Divine and Human Action

This study, which was presented at a symposium on Josef Smolík, first analyses how this author understood the prophetic role of the Church. According to Smolík, the prophetic charism makes it possible to discern God’s will for the congregation, the church, and the individual. Smolík, however, refuses to understand the prophetic role of the church as the ability to deduct God’s action from history, or even to look into the details of God’s intentions for the world. Rather, the role of prophecy is to encourage the believer to find his place in a complex world and to develop the right attitude toward it. It seems that the issue of prophecy is not very prominent in the current theological discussion. This is due, among other things, to the great upheavals that the doctrine of providence has undergone in the last century under the pressure of historical catastrophes. Theology has not only learned to be reluctant to attempts at a theology of history, but has also challenged the traditional doctrine of God’s action in the world. Several models of God’s action can be distinguished in today’s debate, of which the communicative model, resting on God’s appeal and human response to it, has gained much resonance. This also brings the topic of prophecy back into play, albeit in a different context. The communicative model succeeds in defending God’s action against the objections of natural science and in giving adequate space to human free action, but at the cost of abandoning the traditional notion of God’s rule over history.

Reviewed by: Évangile et Providence: Une théologie de l’action de Dieu by Emmanuel Durand Michael J. Dodds, O.P. Évangile et Providence: Une théologie de l’action de Dieu. By Emmanuel Durand. Paris: Cerf, 2014. Pp. 345. €35.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-2-204-10201-8. Emmanuel Durand offers a refreshing perspective on the question of divine action, so much discussed in recent years in the dialogue between theology and science. While not neglecting the fruit of that discussion, his framing of the question under the headings of “Gospel” and “Providence” opens a new vista that is evident in his opening question: “What theology of Providence is needed today for the Gospel of salvation?” (7). Although contemporary theology readily affirms the biblical proclamation of God’s universal offer of salvation, its account of God’s salvific action on behalf of each person has become “uncertain and problematic.” Discussions of divine “kenosis, self-limitation, retreat, and powerlessness” have led many to the conviction God’s action must somehow be “limited” (8). The result is the paradox of a limited God attempting to offer universal salvation. The remedy lies in the recovery of a correct understanding of “the sovereignty of God”—the God who acts not only in the “intimacy of human hearts” but also in and through the “happy and unhappy contingencies” of human life (8-9). Durand begins by placing the question of divine action in the context of contemporary theology and culture, considering first the relationship between divine and human action, then the question of God’s action in history, and finally the understanding of divine action that has surfaced in the dialogue between theology and science (chap. 1). His next task is to clarify the notion of “action” itself. This entails an account of analogy (chap. 2). The discussion then turns to the “creative reappropriation” (10) of three classical theologies of divine providence, those of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and John Henry Newman. This involves a careful consideration of the Confessions of Augustine, the Summa contra gentiles of Aquinas, and the sermons of Newman (chaps. 3-5). The flip side of the question of divine action is of course the problem of evil and why a God who is capable of overcoming evil does not do so. Durand proposes not to “resolve” (résoudre) such problems here, but simply to help us “press” (serrer) them (11) as a preparation for listening to what revelation may say of them (chap. 6). The question of evil serves as the background for the discussion of Scripture that follows, where aspects of the books of Wisdom, Luke, and John are considered (chap. 7). Durand concludes with a [End Page 133] constructive proposal for understanding Providence in the world as we find it today, afflicted with evil (chap. 8). Durand begins his book with a discussion of the widespread opinion in contemporary philosophy and theology that divine and human action are somehow opposed to or in competition with each other. He traces this notion to Sartre, arguing that it now seems to pervade our culture despite the efforts of theologians such as Sertillanges to refute it. God’s action in the world is thought to diminish as humanity matures historically. The sovereign God gives place to the suffering God, who can act only through the actions of humans. The contemporary notion of history itself poses problems for divine action. It is difficult to affirm God’s saving and directing action in history, when history itself has lost its direction: “The loss of confidence in the intelligibility of history also jeopardizes the representation of God as sovereign, cause, author, director or guarantor of history” (29). Finally, the ability of science to explain natural events has led some to the conviction that there is simply no room for God to act in the world without interfering with the order of scientific laws. Durand presents a fine summary and critique of the responses to this dilemma that have surfaced in the ongoing dialogue between theologians and scientists, especially under the auspices of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley (31-60). Durand...

This article looks at the different Hebrew terms used in connection with the stubbornness of the heart. Is there a difference between “making the heart strong” and “making the heart fat”? And what other verbs are used in these contexts where God is active in the hearts of human beings? It also asks how these divine actions are related to the actions of the respective humans. To do this, we will first look at the anthropological meaning of the term “heart” in the Old Testament and then relate this meaning to the different verbs used for God’s actions. The article starts with the assumption of a synchronic reading of the Old Testament and also tries to answer the question of whether or not there is also some change or development of the terms used for God’s working in the hearts of human beings throughout the different books of the Old Testament.

