Lesson 10 Flashcards
How is the doctrine of providence a source of joy for all creatures?
- Comfort when suffering
- God’s plan unfolding for His glory and our good
- Don’t be anxious about your life
- Patience
- Gratitude
What are the alternatives to the classical Reformed view of divine providence? Where do these views miss the mark?
- Pantheism: God in all things
- deny the existence of secondary causes altogether - Occasionalism: God as only ultimate cause
- deny the existence of secondary causes altogether - Open Theism: Future is open for God
- deny the secondariness of secondary causes, insisting that they operate
independently of God the first cause - Deism: God has no providential relationship to creation.
- deny the secondariness of secondary causes, insisting that they operate
independently of God the first cause
What are the various aspects of providence? Briefly describe each
-
Preservation: Existence
* the act by which he, by a positive expression of his will, causes a thing, as it already exists or in connection with that existence, to remain itself
* Errors with respect to divine preservation
1. **Occasionalism **(e.g., Nicolas Malebranche, JE), which “teaches that all causal efficacy is properly described to God alone” (McFarland, 138); on this view, creaturely causes are an illusion.
2. **Deism, **which teaches that God created the world but left it to exist and operate on its own.
- Concurrence/Cooperation: God working with creaturely action
* in him we live and move and have our being
* Whereas preservation is God’s provision with respect to creaturely being, concursus is God’s provision with respect to creaturely action.
* C. Errors with respect to concursus
* deism - the powers and the laws of nature certainly come from God and as such are not necessary for God but now work of themselves such that God remains excluded
* pantheism - God alone does everything in nature, that is, there are not two causes that work together; the laws of nature and the powers of nature are just abstractions from God’s modes of working
- Government/Direciton: Teleology
* Government is “that action that leads the action of second causes to the end determined for them.” “Governing, then, is identical with providence seen from its teleological side.”
* Errors with respect to government
1. Pagan fate and chance: “Pagan fate . . . works with blind certainty,” not according to God’s wise, loving purpose, in cooperation with secondary causes (Vos).
2. “Meliorism,” “the idea that creation naturally progresses to ever-better (in these sense of more harmonious) states” (McFarland, 153). The victories that God brings out of various crises often comes through his “working against the ways of the world rather than through them” (McFarland, 154).
a. There are no “best of all possible worlds”
3. Deism and pantheism: “Both deism and pantheism entail the transformation of teaching about providence into teaching about the regularity of nature; neither has need of a concept of personal divine governance” (John Webster).
How does the doctrine of providence give understanding to the problem of evil?
- God providentially brings about evil a as form of punishment for sin Rom 1:24
- In the death and resurrection of his beloved Son, God triumphs over evil, provides us with a Great High Priest who can sympathize with and assist us in our experience of evil, and inaugurates a kingdom that will transcend evil
- Ultimately, however, the problem of evil is inscrutable (Rom 11:33ff)
- We must distinguish the individual things that God wills to come about and the goal for which he wills them (Gen 50:20)
- John Frame’s analogy: Shakespeare and Macbeth’s murder of Duncan
In each case for alternative views of providence, what do these views rest upon fundamentally.
In each case, different views of providence rest upon fundamentally different views of the God-world relation, effectively denying God’s “radical transcendence” of creatures (i.e., God’s status as “nonunivocal cause” of creatures).
