INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Faith in divine providence has waned considerably during the past century. The brutality of such events as two world wars, China’s Cultural Revolution, and the 9/11 attacks, coupled with sharply declining belief in the authority and trustworthiness of the Bible, have led countless persons, even among those who profess to be Christians, to abandon entirely the doctrine of divine providence. Numerous clergy and theologians, in fact, have come to regard this doctrine, which teaches that God not only creates and sustains the world but also concerns himself with and intervenes in its daily affairs, as an anachronism and an embarrassment. To affirm divine providence in a contemporary context, such persons argue, would be either to sanction implicitly the cruelty of Auschwitz and the killing fields of Cambodia by attributing them to God’s righteous will or to incriminate God for tolerating and even ordaining such manifest evils.
Persons who uphold the authority and inerrancy of Scripture, nevertheless, cannot consistently disavow the doctrine of providence, for Scripture unmistakably teaches it. Such persons, rather, must confess this doctrine and account for it as best they can. In the present volume, Paul Kjoss Helseth, William Lane Craig, Ron Highfield, and Gregory Boyd articulate four distinct conceptions of what the Bible teaches about divine providence
In the following, by way of preface to these authors’ discussions, we will briefly explore the scriptural foundations of the doctrine of divine providence, sketch the history of theological reflection on this topic, and introduce the perspectives advocated in this volume, which the principal authors will explain in detail.
Scriptural Foundations
That Scripture teaches the doctrine of divine providence seems undeniable. From God’s creation of a helpmate for Adam, to the deluge, to the ten plagues, to the parting of the Red Sea, to the inspiration of the prophets, the Old Testament is replete with instances of God’s care for his creation. The first testament, moreover, attributes the works of nature to God. One reads in Psalm 147, for instance,
He covers the heavens with clouds;
he prepares rain for the earth;
he makes grass grow on the hills.
He gives to the beasts their food,
and to the young ravens that cry.…
He gives snow like wool;
he scatters hoarfrost like ashes.
He hurls down his crystals of ice like crumbs;
who can stand before his cold?
He sends out his word, and melts them;
he makes his wind blow and the waters flow.
Psalm 147:8 – 9, 16 –18 ESV.1
Human labor, declares the psalmist, cannot prosper without God’s assistance.
Unless the LORD builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the LORD watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
Psalm 127:1
Hebrew Scripture portrays a God who shows special favor to the poor and oppressed (“who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry,” Ps. 146:7) and cares for the temporal needs of the righteous (“I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for bread,” Ps. 37:25). Likewise, Scripture emphasizes God’s patience and mercy toward human beings. “His anger is but for a moment,” declares David, “and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Ps. 30:5). The Old Testament, in sum, depicts a God who is benevolent to the entirety of his creation. “The LORD is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made” (Ps. 145:9).
The God of the Old Testament, however, is no harmless or one-dimensional character. Though he is “of purer eyes than to see evil” (Hab. 1:13) and “hate[s] all evildoers” (Ps. 5:5), he hardens Pharaoh’s heart (Ex. 4:21; 7:3, 13; 9:12; 10:1, 20, 27; 11:10; 14:4, 8) and moves David to number Israel (2 Sam. 24:1).2 Though “lying lips are an abomination to the LORD” (Prov. 12:22), he sends a lying spirit into the mouths of Ahab’s prophets (1 Kings 22:23; 2 Chron. 18:21 – 22) and declares, “If the prophet is deceived and speaks a word, I, the LoRD, have deceived that prophet” (Ezek. 14:9).
Though God declares, “My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose” (Isa. 46:10), he expresses disappointment at his people’s failure to hearken to his pleas.
What more was there to do for my vineyard,
that I have not done in it?
When I looked for it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?
Isaiah 5:4
Indeed, the God of the Old Testament expresses regret for creating the human race. According to Genesis 6:6 – 7, “The LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.’ “ The Old Testament, then, depicts God’s providential control over creation in somewhat ambiguous terms.
