1963) was brought up in Farmington, Missouri, a town at the time flooded with Christian churches, societies, and practices. One enduring practice was the annual revival where a visiting preacher was brought in to preach the Gospel and bring folks to a living faith in Christ. Little effort was spent on persuading unbelievers rationally to come to faith. “Invariably I was told that the ¹ Herbert Asbury, Up from Methodism: A Memoir of a Man Gone to the Devil (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1926).

Divine Agency and Divine Action Volume IV: A Theological and Philosophical Agenda. William J. Abraham, Oxford University Press (2021). © William J. Abraham. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786535.003.0006

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Bible needed no explanation; I was merely to believe it and have faith.”² Moreover, the believers were all too readily filled with hypocrisy, pious gullibility, spurious sanctity, spiritual sensationalism, a literalistic reading of scripture, and racism against African Americans. Above all, they were determined to see unbelievers converted. In doing so, however, they presented a God who was “an avenging monster ready to devour me for my sins.”³ I had long known that the God who pressed so heavily on Farmington was a conception of unutterable cruelty, an omnipotent Being whose greatest joy lay in singling out the weak and the lowly and inflicting horrible tortures upon them, to the vast and gloating satisfaction of the Brothers and their kind.⁴

Not surprisingly the townsfolk and the visiting evangelist brought incredible emotional pressure to bear on vulnerable teenagers. In Herbert Asbury’s case the impact was spiritually devastating. It was these people that taught me of God, and who had dominion over my spiritual welfare! And not only did they instruct me to worship their conception of Him; they threatened me with eternal punishment if I ventured to cast doubt upon the truth and holiness of the Bible. Eternal damnation meant that I should, in the life to come, hang throughout eternity on a revolving spit over a great fire in the deepest pit of Hell, while little red devils jabbed white-hot pokers into my quivering flesh and Satan stood by and curled his lip in glee. I received the impression that Satan was the only one actively concerned with religion who was ever permitted to laugh. God was not, nor His disciples, and that Satan could and apparently did was sufficient proof that laughter was wicked.⁵

In due course, at the age of fourteen Herbert Asbury caved in to the pressure to profess faith in Christ after religion “had been poured down my throat in doses that strangled me and made me sick of soul.”⁶ The preacher at the revival was Brother McConnell, who spared no effort in his endeavor to bring the unbelievers to a decision for Christ. When the music struck up towards the end of the meeting, the congregation became a cauldron of pious frenzy and noise. Brother McConnell went to work to secure commitments. In the end Herbert Asbury could not hold out against the peer pressure, the music, the exhortations of the congregation, and the plaintive calls of the evangelist. He caved, went down the aisle to the mourner’s bench, made his profession of faith, and even showed up the next day to be baptized by sprinkling. However, the whole process had been a sham. His personal account is searing in its honesty and anger.

² Ibid., 47.

³ Ibid., 10.

⁴ Ibid., 53.

⁵ Ibid., 70.

⁶ Ibid., 79.

, ,    

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By this time [the singing of the hymn known as ‘Rock of Ages’] I was crying; I did not want to go to Hell, and I was horribly afraid of the Devil, and I was not old enough to realize what was being done to me. Yet something kept telling me that I should not do this thing; that it was all a mockery and a fraud. I know now, and I knew soon after that night, that the music was the matter with me, not religion. I did not see Jesus, and I never have. It was that slow music; that doleful, wailing chant of the hymns . . . I was doomed. It was in the cards that my selfrespect was to be stripped from me and that I was to be emotionally butchered to make a religious holiday. They dragged and hauled at me until I was in the aisle, and then they got behind me and urged me forward. One old woman leaped ahead of us and performed a war dance that would have done credit to a frenzied worshipper of Voodoo. And as she pranced and cavorted, she screamed: “A bad boy is coming to Jesus!”⁷

When it was all over and the music stopped, and he headed for home, Herbert Asbury found another boy, went to the local saloon, and had his first drink, a gin rickey. He got gloriously drunk before staggering home at three o’clock in the morning. Later he summed up his experience this way: “I felt that I had been betrayed; I knew that the spirit of God was not working in me, but I was told it was and dared to deny it.”⁸ It would be easy to dismiss all this as so extreme that it poisons any effort to take seriously the role of divine action in the Christian life. I reject this easy way out. Herbert Asbury’s testimony does indeed represent the pathology of Christian theology and practice, but it highlights an acute difficulty. The story he tells captures the fragmentation of a tradition that had long wrestled with the interrelationship between divine action, human agency in ministry, and human response. The initial source goes back to the reflections of John Wesley and their inflection in the theologies of nineteenth-century Methodism. On the one hand, there was a concerted effort to find a pattern for Christian experience that mapped divine action on to the experience of converts. On the other hand, a significant gap emerged between the map supplied and the experience as lived by church members. One can see this, for example, in the work of Border Parker Bowne and Phoebe Palmer who took radically different ways to cope with the cognitive dissonance in Christian experience. In Bowne’s case the acute problem showed up in the absence of the witness of the Holy Spirit articulated in terms of assurance; in Palmer’s case the acute problem showed up in the absence of a second work of grace that delivered the believer from sin. Bowne sought to reconstruct the language of divine action as it related to Christian experience by drawing a sharp division between the former and the psychology of consciousness.⁹ Palmer sought ⁷ Ibid., 89–90. ⁸ Ibid., 80. ⁹ Borden Parker Bowne, The Christian Life: A Study (Cincinnati, OH: Curtis and Jennings, 1899).

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to transform the language of divine action into the language of dedication by getting rid of intense soul-searching and focusing instead on instant dedication as a site of divine sanctification.¹⁰ In due course, the problem became even more acute when Methodist theologians added the language of Pentecost and of the divine action of baptism in the Spirit, drawing on Acts 2 as a seminal source of illumination.¹¹ Once Pentecost enters the picture, issues become even more complicated, for we are now confronted with the manifold interpretations of divine action in the Christian life that show up in Pentecostalism and in the Charismatic movement. In the case of the situation described by Herbert Asbury, we are witnessing a tradition that has lost its way over time. Think of salvation as involving three agents: God, the preacher and congregation (ecclesial agents), and the human subject who is called to respond to the Gospel. While what is sought—salvation— is clearly understood in the tradition as a work of God, the process has morphed into a network of ecclesial actions where the human subject is crassly manipulated by ecclesial agents. Divine action may still be invoked, but it is clearly idling given the obvious spiritual malpractice of the ecclesial agents involved. Leaving aside the spiritual malpractice, it is clear that we have in hand here a school of spirituality that fits a wider discernible pattern of development and decline. Consider in this regard the helpful taxonomy of spiritual traditions provided by Kees Waaijman. Waaijman describes schools of spirituality as exhibiting the following trajectory. We define a school of spirituality as (1) a spiritual way that derives from a Source-experience around which (2) an inner circle of pupils take shape which is (3) situated within the socio-cultural context in a specific way and (4) opens a specific perspective on the future; a second generation (5) structures all this into an organic whole, by means of which (6) a number of people can share in the Source-experience; when the Source-experience, the contextual relevance, and the power to open up the future are blocked, (7) a reformation is needed.¹²

Even though Waaijman is working on a comprehensive canvas as far as spirituality is concerned, his phenomenological observations fit neatly with the material in hand. His metaphysical horizon speaks of spirituality in terms of “our relation to the Absolute”¹³ because he is looking for a framework for the fifty-four forms of

¹⁰ Phoebe Palmer, The Way to Holiness with Notes by the Way: A Narrative of Religious Experience Resulting from a Determination to be a Bible Christian (Sydney: Wentworth Press, 2019). For a fine articulation and defense of Palmer see Elaine Heath, Naked Faith: The Mystical Theology of Phoebe Palmer (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2009). ¹¹ A seminal text in this development is William Arthur, The Tongue of Fire, or The True Power of Christianity (Cincinnati, OH: Methodist Book Concern, 1856). ¹² Kees Waaijman, Spirituality, Forms, Foundation, Methods (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 117–18. ¹³ Ibid., 1.

, ,    

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spirituality that are the focus of his study.¹⁴ However, it is not difficult to reframe the issues for Christian theology in terms of divine action. We can readily map the pattern he outlines here to the developments of piety in the Methodist and Wesleyan tradition. It begins with various source-experiences of the Wesley brothers. These experiences are shared with an inner circle of preachers and laity, drawn theologically and practically from the historically relative situation, provide a perspective on future developments, become codified in patterns of expectation that become global in scope, are blocked for a variety of reasons, and then become ripe for reformation. Herbert Asbury’s experience is a dramatic case where the tradition has ceased to be intellectually credible and has clearly become, in his terms, “a mockery and a fraud.” The need for reformation had already surfaced by the middle of the nineteenth century; by the time we get to Herbert Asbury it is clear that in some circles the tradition had totally lost its way. Waaijman’s work, however, is of limited value once we reframe the issues involved in terms of divine action.¹⁵ He does not begin to deal with the specific divine actions that show up in scripture or the tradition. This is surely essential if we are to deal with the actual content of spirituality in the Christian tradition. The extraordinary place given to discussions about grace and freedom bears ample witness to this need. It is also crucial if we are to attend to the tradition of spirituality developed within Methodism.¹⁶ As noted at the outset, however, my interests here are not confined to Methodism. The more general challenge is how we are to map the rich language of divine action on to the experience and practices of Christians more generally. To be sure, I am interested in providing a reformation for my own tradition at a time of disintegration; however, this in no way excludes drawing on other traditions as a way forward. Moreover, my hunch is that in framing the issues in terms of divine and human action we may all make progress. An obvious way to pursue our quarry is to look at a classical way of articulating the nature of the Christian life. To this end let’s look at the three-stage journey that is commonplace in the literature. I have in mind the threefold way of purgation (via purgativa), illumination (via illuminativa), and union (via unitiva). These stages need not be seen as a purely chronological schema; thus, purgation, illumination, and union can be seen as dimensions of the spiritual life. However, it is helpful to think of them initially as stages because doing so has been common in the history and because it provides a path to understanding what is involved. Moreover, we can equally well understand what is at stake by using different terms for each of the stages. Thus, Diogenes Allen speaks of praktike or ¹⁴ The work as a whole is an extraordinary achievement as a global research agenda. ¹⁵ Waaijman is also clearly at a loss when it comes to Protestantism generally and Methodism and Pentecostalism in particular. ¹⁶ For a splendid overview of the tradition see David Lowes Watson, “Methodist Spirituality,” in Kenneth J. Collins, ed., Exploring Christian Spirituality (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2000), 172–214.

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practice and theoretike or theory, which is then divided into physike or indirect contemplation of God and theoria or the highest form of knowledge of God.¹⁷ My concern in what follows is to state in my own terms what is on offer with respect to divine action. In the first stage, purgation, the sinner must repent and be converted. The second stage, indirect contemplation, involves reflecting on the truth of the faith and its moral requirements; and reflecting on the physical universe, human nature, and the Bible. Thus, all creation is to become a manifestation of God’s presence. The third stage, direct contemplation, involves God face to face. Generally speaking, this stage was reserved for the few; all believers would attain to it in the life to come. One salutary payoff from this tradition is the call to cultivate discernment of the divine presence in creation. In this instance we have a clear reference to specific divine action, namely, the divine creating of the human agent as made in the image of God and the divine creation and sustaining of the universe in whole and in part. We can see how such discernment can begin with meditating on the doctrine of creation as applied to human agents and the universe and develop over time into perceiving God in human agents and the wider creation. Compare this process as it pertains to learning, say, to the nature of political phenomena. In the relevant literature we are given a network of concepts which we initially have to learn and gradually apply. Over time, we internalize the relevant concepts and we then see the world in, with, and by means of these concepts. They become what Caroline Franks Davis has called incorporated interpretations.¹⁸ This process need not at all be conscious; what is conscious is the initial work of indirect contemplation where we take the time to read phenomena in terms of divine creation and general providence. The process may also involve serious efforts to transform our perceptual capacities by dealing with wayward passions and sin.¹⁹ We can also detect the crucial role of faith in taking up the tasks involved in indirect contemplation. What is at stake is the nature of transformative experience. L. A. Paul has captured the issue nicely in this way. [W]e can’t, despite the way the story is often told, approach transformative decisions by stepping back and evaluating our different subjective possibilities, imaginatively modeling outcomes and reflecting on the expected subjective values of our actions. In a situation of transformative choice, if we choose to

¹⁷ See Diogenes Allen, Spiritual Theology: The Theology of Yesterday for Spiritual Help Today (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1977), 10–14. ¹⁸ Caroline Franks Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 148–55. ¹⁹ This is one reason for the attention given to the seven deadly sins; we fail to see things as they really are because of pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.

, ,    

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have the transformative experience, we simply don’t know enough about what our lived experience will be afterwards. We lack the ability to assign the subjective values to the outcome of the act to determine how our preferences might evolve.²⁰

To take the argument one step further, we end up discovering a new self in the process of change. When we choose to have a transformative experience, we choose to have its intrinsic experiential nature, whether that involves joy, fear, peacefulness, happiness, fulfillment, sadness, anxiety, suffering or pleasure, or some complex mixture thereof. If we choose to have the transformative experience, we also choose to create and discover new preferences, that is, to experience the way our preferences will evolve, and often, in the process, to create and discover a new self. On the other hand, if we reject revelation, we choose the status quo, affirming current life and lived experience.²¹

While we can see here the role of faith in the process, we can also understand why theologians have sought to provide reasons for engaging in indirect contemplation by spelling out what the ultimate goal is, together with other practices like meditation on scripture and the life of Christ which will provide assurance of the goodness and beauty of divine intentions in salvation. Indeed, this is why indirect contemplation invariably involves attention to scripture through lectio divina and to the various stages in the life of Christ as represented by his baptism, transfiguration, death, and resurrection. The standard account of the threefold way clearly provides, by exploring the action of God in creation, an invaluable corrective to those proposals about divine action in salvation that focus on the life of God in the soul, I suspect that beyond this the results are meagre. What is striking about this line of thought is the extent to which the concentration is on human action and experience rather than divine action. In fact, it would be easy to dismiss this tradition precisely for that reason. We see little attention to such divine actions as justification, regeneration, the witness of the Spirit, baptism in the Spirit, and so on. It is not difficult to see why. From the theological side, these actions are generally presupposed, as is the broader canonical theology of the church as found in the Trinity and Christology. Likewise, the sacramental life of the ecclesial heritage of East and West is assumed to be in place.

²⁰ L. A. Paul, Transformative Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 177. Paul’s work applies to secular experiences but its extension to the case in hand is obvious. ²¹ Ibid., 178. Emphasis mine.

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However, I think there is a deeper reason in play, namely, that the threefold way is an obvious transposition of material derived from Plato’s allegory of the cave.²² In Plato there is a process in which one moves from the material world of illusion through insight into the world of Ideas to the world of perfect contemplation of Perfect Being. Once the allegory of the cave became the subtext of transformation, it was only natural that attention to specific divine actions in salvation should become marginal if not obsolete. It was as if divine action was artificially glued to the Platonic imagery; they did not really cohere together. No doubt the heavy dependence on Platonic philosophy was one reason why some of the Reformers resolutely turned aside from this whole tradition. The Reformers, however, did not give up on providing extensive accounts of divine action in salvation. They did so by working out an ordo salutis or via salutis, which sought to provide a map of the way of salvation that took with radical seriousness the divine actions involved. Rather than try and summarize their findings, let me simply provide one way in which we might chart a via salutis; perceptive readers will recognize the traces of my own ecclesial tradition. As a point of entry, we can state the process in terms of the doctrine of grace. Grace is understood here as constituted by the generosity and power of God. Thus, it is common to trace a process from prevenient grace, through justifying and sanctifying grace, and ending with glorifying grace. So, we begin with the divine action, which comes initially to prepare the human agent for justifying grace, which in turn leads into divine action in sanctification and ends in glory with the fullness of moral and spiritual perfection. The crucial divine actions are the bringing of the human agent to a conviction of sin, the justification of the sinner through the sacrifice of Christ received by faith (itself a gift of grace), the sanctifying of the believer in the defeat of sin and victory over evil, and the final perfecting of the human agent in the world to come. We can see here a phenomenology of divine action which operates in the human subject, moving him or her through definitive stages understood chronologically and psychologically. We can also articulate the journey more fully in the following terms. Initially the human agent is blind and in bondage to sin. Hence God brings about selfknowledge; which is the prelude to the activity of God related to repentance, conversion, justification, new birth or regeneration; the witness of the Holy Spirit in providing assurance and peace before God; initial sanctification which begins the action of God in the moral and spiritual transformation of the sinner; leading in turn to a deeper sanctification of the heart and life in holiness or victory over evil; and brought to a final climax in the complete perfection of the sinner in the life to come. While the language can readily become formulaic and even archaic, the great advantage of this analysis is twofold. First, there is clear specification of

²² This argument is convincingly made by Waaijman, Spirituality, 131.

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the divine action involved. Second, we can see the potential for mapping the divine action on to the lived experience of the believer. So, it looks as if we have in hand precisely the renovation of the tradition which we saw disintegrate in the dramatic testimony of Herbert Asbury. Certainly, we can begin to see what had gone wrong in the case of Herbert Asbury. The complex story of divine action in salvation had been reduced to one element—new birth— and, even then, that action had been replaced by a process of crass manipulation. All of this could have been avoided if the deeper account of divine action had been preserved. A proper balance between divine action, ecclesial action, and the human subject would surely have been salutary. However, it is entirely too easy to leave our critical analysis at this superficial level. We need to probe further and identify the problems involved. Consider the following catalogue of concerns. First, there is the issue of warrants for this schema. The general intention has been to find a biblical warrant. Yet, the difficulties are obvious. While there are the beginnings of a pattern, for example, in Paul’s letter to the Romans, it is dubious to think that this or the reading of scripture as a whole will secure the desired result. In addition, it is clear that this schema leaves out certain crucial elements that show up in the New Testament. The most obvious example is the case of baptism in the Holy Spirit, the term used by John the Baptist to describe what Christ came to do; and a claim picked up by Luke in his depiction of Pentecost. I shall return to this example shortly, but at this stage I simply want to flag this omission and add to it other crucial concepts as the Kingdom of God, eternal life, life in the Son, the forgiveness of sins, reconciliation, the transition from death to resurrection, and the like. Second, it is not the case that this schema will fit the actual experience of hosts of believers. The obvious example is that of children who have never known a time when they were not attracted to and committed to the Christian life. They did not undergo a period of conviction of sin but readily gave themselves in faith to Christ. There is also the case where the believer only comes into deep conviction of sin after they have been converted. Thus, their initial conversion was tied, say, less to guilt than to finding a meaning and purpose for their lives. It was only on the inside that they came to realize how alienated they had been from God. Another example stems from debates about the nature and dating of entire sanctification. Even John Wesley was ambivalent about this, wobbling back and forth from sanctification as a process and as a “second blessing” or “second work of grace.”²³ He was equally ambivalent about how best to think through the relation between the witness of the Holy Spirit and Christian experience.²⁴ Indeed, a strong

²³ The saintly and learned Fletcher of Madeley quaintly resolved the problem by claiming that entire sanctification was both! See David Watson, “Methodist Spirituality,” 212n77. ²⁴ The definitive essay on this is Richard P. Heitzenrater, “Great Expectations,” in Mirror and Memory: Reflections on Early Methodism (Nashville, TN: Kingswood Books, 1989).

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commitment to the aforementioned schema can create havoc spiritually, leaving Christians deeply disoriented and confused. It is precisely this kind of ambivalence that leads to the kind of reductionistic solution that reached its unhappy climax in the case of Herbert Asbury. Third, it is far from clear how this schema is to be connected to the ecclesial acts related to salvation. This is most conspicuous in the case of baptism but extends to the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper and on to such activity as the preaching of the Gospel, the informal witness of church members, the reading of scripture, prayer, and the like. My point here is not the standard worry about the danger of individualism. There are inescapable human acts related to the process of salvation on the part of the would-be believer. In fact, the stress on personal decision and conversion is an obvious reaction to ecclesial malpractice as it relates to the work of salvation. Thus, in a real way, the personalism of pietism reflects at times massive failure on the part of the church in its ministry as related to salvation.²⁵ My point is this: it is not clear how the schema under review is to be connected to the ecclesial activity that is surely relevant to both divine action and Christian experience as they relate to salvation. It is worth dwelling briefly on these challenges as they relate to recent debates about baptism in the Holy Spirit. It is natural to turn to this action of God because, as already mentioned, it has a clear footing in the ministry of John the Baptist.²⁶ It became prominent in modern times in the transition from Methodism to Pentecostalism and on into the Charismatic movement and beyond.²⁷ The challenge was a simple one.²⁸ Many Christians had entered into an experience of the Holy Spirit subsequent to baptism which met three conditions. First, it was natural to describe the experience as an immersion of baptism in the Holy Spirit. Thus, it was specific, datable, and was captured subjectively in terms of being flooded by the presence of the Holy Spirit. Second, it appeared to follow a pattern that was discernible at times in the book of Acts. One classic text is Acts 18:1–7 where a group of converts at Ephesus first believe, are then baptized, have hands laid upon them, and then experience the descent of the Spirit as manifested in terms of tongues and prophesying. Third, as already noted, this experience of the Holy Spirit was manifested by accompanying signs of tongue-speaking and prophecy. These were public signs of the inner workings of the Spirit in the life of the believer. ²⁵ It bears mention that the standard canard that pietists and revivalists had no interest in the communal or sacramental dimensions of salvation is so obviously a caricature that it scarcely deserves scholarly attention. Jason Vickers lays the issue to rest in “Holiness and Mediation: Pneumatology in Pietist Perspective,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 16 (2014): 192–206. ²⁶ Luke 3:16. ²⁷ The historical details are fascinating but following them here would be a distraction. ²⁸ A splendid summary of the issue can be found in Kilian McDonnell and George T. Montague, eds., Christian Initiation and Baptism in the Holy Spirit: Evidence from the First Eight Centuries, 2nd rev. ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994), 93–4.

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The obvious problem with this schema was that it contradicted the traditional teaching that one was baptized in the Holy Spirit when one was baptized in water. Hence the alternative interpretation of the dramatic experience of the Holy Spirit was to rework the experience not as a baptism in the Holy Spirit but as a fresh filling of the Holy Spirit. In this alternative interpretation, an agreed phenomenological account of the experience of the Holy Spirit was integrated into a classical vision of Christian initiation, which started with infant baptism and confirmation and then sought to integrate later experiences of the Holy Spirit into this paradigm. To this end, various analogies became commonplace. One could speak of receiving the seed of the Holy Spirit which later burst forth into blossoms; or of being connected to the water of the Holy Spirit which then gushed forth from within at a later time; or an initial reception of the Spirit which is actualized at a later date. My aim here is not to resolve this dispute but to illustrate afresh the difficulty of connecting divine action—here represented by baptism in the Spirit—both to the actions of the church and to the lived experience of Christians. Neither appeal to scriptural warrants nor to some kind of pattern in Christian experience has led to a workable consensus. Put more sharply in the present context, it is far from clear that we can look to some sort of via salutis as a solution to the kind of problem brought to light in the case of Herbert Asbury.²⁹ Where does this leave us? Where can we go from here? If the goal is to find a coherent way to relate divine action, ecclesial action, and human experience, it looks as if we are left badly disoriented and this in turn is bound to lead to dangerous confusion when it comes to Christian practice. The temptations at this point are obvious. We can turn on the high-octane theological energy and take refuge in a doctrine of grace that is carefully integrated into the doctrine of the Trinity.³⁰ Or we can abandon the project with Luther by returning to justification as the center of the Christian life and hanging loose to other divine actions. Or we can double down and stand by our conventional accounts of the via salutis and add in other data in an ad hoc fashion. Another route, however, is open to us, namely, we can make a virtue of our failures, step back, and work from some general principles which can inform, if only temporarily, our reflections and the practice of ministry. I suggest the following as a step in the right direction. First, we should think of the wider issue as that of Christian initiation and insist that any rounded vision will take into account divine action, ecclesial action, and human action. The divine action includes the rich network of action-predicates ²⁹ For an excellent treatment of the issues that reflects a lifetime of careful study see Gordon D. Fee, Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1996). ³⁰ This is intricately carried through in David Coffey, “Did You Receive the Holy Spirit When You Believed?”: Some Basic Questions for Pneumatology (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2005), where he follows Karl Rahner in identifying the action of the Holy Spirit primarily with grace.

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already noted, such as new birth, witness of the Holy Spirit, sanctification, and the like. The ecclesial acts include such acts as the proclamation of the Gospel, the call to repentance, baptism with water, fasting, entry into the membership of the church, and the like. The human actions include such acts as hearing the Gospel, coming to terms with sin, repentance, commitment to Christ as savior and lord, entry into the church, and the like. If we do not attend to divine action, Christian initiation will become merely a network of ecclesial and human actions. If we do not attend to ecclesial acts, then the vital mediating role of divine action through ecclesial acts will be neglected. If we do not attend to relevant human actions, then the crucial role of assent and genuine decision-making will become merely marginal. Second, it is entirely appropriate that particular churches have a public or even quasi-canonical account of the process of Christian initiation. We need workable but flexible visions of the crucial elements of Christian initiation, including a sensitive paradigm of the via salutis. The latter can serve as a point of entry into the complexity of Christian discipleship and into the richness of divine action in the Christian life. It is not enough for new believers and the children of believers to be left wandering alone without wise counsel. There is need for an initial mapping that begins to connect up the discourse of divine action with the realities of human action and experience. This in turn needs to be integrated into a robust account of the role of the church as the locus and occasion of divine action. Given the complexity involved it is not surprising that in time an office of spiritual direction should emerge to help folks connect with God.³¹ Third, when it comes to divine action then we need to be clear about such basic actions as, say, new birth, the witness of the Holy Spirit, justification, and sanctification. We need to know by means of analogy what they are and how they take place. In addition, we need to know about the gifts of the Spirit in ministry distributed to each for the sake of the whole. Most importantly, we need to know about the goal of the Christian life in terms of love for God and neighbor, the fruit of the Spirit, holiness, the triad of faith, hope, and love, and the like. However, as to the actual experiences that might be correlated with specific divine actions, we need a resolute commitment to a doctrine of divine sovereignty that insists on the radical freedom of God to meet with each person in a way that is apt for their spiritual history, psychological profile, and vocational life. Perhaps this is the most important conclusion to draw from the failures of both the threefold way and of a precisionist account of the ordo salutis. The former is much too dependent on Platonic imagery; the latter is much too underdetermined by scripture and by the radical diversity of human experience.

³¹ For a splendid treatment of the office of spiritual elders in the Russian tradition see Irina Paert, Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010).

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Happily, this observation on the radical freedom of the Spirit is widely recognized in the literature on spirituality. With respect to the sacraments there is an important scholastic axiom, “God is not bound by the sacraments” (Deus non alligatur sacramentis). This Western platitude is endorsed in the famous treatment of the Christian life by a monk of the Eastern Church. What Orthodox would dare to assert that the members of the Society of Friends are deprived of the graces that the sacraments represent? The angel went down at regular times into the pool, and whosoever stepped in first after the troubling of the waters was made whole; but our Lord directly healed the paralytic who could not step in (John 5). This does not mean that a man could disregard, or despise, the channels of grace offered by the Church without endangering his soul. It means that no externals, however, useful, are necessary to God, in the absolute sense of this word, and that there is no institution, however sacred, which God cannot dispense with.³²

The same observation applies, mutatis mutandis, to the manifold actions of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life. What is needed is radical openness to all that the Spirit characteristically does in the life of the church and of the believer. This entails in turn a readiness to explore the work of the Spirit not just in one’s own parochial setting but across the churches of the world.³³ It is fitting to end this chapter with an example of this that provides fresh hope for the life of the church across the world today. Heidi Baker was brought up an Episcopalian in California, was “saved” through the preaching of a Navajo evangelist, was introduced to a deep experience of the Holy Spirit by enthusiastic Pentecostals, and then gave her life entirely to the service of the poor in Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Mozambique.³⁴ Within this journey she completed a doctorate in systematic theology at King’s College London. Within this she also endured times of excruciating personal suffering, determined opposition from government agencies, spiritual attacks emanating from occult sources, and repeated difficulties caused by the forces of nature. Furthermore, she clearly experienced the manifold

³² A Monk of the Eastern Church, “The Essentials of Orthodox Spirituality,” in Kenneth Collins, ed., Exploring Christian Spirituality (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2000), 115. ³³ This disposition fits nicely with the fresh work in ecumenism that moves from mere convergence on contested issues of doctrine and order to that of critical gift-sharing across our ecclesial divisions. Consider the wise advice of Raniero Cantalamessa: “Perhaps the ecumenical dialogue would gain clarity if, instead of continuing to repeat slogans like sola Scriptura or Scriptura et traditio, it would concentrate its efforts on identifying the shared foundations of our tradition, i.e., what is in itself binding for everyone, what instead is a gift and charism given to a particular church for the benefit of all, and above all what the path and the tools are to distinguish the two.” See his Serving the Word: My Life (Cincinnati, OH: Servant, 2015), 61. ³⁴ Her story is told in Rolland and Heidi Baker, Always Enough: God’s Miraculous Provision among the Poorest Children on Earth (Grand Rapids, MI: Chosen Books, 2003), 24.

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action of the Spirit in ways that could not be reduced to some kind of obvious via salutis. What stands out is not just a narrative of conspicuous sanctity but of the manifold working of the Holy Spirit in personal experience, in amazing outpourings of divine power, and in recurring examples of particular providence. There are also clear but underdeveloped references to the action of God in the Eucharist. “The Holy Spirit touched me powerfully as I took the Eucharist.”³⁵ The bulk of her work was with children. Many of them came to faith and were baptized: “[C]hildren without anyone telling them what was going to happen, begin to pray in tongues as they come out of the water, and they often fall back into the water under the weight of God’s glory in the baptismal tank.”³⁶ Baker is well aware of various efforts to streamline the work of God, say, in revival; but she is skeptical. I have only one message—passion and compassion. We’re passionate lovers of God, so that we become absolutely nothing. His love fills us. When it’s time to stand up, God stands up with us. We focus on His face, never on our ministry, anointing or numbers.³⁷

Material like this undoubtedly needs further reflection.³⁸ Thus, Baker in speaking of becoming absolutely nothing is echoing the language of an ancient spirituality. It fails to do justice to the manifold human actions related to divine action. However, we can readily take care of such discourse by reading it as conventional, exaggerated rhetoric. We can see in her life and ministry that the dead end represented by Herbert Asbury is not the end of the story; the tradition can be reformed and renovated to the glory of God and the praise of his saints. Even then, the kind of life represented by Heidi Baker is often best kept in the bosom of the church; outsiders are all too likely to dismiss it as fanaticism and superstition. Even our understanding of such conspicuous sanctity is more often than not tethered to a complex journey in the life the Triune God. The pearls need to be protected from the swine.

³⁵ Ibid., 24. ³⁶ Ibid., 170. ³⁷ Ibid., 176. ³⁸ There is a splendid scholarly treatment of her work in Candy Gunther Brown, Testing Prayer: Science and Healing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). See also her Global Pentecostalism and Charismatic Healing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

6 Divine Action in the Eucharist In the West the gold standard for work on divine action in the Eucharist is that of Thomas Aquinas. His intention to be faithful to scripture, his deep piety, his comprehensive treatment of the relevant issues, his ingenious metaphysical creativity: all these set him apart in a class of his own. He deserves all the honors of creative speculation that have been showered on him throughout the ages. Even so, there are numerous difficulties that cannot in the end be avoided. Aquinas’s position depends on a literal reading of scripture that is insecure, on a network of concomitant miracles that is concealed from view until looked at with scrupulous care, on the danger of multiple new incarnations in the bread and the wine, and on an ad hoc metaphysical apparatus that lacks credibility. This is how I see it. Consequently, it is time to make a complete break with Aquinas’s whole line of thinking and to look for a better way to think about this pivotal phenomenon in the life of the church. To be sure, this seems ridiculously ambitious. Yet I dare to pursue this ambition by exploring how far a fresh look at the issues from the angle of divine action deployed in this volume might go. On the one hand, I shall spend considerable time exploring a neglected effort to provide an alternative to Aquinas’s position by a distinguished philosopher who is also a Roman Catholic. On the other hand, I shall begin to sketch my own alternative, realizing that this could easily become a whole book to itself. Yet we should make haste slowly. So, I shall devote extended attention to a recent proposal that seeks to be an alternative to that of Aquinas, but which intends to stand within the canonical teaching of the Catholic church. I have in mind the work of Michael Dummett, whose seminal essay on the intelligibility of eucharistic doctrine will help set the table. Given what he proposes on divine action in the Eucharist, his work is also intrinsically interesting and relevant. Dummett’s treatment of the Eucharist, as one would expect from a philosopher, focuses explicitly on the obvious problem that has surreptitiously plagued discussion across the centuries. We can state the issue simply: after the consecration of the bread and wine, they become the body and blood of Christ. Yet if we trust our senses, what we perceive is not the body and blood of Christ but what surely appears to be bread and wine. People have lots of questions about the Eucharist, but

Divine Agency and Divine Action Volume IV: A Theological and Philosophical Agenda. William J. Abraham, Oxford University Press (2021). © William J. Abraham. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786535.003.0007

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     [t]he primary philosophical question is, rather, how is it possible to deny propositions that pass all the normal tests for truth, namely, that this is bread and that is wine, and affirm in their place propositions that pass none of these tests.¹

As it stands this is an epistemological problem. We are asked to believe as true a proposition that is radically different from one that is normally secured by sense experience. We are not assuming here some kind of positivist doctrine of meaning; we are simply assuming that normally sense experience underwrites our true beliefs about bread and wine, about bodies and blood. The relevance of this assumption comes out nicely in the post-Cartesian claim that in the case of the consecrated elements God gives us systematic illusions about what we see before us. This is surely a drastic solution to adopt and one that Dummett immediately dismisses. Dummett also rejects two other options.² He rejects the theory of transfiguration developed by Charles Davis wherein the bread and wine are treated as the body and blood of Jesus. Just as we might treat a Pyrex dish as an ashtray and invite others to do so, we treat the bread and the wine as the body and blood of Christ. Or, as in the case of a coin, we treat a piece of metal as a token of monetary exchange in societies which have the institution of money. There are two fatal problems with this position. First, this usage only works for those objects which are characterized by their use. So, a dog is a sheepdog because it is trained to act in sheep herding; but that a dog is an animal does not depend on its uses. The concepts of bread, wine, body, and blood belong in the latter category. They are natural kind concepts, that is, they reflect groupings that reflect the structure of the world rather than the interests and actions of human beings. Second, this theory of the Eucharist does not require a prior commitment to the incarnation, an assumption that is clearly in play in the case of the eucharistic doctrine. Just as incarnation presupposes belief in God, eucharistic doctrine presupposes belief in the incarnation. It is not possible to believe in the real presence of Christ if one does not believe in the divinity of Christ; yet the transfiguration account can set this aside, logically speaking. We could have the transfiguration of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus even if he were not the incarnate Son of God. Dummett also rejects the metaphysical proposals of Aquinas because they involve a degenerate conception of substance derived from Aristotle. This may appear strange coming from a philosopher often identified as a devout Catholic.

¹ Michael Dummett, “The Intelligibility of Eucharistic Doctrine,” in William J. Holtzer and William J. Abraham, eds., The Rationality of Religious Belief: Essays in Honour of Basil Mitchell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 241. ² I reverse the order in which Dummett develops his exposition.

    

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However, Dummett has his own way of reading the tradition that places him firmly in the Catholic tradition. Thus, he distinguishes between Christian dogma and the philosophical work that seeks to render that dogma intelligible. He fully accepts the deliverances of canonical teaching; but it is up to the philosopher to interpret and make sense of that teaching. This is far from easy because we may well be able to grasp enough to operate with our concepts, “but like troops in battle, we are unable to grasp what exactly it is that is we are doing when we operate with them.”³ Furthermore, back of the work of the theologian there is the teaching of scripture and the practices of the church. Doctrine normally follows practice as informed by scripture. Doctrine supplies in the present instance the proposition: The consecrated elements are in reality the body and blood of Christ. Beyond this philosophers like Aquinas have sought to provide an intelligible account of what initially appears to be false. Therefore, while the solution of Aquinas will be received with honor and respect, it is not the only possible way for a philosopher in the Catholic tradition to proceed. The core objection to Aquinas is that he is committed to an untenable metaphysical theory. Aquinas begins with a robust account of substance following Aristotle, but in the course of developing his position he has to commit to a doctrine of particular qualities (there is a particular instance of the color wine in this particular glass) as distinct from universal qualities (the color red applies to wine as a universal that can be instantiated in other objects). However, particular qualities are redundant once we commit to a proper account of universals. Any particular is an instantiation of a universal that can be reinstantiated in other objects of color. Furthermore, the notion of substance becomes degenerate in that it requires the idea that particular qualities become the bearer of the subject in the case of the body and blood of Christ. So, the bread, suitably transformed after its consecration, is the bearer of the body and blood of Christ: “This piece of bread is the body of Christ.” But the substance of the bread has been transformed into a mere shadow represented by certain qualities of its original substance; we have a mere quasi-subject rather than a genuine subject. This nullifies the entire theory.⁴ Dummett’s alternative is a much simpler proposal, metaphysically speaking. The crucial initial move relevant to the epistemological problem he has isolated is to be found in his deployment of the concept of “deeming.” He sees this as an improvement of the transfiguration theory. A pertinent analogy is “that of deeming a boy or man to be another man’s son.”⁵ This should not be confused with deeming a candidate to have passed an examination. In this case we are dealing with “judging” a candidate to have achieved, say, the relevant grade. It is integral ³ Ibid., 232. ⁴ I leave aside here whether Dummett has taken the full measure of the transformation rather than the adoption of Aristotelian theory in that he ignores the crucial role of divine action in Aquinas’s account. ⁵ Ibid., 250.

