Denis Edwards, William Stoeger, and the Laws of Nature

William Stoeger

Denis Edwards – he of How God Acts fame – has published a new article on William Stoeger’s ideas about natural laws. The article also refers to Thomas Aquinas and secondary causation, should you be interested (which I am).

Denis Edwards, ‘Toward a Theology of Divine Action: William R. Stoeger, S.J., on the Laws of Nature’, Theological Studies 76:3 (2015), pp. 485–502

In the 1990s William Stoeger, S.J., contributed major essays on the laws of nature to the series of conferences on divine action that were cosponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Graduate Theological Union Berkeley, CA. He argued that the laws of nature are to be seen as approximate models rather than as complete descriptions of nature, and that they are descriptive rather than prescriptive. These essays, Denis Edwards proposes, are an important legacy for 21st-century theology and offer creative possibilities for a renewed theology of divine action that builds on the Thomist tradition.

Also of note is the biography for Edwards himself, which reveals he is working on a monograph on the doctrine of creation.