Tensions similar to those that complicate the Old Testament account, moreover, resurface in the New Testament’s teaching on divine providence. Once more, God expresses seeming disappointment at human beings’ unwillingness to cooperate with his salvific initiative. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” Jesus cries out, “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!” (Matt. 23:37). Yet the New Testament also contains some of Scripture’s most emphatic affirmations of divine sovereignty over human beings’ eternal destinies. After one of Paul’s exhortations, Luke writes, “As many as were appointed to eternal life believed” (Acts 13:48). Romans 9, likewise, contains one of the most famous, or infamous, statements of God’s foreordination of human beings to either salvation or eternal punishment. “When Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac,” Paul writes, “though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad—in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls — she was told, ‘The older will serve the younger.’ As it is written, ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.’ What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! For he says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’ So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy” (Rom. 9:10 – 16).
Jesus himself, moreover, says in Matthew 22:14 that “many are called, but few are chosen.” In the New Testament, as in the Old, an apparent breach emerges between emphatic assertions of God’s righteousness and suggestions that he influences human beings to perform wicked acts. James, for instance, commands his audience, “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one” (James 1:13). Yet Paul declares of the followers of the man of lawlessness, “God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (2 Thess. 2:11 – 12). Again, writes Paul, “He has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills” (Rom. 9:18).
Scripture, then, supplies grounds for a range of answers to significant questions about God’s providence. Does God ever foreordain evil acts? Does God always get what he wants? How can one reconcile human beings’ moral responsibility with God’s sovereignty over their acts? More broadly, how does God influence the affairs of this world at all? To answer these and additional questions, each of the authors of this volume will set forth his own vision of what Scripture teaches on these subjects and how that teaching coheres with the rest of what Christians know about God from Scripture and general revelation. The following review of the history of the doctrine of providence in postbiblical Christian theology will help the reader to place each of the theologies of providence advocated in this volume in its approximate historical context
The History of the Doctrine of Providence
For convenience’ sake, one may divide the history of Christian reflection on providence into six periods. These include (1) the ante-Nicene era, roughly AD 70 until the Council of Nicaea in 325; (2) the post-Nicene, 325 until the death of John Damascene in 787; (3) the medieval, 787 until the dawn of the Reformation in the sixteenth century; (4) the early modern, from the outset of the Reformation until the close of the seventeenth century; (5) the Enlightenment, which began in the seventeenth century and reached its zenith in the eighteenth; and (6) the post-Enlightenment, from the outset of the nineteenth century until the present.
In the first of these periods, the ante-Nicene, Christian writers broached the topic of divine providence most frequently when arguing for the existence of a loving God who cares for his world. Minucius Felix, for example, appealed to God’s orderly arrangement of nature as evidence of God’s fatherly concern for humankind. “If, on entering any house,” he asserted, “you should behold everything refined, well arranged, and adorned, assuredly you would believe that a master presided over it, and that he himself was much better than all those excellent things. So in this house of the world, when you look upon the heaven and the earth, its providence, its ordering, its law, believe that there is a Lord and Parent of the universe far more glorious than the stars themselves, and the parts of the whole world.”3
Lactantius, similarly, excoriated the Epicureans for their failure to acknowledge that a wise and benevolent God designed, created, and now governs the universe. “Since the world and all its parts are governed by a wonderful plan,” he wrote, “since the framing of the heaven, and the course of the stars and of the heavenly bodies, which is harmonious even in variety itself, the constant and wonderful arrangement of the seasons the verdure and productiveness of the woods, the most salubrious bursting forth of fountains, the seasonable overflowings of rivers, the rich and abundant flowing in of the sea … and all things, are fixed with the greatest regularity: who is so blind as to think that they were made without a cause, in which a wonderful disposition of most provident arrangement shines forth? If, therefore, nothing at all exists nor is done without a cause; if the providence of the supreme God is manifest from the disposition of things, his excellency from their greatness, and his power from their government: therefore they are dull and mad who have said that there is no providence.”4