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to the concept of passing an examination that the candidate gets the relevant grade, just as it is integral to the concept of a coin that it be used as a means of monetary exchange. This is not the case when, say, a boy is deemed to be another man’s son: “it is not integral to the concept of a son that someone may be deemed to be someone else’s son, even though he did not in fact engender him.”⁶ In the case of the father-son, deeming works as follows. If someone is deemed to be the son of another, there is no sense in which it would be true to say, ‘He is not my son’: but there remains a sense in which it is true to say, ‘He is not really his son’, a sense which we capture by qualifications such as ‘He is not his son by blood’, or, in the modern style, ‘in the biological sense’. This hangs together, but should not be identified, with a further feature: we do not suppose that, by deeming something to be so, we alter anything other than the state of affairs deemed to obtain, together with the consequences, and that correlatively deemed not to obtain. If someone is deemed to be another’s son, he thereby acquires the rights and obligations of that relationship; but the circumstances of his birth and upbringing, let alone his appearance, are not regarded as in any other way what they formally were.⁷

Applied to eucharistic doctrine, we make an adjustment. In the special case of the Eucharist, the two features come apart. We deem the bread and wine to be changed, by the consecration, into the Body and Blood of Christ: but it is not problematic that this has no effect upon the physical circumstances, in that sense of physical specified above, and we need no apparatus of substance and accident to explain this.⁸

How does this take care of the epistemological issue where it appears that our senses are subject to illusion? In ordinary case of deeming, the act is a human act. Deeming is a performative action, different from, say, “declaring,” in which a properly appointed agent, say, a representative of the state, deems Murphy who is the son of Delaney to be now the son of Donovan. The case of the Eucharist is radically different. It is Christ himself who has deemed the bread and wine to be his body and blood. Given who Christ is—the Son of God—there can then be no question that the bread and the wine are indeed his body and blood.

⁶ Ibid., 251. There are, of course, constraints to deeming. Dummett outlines four. Deeming can only apply to past and present states of affairs. Deeming cannot take place if it would render someone morally culpable, if he would not have been so otherwise. Deeming must relate to a particular individual rather than be a quite general proposition. Deeming would be unintelligible if it had no moral, social, legal, or religious consequences. ⁷ Ibid., 252–3. Emphasis as in original. ⁸ Ibid., 253.

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In the case of one person standing proxy for another, say, for a godmother at a baptism who is unable to be present, she is deemed during the ceremony to be the person who is to become the godmother. However, the proxy is not really the godmother; this is merely a matter of human authority. Everything changes when we invoke divine authority. When something is deemed to be so on divine authority, the matter stands differently: there can be no sense in which it is not really so. We have, of course, to recognize that the consecrated elements are Christ’s Body and Blood in virtue of being deemed so, rather than naturally; for if we do not recognize this, we shall be back with the neo-Cartesian theory that God subjects us to mass illusion. But we take ourselves to have divine authority for their being Christ’s Body and Blood in God’s sight: and it would be presumptuous, if not blasphemous, to say that, all the same, they were not really so. Indeed, it would be unintelligible.⁹

For Dummett the appeal to what is the case in God’s sight is no platitude. It is crucial to the intelligibility of our claims about the world. We are impelled by a drive to discover how things really are in themselves, that is to say, independently of the way they present themselves to us, with our particular sensory and intellectual faculties and our particular spatial and temporal perspective. I doubt whether it is possible to represent this notion of reality as it is in itself as even coherent, save by equating how things are in themselves with how they are apprehended by God: without that representation, there is only the description of the world as it appears to us and as how we represent it to ourselves for the purpose of rendering its workings and regularities surveyable.¹⁰

Returning to the core proposal, it is worth quoting Dummett one more time. It is important here that the appearance of bread and wine is an objective one, not an illusion. Our sensations neither lack the customary physical stimuli, nor are misinterpreted, as with an optical illusion. If an appearance is known to be illusory, the right course is to ignore that appearance in our actions; but since this appearance is not illusory, the appropriate behaviour, capable of expressing our belief that the Body and Blood of Christ are present under the forms of bread and wine, is to behave towards them as to the Body and Blood of Christ in those respects in which the appearance is not relevant, but as to bread and wine in those respects in which it is. We may say that an adoptive father shows that he considers a boy to be his son by treating him as his son. This does not mean

⁹ Ibid., 254. Emphasis as in original.

¹⁰ Ibid., 254–5.

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     ‘treating him as if he believed that he was a natural son’: it means treating him as he would treat a natural son save in those respects in which his recognition that he is not his natural son demands. Similarly, treating the sacraments as the Body and Blood of Christ under the objective appearance of bread and wine means treating them as we should treat the Body and Blood of Christ save in so far as our recognition that the appearance is objective demands.¹¹

Dummett’s approach to divine action in the Eucharist presupposes the standard assumptions that Christ’s words at the Last Supper are to be taken literally, not symbolically; and that doctrine grows out of the effort to articulate the understanding which underlies liturgical and devotional practice. The appeal to practice is crucial. It is a combination of New Testament teaching and ecclesial practice that is the grounding for the crystallization of understanding that engages the theologian. The philosopher comes on board to provide relevant interpretation of the deliverances of the theologian. On this last front the core of his proposal rests on two crucial pillars: the concept of deeming and the appeal to divine authority. The great attraction of Dummett’s position is that it sets aside precisely the kind of metaphysical speculation that is in place in many treatments of eucharistic doctrine. Moreover, his vision is motivated by the epistemological problem that he takes to be the principal philosophical problem relative to the claim that the bread and wine after the consecration are now the body and blood of Christ. This is, in fact, a problem that has received all too little attention, although it is tempting to read most of the metaphysical work in play as an indirect effort to solve this problem. Compared to Aquinas’s, Dummett’s position is certainly parsimonious. In Aquinas we have a host of divine actions taking place.¹² The water that is added to the wine is turned into wine; the bread is turned into the body of Christ; the wine is turned into the blood of Christ; if we have the body of Christ, we have the muscles and bones of Christ, and, by concomitance, we have the soul of Christ; if we have the body and soul of Christ, by concomitance, we also have the divinity of Christ. Moreover, the body and blood of Christ is the same body and blood which was in the womb of Mary and the same body and blood that is now at the right hand of the Father. If we add up all these divine actions and their consequences, then the epistemological problem is all the more acute. How do we provide warrants for the full cluster of changes proposed? Presumably, Dummett can accommodate all this by noting that all of these changes are consequences of the act of divine deeming and are seen to be so by God. And divine sight secures their ¹¹ Ibid., 256–7. ¹² I leave aside the crucial place of a doctrine of sacrifice and the attendant vision of presbyters as priests which opens up a whole new domain of human and divine action. For my own sympathetic reading of Aquinas see my Divine Agency and Divine Action, vol. 2: Soundings in the Christian Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), chapter 8.

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objective reality alongside the objective perception of the sensible qualities of bread and wine. It is not some grand metaphysical theory represented by transubstantiation, consubstantiation, transelementation, impanation, and the like that provides such an interpretation;¹³ it is a matter of the vision of God secured through the action of deeming. Epistemologically, we have a case of theistic reliabilism. Divine perception is totally reliable and thus secures the truth about the transformation from bread and wine to the body and blood of Christ. I have introduced Dummett’s proposal because it rightly redirects us away from the extensive metaphysical speculation that is now common in treatments of the bread and wine in the Eucharist. To be sure, one can always respond to Dummett’s worries about the metaphysics of Aquinas by recourse to yet one more miracle. So, God takes one dimension of the bread and the wine and turns it into the substance of the body and blood of Christ in order to secure the doctrine of transubstantiation; the other accidental features of the bread and the wine are sustained by God directly. However, this is surely an entirely ad hoc move that can only be secured by ad hoc theological warrants.¹⁴ The great merit of Dummett’s proposal is that it redirects our thinking into an entirely different register. The language of deeming provides a welcome change in orientation, even as it seeks to work within a Catholic vision of the Eucharist. We need a more radical break from the Catholic tradition if we are to make progress.¹⁵ As we proceed in that direction, note that debates about divine action in the Eucharist tend to gravitate to the focal moment of the transformation of the sacramental elements. However, we need to keep the wider picture of divine and human action in sight. Thus, the transformation of the elements is one moment in a liturgical drama that is much longer. There is an interplay of divine and human action. Suppose we describe the scene more fulsomely. On the human side there will be acts of praise, intercessory prayer, acts of repentance and confession, hymn-singing, moments of greeting, active reflection on the words and actions of Christ, and so on. We also need to identify among the participants those appointed to lead. They have their own unique role to play in terms of presiding, ¹³ For a fine overview of the metaphysical options and a carefully constructed account of sacramental impanation, see James M. Arcadi, An Incarnational Model of the Eucharist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). ¹⁴ In the recent proposal of James Arcadi, we see a turn to Christology and an attendant raft of metaphysical proposals that seek to shore up a doctrine of sacramental impanation. Aside from the potential virtues or vices of the relevant metaphysical apparatus, the crucial mistake in this case is to take the utterly unique action of God in Christ and use it as a paradigm for divine action in the Eucharist. The radical difference in action-specification between the two (the Son of God becoming incarnate in Jesus and God turning the bread and the wine into the body and blood of Christ) is thus set aside. Given the move to see divine action in the Eucharist as parallel in grammar and logic to divine action in Christ, it is no accident that his doctrine of impanation is significantly akin to a fresh incarnation of Christ in the bread and the wine. Once the analogy or parallel is drawn, incarnation lies lurking in the wings. ¹⁵ I leave aside whether the Orthodox tradition is relevantly identical with that of the Catholic tradition; I am deeply skeptical of this claim.

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announcing words of absolution, reading the scriptures, preaching the Word of God, repeating the words of institution, supplying directions for participation, giving the benediction, and the like. Characteristically, there will also be an invocation of the Holy Spirit or a declaration of the active presence of the reign of God at the beginning of the service. On the divine side there is also a network of significant actions. Throughout the service the Holy Spirit is present and active, say, in bringing comfort to the weak and weary-laden, speaking through the preached Word, securing conviction of sin, giving assurance of forgiveness, providing fresh spiritual energy and hope, offering person-relative guidance, giving warnings about judgment, and so on. The details of divine and human action will differ according to liturgical practice, but it is an obvious mistake to isolate divine action related to the bread and wine from the whole network of human actions involved. For this reason, the standard textbook summaries that treat the issue, say, as one of mere memorial, symbolic representation, genuine transformation of the elements, real presence versus real absence, and the like are hopelessly reductionistic. These are a relic of unhappy polemical disputation. That said, there is no evading the challenge posed by claims about divine action related to the bread and the wine. These have become the site of contention, and for very good reason. On the one hand, the heart of a eucharistic service is indeed the reception of the bread and the wine; on the other hand, the central problem is how best to think of the precise divine action related to the relation between these elements and the body and blood of Christ. Dummett’s proposal is that the crucial action is that of divine deeming. So, what should we make of this fascinating suggestion? Take first the crucial move to deploy divine authority as the warrant for seeing the bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ. For Dummett, divine authority secures the truth of the matter as far as everyday reality is concerned. We are not entitled to take our perception of the world as veridical unless we can secure that by a theory of theistic reliabilism. It is divine perception of how things are that secures a reliable account of what they are. If we did not have the backing of divine perception, we would be left with skepticism, in that our description of the world would not represent what they are in themselves. We would only have the world as it appears to us. This is a strange way to proceed, to say the least. If we cannot take our ordinary capacities to be reliable, then on what grounds are we to take claims to have access to the divine apprehension of the world to be reliable? Presumably, access to the divine apprehension comes through reading relevant scriptural texts, reviewing historical practice, hearing the teaching of warranted teachers, and so on. However, we could not even begin to perform any of these actions if we could not prima facie trust our senses. Surely, the more apt way to proceed at this point is to accept our cognitive capacities to be prima facie reliable, but then, once we

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secure a serious doctrine of divine creation, we can strengthen our initial stance on the reliability of our capacities. Second, once we make this adjustment epistemologically, the inference from divine deeming to a truthful description of reality collapses. After the relevant action of divine deeming, the problem is that we cannot set aside our perceptual judgments about the bread and the wine because these are epistemically prior to the purported divine assessment based on divine deeming. It is not enough to be told that God now deems them to be the body and blood of Christ. After the act of divine deeming, we are still confronted in our perception by bread and wine, not body and blood. Compare this example. We are told that God has turned Alvin Plantinga’s body into the body of a crocodile. Not a pretty sight, we think. We then look and see and are relieved that there is no body of a crocodile anywhere to be seen. The claim is simply falsified by observation. Making God the agent involved does not undermine the crucial role of our senses in disconfirming the claim before us. If the claim is repeated, we are not questioning what God can do; we are simply calling into question the person who has a disposition to repeat obvious errors of fact. We can approach this from another angle. Take the analogy with the human case. We have a son, Murphy, the biological son of Delaney, deemed the son of Donovan. This is much too thin to carry the argument. To be sure, Murphy retains all the original physical properties with respect to biological generation, and he is now deemed to have other properties related to, say, inheritance, obligations, and the like, because he is deemed the son of Donovan. These are clearly warranted by the relevant social conventions and human actions in play. Once made, we can check for ourselves and see if they apply. However, the change from bread and wine into body and blood has to rest exclusively on the purported claim to divine deeming. And in this case, what we find when we look for ourselves is quite contrary to this description. The old problem of post-Cartesian illusion comes back to haunt us. Talk of the body and blood being present sacramentally or being present under the form of bread and wine is simply a semantic evasion. The obvious fact that we do not perceive the bread and wine as body and blood has not gone away; so, we invent pious discourse that will give cover to our intellectual nakedness. No doubt it is for this reason that folks have preferred to develop a diverse network of metaphysical speculations about the ontology involved in order to get around the obvious lack of perceptual evidence for body and blood to support the supposed changes. Dummett has shut down that whole operation; it is no longer open for business. I share this latter judgment. Let’s take one step further. Dummett assumes in his deliberations that eucharistic doctrine initially arises because of a combined appeal to scripture and practice. While Dummett leaves this claim underdeveloped, in pursuing this line of argument, he touches on the hem of a very significant garment. The really deep reason for the acute problem he identifies in the first place is that the claim that the

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bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ is secured by scripture as interpreted by the tradition and magisterium of the Catholic Church. At the end of the day, this is where the foot finally rests. These claims are now so integral to the very identity of Catholicism that they are irreversible. So much so that they have tragically become the standard polemical weapons used to lure vulnerable evangelicals to come home to Rome. Papal infallibility offers epistemic security; transubstantiation offers spiritual security. In terms of priority, the teaching magisterium of the church has become through a long process of development the foundation for the standard claims about the bread and the wine. I shall not here rehearse the arguments why I am not persuaded by the case for the relevant ecclesial authority.¹⁶ However, it is worth rehearsing briefly the material arguments advanced about scripture and the practice of the church. This will then pave the way for a sketch of my own proposal on how to think about the bread and wine within the wider horizon of divine and human action sketched above. The crucial scriptural argument is no surprise. We should read the words of institution, we are told, literally rather than figuratively. The problem with this is obvious; and it takes us back to the principal philosophical issue flagged by Dummett, that is, the problem of potential illusion. Our rule for reading a sentence figuratively rather than literally is that if the sentence makes no sense when read literally then it should be read figuratively.¹⁷ To take a hackneyed example, if someone says it is raining cats and dogs this morning, then if there are no cats and dogs to be seen, the sentence should be read figuratively. It means that we have a heavy rain shower. We are dealing with a dramatic way of saying that there is something special about the kind of shower identified. This surely is the case when we read or hear the sentence, “This is my body, this is my blood of the new covenant.” We are dealing with a figurative declaration that expresses the truth that in participating in the eating and drinking of this bread and wine, we are dealing with something special, with something out of the ordinary. What this is then rightly becomes the subject of further reflection and elaboration theologically and philosophically. Moreover, the rule that we decide what is literal and figurative on the basis of broadly empirical observation applies both in the original setting in the Gospels and in later usage in the liturgies of the church.¹⁸ The only reason why this principle is set aside is because it is overridden by claims emanating from ¹⁶ See my Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology: From the Fathers to Feminism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chapter 13. ¹⁷ I take the disjunction between literal and figurative to be the most fundamental issue rather than the disjunction between literal and symbolic. Recourse to discourse of signs is located into the domain of the figurative. ¹⁸ To be sure, we can develop a doctrine of development at this point, working our way from the New Testament all the way to the Fourth Lateran Council and to the Council of Trent. However, as is readily acknowledged, the danger of degenerate development will always lurk in the neighborhood.

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purported divine authority as lodged in the magisterium of the church. God has told us, it is said, that in this case we have an exception. We are dealing, we are told on God’s behalf, with a literal transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. This is the nub of the issue. Dummett’s whole case rests upon it, which is one reason why it should be considered a live option for the Catholic philosopher. However, if papal infallibility (and its correlative claims about tradition) collapses then the exception to the rule collapses. Indeed, as there are no exceptions, we should take the failure to abide by this rule as a serious objection to the reliability of the teaching of the magisterium. Moreover, the only way that the literal claim can be kept in play, given the evidence of our senses, is by elaborate schemes of transubstantiation, consubstantiation, transelementation, and the like, in which the natural kinds of body and blood, we are told, are really present but under the form of bread and wine. And the only way to secure any of these is to engage in metaphysical speculations that are much less secure epistemically than the natural rule governing the switch from a literal to a figurative reading of a sentence.¹⁹ I have noted above that the use of figurative language is not a mere ornamental or incidental feature of our linguistic practice. We use such discourse because we want to say that something out of the ordinary is taking place, that in the context we are dealing with something special. This is exactly how we should proceed in dealing with the dramatic language where we designate bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ. Both the context in which this takes place and the deployment of this discourse are important if we are to unpack the significance of what is taking place. It is not enough at this point to speak of mere memorial or mere communion, relevant and important as these concepts are. Contrary to much popular discussion we need a rich network of concepts to articulate what is happening when we participate in the eucharistic liturgy. Memorial and communion, yes indeed. But also: thanksgiving for our daily bread, celebration of all that God has done for us in Christ, spiritual sharing with other believers, fellowship with the church triumphant in heaven, the renewal of the new covenant in the blood of Christ, fresh acknowledgement of the inauguration of the kingdom of God on earth, anticipation of the great feast in heaven to come, sodality with the angels and archangels gathered around the throne of the Triune God, reception of the spontaneous gifts of the Spirit, and so on.

¹⁹ Arcadi nicely captures the issue in his commitment to declarative theology as opposed to deductive theology. He quotes his exemplar on this front, Durandus, as follows: declarative theology “is a lasting quality of the soul by means of which the faith and those things handed down in Sacred Scripture are defended and clarified by using principles that we know better.” See Arcadi, An Incarnational Model of the Eucharist, 3. I take the rule for distinguishing literal from figurative to be much better known that the manifold metaphysical claims advanced by Arcadi. I also take the evidence of our senses to be much more secure as well.

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Tragically, much of our practice has been so obsessed with the crucial place of eating and drinking the bread and the wine that other crucial features of the celebration are forgotten or neglected. With this in mind, it would be a great addition to our traditions if we celebrated in our homes, placing the action of eating and drinking of the bread and wine right in the midst of a proper meal. This is not to call into question the extraordinary choreography found, for example, on high and holy days in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow.²⁰ We can readily accommodate the various developments in practice that have emerged over time and treat them with generosity and love. However, something precious was lost when the Eucharist was totally disconnected from a full meal where the reception of bread and wine took place in a setting where there was such an abundance of food and wine that folks ran the risk of not sharing with the poor and of going home inebriated.²¹ Returning to our concern to provide a richer taxonomy of divine and human action in the eucharistic service, how might we capture the special place that the bold language of body and blood secures in the proceedings? Compared to the high-octane metaphysical claims that distract us, consider the following. In participating in worship, we come into the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, exalted to the right hand of the Father on High and active through the gift of the Holy Spirit. We encounter afresh the Person of the Son of the Living God. However, this Person is not just the one exalted on high; he is the one who has given his body and blood for our salvation. Moreover, he has instructed us to eat bread and drink wine in such a way as to see in and through them the sacrifice he has made for us in history. This in itself is deeply significant. We are connecting visually our present eating and drinking with the gift of his body broken for us and his blood shed for us. It is the incorporation of this visual experience into our present experience of Christ that is captured in the admonition to eat and drink in remembrance of his life given for us. In this kind of remembering the past is incorporated into our present appropriation of what Christ has done for us. As we might say colloquially, the past is made alive in the present. However, there is an added dimension when we ponder the place of agency and action. The one we meet is not accidentally related to his broken body and shed blood; it is integral to the very identity of the Person we now encounter. His past actions are re-presented (presented again by reenactment) in such a way as to ²⁰ However, we surely have to face the fact that the Byzantine developments bring with them their own serious liabilities spiritually and theologically. For an important and influential discussion of the situation see Nicholas Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). ²¹ It is fascinating that the recognition of the disciples on the road to Emmaus took place precisely in the course of the evening meal together. See Luke 24:28–35. For an older but exceptionally fine exposition of the situation historically see C. K. Barrett, Church, Ministry, and Sacraments (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005).

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inform our sense of the identity of the one we now meet through the working of the Holy Spirit. The past actions become integrally built into the conception and identity of the living Lord. He is encountered as the Savior who died for us. Consider an analogy. Suppose we have a friend who has saved us from drowning by jumping into raging waters and has pulled us to safety with his own bare hands. Tragically, our friend died as a result of the actions involved. However, it so happens that we have a photograph of the hands that saved us; it was originally taken for a specialized exhibition of the human body. It now occupies an honored place in the family pictures on the kitchen wall. Every time we see it, we are reminded of what he did for us. However, this is too weak a description. The photograph on the wall is now an integral part of his identity of our friend in a way that is not the case for other pictures. We cannot think of our friend when looking at the picture without it expressing the deep truth of his love for us. We remember all sorts of other things about our friend. However, this picture does more than evoke a memory; it secures afresh the identity of our friend as someone to whom we owe our very lives by dying for us. In reenacting a meal in which we obey the instruction to receive the bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ, we do, of course, remember vividly what he has done for us in his death. However, this is too weak a description of the bread and wine, just as seeing the photograph of our friend’s hands as a memory trigger is too weak an account of the significance of his hands. The bread and the wine are not just common natural objects once they are placed in the context of the Eucharist, the words of institution, and the epiclesis calling on the Holy Spirit to make these elements be for us the body and blood of Christ. They articulate afresh and they declare anew the sacrificial actions of Christ. One role is cognitive: they enable us to understand afresh the atoning love of God in response to our sins. A second role is conative: they draw us emotionally into a sense of Christ’s love for us and evoke a reciprocal emotional response in our hearts. Furthermore, unlike the analogy with our friend, in the case of the Eucharist we are not just dealing with the passive perception of a photograph, we are dealing with a reenactment of his actions in the season of Passover. The performative element in the service draws us much more deeply into the events of the past. Even more importantly, Christ, unlike our friend, is not dead; he is alive and present by his Spirit. So, turning again to the level of agency and action, the bread and the wine reinscribe those actions into our very sense of the identity of the one we presently encounter in worship and adoration. They make present his past actions as absolutely central to his presence now as risen Lord and Savior. We see in them the body of Christ broken for us and the blood of Christ shed for us. I recognize immediately that I am reaching for an account of the Eucharist that is extremely difficult to articulate. We grasp enough to operate with the relevant concepts, but we do not grasp exactly or fully what we are doing when we operate with them. Those attuned to what has happened bear persistent witness in

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experience that consuming the elements of bread and wine nourishes our relationship with Christ in a powerful and unique way. However, we can turn for help at this point to the eucharistic hymns of Charles Wesley. Consider the following. Jesus, we thus obey Thy last and kindest word; Here, in thine own appointed way, We come to meet the Lord. Our hearts we open wide To make the Saviour room; And lo! The Lamb, the Crucified, The sinners’ friend, is come! His presence makes the feast; And now our spirits feel The glory not to be expressed, The joy unspeakable. With pure celestial bliss He doth our spirits cheer; His house of banqueting is this, And he hath brought us here. He bids us drink and eat Imperishable food; He gives us flesh to be our meat, And bids us drink his blood. Whate’er the Almighty can To pardoned sinners give, The fullness of our God made man We here with Christ receive.²²

Note what is on display here initially: the oblique reference to the words of institution before Christ’s death, tying the meal back to its historical foundation; the identification of the risen Lord as Savior, the atoning Lamb of God, and the sinners’ friend, making clear the identity of the one we meet; and then the sense of joy and good cheer evoked by Christ’s presence at his banquet, for how can we encounter the risen Lord and not be deeply moved emotionally? Charles Wesley then describes the consuming of the bread and wine as consuming imperishable food, that is, they represent the reception of the very life of Christ himself into our hearts and soul. We finish with the broad specification of divine action: Almighty ²² Hymns and Psalms: A Methodist Ecumenical Hymn Book (London: Methodist Publishing House, 1983), hymn 614.

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God gives pardoned sinners whatever they personally may need at this point in their lives to bring them closer to the fulness of what God achieved in the incarnation. Consider a second hymn. Victim divine, thy grace we claim, While thus thy precious death we show; Once offered up, a spotless Lamb, In thy great temple here below, Thou didst for all mankind atone, And standest now before the throne. Thou standest in the holiest place, As now for guilty sinners slain; Thy blood of sprinkling speaks, and prays, All-prevalent for helpless man; Thy blood is still our ransom found, And spreads salvation all around. We need not now go up to heaven, To bring the long-sought Saviour down; Thou are to all already given; Thou dost ev’n now the banquet crown: To ever faithful soul appear, And show thy real presence here!²³

Suffice it to say in this case that Charles Wesley has brilliantly articulated two distinct themes. First, he shows that Christ’s past achievement in atonement is knitted into the very identity of Christ present here and now at his banquet. Second, he insists that those who come in faith receive by their participation God’s generosity and power in salvation, that is, the transformation of their lives as designed by God. What then does God actually do in the celebration of the Eucharist? In the course of the whole service many actions are being performed by the human participants and by the Holy Spirit. My earlier catalogue of divine action in bringing comfort to the weak and weary-laden, speaking through the preached Word, and so on, identifies specific divine actions which take place in the service as a whole. But what of the divine action in the consummation of the bread and wine? In, with, and through the reception of these material realities, the Holy Spirit continues the work of salvation, supplying as only the Holy Spirit can judge,

²³ Ibid., hymn 629.

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whatever is needed to advance the work of God in deeper sanctification. This is inescapably person-relative. There is no need to reach for some further miraculous transformation of the elements. If we want a technical philosophical description then we can think in terms of a weak form of occasionalism: on the occasion of the relevant human actions, the Holy Spirit works in multiple ways to further the work of salvation. If we want a simple theological formulation: God has promised when we perform these actions appropriately that the risen Lord through the action of the Holy Spirit will meet with us and minister to us as personally needed; given who God is, we can rely on his promise. To be sure, these actions are broadly delineated; but this is exactly what we should expect, for the salvation of our souls depends on the supply of spiritual nourishment that only the Holy Spirit knows how to identify and supply. We can be sure that the Holy Spirit will act as the occasion and our lives dictate.

7 Divine Action and Skepticism in the Book of Exodus Suppose the following proposition. Human agents are complex truth-detecting organisms. We can explicate this epistemological proposal in this way. Just as thermometers, if working properly, detect the truth of the temperature in a room, human agents come equipped with a whole array of capacities that enable them to detect truth from falsehood and thus gain knowledge of the world they inhabit. To be sure, the analogy is inadequate, but the point is crucial: truth detection as applied to human agents is constituted by the complex capacities that give them access to the truth about reality. Even the long-standing obsession with providing arguments for our beliefs has to be tracked back to our ability to engage in practices that depend on critical underlying abilities. The fatal mistake of epistemologists in the modern period has been to ignore this insight, focusing exclusively on justification and the provision of deductive argument, and setting aside other crucial epistemic capacities and practices. We need a robust agency-centered epistemology if we are to make progress. Human agents are indeed complex truthdetecting organisms. Consider the following review. By means of memory human agents have access to truth about the past. Through the use of the five senses (smell, hearing, sight, touch, and taste) they can perceive what is happening in the physical universe. Through introspection they can detect various mental events, mental states, and bodily sensations. By means of their aesthetic and moral senses they are capable of making judgments about beauty and ugliness and about good and evil. Through their spiritual senses they are able to detect divine presence and action in nature, in history, in other human agents, and in their own lives. Through testimony they gain access to the truths made available to other human agents who share their knowledge with them in their social world. Equally important, through various practices they can extend their base of knowledge. Thus, they can learn to use deduction, induction, arguments to the best explanation, analogical reasoning, good judgment, and the like, to construct accounts of the world that can be embodied in books, research traditions, oral forms, virtual media, art, music, and the like. Moreover, human agents inhabit a social world where they are given crucial conceptual resources to describe reality and hand these over to new generations of human subjects. Within this complex array of capacities, there is plenty of room for genuine freedom in the acquisition of knowledge.

Divine Agency and Divine Action Volume IV: A Theological and Philosophical Agenda. William J. Abraham, Oxford University Press (2021). © William J. Abraham. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786535.003.0008

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Thus, the cultivation of intellectual virtues is more likely to lead to truth detection than the cultivation of intellectual vices. Choices are inescapable at this point. Formation in such virtues and vices is deeply affected by personal experience, say, of trauma; and formation is also affected by human social environments as found in, say, education, religious ritual, social location, and traditional practices. There is enough in place here to get the bigger picture. Suppose further that we read the book of Exodus with something akin to this vision of epistemology in hand.¹ In other words, just as some readers, say Philo or Maimonides, read the text with certain metaphysical concerns in mind; or just as other readers, say, Yoram Hazony or liberation theologians, read the text with certain political concerns; I propose to read the text with certain epistemological concerns in mind. The initial motivation for this is an important feature of the text itself, namely, the remarkable number of references to knowledge of God that show up. Consider, for now, the astonishing contrast between the beginning and the end of the book. In the early chapters, it is clear that the Israelites begin to have serious doubts about their inherited account of the divine. By the end of the book they have no such doubts and gladly construct a tabernacle to express their commitment and worship of God. How has this remarkable turnaround happened? Does the text as we have it provide significant epistemic clues that explain this shift from unbelief to faith, or from skepticism to deep commitment? I shall argue that it does.² Moreover, these clues display the crucial significance of divine action in securing knowledge of God. Thus, we have a front-row seat on the relation between divine action and the epistemology of theology. At a superficial level the book of Exodus is organized into a threefold division marked by geography: Israel in Egypt, Israel exiting Egypt, and Israel at Sinai. The more interesting division from an epistemic standpoint is the shifts from Israel as a thriving community with its own identity (including its theological identity), through its lapse into unbelief and despair, to its recovery of intellectual nerve, and on to its fresh commitment to God represented by obedience to God both in terms of a way of life and a form of worship. This, of course, is not a straight story from skepticism to knowledge and faith, as the episode of the golden calf makes all too clear; but taken in the round this is a fair rendering of the twists and turns of the narrative. What deserves special attention as we proceed is the relevant epistemic

¹ What is ultimately at stake here is where we stand on the epistemology of theology. For a comprehensive treatment of this see William J. Abraham and Frederick D. Aquino, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). My own vision of epistemology is essentially a vision of agent-epistemology that makes human agents the focus of attention. For my treatment of the epistemology of theology as it pertains to the Christian tradition, see my Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006). ² I read the text in its final canonical form because this is the form of the text bequeathed to us in both the Jewish and the Christian traditions. I leave aside for now questions about earlier editions and final editorial formation, even though I do not at all discount the importance of this work in our readings of the text.

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considerations that are either implicit or explicit in the narrative. Thus, I am interested in such notions as encounter with the divine, divine speaking, providential and miraculous confirmation, and testimony. When Israel arrived in Egypt, she brought with her the testimony of her forebears. This was the epistemic bedrock of her identity and stability across space and time. Behind this testimony lay the radical encounter with God in the life of Abraham, the covenant with him and his descendants mediated in terms of the divine speech-act of promising, and the initial providential confirmation of the covenant represented most dramatically in the preservation and success of Joseph. The people relied on testimony even as the foundation for that testimony lay in religious experience (divine encounter and providence). Given their success and the change of political leadership in Egypt, the received testimony came under strain when Pharaoh decided on a strategy of slave labor followed up by a strategy of genocide. What was at issue was the complete falsification of the received testimony and its underlying foundations. In other words, what was at issue was an epistemological crisis of the highest order. If Pharaoh succeeds, then the promise of God is undermined once and for all. The humanitarian dimension of the crisis is also significant. Given the traumatic effects of slavery, it was entirely natural that it became increasingly difficult for the people to believe.³ The combination of personal trauma and social intimidation shows up in an increasingly effective way until it reaches a climax where they challenge Moses’ testimony and its corroboration, insisting that his testimony about meeting God and its ensuing promise of deliverance were totally unreliable. At that point, even Moses himself has come to question his own interpretation of his experience and, in reality, accuses God of deception.⁴ Thus, he has come to question his own encounter with God, the veracity of divine speech, and the confirmation of his call by various miracles. The reliability of his religious experience in divine encounter and providence—the bedrock foundations of the faith he himself had initially received by means of testimony—had been undermined. Clearly, he remains in a genuine sense a believer, a believer who dares to challenge God, yet the critical content of his beliefs about God were now under enormous strain. God had not delivered his people, thus the threat of falsification loomed; and the social impact of unbelief due to intense suffering within Israel has taken its toll on his capacity to believe. At this point in the narrative, we have one of the most important initial references to the provision of knowledge.

³ I explore the epistemic consequences of personal trauma as represented by death in my Among the Ashes: On Death, Grief, and Hope (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017). ⁴ Exodus 5:22–3.

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God also spoke to Moses and said to him: “I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name ‘The Lord’ I did not make myself known to them. I also established my covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they resided as aliens. I have also heard the groaning of the Israelites whom the Egyptians are holding as slaves, and I have remembered my covenant. Say therefore to the Israelites, ‘I am the Lord, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with many acts of judgment. I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. You shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has freed you from the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I will give it to you for a possession. I am the Lord.’ ”⁵

Two elements in this passage deserve comment. First, the divine response is clearly addressed at one level to the humanitarian plight of the people. Thus, there is an echo of the earlier declaration of the divine awareness of the groaning of the people.⁶ What is repeated is the clear declaration that God will deliver and thus show fidelity to his earlier covenant promise. Second, the theme of knowledge is picked up initially by verbal confirmation that God really did appear to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—their encounter with God was veridical and the divine speaking was not make-believe. It is then implicitly picked up in terms of a knowledge of God that will supervene on the acts of redemption that are to follow. Thus, the problems of skepticism, unbelief, and despair are to be addressed by God’s future actions of deliverance. The underlying epistemic assumption in play here is that God is to be construed as an agent who makes himself known through his mighty acts in history. Thus, the divine speech acts of covenantmaking and promising are to be confirmed by the non-speech actions related to divine deliverance. Both divine speech acts and non-speech acts are here crucial for coming to terms with the epistemic dimensions of the text. In traditional terms, we are dealing with divine encounter in religious experience (various appearances of God to chosen individuals), with divine speaking in special revelation in which the identity and promises of God are made available, and in divine confirmation of these appearances and special revelation by divine actions in history. It is crucial as we proceed not to reach immediately for the standard queries about miracle that have dominated the modern discussion. There is a place for this discussion, but we must step back and come to terms with the religious and indeed political situation depicted in the text. At this point the depiction of Pharaoh becomes especially significant.

⁵ Exodus 6:2–8. Emphasis mine.

⁶ Exodus 2:24.

