So far, I have tried to lay out an essentially philosophical or metaphysical case for understanding God through the primordiality of the concept of action or agency. I have tried to show how such a concept can comprehend God acting in the world without either “violating” the laws of cause and effect or being subsumed under them. But the question remains: if God is an agent, and if God has exercised agency by acting in the world, how do we discern what those actions are? In other words, how are they picked out from all the other acts that constitute history? As we pursue this question, we move from strictly philosophical analysis into the work of theology, which attempts to identify from within the faith perspective of a particular religious tradition the central acts of God in history. Whether it is possible to identify divine acts outside the theological perspective is a question we will need to consider.
Despite resistance from many of its practitioners, theology presumes a metaphysical basis for the notion of God. The work of theology is meaningless unless it presupposes that God acts in the world and expects a response to those acts. But the assumption that God acts implies a metaphysical view of God as an agent, that is, it assumes that God is a particular kind of entity, an agent, not a rock. In this chapter, I want to explore the intersection between the metaphysics of agency and theology’s attempt to identify specific kerygmatic divine acts, despite the fact that some contemporary theologians, such as Kevin Hector in his Theology Without Metaphysics, believe that there can be a theology without metaphysics. Hector’s view is a continuation of the rejection of “natural theology” grounded in the dogmatic theology of Karl Barth who believed that philosophy must not intrude on or set the conditions for the unique revelation of God in the Christ event, a revelation he claimed was not available to philosophy working independently of theology. But Barth’s and Hector’s hesitancy to accept a metaphysical view of God as agent overlooks the fact that any reference to a divine revelation—no matter how it is positioned alongside of or in conflict with “natural” events—already presupposes at least a minimal commitment to the metaphysical view that God is of such a nature as to be able to act through God’s revelations in a world that is other than Godself. The argument I have pursued so far in developing the primordiality of the concept of agency for God is not at odds with the theological project of specifying divine acts in history. My analysis can, however, be supplemented and expanded by bringing it into conversation with some selected contemporary systematic theologians in the Christian tradition whose work complements that of the philosophers I have drawn upon in advancing my project of understanding God as agent. I will take up the issue of metaphysics more fully in my discussion of the work of theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg later in this chapter.
As I have tried to argue, there is a philosophically persuasive case for affirming the primordiality of agency. And that case, which corresponds to the implicit metaphysical assumptions of theology (even when they sometimes seem to be hidden from theologians), requires us to make some assumptions common to both philosophy and theology.
One, that the conception of a divine agent is not self-contradictory or inappropriate for a divine reality “worthy of worship,” and this I hope to have shown in the earlier chapters of this book. Two, that if God is an agent capable of performing historical actions in the space-time continuum alongside other agents, then divine acts are not so radically or ontologically different from human acts as to be incapable of being conceived in roughly the same way in which we conceive human acts. Again, this I believe I have shown in my arguments so far in the book. There must be some univocity to the notion of “act” that captures both divine actions and human actions. (This univocal sense of action does not, of course, rule out enormous differences between divine and human acts with respect to the magnitude of their power, efficacy, range, moral quality, decisiveness, etc.) But if they are completely ontologically different, we will have gotten nowhere in relating divine and human action.
Three, that God can perform “discrete” or particular acts in history. God need not be the author who has performed only a single “master act” (i.e., the sweep of history in its entirety, a kind of pre-temporal “act” that does not touch down in history at any particular times and places). If God is an agent, then God can be the creator of the whole space-time infrastructure but also the author of particular acts for which God is uniquely responsible within that infrastructure. Theology carries out the task of discerning which specific acts are divinely originated.
If God can be conceived in a metaphysically respectable way as an agent, it would seem to follow that God would have left enough evidence of divine actions in the world to permit a reasonable inference to both God’s existence as agent and to the divine character (since character is always inferred from and revealed through an agent’s actions). And yet many theologians in the western tradition have been loathe to base a knowledge of God primarily, let alone exclusively, on a reading of God’s alleged historical actions apart from or independent of a theological perspective. Purportedly divine actions have seemed to be a less than reliable basis on which to build a belief about who God is and what God is up to. As G.E. Lessing once said, “the accidental truths of history can never become the proof of the necessary truths of reason.”[1] If philosophy gives us the conceptual tools for understanding the metaphysical possibility of divine action grounded in a divine agent, then history as it is discerned through the work of theology gives us a basis for claiming to know the meaning of divine action. Philosophy gives us the metaphysical basis for claiming a conception of God as agent; theology gives us the basis for discerning where that divine agent has actually acted. This mutual work of philosophy and theology has even led John Macmurray to see them as very closely related—at least in outcome, if not in method.
