© 2025 The Author(s). Modern Theology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. AGENCY EXPERIENCE AND THE LIMITATIONS OF NON- CONTRASTIVE TRANSCENDENCE SIMEON ZAHL Abstract This essay argues that although the principle of non- contrastive transcendence (NCT) is persuasive on its own terms, there are theologically important dimensions of the relationship between divine and human agency that are not captured by an interpretive framework governed by NCT alone. Agency is not just a philosophical category; it is also a terminology that describes and interprets important aspects of human experience of both themselves and God. The essay begins by suggesting that NCT functions primarily as an apophatic principle in Christian theology, and then shows that a number of scriptural texts thematize the relationship between divine and human agency as operating on the same causal plane from the perspective of the experience of human agents. Two examples are then given of cases where NCT has been overapplied as an interpretive principle due to a failure to recognize the experiential dimensions of agency discourse. The essay concludes by suggesting that a more cataphatic approach to agency is theologically legitimate in the domain of soteriology in particular. Introduction This essay will argue that although the principle of non- contrastive transcendence (NCT) is persuasive on its own terms, the range of theological problems to which it applies is more limited than initially appears. The practical significance of NCT lies pri- marily in the way it precludes theologians from drawing specific conclusions about the relationship between divine and human agency prematurely. Because such conclusions have often been the default assumptions of interpreters of divine and human agency, especially in certain early modern discussions that have had a lasting influence, this is a major development. However, there are theologically important dimensions of the relationship between divine and human agency that are not captured by an interpretive framework governed by NCT alone. Agency is not just a philosophical category; it is DOI:10.1111/moth.12997Modern Theology Month 2025 ISSN 0266-7177 (Print) ISSN 1468-0025 (Online) Simeon Zahl Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, West Road, Cambridge CB3 9BS, UK Email: smz21@cam.ac.uk http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3286-2356 mailto:UK mailto:smz21@cam.ac.uk 2 Simeon Zahl © 2025 The Author(s). Modern Theology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. also a terminology that describes and interprets important aspects of human experi- ence, both of ourselves and of God. I will begin by suggesting, following Karen Kilby, that NCT functions primarily as an apophatic principle in Christian theology. Next, I will show that many scriptural texts thematize the relationship between divine and human agency as operating on the same causal plane from the perspective of the experience of human agents. I will then give two examples of cases where NCT has been overapplied as an interpretive principle because it has not been recognized that theological reflection on agency is an experi- ential discourse as much as it is a philosophical one, and will conclude by suggesting that a more cataphatic approach to agency is theologically legitimate in the domain of soteriology in particular. Non- Contrastive Transcendence as Apophatic Principle The principle of non- contrastive transcendence surfaces with particular precision a major error that lies behind the assumption, not uncommon in the wake of the Enlightenment, that God’s agency and creaturely agency are necessarily engaged in a zero- sum causal game.1 For the purposes of this essay, drawing on Tanner’s God and Creation, I understand NCT in the following way: divine transcendence means that ‘God must be directly productive of everything that is in every aspect of its exist- ence.’2 From this it follows that ‘God’s transcendence over and against the world and God’s immanent presence within it become non- exclusive possibilities,’3 such that ‘nothing prevents the theologian from affirming that genuine created activities, natu- ral powers, and free human decision exist within the created order.’4 NCT is thus a principle drawn from reflection on the transcendence of the God who created the world from nothing that allows intra- mundane events to be interpreted as products of divine agency even as they are also explicable in terms of causal processes internal to the created order.5 One important implication of NCT is that it is coherent, in principle, to affirm that the Christian can participate genuinely and freely in their own salvation and sancti- fication without having to deny or downplay an equal conviction that salvation and sanctification are entirely God’s doing. Thus, for example, it is perfectly coherent to claim, with Augustine, that the Holy Spirit alone can effect the transformation of the heart that constitutes Christian sanctification, and at the same time to describe the desires evoked by the Holy Spirit as the free and genuine desires of the Christian agent.6 Likewise, applying NCT in the domain of sanctification means that there is 1 For a discussion of these assumptions and their sources, with specific examples, see Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005 [1988]), 120- 52. 