Providence

The tradition divides providence into three acts, and the division is not decorative. It is a way of keeping three distinct claims from collapsing into each other. The Latin terms are conservatio, concursus and gubernatio, and the same three appear in Lutheran, Reformed, Catholic and Anglican textbooks with minor differences of arrangement.

Preservation is the claim that created things do not continue in being on their own. Colossians 1:17 says that in Christ 'all things hold together'. Hebrews 1:3 says the Son is 'upholding all things by His powerful word'. Psalm 104:29-30 makes it dramatic: when God hides his face the creatures are terrified, when he takes away their breath they die and return to dust, and when he sends his Spirit they are created. Acts 17:28 says that in him we live and move and have our being. The point is not that God repairs the world from time to time. It is that existence is continuously derived, so that the world's persistence from one second to the next is as much God's act as its beginning was. This is where the doctrine of creation from the last lesson becomes a doctrine about now.

Concurrence is the harder claim and it is the one the rest of this lesson argues about. It says that when a creature acts, God acts in and through that acting, so that the event is wholly the creature's act and wholly God's, without the two being added together like two people pushing a car. Philippians 2:12-13 states it as a single instruction: 'continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God who works in you to will and to act on behalf of His good purpose.' Notice the logic, which is the reverse of what a modern reader expects: the reason given for working is that God is working. Isaiah 10:5-15 supplies the same structure at the level of empires, where Assyria is the rod of God's anger and simultaneously an arrogant aggressor whose intention is not God's intention and who will be punished for it.

Government is the claim that God directs everything towards his ends. Proverbs 16:33: 'The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD.' Note what that verse chose as its example. The lot is the ancient world's picture of pure chance, which is exactly why the proverb uses it. Ephesians 1:11 speaks of 'Him who works out everything by the counsel of His will'. Daniel 4:35 has Nebuchadnezzar, of all people, confess that God 'does as He pleases with the army of heaven and the peoples of the earth' and that 'There is no one who can restrain His hand'. Matthew 10:29 brings it down to a sparrow sold for a penny, with the caution about the supplied word that you have already worked through: the BSB's 'apart from the will of your Father' is one of several ways to fill what the Greek leaves bare.

One text deserves separate handling because it is the doctrine's hardest case and its clearest one at the same time. Genesis 50:20 does not say that the brothers did evil and God made the best of it afterwards. It says that they meant it for evil and God meant it for good, with one act and two intentions, and the Hebrew verb is the same for both parties. Acts 2:23 does the same with the crucifixion, and Acts 4:27-28 says that Herod and Pilate and their allies carried out what God's hand and will had decided beforehand would happen. If you are going to have a doctrine of providence, these are the verses that set the difficulty, because they refuse both of the easy escapes: God is not merely reacting, and the human agents are not merely instruments who bear no guilt.

The classical instrument for handling concurrence is the distinction between primary and secondary causation, and it is worth being precise about what it claims, because it is often used as though it were a slogan. The claim is not that God does part of the work and creatures do the rest. It is that God and creatures are causes in different senses, at different levels, so that they are not competitors for the same causal space. God is the cause of the creature's being, and of its acting, and of its acting in the particular way it acts, while the creature is genuinely the cause of what it does.

Aquinas works this out in the Summa Theologiae, where he argues that God works in every agent, and that to say a creature is a real cause does not detract from God but displays his power, since it is a greater thing to give something the dignity of causing than to do everything oneself. The Westminster Confession says the same in Reformed idiom at 5.2: 'Although, in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first Cause, all things come to pass immutably, and infallibly; yet, by the same providence, he ordereth them to fall out, according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently.' Read that last clause slowly. It asserts that some things come about freely and contingently, and it asserts this inside a sentence about the decree. Whether the assertion can be cashed out is precisely the question the next section is about.

What the distinction genuinely buys is worth stating, because it buys a lot. It means that a complete account of how something happened in natural terms is not a rival to the claim that God did it, which is the point the last lesson needed in its third column. It means God is not one item in the causal chain, a very large link among smaller ones, which would make him a creature. It means the world has real causal integrity, so that science is possible and a doctor is not competing with prayer. And it means that Isaiah 10 is not a paradox to be solved but a description of how providence normally runs.

