No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
‘Doing the will of God’, or seeking to do it, is a notion close to the centre of at any rate Christian, Jewish, and Moslem religion. So too is the notion of ‘accepting’ something as God's will: Fiat voluntas tua. In the former case, the notion of ‘doing the will of God’ is invoked in connection with what would be right to do in a practical situation; in the latter in connection with happenings and circumstances outside our control and as something to be accepted rather than accomplished. I shall be concerned here with the notion of the will of God as something to be accomplished, asking what, if anything, to say that an action is in accordance with the will of God adds to saying that it is right. I shall also look at ways in which we think of relations between our wills and those of other people when we say that one person is doing the will of another person, and ask whether these help us at all in trying to see what might be meant by ‘doing the will of God’.
page 290 note 1 I have discussed this in my Rules, Roles and Relations, ch. v: ‘The Alleged Autonomy of Ethics.’
page 292 note 1 Lindsay, A. D., The Essentials of Democracy p. 18.Google Scholar
page 293 note 1 ‘Immanence’, Theology, (March, 1966.
page 297 note 1 Iliad. 19: 86 and 137. cf. Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational p. 3.Google Scholar
page 297 note 2 Cf. Dodds, op. cit. p. 199.
page 299 note 1 Mother Carey in The Water Babies does this; she is not a bad image of divinity.
page 299 note 2 The Varieties of Religious Experience, chapter XX.