The Purposes of God

Providence as Process-Historical Liberation

Zbaraschuk

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498271912
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The doctrine of providence is one that has fallen into theological oblivion in recent years. How can the words God and history still be said in the same sentence? This book surveys important contemporary attempts to talk about God and history, examines why they haven't been successful, and offers a contemporary doctrine of providence that is historically realistic, adequate to religious experience, and grounded in the Christian tradition. The author draws on the philosophical orientation of Alfred North Whitehead and brings it into conversation with liberation and ecological theologies.

1

Why Providence?

Introduction, History, Task, Method, Outline

The Problem of Providence: God and History?

The topic of providence is a difficult one for contemporary people. How can God be said to act in history?1 In the face of the horrors of just the twentieth century—starting with the Armenian holocaust; through two world wars; the slaughter of the European Jews; genocide and war on a massive scale in Africa; and continuing racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts and widespread ecological destruction throughout the world—how can God be said to be acting in history? What would it mean to say that there is a providential hand in the affairs of the world? That there is a “plan” for history? That God leads the world? In the face of the difficulties listed above, the very idea seems to be non-sensical.

That the idea itself is difficult is a contemporary problem. The citation of some of the horrific events of the twentieth century notwithstanding, life was not any easier in the fifth or thirteenth or sixteenth centuries.2 The interpretative framework by which the world is understood is different from those times. In earlier frameworks, although there was horror and death and disease, philosophers and theologians still found it credible to believe in the hand of God in history. They found the idea that there was a God, and that God’s activity was manifested in and through the historical process, still the best (or only) explanation of the patent facts. Such a situation no longer holds for us today. This is so for primarily two reasons. The first of these is that the idea of God as such has come under increasing difficulty. The second is that history has been increasingly seen as a meaningless struggle, with progress not only impossible, but even the idea of progress as such being questioned as a shield and mask for other, less than noble motives of personal or group domination. Certainly it is less and less thought of an evidence of the providential activity of God. Much reflection on the subject has led to concentration on either God or history, with few considering both in the same view. Let us briefly examine both the ideas of God and history to see the difficulties in continuing to speak of them in the same breath.

The idea of faith in God is, and has been increasingly, difficult to maintain in contemporary discourse. This is so for several reasons. The first of these is that there is an increasing recognition of the constructed character of the concept of God: is God a “king” because that is the case, or because humans have kings, do we understand God to be the King of kings? And, as social conditions change, the idea of God changes. Witness the change from the idea of God as power to God as love, and the concomitant preeminence of the “problem of evil” in philosophy of religion in the last 200 years.3

In addition, the rise of historical criticism as a method of knowing about the nature of the past has led to a loss of belief in the revelatory power of the Christian Scriptures,4 and a loss of belief in the revelation of God as such. Insofar as the idea of God is based on revelation, it has come under increasing scrutiny as knowledge about the methods and content of the means of revelation has increased. And, finally, modern scientific cosmology has led us more and more to think of the world as its own explanation, with no place in it for God.5 Any contemporary doctrine of providence will have to adequately address all of these questions about the doctrine of God in order to be adequate to our contemporary situation.

History, as a category revelatory of meaning, has come under much of the same scrutiny that the idea of God has had. Indeed, to some degree the very idea that history can be revelatory of meaning, that it illustrates a purpose and a plan, is dependent on the ideas about God that have come under so much criticism in the recent past. There is a loss of belief in any kind of social or cosmic teleology (the end of ‘salvation history’), and history is seen as merely “one damn thing after another,” with no patterns other than those of domination, no meaning other than the striving for existence.

Thus, with both the primary terms of the doctrine of providence coming under increasing scrutiny, and with less and less that commands assent to either of them, the doctrine appears to be in serious trouble. Let us briefly examine several seminal Christian thinkers, to see what their responses were to the problem, and see if they have any resources that can assist us in formulating a contemporary doctrine of providence.

History of the Doctrine: Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin

Many Christian thinkers in the past have dealt extensively with the doctrine of providence. They found it credible to believe in the hand of God in history, or that the two were at least integrally related, and found philosophical and theological reasons for doing so. We will examine three of the giants of the Christian past, to see what their understandings can offer us, and how they illustrate the contemporary difficulties of thinking of God and history in the same breath.

