Cramps are painful, and they can stop you in your tracks. To get rid of them, you have got to get out of the uncomfortable position you are in, or drink some water, or take some medication. This, those who have had long aeroplane journeys in economy, or those who have gone out running in the heat, or those who get menstrual cramps, know. So much is familiar from our physical lives. But, according to William J. Abraham, we have developed a cramp in our mental lives, too, a ‘mental cramp’, as he often says with respect to our thinking about divine agency and divine action. In the first volume of a planned four-volume systematic theology, Abraham diagnoses how it is we came to have this cramp, and in the second volume, he provides therapy for it, by getting us out of the uncomfortable position we've put ourselves into, providing us with water to drink and medicine to heal us. After these two volumes, our mental cramp, if Abraham has been successful, is, we might say, in remission. We await the third and fourth volumes to bring us back to full mental health with respect to our thinking about divine agency and divine action. In this review, I will outline Abraham's diagnosis of our mental cramp and how he goes about putting it in remission. I will conclude by raising some challenges for Abraham's project.
In the first volume of his systematic theology, subtitled ‘Exploring and Evaluating the Debate’, Abraham does precisely that: he explores and evaluates the debate concerning divine agency and divine action. But to say that he does this is something of an understatement. For I have come across few, if any, who can better summarize and evaluate a debate, at least the current debate concerning divine action. Abraham is a most careful reader, who shows the fruits of this reading by explaining the major positions on divine agency and divine action clearly, concisely, accurately, and, most importantly, sympathetically, before evaluating these positions in a challenging and constructive way. He does all this with good humour, memorable metaphors, and witty turns of phrase, so that his generous personality shines through his prose. For this reason, among others, reviewing these volumes is equally a great privilege and a great challenge, for I aspire to be as good a reader as Abraham, as good an explainer as Abraham, and as good an evaluator as Abraham. That is not to say that I agree with all of Abraham's evaluations. Far from it. But it is hard not to be impressed with how well Abraham is able to enter into another's intellectual world and present it as if it is his own before offering what he thinks is a better one. Enough by way of admiration for Abraham and his work. Let us get to exploring and evaluating his own project.
In the first volume, Abraham tries to show how it is that we got ourselves into this uncomfortable position that has resulted in a mental cramp concerning our thinking about divine agency and divine action. Just as you want to know right away what is wrong when you go to the doctor, so Abraham tells us right away what is wrong with our thinking about divine agency and divine action: we have assumed that action is a closed concept, such that there are necessary and sufficient conditions for something being an action, and we have assumed that an analysis (conceptual, metaphysical, and epistemological) of human action will also serve as an analysis of divine action. Both of these assumptions are wrong. Action is an open rather than a closed concept, such that, while there are sufficient conditions for something being an action, there are no necessary conditions for something being an action. In addition, instead of understanding divine action in terms of human action, we need to understand divine action on its own terms. What has got us into this position is an insufficient attention to the many examples of how God has acted, particularly as attested to in Scripture, and an insufficient attention to how our theological forebears have understood divine action in the past, which is the task of the second volume. But before going on to that, let us look in a bit more detail how Abraham thinks we got ourselves into this uncomfortable position.
He begins with how the Biblical Theology Movement of the 1960s thought about divine action, and what problems beset that thinking. Looming large here is the debate between George Ernest Wright (The God Who Acts), who champions the return to the Bible in theology and the life of the Church, and Langdon Gilkey (‘Cosmology, Ontology and the Travail of Biblical Language’), who questioned the coherence of this movement, and presented five questions that would guide subsequent thinking about divine action: How can we make sense, conceptually, of divine action? How, metaphysically, could God act? How could we know that God has acted? How can we distinguish between God's universal actions and his specific actions? How can we understand God's intentions in his actions?
Abraham then masterfully guides us through how philosophers and theologians have thought about these questions, the proposals they have made to answer them and the objections they have raised against these proposals, and how this thinking has resulted in our present mental cramp. To alleviate this cramp, we need to turn to ‘theological theology’, or ‘theology proper’, where we do not begin with assumptions about action being a closed concept, or divine action being understood in terms of human action. We begin with God, and what we know he has done for us. And there is no better place to begin, no better way to stretch our previously cramped minds, than with the rich theological tradition, which is our inheritance, and which we ought not squander.
After getting us out of this uncomfortable position which has stopped us in our tracks, Abraham turns to rehydrating us, with the water of the many ways God acts, as found especially in Scripture, and the medicine of attending to the tradition, in the second volume of this systematic theology, subtitled ‘Soundings in the Christian Tradition’. A sounding is an investigation, or a measurement of depth, and this volume is both of those things. In it, Abraham investigates how thinkers from Paul the Apostle to Luis de Molina thought about divine agency and divine action, and what they thought God did, from the creation of the world to the conversion of his creatures. This water of examples of divine action helps us to understand the many ways in which God acts, and this medicine of theological thinking about divine action helps us to understand how it is that God does these things. With Athanasius, the Cappadocians, and Augustine, we think about how God acts in our lives, particularly in salvation and through the Holy Spirit. With Maximus the Confessor, we think about how God acts in Christ, who is both fully human and fully divine. With Symeon the New Theologian, we think about how God acts with us in the spiritual life and in the sacraments. With Aquinas, we think about how God acts in the Eucharist. With Teresa of Avila, we think about how God acts in the soul. And with John Calvin and Luis de Molina we think about how God acts consistently with human freedom. With all these theologians, we begin to ‘have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth’ (Ephesians 3.18) of God's acting in the world. Reading Abraham's investigation of the Christian tradition on divine agency and divine action, one cannot help but be convinced of its depth and how shallow many of our discussions of divine agency and divine action have become in comparison.
