Natural Disasters and Time: Non-eschatological Perceptions of Earthquakes in Late Antique and Medieval Historiography

This contribution analyzes the rhetoric surrounding natural disasters in historiographic sources, challenging our assumptions about the eschatological nature of late antique and medieval historical consciousness. Contrary to modern expectations, a large number of late antique and medieval sources indicate that earthquakes and other natural disasters were understood as signs from God, relating to theophanic encounters or divine wrath in the present time. Building on recent research on premodern concepts of time and historical consciousness, the article underscores the fact that eschatological models of time and history—that is, the relentless linear, teleological progression of time towards the End of Days—was not how premodern people perceived the relationship between past, present, and future. The textual evidence presented here is supported by a fragmented and little-known illuminated historiographic text, the Ravennater Annalen, housed today in the cathedral library in Merseburg. This copy of a sixth-century illustrated calendar from Ravenna contains unique depictions of earthquakes in the form of giants breathing fire. Like the textual sources, this visual document should not be read as a premonition of the End of Days, rather it visualizes the belief that divine agency and wrath caused natural disasters.

Divine Action is Constitutive of Theology: William Abraham, John Webster, and Theological Theology

This article puts forward the view that divine action is constitutive of Christian theology. More precisely, it claims that what makes a theologian’s work theological is her commitment to a narrative composed by God’s actions to create, redeem, sustain and perfect creatures. It begins with a systematic summary of William Abraham’s four-volume Divine Agency and Divine Action. Two objections are then put to it, one regarding the breadth of the concept ‘action’ and another regarding its ability to facilitate a complete theological method. It then argues that these objections can be overcome when partnered with John Webster’s ‘theological theology’ approach, as it supplies the crucial concept of an ‘economy’ of divine action. A final section presents a ‘Websterian/Abrahamic’ approach, with the result that divine action is no longer relegated to discussions of special divine providence but is the defining feature of all theological work.

Beyond Secularized Eschatology Introductory Remarks

History as a body of knowledge, a loose bundle of working routines and writing practices, of genres, memories, imaginaries, and institutions, has struggled with its relationship to “religion” for a long time. In the European tradition, but also elsewhere, historical writing often served to fill the gaps in the knowledge about the past that had been, in the main, supplied by scriptural tradition. At the same time, historical writing also became a competitor with this tradition. The resulting relationship was, and continues to be, uneasy. In its familiar present-day form, for example, the quality of being “historical,” i.e. “historicity,” requires the exclusion of divine agency as a permissible explanation of events in the course of worldly affairs. In what François Hartog calls the modern “regime of historicity,” the culture of historical writing after 1750 became dominated by scholarship and aligned with mechanist understandings of the philosophy of nature. Enlightenment-era historical writing increasingly conceived of the world as a nexus of cause–effect relations that afforded space to the divine agency only in the function of “prime mover.” History then appeared to fall in line with the other forces of reason-driven “secularization” that stripped religious knowledge of the privilege of explaining things in the world, ultimately transforming it into “dogma” and “belief,” both only tenuously connected to reality. Knowledge based on the divinely “revealed” texts and the divinely “inspired” thought of traditionally recognized religious authorities lost its previous epistemic standing. Yet this loss occurred, to the extent that it did, in the form of a highly complicated negotiation, with compromises stacked on top of other compromises, generating a continuously confusing and mobile state of affairs.

Divine and Human Agency in Calvin’s Institutes

This chapter considers the doctrines of providence and sin in the Institutes of Christian Religion in order to draw out Calvin’s views on the interplay of human and divine agency. Calvin’s account of God’s particular providence establishes the basic conditions for human responsibility and characterizes God’s agency as perfectly efficacious—so much so that the relationship between God’s willing and evil/sin cannot adequately be captured through language of ‘permission’. The doctrine of sin further inflects this account, clarifying the relationship between human freedom, necessity, and responsibility for sin. The result is a challenging picture, in which humans are responsible for sin, but not for good, and in which God is causally determinative of both good and evil. The key to this account—to understanding its perplexities and to identifying what features of meaningful human action are at stake—is the nesting of intentions within a layering of human and divine agency.

The Chicken and the Egg

Which comes first, divine agency or the calculations of diviners? Both are integral to divination, other predictive methods, and the ‘hatching out’ of new creation stories among the Nuosu of Southwest China. In this article, I present ethnography on divination in which eggs evoke the person’s position in the world while the bodies or bones of chickens are indices of health or prosperity. When cracking open raw eggs, peeling open slaughtered chickens, or reading chicken bones, diviners creatively draw upon the assistance of spirits and their own calculatory reflections in ways that encourage internal variation within their craft. Through case studies on illnesses and a new family tradition, I show that Nuosu inhabit a hybrid world that features cosmological proliferation, to which the creativity of divination responds.

Divine Agency, Divine Freedom, and Divine Suffering

This chapter argues that traditional concepts of God as pure act, impassible, atemporal, and simple should be rethought in light of the canonical claims the Christian tradition makes about divine action. First, it examines why we should hold to a strong account of divine agency. On this basis, it argues that we cannot avoid predicating such concepts as choice, mercy, rational deliberation, love, suffering, wrath, and patience to God. The chapter calls this divine “agentism.” Second, it argues that the central claims of agentism are incompatible with the thought of Thomas Aquinas (“Thomism”) and some of its major exponents. Third, it argues why Thomism is unpersuasive. Finally, it indicates some directions for future research in this area.

Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume IV

Following the first three volumes in the series on divine action, this fourth and final volume seeks a prescriptive account of God as an agent. Christian systematic theology raises deep metaphysical questions about the central concepts we use in our thinking about God. One of these central concepts bequeathed by the Christian tradition is that God is an agent. While volumes 2 and 3 offered a wide range of specific divine actions offered in the canonical Christian tradition, the question of how to articulate this basic conviction arises. In this volume, Abraham expounds the concept of God as agent by applying it to various traditional problems in Christian doctrine like the relation of freedom and grace, divine action in liberation theology, the presence of God in the Eucharist, divine providence, the relationship of Christianity and Islam, the relation of the natural sciences to theology and apparent design, and the realm of the demonic. In keeping with the argument of the tetralogy as a whole, specific divine actions are the points of departure for reflection on these topics. The book aims not only to clarify the concept of God as an agent but also to articulate solutions to these traditional problems. It is designed to be the launchpad for further research in divine agency and divine action and how an account of God as an agent can throw fresh light on old theological and philosophical problems.

Divine Action, Design, and Natural Theology

This chapter reviews the debate about intelligent design as it emerged within biology. Then it treats the argument from design as represented by various features of the universe, like temporal and spatial order. The chapter argues that divine agency and divine action inform this debate by highlighting the identity of the agent who is the designer, by exposing how far one can specify the intentions and purposes of God in arguments from design, and by bringing to light two radically different ways of construing the place of natural theology in theology proper. It suggests further work is needed on this issue.