Reprinted from The Thomist, 50, 4,
October, 1986
God,
Action, and Embodiment. By THOMAS F.
TRACY. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1984. Pp. xx + 184, $11.95 (paper).
Originally a doctoral dissertation at Yale in 1980, this
book by Thomas Tracy is a masterful, compelling, and forthright analysis of the
concept of God as agent, one which moves the discussion of the issue
significantly forward.
There have always been some of us who consider the issue
of God's agency as one of the enduring problems of theology, not only because
the Biblical witness speaks of God as one who does decisive things in history,
but also because of the fruitfulness which we have seen in recent philosophical
work on the concepts of person, action, and agency. Despite Langdon Gilkey's
attempt to write the epitaph for speaking of God as an agent, the work of
Cordon Kaufman and, more recently, the spate of work within process theology,
have kept alive the possibility of speaking about God, at least analogically,
in language drawn from our human experience of action and agency.
But, as both Kaufman's and process theology's approaches
reveal, there is a tentativeness in speaking about God in absolutely
straightforward and literal ways as an agent. As Tracy persuasively points out,
there is a "residual Cartesianism" in the use both make of
person/agent concepts as applied to God. For example, Kaufman still holds God
to be inaccessible to us except through his external manifestations which are
never completely revelatory of who He is. At the same time, God is not regarded
as the agent responsible for specific acts in history but only for the
overarching sweep of history, for its general pattern. In this way, an almost
unbridgeable chasm is unintentionally opened between the concept of agency as
applied to human persons and as applied to God.
One of the great virtues of Tracy's book is that he
confronts this problem head‑on. Using the vocabulary of character traits
("person‑characterizing predicates"), Tracy argues that we can
only ascribe attributes to God if they are based on the intentional actions of
an agent. It makes no sense to describe God as loving or just unless there is
some intentional action (attributable to him) from which these descriptive
traits are drawn. Nothing is gained and everything is lost by pretending that
such character traits are not literally applicable to God. If God is to be
described at all as personal it can only be on the basis of divine behavior
manifested in intentional action, and intentional action can only originate
from an agent.
Tracy's application of the concepts of agency and
intentionality are particularly impressive because he manages to summarize as
well as to integrate some of the most important analytical work of this
quarter-
century.
His success is particularly noteworthy in that he extends the discussion
precisely to those topics (God and His acts in history) so often considered irrelevant
or unnecessary by the very analytical philosophers whose work is so nicely
mined by Tracy.
Tracy devotes two‑thirds of the book to a full
discussion of the problem of mind‑body dualism and to the claim that God
can be a non‑bodily agent. He wants to argue against such dualism, for
the notion of God as a personal agent, and against the claim that such an agent
must be (ŕ la Strawson) embodied. Tracy agrees with Strawson that the bodily
personal agent is a psychophysical unit, irreducibly one. But Tracy is very
careful not to draw out implications from Strawson that would require that every individual who acts intentionally must be in
every case a bodily agent. Agents must necessarily act intentionally but
intentional action need not necessarily require embodiment as a condition for
enactment. A mental agent is not a category mistake as long as he can
intentionally act. All embodied agents must, as Tracy concedes to Strawson, be
psychophysical units, but not all agents most be embodied.
The key question, here, of course, is whether a non‑embodied
agent can act upon bodies And to that Tracy gives what I think is a less than
fully satisfying answer. He claims that it is not up to the theist (i.e., one
who holds to a non‑embodied God) to explain the means by which
God's intentional activity engages his creatures. And this claim is based upon
Tracy's appeal to God's "uniqueness", which makes the means of divine
activity always a mystery to us.
What moves Tracy to want
to avoid an embodied God is the fact that psychophysical agents are always
bound to limitations set by their biology. These limitations, he believes, are
entailed by recent claims, some of which are associated with process theology,
that the world is God's body. These claims, which clearly trade on the power of
Strawson's notion of agents as psychophysical units, assume that God does not
exist except in and through the processes of the world. While God may well be
able to affect decisively the life of the world, the psychophysical concept entails
that He could not have created the world (since psychophysical agents do not
create their own bodies).
If God is to be God then any limitation on his
intentional activity must be self‑imposed. There must be nothing
in God's activity which is not capable of intentional regulation. This
understanding of God's relation to some kind of bodily structure through which
action can be carried out avoids the obvious problems involved in the
alternative claim that God must work with a bodily structure ‘given’ to him and
in some sense, therefore, beyond his complete intentional control. But if the
only kind of body appropriate to a self‑regulating deity is one which is
completely subject to divine control, that is, "once we have denied that
the world at
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any
level constitutes a pattern of activity beyond the reach of God's intentions,
we may well wonder why we should speak of God as embodied at all" (119).
Tracy rightly points out that, if God's body is identified
with the world (as process thought tends to do), then there can he virtually no
independence of action on the part of the constituents of God's body. But
process thought certainly intends to permit a great deal of independence
for worldly entities which interact with God, and it is this intention which
leads process thinkers to question the metaphysical viability of classical
theism. But, if the entities of the world are God's body, it is hard to
see how they could have any independent capacity for action vis‑ŕ‑vis
the agent whose body they are.
At this point, Tracy seems to think he has disposed of
the strongest argument on behalf of God's embodiment. What he does not seem to
have considered, however, is the logical possibility of a body for God which is
neither the world itself nor an organism identical to those
within the world. It is certainly logically possible that God could have a body
of some sort, consisting of some kind of matter continuous with but not
necessarily identical in every respect to the matter which presently
constitutes this particular universe of space‑time. It could not be
completely discontinuous with matter as we know it if we want to avoid having
the term ‘body’ become so stretched as to be meaningless. Nevertheless, such a
body could be completely inaccessible to us through the normal vehicles of
perception. To be God's body it would have to be completely subject to
his will but it could also be an ontologically necessary infrastructure through
which he enacts his will on others (and thus meet Strawson's condition that all
agents be irreducible psychophysical units). I think Tracy is right in arguing
that one cannot necessarily rule out the logical possibility of a bodiless
divine agent, but he is wrong in claiming that being an embodied agent
necessarily diminishes the power of God. I think he needs to explore more fully
why the notion of a divine body which is not identical to the world, is
inaccessible to human detection, and is subject to divine will, would detract
in any metaphysically significant way from God's majesty and worthiness of
worship.
There are two final observations about Tracy's argument.
First, I sense a certain failure on his part to appreciate the full force of
process theology's claim that part of the reason for insisting on God's
embodiment is to make human relationship with God as meaningful to him as it is
to us. Tracy is still enough of a classical theist to be uncomfortable with any
notion of God which threatens his ‘completeness.’ As the "perfection of
agency," God "will exist from himself (a se) in sovereign
independence from the world of creatures" and will not "have his
being in essential relatedness to creatures . . ." (151). These claims, of
course,
as
Tracy recognizes, break sharply with process theology, which holds that, unless
God is in some sense moved or changed by our action upon him, then he cannot in
any metaphysically coherent way be said to be in relation to us and we must be
completely determined by him. Tracy tries to get around this problem by
insisting that God's perfection does not preclude him from relationships
with creatures, even "mutually affecting" ones. But it is difficult
to see how he can claim both that God is perfect and complete without creatures
‑ his life lacks "no richness without the creature" (143) ‑
and at the same time that God can be genuinely "affected" by them.
The relationship, given Tracy's classical theistic assumptions, still seems one‑way
since God's love toward creatures determines them, but is not determined in any
way by their love toward him. It is not at all clear what God has to
"gain" from creating and interacting with creatures who can add
literally nothing to the richness of his already complete and perfect life. To
talk about love in this content is no answer since a genuine, full love is one
which is reciprocal or mutual: one in which both partners are enriched at least
to some degree. Unless creatures can either help to fulfill or to frustrate
God's intentions, and unless the realization or frustration of those intentions
enhances or diminishes the satisfaction of God, then mutually affecting
relationships between God and creatures are simply not possible. And,
ironically, Tracy's insistence on the perfection and completeness of God does
not square well with his otherwise very sensitive comments about the genuine
mutuality of love and friendship elsewhere in the book.
Finally, I
think Tracy needs to develop more fully the extremely important implications of
his claim that as agent God can (and does) perform specific acts in history.
Given Tracy's vigorous and persuasive case for employing the vocabulary of
character traits for God based on divine action, he is committed to claiming
that "we must be prepared to point to actions in which his love and
justice are displayed . . . . The meaning of these attributes will be tied
logically to the account that we give of what God has done and is doing"
(19). Tracy rightly refuses to fall back solely upon the notion of God's
"overarching " control of history. God must be the agent responsible
for some acts in history which are his and not someone else's. It will
not do simply to say that God cooperates with human action or that in every
human act there are two agents, God and the human person. But Tracy gives no
real indication of how we might go about determining which acts are God's and
not those of other agents or simply natural occurrences. Many events are
claimed to be divine acts, but what criteria would Tracy use for adjudicating
those claims? He is justifiably suspicious of restricting divine activity to
psychological forms of inspiration because these actions "cannot be easily
identified as a basis for the identification of God as their agent" (78).
But, while
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he insists that divine acts
are always story‑relative, he does not provide a full explanation of how
someone, either within the framework of the story, or outside it, can determine
(using historical evidence and philosophical analysis) when they are dealing
with a divine act.
As evidenced by his review (The Thomist, 49
(1985), 299‑305) of William Abraham's Divine Revelation and the Limits
o f Historical Criticism (Oxford, 1982), I'm certain Tracy is aware of this
need for further development despite its absence in this book. It is, in fact,
one of the most important contributions of his study of divine action that he
has recognized the obligation on the part of those who accept his analysis to
identify specific divine acts in history. In this respect, I believe, Tracy is
well beyond the limited view of divine agency in Kaufman (who is reluctant to
identify God with anything other than a vague kind of overarching intention).
Tracy's argument gives us the basis for beginning to support the Biblical view
of divine action on the solid ground of a metaphysics which is faithful to
classical theism (perhaps to a fault) as well as to the most sophisticated
forms of contemporary philosophical analysis and process thought. His book is a
masterpiece of cogent reasoning, but, more important, it breaks new ground in our
understanding of one of the most basic of all Christian claims ‑ that God
is one who acts in history.
Trinity
College
Hartford, Connecticut