ABSTRACT

Intentional action is the most inclusive category for understanding reality. Every other category removes some element from intentional action. The north pole of theological thought is God as the Personal Agent whose creative, sustaining, empowering, and loving acts decisively affect the destinies of human beings and the course of their mutual history. God is ultimately construed as that Person who has acted in history, whose actions have left a trail for human beings to discover, and whose intentions are the ground of the ethical response to God that constitutes the religious life. One important implication of this claim is that value is ultimately personal-agent in origin. If a Biblical ethics is a response to the actions of a divine Being establishing relationships with human creatures, it can only be a response to a personal, non-ontologically transcendent agent. A Biblical ethics is built upon a relationship with the divine Being.