Evangelicals Now
Christian news worldwide
magnifying glass Search archives
home Home check the archives Archives Subscribe Subscriptions Advertising Information & booking of classifieds Adverts Find a local evangelical Church Find a church for the search engines and extremely curious! About us Contact us Site Map
Printable
Version

God's providence

Dick Keyes discusses the difficult doctrine of providence and what it means for us

I have lectured about God's providence recently and it has stirred up some interesting discussions.

'Providence' now seems a forlorn and old-fashioned word, and I think I have seen some of the reasons why.

Of course, it is an enormous stretch for many people who are outside the Christian faith-and in a world after the holocaust-to believe in a good God who is ultimately in control over human affairs. What I had not expected was that quite a few Christians believe in providence-but only if they do not think about what it is.

Lesser God

If God is great enough to be in ultimate control over his creation, yet make creatures who can have responsible choice, then the biblical idea of providence is tenable, though that faith is put to severe test by the tragedies of life. On the other hand, if there is a lesser God, he tends to become either evil (the 'spiteful imbecile' of C.S. Lewis's time of doubt) or else benevolently impotent (the god of Rabbi Kushner), helpless before fate, far removed from control of the world but preserving human trust in his good intentions. That is, a lesser God ends up losing goodness, power or both.

Contrary to general opinion, it was not human tragedy that weighed so heavily against providence that providence buckled. People believed in a good God before the invention of anaesthesia, and after the plagues, which wiped out one-third of the European population. What providence did not survive was having its author reduced to the miniaturised stature of human speculations about God - and then confronting tragedy.

Don't bother praying?

Within the Christian faith, one needs the full teaching of providence to make sense of anything to do with the Christian life. You need it to even account for something so basic as intercessory prayer. If God is not in control, don't bother praying for help, he can't help anyway. If we have no real choice but are only programmed by God, again don't bother, your prayer would only be God talking to himself. The most tentative request in prayer assumes both that God is capable of granting it if he wants to, and also that he takes us seriously enough to be listening.

Faith-wrestling

For all of us, one of the deepest questions is-is there any author of the whole human project or are we in a random world where there is no mind higher than our own? It is hard to believe in God's providence and still see news of senseless slaughters in Littleton, Atlanta, or anywhere else. How could a powerful God be good? Faith wrestles with this question, but also has its own questions to ask. If there is no such God, how can we be so confident that these slaughters are so very bad? Perhaps we have over-reacted. Perhaps human life is much cheaper than we had thought. Could the inflated value of each human life be an idea rooted in a Christian memory, and supported only by human self-centredness and sentimentality? After all, why should human persons have so much more importance than other ultimately random arrangements of molecules?

God and the universe

Our society wants to ignore these questions as the rantings only of a few crazy pessimists at its margins. It tries to minimise the enormous difference between believing that the universe has an author and believing that it does not. For example, a best-selling book on vocation states: '. . . the Universe-God - caused us to be born and put us here for some unique reason ƒ' as if there is no difference between 'God' and 'the Universe'. The Universe (even if you capitalise it) has no intentions or reasons for anything. It is minerals, gases and a lot of space. It cares not a whit whether we live, die or how we treat each other.

The Author and the story

God, on the other hand, is the personal Creator and Author of the whole story. He knows the hairs on our heads and each sparrow that falls. He has purposes for us throughout our lives even extending beyond our physical deaths. It is within these purposes that human beings have meaning. The extraordinary message of the Bible is not only that an Author exists. It is that when the time had fully come, the Author entered the story himself to do for us what we could not have done for ourselves. This dramatic entry, with all that he accomplished when he was here, becomes the pivot point of our assurance of his power and goodness.

Dick Keyes,
L'Abri