Divine and Human Agency in Calvin’s Institutes

This article focuses on Karl Barth's mature doctrine of baptism, as it is developed in the final part-volume of theChurch Dogmatics. Published in 1967 (English translation in 1969) as a fragment of the ethics of the doctrine of reconciliation, Barth's theology of baptism is not without its controversy. Among the critiques that the baptism fragment has generated, one of the most significant concerns is over its presentation of the relation between divine agency and human agency. The formal division in the baptism fragment (and its sharp distinction between ‘Spirit baptism’ and ‘water baptism’) is taken to imply an uncharacteristic separation of divine agency and human agency, which renders his doctrine of baptism inconsistent with other areas of his thought. The argument proposed in this article, however, is that better clarity as to what Barth is theologically up to in the baptism fragment can be gained by reading his mature theology of baptism in connection with his theology of prayer. Barth's theology of prayer is rich and extensive. Although very present across all of his writings, his thinking on prayer (and indeed theChurch Dogmaticsitself) culminates in an intriguing set of meditations on the petitions of the Lord's Prayer. Although unfinished, these lectures on prayer were published posthumously asThe Christian Lifein 1976 (English translation 1981). Together with his doctrine of baptism and his unwritten doctrine of the Lord's Supper, the finished lectures on prayer would have formed the ethics of reconciliation. Importantly, Barth insists that baptism and the Lord's Supper were to be understood not only in the context of prayer but actually as prayer, as ‘invocation’. Rooted in the motif of ‘correspondence’, which is deployed at a number of key points throughout theChurch Dogmatics, Barth's theology of invocation is based on a highly participative account of the divine–human relation: divine agency and human agency ‘correspond’ in the crucible of prayer. From the perspective provided by his writings on prayer, invocation and the motif of the ‘correspondence’ of divine and human agency, this article revisits the critique that Barth unduly separates divine and human agency in the baptism fragment.

Søren Kierkegaard’s authorship exhibits two different trajectories concerning the relation of responsible human agency to sovereign divine agency: one trajectory stresses free human striving, while the other trajectory emphasizes the dominance of divine agency. The first theme led to the view of Kierkegaard as the champion of autonomous existential “leaps,” while the second led to the construal of Kierkegaard as a devout Lutheran who trusted absolutely in God’s gracious governance. Lee C. Barrett argues that Kierkegaard, influenced by Kant’s critique of metaphysics, did not attempt to integrate human and divine agencies in any speculative theory. Instead, Kierkegaard deploys them to encourage different passions and dispositions that can be integrated in a coherent human life, making use of literary strategies to foster the different passions and dispositions that are associated with the themes of human responsibility and divine governance. Kierkegaard on God’s Will and Human Freedom: An Upbuilding Antinomy offers an incisive account of what makes Kierkegaard’s conception of theology as a matter of edification rather than speculation so distinctive and enduringly worthwhile.

Recently there has been rising interest in the doctrine of providence with a number of significant texts being published in English. In general, these and past treatments consolidate established discussions (such as those concerning divine action and causality, human and divine agency and the problem of suffering) rather than engaging liberative theologies of any variety. This article aims to demonstrate how liberative theologies can extend the scope of the study of this doctrine in fruitful ways. In particular, it demonstrates the potential of Jon Sobrino's explication of the Reign of God to reframe explorations of providence around opposition to God's will (described as the anti‐Reign) and the corporate nature of discernment, suggesting that providence is revealed in concrete connection to anthropology and sin in the real world. This reorients reflections on providence towards the theo‐political and practical resistance to the anti‐Reign and participation in the Reign of God in the present reality.

In this article I engage with Kathryn Tanner's theological framework for understanding God's agency, focusing on the way her rules of non‐contrastive transcendence and non‐competitive immanence govern her account of God's acts of creation, providence, incarnation, and atonement. I argue that Tanner's account of God as beneficent gift‐giver uniquely confronts a problem of providential evil and offers a revised framework better able to incorporate the inexplicable existence of divinely sanctioned human suffering under sin and death. Central to the revised picture is a recognition of the deeply ambiguous character of God's providential order and a concept of incarnational solidarity suited to that reality. Finally, I highlight an explanatory advantage that my revised picture has over Tanner's in answering what William R. Jones called a “multievidential objection” to the claim of liberation theologians that under conditions of social and political evil God takes sides with the oppressed.

