Agency (God and Human)
- Michael Haldas
- Apr 4
- 3 min read
“I consider it both a strange mystery and a settled matter of the faith that God prefers not to do things alone…He acts in a manner that involves the actions of others when it would seem, He could have acted alone. Why would God reveal His Word to the world through the agency of men? Why would He bother to use writing? Why not simply communicate directly with people? Why speak to Moses in a burning bush? Why did the Incarnation involve Mary? Could He not have simply become man, whole, complete, adult, in a single moment? Such questions could be multiplied ad infinitum. But at every turn, what we know of God involves others as well. We may rightly conclude that such a means of acting pleases Him.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“Freedom’s a gift from God. And since we’re made in God’s image, we can’t be deprived of it. Its use, of course, may follow two main paths. One leads to God and other people, that is, that we become bound together in love and become companions on the road to the kingdom of God. The other is life with ourselves at the center, as our own God where our thinking, our judgement, our boundaries, our expectations and our criteria are all shaped solely on the basis of our will, our desires, our approach and convictions… [The Book of Genesis] describes a large garden in which people were created by the direct agency of God… so that He could work with and guard us. We were invited to live in communion with God and other people… There’s nothing at all that hinders us from going forward as we wish. We have the option of being nourished by the trees in Paradise except for one, that of the knowledge of good and evil…we have the choice of being with God or making gods of ourselves. The second option leads to spiritual death, because we can then impose ourselves on the world through force. We won’t be in a balanced relationship with other people, as children of God together and images of Him, but we’ll be drawn into the temptation of equating ourselves with God, not as regards his love but rather His power…we’ll be bound with the fetters of failure to renounce the path of his love- which is freedom- and to choose to impose ourselves on others and the world, through our disobedience to God’s will and to God himself.” (Protopresbyter Themistoklis Mourtzanos)
“…freedom or agency requires limits and consequences; freedom is not only limited by but informed by responsibility to eternal truth. Only moral agency (freedom limited and informed by covenants with God and by the structure of reality) is truly agency.” (Ralph Hancock)
“What do people have in mind when they seek freedom? They seek release from whatever controls or threatens to restrain them. And yet, in the name of freedom, many let themselves be dominated by all sorts of indulgences: the pursuit of fame, wealth, adventure, comfort, lust, and power.” (Fr. Basil)
“God brings the animals to Adam “to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name” (Gen. 2:19 NKJV). This synergistic cooperation shows how the relationship between God and man had been designed by God…we see that the rise of technology in Cain’s line that Genesis 4 describes is not meant as a technological history, i.e., a list of inventors. Rather, Genesis is making use of this ancient association of the rise of technology with fallen divine beings to make a point about the nature of the wickedness of Cain and his offspring—it comes from cooperation with demons. That is why St. Irenaeus says that with the proliferation of technology “the affairs of wickedness were propagated to overflowing….Any sinful activity is a cooperation with demonic powers.” (Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick)
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