Macmurray believes that we must, if we are being fully rational, see the world in its totality as God’s action (not discounting the possibility of specific divine acts within the world). If our primordial category of understanding is the agent, the world in its totality must be conceived as the field of action for the supreme or apex agent (where else would God act?). And this means that the world is, as Macmurray puts it, God’s act: God is the universal “Other” from which the community of persons distinguishes itself. But only personal agents can be in personal relationships with each other, and therefore we must conceive God as the personal Other with whom we stand in relation. “I must determine myself and the Other reciprocally, by means of the same categories. . . . Consequently I must characterize the Other in the same terms, as an Agent acting intentionally in relation to me.”[2] This is a metaphysically based conception of God, and it is validated or “proved” only when we act upon it, when we assume its reality in practice. And so, according to Macmurray, in language that would be equally at home in theology and philosophy, “we relate ourselves rightly to the world by entering into communion with God, and seeking to understand and to fulfill his intention.”[3] “We must think the world as one action . . . to conceive it as the act of God,[4] the Creator of the world, and ourselves as created agents, with a limited and dependent freedom to determine the future, which can be realized only on the condition that our intentions are in harmony with His intention, and which must frustrate itself if they are not.”[5]
This linkage of theology and philosophy, represented by modern science, anticipates and essentially agrees with the ideas of another theologian standing in the Barthian tradition, Thomas Torrance. Much of Torrance’s work is an attempt to relate what he calls scientific theology to non-reductionist science. Both “sciences” are about real (though different) objects and both require a realistic (i.e. objective) conception of their objects if our relationship to them is to be fulfilling. Torrance even cites Macmurray on this point. He notes approvingly that Macmurray holds that “we know truly and rationally only when we know objectively and . . . that it this objectivity subsisting between our personal relations that is the ‘core of rationality.’”[6] But if our knowledge is real (not illusory), then we must be able to act upon it in a way that brings ultimate fulfillment of our intentions. This can only happen if our actions are performed with our intention to conform our way of life to God’s intentions since the divine intentions decisively influence the final outcome of history. This decisive influence is not without suitable alterations due to human freedom of action. God’s “vulnerability” and not predetermined responsiveness to human action is part of the dynamic of the relationship between personal agents, both divine and human. The performance of human actions under the guidance of an overarching divine intention then becomes a way of life.
For Christian theology the discernment of divine acts is found in the biblical narrative, which is itself grounded on the claim that it is the Word of God reflecting God’s Word incarnated in Jesus. The presumption of an acting God is clearly at the heart of the biblical tradition. The Bible makes no sense unless one accepts the reality of an acting God. A God who, in some specifiable sense, does not act in history (i.e., does not makes God’s power or presence known in the fabric of space-time, in addition to creating the totality of space-time as God’s signature action) is a God with whom one could have no interaction and therefore no real relationship. Unless God is a “personal Someone” whose acts make a difference to the success of one’s intentions in the same field of action (i.e., the created order), God’s relevance for one’s life would be negligible.
This has certainly been true in the biblical traditions of Judaism and Christianity, which are central resources in the work of theology. As biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann said, “The characteristic claim of Israel’s testimony is that Yahweh is an active agent who is the subject of an active verb, and so the testimony is that Yahweh, the God of Israel, has acted in decisive and transformative ways.”[7] Torrance echoes this claim when he says that “the Bible without the living, acting, revealing, judging, reconciling God becomes merely an ‘academic’ concern of the historical and linguistic scholar.”[8]
Brueggemann also acknowledges in opposition to the non-metaphysical emphasis of some theologians, that the Old Testament has an ontology that features the centrality of God as an agent. And an ontology presumes a metaphysics of the kind of beings that exist. The ontology of the biblical God is discerned from the testimony of the biblical writers regarding what they took to be their encounter with God. “After testimony the Old Testament provides a rich statement on ontology.”[9] Nevertheless, Brueggemann admits that modernist or classical views of God have little place for the ontology of a divine agent. It is precisely the attempt to develop such a place through the ontology of the primordiality of agency developed by Macmurray, Raymond Tallis, and Edward Pols to whom this book is dedicated.
For believers, the Bible becomes the story of God’s acts in history. But before the specificity of theology’s discernment of divine acts can make its entrance, we have the right to ask whether the way of life it commends as most fully conforming to the divine intention (e.g., self-sacrifice, compassion, justice, forgiveness, reconciliation, and nonviolence) can prove itself to someone outside the theological tradition, as more fulfilling than alternative ways of life (e.g., aggressive power exercised over others for the self-interest of the power wielder). Must one rely solely on theology’s interpretation of the biblical narrative as the only way to discern God’s intentions through the divine acts in history? The possibility of an extra-theological discernment cannot, it seems to me, be ruled out a priori. If it is the case that God created the world in such a way that only actions or ways of life that conform to God’s real intentions can and will be realized (because God set up the world in this way), then, at least in theory, the non-theologically informed person might be able to discern what the divine intentions are and what way of life best conforms to them.
