Together Bound: God, History, and the Religious Community - Hardcover

'The text is well written and interspersed with a great many sub-headings which give the reader a feeling that he is in safe hands.'Expository Times

`a clear, and stimulating, defence of divine action'Theology

'What Together Bound seeks to find is a concept of agency which will allow the particular acts of God described in Scripture, yet also respect human freedom as self-caused. There is a clear and helpful account of systems-agency in the work of the American philosopher Edward Pols ... a clear, and stimulating, defence of divine action.'Peter Sedgwick, Westcott House, Cambridge

The text is well written and interspersed with a great many sub-headings which give the reader a feeling that he is in safe hands. (W.D. Hudson, The Expository Times, Volume 106, Number 1, October 1994)

This carefully reasoned book is a contribution to the contemporary debate about divine action...This is an honest and well-argued book, whose goals and methods of arguments are to be welcomed. It is a thoughtful account of how a relatively (but not excessively) conservative reading of Scripture might be construed in a way that makes theological and philosophical sense. (Journal of Theological Studies Vol 46 no 1)

Challenging the assumption that the concept of divine action is necessarily paradoxical, on the grounds that God is radically transcendent of finitude, or can perform only a master act of creating and sustaining the universe, Frank Kirkpatrick defends as philosophically credible the Christian conviction that God is a personal Agent who also acts in particular historical moments to further the divine intention of fostering universal community. Kirkpatrick claims that God and the world are distinct realities "together bound" in a mutual relationship of reciprocal historical action. In this relationship, God both acts upon and responds to human beings in specific moments in their history. The implications of this claim for understanding the biblical narrative, the problem of evil, cosmological theories, and the realism of Christian community are pursued.