2 Tanner, God and Creation, 47. 3 Tanner, God and Creation, 79. 4 Tanner, God and Creation, 91. 5 NCT overlaps in many ways with the traditional theological distinction between primary and secondary causation as well as the distinction between ‘necessity of consequence’ and ‘necessity of the consequent’ in medieval theology. The focus here will be on NCT as articulated by Kathryn Tanner, and its recent theological reception. 6 See e.g., Augustine, spir. et litt. 16.28, 34.60. On this dynamic in Augustine’s thought, see Han- Luen Kantzer Komline, Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 331- 46. Agency Experience and the Limitations of Non- Contrastive Transcendence 3 © 2025 The Author(s). Modern Theology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. no reason why the sanctification of Christian souls by God could not take the form of processes of habituation into virtue that require the participation of the creature’s intentional agency.7 In each of these cases, the implications of NCT are to redefine what constitutes legit- imate and philosophically coherent talk about divine and human agency, and to clarify what can be known about the relationship between divine and human agency in a given case. As a theological and philosophical principle, what NCT primarily does is to open up possibilities of interpretation that would be shut down if divine and human agency were understood as always competing on the same causal plane. Thus in the case of sanctification and virtue ethics, NCT does not make the strong claim that sanctification can occur only through the mechanism of habituation. What it does say, rather, is that just because there is intentional creaturely agency involved, it does not follow that the human person is sanctifying themselves rather than that God is sanctifying them. Likewise, in the Augustinian case of sanctified desire evoked by the Spirit, NCT does not make the strong claim that all creaturely desires of a certain kind are evoked by the Spirit. What it tells us, rather, is that the fact that a given desire can be plausibly narrated as the product of specific contextual, psychological, and embodied causes does not mean that that desire cannot also be understood as genuinely evoked by the divine agency of the Holy Spirit. It is for reasons like these that Karen Kilby has observed that NCT is ultimately an apophatic principle. In her essay ‘Seeking Clarity’, Kilby stresses that NCT as articu- lated by Tanner is a powerful theological insight that clarifies a number of issues in the theology of agency. But she also makes the following observation: Tanner’s approach gives us no help whatsoever in getting a handle on God, or how God works in the world. Any attempt actually to make intelligible God’s agency in the world will be an attempt somehow to place it—God is acting here but not there, at one point rather than some others … All such proposals … in saying that God acts here whereas over there it is only a created being who acts, violate the non- contrastive principle Tanner articulates.8 The result, according to Kilby, is decidedly apophatic: ‘to say that divine and created agency cannot be contrasted is not to offer an explanation of how they go together, then, but instead a rule which defeats all possible explanations.’9 In other words, the power of NCT lies in the way it prevents us from being able to reliably distinguish divine action from human and creaturely action in any given case. In the remainder of this essay, I will argue that although I believe Kilby is correct about the apophatic implications of NCT on its own terms, it does not follow that the theologian can or should approach all questions about divine and human agency in 7 See e.g., Jennifer A. Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 341- 52; and Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 228- 35, 280- 95, 348- 51. It is worth noting that Tanner does not conclude from this that NCT can serve a theodical function. As she points out, to say that human freedom has (or can have) real created integrity is not the same as being able to explain how human beings could ever use that freedom for sin; the latter remains ‘a mystery’ that is ‘properly inexplicable’ (Kathryn Tanner, ‘Human Freedom, Human Sin, and God the Creator’, in The God Who Acts: Philosophical and Theological Explorations, ed. Thomas F. Tracy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 112). On this point, see also n. 43 below. 