William J. Abraham, Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume III: Systematic Theology

Abstract

William Abraham’s four-volume Divine Agency and Divine Action promises to be the most significant advance in evangelical Methodist theology since Thomas C. Oden’s Classic Christianity. This is the third of the soon-to-becompleted four-volume set from Oxford University Press. The first volume gives a philosophical analysis of the concept of divine action. Abraham’s central thesis there is that the concept of action is open. That is, no fixed set of necessary and sufficient conditions can be supplied for those phenomena denominated “action.” Thus, the path to analysis of any given action will be particular; it must develop from the particular phenomenon itself, rather than by application of some general definition of action to any particular case. If this is true for creaturely actions, so it will be for any instance of divine action. The path to understanding action, divine or creaturely, lies in particularist attention to individual cases. And, Abraham argues, the theologian ought to be relieved by this insight. More than that, theologians should be invigorated. Since action is an open concept, we set out in pursuit of detailed reflection upon particular divine actions. And this is exactly what Christian theologians have, in their finest and most valuable moments, always done: attentively developed particular analyses of particular acts. The second volume of Divine Agency and Divine Action narrates key moments in the history of Christian theology as just such a venture. Abraham shows how theologians across the Christian past have approached particular instances of divine action in a particularist manner. This third volume begins to sketch a systematic theology across key dogmatic loci in light of Abraham’s fundamental commitments on divine action. The theology of Volume III is certainly a beginning. Many chapters are mere sketches and suggestions. This is a strength of the book, as Abraham has the unique ability to draw his readers along so many explorations of so many topics and themes in theology. And it is, at times, a weakness. 969899 PRE0010.1177/1063851220969899Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical TheologyBook Review book-review2020