Vigilant God

Horton Davies (1916–2004), D.D., D.Phil., D. Lit., Edinburgh and Oxford, ministered in London during the war, and founded the Religion Department at Grahamstown, South Africa (1946–1953). Invited, he first returned to Mansfield College, Oxford, to chair its Department of Ecclesiastical History and then to Princeton University's Religion Department until he retired in 1984. The author of some thirty-five books, including the six-volume Worship and Theology in England, for which he was given the prestigious Oxford D.Phil. degree, Dr. Davies started painting in his free moments, a hobby that he took up full time from 1984 to 2004.

“The Vigilant God<\i> is a mature scholar’s return to the theological traditions that shaped his life and work. Horton Davies focuses on four great figures of that tradition—Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Barth—giving particular attention to the place of Election in each. This book comes most fully alive in the last two sections, those on Calvin and Barth, for these two biblical theologians have had the greatest influence on the author’s own formation. Calvin is a better expositor of Scripture than Augustine, Davies argues, partly because the Genevan makes Scripture, rather than the Church, the final authority for Christian theology. But the admirer of Calvin is left with the burden of double predestination, a doctrine that, at least to modern sensibility, makes God seem unjust and that ultimately makes human virtue impossible. Davies believes that Barth has largely resolved this dilemma by moving the focus of God’s Election from the individual soul to Christ himself…. Davies was a remarkably wide-ranging historian of the Christian Church, one who was just as alert to the roles of liturgy and arts and music as he was to doctrinal controversies. This little book is a masterful account of how an earnest Christian scholar has been shaped by, and has struggled with, his theological inheritance.”—David B. McIlhiney

• David B. McIlhiney: Foreword – Acknowledgments – Introduction – Biblical Sources for the Traditional Doctrine of Providence – St. Augustine’s Doctrine of Providence – St. Thomas Aquinas’s Doctrine of Providence – Calvin’s Doctrine of Providence – Barth’s Doctrine of Providence – Conclusion.