Amidst the plethora of approaches to ecumenical dialogue and church reunion over the last century, a common theme has been the depreciation of the classic Protestant distinction between the “visible” and “invisible” church. Often seen as privileging an abstract predestinarianism over the concrete lives and structures of church communities and underwriting a complacency about division that deprives Christians of any motive to ecumenical endeavor, the concept of the “invisible” church has been widely marginalized in favor of a renewed focus on the “visible” church as the true church. However, I argue that this stress on visible unity creates a pressure toward institutional forms of unity that ultimately privilege Roman Catholic ecclesiologies at the expense of Protestant ones, and thus fails of its ecumenical promise. Renewed attention to Reformational understandings of the relationship between divine grace and human action and the centrality and uniqueness of Christ as the foundation of the church, I argue, dispels some misunderstandings of the church’s “invisibility” and demonstrates the indispensability of the concept. I argue that this Reformational framework, which refuses to accept the empirical divisions of the Church as definitive and summons us to an ecumenism that belongs to the church’s sanctification, provides the best theological ground for ecumenical endeavor.

<i>Divine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism</i>. Thomas V. Morris

Divine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism.

Preface. Part I: The Project. 1. Human Nature. 2. Philosophical Anthropology. 3. Grammatical Investigation. 4. Philosophical Investigation. 5. Philosophy and 'Mere Words'. 6. A Challenge to the Autonomy of the Philosophical Enterprise: Quine. 7. The Platonic and the Aristotelian Traditions in Philosophical Anthropology. Part II: Substance. 1. Substances: Things. 2. Substances: Stuffs. 3. Substance-referring Expressions. 4. Conceptual Connections between Things and Stuffs. 5. Substances and their Substantial parts. 6. Substances Conceived as Natural Kinds. 7. Substances Conceived as a Common Logico-linguistic Category. 8. A Historical Digression: Misconceptions of the Category of Substance. Part III: Causation. 1. Causation: Humean, Neo-Humean and Anti-Humean. 2. On Causal Necessity. 3. Event Causation is not a Prototype. 4. The Inadequacy of Hume's Analysis: Observability, Spatio-temporal Relations, and Regularity. 5. The Flaw in the Early Modern Debate. 6. Agent Causation as Prototype. 7. Agent Causation is Only a Prototype. 8. Event Causation and Other Centres of Variation. 9. Overview. Part IV: Powers. 1. Possibility. 2. Powers of the Inanimate. 3. Active and Passive Powers of the Inanimate. 4. Power and its Actualization. 5. Power and its Vehicle. 6. First- and Second-order Powers Loss of Power. 7. Human Powers: Basic Distinctions. 8. Human Powers: Further Distinctions. 9. Dispositions. Part V: Agency. 1. Inanimate Agents. 2. Inanimate Needs. 3. Animate Agents: Needs and Wants. 4. Volitional Agency: Preliminaries. 5. Doings, Acts and Actions. 6. Human Agency and Action. 7. A Historical Overview. 8. Human Action as Agential Causation of Movement. Part VI: Teleology and Teleological Explanation. 1. Teleology and Purpose. 2. What Things have a Purpose?. 3. Purpose and Axiology. 4. The Beneficial. 5. A Historical Digression: Teleology and Causality. Part VII: Reasons and Explanation of Human Action. 1. Rationality and Reasonableness. 2. Reason, Reasoning and Reasons. 3. Explaining Human Behaviour. 4. Explanation in Terms of Agential Reasons. 5. Causal Mythologies. Part VIII: The Mind. 1. Homo loquens. 2. The Cartesian Mind. 3. The Nature of the Mind. Part IX: The Self and the Body. 1. The Emergence of the Philosophers' Self. 2. The Illusions of the Philosophers' Self. 3. The Body. 4. The Relationship between Human Beings and their Bodies. Part X: The Person. 1. The Emergence of the Concept. 2. An Unholy Trinity: Descartes, Locke and Hume. 3. Changing Bodies and Switching Brains: Puzzle Cases and Red Herrings. 4. The Concept of a Person. Index

This paper exposes some of the important influences of Malebranche's thinking in Leibniz's philosophy. The relationship between the Reign of Grace and the Reign of Nature unveils the limits of human action, which is part of the idea of the world system. Malebranche well determines with the concept of simple to describe the universe and its designs. As the laws governing the universe, this logic of simplicity and also of its wealth of. This text demonstrates how a concept is formed to construct the very notion of the universe and divine action.

The acquisition of sensory information about the world is a dynamic and interactive experience, yet the majority of sensory research focuses on perception without action and is conducted with participants who are passive observers with very limited control over their environment. This approach allows for highly controlled, repeatable experiments and has led to major advances in our understanding of basic sensory processing. Typical human perceptual experiences, however, are far more complex than conventional action-perception experiments and often involve bi-directional interactions between perception and action. Innovations in virtual reality (VR) technology offer an approach to close this notable disconnect between perceptual experiences and experiments. VR experiments can be conducted with a high level of empirical control while also allowing for movement and agency as well as controlled naturalistic environments. New VR technology also permits tracking of fine hand movements, allowing for seamless empirical integration of perception and action. Here, we used VR to assess how multisensory information and cognitive demands affect hand movements while reaching for virtual targets. First, we manipulated the visibility of the reaching hand to uncouple vision and proprioception in a task measuring accuracy while reaching toward a virtual target (n = 20, healthy young adults). The results, which as expected revealed multisensory facilitation, provided a rapid and a highly sensitive measure of isolated proprioceptive accuracy. In the second experiment, we presented the virtual target only briefly and showed that VR can be used as an efficient and robust measurement of spatial memory (n = 18, healthy young adults). Finally, to assess the feasibility of using VR to study perception and action in populations with physical disabilities, we showed that the results from the visual-proprioceptive task generalize to two patients with recent cerebellar stroke. Overall, we show that VR coupled with hand-tracking offers an efficient and adaptable way to study human perception and action.

