Divine Agency

Panenetheism is the claim that God and the cosmos are intimately interrelated , with the cosmos being in God and God being in the cosmos. What does this exactly mean? The aim of this paper is to address this question by sheding light on four possible models of God-world-inter-relatedness. Being critical of those models, which understand maximal immanence in a literal, spatial sense, the paper argues in favor of a model, which cashes out immanence in terms of divine activity. God is, where God acts. Since God acts upon all of creation everywhere and anytime, God is omnipresent to it at all times. Thus, the proposal is to read the 'en' in 'panetheism' in an 'agential sense': God is in the cosmos by creating and sustaining it and the cosmos is in God by constantly being within the sphere of divine activity. Keywords Panentheism · Divine immanence · Models of divine omnipresence · Metaphysics of material objects

In his Trinitarian theology, Thomas Aquinas maintains that the creative and saving activity of God is common to the whole Trinity. But in this common action, each divine person intervenes in the distinct mode of his or her personal property. Thus, for Thomas Aquinas, there is a proper mode of the action of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. This distinct mode, which accounts for the personal dimension of Trinitarian action and which grounds the value of appropriations, corresponds to the mode of being proper to each person, that is to say, to his personal relationship. Thomas Aquinas develops in this domain an aspect inherited from Cappadocian triadology (Basil of Caesarea).

Two types of exegetical habits shape interpretations of Lukan eschatology: enduring assumptions when approaching the text that, in contrast to his synoptic siblings, Luke has removed eschatological interest in response to the delayed parousia; and recent tendencies to focus on genre and thus to compare Luke/Acts to (predominantly) non-Jewish Graeco-Roman historiographies, where themes of an eschatological character do not feature. This study takes a fresh approach, demonstrating the need to consider Luke’s text within its broader literary context, providing a rigorous methodology for cross-genre comparisons of themes which transcend generic boundaries, and ultimately reasserting the importance of Luke’s understanding of the end of history as it reshapes experience in the present.

What happens to deities when their devotees migrate? Village deities are wrought of a particular landscapes and a specific people. Refusing to remain rooted to icons, shrines or sites, they wander; albeit only within their own jurisdictions. Examining the resonance of Periyachi-the mother and midwife goddess-originally from rural Tamil Nadu and now in urban Singapore, I document the effects of dislocation from their homelands on intensely local deities. In Singapore, Periyachi acquired more regular veneration and a spectacular ritual complex. But what has she also lost? While the goddess remains potent, her nature has subtly shifted. She who had crossed the seas no longer even crosses her own temple's threshold. Migration has immobilized a once vital agentic force. From being immanent in her autochthonous landscape, manifesting herself directly and insistent upon her own will, Periyachi has become marooned in icons, confined to temples and reliant on humans to represent her. Despite a century-old presence, Singapore is not her home over which she can freely roam. Minimizing divine agency, migration has reinforced human mediation. It has rendered not just a subject but a sovereign into an object; stationary, reactive and dependent on human realization.

An analysis of how Hermann von Kerssenbrock deploys supernatural vs. materialistic explanations of the events of the Münster Rebellion as portrayed in his "Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness." (Forthcoming chapter in "The Science of the Supernatural in Early Modern Europe," edited by Kathryn A. Edwards)

As the prince-bishop’s siege of Münster dragged into another day, one man’s betrayal of the Anabaptist forces brought the rebellious kingdom to a sudden end. A city burger named Heinrich Gresbeck was nearly killed when he slipped outside the walls he had been defending and approached the enemy lines. Fortunately for Gresbeck and, subsequently, the prince-bishop, the soldiers took him captive instead. While confined by the Catholic forces, Gresbeck divulged information about Münster and its defenses that enabled the prince-bishop’s army to invade the city and overpower its defenders.

A few years after the kingdom’s fall, Gresbeck penned an account of the radical Anabaptists’ takeover and sixteen-month-long rule. The manuscript, titled Summarische Ertzelungk und Bericht der Wiederdope und wat sich binnen der stat monster in westphalen zugetragen im jair MDXXXV, was the only one to come from someone who had experienced the entirety of the Anabaptists’ rise to power.

My paper examines how Gresbeck, in his account, factors supernatural forces into his retelling of the Anabaptist Kingdom. My central question is, To what extent was the Kingdom of Münster the result of God’s judgment, the devil’s activity, or ordinary human foolishness? I argue that Gresbeck primarily depicts the kingdom as a work of the devil. Satan and his demons possessed the rebellion’s foreign(!) leaders and led the native Münsterites astray. This conclusion sheds light both on this lesser-known account of the Kingdom of Münster and also the way that supernatural forces were integrated into this early-modern German’s view of the world.