What it does not buy should be stated with equal candour. The distinction locates the mystery; it does not dissolve it. Applied to sinful acts it has to say that God is the cause of the act and not of the sinfulness, and Aquinas puts this by saying that the defect in the act comes from the defective secondary cause rather than from God, as a limp comes from the crooked leg rather than from the power of movement. Critics have always replied that this is a verbal distinction doing metaphysical work, since God is said to cause the act in every respect except the one that matters. Defenders answer that sin is a privation, a lack of the good that should be there, and that a privation does not require a cause in the way a positive reality does, which is the argument the last lesson of this module will examine. You should notice that the reply is an argument, not an evasion, and also that it has never persuaded everybody.

Each of the following is stated as its own defenders state it, with the texts it leans on and the hardest question it has to answer. None is a caricature and none is here to be knocked over. The order is roughly that of how much God is said to determine, from most to least, and the order is not an argument.

The Reformed doctrine of meticulous providence. Every event without exception falls under God's eternal decree, including free human choices and including sin, so that nothing occurs which God has not ordained, and yet secondary causes act according to their own natures and moral responsibility is unaffected. Calvin devotes three chapters of the Institutes to it and insists that providence is not bare foreknowledge but active governance, rejecting the idea of God as a spectator who permits without willing. The Westminster Confession 3.1 states it with the guard attached in the same sentence: God 'did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.' The texts are Ephesians 1:11 on working out everything by the counsel of his will; Proverbs 16:33 on the lot; Proverbs 21:1, that the king's heart is a waterway in the hand of the LORD, who directs it where He pleases; Genesis 50:20 and Acts 2:23 and 4:28 on the two intentions in one act; Amos 3:6 and Lamentations 3:37-38 on disaster coming from God's hand; Isaiah 45:7, 'I form the light and create the darkness; I bring prosperity and create calamity'; and Daniel 4:35. The freedom affirmed is compatibilist: a person acts freely when he acts according to his own will and desires without external compulsion, and this is held to be all the freedom the Bible ever ascribes to anyone and all that responsibility requires. The hardest question is the relation of God's decree to sin. The confession itself says at 5.4 that providence extends to the first fall 'and that not by a bare permission', which its critics take as an admission that permission here is not what the word ordinarily means, and which its defenders take as a refusal to pretend that God stood by. Calvin himself rejected bare permission as a hiding place. Whether the compatibilist account of freedom is the freedom that Deuteronomy 30:19 and Matthew 23:37 assume is the question the next positions press.

The Thomist account. God is the first cause of every being and every act, moving each secondary cause according to its own nature: necessary causes necessarily, free causes freely. Because God's causality is not of the same order as a creature's, it does not compete with creaturely freedom but constitutes it, so that the free act is wholly from God as first cause and wholly from the agent as second cause. The sixteenth-century Dominicans, above all Domingo Banez, sharpened this into a doctrine of physical premotion: God actively applies the created will to its act, and the will is nonetheless free because what God moves it to is a free act. The texts are Philippians 2:13, that God works in you to will and to act; Isaiah 26:12, 'For all that we have accomplished, You have done for us'; Acts 17:28, that in him we live and move and have our being; Proverbs 21:1; and Romans 11:36, that from him and through him and to him are all things. Sin is handled by the distinction already met: God causes the act as an act of being and is not the cause of its defect, which arises from the deficiency of the creature. The hardest question is whether premotion is distinguishable from determinism in anything but vocabulary. If God applies the will to this act rather than that one, critics ask, in what sense could the agent have done otherwise, and the Thomist answer, that the act is free because God moves it to be free, strikes opponents as naming the difficulty rather than removing it. Thomists reply that the objection assumes God is a cause on the same level as the creature, which is exactly what the position denies, and that once the analogy of being is taken seriously the objection loses its grip. This position is widely held in the Catholic Church and has clear affinities with the Reformed account, which its defenders resist for reasons worth reading them on: on their telling the Reformed decree is a divine decision about outcomes, while premotion is a claim about how a first cause operates at all, and the two are not the same kind of claim.

