The Mystery and Agency of God: Divine Being and Action in the World.

Haughey, John C.

The Mystery and Agency of God: Divine Being and Action in the World. By Frank G. Kirkpatrick. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014, Pp. xvi + 163. $39.

Philosophical theologian Kirkpatrick is interested in establishing "the primordiality of God as an agent" (15) in contrast to an ontology of God. In more Scholastic terms, his interest is in the divine agere rather than the divine esse. To that end K. enlists a number of philosophers to explore notions of agency, agent, and action. K. senses divine agency being more and more excluded from scientific explanations of nature, thereby making God irrelevant.

The book is rich for those who want to know how to construe agency philosophically and then how one might proceed from there to understand divine agency in particular. K.'s foundation is laid with John Macmurray's conception of the self as agent. He then employs three other thinkers, Raymond Tallis, Edward Pols, and William Alston. The upshot of this philosophical approach, K. argues, is that we too readily think of acting or of being acted upon from our own narrow anthropomorphism and read God's actions in the same light.

If one approaches the question of divine agency with a need to plumb one's own religious tradition's doctrine on the issue, the book can leave one dissatisfied, especially if the agency of the Christian God, for example, is understood as trinitarian and significantly different from that of the Jewish or Muslim God. K.'s purview is of the three traditions together. Agents, whether divine or human, are personal, and K. fails to account for the question of divine agency in terms of the distinctiveness of how persons are understood in each tradition.

DOI: 10.1177/0040563914565315

John C. Haughey, S.J.

Colombiere Jesuit Community, Baltimore