Providence Perceived

Divine Action from a Human Point of View

Mark W. Elliott

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9783110310566
• eBook ISBN: 9783110382976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This book will offer an account not so much of God's Providence an sich, but rather of divine providence as experienced by believers and unbelievers. It will not ask questions about whether and how God knows the future, or how suffering can be accounted for (as is the case in the treatments by William Lane Craig, Richard Swinburne, or J. Sanders), but will focus on prayer and decision-making as a faithful and/or desperate response to the perception of God as having some controlling influence. The following gives an idea of the ground to be covered: The patristic foundations of the Christian view of Providence; The medieval synthesis of 'objective' and 'subjective' views; Reformational and Early Modern: the shift towards piety; Modern Enlightenment: Providence and Ethics; Barth and the Sceptics; The sense of Providence in the Modern Novel and World.

Chapter One: Providence in the early Christian Church’s Theology

Ecumenical Beginnings after the Apostolic Era

Genevieve Lloyd recounts how the ancient playwrights struggled to show how even the gods were subject to necessity at times, and that as a counterpoint, human beings did have a measure of control over the way things turned out.⁵ In the Alcestis of Euripides, Apollo gave Ametus reprieve from mortality for being a good master to him, while Alcestos is able to step in and make a difference. The lesson to learn was to accept mortality and be brave where freedom could be asserted: “there is no horror in the inevitable.” (Aeschylus’ Hypsipyle would be admired by Chrysippus and Cicero.⁶) In this pre-Christian vision “true wisdom lies in the delicate art of learning to live with both necessity and chance.”⁷ The playwrights and Cicero maintained free will where the Epicureans gave all to chance and the Stoics all to fate. Cicero in De Natura Deorum (2.35.88/44.115) is able to see Providence as neither: there is a design, an intelligence, which might just deserve the epithet “personal.” For Foucault, the ancients believed that humans had resistance to offer the course of events, and this disposition could be summed up in the term parrhesia. The body needed to be taken hold of, and yet the soul in so doing was nevertheless serving the body, even in the example of the medicalization of sexuality.⁸ All in all there was some “further” reason for such ordering. Human beings seemed to require “a bigger scheme of things,” even a “macrocosmos” to work with or over-against. Epictetus (born 55 CE) seemed surprisingly like Paul to the point that some like Theodore Zahn thought there just had to be an influence at work.⁹

The New Testament thought that certain things were indeed fixed, the two advents of Christ in particular, but little else is predetermined and no plan may be discerned. There is not much mention of pronoia in the sense of divine overseeing or provision. The New Testament is very interested in the prophesied and enacted history of salvation in Christ, but that in turn does not give much insight into the course of world history of individual life stories.¹⁰ If one has to resort to Jewish contemporaries, Josephus names as one of the distinguishing features of the Pharisees their belief that “Fate” took the choices of humans into account.¹¹ Even this is still more determinist than what one learns from Avot 3:15 from Akiva: “All is foreseen, but freedom of choice is given.” For Josephus himself at times (in Ant 2,4) he could assert a Stoic-like providence against Epicureans (although when it came to particular events like the Red Sea crossing he was less sure.)¹² The book of Wisdom has a long coda where God’s working with Israel in history is a manifestation of his clear involvement in the world (see especially Wisdom xiv.3, xvii.2). It would seem that cosmological ordering is then given some sort of fulfillment in the history of Israel, as it is presented. Josephus too could look back and attribute the fall of Jerusalem and the temple’s destruction to providentia Dei et confusione hominum.¹³ One senses, however, that with the interest in creation and new creation in an “eschatologically minded” first century, that there was less space available for the present and the penultimate.

Philo held the Logos (as distinct from “Sophia”) to be responsible for Providence. David Winston comments:

But if this “dance of the Logos” involves a “perpetual flux”, how is it to be reconciled with Philo’s belief in the ultimate advent of a messianic age? The answer appears to be that the rotational equality that rules the present cosmic era will ultimately be replaced by a steady-state form of equality. The ideal natural law embodied in the Mosaic Torah will then govern all the nations of the world, so that there will no longer be any dislocations in the divine economy and hence no need for periodic redistributions.¹⁴

In other words, Philo did not see Providence as the occasional but sharp intervention which might well get more and more disruptive, but rather as a steady rotational equilibrium that will be replaced by a non-rotational, stable one. Now clearly Philo is writing more from God’s viewpoint, or trying to, and placing the emphasis on order and constancy. When Socrates wrote that providence could be demonstrated from the careful arrangement of human anatomy, he was doing something similar to Philo.¹⁵ The latter’s De Providentia is neither thorough or systematic – it is more a refutation of his nephew Tiberius J. Alexander that the very existence of evil disproved providence. It is a proper question: How can the provident yet transcendent God extend his providence to creation? For creation to exist in time its creation has to be in between divine planning and continual sustaining.¹⁶ Relying on the work of David Runia, Peter Frick comments on the Philonic “three levels” of the Logos: “On the highest, transcendent level, the Logos is the mind of God, and on the lower, immanent level, the Logos administers the cosmos with its attendant powers. Combining both of the levels on a second level is the Logos as the instrument of creation.”¹⁷

In this Philo came quite close to the Middle Platonist Atticus. It seems a little strange to say that Philo thinks of God as essentially provident when it seems clear that in Spec 1:209

seems to follow on from creation, i. e. his treatment of God as such comes after saying he is