Construction of authenticity in Islamic law on contentious issues including gender-related issues is an outcome of an intricate and complex process of interaction between the divine and human agency situated in a specific sociopolitical context. The divine text is not monolithic and is susceptible of various interpretations. It is this interpretative space, which is employed by scholars coming from various backgrounds to articulate their authenticities. Hence, we do not find one authentic perspective on any issue. Without preferring one perspective to others, the paper aims to analyze the process of constructive mechanics by engaging with the issues of polygamy, dissolution of marriage by divorce and khul‘, and women’s participation in the political domain. For this purpose, it has attempted to deconstruct the constructive process of authenticities relating to these issues with an object to discern how mush these authenticities are the product of the divine agency and where they are influenced by a human agency located in a specific context.

Maurice Blondel’s Action (1893) illustrates that the phenomenon of superstition inveigles its way into all forms of human activity, even intellectual pursuits like philosophy and theology, when they insulate themselves from the transcendent in human self-sufficiency. This essay explores how superstition is a constant threat for sacramental theology, manifest in particular, when the heterogeneity of human and divine agency in sacramental synergy is blurred or ignored. It argues that Blondel’s philosophical acumen permits a retrieval of vital insights of the scholastic synthesis, especially the careful distinction between divine agency ( opus operatum) and human agency ( opus operantis) in the sacramental act.

The Conversion of St. Francis and the Writing of Christian Biography, 1228-12631 John W. Coakley (bio) In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the awakening of literary interest in human interiority and self-awareness2 had an important but as yet little-studied effect on the literature of hagiographical biography.3 This was a literature that, from its late-antique origins, had been focused more on divine agency than on human agency; in it, as Theodor Wolpers has written, even though the saintly subject is “presented as an earthly being of natural contingency,” still “what is sought after in him, as he raises himself above the range of secondary causes into the causae primae, is ‘the effects of God’.”4 But with the newly increased attentiveness to inner life as a matter of interest in its own right, the “natural contingency” of biographical subjects began to loom larger in the view of their biographers. Divine agency, though still the sine qua non of hagiographical narrative, had to share the stage increasingly [End Page 27] with human agency—a major development in the idea of Christian biography. The sequence of early narratives of the “conversion” of Francis of Assisi—for present purposes understood as the formative events in Francis’s life that preceded the founding of the Franciscan brotherhood5--stands as a prominent case of this increased interest in human agency on the part of the biographers. These narratives give us, through comparison, a glimpse of what choices biographers made and what was at stake in making them. The first account of the conversion is the one that opens the Life of Francis6 written by Thomas of Celano in about 1228. Substantial revisions of that account then appeared in the interrelated works that we know as, respectively, the Anonymous of Perugia,7 the Legend of the Three Companions,8 and Thomas’s own Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul,9 all dating from the 1240s, and finally the subsequent revision in the official Major Legend10 by St. Bonaventure, completed in 1263.11 All of these are among the sources for the life of Francis that have been the subject [End Page 28] of more than a century of intense scholarly scrutiny, which has gone far toward clarifying their relation to each other and shown how they reflect the vigorous debate in their time within and beyond the Franciscan order, over the intentions and significance of the historical Francis.12 Here I will argue that that, precisely in their attempts to present the historical Francis as the authors understood him, these texts show us another related though largely implicit debate, this one about the nature of hagiographical narrative itself, and by extension about any narrative of human formation. It was Thomas’s initial account that set the terms. By placing the acts of God within Francis’s intimate experience in his early years, and accessing them only through Francis’s self-perceptions, Thomas of Celano located God’s effects within the very structure of the self. This is an approach that contrasts with hagiographical tradition prior to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in its radically exclusive attention to the subjectivity of the saint, but retains, even intensifies, a traditional hagiographical sense of the primacy of divine agency. The revisers of Thomas’s original narrative then, choosing against this configuration of divine and human, attempted more naturalistic depictions of the saint that made his behavior explicable in human terms, and construed the divine as a separate presence in the narrative to which the narrator has access, but which stands now in a sphere distinct from the saint’s self-contained human integrity. What was at stake here was thus how to represent Francis himself in narrative terms, but also more broadly how to narrate human experience itself in relation to what transcends it. [End Page 29] The Conversion Narrative in the “Life of Francis” by Thomas of Celano The learned friar Thomas of Celano13 completed his Life of Francis sometime after 16 July, 1228, the date of the saint’s canonization, and probably before 25 February of the following year.14 It is a work remarkable for...