In this era, the subject of providence also commonly arose in discussions of the problem of evil. That evil exists in God’s world constitutes no evidence against God’s existence or his providence, ante-Nicene Christians typically argued, because all evil results from sin, and God could have prevented sin only at the cost of nullifying human freedom. God, wrote Tertullian, “did not intervene to prevent the occurrence of what he wished not to happen [viz., sin] in order that he might keep from harm what he wished [viz., human freedom].”5
Christian writers of this age also regularly invoked the doctrine of providence when disputing with Marcion and others who distinguished between the just, punishing God of the Old Testament and the good, merciful God of the New. Irenaeus, for instance, argued contra Marcion that justice and benevolence alike are indispensable to genuine deity. “Marcion,” he wrote, “does in fact, on both sides, put an end to deity. For he that is the judicial one, if he be not good, is not God, because he from whom goodness is absent is no God at all; and again, he who is good, if he has no judicial power, suffers the same [loss] as the former, by being deprived of his character of deity.”6
In the ante-Nicene period, then, Christian authors referred to the doctrine of providence mainly in the context of apologetic arguments against paganism and heresy This apologetic emphasis continued in the post-Nicene period, but the Christianization of the Roman Empire and the palpable decline of Roman civilization that quickly followed lent a radically different character to Christian discussions of providence in the later patristic period. Whereas Christian apologists of the ante-Nicene period invoked providence to establish the unity, beneficence, and justice of God, post-Nicene thinkers sought also to defend God’s providence against pagans who blamed Christianity for the Roman Empire’s demise. The theology of providence in the post-Nicene period, moreover, increasingly began to intersect with soteriology as the Pelagian and Semipelagian controversies focused attention on the dilemma of how to reconcile human freedom with divine sovereignty.
The influence of political events on this era’s theology of providence appears especially clearly in the work of Eusebius of Caesarea, who extolled Constantine as God’s chosen instrument for the conversion of humanity. In works such as his Life of Constantine and his Oration in Praise of Constantine, Eusebius articulated a triumphalist ideology, which identified Constantine’s ascent as a manifestation of divine providence and equated, in all essential respects, the interests of the church with those of the empire This ideology’s popularity declined precipitously after Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410, and a more jaded view of all earthly regimes, promoted by works such as Augustine’s City of God and Salvian’s On the Government of God, gradually supplanted Eusebianism in the fifth century.
When the Pelagian controversy broke out in the early fifth century, moreover, Augustine of Hippo began to address a number of issues relevant to the subject of providence in a manner that was, to a certain extent, unprecedented. Specifically, Augustine seems to have been the first to articulate a conception of freedom that allows one consistently to claim both (1) that human beings sin freely and thus deserve punishment for their sins and (2) that human beings, without the assistance of grace, cannot refrain from sinning.7
Augustine’s opponents, followers of the British monk Pelagius, maintained that human beings cannot be morally accountable for their wrongdoing if they are not capable of behaving righteously. Hence, the Pelagians argued, all human beings naturally possess the ability to behave righteously. Augustine, by contrast, held that human beings, before God has regenerated them, can do nothing but sin.
Freedom, as Augustine understood it, consists not in the ability to do otherwise than one actually does but in the ability to do that which one wishes.8 In his view, accordingly, an act can be voluntary and thus liable to praise or blame, reward or punishment, even if one cannot refrain from performing it For, Augustine argued, it would be the height of absurdity to claim that because human beings cannot fail to desire their own happiness, they do not desire to be happy voluntarily. Likewise, he asserted, it would be foolish to say that God is not righteous voluntarily, because he cannot be unrighteous.9
In Augustine’s view, consequently, God can justly punish unregenerate human beings for their sins even though they are incapable of abstaining from sin Inasmuch as human beings can do nothing but sin before God regenerates them, Augustine argued furthermore, they can believe in Christ unto salvation only after, logically speaking, God regenerates them and endows them with the will to believe. According to Augustine, therefore, it is God, not human beings, who ultimately determines which human beings receive salvation.