But what might be possible in theory may be impossible in practice given the sinful condition of human persons and their inevitably limited life view. How does one get to the discernment that this way of life is both divinely created, enacted, and compelling to persons caught in a world in which contrary intentions and ways of life seem to prevail in the short run and in which human insight is clouded and distorted by human sin? This is where theology indispensably supplements the philosophical understanding of reality.
Macmurray, as we have seen, believes that philosophy can lead us to the view of God as the personal agent who unifies all of reality. He argues that by shifting our starting point for understanding reality to the primordiality of the agent’s “I do” from the primacy of the thinker’s “I think,” we “are driven to conceive a personal universe in which God is the ultimate reality. This transformation restores its whole substance to philosophy, which again becomes the intellectual aspect of the search for the real. The problematic of philosophy lies then in the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’” and this, he claims, “is the problematic of religious reflection; and philosophy, if it is concerned with the intellectual aspect of this problematic, must be identical with theology, with an undogmatic theology which, like science, has abandoned certainty, and which has recognized that religious doctrines, too, are all hypothetical. Philosophy, we must conclude, is theology which has abandoned dogmatism, and has become in a new and wider sense a natural theology.”[10]
This reference to natural theology conforms to the mandate of the Gifford Lectures, under whose auspices Macmurray gave the lectures in 1953–54 and which were published as The Self as Agent and Persons in Relation. The lectures were established by Adam Lord Gifford, who was convinced that a natural knowledge of God would lead to human well-being and fulfillment, just as Macmurray was convinced that a philosophically grounded knowledge of God as agent would lead to a reading of human experience and history that only a way of life in harmony with God’s intentions could ultimately “succeed.” Gifford felt, and Macmurray agreed, that the lectures he supported would deal with the topic of natural religion “without reference to or reliance upon any supposed special exceptional or so-called miraculous revelation.”[11] Gifford, I believe, misconstrued the nature of divine action by assuming an ontological difference between miracle and action. But in the ontology of action that I’ve developed, no such ontological difference is needed. For Macmurray, once that difference is eliminated, natural theology then becomes the basis for claiming that God can act in history. Systematic theology concentrates on which acts are divinely authored and point most persuasively to the divine intentions determining them.
In principle, both philosophy and theology are capable of looking to history to find evidence of God’s actions. Philosophy looks there because a supreme agent will have to manifest its intentions in history and theology looks there because it believes that God has chosen to manifest those intentions in certain particular revelatory or kerygmatic actions, which it claims to discern under the guidance of God’s own spirit in interpreting the biblical narrative. Philosophy can postulate the rationality and coherence of the idea of God acting in history: theology identifies certain acts as those for which God is uniquely responsible and that decisively determine the course of history. The centrality of history for a theological understanding of God’s revelations is explored more fully in the work of Wolfhart Pannenberg further on in this chapter.
But even Christian thinkers do not universally accept the importance of history in our knowledge of God. Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, who is committed to the truth of the “central” Biblical claims about who God is and what God is up to and supports a contemporary form of natural theology, is reluctant to rely exclusively upon historical evidence for knowing God’s existence and nature. His reluctance is due to his attempt to make Christian belief properly basic, that is, without need of evidential or inferential support.[12] He not only thinks historical inference is not strong enough to warrant belief in God, but he is also convinced that through the direct action of God upon the believer’s consciousness (which, however, is a form of divine action), the truth about God is given to and sealed cognitively in the mind of the believer.
But there is a certain oddity in this reluctance to base a belief about a God who acts on a discernment of what one takes to be God’s historical actions. If God is truly an agent with unlimited powers in utilizing the causal infrastructure of the world, and does act in history, then surely one would expect that a series of divine actions that formed the core of a witness to their efficaciousness in creating a people (Israel) and bringing about two religious traditions (Judaism and Christianity) would be accessible for interpretation by all human beings even without being participants in those faith traditions. All these alleged acts of God were of a public nature: available for interpretation by anyone. A God who acts and whose acts decisively change the course of history forever but who can’t be known through those acts is a peculiar God and so is an epistemological situation in which knowledge of God through God’s own acts is impossible or at least profoundly difficult. If knowledge of God based on God’s historical acts is completely dependent on a faith-based interpretive framework not available to those outside it, one would have to wonder why God couldn’t or didn’t make Godself known more publicly, albeit also elusively. It is almost as if, no matter how hard he tries, God can’t make Godself known through the record of God’s acts in history unless we first have recourse to a Plantinga type knowledge that appears to be indifferent to historical investigation.
