The Providence of God: Deus Habet Consilium 9780567660640, 9780567033406

Citation preview

Acknowledgements The Editors would like to acknowledge the support of the British Academy and of the Panacea Society, as well the University of Aberdeen for funding the conference out of which this volume grew. We are also grateful to the Scottish Bishops Conference for their very generous backup, especially Bishop Peter Moran and Bishop Philip Tartaglia. We thank Kent Eilers for help in editing this book. We could not have run our conference without the practical support of Aaron Denlinger, Mark McDowell, Scott Prather, Jeremy Wynne, Carolyn Kelly and James Claffey. Our secretaries Ann McHardy and Kathleen Brebner deserve a special note of gratitude for services beyond the call of duty. We are grateful to Thomas Kraft at Continuum for encouraging us to produce this volume, and the editors at Continuum.

FMurphy_FM_Finals.indd viii

4/28/2009 10:39:19 AM

Contributors Sarah Coakley is Norris-Hulse Professor of Theology in Cambridge. Her most recent publications are Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002) and Pain and Its Transformations: The Interface of Biology and Culture (Harvard University Press, 2008). David Fergusson FRSE is Professor of Divinity and Principal of New College at the University of Edinburgh. He gave the Gifford Lectures in Glasgow in 2008. His recent publications include Scottish Philosophical Theology (Imprint Academic, 2007) and Church, State and Civil Society (CUP, 2004). David Bentley Hart is Professor at Providence College, Rhode Island. His writings include The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans, 2004), The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami? (Eerdmans, 2005) and The Story of Christianity: An Illustrated History of 2000 Years (Quercus, 2007). Nicholas J. Healy is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the John Paul II Institute in Washington and a senior editor of Communio. His first book was The Eschatology of Hans Urs von Balthasar: Being as Communion (2005). Douglas Knight teaches theology in London. He is author of The Eschatological Economy: Time and the Hospitality of God (Eerdmans, 2006), and editor of The Theology of John Zizioulas (Ashgate, 2007) and of John Zizioulas’ Lectures in Christian Dogmatics (T&T Clark, 2009). Matthew Levering is Associate Professor of Theology at Ave Maria University and co-editor of Nova et Vetera. His voluminous publications include Participatory Biblical Exegesis: A Theology of Biblical Interpretation (University of Notre Dame, 2008) and Biblical Natural Law: A Theocentric and Teleological Approach (OUP, 2008). Andrew McGowan is Principal of Highland Theological College. In addition to many scholarly articles on Reformed theology, his most recent publication is The Divine Spiration of Scripture (Apollos, 2007). Alister E. McGrath is Professor of Theology, Ministry and Education at King’s College, London University. His published writings include

FMurphy_FM_Finals.indd ix

4/28/2009 10:39:19 AM

x

Contributors

The Dawkins Delusion?: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (SPCK, 2007), The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (Blackwell, 2008) and A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology (Westminster/John Knox, 2009). Charles Mathewes is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious studies at the University of Virginia. He has recently published A Theology of Public Life (CUP, 2007). Francesca Aran Murphy is Professor of Christian Philosophy in the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Her most recent books are God is Not a Story: Realism Revisited (OUP, 2007) and Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Etienne Gilson (Missouri, 2004). Cyril O’Regan is Catherine F. Huisking Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He is currently writing a septet on Gnosticism in modernity, of which several volumes have been published, including The Heterodox Hegel (SUNY, 1994) and Gnostic Return in Modernity (SUNY, 2001). He is about to publish a study of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Hans S. Reinders is Professor of Ethics in the Department of Theology, Vrije University, Amsterdam. His most recent books are Receiving the Gift of Friendship: Profound Disability, Theological Anthropology and Ethics (Eerdmans, 2008) and The Future of the Disabled in Liberal Society. An Ethical Analysis (Notre Dame, 2000). Katherine Sonderegger is Professor of Theology at Virginia Theological Seminary. In addition to lecturing widely on Karl Barth, she is the author of The Jesus Christ was Born a Jew: Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Israel (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992) and many scholarly articles. John Swinton is Professor in Practical Theology and Pastoral Care in the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. His research interests include the theology of disability and the relationship between spirituality, theology and health. In 2004 he founded the Centre for Spirituality, Health and Disability (www.abdn.ac.uk/cshad). His recent writings include Raging with Compassion: Pastoral Responses to the Problem of Evil (Eerdmans, 2006) and Theology, Disability and the New Genetics: Why Science Needs the Church (T&T Clark, 2007). Stephen H. Webb is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Wabash College. A frequent contributor to First Things, Prof. Webb is the author of widely debated books such as American Providence (Continuum, 2004) and Dylan Redeemed: From Highway 61 to Saved (Continuum, 2006).

FMurphy_FM_Finals.indd x

4/28/2009 10:39:19 AM

Contributors

xi

John Webster FRSE holds the Chair in Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen. He is an editor of the International Journal of Systematic Theology. His publications include Word and Church. Essays in Christian Dogmatics (T&T Clark, 2001), Holiness (Eerdmans, 2003), Holy Scripture (2003), Barth’s Earlier Theology (2005) and Confessing God. Essays in Christian Dogmatics II (T&T Clark, 2005). Philip G. Ziegler is Lecturer in Systematic Theology the University of Aberdeen where he currently serves as Deputy Head of the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy. His first book was Doing Theology When God is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement of Wolf Krötke (Peter Lang, 2007).

FMurphy_FM_Finals.indd xi

4/28/2009 10:39:19 AM

FMurphy_FM_Finals.indd xii

4/28/2009 10:39:19 AM

Introduction Philip G. Ziegler and Francesca Aran Murphy

This book appears at a time when an aura of neglect hovers over the theological notion of providence; and yet in fact many of the clearest voices in contemporary theology make the doctrine central to their work. The scope of this volume indicates the breadth of current interest: from Barthians to leading protagonists of natural theology, from Thomists to correlationists, from Cavalier von Balthasarians to Round Head Presbyterian ethicists, and even across secular political divisions, we encounter a profound engagement with the ancient biblical teaching that divine providence is at work in time and history. As editors of this volume, we feel something of the pride shared by Mr and Mrs Noah when then they had successfully shepherded every kind of living creature into the Ark. There is no record of the animals protesting as they were led on board ship, and likewise our authors are natural sailors. In their creative uses of an ancient Christian doctrine, the contributors to this volume are hauling in the rewards of the return of academic theology to faith in the seaworthy traditions of the Church. Our first part reminds us of various ports on the journey of the doctrine of providence through Christian history. Matthew Levering examines Thomas Aquinas’ use of the doctrine of providence in relation to the problem of evil, in his Exposition of the Book of Job. Over against the automatic dismissal by modern exegetes of the Vulgate-based interpretation of Job’s complaint as harbouring moments of hope for eternal life, Levering defends the contemporary relevance of Thomas’ use of Job. The reasonableness of belief in a benevolent providence is linked by Thomas to faith in eternal life. Taking up the theme of Thomistic interpretation of providence, David Bentley Hart argues that, whereas Thomas himself judiciously balances God’s providential ‘causation’ of events against creaturely ‘second’ causes, some early modern Thomists upset the applecart by putting so much weight on divine sovereignty that they effectively reconceived divine providence as divine monocausality. Francesca Aran Murphy claims that, in the same early modern period, a new sense of the value of the providential character of the historical books of the Old Testament, like 1 Samuel, emerged, when providence was pictured ‘dramatically’, by William Shakespeare. The new historical consciousness of the modern period created the stage for apparently secular theories of providential history. Cyril O’Regan takes us through the consequences of the ‘secularization’ of

FMurphy_Intro_Finals.indd 1

4/28/2009 10:38:59 AM

2

The Providence of God

providence in Hegel’s philosophy, showing to what extent the secularization is only apparent. Andrew McGowan shows how, at the end of the nineteenth century, Herman Bavinck recaptured important elements of the Calvinist tradition, especially the notion of a ‘common grace’, at work in human science and culture. The tradition of the theological interpretation of providence contains not only gain and loss, but rehabilitation and renewal. The deeper one’s appropriation of the tradition, it seems, the more inventive one’s approach to the present. Our second part demonstrates the liveliness of the idea of providence in contemporary theology. Douglas Knight indicates the necessity of the doctrine for a proper understanding of human temporality. In an exercise of intellectual charity striking for its rarity among contemporary historians of theology, Katherine Sonderegger leads us once again to the early modern and modern tradition, and indicates the valuable intentions of the tooeasily dismissed deistic conceptions of providence of the eighteenthcentury natural theologians. Rather than consciously intending to reduce the God of Providence to a ‘clock-maker’ who disappears from the scene once his work is set in motion, Sonderegger observes, the deists wished to affirm the plenitude and sufficiency of the original act of divine creation. Having shown how a neglected aspect of the tradition can and must be reappropriated, Sonderegger presents another striking suggestion: that physical death itself is part of God’s providential design, part and parcel of a divinely appointed economy of sacrifice, since it affirms that God is the creator. Drawing on Aquinas, Calvin and Turretin, John Webster provides us with a classical statement of the classical doctrine of providence. Our third part provides an exemplary sample of the engagement of contemporary theologians with science. Sarah Coakley reminds us that the elimination of the unfit is not the entirety of the scientific conception of evolution. Rather, ‘altruism’ and the cooperation of organisms are also requisite to biological evolution, and their operation can be seen as belonging to God’s providential design. Alister E. McGrath’s chapter adds the complementary thought that the observation of purpose in nature owes something to interpretation, and hence the significance of Darwin’s scientific discoveries will be different to the theist and to the atheist. McGrath claims that biological science itself has an ineradicable tendency to the use of the concept of teleology, and that because the data itself can be explained in no better way. Drawing on Conway Morris’ notion of ‘evolutionary convergence’, McGrath claims that, while evolutionary teleology does not entail what Christians understand by ‘divine providence’, it is compatible with it, and thus that the Christian’s interpretation of nature as purposive

FMurphy_Intro_Finals.indd 2

4/28/2009 10:38:59 AM

Introduction

3

is at least as reasonable as the atheist’s interpretation of phenomena as accruing from random chance. Nicolas J. Healey rounds off this part by reminding us that, deriving as it does from mechanical science, the modern notion of final causality is concerned with how best an organism can be instrumentalized and exploited, what it can be used for. The Christian understanding of ‘final cause’, on the other hand, is drawn from the principle that all creatures are created in and for Christ. Whereas the former makes the human consumer the providential disposer of nature – and thus evacuates natural beings of intrinsic purpose – the latter leaves to each natural phenomenon its own purpose, precisely by seeing each living creature as predestined to God from creation. Our fourth and final part links providence to ethics and to politics. This is as it should be, for, as several contributors remind us, providence (from pro-videre) is tied etymologically to ‘for-seeing’, and ontologically to prudence, both divine and human. Stephen H. Webb contends for the prudential use of the notion of providence in politics on the grounds that, without the idea of the providential ordering of political actions, humans ineluctably fall back on paranoid interpretations of political events. Against much current theopolitical rhetoric which describes the Church in terms which set it odds with the State, or which imagines both in imprudent and utopian terms, Webb stakes a claim for interpreting political events in terms of God’s providential design. Charles Mathewes claims that the discovery and application of providence in political affairs is a matter which takes Christian faith, hope and love. Two chapters in Practical Theology lead this book about providence back to where it began, with the question of suffering and theodicy. In a chapter about how faith discovers providence in suffering, John Swinton argues that the Christian experience of suffering takes place in eschatological time. If Levering’s Aquinas is to be believed, this is the experience of Job when his suffering pitched him into a brief glimpse of eternal life. Hans S. Reinders observes that, for the parents of the severely disabled persons, belief in the omnipresence and providentiality of God is a matter not of sight but of faith. In his concluding chapter, Philip G. Ziegler explores the appeal to providence in the political discourses of seventeenth-century Puritan England and Nazi Germany. The essay exposes the logic and the perils of such appeals, and argues that the role of providence in any theological account of politics must be indirect and disciplined by Christology. For all its undonatist diversity, we hope that this book is no zoo but a postfiguration of that Ark which, as Augustine said, ‘is a symbol of the City of God on pilgrimage in this world, of the Church which is saved through

FMurphy_Intro_Finals.indd 3

4/28/2009 10:38:59 AM

4

The Providence of God

the wood on which was suspended “the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” . . . nations have already filled the Church, and the clean and the unclean are contained as it were in the framework of the Church’s unity, until the appointed end is reached.’1

Note 1 Augustine, City of God, XV.26–7.

FMurphy_Intro_Finals.indd 4

4/28/2009 10:38:59 AM

Chapter 1

Aquinas on the Book of Job: Providence and Presumption Matthew Levering

I. Introduction Is the book of Job any help for the doctrine of providence? The poet and translator Stephen Mitchell, introducing his translation of the book of Job, answers emphatically in the negative: The Book of Job is the great poem of moral outrage. It gives voice to every accusation against God, and its blasphemy is cathartic. How liberating it feels not to be a good, patient little God-fearer, scuffling from one’s hole in the wall to squeak out a dutiful hymn of praise.1

Mitchell finds Job an infinitely more appealing character than ‘the Lord’, who alternates between appearing as a torturer, a bungler and a browbeater, despite the efforts of all the characters (except Satan) to love him. For Mitchell, however, God’s words at the end of the book do at least provide Job with a certain awe and peace. Despite Job’s suffering, the world has so much raw beauty; once Job has given up the quest for a meaning, he can enjoy the sheer presence of the world. Influenced by Zen Buddhism, Mitchell affirms that once the search for an intelligible order has turned up nothing, humans are no longer blinded by delusions of our own importance: Job’s comfort at the end is in his mortality. The physical body is acknowledged as dust, the personal drama as delusion. It is as if the world we perceive through our senses, that whole gorgeous and terrible pageant, were the breath-thin surface of a bubble, and everything else, inside and outside, is pure radiance.2

Although Mitchell’s interpretation of the book of Job differs profoundly from that of St Thomas Aquinas, there is nonetheless a similarity. Namely, Aquinas would agree with Mitchell that Job takes comfort in his mortality. For Mitchell, this means that Job learns to perceive the world’s beauty despite inexplicable suffering; for Aquinas, however, Job understands that mortality opens up to eternal life. The wise and just ordering that God is accomplishing becomes manifest not in this life, but in life after death.

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 7

4/28/2009 10:38:44 AM

8

The Providence of God

In his prologue to the Commentary on Job, therefore, Aquinas remarks that the hagiographical books of scripture, among which Job is the first, aim to show ‘through plausible arguments that human affairs are ruled by divine providence’.3 These arguments are particularly important, Aquinas notes, because the fact that ‘both good and bad things happen to good and bad men indifferently’ often leads to the denial of divine providence.4 According to Aquinas, this denial is avoided in the book of Job largely by means of Job’s faith in the resurrection from the dead.5 Aquinas is not here teaching an otherworldly doctrine, as if God exercised providence solely in the life to come. God’s providence governs the events of history, but the perfect wisdom of God’s providence will become clear only in the perfect justice of the life to come, when the historical work of salvation is completed and Christ is ‘all in all’ (Eph. 1.23).6 Although the doctrine of divine providence can be known through philosophical reasoning about God, suffering and death elude an adequate philosophical explanation. In his Commentary on Job, therefore, Aquinas links belief in providence with faith in a divine Redeemer who will establish justice in the life to come.7 Aquinas holds that Job, like ‘many of the gentiles’, received a revelation of the coming Redeemer.8 On this view, Job’s faith enables him to retain belief in providence in the midst of what, humanly speaking, is unjustifiable suffering. Philosophical reasoning about providence thus requires, existentially at least, the insights of theological faith.9 My purpose in this essay is not to ask whether Aquinas’s interpretation of Job merits retrieval by historical–critical exegetes. Rather, I focus on how Aquinas’s engagement with Job instructs theologians who are seeking to appreciate the doctrine of divine providence. Does reading Job with Aquinas foster an affirmation of divine providence that does not minimize the agony of Job’s suffering?10 Does Aquinas’s interpretation show that God is in charge (as Job repeatedly affirms) without conceding that God is unjust (as Job often seems to suggest)?11 Does Job help Aquinas to explore how a theocentric perspective on providence can avoid the presumption of suggesting that God’s all-encompassing love does not richly embrace all of his rational creatures?12

II. Job, Holy and Wise The book of Job begins with a testimony to Job’s character: ‘There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared God, and turned away from evil’ (Job 1.1).13 Aquinas takes this statement at face value: Job is a just man, who cleaves

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 8

4/28/2009 10:38:45 AM

Aquinas on the Book of Job

9

to God in charity.14 God permits Satan to harass Job so that Job might ‘manifest his virtue’.15 To Satan’s first attacks upon Job, one recalls, Job responds, ‘the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’ (Job 1.21). Aquinas finds here Job’s own understanding of providence: For in the statement The Lord has given he confessed that worldly prosperity comes to men not casually nor according to the fate of the stars nor as a result of human effort alone but from divine dispensation, whereas in the statement the Lord has taken away he confesses that worldly adversities among men also come about by the judgment of divine providence.16

Divine providence includes God’s governance of the events of the world. Indeed, God’s wisdom and will are the surest guarantee of good: ‘For it would not be pleasing to God that anyone suffer adversity except for the sake of some good coming from it.’17 For this reason, says Aquinas, Job blesses the name of the Lord even after his temporal goods have been taken away. The first chapter of Job thus reveals Job’s righteousness and his wisdom regarding divine providence. In the second chapter, God permits Satan to attack Job’s health. Job rebukes his wife for despairing, and Job sits seven days with the three friends who come to console him. In his commentary on this chapter, Aquinas summarizes the perspectives of the three friends: They agreed with Job that not only natural things but also human things were subject to divine providence, but they differed from him because they thought that a man is rewarded by God with earthly prosperity for the good things which he does and that he is punished by God with temporal adversity for the evil things which he does.18

Against this view, Job (and Aquinas) hold that divine providence does not make necessary that good persons be able to avoid temporal evils. On the contrary, after the fall, God permits good persons to experience temporal evils for the sake of a higher good that God knows. Through faith, humans can perceive something of this eschatological higher good, whose scope becomes fully manifest only in the beatific vision. Aquinas is clear that Job believes in God’s providence over human events. As Job says to his wife, ‘Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?’ (Job 2.10). But does Job also believe in an afterlife in which good deeds are rewarded and evil deeds punished, thereby confirming God’s wise governance of creation, which God brings to the good end for which God created all things?19 As Aquinas recognizes, the

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 9

4/28/2009 10:38:45 AM

The Providence of God

10

evidence from Job’s speeches is somewhat ambiguous, but Aquinas takes guidance from Job’s remark, For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then from my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. (Job 19.25–7)20

Although this translation of Job 19.25–7 is widely contested today, the passage demonstrates for Aquinas that Job hopes, with firm faith, in the eschatological fulfilment of God’s providence over the events of history. According to Aquinas, Job’s faith in a Redeemer and in the resurrection of the body – and thus in the full accomplishment after death of the just ordering that is lacking in this life – enables Job to appreciate divine providence (and divine goodness) in a manner unavailable to his friends, who do not possess Job’s theological resources. Job can affirm that even though God’s wise ordering ‘is hid from the eyes of all living’ (Job 28.21), nonetheless ‘God understands the way to it, and he knows its place. For he looks to the ends of the earth, and sees everything under the heavens’ (Job 28.23–4).21 In Aquinas’s view, Job’s praise of God’s wisdom, and his praise of ‘the fear of the Lord’ (Job 28.28), indicates that despite the intensity of his suffering, Job knows and desires spiritual goods, and anticipates in faith their eschatological fulfilment. Aquinas reads other less clear passages in the light of such passages. For example, commenting on Job’s wish that he had died at birth, so that ‘I should have been at rest’ (Job 3.13), Aquinas points out that ‘to rest is predicated only of someone who exists’ and so ‘Job means by these words that man, by reason of his soul, remains in existence after death.’22 Aquinas makes the same point about Job’s later wish that God would look away from him (Job 14.6). According to Aquinas, ‘By God’s withdrawal . . . Job understands the termination of the present life.’23 Since Job envisions living after God has looked away from him, Aquinas suggests that Job here intends to signal the existence of the afterlife.24 On this basis Aquinas reads the striking verses of Job 14, where Job laments the prospect of death. Job points out that whereas a tree can be cut down and yet sprout again, ‘man dies, and is laid low; man breathes his last, and where is he?’ (Job 14.10). It would seem that Job here clearly implies that there is no afterlife. Indeed, as Job continues to speak, this sense is amplified. For Job, just as ‘the waters wear away the stones; the torrents wash away the soil of the earth; so thou destroyest the hope of man. Thou prevailest for ever against him, and he passes; thou changest his countenance, and sendest him away’ (Job 14.19–20).25 The dead man

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 10

4/28/2009 10:38:45 AM

Aquinas on the Book of Job

11

cannot know when his sons attain honour or when they die (Job 14.21); the world is lost forever to the dead. Yet, on the other hand, in the same passage Job comments that just as a lake dries up, ‘so man lies down and rises not again; till the heavens are no more he will not awake, or be roused out of his sleep’ (Job 14.12). Might this suggest that man will awake when ‘the heavens are no more’? More importantly, consider Job’s moving plea to be remembered and forgiven by God after death, so that at some future time God would ‘call’ Job, who would then be able to ‘answer’ rather than being annihilated for eternity: Oh that thou wouldst hide me in Sheol, that thou wouldest conceal me until thy wrath be past, that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me! If a man die, shall he live again? All the days of my service I would wait, till my release should come. Thou wouldst call, and I would answer thee; thou wouldest long for the work of thy hands. For then thou wouldest number my steps, thou wouldest not keep watch over my sin; my transgression would be sealed up in a bag, and thou wouldest cover over my iniquity. (Job 14.13–17)

Aquinas grants that, as Job says, ‘man . . . seems to be consumed by death in such a way that nothing remains of him’.26 In Aquinas’s view, however, Job’s plea for ‘release’ from eternal annihilation suggests that the earlier part of Job 14 expresses only the experience of the senses and thus the opinion of people who do not understand spiritual realities. For Aquinas, then, Job 14 treats death with the utmost seriousness while also proclaiming the reality of resurrection. As Aquinas states, God seems to have forgotten man when He takes away from him the benefit of life; He remembers him, then, when He leads him back to life. To appoint a time in which God may remember a man who has died, then, is nothing else than to appoint a time for resurrection.27

Aquinas notes that Job’s theology, according to which God might call Job out of death (14.15), corresponds to the reality that resurrection has no natural warrant. The God of resurrection is the providential God, the God who knows and loves Job so well as to number Job’s steps and who mercifully redeems Job from sin (14.16). By contrast, if one were to view the world solely in terms of what can be known from sense experience, then, as Aquinas (and Job) say, ‘no remains of man appear to the senses; hence, among those who believe that nothing exists except the sensible and corporeal, man seems totally reduced to nothingness’.28 It seems possible, in short, to find in Job 14 two perspectives on the afterlife – where the more positive one does not negate the reality that human death is dreadful.

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 11

4/28/2009 10:38:46 AM

The Providence of God

12

In interpreting the remarks of Job that seem presumptuous or despairing, therefore, Aquinas follows three principles. First, he reads such remarks in the light of other remarks that affirm Job’s appreciation of God’s providence and Job’s hope for resurrection. Second, he argues that the seemingly presumptuous or despairing remarks have a place in Job’s argument, by reducing to absurdity the arguments of his interlocutors who suppose that temporal adversity and prosperity correspond to providential justice. Commenting on Job 7.21, ‘For now I shall lie in the earth; thou [God] wilt seek me, but I shall not be’, Aquinas states that ‘Job is proceeding in the manner of a debater’ who recognizes that ‘if there were no future life, but only a present life, there would be no reason why God would put off sparing those whom He intends to spare, or justifying and rewarding them.’29 Third, Aquinas holds that Job, in speaking from the midst of his suffering, often speaks ‘in the character of his sensual side, expressing his feeling, which has room only for the present corporeal goods and evils’.30 In times of severe bodily suffering, human beings give vent to our suffering by words that do not contain the fullness of our understanding of ourselves or of God. Commenting on Job 7.11, ‘Therefore I [ Job] will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul’, Aquinas observes that Job refuses to suppress his emotion in a Stoic fashion, even though his expressions of bitter suffering do not convey his full perspective.31 Aquinas refers to this as Job’s ‘playing the role of an embittered man’.32 However, Aquinas acknowledges how close Job comes to despair’s edge. Indeed, Job asks for death so as not to succumb to despair: O that I might have my request, and that God would grant my desire; that it would please God to crush me, that he would let loose his hand and cut me off! This would be my consolation; I would even exult in pain unsparing; for I have not denied the words of the Holy One. What is my strength, that I should wait? And what is my end, that I should be patient? Is my strength the strength of stones, or is my flesh bronze? In truth I have no help in me, and any resource is driven from me. (Job 6.8–13)

Job is aware that bodily suffering, and the spiritual sorrow it causes, can lead a person to deny what otherwise he or she knows to be true about God. Aquinas comments on this passage that ‘there was in him [Job] the greatest worry and fear that he would not guard himself against sadness, that he would in fact be led by sadness into some vice. To avoid this vice he was hoping for death.’33 This ‘worry and fear’ on the part of Job is not an indication that his reason has been overcome. If he were not worrying, he would not be being rational. Despite occasional appearances to the

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 12

4/28/2009 10:38:46 AM

Aquinas on the Book of Job

13

contrary, sorrow has not overcome Job’s rational convictions about God, even including Job’s expression of trust in God’s providence: ‘the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’ ( Job 1.21).

III. A Teacher Who Scandalizes His Auditors Job expresses powerful emotions, and Aquinas seeks to register them without setting them to the side. Yet, Aquinas also understands that the book of Job is hardly a raw explosion of emotion: it is a carefully constructed argument about the sufferings of the good and the prosperity of the wicked, in which one of the goals is to show that the views of the three friends are absurd. In interpreting Job, the difficulty consists in balancing Job’s expressions of emotion with the rational argumentation in which Job and his friends spar over the question of whether the distribution of temporal prosperity and adversity manifests God’s providential justice, a position that the book of Job wishes to demolish. In Aquinas’s view, however, Job should not have allowed the discussion with his friends to proceed as it did. Job’s insistence on his own justice over against God’s justice causes misunderstanding, and justifiable outrage, in Job’s friends, who do not know that Job’s seemingly presumptuous and despairing words intend to demonstrate that providential justice cannot be affirmed in the absence of the theological doctrine of resurrection. Although Job’s friends are wrong to suppose that God’s providential justice appears in temporal prosperity and adversity, they are right to cling to their insistence upon God’s justice. This insistence gives them reason to be angry with Job. In Job’s vehement denial that God could be justly punishing him for sin, he more than once seems to impugn God’s justice. As Aquinas comments, Job ‘intended to show that he had not been punished in revenge for sins, as they imputed to him, but for a test, as he had said above at 23.10: ‘He will prove me like gold which passes through fire.’ But yet, this very thing seemed reprehensible, that he commended his justice in such a way that it seemed to pass over into disparagement of divine justice.’34 As examples of such apparently presumptuous claims on the part of Job, Aquinas cites Job 27.2, ‘As God lives, who has taken away my right’, and Job 19.6, ‘know then that God has put me in the wrong’.35 Aquinas’s interpretation of both passages assumes his earlier reading of Job 9, where Job assures Bildad that he too knows that a human being cannot contend against God. As Job says, ‘If one wished to contend with him, one could not answer him once in a thousand times. He is wise in

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 13

4/28/2009 10:38:46 AM

The Providence of God

14

heart, and might in strength’ (Job 9.3–4). Aquinas accepts Job’s assurance ‘that it is not his intention to contend with God’.36 Instead, Job’s controversial statements aim at confuting the view of his friends that adversities are providential punishments for sins. In Job 19 and 27, as in Job 9, Job particularly has in view the arguments of Bildad the Shuhite, but all three friends join in Bildad’s position. When read in context, Job 19.6 is a direct reply to his friends’ position: How long will you [Job’s friends] torment me, and break me in pieces with words? These ten times you have cast reproach upon me; are you not ashamed to wrong me? And even if it be true that I have erred, my error remains with myself. If indeed you magnify yourselves against me, and make my humiliation an argument against me, know then that God has put me in the wrong, and closed his net about me. (Job 19.2–6)

In this context Job’s response emphasizes that his humiliation, when used as ‘an argument against me’, would impute injustice to God. As Aquinas paraphrases Job’s meaning, ‘If adversities come about only in return for sins, God’s judgment, according to which He has afflicted me gravely, though I was not sinning gravely, is inequitable.’37 Likewise Job’s statement that God ‘has taken away my right’ (Job 27.2) comes in the context of Job’s rejection of his friends’ position: as Job goes on to say, ‘Far be it from me to say that you [his friends; the “you” is plural] are right; till I die I will not put away my integrity from me’ (Job 27.5). Aquinas reads Job 27.2 as applying to God only ‘if your [his friends’] opinion were supposed according to which you claim that it pertains to the justice of divine judgment that it bring the present adversities only upon sinners.’38 While Aquinas’s reading of 19.6 and 27.2 is possible, he recognizes that such an interpretation is hardly the most plausible one. Thus Job is at fault for a reductio ad absurdum that could so easily mislead his friends, let alone medieval and modern readers who assume that Job means what he says. Aquinas blames Job for being ‘so immoderate in his manner of speaking that scandal was produced from it in the hearts of the others when they thought that he was not showing due reverence to God’.39 On Aquinas’s interpretation, Job’s overzealous and oversubtle argumentation explains God’s criticism of Job’s discourse – criticism directed at the mode rather than the content, since God affirms that Job (in contrast to Job’s three friends) has ‘spoken of me what is right’ (Job 42.7). Aquinas observes that at the outset of his reply to Job (Job 38), God ‘begins first by charging Job with seeming to have spoken presumptuously when he challenged God to a debate’.40 Job, Aquinas recalls, asks God to

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 14

4/28/2009 10:38:46 AM

Aquinas on the Book of Job

15

explain himself in Job 13.22: ‘Then call, and I will answer; or let me speak, and do thou reply to me.’ God chooses to ‘call’ and require Job to answer: ‘Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me’ (Job 38.3). That the issue is Job’s presumption becomes clear when God goes on to ask Job, ‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements – surely you know!’ (Job 38.4–5). Job, therefore, truly learns something from his debate with his friends. Due to the tendency of suffering to absorb us in ourselves, legitimate plaint in the midst of suffering can easily become an exercise of pride rather than an effort to instruct our auditors. In arguing with his friends about the relationship of his suffering to God’s providence, Job falls victim to such pride, Aquinas observes, ‘because he was claiming that he was just so strenuously that this claim seemed to some to approach derogation of divine judgment’.41 Job’s argumentative fury against his friends’ foolish reduction of providence to rewards and punishments in this life blinds Job, in other words, to the need to set forth more clearly his own view that divine providence is an eschatological and mysterious reality. Having listened to God’s rebuke, Job replies, ‘I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes’ (Job 42.5–6).42 Aquinas interprets this repentance of Job as indicating that Job now ‘recognizes that he had been driven inwardly by some proud thought, which he recognizes did not escape God’s notice’.43 Had he adequately avoided self-absorption, he would have been able, even in the midst of his suffering, to give more place to God’s justice in disputing with his friends. As Aquinas remarks, ‘Now the more someone considers God’s justice the more fully he recognizes his own guilt.’44 As opposed to his earlier ‘pride of thought’,45 Aquinas’s Job learns the pitfalls of discussing God’s providence within the limitations of strictly philosophical debate. God is radically in charge, but in speaking of this truth from within the context of horrific human suffering, we need more than philosophical resources if our discourse is to avoid scandalizing our auditors.46 Aquinas’s commentary underscores that Job’s hope for eternal life, resurrection of the body, and salvation from sin give the doctrine of providence the theological resources necessary for affirming providence without turning away from the horror of human suffering. Job says at the end of his ordeal, ‘I know that thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of thine can be thwarted’ (Job 42.2). He is able to speak this truth with full divine approbation only when at the same time he ‘sees’ God

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 15

4/28/2009 10:38:47 AM

The Providence of God

16

(Job 42.5) and therefore admits, ‘I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know’ (Job 42.3).

IV. Job’s Friends Let us briefly examine how Aquinas interprets the arguments of Job’s three friends and Elihu. Aquinas takes at face value Eliphaz’s claim, ‘Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off? As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same’ (Job 4.7–8). For Eliphaz, Aquinas finds, ‘adversities in this world do not come to anyone except in return for sin’.47 Eliphaz is right that many people become ‘fools’ by trusting in their own wealth,48 which leads to their destruction in various ways: fools fail to discipline their children, stir up hatred against themselves, ‘oppress the poor’ and ‘lose the vigor of the spirit through the delights of life’.49 But Eliphaz is wrong about Job. In response to Eliphaz, Job vigorously proclaims his innocence and begs God to stop tormenting him. Aquinas interprets Job’s strong language as an absolute repudiation of the notion that ‘adversities in this world happened in return for the sins of men and that sinners scourged by God would be led back to a state of prosperity if they should be converted’.50 Given the actual reality of human suffering, Eliphaz’s view would make it impossible to defend the goodness of God. Bildad the Shuhite repeats Eliphaz’s arguments. According to Aquinas, Bildad does so because Job has scandalized him: Bildad does not know that Job’s arguments against Eliphaz assume the existence of the afterlife. Bildad hears Job’s strong language as a condemnation of God. Aquinas comments, Bildad, however, who did not know another life, took these words as if Job intended to say that God does not punish sins or reward good deeds, which seems to be contrary to divine justice; therefore Bildad, speaking up, poses the question Does God overturn judgment and does the Almighty subvert what is just? [Job 8.3]51

Bildad assures Job that ‘if you are pure and upright, surely then he [God] will rouse himself for you and reward you with a rightful habitation’ (Job 8.6). God will make Job’s current adversity into prosperity. As Aquinas points out, Bildad’s premise, like Eliphaz’s, is that providential reward and punishment take place in this life: righteousness corresponds with prosperity in this world.

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 16

4/28/2009 10:38:47 AM

Aquinas on the Book of Job

17

In response to Job’s repeated claim of innocence, Zophar tells Job, ‘But oh, that God would speak, and open his lips to you, and that he would tell you the secrets of wisdom!’ (Job 11.5–6). Aquinas’s interpretation of Zophar’s words grants that sin cannot be fully known without full knowledge of God’s law. He points out, Therefore, since man cannot attain to an inspection of divine law itself, insofar as it is in the secret of God’s wisdom, and as a consequence he cannot know its multiplicity, it sometimes happens that he does not think that he is acting against God’s law when in fact he is.52

The question, however, is whether God sees sin in Job that, despite its escaping human notice, merits such dreadful punishment. Clearly the answer is no. Even though Aquinas thinks that Zophar is eventually somewhat persuaded by Job’s argument that God’s providential justice will only be manifested in the life to come, Zophar cannot get away from Eliphaz’s and Bildad’s error, since Zophar continues to mix ‘future punishments with present punishments’ in his final response to Job.53 All three friends, therefore, have fallen into the same error about God’s providence, and they thereby radically undercut God’s goodness. Aquinas thinks that Job is right to contend against this error with all his strength. With respect to Elihu, Aquinas suggests that God, responding to Job ‘out of the whirlwind’ (Job 38.1), has Elihu in mind when he asks, ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?’ (Job 38.2).54 Why does Aquinas think that God repudiates Elihu’s speech? In Aquinas’s view, Elihu’s main reproach against Job is that Job dares to contend with God about justice (Job 33.13). With Job 19.6 and 27.2 perhaps in mind, Elihu complains, ‘Job has said, “I am innocent, and God has taken away my right; in spite of my right I am counted a liar; my wound is incurable, though I am without transgression”’ (Job 34.5–6). As Elihu sees it, Job bluntly accuses God of injustice. Aquinas, as we have already discussed, interprets Job’s words much differently than Elihu does. Indeed, Aquinas holds that ‘since Elihu, abusing Job’s words, was striving to impose upon him what he himself did not feel and had not understood in his own words, it is manifest that the whole debate which follows was not against Job.’55 Like Job’s three friends, Elihu accuses Job of presumption and asserts that God metes out justice through the distribution of temporal prosperity and adversity. As Elihu remarks, ‘He [God] does not keep the wicked alive, but gives the afflicted their right’ (Job 36.6) and ‘If they hearken and serve him, they complete their days in prosperity, and their years in pleasantness. But if they do not hearken, they perish by the sword, and die without knowledge’ (Job 36.11–12). Aquinas

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 17

4/28/2009 10:38:47 AM

The Providence of God

18

does not find much to be new in Elihu’s speech, although he does attribute to Elihu the view that reward and punishment also occur in the afterlife. In short, Elihu’s great mistake consists, again, in imagining ‘that all the adversities of the present life come about in return for sins, and if one should repent of them he would return to prosperity’.56 Despite Elihu’s dismay with the arguments of Job’s three friends (Job 32.3), Elihu repeats their logic. It is no wonder that God gives such little attention to Elihu. Aquinas excuses Elihu’s mistake on the grounds of Elihu’s youth: ‘one should consider that Elihu had sinned out of inexperience whereas Job had sinned out of levity, and so neither of them sinned gravely. Hence, the Lord is not said to have been angry with them.’57

V. The Hero of the Book of Job: God For Aquinas, the hero of the book of Job is God, who answers Job in chapters 38–41. God’s discourse shows ‘that man is not able to attain either divine wisdom or divine power’,58 but the key to God’s discourse is his development of natural teleology. The earth, the ocean, the stars, sun, rain, and so forth all have a natural course assigned to them, which human beings did not assign; likewise the sense cognition, nutritive force, gestation, strength and natural inclinations of animals exhibit intelligent patterns that animals did not think up for themselves. How does such intelligent inclination come to exist in non-intelligent things? As Aquinas puts it, ‘any natural thing at all, by its desire, in the very fact that it seeks some good, intends, as it were, to acquire something from God, Who is the author of good things.’59 All creatures, in other words, bear witness to God’s wisdom, goodness and power. God summarizes his meaning: ‘Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his?’ (Job 40.9). God’s arm signifies his power, and God’s voice his wisdom.60 God continues: Deck yourself with majesty and dignity; clothe yourself with glory and splendor. Pour forth the overflowings of your anger, and look on every one that is proud, and abase him. Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked where they stand. Hide them all in the dust together; bind their faces in the world below. Then will I also acknowledge to you that your own right hand can give you victory. (Job 40.10–14)

Humans have no glory of their own, whereas God is glory; as Aquinas says, ‘man cannot arrive at this glory except by participating in divine

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 18

4/28/2009 10:38:48 AM

Aquinas on the Book of Job

19

knowledge’.61 Nor can humans accomplish justice so that the proud humble themselves before God, whereas God can accomplish this. For humans, victory over sin comes only through God. In short, reality is profoundly theocentric. How then does Aquinas interpret God’s words about Behemoth and Leviathan? He suggests that although Behemoth is clearly the elephant and Leviathan the whale, nonetheless God uses this description to indicate metaphorically the place held by Satan. Lest one imagine Satan to be comparable in power to God, God identifies him as a mere creature: ‘Behold, Behemoth, which I made as I made you’ (Job 40.15) and ‘He is the first of the works of God’ (40.19). God, and God alone, can conquer Behemoth: ‘Can one take him with hooks, or pierce his nose with a snare?’ (40.24). After describing various modes of hunting elephants, Aquinas remarks that ‘by this passage is designated mystically the fact that Christ overcame the devil’.62 Likewise, human power cannot conquer Leviathan, even though humans try various modes of doing so. Yet, God governs Satan easily. Commenting on Job 41.11, ‘Who then is he that can stand before me?’,63 Aquinas applies this verse to God’s providence, and affirms that God does not allow Satan to have his way with humans: ‘My [God’s] will aims not at the destruction but at the salvation of men.’64 Similarly, interpreting the next verse, ‘Who has given to me, that I should repay him? Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine’, Aquinas emphasizes the unfathomable graciousness of God’s gifting. God gives not because he is in need of anything in return, but out of sheer love. Aquinas paraphrases God’s meaning: ‘Hence, I [God] do not have a spirit of cruelty against the things which I have made. . . . [N]o one opposes his own things.’65 Whatever God’s providence is, in short, it manifests God’s love and is entirely free from the taint of cruelty. But is God cruel in permitting the ravages of Satan, as God has done in Job’s case? What kind of God would permit such things? Aquinas answers that whatever God’s reasons are, they are grounded in God’s love rather than fear of or deference to Satan. This is in contrast to the attraction that humans feel for the pleasure and power promised by Satan. Commenting on God’s description of Leviathan’s imposing strength, Aquinas notes that ‘by all these verses is designated the fact that the devil, by his concealed or manifest suggestion, kindles in man the fire of perverse desire’.66 This strength, Aquinas continues, is absolutely nothing before God. While no creature can overcome Satan by its own power, God does so easily. Thus the concluding verse of God’s discourse, ‘he [Leviathan] is king over all the sons of pride’ (Job 41.34), indicates particularly the danger of Job’s

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 19

4/28/2009 10:38:48 AM

The Providence of God

20

‘pride of thought’. The doctrine of divine providence can only be retained by keeping ever before our minds God’s wisdom, goodness and power, manifested particularly in the love by which God saves us and wills to give us eternal life. Were Job to allow his sufferings or even his own intellectual arguments to absorb his attention, then Job would join in the futility of the seeming power of Leviathan. Aquinas concludes that God terminates his narrative on the subject of proud men in order to show that Job had especially to fear that the devil, who had tried to tempt him, might try especially to lead him into pride so that in this way Job might be transferred into his kingdom.67

The answer that God gives Job, then, consists in the power of humility. Beyond distinguishing himself from the cruel power of Leviathan and reminding Job that Leviathan is a mere creature, God in his response to Job emphasizes that Job must take a lesson from the witness that creatures bear to God’s wisdom, goodness and power. It is in God that Job must trust for the ‘victory’ that will be ‘glory’. Why should Job trust this God? Not because of any complete knowledge of God’s providential plan, but because God has shown himself to be a gifting God: ‘Who has given to me, that I should repay him?’ (Job 41.11). After we have recognized the evidence for God’s providential guidance of his creatures, we must entrust ourselves to his providence as the source and goal of all that is: ‘I know that thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of thine can be thwarted’ (Job 42.2). ‘With God all things are possible’ (Mt. 19.26).68

VI. Concluding Reflections Is Aquinas’s reading of Job plausible? Does Job in fact believe in a future life, in resurrection? Does he get so carried away with his argument against his friends’ views (which undermine God’s goodness) that he forgets to underscore his own position that God will fulfil all justice in the life to come? Without making his intention explicit, does Job often intend his words to be understood as the consequences (divine injustice) that would follow if his friends’ view were correct? When Job gives vent to his agony, does he do so without allowing his emotions to overcome his reasoning? Does Job sometimes speak in order to express solely his emotions, without intending such expression to reflect his intellectual position? Clearly, although Aquinas succeeds in tying together various aspects of the book of Job, his position requires the reader to make a number of

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 20

4/28/2009 10:38:48 AM

Aquinas on the Book of Job

21

improbable assumptions. Furthermore, as we noted above, a key text for Aquinas’s reading of Job is Job 19.25–7, and this text is beset by difficulties. The Jewish Study Bible’s translation of Job 19.25–7 is typical of recent translations: But I know that my Vindicator lives; in the end He will testify on earth – this, after my skin will have been peeled off. But I would behold God while still in my flesh, I myself, not another, would behold Him; would see with my own eyes: my heart pines within me.