8 Karen Kilby, ‘Seeking Clarity’, in The Routledge Companion to the Practice of Theology, edited by Mike Higton and Jim Fodor (London: Routledge, 2014), 69- 70. 9 Kilby, ‘Seeking Clarity’, 70. Emphasis added. 4 Simeon Zahl © 2025 The Author(s). Modern Theology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. apophatic terms alone. As we will see, there are important theological dimensions of the relationship between divine and human agency that are simply not captured or illuminated through appeal to the non- contrastive transcendence of the Creator God. Specifically, I will argue that the relationship between human and divine agency often arises as a topic of theological interest not as a consequence of generalized philosophi- cal reflection on the nature of creation or on the conditions of culpability attribution, but as the result of reflection on specific kinds of human experience. Experiences that raise questions about agency are an important trope in scripture, and have regularly been the subject of Christian theological reflection. They include especially (a) experiences of the inefficacy of human agency, especially moral agency, in domains of religious and soteriological significance, and (b) experiences of the interruption of human agents by a divine agency that is perceived as operating over and against the interrupted human agent. To draw out what I mean by the experiential dimension of the theology of agency, I turn now to two biblical narratives. Contrastive Agency in Biblical Narratives Many biblical texts seem to thematize the relationship between divine agency and human agency in ways that are both contrastive and non- apophatic. The point is especially clear in some of the paradigmatic narratives of divine deliverance. For example, in the story of Gideon and the defeat of the Midianites in Judges, God tells Gideon to send soldiers away until the Israelite army has been reduced one- hundred- fold. The reason given is to ensure that agency for the coming victory is attributed to God, not to Israel: The LORD said to Gideon: ‘The troops with you are too many for me to give the Midianites into your hand. Israel would only take the credit away from me, saying, “My own hand has delivered me.”’ (7:2) Here the clear force of the passage is not to affirm concurrent agency, but to distinguish divine agency from human agency. Agency is characterized in contrastive, zero- sum terms: if Israel were to deliver themselves, that would reduce the ‘credit’ God receives for what happens. Importantly, this zero- sumness is a matter of experience and perception, not of what is technically or objectively the case given the transcendence of the Creator God, who by definition is owed all possible ‘credit’.10 For a second example I turn to the story of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus as told in Acts 9. Here again we have a story of human encounter with God whose main narrative contours emphasize an experience of divine agency in contrastive terms. The core of the narrative is about a dramatic divine disruption of Saul’s agency. In the immediate prelude to leaving for Damascus to persecute the Christians there, no indication is given of Saul’s openness or readiness for what is about to happen. Indeed, what we are told is something close to the reverse: he was 10 A similar pattern of divine agency being contrasted with human agency can be found in Exodus 14, in the story of the Israelites’ flight from the Egyptian army: ‘Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the LORD will accomplish for you today … The LORD will fight for you, you have only to keep still’ (Exod. 14:13- 14). Agency Experience and the Limitations of Non- Contrastive Transcendence 5 © 2025 The Author(s). Modern Theology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. still ‘breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord’ (Acts 9:1). But then, while on the road, ‘suddenly’ everything changes: ‘a light from heaven flashed around him’, he ‘fell to the ground’, and ‘heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”’ (9:3- 4). There are few more dramatic instances in scrip- ture of a human agent being stopped in their tracks by an encounter with God. In this case, God’s interruptive action not only overrides Saul’s own plans in dramatic fashion, it brings about his salvation. Here too, the apophatic approach to agency attribution that derives from the NCT framework is a conceptual tool that is of little help for interpreting what is being de- scribed in the passage. God’s agency in the risen Jesus and Saul’s agency are presented in terms of the starkest contrast: Saul is utterly surprised, the possibility of refusal is never broached, and the way the event is described goes out of its way to express discontinuity and contrast. This is not of course to say that agency is depicted solely in contrastive terms in the story: Saul seems to ask the right question (‘Who are you, Lord?’ (9:5)); he does not refuse to be led to Damascus (9:8); after being healed Saul ‘got up and was baptized’ (9:18); although it is God who heals Saul of his blindness, he does it through Ananias laying his hands on Saul (9:17). But to read the story without a strong sense of a practically experienced contrast between divine agency and Saul’s agency, and without a willingness to locate the respective agencies experientially in dis- tinctive moments and distinctive activities—divine agency in the light and voice Saul encounters on the road, human agency in Saul’s initial actions and intentions for the journey—would be a reading firmly against the grain of the text. NCT can rightly re- mind us that, as creaturely activity, Saul’s initial actions to persecute Christians, like all creaturely causes, are inconceivable outside of God’s action to sustain and determine the created order in all its aspects, and thus that no immanent action is ‘independent’ of God’s agency in that sense. But what it cannot do is help theological readers to interpret the contrast that is nevertheless drawn, in the narrative as well as in Saul’s experience, between God’s intervening action on the road and Saul’s own agency and plans. My point is not that NCT on its own terms is critiqued or problematized by this narrative; it is simply that its usefulness is limited insofar as there are major dynamics, directly rel- evant to theological reflection on divine and human agency, that it is poorly equipped to illuminate. These examples are particularly dramatic instances of the phenomenon I am seeking to describe: places in scripture where (a) the relationship between divine and human agency is narrated in unambiguously contrastive terms, and (b) the contrast depicted emerges at the level of human experience, especially in how human beings perceive and experience divine agency. It is noteworthy that both are stories of salvation and deliver- ance. It would seem that God’s agency emerges most strongly from the general noise of secondary causes, as a distinct signal perceptible to human experience, when human beings find themselves in dire situations from which they cannot save themselves. If these examples carry any force as ‘types’ of divine- human encounter, it would seem that soteriological experience can be legitimately narrated in contrastive terms.11 Experiences of divine deliverance will have a phenomenology, and that 11 This is not to say all soteriological experience is to be interpreted contrastively. For example, in the Confessions Augustine retroactively interprets events in his life that were clearly products of mundane causal- ity as providentially caught up in the saving activity of God in his life. See e.g., conf. 5.8.14. 6 Simeon Zahl © 2025 The Author(s). Modern Theology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. phenomenology will often be obscured or undervalued when our approach to the inter- pretation of divine agency is exclusively apophatic. However, legitimate perception of divine agency in contrastive terms is not limited to the domain of soteriology alone. Insofar as human beings perceive themselves to have a relationship to the God that bears analogy with social relationships between human agents—that God is an agent whom they might love or fear, or to whom they might be grateful; that God is a ‘person’ to whom they speak in prayer; that God is a relational entity whom they can follow or ignore, betray or serve—then that percep- tion will entail agential contrast. In sheer causal terms, these relational realities will tend to be mediated by creaturely causes, with the perception of God’s distinct per- sonhood and agency often emerging not through a light flashing from heaven, but through a process of interpretation of a complex cluster of immanent causalities.12 NCT is valuable here: it shows how the fact that divine agency is mediated by crea- turely causes in a given case does not mean it is not still divine agency. What NCT does not capture, however, is the experience that is the outcome of this interpretive process: the perception of God as a relational agent acting personally and contras- tively in the life of the human agent. Importantly, a failure to distinguish ‘philosophical’ and ‘experiential’ dimensions of the theology of agency can lead to interpretive errors. To make this point I will draw on two contemporary cases. Overapplication of the NCT framework Example 1: Critiques of Martin Luther’s Theology of Passivity The first example is from the recent history of interpretation of Martin Luther’s soteriology. Here I give a more concise version of an argument I have made in detail in a previous article.13 In recent decades, NCT, together with the related scholastic distinc- tion between absolute and conditional necessity, has been deployed by a number of theologians to critique Martin Luther’s theology