If acts are the evidence through which we know the existence and character of the agents who perform them, then at some point the beliefs I form about them on the basis of the evidential trail will have to be tested and validated in and through my ongoing interaction with and response to the agents who performed them. My beliefs must prove reliable not just in meeting standards of doxastic practice but also in successfully informing my future behavior. Inferences drawn from history, however, don’t have the same kind of certainty that comes with properly basic beliefs or with analytic truths. As beliefs derived from history, they are to be confirmed in the continuing relationships I have with the objects or persons about whom they are beliefs. This is a conclusion both theology and an appropriate philosophy can agree upon: as Macmurray puts it, “religious doctrines are as problematic as scientific theories and require like them a constant revision and a continual verification in action . . . verified only by persons who are prepared to commit themselves intentionally to the way of life they prescribe.”[13]
Whether one can find acts of God apart from a theological interpretation still remains unresolved. But in the end, theology does at least give a road map for those willing to risk using it through the multiple acts that constitute history as we seek evidence of where God has been at work in the world. It enables us to see that work in a certain light and its validation of that seeing is the same as that envisioned by philosophy: the living of a way of life that proves ultimately satisfying because it conforms to God’s intentions.
Part of a knowledge of God’s acts in history would have to come through what those acts reveal about God’s intentions. This should be the basis for saying that we know God by revelation. But this is not the revelation often appealed to when the limits of rationality have been reached. While revelation is claimed to be not in conflict with reason, in most Christian theologies it is generally given a unique epistemological status not established by reason. But, if God is an agent who acts in history, why should it require a special sense of revelation beyond that used in our knowledge of any agent’s action, to discern certain acts as being of divine origin? Any act performed by an agent is a revelation of that agent’s intention and thus of his or her character.[14] The ability to reveal oneself is a core part of being an agent. Torrance puts it this way: human persons have the “capacity to reveal themselves without which they may not really be known. How much truer is that of God!”[15] No ontologically other mode of revelation than that available to all agents is required for God’s disclosure of the divine intentions and character.
The other major source of our knowledge of God, religious experience, also implicitly entails a commitment to the notion that God acts in history. But it does not lead logically to any notion of God acting in the larger arena of history as a whole beyond the individual’s immediate experience. No notion of God as the author of public “mighty acts” follows necessarily from a personal experience of divine action in one’s own life. To move to the broader area of inferential knowledge from history as a whole requires one to step into an explanatory narrative more sweeping and inclusive than the experiences of one’s own life even though one’s own experience must “hook up” or mesh with that larger narrative in some way. Such broader narratives constitute the “background” for interpreting personal religious experience but they are not deducible from that experience, per se.
So we return to the original question: if God is an agent, then why would not the normal ways in which people come to believe in the existence (and character) of other agents also provide a basis for belief in God independent of what has traditionally been understood through theology and personal religious experience?
If God does perform specific acts in history, then it would seem possible in principle to make a reasonable inference from what one takes to be some historical actions that they are the acts of God and not just the acts of other human beings—if those divine acts meet certain specifications. Assuming that one does not literally see the agent doing something, one begins with the observation of or testimony to an occurrence (or a series of occurrences) that seems to bear the marks of an action rather than a natural event (i.e., one caused solely by natural causal forces). When the ground shakes or the wind blows hard enough to dislodge loose rocks, we normally do not take the resulting configuration of the dislodged rocks to be the sign of an intentional act by an agent. On the other hand, if we find a series of rocks piled up in a repeated symmetrical fashion roughly an equal distance from each other along a path, we justifiably believe that an agent (or series of agents) produced them in accordance with a common unifying intention (i.e., we interpret them as cairns designed to mark a trail). In short, we have rough and ready criteria for making an inference that a series of “events” was either agent caused or simply “happened” as a result of purely natural causal forces. (Compare this with the classic case of my arm rising because of an unconscious neurophysical stimulus versus my arm rising because I intentionally chose to raise it. One has to dig below the appearance of the occurrence in order to determine whether it was a natural event or an agent-caused act.)
In the case of events whose precise status (acts or natural events) is unclear on the basis of direct observation alone, we are forced to look for clues as to the nature of the power that produced them. The shape and regularity of the cairns clearly indicate intentionality and thus agent origin. The scattered rocks do not. Now, if God has acted in history, one would expect some occurrences accessible to human inspection to indicate that their origin lies in a divine intention. A God who can act and does act and fails to leave enough evidence of God’s actions is a strange God indeed, as would be the epistemological quandary it would put theists in. At this point, theology can provide an interpretation that makes sense of these inferred actions. Christians believe that Scripture does contain repeated testimonies to a series of occurrences construed as divine acts that constitute the history of Israel, the life and resurrection of Jesus, and the formation of the Christian church. Is the testimony to these alleged divine acts similar to the kind of witness to the acts of non-divine agents? Does theology provide a singular or unique entry into divine acts not available to the person who stands outside the faith tradition? One might argue that the problem with the biblical testimony to occurrences believed to be acts of God is that they are not supported by the kind of historical evidence most historians demand. It is important to note that the problem does not lie in the nature of the events reported as divine in origin. A divine agent can perform any action it chooses and, as we argued previously, all actions are interventions in (in the sense defined earlier), superventions over, or deployments of an otherwise closed causal nexus. This notion of action was presented in our analysis of Pols’s work. A divine act is no more problematic than a human act since both are interventions or superventions in this sense.
