It's not that Ms. Mercer wasn't a divine role model.
Twenty-two emperors came here to make sacrifices to heaven, affirming their divine role as ruler and shaman.
And it discusses the human actors like Moses, left out of the original Haggadah to avoid upstaging the divine role in redemption.
Mr. Wallis added that the Bible held nations accountable to God, and did not allow them to arrogate a divine role to themselves.
"There's absolutely no truth to the rumour I'll be taking a job in the Vatican," he adds, although some finance ministers probably consider him worthy of the divine role.
Just as a proponent of grace postulates a special divine role on the volitional side, so a proponent of divine illumination postulates a special divine role on the cognitive side.
But the leading figures in ancient Greek philosophy were equally committed to some kind of divine role in cognition.
The moderates believe in the divine role of the Supreme Leader but hold that he takes his legitimacy from the people and should be responsible to them.
Such an account can still distinguish between strong bringing about at the initiation of the cosmos from the divine role in creating and sustaining the universe at its later stages.
However, what survives in Lucretius as mere poetic personification of pleasure (contrast this in the opening lines of his de rerum natura with the naturalist debunking of a Divine role in reproduction late in its Book IV) may in Empedocles signify more.