Annotating verse 19.25, Mayer Gruber comments that the Hebrew for ‘Vindicator’, go’el, means here not God but ‘a future kinsman who will vindicate him, who will take revenge on God for what God has done to Job’.69 Although such alternative translations and interpretations have their own problems, Aquinas’s translation (and the RSV’s) is probably misleading. Rather than arguing about the translation, the best path for appropriating Aquinas’s insight into the link between the book of Job, the doctrine of providence and the doctrine of resurrection is found in Jon Levenson’s Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life. Levenson first discusses the debate among the classical Rabbis regarding Job’s position on resurrection. On the basis of Job 7.7–9, the fourthcentury Babylonian sage Rava and the great eleventh-century commentator Rashi held that Job denied the resurrection of the dead. By contrast, Rashi’s contemporary Rabbi Joseph Kara, and Rashi’s own grandson, Rabbi Jacob ben Meir, rejected Rashi’s interpretation. Levenson then observes: Any student of the Bible who is mindful of historical change will be tempted to dismiss this debate from late antiquity and the Middle Ages as founded on an anachronism, specifically, the assumption that the cardinal Jewish doctrine of an eschatological resurrection already existed in the time of Job. The historical point is obviously valid, but the dismissal of the theological debate is much too hasty. For we can both grant that the rabbinic doctrine did not exist at the time of the book of Job and still find in the debate an insight into one of the key points at issue between the sufferer and his friends. In fact, the deeper truth in the disagreement among the rabbinic commentators involves a theological point that is very much at issue in the biblical book itself and thus hardly an imposition of the Talmudic sages upon it. The question is, can Job legitimately rely on God’s much-acclaimed faithfulness to rescue from Sheol – not at the end of days, to be sure, but in his own time of lethal torment?70

Pointing to Job 17.15, Levenson argues that the key question that Job poses is whether there is any hope for escape from Sheol. Are hopelessness

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 21

4/28/2009 10:38:48 AM

22

The Providence of God

and gloom – the conditions in which Job finds himself – the last word? Levenson grants that no character in the book of Job envisions ‘an eschatological resurrection of the dead along the lines of the Second Temple and rabbinic doctrine that emerged centuries later’.71 But while the book of Job does not envision a resurrection of the dead, it does hold out hope that God will reverse the conditions of existential hopelessness and gloom. In Levenson’s view, Job needs ‘to see that the hellish suffering of his deathlike condition was not God’s last word, that current affliction is no disproof of future redemption’.72 In contrast to Aquinas, Levenson thinks that Job does not see this. But as Levenson also points out, ‘For Job, God is fully capable of reversing his undeserved fate but – unjustly, irrationally, maddeningly – does not do so.’73 That God can do so – and in fact will do so – is the theological point that Levenson draws from the problematic sketched by the book of Job. This point is also the one that Aquinas draws, even if Aquinas, like Joseph Kara and Jacob ben Meir, attributes the point to Job himself and extends it to eschatological, rather than merely temporal, redemption. From this perspective, in short, Aquinas has identified the theological problematic sketched by the book of Job, and his locating of God’s providential justice in the life to come is a fitting engagement with the book’s manifold discourses. Ultimately Levenson and Aquinas agree, even if they do not agree about what Job knows. For both Levenson and Aquinas, the hopelessness and gloom that Job experiences can only be answered by encountering the God who providentially and eschatologically will restore all things in justice.74 God’s gifting will accomplish all the purposes for which he creates the whole of creation and each of his creatures. We can garner at least three central insights about divine providence from Aquinas’s Literal Exposition of Job. First, providence, as it works itself out in history and (inseparably) in eschatological fulfilment, is resolutely theocentric: ‘Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his?’ (Job 40.9). Divine providence constitutes the ultimate ordering of humans rather than humans determining the ultimate ordering of divine providence; providence is the plan of God and as such is identical to his being.75 Second, while divine providence is philosophically knowable, reflection on divine providence requires not merely philosophical wisdom, but also theological faith. The doctrines of resurrection and eschatological justice, upon which Aquinas’s Job grounds his affirmation of providence, depend upon faith’s knowledge. Third, Aquinas is alert to the problem of presumption in discourse about divine providence, discourse which has to do with the mysteries of the divine wisdom and will.

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 22

4/28/2009 10:38:49 AM

Aquinas on the Book of Job

23

Like Job’s, our discourse on providence must take care not to scandalize our auditors by seeming to impute injustice to God. With regard to all three points, Aquinas’s connection of Satan with ‘Behemoth’ and ‘Leviathan’ may be of help. Why does God permit Satan, ‘king over all the sons of pride’ (Job 41.34), to lose himself in evildoing for which he will be everlastingly punished? In speaking of Leviathan, God rules out any lack in his providence for his creatures: ‘Will you even put me in the wrong?’ (Job 40.8). On the other hand, God also denies that finite freedom allows Leviathan to thwart God’s eternal ordering of his creation: ‘Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine’ (Job 41.11). Job concludes that the discussion involves realities ‘too wonderful for me’ (Job 42.3). There are three elements here: God’s goodness (inclusive of justice and love) vis-à-vis each and every creature; God’s eternal ordering of creation to its end or goal; and Job’s inability to understand the full goodness of God’s plan prior to the eschaton. One further element should be added. In the context of his discussion of Behemoth (Satan), Aquinas points out that ‘there are some who are not overcome by the devil but rather obtain victory against him, and this accomplishment, of course, belongs principally to Christ, concerning Whom it is said in Apoc. 5.5: “Look! The lion from the tribe of Judah has conquered.”’76 As Aquinas puts it in the Summa Theologiae, Christ accomplishes all justice, and conquers the devil, by suffering ‘both out of love of the Father . . . and out of love of His neighbour, according to Gal. ii. 20: He loved me, and delivered himself up for me.’77 This merciful accomplishment of justice in Christ enacts God’s providence for the perfection of creation: ‘The work of the Incarnation is to be viewed not as merely the terminus of a movement from imperfection to perfection, but also as a principle of perfection to human nature.’78 Although Christ’s love reveals the perfection of creation, Christ does not thereby resolve the relationship of God’s all-encompassing creative love to God’s permission of the wickedness of ‘Behemoth’. Aquinas comments that Job, having repented and admitted that he had spoken of realities ‘too wonderful for me’ (Job 42.3), now says to God that (as Aquinas paraphrases) for the rest I do not dare to speak of it but only to ask You about these things. Hence, he [Job] adds I will ask You [Job 42:4] namely, by asking, seeking, knocking, and You respond to me [Job 42:4], namely by instructing me inwardly.79

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 23

4/28/2009 10:38:49 AM

The Providence of God

24

In this way Aquinas connects Job 42.4 with Mt.7.7, where Jesus instructs his disciples, ‘Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.’ As Aquinas knows, Jesus continues: Or what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Mt. 7.9–11)

God’s love for his rational creatures is the love of the gifting God, not a crimped love that does not ‘know how to give good gifts’. But even though God’s love is infinitely great (‘how much more’), God from eternity, in his creative plan, permits some rational creatures (at least ‘Behemoth’ and the fallen angels) to reject his order of love. As Jesus goes on to warn, ‘Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many’ (Mt. 7.13). Can this puzzle about God’s will be resolved by holding that God’s eternal permission of ‘destruction’ (reprobation) either involves a limit upon God’s love or cannot be squared with God’s love for each and every creature? Rather than presuming to answer for God, let us learn, as Job does, to await the fullness of God’s answer – the ‘Yes’ (2 Cor. 1.19) who is seen ‘in a mirror dimly’ (1 Cor. 13.12) in Christ Jesus – in the vision of our Redeemer and our God.80

Notes 1 Stephen Mitchell, introduction to his translation The Book of Job (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992), xvii. 2 Ibid., xxviii. 3 Ibid. 4 Thomas Aquinas, Literal Exposition on Job, 68. Such a denial, he thinks, ‘is found to be especially harmful to the human race, for if divine providence is taken away, no reverence or fear of God based on truth will remain among men’ (ibid.). 5 For Aquinas, faith and the doctrine of providence are intertwined. In his discussion of the virtue of faith, Aquinas draws heavily upon Hebrews 11. Hebrews 11.6 teaches, ‘And without faith it is impossible to please him [God]. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.’ According to Aquinas, therefore, humans may possess an implicit faith in God the Saviour ‘through believing in Divine providence, since they believed that God would deliver mankind in whatever way was pleasing to Him’ (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 2, a. 7, ad 3). The affirmation of God’s ability to ‘deliver mankind in whatever way was pleasing to Him’

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 24

4/28/2009 10:38:49 AM

Aquinas on the Book of Job

6

7

8 9

10

25

requires a robust doctrine of providence, since if God does not govern human events, his saving plan (which unfolds in history) could be thwarted. On this point see also Aquinas’s important discussion of the predestination of Christ: ST III, q. 24. For a contemporary theological perspective informed by this insight, see Matthew L. Lamb, Eternity, Time, and the Life of Wisdom (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2007), especially chapter 1, ‘The Resurrection and Christian Identity as Conversatio Dei’, 1–12. Eleonore Stump comments on this aspect of Aquinas’s Literal Exposition on Job: ‘Because Aquinas has always in mind the thought that the days of our lives here are short while the afterlife is unending, he naturally supposes that things having to do with the afterlife are more important than the things having to do with this life’ (Stump, ‘Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job’, in Reasoned Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology in Honor of Norman Kretzmann, ed. Eleonore Stump (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 328–57, at 334–5). Denis Chardonnens insightfully describes Aquinas’s reading of Job as ‘teleological and eschatological’ (Chardonnens, L’homme sous le regard de la providence. Providence de Dieu et condition humaine selon l’ ‘Exposition littérale sur le Livre de Job’ de Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: J. Vrin, 1997), 290). Likewise John Yocum argues that ‘Thomas extends teleology into eschatology’ and that ‘this eschatology is knowable only by revelation, a revelation given finally in the New Testament, and vouchsafed to Job by a special prophetic insight; nevertheless, this revelation does not nullify, but completes what is available to human reason, so that the evidence of the world of sense and history is rendered more, not less intelligible by it’ (Yocum, ‘Aquinas’ Literal Exposition on Job’, in Aquinas on Scripture: An Introduction to His Biblical Commentaries, ed. Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., Daniel A. Keating and John P. Yocum (New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 21–42, at 32). ST II-II, q. 2, a. 7, ad 3. On this point see Chardonnens, L’homme sous le regard de la providence, 294: ‘According to Thomas, Job is not only a man who encounters the mystery of the divine transcendence, but also a man to whom faith, the gateway of revelation, uncovers something of the truth of Providence.’ As Chardonnens emphasizes, Aquinas’s reading of the book of Job stresses the importance of the via negationis (293). See also Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Maimonides and St. Thomas on the Limits of Reason (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 39–59. For Aquinas, Dobbs-Weinstein observes, ‘although Job held a correct opinion about divine providence, his disordered speech reflects not only the limitations of human reason, but also a lack of understanding and acknowledgment of such a limitation’ (58). Similarly, Martin D. Yaffe’s interpretative essay introducing Anthony Damico’s English translation of the Literal Exposition on Job (1–65) attends particularly to Aquinas’s understanding of the relationship of faith and reason. As Yaffe concludes, Aquinas’s Literal Exposition on Job demonstrates that ‘Christian wisdom is more than an academically satisfying argument. It is also humility, prudence, and charity’ (65). Stump, while largely appreciative of Aquinas’s Literal Exposition on Job, suggests that the answer to this question is no. She observes that ‘in consequence of his sufferings Job has become uncertain or double-minded about the

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 25

4/28/2009 10:38:50 AM

26

The Providence of God

goodness of God, and so his trust in God, which had formerly been the foundation of his life, is undermined in ways that leave Job riven to his roots. Aquinas’s presentation of Job is oblivious to this side of his suffering, so that Aquinas’s Job lacks the conflict with God and the bitter anguish many of the rest of us think we see in Job’ (Stump, ‘Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job’, 333). As we will see, Aquinas argues that Job undergoes bitter anguish in his passions – which Job allows his mind to express – but that this anguish does not overwhelm Job’s speculative commitment to divine providence. In Aquinas’s view, Job’s speculative conflict (as opposed to the conflict engendered in his passions by his bitter suffering) is not with God but with the false god proposed by his interlocutors, a god whose rewards and punishments are fully manifest in temporal prosperity or adversity. Such a god could have no place for Jesus’ Passion, let alone for martyrs. 11 For historical background and a brief discussion of Aquinas’s Literal Exposition on Job, see Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1: The Person and His Work (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 120–1. Torrell dates the Literal Exposition on Job to 1261–5, when Aquinas was also at work on the extensive treatment of providence found in the Summa contra gentiles; cf. Yocum, ‘Aquinas’ Literal Exposition on Job’, 22–3. 12 This question is central for Michał Paluch, O.P., La profondeur de l’amour divin. La predestination dans l’oeuvre de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: J. Vrin, 2004). Agreeing with Jacques Maritain’s appropriation of Aquinas’s position on predestination, Paluch emphasizes that ‘[o]ur difficulties with the mystery of predestination are not constituted by the problem of a limited divine love, but by the problem of our limited understanding and by the problem of the limits of our own love. Predestination is the luminous mystery of a God who gives us all gratuitously, who is always on our side in our effort to follow him’ (317). For difficulties with Maritain’s solution, however, see Steven A. Long, ‘Providence, Freedom, and Natural Law’, Nova et Vetera 4 (2006): 557–605 and Gilles Emery, O.P., ‘The Question of Evil and the Mystery of God in Charles Journet’, Nova et Vetera 4 (2006): 529–55, at 551–2. Drawing on Long’s essay (published in French in the 2002 volume of Revue Thomiste), Emery observes, ‘Maritain’s explanation itself raises a problem. The notion of “nihilation” and of “shatterable motion” is problematic, for if nihilation is something “positive”, it must be caused by God; but if nihilation is purely negative, this means that God has not given something positive to the human person: In either case, it is not easy to see how the explanation can avoid the intervention of an antecedent decree’ (551). Although Aquinas’s Literal Exposition on Job is devoted to exploring God’s providential ordering of all things to their end, Denis Chardonnens points out that Aquinas uses the verb ‘praedestinare’ only once, namely in commenting on Job 7.21 (Chardonnens, L’homme sous le regard de la providence, 51). Chardonnens adds, however, that ‘[t]his does not mean that the elements of a theology of predestination are absent, but they are recovered from within the reflection on Providence’ (52). For valuable recent examination of some of the issues surrounding providence and predestination in Aquinas, see Joseph P. Wawrykow, God’s Grace and Human Action: ‘Merit’ in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); Harm Goris, Free Creatures of an

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 26

4/28/2009 10:38:50 AM

Aquinas on the Book of Job

13

14 15

16 17

18

27

Eternal God: Thomas Aquinas on God’s Infallible Foreknowledge and Irresistible Will (Leuven: Peeters, 1996). When quoting directly from the book of Job, I employ the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, although I also consult the more recent translation found in the Jewish Study Bible. Aquinas, Literal Exposition on Job, 71–5. Ibid., 84; cf. 92. John Yocum underscores that for Aquinas ‘there is a distinction between the sufferings of the virtuous and the wicked. God visits retribution upon the wicked, at least in another life, and here perhaps remedially, but evils that come upon good human beings are attributable to God’s providence, ‘not from the principal intention’, but rather accidentally (per accidens). God turns this affliction to good purpose’ (Yocum, ‘Aquinas’ Literal Exposition on Job’, 29; cf. Aquinas, Literal Exposition on Job, 78). Aquinas, Literal Exposition on Job, 89. Ibid. Eleonore Stump remarks that Aquinas ‘seems not to recognize that suffering in the world, of the quantity and quality of Job’s, calls into question God’s goodness, let alone God’s existence’ (Stump, ‘Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job’, 333). It seems to me, however, that Aquinas’s Job inveighs against the God of his three friends and Elihu precisely on the grounds that their view of God, in light of the character of the sufferings humans undergo in this world, would indeed undermine God’s goodness (and thereby call into question God’s existence). Stump goes on to say that Aquinas ‘supposes that we can know, at least in general, the good that justifies God’s allowing evil. And he accepts basically the same constraints as those [William] Rowe insists theodicies must meet: if a good God allows evil, it can only be because the evil in question produces a benefit for the sufferer and one that God could not provide without the suffering’ (335). Stump explains, ‘Like Rowe, he [Aquinas] feels that (at least for creatures with minds) suffering is justified only in case it is a means to good for the sufferer herself. And Aquinas’s examples of such good all have at least a natural, if not a necessary, connection with the evil in question: patience brought about by affliction, humility brought about by the experience of sin and repentance’ (337). I agree that Aquinas conceives of suffering as ‘a means to good for the sufferer’, whether the good of punishment or the good of increase in virtue. But this does not mean that the good is (in the view that Stump attributes to Rowe) ‘one that God could not provide without the suffering’. As John Yocum emphasizes, for Aquinas God wills the sufferings of the virtuous only per accidens (see above, note 14). The question that theodicy addresses is why God permits these sufferings even per accidens. Although Aquinas suggests that the answer to this question is knowable only eschatologically, he also affirms that the sufferings of the virtuous, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, operate for their benefit. Stump focuses upon this latter point, and shows that for Aquinas Job receives great consolation and happiness through the words of God. In this regard, as Stump says, ‘The lesson learned for us by Job and the example presented by Christ make it easier for others afterwards, Aquinas thinks, to endure suffering without losing spiritual consolation during the period of pain’ (353). Aquinas, Literal Exposition on Job, 96. For Maimonides, by contrast, natural things are not subject to divine providence. For discussion, see my ‘Reclaiming

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 27

4/28/2009 10:38:50 AM

The Providence of God

28

19

20

21 22 23 24

God’s Providence: John Paul II, Maimonides, and Aquinas’, in John Paul II and the Jewish People, ed. David G. Dalin and Matthew Levering (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 95–112. Yocum argues that because ‘[i]t was Thomas’ task to interpret the specific text under examination within an understanding of the truth that derives from reflection on the Bible as a whole’, it follows that Aquinas could only have read Job ‘in light of the fuller teaching on the resurrection of the body’ (Yocum, ‘Aquinas’ Literal Exposition on Job’, 28). Yocum is right about Aquinas’s procedure, but of course Aquinas need not have held that Job, a pagan, believed in resurrection. Aquinas’s Vulgate text of Job 19.25–7 reads, ‘For I know that my redeemer lives, and on the last day I will rise from the earth. And I will be surrounded by my own hide again and in my flesh I will see God, Whom I myself am going to see and my eyes are going to behold, and no one else’ (Aquinas, Literal Exposition on Job, 268). Scholars today generally do not accept the Vulgate and RSV versions of Job 19.25–7. Yocum discusses this problem in ‘Aquinas’ Literal Exposition on Job’, 35–7. As Yocum points out, modern interpreters differ from the Vulgate’s translation of Job 13.15: the Vulgate reads ‘Even if he kills me, I will hope in him’ whereas the RSV reads ‘He will slay me; I have no hope’ (Yocum, 36). Among recent exegetes, Yocum cites Robert Gordis as offering arguments in support of the traditional interpretation of Job 19.25–7, but Gordis, too, ‘assumes that Job denied the resurrection and that later exegetes had to cover this heretical stance in order to save the book’s canonicity’ (40). Yocum argues that Aquinas’s view that Job believes in resurrection can be defended on the grounds that those who canonized the book of Job undertook ‘a theological reception and appropriation of Job, in which the text was harmonized with other texts within a larger theological synthesis’ (40). For my part, I find persuasive the position of Jon D. Levenson, which I discuss in the Conclusion to this chapter. See Gordis, The Book of Job: Commentary, New Translation, and Special Studies (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1978). See also F. Coggi, ‘Dolore, Providenza, Rissurerezione nel libro di Giobbe: Validità di un’intuizione esegetica di S. Tommaso’, Sacra Doctrina 27 (1982): 215–310. Ibid., 337–8. Ibid., 107. For the same argument. Ibid., 225. Concerned that Aquinas’s emphasis on eschatological justice might ‘undercut attention to the plight of the Jobs of this world’, Timothy P. Jackson suggests that Aquinas’s Job need not have hinged his argument on the life to come (Jackson, ‘Must Job Live Forever: A Reply to Aquinas on Providence’, The Thomist 62 [1998]: 1–39, at 36). For Jackson, ‘There may be an afterlife (who knows?), but an accent on its pure graciousness and unpredictability is characteristic of the best of biblical religion and foreign to much of modern theodicy. Certainly any talk of ‘necessary evolution’ between this life and a next will erode a piety that would be grateful to, and responsible before, God for earthly existence and its potential for love. Whatever the place of attrition in ethics, one can no more preserve genuine charity when motivated by fear of death or coveting of life than one can reconcile significant human freedom

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 28

4/28/2009 10:38:51 AM

Aquinas on the Book of Job

25

26 27 28

29

with irresistible grace. Thus just as Aquinas encourages a faith that distances, the problem of evil, so the strong agapist encourages a love that distances the problem of immortality. If love ‘bears all things’ (1 Cor. 13.7), this must include love’s own finitude and possible extinction. (Again, Job nowhere appeals to deathlessness as a requirement for meaning or as a viable remedy for suffering.) The best of Thomistic faith is not blind to the religious implications of undeserved suffering, but the antecedent concern is with how to be a faithful minister to those now in pain. Similarly, rather than postulating the necessity of an afterlife, the strong agapist stops with the realization that, in Thomas’s words, ‘[w]hoever has the love of God . . . already has what he loves’ (36–7). Jackson’s effort to dissociate Christian charity from God’s eternal love for the human beings cannot be squared with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Far from holding open the possibility of everlasting annihilation of his spiritual creatures, God promises to raise the dead to life in the general resurrection. On annihilation cf. ST I, q. 104, aa. 3–4; Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 2: Spiritual Master, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 234–8. Aquinas’s Vulgate text here reads, ‘waters hollow out stones and by floodwaters little by little the earth is consumed. And will You therefore destroy men similarly? Did You make him mighty for a little while so that he might pass away forever? Will You change his face and send him away?’ A similar situation holds for the translation of Job 30.23–4. Aquinas’s Vulgate translation is more amenable to the doctrine of resurrection: ‘I know that You will hand me over to death, where a house has been set up for every living man. But yet, not for their consumption do You send forth Your hand, and if they collapse You Yourself will save them.’ As the Jewish Study Bible points out, the meaning of the Hebrew is uncertain for verse 24. Aquinas, Literal Exposition on Job, 226. Ibid., 228. Ibid., 226. This insight underscores the accuracy of Eleonore Stump’s observation that ‘there is a correlation between the degree to which we associate human good with things in this world and the extent to which we see the problem of evil in its contemporary form’ (Stump, ‘Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job’, 355). As Stump rightly says, ‘our approach to the problem of evil is a consequence of our attitude toward much larger issues, such as the nature of human happiness and the goal of human life’ (356). Or as she puts it earlier in her essay, ‘if we don’t share the worldview that holds that there is an afterlife, that true happiness consists in union with God in the afterlife, and that suffering helps us to attain that happiness, we will naturally find Aquinas’s valuing suffering even as a conditional good appalling or crazy’ (350–1). Stump, however, draws from this point the further conclusion that Aquinas does not recognize, in the way that moderns do, ‘the religious importance of temporal concerns’ (356). She juxtaposes ‘Aquinas’s worldview, characterized by a renunciation of the things of this world and a rush toward heaven’, with our world-view, ‘steeped in comforts and seeking pleasure’ (357). Here she exaggerates the otherworldliness of Aquinas’s world-view. For Aquinas, the justice of Job’s sufferings can only be accounted for eschatologically, but this does not mean that Aquinas (or Aquinas’s Job) locate Job’s sufferings merely within

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 29

4/28/2009 10:38:51 AM

The Providence of God

30

29 30 31

32

33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

‘a renunciation of the things of this world and a rush toward heaven’. On the contrary, Aquinas’s Job expresses his suffering in the most passionate terms and refuses to allow his friends or Elihu to explain away his suffering. Only God’s providence in Christ and the resurrection from the dead can provide an answer for Job’s sufferings. To make this point is precisely not to explain away suffering in an otherworldly fashion; rather it is to wait for an explanation in the vision of God. Ibid., 156. Ibid., 107. John Yocum defends the intention of Aquinas’s reading here: ‘While the comparisons to the Stoics and Peripatetics may strike one as fanciful, in fact, close examination of Job’s reasoning makes the comparisons apt. Aquinas is obviously not saying that Job explicitly thought in these categories, but he makes a strong case that Job’s view supports that of the Peripatetics, that the animal nature of the human being precludes an elimination of sadness. . . . Thomas is sympathetic to Job’s plight, in part, because he holds that pain impedes one’s reason, and thus Job’s condition makes for a struggle’ (Yocum, ‘Aquinas’ Literal Exposition on Job’, 33). Aquinas, Literal Exposition on Job, 151. On the assumption that Job is the author of the book, Aquinas remarks that Job speaks according to three modes in the book: ‘Now one should consider that if the previously cited speech of the Lord [Job 38–9] was not uttered to Job through an external sound but internally inspired, Job is found to have spoken three ways in this book: first, of course, as representing the affection of the capacity for sensation in the first complaint when he said “Perish the day” [3.3]; second, expressing the deliberation of human reason when he was debating against his friends; third, according to divine inspiration when he adduced words in the person of the Lord. And since human reason ought to be directed according to divine inspiration, after the Lord’s words he reproves the words which he had said according to human reason’ (442). Ibid., 139. Ibid., 443. Ibid., 382. Aquinas’s Vulgate translation reads: ‘God lives Who has taken away my judgment’ (27.2) and ‘God has afflicted me with an inequitable judgment’ (19.6). The Jewish Study Bible translation reads: ‘By God who has deprived me of justice!’ (27.2) and ‘Yet know that God has wronged me’ (19.6). Ibid., 176. Ibid., 264. Ibid., 324. Ibid., 415. Ibid., 416. Ibid., 469–70. The Jewish Study Bible translates this verse, ‘Therefore, I recant and relent, being but dust and ashes.’ Aquinas, Literal Exposition on Job, 470. Earlier Aquinas comments on Job 40.3–5 (39.33–5 in the Vulgate): ‘here one should consider that Job, speaking before God and his own conscience, is not accusing himself of falsity of speech or of haughty intention, since he had spoken from the purity of his spirit, but

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 30

4/28/2009 10:38:51 AM

Aquinas on the Book of Job

44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

31

of levity of speech, namely, since even if he had not spoken from pride of spirit his words nevertheless seemed to smack of arrogance, from which his friends had taken an occasion for scandal. Now one must avoid not only evils but also those things which have the appearance of evil, according to the Apostle, I Thess. 5.22: ‘Abstain from every appearance of evil.’ Therefore, he adds I will put my hand over my mouth, namely, so that I may not burst forth in similar words in other respects, and I repent of these things which I have said. Hence, he adds I have spoken one thing which I wish I had not said, namely, that I said I wished to debated with God [13.3], and a second, namely, that I put my justice first when it was a matter of divine judgments [6.2]’ (441). Ibid., 470. Aquinas, Literal Exposition on Job, 470. As Matthew Lamb puts the problem (and the solution): ‘A critically realist understanding of how humans actually live and treat one another would hardly inspire confidence in human intelligence and love. Indeed, modernity seemed to surrender to the counsel of despair, as its major minds conceded that power rather than understanding and love is the means of forcing reason and order on what Hegel termed the ‘butcher’s block’ of history. Without the missions of the Son and Spirit, without a revelatory self-communication of God in history and the higher viewpoint provided by faith as a knowledge born of unconditional love (Rom. 5.5), the social surds of history would set death and destruction as a dead-end to all human striving and living. The immense aspirations and efforts of countless human beings in acquiring skills, developing intellectual and moral virtues – the wisdom of a Socrates, Plato, Aristotle – all these noble and godlike achievements are not destined to end in death and obliteration. The eternal is no apersonal permanence; the eternal is interpersonal presence. The drama of human life is not confined to this moral life’ (Lamb, Eternity, Time, and the Life of Wisdom, 52). Aquinas, Literal Exposition on Job, 128. Ibid. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 158. Aquinas, Literal Exposition on Job, 197. Ibid., 280. Ibid., 415–16. Ibid., 383. Ibid., 413. Ibid., 471. Ibid., 429. Ibid., 431. Ibid., 444. Ibid., 445. Ibid., 454. Aquinas’s Vulgate translation reads: ‘For who can resist My countenance?’ (ibid., 459). Aquinas, Literal Exposition on Job, 454. Ibid.

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 31

4/28/2009 10:38:51 AM

32

The Providence of God

66 Ibid., 463. 67 Ibid., 468. 68 David B. Burrell, C.S.C., concludes that ‘[i]t is the actual speaking – God’s responding to Job – which offers the dramatic point of the poem: the determination by divine authority. Yet Aquinas does not exploit this ‘performative’ dimension’ (‘Maimonides, Aquinas, and Gersonides on Providence and Evil’ (with a Bow to Dorothy Sayers), in Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 43–63, at 47). Martin Buber reads Job in a similar fashion, arguing that in God’s response ‘God offers himself to the sufferer who, in the depth of his despair, keeps to God with his refractory complaint; He offers Himself to him as an answer. It is true, ‘the overcoming of the riddle of suffering can only come from the domain of revelation’ [Walter Eichrodt], but it is not the revelation in general that is here decisive, but the particular revelation to the individual: the revelation as an answer to the individual sufferer concerning the question of his sufferings, the self-limitation of God to a person, answering a person’ (Buber, ‘Job’, in Buber’s On the Bible: Eighteen Studies, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (1982; Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 188–98, at 196). Buber emphasizes that Job’s intercession for his friends (Job 42.10) brings about Job’s restoration: the recognition of the I-Thou relationship with God is the key. 69 The Jewish Study Bible, ed. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, with the Jewish Publication Society TANAKH translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1529. 70 Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 68. 71 Ibid., 70. 72 Ibid., 71. 73 Ibid. 74 In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes clear that God will reward and punish human beings in the life to come: ‘Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you’ (Mt. 5.11–12). By contrast, those who oppress others and seek the goods of this world, rather than the goods of God, already ‘have their reward’ (Mt. 6.2) and are ‘liable to the hell of fire’ (Mt. 5.22). As Jesus goes on to urge his hearers, ‘Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’ (Mt. 6.19–21). 75 I am indebted to Emmanuel Perrier, O.P., for highlighting (in correspondence with me) this point that the divine operations ad extra are carrying the whole divine mystery. 76 Aquinas, Literal Exposition on Job, 453. Aquinas goes on to say, ‘Now by this passage is designated mystically the fact that Christ overcame the devil, showing him a weak nature so that he might be caught by Him as if by a hook, and afterwards He exercised His power against him, according to Col. 2.15,

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 32

4/28/2009 10:38:52 AM

Aquinas on the Book of Job

77 78 79 80

33

‘Despoiling the principates and powers, He confidently triumphed over them’ (454). Leviathan (Satan) cannot resist the power of divine action anywhere’ (464). Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 47, a. 2, ad 1. See also III, q. 48, a. 4; III, q. 49, a. 2. Ibid., III, q. 1, a. 6, ad 2. Aquinas, Literal Exposition on Job, 470. Thanks to Emmanuel Perrier, O.P., and Thomas Joseph White, O.P., for many insights and suggestions.

FMurphy_01_Finals.indd 33

4/28/2009 10:38:52 AM

Chapter 2

Providence and Causality: On Divine Innocence David Bentley Hart

I I shall begin with Heidegger at his most, if not oracular, at least plangently ominous: So kann, wo alles Anwesende sich im Lichte des Ursache-WirkungZusammenhangs darstellt, sogar Gott für das Vorstellen alles Heilige und Hohe, das Geheimnisvolle seiner Ferne verlieren. Gott kann im Lichte der Kausalität zu einer Ursache, zur causa efficiens, herabsinken. Er wird dann sogar innerhalb der Theologie zum Gott der Philosophen, jener nämlich, die das Unverborgene und Verborgene nach der Kausalität des Machens bestimmen, ohne dabei jemals die Wesensherkunft dieser Kausalität zu bedenken.1

There is a profound and disturbing truth in these lines, one in fact of almost inexhaustible relevance for the theologian, but one of which far too few theologians typically take heed. This is hardly surprising, really. Perhaps the most difficult discipline the Christian metaphysical tradition requires of its students is the preservation of a consistent and adequate sense of the difference between primary and secondary causality, or between the transcendent and the contingent, or even between – to use Heidegger’s idiom in a setting to which he would think it inappropriate – the ontological and the ontic. It is a distinction so elementary to any metaphysics of creation that no philosophical theologian consciously ignores it; and yet its full implications often elude even the most scrupulous among us. This is no small matter; for the theological consequences of failing to observe the proper logic of divine transcendence are invariably unhappy, and in some cases even disastrous. Consider, for instance, that most cherished axiom of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange: ‘God determining or determined: there is no other alternative.’2 This is a logical error whose gravity it would be difficult to exaggerate. It is a venerable error, admittedly, adumbrated or explicit in the arguments of even some of the greatest theologians of the Western Church (certain of Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings come troublingly to mind); but an error it remains. Applied to two terms within any shared frame of causal operation, between which some reciprocal real relation obtains, such a formula is perfectly cogent; but as soon as ‘God’ is introduced as one of its terms, it is immediately rendered

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 34

4/28/2009 10:38:31 AM

Providence and Causality: On Divine Innocence

35

vacuous. If divine transcendence is an intelligible idea, it must be understood according to a rule enunciated by Maximus the Confessor: whereas the being of finite things has non-being as its opposite, God’s being is entirely beyond any such opposition.3 God’s being is necessary, that is, not simply because it is inextinguishable or eternally immune to nothingness, but because it transcends the dialectic of existence and non-existence altogether; it is simple and infinite actuality, utterly pure of ontic determination, the ‘is’ both of the ‘it is’ and of the ‘it is not’. It transcends even the distinction between finite act and finite potency, since both exist by virtue of their participation in God’s infinite actuality, in which all that might be always supereminently is. God is absolute, that is to say, in the most proper sense: he is eternally ‘absolved’ of finite causality, so much so that he need not – in any simple univocal sense – determine in order to avoid being determined. His transcendence is not something achieved by the negation of its ‘opposite’. It could, in fact, be argued that the great ‘discovery’ of the Christian metaphysical tradition was just this: the true nature of transcendence. When, in the fourth century, theology took its final leave of all subordinationist schemes of Trinitarian reflection, it thereby broke irrevocably with all those older metaphysical systems that had attempted to connect this world to its highest principle by populating the interval between them with various intermediate degrees of spiritual reality. In affirming that the Persons of the Trinity are coequal and of one essence, Christian thought was led also to the recognition that it is the transcendent God alone who gives being to creation; that he is able to be at once both superior summo meo and interior intimo meo; and that he is not merely the supreme being set atop the summit of beings, but is instead the one who is transcendently present in all beings, the ever more inward act within each finite act. And it is precisely because God is not situated within any kind of ontic continuum with the creature that we can recognize him as the ontological cause of the creature, who freely gives being to beings. True divine transcendence, it turns out, is a transcendence of even the traditional metaphysical demarcations between the transcendent and the immanent. At the same time, the realization that the creature is not, simply by virtue of its finitude and mutability, alienated from God – at a tragic distance from God that the creature can traverse only to the degree that everything distinctively creaturely within it is negated – was also a realization of the true ontological liberty of created nature. If God himself is the immediate actuality of the creature’s emergence from nothingness, and of both the essence and the existence of the creature, then it is precisely through becoming what it is – rather than through overcoming those finite

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 35

4/28/2009 10:38:31 AM

36

The Providence of God

‘idiomata’ that distinguish it from God – that the creature truly reflects the goodness and transcendent power of God. This logic should always be kept prominently, even obtrusively in mind whenever we attempt to speak intelligibly of divine providence (to arrive at last at my topic); for if providence is in any way a meaningful concept – if, that is, it means something more than simple determinism – it must concern a species of divine action towards creatures that truly remains a work of primary causality while also truly permitting secondary causality a real (if utterly contingent) autonomy. If in any measure this boundary is breached, however – if in any way the autonomy of contingent causes must be denied, qualified, evaded or mitigated, in order to avoid any ‘conflict’ with the infinite sufficiency or absolute sovereignty of the primary cause – then all talk of providence is rendered perfectly otiose. The minimal – if not yet sufficient – condition for any coherent account of God’s providential activity in time must be something like Thomas’s distinction between what God directly and of his nature wills, on the one hand, and what he does not will but nevertheless permits, on the other. Without such a distinction, one is forced to imagine the drama of divine grace and creaturely freedom as in some sense a competition or rivalry between divine and human wills – though, of course, a competition that, through the sheer mathematics of the infinite and the finite, God has always already won. Thus, for instance, one cannot grant that John Calvin had any authentic doctrine of divine providence, however often he may have spoken of it; for he quite explicitly and peremptorily denied the distinction between divine will and permission,4 and so cannot be said to have understood by ‘providence’ anything other than absolute divine determinism. It is therefore a matter of indifference, really, that Calvin and his Reformed colleagues were able and willing to draw some kind of distinction between primary and secondary causality; for apart from any proper doctrine of divine permission, secondary causality appears as nothing but a modality of primary causality, by which the sole determining cause of all events works out its positive decrees among creatures. It would be far too easy, however, to hold up Calvin as a cautionary epitome here: in part because of the luminous clarity of his prose (which leaves little room for the cloudier kinds of ambiguity) and in part because of the guileless crudity of his understanding of divine sovereignty. He was hardly unique for his time, though; he was simply the most pitilessly consistent of the theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – a period when metaphysical subtlety seems to have been at its lowest ebb throughout the Christian world – and the one least susceptible to any tendency towards decent embarrassment at the rather ghastly implications

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 36

4/28/2009 10:38:32 AM

Providence and Causality: On Divine Innocence

37

of his own thought. A more interesting example of the decline of any meaningful doctrine of providence in early modern theology, it seems to me, can be found in the Baroque ‘commentary Thomism’ of Domingo Bañez, Diego Alvarez, John of St Thomas, and others – a tradition that continued, principally among the Dominicans, into the twentieth century, in the writings of Garrigou-Lagrange and Jean-Hervé Nicolas, and that is currently enjoying a minor (if undoubtedly transient) revival in the thought of a small number of contemporary Thomists. The particular fascination this line of Catholic thought has for me lies in the irreconcilable tensions it comprised within itself. For the Dominicans, unlike the Calvinists, remained committed to maintaining a genuine qualitative distinction between primary and secondary causes, of a sort that would allow no conflict between the two; and their total failure in this regard, as well as their almost poignant inability to recognize that they had failed, reveals a very great deal about the state of Christian me taphysics at the dawn of modernity. It also demonstrates, moreover, just how difficult it is, even for those who adhere most fiercely to the traditional metaphysical language of divine transcendence, to master the metaphysical logic of divine transcendence. And nowhere was this ‘traditional Thomist’ failure more resplendently obvious than in the ‘Bañezian’ concept of the praemotio physica: an irresistible divine movement of the creature’s will that in no way violates the creature’s own freedom. I do not have any interest, I should say, in wandering through the labyrinth of the ‘de auxiliis’ controversies, and I am perfectly indifferent to the question of whether there is any actual warrant for the idea of the praemotio in Thomas’s writings.5 My interest in the matter is bloodlessly clinical. To me, the praemotio is a perfect specimen of a deformation of theological reason that seems especially characteristic of the modern age, both early and late: not necessarily a conscious denial of any of classical Christianity’s claims regarding God’s nature, but rather a far more general and destructive forgetfulness of the true meaning of those claims – one that renders either their denial or their affirmation largely irrelevant.