So it is not the nature of the act itself that it is in question (contra Lessing, Gilkey, Kaufman, et. al.) but the credibility of the historical witness to it. Today there is debate among biblical scholars as to the historical accuracy of the story of the Hebrew peoples’ slavery in Egypt, their settlement of the land of Canaan, and their claims to the unique importance of Jerusalem in the tribal conflicts of that era. At the very least, the biblical witness, qualified as it is by an overlay of religious interpretation, is not sufficient to ground a well-justified claim to an inference that God is the author of the alleged acts recounted in the biblical stories. In addition, there are many acts attributed to God that hardly seem in keeping with the characterization of God as loving and peace seeking (e.g., God’s commanding the slaughter of women and children, divine direct actions in causing the death of Egyptian children, etc.).
Assuming this is true, where does this leave persons who believe, for rational as distinct from theological reasons, that God has acted in history? What basis do they have for discerning divine actions in history? Must they admit that there are no alleged acts they can reference as sufficiently grounding their belief that God was their author? (They could, of course, admit that no record to date is sufficiently credible to permit them to know with certainty where and when these divine acts occurred. This admission would seriously undermine any basis for inferring God’s existence from the so-called “mighty acts of God” as found in the biblical narratives.)
This may be an extreme position. The debate among biblical scholars is not settled and there are many who believe that independent research does confirm a lot of the biblical narrative, at least with respect to the actual occurrence of many of the events it narrates. This kind of research, of course, cannot by itself determine whether these occurrences were, in fact, divine acts. In this case, it might be possible to draw a tentative inference (always subject to subsequent correction) that God’s actions as depicted in the Bible provide the best explanation of a series of seminal events unified under a single overarching intention. I would suggest that such an inference is not unwarranted but hardly conclusive. If it should turn out that archeology, for example, demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that none of the events described in the Bible from the time of Abraham to the emergence of the Davidic Kingdom happened anything like the way the Bible describes them, the historical basis for believing that these events were at least partially brought about by God’s direct activity would dissolve. At that point, one would either have to find an alternative and more credible testimony to the work of God in history, or one would have to resort to either religious experience alone or a natural theological argument for God that would not, as we indicated, necessarily yield the knowledge that God acts in history, let alone which specific acts God has performed.
But perhaps there is a residuum of facticity in the Biblical narrative. Perhaps after all the sifting and elimination of clearly fanciful stories and alleged events, there is some historical substratum that remains intact. For the sake of argument, let’s say that this includes something like the enslavement in Egypt of a tribe of people who are later able to escape slavery and who, over time, conquer the land of Canaan. Their journey is marked by the emergence of significant leaders (such as Moses and Elijah) who transmit to them a “covenant” they believe to have come from God. They subsequently are removed from the land by occupying forces and eventually return to the land after years of exile. Later, according to Christians, one member of this tribe has a decisive impact on a small group both within and outside the tribe and is eventually declared not only to have been a miracle worker and inspiring teacher but also to have been raised from the dead. Still later, some in this group believe God has directly acted upon them in what they take to be God’s bestowal of the Holy Spirit. Empowered, they then go out and create numerous communities to testify to what they think God has done and to maintain a lively witness to it. Certainly the latter occurrences are more likely to be validated by historical research than the former, according to new schools of biblical scholarship. The claims, for example, that Jesus was bodily resurrected from the dead can draw on such historical evidence as non-Christian corroboratory reference that there was a Jesus (Josephus); he was crucified; his body has never been found; there were multiple witnesses to his bodily appearance to his followers after his death; archeological and epistolatory evidence of early Christian churches and their teachings, and so on. Now if one stands within the master theological narrative formed by these purported acts of God, the overall history makes sense. There is a “best explanation” for it, namely that God has been at work in the world manifesting and furthering a divine intention. The nature of that intention is itself, of course, inferred from the acts that manifest it. Traditionally, the divine intention has been interpreted as the creation of a universal, inclusive community of persons living together in bonds of justice, love, and peace (i.e., the kingdom of God on earth). This interpretation is not incoherent as it conforms to traditional religious interpretations of what God has been and is up to in the world, and it rests on some credible, though surely not decisive or dispositive records.
