9
Providence
A Theological Reflection
Whenever we tell stories to make some sense of our life, or the life of the world, providence is almost always the ghost-writer.
—Vernon White, Purpose and Providence
“We know that all things work together for good for those who love God” (Rom. 8:28).1 These words from the New Testament sank deep into my consciousness long ago—I do not remember when, but probably during my student days. What they express (known as the doctrine of special providence) is even more fundamental to the way I have lived and understood the Christian life throughout my adult life. I do not remember actually bringing these words to mind during the experiences narrated in this book, but I took for granted throughout that I live within God’s loving care and that God is at work in the events of my life. I never doubted that whatever happened to me would be within God’s loving purpose for me.
The word providence derives from the Latin verb providere, meaning “to see beforehand, to have foresight.” (The English words provide and provision also derive from this Latin word.) Providence refers to God’s beneficent government of the world through his wisdom and foreknowledge. Traditionally, theology has distinguished between general providence and special providence. The former refers to the way God constantly upholds the existence and order of the whole of the creation. The latter refers to the way he provides for his people in particular ways, acting in the events of their lives to protect and to care for them, with their ultimate good in view.
When I taught at the University of Manchester, Professor Richard Hanson, who was then the professor of theology, was in the habit of walking around the university campus holding an open book and apparently absorbed in reading it. The fact that he came to no harm, never tripping or bumping into anything or anyone, I used to say was a shining example of the doctrine of special providence. That was in the days before smartphones. Nowadays we often see people who are seemingly entrusting their care to special providence while they walk around with eyes fixed on their phones. I have sometimes bumped into them, which may suggest that God is not too concerned about enabling them to do this with impunity.
The two forms of providence are not unrelated. Special providence is really an aspect of the way God is constantly active in his creation, upholding it in general in ways that aim for its good and acting in specific ways in and around the lives of individuals and groups for their good. From now on I shall call special providence simply “providence,” since it is God’s loving care for me in the events of my life that is my present subject.
It has always seemed to me that belief in providence is essential to the Christian vision of life. Much prayer presupposes that God can and will act to bring about what he is asked. For example, the petition in the Lord’s Prayer, “Give us today our daily bread,” makes sense only if we believe that God has some control or influence over the way we are provided with the basic necessities of life. The petition is not a pious wish but an appeal to God’s power to do specific things in the world. Normally, of course, our daily bread reaches us through identifiable human means that intervene between the wheat field and the table. But if this kind of prayer is valid, these human means do not exclude the action of God. I know that some readers will immediately find this problematic. In fact, providence seems to me one of those Christian beliefs that is essential in the living and practice of the Christian faith but which is really puzzling when one sits back and thinks about it. So it is worth taking some time to consider why it is that people today may find providence a difficult belief. I say “today” deliberately, because I think there are reasons why modern people, including modern Christians, may find providence a whole lot more problematic than people in the past did. I shall discuss four such reasons.
The first is scientific determinism. Many scientists have been so impressed by the way science has revealed the tight relationship of cause and effect in natural processes that they claim that everything that happens in the world is determined by the operation of inflexible laws of nature. Everything follows inevitably from its preceding cause. There is no such thing as chance. (Albert Einstein famously said that God does not throw dice.) Our human sense of freedom to choose and to act without compulsion is ultimately illusory. It should be said at once that science has not proved that determinism is true. It is really a belief about the world that seems plausible to those who observe that much of what happens in the natural world seems to be the predictable result of identifiable causes. But science itself, in the form of subatomic physics, seems to have shown that deep in the material nature of things there is fundamental unpredictability. Furthermore, many of us are not willing to think that human freedom is an illusion. The phenomenon of consciousness needs to be taken seriously as an emergent phenomenon of the world that is not reducible to the mechanical operation of the laws of physics. John Polkinghorne, as expert a physicist as he was a theologian, writes of “a flexibility within the open process of the universe which encourages us to think that [the providential activity of God] is a coherent possibility.”2
This is not the place to pursue these vitally important issues. What I wish to point out is that if the world is actually open to the exercise of human freedom, then it is hard to see why it should not also be open to the exercise of the freedom of God, its Creator. Some of the patterns we observe in the texture of reality are woven by the operation of the laws of nature, but there are other threads interwoven with them that would make a big difference to the whole picture, were we able to see it.
