Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I: Exploring and Evaluating the Debate

279 Pages·2018·1.001 MB·English

by  William J. Abraham

Divine Agency and Divine Action
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I:
Exploring and Evaluating the Debate
William J. Abraham
Print publication date: 2017
Print ISBN-13: 9780198786504
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2017
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198786504.001.0001
Divine Agency and Divine Action
Orientation
William J. Abraham
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198786504.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
The fundamental problems that have arisen over the last half-century in
treatments of divine action in the Christian tradition stem from a failure to come
to terms with the concept of action. Theologians and philosophers have assumed
that we can have a closed conception of agency on a par with the concept of
knowledge. On the contrary, the concept of action is a general concept like
“event,” “quality,” or “thing.” It is an open concept with a great variety of
context-dependent criteria. Recent work on the concept of action can provide an
initial and utterly indispensable orientation in work on divine agency and divine
action, but it cannot resolve fundamental questions about what God has really
done; nor can it illuminate the particular actions of God that are so important in
theology. For that we need to turn to theology proper, that is, to work in
historical and systematic theology.
Keywords:   action, concept, divine action, analytic philosophy, history of philosophy, theology
The fundamental problems that have arisen over the last half-century in
treatments of divine action in the Christian tradition stem from a persistent
failure to come to terms with the concept of action in its openness and in its
complexity.
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Divine Agency and Divine Action
Theologians and philosophers have assumed that we can have a closed concept
of agency on a par with, say, the concept of knowledge. On the contrary, the
concept of action is a general concept like “event,” “quality,” or “thing.” It is an
open concept with a great variety of context-dependent criteria. Moreover,
philosophers and theologians have assumed that once we secure an appropriate
concept of action, we can solve the challenges thrown up over the last fifty years
or so. This too is an illusion. Work on the concept of action can provide an initial
and utterly indispensable orientation in work on divine agency and divine action.
It cannot, however, resolve fundamental questions about what God has really
done; nor can it illuminate the particular actions of God (general or special) that
are so important in theology. For that we need to turn in the end to theology
proper, that is, to work in historical and systematic theology.
Once the full force of these considerations is recognized and internalized,
Christian theology is set free to explore the full gamut of divine action with
enthusiasm and flair. The aim of this volume is to articulate and defend this
liberating agenda. If we are to think through what is involved in claims about
divine agency and divine action, we cannot do so until we clear the decks of the
muddles and dead-ends that bedevil the discussion; the crucial initial task is to
clear space and indicate how genuinely fruitful future work can proceed.
In this opening chapter my goal is to offer an orientation to the debate as a
whole. I want to provide an initial sense of the issues that have garnered our
attention in the debate about divine action, indicate the breadth of the terrain
that has opened up, and set out in broad terms the scope and direction of the
work as a whole.
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Divine Agency and Divine Action
(p.2) Despite a rich discussion about divine agency and divine action over the
last fifty years, there is little consensus as to how best to identify the core issues
to be addressed. Worse still, there is no agreement on the most promising way to
address them. There is a strong sense that divine agency and divine action are
absolutely central concepts for understanding the varieties of theism that exist;
that there are a nest of crucial problems related to these concepts and the
material claims advanced by theists; and that the extensive work done on the
concept of human agency and action is vital in making progress on these
problems. However, entering the arena is like entering a field where the level of
confidence is remarkably high and the level of agreement remarkably low. The
confidence stems in part from the sheer elegance and simplicity of our topic. The
topics of divine agency and divine action give us a sense that we have on hand a
relatively well demarcated field of investigation; they roll off the tongue
effortlessly; it should, therefore, be easy to pin down what questions we need to
pursue and set about answering them with the skills that the questions
themselves evoke. The level of agreement is low because the range of topics and
the range of research they require are daunting. Once you touch one hem of this
garment you stumble into a whole wardrobe of clothes; some of it needs to be
discarded; much of it needs to be sent to the laundry to be sorted and cleaned.
A survey of the literature confirms these judgments.1 The longer one lingers in
the material available and thinks about the topic, the more bewildered one is
likely to become. Divine agency and divine action take off in a host of directions,
and there is no unified map on which to place them. To change the metaphor, it
is very easy to find oneself in treacherous waters once one begins working
through the issues. This, of course, may not be peculiar to issues raised by
discourse about divine agency and divine action; there are in the end no shallow
waters in philosophy and theology. Yet in this instance the complexity reaches
wider and deeper than usual, so much so that we need to ask why this is the
case and seek a compelling explanation for this surprising state of affairs. I shall
supply a fitting explanation when the time is ripe. We can only achieve this goal,
however, if we have before us a relatively clear account of the kind of issues that
need attention. We shall see in due course that the issues are in turn conceptual,
metaphysical, and epistemological.
