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Essay On Divine Agency In Religion

906 Words4 Pages

God revealed through embodied human agency
Divine agency and human practices of faith, hope and love
Jan-Olav Henriksen

Introduction
A very special take on divine agency is expressed in the famous statement by St. Theresa Avila: “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.”
The purpose of the following essay is to explore the wider theological context in which one can speak, like Theresa, about the relation between human life and divine agency. The reason is that several important theological concepts depend on some idea about divine agency. Among them is, most obvious, the concept of divine revelation. Revelation is one of the things that God does: God reveals Godself. No matter how one understands …show more content…

If God, as creator, is relying on, even dependent on, something in creation to reveal Godself, this means that creation and specific creational modes of being are the ways in which God reveals Godself in specific ways. This indirect mode of revelation might then have implications for how we think about divine agency. Hence, by starting out with an analysis of how God reveals Godself through the means of God’s own creation, we may get a better grasp on how we might think about divine agency. To arrive at this result, however, we have to establish several building blocks on which the argument builds. After a presentation of these in the following sections of the article, they will be connected in the final, concluding

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