        

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Read from a human point of view, clearly Pharaoh has a number of problems on his hand. At one level, it is a problem of the long-term effects of immigration, represented by the steady multiplication of an alien community in Egypt. This readily morphs into a problem for his ministry of defense and foreign relations team: how can they preempt the potential action of a fifth column in their midst on the occasion of war with a hostile neighbor? His initial solution was the standard one of enslavement. When this failed, he moved to a policy of ethnic cleansing and ethnic extermination. Clearly, this too failed.⁷ However, he also has an interesting religious problem on his hands: he has become aware of a potential threat to his political theology when he is confronted with the challenge of Moses in the name of the God of Israel. This potential threat is dismissed in terms of a psychological reduction of the discourse of Moses. The real issue is not that Moses or that the people through Moses have heard from another deity; the real issue is that the people are lazy and want to take a break from work. Discourse about the Lord, the God of Israel, Pharaoh insists, is mere epiphenomena. So, he doubles down on the strategy of suffering and enslavement. Pharaoh is a total skeptic from the beginning. The text implicitly explains why. Pharaoh is committed to a contrasting polytheistic religion which is epistemically secure, so secure that he can dismiss the alternative represented by Moses as psychological rather than rationally determined. He develops a causal account of its origins that undermines its credibility. In this respect, Pharaoh anticipates those moderns who have deployed the resources of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche to undermine religious belief. For the moderns, the relevant background beliefs that do the heavy lifting are economic, psychological, and political; for Pharaoh, the relevant background beliefs are represented by the pantheon of Egyptian deities of which he is the titular head. All, however, see the presented religious beliefs as the product of cognitive malfunction; the human agent’s cognitive capacities have failed or misfired. Two further features of Pharaoh’s situation deserve mention. First, the divine response represented by the plagues that befall Egypt are not mere arbitrary occasions of divine shock and awe; they effectively display the sovereign control of the God of Israel over the relevant spheres of the gods represented by the pantheon of Egypt. The dramatic death of the first-born son of Pharaoh himself represents the deepest challenge to the political theology of Egypt. Otherwise, we simply have a totally incoherent narrative that simply shocks our moral and intellectual horizons. This display of divine power is, of course, tradition-relative. It will make no sense to modern secular readers; it will simply invoke the kind of skepticism and unbelief represented by their response, say, to accounts of exorcism that show up in the diaries and writings of Presbyterian missionaries in

⁷ Pharaoh is acting foolishly here, for success would spell the decimation of his labor force!

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China in the nineteenth century.⁸ Yet in the text of Exodus it is precisely the actions of God in nature and history that convince all concerned that there is indeed genuine knowledge of “the Lord” and that his covenant promise can be relied on. All the references to knowledge of God fit into this startling theological background music. Second, the complicated and demanding descriptions of Pharaoh himself bear scrutiny in coming to terms with the epistemic suggestions of Exodus. Here the relevant theme is the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. One way to think of what is at issue is as follows. The “heart” refers in the text more to the life of the mind than to the seat of our emotions. While the first relevant text speaks of God hardening Pharaoh’s heart,⁹ the next ten speak explicitly of Pharaoh hardening his own heart. The core idea is that Pharaoh is so ideologically committed and stubborn, so addicted to his own economic and personal interests, that he refuses to accept any contrary evidence that crops up. We might say that he is so resolutely committed to the intellectual vices of close-mindedness, dogmatism, irrational tenacity, and the like that he simply digs a hole for himself as a matter of settled conviction and even choice. There are occasions when he momentarily relents. Thus, he agrees at one point that the Lord is in the right and he and his people are in the wrong.¹⁰ At another point, he repents and even asks Aaron to pray for him.¹¹ However, these are short-lived. It is at this point that the text vividly speaks of God hardening Pharaoh’s heart, so that God gives him what he wants and helps him dig a deeper hole for himself. Thus, divine judgment on his unbelief takes the form of deeper unbelief. Yet this judgment is not arbitrary, for it is motivated by a decision on God’s part that has significant epistemic consequences. The crucial text is found at Exodus 9:13–17. Then the Lord said to Moses, “Rise up early in the morning and present yourself before Pharaoh, and say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of the Hebrews: Let my people go, so that they may worship me. For this time I will send all my plagues upon yourself, and upon all your officials, and upon your people, so that you may know that there is no one like me in all the earth. For by now I could have stretched out my hand and struck you and your people with pestilence, and you would have been cut off from the earth. But this is why I have let you live: to show you my power, and to make my name resound through all the earth. You are still exalting yourself against my people, and will not let them go.’ ”¹²

⁸ See, for example, the remarkable treatment of this issue in John L. Nevius, Demon Possession (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 1968). The original was published in 1894. ⁹ Exodus 4:21. ¹⁰ Exodus 9:27. ¹¹ Exodus 10:16. ¹² Exodus 9:13–17. Emphasis mine.

        

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Clearly, this is not the depiction of the Teddy Bear deity of popular and much sentimental theological teaching. This is a sobering depiction of a deity who will providentially use the rebellion of human agents to further his own ends: in this case, the end of showing that the Lord and not Pharaoh is the divine ruler of the universe. The Lord does not shuffle off the scene of human history simply because certain important people in public life turn against him. More daringly, the text, in speaking of divine and not just human hardening, suggests a deity who causally constructs the world so that the judgment on sin is more sin, on unbelief more unbelief.¹³ Yet the judgment is directed to a positive end, namely the knowledge of the God of grace and emancipation made manifest in history. The issue is captured in the aftermath of the crossing of the sea: “Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the Egyptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore. Israel saw the great work that the Lord did against the Egyptians. So, the people feared the Lord and believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses.”¹⁴ By this stage the problem of skepticism, unbelief, and despair has been effectively reversed.¹⁵ The change is represented immediately in the Song of Moses and the people.¹⁶ The change is in turn delivered to Jethro by means of testimony.¹⁷ The challenge now is the proper response to what God has done and the sustaining of the knowledge of God among the people into future generations. The former is worked out in the giving of the law and in the directions for proper worship. The latter is dramatically captured in the incident of the golden calf, where Aaron and the people fall into false beliefs about the origins of their deliverance and commit idolatry. Thus, we should note that the challenge for the epistemology of theology is not simply the initial grounding of the knowledge of God in Israel, but the sustaining of that knowledge into the future. Clearly testimony is going to be crucial at this point; however, there are various ways of preserving testimony, as noted initially in the singing of songs and the verbal reports delivered to Jethro. As we shall see, liturgical practices of worship are pivotal in the way testimony is to be preserved in Israel. Even then, we should not miss the crucial place of both historic theophany and ongoing encounter with God in the sustaining of knowledge of God. This theme is captured in the symbolism of the cloud that occurs before the giving of the law at Sinai¹⁸ and in the manifestation of the glory of God in the tabernacle¹⁹ that is the climax of the book at the very end.

¹³ Clearly, this has enormous significance for the limitations of traditional forms of theological apologetics that focus merely on arguments and evidence but pay no attention to the reception of such arguments and evidence. ¹⁴ Exodus 14:30–1. Emphasis mine. ¹⁵ There is initial acceptance of the claims of Moses at Exodus 4:31, but this is short-lived. ¹⁶ Exodus 15:1–20. ¹⁷ Exodus 18:1; 18:10. ¹⁸ Exodus 19:16. ¹⁹ Exodus 40:38.

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In the former case, the mind of people is prepared to hear the giving of the law by various audio-visual aids and by significant changes in their routine behavior. The divine theophany is deftly symbolized by a cloud, which is not exactly a feature of the universe one can take home and erect into a conventional idol. Thus, the hearts and minds are partially trained to perceive the significance of the law and to be motivated to obey it. The divine is to be approached not casually but with appropriate awe and dread. Even though the Lord has delivered them from bondage, he is to be treated with the respect and courtesy that is fitting to his proper identity and ontology. When God speaks at Sinai and gives his commandments, itself a fresh instantiation of special revelation by means of imperatives, the people are called upon to recognize not just its divine origin but its pivotal role in their future wellbeing. Thus, it is clearly perceived that the recognition and reception of divine speaking is in part dependent on the state of the recipients’ minds and hearts. There is an obvious element of proper cognitive functioning that is taken into account in the various features of the theophany and in the strict human preparations that are in place. The tabernacle—the building of which is described in lengthy material meticulously laid out twice—clearly functions as a sacred site of experiences and practices that not only bind the people together religiously but also provides occasion for fresh manifestations of the divine in the midst of the people as they move forward. Once again, the symbol of a cloud undercuts any temptation to construct a conventional idol and serves to represent the ongoing presence and guidance of God. Two points are visible epistemologically; and both have to do with the sustaining of the knowledge of God among the people. First, the testimony of what God has done in deliverance, in keeping his promise, in entering into a deeper relation with Israel at Sinai, and in providing for the ongoing welfare of the people, are preserved in complex rituals that are to be repeated across the years. The means and provisions for these rituals, while they depend crucially on priestly leaders, are such that everyone can participate in their human origination and in their continuing repetition. The testimony is not a mere verbal or oral testimony; it is testimony that requires non-speech action and embodiment. Second, the various rituals are not mere empty practices; they are not merely means for carrying out one’s religious duties; they provide occasions for ongoing divine encounter. They mediate the presence of God and provide crucial spiritual resources for formation in holiness. Liturgical practice takes on enormous epistemological significance when seen from these angles. It carries forward the testimony to past divine encounter, divine speaking, and reports of divine providence. It keeps alive the knowledge of God gained in special revelation in the past. Equally important, it provides the opportunity for personal and corporate encounter

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with the divine that prevents past testimony from descending into mere tradition with no meaning for the present.²⁰ We can now summarize the argument to date. Initially the people of Israel know about God through human testimony. Behind this testimony—and essential to securing its original positive status—stands their ancestors’ encounter with God, their reception of divine promises mediated through divine speaking, and their experience of providence. This testimony was quickly called into question by the actions of Pharaoh, which threatened to falsify the relevant content by eliminating the people to whom God had given the promise of their own land or by preventing them from moving towards it. It could also be eroded by the suffering and trauma of the people as a whole; in cases of trauma their cognitive capacities are in danger of being overwhelmed by suffering so that it is difficult to think straight about reality. The confirmation of the original divine testimony is given first to Moses, who effectively undergoes a recurrence of divine encounter, divine election, divine speaking, and providential and miraculous care, which was the foundation for the original testimony handed down to the people. However, Moses fails in his efforts to convince Pharaoh to let the people go; indeed, he fails to convince his own people; and he himself is on the brink of skepticism. Where the people’s trust in testimony is eroded by potential falsification and trauma, Pharaoh’s skepticism is driven by political and personal self-interest joined to a network of intellectual vices that range from stupidity and pride, through close-mindedness and dogmatism, all the way to irrational tenacity and emotional vacillation. At this point God steps in afresh and shows by miraculous and providential action that he keeps his covenant with Israel. In the process, divine action undermines the competing claims about the Egyptian pantheon and in the final miracle at the sea drives home that in reality the Lord, not Pharaoh, is indeed in charge of the universe. This is recognized by the people and even by Jethro, something of an outsider. The challenge now is the appropriate response to the knowledge of God given to Israel and the preservation of that knowledge for future generations. This is addressed in the materials on the giving of the law and the construction of the tabernacle. Israel as a people is bound afresh to the Lord in an encounter at Sinai where she promises obedience to the commands of God. The challenge of sustaining the testimony of God is dramatized in an acute way in the incident with the golden calf. Clearly, testimony requires more than mere verbal or oral transmission; hence the elaborate provision made for liturgical embodiment of testimony. Even then, this in itself is not enough; hence the tabernacle also serves as a site of ongoing encounter with the presence and glory of God. ²⁰ For a groundbreaking philosophical study of liturgy see Terence Cuneo, Ritualized Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2016.

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Before I take up a brief commentary on the argument to date, let me reiterate the goal of this exercise. My aim has been to provide an epistemological reading of the book of Exodus that begins with a reading of the text in its final canonical form and that brings out the significance of divine action for knowledge of God. This should not be taken as some kind of return to a naive fundamentalist reading of the scriptures. A close analogy can be found in those readings of the text that focus on the text as literature. As I shall shortly argue, the reading of the text in its final form need not at all exclude drawing on illuminating accounts of various sources or voices within the text. Indeed, I consider that kind of historical work, despite the skepticism it rightly evokes from philosophers and ordinary believers, to be indispensable to a fully rounded reading of scripture and its theological content. Moreover, an epistemological reading of the text of the kind undertaken here is only made possible by the revolution in epistemology that has taken place over the last fifty years. This revolution has called into question the focus on internalism and deduction, that is, on the search for strictly deductive arguments that are so precisely articulated that they are self-consciously adopted by the human subject in search of truth. The search for sound and valid deductive arguments is surely only one intellectual practice at our disposal; in fact, this practice depends crucially on the capacity of the human subject to construct them and evaluate them. The same applies to inductive arguments and arguments to the best explanation. The dependence on the proper cognitive functioning has been highlighted by the development of externalist and reliabilist accounts of the human quest for truth, knowledge, justification, and understanding. We must also take into account the wealth of material on intellectual virtues and vices as it pertains to the quest for truth. My own shorthanded way of capturing this revolution is to insist that human agents are complex truth-detecting organisms. So, I prefer to work from an agency-oriented stance in epistemology generally. The more general revolution in epistemology just noted has led to the possibility of reopening older questions about the truth and justification of religious belief that were effectively shut down in the wake of the devastating attack on natural theology and divine revelation developed by Hume and Kant. Many Anglo-American philosophers who write about religion have failed to register the significance of the new work on, say, religious experience and divine revelation, and on the crucial place of informal judgment, testimony, tradition, intellectual virtue and vice, and more generally in the proper working of our cognitive capacities, in current debates in epistemology. To be sure, the whole terrain remains essentially contested, as is always the case in philosophy. However, once we step into the new world opened up to us in the scholarship of the last fifty years, whole new options become available. Thus, we now have to deal with the arrival of analytic theology. Equally, we need to invent a new sub-discipline, the epistemology of theology, to deal with the challenges we face. What this exercise has opened up for me is the possibility of reading scripture through the

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lens of epistemology. To be sure, the danger of anachronistic readings and eisegesis lays close to hand; but this is a danger that befits any reading of scripture we care to undertake, so we should not let it inhibit us. Let me now turn in this last section to further brief ruminations on the short commentary on Exodus that I have provided. I want to take up three themes: the place of Sinai and the giving of divine commands in the text as a whole; the extraordinary tendency to focus on the reliable reception of divine revelation (as manifestation of divine glory, as special encounter with certain chosen agents, as speaking as a means of coming to know the mind of God, and as mighty acts in nature and history) by way of theories of divine dictation and authorship; and finally, the challenge posed by my reading for current debates about the role of historical investigation in the reception of scripture. First, then the place of Sinai in our deliberations. The reception and interpretation of the book of Exodus and the scriptures in which it is embedded have long engaged readers and commentators across thousands of years. I take great delight in the fecundity of riches that underlies this reception. Inevitably distortions have occurred, most notably in the Christian tradition that has seen the Hebrew scriptures as proclaiming a theology of legalism and works-righteousness that has no real place for grace in its understanding of God. On the reading developed above it is abundantly clear that divine grace, divine revelation, divine faithfulness to the covenant with Abraham, and divine revelation are the bedrock of the theology on offer. Indeed, the provision of the commandments on Sinai (moral, civil, and liturgical) is itself an expression of divine grace. And the carefully articulated accounts of the possibility of atonement that follow in the book of Leviticus presuppose that grace is available even after the fall into disobedience. The corollary of this observation is equally important. It is surely a mistake to isolate the commandments as somehow the heart and soul of the spiritual life of the people of Israel. The commandments are embedded in a narrative of prior revelation that renders intelligible their content and motivates obedience to their precepts. They are, further, the prelude to the worship of God as represented by the placement of the material on the tabernacle and the display of divine glory that bring the text to a fitting climax. Hence, we must ever think of law in its more general sense of Torah or divine instruction if we are to begin to do justice to this material. Or so it seems to me. Second, it is unsurprising that readers of Exodus, in the wake of modern skepticism about robust claims about divine action, divine revelation, divine encounter, and the like, have wanted to leave behind the earlier material in Exodus and focus on obedience and morality as the heart of true religion. Even positivists have had to worry about the place of morality in human existence despite the intellectual bankruptcy of emotivist and prescriptivist theories of moral discourse. The ready embrace of Kantian and utilitarian alternatives to theologically oriented visions of ethics shows that morality is a constitutive feature

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of our lives together. The underlying assumption is that the prior theological sources and motivational resources so clearly visible in the text are no longer available. They must be reread as myth, negatively understood, or legend, and thus deprived of their cognitive content. Over against this, the massive efforts to secure the reliability of the text’s testimony are surely fascinating. These efforts are wholly understandable, for, once we read the text as a whole, the move to reduce religion to morality, or to tie it so closely to morality that its theology is marginalized, does not begin to do justice to the reading of the text I am proposing. What was and is at issue here is securing the preservation of divine revelation; that is, the issue centered on sustaining knowledge of God across space and time. It was not enough to explain how the original knowledge was given (through divine encounter, divine speaking, and divine confirmation by providence and miracle); it was crucial to preserve that knowledge. In time the role assigned to the text of scripture—identified in modern times as a sacred book—became utterly central and non-negotiable. The sacred texts in turn were secured as providing reliable recording of earlier testimony by means of elaborate theories of divine dictation, divine speaking, divine inspiration, and divine authorship.²¹ Of course, there was also the problem of the right interpretation of the sacred text, a problem in part solved by simply insisting on an orally transmitted proper interpretation that too was secured by divine dictation and oversight.²² Note what is at stake here epistemologically. The issue is no longer what it was for Moses and the people of Israel, who had become deeply skeptical of the testimony they had received from their forebears. Putting that testimony in written form would not have helped a whit. What turned them around was a fresh encounter with Moses on the part of God, the reiteration of the divine care and commitment to his covenant, the acts of God in deliverance, the manifestation of God at Sinai and in the tabernacle, and so on. The issue was reframed as an issue of the preservation of that knowledge in terms of sacred scripture. And the solution was to reach for further divine action in terms of divine dictation, divine speaking, divine authorship, and the like. With this in place (and there were many diverse iterations) the scene was set for a fresh challenge to the whole of Israel’s faith and for the temptation to reach for morality and obedience (rather than

²¹ Theories of inerrancy and infallibility are intimately tied to these kinds of theories about the divine origin of scripture. There are surprising spinoffs to observe. One of these is to appeal to them in order to reject the significance of precisely the kind of epistemic moves I have traced here in the book of Exodus. ²² The initial problem with all such theories is not just the difficulty of securing the story of the divine origin of the oral tradition involved but the danger of heading towards an infinite regress. If we need a divinely dictated or inspired oral tradition to understand a sacred text, then the next question on the horizon is whether we can understand the oral interpretation on offer. Do we need another interpretation to understand the oral interpretation? Consider, for example, the difficulty of understanding papal pronouncements that are supposed to settle hermeneutical disputes. The pronouncements turn out to require yet further interpretation given the debates they engender.

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theology) as the heart of true religion.²³ That challenge came in the form of the application of historical investigation to the texts of sacred scripture, represented on the Jewish side initially by the brilliant work of Spinoza and on the Christian side carried out under the banner of historical criticism over the last two centuries. In developing the specific defense of the scriptures as mediating divine knowledge, both Jews and Christians inadvertently cooked their own goose. Or so it has seemed to many modern Jews and Christians. The search was then on for viable contemporary alternatives; or, more dramatically, believers could exit religion for supposedly greener pastures in modern forms of atheism. This takes me to my third theme, the role of historical investigation in the reception of the book of Exodus. On this score, I want to make several distinct points. First, we should not narrow the options down to either a flat reading of the text as straightforward historical narrative from beginning to end written by Moses or to the more recent efforts to see the texts as the products across space and time of various editorial hands that are nonetheless described as produced by divine revelation.²⁴ Thus, I do not reject the older quest for various sources or, more modestly stated of late, in terms of diverse traditions and voices that are brought together into a final edition.²⁵ To be sure, the field of biblical studies has become, with the arrival of postmodernism, an arena where we are rightly skeptical and rightly tempted to dismiss the latest proposals as a farrago of nonsense.²⁶ The historical options available range all the way from more maximal proposals that preserve a robust core of historical truth all the way to minimalist proposals that essentially see the material as constructed according to various non-truth-inducing interests from top to bottom. Beyond this parochial arena, there are also wider questions about what historians should do with claims about divine action that continue to inform the discussion. Issues of ontology and epistemology keep knocking at the door despite concerted efforts to keep them at bay.²⁷

²³ Of course, there is a real sense in which obedience, morality, and holiness are at the heart of true religion but not at the expense of other crucial elements, not least its theological commitments. ²⁴ The move in play here is to identify revelation with the text and then treat an inductive account of the origins of the text as the substance of divine revelation. The crucial problems with this are, first, that it gives little or no attention to the concept of revelation; and, second, that it simply identifies divine revelation with a sacred text without any supporting argument. In a way, it trades on older prescriptive theories of divine revelation that treated scripture as a text dictated or authored by God so that the relevant divine action in revelation is that of divine speaking. ²⁵ Older theories that sought confidently to divide the sources into the standard JEDP editions are now under a cloud but there remains a more modest commitment to different traditions or voices in play in the text. I am grateful to my colleague Professor Roy Heller for conversations on this point. ²⁶ I touch on this issue in my “Post(modern) Biblical Historiography: An Interim Report from the Front Lines,” in Oliver Crisp and Fred Sanders, eds., The Voice of God in the Text of Scripture: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016), 146–63. ²⁷ The crucial issue here is that our understanding of the past is governed by our views of causality so that debates about what happened cannot avoid taking sides at times on the assumed vision of the relation between God and the world.

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Second, we will make no progress here if we ignore the kind of claims that are on offer in both the Jewish and the Christian tradition. Exodus presents us with theological claims and not merely historical claims. What is at issue is the claim of the Jewish people to have encountered the living Lord of all in a history of covenant that continues down to the present day. There are surely crucial moments and events that stand out as conspicuously important in this history: the covenant with Abraham, the deliverance from Egypt, the encounter at Sinai, the provision for worship, and the longer history of kingship, exile, and restoration. The decision to be made here is theological and not merely historical: was God involved with Israel of old in the ways specified (religious experience, divine speaking and promise, mighty acts in history, theophany, and the like) or is this simply false overall? This puts the issue very abruptly but it cannot be shirked. To explain further, there are historical scholars who are atheists; they already know there is no God, so the story must be false. There are historical scholars who believe in God but who somehow know that God simply would not perform the actions identified here. So again, the story cannot be true. There are historical scholars who may or may not have thought about epistemology but who somehow know that all claims about religious experience, divine speaking, providence, miracle, and the like are not to be taken seriously, for they represent bogus warrants for belief. Once again, the story must be false. Note, however, the atheological or theological presumptions all down the line here. These are not trivial claims that can gain credibility merely by dogmatic assertion or by endless repetition. They involve massive theological and epistemological assertions and assumptions, albeit negative in content. The matter will be entirely different for those of us who are believers and have weighed the epistemological merits of religious experience, special revelation, providence, miracle, testimony, and the like. Put differently, I think that the revolutions in epistemology requiring work in the epistemology of theology open up much more positive appropriations of the extraordinary claims about divine action on display in the book of Exodus. Third, this opening does not mean for me a return to some kind of naïve reading of the text. There is more in play here than simply having reliable access to knowledge of God, crucial as this is. Exodus, and scripture more generally, is a divinely inspired text meant for the ages. Its ultimate goal is not merely intellectual, much less to enable us to get our epistemology straight. The ultimate goal is holiness. Hence one should expect this goal to be visible in the way the text was produced over time and in the manner in which it was received and read. How exactly that figures in our reading of Exodus is a topic that at present is beyond the scope of this chapter; it may be ever beyond my reach. But I can live with that constraint without undue anxiety. There is more than enough informally available to stay the course in fellowship with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

8 Divine Action and the Preferential Option for the Poor Any attempt to assess claims about divine liberation of the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized is immediately faced with an acute dilemma. How can one begin to do justice to one of the most significant options in contemporary theology? Looked at synchronically, liberation theology involves an international network of theologians, working in radically different contexts and representing diverse instantiations that focus on liberation of the oppressed. Approached diachronically, we are looking not at a static treatment of common themes and concerns but at an evolving development which is by no means exhausted. Yet, any serious treatment of divine agency and action cannot simply ignore this remarkable effort to establish a privileged place for divine action in liberation as front and center in any accurate portrayal of God. It is infelicitous to dismiss this thesis as a mere fad, a fifth column that imports alien Marxist elements into the heart of theology; we are dealing with a theological challenge which refuses to be simply one more contextual theology and initially insists on representing the truth about God as delivered in the scriptures. There is a splendid slogan that gets our attention: God has a preferential option for the poor. However, there is a wealth of material that seeks to explore what that might mean today. I propose to deal with this difficulty in the following manner. Negatively, I eschew any intention to provide a comprehensive treatment of liberation theologies as they have developed over the last half century. Such an endeavor is not needed for my project. Positively, I proceed by way of two strategies. First, I shall focus on the crucial claims about divine action and do so by exploring the following four questions: How is God generally conceived? What does it mean to say that God liberates the oppressed? What are the central warrants deployed to underwrite the relevant claims about God’s liberating the oppressed? What are the crucial problems that arise in the critical evaluation of the answers to these questions? Second, I shall take as the initial textual base for my exposition of claims about divine liberation Victorio Araya’s splendid monograph God of the Poor.¹ There are good reasons for this choice. First, Araya’s work provides a firstrate summary of the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez and Jon Sobrino, two of the

¹ Victorio Araya, God of the Poor (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988).

Divine Agency and Divine Action Volume IV: A Theological and Philosophical Agenda. William J. Abraham, Oxford University Press (2021). © William J. Abraham. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786535.003.0009

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leading theologians who worked in Latin America, the originating home of liberation theology. Second, Araya adds where appropriate material that fills out the work of Gutiérrez and Sobrino. Thus, he provides an excellent review of classical liberation theology. With this as the initial starting point I can then add supplementary material as needed. Third, Araya throughout seeks to provide both an accurate rendering of claims about divine action in liberation and a sympathetic, nuanced positive evaluation of their viability. I have no illusions about the difficulty involved in providing an assessment of the claims I shall explore as regards divine action in liberation. Thus, some committed to the project under review might dismiss my critical assessment at the outset on the grounds that only someone situated in the relevant context and committed to the praxis of liberation as defined in liberation theology is in a position to evaluate its claims. I shall take up this objection in due course. The deepest difficulty is in fact the one already cited, namely, the sheer volume of material and the range of topics involved. However, there is nothing in this that does not crop up in standard scholarly labors. I have already indicated how I plan to stand my ground. Far too much is at stake for evaluation to be limited to those who are specialists in comprehensive exposition. Liberation theologians have long insisted that what is at stake is a choice between life and death; if this is the case, we need to hold tight to our theological wallets. So, let’s begin. What is the central concept of God in play as articulated by Araya? Negatively, it is clear that Araya is unhappy with any appeal to the God of classical theism. Thus, there is no reference to God as Being or Being Beyond Being, together with the classical attributes of God, including simplicity, immutability, and impassibility. “A view of God from the vantage of the suffering and hope of the poor makes a clean break with the perfect, immutable, and impassible God (theos apathes) of ancient Greek tradition.”² Indeed, there is a clear tendency to reject this whole way of thinking. Positively, Araya reaches back to the God of the Biblical Theology Movement, that is, God is the One who Acts, the title of the manifesto of that movement articulated by George Ernest Wright.³ This would take us close to the claim that God is best conceived as a transcendent, personal Agent. However, Araya shows only very limited interest in the kind of question I have posed. The closest he comes to an answer is to speak of God as Mystery, clearly drawing on the seminal work of Karl Rahner. So, God is “the Utterly Other, the Holy One, the ineffable, unmanipulable Mystery.”⁴ The obvious problem with this is that it is hard to see how Mystery can do anything, not least bring deliverance to the poor. Given that this whole issue is not a priority for Araya, it is best to take the issue off the table here.

² Ibid., 61.

³ Ibid., 77.

⁴ Ibid., 49. See also 34, 35, 131.

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So, we turn to our second question: What does it mean to say that God is intimately involved in the liberation of the poor from oppression? The answer is relatively straightforward. God is at work in contemporary history to bring an end to the oppression of the materially poor. This does not rule out the reality of spiritual poverty; however, spiritual poverty is not a sense of spiritual bankruptcy before God and an implicit appeal to divine grace to deal with this; spiritual poverty means a radical openness to see what God is doing now to liberate the poor who are oppressed by economic systems invented and controlled by the rich. What began as a claim about material poverty expanded in time to embrace all systems of oppression that dehumanized human agents made in the image of God. Thus, as we shall see, the identity of the oppressed, which began as a matter of economic class, and was heralded in terms of God’s preferential option for the poor, was extended to include every group that was the subject of oppression, such as African Americans, white women, Black women, Hispanic women, LGBTQI groups, and sex workers.⁵ Prima facie, the claim that God is liberating such groups is clear. We have a specific action verb, “liberate,” and a specified agent, “God”; so, all looks well and good. However, this is but the beginning; we now need to provide more detailed specification. This is so because liberation is a polymorphous activity. Like teaching and farming we need to identify the actions down the line that constitute liberation. Thus, teaching is done by giving lectures, setting homework, chastising students, providing timely advice, setting and grading exams, and so on. Likewise, if Murphy liberates someone from poverty, this can be done, say, by providing help with education, advocating for relevant scholarships, actually providing money for survival, and so on. This, of course, is a typically bourgeois network of actions; liberation theologies readily dismiss it as insufficiently radical, a mere band aid that does not get to the root causes of the problem. Moreover, the crucial agent involved is God. Thus, we now need to know what are the specific acts of God that constitute the master act of divine liberation. Yet liberation theology makes a sudden turn in a radically different direction at this point. Rather than specify the divine sub-acts that constitute divine liberation, what is offered instead is an analysis of the root causes that is at the heart of the activity needed to bring about liberation from poverty. The standard way to describe this is in causal terms, that is, in terms of the mechanisms that generate poverty in the first instance.⁶ At this stage, the favored account is found in some version of Marxism. At this point, we can have a full-throated Marxism, appealing, say, to Marx and Lenin; or we can have a much more dynamic version of Marxism as found, say, in Gramsci, Althusser, and Foucault. The attraction of Marxism in all ⁵ The initial expansion is well brought out in the diverse responses to James Cone’s work in the twentieth anniversary edition of his A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010). ⁶ Araya puts this issue in terms of a “socio-analytic discourse.” See Araya, God of the Poor, 22.

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its varieties is that it provides a large-scale causal hypothesis about the crucial elements that explain not just economic developments but cultural developments. Critics have been quick to pounce on this as being essentially atheistic in its commitments. However, this is a simplistic way to understand what is at stake. Thus, it is at least in principle possible to modify the Marxist causal analysis by insisting that Marx and his successors were radically mistaken in interpreting religion as essentially in league with oppression.⁷ The crucial point in the appeal to Marx is that he ingeniously draws attention to the potential causal mechanisms that underwrite the oppression of the masses. Even if Marx turns out to be significantly mistaken, he is correct in identifying capitalism as the root cause of poverty. Hence, we are given clear direction in identifying the causal mechanisms that cause poverty. We can debate the details, but the bigger picture is clear. Once we work out the relevant causal mechanisms, we are in a position to take up the relevant interventions that will bring an end to poverty. There is no mistaking the agents that will need to do the relevant intervention; it is human agents from top to bottom. We already have by now an acute problem on our hands. God and divine action have suddenly disappeared from the scene of the action. Once we go in search of the causal mechanisms that bring about poverty, we are already introducing human agency into our vision of liberation. This move is abundantly supported by the call to action that is an essential element in liberation theologies. It is not enough to have an abstract commitment to liberation; there must also be a comprehensive response which is spelled out in terms of conversion, discipleship, commitment to the kingdom of God, and the general call to have a faith which is enacted in works. This response means joining in the divine enterprise of liberation.⁸ Thus, we are within reach of the classical debates of faith and works, with a clear mandate to develop a faith that works by love. Such love is enacted first and foremost in works of justice that seek to bring about the end of oppression. This is a radical doctrine of salvation (the ending of poverty) by human works. The idea of grace may be invoked but it is not doing any work; it is simply idling in the background. Yet liberation theologians generally are adamant in claiming that it is God who is bringing about liberation from oppression. How can this be? The answer to this question takes us to our third query, namely, what warrants are given that would lead us to say that it is God who is liberating the poor? The general picture looks something like this. There are three elements that need attention; and all involve a switch back into the field of theology.

⁷ Indeed, it is natural to read liberation theology as a significant effort to show that Marx was wrong on this point. ⁸ Araya devotes a whole chapter to this theme. See God of the Poor, chapter 3, especially 138–43.

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First, the crucial norm for classical versions of liberation theology is clearly scripture. So, the fundamental claim is that scripture provides the justification for claiming that God is liberating the oppressed. The standard exegetical arguments on offer at this stage involve an appeal to the action of God in liberating Israel from slavery in Egypt and the action of God in the Person of the Son in preaching and enacting good news to the poor. This network of divine actions is in turn picked out because they rest on a prior commitment to divine revelation in history. God is revealed in what God does. The exodus represents the paradigm case of divine revelation in the Old Testament; and the coming of the Son represents the paradigm case of revelation in the New Testament. Taken together, these divine actions make manifest that God is indeed the one who liberates the poor from oppression. The second element resolves the challenge of how to secure this particular vision as the correct interpretation of scripture. After all, interpretations of scripture are thoroughly contested. So how do we know that this is the best way to read scripture? The answer is broadly catholic at this point in that scripture is created by communities and its interpretation is secured not by disinterested scholars committed to objectivity, neutrality, and impartiality but by communities of readers committed to liberation. The appeal to some kind of presuppositionless, objective scholarship is a myth; readers come to sacred texts like scripture with identifiable interests, concerns, questions, and the like. They are not naked individuals operating outside the communities that form them. The relevant community that is entitled to a privileged place in the reading of scripture is precisely the communities of the poor. It is these, rather than the rich of the oppressor, who are in a privileged position to read scripture aright.⁹ While scripture is the appropriate norm for theology, we also need an appropriate hermeneutical norm for reading scripture accurately.¹⁰ This norm is the reading of scripture developed in communities of liberation. The third element is a natural extension of this hermeneutical thesis. The contemporary reader of scripture can only gain access to the truth of scripture by listening to the voices of the poor, the oppressed, those at the margins, and the like. Initially, the relevant group is the materially poor, but it is easy to see how this can be extended to cover other oppressed groups. So, to appreciate the truth of ⁹ This is the position is taken up by James Cone in God of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury, 1975). Much the same move is made by Justo L. González, Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1990), 38. For a deeply insightful reading of the role of communities in liberation theologies see Ellen Charry, “Literature as Scripture: Privileged Reading in Current Religious Reflection,” Soundings 74 (1991): 65–99. ¹⁰ The pattern here is exactly the pattern to be found in the fine exposition of divine revelation in Dei Verbum in the deliberations of Vatican II. The full truth about God is to be found in scripture, but it is only in the hierarchy of the church that the proper meaning of scripture is secured. The deep worry, aside from the challenge of determining the meaning of the church’s interpretation, is that the church then controls the very content of divine revelation when the crucial goal is to have the church controlled by divine revelation.

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the claim that God is liberating the poor one has to consult those who have access to the truth about God expounded in scripture. Alternatively, we can take vows of poverty, join in the project of liberation, and thereby position ourselves to encounter God in the liberation from poverty.¹¹ It is by these means that we secure the claim that it is God who is the agent of liberation. Generally speaking, this complex appeal to scripture and divine revelation is taken initially as the sole if not the most important warrant for the claim that it is God who is the agent of liberation. Thus, under the inspiration of Barth, any appeal to divine revelation in creation and conscience or to any version of natural theology is taken to be a form of practical atheism.¹² Such appeals are bound to reflect the economic and morally otiose interests of one’s economic class. This is the case, moreover, with any appeal to experience of the divine where such experience is taken to be generally reliable unless one can show otherwise. Class interests governed by the exercise of domination and power are bound to corrupt the interpretation even if a case can be made prima facie for its veridicality. Human agents who belong to the middle and upper classes suffer at this point from serious forms of cognitive malfunction which can only be fixed by either joining or listening to those caught in the bondage of poverty. Suppose we let this judgment stand for the moment. We can now state afresh the problem I identified above. On the one hand, when we look at the concept of liberation and take into account the fact that liberation supervenes on discovering the mechanisms of oppression as revealed, say, in a Marxist or post-Marxist vision of causality, we discover that it is human agents who do the liberating. The warrants for this claim are clearly broadly empirical in nature. On the other hand, when we turn to the theological discourse involved it is essentially God who is doing the liberation. The warrants for this claim are scriptural and hermeneutical. However, there is an obvious incoherence in play. From the theological side of the aisle, we begin with a grand proclamation about God and divine action but once we begin to specify what is needed for liberation to happen the divine action has disappeared. We are left with a network of human action. This is surely a devastating objection that goes to the very core of any robust version of liberation theology.¹³

¹¹ Araya adds an additional condition, namely, feeling sorry for the other person’s misery and trying to overcome it “by bridging the gap between self and the other’s misery.” See Araya, God of the Poor, 63. ¹² See Araya, God of the Poor, 100–1. ¹³ One might try to mitigate this problem by appeal to the distinction between primary and secondary causation or to a version of non-competitive, double-agency theory where liberation is both an act of God and an act of human agents. Araya attempts to resolve the issue by appeal to the incarnation, that is, there is an analogy between the divine and human in Christ and the divine and human in the liberation of the poor. See Araya, God of the Poor, 150. Aside from the inherent difficulties in these options, liberation theologians generally eschew any appeal to such options. In fact, there would appear to be no awareness of the incoherence at the very core of their agenda.