Owing to the influence of a deterministic view of the natural world, some Christians seem to think that God can act in the world only through the activity of humans. They presuppose human freedom and our ability to relate to God through our mental processes. God can influence us but not the rest of reality independently of us. (I think this view is not uncommon. I once asked a class of about fifteen students studying theology what they thought about this, and they all agreed that God acts in the world only through humans.) But we should note that scientific determinism would make it just as difficult to conceive of God influencing individual humans as it is to think of God influencing the course of events in the natural world. A closed universe is closed to God’s activity in relation to human minds just as much as it closed to any other sort of divine activity. But if we suppose that human decisions and actions are free and able to affect the course of the world to some degree (since human freedom is, of course, limited), it is entirely conceivable that God is also free to do so. Indeed, if God is really God, we can hardly conceive of him as less free than human beings.
The theological bedrock is that God gives his creation existence not just once at its beginning, but constantly. He continuously holds it in being. Without God’s action in upholding it, creation would revert at once to nothingness. This means that God also sustains every part of creation in its regular, lawlike activity. Effects follow from causes because God constantly enables them to do so. If this is the case, then it is conceivable that God is also able to make a difference to the way things turn out. He acts in, with, and alongside the lawlike operation of cause and effect. Scientific investigation is so constructed that it observes only the regularities, not the larger shaping of them into providential patterns of special divine activity. Miracles, perhaps, are not so completely out of accord with the rest of the way the world works. They are those rare (or perhaps, we may one day realize, not so rare) occasions when God, instead of enabling the regular sequence of cause and effect, interrupts it so that something different happens. Science has no possible way of demonstrating that this never happens.
I am not here concerned with miracles, but with the ordinary way in which God is always at work within the texture of reality that is otherwise formed by the operations of natural laws, by the effects of human freedom, and also, I think we should add, by mere chance. None of these, enabled by God, excludes his own freedom to act and to influence. We might be helped here by the notion of sufficient cause. A particular factor may be a necessary cause of some event, but it may not be a sufficient cause. Historians are much more familiar than scientists with this situation. Many causes contributed, for example, to the outbreak of the Second World War. Some were big social and economic causes; others were the decisions certain powerful individuals made, when they could have decided otherwise. Natural as well as human factors could have played a part. The coincidental confluence of different factors was also significant. Many different sorts of causes came together, and none is sufficient to explain the outbreak of war. A historian could never be confident that he or she had exhaustively explained what happened. The world is simply too complex for that. Specific causes may be real without being sufficient to explain what happened. The texture of history is loosely, not tightly, woven, and it is not possible, other than for a priori reasons, to deny that God also is active in the course of historical events.
We could surely apply the same consideration to the events of our personal lives. What happens in and around us, what influences us and what influence we have—the web of interactions is surely very complex. We can tell the story differently by focusing on different causes, different aspects, different lines of development, and these different versions of the story may well be complementary, not contradictory. We can never be sure we have sufficiently explained why things turned out the way they did. Therefore, we cannot, other than for a priori reasons, exclude the activity of God in, with, and alongside the many other factors. Once we begin to think within this real complexity of real events, the simple model of scientific determinism, inferred from the observation of physical processes, must come to seem far too simple. There is no good reason to suppose that all the complexity of human life is reducible to the level of laws of physics.
I have suggested that we think of God working in, with, and alongside the agency of creatures. Here I differ from a form of theological response to scientific determinism that in effect replaces it with a theological determinism. This view would propose that behind all secondary causes investigated by scientists and historians, God is the primary cause of everything. Theological determinism has had a strong influence in the Christian tradition, both Catholic and Protestant. (It is a mistake to think of it purely as Calvinism.) At first sight, its picture of God as the all-powerful ruler of the universe who determines everything that happens may look biblical. But its most obvious flaw lies in the problem of evil. If God determines everything, then it is very hard to maintain an adequate distinction between evil, which he opposes, and good, which he promotes. In the modern period it has become very common for Christian theologians and other Christians to vindicate the goodness of God by ascribing evil to human freedom (and perhaps also the freedom of supernatural agents and of the natural world). God is then said to permit evil, for the sake of the eventual achievement of the ultimate good of creation. Theological determinism cannot make this distinction between what God permits and what he actively promotes.