At this critical juncture, we now must return to a more fully developed and more robust theology. Historic Christian theology insists that we can answer the philosophical problems we have created for ourselves only from within a perspective that believes that God has revealed God’s intentions to those whose knowledge of them comes through faith. We cannot, it is claimed, work our way through the scholarly thickets we have planted without the assistance of God. Karl Barth, and many who follow in his footsteps, have forcefully claimed that unless God has chosen at God’s own initiative to disclose who God is and what God is to us, we have no basis for a knowledge of God based solely on general inferences from history or nature. Our sinful condition and finite human epistemological powers make human knowledge of God impossible apart from a divine revelation, which can neither be controlled by nor comprehended in “normal” human ways of knowing. In the theological perspective of Barth, the crucial divine revelations are the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus. God enters into time and space (in Barth’s view an entry incomprehensible to the human intellect given the radical discontinuity between scientific and theological understandings of time and space) and then overcomes death in and through the resurrection of God’s incarnate Son. But this can be known only through God’s act, not through our normal cognitive abilities. Theology, Barth insists, starts from the reality of God, “complete and whole in itself apart from and prior to the knowing activity of human individuals.”[16] God “cannot be known by the powers of human knowledge, but is apprehensible and apprehended solely because of His own freedom, decision and action.” What we can know by natural human intellect is at best a supreme being, but such a being “has nothing to do with God. . . . Man is able to think this being; but he has not thereby thought God. . . . Knowledge of God is not a possibility which is open for discussion. Knowledge of God takes place where there is actual experience that God speaks, that He so represent Himself to man that he cannot fail to see and hear Him.”[17] God is the “Wholly Other.”
It is in the Christ event alone that “history is actualized, in such a way as to be accessible through participatory, personal knowledge, but beyond access by historical investigation.”[18] Barth assumes an “infinite qualitative distinction” between God and human beings, but this is, I believe, less an ontological or metaphysical claim (given Barth’s skepticism regarding metaphysics) than it is a claim about the sinfulness of humanity that necessarily infects and distorts any “natural” knowledge we may claim to have of God. It is a claim about the radical (if not ontological) difference between God’s power and holiness and our limited power and sinfulness. Barth wants to insist that whatever knowledge we have of God must be provided at God’s initiative—not ours. Whoever receives the revelation of God is privileged to know God through divine grace, but it seems that apart from that grace it is impossible to know God’s intentions through an “objective” reading of historical acts. Barth, therefore, implicitly answers the question, “What about those who are not privileged to receive this revelation?” They seem to be left in profound ignorance of God and God’s intentions. He seems to be ruling out the possibility that a non-Christian can “read” history in such a way as to conclude that the Christian-endorsed way of life is the only one that can be ultimately satisfying. I’m not convinced that Barth’s dogmatic exclusion of a non-biblical access to the divine intention is correct. I also think he draws, in his fear of metaphysics, upon a false dichotomy between God and the world even while he is presuming an unarticulated metaphysics of God as the one who acts. Nevertheless, while leaving open the logical possibility of discerning God’s intentions without the benefit of the Christian faith, it may be the case that in the Christ event God has given the clearest, fullest, most complete, and truest expression of God’s intentions for humankind, a case that even Macmurray accepts (especially in The Clue to History) while developing his metaphysical ontology of God’s actions in the world.
Contemporary writer Kevin Hector extends Barth’s mistrust of human ways of knowing (of epistemology in its philosophical form) by trying to do theology without metaphysics.[19] He observes that many postmodernist writers (as we saw in the first chapter) believe that all human language is inherently metaphysical and as such “shoehorns objects into a predetermined framework and so inflicts violence upon them, and that [therefore] it must accordingly be kept at a distance from God.”[20] He notes Jean-Luc Marion’s claim that a God whom one could conceptualize would be no God at all. God must utterly transcend one’s conception of God because conceiving God is a form of idolatry.[21] Or as John Caputo claims, language is violent because it seeks to fit objects within its horizon and to pin them down and hold them within its grip.[22] Caputo says that by naming God we wrench God into manifestation, and this puts “a violent end to God’s absolute heterogeneity and holy height.”[23] In short, the radical otherness of God is fatally undercut by having a metaphysical knowledge of God. But, I have argued, if metaphysics begins from the primordiality of agency and the agent, then this fear of metaphysics is profoundly misplaced.
Citing Martin Heidegger, Hector sees a parallel between Barth’s rejection of natural theology and Heidegger’s rejection of metaphysics. In Heidegger’s view, metaphysics begins with a prior conceptual framework and determines what conceptions are acceptable and which are not. On that basis, metaphysics comes to see the being of objects as necessarily conforming to our ideas of them. As Hector states, in defense of Heidegger’s view, this leads to the notion that the human person (through his conceptual apparatus) becomes to each being that upon which the manner and truth of its being is grounded. This reduces or structures the reality of the object to what conforms itself to the human conceptual framework and, in the process, obscures and negates the true reality (the radical “otherness”) of the object.
