PROVIDENCE: Limited and Detailed

Question 1

General vs. Special Providence

Answer 1

General providence directs all of nature and history (as referenced in Psalms); special providence is God’s special intervention on behalf of individual nations and people

Question 2

Ideal or perfect will

Answer 2

God’s will always ultimately triumphs even if that includes allowing his perfect will to be thwarted by creaturely rebellion and refusal

Question 3

Permissive will

Answer 3

in the end God wins and that whatever happens is at least allowed (permitted) by God; no creature can overcome God

Question 4

Synergism

Answer 4

any belief that salvation is a cooperative project and process in which God is the superior partner and the human person being saved is the inferior but nevertheless crucial partner

Question 5

City of God

Answer 5

Augustine’s massive treatise on God’s providence in which he argued that no human society is identical with the city of God and that God sovereignly and for his own reasons raises up and throws down human empires

Question 6

Summa Theologiae

Answer 6

Thomas Aquinas’ multivolume work explaining that God’s causation of nature and history is complex such that while God is the cause of the whole and thereby the ultimate cause of each part (e.g. particular human decisions and actions), God’s final causation of the whole works itself out in the details through secondary causes such as human wills

Question 7

Institutes of the Christian Religion

Answer 7

John Calvin’s position that God foreordains everything that happens in nature and in human history but that God is not the cause of evil itself for sin and evil lie in the intentions of persons

Question 8

Jacob Arminius

Answer 8

17th century Dutch Protestant theologian who strongly affirmed God’s providence– to the extent of insisting that absolutely nothing, whatever can happen in either nature or history, without “divine concurrance”– but at the same time argued for divine self-limitation to allow for genuine human free will and to explain how God is sovereign and yet not responsible for sin and evil

Question 9

Fatalism

Answer 9

not identical with divine determinism; denies intelligent design (planning, purpose, and involvement) within and behind history; fatalists believe that nature and history are ruled by blind forces that exclude not only contingency but also meaning and purpose (ex. Shit happens; Life’s a bitch and then you die!)

Question 10

Deism

Answer 10

views “divine providence” as the divinely established network of natural laws that govern both nature and history; for most Deists, both nature and history are full of meaning and purpose, but God is neither immanent (personally present and directly involved) nor intervening

Question 11

Process Panentheism

Answer 11

belief that evil and innocent suffering, such as the holocausts of the 20th century, are neither caused nor even allowed by God; believers in process panantheism completely reject any classical account of divine sovereignty and providence in order to rescue God from responsibility for genocide

Question 12

Meticulous providence

Answer 12

the view of divine sovereignty in relation to nature and history already described as Augustine’s, Zwingli’s, and Calvin’s belief; each added his own spin, but the essence of the model is absolute, meticulous planning, willing and controlling by God such that there is in nature no “maverick molecule” (contingency chaos) and in history no “divine risk”; whatever happens in nature and history is completely, exhaustively willed by God and not merely permitted by God

Question 13

Limited Providence

Answer 13

limited means “self-limiting” in the sense that this view believes God could control nature and history meticulously but chooses not to; instead, according to limited providence, God restrains himself for the sake of a certain, limited degree of autonomy of both nature and human agency; center of gravity for most Christians

Question 14

Open Theism

Answer 14

openness of God theology; most open theists were previously believers in limited providence; open theists explored Scripture with fresh eyes and found numerous narratives about God changing his mind in response to prayers of supplication and concluded that both traditional beliefs about divine providence are mistaken; believe that God does not know with absolute certainty all that the future holds, but he is able to predict events and responds in such a way that his ultimate and final will for the future is never thwarted