God is, of course, the power over everything. He is all-powerful and could determine all the events in his creation. However, it need not follow that he does so. Rather, God’s creation of the world gives it not only existence but also the ability to be itself. I am not inclined to think of this as a kind of self-abnegation by God, as some have advocated. Rather, God’s creation of a world that can develop in part through its own free agency (which I do not limit to humans) is precisely an exercise of his creative power. In order to create the sort of world he values, God can and does choose to create this kind of world. But he does not withdraw from it like the deistic clockmaker. He not only upholds it in being but also is actively engaged with it in all its aspects. Creatures have their own genuine agency, appropriate to their various natures, but because this is creaturely agency, it is limited. It is never the sufficient cause of anything. God engages with it in a no doubt incalculable range of different ways. He acts in, with, and alongside creaturely agencies. He permits evil, but he also works actively to restrain and to overcome evil. He promotes goodness and engages humans in the cosmic task of bringing the whole creation to its ultimate good. The way to this ultimate good is foreseen and planned by God, but it is not wholly determined. Yet the power of his love at work in the creation guarantees that the ultimate goal will be achieved.
This is an approach that gives providence an overriding role in human affairs without canceling the reality of creaturely agency and its effects. What is provided for us by God’s loving providence will be the best that can be provided in the circumstances, not necessarily the best that might be available in a quite different kind of world from this.
A second reason for finding providence a problematic concept today is just as modern as scientific determinism, but curiously contradictory in that it makes much of the human freedom that scientific determinism denies. This second reason is the characteristically modern sense of the controllability of the world by humans. The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, in his book The Uncontrollability of the World, argues that a major change in the human relationship to the world has come about in the modern period. There have always been two aspects to how humans relate to the world. On the one hand, it is characteristic of humans to seek and to acquire some degree of control over the world, but on the other hand, humans recognize and respond appropriately to the fact that what happens is largely outside human control. But in the modern period, partly as a result of the success of science and technology, control has become the dominant form of human approach to the world. “Everything that appears to us must be known, mastered, conquered, made useful.”3 An overriding cultural trend in this direction in science, technology, politics, economics, and other fields means that most people now relate to the world around them as something to be controlled. Rosa is clear that control is a natural and necessary aspect of the human approach to the world, but when everything becomes manageable and predictable, the world loses much of its magic and meaning. Some have called this the disenchantment of the world.
What is especially lost is what he calls “resonance,” which occurs when the uncontrollable “speaks” to us in some way, and we respond and are affected and are transformed in ways that are not predictable. We do not merely appropriate the world but allow an open-ended encounter with an unpredictable other. Resonance (which can be illustrated in experiences such as responses to art or nature) cannot occur if the human person relates to the world only by way of mastery and control. Similarly, it cannot be achieved by some calculable method.
It will be helpful for us to illustrate this in terms of personal life. Modern people characteristically want to be in control of their lives, to choose their own goals, and to set out to achieve them. An illustration of this is the popularity of dating apps, which allow someone to specify in detail the sort of person they want to meet, the sort of person they already know or think they know will be compatible and attractive. The attempt is to make romance controllable and predictable. But what is ruled out is the adventure of falling in love with an unlikely person, and all the unexpected enhancements of life that may follow. The attempt to control all aspects of life deprives life of its surprises and its unexpectedly transformative encounters. When someone knows exactly what they want from experiences such as social life or travel or even having children and enters such experiences with the intention of achieving that, these experiences are drained of life, because it is responsiveness to the uncontrollable that gives life much of its meaning. Predictability is not only dull; it is deadening.
Rosa argues that, paradoxically, modern humanity’s apparently extensive achievement of control over the world has resulted in greater unpredictability, which modern humanity, addicted to control, finds threatening. The environmental crisis is an obvious example. But in the sphere of personal life, we may think of the control people have over the course of their own lives. In the not too distant past, for example, most people had a quite limited choice of occupation and could expect to stay in that occupation for life. Modern people in Western societies, where freedom to choose is highly valued, typically have a wide range of career options available to them. This gives them, in theory at least, much more control over their lives. But it also opens up a much more unpredictable future than their ancestors had. Few people are in jobs for life. Being able to move around as one chooses in the marketplace of employment may seem to give people more control over their lives, but it goes along with huge elements of unpredictability in the workings of the modern economy.
It is noteworthy that Rosa himself takes the idea of the Jewish and Christian God (writing sociology, he is naturally not committed to the reality of God) as a kind of model of uncontrollability. God is the ultimately uncontrollable one. Rosa makes the insightful observation that prayer is not, as magic is, an attempt to manage supernatural power and engineer outcomes. God is not accessible to control, but he is accessible in relationship that involves receptivity, responsiveness, and transformation. Relationship with God is not achieved but experienced as gift bestowed on us or happening to us.4 It is starkly unlike modern humanity’s desire to gain and to exercise control over reality.