II The concept of physical premotion is not terribly difficult to grasp.6 It is a device intended, in principle, to safeguard a proper understanding of divine transcendence and omnipotence (though, in fact, it accomplishes precisely the opposite). It is called ‘physical’ in order to make clear that it is not merely a moral premotion, which would act only as a final cause upon the

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 37

4/28/2009 10:38:32 AM

38

The Providence of God

rational will; it is a work of real efficient agency on God’s part.7 As a premotion, its priority is one not of time, but only of causal order. As God is the primary cause of all causing – so the argument goes – he must be the first efficient cause of all actions, even those that are sinful;8 and yet, as he operates in a mode radically transcendent of the mode of the creature’s actions, he can do this without violating the creature’s freedom. From eternity, God has infallibly decreed which actions will occur in time, and he brings them to pass either by directly willing them or by directly permitting them. Nor is divine permission in any way indeterminate, such that God would have to ‘wait upon’ the creature’s decisions, for then God’s power would be susceptible of a moral or epistemic pathos;9 rather, his is an eternal and irresistible ‘permissive decree’, which predetermines even the evil actions of creatures.10 God, however, is not the cause of evil; such is the natural defectibility – the inherent nothingness – of finite spirits that they cannot help but err if not upheld in the good by an extraordinary grace, and so if God withholds this grace they will, of their own nature, infallibly gravitate towards sin; and the will towards evil must, then, be ascribed entirely to the creature.11 There is no injustice in this, moreover, inasmuch as God is not obliged to supply the creature with any grace at all; and so God remains innocent of any implication in the creature’s sin, even though he has irresistibly predetermined in every instance that the creature will commit this sin.12 As for human freedom, the argument continues, it is in no wise abrogated by the praemotio. The proper definition of a free act is one that is not contingently determined, for an effect is deemed necessary or contingent only in regard to its proximate cause; hence, even if an act is determinately present in its primary cause, so long as it is contingent as regards its antecedent secondary causes, it is by definition free. Logically the creature could act otherwise, though in fact this possibility will never – can never – be realized; for though the creature’s act is contingent in its own mode, it is necessary as eternally decreed by God. That is, it is not necessary in a ‘divided sense’ (which would be the case only if the creature’s potentiality for doing otherwise simply did not exist), but is necessary only in a ‘composed sense’ (which is to say, necessary only in the sense that the creature cannot actually do otherwise than it is doing – which God has irresistibly predetermined).13 It is not a physical necessity, therefore, but a necessity of ‘supposition’; for it lies within God’s omnipotence irresistibly to predetermine an effect as a contingent effect. In the case of the rational creature, God infallibly causes him to act through his own intellect and will.14 Nor are God and the creature competing causes within the act; so radically different are their proper modes of causality, and so radically distinct the

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 38

4/28/2009 10:38:32 AM

Providence and Causality: On Divine Innocence

39

orders to which they belong, that each can be said entirely to cause the act, though as superior and inferior agents.15 Indeed, God does not even really determine the will; this he could do only by way of secondary causes, which would make the creature’s act logically necessary; rather he directly and, so to speak, vertically predetermines the will, creating its power to choose and then efficiently causing the entire act he intends:16 thus the will remains free.17 Thomists of this persuasion sometimes argue that one cannot deny the reality of the praemotio without simultaneously denying the omnipotence and primary causality of God. To suggest that human beings are free either to resist God’s grace, or even to act at all without God directly ‘applying’ them to their actions, is both morally and metaphysically incoherent. To suggest that God’s ‘permissive will’ might actually liberate the creature to an indeterminate diversity of possible free acts would be to imply that human liberty escapes divine providence and that the human will enjoys an absolute libertarian autonomy that places it beyond divine causality.18 God then could know the creature only by way of a pathos, to which he would then reactively respond.19 But, as Bañez says, ‘God knows sin by an intuitive cognition, insofar as the will of God is the cause of the entity of the sinful act (causa entitatis actus peccati)’ – though, he adds, God permits free will to fail to observe the proper law of action, and thus to ‘concur with this act (ad eundem actum concurrat)’.20 Moreover, these Thomists contend, every act of the will is a movement from potency to act, a new actuality, which can be supplied only by the first cause of all being;21 creatures are not able to bring about a new effect ex nihilo, but must be ‘applied’ to action by a divine act; thus, in addition to his act of creation, God must always supply an additional movement of the will, directing it towards one end or another.22 That God elects to predetermine good acts in some and evil acts in others belongs, of course, to his predilective predestination of a few to salvation and his reprobation of the rest to damnation. As for the scriptural assurance that God wills that all men be saved, it would impugn God’s causal omnipotence to suggest that what he ‘efficaciously’ wills could possibly fail to occur;23 thus his ‘universal will to salvation’ applies only to the order of grace, where he supplies what is ‘sufficient’ for the redemption of all; in the order of nature, however, he generally declines to provide the praemotio of the creature’s will necessary to make that grace ‘efficacious’. And God’s purpose in infallibly permissively decreeing the evil that men do is to make both his mercy and his justice known: through the gratuitous rescue of the elect and the condign damnation of the derelict. After all, any world that God might create would still be composed of finite beings, inherently prone to defect, moved by competing

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 39

4/28/2009 10:38:32 AM

40

The Providence of God

and contrary goods, and every possible world falls infinitely short of the goodness of God; thus the permission of evil is intrinsic to the act of creation. But – by God’s providence – evil will always serve a greater good: the final knowledge of God’s goodness in the variety of its effects.24

III What is one to make of a theology quite this degenerate? It obviously falls in that special category of discourse that can be credible only to someone so fanatically devoted to a particular school of thought that he is willing to abide any degree of absurdity rather than modify his intellectual allegiances. From the outside, however, one can only marvel at the repellant involutions of logic, the moral idiocy, the equivocations, the innumerable departures from sense, the sterile formalism. It is one thing, after all, for a theologian simply to assert that God’s ‘mode of causality’ is utterly different from that of the creature, and that therefore God may act within the act of the creature without despoiling the latter of his liberty; but such an assertion is meaningful only if all the conclusions that follow from it genuinely obey the logic of transcendence. For, as primary cause of all things, God is first and foremost their ontological cause. He imparts being to what, in itself, is nothing at all; out of the infinite plenitude of his actuality, he gives being to both potency and act; and yet what he creates, as the effect of a truly transcendent causality, possesses its own being, and truly exists as other than God (though God is not some ‘other thing’ set alongside it). This donation of being is so utterly beyond any species of causality we can conceive that the very word ‘cause’ has only the most remotely analogous value in regard to it. And, whatever warrant Thomists might find in Thomas for speaking of God as the first efficient cause of creation (which I believe to be in principle wrong), such language is misleading unless the analogical scope of the concept of efficiency has been extended almost to the point of apophasis. Easily the weakest traditional argument in favour of the idea of the praemotio is that God must supply the ‘effect of being’ for each movement of the will from potency to act. For one thing, this line of reasoning simply assumes the identity of ontological causation and efficient predetermination, which is the very issue in dispute. More to the point, it divides primary causality into two distinct moments: creation and an ‘additional’ predetermining impulse of the will. This is simply banal. Obviously the act of creation is not simply the act of giving bare existence to static essences, which then must be further animated by some other kind of act. As the transcend-

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 40

4/28/2009 10:38:33 AM

Providence and Causality: On Divine Innocence

41

ent cause of being, God imparts to the creature its own dependent actuality, while also creating the potentialities to which that actuality is adequate; and, inasmuch as both act and potency are ontologically reducible to, and sustained by, their primary cause, and inasmuch as the will is always moved by its primordial inclination towards the good, it is absurd to speak of the need for something in addition to creation to ‘cause’ the movement of the spiritual will. What God gives in creation is the entire actuality of the world, in all of its secondary causes; and, as those causes possess actual being, they are able to impart actuality to potentialities proportionate to their powers. It certainly, at any rate, makes no sense to say that every particular act is a unique creation ex nihilo, of which the distinction between act and potency in creation is a purely formal condition. This would be no better than a straightforward occasionalism – which is surely not what it means to say that all causes are reducible to the first cause.25 All of this, however, merely points to the more pervasive problem bedevilling physical premotion. Champions of the concept clearly believe that it serves to protect a proper understanding of the qualitative difference between divine and human action; and yet this is precisely what it can never do. For, if the praemotio works as its defenders say it does, as the direct and infallible efficient predetermination of this rather than that act, then God and the creature most definitely operate within the same order; and, though the neo-Bañezian may claim otherwise, God acts as a rival – indeed, even in a kind of ‘negative real relation’ – to the creature (though this is, again, a rivalry God has always already won). The God of physical premotion is not fully transcendent, but merely supreme; he is not a fully primary cause, but merely a kind of ‘infinite’ secondary cause; he is not fully the causa in esse of all things, but merely the causa in fieri that reigns over all other motive forces. Rather than causing all causes as causes, he is that absolute immanent power that all other immanent causes at once dissemble and express. Thus, when the ‘classical Thomist’ attempts to explain how God can create dependent freedom, the best he seems able to manage is to talk of a direct and irresistible predetermination of the will, and then – to avoid the contradiction this entails – to attempt to reduce the question of freedom to one of mere logical contingency. But freedom lies not in an action’s logical conditions, but in the action itself; and if an action is causally necessitated or infallibly predetermined, its indeterminacy with regard to its proximate cause in no way makes it free. Of course, it may well have been that, in the late sixteenth century – due to certain drastic changes within the idea of causality – the very concept of a created freedom had become all but unintelligible. It is, at least, tempting to see the notion of physical premotion as a kind of invasion of theology by the mechanical

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 41

4/28/2009 10:38:33 AM

42

The Providence of God

philosophy. Certainly at this point in intellectual history, any concept of ontological causality could not help but seem rather vague and fabulous; and to speak of the infinite plenitude and transcendence of God’s creative act somehow no longer seemed an adequate way of affirming his omnipotence. In the age of mechanism, the only fully credible kind of causality – the cause par excellence – was efficient causality. Whereas once it might have sufficed to assert that, within the fourfold causality of finite reality, there dwelled another, mysterious, and transcendent cause, acting in an entirely different manner, it now became necessary to ground God’s transcendence in a more respectable kind of causality: efficient supremacy. And even spiritual freedom was reduced to the physical effect of a prior external force. One unavoidable result of this general impoverishment of metaphysics was that God had to be conceived as the author of evil – whether directly and explicitly, as with the Calvinists, or elliptically and self-deludingly, as with the Bañezians. And the ‘classical Thomist’ evasion of this conclusion scarcely rises to the level of the risible. Neither the theologically dubious notion that the ‘natural’ tendency of any defectible rational creature not upheld by extraordinary grace is towards sin, nor the related claim that when God permits evil he does no more than abandon the creature to its own inevitable operations, exculpates the creator of complicity in the creature’s sins. To begin with, if God’s relation to creation really is efficiently causal in the way Bañezian thought suggests, then the very distinction between nature and grace within God’s creative act is largely specious; the question becomes simply at what stage of gratuitously imparted blessings – being, will, reason, adherence in the good – he elects to halt in his creative activity towards the creature. And if he has elected to relinquish his gracious ‘restraint’ of the creature’s ‘naturally defectible’ will while yet sustaining the creature in being; and if he has eternally, infallibly, irresistibly, ‘permissively’ decreed that the creature will commit this sin and suffer this damnation, not on account of any prevision of the creature’s sins, but solely on account of his own predetermining act of reprobation; and if this irresistible ‘antecedent permissive decree’ applies even to the creature’s intention of evil (as logically it must); and if the creature is incapable of availing himself of ‘sufficient’ grace – or indeed incapable of any motion of the will at all – without being applied to its act by God’s physical premotion; then moral evil is as much God’s work as is any other act of the will.26 Only if providence is as transcendent as the ontological cause it manifests – if, that is, it is the way in which God, to whom all time is present, permits and fully ‘accounts for’ and ‘answers’ acts that he does not

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 42

4/28/2009 10:38:33 AM

Providence and Causality: On Divine Innocence

43

directly determine, but that also cannot determine him – is God’s permission of evil indeed permission. But if instead it is an irresistible predetermination of every action, then it neither preserves creaturely freedom nor wrests good from evil, but merely accomplishes the only action within creation that is truly undetermined: God’s positive intention – for the purpose of a ‘greater good’ – towards evil. In fact, it can plausibly be argued that, in a very real sense, the Bañezian God does not create a world at all, and that this species of ‘classical’ Thomism amounts only to what the greatest Catholic philosopher of the twentieth century, Erich Przywara, called ‘theopanism’.27 After all, the praemotio is not a qualitatively different act on God’s part within the creature’s act, but merely a quantitatively more coercive variety of the same kind of act. To speak of a superior and inferior agent within a single free operation is perfectly coherent, so long as the infinite analogical interval between ontological and ontic causality is observed; but to speak of a superior and inferior determining efficient cause within a single free operation is gibberish. If there were such a physical premotion, all created actions would be merely diverse modalities of God’s will. And inasmuch as God is not some distinct object or physical force set over against the world, but is the supereminent source of all being, then – apart from some kind of effective divine indetermination of the creature’s freedom in regard to specific goods – there is no ontological distinction between God and the world worth noting. It is true that agere sequitur esse, but also true that each essence is only insofar as it discloses itself in its act; and if all acts are expressions of the divine predetermination of these particular acts, then all essences are merely modes – or phenomenal masks – of the divine will. What is absent from this picture of divine causality is that ancient metaphysical vision that Przywara chose to call the ‘analogia entis’. In this ‘analogical ontology’, the infinite dependency of created being upon divine being is understood strictly in terms of the ever-greater difference between them; and, under the rule of this ontology, it is possible to affirm the real participation of the creature’s freedom in God’s free creative act without asserting any ontic continuity of kind between created and divine acts. When, however, the rule of analogy declines – as it did at the threshold of modernity – then invariably the words we attempt to apply both to creatures and to God (goodness, justice, mercy, love, freedom) dissolve into equivocity, and theology can recover its coherence only by choosing a single ‘attribute’ to treat as univocal, in order that God and world might be united again. In the early modern period, the attribute most generally preferred was ‘power’ or ‘sovereignty’ – or, more abstractly, ‘cause’.

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 43

4/28/2009 10:38:33 AM

44

The Providence of God

IV Can God really create freedom? Is his so transcendent an act that he can – without suffering any pathos – create wills capable of resisting him? Certainly no answer can be provided in the terms of the early modern debates between Bañezians and Molinists. And, anyway, the two positions are effectively the same. The logic of Molina’s position, after all, was that God – in knowing all possible worlds and states of affairs – chooses one reality to make actual and thereby infallibly destines all real actions. This meant that it is secondary causes which determine free choices, but also (in consequence) that God’s election of one world out of an infinity of incompossible alternatives is an act of divine predetermination; thus, though this divine act of election might in one sense be portrayed as a passive divine ‘response’ to the creature, in another, more important sense it must be recognized as an act of absolute determining power. Bañez, being more rigorous, denied that there was any such response; but for him, still, God’s ‘vertical’ predetermination of the creature’s ‘free’ act nevertheless aborts all other possible courses of action. In either case, God elects this world out of an infinity of possibilities and thereby infallibly decrees what shall be. Molina was perhaps the more amiable figure of the two, insofar as he hoped to preserve some sense of the innocence of God; but that was an impossible ambition given the narrowly mechanistic concepts available in his time. On either side of the debate, theologians were attempting to remedy the ontological deficiency of their theory by way of an ontic supplement: either praemotio physica (a solution conceived from the perspective of act) or scientia media (a solution conceived from the perspective of potency). Of course, the very notion of God choosing among possible worlds – especially if, as the classical Thomist position holds, there is by definition no ‘best’ world among them – is already haunted by the spectre of divine voluntarism, an arbitrariness that would make God that much more complicit in each particular evil within creation. But, more importantly, it is a view of creation utterly uninformed by revelation. At the very least, one must start from the assumption that this world – as the world that belongs to the event of Christ – is the world (fallen or unfallen) in which God most fully reveals himself; and, unless one thinks Christ was merely an avatar of God, and that his human identity was somehow accidental to his divine identity, one must then also grant that the world to which the human identity of Christ naturally belongs is one uniquely and eternally fitted to that revelation. Creation is not simply a multifarious demonstration of God’s power and goodness, which might equally well be expressed by some other

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 44

4/28/2009 10:38:34 AM

Providence and Causality: On Divine Innocence

45

contingent cosmic order, but is the event within God’s Logos of beings uniquely – and appropriately – called to union with him. And within this world – within God’s manifestation of himself in the Son – freedom necessarily exists, as the way by which created being can be assumed into the eternal love of the Trinity. To say, moreover, that this freedom is not causally predetermined by God does not imply that it is somehow ‘absolute’ or that it occupies a region independent of God’s power (as one strain of neo-Bañezian apologetics contends). It is in his power to create such autonomy that God’s omnipotence is most abundantly revealed; for everything therein comes from him: the real being of agent, act and potency, the primordial movement of the soul towards the good,28 the natural law inscribed in the creature’s intellect and will, the sustained permission of finite autonomy; even the indetermination of the creature’s freedom is an utterly dependent and unmerited participation in the mystery of God’s infinite freedom; and, in his eternal presence to all of time, God never ceases to exercise his providential care or to make all free acts the occasions of the greater good he intends in creating. The purpose of created autonomy is, as Maximus the Confessor says, its ultimate surrender in love to God, whereby alone rational nature finds its true fulfilment.29 But, whereas in God perfect freedom and ‘theonomy’ coincide in the infinite simplicity of his essence, in us the free movement of the will towards God is one that passes from potency to act, and as such is dynamic and synthetic in form. Thus God works within the participated autonomy of the creature as an act of boundless freedom, a sort of immanent transcendence, an echo within the soul of that divine abyss of love that calls all things to itself, ever setting the soul free to work out her salvation in fear and trembling. And, in the end, it is no more contradictory to say that God can create – out of the infinite well-spring of his own freedom – dependent freedoms that he does not determine, than it is to say that he can create – out of the infinite wellspring of his being – dependent beings that are genuinely somehow other than God. In neither case, however, is it possible to describe the ‘mechanism’ by which he does this. This aporia is simply inseparable from the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo – which, no matter how we may attempt to translate it into causal terms we can understand, remains forever imponderable. There is no process by which creation happens, no intermediate operation or tertium quid between God and what he calls into being. As for those who fear that, in knowing actions he does not predetermine, God proves susceptible of pathos, one can only exhort them always to consider the logic of transcendence. God knows in creating, which is an action simply beyond the realm of the determined and the determining. Nothing the creature

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 45

4/28/2009 10:38:34 AM

46

The Providence of God

does exceeds those potentialities God has created, or draws upon any actuality but that which God imparts, or escapes God’s eternal knowledge of the world of Christ. Just as – according to Thomas – God can know evil by way of his positive act of the good, as a privation thereof,30 even so can he know the free transgressions of his creatures by way of the good acts he positively wills through the freedom of the rational souls he creates. Just as the incarnate Logos really suffers torment and death not through a passive modification of his nature, imposed by some exterior force, but by a free act, so God can ‘suffer’ the perfect knowledge of the free acts of his creatures not as a passive reaction to some objective force set over against himself, but as the free, transcendent act of giving being to the world of Christ – an act to whose sufficiency there need attach no mediating ‘premotion’ to assure its omnipotence. And that eternal act of knowledge is entirely convertible with God’s free intention to reveal himself in Christ.

V This entire issue, of course, becomes far less involved if one does not presume real differentiations within God’s intention towards his creatures. For, surely, scripture is quite explicit on this point: God positively ‘wills’ the salvation of ‘all human beings’ (1 Tim. 2.4). That is, he does not merely generically desire that salvation, or formally allow it as a logical possibility, or will it antecedently but not consequently, or (most ridiculous of all) enable it ‘sufficiently’ but not ‘efficaciously’. If God were really to supply saving grace sufficient for all, but to refuse to supply most persons with the necessary natural means of attaining that grace, it would mean that God does not will the salvation of all. If God’s will to save is truly universal, as the epistle proclaims, one simply cannot start from the assumption that God causes some to rise while willingly permitting others to fall; even if one dreads the spectre of universalism, one can at most affirm that God causes all to rise, and permits all to fall, and imparts to all – out of his own abyssal freedom – the ability to consent to or to resist the grace he extends, while providentially ordering all things according to his universal will to salvation. Or, rather, perhaps one should say that God causes all to rise, but the nature of that cause necessarily involves a permission of the will. God’s good will and his permission of evil, then, are simply two aspects of a single creative act, one that does not differ in intention from soul to soul: God’s one vocation of all rational creation to a free union in love with himself; his one gracious permission that spiritual freedom in some way determine itself in relation to the eternal good towards which it is irresisti-

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 46

4/28/2009 10:38:34 AM

Providence and Causality: On Divine Innocence

47

bly drawn; his one gift of sufficient aid, both in conferring saving grace on all and in sustaining human nature in its power to respond; his one refusal to coerce the will as some kind of determining cause; his one providence; his one upholding of all in being. Indeed, in this sense it almost makes sense to speak of God’s infallible permissive decree for his creatures ante praevisa merita: in God’s one act of self-outpouring love, he decrees that the creature will always be moved by its primordial impulse towards the good, and will always act under permission towards various ends; and that permission infallibly sets the creature free – within its irresistible natural impulse towards the good – to whatever end the creature elects. God and the creature do indeed act within utterly different orders. This double movement of the will is what Maximus the Confessor describes as the relation between the ‘natural’ and ‘gnomic’ wills within us.31 The former is that dynamic orientation towards the infinite goodness of God that is the source of all rational life and of all desire within us; the latter is that deliberative power by which we obey or defy the deep promptings of our nature and the rule of the final good beyond us. It is the movement of the natural will towards God, moreover, whose primordial motion allows the gnomic will its liberty and its power of assent to or rejection of God. In the interval between these two movements – both of which are rational – the rational soul becomes who God intends her to be or, through apostasy from her own nature, fabricates a distance between herself and God that is nothing less than the distance of dereliction. For, whatever we do, the desire of our natural will for God will be consummated; it will return to God, whether the gnomic will consents or not, and will be glorified with that glory the Son shares with the Father from eternity. And, if the gnomic will within us has not surrendered to its natural supernatural end, our own glorified nature becomes hell to us, that holy thing we cannot touch. Rejection of God becomes estrangement from ourselves, the Kingdom of God within us becomes our exile, and the transfiguring glory of God within us – through our refusal to submit to love – becomes the unnatural experience of reprobation.32 God fashions all rational natures for free union with himself, and all of creation as the deathless vessel of his eternal glory. To this end, he wills that the dependent freedom of the creature be joined to his absolute freedom; but an indispensable condition of what he wills is the real power of the creature’s deliberative will to resist the irresistible work of grace. And God both wills the ultimate good of all things and accomplishes that good, and knows the good and evil acts of his creatures, and reacts to neither. This is the true sublimity of divine apatheia: an infinite innocence that wills to the last the glorification of the creature, in the depths of its nature, and that never ceases to

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 47

4/28/2009 10:38:35 AM

48

The Providence of God

sustain the rational will in its power to seek its end either in God or in itself. One reason, I would think, for preferring this vision of God’s will for the creature to the Bañezian – quite apart from its closer conformity to revelation – is the not insignificant concern that the God described by the latter happens to be evil. This seems to me as if it should be a problem. I hasten to add, moreover, that I do not think I am guilty, in using the word ‘evil’, of the querulous vessel’s impertinent reproaches of its maker. For one thing, the Bañezian God is a monstrous and depraved fantasy, who has no real being and whom consequently it is impossible to blaspheme; for another, the use of the word ‘evil’ here is nothing more than an exercise in sober precision. In the ‘classical Thomist’ understanding of God, the word ‘good’ has been rendered utterly equivocal between creatures and God; it has become simply a metaphysical name for the divine essence, to which no moral analogy attaches, and so – as far as common usage is concerned – has been rendered vacuous. If, though, God acts as the Bañezian position claims, and if indeed his ‘justice’ is expressed in his arbitrary decision to inflict eternal torment on creatures whom he has purposely crafted to be vessels of his eternal wrath, then it is possible to construct an analogia mali between human cruelty and God’s magnificent ‘transcendence’ of the difference between good and evil, without doing the least violence to language or reason. And, as for the ancient argument that such actions constitute no injustice on God’s part, because the creature cannot merit grace, this should be dismissed as the fatuous non sequitur it has always been. The issue has never been one of merit – for, indeed, the creature ‘merits’ nothing at all, not even its existence; the issue is, rather, the moral nature of God, as revealed in his acts towards those he creates. And the God of this theology is merely an infinite engine of pure, self-expressive, amoral power, who creates untold multitudes for everlasting misery, and whom – were he really to exist – it would be an act of supreme condescension on our parts to view with contempt. No less distasteful – but even less intellectually respectable – is the equally ancient argument that God requires the dereliction of the reprobate in order to make his ‘goodness’ more fully known, through a display of both his justice and his mercy. If ever there were a purely ad hoc attempt to justify a morally incoherent position, this is it. It is sheer nonsense to suggest that anything meaningfully called ‘goodness’ could be revealed in God’s wilful, eternal and predetermining reprobation of souls to endless suffering, simply as ‘demonstration cases’, so to speak. The full nature of God’s justice was revealed on the cross, where God took the penalty of sin upon himself so that he might offer forgiveness freely to all. The image of

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 48

4/28/2009 10:38:35 AM

Providence and Causality: On Divine Innocence

49

beatitude that this entire line of reasoning summons up is at best coarsely mythological: nothing could be cruder than the notion that final knowledge of God is like knowledge of some external object set before the intellect, which needs to be grasped by an extrinsic, calculative cognition of its ‘attributes’, and by an accumulation of ‘information’ about the divine essence, and by edifying displays of God’s power to torture and destroy. The beauty and variety of creation declares God’s glory, but God, being infinite, could never be an extrinsic ‘object’ for the finite mind. True knowledge of God comes, rather, through an immediate and deifying communication of divine goodness to the created intellect, by which the created soul is in some way admitted into a remote, created participation in God’s knowledge of himself. And that goodness – since all real possibility is supereminently present in it – is sufficient to communicate itself without the ‘clarifying’ supplement of evil; even if the finite mind cannot grasp God’s goodness in its infinite simplicity, the infinite diversity of goods of which the divine essence is capable nowhere requires the shadow of evil to make the lineaments of those goods more evident.33 And created reason, if it is indeed naturally fitted to the good, would suffer no deficiency of knowledge in being ‘deprived’ of the vision of damnation – which, as I have argued above, is nothing but an internal and utterly invisible absurdity, the ‘impossible’ experience of exile in the very midst of an infinite glory. Simply said, if God required evil to accomplish his good ends – the revelation of his nature to finite minds – then not only would evil possess a real existence over against the good, but God himself would be dependent upon evil: to the point of it constituting a dimension of his identity (even if only as a ‘contrast’). And one cannot circumvent this difficulty by saying that the necessity involved applies only to finite creatures and not to God in himself; for if God needs the supplement of evil to accomplish any good he intends – even a contingent good – then he is dependent upon evil in an absolute sense. There would be goods of which the good as such is impotent apart from evil’s ‘contribution’. And, if in any way evil is necessary to define or increase knowledge of the good, then the good is not ontological – is not, that is, convertible with real being itself – but is at most an evaluation. I should note, however, that the defects within the Bañezian position are the result not of too strict a fidelity to the principle of divine impassibility, but of an absolute betrayal of that principle: one that robs it of its true meaning, and thereby reduces God to a being among lesser beings, a force among lesser forces, whose infinite greatness is rendered possible only by the absolute passivity of finite reality before his absolute supremacy. It is the failure to understand omnipotence as transcendence that renders every

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 49

4/28/2009 10:38:35 AM

50

The Providence of God

attempt to speak coherently of God’s innocence futile. It is the failure to place divine causality altogether beyond the finite economy of created causes that produces a God who is merely beyond good and evil.

VI The great irony of the enthusiasm that a few reactionary Catholic scholars today harbour for Bañezian or ‘classical’ Thomism is their curious belief that such a theology offers a solution to the pathologies of modernity – voluntarism, antinomianism, atheism, disregard of ‘natural law’, nihilism (the usual catalogue). Nothing could be farther from the truth. Far from constituting an alternative to the intellectual ethos of modernity, Baroque Thomism is the most quintessentially modern theology imaginable. One cannot defeat the pathogens of human voluntarism by retreating to what is in effect a limitless divine voluntarism. And the mere formal assertion by the Bañezian party that, in their system, God’s will follows his intellect – which is the very opposite of the voluntarist view – simply bears no scrutiny. No less than in any of his other variants – Lutheran, Calvinist or Jansenist, for example – the modern God of the Bañezians is one whose will is defined by an ultimate spontaneity, and a quite insidious arbitrariness. A God whose predestining and reprobative determinations are both utterly pure of prevision and irresistible – who creates a world that bears no more proper relation to his nature than any among an infinite number of other possible worlds, who requires a justice of his creatures that he himself does not exhibit, who condemns whom he chooses to condemn, and who is himself an efficient cause of the sinful actions he punishes – is a God whose will is sheer power, not love, and certainly not governed by reason. This is the God of early modernity in his full majesty: the God who either determines or is determined, and who therefore must absolutely determine all things – a pure abyss of sovereignty justifying itself through its own exercise. He may be a God of eternal law, but behind his legislations lies a more original lawlessness. He is merely the God of the higher nihilism, and to turn in desperation to his comforting embrace is merely to return to the dawn of a history that we would do better to recall and to repudiate in its entirety. Voluntarism, after all, began as a doctrine regarding God, and only gradually (if inevitably) migrated to the human subject. The God of absolute will who was born in the late Middle Ages had by the late sixteenth century so successfully usurped the place of the true God that few theologians could recognize him for the imposter he was. And the piety he inspired was, in some measure, a kind of blasphemous piety: a ser-

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 50

4/28/2009 10:38:35 AM

Providence and Causality: On Divine Innocence

51

vile and fatalistic adoration of boundless power masquerading as a love of righteousness. More importantly, this theology – through the miraculous technology of the printing press – entered into common Christian consciousness as the theology of previous ages never could, and in so doing provided Western humanity at once both with a new model of freedom and with a God whom it would be necessary, in the fullness of time, to kill. It was from this God that we first learned to think of freedom as a perfect spontaneity of the will, and from him we learned the irreducible prerogatives that accrue to all sovereign power, whether that of the absolute monarch, or that of the nation-state, or that of the individual. But, if this is indeed what freedom is, and God’s is the supreme instance of such freedom, then he is not – as he was in ages past – the transcendent good who sets the created will free to realize its nature in its ultimate end, but is merely the one intolerable rival to every other freedom, who therefore invites creatures to rebel against him and to attempt to steal fire from heaven. If this is God, then Feuerbach and Nietzsche were both perfectly correct to see his exaltation as an impoverishment and abasement of the human at the hands of a celestial despot. For such freedom – such pure arbitrium – must always enter into a contest of wills; it could never exist within a peaceful order of analogical participation, in which one freedom could draw its being from a higher freedom. Freedom of this sort is one and indivisible, and has no source but itself. So terrible, surely, was the burden that this cruel predestining God laid upon the conscience of believers that it could not be borne indefinitely. It was this God who, having first deprived us of any true knowledge of the transcendent good, died for modern culture, and left us to believe that the true God had perished. The explicit nihilism of late modernity is not even really a rejection of the modern God; it is merely the inevitable result of his presence in history, and of the implicit nihilism of the theology that invented him. Indeed, worship of this god is the first and most inexcusable nihilism, for it can have no real motives other than craven obsequiousness or sadistic delight. Modern atheism is merely the consummation of the forgetfulness of the transcendent God that this theology made perfect. Moreover, it may be that, in an age in which the only choice available to human thought was between faith in the modern God of pure sovereignty and simple unbelief, the latter was the holier – the more Christian – path. For, at some level, faith in the God of absolute will always required a certain extirpation of conscience from the soul, or at least its pacification; and so perhaps it is better that the natural longing of each soul for God – even if only in the reduced form of moral alarm, or an inchoate impulse towards natural goodness, or of a longing for a deus ignotus – refuse to surrender its

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 51

4/28/2009 10:38:36 AM

The Providence of God

52

worship to a god so unworthy of adoration. Perhaps it was the last living trace of Christian conscience in Western men and women that moved them – like the Christian ‘atheists’ of the first few centuries of the Church – to reject any God but a God of infinite love. Late modernity might even be thought of as a time of purgatorial probation, a harsh but necessary hygiene of the spirit, by enduring which we might once again be made able to lift up our minds to the truly transcendent, eternally absolved of all evil, in whom there is no darkness at all. I began with Heidegger and shall end with him as well. Speaking at one point of how God enters into philosophy – specifically, modern metaphysics, which understands ‘being’ solely as the causal ground of beings – Heidegger writes: [der] Grund selbst aus dem von ihm Begründeten her der ihm gemäßen Begründung, d.h. der Verursachung durch die ursprünglichste Sache bedarf. Dies ist die Ursache als die Causa sui. So lautet der sachgerechte Name für den Gott in der Philosophie. Zu diesem Gott kann der Mensch weder beten, noch kann er ihm opfern. Vor der Causa sui kann der Mensch weder aus Scheu ins Knie fallen, noch kann er vor diesem Gott musizieren und tanzen. Demgemäß ist das gott-lose Denken, das den Gott der Philosophie, den Gott als Causa sui preisgeben muß, dem göttlichen Gott vielleicht näher. Dies sagt hier: Es ist freier für ihn, als es die Onto-Theo-Logik wahrheben möchte.34

Such, at least, is Heidegger’s verdict upon the god of ‘onto-theo-logy’, the god of the metaphysics of the ‘double founding’ – the grounding of beings in being and of being in a supreme being – which reduces all of reality (including divine reality) to a closed totality, an economy of causal power, from which the mystery of being has been fully exorcized. I confess that, in more than twenty years of reading Heidegger, I have never before allowed myself to feel the full force of these words: ‘freier für ihn’. There are some things that I simply have not cared to be told by Heidegger – whereof I here repent. One need not accept all of Heidegger’s history of metaphysics, or despair as he did of the possibility of speaking analogically of God, to value his thought as a solvent of the decadent traditions of early modern metaphysics. When all that is high and holy in God has been forgotten, and God has been reduced to sheer irresistible causal power, the old names for God have lost their true meaning, and the death of God has already been accomplished, even if we have not yet consciously ceased to believe. When atheism becomes explicit, however, it also becomes possible to recognize the logic that informs it, to trace it back to its remoter origins, perhaps even to begin to reverse its effects. It may be that a certain grace operates

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 52

4/28/2009 10:38:36 AM

Providence and Causality: On Divine Innocence

53

through disbelief: perhaps we shall be ready again to receive the truly ‘divine God’ (as Heidegger phrases it) only when certain gods of our own making have vanished. This is the moment (as Heidegger also says) of highest risk, a moment in which an absolute nihilism threatens; but it is also then a moment in which it may become possible once again to recall the God who is beyond every nihilism. It is certainly not a moment for lamentation or misguided nostalgias. In the words of Meister Eckhart, ‘I pray that God deliver me from god.’35 It is principally the god of modernity – the god of pure sovereignty, the voluntarist god of ‘permissive decrees’ and the praemotio physica – who has died for modern humanity, and perhaps theology has no nobler calling for now than to see that he remains dead, and that every attempt to revive him is thwarted: in the hope that, in becoming willing accomplices in his death, Christians may help to prepare their world for the return of the true God revealed in Christ, in all the mystery of his transcendent and provident love.

Notes 1 Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’, in Die Technik und die Kehre, 7th edition (Stuttgart: Verlag Günther Neske, 1988), 26. [Thus, when all that comes to presence presents itself in the light of the connection between cause and effect, even God – as far as representation is concerned – can lose all that is high and holy, the very mysteriousness of his distance. God, seen in the light of causality, can sink to the level of a cause, to the level of the causa efficiens. Even in theology, then, he is thus transformed into the God of the philosophers, which is to say, of those who define the unhidden and the hidden according to the causality of making, without ever also considering the essential origin of this causality.] 2 This is far and away the most tiresome refrain in his ‘classic’ work on predestination (a book that often seems to consist almost exclusively in tiresome refrains). See Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Predestination: The Meaning of Predestination in Scripture and the Church, trans. Dom Bede Rose (St. Louis: B. Harder Book, 1939). 3 Maximus the Confessor, Chapters on Love, III.65. 4 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977), III, 23, 8. 5 Being merely a selective reader of Thomas, whose interest in Thomas’s thought begins and ends with his metaphysics of esse and of actus, I lack the authority necessary to pronounce upon the degree to which Bañez or the larger Baroque commentary tradition ‘got Thomas right’ on this matter. I tend to think that it was a vanishingly small degree, however, and find the expositions of a number of scholars of Thomas entirely persuasive on this score. The now classic ‘refutation’ of the older reading of Thomas on divine causality is, of course, Bernard Lonergan’s Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 53

4/28/2009 10:38:36 AM

The Providence of God

54

6

7 8 9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17

St Thomas Aquinas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). If nothing else, Lonergan demonstrates the sheer anachronism of reading Thomas’s texts through the filter of a later and alien concept of causality. In fact, most of what one needs to know about the concept – if one is not interested in its precise history – can be extracted from certain recent attempts to rehabilitate the Baroque Thomist position. Two articles that appeared in 2006, side by side in a single issue of the English language version of Nova et Vetera, are particularly convenient in this regard: Thomas M. Osborne, Jr, ‘Thomist Premotion and Contemporary Philosophy of Religion’, Nova et Vetera 4:3 (2006), 607–31; Steven A. Long, ‘Providence, Freedom, and Natural Law’, Nova et Vetera 4:3 (2006), 557–605. Both essays are quite accurate as regards the fundamental ideas and concerns of the tradition they defend, as far as I can tell from my sporadic readings in classical Thomism, and most of the defects in their arguments are directly attributable to that tradition. Neither essay makes a convincing case for the Baroque position, but both in their different ways serve, if nothing else, to clarify the failings of that position. Bañez himself – for all his considerable limitations as a theologian or philosopher – was an exceedingly clear and careful writer and is, in that respect, preferable to many of his later expositors; but I – in my admittedly limited survey of his works – have failed to find a single comprehensive summary of his understanding of the praemotio physica that is easily extractable from its context. Perhaps the best treatment of the theme in the Dominican literature written during the early disputes with the Molinists is that of Diego Alvarez in his De auxiliis gratiae et humani arbitrii viribus (Rome, 1610); see especially disps 28 and 83. The most thorough later defence of the position can be found in A. M. Dummermuth, Defensio doctrinae S. Thomae Aq. de praemotione physica (Paris, 1895) – a title that somewhat obscures the not insignificant point that Thomas himself never anywhere enunciates a doctrine of praemotio physica. See also Dummermuth’s S. Thomas et doctrina praemotionis physicae (Paris, 1886). See Thomas de Lemos, Acta omnia congregationum et disputationum . . . de auxiliis divinae gratiae (Louvain, 1702), 1065. Domingo Bañez, Commentaria in Summa Th. S. Thomae, part I (Salamanca, 1584), I, q. 14, art. 13. See Alvarez, De auxiliis, disp. 24: 15. Ibid., disp. 83: 9. Charles René Billuart, Summa summae S. Thomae sive compendium theologiae (Liège, 1754), Tractatus de Deo et eius attributis, dissertatio VIII, art. 5. Alvarez, De auxiliis, disp. 19: 7. See ‘Thomist Premotion and Contemporary Philosophy of Religion’, 608–13; and Steven A. Long, ‘Providence, Freedom, and Natural Law’, 569, 572, 584, 588, 594, 595, etc. Billuart, Summa summae: de Deo, dissertatio VIII, art. 4. See Alvarez, De auxiliis, disp. 22: 19. Ibid., disp. 22: 39. See ibid., disp. 28; see also Jean Baptiste Gonet, Clypeus theologiae thomisticae contra novos eius impugnatores (Bordeaux, 1659–69), disp. 11: 5. See Thomas M. Osborne, Jr, ‘Thomist Premotion and Contemporary Philosophy of Religion’, 611–19, 623–9, 630; see especially 625: ‘If God physically

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 54

4/28/2009 10:38:37 AM

Providence and Causality: On Divine Innocence

18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34

55

predetermined the will through intermediate causes, then in Thomist language such motion would not be predetermination but determination, and consequently incompatible with free choice.’ Alvarez, De auxiliis, disp. 122: 16. Long is especially – and especially crudely – insistent upon this point: Steven A. Long, ‘Providence, Freedom, and Natural Law’, 558, 559, 562, 564, 591, 601, 603, etc. See also Osborne, ‘Thomist Premotion and Contemporary Philosophy of Religion’, 611, 627. John Paul Nazarius, Commentaria et controversiae in Summa Th. S. Thomae, 1st part (Bologna, 1620), I, q. 22, art. 4. Bañez, Commentaria in Summa Th., I, q. 23, art. 3, d. 2, c. 2. See de Lemos, Acta, 1065. Gonet, Clypeus, disp. 9: 5; Osborne 612, 626; Long, 559, 562–3, 567, 569, 573, etc. Alvarez, De auxiliis, disp. 92: 6. See Long, ‘Providence, Freedom, and Natural Law’, 572–7. For an especially enlightening treatment of the issue of God’s causation of freedom as occurring within the act of creation, see David B. Burrell, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993); see especially 95–139. See Jacques Maritain, God and the Permission of Evil, trans. Joseph W. Evans (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1966), 30–1: ‘In the theory of the antecedent permissive decrees, God, under the relation of efficiency, is not the cause, not even (that which I do not concede) the indirect cause, of moral evil. But he is the one primarily responsible for its presence here on earth. It is He who has invented it in the drama or novel of which He is the author. He refuses His efficacious grace to a creature because it has already failed culpably, but this culpable failure occurred only in virtue of the permissive decree which preceded it. God manages to be nowise the cause of evil, while seeing to it that evil occurs infallibly. The antecedent permissive decrees, be they presented by the most saintly of theologians – I cannot see in them, taken in themselves, anything but an insult to the absolute innocence of God.’ See Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysik: Ur-Struktur und All-Rhythmus (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1962), 70–8, 128–35, 247–301. See Shanley, ‘Divine Causation and Human Freedom in Aquinas’, 112–14. See Maximus, Ambiguum 7, PG 91:107B. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.14, a.10. See, for instance, Maximus, Opusculum 14, PG 91:153A–B. See Maximus, Quaestiones ad Thalassium 59, PG 90:609A–B. Thomas’s notorious argument to the contrary, in Summa Theologiae, I, q.23, a.5, ad 3, is unobjectionable in suggesting that it is through the variety of created goods that finite minds conceive some knowledge of the plenitude of God’s goodness; but, in trying to integrate the theology of predilective predestination ante praevisa merita into this vision of things, he attempts to import an impossible alloy into his reasoning. Indeed, the entirety of I, q. 23, inasmuch as it merely attempts to justify a late Augustinian reading of Paul that is objectively wrong, can largely be ignored as a set of forced answers to false questions. Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Onto-Theo-Logische Verfassung der Metaphysik’, in Identität und Differenz, 10th edition (Stuttgart: Verlag Günther Neske, 1996),

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 55

4/28/2009 10:38:37 AM

56

The Providence of God

64–5. [. . . (the) ground itself must in due measure be grounded: that is, must be caused by the most primordially causative thing. This is the cause understood as causa sui. This is how the name of God appropriate to philosophy is inscribed. To this god can man neither pray nor make offering. Neither can man fall to his knees in awe before the causa sui, nor before this god can he make music and dance. Perhaps, then, that godless thinking that must abandon the god of philosophy – God, that is, understood as causa sui – is nearer to the divine God. That is to say, it is freer for him than onto-theo-logy would wish to grant.] 35 Meister Eckhart, Sermon 52: ‘Beati pauperes spiritu.’