It is clear that this rejection of metaphysics assumes that having a concept of God reduces God to the level of the human (as Barth clearly stated). It also assumes that to have an idea of something is to be able to control and limit that thing. But surely this is not what knowledge does if it is adequate to the reality of its object, as both Macmurray and Torrance have pointed out. If knowledge of God is adequate to God as agent, then it will “know” that God as personal agent is dynamic, living, and incapable of being wrenched, reduced, or pinned down by any ideas we have of God. Given the fact that divine agency is the supreme power of the universe and can freely supervene on the entire infrastructure of reality that God created, God always retains the upper hand and always escapes the limiting potential of human ideas. Ideas represent (and then only partially) the object that they know. In that sense, the “others” (or objects) always , transcend the ideas we have of them and that is particularly true when those agent-objects have the freedom to act and to outrun our conceptions of them. Knowing God metaphysically is actually knowing the real God’s resistance, or even inability, to be confined and restricted by human knowing and acting. Heidegger’s fear of metaphysics is exorcised when it is observed that objects, especially personal dynamically acting objects, always transcend and outstrip any confining ideas we might have of them. If ideas confine reality, then no ideas would ever be appropriate to living agents since agents always push the boundaries of the ideas we have of them. The only field of knowing that might be trapped in an interpretive schema in which ideas represent static unchanging things would be science. Science might seek a conceptual knowledge of beings without the power of agency, but a theology and philosophy of agency deals with the agency of persons, and that agency always escapes, to some crucial degree, the limitations of conceptual and scientific knowledge. The primordiality of agency is the metaphysical basis on which theology can proceed without undercutting the centrality of God’s acts in history.
A different theological voice, also in the Barthian tradition, which challenges the fear of metaphysics, and whose work is remarkably complementary to that of Macmurray and Pols, is that of German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg. In his important book Metaphysics and the Idea of God, Pannenberg boldly asserted that “theological discourse about God requires a relationship to metaphysical reflection if its claim to truth is to be valid.”[24] Metaphysics is the attempt to acquire a “comprehensive interpretation of the finite world.”[25] Without explicitly endorsing the metaphysics of divine agency as developed along the lines of my own study, Pannenberg notes that theology is an “inquiry into God and his revelation,”[26] an inquiry that would make no sense unless it assumes the metaphysics of divine agency. Pannenberg clearly recognizes the agency of God in history in a way that is similar to that of Brueggemann and Torrance: “The God of religion is experienced primarily as a will that manifests itself in history, as the will of a holy power and hence as personal.” And he seems implicitly to accept Macmurray’s notion of the confluence of theology with metaphysics when he says “when metaphysics begins to explicate the understanding of God within a particular religious tradition . . . it actually becomes theology.”[27] Torrance appears to support the metaphysical claims of Pannenberg. Since “proper knowing takes place through a steady dynamic interaction between our minds and objective reality,”[28] Torrance argues that scientific theology must come to grips with the objective reality of God (and that is what metaphysics attempts to do).
Unfortunately, Pannenberg laments, the rejection of natural theology and its alliance with metaphysics “has served as an excuse for not entering seriously at all into the dialog with philosophy.”[29] In fact, Pannenberg is highly critical of theologians such as Barth who overemphasize the incomprehensibility of God at the expense of God’s disclosure of Godself through God’s revelatory acts in history.[30] He is rightly suspicious of the view of God as a “transcendent and self-sufficient being, caught in his own transcendence and separation from the world. Rather he affirms the world . . . God is the One who is coming to establish his Kingdom in this world.”[31]
He also writes in a way that echoes Macmurray’s metaphysical approach when he says that “there is no metaphysics without the idea of the unity of reality.”[32] The unity of the world (which in Macmurray is the unity of the world as God’s act) points to a ground that is able to unify the multiplicity of the world, which for a metaphysics of agency is precisely what God’s act(s) and agency do. For Pannenberg, “the whole of reality is seen as a single unity and regarded as history.”[33] And “the way in which we must test any concept of God is by asking whether it can account for the unity of all reality.”[34]
Of all contemporary systematic theologians, Pannenberg has the most positive assessment of history as the locus for our knowledge of God. Systematic theology, he says, “is necessary in order to substantiate the truth claims of Christian language about God. This task is met by attempting a comprehensive and coherent account of the world as God’s creation, including the economy of God’s action in history.”[35] “History is God acting in his creation. Therefore history cannot be fully understood without God. And it is not understood at all if it is conceived as the field of human action alone.”[36] The biblical writings “express an increasing consciousness of God’s historical activity” and the biblical understanding of reality can be compressed into a single word: “history.”[37] And that history is characterized by the theme of promise and fulfillment. For Pannenberg, this means that history is not yet complete and the full revelation of God will only come at its close. “For history is a whole only when seen from the end and through that end.”[38] Nevertheless, he insists—and this is his crucial theological claim—that the end has already been made present in history, proleptically, in the man Jesus Christ. This fact is the basis on which the Christian faith exists, not independent of history but precisely in history. This perfectly echoes Macmurray’s claim in The Clue to History that Jesus fully embodied in his developed consciousness the true intention of God for history and human fulfillment.
Like Torrance, Pannenberg starts with the “fact” that God entered history when God became human in the incarnation. He also insists on the uniqueness of the resurrection of Jesus. This is the “one unique revelation of the deity of the one God.”[39] But this revelation is historically situated. If, as he says, “God mediates his creation with himself through the process of history,”[40] then “Christian theology conceives the reality of God as present for our world in a specific human history,” namely that of Jesus Christ.[41] And this means that “the story of Jesus Christ has to be history” at least in its core if not in all its details.[42]
Nevertheless, Pannenberg is sensitive to the fact that the conclusions of historical research are never incontestable, as we saw earlier in our reference to debates over what historians without the “eye of faith” can conclude from a reading of the biblical narrative. “If Christian faith presupposes information about events of a distant past, it can gain the greatest possible certainty about those events only by historical research.”[43] This echoes Macmurray’s belief that theology must be undogmatic and open to what the best of historiography can yield. Of course, Pannenberg, like most contemporary theologians in the Barthian tradition, accepts the resurrection of Jesus as an historical fact.
Pannenberg, like Macmurray, makes constant reference to the “field of action” within which God and human agents interact. From the perspective developed by Pols that field of action is the infrastructure upon which agents supervene, Torrance adds to this the importance of understanding divine action in the context not only of history but also particularly of the spatio-temporal order in which divine action takes place. Torrance is particularly insistent that the core acts of God (the incarnation and the resurrection of Jesus) take place in the world. He decisively rejects any Kantian dualism between God and the world because it would rule out “any thought of living interaction between God and the world he has made.”[44] While God is transcendent, God is not “detached from the contingent world” and the only dualism is that between the Creator and the world in which the Creator acts.[45] In this vein, Torrance implicitly evokes the notion of the causal infrastructure prominently developed by Pols. His whole understanding of God’s action in the world resonates with the notion of a divine agent deploying an infrastructure (which in this case God has created) to carry out the divine intentions. The universe, Torrance says, “must be thought of as ultimately integrated from above through the creative bearing upon it of the Trinitarian relations in God himself.”[46] This statement suggests the work of an Apex Being or Supreme Agent who “integrates from above” the infrastructure that God deploys to enact divine intentions just as Pols ontology of action attests. For Torrance, incarnation and resurrection “are acts of God within the contingent intelligibilities and natural structures of space and time.”[47] They are in no way “an abrogation of the space-time structures of this world that we call natural laws.”[48] The resurrection “was an objective act of God within the structures of space and time, within the concrete occurrences of history” and we “must interpret it as such, within the structures of space and time as we understand them.”[49] When Jesus enters the world at a particular historical moment, God “penetrates into our existence and creates room for Himself within the horizontal dimensions of finite being in space and time.”[50] This penetration is perfectly consistent with the notion that God acts not by violating the natural laws but by supervening upon them or intervening into the infrastructure of space-time.
Torrance also says that incarnation and resurrection constitute the “boundary conditions” “where the natural order is open to control and explication from a higher and wider level of reality”[51] just as one would expect in an ontology of agency in which the Apex Being or Supreme Agent has at the divine disposal the whole field of action constituted by the spatio-temporal world. The highest and widest level of reality, in the ontology of action, is the being with the greatest degree of power and the greatest control over the widest possible field of action. Here, again, theology and philosophy meet because the latter develops the metaphysics of agency and the former points to the one Being, called God, who fits the description of the Supreme Agent.
But we have left one issue still hanging: where is the mystery that the religious individual looks for in a relationship with this Supreme Agent? We have already suggested the direction in which we must go to get an adequate answer to this question. It lies at the heart of what it means to be a personal agent as such.
To get to that heart we must take one final step. Based upon what I take to be a well-justified inference that God is working out God’s intentions in history, and that the major acts instantiating those intentions are to be found in the biblical narrative, I have to commit myself, in action, to a course of life in which I intend to conform to God’s intentions. (If God’s intentions are bound to succeed given God’s power, it would be self-defeating to act in ways contrary to the divine intention.) I have to believe that my inference regarding the universal divine intention is reliable enough that it becomes a guide for my future actions. And at some indefinite point in the future I would have to experience the payoff for living according to a belief that God’s intentions have been rightly inferred by me and will lead to the kind of ultimate flourishing I believe God promises those who live their lives in conformity with God’s purposes. Until and unless that moment of payoff occurs, any knowledge of God from history alone must remain tentative and uncertain, requiring an act of faith, understood not as a willingness to annihilate reason, but as a fundamental trust or confidence that my knowledge of God is reliable and worthy of entrusting my whole heart and mind to it.