Molinism, and middle knowledge stated properly. Luis de Molina, a Spanish Jesuit, published the Concordia in 1588 to reconcile God's foreknowledge and providence with genuine libertarian freedom. His instrument is a threefold division of God's knowledge. Natural knowledge is God's knowledge of all necessary truths and all possibilities; it is prior to his will and he could not have known otherwise. Free knowledge is his knowledge of what will actually happen; it is posterior to his will, because it depends on what he decided to create. Between them Molina locates a third category, middle knowledge, scientia media: God's knowledge of what any possible free creature would freely do in any possible circumstance. It is like natural knowledge in being prior to God's decision, and therefore not determined by him; it is like free knowledge in being contingent, since a free creature could have done otherwise. God then surveys the complete set of these truths, selects a world in which the free choices people would make add up to his purposes, and creates it. Providence is thereby total without being determining. The texts offered are the counterfactual passages: 1 Samuel 23:10-13, where David asks whether Saul will come down and whether the men of Keilah will surrender him, and the LORD answers that they will, after which David leaves and they do not; Matthew 11:21, where Jesus says that if the miracles performed in Chorazin and Bethsaida had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes; and Jeremiah 38:17-18. Its modern defenders include Alvin Plantinga, Thomas Flint and William Lane Craig. The hardest question is the grounding objection, pressed by Robert Adams and William Hasker: what makes a counterfactual of creaturely freedom true, given that the creature does not yet exist, has not chosen, and by hypothesis is not determined by God or by circumstances to choose either way? If nothing grounds it, critics say, there is nothing there for God to know. Molinists answer that the truths are simply true, that demanding a ground for every truth is a metaphysical prejudice, and that the objection would equally rule out simple foreknowledge of free acts.

The Arminian account. Jacobus Arminius, who died in 1609, and the Remonstrants who published their five articles in 1610, hold that God governs all things and has exhaustive foreknowledge, but that he has granted human beings libertarian freedom in the matters where scripture holds them responsible, and that he therefore permits much that he does not will. Grace is resistible, election is grounded in God's foreknowledge of faith rather than in an unconditional decree, and God genuinely desires the salvation of all. Wesleyan theology adds prevenient grace: the fall leaves no natural ability to turn to God, and the freedom to respond is itself a gift of grace given to all, which is why Wesleyans deny that their position makes salvation a human achievement. The texts are those the first two positions have to explain: 1 Timothy 2:4, that God 'wants everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth'; 2 Peter 3:9, 'not wanting anyone to perish but everyone to come to repentance'; Ezekiel 18:23 and 33:11, that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked; Matthew 23:37, 'how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were unwilling!'; Acts 7:51, that the hearers always resist the Holy Spirit; Deuteronomy 30:19, 'I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Therefore choose life'; and Jeremiah 32:35, where God says of child sacrifice that he never commanded it, nor had it ever entered His mind. The hardest question is what work simple foreknowledge can do. If God knows the future because it is there to be known, then at the moment of knowing it is already settled, and he cannot use the knowledge to decide anything, since any decision he made in the light of it would change what he foresaw. The objection has been pressed most sharply by William Hasker, who is not a Calvinist but an open theist, which tells you it is not a partisan point. Arminians answer variously: that foreknowledge and decision are not sequential in an eternal God, that providence does not require the knowledge to be usable in that way, and that some of them adopt Molinism precisely to solve it.

Open theism, stated as its advocates state it. The position was set out in 1994 in The Openness of God by Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker and David Basinger, and developed in John Sanders's The God Who Risks and Greg Boyd's God of the Possible. Its advocates affirm that God is omniscient, that he knows everything that can be known, and that he knows the past and present exhaustively. Their distinctive claim is about the nature of the future rather than about the extent of God's knowledge: if creatures have libertarian freedom, then what they will freely choose is not yet a fact, and not being a fact it is not an object of knowledge, so God's not knowing it is no more a limitation than his inability to make a square circle. God therefore knows the future as a landscape of possibilities and settled certainties together, works with what people actually do, takes real risks, and genuinely responds. They insist that this is not a God who could be surprised into failure: he is infinitely resourceful and his ultimate purposes are secure. The texts are the ones the other positions treat as anthropomorphism: Genesis 6:6, that the LORD regretted that he had made man; Genesis 22:12, 'for now I know that you fear God' (spoken by the angel); Exodus 32:14 and Jonah 3:10 on relenting; 1 Samuel 15:11 on regret; Jeremiah 18:7-10 and 26:3, where God states conditional intentions as a general policy; Isaiah 5:4, 'What more could have been done for My vineyard than I have done for it?'; and Hosea 11:8. Their argument is that these are too many and too structurally placed to be dismissed as figures of speech, and that the tradition has chosen which texts are literal by a criterion imported from Greek philosophy rather than drawn from scripture. The hardest question is prophecy and the texts about God's declared purposes: Isaiah 46:10, declaring the end from the beginning; Cyrus named in Isaiah 44:28 long before his birth; and above all Jesus's prediction of Peter's denial down to the number of times and the rooster. Open theists answer that God can announce what he will himself bring about, that he can predict what a settled character will do with overwhelming reliability, and that some prophecies are conditional. Critics reply that the Peter case involves multiple free acts by several people and that the answers strain.