FMurphy_02_Finals.indd 56

4/28/2009 10:38:37 AM

Chapter 3

Providence in 1 Samuel Francesca Aran Murphy

I. The Patristic and Medieval Church was Not Especially Interested in 1 Samuel As Joyce Grenville picks up a tome and says to her pupils, ‘Shakespeare! This is bound to be full of good quotations’, so one might open 1 Samuel expecting to find lots of examples of providential events. It begins with Hannah’s prayer for a son. After Samuel is born to her and handed over to Eli the priests at Shiloh, prophecies of doom on the house of Eli are broadcast. The Philistines attack Shiloh, Eli’s sons are killed defending the Ark, and Eli dies of grief. The Ark is kidnapped and taken to Philistia, where it has a wild time of it, firing deadly bum warts at all who affront its majesty, carted from Ashdod to Gath, until it is repatriated to Kirjathjirim. Samuel receives a delegation asking that he appoint a king, God tells him to comply, and Saul sleepwalks by remote control to the seerer’s house, where he is privately anointed. After a Judge-type military success against the odds, Saul is publically acclaimed king. But then, surrounded by Philistine armies which are hyped up like an eschatological peril, like the hosts of Mordor, King Saul fails to rely on Samuel’s instructions: the Wizard prophecies that the kingship will be removed from his house. At Michmass Pass, his son Jonathan proves himself a biblical epic hero. Saul is ordered to fight the Amalekites, but fails, again, to follow the prescriptions for warfare as laid down by God through his prophet Samuel, and the kingship is stripped from Saul and his heirs. David is secretly anointed king by Samuel: David slays Goliath, bonds with Jonathan, and marries Saul’s daughter Michal. Smitten with an ‘evil spirit’ sent to him by God, Saul tries to get David killed by devious and by overt means. After many lucky ‘escapes with comic effects’, David goes for protection to the king of Gath, where he avoids death yet again by feigning madness. David’s ‘deceptions . . . unwittingly unleash terrible consequences . . . and yet in the end turn to the advantage of this eternally happy go lucky man’: David is hiding in a cave at Engedi, when Saul happens by: David stands aside from this opportunity to seize the kingship. There follows the ‘burlesque interlude with Nabal (i.e. ‘fool’) and the sly Abigail, whom David in the end marries along with her considerable dowry’,1 and a foothold in Judah.

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 57

4/28/2009 10:38:20 AM

58

The Providence of God

Abigail and Nabal are like the wise wife and the fool in the Old Testament ‘Wisdom’ tradition. These representatives of the Wisdom tradition stand for principles of cause and effect and of retribution, good for good and evil for evil.2 By asking David, when God has ‘appointed thee ruler over Israel . . . [and] the LORD shall have dealt well with my lord, then remember thine handmaid’ (1 Sam. 25.3–31), Abigail stays David’s hand against her husband. Having been reminded of his destiny, when David ‘chances’ upon Saul asleep in the wilderness of Zuph, David extravagantly refuses the chance to spear his rival. David returns to Gath, takes the Philistine’s shilling, and is detailed to the South when the Philistine divisions launch an attack on Saul’s armies. David is thus absent when Saul and his sons die at Gilboa. Most of this may strike us as a vivid depiction of the hand of divine providence. But 1 Samuel did not inspire the imaginations of the Patristic and Medieval commentators. In The City of God, Augustine finds just 4 of the 31 chapters in 1 Samuel worthy of comment: Hannah’s prayer of thanksgiving for her child, the overthrow of the house of Eli, the substitution of David for Saul, and David’s refusal to kill Saul, which he sees as evincing his respect for the ‘kingdom’ of Christ. Augustine tells us that he skips most of 1 Samuel because the greater part of it is just there for the sake of the historical record. It might be surprising to find Augustine concurring with Fisher in thinking of history as one fact after another, but he says plainly in the City of God that: ‘it is certainly a complete mistake to suppose that no narrative of events in this type of literature has any significance beyond the purely historical record; but it is equally rash to maintain that every single statement in those books is a complex of allegorical meanings.’3 When Augustine says ‘allegorical’, he means prophetical – prophesying Christ. Augustine states that, ‘a careful examination . . . with the help of God’s spirit’ of the ‘scriptural narrative of the succession of kings and their achievements . . . reveals it to be . . . no[t] less concerned . . . with foretelling the future than with recording the past’.4 Augustine cannot make the stretch of finding a prophecy of Christ or the Church in 27 of the stories in 1 Samuel. For Augustine, it is as a ‘foretelling’ of Christ or the Church that an Old Testament event can become the crossroads of historical fact and allegorical meaning, and thus overtly symbolize divine providence. On this reading, most of David’s fantastic good fortune doesn’t count as symbolically providential: David climbing out of Michal’s window in the nick of time, David cutting out and running to Gath, David opportunely detailed by the king of Gath to go South rather than North, and his absence from Jonathan’s deathbed, are not signposts to anywhere important, for the medieval exegetes.

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 58

4/28/2009 10:38:20 AM

Providence in 1 Samuel

59

Everyone ‘knows’ that David was perceived by all medieval exegetes as a prototype of Christ. This is an optical illusion, so far as exegesis of 1 Samuel is concerned. Origen had said, ‘It is the Savior himself who sings on the harp of David’,5 and it was the Psalms, not 1 and 2 Samuel upon which the Fathers and the medievals lavished their exegetical devotions. With the exception of Bede, most of the Fathers and Medievals didn’t comment on 1 Samuel because the means by which the Old Testament lived in the historical memory of the medieval Church was the liturgy, and the books of the Kingdoms, from Joshua to 2 Samuel, were liturgical marginalia. As one scholar says, The Psalms of David are important in the liturgy of the Roman Church; David the King is not. When David does appear in the liturgical drama, he appears as a Prophet rather than as a King; he speaks as a Psalmist rather than as a warrior.6

The four episodes in 1 Samuel mentioned in The City of God are not taken to symbolize anything political: for Augustine, the extinguishing of Eli’s priesthood, Saul’s inviolable anointing, and the handing over of Saul’s kingship to David are symbolic not of kingship but of the Christian priesthood. Some may see in this investiture of the Old Testament with the meaning of the New Testament, as divesting the Old Testament of its original and rightful sense. But crowning the Old Testament with the New is a consequence of treating 1 Samuel as a historical record. As an historical document, 1 Samuel deals with what is past: however so providential they were, the events of David’s reign will never happen again. This is the historically minded, chronicler’s way of looking at it. As Henri de Lubac says, in defence of Origen’s exegetical method, it ‘takes the times into account. . . . The Jewish Bible is for him the Old Testament: not precisely as what it was – as if we imagined ourselves contemporaries of Moses or David – but as what it has become since the coming of Christ and because of that coming. . . . Its literal sense, as real as it might be, has value only for a past that is no more, which we no longer have the right to revive. It is an outdated sense.’7 With their assimilation of the Old Testament history into the Psalms, the medieval Christians deflected much providential history into the liturgy. It may seem self-centred of them so to treat the Old Testament, but, in fact, as history, the events of David’s life have come and gone, never to return. And yet, the lack of attention to the historical books of the Old Testament indicates a lack of resonance with their peculiar drama, the freedom of God and human beings as demonstrated in the rise and fall of Israel’s kings. This, too, is providential, but the medievals make little of

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 59

4/28/2009 10:38:21 AM

60

The Providence of God

it. We notice that 1 Samuel is pure theatre, because it’s all dialogue: the medievals did not. Our heightened historical consciousness makes us aware of the analogies of the ethos of 1 Samuel to the early Wisdom literature, with its idea of God working through natural causes and effects as well as miracles. We also see the analogies of 1 Samuel to Herodotus’s histories and to Aeschylus’ depiction of the repulsion of the invading Persians. Like Aeschylus, and like William Shakespeare, the author of 1 Samuel intuited that ‘ghosts, real or imagined, are good theater’:8 but the witch of Endor scene, with Samuel’s ghostly declamation of the decision of providence on the house of Saul, was never staged in medieval times. We may think that David’s near-miss in avoiding the frontline of the Philistine assault on Israel that results in Jonathan’s death is providential, because it is dramatic. It didn’t strike the medievals like that.

II. Providence as Circular (Fortune) There persists a minor scholarly myth that medieval kings and Emperors were commonly regarded as ‘David’ figures. If you follow out the assertions that medieval exegetes believed their monarchs were David figures, you will run either into the cul de sac of no evidence, or into a footnote to Ernst Kantorowicz, who reconstructed an entire political theology on the basis of a couple of antiphons comparing Charlemagne to David.9 This produces the mirage of a theology in which all medieval kings were treated as providential figures like David. The lack of evidence doesn’t shake our confidence that this theology existed, perhaps because Shakespeare’s history plays have made it so imaginatively present to our minds. But neither Anselm nor Bonaventure nor Aquinas were sufficiently interested in the ‘succession of the Israelite kings’ to comment on 1 Samuel. There were, nonetheless, medieval court poets who wrote Davidic antiphons about Charlemagne. By comparison with the great medieval theologians, they were anachronistic in their conception of divine providence. The handful of sycophantic hymn-writers who called Charlemagne a ‘novus David’ had less of a grip on an event’s historicity, than those who left 1 Samuel aside because it deals with past and not present time. In the seventeenth century, with England torn between Royalist high Anglicans and Puritans, each side wrote as if history were repeating itself; as if Saul versus David could cycle round again in Charles I versus Cromwell. Royalist sermons found in David’s refusal to raise his hand against Saul a respect for monarchy as such; Puritans discovered a warrant

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 60

4/28/2009 10:38:21 AM

Providence in 1 Samuel

61

for civil war in Saul’s replacement by David.10 Failing to recognize that ‘historical re-enactment’ is an oxymoron, they passed to the theological error of interpreting political history as a prefiguration of – political history. Thus, another court poet, Andrew Marvell, in his ‘Ode on the First Anniversary of the Government under Oliver Cromwell’, presents Cromwell as the Sun, around whom all the planets turn in a circle, and who gives birth to the new day: And still the Day which he doth next restore, Is the just Wonder of the Day before. Cromwell alone doth with new Lustre spring, And shines the Jewel of the yearly Ring.

Cromwell is the ‘Sun’ because time is distilled in him: ‘Tis he the force of scatter’d Time contracts’, says Marvell. While other kings, like planets, wander through the heavens, . . . indefatigable Cromwell hyes, And cuts his way still nearer to the Skyes, Learning a Musique in the Region clear, To tune this lower to that higher Sphere. . . . Such was that wondrous Order and Consent, When Cromwell tun’d the ruling Instrument

We are told that, ‘Any contemporary reader versed in . . . the contemporary . . . exegesis would have recognized the implicit analogies to David in Cromwell’s attributes of sublimitas-humilitas, his election by heaven for rule by a special covenant . . . and . . . his love of music, the art which is necessary to impose order and harmony on the body politic.’11 But, in Marvell’s poetic exegesis, David the Psalmist no longer controls the figure of David the warrior-king: rather, David’s musicality is a symbol of his political prowess. The guiding idea of providence is thus imposed on 1 Samuel through the filter of seventeenth-century politics. This secularity doesn’t inhibit Marvell from endowing Cromwell with eschatological overtones: Sure, the mysterious Work, where none withstand, Would forthwith finish under such a Hand: Fore-shortned Time its useless Course would stay, And soon precipitate the latest Day. But a thick Cloud about that Morning lyes, And intercepts the Beams of Mortal eyes, That ’tis the most which we determine can, If these the Times, then this must be the Man.

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 61

4/28/2009 10:38:21 AM

62

The Providence of God

Like many an eschat-enthusiast before or since, Marvell had to backtrack. His ‘Poem on the Death of Oliver Cromwell’, begins: That Providence which had so long the care Of Cromwell’s head, and numbred ev’ry hair, Now in its self (the Glass where all appears) Had seen the period of his golden Years . . .

Marvell confidently expects the dead leader to be welcomed into heaven by ‘David for the Sword, and harpe renown’d’. The poet presents the Puritan Protector in the unlikely costume of a dancer: No more shall follow where he spent the dayes In warres in counsell, or in pray’r, and praise, Whose meanest acts he would himself advance As ungirt David to the Arks did dance.

The observation of one literary historian that, for Marvell, David was ‘the archetypal figura of which Cromwell was a contemporary fulfilment’ is unfortunate, because Marvell’s use of scripture and thus his understanding of historical providence departs from mainstream medieval exegesis. It is not that Marvell ‘historicizes’ the figure of David. Rather, the reverse: Marvell dehistoricizes him, uprooting David from his ancient historical reality and from liturgical memory. De Lubac comments that it was not the exegesis of Origen or Augustine which retarded the emergence of historical biblical criticism: in the ‘Christian exegesis in the last few centuries . . . what barred the way to critical work was not . . . the spiritual interpretation. It was false science; it was bad literalism.’12 De Lubac gives as an example of such literalism a work by a French absolutist who abominated Cromwell – the seventeenth-century Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, author of the Politique tirée de l’Ecriture Sainte. Augustine’s astringent sense of Old Testament history as a ‘dead letter’ required the implicit awareness that ‘History . . . is essentially what passes on. Thus the events recounted in the Bible . . . all exhausted . . . their historical role at the same time as their factual reality, so as no longer to survive today except as signs and mysteries . . . history is a preparation for something else. To deny that is to deny it. The truth to which it introduces us is no longer the order of history.’ Hence, to imagine the providential events of 1 Samuel as a paradigm for historical providence in our own times is to neglect the respect for historical documents which should have been taught us by medieval allegorism: it is not ‘enough to “allegorize” . . . the events and persons of the Old Testament so as to see in them figures of the New

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 62

4/28/2009 10:38:21 AM

Providence in 1 Samuel

63

if we continue to see in them only other events, other persons.’ As Origen himself says, ‘we should not suppose . . . that the historical events are types of other historical events, and the physical actions are types of other physical actions; rather, the physical actions are types of the spiritual; and the historical events are types of the intelligible.’13 It was not the supposedly ‘Platonist’ Origen, but the poets from Charlemagne’s antiphon-doctors to Andrew Marvell who depicted divine providence as turning in a circle. The figure of the Wheel is also used to symbolize the gyrations of Fortune: fortune is impersonal, and therefore unhistorical: what the West understands as history is the product of free, and therefore, personal agency. That doesn’t commit anyone who thinks the figure of David and his providence have a contemporary relevance to immanentizing the eschaton or thinking that history moves in circles. The historian John Lukacs defines history as ‘the remembered past’.14 Potentially, all the free persons of the past can be remembered in ourselves. We can thus think our way into them by analogy. It is not that history repeats itself but that all the free persons of the past are analogous to ourselves. David can be remembered and understood by us, just as Cleopatra can be understood, by our mutual humanity. To put it theologically, in the ‘mode’ of ‘signs’ biblical events ‘remain . . . first . . ., for . . . our spiritual re-creation in Christ, then for . . . our moral instruction as Christians’.15 Whereas taking David as an analogy tests his figure against our moral wisdom, literal-eschatological one focuses on his political success, and thus on his good fortune.

III. Medieval Drama Fortune plays no role in the medieval mystery pageants. The biblical Corpus Christi plays run from Creation to the Last Judgement. None of them contain any episodes about David. Augustine had said that the ‘period’ which ‘extends from the time when the holy Samuel began to prophecy down to the deportation of the Israelite people to captivity in Babylon . . . is the era of the prophets.’16 Thus, in the Mystery Plays, ‘David’ was a non-acting role, presumably for a dignitary with a lisp whose thespian aspirations could not diplomatically be thwarted: he comes on in a silent parade, signifying the Ordo Prophetarium. This is a ‘pageant’, not drama, and the Corpus Christi plays as a whole are, to us, more like pageantry than a dramatization of the history of humanity before God. The ultimate upbeat theme of the Plays, with exact retribution following upon crime, and all ending in the Last Judgement, seems a long way from the rapes, murders and family hatreds of the political

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 63

4/28/2009 10:38:22 AM

64

The Providence of God

history of Israel. There is, in fact, a fair amount of darkness in the medieval plays: ‘Though the total dramatic scheme of the mystery cycle is a divine comedy, almost all the scenes take place in a fallen world.’17 From the rebellion of Lucifer to the temptation of Adam and Eve, and from Cain’s murder of Abel down to Judas’ betrayal of Christ, the Corpus Christi plays present one fall story after another. Some of the materials for what will later become tragic drama are there in the Corpus Christi plays, with their tremendous rebels against God: Lucifer, Cain and Judas. The bombastic tyrant, like Herod, in the play about the Massacre of the Innocents, is a prototype of Shakespeare’s bad kings: ‘The Pilate of the Wakefield cycle is a forerunner’ of Shakespeare’s villains, like Richard III.18 Like the Old Testament Saul, the ‘tyrants’ of the Mystery Plays all meet with retribution: their pride affronts the moral law of God. The authors of the medieval plays thus know, from scripture, of the imaginative notion of the ‘tragic fall’. But, the Tyrants of the Corpus Christi plays are ‘not . . . tragic characters’, because the characterization is too black and white, too much moralized. The moral arm of providence is too much the driving force to permit that audience-empathy with the protagonist which makes for drama. If Saul had appeared on the medieval stage, he would not have been portrayed in such a way as to arouse the sympathy of the audience; the biblical tyrants’ fictional successors, like Macbeth and Claudius, likewise meet with an ineluctable moral law, which is their downfall, but not before we experience their come-uppance as if it were our own.

IV. Historical Consciousness versus Historical Records This is what is missing from the Patristic and Medieval perception of historical characters like Saul and David. When Origen asks, in his commentary on Joshua, ‘of what importance is it to know that the king of Ai was hanged?’ he ‘betray[s] a . . . lack of curiosity that situates’ him ‘very far from us. . . . Origen shows himself to be incapable of the imaginative effort that would be necessary to make the events live again . . . in their concrete reality. . . . Neither does he have the sense of history in the way a postHegelian can have it. But’, according to Henri de Lubac, ‘that does not prevent him from . . . possessing . . . that sense of history which is one of the essential traits of Christian thought’.19 Like his medieval successors, Origen is historically minded without being interested in history for its own sake. It’s rather like having a feeling for beauty without wanting to theorize one’s tastes, as one historian puts it: ‘History was not taught anywhere during the “historic centuries”, just as during the great centuries of

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 64

4/28/2009 10:38:22 AM

Providence in 1 Samuel

65

Western art no one knew anything about aesthetics.’20 History is the past as it lives in recollection, in the minds of the custodians and heirs of the documented past. Given that history is all of the past that we bear in living memory, ‘historical existence refers to more than the existence of documents’. The biblical History books were remembered, in the medieval Christian liturgy, though this appropriation of the past was unselfconscious. Human beings live in time, never more so than when they made a habit of comparing time to eternity, and we have kept records of the passing of time: ‘the historical condition of human existence is universal, true of the very beginning of mankind ever since Adam and Eve, and not something new: but what is relatively new is our consciousness of this condition.’21 What about Herodotus, and Thucydides, the Greek historians? They did little to enable the medievals to see the potential contribution of the historical books of the Old Testament to our appreciation of providence because, as M. I. Finley said, ‘of all the lines of enquiry the Greeks initiated, history was the most abortive’. Despite great historians, like Bede, Joinville and Froissart, the ‘study of history did not figure in the seven liberal arts of the Middle Ages, neither in trivium nor in quadrivium.’22 The very phrase, ‘Middle Ages’ is an invention of the late fifteenth century – and did not catch on until the 1680s. ‘Middle Ages’ is a relationship between one period and another. It is around 1600 that a new vocabulary for pinpointing historical relationships emerges, including words such as antiquated, century, contemporary, decade, epoch, historic, out-of-date, primeval. All these words, denoting relationships of historical proximity or distance are inventions of the early 1600s. It’s as if the map of remembered time sprouted more crossroads, events being seen as interlinked from the perspective of the present moment, the eye of the self-conscious perceiver of history. This achievement of an historical consciousness emerged on the back of the Christian patristic and medieval sense of the biblical ‘history’ as living in its own faith. This Christian theology of history first implicitly supported a chronologer’s sense of historicity, and then, as it came to be explicitly articulated, gave rise to the historical consciousness of the seventeenth century. With historical consciousness came a flurry of new words, introspective words Hamlet would appreciate, such as ‘selflove, self-confidence, self-command, selfhood, self-esteem, self-knowledge, self-pity’.23 The men and women of this time became interested in their own consciousness not because they realized they knew themselves, but because they recognized that a person’s motives are opaque even to himself. Hamlet delays over vindicating his father’s murder, not because he doubts the morality of retribution, but because he fears his only motive is revenge. Historical self-consciousness is contemporary with the emergence

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 65

4/28/2009 10:38:22 AM

66

The Providence of God

of personal self-consciousness. It is late in the play when Hamlet realizes that he can act with the ‘untainted mind’ enjoined by the Ghostly Hamlet Sr, after the acts of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Claudius are directly exposed to him as starkly evil.24 Historical consciousness is the awareness that character is situated in relation to constellations of other people. The evolution of historical consciousness made it possible to rethink the providentiality of history. With that, it became possible to grasp that providence is at play in 1 Samuel in the very opacity of providence.

V. Dramatic Interpretation: Hamlet As the Elizabethans began to compose tragedies, at least one structural law is carried over from the medieval play cycles, and indeed from Greek tragedy: the tyrant must be felled by an absolute, transcendent law, which metes out recompense for evil deeds.25 Retribution is an important theme in the Deuteronomic histories. When David sets out to slay Nabal, Abigail forestalls his anger by reminding him that, ‘the soul of my lord [David] shall be bound in the bundle of life with the LORD thy God; and the souls of thine enemies, them shall he sling out, as out of the middle of a sling’ (1 Sam. 25.29): that is, that David’s destiny and success is in God’s hands. The earlier Elizabethan translators of the ancient tragic dramatists expressed the Graeco-Roman concept of nemesis in the language of Deuteronomic ethics: for Alexander Nevyle, the catastrophe which strikes Seneca’s Oedipus is ‘A dredful Example of Gods horryble vengeaunce for Sin’.26 The uncovering of criminality is a natural law: ‘Foul deeds will rise’, Hamlet says, ‘though the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes’.27 Laertes confesses, at the end, when the rapier he had poisoned is turned against him, ‘the foul practice / Hath turned itself on me.’28 Along with objective retribution for crime, the figure of the revenger comes to the centre of the hot-blooded Elizabethan stage. But, in tragedies which still take place against a background of belief in a transcendent God, ‘private revenge’ is always subjugated dramatically to ‘God’s revenge.’29 The idea of God’s providential justice works against the idea of taking private revenge. It is Laertes, not Hamlet, who yearns for infinite and amoral recompense. It is Laertes who vows ‘To cut’ Hamlet’s ‘throat I’ th’ church!’, and to which Claudius suavely replies, ‘No place indeed should murder sanctuarize / Revenge should have no bounds.’30 Some Elizabethan stage tyrants appear to be toppled by bad luck, or ill fortune, not because God’s hand deals out justice to them. The arbitrariness of fortune is a central element in the Italian sources of Elizabethan

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 66

4/28/2009 10:38:23 AM

Providence in 1 Samuel

67

tragedy. Fortune is a ‘strumpet’, who yet drives the plot for those who do not share Horatio’s immunity to her ‘buffets and rewards’.31 And, in some of the stories which the Elizabethans used, it is not the majestic turning of fortune’s wheel, but the ‘cunning mind’ of the ‘villain’ which directs events.32 In Shakespeare’s Richard II, it is not clear whether the protagonist is tripped up by fortune, or by divine destiny, or by his own human, iniquities. This is where a theme which was marginal in medieval theatre, but which is crucial to our own sense of drama enters in – and that is irony. Richard II projects himself as the victim of Fortune’s wheel: there is enough in the play for us to take him at his word, and enough for the audience to ponder this ‘self-dramatization’.33 In the Medieval plays, the fall of tyrants like Herod and Pilate is a direct, observable, punishment from God. In the Elizabethan plays, the introduction of arbitrary Fortune undermines that direct moralism: everything still happens because God wills it so, but the characters on stage are not shown this. Nor is the audience always in a position to ‘see through’ the pretensions of the protagonists: they share the stage characters’ relativity. A conscious Heisenberg uncertainty principle enters into this drama, and it is this which enables theatre to recognize tragedy: ‘No longer is there complete certainty as to the causes of worldly events, but moral law must take up a limited place beside the deterministic law of cause and effect and the principle of uncertainty symbolized by fortune.’34 The father of Western theology did not want to take the stretch of advancing allegorical explanations of all the events in 1 Samuel. When Thomas Aquinas argues, in the Summa Contra Gentiles, that all events are divinely guided, he is contending that God knows the providential purpose of events. He is not claiming that we human beings know how any given event is providential. Because he tackles the objective reality of providential causality, not the question of human consciousness of the providentiality of particular events, he does not directly address the uncertainty principle. For the Elizabethans, that existential issue has begun to matter. Because the Elizabethan protagonist is denied knowledge of what combination of fortune, human mismanagement and divine destiny went into his doom, ‘there is scarcely a tragic character from Edward II to Coriolanus who sees more than a part of the meaning of his tragic experience. The rest is for the audience to try to comprehend in the context of the play. Such ‘partial recognition’ is ‘“a deliberate element” of the “art” of “the tragedy of this age . . . in portraying the uncertain boundaries of human experience”’.35 Thus, the hero of Hamlet sets out with a literally spectral knowledge that evil has been done and must be recompensed. In Elizabethan England, ghosts were suspect. The Reformers regarded ghosts as emissaries from

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 67

4/28/2009 10:38:23 AM

68

The Providence of God

hell. Hamlet himself says, ‘The spirit that I have seen’, of his Father’s ghost’, ‘May be a devil’.36 The question, ‘How should a real ghost prompt Hamlet on a quest for revenge?’37 seems to tell against the reality of the figure seen by Hamlet alone on the freezing ramparts. Hamlet Sr’s last words, to Hamlet are ‘Remember me’,38 and, Stephen Greenblatt says, ‘the apparition on the battlements is a kind of embodied memory’.39 Even as a memory, the Ghost serves to put Hamlet in pursuit of the historical truth about his father’s death: historical consciousness recognizes that ‘we are human repositories of all mankind’s historical experiences in the past, which is why . . . everything that is historical is potentially understandable.’40 Insisting on following the Ghost’s beckoning, Hamlet tells Horatio, ‘My fate cries out’ to me. Having heard the voice of ‘Fate’, in the ghost, Hamlet must discern whether this is Fortune or providence. Whereas the audience of the Corpus Christi plays affirmed a moral judgement which had been made for them, Shakespeare’s audience is asked to make a prudential moral judgement. Because he makes space for uncertainty, Shakespeare is able to take us into the inner world and perspective of his tyrants. He makes us experience Claudius’ entrapment, when we see him trying and failing to pray. Here is a further acknowledgement of historical and dramatic perspective. It is this recognition of perspectivalism which makes for both Elizabethan tragedy and historical consciousness. The Latin providens, foreseeing, generated the adjective prudens: Providence and prudence come from the same linguistic stem.41 By acknowledging or denying the rightness of the staged action, the audience participates in the divine providence which works through the action of the play. It is in this intellectual and imaginative context that the biblical David leaps to life, and joins the ‘remembered past’ of modern Christians. The David of 2 Samuel becomes the hero of George Peele’s 1593 play, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, with the tragedie of Absalon. With Shakespeare, the young David came to life as Hamlet. Though a prince, Hamlet is not David in Renaissance dress, literally repeating David’s exploits. There are some parallels of event between 1 Samuel and Hamlet: both have a ghost scene, and, in both, the hero feigns madness to disguise his true aims and purposes. Much more important is the parallel in character: both have generous natures, that open-heartedness which the Renaissance called Grandezza. David is generous because he recognizes that the Measurer of Justice is the LORD, who will recompense his act of mercy: ‘The LORD render to every man his righteousness and his faithfulness, he tells Saul, for the LORD delivered thee into my hand to day, but I would not stretch forth

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 68

4/28/2009 10:38:23 AM

Providence in 1 Samuel

69

mine hand against the LORD’s anointed. And, behold, as thy life was much set by this day in mine eyes, so let my life be much set by in the eyes of the LORD, and let him deliver me out of all tribulation’ (1 Sam. 26. 23–4). In the Lectionary, this is set alongside Lk. 6.38: ‘For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.’ Hamlet famously tells the tightwad Polonius, ‘Use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.’42 It is because of his generosity that David-Hamlet experiences himself as called to a vengeance which is, ironically, morally impossible. Both David and Hamlet are handed opportunities by fortune, and both turn them aside, letting God’s providence ride its course. In the wilderness of Zuph, where David boldly enters Saul’s camp and finds his pursuer helplessly asleep aside his spear, David’s followers urge him to murder the king, and seize the kingship. David tells his lieutenant, ‘Destroy him not: for who can stretch forth his hand against the LORD’s anointed, and be guiltless? . . . As the LORD liveth, the LORD shall smite him; or his day shall come to die; or he shall descend into battle, and perish’ (1 Sam. 26.9–10). Like David, Hamlet refrains from murdering Claudius when he comes upon him at prayer: Hamlet desists, in the hope that a worse end than death in a state of contrition may consume his Uncle. He has yet to learn the lesson expounded to David by Abigail. Hamlet is sent to England, under concealed threat of execution. On board ship to England, Hamlet ‘happens’ to rifle through the papers of his minders, and uncovers Claudius’ execution order. Once he has been given this ‘revelation’, killing Claudius is no longer a private matter, between Hamlet and his uncle, but the enactment of God’s moral law. Hamlet says, ‘is’t not perfect conscience / To quit him with this arm? And is’t not to be damned / To let this canker of our nature come / In further evil?’43 It was an apparently ‘chance’ act which led to the exposition of where justice lies. Hamlet tells Horatio: ‘Praised be rashness for it – let us know, / Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well, / When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us / There’s divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.’44 Like David, Hamlet is taught that ‘heaven [is] ordinant’45 and henceforth he leaves providential justice to God. Hamlet leaves providential justice to God not because he doesn’t know what the moral law requires, but because he does, and since he does, he believes that God will enact it through him. Horatio warns him not to play in the dubious fencing match arranged by Uncle Claudius. But Hamlet replies, ‘Not a whit, we defy augury: there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now,

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 69

4/28/2009 10:38:23 AM

70

The Providence of God

yet it will come – the readiness is all. Since no man has of aught he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.’46 Just as David, in George Peele’s 1593 play had said, ‘to God alone belongs revenge’, so Hamlet recognizes that ‘resolution of the dilemma’ of the demand for revenge ‘comes in trusting a just, holy, and active God, leaving judgment and their own actions open to his will’.47 Once he knows where justice truly lies, he can, like Horatio, ignore fortune and ‘surrender to God and his providence’. Thus, ‘[i]n the final scene, Hamlet’s actions and his end are . . . shaped elsewhere; he neither intends evil nor contrives; he becomes God’s instrument.’48 Many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Christians had tyrants for rulers. For some of these, struggling with the question of the rights and wrongs of regicide, David is a model of one who relies on providence and, in so doing declines to enact the moral law. For Melanchthon, David’s refusal to slay Saul at Engedi and Zuph shows that, while it may be natural law to kill a tyrant, faith sees the matter differently, and offers nonresistance to evil kings.49 As a David figure, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is not quite in this mould. In the last scene of the play, Hamlet’s active awareness that Claudius is a walking affront to moral law goes along with a passive readiness to enact providential retribution. Hamlet’s passivity is in his acting, in his awaiting the opportunity offered by God. His faith in providence is in tune with his knowledge of the moral law. Hamlet has distinguished between fortune and providence by the chance empirical discovery that Claudius is a ‘canker of our nature’, an affront to law of human nature. Once Hamlet knows what Claudius is, he can rely on God to use him to enact Justice against him. One cannot be an agent of God’s providence while knowingly breaking the moral law. The Proverbs quoting David of 1 Samuel and the David of the Psalms believe that justice is an inevitable feature of God’s universe. ‘The heathen’, says David the Psalmist, ‘are sunk down in the pit that they made; in the net which they hid is their own foot taken’ (Ps. 9.15, KJV) David the Psalmist asks that the ‘wicked be taken in the devices that they have imagined’ (Ps. 10.2, KJV) Likewise, when, because of the ‘accident’ of the exchange of the rapiers, Laertes, takes the poisoned tip of the sword, he says, ‘Why, as a woodcock; to mine own springe, Oscric / I am justly kill’d with mine own treachery.’50 Christians today are suspicious of the notion of seeing another man, a David figure, as ‘God’s instrument’. This is because of the misuse of the idea which I mentioned earlier, with reference to Charlemagne and Cromwell. The difference between the two is that the way in which Charlemagne and Cromwell were constructed as David figures separated them both from natural law morality of the Wisdom literature, and from historicity. Marvell’s ‘Cromwell, the “star”, the man of

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 70

4/28/2009 10:38:24 AM

Providence in 1 Samuel

71

destiny and instrument of Providence, . . . cannot be . . . judged by customary ethical norms.’51 The biblical David and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, on the other hand, are held to the divine moral law.

VI. Historical Records and Historical Consciousness versus Historicism The literalistic typologists overplayed their hand, finding David in Cromwell or Louis XIV. What was seen to be overstretched was the reliance on scripture – and not the motivation behind it, the idea that there is a science – rather than a wisdom – of providentiality. The idea that one can grasp the providentiality of contemporary events by applying scripture to them becomes the nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideal of the historian as seer of the causes of historical events. The deterministic concept of historical progress and the idea of history as a science, ‘perpetually connecting results with causes’,52 both skirts the sense of chronological time and endeavours to stand athwart the ambiguities of historical consciousness. Once the progressivist attaches himself to the ideal of historical events as the ‘necessary maturation’ of their forerunners, the ‘historical sense’ is set aside, for he no longer sees ‘the essential role played by certain actions that transform everything, analogous to . . . “sudden mutations”. Continuity and discontinuity are both historical categories’,53 and the discontinuities effected by the acts of free persons are unpredictable. If we ‘take the point of view of empirical history’ there is not even a continuity in the sense of a ‘pre-established harmony’ between Old and New Testaments: the ‘harmony that the two Testaments make the ears of faith hear’ had to be created by an act of free will on the part of God – the incarnation: ‘it was necessary for Christ to come in order to . . . make of them a single harp and a single song.’54 For the old fashioned historical sense and for historical consciousness, history is the acts of persons; for historicism, the acts of persons are relayed by History, with a capital ‘H’. The difference between historicism and historical consciousness is that, whereas historicism treats history like an ‘abstract’ category, categorically and abstractly applied to personal events, historical consciousness is the awareness that our own thinking, including our thinking about history, is historically and personally relative. For the historical sense, this acknowledgement of the ‘multiplicity of truth’ is not an abnegation of our knowledge of the past. It roots us more firmly in our past, since its understanding of the figures of past time is based not in science but in common kinship in the human race. Just as historical consciousness roots its understanding of human nature in the

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 71

4/28/2009 10:38:24 AM

72

The Providence of God

memory of the human race, so, the theological sense witnesses that what happens to David happens to ‘the soul in the Church’.55 The providential history of 1 Samuel is indeed an allegory for our lives.

VII. Providence in What Doesn’t Happen in 1 Samuel David has became a popular subject for the theatre, in the nineteenth century, and for twentieth-century novels, and for some quasi-fictive history in the twenty-first century. In its ‘striking realism’, David’s biography seemed relatively ‘unsupernatural’, and hence its popularity.56 His constant success could be luck, or he could be propelled to victory by Saul’s human errors of judgement. The Deuteronomist tells us David is anointed king, but God does not explicitly guide David’s pebble into Goliath’s forehead; providence does not slow Saul’s troops as they stormed up the stairs and he jumped out the window; God does not move David South, like a chess piece, before the Philistines’ final assault at Gilboa. In his faithful reliance on God, David is divine providence. David is divine providence because his cause is just, and he lets the rest fall out as it will: he could say, with Hamlet, ‘the readiness is all. Since no man has of aught he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.’

Notes 1 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. VI: Theology: The Old Covenant, trans. Brian McNeil and Erasmo LeivaMerikakis, ed. John Riches (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 111. 2 See Jon D. Levenson, ‘1 Samuel 25 as Literature and as History’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 40 (1978), 11–28. 3 Augustine, The City of God, bk XVII.3. 4 Ibid., bk XVII.1. 5 Origin, Commentary on Psalm 3.1, cited in Henry de Lubac, History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to Origen, trans. Anne Englund Nash with Greek and Latin translation by Juvenal Merriell (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 197. 6 Blistein, Introduction to David and Bersabe, in The Dramatic Works of George Peele (Yale: Princeton University Press, 1980), 166. 7 De Lubac, History and Spirit, 143–4. 8 Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 200. 9 Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 187–8.

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 72

4/28/2009 10:38:24 AM

Providence in 1 Samuel

73

10 Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik, ‘Introduction: Transformations of the Myth of David’ in Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik, eds, The David Myth in Western Literature (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1980), 6–7. 11 Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies, 207–8. 12 De Lubac, History and Spirit, 430. 13 Ibid., 322–4, citing Origen’s Commentary on Jn 10.13. 14 John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness: Or, The Remembered Past (New York: Schocken Books, 1968, New Edition), 9. 15 De Lubac, History and Spirit, 322. 16 Augustine, City of God, bk XVII.1. 17 J. M. R. Margeson, The Origins of English Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 13. 18 Ibid., 2. 19 De Lubac, History and Spirit, 319–20. 20 Lukacs, Historical Consciousness, xx. 21 Ibid., 9–10. 22 Ibid., 11. 23 Ibid., 14. 24 Judith Stewart Shank, ‘Fathoming Cliffs of Frightful Fall’, in Glenn Arbery, ed., The Tragic Abyss (Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications, 2003), 202. 25 Margeson, Origins of English Tragedy, x. 26 Ibid., 78. 27 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.iii.227–8. 28 Ibid., V.ii.318–19. 29 Lily B. Campbell, ‘Theories of Revenge in Elizabethan England’, Modern Philology, 28 (1931), 281–96, 293. 30 Shakespeare, Hamlet, IV.vii.127–9. 31 Ibid., II.ii.238 and 504 and III.ii.63–74. 32 Margeson, Origins of English Tragedy, 83. 33 Ibid., 110. 34 Ibid., 181. 35 Ibid., 182. 36 Shakespeare, Hamlet, II.ii. 37 Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 237–40. 38 Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.v.111. 39 Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 212. 40 Lukacs, Historical Consciousness, 236 and 248. 41 See Eric Partridge’s Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, under ‘Vide’. 42 Shakespeare, Hamlet, II.ii.540–4. 43 Ibid., V.ii.62–70. 44 Ibid., V.ii.7–11. 45 Ibid., V.i.48–59. 46 Ibid., V.ii.209–17. 47 Gene Edward Veith, Jr, ‘“Wait Upon the Lord”: David, Hamlet, and the Problem of Revenge’, in Frontain and Wojcik, eds, The David Myth in Western Literature, 80.

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 73

4/28/2009 10:38:24 AM

74

The Providence of God

48 Shank, ‘Fathoming Cliffs of Frightful Fall’, 205. 49 Edward A. Gosselin, The King’s Progress to Jerusalem: Some Interpretations of David during the Reformation Period and their Patristic and Medieval Background, Malibu: Undena Publications, 1976, 94–5. 50 Shakespeare, Hamlet, V.ii.298–9: I owe this to Veith. 51 Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth Century Studies, 200. 52 Lukacs, Historical Consciousness, 19, citing Schlözer. 53 De Lubac, History and Spirit, 306. 54 Ibid., 313–14. 55 Ibid., 164, citing Origen CSong 3. 56 Frontain and Wojcik, ‘Introduction: Transformations of the Myth of David,’ 2.