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Divine Agency and Divine Action
(p.3) It is worth pausing immediately to illustrate the confusion and complexity.
Most commentators agree that the concept of action necessarily involves
intentionality on the part of the agent. Thus actions are distinguished from
happenings or events by the criterion of intentionality. To quote one fine
contribution by Robert Ellis, “intention is what makes an action an action, rather
than a happening.”2 In making this claim Ellis rightly notes the crucial place of
intentionality in the concept of action in the relevant philosophical literature.3
Once this premise has been secured, divine actions are to be construed as
analogous to human actions in that all divine actions are thought to be
intentional in nature, with appropriate qualifications being made to take care of,
say, the transcendent character of divine agency. Yet by the end of Ellis’ paper,
we are given no less than fifteen theses about action that are to be applied to the
idea of divine action. It is clear that there is much more to the grammar of
human action on his account than simply intentionality. Should we now expand
our list of the necessary and sufficient conditions for action? More seriously one
cannot but worry about the consistency of Ellis’ analysis of the concept of action.
Thus Ellis notes that “an act may be voluntary but not intentional if no thought is
given to the act, for example, doodling.”4 Here we have a vision of action in
which intentionality has disappeared. Something appears to have gone wrong
here at the heart of this project. Suddenly the critical condition of intentionality
—whatever we may make of that complex notion—has been abandoned with
alacrity in the light of an obvious counter-example. What we all took to be a
necessary if not sufficient condition of action has been summarily dismissed;
what started out as relatively simple has grown into a vast network of
commentary with a stark contradiction visible within it on immediate scrutiny.
Ellis’ project is representative in that the whole operation is, I suspect,
predicated on the following assumptions: we can have an account of the
necessary and sufficient conditions of action in the case of human agents; these
conditions can be applied analogously to God; thereafter the central task of the
philosophical theologian is to execute a program of analogical predication
comprehensively.5 These assumptions have effectively governed the debate
about divine agency and action over the last generation. Intuitively these
assumptions look exactly right in their conception and in their promise for
fruitful results. Most especially it draws on the critical place of analogy in our
understanding of all predicates as applied to God. While we need not agree with
the details of Aquinas’ account of analogy, univocity, and equivocation, the
deployment of analogy is surely critical in understanding divine agency (p.4)
and action. So the common strategy of executing a program of analogical
predication has immediate attraction in sorting through the problems that arise
in our understanding of divine agency and divine action.
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Divine Agency and Divine Action
Yet none of these assumptions has been the subject of careful investigation.
While there are important gains from this research agenda, I shall indicate that
many of the hopes it has engendered are illusory.6 They are illusory, moreover,
because we have been subject to certain kinds of mental cramp that have
created pseudo-problems for theology, have ruled out options that are entirely
respectable, and prevented the kind of piecemeal progress on particular,
specifically identified instances of divine action that is available in the wake of a
more deflationary kind of enterprise. It is not that the vast literature on human
action and agency has failed us in explicating and illuminating divine action and
agency; it is that we have too often approached that literature in a dogmatic
fashion and failed to deploy its resources in the most fitting manner.
Consequently the early debate that animated the discussion fifty years ago
abruptly stalled; hopefully a revisiting of the issues from a different angle will
allow us to make fresh progress. Or so I shall argue.
By looking again at the nature of action and agency and unpacking both the
richness and limitations of our conceptual work, we can both explain why so
much of the discussion stalls and make positive progress in both theology and
philosophy. This may disappoint those committed to developing a certain kind of
vision of action and agency, but perhaps the problem stems from the search for
the wrong kind of vision of agency and action in the first place. If there is no
tidy, unified picture of human action and human agency then it is highly unlikely
that we can develop a tidy, unified vision of divine action and divine agency. I can
put this same point more simply: if there is no single concept of action, or if the
concept of action can be instantiated in significantly different ways, then this
has deep consequences for the debate about divine action. My sympathies are
with the former option (there are no tidy, closed concepts of action), but this
cannot and should not be resolved at this stage of the discussion. I shall address
these alternatives at length in due course. Either way, explicating the options is
helpful in explaining why so many of our efforts to make progress have been
stymied.