of soteriological passivity, and to argue that his critique of Christian virtue ethics is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of divine as well as creaturely agency. Critics of Luther like Reinhard Hütter, Jennifer Herdt, and Otto Pesch claim he did not understand the implications of divine transcendence for creaturely causality. Herdt, whose account is most directly influenced by Tanner’s NCT framework,14 ar- gues that Luther’s emphasis on ‘the bankruptcy of human agency … threatens the coherence of any Christian account of moral agency’, and is the consequence of his philosophically mistaken ‘tendency to think of divine and human agency in compet- itive terms.’15 Close reading of Luther’s own discussions of divine and human agency reveals that these interpretations of Luther’s emphasis on the passivity of human agents in salva- tion are dependent on a failure to consider experiential rather than just metaphysical sources in theological reflection on divine and human agency. Although there are 12 Augustine’s Confessions again furnishes many examples. 13 Simeon Zahl, ’Non- Competitive Agency and Luther’s Experiential Argument against Virtue’, Modern Theology 35, no. 2 (April 2019): 199- 222. 14 Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 339n38 and 164n70. 15 Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 175, 195. Agency Experience and the Limitations of Non- Contrastive Transcendence 7 © 2025 The Author(s). Modern Theology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. several factors behind Luther’s theology of passivity,16 one of the most important is his consistent appeal to experiences of inability to conquer intransigent sinful affections and desires by means of his own agency, whether through force of will or through habit- generating practice. In the 1531/35 Lectures on Galatians, Luther describes the spiritual frustrations that led to his convictions about soteriological passivity in terms of his inability over many years to develop any mastery over sinful affections. He attempted ‘many methods’, but found that his good works were ‘to no avail’, because ‘the desires of the flesh kept coming back’.17 That this experience was fundamental to Luther’s de- veloping anthropology and soteriology in the 1510s is clear in texts from this period and immediately after: ‘Ask experience how impervious to dissuasion are those whose affections are set on anything!’;18 ‘if you do not believe the Scripture and its example, at least believe your own experience [saltem proprie experiente credite]. For through the Law you have deserved wrath and desolation’;19 ‘Experience proves this [Et hoc probat etiam experientia]; for ask all the exercisers of free choice to a man, and if you are able to show me one who can sincerely and honestly say with regard to any effort or endeavour of his own, “I know that this pleases God”, then I will admit defeat.’20 Analysis of these and similar passages makes clear that the reason Luther affirmed the passivity of the human agent in salvation was not because he did not possess the metaphysical tools to conceive of divine and human agency in non- competitive terms. He affirmed soteriological passivity in significant part because of personal experience of the inefficacy of his own agency in attempting to obey the law of God. This experiential and phenomenological aspect of Luther’s argument is missed when the discussion of divine and human agency is conceived in philosophical and meta- physical terms alone. What are arguably Luther’s most decisive theological concerns in arguing for the passivity of the human agent in salvation are simply not captured by the NCT framework. To recognize this is not of course the same as saying that Luther’s view of human agency in salvation was correct. It remains the case that NCT does help explain how a virtue- based soteriology and ethics is not necessarily at odds, on its own terms, with a view of God as the true author of salvation and sanctification. What it means, rather, is that such accounts need to address the question of experiences of agential inefficacy as well as of divine overruling of human agency that Luther so forcefully raises, which as we have seen do seem legitimately to emerge in paradigmatic biblical of accounts of divine deliverance. Attending to experience in developing a theology of agency shows that simply demonstrating the formal philosophical viability of a certain account of human agency in salvation does not yet answer all the questions that must be answered by the theologian. 16 See Zahl, ’Non- Competitive Agency’, 211- 12. 17 WA 40.2:91- 2; LW 27:73. See also WA TR 4:260/LW 54:334 and WA 18:783/LW 33:288- 9. 18 WA 18:634; LW 33:64- 5. See also WA 7:448/LW 32:93 and WA 7:145. 19 WA 56:291; LW 25:278. 20 WA 18:769/LW 33:265–6. For further examples, see e.g., WA 18:674/LW 33:122; WA 8:127/LW 32:258; WA 1:373- 4/LW 31:68- 9; and WA 56:271/LW 25:259. For more detailed discussion, see [XXX]. 