FMurphy_03_Finals.indd 74

4/28/2009 10:38:25 AM

Chapter 4

Hegel, Theodicy and the Invisibility of Waste Cyril O’Regan

The owl goes back and forth inside the night And the night holds its breath. Randall Jarrell

In terms both of self-ascription and critical judgement, theodicy has always been the issue of the Hegelian system. An important reason for this is Hegel’s appeal to the concept of providence, and his articulation of a providentialist optics with respect to history. In Hegel’s own day and immediately following it, philosophers were persuaded that Hegel had appropriated the notion of providence from ancient philosophy and from moderns like Leibniz and his followers, and fashioned his own theodicy, at once more complicated, more dynamic and open to history than all that preceded it. One can see the force of Kierkegaard’s rejection of Hegelian mediation.1 One can see it even more clearly when one refers to Trendelenburg’s spirited defence of Aristotle’s notion of individual substance,2 which Kierkegaard thought subverted Hegel’s attempt to pass over the pathos of individuals in an economy that could prescind from taking account of their plight. One can see this line of reflection developed in Heidegger and Adorno, who agree that Hegelian dialectic, in whatever dimension it enacts itself (logical or real), favours resolution and the bleaching of that which would interrupt the parousiac ambitions of the self-development of Spirit.3 Although, Derrida would on principle resist an interpretation of his textual production as a destinal point of resistance to Hegel’s work in which the price of the Hegelian economy is clarified, depending on how central to his oeuvre one considers Glas,4 which brilliantly diagnoses how Hegel’s speculative discourse explains and thus explains away ‘waste’, that which is resistant to the Hegelian logic’s production of sense, and defiantly presents the sacrifices that Hegel would deny. Theological critique of Hegel’s work begins immediately after his death. Hegel’s dialectical discourse, which is significantly focused on history, is thought to undermine or make unnecessary constitutive aspects of Christian belief such as a strong doctrine of creation and an eschatological view that sees human beings as transcending the space-time continuum. Franz von Baader, Hermann Fichte and Franz Anton Staudenmaier are only three of the many nineteenth-century religious thinkers who had problems with

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 75

4/28/2009 10:38:03 AM

76

The Providence of God

Hegel in this respect.5 In the twentieth century the group of demurrers has grown. The great Russian commentator, Iwan Iljin,6 has to be counted as one of these. Hans Urs von Balthasar, who throughout his career turns to the eschatological and apocalyptic dynamics of Hegel’s thought, is another.7 Balthasar represents something of the theological equivalent of Derrida’s Hegel-critique; both influence this reflection on Hegel’s notion of providence, its philosophical explanation, theological contextualization and their relation. The chapter has three main sections. In the first I treat of Hegel’s explicit recall of the notion of providence, and describe how providence is interpreted in the two manifolds. In the first, providence is considered from the point of view of a historical reality, which despite evidence to the contrary, can be perceived to be goal directed and thus meaningful. In the second, providence is linked to and constrained by metaphysical considerations that describe the more than historical agent that acts in history. Here especially the influence of both Leibniz and Spinoza are felt in Hegel’s fashioning of a complex explanation of divine guidance in and of history that denies Kant’s prescription against theodicy by refuting its grounds. I try to sort out the relative contributions of Leibniz and Spinoza, which make Hegel’s theodicy substitution for a Christian providentialism the strange thing that it is: a proposal in which knowledge has been substituted for faith, certainty for hope, absolute transparence for the ambiguity of history, and self-thinking thought for prayer and praise. Section two considers in detail Hegel’s more Christianly specific and theological treatment of providence. Although Hegel never openly avers that providence is a mixed doctrine, he does seem to recognize that it relates to the doctrines of creation and last things, and to the whole economy of salvation that includes the Church. This recognition is reflected in Hegel’s articulation of the symbol of the Trinity as this symbol functions as ground and synopsis of the Christian narrative. But as was the case in his working out of providence in the philosophical context, there are also two levels of reflection. For beyond talking about the economy in terms of Trinity, Hegel dares to offer a Trinitarian doctrine of God. Moreover, again as was the case in the philosophical quarter, there are complex relations between the two levels. Using Augustine’s de trinitate as a benchmark, I will ask whether in the economic, and immanent fields of the Trinity, and their relation, Hegel subverts the classical doctrine of the Trinity. With respect to the economic Trinity, I will suggest that there are good grounds for suspecting that Hegel’s Trinitarianism give expressions to a modern version of Joachimism, which represents Augustine’s other. I suggest further, however, that Hegel’s speculative commitments preclude his Trinitari-

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 76

4/28/2009 10:38:03 AM

Hegel, Theodicy and the Invisibility of Waste

77

anism being Joachimite without remainder. Other precedents, again very different from the Augustinian, such as that of the Lutheran mystic, Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), play a major role. But this speculative form of Trinitarian thought also figures a theodicy in that any and all negativity is ingredient in divine becoming. This implies a doubling of the theodicy quotient, and a double removing from a classical view of providence. In addition, I suggest an order in relation in which economic Trinitarian reflection serves a more than economic purpose, and more specifically that due to this ordering a theodicy program that represents a modification of Augustine (Joachim) is inscribed in a theodicy program that is best described not simply as Augustine’s other, but the other to Christianity, that is, Valentinianism. Finally, I want to underscore that Hegel’s philosophical and theological discussions of providence are not hermetically sealed from each other. They relate positively to each other, and in this relation theological representation provides conceptual thought with a rich articulation of divine activity and human response in history, while philosophical thought conceptually secures (but also scours) the Trinitarian form of Christian thought that had being marginalized in the modern period in general and in Protestant thought in particular. While these discourses mutually influence each other, Hegel does in fact order them, making the theological discourse serve philosophical discourse, since symbol and narrative are sublated in the concept. This brings me to the third section of this chapter. In his double inscription of providence, first in a Trinitarian manifold and ultimately in a larger conceptual framework, Hegel might be thought to effect a kind of auto-immunization of theodicy in which conceptual articulation functions ironically as a form of forgetting, just the opposite of the memory that is called forth in a standard doctrine of providence in which the fragile historical subject asks to be remembered by God. But I want to ask the further question whether this forgetting, specifically the forgetting of the particular or individual, has itself two dimensions. I am prompted in this question by the work of Derrida, who not only suggests that there are domains of reality and experience that do not come within the ambit of the encyclopedia of Spirit, but also asks whether there is something like a forgetting of forgetting a profound repression of the challenge of the pathos of the particular that seems in some sense to provide the motor of the articulation of Spirit. Here we might be dealing with the pathos of suffering as invisible rather than even potentially visible waste. This reflection, which is led but not determined by Derrida, prompts another question: granting that in Hegel the linking of Trinitarian thought and speculation removes any voice

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 77

4/28/2009 10:38:04 AM

78

The Providence of God

that would not sing the chorus of the Absolute, the question arises as to whether the Trinity is obliged to function in this way, or functions only contingently in this way, or read properly should not function in this way, that is, in short, should behave as an anti-theodicy discourse. Here I bring together and separate the philosophical and theological critiques of Hegel prosecuted by Derrida and Balthasar respectively: bring them together in that both espy the ways in which Hegel links Trinitarian thought with speculative articulation to seal off human complaint of being excluded as waste; separate them, insofar as Balthasar denies what Derrida affirms, that is, that the doctrine of the Trinity, which frames all doctrines, including the mixed doctrine of providence, is a doctrine made to be enlisted by speculative thought. Conversely, Balthasar affirms what Derrida denies, that is, that the doctrine of the Trinity represents speculation’s principled critique.

I. Refiguring Providence: Philosophical Contours The nerve centre of Hegel’s reflection can be triangulated from three statements from two texts. The first is the famous assertion in the Introduction to Lectures on the Philosophy of History in which the Christian symbol of providence is associated with Nous but also with Logos and thus with the rationality of history, if only in the long run;8 the second, is the lapidary statement from the Introduction to Lectures on the Philosophy of Right (10) ‘the rational is the real, and the real is the rational’;9 and the third is the provocative passage, again in the Introduction to Lectures on the Philosophy of History which, leading off with the description of history as a ‘slaughter-bench’, ends with the question ‘to what final aim have these enormous sacrifices been offered?’ (21). In the triangulation, the base is provided by the questionableness of the meaning of history, and the first two statements represent different aspects of the putative reply. Whatever commitment Hegel has to Enlightenment and/or Romantic models of progress and development, he does not here at least take a blithe view of the casualties of history: they are many and their cries climb towards the heavens which seem not disposed to answer. This particular passage can be backlit by socio-historical reflections from the Phenomenology.10 However ‘we’ as philosophers should read the direction of the unfolding drama of history, Hegel makes it quite clear in his famous reflections on the Master and Slave (PS #178–96) that history is a scene of power, violence and the threat of death.11 If edification happens, it necessarily will be after the fact. Moreover, there is something Goyaesque about Hegel’s account of the dialectic of the Enlightenment in the same text in which terror reveals the

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 78

4/28/2009 10:38:04 AM

Hegel, Theodicy and the Invisibility of Waste

79

inner logic of a deficient view of reason. The questioning is considerably less urgent in either the Phenomenology or Lectures on the Philosophy of History than that found in Candide or Voltaire’s prophetic-lugubrious poem on the Lisbon earthquake, and more redolent of Gibbon’s ‘realist’ depiction of Western history in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Nonetheless, whatever the critical estimate of the existential dimension of Hegel’s thought, it is evident that experience is neither benched completely nor consistently in favour of irrefragable notions. This is crucial, because ingredient in Hegel’s response to the provocation of harm and suffering that marks history is the urge to disbar the question of intelligibility by refuting the presuppositions that would make such questioning valid. The first two statements involved in the triangulation’ which function as answers to what presents itself as moving towards an aporia without ever really getting there’ appear to be, if not identical, then very similar. The famous passage from the Lectures on the Philosophy of Right suggests that in deliberating on the events and patterns of history there is no justification for thinking of an excess of possibility over actuality, precisely that kind of excess that gives one moral leverage in protesting how things turn out, how is does not correspond to ought. Hegel expressly draws the conclusion later in the text (PR #324, 344). The equally famous passage about providence from Lectures on the Philosophy of History, and its putative philosophical correlative of Nous, suggests that although it will not be the default perception, a properly philosophical look at history proves therapeutic in that it removes scepticism with respect to meaning in history, a meaning that is unhinged, on Hegel’s view, unless history is the movement of time towards a pleroma of meaning and truth, and a form of fully realized community in which there is unsurpassable recognition of other selves. Anything short of this fails to justify the obvious sacrifice of individual and communal happiness in history. Now I want to propose that with respect to these two statements, Hegel leans in different ways and in different respects on Spinoza and on Leibniz, although he also departs from both in quite significant ways. Beginning with the second of the two passages, as a preliminary, the following can be said. Embracing the notion of providence is not eccentric in Hegel’s canon. Explicit avowal can be found elsewhere in Hegel’s texts, most noticeably in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, above all in his reflections Judaism in which Hegel seems to adopt a fairly Philonic construal of how Judaism understands sacred history,12 which positively bridges the gap between Judaism and Christianity, indeed, to the point of providing a template for the properly Christian view, which eschews a radically transcendent and sovereign God. In addition, in his Lectures on

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 79

4/28/2009 10:38:04 AM

80

The Providence of God

the History of Philosophy Hegel shows himself favourably disposed towards the idea of Philo’s Reason or Logos as it expresses itself in the world (logos prophorikos) (LHP2, 392–3). Providence has a number of aliases, or, to reverse direction, providence is a theological alias for Hegelian Reason (Vernunft) which trespasses against Kant’s strictures that knowledge reaches only as far as phenomena rather than noumena or things in themselves, and also ignores Kant’s restriction of the categories to subjective conditions of the possibility of objectivity. In Lectures on the Philosophy of History when Hegel behaves as if Anaxagoras’s Nous is synonymous with providence, he has all of this in mind. The main purpose in making providence and Nous equivalent is to draw attention to the congruence of Christianity and philosophy that has been denied in the philosophical and theological traditions associated with Protestantism, and which had only been affirmed with such serious reservation by Kant as finally not to count in Hegel’s eyes. The proper name ‘Anaxagoras’ should not be thought uniquely to specify the referential range of Nous which, again, looking to the Lectures on History of Philosophy, seems to be broadly Neoplatonic. Hegel honours the names of Plotinus (LHP2, 404–31) and Proclus (LHP2, 432–50), and it is their view of the activity of Reason in the world and in time that is being evoked, if not stated, in the Introduction. Second, the therapeutic value of the appeal to providence, which is predicated on leaving behind individual self-interest and rising to a higher (i.e. philosophical) point of view, demands that one neither validate the individual nor the contingent. One might even say that it requires their invalidation. A passage that could be understood to parse the working of providence seems explicitly to invalidate contingency: ‘The sole aim of philosophical inquiry is to eliminate the contingent’ (LPH, 28). Philosophical inquiry involves then a shift in perspective, indeed nothing less than a shift from a perspectival to a non-perspectival frame in which things will be seen differently, and judgements of ‘out of jointness’ and sheer badness necessarily withdrawn. Of course, what Hegel says here is vindicated in his logical texts in which the contingent is precisely what is surpassed by the categorial movement which vindicates necessity.13 Third, and relatedly, the shift in perspective implies a shift from the part to the whole, and assumes that ‘our’ essential obligations have to do with the whole rather than the part. So how it goes with the part or with the individual is not relevant from a philosophical point of view, which is the only reasonable view. This favouring of the whole over the part is at once aesthetic and metaphysical; aesthetic in that beauty is a feature of the perception of a whole that relativizes its constituents and might even demand contrast and discordance, metaphysical in that it suggests that truth is a function of a whole.

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 80

4/28/2009 10:38:05 AM

Hegel, Theodicy and the Invisibility of Waste

81

If the Preface of the Phenomenology offers the slogan for Hegel’s extreme coherentist view of truth in its insistence that das Wahre ist das Ganze (PS #20), the rest of the text validates the slogan by showing how correspondence represents a minor aspect of truth construed as the systematic articulation of all particulars and all perspectives. This commitment is hardly theologically innocent: it suggests an absolute priority of general over special providence, where the biblical trope of the latter is God’s numbering of the hairs on the head of each individual. This trope is a hyperbole of God’s goodness in which all doings and happening to individuals are an object of divine concern, and thus significant from an absolute point of view: flubbing a line; meandering in a lecture; forgetting one’s way home; being sick on the day of an exam; no longer being loved by someone who has not stopped mattering; not being loved by anyone; worrying about a child, about one’s looks or about getting older. And then those other things, being imprisoned (justly or unjustly), dying; being hurt or tortured; the primal fear of being reduced to having been or being only as past. Although Hegel’s view of providence has some roots in the biblical text, and is, as I have already indicated, inflected by Neoplatonic and Stoic reflection, its overall contours are provided by Leibniz, with the obvious difference, that Hegel is more focused on time and history than the author of the Théodicée (1710).14 More specifically, the construct of providence appears in a fraught context in which it is an answer to a real existential and historical dilemma. Yet it plays the role of answer only to the extent it accepts a description of the evident nightmare of history. In the Introduction it is accepted that providence is contraindicated, and that a view like Voltaire’s more nearly corresponds to our individual and communal experience than the natural philosophers whom it pans. Still, Voltaire’s caricature of Pangloss notwithstanding, Leibniz’s theodicy argument depends on accepting the challenge that reality and history seem not to express divine purpose. The second facet of Hegel’s account of providence, namely the therapy afforded by rising from one’s limited perspective to the perspective of the divine, while again hardly unique to Leibniz (T, 265–6) it can also be found in Neoplatonic (Plotinus, Proclus) and Stoic (Epictetus)-figures with whom Hegel was familiar. Needless to say, both he and Leibniz would have found it proximally in the Ethics in which Spinoza enjoins a cleansing of knowledge by rising to the divine point of view.15 The third facet of Hegel’s view, the implicit recognition of the distinction between general and special providence and the valorizing of the former over the latter, also has a role in the Theodicy and other texts of Leibniz in which he makes a distinction between antecedent will in which God wills an individual’s good and consequent will in which he wills the good of the whole.

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 81

4/28/2009 10:38:05 AM

82

The Providence of God

In Hegel’s account Leibniz does not have any absolute advantages over Spinoza, who anticipates him, and whose more radical positions he modifies. They agree, for example, on the need to cull self-interest and move beyond one’s own individual perspective. Nevertheless, Leibniz enjoys a number of important advantages. For although Spinoza speaks to the issue of evil, for him it does not constitute the same threat that it does for Hegel and even for Leibniz. He feels inclined to regard it as the result of confused perception and knowledge and dismiss it ontologically as nonbeing. Neither Leibniz nor Hegel can quite reach this Parmenidean height. Moreover, Spinoza does not make any distinction between universal and special providence, and any notion of final causality, whether left underdetermined as in Leibniz, or historically specified in figures such as Lessing and Schiller, who are important sources in German Idealism’s historicization of reality. A question that naturally emerges, however, is whether the relative advantages of Leibniz are carried all the way through. How then does it go with the infamous passage from Lectures on the Philosophy of Right, regarded often as the ne plus ultra of insensitivity not only to those to whom bad things happen, but to those of us who are witnesses to their suffering? What role does Leibniz play and to what extent is his contribution matched if not surpassed by Spinoza? The intention behind the aphorism ‘the rational is the real and the real is the rational’ is to outbid complaint with respect to our own or third-party cases by discouraging our imagining that things can turn out other than they actually do. So, for instance, it is understandable and thus forgivable that the abused child (Cecile) in Alice Walker’s Color Purple writes puzzled letters to a God who does not seem to take an interest, but should thought follow the correct developmental curve, she will undoubtedly grow out of it and come to see its essential rightness. At one level, Hegel’s aphorism implies once again the necessity of an extrospective shift in which one climbs the ladder towards and from the disinterested and ‘divine’ point of view, and from this perch looks at the horrors experienced by individuals, groups and entire societies. At another and deeper level, however, the statement points to the metaphysical issue as to whether it is ever philosophically legitimate (this is a pleonasm) to think of an excess of possibility over actuality. In a particular situation more than one outcome, some or at least one better than the actual outcome, is imaginable, but only one is actual. Obviously, some result other than the one that in fact logically could have happened. From Leibniz’s point of view, however, not only is such a possibility notional given the actual world, it fails to honour the matrix of action and passion that so precariously keeps evil and/or suffering to a minimum. It follows logically that a certain particular evil not occurring in the world

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 82

4/28/2009 10:38:05 AM

Hegel, Theodicy and the Invisibility of Waste

83

leads to a net increase in evil and/or suffering. For Spinoza, however, it is not sufficient to issue a pragmatic disavowal of mere possibility, thereby putting out of action the possibility of moral judgement on actuality. Required rather is an embargo on any prospect of possibility being in excess of actuality. Book 1 of the Ethics (props 34, 35) rules that there is a one-to-one correspondence between actuality and possibility: there is absolutely no remainder or leftover. While on a rhetorical level, Leibniz’s softer position, which allows the bare possibility of things being otherwise, more nearly addresses human concern, on the philosophical level it is insufficient. Thus, in the Logic Hegel adopts Spinoza’s view that actuality is no more shadowed by possibility (abstract), indeed is concrete possibility, than necessity is by contingency (Enc #142–3). The Spinozist ascendancy here both grounds and reflects other ways in which Hegel’s logical or ontological categories buoy up a more Spinozistic way of dealing with challenges to meaning when reality fails to meet our expectations and hopes. An important feature of Leibniz’s theodicy is to protect divine freedom, even as he restricts it theologically to wisdom and metaphysically to non-contradiction and the principle of compossibility. While things will not in fact turn out other than they do, God’s freedom to intervene is still affirmed. But it is precisely this voluntarism that is dismissed by Spinoza as specious. This is coded in the famous linking in book 1 of the Ethics of freedom and necessity (prop. 33). Freedom finds itself defined in fact by necessity, which in turn is defined by the absence of external compulsion (bk 1 prop. 7). Agreeing with Spinoza’s critique of philosophical and theological voluntarism (bk 1 prop. 35), Hegel essentially emends Spinoza by thinking that the terms of the statement are reversible: necessity is also freedom (Enc #158). This reversal enables Hegel to make necessity more capacious and more fluid than Spinoza’s more narrowly logical and even geometrical view. One might even say that he turns it in a Neoplatonic direction in which it connects with the trope of diffusive generosity.16 Still, necessity rules in history: all events in history have to be considered as necessary in the strict sense (PR #344); even the term fate, not absent in Spinoza, is entertained by Hegel (PR #324). Depending then on which of Hegel’s two more famous statements are elucidated, one can conclude that Hegel is fundamentally Leibnizian or Spinozist. The truth, of course, is that Hegel’s position represents a complicated combination of both. Within a Christian context, it may often be sufficient to reply to the complaint that the world lacks meaning, because of the presence of evil, in a manner that broadly resembles Leibniz, but without commitment to his particular argumentation or to his specific metaphysical positions. Subject to critical vetting that puts the demands of

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 83

4/28/2009 10:38:05 AM

84

The Providence of God

explanation in the strict sense to the forefront, Hegel thinks that as a philosopher one necessarily decides in favour of Spinoza, although he is too much of a teleologist to concede to Spinoza the reduction of all causality to efficient causality, and specifically the exclusion of formal and final causality.17 In addition, Hegel is aware that Leibniz is a Christian thinker in a way that Spinoza is not; even if Spinoza necessarily has to be classed as a religious thinker (LHP3, 280–2) indeed, nothing short of the ‘God-intoxicated man’ of Moses Mendelssohn. Leibniz’s commitment to teleology is but the most obvious index of his Christianity: certainly, his view of the working of divine wisdom in the world allows more scope for the biblical and theistic view of the working of providence, which speaks to a divine plan for the universal and the individual in the ambiguities of history. Let the comparative be underscored. Leibniz not only remains vulnerable to Voltaire’s kind of critique, but falls well short of the figuration of an infinitely provident God that is the God of Christian witness. Hegel seems much more interested in the former than the latter, and attends to it by granting that the enactment of providence is against the grain of the deliverances of history that generally disappoint and frequently appal. Thus, the difference between Leibniz’s more sanguine assumption that things work out for most people most of the time, and Hegel’s recourse to the trope of the ‘cunning of reason’ (List der Vernunft) which suggests that while reason is operative throughout history, it works in and through its apparent denial in particular events and particular situations. Hegel, then, gets closer to the specifically Christian view of providence, which is intrinsically dramatic, but obviously rationalizes the notion when he insists that positive outcomes are verifiable in history itself. In doing so, Hegel continues Leibniz’s theodicy replacement of the doctrine of providence that has its epistemological correlative in faith and its performative correlative in prayer and praise. This modified Leibnizian tendency provides the lower of the two strata of Hegel’s discourse. The other, as I mentioned, is provided by Spinoza’s Ethics, which refuses the theodicy enterprise by aggressively insisting on its epistemic flaws and faulty metaphysical understanding. While Spinoza’s refusal of theodicy might be construed as doing theodicy by other means, in any event in the context of Hegel’s developed thought, in conjunction with indissoluble Leibnizian elements (e.g. finality), its metaphysical articulation, which tells against the need for justification, helps to justify a more dynamic and more history oriented divine than Spinoza’s own position allows. But here the fact of the coexistence of two very different discourses, which either revise or excise providence, points to the possibility of their coexistence. What makes their coexistence possible is that whereas Leibniz’s

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 84

4/28/2009 10:38:06 AM

Hegel, Theodicy and the Invisibility of Waste

85

discourse focuses more nearly on divine operation in the world, and thus more nearly maps the doctrines of creation and eschaton and/or their relation, Spinoza’s discourse more nearly concerns the nature of the divine from which operation follows necessarily. The different levels allow the tension between positions not to escalate into contradiction. In anticipation of the second section of the chapter, I should say that the theological twin of his philosophical discourse will manifest a similar stratification. At a lower level there will be evidence of a theology of history which, if it concerns the dynamic interval between creation and eschaton (also include Christology), also gets specified trinitarianly, and at an upper level a Trinitarian articulation of the doctrine of God. But as in the case of Hegel’s philosophical translation of providence in which the two strata influence each other to give a unique result, so also with the specifically theological strata which effect a strange transformation on the classical doctrine of the Trinity.

II. Providence and Trinitarian Thought It is clear that within Hegel’s work as a whole, much more is afoot than metaphysical containment. In speaking of providence, or its analogues in history, Hegel understands well their relation to the Christian articulation of salvation history and in particular to salvation history as it has been inserted in a Trinitarian frame. Hegel does not directly connect providence with the Trinity in Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Through the association of providence with Logos and Nous in the Introduction, however, a link is made both with Hegel’s reflections on Philo and Neoplatonism in Lectures on the History of Philosophy and with his construction of Philo in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.18 While this does not seem to be especially propitious for a Trinitarian framing, it needs to be remarked that Hegel thinks of both Neoplatonic and Philonic schemes as being Trinitarian in fundamental respects.19 Although the connection with Christian Trinitarianism is made indirectly rather than directly, it is made. The indirect route is indicative of Hegel’s distancing himself from anything that would involve a commitment to Nicaea or a Trinitarian formulation that would look like a standard doctrine of the Trinity. One reason is that Hegel prefers a Trinitarianism that operates on a different level to Christian representation; triadic philosophical schematization can bear the burden of conceptually validating the Christian Trinity that specifically ‘theological’ and ‘representational’ versions of the Trinity cannot. At the same time, operating more nearly in theological terms, Hegel sees the history of

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 85

4/28/2009 10:38:06 AM

86

The Providence of God

Trinitarian thought as being involved in what looks like self-reflexive critique. Thus, the boundary cases of Jacob Boehme and Valentinian Gnosticism, which are treated in volumes three and two respectively of Lectures on the History of Philosophy, become for Hegel exemplary.20 Hegel understands well that providence is a mixed doctrine, or in his terms a doctrine that mediates between any number of other doctrines, indeed, essentially mediates between them all, for example, the redemption of Christ as much as creation and eschaton. Given either Hegel’s underdetermination or outright deviance on every Christian doctrine associated with providence, it might be better to say that the theologoumenon of the Trinity represents the synoptic frame of the entire Christian narrative, as well as what we might call its logical prologue and deepened logical epilogue. From a chronological point of view, Hegel’s deployment of the theologoumenon of the Trinity for this purpose dates at least from his 1807 discussion of ‘Revealed Religion’ of the Phenomenology (section 7), and lasts throughout the rest of Hegel’s career, receiving its most ample expression in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and its most concise and logically precise articulation in the Encyclopedia (#564–71). In his discussion of the Trinity in all of these texts Hegel makes two things very clear: First, he has no truck with the classical Christian distinction between the Trinity in se and the missions of the Trinity. Second, at the level of the divine, understood as logically (but not temporally) prior to creation and history, the Trinity cannot be presumed to be a Trinity of persons; rather the only way to construe this aspect of the Trinity is to see it as a dynamic process of self-reflection of a unitive self-differentiating subjectivity, or better a rehearsal of such. To think of it in any other way is, in Hegel’s view, essentially to be tritheistic, for it is impossible not to think of three distinct entities. Hegel makes the point often in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (LPR3, 83–6, 194, 287) but, arguably, makes it with even greater force in the Phenomenology (#770). The push behind this double correction is obvious: simultaneously to justify the world and the divine by conceiving of a relation in which both are the outcome of a common process and development. I need to say more about this push; but as a preliminary I will say more about the first correction, which is further specified in the second. In Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Hegel offers the following as the Trinitarian schematization of the Christian narrative: the intradivine Trinity is the ‘kingdom’ (Reiche) or ‘sphere’ (Sphäre) of the Father; the order of creation, as this receives its limit and realization in the incarnation, passion and death of Christ, is counted as the ‘kingdom’ or ‘sphere’ of

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 86

4/28/2009 10:38:06 AM

Hegel, Theodicy and the Invisibility of Waste

87

the Son; the order of salvation history, which has its ground in the passion and death of Christ and concludes in the eschaton, is understood to provide the basic content of the ‘kingdom’ or ‘sphere’ of the Spirit.21 Within the third and last manifold it is possible to distinguish progress across history in modes of relation to divine presence, from very autocratic notions in which the divine is sovereignly remote (father), through focus on the concentration of divine presence in Jesus of Nazareth and the community effect of the love that he preaches and enacts (son), to the modern age in which communion with the divine is the self-presence of the community (spirit), which is the community’s own work and is not effected by Christ. This pattern is similar in the Phenomenology and the Encylopedia, although there are subtle variations, one of the most important of which is that instead of using the spatial language of ‘kingdom’ or ‘sphere’, these other texts prefer the more dynamic temporal language of ‘moment’, which more nearly captures Hegel’s dynamic ontology.22 The overall implications are clear. What in modern Trinitarianism is usually called the ‘immanent Trinity’ now becomes the first movement or moment of self-developing Spirit; under the auspices of the title ‘Father’, the immanent Trinity is defined by its opening towards world. Indeed, the opening is constitutive, since the manifold of the Trinity in se is not a plenitude, but more nearly a lack. Hegel’s way of putting it is that the Trinity in se is ‘abstract’, and that it overcomes this abstractness in the concreteness of its self-enactment in world and history. This word ‘selfenactment’, however, could possibly prove misleading. It might give the impression that divine activity has its ground in a pre-given divine self that is the real subject of action. Whereas, as Hegel reveals most succinctly in his discussion of the speculative proposition in the Preface of the Phenomenology (#61–3), act precedes being, actuality and subjectivity are subsequent, indeed consequent to activity. This in turn requires that the relation between God and world and God and history is absolutely reciprocal in a way that it is not in the classical tradition for which the world is gratuitous and history a scene of engagement of God with humanity that contributes in no way to God’s actuality (Wirklichkeit). The relation is one of mutually satisfying need; the abstract Trinitarian divine has need of the world and history in order to be concretely divine, and the world and history needs a divine ground – whether teleologically or archeologically specified – in order to have meaning and truth. One important consequence of this remapping, in which the immanent and economic Trinity is reduced to one manifold, is that the divine is understood to be implicated in the imperfections of the world and exposed to the vicissitudes of history, which

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 87

4/28/2009 10:38:07 AM

The Providence of God

88

involve frailty, fragility, suffering and death. The following passage from Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion is typical: the human, the finite, the fragile, the weak, the negative are themselves a moment of the divine, that are within God himself, that finitude, negativity, otherness are not outside of God and do not, as otherness, hinder unity with God. Otherness, the negative, is known to be a moment of the divine nature itself. This involves the highest idea of Spirit. (LPR3, 326)23

This new Trinitarianism figures a deus patibilis that the Christian tradition was anxious to avoid, whatever its qualification of the axiom of impassibility with respect to God as such and the Trinity in se.24 For patristic writers such as Tertullian and Irenaeus the idea of the ‘suffering God’ is identified, albeit for different reasons, with Gnostic forms of thought. Important nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators on Hegel such as Franz Staudenmaier and Iwan Iljin have indicated that Hegel’s Trinitarian thought enacts a passional theogony.25 The former thinks it appropriate, despite the commitment to theogony, to associate Hegel with Gnosticism, and to question whether the departure of Hegel from standard forms of Christianity is so wide and deep as essentially to vitiate the theological use-value of Hegel.26 Twentieth-century supporters (Bloch) and critics (Löwith, de Lubac) of Hegel alike have not been shy about linking Hegel to the Joachimite tradition. Whereas de Lubac has provided by far the most detailed account of the filiation of Joachimite ideas and symbols in modern religious and philosophical discourses, it is Löwith who has more sharply pointed to its break with an Augustinian pattern of thought in which any talk of Spirit is necessarily talk of Christ and the Church which is its medium.27 Löwith is concerned neither with the theological nor ecclesial consequences of construing salvation history as a development of freedom and knowledge in intensity and range; rather he is preoccupied with the ethical and political consequences of stipulating the appearance of a pneumatologically indexed Endzeit. Hegel’s Trinitarian subversion of Augustine, which involves interpreting history along a developmental axis with a determinate immanent term, is however inscribed in the larger developmental program in which the movement of history is an ingredient. Now this program, which concerns the constitution of divine subjectivity, from a Trinitarian point of view necessarily takes a modalistic form: there are not three subjects of attribution only one, an emergent divine subjectivity, indifferent between the divine and the world, the divine and the human: thus, on the one hand, a worldly and human divine and, on the other, a divinized world and humanity. The Joachimite inflection of salvation history, which Hegel

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 88

4/28/2009 10:38:07 AM

Hegel, Theodicy and the Invisibility of Waste

89

probably owes to Lessing’s ‘The Education of the Human Race’,28 is then an element in the construction of an alternative to the kind of comprehensive Trinitarian construal prosecuted by Augustine in de trinitate. In his classic text, Augustine insists on the tri-personhood of the intradivine Trinity, while making an analytic distinction between the Trinity in se (bks 4–6) and the missions of the Trinity (bk 7). The purpose of such a distinction is hardly to suggest two Trinities with two independent spheres of operation, but rather to insist upon a divine agency that is not the effect of need and thus of a passion. The distinction is also an important line in defence against explaining the Trinity. For Augustine, all talk of the Trinity supposes revelation (bks 1–3); precisely because it does so, explanation in the strict sense is ruled out. The classical doctrine of the Trinity represents the maximum the Christian community can assert about the God, given the economy of salvation, and given what the community holds to be true and the judgement that what they hold and have held to be true is the fruit of the best possible interpretation of scripture. In this case a maximum represents a limit: thus, for example, Augustine’s insistence in book 8 of de trinitate on the Trinity being a mystery is not an emergency measure in which he takes back something that he has elaborated in books 5–7, but is consistent with his highly cataphatic stance about the Trinity. In his major texts, Hegel twists the definition of mystery to such an extent that it comes to mean the opposite of its ordinary meaning of a reality that lies outside human knowing: Christian mystery is the opposite of the secret;29 it is the disclosed, the revealed, what has been given, what has been given in the first instance to symbol and representation, and ultimately to thought as such, which is conceptual in Hegel’s special sense of the term. To the extent to which it provides the horizon for the concept of providence, precisely in its role of framing the entire Christian narrative, Hegel’s Trinitarian thought articulates at once an anthropodicy and a theodicy. Indeed, the justification of the one involves the other. But, Hegel articulates a theodicy across both the economic and the more than economic frames of the Trinity. One can say with equal truth that a fully inclusive Trinity inscribes salvation history and that salvation history distends a process that is not in every respect historical. Hegel’s Trinitarianism involves erasing features of gratuity and contingency across the entire Trinitarian metanarrative which foregrounds the narrative of salvation history. This in turn makes it more apt as a theodicy (also an anthropodicy), although Hegel has enough sense from his own Lutheran tradition to realize that Christian representation – even at its best – has some narrative and temporal features that require correction, since they suggest a contingency and a divine discretion that in its most highly reflected forms

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 89

4/28/2009 10:38:07 AM

90

The Providence of God

(e.g., Boehme) representation intends to deny. This is the main reason why Hegel demands that Christian thought move from representation (Vorstellung) to concept (Begriff). The most succinct account as to how this is to be prosecuted is to be found at the end of the Encyclopedia (#564–74) in which Hegel charts the movement from the syllogistic form of the representational Trinity to the syllogistic form of the philosophical Trinity which squeezes out all remaining residuals of contingency, of the possible, of freedom, of otherness, and of time, that puts up the slightest resistance to explanation, indeed, self-validating explanation.30 The different Trinitarian syllogisms are the point at which theological and philosophical meet. As the theological figuration is sublated in the philosophical (#574), a Joachimite figuration of history and a peculiarly narrative form of Trinitarianism which enfolds it, and which smacks of Valentinianism of the earliest centuries, welcome the kinds of metaphysical arguments for and against theodicy that characterize the discursive regimes of Leibniz and Spinoza and between which, as we have shown, Hegel allows the unfolding of thought to make its judgement, indeed, precisely as judgement.31 The domain of the syllogism is the domain of the logical, and the logical is a long way from the motivating experience of the perception of human being’s exposure to accident, to lack of flourishing and horrendous harm. It now turns out that the logical is the destination not only of thought simpliciter, but also any theology that has genuine claims to validity.32 Hegel does not allow Christianity to be determined by the book of Job; whatever philosophy or theology is going to be in after Kant, it can only provisionally permit the purchase of complaint against the way things are. Here Hegel’s shift beyond Kant is stark. Both Kant and Hegel embrace the figure of Job. Kant, however, embraces Job precisely as a wedge that prevents the closure of explanation in his famous essay against theodicy,33 and not as a figure of wisdom who adopts the divine point of view, finding a place for suffering in a higher economy. In Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion the simple judgement that the book of Job belongs to the genre of Wisdom literature encourages figuring Job as one who acknowledges the probity of the divine point of view. Job, at once, then gains purchase over the texts of Hebrew scripture in which God appears to act arbitrarily and over those texts in which human beings petition God.34 Read thus, Philo can be thought to bring the Wisdom tradition to term, and bring it to its appropriate logocentric and Trinitarian completion. Unlike Hegel, Kant was persuaded that no movement of thought could leave complaint aside: anything that could be asserted could only be asserted ‘in spite’ rather than ‘because’ of the evidence. Ricoeur is Kant’s faithful disciple in this respect.35 Hegel thinks otherwise: the complaint sets

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 90

4/28/2009 10:38:08 AM

Hegel, Theodicy and the Invisibility of Waste

91

in motion a process of reflection that reveals not only the provisional nature of complaint, but the provisional nature also of the Joban ‘in spite of’. Looked at properly, that is, philosophically, it is possible to do more than make a wager that there is a reason for what happens, and specifically a reason why bad things happen to good people. It is both possible and necessary to articulate an encompassing reason and be articulated by it. ‘In spite’ is thus decisively replaced by ‘because’. Among other things, this means that it is illegitimate to introduce immortality as a postulate. Hegel early came to the conviction that Kant’s notion of postulate is philosophically bankrupt, effectively substituting the needs of explanation for explanation itself. In addition, the use of the notion of ‘eternity’ will not stretch far enough to include post-mortem durational existence of an individual being. In terms that are redolent of Neoplatonism and the mysticism of Meister Eckhart,36 but proximally borrowed from Spinoza, in the Encyclopedia, Hegel can think of eternity only as a form of knowledge.37 With the mobility of syllogism displacing the stasis of the geometry (more geometrico), explaining suffering and in general the lack of match in life of reward and merit, is conducted within the precincts of reason that rise above time and history by availing of time and history as elements of divine pedagogy. In the domain of the syllogism, the dramatic character of the affirmation of God’s providence, which is a stable of the theological tradition, is finally pushed aside. It is true that this affirmation of providence, which is expression of faith that sees through the glass darkly, is often attended by arguments that bespeak anxiety as to whether puzzlement with respect to divine action would finally issue in accusation. No less a figure than Augustine offered any number of embargoes against questioning God’s justice. When one questioned God’s justice, not only did one fail adequately to come to terms with one’s own sinful situation, which inevitably has a deleterious effect upon perception, but, even worse, one constitutively failed to understand what it is to be God. God is transcendent and sovereign; this suggests the lack of appropriateness in raising issues vastly above one’s station. This rubbishing of the question, however, is not viewed as an answer, but rather as curbing curiosity, whose ‘logic’ entails that there is an answer to any question human beings pose and that all inquiry, no matter what its object, can be conducted in exclusively in human terms. That we should rightly expect that God will not explain Godself to us does not mean, however, that there is not a purpose to everything. Still, just how divine purpose corresponds to our ideas of justice and wisdom is far from transparent, leaves open two possibilities: that divine wisdom illustrated in the entirety of God’s action in history bespeaks a more expansive wisdom

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 91

4/28/2009 10:38:08 AM

92

The Providence of God

which, although qualitative different than human wisdom, is not totally other than it, and another view in which divine wisdom is totally other, and thus quite literally scandalous. Since throughout his long writing career Augustine subscribes to both of these views, he sets the table for the entire Christian tradition, with Aquinas being an instance of the former, and the Nominalists and the Reformers an instance of the latter. Kierkegaard also opts for the latter, though it is more clear that he is reacting to an absolutely univocal view of wisdom, which is indifferent between divine and human knowing, than it is with Luther and Nominalism. In making the turn to the history and in his deployment of the doctrine of the Trinity, which allows for a mode of justification of history that approaches but falls somewhat short of the aim of philosophy, Hegel confirms and strengthens his commitment to irrefragable explanation. As if to make sure that he has cut off ways of challenging this squeezing of the inexplicable, in his treatment of the proofs for God’s existence (LPR1, 414–41), Hegel offers a further mediation of the theological and the philosophical. Of course, this is a role that proofs cannot play within Kant, who erects a firm boundary between the philosophical and the theological. Formally, then Hegel goes beyond Kant. Substantively, Hegel also takes a measure of distance. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant demonstrated in the section on Transcendental Dialectic (1) the priority of the ontological argument vis-à-vis the cosmological and teleological arguments, and (2) the invalidity of all proofs, given the invalidity of the ontological argument.38 Hegel thinks that Kant has sustained (1), but not (2). With respect to the latter, all that Kant has proved is that the ontological argument is invalid as long as one subscribes to Kant’s finitist epistemology. Should one have good post-Kantian reasons not to do so, then the issue becomes whether a reframed ontological argument articulates an unrestricted dynamic process that flows naturally from the logical to the non-logical domains. Hegel speaks of the movement more as one from concept to actuality than thought to existence, existence being too brute for Hegel to be identified with divine perfection. Although interested in rehabilitating Anselm,39 Hegel relies here on Spinoza’s reflection in book 1 of the Ethics as to what is the implicate of the perfection of Substance. Hegel does so without prejudice to what he believes is his much more dynamic view of Substance precisely as Subject, and Spinoza’s lack of an adequate Trinitarian scopus.40 The latter worry in no way connotes that Hegel is troubled by Spinoza’s lack of orthodoxy. As we have seen, Hegel himself plays fast and loose with Trinitarian orthodoxy, and does so with significant complacency. What bothers him is that Spinoza’s view of Substance does not correspond to the

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 92

4/28/2009 10:38:08 AM

Hegel, Theodicy and the Invisibility of Waste

93

best intuitions of the Western tradition, which include non-Christian and Christian Neoplatonists and the Lutheran mystic, Jacob Boehme. As is well known, Hegel lavishes attention on the thought of Jacob Boehme in Lectures on the History of Philosophy.41 What appeals to him in Boehme is his dynamic Trinitarian articulation of the divine, characterized by negativity and angst. More than any other modern thinker Boehme takes absolutely seriously the problem of evil, which in this text Hegel seems to suggest is the problem of problems. For Hegel, Boehme represents a double threshold: a threshold between the premodern, static and non-dialectical view of reality and a modern dynamic and dialectical view, and at the same time discursively the threshold between theological and philosophical discourse mediated also through the discourse of the Trinity. For Hegel, the dialectical and the Trinitarian are equally necessary in explaining the how and why of evil. Offering a (onto)logical rationale for the presence of alienation, pain and death is accompanied by a Trinitarian conspectus in which the negative is overcome in the self-shaping process of Spirit in which the intention of meaning in the negative is recollected (Erinnerung). Recollection, which involves the closure of the becoming of meaning, is impossible in pure Substance metaphysics; or better put, is only possible within metaphysics that in essential respects is Trinitarian. Thus theodicy is only a possibility of a Trinitarian ontology, which is necessarily an ontology of divine self-development. This conviction, which is also a demonstration, throws down the gauntlet for contemporary theology, as well as raising the fundamental Trinitarian question: does Trinitarian thought, which enfolds the Christian narrative and provides the horizon of the view of providence, in the end speak for or against theodicy? If Hegel allows that Boehme provides the modern template for such a dynamic Trinitarian ontology or ontotheology, nonetheless, two other resources are available to him. Neither is intuitively obvious. The first is Leibniz, the second Valentinian Gnosticism. Hegel treated Leibniz as a philosophical figure who both had different concerns than Boehme and operated in a different discursive medium from Boehme, which Hegel thought was mythopoetic rather than conceptual. Still, given that Leibniz had in all likelihood read Boehme, there is reason to suppose that Leibniz has folded fundamental aspects of Boehme’s dynamic Trinitarian ontology into his critique of Spinoza in his articulation of the supreme Monad as constituted by apperception and drive. The relation between both thinkers becomes even closer when one observes that precisely within the precincts of his metaphysics, Leibniz also elaborates a kind of Trinitarianism that proceeds without recourse to revelation while obviously supporting it.42 Indeed, Leibniz seems to turn what in Augustine and Aquinas was a basic analogy

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 93

4/28/2009 10:38:08 AM

94

The Providence of God

between consciousness and self-consciousness and the dynamic life of the Trinitarian persons into the basis of the understanding of the Trinity.43 One of the strangest recalls in all of Hegel’s work is his discussion of classical Gnosticism. In Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Hegel enlists Valentinus in the cause of a refurbishing of a doctrine of the Trinity in a philosophical and theological context that had marginalized it (LPR3, 85–6). To underscore just how extraordinary this is; one has to note that Hegel does not refer to the creed, nor a single Western or Eastern Church father, nor to the magisterial Reformers. Of course, this appeal to Gnosticism in the service of Trinitarian thought is not only extraordinary, but also anachronistic, since the Gnosticism described by Hegel in Lectures on the History of Philosophy is pre-Trinitarian.44 Clearly, Hegel is reading Boehme and Valentinianism together: just as the latter proffers a dynamic narrative ontology in which the emphasis falls on return (Rückehr), the former embodies the Trinitarian schematization. This emphasis on return is the condition of the possibility of recollection or memory. All of reality is remembered as recollected. What has not been thought through is the question: recollected in what way, as present or as a trace, as fully concrete or schematized? Boehme and Valentinianism provide sketches of the selfjustifying cursus of the encyclopedia, which is absolute memory. The theological question that knocks on the door is whether this in any way relates to the Christian view of the memory of God, memoria dei, which would be the Augustinian view of providence. As the Confessions puts it, and de trinitate confirms, our struggle to remember God in history is the struggle to find a God who remembers us, who never leaves us, in our grief or joy, and who never leaves those in their alienation and in their spiritual and even physical deaths.