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This objection is a very general objection that draws attention to an obvious feature of discourse about agents and their actions. There are additional objections to the theological agenda that deserve attention. One of these which is in the neighborhood raises the issue of the epistemic status of the poor. One sometimes gets the impression that the poor per se have privileged access to the truth about the causal mechanisms that are taken to be the root causes of poverty. This can readily be pressed on the grounds that the poor indeed see all too clearly some of the factors that lead to their poverty. They not only propositionally know, but know by acquaintance, the effects, say, of multinational companies shutting down factories and moving them to the other side of the world. However, we will need a lot more information to fill out this causal story if it is to be accurate and thus the basis for human action. This is precisely why liberation theologians turn, say, to Marxism and its updates to articulate what is really the truth as regards the underlying causes of poverty and oppression. The general diagnosis of the problem is that the crucial causal mechanisms are to be found in the workings of capitalism. This then naturally leads into discussions about the role of class conflict, revolution, making the people the owners of the means of production, and the like, in securing genuine liberation.¹⁴ It is no accident that within Marxism its leaders worried about the extent to which workers could be bought off by higher wages, union negotiations, and welfare programs. Lenin was clear that those who needed liberation did not always perceive what was at stake from a causal point of view; hence the need for a vanguard who would provide the relevant information and leadership to bring about revolution.¹⁵ The takeaway from these reflections is this: the claim that the poor have privileged access to the truth about the root causes of poverty is weak. What we really have is an appeal to the supposed expert judgment of Marx and his successors. Turning to the theological work in play, we ask: What about the claim that the poor as a community provide us with privileged access to the truth about the content of scripture? Does this fare any better? There are two lines of argument to take up at this point. First, initially this is surely an empirical claim in that we now have to leave scripture and go ask the poor for guidance. Worried about the Babel of voices that appear when we seek to identify the truth of divine revelation as given in scripture, ¹⁴ José Míguez Bonino states the elements from Marx which are to serve as the evaluation of ecclesial praxis in this way: “The social (collective) appropriation of the means of production, the suppression of a classist society, the de-alienation of work, and the reinstallation of man as agent of his own history are the theoretical hypotheses on the basis of which revolutionary praxis is predicated. They become the intrinsic tests for such praxis. A consistent engagement demands a constant criticism in these terms.” See Míguez Bonino, Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), 99–100. Emphasis as in the original. For a fuller treatment of the relation between Christianity and Marxism see his Christians and Marxists: The Mutual Challenge of Revolution (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974). ¹⁵ A fascinating account of the relevance of Lenin for liberation theology can be found in Theodore Wesley Jennings, “Lessons from Lenin,” http:www.oxford-institute.org/docs/2007-6Jennings.pdf.

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we are invited to consult the poor. The obvious initial question then is: which poor communities should we consult? Clearly, we must exclude, say, communities of Muslim poor, say, in Bangladesh. We must confine our inquiries to Christian communities engaged in the struggle for liberation.¹⁶ Yet, we have exactly the same problem that confronted us when it comes to consulting the poor on the root causes of poverty. Aside from the fact that the study of scripture will involve significant expertise in the field of biblical studies, we will have to rely on reports supplied by liberation theologians to find out what the poor are telling us about divine action in liberation. Even if we reject the role of experts in biblical studies, we will still have to rely on the testimony of liberation theologians to get access to the expert testimony of the poor. In other words, we now have to rely on the word of liberation theologians to get access to the truth of scripture. The idea of serious, independent evidence has evaporated. Second, recall that the crucial information we need at this point relates to what God is doing to liberate the poor. So, we have to press the question of how we know what God is doing in history. This is a complex question, but we can get to the core issue by looking at the two loci of divine action to which liberation theologians characteristically appeal, namely, the exodus from Egypt and the coming of the Son into human history. It is the tracts of scripture dealing with this material that are in play. Allow for the moment that we can read these materials for ourselves with an eye on how the relevant divine actions are identified. As far as the appeal to the exodus from Egypt is concerned, it is obvious that we are supplied not just with claims about the deliverance from bondage, but with claims about divine speaking that both identify and explain what God is doing. For the purpose of the argument, I leave aside here the obvious role of divine intervention by means of miracle and special providence. What is important is that the impoverished Israelites find the whole idea of divine liberation ridiculous. Even Moses has become a skeptic after his initial negotiations with Pharaoh.¹⁷ It is in part because God speaks to him that he comes to identify what God is doing in Egypt. Any serious engagement with the text must take this into account.¹⁸ The issue can be put this way. Given that God does not have a body, we rely even more on the role of divine speaking in knowing what God is doing than we do in the case of human agents where we have access to their bodily movements. The implication of this argument for the question in hand is that liberation theologians will have to become genuine prophets who hear a Word from God if they are to identify what God is doing now to liberate the poor. On this score, it

¹⁶ For this reason, we have to exclude monastic communities whose members have taken vows of poverty. ¹⁷ The whole of Exodus 1–6 needs to be read with care at this point. ¹⁸ The case for this reading was made a generation ago by James Barr.

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is not enough to rely on flimsy claims about reading the signs of the times; these are much too thin and diverse to do the work that is needed; liberation theologians will need to supply a definitive Word from God to secure their claims. It will not do, moreover, to say that the deliverance from bondage provides a paradigm case of divine action that can be applied universally as the form or specification of divine action more generally in history. This is a popular move which takes a thinned down vision of divine action in the exodus and then looks for re-instantiations of this today. For one thing, this ignores the unique once-forall nature of the exodus; this particular act of deliverance was essential if the covenant promise to Israel was to be maintained; it was not a window into what God is doing everywhere in history. For another, once we take the wider narrative of divine action in history, it is clear that at a later stage in Israel’s history God sent the people of Israel and Judah into exile; there was no deliverance at this point in that Israel was simply handed over in judgment to the full effects of its theological and moral apostasy.¹⁹ Precisely similar arguments can be applied to the appeal to Jesus as an instance of divine liberation from poverty and oppression. Actually, Araya goes so far as to insist that God is now incarnate in the poor. There are in fact ever new incarnations.²⁰ The issue becomes more acute in this case for those who claim that the action of God is hidden in Jesus, most especially in the case of his crucifixion, where it is said he is abandoned by the Father.²¹ If the divine action is hidden, it is hard to see what is going on. Thus, there is no way to appeal to Jesus as a warrant for the divine action of liberation; those who do so are simply smuggling in traditional material that is otherwise rejected or idling. All that aside, it is easy to see what is happening. Crucial material relative to identifying and explaining what God is doing is being systematically ignored. The actions of Jesus are accompanied by his teaching, not least in parables, as to what God is doing in his life, death, and resurrection. The deeds of Jesus are accompanied by words of illumination and explanation, a process which is taken up, for example, in Paul, who appeals to his authority as a prophet to further

¹⁹ This is the message that is at the heart of the prophet Hosea. For a superb rendering of the message of Hosea see Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets in Two Volumes, vol. 1 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1962), 39–60. ²⁰ This claim is repeated several times. See Araya, God of the Poor, xiii, 10, 50, 51, 142. Araya sometimes attributes liberation to the work of the Spirit (151–2) but the emphasis falls on a new incarnation of God in the poor. No defense is offered for this extraordinary claim, other than perhaps to see it, like the act of liberation in Exodus, as a generalization from one act of God to repeated acts of God with the incarnation operating as a window into the acts of God universally. José Míguez Bonino expresses the issue in terms of divine identity with the suffering of the oppressed. “God himself identifies utterly with man oppressed, destituted, and abandoned. He dies the death of the blasphemer, the subversive, the God-forgotten man.” See Míguez Bonino, Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation, 145. ²¹ This theme is taken up in Araya, God of the Poor, 65.

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explicate the meaning of Christ’s life and ministry.²² Even more devastating for the appeal to Jesus is the fact that he did not liberate Israel from poverty and oppression. A generation after his death the Roman armies march into Jerusalem, flatten the city, and expel her inhabitants. It would be hard to think of a turn of events that more decisively falsifies the claims of liberation theologies that God is to be understood as the one who liberates from poverty and oppression. By this stage we have unpacked two sorts of objections. On the one hand, the effort to chart the mechanisms of liberation by necessity leave out divine action. On the other hand, when we chart the theological warrants for the relevant claims about divine action, they turn out to be deeply inadequate. It is not difficult to identify the rebuttal that will be deployed to undermine the arguments I have just developed. The arguments involve, it will be said, a joint appeal to considerations in analytic theology and considerations that are broadly exegetical and historical in nature. The problem, however, is that these should be excluded because they assume that these enterprises are immune from the harmful interests that are driven by their location in the very system of oppression that is called into question by advocates of liberation theology. They involve presuppositions that cannot be granted legitimacy once we come to terms with the causal mechanisms in which they are enmeshed. Consequently, anyone pressing these considerations is suffering from cognitive malfunction because of their social location. Objections are essentially “a projection of the ideology of the dominant class.”²³ Hence, what is needed is exposure to the kind of critical studies which seek to uncover the hidden biases, class interests, and material concerns that unmasks the deeper considerations that are driving the objections. We can think of harder and softer versions of this rebuttal. The harder version is that the objections are determined by hidden causal factors that produce a false consciousness out of which they are generated. The softer version is that the objections are shaped by but not determined by the relevant but hidden causal factors. On the first version, no objection could ever undermine the claims of liberation theologies; on the second version, the default position is that the objections are likely to be spurious but on further reflection just might turn out to be effective. The primary mode of rebuttals focuses on the nature of historical investigation, but it can readily be extended to cover the work of analytic philosophy. The response to this rebuttal can be stated with relative brevity. Let me take it up in terms of the harder version of perspectivism involved.²⁴ First, the claim itself is a philosophical claim in that it is an effort to work out an account of the ²² This is very clear in Paul’s astonishing self-avowals as found in Galatians 1. ²³ Araya, God of the Poor, 2. ²⁴ I take it that the more moderate version is in fact an interesting platitude that can readily be accepted even though it calls for extended treatment in its own right, as is made clear by current work on the nature of bias in making good judgments.

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epistemology of historical investigation. Thus, it cannot simply assert that historical investigation is determined by one’s social location; we need arguments for this assertion. Happily, I have elsewhere unmasked the central problems in this whole way of thinking.²⁵ The same applies even more forcefully to the epistemology of analytic philosophy, for epistemology is deeply contested within analytic philosophy itself. Thus, the assertion under review is simply mere dogmatism. It will have to be supported by robust philosophical argument. Second, when we look at the conflicting claims that show up in historical investigation, it is patently clear that claims about social location are useless in explaining why they occur. They occur not just because of different interests and presuppositions but because of diverse claims about historical sources, modes of explaining events, the assembly of relevant evidence, the overall coherence of the narrative deployed, and so on. The same applies to the developments in analytic philosophy as they have played out over the last century and more. The radical shifts from say, logical positivism to ordinary language philosophy to the renewal of metaphysics and on to the revolutionary work in epistemology can only be understood if we attend to the relevant philosophical arguments that led to radical reversals and changes of course. In reality, the rebuttal is little less than a massive effort to ward off serious criticism of central elements in liberations theologies. It is a strategy for insulating oneself from criticism. Perhaps the most egregious version of this strategy is to assert that my core objection, namely, that there is a deep incoherence at the heart of liberation theologies as regards the specification of divine action, assumes the legitimacy of coherence as a criterion of evaluation. It does indeed, for coherence is a bedrock criterion of evaluation for discourse that seeks to describe and explain historical events. More recent forms of liberation theology have turned to forms of postmodernism where claims about authorship, truth, rational argument, and coherence are dismissed as covert forms of the exercise of power which mask what is really going on. Thus, some have given up on any form of historical investigation of scripture because they see scriptural materials as subject to the same network of causal mechanisms that are in play in analytic philosophy and historical investigation. In broad terms scripture is seen as a network of narratives and myths many of which are expressions of political oppression that need to be unmasked. Scripture, it is argued, needs to be studied and cleansed of its oppressive nature by bringing to it an ethical stance that is centered on liberation from the many forms of oppression that are in play in contemporary society. Thus, the central ethical implication of liberation theology is retained but any appeal to scripture, divine revelation, and divine action is seen as the ultimate trump card in

²⁵ See chapter 10 in this volume on divine action and history.

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the struggle for power and domination.²⁶ Moreover, the appeal to a revised form of Marxism is retained as an accurate rendering of the causal mechanisms that generate and sustain systems of oppression. It is hard to see how the plainly absolutist ethical commitment to liberation is to be rationally defended at this point; equally it is difficult to retain the appeal to an accurate story of the relevant causal mechanisms as corresponding to the truth about the world. We have landed right back into the arena of philosophy; however, given the causal story about cognitive malfunction, it is not likely that these considerations will even begin to be persuasive. Given this impasse, what is needed at this point is in fact a brief analysis of the attraction of liberation theologies in contemporary Christian theology. I find it fascinating that it is especially attractive to theologians in my own Methodist tradition. One reason for this that can be generalized is that liberation theology is morally attractive to those who look to Christianity for moral orientation and guidance. There is a sharp focus at times, clearly present in both scripture and tradition, that lifts up the plight of the poor and excoriates the sins of the rich. John Wesley was, for example, deeply worried in the latter half of his life on the dire effects of money on his followers.²⁷ There is no doubt also here a pleasing simplicity that short-circuits the need for a much more complex causal account of the origins of poverty. A very different reason that emerges in the genesis of classical liberation theology in Latin America stems from the appalling failure of the church to deal with the systematic poverty of its members. The Catholic Church, like other churches elsewhere, has been all too ready to curry favor with corrupt governments and robber baron, industrial owners. A further reason is that liberation theologians, in so far as they look to Marxism and its developments, were convinced that they had access to an accurate account of the root causes of poverty. This gave a proposed empirical if not scientific point of entry for their worldview that fitted neatly with the moral concepts of justice, equality, solidarity, and hope that have become central concepts of current political discussion. They were not convinced that the appalling record of Marxism in the twentieth century represented a falsification of their causal commitments because there was always room for revision of the basic causal story and because they were convinced that once they were in charge things would be different.²⁸ Where others failed they would succeed, even though this was clearly a matter of mere aspiration and hope. ²⁶ For a vigorous treatment of the Bible as a political document along these lines see Susanne Scholz, The Bible as Political Artifact: On the Feminist Study of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2017). ²⁷ Wesley was acutely aware of the moral and spiritual dangers that came with surplus wealth. His famous treatment of this can be found in his sermon “The Use of Money,” in The Works of John Wesley, vol. 2, ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1985), 263–80. ²⁸ For a superb review of the debate in France after the work of François Furet challenged the standard historiography of both the French and Bolshevik revolutions see Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

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This judgment remains intact in contemporary political debates across Europe and all of America, so that liberation theology is an obvious theological partner if not court chaplain for contemporary appeals to democratic socialism. The longstanding debate between the left and the right is as much alive as ever. An exceptionally important reason for the attraction of liberation theologies is in fact intellectual in nature. Once the basic claim about God and liberation is put in place, it is possible to launch a cross-generational and international research agenda that generates new phases of investigation by identifying a neglected group of the oppressed. Even without the theological content, there was ample room for fresh endeavors in the secular arena, not least within the universities in the United States. Mark Lilla has provided a splendid account of the developments that have emerged since the 1960s in the United States.²⁹ The situation in Christian theology is even more fertile because as a research agenda there is room to explore the standard loci of systematic theology from a liberationist perspective. This added spice to the network of oppressed groups that were readily identified over time. It is worth dwelling on this development for a moment. One of the more interesting versions of liberation theology is that developed by a Latin American theologian who was nurtured in the Methodist tradition, namely, Marcella Althaus-Reid. Born into poverty in Buenos Aires, Althaus-Reid became the first woman professor of theology in 160 years in New College at the University of Edinburgh. She developed a wide range of interests before her untimely death in 2009 but is probably best known for her work in liberation theology. Her work readily enables us to see the extraordinary fecundity of the issues involved.³⁰ Her work has a wingspan involving at least three logically distinct levels of inquiry. First, while committed to the core elements of liberation theology as initially developed with reference to Marx, she expands the range of sources used to describe the complexity of cultural, social, and economic life to include a fertile if exotic network of academic disciplines. So, one of her main texts, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics, draws on Sexual Theory (Butler; Sedgwick; Garber), Postcolonial criticism (Fanon, Cabral, Said), Queer Studies and theologies (Stuart; Goss; Weeks; Daly), Marxist Studies (Laclau and Mouffe; Dussel), Continental Philosophy (Derrida; Deleuze and Guattari; Braudrillard) and Systematic Theology.³¹

²⁹ Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal after Identity Politics (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 2017). ³⁰ There is a fine collection of essays in her honor: Lisa Isherwood and Mark D. Jordon, eds., Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots: Essays in Honour of Marcella Althaus-Reid (London: SCM, 2010). ³¹ Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2005), 7.

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Second, in a sustained critique of Gutiérrez and Sobrino, Althaus-Reid insists on opening up the list of oppressed to include those who have been excluded because of traditional commitments as regards sexual purity codes. Thus, at one end of the scale she calls for theological reflection on the experience of city women who live at the bottom end of the economic ladder and who, wearing skirts but no underwear, sell lemons. At the other end of the scale she reflects on the sexual experiences of those who engage in sadomasochism as an expression of their voluntary submission to control and suffering modeled on the suffering of Christ. Third, Althaus-Reid refigures the epistemological significance of social location by expressing the opposition to standard forms of objectivity and rationality in graphic sexual metaphors. “The logic of theology follows models of spermatic flow, of ideas of male reproduction which defy modern science but are established firmly in the sexual symbolics of theology.”³² Clearly such logic requires cooling down, a project to be undertaken by reflection on fetishism which will allow “the traces of the obscene to become more obvious.”³³ It is hard to know exactly what to make of this. However, Althaus-Reid and those who endorse her work as the “best feminist theology . . . in the last decade”³⁴ claim to have seen something profound that most readers fail to see. It is no surprise that her work has taken her into conversation with Marquis de Sade; her publisher to her dismay excised this section from one of her texts.³⁵ It is tempting to see this work as the end of the line for liberation theology. The passion for alleviating the oppression of the poor has morphed into a descent into unapologetic sensuality and even violence once we bring de Sade to the theological seminar.³⁶ One is reminded of Hume’s aphorism that reason is and always should be the slave of the passions. Given that conventional forms of rationality have been abandoned, his prediction seems eerily accurate. However, to end on this note would be altogether cheap and easy. Liberation theology opened up a whole new phase in the debate on the relation between theology and politics. The register in which it was presented, that is, in a whirlwind of denunciation and moralistic calls to action, was exhilarating to generations fed up with the corruption of the church and bored by the gaps between academic theology, the life of the believer in the church, and the existence of devastating poverty. While its core claims about divine and human action are incoherent; while its ancillary claims about scripture and its interpretation are unpersuasive; and

³² Ibid., 155. ³³ Ibid. ³⁴ See the endorsement of Robert Gross on the back cover of Indecent Theology. ³⁵ See Robert Shore-Gross, “Dis/Grace-full Incarnation and the Dis/Grace-full Church: Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Vision of Radical Inclusivity,” in Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots, ed. Isherwood and Jordon, 2. ³⁶ For a penetrating treatment of the potential for corrupting de Sade’s readers see Pamela Hansford Johnson, On Iniquity: Some Personal Reflections Arising out of the Moors Murder Trial (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967).

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while its epistemological proposals are obscure and underdeveloped; the underlying challenge of the relation between theology and politics remains intact. This is not the time or place to identify a viable alternative. However, we can make two brief observations in conclusion. First, it is now clear that the Hebrew scriptures provide the first and most important reflections on the relation between theology, morality, and politics. It is understandable that philosophers prefer to begin with Plato and Aristotle and then move forward through Augustine and Aquinas to the Reformation and modernity. However, theologians should be the first to offer a correction on the canon of texts to be read and pondered.³⁷ Second, in doing so, theologians cannot ignore the wealth of material made available in recent philosophy devoted to the kind of concepts and arguments that show up in politics.³⁸ We need conceptual skill in order to identify what to look for in scripture and how to bring it to bear on contemporary discussions. Such work will provide plenty of food for thought on how to bring together a robust commitment to divine action and to human action in order to best love our neighbors in the present. In the meantime, we can hope that nobody gets silenced, canceled, imprisoned, or even killed in the name of some secular or theological utopian catechism.

³⁷ The pioneering work of Yoram Hazony is especially important. See, for example, his God and Politics in Esther (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For a splendid essay see Serge Frolov, “The Cup Does Not Run Over: Political Theology in the Hebrew Bible,” in Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, ed., T&T Clark Handbook of Political Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2020), 47–60. ³⁸ For a fine treatment of the nature of judgment in politics see Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss, eds., Political Judgment: Essays for John Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

9 Divine Action and the Charge of Sexist Discourse In the Christian tradition the God who acts is canonically identified in unapologetic Trinitarian terms. Moreover, one Person in the Trinity is clearly and unambiguously a male. In this chapter I want to take up what I take to be a very serious objection to the core of this vision of God and of Christology. Our first task is to get hold of the problem. The problem stems initially from the place of male imagery both in the canonical vision of the Trinity and in the centrality of Christology in its own right within that vision of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity as I wholeheartedly embrace it cannot avoid the language of Father-Son at its very core. First, God is named and identified as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Male imagery predominates. This is not just one item of discourse among others; it is deeply embedded in a host of ways in scripture, in the sacraments, in soteriology, and the like. Second, there is an inescapable ontological hierarchy within the Trinity. The Father is the source of the Son and the Spirit. There is no source beyond the Father as there is in the case of the Son and the Spirit.¹ Third, while all three Persons unite in the work of salvation, it is the Son who carries the weight of salvation in the incarnation. There is a male human agent at the very heart of the faith, a figure who is not incidental to the story of the Gospel but at the very heart of it.² Hence the problem: Male language and a very specific male human agent, the Son of God, are utterly integral to canonical theism and more generally to Christianity as generally understood. They are constitutive of the tradition as a whole. Why are these two elements a problem in most forms of feminism? Here we get to the nerve center of the debate. This language is a problem because such discourse is integrally and inescapably bound up with oppression. Keeping this male-oriented imagery is therefore theologically and morally otiose. It is causally bound up with practices that are harmful to women, in fact all women whatever

¹ It should be noted that I am deeply skeptical of deriving substantive moral and political agendas from the doctrine of the Trinity, so initially no moral consequences are built into this ontological vision of the Trinity. ² This is not to deny a vision of the unity of Trinitarian action in salvation. It is no accident, however, that so much of Christian theology is Christocentric in focus given the crucial place of the incarnation in the Christian tradition.

Divine Agency and Divine Action Volume IV: A Theological and Philosophical Agenda. William J. Abraham, Oxford University Press (2021). © William J. Abraham. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786535.003.0010

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their class or ethnicity. Hence it is imperative to find fresh discourse about God that will be liberating and emancipatory. In broad terms this is surely the central objection that feminism has developed over the last fifty years against Christianity. In the early years in the work of Mary Daly this objection was something of a battle cry. Over the years the cry has become a little more muted. Moreover, this objection has displaced at least two other objections that have originally been at center stage in the twentieth century. It has displaced the objection that Christianity is strictly speaking irrational, incredible, and unjustified. Even if it is coherent, there is no good evidence in its favor. The other objection, lodged against its Christology, is that historical investigation undermines the robust theological claims made about Jesus, that is, that he was born of a virgin, was God incarnate, performed miracles, and was raised from the dead. Over against this it is argued that we can and do have much better accounts of the real, historical Jesus. The objection here is radically different. It is essentially an argument against the primary language and indeed the primary intellectual content of the tradition. Our speech and discourse are essentially harmful and oppressive.³ I am assuming at the outset that this problem cannot be solved by finding female images and metaphors in the tradition and then adding them to the explicit exposition of tradition. Such a move is, in fact, to be welcomed not just because it retrieves lost elements in the tradition due to patriarchy but because it provides a much richer and more accurate description of God. However, this development leaves the core of the tradition that is the real trouble in place. Nor can the problem be solved by arguing that what is at issue is the misuse of this language. It is the very language itself that is the difficulty, for the very discourse is oppressive or undergirds forms of oppression. The solution is going to have to take this crucial claim with deadly seriousness. It is obvious that if we work from within feminism and its many forms then the solution will draw on the broader resources of liberation theology as a way forward. This is perfectly clear in the literature. What is needed, it is thought, is a more emancipatory way of speaking about God. The ultimate goal is to end oppression of women. In the light of this, it is surely fair to say that feminist theologies are a species of liberation theology. Generally speaking, this is often taken to be a major plus factor in its favor. It would also be fair to say that liberation theology is now the default position in most of mainline Protestant Christianity and indeed within much of mainline Roman Catholic Christianity. It is a lively and attractive research program in contemporary Christian theology. One can see this feature of the landscape in the dispositions of students. On the one hand, many simply assume that some version of liberation theology is the way ³ I am grateful to conversations with Professor Ellen Charry for helping me see the problem in these terms.

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forward. They feel the onus of proof is on those who do not begin from this starting point. Liberation theology is the default position; those who do not agree are simply out of date, or obtuse, or complicit in the oppression of women. Indeed, liberation theology opens up an exciting project for them and for the church at large. On the other hand, students (male and female) who are uneasy or who in fact quietly reject liberation theology lie low. The price of entry is that they acknowledge that they sympathize if not share the fundamental worry in play, and then do what they can to raise a question here and there in order to maintain their integrity. The situation is especially difficult for women who find themselves uneasy with liberation theology. The worry is that they will be seen as unhelpful in a situation that cries out for action in favor of liberation; worse still they will be seen as traitors to a noble and inescapable cause. Even so, proponents of feminist theology do not read the situation this way. They often see themselves as a beleaguered minority that is up against the whole weight of the tradition. They naturally want to win over folk to the noble cause of emancipation and liberation. This is especially the case where they find themselves up against those feminist critics who insist we should give up on Christianity. It is time to abandon it, says the secularist and post-Christian feminist, and it is time to find a better alternative. This is an acute dilemma and we need to feel the force of it. Put positively, Christian feminist theologians want to keep Christianity alive as a serious option in our current situation. In this they are seeking to perform the same service as those Christian theologians who seek to deal with the challenges of credibility and of historical investigation that I mentioned earlier. At another level they see themselves as participating in an urgent movement of social reform, a movement that will be resisted on many sides, and therefore calls for courage and determination; and it calls at times for the aggressive engagement with reactionary conservatives or just folk who want to keep things the way they are. These motivations are surely right and proper; they deserve not just our respect but our admiration. The solutions to our problem on offer come in various shapes and sizes. The two that interest me here are complex but I think I can fairly sum up the direction they take. One way ahead is to develop over time a whole new discourse about God that essentially strips it of its oppressive elements. This is essentially the solution developed by Elizabeth Johnson in her now classic work entitled She Who Is.⁴ Johnson is well aware that this is a tall order when it comes to liturgy and the worship of local churches. Moreover, she is modest about her own specific

⁴ Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroads, 1992). There is a lot more going on in Johnson than a change in Trinitarian discourse, as is well attested in her commitment to panentheism. However, this need not concern us here.

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proposals, insisting that they are a bridge to a better future rather than the future itself.⁵ A different way ahead is proposed by Sarah Coakley in God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity.⁶ She wants to keep the classical language of the tradition and then reappropriate it after the cleansing of our desires through the discipline of contemplative prayer. In this instance we can keep the Trinitarian language and the high Christology but through experiences of the Spirit we come to a non-oppressive appropriation of the discourse that causes so much trouble. In both of these theologians there is a rich array of insight and theory that draws on a range of ancillary disciplines. Thus they can draw on a network of resources like our initial moral intuitions about oppression, the semiotics of poststructuralism, epistemological suggestions about desire, materials developed in postcolonial studies, gender studies, sociology, and so on. This is not in the least surprising, for as I have already mentioned, theology is a field-encompassing field where you draw on a host of disciplines to thread your way through to the tapestry of your theology. It is clear that the debate is still live. It is tempting at this point to let it run its course and stay on the sidelines. However, doing so would be a clear abdication of what is a critical task of systematic theology, namely, the task of providing a rejoinder to those who think that the tradition is to one degree or another radically flawed. So, I cannot on my own terms of reference stay on the sidelines. Yet I want to do so in a way that might prove to be illuminating to all sides in the discussion. One way to think of where I am headed is to think of what follows as joining in some if not most of the crucial goals of feminism but proposing that we need a deeper analysis of the diagnosis and therefore of the solution. I begin by looking in more detail at the core claim as I have already delineated it. The very language and discourse of the tradition, it is said, are oppressive.⁷ To be precise, we really have two crucial causal claims to consider. The first causal claim is that Trinitarian and Christological discourse causes in the relevant sense oppression; the second causal claim is that changing the discourse will bring about the end of oppression and the beginning of liberation. These are striking claims that anyone with a heart cannot ignore for surely we are all in favor of the ending of oppression; and we are all in favor of liberation broadly conceived as ending oppression.⁸ It is precisely commitment to emancipation that ⁵ Her proposed change is to speak of Sophia-Spirit, Jesus-Sophia, and Mother-Sophia. ⁶ Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). ⁷ Let’s work with the version of the objection that says that the language is the primary cause of or sufficiently entangled in the causation of oppression that the discourse has to be radically changed. The corollary of this is equally clear: changing the language will be the primary cause or a necessary cause of the ending of oppression and the beginning of emancipation. ⁸ Sometimes it is implied that if a person rejects this claim then that person is in reality complicit in oppression and guilty of holding back the cause of emancipation. The moral overtones here are obvious

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requires that we examine this causal claim with some care. What if the causal claims in both the description and the prescription are highly precarious if not false? We have all been down dead ends where we were mistaken about how to fix things. Theology is littered with examples; so too is politics. We are beset on all sides with the possibility of error. Put differently, it is crucial that we get the causal stories right. If that fails then the enterprise is seriously flawed. Most importantly we will fail to secure the promise on offer, namely, that the solution will lead to emancipation and liberation. If this happens then we shall inevitably face disappointment and disillusion. Finding a better causal story will surely be one step in restructuring what needs to be done. Better accounts of causality should lead to better and more apt promises. Focus for a moment on the first causal claim, that is, the Trinitarian discourse is the cause of oppression. Let’s unpack the various forms of oppression that show up in the literature. The list is surely long and rich. We can begin with patriarchy, the claim that men are inherently superior by nature to women. Then we can move to the following: discrimination against women in employment, the loss of agency on the part of women in family and society, the exclusion of women from the ministerial offices of presbyter and bishop, second-class citizenship for women in the eyes of the law, significant inequity for women in terms of hiring, pay, and promotion in the business world, the airbrushing of women out of ecclesiastical and secular history, the failure to attend to the learning aptitudes of girls in education, the exclusion of women from the hard sciences and their relegation to “feminine” professions like nursing and teaching, the high tolerance of sexist language in social intercourse, misogyny, male chauvinism, and so on. And to mention one other deep concern, we must add the silencing of women on theological grounds when they are subject to spousal abuse, that is, they are told to bear their suffering as Christ bore his suffering on the cross. The list here is not meant to be exhaustive but it is meant to be representative. Moreover, the aim is to locate the discussion firmly in the real world rather than work with abstractions like oppression and discrimination. Consider briefly the prescription for ending oppression and ushering in liberation. Remember how I have stated it: it is Trinitarian and Christological discourse that is causally responsible for bringing this about. Therefore, it is a change in our speech and discourse about God that will bring about emancipation. I doubt if anyone will say that changing the discourse is a sufficient cause of emancipation but I think that the version of feminism under review will say it is a necessary condition of emancipation. On this end too specificity is crucial in any causal claim. Many feminists have been perfectly specific. Thus Johnson proposes even though they are often left unsaid or relegated to forewords to later editions of one’s work. This makes it extremely difficult for the critic, for their contribution will be read with a hermeneutic of suspicion. Folk will look for a story behind the story that discredits any critical evaluation virtually from the outset. Sophisticated feminists are careful to avoid this, but it is in the air nonetheless, sometimes in pretty crude forms.

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that we speak of Sophia-Spirit, Jesus-Sophia, and Mother-Sophia. Changing the discourse is one critical causal factor if not the critical factor, they insist, depending on how you run the relevant theory of language. Thus, in deploying the resources of some versions of semiotics, language is understood in terms of signs and symbols that are essentially divorced from the agents who use them and thus given a highly developed causal role in and of itself. It is language, discourse, speech in general, signs and symbols, and the like that are the relevant causal factor that has to be identified in any realistic causal assessment of the existence of oppression and its elimination. The crucial next move is to examine the two causal claims I have identified. Suppose we ask ourselves what are the causes of the range of items we have listed under oppression. Any number of causal factors lie behind the specific evils I have catalogued. Certainly some version of patriarchy if not misogyny will have to be in play, together with the complex sociopolitical arrangements through which these are exercised. When it comes to specific theological causes then we can be specific. Hence women are excluded from ministry on various grounds: it is forbidden by the practice of Jesus in choosing twelve male disciples, on the basis of obvious readings of Paul and the Pauline corpus in the New Testament, on the basis of certain readings of Eve in Genesis 3, and the like. When it comes to the spousal abuse of women we can think of appeals to the Christian to bear suffering as Christ did on his way to Golgotha; and we can think of the exercise of just oldfashioned human lust for dominion and power on the part of husbands. In the case of legal discrimination we can think of the actions of power-hungry politicians who operate inconsistently by a double standard which favors their interests. There is not going to be one generic cause for the specific forms of oppression. We are going to have to tell different causal stories depending on the range of oppressions and the specificity of the oppressions that we want to explain causally. Furthermore, any claim about the crucial causal factor being the language of the Trinity or Christology is very far removed from any of the causal stories that we will have to tell. This is most certainly not the first or the most obvious causal factor that I would cite in explaining the variety of oppressions we are considering. The same can be said about the second causal story about liberation and emancipation. The relevant theological claims that need to be deployed are in fact very varied. They will begin with the moral imperative to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. This can be extended by insisting that both male and female are created in the image of God and should be treasured as such. We can press on by pointing out that women and not just men have been redeemed by the suffering and death of Christ and are thereby of inestimable value in the eyes of God. If the problem is exclusion from ministry in the church then we can begin with the insistence (against all forms of clericalism) that every member is given gifts to be exercised. Beyond that we will have to look carefully at the context. For fundamentalists and Roman Catholics the issue will cut much deeper because

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there are ecclesiological considerations and issues related to biblical authority that will come into play. Note, however, that this has little or nothing to do with Trinitarian or Christological language. A different ecclesiology and different vision of scripture will not necessarily have to trouble themselves with these contested proposals. Taking this to its most general level all of us will, of course, have to figure out how to locate these particular evils, however we describe them, in our analysis of sin, salvation, and holiness. Thus far I have been prepared to let the first causal claim in play here stand as secure. Those who resist the case I am making will surely want to argue that this is exactly what I have ignored to date. Thus they will not deny that the varieties of oppression have multiple causes and thus that the problem will require multiple causal solutions. They may want to say all this but they will also want to retain the more general thesis about the role of language and discourse in the causal story as a whole. Sooner or later the language and discourse will have to be fixed, they will say, so all I have done is show what everybody already knows, namely, this is one big mess that will not be fixed easily or overnight precisely because of the intersection of so many causal chains related to oppression. We reach the heart of the problem at this point. It is precisely this claim that I now want to challenge. Consider what it is to have a language.⁹ The possession of a language is an extraordinary gift and achievement. It is one of the wonders of wonders. The complexity boggles the mind once one reflects on this at length. There are puzzles galore here that are well known in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. I do not mention this to throw dust in our eyes, but to urge caution in our judgments. We test our general theories by what we implicitly or tacitly know in our practices of speaking and meaning making. It is not that we have some grand theory, learn it, and then apply it in action. Rather, we learn to speak, and in speaking we learn to do multiple things with words. The job of a good theory of language is to make sense of all of this as best we can. To understand the fundamentals of meaning making we need to attend to agents and their speech acts in particular situations and contexts. Language and discourse in and of itself is not causally efficacious. It is speakers making certain utterances in specific circumstances and contexts that operate causally. One of the greatest exponents, if not the discoverer, of this insight was the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin.¹⁰ There has been much work since then, and many have labored in the vineyard first planted by Austin, but we do not need to harvest all that work here.¹¹ What are needed are the fundamentals of the matter. ⁹ At this point I borrow some of the wording from my Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 163–4. ¹⁰ See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). ¹¹ Most especially see William P. Alston, Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). There are of course no uncontested claims in this domain. However, I am persuaded that any comprehensive theory of meaning will have to reckon with the insights first

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When we speak we can distinguish immediately between three radically distinct dimensions of the act of speaking. There is, first, the locutionary act or event. For example, we utter certain sounds that are heard. Some kind of medium is used to communicate. There is, second, the illocutionary act. In and through, say, the sounds we utter, we perform certain acts. We make assertions, raise a question, curse, make promises, give a command, tell a joke, and so on. There is, third, the perlocutionary effect or act. In doing what we do our speech acts may have certain effects or consequences. Thus, in making a certain assertion or in making a promise, we may have the effect of making some of our hearers feel sad, or elated, or jealous, and the like. Consider a humdrum example. I am in West Texas and one morning when it is raining I utter the sentence: “It is raining.” The illocutionary meaning is that I have made an assertion about the weather. The perlocutionary effect is to have those who hear break forth into doxologies of joy. They are kind to the dog, give money to the a local charity, go to church, and generally have a great time. Now consider the same sentence told in my home county in Ireland. Rainy weather is the bane of our lives, so much so that it can actually lead to depression in the long wet winters. So I utter the sentence: “It is raining.” The illocutionary meaning is that I have made an assertion about the weather. The perlocutionary effect is to have those who hear it break forth in lament about the situation. They kick the dog, buy another umbrella, feel miserable, and head off to the local pub to drown their sorrows. Suppose I utter some such sentence as “God is our Father.” Suppose the relevant illocutionary act is an assertion that says that God in God’s care and love for us resembles the care and love of a good father, say, like the father in the story of the prodigal son. Or suppose I mean something deeper. Suppose I mean that we have access to the kind of intimate relation in the Spirit that Jesus instantiated in his relation to his Father, the eternal first Person of the Trinity who sends the Spirit in our hearts so that we cry “Abba, Father.” This is true for men and women, for boys and girls. We can well imagine two quite different perlocutionary effects. Suppose a person, male or female, who has been so damaged in the relationship with their earthly father that the very sound of the language sends shivers down the spine. Clearly, the meaning of the utterance has been completely missed. This reaction does not, however, at all undo the meaning of the utterance, that is, its illocutionary force. The same applies in the case of a positive perlocutionary effect. So a person (male or female) who has never been abused may well hear this utterance and the perlocutionary effect is one of

developed with care by J. L. Austin. For a fine introductory text in analytic philosophy of language, see William G. Lycan, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008).

