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Providence and Divine Action

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Brian L. Hebblethwaite
Brian L. Hebblethwaite
Affiliation:
Fellow of Queens’ College
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Extract

In the preface to his book God the Problem, Gordon Kaufman writes ‘Although the notion of God as agent seems presupposed by most contemporary theologians … Austin Farrer has been almost alone in trying to specify carefully and consistently just what this might be understood to mean.’

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 223 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

1 I detect a certain tension in Kaufman's book between what he had learned from Farrer and indeed the whole Christian tradition about the paradigmatic notion of God's agency and what he has learned from Troeltsch and Collingwood about the interconnectedness of nature and history, not to mention what he has learned from Schutz, Luckmann and Berger about the humanly constructed nature of all our ideas, including our idea of God. To contrast what Kaufman calls the ‘available God’ with the ‘real God’ may serve to bring out the inadequacies and limitations of all our ideas of God, but to treat the ‘available God’ as the immediate referent of religious talk is to operate with bad epistemology and to create untold difficulties for theology. Approximate ideas are not themselves referred to, they are the means of referring, approximately, to reality.