Process theology, named for what it is. The framework comes from the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, whose Process and Reality appeared in 1929, and was developed theologically by Charles Hartshorne and then by John Cobb and David Ray Griffin. On this account reality is made of events rather than substances, and creativity, not God, is the ultimate metaphysical category. God is dipolar: eternal and unchanging in his character and aims, and genuinely affected and enriched by what happens in the world. Crucially, God does not possess unilateral power. He acts on every event by persuasion, offering each occasion its best possibility, and the occasion decides. He cannot override, because on this metaphysics the power to determine another's act does not exist to be had. Its advocates argue that this is a gain and not a loss: it makes God's love non-coercive all the way down, it removes the problem of evil at a stroke since God prevents nothing because he cannot, and it takes the biblical picture of a God who suffers and responds more seriously than classical theism does. The texts appealed to are the relenting and suffering passages, Hosea 11:8, Jeremiah's grief, and the cross read as God's participation in the world's pain rather than as a transaction. The hardest question is what is left. A God who cannot act unilaterally did not create out of nothing, cannot raise the dead, and cannot guarantee any outcome, and process theologians generally accept all three consequences rather than deny them: Whitehead's God is not the maker of heaven and earth in the creedal sense, and the hope offered is that every moment is taken up everlastingly into God's own experience rather than that the dead are raised. Whether that is the God of Abraham and of the empty tomb is the question, and it is a question its own proponents engage rather than evade. Cobb and Griffin answer that classical theism purchased omnipotence at the price of making God responsible for every atrocity, and that the trade is a bad one; their critics answer that a God who could not have prevented Auschwitz is not being excused but replaced. That exchange is the cleanest statement of what is actually at issue between process theology and the rest of the field, and it is worth reading both halves of it before deciding.

This is a question of fact, and a student should be able to answer it without being told which position to prefer. The first four accounts are all held inside historic Christian orthodoxy, by communions in full possession of the creeds, and none of them has ever been condemned as such by the whole church.

The Catholic case is the clearest because it was tested formally. Between 1598 and 1607 a commission in Rome, the Congregatio de Auxiliis, examined the quarrel between the Dominican followers of Banez and the Jesuit followers of Molina over grace and free will. It heard arguments for nine years. In 1607 Pope Paul V closed it without a ruling, permitting each order to teach its own doctrine and forbidding either to brand the other heretical. That decision stands, and it is why a Catholic theologian today may be a Thomist or a Molinist without difficulty. It is also a model worth noticing: a church body examined a genuine dispute at length and concluded that the question was not settled, rather than manufacturing an answer.

The Protestant case is messier and more instructive. The Synod of Dort, meeting in 1618 and 1619, rejected the five articles of the Remonstrants and produced the canons that supply the five points now associated with Calvinism. That was a real ruling by a real synod, and it settled the matter for the Dutch Reformed church and for the Reformed confessional tradition generally. It did not settle it for the church at large. The Remonstrant position survived, was taken up by Wesley and by the Methodist movement, and is now held by a very large part of world Christianity, including most Pentecostals, most Baptists in some regions and most Wesleyan and Holiness bodies. The Lutheran Formula of Concord took a third path, affirming unconditional election to salvation while denying any decree of reprobation, and Lutherans have generally declined to resolve the resulting tension on the ground that scripture does not. The Eastern Orthodox have framed the question differently again, speaking of synergy, the cooperation of divine grace and human will, and using the distinction made by John of Damascus between God's antecedent will, what he wills by good pleasure, and his consequent will, what he wills in response to what creatures do. A course written from one of these positions would tell you that its own synod settled things. The honest description is that several bodies have ruled, that their rulings bind their own members, and that the church as a whole has not spoken with one voice.