Rosa does not suggest, but it seems to me likely, that the so-called death of God, meaning the widespread loss of an awareness of God in modern culture, has a lot to do with the way modern humanity approaches the world as controllable. It is due not so much to the actual extent to which control over the world has been achieved by science and technology as to the attitude of management, mastery, and predictability that has come to dominate people’s approach to the world. Imagining we have extensive control over the world leaves little room for God. Approaching every aspect of life with the desire to control makes the very idea of God undesirable. For God is the ultimately uncontrollable one whom we can recognize as active in the world only if we are open to the significance of what simply happens to us or is simply given to us, entirely beyond our control.
A third reason for finding providence a problematic concept today is the problem of innocent suffering. This is by no means just a modern phenomenon. It is already powerfully presented in the book of Job in the Old Testament. But in the modern period it does seem to have become a dominant objection to religious belief. When people who do not believe or practice a religion are asked why, they regularly say that a good God would not permit all the suffering that exists in the world. Of course, many of these people may not have thought seriously about faith in God at all and are simply citing what is commonly said without any deep concern with the problem of suffering. It is certainly notable that the problem is more often raised as a reason for not believing by people who are relatively affluent and comfortable than by people who are undergoing severe suffering. At the time of the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004, one of the worst natural disasters of recent times, which devastated parts of Indonesia, armchair commentators in the Western media asked, “How can anyone believe in God after this?” But I recall seeing people on the spot, who had lost everything, interviewed on the news. They said that it was only their faith in God, as Muslims, that enabled them to keep going. They had a strong belief in providence that sustained them in extreme circumstances that might otherwise have defeated them. Many similar examples, including Jewish believers in the Nazi death camps, could easily be provided.
However, this cannot excuse us from taking the prevalence of evil and suffering in the world as a serious matter for belief in the loving and all-powerful God of Christian faith. The subject has, of course, been extensively examined and debated and has many aspects. We cannot discuss it here at any length. I merely offer a few considerations. First, because God is goodness itself, we must distinguish God’s relationships to good and evil in the world. God initiates and promotes good. He permits evil but restrains it, inspires opposition to it, and works for a redemptive outcome.
Second, although Christians must believe that God is at work throughout his creation, we cannot reasonably expect to understand his purpose in all the innumerable events of nature and history in their vast complexity. In many ways, providence is a secretive process we cannot hope to fathom, at least before the end of history. There is a proper degree of agnosticism involved in faith in the God who utterly transcends his creation.
Third, the way we understand events depends on the context in which we view them, and it changes as that context broadens. Thus, it is possible, in an individual life, for events that seem nothing but tragic at the time to acquire good outcomes when seen in a later perspective. I recently read about a journalist who had a very troubled childhood, shunted from one unsatisfactory foster home to another. But as a young man, he was grateful for this experience, without which he would not have had the insight into the deprived and difficult lives he wanted to write about.
Fourth, insofar as we have been given insight into the purposes of God in the world, it is found in the biblical metanarrative, the overall story the Bible tells about God and the world, stretching from creation to the new creation and focused on the story of Jesus—his life, death, resurrection, and future. It offers many perspectives on the way. God deals with evil, including the perplexity of Job and the protests of the psalmists. But at its heart is the cross, where God himself suffers in solidarity with his whole creation and its manifold plight. This proves to be the unexpected way in which God delivers creation from evil and prepares it for eternity, when he “will wipe every tear from their eyes” (Rev. 21:4). Insofar as we are able to identify God’s purposes at work in the world, the biblical metanarrative and the story of Jesus in particular are the master keys.
Finally, a Christian response to evil and suffering must include not only faith but also love and hope. We do not have an explanation for evil that allows us to justify it as God’s will and so to simply accept it. Evil is what God opposes, and so we align ourselves with God’s loving purpose to overcome it. We must love all who suffer, and we hope for the ultimate redemption of the whole creation. Only then will the total and final context in which all events are understood be available.
Finally, a fourth consideration that for some people makes it hard to believe in special providence has to do with the immensity of the universe as we now perceive it. If God created and manages this whole vast creation (even supposing there is only one universe), is it plausible that he micromanages the details of our daily lives? In fact, this is not a particularly modern question. The author of Psalm 8 already observed how insignificant human beings seem in the context of the heavens, even in the worldview of the ancient Near East. He marveled that God should interest himself in humans, but firmly believed that he did and wondered at the generous grace of such a God. Our apparent insignificance in the vast universe can be a cause not for supposing that God is unlikely to be concerned for us but for grateful amazement at the fact that he is.