Although Augustine’s view, in the main at least, came to dominate the Latin West by the end of the post-Nicene, or patristic, period, it received scant support in the Greek East. Over against Augustine, the Eastern Fathers held with virtual unanimity that voluntary acts are solely those that one may choose either to perform or not to perform. John of Damascus, for instance, equated voluntary acts with those “which we are free to do or not to do at our will.”10 Such acts, he continued, concern “equal possibilities: e.g.… to tell lies or not to tell lies, to give.… or not to give and all such actions as imply virtue or vice in their performance, for we are free to do or not to do these at our pleasure.”11
The Eastern Fathers, moreover, considered human beings, not God, the primary determinants of who receives salvation. “Whence,” asks John Chrysostom, “are some vessels of wrath, and some of mercy? Of their own free choice. God, however, being very good, shows the same kindness to both. For it was not those in a state of salvation only to whom he showed mercy, but also Pharaoh, as far as his part went. For of the same long-suffering, both they and he had the advantage. And if he was not saved, it was quite owing to his own will: since, as for what concerns God, he had as much done for him as they who were saved.”12
At the close of the patristic period, then, two radically opposed conceptions of divine providence dominated in the East and the West, respectively. The perspective of the East on the relation of God’s providence to human freedom remained largely unchanged in the succeeding centuries. Views on divine providence vis-à-vis human freedom in the West, by contrast, fluctuated radically. It is on the West, therefore, that we shall focus in our treatment of the doctrine of providence in the medieval, early modern, Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment eras.
Throughout the medieval period, moderately Augustinian and moderately anti-Augustinian theologies of providence and grace coexisted in the Western church. Whereas the Synod of Quiersy in 853 condemned Augustinian predestinarianism in the person of Gottschalk of Orbais, for example, the Synod of Valence in 855 countered Quiersy by endorsing Augustine’s views on predestination emphatically. Again, whereas thinkers such as John Duns Scotus13 and William of Ockham14 held that human beings are always free to sin or not to sin, theologians like Thomas Bradwardine15 and Gregory of Rimini16 reaffirmed Augustine’s contention that the unregenerate are incapable of refraining from sin. This ongoing diversity notwithstanding, theologies of providence and grace that emphasize the freedom of the human will over against divine sovereignty came overwhelmingly to predominate in Western Christendom immediately before the Reformation.
Augustinianism enjoyed a great resurgence, however, in the early modern period, the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The magisterial Reformers, the later Melanchthon alone excepted, uniformly endorsed the view that God primarily determines who is or is not saved: not putatively autonomous human beings. The Jesuits, perhaps the most formidable enemies of the Reformation, by contrast, insisted that human beings always possess the freedom to do otherwise than they actually do. On the basis of this robust conception of human freedom, then, the Jesuits maintained that human beings, rather than God, are the primary determinants of who does or does not attain salvation
The most distinguished champion of the Jesuits’ libertarian conception of providence in this period is unquestionably Luis de Molina (1535 – 1600). Like the Thomists, disciples of Thomas Aquinas, and the stalwart defender of their moderately Augustinian theology of grace, Domingo Banez, Molina denied that God derives his knowledge of what will occur in the world from the world itself.17 To assert that he who gives all others whatever they have receives something from these others, Molina and the Thomists agreed, would be patent nonsense.
The Thomists inferred from the truth that God does not derive his knowledge of human decisions from observing the decisions themselves that he must derive it from his knowledge of his own will. God knows what human beings will do, the Thomists held, because he has foreordained that they will do it. Molina, however, maintained that God’s “middle knowledge,” his knowledge of what free human beings would do in any set of circumstances, enables him to know in advance and even to control human decisions without predetermining them. If, Molina reasoned, God knows what free agents will do in any set of circumstances and can determine by his acts what circumstances they will face, he can foreknow and even control what those agents do without compromising their liberty in the slightest.18
The conflict between Thomists and Molinists grew so severe that in 1598 Clement VIII appointed a special commission, titled Congregatio de Auxiliis, to consider the points in dispute. Congregatio de Auxiliis literally means “congregation on helps,” an appropriate name for the commission, given its assignment to investigate a controversy about what kind of help God gives human beings to perform salutary acts, that is, acts that lead to salvation. The Thomist position was that God’s saving grace is intrinsically efficacious: his grace is such that whoever receives it will certainly perform a salutary act.19 The Molinist position, by contrast, was that the human will is always able either to cooperate with or to resist God’s grace.20 Although the commission voted several times to condemn the Molinist position, Clement VIII’s successor, Paul V, ultimately disbanded it in 1607 and left the controversy unresolved.
