Divine Action: Expected and Unexpected

Miracles are signs of God's power. Confusion about them comes from misunderstanding or doubting the relationship between God and creation rather than from science properly understood.     

Middlesex: A Pastoral Theological Reading

This article, written for the Group for New Directions in Pastoral Theology’s conference on the theme of “Emotion, Mood, and Temperament,” focuses on Middlesex, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, Professor of Creative Writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. The novel, set in 20th century America and written as a fictional memoir, is a coming-of-age story of Cal/Calliope, a man with an intersex condition caused by 5-alpha-reductase deficiency. The mission statement of the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) states that the organization is “devoted to systemic change to end shame, secrecy, and unwanted genital surgeries for people born with an anatomy that someone decided is not standard for male or female.” This essay employs the resources of pastoral theology to assist in the project of ending shame regarding intersex conditions by offering a pastoral theological reading of Middlesex. As such, this essay is an example of the discipline of pastoral theology being employed in the field of medical humanities in particular and the field of clinical humanities more broadly, and it also serves as an example as to how one might offer a pastoral theological reading of a novel.     

Divine Action and Quantum Theory

Recent articles by Nicholas Saunders, Carl Helrich, and Jeffrey Koperski raise important questions about attempts to make use of quantum mechanics in giving an account of particular divine action in the world. In response, I make two principal points. First, some of the most pointed theological criticisms lose their force if we attend with sufficient care to the limited aims of proposals about divine action at points of quantum indetermination. Second, given the current state of knowledge, it remains an open option to make theological use of an indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics. Any such proposal, however, will be an exploratory hypothesis offered in the face of deep uncertainties regarding the measurement problem and the presence in natural systems of amplifiers for quantum effects.     

Divine Action and the Natural Sciences

The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences and the Vatican Observatory have jointly sponsored a series of conferences exploring the overarching question: How can we conceive a personal God creating and active within the universe described by the natural sciences? The volumes include significant contributions to the field, although I highlight two important weaknesses: (1) theology is not adequately respected as an active conversation partner capable of advancing the agenda under discussion; and (2) insufficient attention is paid to the many scientific and philosophical uncertainties that plague the overall project.     

Evolutionary Theologies and Divine Action1

Abstract

Two challenges loom large for efforts to develop a theology of evolution. The first is the problem of purpose: can evolutionary processes, in which chance plays so prominent a role, be understood as the context of God's purposive action? The second is the problem of the pervasiveness of suffering and death in evolution. To the extent that we succeed in responding to the first difficulty by giving an account of how God's purposes are enacted in the history of life, we deepen the conundrum about God's relation to natural evils. In particular, if we embrace evolution as God's clever way of making life make itself, we will find it difficult to sustain the classical theological claim that death is a disruptive interloper in God's good creation.     

Divine Immutability,Divine Action and the God–World Relation

In his thought‐provoking critique of classical Christian theism, Isaak Dorner argues that a traditional understanding of God's immutability precludes any diversity in God's action and presence in the world. Dorner reasons that the view of God developed in scholastic thought entails a ‘uniform’ divine causality in which God cannot act in new and distinct ways according to the various circumstances of his creatures. This sort of critique elicits the question of whether God's immutability, if taken to include his pure actuality, flattens out his action such that he is no longer truly engaged in the lives of his creatures. In this article, I propose that a development of the virtual distinction found in scholastic theology proper will enable us to integrate (1) the pure actuality of God and (2) what we may call the formal and temporal diversity of God's action pro nobis that confirms his authentic involvement in the world. Unfolding the explanatory power of the virtual distinction will require considering its relationship to the concept of God's pure actuality and analyzing different aspects of divine action in which the diversity of that action might be located.     

Politics and Miracle: Radical Democracy and Non-Interventionist Divine Action

This paper elucidates Nancey Murphy's theology of special divine action in order to show its unique coherence as well as explore some political implications of this theory. Besides showing itself to be a fruitful conceptualization of both “the miraculous” and the natural world, this paper argues that Murphy's insights can be extended to address a pressing question in contemporary political theology: the nature and function of power in increasingly pluralistic societies. The upshot, drawing on the connection between conceptualizations of miracle and sovereignty made by Carl Schmitt, is that Murphy's non-interventionist theory of divine action at the quantum level “fits” with an equally non-interventionist account of political authority from below, at the level of an active, democratically engaged citizenry.     

Theological and Secular Meta-Narratives of Politics: Anabaptist Origins Revisited (Again)

Until recently, scholars both friendly and hostile to Anabaptism have agreed that its origins and development to the present time could be rendered in a coherent, continuous narrative, making Anabaptist identity relatively unproblematic. This consensus has broken down. The present essay seeks to show how newer, ostensibly "objective" social-science accounts of Anabaptism in fact offer a secular counter-narrative to the Anabaptists' accounts of their own activity. This seemingly confined dispute over Anabaptist origins and identity leads to a wider consideration of the significance of both Christian and social-scientific uses of meta-narratives or "narrative bases" in political and ethical reflection.     

Gregory of Nyssa and Divine Simplicity: A Conceptualist Reading

Andrew Radde‐Gallwitz probes Gregory of Nyssa on divine simplicity, a topic that Radde‐Gallwitz treated earlier in a book‐length monograph and takes further here in response to critics. As he notes, the Cappadocians and their opponents shared belief in divine simplicity. But for Gregory, simplicity functions as part of affirming the co‐equal divinity of the Father and Son, against his opponents. Radde‐Gallwitz lists six negative claims that Gregory’s understanding of divine simplicity supports: (1) God is immaterial; (2) God is without parts; (3) God does not possess any perfection “by acquisition”; (4) God does not possess any perfection “by participation”; (5) in God, there is no mixture or conflux of qualities, especially opposite qualities; (6) in God, there are no degrees of more or less. Yet with regard to positive statements about God’s perfections—for example the relation of God’s goodness to God’s wisdom—things are more difficult, as Radde‐Gallwitz shows. Interpreters of Gregory have differed sharply on this issue, in part because Gregory does not make his position crystal clear. Radde‐Gallwitz himself earlier held that Gregory considers God to have real but non‐definitive perfections distinct from the divine essence. Indebted to Richard Cross, however, Radde‐Gallwitz here adjusts his view, distinguishing more firmly between the divine essence itself and our limited concepts. He draws upon the Platonic distinction between natural and conventional naming, which differ in their accounts of what makes words meaningful. Arguing that Gregory is a “naturalist,” he reads Gregory’s texts on divine simplicity in this light.     

Nurturing Faith for Action: Theological Education and Global Responsibility

Ghana hopes to parlay the financial promises of oil recovery into a better life for its people. If Ghana succeeds, it would be a model for the developing world. But Ghana's capacity to overcome poverty and support human dignity will be stronger if the rest of us who also hold that value commit more truly to it. As people of faith, as leaders of institutions, as educators, we face substantive questions about how our own actions, business decisions, and consumptive practices contribute to the larger issues of oil, consumerism, and planetary health. A course that asks not just Christian scholars and clergy, but leaders of theological institutions, church bodies, businesses, and others, to consider an ethical, paradigmatic shift toward a whole‐world ethic of well‐being is in order.     

The Solubility of Salt: A Divine Action Account

In the burgeoning literature on dispositions, solubility is a standard example. In this paper we give a rigorous theistic divine action account of the simple mechanism of the dissolving of salt, NaCl, into the ions Na⁺ and Cl^?. We explore this reaction in terms of an alternative view of divine action, Divine Compositionalism, which holds that the functioning of every physical, chemical, and biological mechanism in the universe is a manifesting complex disposition, which is nothing other than ways God acts according to plan.