III. Memory, Forgetting and the Doxological Trinity This chapter is provoked by Derrida who, obliquely sums up a history of querying the theodicy implications of Hegel’s speculative Trinitarian system with a view to asking the cost in terms of what and who are excluded by the system. For, with other modern French interpretations of Hegel, Derrida wishes to underscore that violence is enacted discursively by Hegelian systematicity. But Glas goes beyond gesturing to cost, gesticulating at what Derrida names ‘remains’.45 In some sense Derrida itemizes; neither women, Jews, nor homosexuals can abide in the Hegelian system. Moreover, putatively these groups represent but the tip of the iceberg with respect to Hegel’s vicious ethnocentrism, his Occidentalism and his near

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 94

4/28/2009 10:38:09 AM

Hegel, Theodicy and the Invisibility of Waste

95

criminal sang-froid with respect to those groups in history that are determined not to be historical although neither do matters go well for those who are determined to be merely historical such as the Jews. However selfconsciously modernist the style, the content of Derrida’s critique has much in common with nineteenth-century philosophical and theological critiques of Hegelianism as the quintessence of theodicy. Indeed, we can even say that stylistically it is continuous with Kierkegaard’s critique, to the degree to which Kierkegaard’s Hegel’s critique is indirect and consists of a series of strikes against the Hegelian system that are self-consciously tactical and rhetorical in nature, since the fear they relay is that rebuttal will be subsumed or ‘digested’ by he Hegelian system.46 If there is an excess over nineteenth-century models, it lies in Derrida’s insight that the Hegelian system both openly confesses that there are ‘remains’ or waste and denies it. We tracked this doubleness in our own more taxonomic way in Section one of the chapter by speaking to the way in which the Spinozist and Leibnizian elements of Hegel’s discourse modified each other. Derrida is right in suggesting that despite itself the Hegelian system confesses there is waste, indeed, that it is the system of the production of waste. To speak to an example that Derrida does not use: in the socalled Lesser Logic (Enc #44) one comes upon a symptomatic betrayal of the Hegelian system to explain and thereby logicize all of reality. The term is caput mortuum, which literally means ‘dead head’ or ‘dead remains’. The historical context of the term is the Renaissance Alchemy of Paracelsus, but the term has currency in German Romanticism and is available for anthropological and Naturphilosophie kinds of uses. The caput mortuum is the waste that remains after the successful experiment to extract the philosopher’s stone. It is the dark matter than cannot be used, refuse, maybe even refusal in the order of being that is an order of dramatic transformation. But, the Hegelian system does not always confess the fact of waste or its role in production. As Derrida points out, the Hegelian system is a system of denial of the waste or redundancy, which goes under the names of particularity and contingency, that it otherwise gestures towards. But this is to imply that Hegel’s system represents a vast conspiracy against vulnerability and pathos, for the particular and contingent are its sites. Derrida’s attack on Hegel in Glas not only seems to preclude a Christian counterpart, and specifically Trinitarian counterpart, but to represent an indictment of Trinitarian thought as co-conspirator with respect both to the generation of ‘waste’ and its denial. Derrida accepts uncritically Hegel’s own account of his relation to the Christian tradition in general, and the relation of Hegelian philosophy to Trinitarian discourse in particular. He passes over in silence Hegel’s revisionist understanding of revelation,

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 95

4/28/2009 10:38:09 AM

96

The Providence of God

his idiosyncratic Trinitarian canon, and above all his deviation from the common Trinitarian tradition. At this juncture there is a fork in the interpretative road, either to add to my ad hoc remarks concerning the difference between Hegel’s Trinitarianism and that of the classical tradition, emblematically represented by Augustine’s de trinitate, or to go to contemporary Trinitarian theology awake to the sacrifices Hegel is willing to make to the God of Erinnerung, who is precisely not the God of Christian memory, nor the God who Christians worship and to whom they pray. I will adopt the latter strategy and speak briefly to the Hegel-critique of Hans Urs von Balthasar, all the more powerful for being conducted on ground that is analogous to that of Hegel. Throughout Balthasar’s corpus the conversation with Hegel is as interminable as the corrections in the direction of the common Trinitarian tradition are sharp. As early as Apokalypse der deutschen Seele (1937–9), Balthasar is made anxious by Hegel’s commitment to the auto-constitution of Geist, which he believes is dangerous both for philosophy and theology and for different but complementary reasons. (1) Hegel’s thought is dangerous for philosophy and theology in that it assumes that the divine origin is defined by indigence. Balthasar recognizes that this conflicts with the best insights of the philosophical and theological traditions, which in different registers, the one that of principle, the other that of person or persons, considered origin to be ontological plenitude. In the context of Apokalypse, Balthasar refers to origin as the principle of ‘potentiality’ that Hegel shares with the other Idealists despite or perhaps because of the focus on act (Apok.1, 597). For ‘act’ in German Idealism is not act as understood in the classical philosophical and theological traditions as the complete absence of privation or potentiality, but rather actualization imagined as a process of development towards perfection. (2) Since the process of divine self-actualization or divine self-constitution requires history, and specifically the history of human freedom, in order to be all that it can be, this means the conflation between the divine and human subject of becoming. (3) Relatedly, envisaging divine actualization in terms of knowledge and freedom has the result not only that God is thought to acquire rather than posses these constitutive features, but that human beings acquire through historical experience knowledge and freedom that is in no way different from the divine. From Balthasar’s perspective, this is the point at which the Prometheanism of Hegel’s thought is most nearly visible. (4) Just as the curriculum of development in its entirety is taken to be logical and/or ontological necessary, so also is any and all imperfection, suffering undergone, and wrongs committed with respect to individuals and communities in history (Apok.1, 601).

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 96

4/28/2009 10:38:09 AM

Hegel, Theodicy and the Invisibility of Waste

97

While Apokalypse establishes the basic contours of Balthasar’s critique, nonetheless, in his later work, and especially in the trilogy, there is both considerable prizing apart and amplification on both the philosophical and theological fronts, with the latter being the more important. On the philosophical front, Balthasar shows himself wedded to the ‘really real’ as plenitude, thus his excavations of the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions in Glory of the Lord and his interpretation of Aquinas in Wahrheit (1946).47 But he also strengthens his commitment to ‘analogy’, which for him means distinguishing clearly between absolute and relative levels of reality and knowing, and assigning human being to the relative side, without necessarily assuming that the absolute and relative constitute two independent domains. For him, the absolute subtends the relative, as the relative participates in the absolute. Balthasar does not consider himself to be an original philosopher in this respect. Although he can avail of Heidegger in his critique of Hegel,48 he is even more influenced by Przywara’s synthesis in Analogia Entis in which the tradition of Augustine and Aquinas is given leverage over Hegel and to some extent even Heidegger, who so loudly complains about Hegel’s parousiac tendencies. The development on the theological front is both more deep and more ample. The main reason is that Balthasar increasingly takes seriously Hegel as a theological thinker who offers an alternative to the classical theological regime, which especially in its neo-scholastic form, exercises no pull on the imagination. Anodyne and self-innoculating from relevance as well as change, theology is open to the kind of simulacrum presented by Hegelian thought, which appears to have both aesthetic form and dramatic character. For Balthasar, theological simulacra are insidious precisely because they can look more real than the real thing which has lost its brilliance and which tends to substitute propositions for the drama of existence from and towards God. What supplies the horizon for resistance is the very theologoumenon that Derrida presumes indelibly locks together Hegelianism and Christianity, that is, the Trinity.49 Balthasar agrees with Derrida that, for Hegel, it is the Trinity that provides the ultimate horizon of Christian discourse, while coordinating all the others. Balthasar suggests that while this represents Hegel’s most positive insight, in itself this provides no guarantee that Hegel remains faithful to this tradition. Obviously, it is not possible to describe Balthasar’s act of resistance in its entirety,50 although necessarily one would have to include the analytic distinction between immanent and economic Trinity, a commitment to a tri-personal view of the Trinity, and a view that love is rendered throughout the history of the Triune God’s engagement in history.

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 97

4/28/2009 10:38:10 AM

98

The Providence of God

I begin with Balthasar’s commitment to a view of salvation history that has the saving act of Jesus Christ as the expressed love of the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit at the centre. Balthasar’s commitment to Heilsgeschichte hardly separates him from Hegel. As the trilogy makes clear, the central category is that of ‘drama’, and more specifically the drama of human and divine freedom, with the latter underwriting and enveloping the former. Despite the asymmetry, which in Balthasar’s view is constitutive, throughout Theo-Drama the point is made that divine freedom does not overpower human freedom, which while incapable of being interpreted as a neutral point for good or evil, nonetheless can refuse God’s offer of salvation, as well as refuse to discern or commit to a form of life that corresponds to God’s intention, that is, one’s mission. Of course, divine intention is solicitous; indeed, divine intention is the intention of love itself. In the Theo-Drama, Balthasar does not address the issue of what providence has to do with human suffering on an individual and social scale. He neither dismisses suffering, nor picks from the vocabulary of readymade Christian explanation that focusses on divine punishment or human improvement. While the reserve shown by Balthasar is not untypical of the Christian tradition, it does not correspond to what might have been expected of a speculative theologian with decided roots in a Hegelian style of thinking. On closer inspection, however, the puzzle turns out to be part of the solution. It is evident from the prominent discussion of Hegel in the programmatic volume of Theo-Drama that Hegel and his tradition is going to serve as foil throughout the rest of Theo-Drama, and perhaps also Theo-Logic, and that this battle will have to do with what properly is a Christian understanding of history, the nature and limits of human aspiration and knowledge, but also with our vision of God as triune and our relation to this reality that is a reality of love.51 The generic category of ‘drama’ proves to be the hinge when it comes to marking the difference. Agreeing with Hegel against much of the history of philosophy and theology about the importance of drama, and seeing that in some respect drama has been enfolded into Hegelian dialectic, Balthasar’s considered judgment is that Hegel proves misleading with respect to the definition of drama and fatally underestimates its dialogical horizon. Hegel gets the definition of drama wrong by placing too much emphasis on both alienation and resolution, and he sacrifices its essentially dialogical structure by sacrificing either divine or human freedom or sometimes even both.52 Hegel’s thought has been attractive to contemporary Christianity because it offers a kind of ‘pseudo-drama’ which has compromised the openness and incompleteness of dialogue. The true genre of Hegel’s Trinitarianism, as Balthasar makes

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 98

4/28/2009 10:38:10 AM

Hegel, Theodicy and the Invisibility of Waste

99

clear in Theo-Drama 2, is that of epic rather than drama; as the latter is the horizon for faith, hope and love, the former is the horizon of knowledge. Balthasar’s challenge to the Hegelian theology of the cross is not separate from his Trinitarian reservations, precisely because the cross for him is both the hinge of salvation history and the fullest expression of the triune love. Balthasar follows Barth when he suggests that Hegel essentially makes Christ and the cross elements in a dialectical scheme at once narrative and speculative that transcends these central Christian givens. This general criticism expressed in his reflection on Hegel in the opening volume of Theo-Drama in turn forms the backdrop of a full-scale attack on Hegel’s theology of the cross, which amplifies a number of other Barthian criticisms, while adding new ones. Aside from a resolute commitment to a duophysite Christology that represents an interpretation of Christ as fundamentally characterized by obedience rather than autonomy, Balthasar differs from Hegel in thinking that the embrace of the human condition by Christ involves taking on the burden of human sin that qualifies finitude. Moreover, however dramatic the cross, there is not only an important interregnum between Good Friday and Easter (Holy Saturday), there is Easter, and the resurrection of Easter is a gift not constituted by the Church but made available to it throughout history by the Spirit. Balthasar, then, is as nervous as de Lubac about a pneumatic displacement of Christ, which if evident in classical Joachimism, is even more so in modern species of Joachimism, of which Hegel represents the supreme instance. Throughout Theo-Drama and Theo-Logic, Balthasar inveighs against the Joachimism of Hegel and followers such as Bloch and Moltmann. He recognizes that a Joachimite construal of history represents one of contemporary theology’s imminent dangers, since it allows the modern discovery of history to console rather than terrify, since all things will be well and every manner of thing at the end of history. A condition of consolation, however, is that the shape and form of this end of history is known rather than conjectured or hoped for; specifically, that we can point to the mechanisms by which this end, which maximizes human desire, is brought to realization. For Balthasar, this has the effect of making history the scene of fate rather than the open and unverifiable process of the offer of divine love to the world. Balthasar sees many ways in which modern Joachimism effectively amounts to a theodicy or anthropodicy in which the ambiguities of history are dismissed as well as the incommensurability and sovereignty of God. Balthasar believes that in the wake of Hegel a generalized Joachimism, and a Joachimite Trinitarianism, can flourish in a modern environment. He understands that a Trinitarianism of a minimalistic and economic kind represents an attractive aesthetic option for theologians

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 99

4/28/2009 10:38:10 AM

100

The Providence of God

tired of the conceptual chicanery of the classical tradition, characterized by more than one distinction too many. Yet, however often Balthasar makes the Joachimite charge against Hegelianism, this is neither his only nor final word. Balthasar espies in fullblown Hegelianism an even deeper entrenchment in the theodicy enterprise than that evinced in a Joachimism, which after all in the main restricts its interest to history. The basic reason is the one that we examined in detail in Section two, that is, in the case of Hegel the so-called economic Trinity cannot be defined as divine action expressive of a Triune God (act follows on being), but rather as the condition of the possibility of a triadically articulated divine subjectivity. The ‘economy’ is not then economy; it is the essential temporal component in divine self-constitution which involves divine recollection of self from both fragmentation and alienation. Here the myth of Osiris joins forces with the myth of Ulysses to displace the scandal of incarnation and of the cross. Here also necessity comes to the fore much more than in a pure Joachimite frame: Hegel supplies the reasons why the divine requires the trial of history (the reverse is also true), indeed, the suffering of human beings in history, in order not only to demonstrate glory through acts of mercy and solicitude, but essentially to become glory. The issue, then, is doxological, and specifically whether there are prospects in Hegelian forms of theology for a doxological Trinity: an immanent Trinity that is, on the one hand, our exclusive object of communal and individual praise and worship and, on the other, the demonstration of gloriousness, which without sacrifice to divine omnipotence, indicates divine love. That Hegel and Hegelian like theology can speak the language of worship does not mean that it is real: between the word and the reality falls the shadow, thus, Balthasar’s finally unflattering estimate of Hegel as representing the return of Valentinianism, albeit one infected by modern commitments to time and matter, and inflected by the history of the rise of Joachim and the corresponding fall of Augustine. A doxological Trinity supposes not only our situation as indelibly finite and fallen, it also supposes that we look for consolation and assurance that all will be well. If Balthasar believes that God provides sufficient evidence for consolation and assurance, he is Pascalian enough to realize that it is insufficient for knowledge and certainty.

IV. Concluding Reflections This chapter has explored the theological and philosophical operations in and through which the Christian doctrine of providence is turned by Hegel

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 100

4/28/2009 10:38:10 AM

Hegel, Theodicy and the Invisibility of Waste

101

into something that it is not, that is, a theodicy. Although I recognized a number of different philosophical influences, I suggested that at the purely philosophical level Hegel’s theodicy-conjugation of the doctrine of providence is a tensional synthesis between Spinoza and Leibniz, which both suggests that the divine is so obviously justified as to make the enterprise of theodicy unnecessary, and attempts to justify the divine by pointing to the way that the system as a whole can bear significant redundancy. Lost from view in the synthesis is the extravagantly provident God who hears each or our prayers and each of our cries. I led with Hegel’s philosophical adaptation of providence, first, because it is the most famous aspect of Hegel’s transmogrification of the doctrine of providence, and, second, because all of the operations performed by Hegelian thought ultimately lead back to philosophical discourse which, precisely as conceptual, enjoys privileges over first-order and even second-order Christian discourses which cannot shake off all traces of the symbolic and the narrative. From the vantage point of my interest in diagnosing and isolating the operations of alteration of the doctrine of providence, I consider the second part of the essay, in which I explored the theological and specifically Trinitarian alteration of the doctrine, to be more rather than less important than the first. Hegel seems to recognize providence is a ‘mixed doctrine’ in thinking of it, on the one hand, as being connected with the entire salvation history narrative and, on the other, with a doctrine of God. In both cases, as I showed, this comes to mean that the doctrine of providence is connected with the doctrine of the Trinity. I demonstrated, however, that Hegel understands quite differently than classical Trinitarianism the economic Trinity, the Trinity in se, and their relation. Hegel, I indicated, offers a Joachimite reworking of the economic Trinity, and he rubs out the tri-personality of the Trinity to forge a dynamic form of Sabellianism. In effecting both of these alterations, he presents a self-developing Trinity that deconstructs the distinction between the economic and immanent Trinity by making each aspects of a larger dynamic of the self-fulfilment of the divine. Hegel, I explained, has two speculative precedents for this narrativization of the Trinity: (1) the proximate precedent of the Lutheran mystic, Jacob Boehme, and (2) the ultimate precedent of Valentinian Gnosticism. It is an essential part of my argument that the insertion of the doctrine of providence into this subversive Trinitarian environment is calculated to alter the doctrine in fundamental respects. The Hegelian Trinity is speculative in the strict sense in that it involves a reflexive divine reality, that is, a reality that divides in order to mirror itself, in which the reflective medium is provided by world and human being. The upshot is that in Hegel’s hands the doctrine of the Trinity functions already as the matrix of theodicy, since

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 101

4/28/2009 10:38:11 AM

102

The Providence of God

divine self-reflection is the greatest good. Moreover, the insertion of the Christian doctrine of providence into this speculative Trinitarian environment makes the doctrine serve a purely explanatory purpose for which it was not intended. In Hegel’s complex system Trinitarian thought, which seems comfortable with the waste of history, points forward to its fulfilment in philosophy that beggars the provocation of waste to such an extent that the Hegelian system of memory (Erinnerung) becomes ironically the milieu of forgetting. Within the fulfilment dynamic, we pointed to the almost contractual basis of the relation between Trinitarian thought and conceptual articulation: as Trinitarian schematics primes conceptual theodicy, conceptual articulation takes on specifically Christian credentials by presupposing Trinitarian articulation that cannot fully account for itself. The genius of some of Hegel’s greatest critics is to see the working together of Trinitarian thought and conceptual articulation to outbid the gestures, symbols and narratives of lamentation, solicitation, impeachment, thanksgiving, faith in darkness, hope without the evidences that would make hope other than a risk. The third section of this chapter examined two very different views of how to read the Hegelian braiding of Trinity and the concept. The first was that of Derrida, whose justification for indicting Christianity as well as Hegelian thought as indulging in the obscenity of theodicy, is that Hegel represents Christian Trinitarian thought adequately, indeed sums it up. The second view was provided by Balthasar, who insists against Hegel that Trinitarian articulation necessarily has to be uncoupled from conceptual thought: if the latter defines a theodicy, the former does not. Balthasar so brings the full resources of the Trinitarian tradition to bear against Hegel, that one can speak indifferently of a Dionysian or Maximan, a Thomist or Bonaventuran, an Augustinian or Nyssan critique of Hegel’s Trinitarianism, a critique that rules out of court any theodicy-priming function of the doctrine of the Trinity, especially as the doctrine provides the horizon for and the synoptic frame of all other doctrines, and most especially the ‘mixed doctrine’ of providence. I decided resolutely in favour of Balthasar. The preference was motivated in part by Derrida’s uncritical reading of Hegel’s Trinitarian thought in which the Idealist philosopher is allowed to set the terms for description and explanation, and thus develop an impeachment of Trinitarian doctrine as a vicious form of theodicy/anthropodicy in which waste is ignored. It was motivated in part also by and Balthasar’s more fluid and plural reading of the theological tradition, which insists that the Trinity is never speculative, never divorced from prayer, from worship, from the mystery of Christ’s solidarity with us in sin as well as suffering. Understanding its limitations, here I essentially restricted my own and Balthasar’s naming

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 102

4/28/2009 10:38:11 AM

Hegel, Theodicy and the Invisibility of Waste

103

of the alternative to Augustine, because the relation between Hegel and Augustine is one that has intrigued scholars, because Hegel’s and Augustine’s respective construals of history have quite often been compared, because more than other major Christian thinkers, the doctrine of the Trinity is taken by both to frame our perception of God’s reality and activity, and because of the sheer comprehensiveness of theological treatment in which every theological doctrine is in play. One should differentiate out these Trinitarian models and assess independently their critical capacity vis-à-vis Hegelian Trinitarian thought and its relation to reason. The critical ratio might be more or less than that of Augustine. Still, Augustine is more than a capable place-holder for a theological tradition that Balthasar appreciates, in a way that Derrida does not, is profoundly multivocal, but which in any event is united in its invocation of an alterity that is the countersign of how it goes with the world, maybe even the countersign of the countersign.

Notes 1 See Nils Thulstrup, Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, trans. Goerge Strenger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 359–65; 370–8. Although Concluding Unscientific Postscript is directed against Hegel’s dialectical mediation and thus overcoming of Christianity, the crucial text is Philosophical Fragments, trans. David F. Swenson, revised by Howard V. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). 2 Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, Die logische Frage in Hegels System (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1843). A relevant excerpt from this text is available in English translation by Thomas Davidson. See G. W. F. Hegel: Critical Assessments. Volume 1: Nineteenth Century Readings, ed. Robert Stern (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 182–216. 3 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 313–38; Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience (no translator given) (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); also Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Mead and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988). 4 Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr and Richard Rand (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). In line with Adorno and Benjamin, Derrida does not mount a straightforward ethical attack against Hegel insouciant speculation, but shows the dimensions of the sacrifice that the system demands and about which it does not always come clean. 5 See Immanuel Hermann Fichte – the nephew of Gottlieb Fichte – Die Idee der Persönlichkeit und der individuellen Fortdaur (Eberfelt, 1834); see also Christian Hermann Weisse, Die Idee der Gottheit (Dresden, 1833). The German Catholic Romantic thinker, Franz von Baader (1765–1841), critically engaged Hegel for over 30 years. A good synoptic account is provided by Peter

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 103

4/28/2009 10:38:11 AM

The Providence of God

104

6 7

8

9 10

11

12

Koslowski in his fine article, ‘Religiöse Philosophie und speculative Dogmatik – Franz von Baaders Theorie der Gesamtwirklichkeit’, in Die Philosophie, Theologie und Gnosis Franz von Baaders. Spekulative Denken zwischen Aufklärung, Restauration und Romantik, ed. Peter Koslowski (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1993), 289–325; esp. 313–25. Of these criticizers of Hegel, Franz Anton Staudenmaier (1800–56) stands out. Although early on his career Staudenmaier was prepared to think that Hegel’s thought could be reconciled with that of traditional Christianity, he gradually came to see that they were in opposition. In the 1840’s Staudenmaier produced a number of texts directed against Hegel, the most famous of which is Darstellung und Kritik der Hegelschen Systems. Aus dem Standpunkte der christlichen Philosophie (Mainz: Kupferberg, 1844) (Reprinted Frankfurt: Minerva, 1966). See Iwan Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels als kontemplative Gotteslehre (Berne: Franke, 1946). This reading of Hegel is consistent throughout Balthasar’s 50-year engagement with Hegel. It begins with Apokalypse der deutschen Seele. Studien zu einer Lehre von letzen Haltungen, 1: Der deutsche Idealismus (Salzburg: Pustet, 1937) and Hegel is a dominant interlocutor throughout the triptych of Glory of the Lord, Theo-Drama and Theo-Logic. For a convenient English translation of a text that is a complication of Hegel’s lectures on the idea of history, see The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956). The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) (First published by Clarendon Press in 1952). While not perfect, A. V. Miller’s translation of the Phenomenology is still more than serviceable. See Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Hegel’s reflections here serve as the hinge for Alexandre Kojève’s influential interpretation. See Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. J. H. Nichols, ed. Allen Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1969). Kojève was not on insecure ground, since violence is not restricted to the reflection on the master– slave dialectic. Especially pertinent also is Hegel’s reflections on the French Revolution and its relation the Enlightenment. See Phenomenology #532–98 where Hegel discusses the Terror that has its ground in the Enlightenment (#538–81). See Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 volumes, ed. Peter Hodgson, J. Steward, with assistance from H. S. Harris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985–7). Especially relevant is LPR2, 669–87. In breaking his pattern of contempt for the Jewish sublime that emphasizes God’s transcendence of the world, Hegel speaks of the justice and wisdom of this God as the foundation for his self-expression in the world. The linkage of wisdom and justice is typical of Philo, who serves the same function that he served in the patristic period, that is, mediating Judaism and Christianity. See also Hegel’s discussion of Philo in Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 2, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). (This is a reprint of the 1894 translation published by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner.) The relevant pages on Philo, whose notion of the Logos gets an extraordinarily good press, are 389–96.

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 104

4/28/2009 10:38:12 AM

Hegel, Theodicy and the Invisibility of Waste

105

13 Paragraphs 142–3 of the so-called lesser logic provide a particular clear account. See Logic (The First Part of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. William Wallace, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892) (Reprint 1974), 200–4. 14 G. W. F. Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E. M. Huggard (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1985). 15 Throughout the Ethics, Spinoza is interested in ascertaining whether fully adequate knowledge of reality is attainable, that is, a knowledge that can take in the whole in a kind of non-discursive intellectual intuition. One can see here how his reflections throw down the gauntlet for all of German Idealism. After speaking of it in place-holder fashion as the ‘third kind of knowledge’ earlier on in the text, he specifies it in some of the final propositions of the last book of the Ethics as scientia intuitive. 16 Hegel appeals to the Neoplatonic trope throughout his work. See Enc #564, and LPR1, 104 for two such examples. 17 This is a major impulse behind the pejorative contrast between Substance and Subject in the Preface (#28, 29) and throughout the Phenomenology and his frontal attack on Spinoza’s Substance in his long excursus on Spinoza in volume 3 of Lectures on the History of Philosophy (252–90). But the most interesting attack on the non-teleological nature of Spinoza’s metaphysical system is in the Greater Logic, where Hegel seems anxious to defend something like the dynamic Trinitarianism he has found in such a heterodox Christian as Jacob Boehme (1575–1624). See Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 328–39. 18 See LHP2, 392–3; LPR2, 339; also LPR3, 82–3. 19 The connection between Neoplatonic conceptuality and Trinitarian thinking is made with particular force in the case of Proclus. See especially LHP2, 40, 48; LPR3, 80, 280. For a fuller discussion of this point, see my The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), 102–7, 133–4. 20 The case of Valentinian Gnosticism is especially interesting. In Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Volume 2, Hegel discusses Valentinian Gnosticism alongside Philo under the general umbrella of Neoplatonism and its triadic narrative dynamic. Hegel seems to know Ptolemy’s system, and likely supplemented the views of Gnosticism and Philo that he found in the standard histories with the work of August Neander. See the latter’s important, Genetische Entwicklung der vornehmsten gnostischen System (Berlin: Dümmler, 1818). Hegel directly links Philo and Neoplatonism with Valentinian Gnosticism when it comes to the expression of the hidden God in LPR3, 84–5, 195–7, 287–8. 21 The same schematization is to be found in the section on ‘Revealed Religion’ in the Phenomenology (#770–87). It differs slightly in the Encyclopedia #564– 71 in which the incarnation, passion and suffering of Christ are placed in the third moment. 22 For a discussion of the Trinitarian synopsis of an absolutely encompassing narrative, see The Heterodox Hegel, 67–77. 23 For similar passages, see LPR3, 124–5, 132, 219–20; PS #19. 24 While contrary to the shibboleth of its promiscuous metaphysical borrowing from the Hellenistic environment, Christian writers were prepared to put limits

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 105

4/28/2009 10:38:12 AM

The Providence of God

106

25

26

27

28 29

30 31

32

33

34 35 36

to the axiom of impassibility that dominated philosophical construals of ultimate reality (as witnessed by Origen, who says that one of the Trinity suffered, and Gregory Thaumaturgos, who insisted that the Son suffers uniquely and sublimely), the challenge to the impassibility axiom was not radical. It was not easy to square ‘suffering’ with God’s total otherness. For Staudenmaier’s use of the term ‘theogony’, see Darstellung und Kritik des Hegelschen Systems, 771. See also Iwan Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 203 where he speaks not so much of ‘theogony’ as its formal equivalent ‘theogenetic process’ (theogenetische Prozess). Staudenmaier does not explicitly connect Hegel and Gnosticism in Darstellung und Kritik des Hegelschen Systems, although it is implicit in this text, which is clearly in conversation with Ferdinand Christian Baur’s Die christliche Gnosis oder die christliche Religionsphilosophie in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung (Tübingen: Osiander, 1835), who connected Hegel’s developmental ontology explicitly with ancient gnosis (668–735). See Henri de Lubac, La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore. Tome 1. de Joachim à Schelling (Paris: Letheilleux, 1979); Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought, trans. D. E. Green (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 31–51. See also Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). For Hegel, see 52–9; for Joachim, see 145–59. Löwith explicitly connects Joachim with Hegel (159), and throughout regards Augustine as the antithesis to Joachim and vice versa. See Lessing’s Theological Writings, trans. Henry Chadwick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1956), 82–98. This point is eloquently expressed in Enc #36 and PS #722. The latter is worth quoting in full: ‘For the mystical is not the concealment of a secret, or ignorance, but consists in the self knowing itself to be one with the divine being or that this therefore is revealed’ (Miller’s translation, 437). I discuss the movement from Vorstellung to Begriff in The Heterodox Hegel, 331–70. The most comprehensive account of the role of judgement in Hegel’s religious thought is to be found in Dale M. Schlitt’s Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim: A Critical Reflection (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984). The validity claims of theology are not sustainable if theology confines itself to elucidating that which has been given in faith and revelation. From Hegel’s perspective, theology is not coextensive with dogmatics. The essay was written in 1791, and in the new English translation goes under the title of ‘On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy’, trans. George di Giovanni in Immanuel Kant: Religion and Rational Theology, trans. and ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 19–37. For Job references, see 32–3. See LPR2, 139–41, 446, 681–3. See Paul Ricoeur, ‘Evil, A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology’, in JAAR, vol. 53, no. 4, 631–48. For a treatment of the relation between Eckhart and Hegel on knowledge, see both The Heterodox Hegel, 250–62, and my essay ‘Hegelian Philosophy of Religion and Eckhartian Mysticism’, in New Perspectives on Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), 109–29.

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 106

4/28/2009 10:38:12 AM

Hegel, Theodicy and the Invisibility of Waste

107

37 See Enc #564; LPR1, 195; LPR3, 386. 38 Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1968). For Kant’s full treatment of the proofs, with context and after reflections, see 485–531. For the proofs proper, see refutation of ontological proof (500–7), cosmological proof (507–18), and the teleological or physico-theological proof (517–24). 39 For Hegel’s positive assessment of Anselm, see LPR1, 438; LPR3, 72, 183–4. 40 An important corroboration of Hegel’s revising of Spinoza which takes Spinoza in the direction of subject but a kind of dynamic triadic scheme is to be found in book 1, section 3 of the Science of Logic in which Hegel rereads Spinoza’s categories of Substance, Attribute and Mode as being features of an intrinsically dynamic triadic self-reflective whole. See especially 328. 41 LHP3, 188–216; also LPR3, 275–6. For a treatment on the relationship between Hegel’s and Boehme’s view of the Trinity, see The Heterodox Hegel, 150–5, 180–7, 223–32, 279–85. 42 For a synoptic account of Leibniz’s Trinitarianism, which brings out both the relation of Leibniz’s view to both the classical tradition and Hegel, see Samuel M. Powell, The Trinity in German Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 46–59. Leibniz’s articulation of the Trinity is in terms of metaphysics. There is no appeal to scripture or revelation. In this way, even more than Boehme, whose notion of divine energy and power he borrows, he is Hegel’s precursor. 43 Powell, The Trinity in German Thought, 53. 44 See LHP2, 396–9. In Hegel’s recall, he shows knowledge of the Gnostic system of Ptolemaeus that is presented in book 1 of Irenaeus’s Against Heresies. There is no reason, however, to suppose that Hegel read Irenaeus. He probably gathered all he knew about ancient Gnosticism from August Neander, Genetische Entwicklung der vornehmsten gnostischen Systeme: See Hodgson’s glosses in LPR3, 84–5, 89, 99, 219, 277, 287, 315. 45 See Glas, 1, 43, 53, 60, 70, 226–7 inter alia. 46 Glas, 71, 105–6, 115 inter alia. 47 Wahrheit is recycled as Theologik 1. For a convenient English translation, see Theo-Logic 1: Truth of the World, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000). TL1 represents a critical engagement with De Veritate that proceeds on a level of sophistication that surpasses Balthasar’s account of Aquinas in Glory of the Lord. See Glory of the Lord 4: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity, trans. Brian Mc Neil, Adrew Louth, John Saward, Rowan Williams and Oliver Davies (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 393–412. This volume also has an interesting reflection on Plotinus (GL4, 280–313). Of course, Christian Neoplatonism is rife throughout the first three volumes, with an essentially Bonaventuran aesthetics setting the terms of Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, and with important essays on the theological aesthetics of Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius and Bonaventure himself. 48 See TL1, 29, 33, 71, 100, 103, 109, 123–4 inter alia in which Hegel’s infinitist tendencies are curbed by an appeal to the finitude of knowledge and the horizon of Being as mystery. 49 For Derrida’s attack on the Trinitarian theology which he deems is summed up in and by Hegel’s system, see Glas, 28–32, 56–8, 64–5, 75–80.

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 107

4/28/2009 10:38:13 AM

108

The Providence of God

50 It would take a monograph to demonstrate the extent and depth of Balthasar’s resistance to Hegel on this point. Intimated the first part of the trilogy, it is a central preoccupation of both the second and third parts of the trilogy, or Theo-Drama and Theo-Logic respectively. Volumes 4 and 5 of the former and volumes 2 and 3 of the latter are especially important. 51 See Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. Volume 1. Prolegomena, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 53–70. 52 The point is made throughout Theo-Drama. It is made with particular force in Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. Volume 2. Dramatis Personae: Man in God, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 189ff.; also 125.

FMurphy_04_Finals.indd 108

4/28/2009 10:38:13 AM

Chapter 5

Providence and Common Grace Andrew McGowan

I. Introduction After the Reformation, there developed within Reformed theology an aspect of the doctrine of divine providence which was unique to that strand of Christianity. It originated with Calvin and came to be known as the doctrine of common grace.1 The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how the Dutch Neo-Calvinist development and revision of this doctrine at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly in the theology of Herman Bavinck, offers considerable assistance to Reformed theology, both in its relationship to science and in its relationship to culture. John Murray identifies the theological problem which Reformed theology seeks to answer by its doctrine of common grace: The subject of common grace is not only of particular but also of very urgent interest to the person who accepts the witness of Scripture regarding the total depravity of human nature by reason of sin. For if we appreciate the implications of total depravity, then we are faced with a series of very insistent questions. How is it that men who still lie under the wrath and curse of God and are heirs of hell enjoy so many good gifts at the hand of God? How is it that men who are not savingly renewed by the Spirit of God nevertheless exhibit so many qualities, gifts and accomplishments that promote the preservation, temporal happiness, cultural progress, social and economic improvement of themselves and of others? How is it that races and peoples that have been apparently untouched by the redemptive and regenerative influences of the gospel contribute so much to what we call human civilization? To put the question most comprehensively: how is it that this sin-cursed world enjoys so much favour and kindness at the hand of its holy and everblessed Creator?2

II. John Calvin Given John Calvin’s predestinarian theology, one might have expected that when he came to deal with the doctrine of providence, his concern would have been to speak about God’s dealings with the elect and his provision for their needs. Instead, Calvin argued that God’s providential dealings with humanity included an important element in respect of the reprobate.

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 109

4/28/2009 10:37:50 AM

110

The Providence of God

As Raymond Van Leeuwen has commented, ‘Calvin considered common grace an aspect of God’s all-encompassing providence by which he maintains human life and culture as well as the rest of creation for his own purposes (Inst., 2.2.3). Common grace maintains the goodness of creation in spite of humanity’s radical depravity resulting from the fall. This grace is the source of all human virtue and accomplishment, even that of unbelievers who have not been regenerated by the salvific grace of God (Inst., 2.2.12–17).’3 In the final edition of his Institutes, Calvin turns to the doctrine of providence towards the end of book 1. His primary concern initially is to make clear that, if we contemplate God’s creation of all things but do not immediately go on to speak of his providence, then we do not properly grasp the meaning of creation.4 This close link between God’s creation of all things and his providential sustaining of all things is key to understanding everything which follows and Calvin argues that such understanding comes only by faith. The providence he goes on to describe is what he later calls a ‘universal providence’.5 Calvin speaks of how God, ‘sustains, nourishes, and cares for, everything he has made, even to the least sparrow’.6 This providence is all-encompassing such that there is no such thing as chance or fortune but rather, ‘all events are governed by God’s secret plan’.7 Indeed, Calvin goes so far as to say that, ‘governing heaven and earth by his providence, he so regulates all things that nothing takes place without his deliberation’.8 Nor can this providence be reduced to a ‘universal law of nature’.9 Rather, God is intimately involved in and concerned with every aspect of the life of his creatures such that, ‘they are governed by God’s secret plan in such a way that nothing happens except what is knowingly and willingly decreed by him’.10 Lest anyone imagine that Calvin is simply teaching that God ‘sees’ everything that happens, he goes on immediately to say this: ‘providence means not that by which God idly observes from heaven what takes place on earth, but that by which, as keeper of the keys, he governs all events’.11 Or, as he says a little later, ‘God so attends to the regulation of individual events, and they all so proceed from his set plan, that nothing takes place by chance’.12 As Benjamin Farley puts it, ‘the sovereignty of God is simply indispensable to a doctrine of providence’.13 This very strong doctrine of a providence by which God decrees and governs all things is the basis for what Calvin then goes on to say about different aspects of God’s providence. In relation to creation he speaks of a ‘general providence’ and he does not avoid the hard conclusions of his earlier strong statements. Rather, he is quite prepared to say that good harvests and bad harvests are alike the result of God’s specific choice and action, the one conveying his favour and blessing, the other his judgement

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 110

4/28/2009 10:37:51 AM

Providence and Common Grace

111

and vengeance.14 This controlling providence relates particularly to the individual lives of human beings, for whose sake, says Calvin, the universe was established.15 The life situation of every human being is attributed to God. As one would expect, Calvin brings forth a wealth of biblical evidence for all of these propositions. The fact that even the throw of the dice is said in scripture to give the result determined by God ranks high among these references.16 It must not be imagined, however, that Calvin is oblivious to the various problems and possible misrepresentations of his position. First, he is at pains to point out that this doctrine of providence is not the same as some Stoic conception of ‘fate’.17 Second, he recognizes what the Westminster Divines would later call ‘the liberty and contingency of second causes’. Calvin understands that, in our human experience, the true causes of events are hidden from us and that we will naturally attribute events to various causes which we can identify. He is quite content to appreciate the validity of these ‘second causes’,18 so long as we remember that the primary cause of all events is God’s action.19 The important point is that, in considering the events of daily life, we approach them with faith in God and an attitude of humility, fear and reverence.20 Third, Calvin insists that we must not use the providence of God as an excuse for our behaviour or for the behaviour of others. We remain responsible for our decisions and our actions.21 Similarly, those who have committed evil acts cannot blame God but must be suitably punished.22 Above all, Calvin wants to stress that this doctrine of the providence of God is to act as an encouragement to believers.23 The knowledge and assurance that the world is not a place of chaos and pure chance but rather a place where God is in control, provides believers with strength for everyday life and takes away fear and uncertainty. It is in a later chapter, when he is dealing with the subject of the human will, that Calvin begins to open up what would later be classified as the doctrine of common grace. He argues, following Augustine, that human beings lost their spiritual and supernatural gifts at the fall but they did not lose their natural gifts, rather these gifts were damaged and weakened. The spiritual gifts in question include, ‘faith, love of God, charity toward neighbour, zeal for holiness and for righteousness’.24 The natural gifts include reason and the ability to distinguish good from evil. Human beings are no longer as they were intended to be by God but they are still to be distinguished from beasts and they remain capable of some understanding and of some ‘power of perception’.25 Similarly, since every human being is by nature a ‘social animal’, there is a ‘natural instinct to foster and preserve society’.26 Calvin extends this line of reasoning even further and notes that human beings retain a ‘certain aptitude’ in the arts and sciences.27

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 111

4/28/2009 10:37:51 AM

112

The Providence of God

One important point must be made here, the significance of which will be clearer when we come later to discuss the work of Herman Bavinck. Calvin is emphatically not saying that human beings are capable of certain things by nature and of other things only by grace. He has sometimes been interpreted as arguing here for a distinction between nature and grace which is, in fact, foreign to his whole line of reasoning. Rather he is arguing that everything good which human beings do is the result of grace, either that grace which God exercises towards all human beings or that special grace which brings regeneration and the life of the kingdom. It is no accident that, in this midst of this very section of the Institutes which we are considering, he devotes a chapter to arguing that science is a gift of God28 and that human ability in the arts and sciences comes from the Spirit of God.29 There is, however, a residual problem here which Calvin addresses directly when he comes to deal more specifically with human sin and depravity. The problem may be expressed in this way: Why is it that some human beings are able to live in ways which demonstrate a certain honesty, honour and moral purity? If human beings are indeed ‘totally depraved’ why are they not as bad as they could be? Calvin’s answer is that amid this corruption of nature there is some place for God’s grace; not such grace as to cleanse it, but to restrain it inwardly. For if the Lord gave loose reign to the mind of each man to run riot in his lusts, there would doubtless be no-one who would not show that, in fact, every evil thing for which Paul condemns all nature is most truly to be met in himself.30

Here, then, we have two important themes. First, fallen human beings are enabled to create and preserve society and to engage in the arts and sciences, because of the work of the Spirit of God. Second, fallen human beings are not as bad as they could be because God, by his grace, restrains and curtails their sin and depravity. Taken together, these two themes represent what became the Reformed doctrine of common grace. On the negative side, God restrains sin and, on the positive side, God enables human society and grants ability in the arts and sciences.

