Panel: THE FUTURE OF ACADEMIC THEOLOGY



497.4 - COSMONOMIC DIVINE ACTION AND THE FUTURE OF THEOLOGY AS ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE

AUTHORS:
Alinurdin D. (South East Asia Bible Seminary ~ Malang ~ Indonesia)
Text:
The debate over divine action—historically bifurcated between interventionist and immanentist positions—has persistently challenged theologians seeking to reconcile the demands of scientific naturalism with the transcendent claims of the divine. This paper proposes a novel framework for understanding divine action through Herman Dooyeweerd's cosmonomic philosophy, which distinguishes aspect-oriented thinking from entity-oriented thinking. By emphasizing the irreducible normative spheres inherent in multiple aspects of reality, Dooyeweerd's approach dissolves the binary opposition between miraculous intervention and continuous immanence. Instead, divine action is re-conceptualized as the cosmonomic ordering of reality, wherein the divine functions as the source of norms that govern and interrelate diverse ontological domains. This integrative schema not only mitigates the longstanding tensions within the divine action debate but also repositions theology as a rigorously systematic and interdisciplinary academic discipline. Consequently, it provides a conceptual framework that offers sufficient explanatory capacity for both theological inquiry and interdisciplinary dialogue in contemporary public university contexts.