With Pols' explication of agent-act as our foundation, we can now
begin to develop its application to a concept of God as the supreme
Agent who acts decisively in history. The notion of personal agency
as a model for divine action is not new in Christian theology. ¹ Our
task is to show how a 'literal' application of agency is appropriate
to God as the Agent who is together bound with us in the deepest
possible kind of mutual relationship. In particular we want to show
that this relationship must include the possibility of divine action
at particular times and places, in addition to an overarching divine
act through which everything created is sustained in existence. At
the same time, however, we need to identify those elements in the
concept of God as Agent that distinguish it from the concept of the
human being as agent. We will have to walk a rather narrow tight-
rope between reducing God to the status of being simply a very
powerful human-type agent and extending God to a transcendent
realm so utterly different from that in which we human agents act
that God's being becomes absolutely unintelligible to us.

William P. Alston has recently used the phrase 'partial univocity'
(i.e., partially literal application of finitely derived terms to God) to

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