These disputes exerted great influence on the course of Protestant and Catholic theology alike in the seventeenth century. Jacobus Arminius (1560 – 1609), the eponymous founder of the Arminian movement in Reformed Protestantism, for example, incorporated the notion of middle knowledge into his critique of Calvinistic belief in absolute predestination.21 The notion of middle knowledge, moreover, became a key element of the Arminian theology constructed by Arminius’s disciples Simon Episcopius22 and Hugo Grotius,23 which would guide Dutch Remonstrants and their sympathizers abroad for the next century. In response, Calvinist theologians of the seventeenth century frequently argued against Molinism.24 As a general rule, moreover, they adopted the Thomistic doctrine of physical premotion, according to which nothing in creation can act in any way without being predetermined so to act by the operation of God. Not only the theological but also the philosophical arguments of the Thomists found their way into mainstream Reformed dogmatics, and the debate between Arminians and Calvinists raged throughout the seventeenth century on parallel lines to that between Molinists and Thomists.
During the Enlightenment, which began in the seventeenth century and flowered in the eighteenth, belief in providence declined precipitously as intellectuals gravitated to deism and atheism. Some deists of the time, admittedly, granted that God governs the world’s affairs in some sense and that he metes out postmortem rewards and punishments to the righteous and the wicked, respectively. Nevertheless, all deists denied that God intervenes in nature by working miracles and that he reveals himself to human beings in a supernatural manner. Deists usually acknowledged only what came to be known as “general providence,” that is, a loose superintendence over the world by God, who allows everything to proceed in accordance with physical laws.25 Orthodox Christians of this period, naturally, objected vociferously to the notion that God exercises a merely general providence. John Wesley wrote:
You say, “You allow a general providence, but deny a particular one.” And what is a general, of whatever kind it be, that includes no particulars! Is not every general necessarily made up of its several particulars? Can you instance … any general that is not? Tell me any genus, if you can, that contains no species? What is it that constitutes a genus, but so many species? What, I pray, is a whole that contains no parts? Mere nonsense and contradiction!26
In the view of the orthodox theologians of this period, a denial of God’s providential guidance of everything leads logically to a denial of his providential guidance of anything. Again, Wesley asked the proponent of a merely general providence: “Do you mean … that the providence of God does, indeed, extend to all parts of the earth, with regard to great and singular events; such as the rise and fall of empires; but that the little concerns of this or that man are beneath the notice of the Almighty? Then you do not consider, that great and little are merely relative terms With regard to the Most High, man, and all the concerns of men, are nothing, less than nothing, before him.”27
Such considerations notwithstanding, many professedly orthodox apologists for Christianity in the eighteenth century advocated relatively deistic accounts of divine providence. Whereas earlier theologians characterized God’s preservation of the world as a continuous creation and underscored the impotence of creatures to act without God’s concursus, that is to say, the anti-deist apologists of this era tended to depict the world as a machine that requires a God to operate it but does not continually receive from him its inmost being.28
These apologists, moreover, ultimately proved much less influential than the glib rationalists who abounded in German theological faculties during the last decades of the eighteenth century. These thinkers banished divine causality entirely from the world. Miracles they either denied or attempted to explain away in a naturalistic fashion.29 Indeed, they frequently claimed that one can know, at least in the strictest sense of this term, nothing about God whatsoever.30
Matters improved somewhat, then, in the nineteenth century, the post-Enlightenment era. “After the shameful defeat of theology in the period of the ‘Illumination’ (Aufklarung),” wrote Abraham Kuyper, “we may affirm an undeniable resurrection of theology in the nineteenth century.”31 Rationalism, admittedly, continued to exert influence in the first half of the century.32 In the Hegelian school, which largely supplanted that of the older rationalists, the tendency of the older rationalism to isolate God from his creation gave way to the even more destructive tendency to confuse God’s being with that of the world.33
Elsewhere, even within Germany to an extent, more orthodox modes of depicting the relation between God and the world manifested themselves. Abraham Kuyper34 and Herman Bavinck35 of the Netherlands, for instance, at least arguably embraced the old Reformed and Thomistic doctrine of physical premotion, and leading Reformed theologians in the United States and Scotland, although they renounced the doctrine of physical premotion,36 granted that God foreordains everything that occurs.37 The revival of scholastic philosophy that swept through the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century, furthermore, led to renewed advocacy of physical premotion by Dominicans and of middle knowledge by Jesuits. Among the nineteenth-century Jesuits who disputed Aquinas’s doctrine of physical premotion, ironically, were some of the architects of that century’s revival of Thomistic philosophy.38
In the twentieth century, this dispute among Catholics continued until the Second Vatican Council of 1962 – 65, which unleashed a wave of theological liberalism in the Catholic Church and marked the end, for all practical purposes, of neoscholastic theology. Among Protestants, the central conflict of the century concerned whether it makes sense to say that God acts in history at all. From the emergence of neoorthodoxy as a major alternative in Protestant theology until its demise in the 1960s and 1970s, scholars who sympathized with the so-called biblical theology movement tended to emphasize God’s “mighty acts” in history as the locus of his self-revelation. This school disintegrated, however, in the face of criticism by James Barr,39 Langdon Gilkey,40 and others that its proponents could not justify exempting the salvation history in which they located God’s revelatory acts from the naturalistic assumptions they applied to all other spheres of human life.
Unlike neoorthodox followers of the biblical theology movement, other Protestant theologians attempted throughout the twentieth century to speak meaningfully of divine influence on the world without invoking the concepts of intervention or miracle. One can divide these thinkers into two categories: process theologians and more conventional panentheists. The second group identify God with the act of being in which the being of every individual being consists. These thinkers regard all talk of divine action as incoherent, because, in their view, only beings act, and God, who is the act of being that all beings share, cannot himself be one of these beings. The most eminent twentieth-century representative of this viewpoint is Paul Tillich.41
Process theologians, although panentheists, typically admit the possibility of meaningful language about divine action on particular entities in the world. Nevertheless, they exclude the kind of divine action requisite to generate miracles. Since every entity, in their view, possesses a measure of freedom, God cannot unilaterally cause anything to occur. He can only contribute his influence, which he does by endowing each particular entity with an aim, which consists in the greatest self-realization achievable by that entity in its present situation. To ensure that this aim rather than any other comes to realization in a given instance is not possible for God, process theists hold, for two reasons: (1) each entity possesses a freedom and causality of its own, which can resist the divine purpose, and (2) God’s loving character precludes his violating the freedom of particular things by determining what they will or will not do. God, in the view of process theists, acts only by persuasion.42
Both process theists and panentheists, moreover, reject the notion of particular divine interventions as inconsistent with their experience of the world as a closed nexus of natural causes and seek, by denying that God can intervene in nature, to exempt him from responsibility for evil in the world.43 The humanitarian bent of these theologies is much too strong to allow that God might refrain from righting grave injustices or alleviating extreme suffering if, in fact, he were capable of so doing.
Evangelical theologians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, admittedly, articulate a variety of orthodox views on divine action, and evangelical philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff exert considerable influence in the academic philosophy of religion. Nevertheless, the sounder views advocated by these thinkers did not enter the mainstream of academic theology in the twentieth century and have yet to enter it in the twenty-first.
Views Advocated in This Volume
Ambiguities within Scripture’s testimony to providence as well as massive conflicts of worldviews, then, have led theologians of all ages to advocate diametrically opposed conceptions of providence. In the present volume, Paul Kjoss Helseth, representing the Reformed tradition, argues that all events owe both their occurrence and the precise mode of that occurrence to God, who causes every creaturely act in such a way as to determine completely its nature and outcome. William Lane Craig, who argues on behalf of contemporary Molinists, maintains that God knows what creatures will do by virtue of his middle knowledge and that he controls the course of worldly affairs by means of this awareness without predetermining any of his creatures’ free decisions.