8 Simeon Zahl © 2025 The Author(s). Modern Theology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Example 2: Tanner’s Critique of Appeals to Pneumatological ‘Immediacy’ A second example where an NCT- informed account of human and divine agency seems to lead to inadequate recognition of the role of experiential factors can be found in Tanner’s 2010 work Christ the Key. In the chapter ‘The Working of the Spirit’, Tanner makes a compelling case for seeking the work of the Spirit in the messy complexity of creaturely causes and mediations. From this perspective, ‘the Spirit does not begin to work where ordinary sorts of human operation come to an end. To the contrary, the Spirit works through the whole of those ordinary human operations, in and over their gradual and apparently meandering course’.21 Behind this view of the Spirit, Tanner goes on to confirm, lies ‘a quite classical account of the way God works with the world’, in which ‘God does not evacuate the human or push it aside’, namely, NCT.22 The positive vision here is a striking and valuable one that uses the resources of NCT to open new vistas on the perennial question of the discernment of the Spirit. Of interest for present purposes, however, is the account of the working of the Spirit that Tanner uses as a foil for the non- competitive pneumatology proposed in the chap- ter. In this other view, which Tanner finds especially prevalent in the early modern period, ‘the Spirit is thought to work immediately—both instantaneously and directly, without any obvious mediating forms—in exceptional events, rather than in the ordi- nary run of human affairs, upon the interior depths of individual persons, apart from the operation of their own faculties’.23 Drawing on a series of seventeenth- century examples, Tanner then argues that appeals to the ‘unmediated’ operation of the Spirit in individual lives and experiences are always plays for religious power.24 By appeal- ing directly to the Spirit’s authority, such claims preclude testing or critique.25 It is therefore no surprise, she suggests, that this theological move is one that tends to be deployed by those lacking other forms of religious authority or power.26 Although Tanner acknowledges that appeals to the ‘immediate working of the Spirit in individual lives’ can at times serve a salutary function, for example as ‘a counter to authoritarian justifications of religious persecution’,27 overall the chapter articulates a scathing critique of appeals to immediate experience of the Holy Spirit in theological discourse. Not only are such appeals often reducible to a crude ‘demand for control’,28 they are also premised on the same faulty modern metaphysical assumptions identified in God and Creation, namely, that God must operate over and against creaturely causes rather than ‘in and under the human’.29 As evidence for this phenomenon, Tanner presents a series of representative quo- tations from seventeenth- century Puritan writers. Thus she quotes Richard Sibbes: ‘How do you know the word to be the word? It carrieth proof and evidence in itself … I am sure I felt it, it warmed my heart, and converted me’;30 ‘There is no other 21 Tanner, Christ the Key, 274. 22 Tanner, Christ the Key, 296, 297. 23 Tanner, Christ the Key, 274. 24 Tanner, Christ the Key, 281. See also 276- 77, 280, 285. 25 Tanner, Christ the Key, 287. 26 Tanner, Christ the Key, 286. See also 285, 290. 27 Tanner, Christ the Key, 290. 28 Tanner, Christ the Key, 299. 29 Tanner, Christ the Key, 298. 30 Richard Sibbes, The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. Alexander Grosart (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1862- 64), vol. IV, 363; cited in Tanner, Christ the Key, 282. Agency Experience and the Limitations of Non- Contrastive Transcendence 9 © 2025 The Author(s). Modern Theology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. principle to prove the word, but experience from the working of it.’31 Likewise Walter Cradock: [In] the very manifestation of God to the soule, it carries a witnesse in it self, it is so cleare, that when I have it, though I never had it before, and I cannot demon- stratively speak a word what it is, yet I know as it is Gods sight, so I know as I see him.32 At first reading, these quotations do seem to claim that the ‘immediate’ experiences of the Spirit being commended are self- authenticating, occurring in a place that, as Tanner puts it, is ‘shielded from public view in the depths of [one’s] interior life’.33 Tanner inter- prets this to mean that they therefore provide a kind of epistemic invulnerability: for the one who has not shared the experience, there is simply ‘no grounds to challenge them’, any more than ‘a blind man has the right to question what a sighted person sees.’34 I suggest that by interpreting these texts exclusively in terms of questions of power and