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uninhibited joy and peace. They are thrilled to be adopted into the very being and agency of the Trinity expressed analogically as now being not just children or even daughters of God but sons of God with all the consequences that are made visible in the Sonship of the second Person of the Trinity.¹² Note a corollary of this that is also relevant to the causal claim I am reviewing. The problem will not be fixed by changing the language. Suppose we utter such sentences as “God is our Mother,” or “God is our friend,” or God is “Holy Mystery,” or “God is a wellspring of Living Water.” The illocutionary force of these speech acts can be very clear; indeed, they can be true and apt. However, there is no controlling the perlocutionary effect, for this is utterly person-relative and situation-relative. Indeed, the likelihood is that there are significant segments of the population who will find each of these examples offensive and oppressive. Changing the language is simply not going to solve that problem. Yet it is precisely this solution that is at the heart of much contemporary feminist theology. If I am right the solution cannot be fixed by changing the language. This is precisely where Coakley has landed; she has effectively changed the subject and turned to the reception of the language by human agents rather than changing the language itself. Some may worry that there is a tacit appeal to an individualistic rather than a social reading of the context. Suffice it to say here that there is no understanding of speech acts without attending to the relevant context, which cannot be other than a social context. Hence one can add whatever chains of causation one likes (as Michel Foucault, intentionally following J. L. Austin, set out to do¹³) and the basic results will be the same. On the one hand, one will have a longer and more complex story of the perlocutionary effects; but this will not undo the illocutionary meaning of the speaker. Likewise, the fixing of the problem by changing the language as suggested will still be deeply meshed in the web of perlocutionary effects. There will still be those for whom the complicated perlocutionary effects will be negative and harmful. This is contingently inescapable. This is surely why lots of ordinary Christians and local churches fiercely resist the changes offered. The new speech acts do not have the positive perlocutionary effects desired by the revisionists of theological discourse. On the contrary, they hear them as involving all sorts of negative effects, many of which are grounded in their own experience. The old language works perfectly well for them as spiritually and morally liberating both in terms of illocutionary meaning and perlocutionary effect.

¹² Note than in order to understand the full force of the privileges opened up in the life of the Spirit it is crucial to retain the language of sonship here. Losing this language will mean missing precisely the illocutionary meaning of Paul’s claim and thus failing to see how utterly emancipatory the Gospel really is. ¹³ See his fascinating comments in Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” in Lectures at the College de France 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003), xix.

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Where does this leave us? One obvious conclusion is that there is no compelling case to change the canonical Trinitarian and Christological discourse at our disposal. Taking this stance will require courage and patience in our current situation. It will also in certain circumstances require sensitive pastoral care for those for whom the perlocutionary effects of what Christians say is negative intellectually and spiritually. It will also require painstaking retrieval of lost material together with the spiritual formation and discipline that are essential to the reception of the treasures of the tradition. Let it also be noted that the problems that feminism sought to eradicate need to be eradicated and in my judgment can be eradicated. On this front we need real solutions not pseudolinguistic solutions.¹⁴ As I see it there is one important and very obvious causal factor much closer at hand than is generally recognized. The challenge for me is to understand how it is that so many folks have given up the faith or set out to change the faith radically, given the unconvincing vision of language that is either explicitly or implicitly in play. Equally, I find it astonishing that there is insufficient probing of the causal claims in play. In reflecting on this challenge I have come to an initial conviction: I think that the deeper problem is the problem of formation and catechesis. The church in the West is so torn by internal division that even the thought of consensual forms of catechesis is impossible. The result is that Christians pick up all sorts of flotsam and jetsam depending on their local pastor, their location in different parts of the country, the denomination to which they belong, and the like. In addition we live in a post-Enlightenment culture which has long been on the attack against Christianity both intellectually and morally. Furthermore, in mainline Protestantism circles there is the basic assumption that each generation has to reconstitute the very content of Christianity in order to save it and keep it alive for the future; this is precisely the legacy of liberal Protestantism which operates with a strong hermeneutic of suspicion against the tradition. Given these circumstances I am not an optimist. Preserving the canonical Trinitarian faith of the church with its high Christology will at times be a heavy cross to bear in some theological circles. For my part, I am content to develop a vision of theology that will be a minority report (even though it is truly the faith of the church across the ages) and that will keep alive the treasures of the canonical heritage for the future. Changing the language is not going to lead to liberation or emancipation. However, it will take time for this truth to play out in the culture and the church. The repetition of error is a common feature in theology and politics; so I am content to live out my days in obscurity and peace.

¹⁴ I suspect that looking for linguistic solutions displays a more general political illusion about how to fix things politically. We think that sheer talk will change the world when what is needed is the nittygritty of effective policies, genuine reform, and real change elsewhere in the system.

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A real danger is that many contemporary Christians will in fact lose access to the resources of the tradition. Our language about God, including our strictures on pronouns, will create a generation who will not in fact be able to read the great expressions of the tradition because they have been indoctrinated into a critique of the very discourse of the tradition and into a replacement vision of the Christian faith. Many become confused and disoriented; they never regain their footing. I have seen students (some of them exceptionally bright) counting the number of times male pronouns show up in an assigned reading and thus fail to read what the author was actually saying. I have seen students squirming because they find themselves tongue-tied because they cannot use the language of the tradition without being carpeted by their peers and their professors either by innuendo or to their face. Worse still I have seen female faculty members who were sterling feminists, who have taught me some of its real insights and virtues, shunned and vilified in the most obnoxious ways by feminists who operated from a position of imperial intolerance and power. This chapter is in part for those who squirm and refuse to allow injustice to flourish within the rhetoric of liberation. It is time to be done with squirming and with such injustice. This chapter is also a call for all of us to look again at the canonical faith of the church with an eye on the surprises that may be in store for us. It is surely interesting that we find theologians who are committed to the Trinitarian discourse of the tradition doing things which on the theory under review should never have occurred to them. Consider Gregory of Nazianzus, who is not just one theologian among theologians: he is one of the canonical theologians of the tradition.¹⁵ He earned this title because of his extraordinary role in articulating and defending the Trinitarian faith of the church. Here he is dealing with the topic of divorce in the teaching of Jesus. He refuses to accept the legislation of the Roman Empire of his day, which was clearly written from a patriarchal point of view. I see that the majority of men are ill-disposed, and that their laws are unequal and irregular. For what was the reason why they restrained the woman, but indulged the man, and that a woman who practices evil against her husband’s bed is an adulteress, and the penalties of the law for this are very severe; but if the husband commits fornication against his wife, he has no account to give? I do not accept this legislation; I do not approve this custom. They who made the law were men, and therefore their legislation is hard on women, since they have placed children also under the authority of their fathers, while leaving the weaker sex uncared for. God does not so; but says honor your father and your mother, which is the first commandment with promise; that it may be well with you; and, he that curses ¹⁵ For a splendid intellectual biography of Gregory of Nazianzus see John Anthony McGuckin, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001).

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father or mother, let him die the death. Similarly he gave honor to good and punishment to evil. And the blessing of a father strengthens the houses of children, but the curse of a mother uproots the foundations. See the equality of the legislation. There is one maker of man and woman; one debt is owed by children to both their parents. How then do you demand chastity, while you yourself do not observe it? How do you demand that which you do not give? How, though you are equally a body, do you legislate unequally? If you enquire into the worse—the woman sinned, and so did Adam (Genesis 3:6). The serpent deceived them both; and one was not found to be the stronger and the other the weaker. But do you consider the better? Christ saves both by his passion. Was he made flesh for the man? So he was also for the woman. Did he die for the man? The woman also is saved by his death. He is called of the seed of David (Romans 1:3); and so perhaps you think the man is honored; but he is born of a Virgin, and this is on the woman’s side. They two, he says, shall be one flesh; so let the one flesh have equal honor. And Paul legislates for chastity by his example. How, and in what way? This Sacrament is great, he says, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:32). It is well for the wife to reverence Christ through her husband: and it is well for the husband not to dishonor the Church through his wife. Let the wife, he says, see that she reverence her husband, for so she does Christ; but also he bids the husband cherish his wife, for so Christ does the Church. Let us, then, give further consideration to this saying.¹⁶

If Trinitarian and Christological discourse is oppressive, then it is odd that it failed so signally in the case of one of the great architects of the tradition.¹⁷ Incidentally, Gregory goes on to provide a fascinating reading of what to do in cases of divorce. He insists that the teaching on divorce must be set in the wider context of a God who understands our infirmities and acts with compassion towards us. He keeps the ideal but allows for second and third marriages beyond divorce, thus paving the way for the Eastern Orthodox resolution of the debate. Gregory could fix this problem without abandoning the Trinitarian and Christological discourse of the tradition. On the contrary, he appealed to it. Rather than squirming, Trinitarian theists should take heart and sail forth in quiet confidence and joy in the faith of the church.

¹⁶ Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 37. I have changed the language in one or two places to preserve its sense. ¹⁷ It is also interesting to explore how Gregory of Nyssa argued vehemently for the emancipation of slaves. See J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 229–51, where he felicitously refers to Gregory of Nyssa as an abolitionist intellectual. Consider also Saint Patrick, a Trinitarian to the hilt, and his rejection of slavery two centuries later.

10 Divine Action in History Conor Cruise O’Brien, one of the great intellectual luminaries of Ireland, wrote an 800-page book called The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism.¹ O’Brien trained as a historian but brings to his work an extraordinary blend of intense political experience, linguistic wit, everyday curiosity, and academic teaching. In the prologue he explains why he undertook the project. In the main he wanted as a good historian to tell a story, “perhaps the greatest story of modern times.”² He then says this: I hope that something of the awe and wonder—the sense of “What hath God wrought?”—that beset me so many times as I was reading for this book, and writing it, may come through, here and there, to the reader too.³

Later he makes a similar comment, this time speaking more specifically of the recovery of Jerusalem. “The Jews had recovered Jerusalem, after nearly two thousand years, through a train of efforts and events so strange and unprecedented as to appear to some miraculous and to others literally miraculous.”⁴ These are not the comments of a pious Irish academic. O’Brien was brought up Catholic but became an agnostic. What is fascinating if not astonishing is that the references to divine action are mentioned neither casually nor accidentally but deliberately and with emphasis. They point to one of the most contested and politically charged claims that anyone, least of all a historian, might make, namely that the creation of the modern state of Israel and the return of the Jews to Jerusalem is nothing less than an act of God, here identified as a miracle. In this chapter I want to explore this claim for the light it throws on the relation between claims about divine action and events in history.⁵ In order to forestall objections and misunderstandings it is important to be crystal clear what I plan to do. I am not going to take sides here on the material theological claim in play. My primary goal is to use this opening by O’Brien to look afresh at the relation between historical investigation and claims about divine action in history. In other words, this chapter is a contribution to debates about

¹ Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986). ² Ibid., 21. ³ Ibid., 21. ⁴ Ibid., 651. ⁵ I shall for the most part stick to references to the birth of the modern state of Israel in 1948.

Divine Agency and Divine Action Volume IV: A Theological and Philosophical Agenda. William J. Abraham, Oxford University Press (2021). © William J. Abraham. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786535.003.0011

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the nature of historical investigation as it applies to theological claims. Within this horizon I plan to rehabilitate the much maligned but deeply misunderstood contribution of Ernst Troeltsch to the discussion. This will mean mounting arguments against competing ways of thinking about the issues at stake. More positively, it will involve highlighting the crucial role that debates about causation have in sorting through the thicket of questions that crop up. Agency and causation are the crucial concepts that deserve attention. As we proceed several other clarifying comments are in order. First, by debates about the nature of historical investigation I mean debates about what historians are doing when they construct accounts of the past. So, this is not an exercise in speculative philosophy of history. Moreover, I use the term historical investigation because I want to avoid the polemical and distracting discussion that centers around terms like “the critical historical method,” “historical criticism,” or “historical study of scripture.” I shall occasionally use these terms, but nothing hangs on their usage here. Furthermore, in using the term “historical investigation” I do not plan to say much about the kind of work that historians pick up in their training, say, in learning how to consult ancient archives, or in dealing with archaeological findings, or in coming to terms with relevant linguistic skills, and the like. My interest is tightly focused on what earlier philosophers identified as the logic of historical study as that related to the subject matter involved, the kind of claims advanced, the nature of historical explanation, and the possible causes used in historical explanations. These topics naturally drift into the arena of metaphysics and epistemology; indeed, they require forays into both these subdisciplines even though practicing historians often avoid them like the plague. Second, we need to clean up as best we can what we mean when we speak of the creation of the state of Israel and the return of the Jews to Jerusalem as an act of God or a miracle. We can begin here as O’Brien does, but this is merely that, a beginning. What is really at stake is a claim about divine providence. More precisely, it is not providence as applied to the preservation of creation; nor providence as involving a miracle in the robust Humean sense of a violation of a law of nature brought about by God or some other invisible agent. It is providence as meaning God working through human and natural events to further his purposes for creation and redemption. The obvious case study in scripture is the story of Joseph in Genesis. In traditional terms we are dealing not with general providence but special or particular providence. This specification of divine action as a mode of divine providence means that an entirely human-historical story can be told about the relevant events in terms of the messy vicissitudes of everyday life. The challenge theologically is to interpret these events accurately and persuasively as divine actions which supervene at least partially on human and natural events of the sort that detain the historian. In fact, I think that historical investigation is first and foremost such an endeavor. To take a current example, when I read the brilliant historical work of Stephen Kotkin on

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Soviet Russia⁶ and on the life of Stalin,⁷ I do not expect to find any reference to divine action or divine providence. Nor do I fault it because this is the case. Historical investigation is fundamentally the story of what human agents do and suffer, set of course in the appropriate context as developed by a variety of historical narratives. Hence, there is a real sense in which dragging in considerations about divine action looks like a poisonous snake to be killed on first sight. Third, this understanding of historical investigation does not mean, however, that theological assumptions are missing from ordinary historical writings. A good theologian has a vision of what it is to be human as made in the image of God, ruined by sin, and restored by grace; hence such visions are likely to show up in the work of the historian. If the historian is a believer, then it would be odd to think that his historical narrative would not involve a robust vision of human agency and visions of human evil that are clearly informed by relevant theological convictions. They may therefore reject competing Marxist or postmodern sensibilities in and around these themes. Thus, even in what I am calling ordinary historical work, theological proposals are not at all irrelevant; in fact, they make a difference as to how causation is materially conceived in their work. However, it clearly the case that the debate about divine action in history really kicks in when we take up the particular accounts of divine action that show up in accounts of the origins and role of Jews in the purposes of God and in accounts of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. This can readily be extended into accounts of the history of the church and in the history of the lives, say, of the saints. But these are rarely the site of contestation. Fourth, my aim in looking at the birth of the state of Israel in 1948 and the return of the Jews to Jerusalem is to employ an example that takes us into a dramatic terrain where we can begin to see their import for the understanding of divine action and historical investigation. This may seem a foolhardy enterprise. We have enough problems dealing with the classical biblical case studies; grasping this bunch of nettles makes life even more difficult. It is exactly those nettles that we need to explore, however, if we are to gain clarity and make progress on the bigger questions that have long been in place. Or so I shall argue. So much for introductory considerations. As regards the relation between divine action and history, theologians have invented a number of conceptual strategies for getting down to business. All acknowledge that there is a nest of problems to be solved. What do we do if central theological claims about divine action are falsified by historical investigation? What if central claims about divine action are underdetermined or simply not supported by historical investigation?

⁶ Stephen Kotkin, Magic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). ⁷ Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, vol. 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (New York: Penguin, 2014); and Stalin, vol. 2: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1944 (New York: Penguin, 2017).

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We speak here of at least a tension between specific, material claims about divine action, say, in the Exodus or the life of Jesus, that are in one way or another called into question by historical investigation. Quests for “the historical Israel” and “the historical Jesus” illustrate what is at stake. Various traditional historical claims about the Exodus and about Jesus are broadly false; they may be still invaluable as “myth” or “story” but not as historical realities. The old way of establishing the reliability of the biblical accounts by means of divine inspiration was thereby discredited. If you make historical claims, you go to historians to secure their status. Divine inspiration, which in reality was actually divine dictation and other forms of divine speaking, was no longer a reliable source for the historical claims logically embedded in or inferred from them. This was the old dogmatic way of securing them; it is by no means a dead letter in Jewish and Christian circles; but it was effectively blown up by historical investigation. Leaving aside claims about miraculous acts of God, the kind of providential action identified above could be resolved in at least one of two ways. On the one hand, one could deploy a theory of primary and secondary causation in which the same event could be seen as an act of God and a human act. So, Murphy uses a hammer to drive in a nail; both Murphy and the hammer count as causes, with Murphy being the primary cause and the hammer being the secondary or instrumental cause. The background music in this case was drawn from the relation between divine action and the conservation of nature. So, nature could be seen entirely as a natural event, explicable in terms of natural laws or the nature and dispositions of creaturely entities; and the same phenomena could be seen as entirely a matter of divine primary causation which upheld the laws or substances in being. An army of Thomists continue to work up this solution.⁸ The fundamental problem, one some Thomists readily recognize, is that it is not at all easy to apply this distinction in the case of human actions. Human agents are radically different from other ontological phenomena. If God works through Murphy to help the Little Sisters of Charity, Murphy is not like a hammer; he is a personal agent with a mind and will of his own. Moreover, while one can claim and repeat that the divine causation works by upholding their agency in an appropriate manner apt for their ontology, it is far from easy to see how, say, Stalin’s acts of kindness to some of his comrades were also entirely acts of God. The metaphysical theorizing runs deep at this point; not least when it has to deal with Stalin’s murderous rampages of the late 1930s. Moreover, it does not help to appeal to the incarnation as at once involving fully human and fully divine action, precisely because this is a unique case which cannot be generalized to cover the

⁸ For a splendid recent treatment of the issues see Michael C. Dodds, Unlocking Divine Action: Contemporary Science and Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012).

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kind of providential acts in play before us. We might describe these theories of double agency as a form of high-octane Thomistic metaphysics. The other alternative involves low-octane metaphysics. In this instance the crucial distinction is between naturalism and non-naturalism.⁹ Thus, historians who seek to undermine robust theological claims about divine action are really committed to a form of naturalism which in principle refuses to take any kind of divine action seriously. It is not as if their investigation leads them materially to historical claims that undermine or underdetermine theological claims; the whole enterprise is based on assumptions that rule out the very possibility of divine action as a matter of principle. The relevant assumptions may be merely methodological, or they may be more substantial; either way they rule out the possibility of drawing on information that if allowed would alter the conclusions reached. Perhaps, the Holy Spirit has implanted truths about the Exodus and about Jesus that alter the total body of relevant evidence and thus offer a rebuttal to the defeaters offered by the historians. In this way, a finely tuned doctrine of divine inspiration is resurrected to replace the old dogmatic method that was ousted by the historical critics. There is some truth in this latter strategy that I will come back to later; and it has the great merit of touching on the epistemological considerations relevant to understanding historical investigation. The problem is that claims about naturalism and non-naturalism are far too abstract to unpack the issues involved. The conceptual tools are simply too blunt to take us very far. After all, naturalism and non-naturalism come in a host of varieties and even though care is taken to stipulate what is meant they leave us worried that too much luggage is being smuggled into the basement of inquiry. Again, the problem is that issues related to causation are given far too little attention. We need a richer set of concepts to capture what is in play. This is where Troeltsch matters. Troeltsch famously proposed that in order to do good historical work it was imperative to abide by the principles of criticism, analogy, and correlation. He also insisted that it was crucial to distinguish without separating interests of the first degree from interests of the second degree. Against the rolling tide of scholarly opinion, especially within theology, I plan to resurrect both in what follows. To be sure, both these insights are not all that matters in an analysis of historical investigation, but they are central and exceptionally fruitful. Both can be explained relatively easily and briefly; I shall deploy my own rendering of their content.¹⁰

⁹ For a fine exposition of this position which draws on the work of Alvin Plantinga see C. Stephen Evans, “Methodological Naturalism and Historical Biblical Scholarship,” in Carey C. Newman, ed., Jesus and the Restoration of Israel: A Critical Assessment of N. T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1999), 180–205. ¹⁰ For an exposition which sticks closely to quotations from Troeltsch see my Divine Revelation and the Limits of Historical Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), chapter 5.

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“Criticism” as deployed in historical study means that historians interrogate their sources when they seek to find out what happened in the past. They have to learn that marshaling relevant evidence for a narrative requires looking with both a sympathetic and a skeptical eye at what, say, first-hand witnesses and later witnesses tell us. The same principle applies to the deployment of other types of evidence, say, from weather conditions, archaeological data, economic factors, and so on. One cannot simply take as an uncritical authority the sources used to construct a faithful account of what happened. Once doubt arose as regards the biblical accounts of this or that event, it was no longer enough to appeal to the Bible as a sacred text whose origins in divine causation were thought to secure the truth of what happened. It is crucial to note that this is not in itself an anti-theological stance to take. Suppose we agree that God inspired, or spoke, or dictated the original autographs of the Bible. Leaving aside the issue of which book is really God’s book, this does not secure, say, the inerrancy of scripture and, therefore, its reliability. After all, God could for various purposes dictate a book which contained all sorts of materials: parables, edifying myths, brilliant dialogues on the problem of suffering, various occasional letters, and so on. Perhaps God might even throw in a joke or two and, if we had a sense of humor, we would have a good laugh. To get to strong doctrines of reliability we have to add non-scriptural considerations about the genre of the material. Hence off we go to the races into the field of hermeneutics.¹¹ Once we open this Pandora’s box, there is no avoiding the use of criticism understood in the broad sense as examining our sources in order to find out what happened in the past, including the past in which God is said to have played a decisive role in the outcome of events. So, how do we now proceed? This is where the principles of analogy and correlation enter the picture. Notice that I take these two together. Analogy means that we draw on our own judgments as to what happens in nature and history in the present as a check or constraint on handling claims about what happened in the past. Thus, if someone tells me that Andrew Wiles solved Fermat’s fourth theorem when he was a child of three, I will not take that seriously. It would be different if we were to consider the case of a child prodigy in music. Why this is the case takes us to the principle of correlation, namely, to the wider causal assumption that three-year-old children are in no position intellectually to understand the problem involved much less solve it. So, the appeal to analogy is not at all an appeal to what I or my friends have experienced and then deployed as an analogy. It is rather that analogy always operates within a wider set of assumptions about causality without which the

¹¹ This point is made in somewhat different language and with characteristic skill by Michael C. Rea in “Authority and Truth,” in D. A. Carson, ed., The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 872–98.

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appeal to analogy would have no purchase whatsoever. Causation is absolutely crucial at this juncture. Notice here that there is nothing skeptical per se in this account of historical judgment. Thus, there is a resolute commitment to the principle that historical events have causes and explanations that cry out for investigation. Historical events are not bolts from the blue; they have causal antecedents without which they remain totally enigmatic. Moreover, there is a clear commitment to find out what really happened. This is not a matter of contrast with some perfect recording of an angel’s narration of history. The contrast is with gossip, low- or high-class journalism, speculative guessing, polemical oratory, political propaganda, conspiracy theories, fake news, and the like. Notice also that the judgments are fallible and revisable in nature; there is no one perfect way to tell what happened. The agents and causal factors involved are too complex and ramified to allow for any kind of apodictic certainty. Yet there are better and worse ways of telling what happened; and there is plenty of room for well-placed assurance. There really was a Holocaust despite the existence of Holocaust deniers; and the modern state of Israel was founded in 1948. Most important of all, the aim of the historian is to find out what really happened. The truth-makers for historical claims are located in what happened in the past. This may seem like a trivial tautology. On the contrary, it is crucial for it does not locate the truth-makers in the subjective reasoning of the historian, say, in the warrants and evidence invoked. Warrants and evidence are means of securing our beliefs about the past, but the truth-makers for these beliefs are what really happened in the past. This takes me to the other deep insight deployed by Troeltsch, namely, the distinction but not separation between interests of the first degree and interests of the second degree. Together with the preceding observation, this insight undermines the dead-end debate about subjectivity and objectivity in historical inquiry. Historians come to their work with a host of presuppositions, interests, prejudices, hunches, prior historical conclusions, and the like.¹² They also come with emotions and feelings that can go all the way from hatred to love. Thus, if I want to find out the relation between terrorism and Irish nationalism, I will bring to the table a host of prior commitments. There will be no tabula rasa. In that sense, the work will be inescapably subjective. There will be a host of interests not intrinsically related to finding out what that relationship is. Thus, I may be driven by a strong moral intuition that revisionist accounts of the relation between terrorism

¹² Kotkin brings to his work on Stalin a deep interest in the workings of power. This in fact enhances the depth and quality of his massive volumes. This feature of background comes out in his many interviews available on YouTube.

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and Irish nationalism seek to whitewash the appalling moral evil involved.¹³ These are interests of the second degree and they are vital to the psychological and intellectual energy involved at times in historical work. However, if there is no interest of the first degree, that is, the interest to find out the truth about the relation rather than what I would like the truth to be, morally speaking, then it is less likely that I will find out what was really the case. It is this interest that claims about objectivity are meant to secure. Once the history is written up, the work will, of course, include interests of the second degree. Without these interests the work would in all likelihood be extremely boring. However, to reduce the work to these interests or to conflate the two as equally important in historical study is poisonous for understanding the nature of historical inquiry.¹⁴ So far so good. In my own words but drawing on the concepts deployed by Troeltsch, I have been unpacking the logic of historical investigation. Yet Troeltsch was convinced that his proposals disposed of any kind of robust claims about divine action in history. This then, aside from various quibbles about criticism, analogy, and correlation, is taken as the end of the matter.¹⁵ So, we turn to claims about primary and secondary causation or about naturalism and move on. This is understandable. After all, if Troeltsch himself drew this conclusion, what is there to say? Happily, much in every way. What is lost in this is that Troeltsch made the fatal mistake of substituting a material claim about causation in history for the formal claim that he rightly saw as crucial to historical investigation. He does actually notice the possible equivocation on causation, but he fails to see the import of it for his own theological conclusions on the relation between divine action and history. In an obscure paper he insists that historians cannot avoid making metaphysical assumptions about causation.¹⁶ Put differently, purely formal claims about the ubiquity of causation in historical events do not tell us what the actual causes in play may be in any particular case. Troeltsch did not at all rule out the role of divine action in history. He simply was convinced that his account of the Godworld-history causal relation ruled out traditional claims, say, about the Exodus or Jesus. God worked only in, with, and through historical and natural events. In this he relied on an idealist metaphysics to carry the day. In this respect it is not ¹³ This is one of the great merits of Patrick J. Roche’s treatment of this topic. See his “Terrorism and Irish Nationalism,” in Patrick J. Roche and Brian Barton, eds., The Northern Ireland Question: Perspectives on Nationalism and Unionism (London: Wordzworth, 2020), 85–118. ¹⁴ We could readily write up the relevant issues here in terms of virtue epistemology, but this would be a distraction. An interest of the first degree is simply the intellectual virtue of seeking the truth for its own sake. ¹⁵ For two opposing scholars who offer some of the standard quibbles about these concepts see N. T. Wright, History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019), 89; and Seth Heringer, Uniting Theology and History: A Theological Critique of the Historical Method (Lanham, MD: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2018), 3. ¹⁶ Ernst Troeltsch, “Historiography,” in James Hastings, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1914), 716–23. The crucial passage can be found on page 721.

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inaccurate to say that he was a kind of robust naturalist. However, he was well aware that this kind of metaphysical commitment was by no means intellectually secure. What he did not envisage was that a radically different account of the divine-world-history relation might yield entirely different conclusions for the historian. We might even surmise that Troeltsch could allow for the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 as an act of providence. After all, the claim is precisely that God acts in, with, and through the vicissitudes of human and natural events to achieve his good purposes for creation.¹⁷ Even so, this remains somewhat opaque, for now we want to know how to spell out the details of divine action as it relates to such historical events. I lay that issue aside here. However, I now want to argue that Troeltsch’s insights about the crucial place of causation in historical investigation throw invaluable light on discussions about the modern founding of the state of Israel. As a point of entry to this I turn once again to Conor Cruise O’Brien. Writing about Chaim Weizmann’s success in securing George Curzon’s reworking of the Balfour Declaration as it became the legal backdrop for the state of Israel, he notes initially: Reading Curzon’s protestations, and looking at Israel’s legal foundation stone, as it left Curzon’s hands, I found a line of Racine’s coming into my mind: Le cruel Dieu des Juifs l’emporte aussi sur toi (The cruel God of the Jews has you beaten too).

Shortly thereafter, O’Brien picks up this theme of divine action: If a Zionist, of the pious sort, were to tell me that the true explanation of this phenomenon was that God had decided that it was time for his people to come home, I should no doubt express polite skepticism. But if the same pious Zionist were then to ask me whether I can discern any explanation, in terms of Britain’s material interests, for the British Government’s reinforcement of the Balfour Declaration, in the circumstances of the early twenties, I should have to say that I can’t find any such explanation. This doesn’t mean, of course, that one has to look around for miracles. It means that the mainspring of action in this matter seemed to come from moral, spiritual and aesthetic forces, rather than from calculations of self-interest. The Zionist idea was and is power. For Herzl, it opened the doors of King and Emperor and Pope. For Weizmann, it was opening the doors of Palestine itself. As the doors of Palestine opened, Weizmann’s language, in writing to Zionist friends, takes on a note of mystical exaltation, similar to many passages in Herzl’s ¹⁷ Troeltsch also allows for divine action in the inner life of the believer. See Troeltsch, The Christian Faith (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016), 216, 221.

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diaries. As he prepared to present the Zionist case to the Paris Peace Conference, Weizmann wrote: “I am living like Moses on Mount Sinai . . . ‘on fire’ . . . ”¹⁸

This is a subtle set of observations. At one level, O’Brien appears to be flirting with a god-of-gaps strategy. He was well aware of the standing explanations given that might work but was unpersuaded. At another level, he was flirting with the remote possibility of miracle, but he is unclear what this might mean, and his skepticism undermined this option. In the end he resorted to claims not about what God may be doing but how the intellectual power of ideas about the fulfillment of divine promise in scripture has a significant role in historical causation. What is interesting is that language about ‘the cruel God of the Jews’ shows up at all. I suggest it does so because he is aware instinctively that claims about divine action are both causal and explanatory. Hence, the theology of Zionism, if true, when deployed in this instance would not at all necessarily undermine Troeltsch’s insights; it confirms them as an option once we replace his account of the God-world-history relation with one that fits in principle with the Jewish tradition. Troeltsch rather than undermining the theology helps us understand the logic of the argument. The theology of Zionism holds at this point that the creation of the state of Israel and the return of the Jews to Jerusalem was an act of God in the sense that in these events God fulfilled his promise that the people of Israel would return to the land that God gave to their ancestors. The warrant for this claim is essentially derived from divine revelation recorded in scripture and kept alive in the Passover ritual across the generations. It is, as O’Brien rightly notices, a causal claim, a claim about what God hath wrought. As such it offers a partial explanation for the creation of the modern state of Israel. To be sure, it is an incomplete explanation in the sense that there are other agents involved, and in the sense that the details are not filled in. However, it is indeed a causal explanation which enters into the deep structure of Zionist theology. For this reason, it is treated with extreme caution by Israeli diplomats who want to develop a more secular account of what happened for obvious purposes in negotiations with those who do not share that perspective.¹⁹ O’Brien naturally tells us of his polite skepticism precisely because, as an agnostic, he does not share the metaphysical commitments on causation that are invoked in the theology of Zionism. Even though he is at a loss to provide an alternative and entirely natural explanation, he clearly holds that he prefers such explanations. In other words, he has a different set of metaphysical commitments

¹⁸ Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism, 152–3. ¹⁹ I recall at this point a panel in which I participated at Pepperdine University where an official from the Israeli Consul Office was extremely nervous if not hostile to any reference to Zionist theology.

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on causation that enter into his quest for appropriate explanation. This is precisely the dilemma that is presented to those who, for whatever reason, have rejected the possibility of explanations in terms of divine action. The crucial point to register at this point is that the debate is no longer simply about doing good or bad history; it is a deeper debate about causation and agency. We may in the end want to have a division of labor at this point, say, by limiting historical explanation to explanations that allow for but do not deploy theological explanations. So, historians may want to stay clear of theological considerations, leaving that to the theologians to ponder. However, no one should be fooled at this point and allow this to morph into the claim that there are no divine actions in history, and for two reasons. First, because it is easy to ignore that this division of labor is a matter of stipulation rather than substance. And second, because historians across the modern period have not simply left theological explanations to the theologians; they have sought aggressively to eliminate theological explanations in the name of historical study; and many have then gone on to banish theology from the university in the name of academic integrity. Here is the upshot of this line of argument: if we want to deal with claims about divine action related to the creation of the modern state of Israel, then we should contest the relevant theological claim before us. The claim is that God in an act of special providence brought the state of Israel to birth in 1948. This is a causal claim, a claim about what God has done. It is not mere poetry, or rhetorical excess, or an expression of emotion, or a disguised exercise of raw political power. It should be argued for or rejected on theological grounds. If historians want to enter the fray, they cannot win the argument by stipulations about the nature of causation in history. They must tackle the issue in its own right as a theological claim which impinges on what will be proposed as a matter of historical fact. In this respect the debate is simply an extension of the standard debates about divine action in Israel in the Exodus and divine action in Jesus of Nazareth. I want now to pursue my quarry by digging deeper into the way convictions about agency and causation play out in historical investigation. I shall do this briefly first, by noting how large-scale proposals about causation show up in historical work; and second, by looking at what happens when theological claims about divine action in history are abandoned by historians in the case of the history of ancient Israel. The latter topic is obviously relevant to debates about the creation of the state of Israel in that the claim that God is at work in the creation of the current state of Israel depends logically on divine promises that show up in the history of ancient Israel. I have already noted that how one thinks of human agents will inescapably show up in historical writing. In this case, it is the metaphysics of human freedom

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that becomes relevant. However, this is not the only example where material proposals about human action show up.²⁰ Consider four further examples. First, historians readily give priority to certain domains of human action in their historical work. Thus, Frank Ankersmit gives priority to political history as the causal backbone of historical investigation.²¹ This is in stark contrast to what has been called the “great man” vision of historical work where the emphasis falls on the place of significant individuals in historical explanations. Second, historians in the Marxist and revisionist Marxist traditions give pride of place to economic history understood in term of class distinctions in their deliberations. Marxism is in fact a large-scale hypothesis about the crucial causal factors in the forces that drive human history. In revisionist Marxist traditions, one also finds, as happens in the Frankfurt School, the additional deployment of psychoanalytic categories in order to understand historical phenomena.²² Third, others concentrate on ideas as the really crucial causal factors involved, a tradition which is brilliantly represented by Isaiah Berlin. Fourth, it is only a matter of shift in emphasis for deep spiritual considerations to be brought front and center in the understanding of historical events. David Patterson’s dramatic claim that antiSemitism is driven by rebellion against the God of Israel, understood in a thoroughly realistic manner, is a perfect example of this option.²³ For Patterson, it is not enough to limit explanations to various psychological, political, or sociological factors. These miss the real story to be told, a story that takes with deadly seriousness the rebellion of human agents against the reality and commands of the God of Israel. Looking at what has happened in the quest for the origins of Israel as an historical enterprise is equally illuminating in thinking through the place of claims about divine action in history. In this case we see what has happened when the possibility of divine causation is systematically erased from the historical study of scripture. The issue is taken up in a fine study of the relevant issues by Stephen Weitzman.²⁴ Weitzman’s work concentrates on what happens once scholars abandon the idea that the story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob gives an accurate historical account of the origins of the Jews.