The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon by Bruce Lindley McCormack, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2021, pp. xi + 316, £29.99, hbk

ABSTRACTThis article contextualizes Francis Turretin’s (1623–87) doctrine of sin, and in particular his understanding of sin as a punishment for sin. Specifically, it elaborates on the theological context into which Turretin speaks. Through analyzing Turretin’s historical situation, it progresses to the content of Turretin’s theology in light of his theological and political opponents. Utilizing Turretin’s Institutes of Elenctic Theology (1679–1685), St Augustine’s Contra Julianum, and John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, amongst others, this article evaluates Turretin’s view of the doctrine of sin and its relation to medieval and early-modern European theology. Ultimately, it argues that Turretin’s view of sin as a punishment of sin is born from his understanding of God’s holiness being demonstrated through his ‘vindicatory justice’ and Turretin’s self-understanding as an ‘orthodox’ theologian in the grand tradition of Western theology extending back to the Church Fathers.

God is relying on, even dependent on, something in creation to reveal Godself, and creation and specific creational modes of being are the ways in which God reveals Godself in specific ways. This approach offers us a richer and more nuanced picture of the interplay between. divine and human agency. All God’s actions in order to manifest Godself as love can be seen as a result of the many and diverse actions and practices that God has allowed to emerge though evolution, both in the totality of creation and through capacities for human agency. It may also help to overcome interventionist conceptions of the relation between God and the world, or the idea that God is only present at specific instances or in specific acts. The article draws on recent emergence theory in order to overcome the distinction between mind and body, and recent social practice theory that underscores the composite and manifold, individual-transcending conditions for human social practices. Taken together, these may be used in order to develop theological contributions pointing towards relationality and participation further with regard to the understanding of divine agency.

King Saul was not only Israel’s first monarch, but he was also her first sacrilegious ruler, a point on which the two historiographical books in the Hebrew Bible agree. However, each respective corpus delineates Saul’s portrayal in uneven and distinctive representations, varying in theological perspective and emphasis. 1 Samuel presents a complex account of Saul’s rise to power and his subsequent fall from divine favor, and culminates with Saul’s battlefield suicide. 1 Chronicles, however, shows no interest in Saul’s life, but begins and ends with his suicide. Though Chronicles uses the antecedent Samuel as a source, the story of Saul’s suicide and its ramifications experience a conceptual metamorphosis, resulting in considerable shifts in the perception of human and divine agency. Relatedly, Chronicles is temporally posterior to Samuel, finding its inception following the Judean restoration in the Second Temple period’s postexilic milieu. This paper seeks to uncover these shifts manifested in Chronicles by elucidating each account, highlighting the relationship between human and divine agency. Attention to the shifts yields a different sacrilegious Saul and an altered concept of divine transcendence, both birthed in the cradle of the Judean community in the Second Temple period.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Visionary Religion and Radicalism in Early Industrial England: From Southcott to Socialism . By Philip Lockley . New York : Oxford University Press , 2013. xvi + 298 pp. $125 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesIn this compelling, archive-driven work, Philip Lockley the dominant interpretations of Southcottian millenarianism. He takes particular aim at E. P. Thompson's dismissal of the movement's followers as deluded (vii). The book argues that paying attention to Southcottians' religious experiences and theology between 1815 and 1840 overturns many of historians' assumptions about the relationship between popular religion, radical politics, and agency.Lockley reveals that the two main strands of separately developed a theology of engagement with the political and social realms. Both sought to transform the world. The supposed despair of millenarian religion did not sabotage personal agency and politics. Rather, Southcottian theology came to encourage believers to use human action to improve the world and to participate in social radicalism. Lockley rejects the notion that there was a transition from religious to secular attitudes in politics. Instead, Southcottians' engagement with the world stemmed from their theology. Their actions and motivations are comprehensible only in terms of their own lived religious experience.Lockley builds on Phyllis Mack's Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) to understand how divine and human agency could be understood as inter-relating rather than mutually exclusive concepts. In turn, this prompts him to propose a new heuristic framework for categorizing millennial beliefs. Instead of a simplistic divide between passive premillennialism and active postmillennialism, Lockley emphasizes how believers expected the millennium to come about (evolutionary vs. disruptive) and how they believed that they gained this knowledge about future events (interpretative vs. revelatory). A believer's position on the spectrums between these points shaped their attitude toward human or divine agency. Thus, premillennialists who anticipated an evolutionary chronology might embrace human agency instead of passivity.In addition to Southcottian archives, including an until now inaccessible collection of manuscript and rare printed materials, the book makes use of a creative range of sources such as Home Office spy reports, radical journals, and private correspondence. These sources lead Lockley to assert that the most influential interpretations of by E. P. Thompson, Barbara Taylor, and Iain McCalman are not supported by the evidence of Southcottians themselves. Thoroughly revisionist, the book challenges components of every other study of Southcottianism (15).These corrections include insights about the divisions within the movement after Joanna Southcott's death and the geographical spread of its adherents. Through a careful reexamination of membership rolls and the discovery of a major error in their previous interpretation, Lockley also suggests that the movement did not appeal to women in any distinctive way. Outside of a few southern communities, the gender ratio in mirrored that found among Methodists, Congregationalists, and Baptists.The book also argues that Southcottians were not necessarily poverty-stricken victims of the industrial revolution. The movement certainly included poor textile workers, but also attracted aristocrats, merchants, and families with capital and employees. survived in communities across decades and among families of means, countering the notion that millenarian beliefs flourished only temporarily during economic crises. …

