God, Action, and Embodiment by Thomas F. Tracy (review)

706 BOOK REVIEWS God, Action, and Embodiment. By THOMAS F. TRACY. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1984. Pp. xx + 184, $11.95 (paper). Originally a doctoral dissertation at Yale in 1980, this book by Thomas Tracy is a masterful, compelling, and forthright analysis of the concept of God as agent, one which moves the discussion of the issue significantly forward. There have always been some of us who consider the issue of God's agency as one of the enduring problems of theology, not only because the Biblical witness speaks of God as one who does decisive things in history, but also because of the fruitfulness which we have seen in recent philosophical work on the concepts of person, action, and agency. Despite Langdon Gilkey's attempt to write the epitaph for speaking of God as an agent, the work of Gordon Kaufman and, more recently, the spate of work within process theology, have kept alive the possibility of speaking about God, at least analogically, in language drawn from our human experience of action and agency. But, as both Kaufman's and process theology's approaches reveal, there is a tentativeness in speaking about God in absolutely straightforward and literal ways as an agent. As Tracy persuasively points out, there is a " residual Cartesianism " in the use both make of person/agent concepts as applied to God. For example, Kaufman still holds God to be inaccessible to us except through his external manifestations which are never completely revelatory of who He is. At the same time, God is not regarded as the agent responsible for specific acts in history but only for the overarching sweep of history, for its general pattern. In this way, an almost unbridgeable chasm is unintentionally opened between the concept of agency as applied to human persons and as applied to God. One of the great virtues of Tracy's book is that he confronts this problem head-on. Using the vocabulary of character traits ("person-characterizing predicates "), Tracy argues that we can only ascribe attributes to God if they are based on the intentional actions of an agent. It makes no sense to describe God as loving or just unless there is some intentional action (attributable to him) from which these descriptive traits are drawn. Nothing is gained and everything is lost by pretending that such character traits are not literally applicable to God. If God is to be described at all as personal it can only be on the basis of divine behavior manifested in intentional action, and intentional action can only originate from an agent. Tracy's application of the concepts of agency and intentionality are particularly impressive because he manages to summarize as well as to integrate some of the most important analytical work of this quarter- BOOK REVIEWS 707 century. His success is particularly noteworthy in that he extends the discussion precisely to those topics (God and His acts in history) so often considered irrelevant or unnecessary by the very analytical philosophers whose work is so nicely mined by Tracy. Tracy devotes two-thirds of the book to a full discussion of the problem of mind-body dualism and to the claim that God can be a non-bodily agent. He wants to argue against such dualism, for the notion of God as a personal agent, and against the claim that such an agent must be (a la Strawson ) embodied. Tracy agrees with Strawson that the bodily personal agent is a psychophysical unit, irreducibly one. But Tracy is very careful not to draw out implications from Strawson that would require that every individual who acts intentionally must be in every case a bodily agent. Agents must necessarily act intentionally but intentional action need not necessarily require embodiment as a condition for enactment. A mental agent is not a category mistake as long as he can intentionally act. All embodied agents must, as Tracy concedes to Strawson, be psychophysical units, but not all agents must be embodied. The key question, here, of course, is whether a non-embodied agent can act upon bodies? And to that Tracy gives what I think is a less than fully satisfying answer. He claims that it...