²⁰ For a penetrating discussion of this issue see Isaiah Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” in his Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 41–117. ²¹ See Frank Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), chapter 12. ²² See Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (New York: Verso, 2015), 151–4. ²³ David Patterson, Anti-Semitism and Its Metaphysical Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). ²⁴ Stephen Weitzman, The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

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The story told of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in Genesis, most scholars would agree, is an attempt by much later authors to explain the origin of their people: they might preserve certain kernels of genuine experience, but for the most part, many scholars believe, they do not reflect historical reality, having been composed in a much later period and projecting on to the past the experience and perspectives of later authors. Similar considerations have led scholars to conclude that the Exodus probably did not happen, or at least not in the way the Torah describes, and they have their doubts as well about the Israelite conquest of the land of Canaan, the existence of the kingdom ruled by David and Solomon, and other events and people in the biblical account especially in the formative period of Israel’s history.²⁵

The obvious question that then arises is how we are going to develop an account of the origins of the Jews. Weitzman actually provides no answer to this query; instead he engages in a fascinating account of what has happened as historians have set out to find a plausible historical account of the origins of the Jews. If history is a straightforward attempt to provide such an account, then we should expect in time to have an answer that will stand up to historical scrutiny. This is not a request for some sort of final, definitive account; it is the more modest aspiration to have an account that can win the allegiance of those experts who profess to deal with the relevant issues. However, this is not at all what we find when we follow the trail with the historians. So, Weitzman walks us through the various schools of historical research that have sought to come up with a compelling answer. He provides a gripping account of the work of such figures as Robertson Smith, Duncan Mackenzie, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Sir Flinders Petrie, and so on. The book is a goldmine of detailed historical excavation relative to the quest for the origins of Israel. Yet as we reach the end of the line, we find that the quest for the origins of the Jews is in danger of becoming an exhausted research program. So much so that Weitzman turns to the debates between constructivism and primordialists to illustrate the fact that the whole enterprise is now under review.²⁶ Weitzman is not a complete skeptic; he is still haunted by the search. However, I suspect that he is extremely sanguine about the possible success of the search. Early on he wonders whether he should even undertake the task he set himself. “The search for origins poses so many evidentiary and philosophical problems that there have long been scholars who have rejected the search for origins as a

²⁵ Ibid., 2–3. ²⁶ By constructivism Weitzman means the view that tends to see nations as artificial and very temporary. By primordialists he means the view that the nation continues or emerges from something earlier. See ibid., 258. He also deals with “constructivism” in the sense of seeing historical works as works of fiction or the imagination. See ibid., 22–3.

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futile and misguided quest.”²⁷ At one point he looks to personal and political considerations to make sense of the radical differences in methodology that show up; yet he recognizes how brittle any kind of correlation between psychological information and research results will be. He does not give up on the search, opting for a version of what he calls the “genealogical” by which he takes “genealogy” as a metaphor for an open-ended quest that, like the effort to follow an exponentially increasing number of ancestors backward in time, must move from the present moment into the a past that grows increasingly complicated, many-sided, and hard to pin down. Even if there is some common ancestor or inaugural moment at the beginning of it all, genealogy can never get there because it confines itself to the documentable, to what can be proven, and it is just as likely to expose gaps in the evidence that cannot be filled as it is to answer our questions. All it can do, at best, is reveal partial and tentative answers, in a way that is halting, is always subject to critique, and has frustration built into it. In my view, this is the only kind of search that scholarship allows for, a search that grows more ramified, entangled, and daunting as it moves forward (if it can be said to move forward), but it does at least hold a door open for those not ready to give up.²⁸

This is a wonderful peroration that captures so much that is true of historical investigation more generally. Moreover, I agree entirely with Weitzman that one reason for keeping alive this whole enterprise as it applies to the origins of the Jews is because there are so many false narratives available that are appallingly toxic and dangerous. However, this whole enterprise is predicated on rejecting the possibility that divine election and covenant can have any role in explaining the origins of the Jews. That door would seem to be firmly closed. So, we have to live with the absence of clear-cut answers. In truth, that possibility was probably lost from the moment people began to question the Genesis account many centuries ago, and given all the ways in which scholarship has fallen short since then, it seems a safe bet that it is never going to be able to clear things up.²⁹

It would be easy to make theological hay of this state of affairs by drawing on Schweitzer’s famous remark finishing his work on the quest for the historical Jesus where he notes that historians looked into the well of history and saw nothing in the end but the reflection of their own faces. We seem to have reached a similar impasse in the quest for the origin of the Jews. However, this is not at all what we

²⁷ Ibid., 9.

²⁸ Ibid., 327–8.

²⁹ Ibid., 327.

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should conclude. The better alternative is to deal with the wider metaphysical issues that crop up in historical study and face head on the theological dimensions of the historical study of both Jewish and Christian origins. Like my comment on the question about divine action in the rebirth of Israel as a state in 1948, the question is once more a theological issue about divine action. Did God elect Israel for a purpose that does not apply for other nations, say, Ireland or Botswana? That question deserves theological attention. It is precisely this that historians want to keep at bay, not just by arguing for this or that material historical conclusion but by arguing that serious attention to causation forbids it. This is surely a glaring error. False or misleading answers to this question are as dangerous as false secular narratives of the origins of the Jews. Of course, this makes the historical enterprise even more elusive and difficult than that depicted by Weitzman. However, it is silly to cry foul simply because the pitch turns out to be bigger and the game longer than the players anticipated.³⁰ I understand the reluctance to open the door wider. Perhaps I can relieve some of the anxiety by the following concluding remarks. First, I reiterate that opening this door does not mean that for most of what historians study this will be an issue. Thus, nobody is claiming that God did something in ancient Ireland that is of vital significance to the whole world. It is the actual, deep, enduring theological claims about divine action in history, including divine action through the election of Jews, that should be taken seriously. So, it is no accident that all the fuss has been about the Jewish and Christian scriptures. This is not going to go away; nor should it go away, given its incredible relevance to what we think about ourselves and our lives together. Second, as the arrival of postmodernism and constructivism signals, it is clear that modernity has not turned out to be the great hope of the world that many have proclaimed and implemented in the social order. We are now entering an era where theological claims are back in the public arena; many of these claims are false and extremely dangerous to the welfare of Jews. They require more and not less attention. To be sure, as with the case of epistemological issues related to historical inquiry, we need to take the epistemological questions that crop up with radical seriousness. The passport office that has shut down theology has closed; and the educational officials who have sought to banish theology from the university should be sacked. However, we need good rather than bad theological inquiry. This too is good reason to keep historical inquiry as a separate discipline; the division of labor is inescapable. However, the bridges between theology and history need to be kept open, as do the doors in both directions.

³⁰ Isaiah Berlin’s long essay, “The Concept of Scientific History,” in his Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays (New York: Penguin, 1981), 103–42, bears reading and rereading for its ability to bring out the complexity of historical investigation.

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Third, one of the critical links between the two disciplines is the nature of causation. This is why I think Troeltsch still matters. Not only does he get us beyond the futile debates about subjectivity and objectivity in historical inquiry, he also highlights the fact that without a commitment to causation there can be no historical investigation. He took us into a dead end by limiting divine action because of his metaphysical commitments on what could count as divine action. Even so, it was a mark of genius to discern that this was itself a metaphysical commitment as much as it was a theological commitment. Prima facie, there is something bizarre about God having any possible role in the rebirth of Israel in 1948 and in the return of Jews to Jerusalem. It sends shivers down our backs. Something as dangerous as this development, something that is at the core of problems in the Middle East, something so concrete and particular, something that is threatened by another Holocaust, something that evokes such rage, hatred, and moral disapproval, surely this cannot be even a possible site for divine action for serious thinkers. Add to these observations the apocalyptic nonsense that shows up in contemporary dispensationalists circles. It is best to leave all this to one side. However, if true, it was odd of God to choose the Jews to achieve his intentions and purposes for creation. If that is true, maybe it is not so odd that the God of Israel would providentially recreate their state in 1948 and bring them back to Jerusalem. No doubt, if we and our friends were in charge of the universe, this would not be on the agenda. But then, maybe it is better that we are not in charge of redeeming the world. Our modern and postmodern projects are not exactly a charter for hope and confidence. A lot of Jews and non-Jews have been killed in these projects. Maybe, like Conor Cruise O’Brien, we should let “the cruel God of the Jews” come to mind after all.

11 Divine Action, Design, and Natural Theology One of the astonishing features of philosophy of religion over the last generation has been the renewal of natural theology, that is, the attempt to develop cogent arguments for the existence of God from features of the natural world. This shift was nothing less than revolutionary. For a time, the arguments of Hume and Kant had been taken to be a decisive refutation of natural theology, a claim that was correlated theologically by Barth in his assertion that natural theology was a form of idolatry. Philosophers and theologians worked independently to argue that natural theology was a dead-end enterprise. The remarkable reversal of this state of affairs need not detain us here. My interest will be focused on efforts to resurrect the argument from design. My goal is to see how our commitments on divine agency and divine action might throw light on the central controversy that has emerged over the last generation. As a point of entry to the issues at stake I shall begin with a review of the debate about intelligent design as it has emerged within biology. This will lead to a more general treatment of the argument from design as represented by various features of the universe, such as its temporal and spatial order. Considerations about divine agency and divine action impinge on these arguments in at least three ways. First, they highlight how the identity of the agent is to be enumerated. Second, they expose how far one can specify the intentions and purposes of God in arguments from design and whether this has a bearing on the strength of the argument. Third, they expose two radically different ways of construing the place of natural theology in theology proper, one of which prompts us to further work on divine action in nature. The appeal to intelligent design as a necessary feature of phenomena in biology can be articulated relatively simply.¹ The starting point hinges on doubts about the ability of Darwinian and post-Darwinian theories of evolution to account for

¹ In the exposition of what follows I have found the work of Stephen C. Meyer especially helpful. See his “Intelligent Design,” in J. B. Stump, ed., Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design: Four Views (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 177–208; and Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2013). William A. Dembski’s work was ground-breaking in its content and impact. See, for example, William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Divine Agency and Divine Action Volume IV: A Theological and Philosophical Agenda. William J. Abraham, Oxford University Press (2021). © William J. Abraham. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786535.003.0012

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well-established observations in nature. A Darwinian account posits that the development of all life can be accounted for by appeal to three interrelated hypotheses: common ancestry, natural selection, and variation. All life began from a common ancestry placed in an environment where there was variation such that certain traits were selected as more adaptive which in time became stabilized by inheritance. To take a well-known example, tree frogs are eaten by snakes and birds. Those tree frogs that were green or gray in color blended in more readily with the environment and were thus less likely to be eaten by snakes and birds. Over time, those with this advantage passed these traits on to their offspring so that they inherited these features as a permanent feature of their lives. These features were selected as advantageous in the competition for survival. Generalized across time, the basic logic of this explanation was extended upwards from the most primitive forms of life to the highest form of life in human agents. The deep warrants for this generalization were a combination of simplicity (the basic mechanisms were variation, natural selection, and adaptation) and scope (the theory explained a vast array of phenomena in nature). Crucially, there were no gaps in the phenomena as a whole which required appeal to divine intervention to provide a kind of boost from one level of life to another. The initial theological response to this development was complex but many theologians saw no real threat to their work. Given the wisdom and power of God, it was taken as entirely possible that God worked in, with, and through these natural processes to create human beings made in his own image. After all, in terms of strict logic, when we pray to God to give us our daily bread, we see no problem in that being produced entirely naturally without direct intervention by God. All that was needed was the application of a general account of providence, whereby God provides for human need in, with, and through the natural order. What mattered in the end was the climax of creation as represented by genuinely free human agents made in the image of God. Indeed, for God to create free human agents through a process of evolution struck many as an extraordinary display of power and wisdom. To be sure, this shift to a doctrine of general providence was thought to be in conflict with a conventional reading of the Genesis accounts of creation. However, conflict with a conventional interpretation of a text is not a problem for any serious theologian. Aside from better accounts of the meaning of Genesis that became commonplace, the natural response is to deploy the hermeneutical platitude that when a literal interpretation of a text conflicts with what we know from empirical observation, then we should shift to a figurative account. Even if God dictated all of scripture, which was in fact the long-standing account of divine inspiration, this platitude applied. Clearly, if God dictates a sentence, and that sentence takes the form of an assertion rather than, say, an imperative or an interrogative, then if a reading of that assertion turns out to be false given what we know on empirical grounds, we should interpret what God tells us as figurative.

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We can then begin the creative task of figuring out how best to articulate the figurative meaning of the relevant text. Even the inerrancy of the original autographs derived from a theory of divine dictation or divine inspiration cannot avoid the consequences of our most basic hermeneutical practice. Contrary to what is often argued, refusal to follow such practice imposes a foreign meaning on the text and limits our access to the rich content of scripture. The intelligent design movement as opposed to an appeal to design in nature began as a noisy feature of the culture wars in the United States. It was in fact an effort to provide an apologetic resource for dealing with forms of metaphysical materialism and atheism.² In some cases, it was marshaled to shore up various doctrines of scripture. Thus, it showed up in the literature of apologetics and in efforts to secure the teaching of “creationism” in science classes in schools. In many ways this was a disaster, for two reasons. First, it was a matter of bait and switch: draw folks into the debate by appeal to scientific considerations but then substitute a specific theological agenda that goes beyond science. Such a strategy rests on political and polemical moves that become self-defeating. The best strategy in apologetics is to stay with the truth and allow the truth to do the heavy lifting in any culture wars that ensue. Second, this strategy distracted inquirers from the really interesting and worthy features of the movement in terms of the challenges it posed for broadly Darwinian versions of evolution. I do not at all presume at this point that these challenges are successful; I simply flag that these challenges are both important in their own right and illuminating when it comes to claims about divine agency. The challenges are straightforward in their focus. They begin by drawing attention to features of the biological world that prima facie cannot be accounted for in terms of the Darwinian research program. Let me mention three of these. First, the emergence of forms of life in the Cambrian period calls into question the claim that all life descends from a common ancestry. The changes are too substantial and emerge much too quickly to be explained in terms of natural selection and adaptive variation over time. The crucial excavation sites were at the Cambrian site in Wales, the Burgess Shale site in Canada, and the Chengjiang site in southern China. Second, the emergence of complex forms of life which depend on simultaneous, interdependent functions appearing all at once cannot be explained in terms of the mechanisms of natural selection and adaptive variation. In the famous analogy of the mousetrap, the trap requires that no less than six different functional elements (platform, catch, spring, hammer, holding bar, and holding bar curl) appear at once in order for one to have a mouse trap.³ This is a paradigm case of irreducible complexity. Likewise, in nature there are instances of irreducible complexity that ² See, for example, Philip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991). ³ The analogy was developed by Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University.

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cannot be explained in terms of standard evolutionary theory. Specifically, irreducible complexity signals that we are confronted with intelligence. Third, the discovery of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) proposes that one way to think of its nature is in terms of the storage of information. Thus, new forms of life require genetic information to construct the crucial protein molecules that cells and organisms need to live. Neither biological evolutionary theory, which attempts to explain the origin of new forms of life from simpler preexisting forms of life, nor chemical evolutionary theory, which attempts to explain the origin of the first life from simpler, non-living chemicals, can explain the origin of the digital information stored in DNA. As things stand, these phenomena constitute an amazing mystery. Yet we have, it is said, a better alternative available in terms of an intelligent designer. Such a designer will have the causal power to bring about these phenomena directly by means of basic actions; so, we have a causal theory in hand. We are appealing to an agent with the relevant capacities who is free to perform such basic actions. Moreover, we have a theory that is comprehensive in scope in that it provides an explanation for a variety of natural phenomena. The deep assumption in play here is that we readily explain all sorts of phenomena in terms of intelligent agency. We are not introducing an ad hoc explanation just to fill in the gaps in nature. We are deploying an explanation in terms of intelligent agency. Nowhere is this more relevant than in the case of the information coded in our DNA, for intelligence is the only known source of specified information. Putting the relevant issue in other words, we are not appealing merely to human ignorance; we are appealing to what we know; that is, we have positive, evidence-based knowledge of an alternative cause that is sufficient to produce specified information. There is an additional assumption to be noted. The case in hand should be understood as a contribution to science rather than an intrusion from an alien academic discipline that works off entirely different forms of reasoning, such as an appeal to divine revelation. What is at stake here is the unscientific commitment to materialistic naturalism, which in turn presupposes some kind of settled account of the demarcation of science that limits its resources arbitrarily. What matters is the legitimacy of the explanation deployed and its comparative superiority to alternative options. The appeal to intelligent design satisfies both these criteria. In my exposition I have deliberately sought to distinguish the appeal to intelligent design as an explanation for certain phenomena in nature from the cultural and polemical context in which it was embedded. This is required for at least two reasons. First, it is required by a hermeneutics of charity, whereby the proposal is seen in terms of its best interpretation. Second, it is required if the logic of the argument is to be accurately evaluated. How should that evaluation run? First, it is clear that the worry about naturalistic materialism is a distraction. There is nothing theologically otiose in relying on the principle of methodological

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naturalism in the pursuit of truth in natural science. Indeed, we ought to deploy a principle of epistemic tenacity with respect to methodological naturalism in that this principle has been pivotal in the success of science across the centuries. It has certainly been central to well-informed Christians who are also scientists. We explain a host of phenomena in nature without appeal to basic actions of God. This should be our rule unless we have compelling evidence to abandon it. At this point, the theologians, unless they are relevant experts, are in no position to challenge this rule. Most theologians are simply laypersons dependent on relevant experts. It would be exaggerated to say that the jury is still out on whether our current theories of evolution can accommodate the phenomena identified above; the general consensus is positive. It is a matter of intellectual vice that many in the jury pool simply refuse to accept that, despite the positive consensus, there are indeed serious problems that need to be faced. This is nothing new in the academy. Those committed to the intelligent design project render an invaluable service to science by forcefully pressing the anomalies that are not addressed by current theories. Nothing is to be gained by running away from the data and arguments they have mounted. However, in the end, it is a matter of judgment as to how far these challenges might be met within the horizon of natural science as it currently functions. In this respect scientists operate on the basis of hope and faith. Such hope and faith cannot be ruled out given the present debate among the experts. Theologians are free also to exercise such faith and hope, not least when they find scientists who think that some version of evolution represents the best light we have at present.⁴ Second, once we become skeptical about settling demarcation disputes about the scope of natural science, we can in principle bring back basic divine actions as an element in natural science, but mere possibility is a matter of philosophical handwaving at this point. In fact, what is astonishing in the present proposal is that there is no appeal to divine action at all. All we have is the appeal to an intelligent designer. The agent involved is left entirely unspecified. It could in principle be a less than omnipotent and wholly intelligent designer or a committee of designers working together. God is simply absent from the project. To put the issue sharply, this project has nothing to offer with respect to divine agency. There is no reference to God as an essential element in the explanation. Third, we can indeed explain phenomena in terms of the activity of an intelligent agent. We say, for example, that the bank was robbed by Delaney. We have an explanation for the bank robbery. It was done by Delaney. At least in this case we know who the agent is. However, this is only a partial explanation of the phenomena. We do not yet know why Delaney robbed the bank. Did he do so ⁴ This position is splendidly represented by Deborah B. Haarsma in her essay “Evolutionary Creation,” in J. B. Stump, ed., Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design: Four Views (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 124–53.

 , ,   

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because he was bored, because he was under threat to do so by a local gangster, because that is where the money is, or because he did it to impress his girlfriend? So, right away we have a radically incomplete explanation even in the terms in which the proposal is enunciated. If we bring God into the picture, we are in exactly the same situation. So, suppose we make God the relevant agent. If we follow the logic of explanations as drawn from cases where we know how they best work, we now want to know why God would perform these basic actions in nature. We might speculate on possible reasons, say, that God did so providentially to stump natural scientists committed to naturalistic materialism; or, say, that God intended us to marvel at the wonderful basic actions he has performed in nature. However, if we really want to make progress on this front, we need access to divine testimony to provide any kind of substantial warrant for our deliberations. It is not enough to point to general reasons, say, that God thereby makes known his wisdom and power in and through the natural order. We need specific reasons for God performing the proposed phenomena that cannot be accommodated in evolutionary theory. We have no such testimony either from scripture or from prophecy. So, it is no accident that those committed to intelligent design in biology are totally silent as to why the designer performs the basic acts that are supposedly in play. They have no way of grounding any kind of complete explanation not just because they cannot appeal to divine testimony but because the explanation proposed is radically incomplete in terms of its own logic. In reality, the attraction of proposals about intelligent design in nature stems from the background beliefs that are brought to its reception. Folk informally identify the intelligent designer as God understood as good and all-powerful. They may even think it is more devout to read the theory in this way. Somehow, they are refusing to acknowledge the wisdom and ingenuity of God in nature if they refuse this gift from its adherents. However, to take this line is to be subject to delusion and self-deception. God does not need such speculative compliments. As we can see when we look at the fine print, these proposals neither identify the relevant designer as divine nor offer a comprehensive explanation of divine action. If we accept this conclusion, is there a better way to articulate the significance of apparent design in the universe so that our theological and spiritual lives will be enriched without prima facie running into conflict with the content and logic of our scientific endeavors? Precisely such an option has been opened up in the last generation by the work of Richard Swinburne. His proposals have the great merit of being clear about the identity of God, about the logic of personal explanation, and about the possible reasons for God creating a world that does indeed exhibit intelligent design. Swinburne’s treatment of apparent design in nature is one element in his project of developing a full-scale natural theology that deploys Bayes’s theories of probability to secure the conclusion that the existence of God as understood

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broadly in terms of classical theism is more probable than not. In terms of the logic of his argument from design, his claim is that certain features of the universe make the existence of God more likely than it would otherwise be. My initial goal here is to get clear on how he articulates a teleological vision of crucial features of the natural world. I shall return to the logic of his natural theology in due course. As with classical treatments of the argument from design, Swinburne begins by drawing attention to two interesting features in the universe: we live in a world where there are regularities of co-presence or spatial order and regularities of succession or temporal order. An example of a regularity of co-presence would be a town with all its roads at right angles to each other, or a section of books in a library arranged in alphabetical order of authors. Regularities of succession are simple patterns of behavior of objects such as someone moving his or her legs in accord with the standard movements of a dance. In both cases the regularities are produced by humans. The universe is characterized by regularity of both kinds not produced by humans or other embodied humans. There is first the temporal order of the regular succession of events, codified in laws of nature. In books of physics, chemistry, and biology we can learn how almost everything in the world behaves. The laws of their behavior can be set out in relatively simple formulae that humans can understand and by means of which they can successfully predict the future . . . And then there is a spatial order of the intricate arrangements of parts in human (and animal) bodies. We have limbs, liver, heart, kidneys, stomach, sense organs, etc. of such a kind that, given regularities of temporal order, our bodies are suitable vehicles to provide us with enormous amounts of knowledge of the world and to execute an enormous variety of purposes in it.⁵

These descriptions of order are seen by humans as evidence of a creator. The philosopher at this point is simply providing a codification of a reaction to the world embedded in the human consciousness. It is from this codification that we can then move to reconstruct the teleological argument for the existence of God. The crucial bridge from data to conclusion takes us in time to the significance of divine agency for Swinburne. When confronted with these striking features of the universe we naturally look for explanations. Why is there so much temporal and spatial order in the universe? At this point we need to realize that we can explain phenomena in the universe in one of two ways. First, we can look for scientifictype explanations in which we relate the phenomena to a set of initial conditions and covering laws that, applied to the case at hand, predict the existence of the phenomena. We deploy the concepts of initial conditions and laws of nature and, ⁵ Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 153–4.

 , ,   

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if we have a true explanation, the phenomena will be seen as a consequence of the operation of the laws of nature on the initial conditions. To be sure, the descriptions of the initial conditions and of the laws of nature may be complex, but the basic structure of the explanation is straightforward. By means of this structure we arrive at good judgments of probability. However, this is but one way to explain events in nature. We can also explain events by means of personal explanations. In this case, we explain the event in question by saying that it is brought about by a rational agent doing something intentionally. Within this type of explanation, we can readily distinguish between basic actions and mediated actions. A basic action is an action that an agent just does, straight off. A mediated action is an action that an agent does by doing something else. So, I break the door down by giving it a kick. Breaking the door down is a mediated action; the kick is a basic action. Such personal explanations are not reducible to scientific explanations. Moreover, personal actions are brought about by personal agents, understood as individual substances who are the bearers of properties. Such agents have various intentions that are in turn basic actions. Indeed, “Intentions are such that necessarily the agent whose they are ‘go along’ with them, is aware of them, and has privileged access to them in the sense that he is in a better position than outsiders to know about them.”⁶ So, we now have two ways of explaining events: a scientific way and a personalistic way. These are in fact the only two ways of explaining phenomena available to us. We naturally recognize their provenance, unless, that is, we are prepared to become radically impoverished in our understanding of what happens in the world. Explanations in terms of personal actions has been known from time immemorial; it is one reason why we can understand our ancestors even as they understand the world in ways that are foreign to us. Scientific explanations are of more recent origin but, clearly, we now deploy them entirely naturally in our intercourse with the world. Such explanations were invented by human agents seeking to understand the world, a fact that secures the logical priority of personal explanations in that without the work of rational agents we would not have science and all that it gives us. Of course, there is more to the story than I have given in this sketch of Swinburne’s carefully constructed position. Moreover, we do not have to sign up to all the contested philosophical moves developed by Swinburne to recognize that he has brilliantly captured a critical feature of our intellectual endeavors in a fresh and concise way. However, there is enough to take us all the way to his claims about divine agency and divine action. These enter the picture because implicitly Swinburne deploys a vision of God as an agent who has the beliefs, powers, and intelligence to bring about events in the world.⁷ Let’s apply this to the two types of

⁶ Ibid., 44.

⁷ God also has the capacity to create the world ex nihilo. See ibid., 49–50.

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order identified. In the case of temporal order, clearly temporal order already commits us to laws of nature as crucial in securing scientific explanations of events in the world.⁸ So the crucial question is how we are to explain the existence of laws of nature. We could simply stop there and make these brute facts about the universe. However, this does not take sufficiently seriously our wonder at regularities of success. So, we naturally wonder why they exist at all. We might try out an explanation in terms of chance; but chance is not an explanation; it is the absence of explanation. The obvious move to make is to see if a personal explanation will work. Could we explain the existence of laws of nature in their simplicity and universality in terms of the intentional action of an agent? The obvious candidate is God understood as an agent with appropriate beliefs, powers, and wisdom. What then about spatial order, say, as represented by the intricate features of animals and human agents? The initial explanation is clearly in terms of the evolution of life, drawing on a broadly Darwinian account that traces the development, say, of human agents as the result of natural selection, random variation, and survival of the fittest. At this stage Swinburne sees no reason to posit divine intervention in the form of basic actions attributed to God; rather, we should see the whole evolutionary process as governed by laws.⁹ But now, we are back to the existence of laws of nature, and the obvious alternatives once again are: either brute fact (which is to give up on the pursuit of explanation), chance (which is no explanation), or the intentional action of God understood as an agent with appropriate beliefs, powers, and wisdom.¹⁰ The merit of this way of handling spatial succession is that it allows us to see divine intelligence at work in the biological world without calling into question the general scientific consensus on evolution.¹¹ There is no need to adopt many of the details of Swinburne’s position, say, on the restriction of action to intentional action, to see that this is a very attractive way to relate divine action to apparent design in the universe.¹² Three elements are especially important when we compare Swinburne’s proposals with that of the previous option. First, there is a clear account of the identity of the divine agent

⁸ Swinburne can also state the relevant issue in terms of substances with causal powers but let’s stay with the idea of laws of nature. ⁹ Swinburne also draws attention to the fine tuning involved in the sweep of evolutionary developments. See ibid., 172–88. ¹⁰ Swinburne also considers the possibility of an axiarchic explanation, which posits the law that states that phenomena come into existence because it is good that they should exist. The obvious problem with this solution is that it is clearly ad hoc for there are no examples of mundane phenomena which instantiate this law. See ibid., 47. ¹¹ Swinburne discusses the merits of “intelligent design” as developed in the intelligent design movement. See ibid., 346–9. ¹² For my purposes, intentionality is clearly a sufficient condition for personal action; as I have argued elsewhere, it is not a necessary condition.

 , ,   

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involved. We are referring to God as an omnipotent, omnipresent spirit, possessing necessary existence, perfectly free, and perfectly good. In the case of Meyer all we have is intelligent design absent any account of the relevant designer. Second, there is a carefully constructed account of how personal action can operate as a perfectly respectable explanation for events in the world. In the case of Meyer, we simply have a vague appeal to intelligent agency without deep attention to the crucial distinction between basic and mediated actions. Third, there is the beginnings of an account of why God might make a world with the kind of spatial and temporal order that we meet all around us. In the case of Meyer, we have no account of why God might intervene at exactly the points in the created order which are not adequately covered by scientific explanations. I have said that we have the beginnings of an explanation for the actions of God in Swinburne, but this is clearly underdeveloped in his work. This is so because he neglects this aspect of the logic of personal explanation, resting content for the most part to make appeal simply to the intentional action of God.¹³ Furthermore, in articulating the potential reasons why God provided spatial and temporal order, he necessarily relies on considerations generated by the general attributes of God, for there is no robust divine testimony to guide our deliberations. However, it is worth mentioning two of the reasons he gives as to why God might make the kind of ordered world he has made. Thus, there is good reason for God to make a universe with regularities of succession. It is the (almost entirely reliable) phenomenal regularities of succession that we observe and then use in order to bring about our chosen goals. Regularities (fundamental and phenomenal) have to exist if we are to be able to make a difference to things beyond our bodies. If we are to grow plants, it has to be the case that certain basic actions of ours will have to have results. But, unless we are to be non-rational creatures, we need to be able to observe phenomenal regularities and learn from them. Humans (and often higher animals) can observe seeds being watered, or day being followed by night, and extrapolate to the regularities described as the simplest account of what they observe . . . They can water seeds and grow plants . . . Knowledge of such regularities gives to humans choices. Discovering that toadstools poison, they can choose to poison someone by encouraging him or her to eat toadstools; or they can prevent accidental poisoning by toadstools by uprooting toadstools and telling people that they are poisonous; or they can choose not to bother.¹⁴

¹³ It would be fair to say that Swinburne has bigger fish to fry when it comes to his account of personal action. ¹⁴ Ibid., 158–9.

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This is a dull, prosaic passage but the theological content is astonishing. What is at stake is a conception of human agents with enormous capacities and thus with extraordinary freedom. We can choose whether to pursue science and find out what the world is like; and when we know what the world is like, given, say, our knowledge of nature and human societies, we can choose whether to use this knowledge for good or ill. We are no longer thinking of human freedom in terms of whether to have eggs or cereal for breakfast. There is also good reason for God to take an evolutionary route in producing human beings. [T]here is the beauty of the inanimate universe shown in the development of galaxies, stars, and planets. God has every reason for bringing about this process of development from the Big Bang for its beauty—even if he were the only person to observe it. But of course, he is not the only one person to observe it. We can observe it through telescopes reaching further and further back into the earliest stages of the universe. And God has the same reason for bringing about plants and animals—their beauty. And animals are good also . . . in virtue not only of their beauty but also of their ability to have pleasant sensations and true beliefs and spontaneously to do good actions (even if ones not chosen freely). In view of this it not too surprising that God should take the long (by our timescale) evolutionary route to produce human bodies. And similar, though weaker arguments would show it to be unsurprising if God produced human bodies by an even longer route of going through more than one universe to achieve this goal.¹⁵

Once again, the language is dull and prosaic, but the theological content is extraordinary. It summons us to a breathtaking vision of divine ingenuity and patience across the whole sweep of creation. What Swinburne is doing here is inviting us into a deeper vision of divine action in creation. Initially, the register he uses is not particularly effective in evoking an appropriate spiritual response to creation. This was not his intention in developing his revised natural theology, so, if taken as a criticism, it is beside the point. He set himself the task of overturning the standard orthodoxy in both theology and philosophy which he found so thin and anemic. Even so, I can report that I heard the first edition of this work as a graduate student at Oxford. In hearing his account of the argument from design in its initial form, I found myself beginning to see creation through the lens of personal agency so that his lecture was spiritually invigorating. An undergraduate student whom I had invited to attend found his appropriation of Swinburne’s exposition even more spiritually nourishing. We need at this point other registers in which the deep

¹⁵ Ibid., 188–9.

 , ,   

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spiritual import of his work can be baked into our vision of ourselves and God’s world. Regrettably, either we have such registers, but they are not generally known in the church; or we need a whole new generation of writers and artists who can take care of this lacuna. Pressing this point home requires initially a relocation of Swinburne’s insights and arguments into a much more robust theological horizon. How might we do this? I propose that we set aside the wider framework of his natural theology and re-envisage the justification of Christian belief in a radically different way. Swinburne’s project has a very clear line of development. He begins by showing that the concept of God is coherent; he then develops a probabilistic argument for the existence of God; from there he proceeds to take up standard theological topics such as the nature of faith, the evolution of the soul, miracles, divine revelation, the Christian conception of God, providence and evil, and the resurrection of God incarnate. Along the way he also develops a fully rounded account of epistemology focusing on the nature of justification; and he fills several volumes defending his substance dualism and the existence of free will. The crucial observation to make is that he begins with arguments for the existence of God before proceeding to deal, say, with divine revelation or the Christian vision of God as Triune. Taken as a whole, his corpus is rightly recognized as one of the most comprehensive contributions to the philosophy of the Christian religion in its time and context. It shares the pattern of natural theology, establishes the existence of God, and then move to divine revelation and the theological content of the Christian faith. It differs in that it deploys the Bayesian networks to secure his central theses. Thus, it rejects the possibility of good deductive arguments for the existence of God and is extremely wary of the use of personal judgment in weighing the strength of arguments for the existence of God. So, Swinburne’s articulation of divine agency and divine action is lodged in a dense network of philosophical argument. It is therefore only to be expected that the theological content, say, of divine action in nature, is flat and factual. However, there is another way to approach the justification of Christian belief which might lend itself more readily to a more salutary vision of divine action in the temporal and spatial order of the universe.¹⁶ We can begin with a much more robust account of Christian belief and take its claims to be grounded in divine revelation and experience of God much more seriously as our starting point. We can then go on to deploy the kind of arguments developed by Swinburne as confirming our initial warrants for the whole gamut of Christian belief. When we do so, we discover that divine revelation is not just one more item in a cumulative case for the existence of God; encountering divine revelation and responding to it involves crossing a threshold into a whole new world opened up by the rich ¹⁶ I articulate this alternative in Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006).

