I am grateful to the scholars who read and responded to a book that did not always make for easy reading. The generous and irenic nature of their comments invites a reply in kind. I especially appreciated what seems to be a general recognition among these readers (possibly representing the totality of its audience) that the…

Luke Timothy Johnson is rightly known as one of the more thoughtful New Testament scholars in our country. He is well known for going his own way on issues and calling them as he sees them with a clarity of expression as he does so. This has certainly been the case in Historical Jesus study…

Merriam-Webster defines a miracle as “an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs.” How can a modern, educated Western adult believe in miracles? Miracles are a hard sell in our modern secular age. We know better—or so we are told. More personally, how can a scientist believe in miracles? Isn’t “believing scientist” something of…

The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that The Princess Bride (1987) is a cinematic masterpiece, and a virtually limitless source of helpful quotations, from scene after scene. About two-thirds through the film, Inigo and Fezzik take the (mostly) dead Man in Black to Miracle Max asking for, well, a miracle: the resuscitation…

A close friend recently told the story of his daughter coming home from a kindergarten class in a mainline Protestant Christian school. Her teacher, also a pastor in the church, had taught the children that the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand was that because of Jesus’ influence, people shared their food with…

Previous Sapientia symposia seem to analyze books on big-picture issues of science and religion. A new work on miracles by an eminent New Testament scholar would appear to fit this pattern well, but does it? The subtitle aptly indicates the work’s main focus: “God’s Presence and Power in Creation.” Johnson explains that he is not…

In his Miracles: God’s Presence and Power in Creation, Luke Timothy Johnson argues that at the heart of the Christian faith is the claim that God has revealed himself and acted to accomplish his purposes through signs, wonders, and miracles. The mighty acts of God—from Creation to Exodus to Christ’s resurrection to the outpouring of…

I am grateful to all the participants for their thoughtful comments on my book and to Hans Madueme for inviting me to participate in this symposium. Response to Jennifer Frey I appreciate Jennifer Frey’s careful summary of the main themes of the book, especially her emphasis on the distinction between univocal and analogical causality. Her…

Michael Dodds’s Unlocking Divine Action is an impressive and deeply learned attempt to deepen conversation about the relationship between divine action and scientific understanding of the natural world. Dodds claims, quite reasonably, (1) that important ways of understanding action and causation were lost in the transition from Aristotelian/Thomistic thought to what he calls “Newtonian science,”…

Michael Dodds’s proposal for understanding divine action is fundamentally analogical. It is based on an understanding of ex nihilo creation that also can only be expressed analogically. Because there are different orders or levels of reality, our language of creation in general and causation in particular must be able to stretch across such levels. Whether…

I am grateful for the opportunity to read and comment on Fr. Michael J. Dodds’s excellent work, Unlocking Divine Action. In the interest of space, I have been asked to confine my remarks to one or two areas of divine action discussed by Fr. Dodds. I have chosen, therefore, to focus on his use of…

While the stated topic of the book is divine action, the subtitle does a lot of work: Contemporary Science & Thomas Aquinas. Dodds believes that modern views of causality are impoverished, and that Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics provides the remedy. While this is doubtful in my opinion, the mapping of medieval concepts to contemporary science should be…