With my exposition of Abraham's two volumes and appreciation of it completed, I turn to a note of disagreement. In his first volume, Abraham is rightly critical of philosophers who approach theological claims with pre-existing philosophical commitments, and with those commitments rule out even the possibility of the truth of those claims. As a philosopher myself, I join him in this criticism. It is the task of the philosopher, as I see it, to clarify theological claims, detect the philosophical problems they give rise to, offer philosophical solutions to those claims, and perform a comparative, cost/benefit analysis of them so that the theologian may select the best solution for their project. In this way, the philosopher is a helpmeet for the theologian. I think Abraham would share this vision of how philosophers and theologians can work together to advance theological thinking. The reason I think this is that, in his second volume, Abraham discusses Calvin's account of predestination, which requires a sophisticated account of divine and human causation that allows for both divine sovereignty and human responsibility. In this context, Abraham observes that Calvin's position
is underdeveloped . . . As a theologian he can leave it to philosophers to take up this research agenda and provide ancillary help to the theologian; they in turn can turn for help to secular accounts of the compatibility between determinism and human freedom. The threads of the latter proposal run all the way back to Aristotle. (181)
This seems to be more or less the account of how philosophers and theologians can work together to advance theological thinking I have just given.
If that is right, then I think his criticism of William P. Alston's account of divine action, given in volume I, is not successful. After carefully narrating Alston's theory of divine action, Abraham writes:
To be sure, in philosophical terms, this work is not at all meager and sparse; it involves in its own way a rich account of the concept of intentional action; it is the fruit of extensive philosophical reflection in the analytic mode . . . However, this operation tells us next to nothing about what to make of particular acts of God like creation, providence, forgiving us our sins, making atonement for our sins, promising us eternal life in the world to come, and on and on. Nothing in Alston's analysis helps us differentiate these actions, much less get a grip on what they might mean. This is not accidental. In the very nature of the case, this kind of analysis of the concept of action is not just meager and thin, it is utterly barren when it comes to the particularities of divine action. (123)
In response, even if Alston has not given an adequate philosophical account of divine action, I do not think he can be criticized for failing to give an adequate philosophical account of particular divine actions. For that was not his aim. He aimed to say, in philosophical terms, that is, clearly and rigorously, what it is for God to act, in particular, to act intentionally. Now, if we want to say further what it is for God to create, to exercise providential care over his creation, to forgive us our sins, to make atonement for our sins, to promise us eternal life in the world to come, and so on, we will need particular sub-theories of Alston's, or some other theory of divine action. And this is something a philosopher can do. It is just not what Alston aimed to do, at least not in the work under consideration. But once it has been specified what God has done in particular, we can go on to give a philosophical account of that particular divine action. So, when Abraham goes on to say,
As in the case of human action, we need to specify who the agent is, individuate what the agent has done, explore why he or she did it, and so on. On this important set of questions, that is the questions that were let loose in the wake of the claims of the Biblical Theology debacle, we are left entirely in the dark. On this score, on the problem of particularity, this kind of analytic philosophy has run out of gas in a big way; worse still, it looks as if there is no gas available at the gas station. (123)
I think he criticizes Alston, and analytic philosophers, in general, for not doing something it was not their job to do. In my view, it is for the theologian to say who God is (theology is, of course, the study of God, who is a person, and so the theologian is best placed to say who God is), and it is also for the theologian to say what God has done, and why God has done it. The philosopher can then help clarify what the theologian has said, noting philosophical problems, providing solutions to them, and evaluating those solutions, so that the theologian may give the best account of divine agency and divine action they can give. In this way, theologians and philosophers can work together, each needing one another, each part of the same body.
It may seem excessively nit-picky to isolate one criticism Abraham makes of one philosopher, when he deals with so many and offers so many points of evaluation of their work. But I think the point I make about how philosophers and theologians can work together may help us advance theological thinking on divine agency and divine action following volume II of Abraham's systematic theology. For, in volume II, Abraham delineated how our theological mentors thought about divine agency and divine action. As he is clear, these mentors are unabashedly theological, doing what Abraham would term ‘theology proper’, or what John Webster terms ‘theological theology’. In so doing, we find a variety of fascinating philosophical problems that our theological mentors have uncovered in thinking about particular divine actions, such as the Spirit's action in the Christian life and in the life of the church. As Abraham writes concerning Symeon the New Theologian's thought on this in volume II:
In both arenas it is a challenge to specify how precisely our central action predicates function. In the end we will need to be able to speak of the long-term action of the Spirit undergirding the journey from birth to death; equally we need to wrestle with what God does more specifically in personal encounter and in the sacramental practices of the church. (137)
This is something a philosopher can help a theologian do. A philosopher can help a theologian think about how a person might perceive God in their daily lives, how they might encounter him second-personally, and how they might share attention with him in the sacraments. Perception, second-personal encounter, and sharing attention are all things philosophers think about. And they can be brought to bear on making progress on Symeon the New Theologian's thoughts on how the Spirit engages with us, from birth to death, and how God works in and through the Church. It will be fascinating to see if anything like this appears in volume III of Abraham's systematic theology. I await the volume eagerly, and thank him for the gift of volumes I and II.