III. Post-Reformation Theology Reformed commentators on scripture, following Calvin, have continued to identify various strands of biblical teaching in support of common grace. It is not possible to survey all of this exegetical work but perhaps we might note two particular themes. First, commentators have focused attention on

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 112

4/28/2009 10:37:51 AM

Providence and Common Grace

113

those passages in the Synoptics which affirm God’s care for the unrighteous as well as for the righteous. The key text is from Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount, Mt. 5.43–6: You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy’. But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?

The strength of this passage is that God has a general love and concern for all humanity, righteous and unrighteous, this being the foundation of the command to human beings to love their enemies. The second strand of New Testament teaching often used in the defence of common grace concerns God’s restraint of sin. For example, some commentators have seen this theme in Rom. 1.18–32 and particularly verses 24, 26 and 28 where we have the repeated refrain ‘God gave them up’ (Ò θεòς παρεδωκεν). This has been taken to mean that, in those instances, God withdrew his restraining common grace and allowed sin full and free reign in the lives of those individuals, effectively permitting them to become what they truly wanted to be in their hearts. There are also, of course, many disputed passages. For example, much discussion has taken place on Rom. 2.14, 15: Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.

Proponents and opponents of common grace have turned to this verse to assist their cause. Berkouwer wisely notes, While Romans 2:14 plays an important role in all theological discussions of the problem, Paul himself does not here give an explanation of the fallen man’s conformity to the law, not does he take this up anywhere as a separate topic. We can only say that Paul does not wish to deny such a conformity, but views it as a possibility which sometimes becomes an actuality within the limits of a life turned away from God, without examining further how this can be reconciled with the radical apostasy of man’s alienation from God.31

This doctrine of the common grace of God remained a factor within Reformed theology but not much was made of it until the end of the

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 113

4/28/2009 10:37:52 AM

114

The Providence of God

nineteenth century. It did not find a place in the Reformed confessions of the seventeenth century, except in some passing references. For example, article 4 in section III/IV of the Canons of Dort says, There is, to be sure, a certain light of nature remaining in man after the fall, by virtue of which he retains some notions about God, natural things, and the difference between what is moral and immoral, and demonstrates a certain eagerness for virtue and for good outward behaviour.32

This is not developed into a doctrine of common grace, but is merely used to insist that this light of nature is insufficient for salvation. In the ‘Rejections’ following this section, however, the expression ‘common grace’ is used but only to underline the point already made, namely, that it is impossible by the use of this common grace gradually to move towards ‘a greater grace’.33 Similarly, chapter 10, section 4 of the Westminster Confession of Faith speaks of how unbelievers ‘may have some common operations of the Spirit’34 but does not elaborate on the theme.

IV. Abraham Kuyper Most commentators give the credit for the resurgence of the doctrine within Dutch Neo-Calvinism to Abraham Kuyper, because of his three-volume work on the subject.35 Certainly Kuyper developed the theme on a grand scale, combining it with at least three other key themes in his theology. The first theme is that of ‘antithesis’, by which he meant the fundamental difference between believer and unbeliever, Christian and non-Christian. This was based on his exegesis of scripture, not least on the imagery of light and darkness. The second theme is that of ‘world-view’. Consciously following the Scottish theologian James Orr, he emphasized that Calvinism was not merely a soteriology but rather an all-encompassing approach to life and salvation in which there is not even one aspect of the life of the created order and of human beings within it which Christ does not claim as his own. The third theme is that of ‘sphere sovereignty’. Kuyper argued strongly that God had established several institutions, each of which had sovereignty in their own spheres of operation. In particular, he identified the Church, the state and society. Others later developed this and included the family. According to Kuyper, it was wrong for the state, for example, to interfere in the sovereignty of the Church and vice versa. Each had its own duties and responsibilities before God and was answerable to God for the way in which it carried out these duties and responsibilities. The result of this reconstituted ‘world-view’ Calvinism, with its strong emphasis on common grace, was a revival of Calvinism and the

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 114

4/28/2009 10:37:52 AM

Providence and Common Grace

115

development of a whole new strand within Reformed theology. It spawned political action, Kuyper himself founding a Christian political party and eventually becoming prime minister of Holland. It spawned a new interest in Christian institutions, not least the Christian daily and weekly newspapers which Kuyper edited and the Free University of Amsterdam of which he was co-founder. It also spawned a philosophical movement, with significant work by Vollenhoven, Dooyeweerd and others. Above all, it spawned a revival of Calvinistic theology, such that a school of theology was born, beginning with Kuyper and Herman Bavinck and leading on to modern times in the theology of G. C. Berkouwer and others. Kuyper’s exposition of the doctrine of common grace was, nevertheless, somewhat controversial. Some embraced it warmly and it became the basis for a recovery of a good relationship between theology and culture in Holland. Others, however, were critical and some of that criticism has continued to the present day. These critics have fallen into three main groups. First, there are those who are generally sympathetic to the doctrine of common grace but who express the doctrine differently than did Kuyper. In this group we have Herman Bavinck to whom we shall turn shortly. Second, there are those who appreciate the concept of universal blessing or grace from God but who do not believe that it should be called ‘common grace’. A recent exponent of this position is Campbell Campbell-Jack who, in his doctoral thesis, offered a significant critique of the doctrine of common grace in Dutch Neo-Calvinism. Campbell-Jack argues that the primary weakness in Kuyper’s exposition of the doctrine of common grace was the attempt to expound a form of grace which was not rooted in the incarnation.36 Campbell-Jack writes, ‘The fundamental flaw in the doctrine is that by separating creation from an integral relationship with the incarnate Christ we create tensions between the two graces in their origin, development and purpose.’37 The third group of Kuyper’s critics, however, are undoubtedly the most significant, namely, those who have advocated a wholesale rejection of the concept of common grace, arguing that it undermines the doctrine of predestination and the decrees of God. This group argues that the antithesis and common grace cannot cohabit in the same theological system because they are mutually contradictory. This debate caused a split in the Christian Reformed Church in America. At its Synod meeting in 1924, the denomination, following Kuyper’s position, adopted what were called the ‘Three Points of Common Grace’. The first point affirmed that, as well as saving grace, there is a certain grace which God shows towards all his creatures. The second point affirmed that human life in society is only possible after the fall because of God’s restraint of sin. The third point affirmed that God so works in the lives of the non-elect that they are able to do civic good,

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 115

4/28/2009 10:37:52 AM

116

The Providence of God

although not saving good. Three ministers of the Christian Reformed Church refused to accept these points and were removed from office within the Church. They subsequently founded the Protestant Reformed Church. The leader of the group was Herman Hoeksema who, because of a high supralapsarian theology, rejected the concept of common grace. It is significant, however, that Hoeksema not only rejected the doctrine of common grace but also the free offer of the gospel.38 A similar split later took place in Holland, in the Gereformeerde Kerken, again over Kuyper’s theology. In this case, the issue was over ‘presumptive regeneration’ and the covenants, which Kuyper had affirmed but which Klaas Schilder, professor of Dogmatics in Kampen, could not accept. Schilder was a significant opponent of the Nazis and indeed was in hiding at the point when his denomination suspended him from the ministry and from his chair at Kampen. There was naturally a huge flood of support for him in the country and the Liberated churches were formed. Although the issue of common grace was not at the forefront of this later schism, Schilder had sided with Hoeksema to some extent in the debate within the Protestant Reformed Church. As Anthony Hoekema has noted, Schilder’s position was, in fact, quite similar to that of Herman Hoeksema. Schilder objected to the term common grace (algemeene genade) on the ground that, in his judgment, the term grace as used in Scripture always implies the forgiveness of sins. That the effects of God’s curse on fallen mankind are being somewhat alleviated, Schilder does not see as an evidence of God’s grace.

Indeed, Schilder believed that the doctrine of common grace ‘weakens biblical teaching about human depravity’.39 He proposed instead the concept of the ‘cultural mandate’.40 This brief historical sketch is intended only to demonstrate that although Kuyper’s position on common grace was broadly affirmed within the Dutch Calvinist churches, it was not without its critics nor unfortunate schismatic results.

V. Herman Bavinck I want now to turn the focus away from Kuyper and on to the work of Herman Bavinck. I do so for three reasons. First, because a number of the problems which have been identified in Kuyper’s development of the theme of common grace are either not present or are less significant in Bavinck’s treatment; second, because Bavinck actually gave an important lecture on common grace ten years before Kuyper finished his own work on the

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 116

4/28/2009 10:37:53 AM

Providence and Common Grace

117

subject; and third, because, as in other areas, Bavinck’s careful theological method, enabled him to provide a much more solid theological foundation for common grace than did the entrepreneurial and creative Kuyper. In December 1894, in his rectorial address at Kampen, Bavinck addressed the subject of common grace. He had touched upon the theme previously but this was his first full treatment of the doctrine.41 In order to understand Bavinck’s argument we must recognize two key elements in his thinking. First, he rejected the idea of natural theology, while maintaining the concept of general revelation. Second, he did not believe that grace was something which is ‘added on’ to nature, which he took to be the prevailing position of the Roman Catholic Church of his day. Rather, he believed that common grace underlies all of human existence and is the basis for special grace. There are three elements of Bavinck’s treatment here which are worthy of careful consideration. First, the relationship between nature and grace. Second, the significance of common grace for fallen humanity. Third, the way in which he relates the streams of common grace and special grace. The first and most important theme which Bavinck outlines in this lecture is that nature and grace must not be set in opposition to one another. As he writes, ‘Grace does not remain outside or above or beside nature but rather permeates and wholly renews it. And thus nature, reborn by grace, will be brought to its highest revelation.’42 In other words, grace does not stand in opposition to nature but rather purifies and restores it. Bavinck argues that the natural remains the field of God’s activity, even after the fall. He contrasts his view with various forms of dualism, which he identified in both Catholicism43 and in Lutheranism.44 He also rejected the way out of dualism chosen by the Socinians (who rejected grace in favour of nature) and the Anabaptists (who rejected nature in favour of grace).45 He even rejected Zwingli’s view, arguing that Zwingli had ‘extended the sway of the gratia specialis far beyond the borders of historic Christianity’.46 Instead, he argued that Reformed theology, stemming from Calvin, had adopted an ‘organic’ relationship between nature and grace.47 The second theme which Bavinck expounds is the significance of common grace for fallen humanity. The good that can be seen in fallen human beings is not the result of their natural abilities and inclinations, so that they could be given the credit for their achievements. Rather, the good is a direct result of God’s grace, so that he alone receives the glory. The fall damaged but did not eradicate the imago dei. As Bavinck writes, God did not leave sin alone to do its destructive work. He had and, after the fall, continued to have a purpose for his creation; he interposed common grace between sin and the creation – a grace that, while it does not inwardly renew, nevertheless restrains and compels. All that is good and true has its origin in this grace, including the good we see in fallen man. The light still

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 117

4/28/2009 10:37:53 AM

118

The Providence of God

does shine in the darkness. The spirit of God makes its home and works in all the creation.48

Bavinck goes on to indicate some of the evidence for the work of God’s common grace in fallen humanity. He notes that even after the fall there remains much that is good and God-given, such as understanding and reason, the sensus divinitatis, music, the arts and sciences, the state, the love between parents and children and so on. The third theme which Bavinck takes up is the relationship between common and special grace. He states clearly that, despite all the advantages it brings to humanity, ‘common grace is not enough. It compels but it does not change; it restrains but does not conquer’.49 God’s special grace in Christ was necessary for the salvation of the world. The important point here is that this special grace does not create an entirely new order, a New Creation. Rather it purifies and builds upon that which is already there. It is also important to notice the way in which he roots common grace in Christ. Kuyper separated common grace and special grace in their relationship to Christ. He argued that Christ’s relationship to common grace was in his capacity as the Lord of creation, whereas his relationship to special grace was as the incarnate Christ. Bavinck seems to avoid this and roots both common grace and special grace in the incarnate Christ. We should note here that Bavinck, as a theologian of the Church, has a very practical purpose in his theological exposition of common grace. Primarily, he calls the Church to avoid flight from the world, citing Catholics and Anabaptists as having made a serious mistake in this matter. Catholicism had held up monasticism and asceticism as the supreme examples of spirituality and the Anabaptists had advocated withdrawal from the world, circling the wagons into a tight little Christian ghetto. Over against both of these, Bavinck advocated a full involvement in the everyday life of society as the calling of the Christian. Indeed, at this point, Bavinck offers a challenge to the Protestant churches which he believed were beginning to be guilty of the same world flight. He writes, The ordinary man who honorably fulfills his daily calling before God hardly seems to count any more; he does nothing, or so it is thought, for the kingdom of God. A student who studies hard and spends his time in a Christian manner may be good, but a person who dedicates a great part of his time to evangelism is better and more worthy. In the view of many today, to be a real Christian requires something extra, something out of the ordinary, some supernatural deed. Now this ‘something extra’ for many people consists only in being a member of a host of Christian clubs or organisations. Whether they be regular members, officers, honorary members, inactive members,

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 118

4/28/2009 10:37:53 AM

Providence and Common Grace

119

active members, or contributing members, in any case they are members. And so it is that the power and the worth of Christian faith is not appraised according to what a man does in his common calling but in what he accomplishes above and beyond it. People then seem to be Christians to the extent that they cease to be human and distinguish themselves in speech, dress, customs, and habits from the common man.50

Now there are dangers lurking here. Bavinck could be accused of so reacting against the view that monastic asceticism is the ultimate spiritual condition, that he goes to the other extreme of arguing that work and family and everyday matters are so important that the distinction between Christian and non-Christian vanishes completely. This does not happen, however, because Bavinck retains the antithesis between believer and unbeliever. He does not emphasize the antithesis to the extent that Kuyper did but that is no bad thing. Kuyper so emphasized the antithesis that it somewhat skewed his exposition of common grace. On the positive side, he rightly rejected the notion of human neutrality, arguing that the believer and the unbeliever each had presuppositions which governed their thinking and that the Christian should always view things differently than the non-Christian. This was the philosophical principle which later became so important for Cornelius Van Til.51 On the negative side, however, although Kuyper believed that common grace provided the basis for the state, society, culture and science, his understanding of the antithesis inevitably led him to argue for a separatist position. For example, Kuyper believed that Christians should be involved in politics – so he formed a Christian political party. He believed that Christians should be involved in journalism – so he formed a Christian daily newspaper and so on. There was a consuming desire to reform and renew culture but only by the use of specifically Christian institutions. Kuyper also insisted that there was also an antithesis between two types of science, Christian and non-Christian. Bavinck, on the other hand, emphasized common grace more and the antithesis less, so that Christian involvement in politics, the arts, the sciences and so on was possible without the need for specifically Christian institutions. These differences between Kuyper and Bavinck have been well explained by Jacob Klapwijk, who followed his mentor Vollenhoven to the chair of Philosophy in the Free University of Amsterdam.52 Klapwijk argues that Bavinck’s exposition of common grace takes him much closer to Calvin and distances him somewhat from Kuyper. After noting the similarities between Kuyper’s position and that of Bavinck, he says that Bavinck ‘arrived at a much more moderate judgment of non-Christian thought than did Kuyper’. He goes on to give the reasons for this, the first of them being the most significant:

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 119

4/28/2009 10:37:54 AM

120

The Providence of God

Bavinck notes that the antithesis is a conflict of principles, not of persons or organisations. He therefore cannot follow Kuyper in concluding from two kinds of principle to two kinds of people and two kinds of science. . . . For Bavinck, the kingdom of the truth can no more be equated with those who have been born again than can the kingdom of Satan be equated with those who have not been born again; among the former there is in fact much error present, among the latter much truth.53

Bavinck later wrote another article on the theme of common grace as part of the 400th anniversary of Calvin’s birth in 1909. It was titled ‘Calvin on Common Grace’ and appeared first in the Princeton Theological Review. It was then published later in the year, together with articles by Emile Doumergue, August Lang and B. B. Warfield, in a volume to mark the anniversary.54 In this article he calls attention to the significant differences which existed between the magisterial Reformers. He writes, While Luther’s faith was almost entirely absorbed in the fides justificans, and while Zwingli one sidedly defined faith as fides vivificans or regenerans, Calvin widened the conception to that of fides salvificans, – a faith which renews the entire man in his being and consciousness, in soul and body, in all his relations and activities, and hence a faith which exercises its sanctifying influence in the entire range of life, upon Church and school, upon society and state, upon science and art.55

In other words, he is not merely arguing that Calvin taught common grace but rather that the doctrine of common grace is one of the vital elements that distinguishes Reformed theology from Lutheran or Zwinglian theology. He has already argued in the earlier lecture that it also distinguishes Reformed theology from Catholicism and from Anabaptism. These are bold claims but I believe that Bavinck was fundamentally correct. Van Leeuwen, commenting on Bavinck’s rectorial address in Kampen, sums up the position very well when he writes, Bavinck’s view of common grace articulates a theological worldview that provides a basis for dealing with fundamental problems of the twentieth century. It enables us to acknowledge the importance of creation and human culture as good gifts of God that not only form the arena of his redemptive activity but are themselves subject to redemption. Bavinck contends that world flight is not a suitable Christian option. He affirms human responsibility for culture and creation in the context of the Creator’s ultimate sovereignty and Christ’s redemption of all things. Science and scholarship, art and politics, domestic and public life all have their basis in common grace. Such grace sustains the creation order even while all things await renewal by God’s salvific grace in Christ.56

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 120

4/28/2009 10:37:54 AM

Providence and Common Grace

121

VI. Application As I now move into the final section of this chapter, I want to demonstrate that this exercise in historical theology has implications for the life of the Church. My argument is that a recovery of the doctrine of common grace, as a significant aspect of the doctrine of providence, will help us in at least three areas. First, it will enable us to provide a more adequate foundation for the relationship between theology and science; second, it will help us to provide a solid theological argument for ecology in opposition to various fundamentalist approaches; and third, it will enable us to respond to the anti-cultural bias of much Scottish Calvinism.

A. Common grace and science It seems to me that a recovery of the doctrine of common grace might well assist in a more productive relationship between theologians and scientists. For over a hundred years now theology and science have been uneasy bedfellows and indeed have often been in direct conflict. Sometimes this has been because theologians have rejected the findings of science without good reason and on the basis of weak exegesis of scripture. Sometimes it has been because scientists have assumed that sense perception and logical analysis of the evidence gathered from sense experience is the only way in which knowledge can be obtained. Christianity has often felt threatened by advances in science and technology, believing that scientists have a tendency to ‘play God’, not least in areas such as genetic engineering. Scientists have often been frustrated by what they see as attempts to restrict the free progress of knowledge and the advance of humanity. More recently, due to the work of significant theologians and scientists, something of a rapprochement has taken place. Perhaps most significant among the theologians who have engaged in this task has been T. F. Torrance. He recognized that the old liberal theology was based upon a Newtonian cosmology, positing a closed, causal universe. Christian theologians in the liberal Protestant tradition, genuinely and honestly trying to accommodate Christianity to the prevailing scientific world-view, which they regarded as the assured results of modern scholarship, saw no place for miracle or divine intervention. Professor Torrance, who was awarded the Templeton Prize for his work in the interface between theology and science, pointed out that the scientific world-view had changed and that many of the scientists who were working at the very edges of advanced cosmology, following Einstein, had reached new conclusions. They now

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 121

4/28/2009 10:37:54 AM

122

The Providence of God

envisaged an open and expanding universe, not some closed, causal continuum. In the midst of these advances, the idea of a God who acts in the universe no longer seemed so incredible, nor did the concepts of creation, incarnation and resurrection. This is what Professor Torrance said in an address to the Scottish Church Theology Society, which he co-founded: Many a scientist is now ready for the first time to entertain the Christian concept of the incarnation and to think seriously about the absolute significance of Jesus Christ. And increasingly not a few are ready to believe in him as the way, the truth, and the life apart from whom there is no way to God the father. . . . More than one distinguished scientist has recently become a Christian, for the advance of scientific knowledge has undermined their atheism or their agnosticism – I am constantly hearing of them and sometimes from them. They clamour for a proper understanding of creation and its openness to God. The whole intellectual climate has changed, and scientists are asking theologians to help them think out the interrelation of the incarnation to the creation.57

This is a remarkable and welcome development which other scholars have build upon but it seems to me that sometimes the theological basis for the integration of science and theology has been somewhat weak. In the case of many of those working in this area, including Professor Torrance, it has involved some kind of rehabilitation of natural theology. This is not a concept, however, which sits well with many of their other theological affirmations, not least the high claim that all revelation comes in and through Jesus Christ. It seems to me that the doctrine of common grace might provide a more sustainable basis for the continuing engagement between science and theology, without the many problems and complications which are produced by natural theology.

B. Common grace and ecology In a recent visit to the United States, I heard a radio programme discussing climate change. One of the speakers was the designated spokesman of the Southern Baptist Convention. He said that he was not persuaded that climate change was taking place and even if it was taking place, he was not persuaded that human action was causing it. Having been to Spitsbergen three times in the past fifteen years and having witnessed the visible melting back of the ice cap, I was astonished by this attitude. It would seem that I was a little naive and that such views are actually quite common. They stem partly from eschatologies which see the earth as temporary and relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things and partly from theologies

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 122

4/28/2009 10:37:54 AM

Providence and Common Grace

123

which advocate a spiritual/material division of which any Hellenist or Gnostic would be proud! Those who hold to such views would probably, if pressed, accept the idea of a creation mandate based on Gen. 1.26 but they often see this in terms of ownership rather than of stewardship, as evidenced by various political philosophies which give evidence of fundamentalist influences. It seems to me that a recovery of the doctrine of common grace as part of an understanding of the universal providence of God provides the perfect antidote to this anti-ecological, fundamentalist thinking. This would enable a reintegration of the doctrines of creation and redemption, of nature and grace, of common and special grace.

C. Common grace and culture It seems to me that a recovery of the doctrine of common grace is vital for a proper theological understanding of human culture. This is especially the case for that expression of Scottish Calvinism which is deeply rooted in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, where I now live and work. Let me illustrate the problem by referring to a lecture which I heard several years ago. The lecturer, who is himself a minister, was telling the story of one of the great Highland ministers of the nineteenth century. In the course of the lecture, attention was drawn to the events surrounding this Highland minister’s conversion and we were told of the way in which his life was changed by God. Then, however, the lecturer went on to say that before his conversion, this man used to go to the theatre and read the novels of Sir Walter Scott but that after his conversion he gave up these pursuits. The lecturer made it clear that this was entirely the right thing to do and that all of us should also give up novels and the theatre when we become Christians. Now I had heard that kind of statement before and I had read stories of Highlanders who were converted and then burned their fiddles or drowned their bagpipes in the loch. Indeed, I recall hearing a minister from the Island of Lewis say publicly, at a meeting of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, that anyone who attended a Runrig concert should be disciplined by the Kirk Session. I have also heard of people who were involved in the Mod and had a real interest in Gaelic literature and poetry and music but who gave up this interest when they became Christians. All of this is based on the conviction that when you become a Christian you should withdraw from activities which are not specifically Christian and cease to engage in any cultural pursuits. The only books you should read are the Bible and specifically Christian books; the only gather-

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 123

4/28/2009 10:37:55 AM

124

The Providence of God

ings you should attend are those specifically for worship or prayer or otherwise in connection with the Church and the gospel; the only singing you should enjoy is the worship of God. If you ask why it is necessary to act in this way you will be told that all of these other things (novels, plays, concerts, instruments, the cinema, the Mod and so on) are ‘worldly’. Some will go further and tell you that these things are of the devil. It seems to me that these attitudes are deeply mistaken and the implied separation between the sacred and the secular with the conviction that Christians should retreat from the world into a private Christian subculture is a fundamental theological error. The idea that some things can be described as ‘sacred’ and others as ‘secular’ is simply not Christian. As we read in Ps. 24.1, 2: ‘The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; for he founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters.’ Although it is very common to use this distinction between the sacred and the secular, it is, in fact, a denial of the sovereignty of God. We must ask ourselves how it is that this error has developed. I believe that there is an exegetical reason and also a theological reason. First, then, the exegetical reason. In the New Testament there are two Greek words which are sometimes translated as ‘worldly’. In the AV, the word κοσμικος is translated as ‘worldly’. In the NIV, the word σαρκικος is translated ‘worldly’. The AV usually translates σαρκικος as ‘carnal’ which is probably more accurate since a literal translation of σαρκικος would be ‘fleshly’. There are several important points to note here. First, the word κοσμικος is used only twice in the New Testament. In one instance is refers to bodily lusts (Titus 2.12) and in the other (Heb. 9.1) it refers to the ‘earthly’ tabernacle. Second, the word σαρκικος and related words are used 14 times and normally mean ‘fleshly’, referring often to the sins of the body. Thirdly, although these words are often used to refer to moral or spiritual weakness or failure, there is not one instance of either κοσμικος or σαρκικος being used to refer to any cultural activity. So when someone describes, for example, a concert as ‘worldly’, the word is being used in a different way from its use in the New Testament. Now apart from the actual occurrence of Greek words which are translated as ‘worldly’ there is, of course, a body of references which speak of the ‘world’ as being in opposition to the Spirit or to the Kingdom of God. The classic passage is 1 Jn 2.15–17: Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world – the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does – comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives for ever.

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 124

4/28/2009 10:37:55 AM

Providence and Common Grace

125

Now what is John saying in these verses? Some have argued that these verses require Christians to be completely withdrawn from involvement in the world and to separate themselves from the world. In support of their argument, they quote 1 Pet. 2.11 in which Christians are described as ‘aliens and strangers in the world’. They also quote 2 Cor. 6.17: ‘Therefore come out from them and be separate, says the Lord.’ Or perhaps 1 Jn 5.19 where we are told that ‘the whole world is under the control of the evil one’. This all sounds very persuasive but if you interpret these verses in a separatist manner then you have real problems with the words of Jesus. Instead of telling us to leave the world Jesus makes it clear that he was sending his disciples into the world. In Jn 17.14–18 we read this, I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world so I send them into the world.

In other words, Jesus did not call us to leave the world and form a community separate from the world; he called us to be involved in the world, to be ‘salt’ and ‘light’. But how are we to reconcile the words of Jesus with these very strong warnings from the apostles about not loving the world and about coming out and being separate? The answer involves an understanding of what they meant by ‘the world’. They were not telling Christians to retreat into a ghetto away from normal human life, rather they were explaining that Christians must separate from the immorality and unbelief of the world, they must separate themselves from anything which is in opposition to the Kingdom of God and to the gospel of his Son. As well as this exegetical error, however, there is a theological reason for the ‘world flight’ and the rejection of cultural activities in Scottish Calvinism. You see, although the doctrine of common grace is affirmed and taught within Scottish Calvinism, it is generally only one side of the doctrine which is expounded, namely, God’s restraint of sin. The other side, namely, God’s grace as the foundation for society, politics, science and culture, is neglected or ignored. Many are happy to use the doctrine of common grace to explain why human beings, although sinful, are not as bad as they could be but are unwilling to go further. There is a sense in which many Highland Calvinists are the children of Hoeksema rather than the children of Calvin. It seems to me that if Scottish Reformed theology were to learn from the Dutch Neo-Calvinist strand of Reformed theology, rather than simply the

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 125

4/28/2009 10:37:55 AM

126

The Providence of God

English Puritan and American Princetonian strands, this mistaken view of the relationship between Christianity and culture would be dismissed in favour of a more culture-affirming Calvinism. In this attempt to inject Scottish Reformed theology with a healthy dose of Dutch Neo-Calvinism, there will have to be a reconsideration of the relationship between common grace and the theology of the covenants. Indeed, the whole question of the meaning of grace will have to be reexamined. There is no time to open up that subject here, although it is my intention to turn to it in a future writing project. At this point let me simply highlight some of the issues at stake. For example, some argue that when God entered into a relationship with Adam in Genesis 2, this was an act of God’s grace (Scottish theologians Thomas Boston and John Murray took this position) whereas others argue that one cannot speak about grace until after the fall (e.g. Meredith Kline). This has implications also for our understanding of the Noahic covenant. Kuyper sees the Noahic covenant as the starting point for his doctrine of common grace. Klaas Schilder sees no grace in the Noahic covenant at all.58 Karl Barth sees the Noahic covenant as the primary basis for understanding the later covenant of grace. There is, I believe, some useful work to be done in this area.

VII. Conclusion It seems to me, then, that we need to learn from Dutch Neo-Calvinism the importance of the doctrine of common grace and reconstruct our doctrine of the providence of God with this as a key component. If we do so consistently, always recognizing the limitations of the doctrine,59 then I believe it will provide a solid basis from which to tackle various theological problems. More importantly, however, it will enable us to prevent the Church from falling into false ways of thinking and will help us to call men and women to worship a gracious God who has provided everything necessary for life and salvation.

Notes 1 More recent discussion of this theme was sparked by the publication of Richard J. Mouw, He Shines in All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001). 2 John Murray, Collected Writings 2: Systematic Theology (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1977), 93. 3 Herman Bavinck, ‘Common Grace’, Calvin Theological Journal 24, no. 1 (1989): 36.

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 126

4/28/2009 10:37:56 AM

Providence and Common Grace

127

4 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977), 1.16.1, 197. 5 Ibid., 1.16.4, 203. 6 Ibid., 1.16.1, 197–8. 7 Ibid., 1.16.2, 199. 8 Ibid., 1.16.3, 200. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 1.16.3, 201. 11 Ibid., 1.16.4, 201–2. 12 Ibid., 1.16.4, 203. 13 Benjamin W. Farley, The Providence of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1988), 234. 14 Calvin, Institutes, 1.16.5, 204. 15 Ibid., 1.16.6, 204. 16 Ibid., 1.16.6, 205. 17 Ibid., 1.16.8, 207–8. 18 Ibid., 1.17.9, 221–2. 19 Ibid., 1.16.9, 208–10. 20 Ibid., 1.17.2, 212. 21 Ibid., 1.17.3, 214–16. 22 Ibid., 1.17.5, 216–19. 23 Ibid., 1.17.10–11, 223–4. 24 Ibid., 2.2.12, 270. 25 Ibid., 2.2.12, 271. 26 Ibid., 2.2.13, 272. 27 Ibid., 2.2.14–17, 273–7. 28 Ibid., 2.2.15, 273–4. 29 Ibid., 2.2.16, 275. 30 Ibid., 2.3.3, 292. 31 G. C. Berkouwer, Man: The Image of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1962), 169. 32 N. D. Kloosterman, Ecumenical and Reformed Creeds and Confessions Classroom Edition (Dyer, IN: Mid-America Reformed Seminary, 1993), 70. 33 Ibid., 74. 34 John Walter Ross, ed., Westminster Confession of Faith & Etc (Edinburgh: Free Presbyterian Publications, 1981), 56. 35 Abraham Kuyper, De Gegemeene Gratie (Amsterdam: Hoeveker and Wormser, 1902–4). 36 Campbell Campbell-Jack, ‘Grace without Christ? The Doctrine of Common Grace in Dutch-American Neo-Calvinism’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Edinburgh, 1992). 37 Ibid., 236. 38 For an analysis of Hoeksema’s theological method, indicating why he reached these conclusions, see David B. McWilliams, ‘Herman Hoeksema’s Theological Method’, (Ph.D. diss., University of Wales Lampeter, 2000). 39 Anthony A. Hoekema, Created in God’s Image (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1994), 193. 40 Campbell-Jack, ‘Grace without Christ?’ 106ff.

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 127

4/28/2009 10:37:56 AM

128

The Providence of God

41 See English translation by Raymond C. Van Leeuwen which appeared as: Herman Bavinck, ‘Common Grace’, Calvin Theological Journal 24, no. 1 (1989). 42 Ibid., 59–60. 43 Ibid., 45–9. 44 Ibid., 50. 45 Ibid., 52–5. 46 Ibid., 50–1. 47 Ibid., 60. 48 Ibid., 51. 49 Ibid., 61. 50 Ibid., 62. 51 Cornelius Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1972). 52 See Jacob Klapwijk, ‘Rationality in the Dutch Neo-Calvinist Tradition’, in Rationality in the Calvinian Tradition, ed. Hendrick Hart, Johan van der Hoeven and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 98–9. 53 Ibid., 103. 54 Princeton Theological Review Association, Calvin and the Reformation (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1909). 55 Ibid., 112. 56 Bavinck, ‘Common Grace’, 37. 57 Thomas F. Torrance, Preaching Christ Today (Carberry: Handsel Press, 1994), 19. 58 G. C. Berkouwer, The Providence of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972), 71. 59 See the useful warnings in Donald Macleod, Behold Your God (Fearn: Christian Focus, 1995), 165–76.

FMurphy_05_Finals.indd 128

4/28/2009 10:37:56 AM

Chapter 6

Time and Persons in the Economy of God Douglas Knight

I. The Doctrine of God Every Christian doctrine is an elaboration of the Christian doctrine of God. The confession that God is for us brings with it an account of God’s ordering, sustaining and final redemption of creation. Our account of this provision, the economy of God for man, is what the Christian doctrine of ‘providence’ is. The Christian doctrine of God gives us the truth of man, but the truth of man cannot be extracted from this doctrine and cashed out into a theory about man. Because God is mystery, by which we mean he is knowable only to the extent he makes himself known, and because man is the creature of God, man is a mystery too. The secret of being human is hidden with God, since he has decided that humankind is worth waiting for: in communion with God, we can be human, together, with other humans. We are not obliged to distance ourselves from everything in order to decide whether or not to affirm it, or to defy everything that we have not made for ourselves. We really can know other people. We cannot utterly know them or master them, because they do not belong in the first place to us, but to God, who has high ambitions for them. We are not human by being just human, without God, or by isolating ourselves from all others. So the first thing to say about the good provision of God is that God calls us into the company of our fellow humans. Other people are the providence and provision of God for us, so it is they who are good news and the bad news. The question of providence is how the bad news may turn into good news, so that other people cease to be our fate and become our fortune. Therefore, when it looks as though providence is directed simply to extricating me from the clutches of other people, something has gone awry. God does not intend to extricate me from other people and set me up in a solitary dignity. Persons are given to us by God, and thus are good. God rather calls me to grow through my presently small, poor and disordered relationships into larger and better ordered relationships, so that I am able to receive and return the identity of all those I encounter, and am prepared to receive my own identity from them. I have to receive them as gifts, and to give myself to them.

FMurphy_06_Finals.indd 131

4/28/2009 10:37:32 AM

132

The Providence of God

With its ideas of divine grace and salvation, election, vocation and accommodation, history and eschatology, the doctrine of providence relates to the idea of time. Time is the means by which we conceptualize our locatedness among other people. But God does not give persons faster than we can receive them. Though we are hurled into the world, persons come to us serially, in time, first in our own close family and then in gradually widening circles of friends and neighbours, through whom we learn to be members of a society and human history. At the same time we come to fear the open-endedness of history and attempt to secure ourselves against it by contrasting ourselves to other persons and groups. Each group identity has its own account of what is good and what is providential, and they are not all compatible. But as yet we have no means of taking all those who pass before us as the providence of God. They may be good gifts, but I cannot yet see how. I need the means to perceive them as good. I need a process of formation, and so I also need the community that will patiently bear me through this formation. God has acted for us. He has opened his own life and communion for us and the Church is the form which this communion takes. The act of God for us is Christ, together with his Body. Among all the vast variety of human societies and forms of sociality God has provided this one, the Church, to be the means by which all others may be redeemed. God gives the world this particular communion, and preserves it so that the world is always confronted by it; the Church is dedicated and set apart from the world, for the world’s sake. The difference between Church and world is not obvious or uncontroversial, but it is a Christian doctrine. If God were not able to sustain the Church distinct from the world, he would not be able to sustain our individual identities, and the God who could not do this would scarcely be worth our interest. The Church is the evidence and first fruit of the resurrection; it bears the mark of God, and so it is the gift of God to the world. Within the Church we can begin to say what changes would have to occur in us before we can tell what is providential or not. The Church is the community of those sanctified, who are thereby enabled to see us patiently, not only as we presently are, but also as we will be, and thus see us together with our future. The Church is a mystery, so though the provision and providence of God is dark, it is not faceless, for it is the company of saints. We need the mediation of this specific group to enable us to grow until we become able to receive all persons as good. Only the taught, discipled and so sanctified community of the Church is able to greet whatever comes as part of the good provision of God.

FMurphy_06_Finals.indd 132

4/28/2009 10:37:32 AM

Time and Persons in the Economy of God

133

The Church tells us that it is hard to identify what is providential. His guidance is dark, for God leaves us under regimes that do not intend to serve us as we hope to be served, and we are not able to say why this is. Yet the Church says that even bad governments are the servants of God, sent to do us good, and it is for the Church to assist us in finding out how to discern this non-obvious good. Even when the contradiction between our hopes and their intentions is at its worse, we have to be able to tell our rulers that ‘You intended it for harm, but God intended it for good.’1 The providence of God is not directed to holding my culture or nation above other cultures or nations: though I may pray for the release of this country from whichever ideologists presently wield an excessive power, I may have to concede that our oppressor may be the providence of God for us. So, for example, the Church is here to tell the British public that we cannot have all we want, and that we do ourselves no favours by insisting that we are only consumers with rights, and who are rightly outraged when our desires cannot be instantly satisfied. The Church may encourage us to discover how, when our government is able to hold out against our more short-term demands, our desires may develop and mature, so that we cease to speak only in terms of our rights, and become citizens who find satisfaction in service and responsibility. The Church shows the nation how to respect even the leader we voted against, and obey the law that we do not like, and so how to suffer, in the hope that we will thereby be turned outward towards a good that we cannot yet see.2

II. Time, Persons and Plurality To keep the doctrine of providence properly Christian we have to connect our account of time to the Christian account of persons, relating it to our doctrines of Christ, the Spirit and the Church. When we fail to tie it to the doctrine of God, our talk of providence ceases to be Christian and becomes instead about escaping our involvement with other people. In the course of the past 400 years, providence has drifted away from the doctrine of the Church and so from the framework of doctrine that could keep it truthful, with the result that it mutated into notions of development, progress, enlightenment, civilization.3 But, since it is no longer connected to the Christian concept of man and controlled and renewed by it, these notions now seem implausible. Without Christian doctrine, providence relates to a notion of the ascent of man without God and away from God; when we ask who or what man has ascended to, the narrative changes from one of

FMurphy_06_Finals.indd 133

4/28/2009 10:37:33 AM

134

The Providence of God

ascent into one of disintegration and crisis. As a result sub-Christian concepts of time and history describe time as neutral or even hostile to the relationship of God and man. Time then functions as a container which keeps us in, and keeps God out, which both skews all we say about how God acts for us now, but also about how we are human. A Christian account of persons comes with an account of time. We are human, and we may become human. This becoming human takes place in time, and indeed it is just what time is for. We live our lives before others, for none of us is made for himself or herself alone. We stand before our home crowd and play to them and they acknowledge the meaningfulness of what we do. We negotiate our identity with them and eventually we settle on what they concede us. Our acts have to be acknowledged by others with sufficient authority to judge them, and we have to judge others, giving them neither too little nor much recognition. This means that a human being is not first an agent, but the recipient and patient of an agency that is not theirs.4 Each person has to be freed to recognize what is not themselves, and we can only become free when we are freed by someone who is themselves free. If we are to have a future, it will include someone other than ourselves, for we have to be given a future. But a future that is simply given is unilaterally imposed, and so it is not yet truly our future. So this future must be both someone else’s act and our own act, and therefore the act of two or more parties. Christian worship of God allows us to see others as the creatures of God, and thus to understand that they are ours because they belong first to God, the guarantor of their inalienable particularly and uniqueness.

