Thanks Eddie,
I appreciate your clarifications and your willingness to walk me through your arguments. As you say, this is one of your refrains, so I am fairly familiar with your views on this. Although I would love to, I won’t go into the issues you have raised, partly since I have already touched on a few of these points with you in passing over the last few years and partly because we would accidentally end up coauthoring an online book;-).
More to the point, I think you made the critical distinction fairly early on in your reply; you are just not concerned with divine action itself. Your concern is with questions of divine intention and sovereignty and you continue to show an ongoing concern that TEs are being dishonest and evasive as some of them all but renounce God’s sovereignty in favor of something that is indistinguishable from open theism. Important issues to be sure and very clearly laid out as usual, but the problem is this: it is divine action that is being discussed here, not questions of divine intention or open theism, and it is my impression that to introduce these points of possible division is to derail the common and important project of looking into proposals for divine action
Since we do not disagree that God interacted with the universe in the past and continues to do so, that divine action is an important issue to address for both camps, and that the question of divine action has to be handled in much the same way for both camps, I think this is enough common ground from which to address a common issue. I doubt it will be resolved, but I think it almost certainly won’t progress unless we lay aside more controversial issues that don’t promise to advance the question (especially if it is as you say, and you haven’t seen the slightest move to address your concerns over the last decade).
I tend to think that portions of the ID and EC camps are closer than we think and have more in common than we usually recognize - including the problems that need to be addressed, but that it is misunderstandings, exaggerated statements of each other’s positions and questions about each other’s underlying motives that contributes far more to forming and maintaining any rift more than the actual dividing views that we openly hold (many of which are provisional and open to discussion for many of us anyway). These days I am more concerned with a better and more constructive dialogue between the different positions than with some of the points that are said to distribute Christians into opposing trenches, since I view the former as the key to resolving much of the later.
Thoughts?