Divine Activity Research Articles

Morality and National Power in International Politics

There are two principal elements in Christian faith which underwrite and require the attention of Christian ethics to problems of foreign policy. First, the Christian is convinced that God is sovereign over all the world and therefore over all the areas of the common life—not the least of which is political society. On these terms no political engagement is ever a mere power struggle and no Christian in politics is ever merely or even primarily political man, for the engagement is understood through faith to be a locus of divine activity and the politically-involved Christian is above all a man seeking to make his action correspond faithfully to the action of God. Divine sovereignty imposes a qualification on political sovereignty and thereby requires the recognition of limits to the exercise of political power and to the exaltation of national existence. But it also strengthens legitimate political authority by means of the explicit declaration that the powers that be are ordained of God. Second, the vocation of the Christian in the world is to serve the neighbor in love.

Cosmolog y aNd the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel

From very early times the opening verses of the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel have been taken to have a specific reference to the divine activity of creation 'in the beginning'. The earliest commentator on the Fourth Gospel, Heracleon, the friend of Valentinus the Gnostic, interpreted John 13 in the light of the typical Gnostic dualism; 'he said that it was the Logos who caused the demiurge to make the world'.1 Dr A. Orbe 2 has shown how popular this text was with the Gnostics of the second century and how they interpreted it in support of their cosmological speculations. The first extant orthodox Christian use of the text is by Theophilus of Antioch 3 in the context of an attempt to demonstrate the superiority of the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo over the Platonic

The ministry of counseling

Somewhere in religion there is the awareness of and reach toward a divine agency beyond the purely human, whether the divine activity is conceived to be found in Holy Scripture, or a divinely guided Church, or in the stilling of creaturely thoughts in a Friends meeting. All religion asks of psychotherapy is that God be given a chance to will and to do of his good pleasure in us. Religion may fearlessly ally itself with a therapeutic spirit in which the role of man is the humble one of providing the field of action for the Holy Spirit. The therapist is a Christ-bearer, as we are all called to be Christ-bearers in our measure, confirming the intimation of the Spirit that we are sons of God and capable of growing into his image from glory to glory.

Plato and the ἈΡΧΗ ΚΑΚѠΝ

Cook Wilson remarks that one of the chief doctrines of the Timaeus ‘relates to the existence of evil … all cosmogonies which attribute the world to some divine activity find a difficulty here. Some assume another spirit, an evil one, though partly subordinate to the good one; others, to avoid making an evil spiritual principle, assume an unintelligent matter, or in general some form of Necessity beside the Good Spirit. We should suppose that Plato, if not monist, would incline to the latter and should have thought he clearly adopted it in the Timaeus.’ In Laws X, ‘soul’ is the cause of evil as of good. So Plato says one thing at one time, another at another. But his interpreters do not like to admit this. Professor Cornford found the spiritual view of evil lurking in the Timaeus too. Mr. Vlastos and lately the Rév. Père Festugière, though they differ about the meaning of Laws X, agree that for Plato the κακοποιόν is always matter. I think that we should not try too hard to smooth over the discrepancies in what Plato says about evil. They call attention to something obscure, perhaps incoherent, in his metaphysical thinking.

Shadow Language

It would be interesting to trace to its origin that hidden language which is familiar to every adult male, and to a large proportion of women, but which is hardly ever written down, except on walls: and to know whether it arose because it is natural to man to use a special set of terms to indicate strange forces more powerful than himself; whether it is a consequence of the psychological disintegration of the Fall, which made human beings afraid of God and ashamed of their bodies; how it has been affected by the immense change in Western human ecology which began about 1750 and is still in progress; why it has flowed more deeply underground at one time than at another; and what significance lies in the fact that its terms, and the knowledge of its existence, have during the last fifty years come far nearer the surface of communal life.An immense learning would be necessary fully to discuss all these points; and many of their implications have to be left aside by a writer without experience of the organic cultures of the East or of the mechanized economy of the U.S.S.R. It should be possible without this, however, very briefly to sketch the nature, function, and recent history of submerged language, at any rate in this country; and to suggest possible reasons for its slow invasion of ordinary speech.The language deals mainly with three subjects: with God; with sexual life; and with digestion. God, mystery beyond all thought, all argument, all imagination, “to whom all angels cry aloud’’ and Whom all non-reasoning things worship by being alive; sexual life, through which humans consciously, as other creatures unknowingly, share in the almost incredible Divine activity of creating new selves, each sentient and unique, where before there was nothing; digestion, the unconscious process of transmuting into human bodies pieces of the outside world upon which their continued life depends.

Folk-Lore and the Supernatural

Baron Von Hugel compared the interpenetration of nature and grace to the movements of a hand inside a glove: “God everywhere but stimulates and supports man whom He has made, and His Hand moves ever underneath and behind the tissue—a tissue which, at best, can become as it were a glove, and suggest the latent hand. The Divine Action will thus stimulate and inform the human action somewhat like the force that drives the blood within the stag's young antlers, or like the energy that pushes the tender sap-full fern-buds up through the hard, heavy ground.” All that can be seen is the outward veil. But the movements of it are of such a kind that they point to a power within, other than, on another plane of being than, the glove.So also in the history of divine activity among men, the raising of fallen humanity according to those concrete needs which spring from the combined historic facts of original justice, original sin, and Redemption, we see only the race, each individual human being. But as in the movements of the glove, so in the activity of grace-impelled men, those movements, that activity, point beyond the visible fringes of the natural vehicle to a Presence of an altogether different kind, working, planning, for the good of men, things far above what we can conceive, or, having conceived, could achieve.