Does the mere size of this planet in comparison with the unimaginable extent of the universe necessarily make it unimportant in the eyes of the Creator of all? In fact, it is a mistake to suppose that relative size in any way correlates with relative importance. Very small things can be much more important than very big things. For example, in terms of their effect in human history, short texts such as the Christian creeds and The Communist Manifesto have been far more important than the vast majority of huge tomes. It is entirely conceivable that human beings are far more important to God than many a galaxy.
Such arguments will not convince those who find it hard to imagine how God could possibly have, as it were, a mental grasp of everything that is happening all the time throughout the vast reaches of the universe and down to the smallest subatomic particles and the merest trace of a thought in a human mind. This difficulty arises from confining God to the analogy of a human mind or, perhaps, a supercomputer. God is not just much “bigger” than either of those; he is utterly “other” than them. We cannot help thinking of God as perceiving and understanding things the way we do. But this is a human analogy that the true God transcends. When we speak of God’s omniscience, we mean more than that what he knows is not limited, as our knowledge is. We mean that he transcends all the limitations of created intelligence. A human mind cannot hold very many things in its consciousness at once. Not so for God. It is not that God’s mind has a much greater capacity. For God, knowing everything about everything is not in any way difficult or problematic. In this and in so many other ways, we cannot imagine what it is like for God to be God. Rather, we know, without being able to imagine it, that we are finite creatures and that God is not. We can truly know God by the analogies with his creatures that he gives us, but only if we also recognize that he is incomprehensibly other than creatures. Simply because God is God and not human, as Jesus said, he knows the number of the hairs on every human head just as easily as, according to the psalmist, he knows the number of the stars in the universe.5
I have offered, all too briefly, a general apologia for the notion of providence, but since this book is about my experience of living within God’s providential care, I should like to return to the quotation from Paul’s Letter to the Romans with which I began this chapter: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God” (Rom. 8:28). Undoubtedly, the background to Paul’s thought here is a general conviction of God’s governance of the world and its history, such as he would have learned from the Hebrew Scriptures, but he is concerned with the implication for his readers, “those who love God.” We need not suppose, on the basis of these words, that God’s good purpose does not extend to those who do not love God. Paul would have said that God’s purpose, as seen in the events of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, was that all people should come to know God’s love and to respond in love for God. All human life is richly blessed by God, but since loving God is the fulfillment for which all people have been created, their ultimate “good” must include their coming to love God.
What Paul means by “good” is the ultimate good that those who love God will attain in the new creation, when God will achieve the ultimate good of his whole creation. This is clear from the context, in which verse 28 follows verses 18–25. In that passage Paul is concerned with the contrast between “the sufferings of the present time” and “the glory about to be revealed to us” (Rom. 8:18). At the present time, believers are afflicted with the difficulties and sufferings that are inseparable from life in this world, but they have the sure hope of “glory” when the whole creation is renewed. So when Paul says that “all things work together for good,” he does not mean that providence will ensure that “those who love God” will have trouble-free lives. He means that whatever happens to them will in the end lead to their ultimate “good.”
This is developed later in the chapter, where God’s love for us takes priority over our love for God: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” (Rom. 8:35). This catalog of troubles may well reflect Paul’s own experience. He had suffered most of them in the course of his apostolic labors and had found for himself that they did not separate him from the love of God as he had come to know it in Jesus Christ. Paul’s writing then becomes lyrical as he accumulates a long series of even more daunting forms of opposition that might be barriers to God’s love for his people, beginning with death and ending with “anything else in all creation” (8:39).
As an interpretation of providence, this passage is notable for its focus on Jesus Christ (Rom. 8:34, 35, 39). The way God works in “all things” for the ultimate “good” of those he loves and who love him is Christ-shaped. It has the contours of the cross and the resurrection. Therefore, sufferings, contradictions, and difficulties, far from being excluded, are the expected context in which God’s love will be experienced and his purpose worked out. There is a kind of solidarity between the passion of Jesus and the sufferings of those who trust in him. The love of God for the world, which Jesus embraced and implemented when he went to his death on the cross, reaches above all those who embrace that love as followers of Jesus. Absolutely nothing at all “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (8:39).