Ronald Highfield, writing out of the Restorationist tradition, calls both traditional and recent conceptions of providence before the bar of Scripture and finds them wanting. He articulates, instead, what he considers a biblical perspective on the subject, which differs in content and emphases from the others in this volume. Gregory Boyd, finally, advocates open theism, according to which human decisions, in most circumstances, can be free only if God neither determines nor even knows what they will be.
Conclusion
As we established at the outset of this introduction, none of these views possesses indisputable scriptural warrant. To arrive at a responsible position on the questions of what God controls and how he controls it, one must weigh a great deal of evidence, carefully work out the implications of alternative answers, and scrutinize the frequently intricate arguments employed for and against different models of divine providence. This is unquestionably an arduous task.
Contemporary Christians, nonetheless, must expend the labor necessary to attain a scripturally and rationally adequate account of providence. For in an increasingly chaotic and frequently tragic world, persons within and without the church demand answers as to how a good God can allow one billion people to languish on an income of a dollar or less a day; why God sends natural disasters, prolonged wars, and debilitating illnesses; and what relevance God has for their personal agony. One cannot credibly present the gospel in today’s culture, it seems, without supplying defensible answers to such questions.
1. Unless otherwise noted, all further Scripture quotations in this introduction are from the ESV.
2. God punishes the latter act, incidentally, with a plague that slays 70,000 Israelites (see 2 Sam. 24:15; 1 Chron. 21:14).
3. Minucius Felix Octavius 18 (ANF 4:182). ANF refers to The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to AD 325, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, 9 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1896 – 1926).
4. Lactantius Institutes 7. 3 (ANF 7:198).
5. Tertullian Against Marcion 2.7 (ANF 3:303).
6. Irenaeus Against All Heresies 3. 25. 3 (ANF 1:259).
7. See, e,g., Augustine Man’s Perfection in Righteousness 2. 3 (NPNF 1. 5:160). NPNF refers to A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, 28 vols. (New York: Christian Literature Co., 1890 – 1900).
8. See Augustine The City of God 5. 9 – 10 (NPNF 1. 2:90 – 93) and On the Spirit and the Letter 53 (NPNF 1.5:106).
9. Augustine On Nature and Grace 54, 57 (NPNF 1.5:139 – 40).
10. John of Damascus On the Orthodox Faith 2.26 (NPNF 2.9:40b).
11. Ibid
12. John Chrysostom Homily 16 on Romans 9:22 -24 (NPNF 1.11:469).
13. John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio II, dist. 28, q. 1, in Opera Omnia, ed. Luke Wadding et al., 26 vols. (Paris: Vivès, 1891 – 95), 13:255 – 56.
14. William of Ockham, Reportatio in II Sententiarum, q. 15, in Guillelmi de Ockham: Opera theologica 5, ed. Gedeon Gal and Rega Wood (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute of St. Bonaventure University, 1981), 356, lines 6 — 11.
15. Thomas Bradwardine, De Causa Dei contra Pelagianos, ed. Henry Saville (London: Ex officina Nortiana, 1618), §2.7, pp. 490 — 91.
16. Gregory of Rimini, In II Sententiarum, dist. 26 —28, q. 2, art. 1, in Gregorii Ariminensis OESA lectura super primum et secundum sententiarum, ed. Damasus Trapp et al., 7 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1979 — 87), 6:96 — 101.
17. Luis de Molina, Liberi arbitrii cumgratiae donis, divina praescientia, providentia, praedestinatione et reprobatione concordia, 2nd ed. (Antwerp: Officina typ. Joachimi Tragnæsii, 1595), disp. 49, in q. 14, art. 13, p. 208b. Hereafter cited as Concordia.
18. Ibid., disp. 53, memb. 3, in q. 14, art. 13, p. 263a.
19. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 23, arts. 4—5, 7.
