Summary of Part I

Abstract

Extract Part I discussed the divine action debate (DAD) in terms of a three-stage development. In the first phase, scholars posed the question of the meaning of divine action. Does God really act in the world? This question was prompted by the Biblical Theology Movement’s twofold claim that divine action is the central message of the Bible, and that biblical language, taken at face value, is most appropriate in expressing God’s providence in history. The second phase of the debate was a theological pushback on divine action in the world. Theologians ‘from Bultmann to Kaufman’ countered that divine action in the world is in actual fact an outdated belief incompatible with the closed and determined causal nexus of the modern scientific worldview. The argument against divine action in the world can be formulated as follows, where OSDA stands for objectively special divine action—a robust form of divine action that goes beyond the creation and conservation of the world: