[Ch. 10 in Owen C. Thomas, ed., God’s Activity In The World: The Contemporary Problem (Scholars Press, 1983)]

 

UNDERSTANDING AN ACT OF GOD©

 

Frank G. Kirkpatrick

 

 

A Methodological Catch‑22

 

There is a certain catch‑22 element in any discussion of the nature of an act of God. The discussion necessarily involves two distinct concepts, that of an act and that of God. If the notion of an act becomes the focus of discussion and the notion of God remains relatively unexplored, traditional assumptions about God's ubiquity, transcendence, ontological otherness, etc. normally obstruct our willingness to admit that God can perform an act in anything like the way human agents perform acts. If the notion of God becomes the focus of discussion and the notion of an act remains relatively unexplored, traditional assumptions about acts being subject to causal explanation normally obstruct our willingness to admit that any agent's act (including God's) can be explained without violating the canons of causal law.

 

The only way to cut through the catch‑22 dimension of the problem is to suggest at the outset that the two concepts (an act, God) are so related to each other that only by understanding what is involved in the explanation of any act by any agent can a case be made for conceiving God as an agent ‑‑ and that only by conceiving God as an agent can any case be made for modifying some of the traditional attributes ascribed to Him, such as His absolute transcendence of the ontological structures of the world within which human agents act, without sacrificing His divinity.

 

In other words, to avoid the charge that a picture of God as an agent is not a literal picture of what God really is, since agents are too limited and finite, one must first show that what being an agent entails is sufficiently expansive to permit God to be both an agent and worthy of worship. The real trick is developing a notion of agency which entails for and agent the kind of power, supremacy and freedom from significant restrictions upon his scope of action that God, as agent, must have if He is to be 'really' God. It is not possible to develop a notion of agency such that God can be both an agent and many of the things traditionally claimed for Him, such as not being a singular entity, not

 

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capable of performing distinct acts which are peculiarly His, impassible, beyond all human conceptualization, and exempt from the basic metaphysical principles of reality.

 

What I would like to suggest, and then to argue, is that we entertain the thought‑experiment that God is an agent, a singular being, existing as a distinct entity alongside other entities and sharing, at least in part, a common world with them (i.e., existing in time and having some locus from which his action proceeds). It is then possible, through an investigation of what an act is and what being an agent entails, to make a case that being an agent imposes no significant limitations on God's ultimacy and worship­ fulness.

 

One basic stranglehold on the concept of God as an agent is the assumption that all acts are exhaustively accounted for by causal explanation. Any act, including a divine act, would therefore have to be regarded as unfree, hence, not the kind of thing to be attributed to God in an unrestricted manner. If it can be shown that acts, by their very nature, are occurrences not completely subject to causal law, then the case can be made that to explain an act is not to capture it without remainder in a net of scientific, causal law. If the agent and his act are free, at least in significant respects, from that kind of net, then a divine agent, with no meaningful limitations upon his scope and efficacy of action, is necessarily free from the kind of restraints implied by causal law. Part of what it means to be worthy of worship is to possess the kind of power, and the freedom to use it in such a way, as to affect decisively the fulfillment of others. As agent, God would possess both and hence be worthy of worship (provided of course, that His use of power was benevolent).*

 

God as Singular

 

            In order to get the analysis under way, the thought‑experiment requires only that we accept the intelligibility of the notion of God as a single being, subject to the same metaphysical principles

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*To be worthy of worship a being must possess two kinds of things: power to effect its decisions without restraint and the use of that power in ways that enhance the worshipper. It is possible to imagine a most powerful being who uses his power to degrade beings dependent on him. It is also possible to imagine a most loving, morally righteous being who does not have enough power to accomplish his loving purposes. Neither being would be worthy of worship. In this essay, however, I am concerned primarily with the first requirement: the capacity to act in such ways and with such power as to effect decisions without significant restraint. Only if that requirement is met is it possible to ask whether the power and action are employed for benevolent purposes.

 

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of explanation as other single beings. We can invoke Whitehead's famous claim that God is not an exception to metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse, but their chief exemplification.

 

In support of our claim that it is intelligible to understand God as an agent, 'alongside' other agents, we can also call upon Edward Pols's claims that "The most fundamental and concrete sense of power accessible to our intelligence is power in the sense of agency," and that power in the sense of agency necessarily means "the power of an agent regarded as an entity."1 Therefore, if ultimacy has to do with power, then only a being can have the requisite ultimacy because only an agent‑being can exercise power.

 

Clearly, the full explication of what is entailed by the notion of God as a singular being is not possible here. All that is necessary as a basis for the remaining discussion of God's acts is a commitment to the possibility that divine uniqueness and transcendence need not be so radically construed as to deny that God is a singular entity. That commitment will be strengthened, I believe, by seeing in the following discussion just what is entailed by the notion of an agent in relation to his acts and to other agents. As William Power has recently pointed out, transcendence as a concept "can best be articulated in terms of identifying and describing an unsurpassable concrete or enduring individual in the context of a metaphysical theory."2

 

Such a concept of transcendence might have two essential component meanings: 1) that any being is other than (over‑against or alongside) other beings. The notion of being 'alongside' other entities is simply another way of saying that God is an individual. As a singular, distinct, unique entity God can be 'picked out' from among other beings and things as 'this' particular being. To say that He is alongside other beings merely means that there are other beings, (no matter how dependent they might be upon God's decision to sustain them in existence) with some degree of ontological independence from God; 2) that any free being with the power to act is transcendent of the limits of his past in the sense that he can create a future which is not yet. In this sense, transcendence would be relative to the power and freedom of the agent. With this second meaning of 'transcendence,' one could affirm God as the transcendent being (the superlatively powerful and free being) while recognizing relative degrees of the same kind of transcendence in other beings. But both meanings of transcendence presuppose and build upon the concept of singular beings ontologically alongside each other.

 

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The Gordian knot which holds captive any further discussion of God's acts as straightforwardly intelligible is the assumption that God cannot be an agent like other agents. Once the intelligibility of God's nature as agent is established, as it can be only by the principle that He is a singular being (since agents must be singular beings), then it becomes possible to show how the categories of action apply to Isis acts just as they do to the acts of other agents.

 

God's Relation to the World

 

If we are willing to entertain the idea of God as a singular being, we can now move to the second major issue in understanding an act of God: God's relation to the world. We will bypass, for the moment, the full justification of using the agent/act category for God, since that will be the subject of the next phase of the discussion. In this phase, we are concerned primarily with how that category best explicates God's relation to the field of His action. The three possibilities which have been offered are: 1) the world is to God as the body is to a human agent; 2) the world is not directly the recipient of God's act but is affected only through His use of intermediaries; and 3) God is one agent among many, acting within a common world. Since I have already indicated my sympathy for the third possibility, I will discuss why I find the first two possibilities unattractive.

 

Working backwards, option 2 relies too heavily upon agnosticism regarding our knowledge of God's real being. As a result it qualifies unnecessarily, I believe, the model of agent/act, thereby putting God at too great a distance from any acts He might perform. The notion of intermediation presupposes that the agent works his will upon one thing (the world) by means of some other thing (his body) in the first instance. If one assumes that God's essential being is beyond conceptual grasp because it ontologically transcends the world, then clearly the vehicle of mediation (God's body) will, also be unknowable, and a form of double mediation will be required. Gordon Kaufman seems to accept this position when he says that "the instrumentalities through which God qua His transcendence acts are by definition completely inaccessible to us . . , we have no access to God's "body"; we cannot directly observe His "behavior."3 The obvious difficulty with this position (which follows from the as­sumption that God is unknowable in Himself) is that it makes prob­lematic the intelligibility of God's action, which is the very thing the model of God as agent is supposed to provide. Unless in some sense, we can directly observe God's behavior (or vehicle of

 

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mediation) as we observe the behavior of other agents (their bodies: no matter how unobservable their 'inner life' might be), we will have no significant conception of how God relates to the world.

 

The virtue of the first model (the world as God's body) is that it promises to obviate the difficulties Kaufman runs into in understanding how we can link God to his observable acts in the world. The problem with intermediaries is really the problem of the relation between a non‑observable intention and its observable effect. In our relation to our own bodies, any link between intention and effect (I intend to raise my arm and it rises) is relatively non‑problematic.* Such an act is usually called basic,4 requiring no intermediate vehicle (except the use of the natural processes of my body which permit the intention to be carried out). In this instance, such as winking at someone, I do not need to employ some other 'body' to get my intention enacted. If I wish to open the door, however, I must use my body as the intermediate vehicle to enable me to pull the door open. When someone sees the 'bodily me' pulling open the door, he can reasonably infer that the opening is my act. But in the case of God, according to Kaufman, we do not see his body 'in' the act, and therefore we are in ignorance as to what kind of body he has by means of which he carries out his intention. But David Griffin suggests that all God's acts are like the raising of my arm, requiring no intervening body between the intention and its effect. Therefore, he concludes that the most adequate model for understanding God's relation to his basic acts is that of an agent to his own body, in this case the world.5

 

What Griffin does not consider, however, is whether it is possible for an agent to act without using the vehicle of his own body in order to affect some object which is not his body. It is at least conceivable that an agent could move an object other than himself simply by willing it without using a physical mediator. Speculation has called such an act 'telekinetic' or 'psychokinetic.' It is not known whether such acts do occur but conceptually they are not incoherent. They would involve an agent willing that something happen, not necessarily to his own body or by means of his own body, and simply as a result of the willing, it happens. As John S. Morreall has said, "while most of us have not had the experience

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*In the sense that the difficulty of understanding how arms rise upon the instigation of an intention is not resolved by an appeal to supernatural or transcendent forces. It is certainly problematic in the sense that it has given rise to a vast amount of philosophical literature and argument.

 

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of psychokinesis we have a pretty good concept of moving objects outside ourselves just by willing them to move."6

 

If Griffin's concern is that a non‑mediated form of action be found for God's relation to the world, then the possibility of a telekinetic kind of act, (or basic action at a distance) in which God simply wills something to happen and it happens, would permit His non‑mediated relation to the world. But it would not require, as Griffin's own position does, the notion of the world as God's body since God would not need a body, in the physical sense, to effect His intention.

 

This alternative to Griffin's view, while not logically required, does have the virtue of permitting us to understand God as an independent entity alongside other agents. If the world is God's body, then we, as parts of the world, would have relatively little independence from God since we would be merely parts of His body. But if we exist alongside God, each acting upon the world in ways appropriate to our nature, God simply by willing, we by a combination of basic acts and employment of our bodies, then the relative ontological independence from God we seem to need if we are to enter into genuine personal relationship with Him and intelligibility of His action and ours would be provided for.

 

The Model of Agency and Its Application to God

 

The fundamental strength of the model of God as an agent alongside other agents, however, is its ability to make the fit between the understanding of agent/act developed by recent philosophical analysis and our understanding of God as agent as tight as possible. If God can be thought of as a singular being, acting within and upon a shared ontological structure alongside other agents, then in principle there should be no serious qualifications on our application of the principles of agency to His action. The greatest fear of making the fit a literal one is that God's action then will become too restricted to be truly ultimate. But what are the necessary limitations inherent in the notion of the agent acting? It is my belief that the kind of limitations in question are not seriously damaging to God's supremacy and worshipfulness; that, in fact, the virtue of the model of agent is that it provides not just a metaphor or remote analogy useful for preserving the uniqueness of God but that it provides the very meaning of that uniqueness. This meaning requires, however, that God be an agent a singular being in relation to other beings who have their own ontological individuality.

 

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One aspect of the agent model which has appealed to recent commentators is that which Gordon Kaufman calls the element of "interpersonal transcendence."7 The virtue of this concept, according to Kaufman, is that it preserves God's mysterious unknowability while at the same time linking His acts with our knowledge. We assume, argues Kaufman, that in any act there is an irreducible distinction between the 'real' agent hidden behind the act and the observable, public face of the act by which the agent reveals himself. What we observe is the effect of the act and/or its vehicle of mediation, i.e., the body of the agent. What we cannot observe is the essential agent, i.e., the agent in himself.

 

While it is important to maintain that the agent is not his act and that in some sense the agent always transcends his act, it is dangerous both to press too hard the distinction between the mysterious 'real' agent and the observable act by which he reveals himself, and to maintain, as Kaufman does, that God's form of transcendence must be somehow categorically different from the interpersonal transcendence common to human agents.

 

On the first point Michael McLain has argued forcefully that the exclusive use of the interpersonal model "implies a 'residually Cartesian' understanding of the self"8 a which bifurcates our modes of knowledge in a way that "is not adequate to the facts at hand."9 McLain wants to substitute a model in which the agent's relation to his act carries the primary meaning of transcendence. The agent, by means of his intention, is able to transcend his immediate experience and to carry out his intention through multi‑faceted agency or modes of activity. This agent/act model, as McLain calls it, takes more seriously than does Kaufman's interpersonal model both the embodiedness of the agent who reveals himself as well as the observable side of his action. The agent remains embodied, not dualistically haunted by a mysterious inner self, but the intentions he entertains remain transcendent of their empirical manifestation.

 

McLain does not suggest that God's body is visible in his acts. The stress in McLain's argument lies more upon the need for a locus from which the agent issues forth his intentions and actions. The kind of body which would constitute this locus may be difficult to conceive but the thrust of McLain's argument is that some kind of locus is necessary to the full notion of an agent. If, additionally, we accept the possibility of basic action at a distance then God's actual body need not be present or observable in the act itself. To suggest God's embodiedness in this context

 

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is not to suggest or even argue for its necessity. What we need is some notion of singularity from which intentions and the power to effect them proceed. If that can occur out of a disembodied agent, well and good. Particularly if embodiedness suggests the decay intrinsic to a material body, it would not be appropriate to God.

 

I believe McLain is much closer to an adequate view of the agent than is Kaufman because of his insistence that the agent not be dualistically conceived. At the same time, his model has the virtue of employing Kaufman's interpersonal model without subscribing to its defects.

 

The agent/act model provides the fundamental framework within which the meaning of a transcendent reality is meaningfully described . . . . The use of the second model, the one rooted in our interpersonal experience, prescribes the limits within which the qualifications of the first model may take place.l0

 

The difficulty with McLain's final position is not that he has failed to elaborate the virtues of the synthesis of the agent/act model and the interpersonal model but that he fails to see how the models can be applied literally to God, even though thanks to his own analysis, he has given a full and adequate meaning to the concept of transcendence. McLain is rightly concerned that God not be unnecessarily limited in His action, and that, therefore,

 

the use of the agent/act model to render meaningful the concept of 'transcendence' involves the qualification of human agency in the direction of an agency not beset by limitations.11

 

The removal of these limitations leads to the notion of

 

an agent whose will is not that 'of a determinate being, operating within a certain charter of function or scope of effect', but is rather ‘a fully creative agent, one who is defined only by his unrestricted freedom . . . the notion of an agency unrestrictedly free . . . . It is the notion of a radically transcendent reality, one who escapes the limitations of finite existence.’12

 

McLain does not, unfortunately, spell out in detail what these unacceptable limitations of finite existence are, except to suggest that 'unrestricted freedom' means that no obstacle exists to the full and complete realization of one's intention. He assumes that being finite, or, as in the quote from Farrer, being 'a determinate being,' entails encountering some resistance in the field of one's action. But why this should be a significant limitation on God is not clear, especially if, as a determinate agent, he has the requisite power to overcome (with due regard, perhaps, for the

 

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freedom and integrity of the others) any ultimate obstacles to his goals. There is a two‑fold sense of restriction here, one of which is significant, the other of which is not. The unimportant restriction is that of being an entity alongside other entities. The important restriction, which in the case of God would not be empirically actualized, would be one in which the other beings ultimately thwarted or frustrated his intention.

 

Each entity has some others with whom it has to deal in carrying out its intentions. Unless, contrary to the spirit of the Biblical tradition, one wanted to make God completely unrelated, then he necessarily will act in relation to others. It is not the fact of dealing with others that should constitute an important restriction on God, but the nature of the relationship. As long as God retains power sufficient to override recalcitrant counter-intentions and forces, his being‑in‑relation would constitute no meaningful restriction whatsoever.

 

McLain's reluctance to press the literal application of his own improved model of transcendence shows itself most tellingly, I think, with respect to the central issue toward which this discussion is leading. That is the issue of whether God can perform single, discrete acts which are exclusively his. All of the commentators on the topic seem to agree, notwithstanding their different starting points and models, that God cannot be the sole agent of particular acts. For an analysis of that issue, we need to develop one remaining aspect of the concept of action: the conceptual distinction between acts and events. While noted often in passing, this distinction has not, to my mind, been sufficiently utilized in treating an act of God. If it is utilized properly, I believe it can enable us to talk of particular acts of God without compromising God's transcendence. Failure to use the distinction between acts and events has considerably weakened the work of most interpreters of God's acts because they have not been able to see how God could remain transcendently free and perform specific acts within a closed causal nexus.

 

Acts and Events

 

Perhaps the greatest contribution of the linguistic analytic approach to the concept of action has been its distinction between acts and events.13 In our own experience we know without inference the difference between performing an act and having an occurrence (event) merely happen. This difference is crucial to our understanding of ourselves as personal agents since it is only in acts freely initiated that we manifest that quality of personhood or

 

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agency which distinguishes us from the less‑than‑personal world. When we act intentionally, it is truly we who are acting. When a biological event occurs within our bodies we do not normally say that we are doing it.

 

         The most important consequences of the act/event distinction are that 1) the acts of human agents cannot be exhaustively ex­plained in categories which reduce them to causally necessary hap­penings, and 2) if God is also a free agent, his acts, likewise, cannot be fully explained by categories of causal necessity.

 

         It is crucial to observe, however, that the explanation of an act is more inclusive than the explanation of an event and therefore does not conflict with it. As John Macmurray says:

 

now when no reason can be assigned for an observed change, and it is therefore not an act, we call it an 'event' and refer it to a 'cause'. What then do we mean by a 'cause'? We mean the source of an occurrence which stands to an event as an agent stands to his act, but which is not an agent . . . a cause is a source of occurrences which is a non‑agent; an existent which is other than an agent.l4

 

As something other than an agent, Macmurray contends, a cause is not self‑explanatory. The very notion of cause entails that be­hind it there is a further cause and behind it a still further one and so on. On the other hand, if we discover a freely determined intention as the source of an occurrence, we cannot get back behind it (without annihilating the distinction between intention and cause) to find its cause. When we reach an intention we reach the end of our search for the final explanation of why that par­ticular act occurred.

 

         For example, if my arm rising was brought about by my inten­tion to signal my wife, it can be described accurately, though only partially and incompletely, by reference to causal mechanisms. As my arm rises these mechanisms make it possible for the elbow to bend, the muscles to tighten, the nerves to relax, etc. None of these biological events occurs without causation. And I clearly do not intend in any direct way the organic processes taking place in my muscles. But the rising of my arm still occurs and still is explainable ultimately only by reference to my intention to raise it, regardless of the fact that in raising it I make use of natural organic forces. If we could, for the moment, forget about the origin of the arm rising, i.e., my intention, and concentrate just upon the movement itself we could describe it in purely causal terms. At no point in the rising (after its initiation) do we see the intervention of intention. Everything that takes place as the

 

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arm rises proceeds naturally and according to causal law. But when we reintroduce the intention which initiated the rising we add a factor which is not adequately accounted for in causal terms since it is not a cause in the narrow sense.

 

The difficulty in accepting this distinction between an intention which initiates an act and the causes which control the events which carry the act to completion is our belief that the distinction leads inevitably to an incoherence in understanding the world. We have come to believe that there are 'laws of nature' so tightly woven within the world that any occurrence which is partially explained by something which is not subject to these laws is unintelligible or absurd. A free act is seen as something which violates or upsets these laws of nature.

 

The way around this difficulty, as Macmurray reminds us, is by remembering that a law of nature essentially is a description of what happens in the world provided that no agent interferes. The laws of nature are descriptions of a world without agents: a world of occurrences in which intentions play no role. As long as there are no intentions or free acts then the laws of nature will completely and without remainder account for all the happenings within the world.

 

But if there are agents and if their acts are freely initiated, then the laws of nature cannot account for or exhaustively explain them. However, there need be no conflict between the initiation of an act and the processes by which it is carried out. An intention need not violate the laws of nature inasmuch as the intention initiates the act and the laws of nature account for its realization subsequent to its initiation. There is a sense in which an agent always interferes in nature because he must interrupt what otherwise would be the natural, causal flow of events (e.g., until and unless I decide to lift my arm it will remain hanging at my side). Assuming that the decision is freely made, not predictable in the same way that completely causal events are, then causal laws are not sufficient to account for it. In this case, the full explanation of the act will have to include reference to a non‑causal intention as well as to the causal events 'within' its enactment. The interference of the agent with the causal region of nature is not, therefore, a violation of causal law but its employment by a dimension of reality which 'goes beyond' causal law. As G. H. Von Wright has said:

 

The idea that causal connections are necessary connections in nature is rooted in the idea that there are agents who can interfere with the natural course of events. The

 

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concept of causation . . . is therefore secondary to the concept of a human action . . . .The determinations of action . . . are of a totally different kind from causes and effects among events in nature.l5

 

Edward Pols has called the realm of caused events the 'infrastructure' of the act. Insisting that an act has an 'ontological authenticity,' Pols argues that the act "embraces, makes use of, even in some measure dominates the realities of the infrastructure, but neither act nor infrastructure cancels the authenticity of the other."16

 

As long as there is such a thing as a free act, and as long as the initiation of such an act does not contradict or exclude the occurrence of events which are not in themselves freely initiated but which can be employed in the realization of an act, there need be no metaphysical problem in accepting the reality of a coherent relationship between acts and events. Thus the existence of causal laws, or laws of nature, need be no barrier to our acceptance of intentional acts. The peaceful co‑existence of acts and causal law requires only that the latter recognize the limits of its application.

 

Particular Acts of God

 

To come now to the heart of the debate over God's acts, I believe that it is the failure to use the distinction between act and event to its fullest that has weakened what is generally said about God's ability to perform specific acts and which has made claims about God's acts go on the defensive in the face of what is mistakenly taken to be the imperial sweep of scientific explanation. It has for the most part been assumed, from Bultmann to Kaufman, that there is an unbroken causal nexus into which every occurrence must fit and in relation to which any divine act becomes absurd. Gilkey has said that "a vast panoply" of divine deeds is now no longer regarded as having actually happened because of "the liberal insistence on the causal continuum of space‑time experience."17 Bultmann has maintained that:

 

In mythological thinking the act of God . . . is understood as an action which intervenes between the natural, or historical, or psychological course of events; it breaks and links them at the same time. The divine causality is inserted as a link in the chain of the events which follow one another according to the causal nexus . . . . The thought of the action of God as an unworldly and transcendent action can be protected from misunderstanding only if it is not thought of as an action which happens between the worldly actions or events, but as happening within them . . . . The action of God is hidden from every eye except the eye of faith.l8

 

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McLain, in agreement with Kaufman, says, regarding specific acts of God, "we cannot view these actions for which God is the sole agent, since this would involve introducing unintelligible surds into an ordered world." 19

 

 Frank Dilley likewise sees the problem as reducing to only two alternatives: "Either a conservative tradition affirming miraculous acts of God, whether spectacular or 'hidden,' or a God who acts solely through the general orders and processes of nature and history."20 In other words, if specific acts of God are to be defended it can only be through option one, which is equivalent, for Dilley to affirming miraculous violations of the natural order. Schubert Ogden also accepts the conclusion that "God's action . . . cannot be simply identified with any particular historical event or events."21 Ogden goes on to qualify this somewhat by insisting that in some sense “man's action actually is God's action . . .”22 Ogden does not deny that in some events "the ultimate truth about our existence before God is normatively represented or revealed."23 But as David Griffin has pointed out Ogden's understanding of the revelatory aspect of God's act

 

does not do justice to the objective intention implied in saying that a certain action is peculiarly someone's, in a sense that other of his actions are not. For, objectively speaking according to his explanation, a special act does not express the person's inner being any more than his other actions do; it does reveal his inner being more than other actions do, but this is due to its being received in a certain way by others.24

 

Griffin, who represents the process view more adequately than anyone else on this topic, goes on to assert the importance of affirming acts of God which are 'peculiarly' his. Such acts would be ones

 

a) for which God's aim was such that, if the aim were actualized, the event would optimally express God's being, and b) which did in fact actualize God's aim or will for it to an optimal degree.25

 

The most fully elaborated denial that God can perform specific, exclusive acts has been made by Gordon Kaufman. He explicitly affirms the necessity of thinking of a tight causal web as the locus for any occurrence whatsoever. "Every event is defined as a focal point in a web that reaches in all directions beyond it indefinitely."26 Kaufman seems to be so concerned that nothing tear or break into the continuity and unity of this web, that he does not pay sufficient attention to the distinction between caused events (which are the essential components of the web) and intended acts (which, if the earlier distinction is valid, cannot

                       

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be completely contained by the web). Because he is wedded to the notion of "nature and history as a web of interrelated events that must be understood as a self‑contained whole," it is impossible for him to conceive of any event having its source "in the divine will and action rather than in the context of preceding and coin­cident finite events."27 We would be forced to think of God's acts

 

as absolute beginning points for chains of events which occur not at the 'beginning' of the world and history ‑‑ but within ongoing natural and historical processes . . . . Our experience is of a unified and orderly world; in such a world acts of God (in the traditional sense) are not merely improbable or difficult to believe: they are literally in­conceivable.28

 

            The crux of the problem which Kaufman poses is that on the basis of the reasons he uses to rule out specific divine acts, he must also, and for the same reasons, rule out human acts. This, presumably, he does not want to do. But by invoking the relation of acts employing events in their realization it is possible to restore the agent’s freedom, maintain the integrity (but limited scope) of causal law, and create room for divine acts without resort to mystery or absurdity.

 

            The knot which has traditionally held divine acts captive in a closed causal network can be cut by distinguishing between descriptions of events and explanations of actions. This is one of the primary virtues of the agent/act model for understanding acts of God. As long as we can ‘make room’ for human acts within the otherwise ‘closed’ nexus of events, there would be no reason why divine acts could not have the same room, assuming that God is at least as much as an agent as we are.  In this sense, all acts are “absolute beginning points … within ongoing natural and historical processes” (the very characteristic Kaufman feared would make God’s acts “literally inconceivable”).

 

            Although we have indicated in a general way how acts can be related to the natural laws which hold for events, we also need to establish, in a way not applicable to human agents, how God can he held responsible both for his specific acts and for the natural laws into which they are inserted.  For God must have a degree of control over natural laws which no human agent can possibly have. They must be in some sense peculiarly His, but in a way that does not obviate the distinction between His relation to them and His relation to specific acts within them.

 

            The only assumption we would need to make in this regard is that God is an agent with sufficient power to be able to use the

 

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forces of nature for His purposes. This degree of power is no different in kind from the power we use when we use the forces of nature to carry out our intentions. The difference between God and us would be one of degree, God having no effective limitations on His utilization of the laws of nature. He could even be assumed without incoherence to have created and to sustain the laws of nature (an ongoing act) as well as to perform specific acts within and through them.

 

God's Act at the Red Sea

 

Our analysis of the relation between act and event was intended to raise an objection to the acceptance of the assumption that all occurrences are exhaustively subsumable under causal law. When we apply the results of our argument to a particular act of God, therefore, it is natural to expect a very different interpretation than one based on that assumption. Kaufman, for example, claims that

 

it will not do to speak of God as the agent who made it possible for the Israelites to escape from the Egyptians, if one regards it as simply a fortunate coincidence that a strong east wind was blowing at just the right time to dry up the sea of reeds. The Biblical writer's view is coherent and compelling precisely because he is able to say that "the Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind" (Ex. 14:21), i.e., it was because, and only because, God was Lord over nature, one who could bend natural events to His will that He was able to be effective Lord over history.29

 

Kaufman of course, cannot make an intelligible explanation of this purported act of God because it suggests a divine interruption of the natural flow of unbroken finite events, which on his initial assumption is absurd. But if there is a categorical difference between the explanation of an act and the description of an event, then there should be nothing more, nor less, mysterious about ex­plaining an act (willed by God) which intervenes in the natural order than there is about an act willed by a human agent.

 

            Let us look at how this distinction might be applied to the specific case Kaufman has raised. It is irrelevant for this pur­pose to decide whether there ever was such an 'occurrence.' Let alone whether it was 'truly' an act of God. Let us assume, as a thought‑experiment, that there was a parting of the waters at the Red Sea. Let us say that what is to be explained is a sudden drying up of the sea by a strong wind. According to those who claim it is an act of God, the wind dried up the sea as a result of having been moved by God for that purpose. To understand this as an act of God we need to invoke exactly the same principles by which we

 

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understand a human act. If the agent's intention had not intervened in the otherwise natural flow of events, what would have happened would have been completely predictable and explainable in causal terms. Just as a human agent does not violate natural law by deciding to raise his arm, so God does not violate natural law by deciding to move the wind in order to dry up the sea. In both cases the agents employ natural forces in order to carry out their intentions and in neither case is violence done to the notion of causal law inasmuch as their intentional intervention occurs only at the limits of causal law. Neither act can be completely ex­plained by causal law but neither act transgresses causal law.

 

If we add the assumption that God has sufficient power to control the wind, then the alleged act of drying up the waters of the Red Sea is neither more nor less intelligible, in principle, than any human act. God's decision to part the waters was a decision to intervene, as any agent must do when he acts, into the otherwise regular, predictable nexus of natural events. Like any agent, God's decision is free, transcendent of causal law but not in conflict with it, and is revelatory of his personality. But his act is also his in a particular, distinctive way, and, most importantly, it is intelligible to our human understanding.

 

If we are willing to entertain the possibility that God is an individual agent, then it is possible to understand his action without reducing it to causal terms but also without requiring a sacrifice of intelligibility. Whether he has acted, even whether he exists, are questions not touched on here. But if he does exist and has acted, then understanding an act of God becomes a coherent conceptual task unlocking the methodological catch‑22, and thereby preserving the freedom and power which makes God God.

 

 

 

NOTES

 

1.   Edward Pols, "Power and Agency," International Philosophical Quarterly, XI, #3 (September 1971), pp. 295‑96.

 

2.  William L. Power, "The Notion of Transcendence and the Problem of Discourse About God", Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLIII, #3 (September 1975), p. 531. I am aware of the possible ambiguity of the notion of 'endurance,' espec­ially since the new meaning given it by process thought. I am taking the term here in a non‑process way, but I do not want to foreclose discussion on the merits of the process position.

 

3.   Gordon Kaufman, "Revelation and Cultural History," God the Problem (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1972), pp. 158‑59.

 

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4.   See, for example, Arthur C. Danto, "Basic Actions," in Alan R. White, ed. The Philosophy of Action  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 43‑58.

 

5.   David R. Griffin, "Gordon Kaufman's Theology: Some Questions,"

Journal of the American Academy  of Religion, XLI, #4 (December 1973) pp. 554‑72.

  

6.   John S. Morreall, Analogy and Talking About God: A Critique of

 the Thomistic Approach (Washington:University Press of America, 1979), p. 39.

 

7.   Gordon Kaufman, "Two Models of Transcendence," God the Problem,

 pp. 72‑81.

 

8.   F. Michael McLain, "On Theological Models," Harvard Theological Review, 62 (1960) pp. 162‑63.

 

9.   Ibid., p. 166.

 

10. Ibid., p. 180.

 

11. Ibid., p. 179.

 

12. Ibid., p. 171. The internal quote is from Austin Farrer's Faith and

 Speculation.

 

13. See, for example, Richard Taylor, Action and Purpose (1966): G. H. Von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (1971); A. I. Melden, Free Action (1961), among a host of others.

 

14. Macmurray, The Self as Agent,  (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), especially the chapter "Causality and the Continuant," p. 152. Macmurray carefully limits the meaning of the terms 'cause' and 'reason.' This can be confusing inasmuch as 'cause' is often used very broadly in the current literature on action. A 'cause' for Macmurray is what brings about an event and is, therefore, non‑intentional. A    'reason' is what initiates an act and is quintessentially intentional.

 

15. G. H. Von Wright, Causality and Determinism, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 1‑2. The philosophical under­standing of action rehearsed here should not be taken to be the only position accepted by most philosophers of action today. Action is still at one level a mystery and its relation to causality for many philosophers does not admit of simple ex­planation (thus the enormous literature already devoted to the issue). Nevertheless, it is testimony to the cogency of the view presented here that so many philosophers tacitly admit that there is a prima facie case to be made for a metaphysical distinction between acts and events.

 

16. Edward Pols, "The Ontology of the Rational Agent," Review of Metaphysics, V. XXXIII, #4, June 1980, pp. 691‑92.

 

17. Langdon Gilkey, "Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Bib­lical Language," Journal of Religion, 41 (1961), p. 195.

 

18. Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Charles Scribner's & Sons, 1958), pp. 61‑62.

 

19.  McLain, op. cit., p. 183.

 

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20. Frank Dilley, "Does the 'God Who Acts' Really Act?," Anglican Theological Review, XLVII (1965), p. 80.

 

21. Schubert M. Ogden, "What Sense Does It Make to Say, 'God Acts  in History'?" in The Reality of God (New York: Harper & Row), 1966, p. 179.                    

 

22. Ibid., p. 181.

 

23. Ibid., p. 184.

 

24. Griffin, "Schubert Ogden's Christology and the Possibilities of Process Philosophy," in Process Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. by Delwin Brown, Ralph James, Jr., and Gene Reeves (Indianapolis: Bobbs‑Merrill Co., Inc., 1971), p. 353.

 

25. Ibid., p. 358.         

 

26. Kaufman, "On the Meaning of 'Act of God,'" God the Problem, p. 133.

 

27. Ibid.

 

28. Ibid., pp. 134‑35.

 

29. Ibid., pp. 122‑23.

 

Copyright 1983 Frank G. Kirkpatrick.