Smith's first chapter, "
Prevenience," will be of particular interest to readers of Communal Societies.
Michael Purcell, "The
Prevenience and Phenomenality of Grace, or, the Anteriority of the Posterior," pp.
(3) In synoptic form, these hypotheses (or "links") may be delineated as follows: 1) The "natural spirituality" of all persons, believer or nonbeliever (universal
prevenience hypothesis); 2) the spiritual (directional) nature of psychological structures and processes (telic directionality hypothesis); 3) the structural (psychological) mediation of all relational experience (structural mediation hypothesis); 4) the development of structural and directional maturity markers (developmental complementarity hypothesis); 5) the primacy of implicit and procedural structures of morality in personality change (implicit structural change hypothesis); and, 6) the centrality of intersubjective relatedness for implicit relational transformation (intersubjective relatedness hypothesis).
Prevenience is an operative principle in Milton's epic for denoting the Son's gracious intervention.
Explaining that "faith is the motion of mans heart wrought in him by the Spirit of God," Ball proceeds to a more quotidian level of illustration, comparing the "action" of faith to a wheel that, "in being moved of another, doth move." Divine
prevenience is such that "faith is nothing but the action of God in man"; yet the "act" of faith "is the act of man," for all that the believer, like the wheel, is incapable of autonomous motion.