. It is not the case that a predicate demands “essence.” But Runia and Frick’s general point is well-taken: God’s Providence is a doctrine about God and Creation, not just about God and His excellence – as was the case with Atticus.¹⁸ For Philo then, the Logos provides a gracious link between God and human soul via the rest of creation. God’s gracious providence that is greater than goodness is not something apophatic but is goodness in action. Pronoia originally meant “intention” as in 2 Macc 4:6; or “eternal plan” that freed the Israelites (Wis 17:2). For the Neoplatonists pronoia was a general rule that allowed for no exceptions. With Philo it was very much related to the law and one’s following of it.¹⁹ It is about taking part in an eschatological conflict between good and evil spirits, whose dialectic drives history’s course, or rather the destiny of the individual.²⁰ If Philo’s work was really a polemic against fatalism, rather than a treatment of the theme as a whole, then it could be argued that before Plotinus there was no work dedicated to the topic, unless one counts Book X of Plato’s Laws. There was much more done on Fate: Seneca’s work De Providentia is actually about fate (of a fairly blind sort), and offering oneself up to it.²¹ Yet, insisted Seneca, it is incumbent on a person to struggle to hold his course against his fortune.

In the earliest decades of the history of the Church there seems to have been little real attempt to address the issue of Providence; the Apologists only touch on it when claiming that God’s sustains the world through the Pax Romana, while some contemporaries were convinced the world was at an end, so that to speak of God’s providence of it would have been a futile pursuit. Justin Martyr saw biblical, interventionist providence as concerned with the souls of believing individuals only. Tertullian viewed anything lying outside of salvation history as simply demonic, with safety only found in God’s ownership. Compared with the other second-century Apologists for whom Creation and its initial goodness, was more of a concern, Athenagoras had quite a lot to say on Providence as God’s ongoing ordering activity in creation and human free will. He was possibly the first Christian to distinguish “general” from “specific” providence. Much of his writing mixes in influences from Plato and the Stoics wherever they fit with the biblical view of a ruling, upholding God. As David Rankin outlines, “From Chapter 24 on of the Legatio, after he has indicated that the spirit opposed to God was given the administration of matter and material things, he speaks of the general and universal Providence over all things exercised by God alone and of the particular Providence which is given to angels called into existence for this purpose (24.3).”²² Yet at 25,2 he is quite happy to say against the Stoics that God is quite happy to delegate oversight of sub-lunar regions to the wills of angels (perhaps a “third providence”) and men, and that the only necessity is that of consequence. God’s providence will only fully catch up with earthly history on the day of Judgement (De resurrectione 14.5).

An awareness of Providence can be seen in the religious practice of late antique Egypt: “No, no-one prayed for sun to rise, but they prayed for the Nile to rise.”²³ Reports on what seems to have been a widespread view of providence at a popular level at the end of the second century. Where there was contingency, there arose a felt need for special providence. In this respect second-century Christian thought was more like Josephus and Wisdom than like Philo. Robert Grant relates that the world of Imperial Rome, at least when interpreted by those with religious sensitivity, is quite ready to ascribe events to the action of supernatural power. It was well known that the Twelfth Legion was “miraculously’” spared when the Quadi tribe was struck by lightning.²⁴ Furthermore divine help was actively sought and expected: Dio Cassius (60.9.2–5) reports incantations, or prayer to Mithras before battle. But the divine employment of the elements was not always so predictable. As Theophilus of Antioch, reflecting on Jeremiah 10:13 and Psalm 134:7 has it: “multiplying lightnings turn into rain. It is God himself who controls the flashes from burning up earth.”²⁵ Also, Theophilus declared that humans are like seeds within the pomegranate who cannot see outside it. Foresight is not guaranteed.²⁶ These few details that Grant helpfully relates seem a world away from how Philo wrote about providence, or maybe one could say as far as a heaven’s eye-view is from an earth-bound one. Having established that the term “Sebaoth” (LXX: pantakratôr) means one who has actual, limited power, Gijbsert van den Brink notes that there took place a gradual semantic shift toward a definition of “omnipotens,” i. e. as one having actual unlimited power, but in the first few centuries of the Common Era this was not so. The actuality of this function combines with the idea of divine “total sustaining,” a notion, he argues, introduced by Posidonius into Stoic circles. Hence kratein came to mean “sustain, preserve, hold” and not just “have power.” He concludes, “Instead of describing God’s sovereign power as exemplified in creation, on occasions the term pantokrator is now more and more going to point to a continuous relationship between God and the world.”²⁷ In other words, a providential one. He adds that most of the fathers have this, from as early as Theophilus of Antioch: “But he is called Pantakrator because he himself holds (kratei) and embraces (emperiechei) all things (ta panta) […] there is no place withdrawn from his power” (Ad Autolycum I,4)²⁸.

One needs also to remember the “Gnostic” contribution to the formation of Christian thought. As one might expect, there is evidence of a ...

Table of contents

• Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgement
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Providence in the early Christian Church’s Theology
• Chapter Two: The Medieval Account of Providence
• Chapter Three: Later Medieval Developments
• Chapter Four: Reformation Providence
• Chapter Five: The Doctrine’s Fortunes in the Early Modern Era
• Chapter Six: The Enlightenment’s ongoing Challenge to the Doctrine of Providence
• Chapter Seven: Providence in twentieth-century theological discussion
• Chapter Eight: Coming up to date: works in the last five years
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index of Scripture References
• Index of Key Figures