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Two of the more recent attempts to deal with the issue of divine action have been Peter C. Hodgson,God in History (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989) and Maurice Wiles,God's Action in the World (London: SCM Press, 1986). Both works reflect the contemporary theological consensus that however divine action is construed, it must not entail specific divine acts in history or nature because such a notion is not intellectually convincing (Wiles, p. 11) because history “admits of no suprahistorical interruptions” (Hodgson, p. 197). Both Wiles and Hodgson (in somewhat different ways), like Gordon Kaufman before them, accept only the creation of the totality of the universe as the one and only divine act. To accept the idea that God might performspecific, particular acts, is to conceive God as interventionist, as one being alongside others, whose acts would then be subject to the charge that they are arbitrary, manipulating, infrequent, and unresponsive to the enormity of evil.
Langdon Gilkey, “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language,”Journal of Religion 41 (1961):200.
Rudolph Bultmann,Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), esp. the chapter “The Meaning of God as Acting,” pp. 60–85.
This is the position taken by such philosophers as Richard Rorty,Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) and by deconstructionists generally. See especially Mark C. Taylor,Erring (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Thomas J.J. Altizer et al.,Deconstruction and Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1982).
This is the position by some representatives of transcendental Thomism. See, e.g., Richard Viladesau,Answering for Faith (New York: Paulist Press, c. 1987), pp. 39–42.
Alan White, “Introduction,”The Philosophy of Action, ed. Alan White (London: Oxford University Press, 1968) p. 2.
Daniel Day Williams, “How Does God Act?: An Essay in Whitehead's Metaphysics,” inProcess and Divinity, ed. William L. Reese and Eugene Freeman (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1964), pp. 170–171. This view is not far from Maurice Wiles' claim that God acts only through the creation of the structures of reality as such and Hodgson's claim that God acts “by being efficaciously present as who and what God is ⋯ bybeing the normative shape, the paradigm” of a transfigurative praxis. (Hodgson, op. cit., p. 205).
David Tracy,Blessed Rage for Order (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), Ch. 3.
Gordon Kaufman, “On the Meaning of ‘Act of God’”,Harvard Theological Review 61 (1968):175.
Ibid., p. 176.
Ibid., p. 192.
See F. Michael McLain, “On Theological Models,”Harvard Theological Review 62 (1969):155–187 for a good critique of Kaufman's argument as Cartesian.
Ibid., p. 163.
Wiles, op. cit., p. 2.
Ibid., p. 28. He refers to Kaufman's claim that “it is thewhole course of history ⋯ that should be conceived as God's act in the primary sense.” Interestingly, Wiles is even more consistent than Kaufman in refusing to go beyond the notion of a single divine master-act. Kaufman occasionally refers to God performing ‘subacts’ within God's overarching master act. But Wiles seems suspicious of reintroducing the causal problem if one permits God to perform a subact but not a discrete historical act.
Ibid., p. 56.
Thomas F. Tracy,God, Action, and Embodiment (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1984).
Ibid., p. 152.
Hilde Hein,On the Nature and Origin of Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), pp. 172–173.
Donald Davidson, for example, holds that causation is strictly a relation between events, not between an agent and an event which follows from the agent's act. See “Causal Relations,”Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967):691–703.
Ervin Laszlo,Introduction to Systems Philosophy: Toward a New Paradigm of Contemporary Thought (New York: Gordon and Breach, Science Publishers, 1972), p. 97.
Pols' analysis of the action of an agent has many points in common with that of Richard Taylor and Roderick Chisholm who have argued for an ‘agent causation’ theory. All three hold that some causal sequences have their origin in the agents themselves (and not just in their volitions, desires, neural movements, etc.). This view is traditionally rejected on the grounds that it leaves direct agent causation an essentially mysterious phenomenon. (See Lawrence H. Davis,Theory of Action (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979) (Prentice-Hall Foundations of Philosophy Series), p. 11.) Pols' analysis wants to challenge the claim that explanation in terms of agents is inherently mysterious by utilizing, as Taylor and Chisholm do not, the systems or hierarchy notion.
Edward Pols,Meditation on a Prisoner: Towards Understanding Action and Mind (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975), p. 11.
Edward Pols, “The Ontology of the Rational Agent,”Review of Metaphysics 43.4 (June 1980):690.
Edward Pols, “Power and Agency,”International Philosophical Quarterly 11.3 (September 1971):295.
Edward Pols,The Acts of Our Being (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), pp. 36–38.
Pols,Meditation on a Prisoner, p. 103.
Ibid., p. 99.
Edward Pols, “Human Agents as Actual Beings,”Process Studies 8.2 (1978):111.
Pols,Meditation on a Prisoner, p. 105.
Ibid., p. 110.
But not necessarily a basic act since an act in Pols' sense can include a whole series of subacts some of which the agent does not perform directly without having to do something else. My typing this article can be an act but not a basic act since it involves a whole series of intermediary occurrences which take place between my intention and the finished product on the computerprinted page. Nevertheless Pols does suggest that his notion of an ‘originative’ act is similar to Danto's notion of a basic action in that neither is caused in a strict cause-effect sense by prior acts. (SeeMeditation on a Prisoner, p. 95–96.) The exact relation between acts and subacts in Pols is not entirely clear but its basic point is all that I want to establish for the purposes of my argument.
Ibid., p. 72.
Ibid., p. 309.
Ibid., p. 65. This notion of the agent's ‘causality’ of its actions links Pols rather explicitly with the point of view adopted by Richard Taylor and Roderick Chisholm.
Ibid., p. 310.
Ibid., p. 315.
William P. Alston, “Divine and Human Action,” inDivine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism, ed. Thomas V. Morris (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 258.
Ibid., p. 280.
Ibid., p. 275.
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Kirkpatrick, F.G. Together bound: A new look at God's discrete actions in history. Int J Philos Relig 32, 129–147 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01565346
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01565346