I have been privileged to know just one centenarian. Brother Herbert Kaden, a Benedictine monk, died recently at the age of 101. Several weeks previously, when he seemed hale and hearty, I asked him if from his long life he was able to distill any spiritual advice. He said he could do so in just one word: accept. He instanced, as an example, the time when, in his thirties, he was “certified” and had to spend five months in a mental hospital against his will. He had been in a state of some mental disturbance but years later was still sure that he would have been better off recovering at home. He wrote that the “first weeks in the hospital were terrible.” But with the arrival of spring, he slowly realized that “all was not wrong—that there was a purpose in my being in that hospital. It was after all, God’s will.” This made the rest of his time there more tolerable, even though he was subjected to insulin treatment and ECT (electroconvulsive therapy), treatments that are now regarded as misguided. To some people they were harmful, “but not,” he recalled, “to me, thank God, for gradually I began to improve.”6 It is important to realize that he was referring to a situation he had no power to change. When I asked, he agreed with me that his watchword, accept, should not apply to situations that one has the ability to ameliorate or even to transform.
I am reminded of Paul’s mysterious “thorn in the flesh,” which may well have been recurrent migraines. He says that “three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness’” (2 Cor. 12:8–9). Paul came to see that it was good for him to accept this “weakness,” along with other such weaknesses, because they made it evident that the “power” at work in his apostolic ministry was God’s, not an ability of his own of which he could boast (12:7–10). Whether or not he was aware of it, Paul was following the Jesus of Gethsemane.
Accepting what happens to us as God’s will is not the same as resigning ourselves to inevitable fate. It differs from fatalism because we know that, within God’s providential care, God is calling us to participate with him in his purposes for ourselves and for others. He is acting not only for us but also with us. Ideally, we will not just passively accept but actively affirm God’s will for us (as Brother Herbert did in the mental hospital), though it is not wrong to struggle with circumstances and cry out to God in bewilderment, as the psalmists often do. If we are able to identify and affirm God’s will for us, then we also know that God wants us to collaborate with him through prayer and action, in whatever ways might be appropriate. We do what we can in the direction of what, as far as we are able to tell, is God’s purpose.
With this kind of awareness of providence, we shall be able to avoid the temptation of exaggerating the power of our own agency. We are never in a position single-handedly and infallibly to achieve an outcome. Attendant circumstances always make a difference. We do not even fully control our own psychological states or perceptions or motivations. We may play a greater or a lesser role in an outcome, but we are never in control. Awareness of providence can keep us from the many dangers of overreaching. On the other hand, it should not deincentivize us, as though we were helpless to act at all. Quite the opposite, it will give us the confidence that if we are seeking God’s will, God will prosper our action. He can make more of what we do than we can make of it ourselves.
Although I did not think about it at the time, the way I applied myself to researching and getting electronic aids for low vision in the period after my first eye injection was an attempt to exert some control over what was happening to me. I was struggling to find a way through what seemed to me the encroaching darkness of a life in which I might have real difficulty reading. Of course, it also gave me something purposeful to do in a period of anxious waiting. It was not inconsistent with trusting that God was working out his loving purpose for me. I was holding on to my conviction that my vocation, as I understood it, was still my calling from God. The electronic aids encouraged me to think I would be able to continue that, even if it became more difficult.
As I stated before, God is the ultimately uncontrollable one. Trusting in his providential care does not mean that we can count on a particular outcome, only that he will in the end achieve his good purposes for us. We should not be so self-centered as to forget that God’s purposes in the world go way beyond ourselves. That was the lesson Job had to learn. Collaborating with God in those wider purposes means accepting outcomes that we would not have wished for ourselves. At times his providence may seem utterly opaque to us. But even as we cry, “Why? Why?” in bewilderment, we can still trust that his love for us has not diminished and will ensure our ultimate good.
Belief in providence may be difficult, but it is also productive of thanksgiving. It enables us in retrospect, whether that be at the end of a day or years later, to see what God has been doing in our lives and to be grateful.
1. This is the most familiar translation, found, e.g., in the NRSV. Another reading is “God makes all things work together for good” or “in all things God works for good.”
2. John Polkinghorne, Science and Providence: God’s Interaction with the World (London: SPCK, 1989), 17.
3. Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, trans. James C. Wagner (Cambridge: Polity, 2020).
4. Rosa, Uncontrollability of the World, 58–60.
5. Matt. 10:30; Luke 12:7; Ps. 147:4.
6. Brother Herbert Kaden, Some Memories of My Life (n.p.: privately printed, 2008), 57–58.