ABSTRACT
The claim that God acts ‘through the wills and actions of men’ raises a number of conceptual difficulties that seem so intractable as to cast doubt on the intelligibility of the concept of divine agency as such. The key issue has to do with interpreting what Farrer calls the ‘causal joint’ between divine and human agency in such a way that it does not deny the integrity of human agents ‘through the wills and actions’ of whom God is said to act. There are two aspects of the set of causal conditions that are especially important within the present context. First of all, to be logically complete, the set of necessary causal conditions would have to include negative conditions as well as standing conditions. Secondly, in the case of actions, the complete cause necessarily includes the decision of the agent, and can consequently never be brought about by somebody else.