Kant and Creation of Freedom: A Theological Problem. By Christopher J. Insole. Changing Paradigms Historical and Systematic Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. xiv + 264 pp. $125.00 (cloth).In this clear and well-organized volume, Insole argues that Kant's critical project was, part, generated by an irreducibly (p. 1). How can we coherently explain human freedom, given assertion that human beings are created by God?Chapters 2 through 5 provide core exposition of Insole's exegetical claim. Kant's view of divine freedom, despite shifting epistemic status, is constant across pre-critical and critical periods. Like Anselm, Kants view Gods perfect freedom is compatible with God being unable to do other than good (p. 26), where God is constrained by moral-metaphysical necessities internal to God's own nature. Kant, Insole remarks, has a positive and teleological conception of freedom simpliciter in his bones ... where what matters for freedom is that an agent wills good (p. 57).Kant's view of what constitutes meaningful human freedom continues to develop throughout his life. Originally a compatibilist, Insole argues, Kant comes to believe that human freedom requires both ultimate responsibility and ability to do otherwise (although this later feature of freedom is conceived of as a human failing). By Insole's reading, transcendental idealism develops to protect possibility of human freedom from physical determinism Newtonian science demands while protecting divine impassability from emanationism. Kant, Insole notes, comes to distinguish between human dependence on God (which does not threaten freedom) and human dependence on other created substances (which does). The possibility of meaningful human freedom, ultimately realized Kingdom of Ends Kant's mature view, is where noumenal self is dependent upon God alone, who enables reciprocal and nondependent interaction within a community of noumenal selves.Insole anticipates and replies to objections to more controversial aspects of this eonstrual of Kant. He addresses atemporal noumenal first causation and inexplicability of origins of evil when human freedom is construed as outside of space-time (chap. 6), and worries about status of Kant's belief God after 1770 (chap. 7). These are significant obstacles, but Insole presents his case a clear and well-cited way and even those who are not convinced by his reading will find Insole an articulate and well-versed opponent.In last three chapters, Insole turns to a fuller theological evaluation of Kant's mature position on divine-human interaction. Insole recites well-established evaluation that Kant's rational theology is hamstrung by limits Kant's epistemic discipline places on grace and atonement. Furthermore, Insole argues that Kant highlights the with problem (p. 226) when Insole considers what more can be known or hoped about divine action than creation and conservation, given Kant's articulation of human freedom within transcendental idealism. The argument between concurrentism and mere conservation stems from concerns about metaphysical possibility of meaningful human causality of events which are directly and sufficiently caused by divine agency. …

A Lutheran perspective on the Catholic–Methodist dialogue is complex, sometimes agreeing with one, sometimes with the other, and sometimes with neither. The dialogue is to be commended for integrating diverse elements and holding to the ecumenical goal of visible unity. While the dialogue discusses justification in language not typical of much twentieth-century Lutheran theology, its language is congruent with that of the Reformation itself. The most important issue raised from a Lutheran perspective by the dialogue is the interaction of human and divine agency in the mediation of salvation. Lutheran theology tends to distinguish sharply between divine and human agency and authority. The dialogue raises the question whether this distinction holds in such a sharp form in light of the incarnation and the outpouring of the Spirit. The issue comes to a focus in differing attitudes toward historical developments in the church.

This paper aims to offer a sympathetic reading of Berkeley’s often maligned account of human agency. The first section briefly revisits three options concerning the relationship between human and divine agency available to theistically minded philosophers in the medieval and early modern eras. The second argues that, of those three views, only the position of concurrentism is consistent with Berkeley’s texts. The third section explores Berkeley’s reasons for adopting concurrentism by highlighting three motivating considerations drawn from his larger philosophical system. Finally, the fourth section attempts to flesh out Berkeley’s understanding of human activity by looking at how we might understand his claim that “we move our legs ourselves” in light of his commitments to idealism and concurrentism.