authority, Tanner is significantly overreading them. Shaped by a NCT frame- work that is highly attentive to power dynamics in the relation between divine and human agency, but poorly equipped to attend to the experiential dynamics of agency, Tanner’s reading misses a crucial possibility: that in appealing to ideas of immedi- acy, interiority, and self- authentication to characterize these experiences, writers like Sibbes and Cradock might also, or instead, be trying to articulate something about the phenomenology of such experiences. In other words, when Sibbes claims that he ‘felt it, it warmed my heart, and converted me’ he may have simply been trying to describe what it was like to have a particular experience in his life that he attributed to the work of the Holy Spirit. Historically, phenomenological descriptions of certain kinds of experience of the Spirit as having both a felt ‘immediacy’ and a certain incommunicability are regu- larly found well beyond seventeenth- century English Puritan and Dissenting tradi- tions. To give just a few examples: William James speaks about both immediacy and incommunicability (‘ineffability’) as standard features of what he calls mystical ex- perience, both within and beyond Christian traditions, across a number of historical periods;35 descriptions of felt ‘immediacy’ in religious experiences has long been recognized by scholars as a standard feature of Pietist spirituality right through to the twentieth century;36 the idea that theological judgments must always be filtered through experience of a ‘personal Pentecost’ is a mainstream idea in Pentecostal the- ology as well as practice to this day.37 Such examples could be multiplied. The up- shot is that it is not implausible to suggest that one of the reasons Christians often draw attention to a ‘felt immediacy’ and related affects in certain kinds of 31 Sibbes, Works, vol. II, 495; cited in Tanner, Christ the Key, 282. 32 Walter Cradock, Gospel- Holiness (London: M. Simmons, 1651), 32; cited in Tanner, Christ the Key, 282. 33 Tanner, Christ the Key, 283. 34 Tanner, Christ the Key, 283. 35 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), Lecture XVI. 36 Hartmut Lehmann, Pietismus und weltliche Ordnung in Württemberg vom 17. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1969), 16. 37 Daniel Castelo, Pentecostalism as a Christian Mystical Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017), 20- 21. 10 Simeon Zahl © 2025 The Author(s). Modern Theology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. experiences they attribute to the Spirit is simply because that is what certain kinds of experiences of the Spirit tend to feel like. And this is just what we find when we read the quotations from Sibbes and Cradock in their wider textual context. When Sibbes asserts that ‘There is no other principle to prove the word, but experience from the working of it’, he is not in fact asserting the sheer incommunicability or brute self- authenticating authority of such experience. Far from incommunicable, in his view such experience has theologically specific experien- tial content that he finds himself capable of describing in a fair bit of detail. Two sen- tences earlier, he writes: ‘And if you ask how they know whether the word be the word? A man may answer, I have found it to be so, raising me up, comforting me, and strength- ening me’ during an experience of ‘affliction’.38 On the previous page, Sibbes describes the same kind of experience of ‘the word’ as following a standard Protestant pattern of experience of sin leading to an experience of consolation connected with the saving work of Christ: the word first gave his ‘soul … a sense of its own misery’, before then calling him to ‘believe in the Lord Jesus’ so that he might experience ‘pardon’ and after- ward be ‘full of Joy’.39 When Sibbes asserts that it is only ‘experience’ that can ‘prove the word’, he simply means that when a ‘word’ is really from God, it makes a practically recognizable difference in the life of the one experiencing it, and that this difference has epistemic value. Cradock, too, writes at length about the experiential effects of the ‘manifestation of God to the soule’ he is describing. In the same section from which Tanner’s quotation is drawn, Cradock goes on to describe how a true sign of such a ‘manifestation’ is a particular kind of transformation of desire: its effect is to ‘satisfy the soule’, filling the ‘emptines’ that is otherwise ‘left still in some corner of the soule’ even when one has an ‘estate’, and ‘friends’, and all other ‘such comforts’.40 This ultimately leads to ex- periencing ‘a transcendent, exceedingly high joy’ that comes from knowing ‘God manifested in Christ’.41 In these straightforward public descriptions of common Christian religious affections, we seem a long way from the shielded and hidden ‘private revelations’ that Tanner describes.42 As in the case of