God and Human Action

In a chapter on providence and politics in The Providence of God: Deus Habet Consilium , Charles Mathewes contrasts a modern ” ex nihilo ” view of human action with the view that human action is “responsible,” not only in the sense of moral responsibility but also in the sense of being responsive to prior actions upon us.  He notes two implications of the latter view: First, that if our first “act” is receptive, it must be “a form of discernment,” and second that this discernment includes a confession.

These point is profound.  On modern premises, which claim a “Promethean” originality to all human actions, there is no meaning inherent in action.  Or, better, there is only the meaning that we impose, ex nihilo , on the action.  But if our actions are receptive, if “we listen, we seek and beseech a word,” then our action in the world is meaningful: “action is not fundamentally, sheerly, brutally physical but ineliminably meaning-laden: it is intelligible, responsive, one moment in our ongoing intellective engagement with the cosmos and our fellow humans.”

Thus too, these claims about human action open up in a narrative view of the self and our actions: “This inquiry is narratively structured, and our actions become what they are by finding their place in a story – we are story-formed creatures, and to know who we are, both for ourselves and for others, is to know the shape and texture of the story of who we are.”

And this story is finally a theological one: “In this way our actions reveal how we understand ourselves to be in a ‘dialogue’ with those around us, and with the cosmos as a whole: in short, with God.”