1. Introduction 2. 'Life from the third dimension': Human action in Barth's early ethics 3. 'The great disruption': Word of God and moral consciousness in Barth's Munster ethics 4. 'The firmest grasp of the real': Barth on original sin 5. 'Assured and patient and cheerful expectation': Barth on Christian hope as the Church's task 6. Freedom in Limitation: Human freedom and false necessity in Barth 7. Eloquent and radiant: The prophetic office of Christ and the mission of the Church 8. 'The grammar of doing': Luther and Barth on human agency 9. Justification, analogy and action: Barth and Luther in Jungel's anthropology Further Reading Index of names

Summary Christians often presume that immediate and universally extensive divine governance of human behavior is incompatible with human agency and responsibility. Against this presumption, Kathryn Tanner argues for a distinctive metalinguistic paradigm whereby Christians can coherently speak of God’s transcendence in such a way that divine action could never in principle ‘compete’ with human action. Thus, it is said, God can comprehensively will each human action without thereby compromising significant human freedom and corresponding moral responsibility. In this article, it is argued that Tanner’s non-competitivist paradigm fails to circumvent a theological version of the ‘direct argument’ for the incompatibility between human moral responsibility and causal determinism.

A number of philosophical perspectives, such as deep ecology, posthumanism, and new materialisms, to name a few, have challenged the deep-rooted anthropocentric assumptions about human exceptionalism. Yet these non-anthropocentric perspectives must still find a place for human action; they require clear conceptualisations of human action and agency. It is generally acknowledged that human beings have a weighty moral responsibility for correcting the current global ecological crisis. For more than two millennia, theories of praxis supplied conceptualisations of action for the good of humankind. In this paper, we argue that the non-anthropocentric perspectives can be substantially extended and enhanced by a new theory of transformative praxis that breaks through the anthropocentric limit imposed by the notion of ‘the good for humankind’ to embrace collective human action for planetary well-being. We call this approach a praxis orientation to environmental education.

Physical theories have their most fundamental expression as action integrals. This suggests that the total action of the Universe is the most fundamental physical quantity, and hence finite. In this article it is argued that finite universal action implies that the Universe is spatially closed. Further, the possible spatial topologies, the types of matter that can dominate the early universe dynamics, and the form of any quadratic additions to the lagrangian of general relativity are constrained. Initial and final cosmological curvature singularities are required to avoid a universal action singularity.

Dramatic alterations to the natural environment due to human activity have produced a permanent rupture in the Earth system; the relative stable epoch of the Holocene has given way to a volatile Anthropocene. Acceptance of these claims means that we now live in this altered physical reality, inviting us to rethink how we conceptualise disasters. Yet, disaster scholars have been hesitant to apply the Anthropocene label and to acknowledge the profound changes that it can bring to the study of disasters. This paper queries whether this label is a necessary adage or unnecessary baggage for disaster studies by examining the possibilities and the challenges associated with engaging with the Anthropocene. An analysis of the concepts, causes, and consequences of disasters reveals how the Anthropocene provides, as the very least, a theoretical heuristic for challenging linear temporal assumptions, the epistemological status of uncertainty, and the location of agency in disaster studies.

This essay examines longstanding, widely circulated arguments regarding blocked futurity in relation to emerging forms of temporal experience associated with financialization. From ambivalent conservative accounts of the ‘end of history’ to the grim repetition diagnosed on the Left as ‘capitalist realism’, divergent accounts of post-1960s culture have focused on what I call ‘static time’, or an experience of time in which human agency is no longer operative because meaningful change cannot be created. Although versions of static time continue to proliferate in academic discourse, liquidity and financialization produce forms of individual temporality that operate very differently. When we make the conceptual parameters of static time explicit, I suggest, it becomes more possible to read for the forms of temporalized human action that these parameters may prevent us from noticing. These forms include what I call suffering agency, or the experience of individually chosen, consequential human action as horrific and unwelcome, and life-interest, or the production of individual binary decisions made in relation to survival. Rather than being inaccessible or unshaped by human efficacy, the future here bears down in the form of negative results directly caused and deliberately chosen by the individual in question. In this form of ‘punitive futurity’, individuals experience temporalized forms of distress keyed to the willed unfolding of their own choices over time. By reading punitive futurity in relation to what Lisa Adkins calls ‘speculation as a rationality’, I argue that this temporal form serves as an increasingly crucial means by which individuals experience their subjection within contemporary capital.