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Divine Agency and Divine Action
The first kind of issue that naturally arises in investigation into divine agency
and divine action is conceptual.7 We would like, for instance, to know the
necessary and sufficient conditions for action discourse as a whole. Once we
have an account of human action in hand, it is conjectured, we can (p.5)
proceed to make sense of divine action. Not surprisingly, this conceptual
enterprise has started with the exploration of what it is to speak of human
action. This move fits aptly with the initial thrust of analytic philosophy in its
emphasis on conceptual analysis as a vital first step in philosophical work. The
standard initial work in the field quickly isolated intentionality as a necessary
feature of action.8 This then grew into work on neighboring concepts like
motives, desires, and reasons, and their relation to action;9 and extended further
into study of the nature of explanation as applied to action.10 More recently
much attention has been given to the place of reasons in causal explanations of
action. Broadening the discussion, it became clear that the concept of causation
occupied neighboring territory. Indeed one important suggestion, developed
with characteristic freshness by R. G. Collingwood, was that our concept of
causation was parasitic on our concept of intentional action as experienced first-
hand by human agents.11 Clearly both action and causation are interrelated in
that they seem to involve the basic idea of “bringing about something.” At first
sight this looks like a logically primitive concept inherent in our ideas of action
and causation.
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Divine Agency and Divine Action
Two other questions bled into this conceptual work when it was taken up and
applied to discourse involving divine action. There was the prior question as to
how language about God more generally was to be understood. Should talk
about divine action be construed as factual, literal, figurative, symbolic, or
expressivist? Could one deploy discourse about divine action to make assertions,
to describe reality, to deliver explanation of events in the cosmos, in history, in
the church, or in personal experience? Clearly the level of generality in play here
is very broad indeed; there is behind this a quest for a general theory of
religious discourse. Related to these questions but more particular and distinct
was the question of the role of analogy in moving from language about human
action to language about divine action. All agreed that analogy was crucial, but
precisely how should we think of analogical predication in this context? Did the
heavy reliance on analogy mean that there were no instances of discourse about
divine action which were literal? What if a special divine action, notably the
incarnation, was the primary term and was then used analogically to apply to
human agents, as for instance, when someone claims (p.6) that Hitler was the
devil incarnate? Does this not suggest that we need to broaden the inquiry to
include exploration of metaphor, the figurative, the symbolic, myth, and the like?
The first of this run of questions is pretty much resolved, so we do not need to
spend too much time on it. I shall not argue other than indirectly for the claim
that religious discourse generally, and divine action discourse more particularly,
can be used to make assertions. There is no such phenomenon as religious
language governed by a single network of speech acts; in religion and theology
we can use language to perform a host of speech acts. The second raft of
questions remains thoroughly contested with very important implications for the
debate about divine agency and action as a whole.
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Divine Agency and Divine Action
It is tempting to dismiss the network of conceptual issues that revolve around
action discourse as passé. Philosophy has moved on since the great heyday of
linguistic analysis. There is the additional worry that conceptual analysis may
harbor hidden cultural, political, and ideological agendas that beg important
theological and philosophical questions or that operate to distract from the
deeper issues that need to be addressed. The turn to ordinary language, it was
and is feared, may harbor hidden conservative sensibilities. While ordinary
language may not harbor the metaphysic of a savage, as Bertrand Russell once
quipped, it is bound to reflect the background beliefs and values exhibited in the
samples chosen. What if these beliefs and values are oppressive and poisonous
rather than emancipatory and salutary? Anyone acquainted with the moral
ferocity of liberation theology in even its more measured expressions will know
what I mean. So there is room for caution and skepticism about the appeal to
ordinary language. However, such a judgment best comes towards the end of our
inquiries or at least well into them; it should not be allowed to settle the issue in
advance; otherwise it runs the risk of being a dogmatic prejudice that cuts off
vital resources for theological reflection.12 We need to wait and see what can be
garnered from conceptual analysis. We shall, in fact, see that there is much
illumination in store for us on this front.
More importantly, there are two substantial reasons for taking conceptual issues
very seriously. First, many of the disputes about divine action often look very
much like verbal disputes which can be diminished if not resolved by careful
attention to the concepts in play. Folk simply talk past one another because
there is equivocation or fundamental disagreement on the terms in which the
issues are expressed. The track record of conceptual analysis from Plato
onwards should strengthen our hopes that this will be the case with divine
action. Worries about abstraction or objections that make much of the
distraction if not irrelevance of fine distinctions have their place; but they (p.7)
can be readily dissolved. There is no escaping the hard work of conceptual
analysis; there is a place for standing back and paying careful attention to the
concepts we use to think and speak of divine action.
