Methodological naturalism is the thesis that only natural features can be factored into any legitimate explanation. Moreover, the thesis contends, any attempt to explain natural phenomena by appealing to supernatural features is unscientific and, therefore, illegitimate. This book argues that nothing inherently problematic afflicts possible appeals to supernatural agency in the attempt to explain select phenomena in nature. Reputable philosophers of the ancient and medieval periods, as well as prominent scientists of the early modern era, invoked supernatural agency in their attempts to understand nature. For them, miraculous interventions in nature by a supernatural agent were not unreasonable. However, the super-naturalistic worldview has been replaced by methodological naturalism. The assumptions of two pivotal figures--David Hume and Charles Darwin--brought about this change. This book shows that this change was motivated by unscientific means. Hence, the change itself remains inconsistent with the assumptions of methodological naturalism.

In this first serious assessment of the meaning of church division, Ephraim Radner provides a theological rationale for today's divided church in the Christian West that goes far beyond the standard socio-historical explanations of denominationalism. Through an examination of controversial, post-Reformation discussions about the church, Radner offers a significant theory that describes the relation between Christian division and the work of the Holy Spirit within Western modernity. Radner's description of the church is based on the traditional notion that a divided church is, in a significant sense, a "dead" church, after the figure of the pneumatically abandoned "dead Christ," who himself suffers redemptively the disintegration and restoration of divided Israel in his physical and spiritual passion. The hermeneutical basis for the usefulness of this figure lies deep in the scriptural practice of the undivided church, and was common up through the Reformation. Radner's recovery of this figural perspective is applied to the cluster of pneumatological issues that define ecclesial life.