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content of Christianity. We are invited to see divine activity in creation and evolution not just as data supporting a conclusion but as a crucial lens through which we see the world in a whole new way. Paul’s claims regarding divine revelation in creation in his epistle to the Romans pick up this theme in that he affirms that the world in and of itself manifests the wisdom and power of God.¹⁷ This is not a claim about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of natural theology; it is a restatement of the common observation that most people do not believe in God because of argument but because they already perceive the divine in creation but regrettably repress this truth from consciousness. Once we turn to the classical data of natural theology as a confirmation of our initial perception of God in creation and corrected by special revelation, we can then enshrine our proposals about divine action in nature into a deeper perception of creation. We become formed to perceive God at work intimately in the temporal and spatial order of the world. Moreover, once we identify God as the Triune God, we are invited to explore how the actions of the Son and of the Spirit might take our perception of creation to an even deeper density. I suspect that the radical turn to classical forms of natural theology in the modern period has inhibited this kind of theological formation and development. I also suspect that various worries about evolution have had a similar effect, not least when they are charted in terms of our culture wars. Worst of all, the way in which evolutionary theory has been presented as a form of nature red in tooth and claw has added its own negative impact.¹⁸ We return to theology proper at this point in search of fresh ways to articulate a vision of divine order and design in nature. Such a project belongs firmly in the research program to which this volume is devoted. Think of the extraordinary insights into a Christian vision of fallen human nature in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. He gives us a dense and brilliant account of human agency and action that could never be captured in the logic of even the most sensitive analysis of the concept of action. What if we had the functional equivalent of such a vision of divine action and design in nature, a project that can begin with the logic of divine action in nature but would totally transcend its narrow limitation?¹⁹ As things stand, I can only offer a little-known hymn that captures brilliantly what is at stake.

¹⁷ Romans 1:19–20. ¹⁸ Sarah Coakley’s 2012 Gifford Lectures, “Sacrifice Regained: Evolution, Cooperation and God,” are a splendid effort to rework the popular image of evolution as nasty and bloody. They are available on YouTube. See also Martin A. Nowak and Sarah Coakley, eds., Evolution, Games, and God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). ¹⁹ Perhaps a revisit of classical forms of the design argument, as found, say, in Thomas Reid, might help a tad. See Thomas Reid, Lectures on Natural Theology, eds. James A. Barham and Jake Atkins (Nashville, TN: Erasmus Press, 2020).

 , ,   

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How wonderful this world of thine, A fragment of a fiery sun, How lovely and how small! Where all things serve thy great design, Where life’s adventure is begun In God, the life of all. The smallest seed in secret grows, And thrusting upward answers soon The bidding of the light; The bud unfurls into a rose; The wings within the white cocoon Are perfected in flight. The migrant bird, in winter fled, Shall come again with spring, and build In this same shady tree; But secret wisdom surely led, Homeward across the clover-field Hurries the honey-bee. O thou, whose greater gifts are ours— A conscious will, a thinking mind, A heart to worship thee— O take these strange unfolding powers, And teach us through thy Son to find The life more full and free.²⁰

I only wish I had the ability to capture this in prose.

²⁰ F. Pratt Green, Hymns and Psalms: A Methodist and Ecumenical Hymn Book (London: MethodistPublishing House, 1983), hymn no. 336. © Copyright 1950 for the USA and Canada by Hope Publishing Company, Carol Stream, IL 60188. Rest of the World © Copyright 1950 Stainer & Bell Ltd, 23 Gruneisen Road, London N3 1DZ, [www.stainer.co.uk.]www.stainer.co.uk. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

12 Divine Action and the Demonic In October 1965 and in April 1966 Time Magazine devoted two articles to the theological views of Thomas Altizer. The one on April 1, 1966 was published at Easter. The cover had a black background and then in red letters the question of the day was posed: “Is God dead?” Altizer was the posterchild of the God Is Dead movement in theology. Between 1962 and 2012 he published eighteen books. In 2006 he published a memoir, Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir. The title is important. This is not an autobiography; it is a work of theology. Chapter 1 has an interesting title: “The Calling.” The ordinary reader will expect a conventional account of a call to ministry and then within that a vocation to take up the work of a theologian. We are in for a surprise if we expect this. Before I note the surprise, let me note briefly what was involved in the God Is Dead proposal in Christian theology. God, so it was said, had really and truly died in an act of self-emptying in Christ at Calvary. God is now fully spilled out into the life of the world. The background to this absurd move is fascinating. One element is the theology of Karl Barth, who argued that God—the Wholly Other—is fully identified with the person of Jesus of Nazareth who did indeed die in Jerusalem around the year 30 . Altizer joined this to the theology and philosophy of Hegel, who famously took the Trinity and historicized the Triune life of God in the great drama of human history. Altizer then integrated these two themes with the passionate rejection of God developed by Friedrich Nietzsche. Altizer is clearly one of the most creative practitioners of what we might call Legoland theology. You find a series of building blocks and make yourself a house of faith for yourself and others.¹ With that behind us let me come back to the interesting first chapter, “The Calling.” Altizer was brought up in a nominal Christian home; in time, he joined the Episcopal Church and considered becoming a priest. He failed his psychiatric examinations. One of his teachers at the time, Joachim Wach, told him that this was an act both of providence and grace; he had no vocation for Christian

¹ I intend this pejorative analogy to be taken seriously. I find it astonishing how much theological work takes the form of attempts to integrate insights from this or that great figure both at the expense of positive exposition in the theologian’s own voice and without any serious attempt to provide a rationale for the positions adopted. We are offered sophisticated bricolage rather than real food for the mind and the soul. To be sure, we live in something of a golden period of theological work; perhaps this makes possible such ventures which masquerade as the real thing.

Divine Agency and Divine Action Volume IV: A Theological and Philosophical Agenda. William J. Abraham, Oxford University Press (2021). © William J. Abraham. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786535.003.0013

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ministry, but he did have a vocation for theology, which could most effectively be conducted outside the church. Here is the story in his own words. Shortly before this examination, I was in a turbulent condition. While crossing the Midway I would experience violent tremors in the ground, and I was visited by a deep depression, one that occurred again and again throughout my life, but now with particular intensity. During this period I had perhaps the most ultimate experience of my life, and one that I believe profoundly affected my vocation as a theologian, and even my theological work itself. This occurred late at night, while I was in my room. I suddenly awoke and became truly possessed, and experienced an epiphany of Satan which I have never been able fully to deny, an experience in which I could actually feel Satan consuming me, absorbing me into his very being, as though this was the deepest possible initiation and bonding, and the deepest and yet most horrible union. Few who read me know of this experience, but it is not accidental that I am perhaps the only theologian who now writes of Satan, and can jokingly refer to myself as the world’s leading Satanologist; indeed Satan and Christ soon became my primary theological motifs, and my deepest theological goal became one of discovering a coincidentia oppositorum (a coincidence or identity of opposites) between them.²

I chose this particular testimony for an obvious reason; it comes not from the usual sources on demon possession, but from a theologian. I could have readily chosen any number of case studies from the literature.³ This example is furnished by someone who claims that his vocation is that of a theologian and is treated as such by his peers. It is important not to glide over this passage and move on. This is an astonishing narrative. Here is a highly regarded theologian telling us without prevarication that he was possessed by Satan. He sees this as an ultimate experience, which I take him here to mean that it was not to be analyzed in more ultimate categories, say, of psychological or other mental phenomena. The actions attributed to Satan are those of possessing, consuming, absorbing, bonding, and uniting. And the epistemic force is captured by the modest but surely telling phrase, “I have never been able fully to deny,” suggesting that efforts to explain away the encounter with Satan were unsuccessful. Moreover, the encounter is ² Thomas J. J. Altizer, Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2006). The emphasis is mine. There is a fascinating paper by Patricia Snow, “The Devil and Hilary Mantel,” First Things, February 2017, 25–31, which gives an interpretation of an episode in the life of the famous author Hilary Mantel that Snow identifies as a demonic encounter. The original episode can be found in Hilary Mantel, Giving up the Ghost: A Memoir (New York: Picador, 2003). ³ For three very different case studies see M. Scott Peck, Glimpses of Evil: A Psychiatrist’s Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption (New York: Free Press, 2005). For a fine account from the nineteenth century with first-hand witnesses see Frank S. Boshold, Blumhardt’s Battle: A Conflict with Satan (New York: Thomas E. Lowe, 1970). For an excellent historical treatment of the famous case of Gottlieben Dittus, see Friedrich Zundel, Pastor Johann Christoph Blumhardt: An Account of His Life (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2010), chapter 9.

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integrated in a lasting fashion into his very identity as “the world’s leading Satanologist,” and this identity is at the very core of the enduring goal of his work in theology. Modern treatments of narratives about demonic discourse and phenomena have been dismissive.⁴ This phase of the history of investigation is in its own way salutary and indispensable. Modern forms of criticism—philosophical, historical, and theological—have cleared the air and gotten rid of lots of nonsense. Skepticism has been invaluable; we must go through it and not around it. Lots of claims about the demonic are hopelessly speculative, ridiculous, and even misogynistic. Even in the case of Altizer, there is room for ambiguity: Are we dealing with mental illness, or with demon possession, or with a combination of both? There are two questions we need to identify immediately. First, what do we mean by the “devil”? Second, what are the reasons for believing that the devil exists? The first is a conceptual issue about what we mean when we speak of the devil or the demonic. The second is an epistemological or evidentiary issue asking us to explain why we might find this a live option. There are four distinct uses or functions of discourse about the demonic that we can identify immediately. There is, first, an expressivist use where we use language about the devil to express hatred of our enemies. The polemics in and around the Reformation and the French Revolution readily illustrate this. One can also see this usage in the iconography of these periods in the history of Europe. Second, there is a prescriptivist use where we speak of the devil in order to provoke hatred and disapproval of others. Public orators will deploy the language in order to evoke the same hatred they feel in themselves towards enemies and critics. These are interesting uses, but they need not detain us. It is much more common to use discourse about the devil in a constructive rather than simply polemical way. I have in mind the figurative use of such language. On a figurative reading speaking of the devil is a dramatic way of speaking of the natural forces of evil and our own propensities for evil. It is an attempt to deal with lethal forms of moral evil. Think of instances where evil is intentional, systematic, persistent, and virtually ineradicable. These show up in people, that is, in human agents, and in the structures of evil they invent and sustain. These agents, personal and structural, show amazing dexterity and ⁴ There is a fascinating treatment of the demonic in Edward H. Jewett, Diabolology (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1890). For extensive historical overview see the several volumes of Jeffrey Burton Russell, including, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). Also worth consulting is Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). For a recent set of philosophical essays devoted to the topic see Benjamin W. McCraw and Robert Arp, eds., Philosophical Approaches to the Devil (New York: Routledge, 2016). See also Philip Wiebe, God and Other Spirits: Intimations of Transcendence in Christian Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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ingenuity; the human agents involved take delight in evil; they perpetuate the inversion of moral values. Goodness, sanctity, and virtue are maligned, sneered at, ridiculed, and rejected. Evil and vice are welcomed, celebrated, dwelt on, desired, loved, and passed on from generation to generation. Think of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot; and think of the regimes they invented with their racism, brutality, antiSemitism, fascism, and the like, all done in the name of progress, freedom, and a better future. We reach for the language of the demonic because ordinary prosaic discourse is not sufficient to describe what is at stake or to express our revulsion. In this respect, the language of apocalyptic works to express what is happening in terms of great stress and crisis. We speak of hell on earth, of the end of the world, of the stars ceasing to shine, and of nature itself being subject to cosmic convulsions. I am going to assume we have no trouble with this kind of talk about the demonic. Even country and western singers know how to use it to good effect. The really interesting usage is the literal usage. On a literal reading of the language we take the language of the devil straight rather than on the rocks. We commit to the existence of genuine personal agents who are out to do us and the whole created order great harm. These agents are invisible, spiritual, and incorporeal. They are not detected by any kind of scientific equipment, say, in special sensory instruments. They are made manifest in unusual events and actions. We are dealing with out-of-the-ordinary phenomena, which is one reason why they are a headache intellectually. Our standard patterns of explanation and understanding are designed to deal with the normal, the repeatable, and the ordinary. They break down in this arena. Hollywood solves the problem of difference by making the demonic especially gruesome, ugly, and bizarre; the theologians at Hollywood need a recall or should be sacked for incompetence. However, they build on an important insight, namely, that the demonic shows up in non-natural manifestations. There are quick changes in personality represented by ugliness of demeanor, the use of foreign languages, gut-wrenching sneers and accusations, and expressions of extreme physical force. We can note the following characteristic phenomena. There is a radical change in personality so that one becomes engaged with another agent rather than the human agent before one; there is a manifest possession of that other agent, that is, while the actions are intermittent, there is permanent residency; the alien agent displays all the features of a personal agent, that is, it indicates supernatural knowledge of events and states of affairs, possesses selfconsciousness, has a distinct name and identity, operates in tandem with other alien agents, expresses dramatic hostility to God, to Jesus Christ, to scripture, to the symbol of the cross, and the like, readily shows superhuman strength, and is subject to authority and divine command. Speaking metaphysically and theologically, we are dealing with invisible personal agents or spirits, identified as fallen angels; they are distinct creatures,

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ontologically distinct from God; and they seek to harm and destroy God’s good creation, especially human agents made in his image. As to the actions they characteristically perform, think of a scale where at the bottom end they engage in testing, tempting, deceiving, causing intellectual disorientation, confusion, and fixation and then move up through the infestation of certain spaces to a series of actions involving full-scale possession, that is, maximal influence and direction of a human agent’s capacities and powers. On this analysis there are limits to demonic actions. Demons cannot operate without human consent and free will; and they cannot defeat the purposes of God for the redemption and salvation of the world. They have already suffered initial defeat; the victory will be completed in the future in the final consummation of God’s purposes in the world to come. Having developed a profile of the devil and his actions, we now want to know why we should believe that the devil exists. We might want to turn immediately to scripture and to church doctrine and let the matter rest there. This would constitute an appeal in broad terms to divine revelation and the reflection on revelation in the teachings of the church and her theologians. There is merit in this move, but I do not think that this is the best way to proceed, as I shall argue up ahead. We need to begin further back and then look again at how best to draw on this kind of material.⁵ Let me begin this more deflationary project with a comment by Roger Scruton, who is one of the keenest philosophers of the current generation, and typically one who did not know what to do with theology. In most of his references to theology he uses it as a stand-in for bogus intellectual disciplines or proposals. We distinguish people who are evil from those who are merely bad. Bad people are like you or me, only worse. They belong in the community, even if they behave badly toward it. We reason with them, improve them, come to terms with them, and in the end accept them. They are made, like us, from the “crooked timber of humanity”. But there are evil people who are not like that, since they do not belong in the community, even if residing in its territory. Their bad behavior may be too secret or subversive to be noticeable, and any dialogue with them will be, on their part, a pretense. There is, in them, no scope for improvement, no path to acceptance, and even if we think of them as human, their faults are not of the normal, remediable human variety but have another and more metaphysical origin. They are visitors from another sphere, incarnations of the Devil. Even their charm—and it is a recognized fact that evil people are often charming—is

⁵ For an important treatment of the issues that deals with exegetical considerations see Esther E. Acolaste, Powers, Principalities, and the Spirit: Biblical Realism and the West (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018).

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only further proof of the Otherness. They are, in some sense, the negation of humanity, wholly and unnaturally at ease with the thing they seek to destroy.⁶

Scruton goes on to develop a series of contrasts. A bad person is guided by selfinterest; an evil person has selfish designs on others. With a bad person, the motives are intelligible; with an evil person, the motives are uncanny, inexplicable, and even supernatural. A bad person is open to reason; an evil person is impervious to reason or to our moral pleas. In the case of a bad person, we are suspicious and fearful; in the case of an evil person, we dread them, not in the way we dread an earthquake or a hurricane, that is, because they cause suffering; we dread them because they want to erase our will, freedom, conscience, and integrity. In a word, they seek to destroy our souls. In the earlier language of Altizer, they consume us. Consider in this regard the content of a devastating poem penned by a child molester. The poem consists of four stanzas. In the first the molester announces himself as the slayer of the soul, a chilling phrase, and goes on to describe himself as the sources of the victim’s nightmares which cause him or her to wake up screaming. The second stanza describes himself as causing the end of innocence and eating away inside the mind of the victim so that he or she is gradually killed. The third stanza describes the searing effects of abuse in terms of guilt and twisted memories. The last brings the poem to an appalling climax by speaking of the terror involved in trying to fight the urges to become like the abuser.⁷ This kind of morally appalling sensibility surely gives us one of the obvious warrants for reaching for a conception of the demonic in the third sense noted above. We are still in the realm of human evil rather than just badness. We naturally reach for the language of the devil in order to do justice to phenomena that we can all recognize once it is pointed out to us. Scruton even goes so far as to say that we are dealing with human agents that are in the world but not of the world. However, it is important to identify the kind of enterprise involved. Once we move to the next level and deal with the demonic in the literal sense I noted above, we are not engaging in some kind of scientific endeavor. The mode of inquiry is much more modest and tentative even though it carries its own radical metaphysical weight. Rather than seeking some sort of explanation for odd phenomena, as might happen in the case of parapsychology, we find ourselves dealing either with our own experiences or with testimony from those who report the relevant experiences, accompanied by a body of material bequeathed to us in our theological traditions. What we are dealing with are not complex natural phenomena of ⁶ Roger Scruton, On Human Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 134–45. ⁷ I am grateful to Dr. Monti Fite for bringing this poem to my attention. It can be located in L. M. Lothstein, “Psychological Theories of Pedophilia and Ephebophilia,” in Stephen J. Rossetti, Slayer of the Soul: Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church (S.19-43), (Mystic, CT: 23rd Publications, 1990), 17.

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the kind investigated by science; we are dealing with the encounter with radical evil, with phenomena which at a minimum can only be captured in rich but radical moral categories.⁸ Think of what is going on not as the framing of a hypothesis in some kind of scientific manner but as the common process of finding ourselves believing in the demonic and that this belief is grounded in the principle of prima facie entitlement to believe. This entitlement is constituted by the principle that things are as they appear to be unless we have good evidence to believe otherwise and by the principle that we are entitled to believe the testimony of others unless we have good evidence to believe otherwise. These are principles that we rely on in most areas of our lives. They involve a reversal of the alternative procedure, namely, that we have no right to believe the beliefs that are formed within us unless we have positive evidence in favor of them. With this in hand we can then take up the appeal to scripture and church tradition. Descriptions of the demonic and his action are in the Bible because they are true; they are not simply true because they are in the Bible. Thus, when the Gospels depict, say, exorcism, they do so because the writers think that they portray what has actually happened. Thus, the appeal to scripture and to the teaching of the church is effectively an appeal to further testimony and an appeal to informal wisdom. I am deploying the appeal to wisdom here in the sense that where we find ourselves short on intellectual resources, we should begin with those who have sought to make sense of these phenomena across the years. I suggest we deploy here also the principle that this material should be taken with radical seriousness unless we have good reason to believe otherwise. In other words, we are attempting to secure initial plausibility rather than all-thingsconsidered plausibility with respect to scripture and the teachings of the church. Rather than simply start from scratch and work up an account of the phenomena on our own, deploying the meager resources available in our private bank, we should draw on the testimony and wisdom lodged in the common banks of the church across the ages. I state the epistemic issues in this manner for three reasons. First, there is no need to think of the resources and church tradition as infallible. Rather, they should be given an initial privileged position as we seek to sort out what is involved. Second, this way of making the argument allows for correction and enrichment of the received tradition by further evidence and reflection. This will become important later, as we shall see. Third, it gives us an apt way to deal with the skepticism about the demonic that has become normative for much of Western culture. Rather than dismiss it out of hand, we can and should recognize ⁸ This is why it is much more natural to turn to great writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky or Isaac Singer to get a grip on what is at stake. See for example Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1944); or Isaac Bashevis Singer, Satan in Goray (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1996).

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that there may be good reasons for rejecting a robust, reality-depicting account of the demonic. Unbelievers can and should be treated with respect without falling into an uncritical deference. Truth be told, many believers share the doubts of the unbeliever; hence insiders may need as much help as outsiders. Moreover, we should be grateful for the effects of the skepticism where it eliminated all sorts of nonsense and superstition from our cultural heritage. The positive consideration I now want to advance is more controversial, but I think has enormous weight. We can see this if we take seriously the more advanced cases of demonic action that I mentioned earlier. The disorders involved are relatively clear. Demonic action in extreme and therefore rare cases involves the following: knowledge of information beyond the capacities or sources of the victim, insane hatred of holy objects, superhuman strength, and knowledge of foreign languages. These kind of phenomena have been identified for centuries as demonic in the strong sense I am exploring here. Furthermore, they have long been identified cross-culturally and across deep divisions of religious belief and practice.⁹ What is striking is that these lists do not naturally belong in psychological handbooks dealing with standard forms of mental illness. Compare these with cases of clinical depression, panic-anxiety attack, parasitosis, or Capgras syndrome. Moreover, the treatment and cure of these latter kinds of disorders are obvious: intervention at the biochemical level by drugs and intervention at the psychological level by way of psychotherapeutic treatment. The relevant treatment is long-term and progressive. In radical contrast, the proper response to the former constellation of disorders is exorcism represented by a word of command in the name of Jesus, prayer by the victim, and spiritual aftercare. The cure is not really a cure; it is a deliverance; and it is generally immediate and complete even though the relevant rituals may take days. In the case of the demonic, we are dealing with complex spiritual agents whose sphere of operation is persistent, resolute opposition to all things divine. The problem is not psychological; so, the solution is not medication or therapy. The problem involves destructive spiritual agency and the solution is deliverance by speech act and command in the name of Christ. The divine action involved in paradigm cases is then that of command mediated through a designated agent. Perhaps the relevant analogy to deploy at this point is that of a policeman. We are ordered to leave the building; recognizing the authority that is the warrant and rationale for the command, we obey.

⁹ An older treatment that is still worth consulting is that of John L. Nevius, Demon Possession (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 1968). This was originally published in 1884 and represents the remarkable intellectual journey of an educated Presbyterian missionary coming to terms with the situation in China.

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There are standard objections to this whole way of thinking. I shall deal with four of these and then dwell at length on the fourth. First, Karl Barth goes so far as to argue that just to take up the topic of demons is to become demonic. He has a lengthy treatment of the topic that would require a lengthy response.¹⁰ It is a good-humored combination of brilliant wit and evasive wordsmithing that can be set aside here. Frankly, it is hard to think of a worse ad hominem argument than this. Second, a more serious theological challenge to my position raises the specter of dualism and, thus, of the tendency to reach for a doctrine of privation to deal with all kinds of evil, including radical evil. In order to avoid any taint of dualism, it is often thought that it would be better to think of evil as the privation of good. The crucial objection to this idea is that it cannot do justice to the aggressive causality visible in the phenomena under review. It is hard to see how privations of any kind can perform the kind of actions that show up in demonic action. Privations are not agents; they are absences of the good. Hence whatever the merits of this notion in covering some kinds of evil, it does not come within conceptual range of helping us in the case of the phenomena under review.¹¹ As to dualism, this is unpersuasive in that the devil is a fallen creature in rebellion against God; there is no ontological dualism anywhere in sight. Third, it is tempting to argue that the best explanation for apparently demonic phenomena is fraud. It would be a relief if the case for fraud were persuasive; life would be simpler and less complicated; but no one who is either the subject or the active agent in exorcisms of the sort I have identified will be persuaded. These responses are simply efforts to ignore the relevant evidence by dogmatic assertion. We are dealing with an advanced case of academic sloth. Fourth, there is the charge of misperception and misdescription. This is a much more interesting and initially attractive challenge. It is the standard view in many theological and intellectual circles. What is interesting about this objection is that it allows the descriptions of demonic phenomena to stand as accurate. While there may be differences here and there as to what is allowed as an accurate description, the critic is prepared to leave them in place. In fact, the critic must do this if the case to be mounted is to be sustained. Think of the argument as having four distinct elements akin to Russian dolls. The first move is to say that it was natural before the modern period to think in categories of the demonic. People were prone to look for supernatural explanations for everything; so, they naturally invented theories in terms of demonic agency and action.

¹⁰ It can be found in III.3 of his Church Dogmatics (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2010). ¹¹ For a fine treatment of the topic see Kenneth R. Seeskin, “The Reality of Radical Evil,” Judaism 29 (1980): 440–53.

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The second move is to say that science, and only science, gives us accurate explanations of what is going on in the world, including the phenomena noted above. The third move is to say that if we do not have at present a really good explanation, we should stay the course because the inductive evidence behind the success of science is so overwhelming. Finally, there is a fourth move in the neighborhood that also bears mention; and it is one made by many theologians. Thinking in the way I outlined earlier, they say, is really an expression of the god-of-the-gaps strategy. It takes a gap in our natural explanations and arbitrarily posits some kind of demonic agent. This is simply an ad hoc operation that will find itself upstaged by better scientific explanations in due course. It is surely fair to say that the modern rejection of the demonic is effectively driven by the plausibility of this network of considerations. It is not difficult to find rebuttals to this set of proposals. The disdain for premodern ways of thinking is simply a case of chronological intellectual snobbery which begs the question against the kind of case I mounted about the formation of beliefs about the demonic. It is false to say that they were engaging in a kind of vulgar scientific enterprise. The enterprise was more modest and relied on everyday epistemic practices related to perception, testimony, and the wisdom of their forebears. The claim that science and only science gives us proper explanations of phenomena is not itself a scientific claim. Moreover, it is false to say that all our explanations have to be scientific. Explanations in terms of agents and their actions are entirely legitimate and are used by scientists when they apply for grants and make decisions about what to have for lunch. The claim that the success of science guarantees its future success is not a scientific argument; it is a historical argument. As I have argued heretofore, there are very good reasons for thinking that historical investigation has its own kind of explanations and evidence that cannot be captured in the terms available in natural science. The claim that this is a god-of-the-gaps strategy would only apply if the argument operated along the lines of a scientific hypothesis. But this is an erroneous way to construe the way the argument as outlined above operates. Theologians who believe in the demonic are not doing science; they are doing theology. They are not proposing some kind of research agenda which will be gauged by its fruitfulness. Nor are they proposing any experiments that would serve to confirm or falsify some kind of scientific hypothesis. To put the issue forthrightly, they are not proposing that we set up laboratories and invite the devil to show up so that we can establish his existence and characteristics. We can press the issue further in this way. The debate about the devil is a debate about the nature and depth of evil. The phenomena in question are constituted by

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a network of experiences that can only be captured by the deployment of dramatic moral concepts. In the human case we are dealing with an endless list of evils: treachery, cruelty, murder, rape, gangland prostitution, lies, betrayal, theft, manipulation, torture, deceit, and so on. In the case of demonic possession we are dealing with evil intensified to the point where the personality is invaded, the person is consumed, the human agent is brought to engage in intermittent but dramatic acts of rebellion against God, his followers, and the great symbols of the faith; the human agents may also find themselves with deep experiences of powerlessness, despair, spiritual agonies, and self-destruction. My argument at this point is that scientific concepts and procedures however stretched to fill the landscape cannot begin to do justice to the reality involved. There is a deep category mistake in play when we seek to assimilate these phenomena to the intellectual space of science. I begin with cases of radical human evil and then invite the reader to extend this to the more intense cases represented by demonic possession. Consider the following account of what happened in Belfast on Friday, July 21, 1972. Nine people were killed and 130 were injured when twenty explosive devices were detonated within an hour and a quarter. There was panic and pandemonium within the civilian population as they heard bombs go off all over the city. The carnage was massive. A car bomb which exploded in Oxford Street bus station killed four Ulsterbus employees and two soldiers. At another site two women and a fourteen-year-old schoolboy were killed. A police officer who was in Oxford Street, interviewed by the BBC reporter Peter Taylor in a program aired in 1977, said: You could hear people screaming and moaning. The first thing that caught my eye was a torso of a human being lying in the middle of the street. It was recognizable as a torso because the clothes had been blown off and you could actually see the body parts of the human anatomy. One victim had his arms and legs blown off and some of his body had been blown through the railings. One of the most horrendous memories for me was seeing a head stuck to a wall. A couple of days later we found vertebrae and a ribcage on the roof of a nearby building. The reason it was found was because seagulls were diving into it. I’ve tried to put it at the back of my mind for 25 years.¹²

This is an account of horrendous moral evil carried out by those who were sincerely if fanatically committed to an ideology that mandated the killing of civilians for political purposes. It was an appalling act of terrorism.

¹² Stephen McKittricket et al., Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women, and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Edinburgh and London: Mainstream, 1999), 229.

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My point here is not to attribute it to the devil; it was done by nefarious human agents for well-articulated intentions and purposes, that is to inflict as much pain and suffering as would help further their political agenda. Is this the result of scientific investigation? Do we need to launch a research program in psychology in order to understand what is going on? Are we forbidden to use our moral sense to identify what is happening and to undermine the descriptions of those who a generation later would try to whitewash what they were doing with grand talk about oppression and nationalism? Surely not; the turn to science (done in the name of philosophy and not science) is a snare and a distraction. For the policeman who is reporting what happened and trying to hold at bay the moral evil he had encountered, these suggestions are ludicrous. They involve a radical category mistake that is itself a manifestation of moral and intellectual vice. The encounter with evil that is at stake in demonic activity is an extension of this kind of phenomenon. This is one reason why I noted earlier Scruton’s splendid phenomenological distinction between bad people and evil people, a distinction which entirely naturally led him into discourse about the demonic. In cases of demonic possession, we are looking at situations, not so much where the devil creates havoc through the actions of the human agents involved, but where the goal is to consume and possess the agency, inner life, and identity of human creatures made in God’s image. This is the limit case of radical evil as far as demonic action is concerned and as such it is morally hideous and harrowing. So, the upshot of my line of reasoning is that the claim that descriptions of the demonic are misdescriptions once we hand the phenomena over to science is a red herring once we think through what is at stake. The phenomena involved are inescapably moral in character; they cannot be captured in the web of concepts and methods developed in science. Some cases attributed to the demonic may indeed be a matter of misdescription; there may be need for adjustments in the range of phenomena often attributed to the demonic. However, this is not the objection under review. The objection under review is the claim that the explanations under review are best understood as a kind of primitive science operating without a license and refusing to deploy the logic of scientific explanations which if appropriately followed would yield a much better account of the phenomena. This is not how we should handle our encounter with evil; and it is the encounter with radical evil that is before us for consideration. This point is so important that I want to approach it from another angle. Suppose Murphy gets a call in the early hours that a student is displaying nasty and bizarre behavior in the dorm. He tells his wife to pray. The person who called him is a friend and tells him on arrival that the student has already announced that she knows Murphy is on the way and in the telling becomes extremely agitated. This naturally makes Murphy nervous. He would much prefer that he could leave things as they are until there is a proper psychiatric examination, but

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this is not a practical possibility. Moreover, he is worried about the possible legal liabilities. The caller, who has had some experience with exorcisms, has already made it clear that he thinks he is dealing with demonic manifestations. Murphy is open to this possibility but not at all sure. He has degrees in a strictly rigorous version of psychology and in analytic philosophy, but he instinctively knows that these set limits as to what counts as genuine causality. As a theologian he has a wider range of metaphysical options at his disposal; and he has read enough in the testimonial literature and the wisdom of the church to be open to what the caller is suggesting, namely, that he is about to encounter demonic activity. This is precisely what happens. In a series of phases, the student engages in some of the classical hallmarks of demonic activity. She shows superhuman strength, ready to slam Murphy against the wall until he orders the presenting agent to stop in the name of Jesus and she melts into total weakness. She shows total hatred for religious objects like a cross and a Bible. She treats Murphy and his friend with utter disdain, displaying uncontrollable hostility to their identity as Christians. At one point the presenting agent self-identifies as “reason” and claims to be present all through the institution where he teaches. This hits Murphy hard and causes him to hesitate before taking the normal course of commanding the alien agent to leave immediately in the name of Jesus. The whole affair lasts over an hour. Even then the work is not complete, so it is handed over to those who are much more experienced. Murphy left the encounter with three enduring results. First, he never wanted to do anything like this again. Second, he recalled and has never forgotten a strange passage in Athanasius, who noted that the sign of the cross was a vital symbol in confronting cases of demonic possession. Indeed, Athanasius suggested that this counted as evidence for his high Christology. Third, and most importantly, he knew that this was an ultimate experience in the encounter with evil and that what had been a mere intellectual option was now a belief grounded in first-hand perception. He had shifted from notional belief to real conviction and he was now prepared to take as utterly realistic the testimony and teaching of Christ on the demonic as divine revelation. And once he had crossed over the threshold into the world of divine revelation, he now had before him a theological research agenda that was radically different from mere historical or scientific research, important and wonderful as these are for him in their own right. He was content to keep this kind of research in the bosom of his own mind and in the bosom of the church, hoping that one day, when the cultural tides would turn, well-trained theologians would tackle the many issues that were now at the back of his mind. So, the initial summary conclusion in response to the fourth objection is this. We are dealing with unique, dramatic phenomena that cry out for understanding and that are profoundly important for a network of deeply disturbed people. Science runs out of resources because of its terms of reference with respect to causation and because of its inherent limitations in that it does not deal front and

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center with the phenomenon of moral evil. It has nothing of deep substance to offer when it comes to the encounter of radical evil which shows up in appalling forms of human behavior and in manifestations of the demonic. Working with the concept of the demonic is not at all an ad hoc scientific operation but a deployment of the rich resources of the Christian tradition, which operates with its own range of epistemological resources, including in the end the resources of divine revelation delivered in the scriptures and in Christ. One need not start there; indeed, in Murphy’s case he did not start there. Starting with one’s own experience and the testimony of others and open to the wisdom of scripture and tradition, one can then move to higher ground in divine revelation. But this is not the end of the matter; it means that the treasures of scripture and church tradition are treated with greater epistemic charity than one had at the beginning. We then have the possibility of a whole new research agenda which is properly theological in orientation even as it seeks relevant help from neighboring disciplines in its endeavors.¹³ One of the remarkable developments in recent analytic philosophy and theology is that scholars in this arena have been prepared to take up the challenge of thinking about the demonic.¹⁴ In reviewing some of that debate I want now to indicate where I differ from one important account of potential demonic activity. Beyond that I shall briefly note the relevant modes of divine action that are available to counter demonic activity. In recent work on the problem of evil, Alvin Plantinga suggested that we might think of natural evil, like diseases and earthquakes, as explicable in terms of the activity of demons who act freely to cause havoc in God’s good creation. In making these moves he was extending the free will defense to cover natural as well as moral evil. I noted in an earlier review of this that I found this argument “hokey or implausible.”¹⁵ I was gently taken to task for this in a fine article by Kent Dunnington, who went on to explore with exquisite care the potential place of what he calls the Satan hypothesis in theodicy.¹⁶ Dunnington is much more prepared to think of the appeal to Satan as a hypothesis than I am; but he is very astute in noting that earlier theologians extended the range of demonic activity to include the governance of the natural universe. Thus, rather than directly create and then conserve the universe, God deployed intermediaries in the form of angels to take care of business. This was indeed the standard reading of ¹³ For a splendid contribution to a research agenda that eschews theological considerations and seeks to develop a secular account of evil see John Kekes, Facing Evil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). ¹⁴ There has also been significant exegetical scholarship which has challenged standard moves to demythologize talk of the demonic, especially in the Pauline corpus. ¹⁵ William J. Abraham, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 68. ¹⁶ Kent Dunnington, “The Problem with the Satan Hypothesis: Natural Evil and Fallen Angels Theodicies,” Sophia 57 (2018): 265–74.

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scripture and it was the considered opinion of the fathers and doctors of the church, including Origen, Augustine, and Aquinas. The theory has also been recently revived by Gregory Boyd¹⁷ and David Bentley Hart.¹⁸ It is this element in Dunnington’s work that interests me here; I leave aside the whole issue of theodicy. What eventually detains Dunnington is the question as to whether it is plausible to think of demonic action as causally relevant to natural evils given the fact that natural evils are by definition the result of what appears to be the normal course of nature. To take an obvious example, it does not seem plausible to think of the coronavirus pandemic as being brought about simultaneously by complex natural agents and by the demonic. Dunnington considers various philosophical possibilities represented by occasionalism, the seed thesis, and the watchmaker thesis to solve this problem; he provides good reasons for rejecting all of these options. In his conclusion, he considers a potential analogue between claims about thinking of ordinary events being instances of divine blessing and ordinary events being instances of demonic curses. In neither case can we provide, it is said, a detailed account of how God or Satan can act in events which are explained in terms of natural causes. He then makes this telling observation: There is in fact a significant difference between the ‘mystery’ of how God might govern nature and the ‘mystery’ of how demonic forces might do so. Theists can offer an account of how God’s governance of the natural order is consistent with the claim that mundane events unfold according to natural law. For example, they can affirm the Aristotelian/scholastic claim that God is the creative source of the essences and powers of material objects, and accordingly understand natural laws as shorthand descriptions of how material objects or systems of material objects will behave given those essences or powers. But no similar account of how demonic agency can be understood as actively involved in the natural order of things is close to hand, at least the Christian tradition has not offered a satisfactory one . . . The strength of the fallen angel theodicy will depend on its ability to tell a significantly convincing ‘just-so’ story about the relation between demonic agency and the natural course of events.¹⁹

This is an extremely important line of argument in that it highlights that the tradition of the church is by no means complete or infallible when it comes to ¹⁷ Gregory Boyd, Satan and the Problem of Evil (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 2001). ¹⁸ David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005). ¹⁹ Dunnington, “The Problem with the Satan Hypothesis”, 274. For an excellent account of the importance of the rejection of theological intermediaries for the development of modern science see Jeffrey Korpeski, Divine Action, Determinism, and the Laws of Nature (New York: Routledge, 2020), chapter 4.

