Tag: philosophy

Q&A with Jonathan R. Heaps

April 12, 2024

One of the most important, but also most challenging arguments in the book is that the actions of rational, free agents (like humans and God) are what they are because of what the agent means by them. And so while the first half of the book is concerned with a metaphysical question about how it can be that God acts in human action, in the second half, we eventually turn to the question, what is God doing in human action? And this question requires that theology be not only a metaphysical enterprise, but also a hermeneutical one. In other words, we need to be able to interpret what God means by what God is doing in human action. And because the earlier part of the book establishes that there are not parts of creation where God is not acting—God, after all, is the maker of “all things”—that means that the data for this hermeneutical project are given not just in some particular “religious” area of human action, nor in one particular institution or one culture or one community, but in and through all of the product of human action in every human community in every place and every time. It means that the theological enterprise, considered at its most fundamental level (and my book is probably best understood as a work of “fundamental theology”), is as wide and deep and tall as human history itself.