Augustine is often cited as having the “first philosophy (or theology) of history,” but this is to misunderstand him. In Augustine’s great work The City of God, he does indeed deal with the working out of God’s purposes in history, but his final treatment of the city of God and the city of the world serves to de-emphasize the importance of the earthly city except as a vehicle for the foundation, testing, and flourishing of the heavenly one.6 God is seen as bringing into existence the various earthly kingdoms like Persia and Rome, for the purpose of furthering his own will. That we do not understand how the various actions fit together is not important.7 What is important is that we become part of the reason for the existence of the city of this world—the City of God, the Church.8 God’s plan for history is that the Church, the means of salvation, come into being and that the citizens of this city participate in the eschatological end of history. Although terrible things happen in the “city of this world,” and they do indeed happen by the will of God, they are finally not what God’s plan is about—it is about the church and its eventual triumph.

The interpretive framework in which this view makes sense is one of Plotinian emanationism combined with an eschatology informed by the biblical narrative. The structure of the world is organized into a hierarchy of value/goodness/existence (all of which are more or less identical), with evil being both a privation of good and a contrast to it, which serves to highlight the difference between the two. The biblical narrative provides the reason for the existence of evil in the fall (both of Satan and of humanity), and the assurance of the eventual end in the eschatological consummation promised in the book of Revelation. Although it is not without difficulties, this interpretive framework of Neo-Platonism and eschatological consummation makes it possible to speak of providence more or less coherently.

In many senses, Augustine’s position is one that it is possible to continue to hold in the twentieth century. Such a view, that considers the history of the Church the reason for history at all will not be so concerned about the history of the world, and will be less troubled by the seeming difficulties in the realm of history. History as such is not what God’s interaction with humanity is about, and thus its seemingly random and horrible activity will not trouble the believer as much. Such a view is most closely replicated in the twentieth century by Barth’s view of the history of the covenant with its similar idea of a “history within a history,” and its insistence that the relation between God and human beings is disclosed in a special case (the church for Augustine, the history of the covenant for Barth), rather than in history in general.

Such a view, however is not an effective contemporary doctrine of providence. In the first place, the trust in the miraculous history of God as outlined in the Scriptures has been undermined by the advances of historical criticism. In the second, there is a loss of belief that an eschatological resolution will be occurring, and even if it did, that it could make up for the horrors inflicted on the way.9 And, in a similar point, the idea of the distinction between the city of God and the city of this world is difficult to maintain. Does God really split the world into two factions, and let one fall by the wayside? How is this the loving God revealed in the Bible? And where exactly is the split between the two cities? The interdependent nature of the world makes that line difficult to draw. And, finally, the idea of emanation is no longer an adequate philosophical account of the world. Thus, even with all its attractions, adopting an Augustinian viewpoint is no longer open to us. His ideas, nevertheless, continue to resonate throughout the remaining reflection on the subject, both historical and contemporary. The ideas of emanation and consummation, for example, also figure prominently in the understanding of providence in the next figure we will consider: Thomas Aquinas.

Aquinas is different from Augustine in that narrative does not figure into his understanding of providence. In Aquinas, the emanation from and return to God is the dominant philosophical ordering pattern of his Summa Theologica, and can be said to characterize his general understanding of the providence of God as well. For Aquinas, providence is the ordering of things to an end,10 what is generally referred to as a final cause. Providence is the way in which God orders things to ends, and the end of all creation is God in God’s own self.

In the Neo-Platonic understanding of exitus-reditus, which Aquinas understands as the mechanism of creation, salvation, and consummation, to speak of providence is merely to give a particular understanding to the general way in which God is understood to work in the world. Providence is another name for the process of creation, with a special application to human beings, as befits God’s action toward each set of creatures being tailor-made to its particular nature. Clearly, there is no insurmountable difficulty in speaking of providence within this viewpoint. Indeed, once one accepts the initial points of God and emanation-as-creation, then Aquinas’ understanding of providence naturally follows.

There is much to be said for a philosophical view that abstracts from the actual history of the place and time and sees God’s action in and through all other actions, in the manner of the primary cause. However, Aquinas’ vision is problematic for several reasons. The first of these is that, as mentioned above in the section on Augustine, the idea of emanation is less and less convincing as an account of the origin and ac...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Why Providence?
• Chapter 2: Bultmann and Barth
• Chapter 3: Historicism
• Chapter 4: Whitehead
• Chapter 5: Freedom and Praxis
• Chapter 6: Freedom for Beauty and the Other
• Chapter 7: The Spirit in and through the World
• Bibliography
• Subject Index