20. See Molina, Concordia, disp. 29, in q. 14, art. 13, p. 125a.
21. See Jacobus Arminius, “Twenty-five Public Disputations,” 4.43, 45, in The Works of James Arminius, trans. James Nichols and William Nichols (London: Longman, 1825 —28 and Thomas Baker, 1875), 2:123 — 24; and the discussion of Arminius’s views in Eef Dekker, “Was Arminius a Molinist?” Sixteenth Century Journal 27 (1996): 337 — 52.
22. Simon Episcopius, Institutiones theologicarum 4 2 19, in Opera theologica (Amsterdam: John Blaeu, 1650), 303 — 4.
23. Hugo Grotius, Conciliatio dissidentium, in Opera omnia theologica (Basel: Thurnissios, 1732), 4:352 — 54
24. For bibliographical details and an account of the arguments generally employed, see Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 3:419 — 25
25. See the fourfold classification of deists in Samuel Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God, the Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation (Glasgow: Richard Griffin, 1823), 2:140 — 55.
26. John Wesley, “On Divine Providence,” sermon 67, in The Works of John Wesley, 3rd ed., 14 vols. (London: Wesleyan Methodist Book Room, 1872), 67.23, p. 322.
27. Ibid., 67.26, p. 323.
28. See, e. g., William Derham, Physico-Theology: Or, a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God from His Works of Creation (London: Robinson & Roberts, 1768).
29. See, e,g., Karl Friedrich Bahrdt, Würdigung der natürlichen Religion und des Naturalismus in Beziehung auf Staat und Menschenrechte (Halle: Francke & Bispinf, 1791), 61 — 69; Johann Eberhard, Neue Apologie des Sokrates, oder Untersuchung der Lehre von der Seligkeit der Heiden, 2 vols. (Berlin: Nikolai, 1772—78), 1:125—32.
30. See, e,g., Karl Friedrich Bahrdt, Katechismus der natürlichen Religion (Halle: Francke & Bispinf, 1790), 3 — 11.
31. Abraham Kuyper, Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology: Its Principles, trans. J. Hendrik de Vries (New York: Scribner, 1898), §3. 5. 106, p. 672.
32. In this period, indeed, appears the rationalist dogmatician par excellence, Julius Wegscheider, whose masterwork, Institutiones theologiae christianae dogmaticae, 7th ed. (Halle: Libraria Gebaueria, 1833), is arguably the greatest work of systematic theology produced by the rationalist school
33. See, e,g., Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), 1. 1.2, pp. 137—49, where he identifies the truly infinite as the all-inclusive
34. See Abraham Kuyper, Dictaten Dogmatiek, 2nd ed., 5 vols. (Kampen: Kok, 1910), 3:66 – 69.
35. See Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003 – 8), 2:614.
36. For America, see Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1872; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 1:604—5; for Scotland, see John Dick, Lectures on Theology, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1878), 1:433 — 35.
37. See Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:542; and Dick, Lectures, 1:353.
38. See, e,g., Matteo Liberatore, Institutionesphilosophicae, 8th ed., 2 vols. (Rome: Propaganda Fide, 1855), 2:348 — 49; Giovanni Cornoldi, La filosofia scolastica di San Tommaso e di Dante, 7th ed. (Rome: Tipografia A. Befani, 1889), 472 — 74, 479 — 83.
39. See, e.g., James Barr, The Bible in the Modern World (London: SCM, 1973), 75 — 88.
40. See esp. Langdon Gilkey, “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language,” Journal of Religion 41 (1961): 194—205.
41 See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951 — 63), 1:115 — 17, 239 — 45. For a sketch of the trend toward panentheism in twentieth– century theology, see Michael Brierley, “Naming a Quiet Revolution: The Panentheistic Turn in Modern Theology,” in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World, ed. Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 1 — 15.
42. For a brief discussion of divine action in process thought, see John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1976), 41 — 62.
43. See esp. Maurice Wiles, “Divine Action: Some Moral Considerations,” in The God Who Acts: Philosophical and Theological Explorations, ed. Thomas F. Tracy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 13 — 30.