Open theism is in a different category, and the accurate word is disputed rather than condemned. It is incompatible with the Catholic and Orthodox doctrine of divine eternity and exhaustive foreknowledge as those churches teach it, and with the Reformed, Lutheran and Anglican confessions, all of which assume that God knows the future exhaustively. Within evangelicalism it produced a public fight. In 2003 the Evangelical Theological Society voted on motions to expel Clark Pinnock and John Sanders over the doctrine; the society's constitution requires a two-thirds majority to dismiss a member, neither motion reached it, and both men retained membership. Draw the right conclusion from that: a large body of conservative evangelical scholars declined to treat the position as putting a man outside the faith, while a substantial minority thought it did. It remains a minority position held by a small number of theologians who affirm scripture's authority and argue their case from texts, and it is rejected by the great majority of Christian theologians of every communion. Both halves of that sentence are true and a student should be able to say both.

Process theology is the one case where the boundary is not really in doubt, and the reason is not that anybody has anathematised it but that its own proponents state the disagreement plainly. It denies creation out of nothing and it denies that God has the power to determine any outcome unilaterally, and both denials are deliberate. The Nicene Creed's first article confesses God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and the resurrection of the dead is the second article's hinge. A theology that gives up both is outside what the creeds affirm, and saying so is a description rather than an insult. It is worth adding that process thought has been a serious conversation partner for Christian theology, that its criticisms of an impassible and coercive picture of God have been felt across the spectrum, and that several theologians who reject its metaphysics have learned from its questions.

One last distinction, because it prevents a common error. Disagreeing about how God governs is not the same as disagreeing about whether he governs. All six accounts in section 3 affirm that God is at work in the world, that he has purposes, and that history is going somewhere. What divides them is the mode of divine action and the nature of creaturely freedom, which are metaphysical questions on which scripture speaks by implication rather than by definition. That is why the argument has lasted, why it will not be settled by finding one more proof text, and why a person who holds one of these positions with a good conscience should be able to state the others without sneering.

Providence is not first a theory and it is not chiefly for debate. In every tradition that has taught it well, it is for two things: worship and endurance. The Heidelberg Catechism, answering what good it does us to know that God creates and upholds, says that we may be patient in adversity, thankful in prosperity, and confident about the future, because all things come to us not by chance but from his fatherly hand. The Catholic Catechism ends its treatment of providence by saying that the ways of it are often unknown to us and will be fully understood only at the end. The Orthodox liturgy prays for a Christian ending to our life, painless, blameless and peaceful, which is a prayer only a person who believes in providence would bother to make. Those three are from three different communions and they are doing the same job.

Which is why the doctrine has to be taught carefully rather than deployed. Romans 8:28 says in the BSB that 'God works all things together for the good of those who love Him', and it is one of the most abused sentences in the Bible. A note on the BSB first: it makes God the explicit subject of the verb, and has no footnote saying the Greek can be read otherwise. Translations divide here, and many read the verse as saying that all things work together for good, with no named worker, as a general statement of how things go for those who love God. The BSB's reading puts God's active hand in the verse; the other makes it a statement about outcome, and does not by itself say who brings it about. The pastoral warning below holds on either reading. Notice what the verse does not say. It does not say that all things are good. It does not say that the good in view is the comfortable outcome the sufferer wanted; the next verse defines the good as being conformed to the image of the Son. And it is addressed to those who love God, in a chapter whose surrounding verses are about groaning, weakness and not knowing what to pray for. A person quoting it at a funeral to stop someone crying has used it against its own paragraph.

There are sentences that should not be said in a hospital room, and a teacher does his students a favour by naming them. God needed another angel is not Christian doctrine in any tradition and it is not true. Everything happens for a reason is ambiguous enough to be either the doctrine of providence or fatalism, and the person hearing it cannot tell which you mean. God is teaching you something may be true and is not yours to say. What every position in section 3 can honestly say to a sufferer is smaller and firmer: that this is not outside God's knowledge or his reach, that he is not indifferent to it, that Christ has been in the place of godforsakenness and did not stay there, and that you are not going to be left alone in it. Then stop talking and stay.

And notice what providence does not yet answer. If God governs everything, why does he govern it like this? The doctrine as stated here has told you that God is at work in the worst things that happen and that this does not make him their author, and it has shown you six ways of saying how, five of them live options inside the church and none of them commanding the field. It has not told you why the child died. That question is the subject of the next lesson, and the honest thing to say at the end of this one is that the doctrine of providence makes the problem of evil harder rather than easier, which is exactly why the two lessons are next to each other.