Abstract
Christian theology has emphasized how agency is meant to be used in the service of God and others and thus should be considered shared agency. In this chapter, I take a feminist process theology approach to agency, showing how agency is exerted in webs of relationships that contribute to well-being. From a process viewpoint, God is integral to relation so that the exertion of human agency impacts God. I briefly explore how shared agency is explained in attachment theory, neurobiology, and cognitive psychology. This chapter revises top-down notions of agency—the idea that persons have the capacity to act according to goals and intentions—including our theological notions about freedom. People seem to act with agency towards their own goals, but this agency is actually fostered in networks of relationships with others and with God. It is out of these very networks of relationships that persons discover top-down by persons believing in their agency.
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Notes
- 1.
The primary difference between agency and free will is that in the psychological literature agency is often linked with the capacity to develop and attend to goals, whereas the concept of free will is often posited as a philosophical or even ontological issue, having to do with the capacities or the traits of the person with a spirit or soul.
- 2.
Suchocki (1994) does believe that redemption of structural sin happens through Christian faith and argues that Christianity provides a specific saving knowledge of God. She maintains that persons can know God through Jesus Christ, but this is particular knowledge rather than universal knowledge: It is known through a certain kind of “perspective” (p. 53). Since it argues that God became a person in a particular time and place, Christianity affirms the creation as the space in which God exists. On the other hand, God’s perspective is broader than God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ, so that God’s knowledge encompasses all cultures and religions rather than being limited to one, allowing the provisional revelation of the Christian faith to be experienced in a variety of contexts without eliding the distinctiveness of other forms of knowledge. Suchocki maintains that it is through incarnation that God is linked to creation, moving with agency towards the well-being of all.
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Helsel, P. (2015). The Relational Basis of Agency: An Integrated Psychological/Theological Approach. In: Gruber, C., Clark, M., Klempe, S., Valsiner, J. (eds) Constraints of Agency. Annals of Theoretical Psychology, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10130-9_10
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