Alex Jensen from Murdoch University was one of my supervisors for my doctoral studies and I owe him a great debt of gratitude for his friendship, support and expertise. I am pleased, therefore, to bring his new book to your attention: Divine Providence and Human Agency: Trinity, Creation and Freedom published by Ashgate.
Alex’ concern in this book is to explore the nature of what I call a “strong doctrine of divine providence” in a context in which human freedom is fully affirmed. He insists that the sovereignty of God with respect to history must be fully affirmed lest we lose the basis for Christian hope. But so too must the modern human self-understanding as free agent within certain limitations. He seeks to understand and ultimately transcend this apparent contradiction by appeal to the the holy Trinity. This looks like a significant contribution to an important topic, and I look forward to reading it.
Alex sent me a copy of his conclusion to the book; here is an excerpt:
“We can summarise the argument of this book by saying that God acts in creation through God’s one eternal act of willing, by which God creates being, time, space, the world, its history, and all events taking place within it. This one divine act of willing is enacted in time and space by the logos and the Holy Spirit. At the same time, God grants God’s creatures genuine freedom and agency. These two things must not be separated, even if they are superficially paradoxical, because they are necessary in order to safeguard the specifically Christian experience of salvation through the saving presence of the risen Christ in the church. …
“All attempts to resolve the paradox by dissolving it into one or the other position are inadequate, as they either deny that God is indeed the creator and Lord of all things, who saves humankind by grace through faith, or that humans are free agents and act with responsibility. Both must be held together, even if this poses a challenge to modern human reason. …
“As a result, our understanding of divine eternity as well as of divine agency in the world must be developed from a consistently trinitarian starting point. So God’s one act of willing, by which God creates, preserves and providentially governs the world is threefold: timelessly eternal by the Father, put into action immanently by the Word and completed immanently by the Spirit. … Or, from a different perspective, the Word moves forward the divine act of willing in the world, while the Spirit elicits the human response to this. Most importantly, the Spirit gives faith that the Word became flesh, dwelled among us and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and in all this revealed the Father. It is therefore not sufficient, from a Christian point of view, to begin the discussion of divine eternity from a unitarian starting point, and then to bolt the Trinity onto this one God, as we observed in authors such as Richard Swinburne, Keith Ward, Paul Helm and Nancey Murphy, to name but a few.”