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tackling the challenges posed by demonic activity. Given the proposal that natural evils are broadly and rightly seen as best explained by the resources of natural sciences, either in terms of natural law or in terms of the powers and dispositions of natural agents or a combination of both, then it is surely redundant to think of these phenomena in terms of demonic cursing. My argument takes a very different approach. In confronting natural evils, horrendous though they are, we do not deal phenomenologically with the kind of phenomena I have described heretofore. Encountering the effects of the coronavirus is not in the least like confronting the radical evil that is at issue in the case of demonic activity. We are not confronted with radical evil of the kind that is an extension conceptually of human evil. This is why I think that Satan should not be treated as some kind of hypothesis along the lines familiar in science; the move to do so will run into exactly the problem so carefully identified by Dunnington. No doubt certain analytic philosophers and theologians will continue to explore the Satan hypothesis, but I do not share their confidence in finding a satisfactory solution. The lesson to be learned is to go back to theology, resolutely refuse to see theology as some kind of science offering hypotheses, and then make appropriate adjustments in the range of actions predicated of the devil. One such adjustment is to abandon the claim that Satan is the real agent behind natural evils. As I noted earlier, this kind of work is perhaps best kept in the bosom of the church. It is not front and center in the initial formation of the theologian. Furthermore, there is no doubt as to how demonic activity is to be dealt with in the life and work of the church. God works in and through the means of grace to deal with the more mundane forms of demonic activity like temptation and other forms of spiritual malaise. In the extreme cases, he has authorized the workers in his kingdom to perform exorcisms. All that belongs rightfully in the arena of spiritual direction, pastoral care, and practical theology. The goal here is to get clear on what is at stake conceptually and epistemologically and prepare for the kind of deeper research we urgently need both in post-Christian situations in Europe and in fields outside Europe where Christianity is flourishing numerically speaking. Permit a few final comments. First, there is a sense in which we live in enemy territory. There is radical evil in the world; even Kant, the great exponent of the Enlightenment, had to admit this. We live in a poisoned atmosphere that is at odds with the divine and this shows up in our personal lives and in our cultural and political lives. More prosaically, life is a constant battle against evil. Normally this comes by way of suggestion in our minds and souls (think of the temptations of Christ); in extreme cases this shows up in dramatic cases of exorcism. Second, this in no way undercuts a commitment to genuine human freedom. Even the devil was once a free agent. And so are we, even though we live in a fallen universe. We should never let the devil take the place of God either in our thinking

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about reality or in responding to reality. The Gospel is theocentric; it brings a deep assurance of victory over every form of evil. So, we should keep our nerve; retain a sense of proportion; and never give up on a sense of genuine agency for ourselves and others. And we should take time to develop a sense of hope. If demonic possession represents the bottom end of experience in sin, the possession by the Holy Spirit and transfiguration represents the hope of salvation as a foretaste of the life to come. Third, exorcism and what it involves provides striking evidence for the existence of God. It exposes us to one of God’s creatures; you cannot have the devil without a divine Creator. In addition, it provides confirmation for a Christian vision of evil that is robust and accurate. It makes manifest the power of God in experience, and it also operates as a striking fulfillment of divine promise. These are not proofs, but they constitute striking evidence not for theism but for Christian theism. The challenge was nicely captured by Lt. General Roméo Dallaire after his experience of genocide in Rwanda. He was asked if he still believed in God after having confronted so much evil. He replied: “I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, and I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists and therefore I know that there is a God.”²⁰

²⁰ Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), xxv.

13 Divine Action and Divine Identity in Christianity and Islam Is the God of Christianity the same God as the God of Islam? Or, to put the same issue more specifically, is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ the same God as the God of the Muslim prophet Mohammad? In this chapter I want to explore how far considerations related to divine action bear on the resolution of this question. Beyond that I shall indicate some important implications which follow from my preferred position. We shall see that these in turn bring out the deep significance of decisions about divine action for our deliberations. As a point of entry consider this little episode from the Pacific Northwest. Janet I. Tu reported the following some time ago in the Seattle Times: Shortly after noon on Fridays, the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding ties on her black headscarf, preparing to pray with her Muslim group on First Hill. On Sunday morning, Redding puts on the white collar of an Episcopal priest. She does both, she says, because she’s Christian and Muslim. Redding, who until recently was director of faith formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, has been a priest for more than 20 years. Now she’s also been a Muslim—drawn to the faith after an introduction to Islamic prayers left her profoundly moved.¹

By October 10, 2008, Redding had been handed an ultimatum from her bishop: resign her priesthood, deny being a Muslim, or be deposed. Redding was not altogether happy: “I’m saddened and disappointed (she said) that this could not be an opportunity for the church to broaden its perspective and talk about what it means to adhere to more than one faith.”² She was deposed on April 1, 2009. Redding is not the only person to make favorable comments on the relationship between Christianity and Islam. President George W. Bush once claimed at a press conference in England with Prime Minister Tony Blair that Muslims worship the same Almighty as Christians do. Interestingly, this is a claim that Bush shares with many Muslim leaders, many of whom do not hesitate to say that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Thus Umar F. Abd-Allah notes: “As a Muslim, I am led by my understanding of religious history, languages and Islamic theology ¹ Janet I. Tu, “I Am Both Muslim and Christian,” Seattle Times (Seattle, WA), June 17, 2007. ² Janet I. Tu, “Episcopal Priest Given Ultimatum,” Seattle Times (Seattle, WA), October 10, 2008.

Divine Agency and Divine Action Volume IV: A Theological and Philosophical Agenda. William J. Abraham, Oxford University Press (2021). © William J. Abraham. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786535.003.0014

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to say unequivocally that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.”³ Over against this judgment, Muslim leaders in Malaysia have threatened to shut down a Catholic newspaper for continuing to use the term “Allah” to refer to the God of Christians. Moreover, many evangelicals in North America have excoriated President Bush for saying that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Dr. Richard Land, for example, insisted that President Bush was simply mistaken. “We should always remember that he is commander in chief, not theologian in chief. The Bible is clear on this: The one and true God is Jehovah, and his only begotten Son is Jesus Christ.”⁴ The identity of God in Christianity and Islam is not just a hot ecclesiastical and political issue; it is also critical theological, political, and missiological issue. To provide an obvious example, in proclaiming the Gospel with Muslims, should we assume that Christians believe in the same God or should we tacitly seek to wean them away from belief in Allah? I once discussed this with a Nigerian missionary to Muslims and he was insistent that Muslims and Christians did not believe in the same God, even though he conceded that initially new converts were allowed to refer to God as “Allah” before they learned to refer to God as the Almighty. The dissonance in his mind was palpable as we dug deeper into the issue. Yet he was adamant that Muslims and Christians did not believe in the same God.⁵ The issue is first and foremost a theological issue with philosophical dimensions. The question revolves around the issue of sameness of identity. Is the God of Christianity the same God as the God of Islam? Is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ the same God as the God of the Muslim Prophet Mohammad? We could also frame the issue as one of sameness of reference. Does “God” in the phrase “the God of Islam” have the same referent as “God” in the phrase “the God of Christianity”? This sort of question has been familiar to students of analytic philosophy since the late nineteenth century. It has engaged some of the leading figures of philosophy. One thinks of Meinong, Frege, Russell, and Strawson; more recently one thinks of Evans, Kripke, Searle, and Donnellan. Drawing on philosophical material as needed I shall begin by arguing that Christians and Muslims clearly believe in and worship the same God. I shall then take up the claim that, given the radical differences in beliefs, Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God. I shall develop this case in the strongest version possible by highlighting the radical differences that must be acknowledged. However, I shall seek to show that this displays merely radical differences in beliefs about God; it does not ³ See “Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God? Fifth Part,” Christian Century, August 24, 2004, 34. ⁴ WorldNetDaily Staff, “Evangelicals Outraged over Bush’s ‘Same God’ Remark,” WorldNetDaily. com, November 24, 2003, accessed September 17, 2020. ⁵ The conversation was with Rev. Martins Atanda at a meeting of the Overseas Ministry Center, New Haven, CT on December 6, 2008.

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undermine the fundamental agreement on reference and worship that secures sameness of identity. So we begin with a simple proposition: Christians and Muslims believe in the same God and under certain agreed descriptions worship the same God. This claim is secured initially by the fact that Christians and Muslims can both identify their God as the one and only Creator of the world who is all good, all powerful, and worthy of worship and obedience.⁶ As Gregory of Nyssa nicely says: If anyone wants to call him Word or Wisdom or Power or God or any other sublime or dignified title, we shall not contest the point. For whatever word or name is invented to indicate this subject, it expresses the same thing, viz., the eternal Power of God, which creates what exists, contrives what is non-existent, sustains what is created, and foresees the future.⁷

It is tempting to say that all we really need here is the first item in the identity, where God is identified formally as the one and only Creator of the universe. However, implicit in this move are two other propositions: one is a material judgment that there is only one Creator of the universe; and the other is that Christians intend to identify the divine in this way. So, the case is different from that, say, where one can agree that there is one and only one first dog in the universe, but where the speakers might disagree on which dog this was; one of them might think that Sophie rather than Fido was the first dog in the universe. Hence, they could agree that there was only one first dog in the universe but disagree on the identity of that dog. This analogy is undermined by the fact that Christians and Muslims are in agreement that materially the God to which both are committed is the one and only Creator of the universe. To repeat my earlier assertion, they both intend to use the description—the one and only Creator of the universe—to identify God in the Christian tradition and Allah in the Islamic tradition. Both Christians and Muslims believe that this God, the one and only one Creator of the universe, exists; they disagree with atheists and agnostics on this score. When Christians and Muslims say that it is true that “the one and only Creator of the universe exists” they are realists with respect to truth. They believe that the proposition “God exists” is true in virtue of God actually existing rather ⁶ Compare how Paul K. Moser develops a similar position when he proposes that we use “the term ‘God’ as a maximally honorific title that connotes an authoritatively and morally perfect being who is inherently worthy of worship as wholehearted adoration, love, and trust.” See Moser, The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). An alternative route would be to work from the Anselmian conception of God as “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” However, this is much too removed from the ordinary Christian’s and Muslim’s conception of God to be of much help here. ⁷ Gregory of Nyssa, “An Address on Religious Instruction,” in Edward R. Hardy, ed., Christology of the Later Fathers (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1954), 275–6.

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than in virtue of some ideal of justification that it satisfies or in virtue of the socially constructed nature of language.⁸ Christians and Muslims, of course, disagree on why they think this proposition is true; they even disagree among themselves on the relevant arguments. Thus, they debate about the merits of appeals to natural theology, religious experience, and divine revelation. This latter discussion is a debate about the epistemic status of the proposition “God exists”; it is not initially, at least, a debate about the conception of truth deployed or a debate about the identity of God. Broadly, they agree about the nature of truth and about the shared identity of God as the one and only Creator of the universe. Consider an analogy. Take the proposition: “Winston Churchill existed.” Many with widely different worldviews would agree both on the identity of Winston Churchill and on the truth of this proposition. The identity in this case is secured by means of a unique description laid out in terms of specific actions. That description could be something like this: Winston Churchill was the one and only British prime minister who smoked Cuban cigars and defeated Hitler in the Second World War. If someone raises questions about the identity of “Winston Churchill” then this is resolved by the practice of supplying a unique description that picks out this “Winston Churchill” from some other “Winston Churchill.” Interestingly the description does not have to be absolutely accurate. Winston Churchill was identified as the one and only British prime minister who smoked Cuban cigars and defeated Hitler in the Second World War. Yet, for all we know, Churchill may have smoked Dominican cigars. This would not matter; there is enough content in the description to secure sameness of identity across speakers. Let’s look at a more difficult case, one that brings to light radical differences in belief. Suppose we were to ask the ancient Irish if the moon was shining. They would look up at the sky, wonder if we had lost our mind, and say, “Yes, the moon is shining tonight.” In this instance we and the ancient Irish initially share the same referent for “moon”; however, we do not share the same sense when we use the word “moon.” Put differently, we differ radically on our understanding of the moon. For the ancient Irish the moon may well have been simply a disc in the sky that emits light on its own; but for us it would be a large globe that reflects the light of the sun. At the level of sense, we and the ancient Irish do not at all believe in the same thing. However, this in no way undermines the claim that we share the practice of referring to the moon either by ostension (we point to the relevant phenomenon in the sky) or by a relevant description (the brightest light in the sky at night). Indeed, we could not differ as we do if we were not able to identify the object that we are describing. Otherwise, our competing descriptions would have nothing to which they apply. Competing descriptions only work if we are already in agreement about the enduring entity of which we speak. ⁸ For a fine treatment of these issues see Christopher J. Insole, The Realist Hope: A Critique of AntiRealist Approaches in Contemporary Philosophical Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

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Consider now a different and much more difficult example. In the spring semester some time after George W. Bush was elected president of the United States, I was teaching at Harvard Divinity School. Even though I had been exiled from Ireland to Texas, I quickly discovered that merely living in Texas was a problem with a lot of folk at Harvard. Somehow, they connected living in Texas with George W. Bush. In fact, I quickly discovered that folks hated Bush. I also discovered that they did not share the same sense of George W. Bush as, say, his wife Laura did. Bush was identified as a Texan, a bigot, a cowboy, a fundamentalist, a liar, a deceiver, and a villain; he was described as incompetent, stupid, tongue-tied, mean, corrupt, divisive, deceitful, messianic, and unfit to be president. The cluster of descriptions held on the basis of his actions was so radically different that it is very tempting to say that they did not signify the same person at all. In this instance the same person means the same person as identified by the narrative of his life, the attributes that describe who he is, and the adjectives that fill out his character. In this instance the criteria of identity are constituted by a rich, complex narrative of the person’s character or nature; we are dealing with a rich network of actions performed. In the light of this, it is very tempting to say that Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God. In the context of worship Christians insist on the identity of God as laid out in the Apostle’s or Nicene Creed; they speak of God as Father; they name God as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” The practices of the church show that they pray to the Triune God, that they baptize in the name of “the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” and that they praise God as the Triune God. These are not incidental phrases; they are canonical; they are constitutive of the identity of God in the church. All of this is resolutely, systematically, and canonically rejected by Islam. These differences cut so deep that it is natural to say in this context that we do not worship the same God. Jon D. Levenson makes the point succinctly: “to the extent that the One God of the universe is rendered in narratives such as those in the scriptures and not through abstract attributes, the claim that Christians and Muslims worship the same God cannot but appear, if not false, then certainly simplistic and one-sided.”⁹ This judgment holds even though Christians and Muslims share a belief in special revelation epistemologically and even though they share a cluster of attributes that go beyond the initial description of God as the one and only Creator of the universe.¹⁰ The same line of argument applies to Christian and Muslim references to Jesus. They have different names for Jesus, “Jesus” and “Isa,” but they both believe that ⁹ “Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?,” Christian Century, April 20, 2004, 32–3. ¹⁰ For a sensitive treatment of how far Christians and Muslims share the same sense even of crucial attributes of God see Gerald R. McDermott, “Response to Francis J. Beckwith,” in Joseph L. Cunning and David W. Shenk, eds., Do Christians, Muslims, and Jews Worship the Same God? Four Views (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019), 93–7.

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the same human agent existed. They both believe that a first-century prophet, born of a virgin, known to Christians as Jesus, lived. When we shift into the context of worship, Christians and Muslims clearly do not revere the same “Jesus.” Muslims and Christians believe the same Jesus existed, but they do not obey and are not devoted to the same Jesus. Thus, Muslims do not believe that Jesus was crucified; and they consider the Christian attitude to Jesus to be that of idolatry and blasphemy. Jesus is merely one of the prophets of God, and not the most important one. The differences are too radical, it will be said, to allow sameness of identity in this context, for Christians revere and worship Jesus as crucified Savior, risen Lord, and Unique Son of God.¹¹ So, even though we can agree that in the context of the created order, Christians and Muslims believe in the same God, we need to distinguish this from the context of worship where they clearly do not. We can further support this line of reasoning by drawing on recent work on reference. In some of the most recent, creative work on the identity of God in Christianity and Islam, it has become common to draw on the role of reference shift as a way to capture the crucial theological differences between Christians and Muslims.¹² The crucial idea was introduced by Gareth Evans in his work on reference as applied to the practice of naming.¹³ Evans proposes that we think of a name as constituted by a dossier of information. We secure reference by noting the dominant sources of information that show up in the name of the dossier. Thus, in the context of worship the dossiers have such radically different content that it is not just awkward but mistaken to say that the reference is the same in both cases. Even though Christians and Muslims can begin their encounter by agreeing to the same dossier (God is the one and only Creator of the universe), there is such a radical shift when we move to the level of worship that sameness of reference has radically altered. There is so much mismatch between the information in the relevant dossiers, that the preliminary, minimalist reference simply breaks down. I have in the past been very attracted to the claim that while Christians and Muslims believe in the same God, they do not worship the same God. This way of thinking seems initially to make best sense of our intuitions about the radical

¹¹ Interestingly, similar differences can arise within Christianity itself. Consider the following comment by Bishop Gene Robinson on Rick Warren in the dispute in and around the Obama inauguration. “I’m for Rick Warren being at the table, but we are not talking about a discussion, we’re talking about putting someone up front and center at what will be the most watched inauguration in history, and asking his blessing on the nation. And the God that he’s praying to is not the God I know.” Emphasis added. See Jeff Zeleny and David D. Kirkpatrick, “Obama’s Choice of Pastor Creates Furor,” New York Times (New York, NY), December 19, 2008. ¹² See Thomas Bogardus and Mallorie Urnab, “How to Tell Whether Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God,” Faith and Philosophy 34 (2017): 176–200. This is an especially illuminating article. See also Jerry L. Walls, “None Worship the Same God: Different Conceptions View,” in Cunning and Shenk, eds., Do Christians, Muslims, and Jews Worship the Same God?, 160–81. ¹³ See Gareth Evans, “The Causal Theory of Names,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volumes 47 (1973): 187–208.

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differences between Muslims and Christians when it comes to their deepest beliefs about God. However, I have come to abandon this position for several reasons. First, it is surely the case that Christians and Muslims worship God under the description of “the one and only Creator of the universe.” Thus, at the very outset it is not possible to sustain any absolute distinction between belief and worship once we see that God is worshiped as the one and only Creator of the universe. Second, as with the case of radically different descriptions of George W. Bush, we should see these essentially as a form of rhetorical hyperbole. The issue is put starkly in terms of a difference in identity (the Bush known by Laura Bush is not the same Bush posited by his critics at Harvard); it is really a dramatic way of expressing radically different understandings and evaluations of the actions Bush 43 has performed. It is surely obvious that all concerned can readily secure the sameness of identity ontologically by referring to him as an American businessman and politician who served as forty-third president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. We are not speaking here of two different agents; there is but one agent whose actions are deeply contested in terms of their identity, proper descriptions, and assessment. Third, without an initial way of identifying God, interlocuters who disagree radically about God would not be able to attach their different descriptions to an agreed intentional object. There would in fact be no disagreement because they would not be speaking of the same agent.¹⁴ Disagreement arises only after, logically speaking, we have secured what we are talking about.¹⁵ It is tempting to leave the issue there and move on to the implications of our position. However, it is important to note three features that are needed to round off this phase of the discussion. First, however we state the significance of the radical theological differences between Christianity and Islam, the solution inevitably leaves the sensitive observer puzzled. So, we can think of the difference as between sense and reference, or as a radical shift in reference. However, we must allow for the fact that under the description of “the one and only Creator of the universe” Muslims and Christians do actually believe in and worship the same

¹⁴ There is relevant linguistic support for this conclusion. Our conclusion explains the standard practice in Bible translation when “Allah” is used to translate the term for “God’ in both Old and New Testaments. Indeed, “Allah” may well have been the term that Jesus would have used, in that the usual term for God in Aramaic was “Alâh.” “Allah” is the common term for “God” in Arabic, Indonesian, Javanese, Sudanese. See Rick Brown, “Who Is ‘Allah’?” International Journal of Frontier Missions 23 (2006): 80. ¹⁵ Interestingly, the same problem crops up in Mark with respect to what Markan scholars have referred to as the “messianic secret.” Jesus initially accepts the designation given to him by Peter in Mark 8:29 when he says: “You are the Messiah”; but he then systematically revises and enriches this identity in order to bring it into line with the full truth about himself as savior and redeemer of the world. Jesus does not repudiate the initial reference to himself as “Messiah”; he corrects it. Likewise, the theological debates between Christians and Muslims make best sense when we acknowledge the basic agreement on sameness of identity for God. In fact, disputes within Christianity and Islam can be equally profound unless, that is, we seek to solve the relevant issue by mere stipulation.

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God. Thus, they exhibit not just assent but also commitment and devotion; and in their worship they worship God as Creator and sustainer of the universe. This is why it is mistaken to say that that Christians believe in the same God but do not worship the same God. Second, it is important to note that there is no theory available in philosophy that we can appeal to in order to resolve the debate. Thus, I have not claimed that the use of uniqueness of description is the only way to secure reference for God. In fact, we manage to secure sameness of reference as a basic linguistic practice without having any idea how to resolve the deep underlying philosophical problems. Moreover, as William P. Alston has argued, we might well secure sameness of reference not by unique description but by direct reference in which we rely upon direct acquaintance with God and use this as the baseline for the identity of God in Christianity and Islam.¹⁶ In the light of these complications, we may well see that our criteria of identity are best seen as important heuristic devices to help us sort out the relevant issues, Thus, our best efforts do not exclude the fact that we may have to resort to stipulation and accept the limitations of conceptual inquiry. The difficulty is dramatically visible in the disputes that arise over how best to identify the relevant dossier that secures reference for God. Thus, Francis L. Beckwith insists that the relevant dossier is secured by deploying the resources of classical theism; Jerry L. Walls insists that the relevant dossier is the deep content of Christian theology.¹⁷ I see no easy way to resolve this dispute given that I disagree with both Beckwith and Walls. Third, the limitations of our inquiry bring us to the point where it becomes salient to explore the significance of our proposals for our life together. The recent debate has in fact been occasioned by acute questions about the relation between theology, religion, and politics that are unavoidable. In the remainder of this chapter I would like to explore briefly three dimensions of our topic that build on the proposal I have laid out thus far. The issues are broadly theological, political, and missiological. Let me signal that the space devoted to each of these topics shrinks as I work my way through them. First, wrestling with the issue of the identity of God as it now confronts us in the West, our living encounter with Islam signals an important shift in the context in which we have to carry out our work as Christian theologians and teachers. Coming to terms with that new context requires fresh engagement with the detailed catalogue of divine action that I have been at pains to pursue to date. Let me explain. When I first went up to university over forty years ago in the 1960s, I was well into sorting through my conversion from a befuddled atheist as a teenager. ¹⁶ William P. Alston, “Referring to God,” Philosophy of Religion 24 (1988): 113–28. ¹⁷ See their contrasting views in Cunning and Shenk, eds., Do Christians, Muslims, and Jews Worship the Same God?, 66–86, 160–81.

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Abandoning the interest in modern languages that had absorbed me in grammar school, I gravitated to the study of philosophy and psychology. The reason was simple: I intuitively saw these as important areas of investigation bearing on my long-term plans to study theology. This fitted neatly with the zeitgeist I occupied. At school in religious studies I had been exposed to biblical criticism and to the deep worries about the status of Christian belief developed, for example, by Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God.¹⁸ I already sensed that the problem of credibility was widespread across Europe; this was a watershed period for the decline of Christianity in Europe.¹⁹ This observation applies even to the last bastion of Christianity in Europe, that is, to Holy Mother Ireland, which is now systematically abandoning the civilization she saved after the Dark Ages. Much of my intellectual work has been taken up with questions driven by the skepticism that gripped Europe in the wake of Hume, Kant, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Freud, Durkheim, Marx, Russell, Ayer, Flew, and the like. Thus, I have worked extensively on the challenge of historical criticism, on the nature of canon, and on issues in the epistemology of theology. In coming to the United States, these interests in epistemology and related questions continued, but they were overlaid with the challenge of race and gender that have been so central to theology over the last forty years. I began to deal with this challenge at the very same time that I was thrown into the study of evangelism, an area of investigation that has proved extremely fruitful in unexpected ways. In time, dealing with all these very difficult topics has forced me to take up two sets of issues that I would prefer to leave aside if it were merely a matter of personal preference. On the one hand, the encounter with issues of gender and race has led to a deep interest in political theology; the current orthodoxy in much of my context is in fact variations of liberation theology.²⁰ On the other hand, working through the history of evangelism led me to rethink the nature of systematic theology, liberating it from the shackles of epistemology and creating the space thereby for a massive retrieval of the full faith of the church.²¹ The questions these endeavors represent are not at all slated to disappear in the near future. The challenges of virulent atheism and secularism are here to stay. The challenges of race and gender have by no means run their course. However, the challenge of Islam adds spice to the mix; it adds whole new dimensions to the epistemological and political issues that currently preoccupy us. ¹⁸ Bishop John Robinson, Honest to God (London: SCM Press, 1963). ¹⁹ For an extended discussion see Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London: Routledge, 2001). For a splendid overview see David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 195–201. ²⁰ The current site of investigation revolves around the debate about the United States of America as the new Empire. For a refreshing treatment of this topic by a historian see Thomas F. Madden, Empires of Trust (New York: Dutton, 2008). ²¹ See William J. Abraham, Jason E. Vickers, and Natalie B. Van Kirk, eds., Canonical Theism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008).

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What might this mean? First, we will have to revisit the complex theological foundations of Western democracies, sort through how to deal with theologically motivated terrorism, and revisit the nature and limits of religious freedom. Second, we will have to overhaul our current treatments of inclusivism, political correctness, and diversity. These when absolutized cannot begin to do justice to the deep incompatible commitments that arise when you have real diversity and radical pluralism. Third, we will have to revisit the epistemological issues that swirl around the appeal to special revelation, to public truth, and to reasoned argument. To be more specific, the turn to Barth will no longer help us, nor will the turn to postmodernity in most of its current forms get us very far. Most importantly, the shift in context requires a deep re-engagement with the Christian conception and doctrine of God in all its fullness and complexity. The encounter with Islam makes manifest how unique and rich the Christian vision of God truly is. Muslims drive this home when they accuse Christians of idolatry and incoherence. At this point we can no longer take refuge in merely philosophically oriented conceptions, important as these are in their own context. These conceptions of God will not be decisively refuted; they will continue to be elaborated and contested. However, if I am right that Christian and Muslims believe in and worship the same God, this in no way means that we ignore the full distinctiveness of the Christian tradition. We will need to be clear on how it developed and what it means. Equally, we will have to be clear on why we think it is true and why it matters. It will no longer do to change the subject and take refuge in morality, or theological methodology, or philosophical speculation, or self-contained appeals to divine revelation, or postmodernity.²² The critics of Christian theology are no longer simply the secularists that have been around a long time and who have become increasingly shrill and even paranoid. They are serious theists who are full of self-assurance, who are aware that what we have to say is radical and strange, and who will not hesitate to accuse us of blasphemy. Yet we should note that this is not the first time Christian theology has faced this challenge. It was a major issue in Syriac Christianity and in the Middle Ages. It remains a major issue for Christians living in Lebanon, Egypt, Indonesia, and Malaysia. So, we need not enter this conversation alone. We should even find ways to learn all we can from the many Christian believers that currently exist within Islam itself, difficult as this may be. The debate about the identity of God in Christianity and Islam is, moreover, the harbinger of a wider encounter with Islam for which ordinary Christians and not just theologians need to be prepared. Christians are not prepared for this at present. We face a massive doctrinal and theological deficit at the local church level. Western mainline Christianity is in disarray. Many of its clergy and ²² For my own treatment of some of these issues see William J. Abraham, Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007).

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members are ignorant and unteachable; they are totally ill-equipped to understand much less offer an intelligible response to Muslim criticism. Evangelicalism is numerically strong, but it too is fragmented; in some places it is saturated in eschatological doctrines that are out and out heretical when measured against the faith of the church. Currently evangelicalism is in the throes of one more facelift in which a new disillusioned generation is madly networking, hoping against hope that something new will emerge. Cherry-picking the past together with betting the store on a shotgun wedding with postmodern philosophy is not a recipe that will serve us well in the long run. Certainly, Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism offer vast resources and experience; but the jury is out on whether they will face up to the stewardship of those resources. It is not entirely clear how far they will exploit the weakness of Protestants in order to win converts and advance exaggerated claims about the spiritual and theological superiority of their lineage. Clearly what is needed is a massive collaborative effort across our ecclesial divisions that will deal with the doctrinal and theological deficit at the level of the local church. Whatever resources we seek out, and whatever lies ahead for our ecclesial institutions, we have to come to terms with the changing context in which we must now do theology. Hence, I see the debate about the identity of God as a welcome catalyst to awaken us from our dogmatic slumbers and replenish the theological store for future generations. As I expressed it earlier, it calls for a fresh engagement with the canonical faith of the church. Let me attend now to the second area opened up by the central thesis of this chapter, that is, let me turn to a broadly political dimension of the debate about the identity of God in Christianity and Islam. Consider the following proposition: The position I have adopted is vital if Muslims are to find a place in the civil and political life of North America. Note that I speak here specifically of the United States of America; I am not speaking of France, or Ireland, or the United Kingdom. The United States represents a unique political experiment that is theological through and through. This thesis was highlighted with particular skill and detachment in the 1960s in the debate about American civil religion sparked by the sociologist Robert Bellah. This was taken up and elaborated by Robert Wuthnow, Martin Marty, Russell Ritchey, and many others. Will Herberg captured the issue nicely when he said that America was a nation with the soul of a church. By civil religion these scholars meant a form of religion developed to give expression to the religious beliefs, values, and sentiments that govern the identity, politics, and public life of the nation. This very particular civil religion has its own network of materials, persons, and practices. This is a faith with its own pilgrims and founding fathers; its own scriptures; its own canon of theologians, prophets, and priests; its canon of saints and heroes; its own high and holy days; its own iconography and hagiography; its own ceremonies and liturgies; its own sacred

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sites; its own imaginative expressions; its own creed; its own network of virtues and vices; and its own internal divisions.²³ What is important here is the vision of God that is in play. The core identity of the God of America’s political theology is the same God that has emerged in our analysis earlier. Broadly, the God of American public theology is identified as the one and only Creator of the universe who acts providentially in history. This is the same God that Muslims and Christians believe exists. Compared to the full Trinitarian vision of God, this vision is deflationary and minimalist. Many Christians on both sides of the theological aisle get hot and bothered about this. They should relax and smell the coffee. The minimalist, deflationary identity of God shared by Muslims and Christians is precisely the God of the Founding Faith²⁴ of America; this is the God of the American Gospel,²⁵ to use the provocative titles of two important books. The minimalist conception of God is precisely the strength of American political theology. What began as a theology that grew out of Protestantism was extended to include Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox immigrants, and was then extended further to include Jews. This was possible because they could all acknowledge God under the deflationary description of the one and only Creator of the universe in the public square. They avoided thereby the alternative choices that showed up in Europe after the wars of religion. They rejected the secularism of France where God was banished from the public square; and they rejected the confessionalism of England where the fuller identity of God deployed in worship was, with carefully identified exceptions, imposed on everyone. They took a third route. They welcomed reference to God in the public order, but they deployed a minimalist conception of God and resolutely refused to impose either secularism or a particular version of Christianity on the nation. The obvious question that remains is simply this: can Muslims now find their place within the political theology that is at the heart of the American political experiment? If I am right that Christians and Muslims believe in and even worship the same, then the issue is an open one for the future. The ultimate test would be whether a Muslim could be president of the United States, for the president is a crucial figure in the liturgical and ceremonial practice of American civil religion. This, of course, is an issue of principle, not of current political realities. I have put the question squarely. Let me ruminate around an answer. A positive answer to the question of full participation of Muslims in American political theology is vital to the future health of politics in North America. It is very ²³ I take up these themes in an unpublished paper, “American Civil Religion: Problem, Prescription, or Puffer Fish?” ²⁴ Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America (New York: Random House, 2008). ²⁵ Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Random House, 2006).

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important not to be naïve or to engage in wishful thinking at this point. At one level, it is obvious that radical Muslims, as represented by groups like Al-Qaeda, have no interest in this issue; they simply want Americans to convert and become part of the Dar al-Islam where shariah law will hold sway. At another level, it is obvious that liberal forms of Islam can get on board without undue stress. These forms involve significant reformation from within Islam that has come to terms with the complicated demands of liberal democracy. The real challenge comes for mainstream, canonical Islam. The challenge in this instance mirrors the challenge that Jews faced after the fall of Jerusalem when they developed Rabbinic Judaism and the challenge that Christians faced after the Reformation. In both cases, Jews and Christians had to abandon their commitment to their visions of theocracy and make drastic readjustments in their political theologies. It is obvious that if mainstream Islam is going to be anything but a fifth column in the West then it will have to make similar drastic changes in its political theology both in principle and practice. It will have to come to terms with the distinction between religion and politics; and it will have to work through its conventional practices with respect to marriage, banking, women, and its disposition to Jews. Only a fool would try to predict if canonical Islam can make these changes.²⁶ However, if the thesis I have developed holds, then at least we have a toehold for the inclusion of Muslims in the full political life of North America. So, our proposal is no mere abstract debate; it has important political possibilities and ramifications. Let me deal very briefly with the missiological dimension of my thesis. The point to be made this time is this: our distinction opens up a vital hermeneutical move in theological conversations with Muslims. How do we ensure that our depiction of the Triune God connects naturally with the good news of the Gospel? Let me explore this question by way of contrast. Rowan Williams is a theologian’s theologian; he operates at a high-octane level, much to the chagrin of the British press and not a few of his own flock. Yet in two important public lectures given to exclusively Muslim audiences he displayed remarkable dexterity in laying out the content of the Christian faith. One was given at the Al-Azhar Al-Sharif Islamic Research Academy in Cairo in September 2004, the other at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan, in November 2005.²⁷ In both instances Williams tacitly deployed the distinction I have sought to elaborate here, that is, he worked through what united and divided Christians and Muslims in their vision of God. In the first lecture, he

²⁶ Lamin Sanneh’s contribution to this discussion is especially interesting. See his comments on Islam in West Africa in “Muslim-Christian Encounters: Governments under God,” Christian Century, December 2, 1992, 1103–6. ²⁷ Both lectures are available at the website of Rowan Williams, 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, at aoc2013.brix.fatbeehive.com. For a helpful discussion see Greg Clark, “The Beauty of God in Cairo and Islamabad: Rowan Williams as Apologist,” in Matheson Russell, ed., On Rowan Williams (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009), 186–204.

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dwelt on what Christians share with Muslims theologically and drove home the shared moral implications that this entailed. In the second lecture, he unapologetically expounded the rich content of the Christian faith, expeditiously using the Christian year as the thread that held the whole lecture together. These are remarkable lectures: they are clear yet sophisticated, deep yet accessible, and robust yet personal. Yet something was missing. At one level, the lectures were too “Pelagian” and moralistic; understandably, given the long history of violence, they put a lot of store by human effort in the effort to gain peace and justice. At another level, I found them hyper-intellectualist; they were content to render the doctrine of the Trinity as intelligible as possible to skeptical Muslims. What was missing was any kind of really deep and natural connection between the good news of the Gospel and the Trinitarian faith of the church. It is surely this that is the hermeneutical challenge in our sharing and teaching the great faith of the church not just to Muslims but to the many ill-informed Christians in the West. The doctrine the Trinity arose because something extraordinary happened to bring the world from darkness to light, from the demonic to the divine, from despair to hope, and from sin to liberating salvation. The doctrine of the Trinity was not developed because it resolved a theological conundrum or because theologians are intrigued by dialectical speculation. This keeps it all at the level of a certain kind of dry, academic theology. We need to figure out how to bring in the background music of the Gospel without it becoming abrupt and intrusive. We share the doctrine of the Trinity because we have become intoxicated and drawn into the love of the Triune God that came down from the Father, was manifested in Christ’s voluntary sacrifice for the sins of the world on the cross, and is now shed in our unworthy hearts through the Holy Spirit. There is a Gospel at the heart of the Trinity and being clear about the full Christian identity of God requires that we find apt ways to share that Gospel in our theological encounter with Islam. In being faithful to this God, the joy and liberation we have found in the Gospel is surely at the heart of the Trinity; the doctrine of the Trinity is not an addendum, it is right at the core of what we believe in the Gospel. Coming to terms with the Christian identity of God is not philosophical nitpicking; expounding the identity of the Triune God calls for joyous sharing and celebration of the Gospel with the Muslim world.