Sibbes, attending to the experiential dynamics that surround and inform Cradock’s claim that immediate experience of the Spirit contains its own ‘witness’ results in a more accurate reading of the text than an NCT- based hermeneutic can provide. The latter simply does not contain the tools needed to interpret a text that seeks to describe what it is like to encounter God as a contrastive agent. Lacking these tools, its only recourse is to in- terpret such texts as caught up in a purely human play for power, clothed in religious language. This is not to say that theological appeal to ‘immediate’ experiences of the Holy Spirit may not also be caught up in the power dynamics Tanner describes, or that the latter may not be differently and more intensively available as possibilities in the early mod- ern period or amongst Christian groups that are forced to operate outside of dominant channels of religious power. What it is to say, however, is once again that failing to attend to experiential factors in descriptions of the relationship between divine and 38 Sibbes, Works, vol. II, 495. 39 Sibbes, Works, vol. II, 494. 40 Cradock, Gospel- holiness, 35. 41 Cradock, Gospel- holiness, 39. 42 Tanner, Christ the Key, 283. Agency Experience and the Limitations of Non- Contrastive Transcendence 11 © 2025 The Author(s). Modern Theology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. human agency risks missing major theological dynamics that are often at work in such cases. Conclusion In this essay I have argued that, for all its usefulness in key domains, the principle of non- contrastive transcendence is poorly equipped to capture the ways that the ques- tion of divine and human agency in Christian theology is concerned with experience and encounter, not just the formal conditions of possibility for agency and agency at- tribution. If I am correct, then going forward it will be important in theological discus- sions of agency to clarify where what is being discussed is agency as a ‘philosophical’ topic grounded in the doctrine of creation, and where we have to do with questions that arise from or are informed by experience. Experiences of what feel like interrup- tive or ‘immediate’ encounters with God as a relational agent are an important aspect of Christian spirituality that has robust scriptural precedent and a long history in the church. This is especially the case in the domain of soteriology: the experience of being saved or rescued by God in spite of the inefficacy or indeed resistance of one’s own agency is a major element in the phenomenology of salvation, in both its liberative and its redemptive- penitential aspects. Discussing agency through the lens of NCT alone obscures these important dynamics. More generally, my argument about agency experience and NCT is a reminder of how much in theology has to do with recognizing and rightly calibrating the scope of arguments. Theologians need to seek so far as possible to be clear about which prob- lems a given concept illuminates or resolves, and which problems are beyond its range, or we will find ourselves misusing good insights. NCT is a large- scale conceptual framework that can be applied, in principle, to very many domains in theology. Attending to experience questions has shown that it is easy to miscalibrate its scope, leading to interpretive blind spots and errors.43 Without question, NCT is a major re- source for thinking through God’s relationship to the world in the context of assump- tions about agency that have rendered it difficult to think well about that relationship. But it is also a principle that needs to be applied in a limited and differentiated way, in some domains but not others, and alongside other sources of theological insight. DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study. 43 The pneumatological example above notwithstanding, Tanner herself is usually well- attuned to these dynamics, and does not herself seem to view NCT as a totalizing framework for understanding the theology of agency. A good example is her observation that NCT cannot explain sin and is of no use in constructing theodicies (see n.7 above); another is her acknowledgement that NCT does not preclude special divine action (e.g., in the case of miracles—see Tanner, God and Creation, 99- 100). My argument, once again, is not with NCT as such, but with certain interpretive possibilities it affords that can result in an unreflected eclipse of experi- ence in theological reflections on agency. Agency Experience and the Limitations of Non-Contrastive Transcendence Abstract Introduction Non-Contrastive Transcendence as Apophatic Principle Contrastive Agency in Biblical Narratives Overapplication of the NCT framework Example 1: Critiques of Martin Luther’s Theology of Passivity Example 2: Tanner’s Critique of Appeals to Pneumatological ‘Immediacy’ Conclusion DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT