God's Action in the World
God's Action in the World
In what sense can God be said to be present and active within the world? A number of models have been developed to articulate the richness of the Christian understanding of this matter, and they are probably best regarded as complementary rather than competitive. In what follows, we shall explore several approaches to this important question. We begin, however, by asking what sort of divine action we are talking about.
“Special” and “General” Divine Action
The first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a renewed surge of interest in the question of whether, and to what extent, God may be said to act in the world. The language of divine action is integral to both the Old and the New Testaments. The God of Israel is regularly and definitively depicted and described as a God who acts in history. God's identity and character are understood to be made visible in the sphere of human action and reflection. Israel understood and represented God as one who acted in nature and in history. The New Testament maintains this belief and focuses it on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and on the action of the Holy Spirit. We shall consider the theological significance of the Holy Spirit in Chapter 12, noting particularly how the Spirit is linked with the themes of divine action and presence in the world, and in believers.
A distinction is often drawn between “Deist” and “Theist” understandings of God. These terms are widely used in the theological literature, although there are some disputes about their precise interpretation. In general terms, the word “Deist” is often used to refer to a way of thinking about God which affirms the idea that God created the world but not that God continues to be engaged with the creation.
Deism was found to be attractive by many in the eighteenth century, as it chimed with the new scientific discoveries which emphasized the regularity of the universe (see the next section). It remains influential today. A generalized and generic deism – similar to that of the “Age of Reason” – has gained considerable influence in the west since the Second World War, partly as a means of positioning the three monotheistic faiths – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – within a common theological matrix that enables maximal social inclusivity.
“Theism,” on the other hand, designates a view of God which affirms both God's activity in the original creation of the world and an ongoing concern for the world. This latter idea is often expressedin terms of the idea of “providence,” which is often understood as some special divine action or influence which guides or governs the created order in general, and human beings in particular.
A related distinction needs to be noted here. If the idea of divine action is conceded, is this to be understood in terms of some general influence of God or some special interaction with the created order? Deism tends to believe in a God who does very little, if anything – but, if God can be said to “act,” it is through the causal agency of the laws of nature. God may thus bring about particular purposes through the original creation of the world's initial conditions and laws of nature. Some scholars thus distinguish a “general divine action,” understood as those actions of God that apply to the whole of creation, and a “special divine action,” understood as those actions of God that apply to a specific time and place in creation. A good example of a “special divine action” is the concept of a “miracle,” which is often interpreted in terms of God acting specially to redirect the course of nature.
We begin our discussion of how God might be said to act in nature by looking at Deism in a little more detail.
Deism: God Acts Through the Laws of Nature
In the previous section, we noted how the Newtonian emphasis upon the mechanical regularity of the universe was closely linked with the rise of the movement known as “Deism.” The Deist position can be summarized very succinctly as follows. God created the world in a rational and ordered manner that reflected God's own rational nature, and endowed it with the ability to develop and function without the need for any continuing divine presence or interference. Alexander Pope's (1688–1744) celebrated epitaph for Isaac Newton (1643–1727) brings out the popular understanding of the scientist's importance.
Nature and Nature's Law lay hid in Night
God said, let Newton be, and all was light.
This viewpoint, which became especially influential in the eighteenth century, regarded the world as a watch and God as the watchmaker. God endowed the world with a certain self-sustaining design, such that it could subsequently function without the need for continual intervention. It is thus no accident that William Paley (1743–1805) chose to use the image of a watch and watchmaker as part of his celebrated defense of the existence of a creator God (pp. 162–3).
So how does God act in the world, according to Deism? The simple answer to this question is that God does not act in the world. Like a watchmaker, God endowed the universe with its regularity (seen in the “laws of nature”) and set its mechanism in motion. Having provided the impetus to set the system in motion, and having established the principles which govern that motion, there is nothing left for God to do. The world is to be seen as a large-scale watch which is completely autonomous and self-sufficient. No action by God is necessary.
Figure 9.2 William Blake's watercolor Ancient of Days (1794).
Source: © 2015. Photo Pierpont Morgan Library / Art Resource / Scala, Florence.
Inevitably, this led to the question of whether God could be eliminated completely from the Newtonian worldview. If there was nothing left for God to do, what conceivable need was there for any kind of divine being? If it can be shown that there are self-sustaining principles within the world, there is no need for the traditional idea of “providence” – that is, for the sustaining and regulating hand of God to be present and active throughout the entire existence of the world.
The Newtonian worldview thus encouraged the view that, although God may well have created the world, there was no further need for divine involvement. The discovery of the laws of conservation (e.g., the laws of conservation of momentum) seemed to imply that God had endowed the creation with all the mechanisms that it required in order to continue. It was this point that the astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) was making in his famous comment concerning the idea of God as a sustainer of planetary motion: “I have no need of that hypothesis.”
A more activist understanding of the manner in which God acts in the world, which focuses on the use of secondary causes, stems from Thomas Aquinas and modern writers influenced by him.
Thomism: God Acts Through Secondary Causes
A somewhat different approach to the issue of God's action in the world can be based on the writings of the leading medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas's conception of divine action focuses on the distinction between primary and secondary causes. According to Aquinas, God does not work directly in the world but through secondary causes.
The idea is best explained in terms of an analogy. Suppose we imagine a pianist who is remarkably gifted. She possesses the ability to play the piano beautifully. Yet the quality of her playing is dependent upon the quality of the piano with which she is provided. An out-of-tune piano will prove disastrous, no matter how expert the player. In our analogy, the pianist is the primary cause and the piano the secondary cause for a performance of, for example, a Chopin nocturne. Both are required; each has a significantly different role to play. The ability of the primary cause to achieve the desired effect is dependent upon the secondary cause which has to be used.
Aquinas uses this appeal to secondary causes to deal with some of the issues relating to the presence of evil in the world. Suffering and pain are not to be ascribed to the direct action of God but to the fragility and frailty of the secondary causes through which God works. God, in other words, is to be seen as the primary cause, and various agencies within the world as the associated secondary causes.
For Aristotle (from whom Aquinas draws many of his ideas), secondary causes are able to act in their own right. Natural objects are able to act as secondary causes by virtue of their own nature. This view was unacceptable to most theistic philosophers of the Middle Ages, whether Christian or Islamic. For example, the noted Islamic writer al-Ghazali (1058–1111) held that nature is completely subject to God, and it is therefore improper to speak of secondary causes having any independence. God causes things directly. If lightning sets a tree on fire, the fire is not caused by the lightning but by God. God is thus to be seen as the primary cause who alone is able to move other causes. In the view of many historians of science, this approach to divine causality (often known as “occasionalism”) is unhelpful to the development of the natural sciences, as it downplays the regularity of actions and events within nature, and their apparent “law-like” nature.
Aquinas thus argues that God is the “unmoved mover,” the prime cause of every action, without whom nothing could happen at all. Yet he allows that God can act indirectly, through secondary causes. The theistic interpretation of secondary causes thus offers the following account of God'saction in the world. God acts indirectly in the world through secondary causes. A great chain of causality can be discerned, leading back to God as the originator and prime mover of all that happens in the world. Yet God does not act directly in the world but through the chain of events which God initiates and guides.
Aquinas's approach leads to the idea of God initiating a process which develops under divine guidance. God, so to speak, delegates divine action to secondary causes within the natural order. For example, God might move a human will from within so that someone who is ill receives assistance. Here an action which is God's will is carried out indirectly by God – yet, according to Aquinas, we can still speak of this action being “caused” by God in some meaningful way.
A related approach was developed by the British philosophical theologian Austin Farrer (1904–68). This account of divine action is often termed “double agency.” According to Farrer, every action which takes place in the world includes a causal role for one or more agents or objects (the “secondary” causes) and a distinct role for God as the “primary” cause of what occurs. We could therefore speak of an ordered nexus of created causes and effects which are ultimately dependent upon divine agency. Two different orders of efficacy can be distinguished: a “horizontal” order of created causes and effects, and a “vertical” order through which God establishes and sustains the former.
An approach which is clearly related to this, but that differs radically at points of significance, can be found in the movement known as “process thought,” to which we now turn.
Process Theology: God Acts Through Persuasion
The origins of “process thought” are generally agreed to lie in the writings of the Anglo-American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), especially his important work Process and Reality (1929). Reacting against the rather static view of the world associated with traditional metaphysics (expressed in ideas such as “substance” and “essence”), Whitehead conceived reality as a process. The world, as an organic whole, is something dynamic, not static; it is something which happens. Reality is made up of building blocks of “actual entities” or “actual occasions,” and is thus characterized by becoming, change, and event.
All these “entities” or “occasions” (to use Whitehead's original terms) possess a degree of freedom to develop and be influenced by their surroundings. It is perhaps at this point that the influence of biological evolutionary theories can be discerned: like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), Whitehead wanted to allow for development within creation, subject to some overall direction and guidance. Causation is not seen in terms of an entity being forced to act in a given manner: it is a matter of influence and persuasion. Entities influence each other in a “dipolar” manner – mentally and physically. Precisely the same is true of God as of other entities. God can only act in a persuasive manner, within the limits of the process itself. God “keeps the rules” of the process. Just as God influences other entities, so God is also influenced by them. God, to use Whitehead's famous phrase, is “a fellow-sufferer who understands.” God is thus affected and influenced by the world.
Process thought thus redefines God's omnipotence in terms of persuasion or influence within the overall world-process. This is an important development, as it explains the attraction of this way of understanding God's relation to the world in relation to the problem of evil. Where the traditional free-will defense of moral evil argues that human beings are free to disobey or ignore God, process theology argues that the individual components of the world are likewise free to ignore divine attempts to influence or persuade them. They are not bound to respond to God. God is thus absolved of responsibility for both moral and natural evil.
The traditional free-will defense of God in the face of evil is persuasive (although the extent of that persuasion is contested) in the case of moral evil – in other words, evil resulting from human decisions and actions. But what of natural evil? What of earthquakes, famines, and other natural disasters? Process thought argues that God cannotforce nature to obey the divine will or purpose for it. God can only attempt to influence the process from within, by persuasion and attraction. Each entity enjoys a degree of freedom and creativity, which God cannot override.
While this understanding of the persuasive nature of God's activity has obvious merits, not least in the way in which it offers a response to the problem of evil (as God is not in control, God cannot be blamed for the way things have turned out), critics of process thought have suggested that too high a price is paid. The traditional idea of the transcendence of God appears to have been abandoned, or radically reinterpreted in terms of the primacy and permanency of God as an entity within the process. In other words, the divine transcendence is understood to mean little more than that God outlives and surpasses other entities.
Whitehead's basic ideas have been developed by a number of writers, most notably Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000), John B. Cobb (born 1925), and Schubert Ogden (born 1928). Hartshorne modified Whitehead's notion of God in a number of directions, perhaps most significantly by arguing that God's ability to be influenced by other entities does not mean that God is reduced to their level.
Process thought has no difficulty in speaking of “God's action within the world,” offering a framework within which this action can be described in terms of “influence within the process.” Nevertheless, the specific approach adopted causes anxiety within traditional approaches to the doctrine of God. For traditional theists, the God of process thought seems to bear little relation to the God described in the Old or New Testaments.
For many commentators, the real strengths of process theology lie in its insights into the origin and nature of suffering within the world. Those strengths are best appreciated through an analysis of the various alternatives on offer within the Christian tradition concerning suffering – an area of theology which has come to be known as “theodicy,” to which we shall presently turn. But, first, we must explore the doctrine of creation, which sets the backdrop to these important discussions.