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The doctrine of providence, which states that God guides his creation, has been widely conceived in action terms in recent theological scholarship. Instead of recalibrating the much-discussed non-interventionist objective divine action (NIODA) approaches, Simon Maria Kopf advocates a 'reframing' of providence in terms of the virtue of prudence.
List of contents
- Introduction
- PART I. Framing Providence - Actionistic Providence
- 1: The Divine Action Debate
- 2: The Divine Action Project (1988-2003)
- 3: The Reason for the Deadlock
- PART II. Reframing Providence - Prudential-Ordinative Providence
- 4: Towards a Prudential-Ordinative Understanding of Providence
- 5: Divine Providence, Natural Contingency, and the Doctrine of Transcendence
- 6: The Teleological Nature of Providence and the Teleological Natures of Creatures
- PART III: An Application - Revisiting an Evolution Debate
- 7: Replaying the Tape of Life
- 8: Evaluating the Theological Responses
- Conclusion
About the author
Simon Maria Kopf is Associate Professor of Fundamental Theology at ITI Catholic University and Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London. Previously, he was Principal Investigator on a Templeton project titled 'A Virtue-Based Approach to Providence: Bridging the Analytic/Continental Divide in the Central-European Divine Action Debate' based at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. From 2017-2019, he worked on the ERC project 'Authority and Innovation in Early Franciscan Thought (c.1220-45)' at King's College London and the Templeton project 'Human and Divine Providence' at Universidad Austral. Kopf holds degrees in Theology, Philosophy, and Science and Religion from Universität Innsbruck and the University of Edinburgh, and a DPhil from the University of Oxford.
Summary
The doctrine of providence, which states that God guides his creation, has been widely conceived in action terms in recent theological scholarship. Instead of recalibrating the much-discussed non-interventionist objective divine action (NIODA) approaches, Simon Maria Kopf advocates a 'reframing' of providence in terms of the virtue of prudence.
Additional text
Kopf writes with admirable clarity, though the book, which began life as a dissertation, still bears the marks of the extensive (even excessive) signposting and summarising that characterises that genre, which can make for somewhat slow going, particularly for readers who are already familiar with some of the views and debates discussed.