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Divine Agency and Divine Action
Second, it is very clear that the conceptual apparatus in and around talk of
action has a history. Aristotle has a very rich vision of causation that was put to
use by many Christian theologians, yet it does not exactly map more recent ways
of thinking about action and causation. Aquinas, to take a later example of a
theological genius who readily deployed Aristotelian categories, uses the idea of
“act” in a way that is very strange to contemporary ears. He held that God
should be construed as “Pure Act.” This is not an easy concept of God to
understand, yet it remains a concept that shows up regularly in efforts to make
sense of divine action. To take a very different example, if R. G. Collingwood was
right on the origination of our causal discourse, it may well be that our standard
use of “cause” was invented by extending the use of “action” as applied to
human agents to its use in the natural world. Conceptual excavation may,
therefore, turn out to be pivotal in untying the kind of intellectual cramp we
readily experience when it comes to divine action.13 When added to the
deployment of more recent work in action theory, we have very good grounds for
insisting on the critical significance of conceptual work. Such work enables us to
name the problems we face, to identify crucial errors that recur, to spot blind
alleys that have led us astray, and to find ways to make progress in our
understanding.
It is clear, however, that conceptual analysis very quickly spills over into deeper
metaphysical inquiry. Analysis dovetails in the end with how we see the world as
a whole or how we see crucial elements within the world as a whole. Human
actions are performed by human agents; so we cannot avoid getting into
theories of human agency once we try to think about human action. This comes
through immediately in one of the seminal exponents of linguistic analysis as
applied to the language of human action. Thus J. L. Austin’s work was in part
driven by dissatisfaction with those visions of human action which saw action as
both determined and free at the same time.14 What was at stake was a theory of
human agency which saw agency as fully determined by the preceding necessary
and sufficient conditions. The motivation behind this was obvious: human agents
were at bottom no different from the kind of natural agents that were the
subject of ordinary empirical and scientific description, explanation, and possibly
prediction. The proposal that Austin set out to demolish was not simply an
observation about action discourse; it (p.8) involved a theory (or family of
theories) which has enormous ramifications for human freedom, human
responsibility, human resentment,15 and the host of topics that swirl around
these notions. His own alternative, however underdeveloped, had equally robust
ramifications.
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Divine Agency and Divine Action
In addition, once one looks carefully at the language in which action discourse is
lodged, one quickly runs into such topics as intentions, desires, volitions,
passions, motives, sensations, consciousness, and the like. These clearly involve
reference to the inner workings of human agents that take one deep into
theories of human nature; they were a serious problem for purely behaviorist or
quasi-behaviorist accounts of human agency, as Gilbert Ryle discovered in the
response to his seminal work on actions and volitions in The Concept of Mind.16
We are off into a world of anthropology and metaphysics;17 we may even find
ourselves reaching into the world of literature, narrative,18 and hermeneutics to
make progress. It would obviously be unwise at this point not to follow wherever
our inquiries lead us.
These observations are readily confirmed when we enter the world of divine
action and divine agency. In the early days of the discussion one of the first
problems to be resolved was that of the coherence of the very idea of divine
action. Given that many believed that action requires bodily movements to be
coherent as actions, the idea of divine action could not get off the ground
because God was incorporeal. It was relatively easy to dispose of this worry
without taking the drastic step of proposing the world as God’s body,19 even
though that option is still alive and well. However, the interesting point is that
the critics were appealing to certain features of the divine nature to make their
case. The issue was as much about the nature of God as it was about the logic of
action discourse. The material nature of the dispute became even clearer when
Schubert Ogden and others fixed on “classical theism” as the real elephant in
the room when it came to resolving problems of divine action. It quickly
emerged that Ogden and many others believed that the only intellectually
responsible way forward was to develop a solution to the problem of (p.9)
divine action by using the resources of Process metaphysics.20 Even then it was
not always clear how far the issue was conceptual and how far ontological or
metaphysical. This move to mine the resources of Process philosophy is also still
very much alive today. In this instance there can be no ignoring the move into
metaphysical inquiry as inescapable. Precisely how deep we should go into
metaphysics and in what manner we should deploy its resources are clearly very
important issues.
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