A. Resurrection Our being as persons is not given to us complete at birth, but is part of a process, enabled by the Holy Spirit which, because we must all participate in it, unfolds through time. As long as I do not give and receive my identity with all, but with some only, I define myself in opposition to others: they are given to me, but I reject them and set out to defend myself from them. Until I have learned to enjoy the irreducible otherness of others without attempting to conform or assimilate them to myself, I have a passion to undergo. I am in flight from the many persons whom I consider too different from myself, but who are sent to me by God. They are the gifts the goodness of which I cannot recognize. Thus life is both a series of encounters with other persons and it is a flight from such encounters. But the event of

FMurphy_06_Finals.indd 134

4/28/2009 10:37:33 AM

Time and Persons in the Economy of God

135

the resurrection turns us about so that we run straight into the very people we have been trying to avoid. Our collision with them is what the resurrection is, for us and for them. In the Church I am in one communion with those who are not like myself. I am on the run in a further sense that I do not want to join all the generations that precede me. They are dead, while I am still alive and wish to remain so. Yet ‘We look for the resurrection of the dead.’ Christ has refused to run from them, or to consider them dead and, the Church confesses, death is not stronger than Christ; though they be vanished, forgotten and dead to us, they are not so to him. Christ holds them in life, and nothing can remain dead or unhearing when he calls. This means that in the body of Christ we are turned around, and rather than running away from all previous generations, we go back to meet them and be reconciled with them. Our future consists in being joined to them, the present unified with the past. Though the saints may be past to you and me, to the Church the saints are not behind us, in our past, but ahead of us, in our future – indeed they are our future. The individual believer is incorporated in the body of Christ, the communion of the Church. We can presently only see this body extended through time as though divided by time, strung out like stragglers in a race. Nonetheless Christ is anointed – ‘christed’, we might say – with this body made up of his entire people, including those who to me are out of sight, in the past or in the future. I cannot have him without receiving them too. Christ mediates them to me and me to them, so that I am brought into relationship with those from whom time presently separates me. Thus we are being broken out of our present partial and sectarian community and brought into a much bigger one, indeed to universal communion which unites all times in itself.

III. Time and Persons The communion we know as the Church is the economy and providence of God for us. The resurrection of Christ has opened an imperceptibly small crack in the side of the world, and the Church is the wedge which keeps it open so that the world is gently exposed to the whole communion of God. The resurrection mediates itself to us, slowly enough to internalize itself within us, and the Church is the form in which it does so. The Church makes itself present to us as a stream of persons who are themselves being made holy, it gives us the means to receive them, and through them it draws us into ever-thicker communion with God and with all his creatures. This communion comes serially and gently to us, in time, and indeed, as

FMurphy_06_Finals.indd 135

4/28/2009 10:37:33 AM

136

The Providence of God

time. Though creation is always on the point of giving up and closing down, each gift of God’s provision opens up creation again by just a crack and gives us a little more time. The Church is that gathering of particular persons sanctified and prepared for our service, to escort each of us through a lifelong series of encounters into this communion. Each sanctified person is both an invitation to communion and a lesson in how to sustain it, and all these persons are gifts of Christ, brought to us by the Holy Spirit. In the Church, God holds humanity finally beyond the reach of every other community and collective: the People, the Party, History, Evolution, and even from ‘Providence’. The ideologists of each new regime declare that we are entering a new epoch that represents the culmination of the human quest. But the Church identifies such claims as false, and rebukes their makers. It is commanded to watch and wait for the coming of the true Lord (Mk. 13.34–7) who will not allow such premature and coerced identity claims to determine us. Though we may try to pull the hatch down on ourselves for a last time and so bring our history to an end, Christ will forestall us, extricate us from all pretenders to messianic power and so keep all humanity in play. From God we have the freedom in which to make decisions and exercise judgement, in favour of others. We acquire the maturity to make such judgement through the process of formation that the Church terms sanctification. This process must not be brought to any premature end by any announcement that we are already mature, and may now precede under our own power without God. We must endure the process of our formation and disciplining, which is what life in the Church is. We may, and must, say that the world is not yet at peace, and we must lament this, and deplore our own recalcitrance, and this the Church does in hope and faith. To point out to God that many people await justice and that there is great evil is a faithful, not faithless, thing to do; it is the exercise of responsibility that God intends that we take up on one another’s behalf. Yet we may not judge that we have now suffered enough evil. We may rule that others have now gone too far and that all relationship with them is ended, but God does not allow such judgements to stand. No creature may finally pronounce against another, so we may not declare that we have spoken the last word. Final judgement is reserved for God only, and so it is ‘delayed’, and thus human history goes on. Meanwhile God calls the Church to attend to the world so that the Church may learn to speak up and intercede for it. The Church has to hear, and in its prayers pass on, all the otherwise unheard voices of the world. In the liturgy we may hear that God is at work and we may judge that the multiplicity that he is bringing

FMurphy_06_Finals.indd 136

4/28/2009 10:37:34 AM

Time and Persons in the Economy of God

137

into being is very good, and we may realize that he is patient and that we must wait too. This present time is the good provision of God for us.

IV. The Son and the Spirit Next we need to indicate the role of the Son and the Spirit in this theological account of our present time. God has set us before one another, so that we find ourselves in a world of other persons. If we decide that these persons are intimidating and this world too vast, we may hide ourselves from them and take refuge in whatever more confined and controllable corner we can construct for ourselves. All these persons are the gift, providence and so in some sense even the presence of God to us, so not receive them or creation as a whole as good is to distance ourselves from him. And the unconstrained God has also made himself known as one person among persons within this creation. The Holy Spirit is more powerful than any other power; he holds all things together. Nothing can remove any creature from his hold, so nothing can take the Son away from him, or separate the Son from his people. Secure in his unity with the Spirit, Christ is entirely content to exercise his power in ways that we may not understand as power at all. Although he cannot be made to wait, God has decided to do so, and so he waits freely: for our sake God exercises his impassivity as patience. God waits for us for as long as it takes; all our determination to resist him will crumble before his ability to wait without limit for us. We may reject his creatures and God himself, but his patience will outlast our rejection, and when we no longer have the power to hold out against them, God will still be there. The unreachable, inexhaustible God is powerful enough to conceal the knowledge of his presence from us, and since we are not aware of him we are free to concede or withhold our acknowledgement of him. This great power is exercised in such a reserved way that it does not impinge on us. Christ does not steer us unless he perceives that we are ready to take his direction, or unless we are so out of control that we threaten others. This king is free whether on his throne, and so locatable for his subjects, or moving through his kingdom as though just another member of it, although we would not then be able to identify him. Christ is not hedged by time as we are, so he is not merely locatable in our past. Although we must identify him through that brief window of historical events around AD 30, and so first through all those interactions with witnesses from the Virgin Mary to Pontius Pilate, and secondarily with all the saints of the Church, there are no limits whatever on him. He is utterly free, and freely able to be for us,

FMurphy_06_Finals.indd 137

4/28/2009 10:37:34 AM

138

The Providence of God

without reservation, here where we are, in our own time. He is able to mediate directly between every two human beings, to speak to one for another, and so allow us freely receive that person and affirm him in love. Christ is always with the Spirit, even when it does not appear so to us. He is always the king, raised and exalted, however he is present to us in what seems to us to be the incomprehensible and demeaning form of the Church. The communion of God makes itself known in the persons of the Church, and this includes those apparently unsanctified persons whom you can name in your own church. By the Holy Spirit the Church gathered to worship confesses the presence of Christ: it makes this confession by faith, since no evidence of him imposes itself on us. The glory of Christ is there, and makes our gathering possible, but it is there only in the obscure form of our unattractive fellow Christians. Christ is present to us in this dark and incomprehensible way, that puts our expectations of him on the rack – or on the cross. In each of these people at the altar rail, whom I find so unlovely, Christ turns to me and says ‘Do you see me, do you love me?’ It may be easier to imagine that we find Christ in the pages of St Augustine and thus on our own in the library, but this would reduce us to disembodied intellects, unable really to reach one another. But it is the whole person, head and body, that is being gathered and raised, each of us called before the people of our congregation, made a public person, embodied and available to others.5 If we are not yet able to approach our fellow Christians as Christ’s gifts to us and with the awe and love that we owe to Christ himself, it is because we are holding out against him. But all the faithlessness of the Church cannot prevent Christ from sustaining it as his effectual witness and so as the providence of God for anyone who seeks it.

V. The Church and the Eucharist The Kingdom of God makes itself present to us now, in a hidden way, in the people gathered together by the Eucharist. In these few people present to me in this space and time are hidden all the many persons of the eschatological assembly of the Kingdom of God. Christ conceals the kingdom so that we are not confronted by it as a unilateral imposition. He offers us only one another, serially, through time, and in this particular place, and present us with one another and waits until we are able to receive one another as good gifts. We are being called towards a future much larger than our present. Who can receive and affirm this present, and who can establish it? Our existence is not merely a matter of being, but also of giving, and not merely of giving but also of being received.

FMurphy_06_Finals.indd 138

4/28/2009 10:37:34 AM

Time and Persons in the Economy of God

139

Somebody has to receive me, affirm my existence, if I am ultimately to have existence, for ‘one person is no person at all’. Left to itself, all creation pulls apart, each part drifting into increasing isolation and eventual dissolution. The resurrection is the reversal of this drift apart, and the drawing together of all things into order and integration, and the Eucharist is the resurrection entering and replenishing our time.6 Eternity receives our time, so that we, and our time, receive the affirmation which sustains us. In the fellowship which we call the body of Christ, all persons, and within them all the world, come into encounter and finally into mutual recognition and love. In the Eucharist, Christ presents us to God and because God receives us from him, we receive our existence from God and our present has all the value God gives it.

VI. Time and Eschatology The future is not simply a torrent of more stuff that comes inexorably towards us. The future is also a question put to us, and which we put to each other. We are entirely free to decide whether or not to accept these persons and so to accept a future that includes them. But when we do not respect the unity of the Son and Spirit, our world tends to part and drift off in opposite directions. Without pneumatology, our Christology describes one direction, that of the past: the incarnation of Jesus Christ took place in time that is past, so he is now unreachable for us. When considered without the Spirit, Christ is confined to the past, and the passing of time takes him and the Church away from us. If we imagine only that all previous generations are moving further away from us, rendering us ever more detached so that we regard the world and all previous human achievement with increasing alienation, we are indeed ‘without hope in the world’. The other direction is that of the Spirit separated from Christ, who is then thought to represent all freedom and spontaneity. When we consider the Spirit without Christ, we will assume that we become free by ridding ourselves of the past, again disassociating ourselves from all givenness, and imagining that everything around us, our contemporaries and even our own bodies, are encumbrances that we have to struggle to free ourselves from. Christology without pneumatology is past without present, while a pneumatology without Christology is a future that has to be wrenched violently out of the present. When Christology and pneumatology are separated a fiercely necessitarian concept of time interposes itself between time past and time present and creates a widening gulf between us and all

FMurphy_06_Finals.indd 139

4/28/2009 10:37:34 AM

140

The Providence of God

earlier generations. Then time becomes an alien god, to which Son, Spirit and all creation are subject. When however Christology and pneumatology are united, we have no such fatalistic conception of time, so human history is neither an irresistible ascent or inexorable descent and dissolution of man. Do we imagine that we are in the present being bourn along by the flow of neutral time by some providence, divine or other, until we hope we emerge into the end times and eternity? But our time is not just a long and pointless wait, until time is over, and eternity follows. It is not as though we are on a train and can do nothing until we arrive at our destination. Nor are we waiting for time to get out of our way, as though we are waiting for a long freight train to rumble past before we can cross the line into eternity. A properly pneumatological Christology would relate our conception of time to persons and purposes. We need an analogy. Imagine that you are the leader of a youth group and that a gaggle of teenagers demand that you take them out on an adventure which, they have decided, must be a potholing expedition. Their object is to explore the caves, but you can see that this would also teach them about looking after each other, not being afraid either of each other or of anything else. They descend out of the light of day into the ground – down from eternity into history – to explore the first passages of the cave system. But as the morning wears on the group loses its discipline, splits up until each of them is lost in a separate cave. At different times, and finally altogether, they declare themselves lost, and threatened by the noises coming from neighbouring caves, cries to you, who are standing outside on the surface, to come and rescue them. But if you simply go down and extract each one of them singly from the caves, in a state of complete fright, there will have been no growth in self-reliance, cooperation or mutual regard and the expedition will have been a failure. You decide, not on a rescue, but on a mediated staged assistance, in which each teenager is led to each other so that together they are able to identify where they are and no longer feel stuck or threatened. This resurrection must involve the participation of all and so it must take time, as much time as the very slowest of them needs. The cave system is not their enemy and neither is time our enemy: our only problem is a lack of those skills by which we can receive others as persons. But God has not left alone with this problem, but mediates between us and all other persons. Time and history are not ultimately non-personal phenomena. That we are in time is not a problem, and the solution is not to airlift us out of time into eternity. Time is being-with-one-another, serially, and thus not all at

FMurphy_06_Finals.indd 140

4/28/2009 10:37:35 AM

Time and Persons in the Economy of God

141

once. The purpose of this serial mode of being is to allow us to learn to be with one another and be so freely. Through these serial encounters that are held together by the communion of the Holy Spirit, we gain the skills of this communion, which is to say that we learn to love. When we are freely and contently with all the creatures of God and no longer defend ourselves from them or seek to hide from God himself, our time will have become eternity. Eternity is the communion of God, mediating itself slowly to us in the form of time. So eternity calls us, the whole calling the part, the future calling the present, or rather calling together the many separate ‘presents’ to bring them into compatibility within his communion. It is only Christ and the whole unity of Christian doctrine that gives unity to time. Without Christ, there is no unity to the history of creation, and thus no unity of creation, but we rather move in many directions, time’s many currents bearing us around in their eddies and into eventual dissolution. The unity of time that we assume, we owe to the Christian confession of Christ, which is to say, his unity with the Spirit and so with God. But in Christian confession, our history is not merely given (and therefore necessary) but free. God calls us into freedom, and it can only be by freedom that we reach freedom. Our history is therefore not a matter simply of the passing of time, but of gift and love. Many voices address us, making the world a cacophonous marketplace. Which of these voices is the voice of God, who disinterestedly offers the truth of our identity? Only this voice will take us to him who, being entirely independent of us, can tell us who we are, and can confirm that we are indeed the creatures he delights in. Jesus Christ is calling, gathering, ushering all humanity along towards the Father. We do not have to go, but equally we may go. He will allow us to overcome all the other would-be autonomous masters that compete to take us in different directions, so the whole human body will come together in peace, no part of it any longer at war with any other. Christ is the universal or catholic being who alone is able to sustain relationship with all other men, and through whom each of us is related to all others. Only when we are connected with all other beings, through him, will we finally be human. Christ is in himself both head and the body: nothing is added to him by the arrival of the Church; we may become plural only because who is already plural extends the plurality of his communion to include us. Our action is a dependent participation in his: it is his action, not our own, that carries us and sustains the communion of humanity. He will not cease to serve us and take us in the direction he decides, to the Father, and waits for us until we consent in this, so it becomes our direction too. The future is only our future if we wish it to be.

FMurphy_06_Finals.indd 141

4/28/2009 10:37:35 AM

142

The Providence of God

VII. The Economy of the Father The work of the Son is the work of the Father, Son and Spirit together; the work of each person is the work of God. Our origin and our end is the communion of these persons who hear and reply to one another and so are one. Call and response, and so person to person conversation is basic: God is conversational, and so consequently must his creatures be. God does not simply speak, but listens and waits for each and every person to hear and answer. Since we are heard by God, none of us is ultimately lost or abandoned. Each new word from God is a new summons to act and to do so for one another. So it is not simply words or anything else that pours from God (for such would be a form of necessity), but our words and lives are received again by him and regarded as good. What is offered, tentatively and freely, by one person can only be accepted, also freely, by another. Christ is the one who can recognize each of us and distinguish each of us from all others. All human beings are held together by him and are able to relate freely to each other by his mediation. He can ensure that we do not obliterate the particularity of others. In Christ we are one – a single communion and unity, with the world and with all other persons, and in the Spirit we are distinct and many. Such an identification of Christ with the unity and the Spirit with plurality would tempt us to reduce these persons of the Trinity to these two attributes. But the distinction between the ‘economy’ and ‘theology’ prevents us reading this distinction of attributes back into the eternal life of God. Nonetheless, the economy is the economy of God, for the Son and the Spirit are doing the work of the Father and it is to the Father that they bring this work in order that it receives approval, and its existence, from him. Only God, who is truly other than us, and who does not seek our recognition for himself, can give us the recognition that establishes us. The Holy Spirit secures us in the person of Christ in order that we can acknowledge the Father; in the Spirit, therefore, the Son’s act of knowing God becomes our act too, and because it is ours, we are free in it. Then we are able to do more than obey and follow, or even disobey and flee. We are able to recognize, to find good and to love. We are able to say that all the works of God, even those that once seemed darkest to us, are good. The doctrine of providence is Christian only when it is controlled by all other Christian doctrines. Providence is a particular aspect of the problem of time, and we can talk about time by talking about persons and vice versa. The distinction between world and Church is analogous to the distinction between present and future, which is itself analogous to the distinction between part and whole. The Church is pledge of this future, which gives

FMurphy_06_Finals.indd 142

4/28/2009 10:37:35 AM

Time and Persons in the Economy of God

143

meaning to the present and to every part of which creation presently consists. This future is not imposed upon us, but comes into being within the communion in which we freely give and receive one another in truth and love.

Notes 1 Genesis 50.19. 2 This is the argument of Oliver O’Donovan Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008). 3 For an account of this see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 4 This is well argued by Reinhard Hütter in Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999). 5 According to Robert W. Jenson ‘You Wonder Where the Body Went’ in Essays in the Theology of Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 1995): ‘What bodies really are, is availabilities that enable freedom.’ Bodies enable us to encounter others, and through such encounters we may grow into freedom in God’ (221). This claim is tested throughout the second volume of Jenson’s Systematic Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Herbert McCabe gives a similar account in Law, Love, Language (New York and London: Continuum International, 2004) 68–78. 6 John D. Zizioulas, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics (London: T&T Clark 2009).

FMurphy_06_Finals.indd 143

4/28/2009 10:37:36 AM

Chapter 7

The Doctrine of Providence Katherine Sonderegger

I. Mystery and Governance Providence is the mystery of the Lord’s governance of creation, from death into life. Providence is both mystery and governance: it is neither manifestly the naked and static ordering of the cosmos, nor the inscrutable and unseen sustaining of the universe. Providence is rather the purposeful, intelligent and revealed governance of the world by the holy mystery of God. Indeed, were it not a governing by the Almighty’s hand, it would not be mystery. Were it not the sovereign holiness of God’s own mystery, it would not be governance. The doctrine of providence properly brings us into the realm of God’s own mighty working, a realm that is surely in the Lord God’s hand, most surely sustained and guided to its end, and in just this way, a sure, certain and abiding mystery. God is holy and mighty. These perfections of God are not two but rather one; yet one as Almighty God is one: rich, full, complete. Just as God is both holy and mighty, just so is his providence over the world both mystery and governance. As divine ordering, it is a unified expression of God’s very intellect, turned now to the world. And as divine directing, it is a unified expression of God’s very will, turned now to the world. As an ordering and a directing, providence denotes both an internal property of creatures – its order in the cosmos – and a relational property of those same creatures – its direction given by God’s will. Ordering and directing are the two principal elements of the doctrine of providence, the two divisions of divine governance; but they are not equal or static. Providence is properly and primarily direction, the movement of all things from and through and for the Word. The order of creation serves this higher purpose, the bringing of all things into captivity to Christ.

II. Death and Life For this reason, we should not look first to creatures to investigate and discern the divine governance of the cosmos. Providence is not principally a doctrine about the abiding order and property and telos of creatures, apart from the creator. It is not first and properly an ontology. Rather,

FMurphy_07_Finals.indd 144

4/28/2009 10:37:21 AM

The Doctrine of Providence

145

providence is a doctrine about God: God’s way with us creatures; God’s act towards and in the cosmos; God’s mastering and directing; God’s breaking down and healing, his killing and making alive, his very own dying, Sabbath rest, and rising to life again. The providential properties of creatures are principally external and relational: they are the characteristics of finite being in relation to the infinite God. Secondarily, and to serve the principle end of direction, creatures possess internal properties of divine ordering, the finitude proper to creatures. The doctrine of providence concerns creation, then, just because the creator has made the cosmos his concern and cause, to sustain, shape, dissolve and raise it in conformity to Christ, the first-born of all creation. Death and life are the markers of the doctrine of providence, the pivots on which God’s governance turns; and that because it is Almighty God’s gracious rule to come among us as One whose food is to do his Father’s work, a work of dying, a ransom for the many, and of rising, victorious over the grave, a deliverance to the captive and setting free those who are bound. The cosmos, made through Christ, will be sustained and governed in conformity to him, so that the mystery of Christ’s redeeming work will be set out in the great movement of all creation into perishing and death and at the end into life, the fullness of life. There is, then, a movement and direction to all providence. Just as death is the royal gateway into life, so the providence of God orders the cosmos in this direction, a motion from dying and rising into Christ. Just as Christ moves from his death and Sabbath rest, to a life of sovereign rule over his realm, just so the cosmos made for him conforms to his way by echoing both order and movement, both stasis and life from the dead. Providence is order and direction; it is mystery and it is governance; it is death and it is life. All this is Almighty God’s gracious rule, his own perfection poured out and exercised towards the world. Now, to set out providence in this way is to rule out other treatments of this doctrine, treatments that have held sway in many corners of the Church. These other treatments will not be left without a voice: they will quietly have their say at many points in this new statement of the doctrine. Yet the aim and contours of many earlier doctrines of providence – and several contemporary ones too! – will be set aside in this focus on divine governance through death and life.

III. Complete at Creation? On the fringes of a proper doctrine of providence, then, we may place the treatments that consider God’s ordering and directing of the cosmos to be

FMurphy_07_Finals.indd 145

4/28/2009 10:37:21 AM

146

The Providence of God

complete at creation. For these theologians, providence is simply another name for creation, the outworking of creaturely powers and laws in time. Such a view has seemed attractive to thinkers both within and outside the Church; perhaps this is part of its hold over the doctrine of providence. In the age of Enlightenment, many rationalizing deists taught a version of this doctrine; some advocates of evolutionary biology advanced a version in the nineteenth century; and in our day, some cosmologists and scientific theologians have revived it. The core intuition, I believe, is that God’s creative work is both sufficient and benevolent, a full and complete work for the cosmos. It is this intuition that is the genius and attraction of this doctrine, and not the caricature of a God absent and indifferent to the world and its ways. The doctrine can still attract. For is there not a danger, after all, that other doctrines of providence will immiserate the doctrine of creation? Do we not rightly fear that an energetic doctrine of providence will turn creation into the production of inert things, so many creaturely ‘nouns’ that are animated, set in motion and given ‘verbal’ life only when creation ends and providence begins? We court the danger, too, in other doctrines of providence that God must, after creation, be seen to do a ‘new thing’, to complement or even correct an element left somehow imperfect at creation. It is an exacting science, after all, to say just how God is to relate to the cosmos after its creation, how eternity and time are to meet. Perhaps we consider it a rather dusty artefact of ‘early modernism’ to say that ‘miracles pose a problem to the natural order’ or, again, that ‘Divine intervention undermines natural law’; yet the relative autonomy of the creaturely realm is vital to a proper doctrine of the creator’s benevolence and freedom, and exceedingly difficult to secure conceptually. Like redemption, creation properly must be seen as a complete and perfect work. Just this benevolence and perfection are expressed in the verdict of the Lord God at the close of his creative labour: He saw all that he had made, and ‘behold, it was very good’. So, too, the Sabbath rest of the creator marks off creation as a finished act. The properties and powers of creatures belong to the divine act of creation; and it is only a small step from here to the view that creation should run under its own laws and develop its own patterns and grow into its own telos. All these features of the ‘deist conception of Providence’ – for want of a better name – are the strength of this high view of a benevolent and sufficient creation. The attention paid to the autonomy and dignity of the cosmos is not the weakness of this view but rather its strength. Its weakness lies elsewhere. The ‘deist conception’ is vulnerable precisely where it should be strong, in its high regard for the benevolence and sufficiency of creation.

FMurphy_07_Finals.indd 146

4/28/2009 10:37:22 AM

The Doctrine of Providence

147

These properties stem from the attributes of the creator who, for sufficient reason, brings into being the cosmos that is good, fitting and pleasing to God. But there is, for this cosmos, no future history with its creator, no exchange or confirmation or guidance from this loving and wise Originator. The history of the universe has no real purpose, then; no ground or ratio for its temporal unfolding. The history of our world is rather the uncoiling of a spring: a genuine action and dynamos, but one whose full purpose, character and goal, is already achieved in its making. A cosmos that existed for a brief season would manifest the benevolence and sufficiency of the creation, and more, the creator, fully as well as one existing for millennia. Indeed, it appears far wiser for such a creator to both realize and conclude such a cosmos at once, than to permit it to unfold in an orderly yet purposeless extension. Scripture speaks otherwise: Our times are in God’s hands. A proper doctrine of providence will secure the benevolence and sufficiency of creation with a history of the cosmos genuinely lived before God.

IV. Continuing Creation? Perhaps a doctrine of ‘continuing creation’ would fare better. Modern theologians who propose such a doctrine aim, with a single stroke, to ward off the dangers of the ‘deist conception’ and to accept its verdict about the doctrine of providence. For Schleiermacher, for Tillich, for some evolutionary cosmologists, the doctrine of creation is a yet incomplete act of God. No danger that history has lost its purpose here! The unfolding of the cosmos and the workings of its creatures are all ingredients in the act of God realizing his will to create. More impressively still, this doctrine of ‘continuous creation’ makes manifest the Christological shape and telos of a proper doctrine of providence. Drawing on Romans 5, these theologians see Adam fulfiled, completed and perfected in Christ, the eschatos Adam. As the Son came first in lowliness and then again in glory, so the cosmos will reach its first, partial and proleptic completion in the incarnation; its perfect goal and eternal weight of glory in the eschaton, consummation of the age. These are its strengths. But they do not come without cost. Critical to a proper doctrine of the divine works ad extra is the ability to mark off each act of God in its own fitting time and sequence, each complete in itself. Just this distinguishes the opera dei ad extra from noumenal states and acts – should there be such. In The Critique of Pure Reason it is not clear conceptually whether Kant teaches distinctive noumenon lying behind each phenomenal object; by

FMurphy_07_Finals.indd 147

4/28/2009 10:37:22 AM

148

The Providence of God

rights, I believe, he should not. As extension belongs to the structure of experience, the noumenal should remain utterly simple, unified, and one. A thoroughgoing Kantianism, I believe, would claim that there can be only one noumenon, standing behind the world yet utterly inaccessible to human knowledge. Such Kantianism throws in bold relief the distinctive features of a Christian doctrine of the divine nature and works. Proper to the divine acts towards creation, as in the divine nature itself, is a certain distinctiveness – an incommunicability – of one work compared to another. There is determination in God; not as opposed to the divine infinity – precisely not that – but as opposed to a radical simplicity without irreducible particularity. The Triune God is radically One, infinitely One, and this Oneness is compatible with distinction, determination and incommunicability: Three persons, One God. Just so, the works of Almighty God are utterly One and self-consistent; but not without their particularity and distinctiveness. We see just this pattern in the distinctiveness and incommunicability between creation and providence. Creation, Genesis tells us, is a complete and single act, worked in six particular days. We see in Genesis 1 and 2 not so much the suturing together of two separate creation narratives as the textual expression of a single divine act, at once unified and marked out by particularity. In Genesis 1, we hear of the Lord’s work of creation, unfolded in six days. In Genesis 2, we hear of the generations of the heavens and the earth in a single, undifferentiated whole. Joining together these chapters is the creation of the Sabbath day. The Sabbath declares the rounding off, the completing and fulfilling of the work of creation. Both scripture as a whole, and Israelite practice, confirm the Sabbath as the perfect completion of creation, despite the remainder of chapter 2 unfolding after its declaration and, even more, the history of covenant observance unfolding long after that. The divine act of creation is a perfect work, complete and finished in itself, declared and confirmed and praised in the Sabbath rest, from seventh day to seventh day, throughout all generations. We discern this pattern throughout the divine working. Providence is distinct, particular and perfect, incommunicable with creation; yet they are the one act of the One God. The calling of the covenant people is distinct and particular, a finished and complete election; yet it is one with the gracious engrafting of the nations of the earth. Christ’s saving work is complete, perfect and finished on Calvary; yet it is one with the providential guiding and sanctifying of the world for which Christ came. The days and seasons of each human life, of each culture and congregation are particular; and for the individual, supremely so. Yet each creaturely life, each haecceitas, is compatible with and in the Spirit, one with the saints on

FMurphy_07_Finals.indd 148

4/28/2009 10:37:22 AM

The Doctrine of Providence

149

heaven and on earth, one in Christ Jesus. Just so, creation is marked off, perfect and finished; yet one with the divine work of providence, itself the distinctive and incommunicable work of God.

V. Providence over against Divine Causality Finally, we can construct a proper doctrine of providence over against a doctrine of divine causality that is little more than determinism. In this latter doctrine, the instinct of providential causality is to build a doctrine of God’s works ad extra on the fundamental divine attribute of sovereignty: nothing takes place in the creaturely realm that is not subject to the divine will and power. In one way, of course, all doctrines of providence fall under this rubric – unless they are willing to allow creatures to determine, transform or prevent the divine ruling of creation. Indeed, the common reliance upon divine sovereignty gives comfort to those critics of the doctrine, both within and outside the Church, who believe providence at bottom incompatible with human agency, creaturely dignity, or human self-determination. Any providential doctrine that affirms divine sovereignty, as I do, will have to face these criticisms. They do not belong only to those considered determinists! Yet the problem for a doctrine of providential causality is acute. For Schleiermacher, for Zwingli, for Occasionalists, and some say – wrongly, I think – for Calvin, the principle attribute of the divine opera ad extra is causal power. The genus under which we are to seeing the divine working is that of causality, such that all relation of God to the world is an expression and outworking of God’s supreme causal power. The world is the direct effect of the divine cause. Now, this is a natural move for any Christian theologian to make. Scripture speaks unmistakably of an Almighty Agent, a God who is at work and who works still. The Psalms and Wisdom literature brim over with praise of the Lord God’s handiwork; the Pentateuch with the Lord’s calling, judging, destroying and raising up; the Pauline epistles rich with the echoes of the Prophets: Who can resist his will? Has not the potter power over the clay? The very title, Almighty, Pantokrator, belongs to the very heart of Christian proclamation, standing at the head of the Nicene Creed. It is more than natural for the doctrine of providence to reach for a category that expresses the divine might in effective, complete and perfect power. Causality is a natural home for the doctrine of providence. Yet, it is a dangerous ally. Thomas Aquinas said long ago that ‘God is not in a genus’ (Deus non est in genere ST 1. q3. a5) and that profound

FMurphy_07_Finals.indd 149

4/28/2009 10:37:23 AM

150

The Providence of God

insight must govern the conceptuality of God’s nature ad intra et ad extra (as Thomas observes in the sed contra). Just as God’s Being is utterly unique, at once Person and Nature, without reduction, multiplicity or indetermination, so God’s Agency is utterly without genus; effective, powerful and sovereign without competition, rivalry, or domination. The genus, cause, requires a conceptual pairing of agency and effect, such that primary, sufficient and necessary working must be assigned to the dominant cause; all other causes subserve this principle power. The effect just is this power realized, however many subsidiary influences are detected and allowed their place. Such schemas threaten creaturely agency with complete reduction to an effect of the divine cause; a ‘happy inconsistency’, as Barth would say, prevents many other doctrines of providence from arriving at this somber destination. To ward off this danger, Thomas Aquinas developed a delicate doctrine of ‘secondary causality’, a notion that, in my view, empties and radically reworks the very idea of cause all the while borrowing its forces. Kathryn Tanner’s doctrine of ‘non-competitive’ working seems to me an insight much along these lines. A proper doctrine of providence will learn from these reworkings of divine causality; but even more, it will resist the root notion of cause altogether. The relation of Almighty God to the world is utterly unique, without parallel, category or analogy. Deus non est in genere.

VI. The Proper Doctrine of Providence So we must now ask: What is the proper doctrine of providence, the proper teaching about the mystery of divine governance? We begin with the first moment of the great twofold action of God on behalf of his creation: the divine ordering. Here we part company from much traditional – and modern – accounts of the order of creatures by starting from the conviction that the cosmos and its creatures are ordered by mortality and death. Under the Lord’s gracious ordering, all creatures and the cosmos as a whole are marked out, ranked and structured by natural death. By this I mean that to be a creature under God’s hand is to exist for a season and a day, a season and a day only, and at the end to be returned to the dust, the pit and the places that know them no more. Death is not principally and properly the last enemy. Rather it is the structure and order of creaturely being. It is the determination of the cosmos at its creation: its genesis is rounded out by a sleep, a Sabbath rest and end. Just so the cosmos as a whole will come to its end, its death by the Lord’s providential rule, either in fire or in ice.

FMurphy_07_Finals.indd 150

4/28/2009 10:37:23 AM

The Doctrine of Providence

151

For the doctrine of providence, death denotes a creaturely ordering that is universal in scope. Unlike Augustine or Thomas, this doctrine of providential ordering does not seek to distinguish particular elements of the cosmos, assigning them a distinctive place and sequence within the cosmos as a whole. The cardinal text for traditional treatments of divine ordering is Wis. 11.20b: ‘Thou hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight.’ Theologians who rest on this text seek to anchor the divine ordering in the particular form, extension and habitat of creatures, ranked in sequence and preference to one another. However, we conceive the particularity of creatures – their species or natural kinds or individual entelechies – we do not properly discover their divine ordering by their natural placement in the cosmos. Christian doctrines that strongly emphasize the divine plan or even, as in Boethius, the divine fate, draw too near to Stoic doctrines of providence: creatures, in these doctrines of order, align themselves with the grain of the universe. Christian doctrines of providence do not properly circumscribe, determine and measure creaturehood in this way. The Christian doctrine of ordering by ‘measure, number, and weight’ more properly belongs to the doctrine of creation itself, as the designating, naming and sequencing of creations is unfolded in Genesis 1 and 2. In the work of providence, divine ordering is most fittingly characterized by its broad demarcation of creatures from the creator: ‘They shall perish, but thou shalt endure; they shall be changed, but thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.’ (Ps. 102) Death is the name of creaturehood within the realm of God’s reign, and all partake of it alike. Now, there are texts in scripture that stand against this account of divine ordering. Representative and influential is the opening of Wisdom: For God made not death: neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living. For he created all things, that they might have their being: and the generations of the world were healthful; and there is no poison of destruction in them, nor the kingdom of death upon the earth. (1.13, 14)

Not far from this text is the long tradition, East and West, which views death as the consequence of the primal disobedience; in Paul’s language: ‘By sin came death.’ Traditionally, Eden, its human and perhaps its animal creatures, are immortal; they are destined for everlasting life with God. Through the human disobedience, pride and disbelief, death ruptures the glorious life of Eden, stains and defiles its creatures, and awaits all who live in exile, East of Eden. It is the last enemy.

FMurphy_07_Finals.indd 151

4/28/2009 10:37:23 AM

152

The Providence of God

VII. Sacrifice Anyone who has witnessed the death of a someone precious and most dear, anyone who has grieved that loss and felt death gnawing at one’s own life; anyone who contemplates the crushing scorn and indifference to the death of Christ, or the mass death of the ‘Terrible Century’, that one just past, and looks with fear at the destructive frenzy of our own: anyone who sees this with a clear eye understands the teaching that ‘the wages of sin is death’. A proper doctrine of divine providence must take hold of this teaching firmly in its doctrine of sin and evil: there can be no escape from this reckoning by folding such deaths into the doctrine of divine ordering. No. We must rather say, borrowing and transforming a phrase of Augustine’s, that these are ‘second deaths’, the ‘sting of death’ brought on by sin. The ‘second death’, the death we suffer, inflict and endure after the fall, is more properly known as ‘corruption’. In our world, sin and evil are corruptions. But the ‘first death’, the natural and creaturely mortality ordered by God shares with this sinful death only the shape and outward shell of a life ended. In its essence, death is the good, gracious and healthful work of Almighty God. To give it its most proper scriptural name, it is ‘sacrifice’. ‘Sacrifice’ captures the movement of finite creatures towards the death that is their perfect end, their consummation before and by the living Lord, the whole offering that is pleasing to God. The full doctrine of this selfoffering belongs to sacramental theology. But here in the doctrine of providence we can say that sacrifice is a perfectly general term that denotes the limitation, finitude and decomposition of all creatures as they are ordered by the incomparable life of God. Creatures are ordered by God not just by being finite, as opposed to his infinity; nor just limited, as opposed to his omnipresence. No, the ordering by God has a natural, ordained and fully benevolent end: creatures die. This is the great mystery of creaturely life: we all go down to the dust. If ever there were a natural law, this is it. In this sense, the earthen crust and boulders and volcanoes die: even as inanimate forms they participate in the ordering that is sacrifice to God. All living beings, all organic, conscious, mobile and sessile life die a holy death, a sacrifice, to the Lord. The innumerable galaxies, the far-distant suns and stars, the planets silently moving their paths in the sea of space: all these die the appointed sacrificial death. All are pleasing to God, an incense and a savour to their Maker. In this very same way, Jesus Christ goes to his death, a sacrifice to the Lord. Unlike other doctrines of divine ordering, death is not unnatural or in itself a mark of sin. That Jesus Christ, the sinless One, could die is not the great miracle of Good Friday; it is not an overriding of his sinless

FMurphy_07_Finals.indd 152

4/28/2009 10:37:23 AM

The Doctrine of Providence

153

obedience that he should yield up his spirit on the Roman cross. Rather, just as the sinless One he can and does die. Quite apart from his redeeming work, his assumption of corruption and sin, Jesus Christ remains our nearest neighbour and friend in going to his death, joining the great sacrifice that is all creaturehood before God. Now, this doctrine of divine ordering throws a light back onto the perfect work of creation. Because providence ordains the mystery of death for all creatures, we may also affirm that the creator properly and principally brings into life visible, distinct and complex objects, the nameable creatures of Genesis. These are the realities we might call ‘medium-sized objects’. We do not have to settle the question here whether and in what way such ordinary objects supervene upon atomic and subatomic particulars. But the doctrine of providence does afford us sufficient light to affirm that the creaturely realm is conceived, sustained, created and ordered with these ‘upper-level objects’ in view. The world of trees and grasslands and migratory sea birds and leopards; of humankind; and even of artefacts – this world does not need to be conceived as clumps of electrons and quarks, pleasingly arranged according to our point of view and interaction. No, the world we perceive, in its interconnection, purposeful and lawful orderliness, its dignity, in its reproduction and growth, in its groupings by natural kinds or species, and most especially, in its genuine passing away and finality: this world is the One created, conserved and appointed for its sacrificial end. Of course, quarks and positrons and atoms are created too! But they are no more the ‘real’ or primary object than are blood corpuscles the real agency of human life. Only medium-sized objects die; only they truly end. And just this gives us the confidence to affirm that the Lord God willed their existence, conserved it and ordered them to their appointed season and end. The death of creatures is the full confirmation of their dignity and irreducible significance before Almighty God.

VIII. The Divine Direction And now we turn to the second moment in the great twofold movement of the divine action on behalf of his creation: the divine direction. Unlike the divine ordering, direction is perfectly concrete and determined, rather than perfectly general. The divine direction brings the whole cosmos into conformity to Christ, the image of God, through whom and for whom the world was made. This is the principle, proper, and highest expression of the divine governance. Creation was made for this. The sacrificial death creatures undergo speak Christ’s name indirectly, ‘anonymously’, in the

FMurphy_07_Finals.indd 153

4/28/2009 10:37:24 AM

154

The Providence of God

idiom of natural rising and passing away. Though indeed Christ dies their death, a natural decomposition and end, he enters into that death in order that natural sacrificial death may conform to his image and likeness. Apart from the fall, then, the incarnate word still would come to die: he would enter the cosmos, assume its conditions, so that it might bear his name and speak his own perfect end. Seedtime and harvest, new moon and Sabbath, planting and reaping, life and death would all represent and join in Christ’s perfect sacrifice, his own self-offering in death, a pleasing and fragrant odour unto the Lord. But as it is, the whole cosmos stands within the fall, and Christ’s passion and rising now constitute the telos of the divine direction. God directs the cosmos towards the image of the Son, and the movement of the whole creation is towards this dying and rising Saviour. His sacrificial death is now the sacrifice for sin. Human history unfolds the mystery of divine governance, directed towards the curing of our corruption by the One who rises from death with healing in his wings. We see here the way in which the doctrine of providence properly coordinates the doctrine of concursus or preservation with the doctrine of the Kingdom of God. Divine governance concerns itself not only with creatures in their secular or worldly existence, mortality and movement. Rather, divine governance concerns itself principally, and most importantly, with the centre of history, the planting, in the midst of creaturely corruption, of the standard of Christ the King. Christ announces the Lord’s reign; he enacts its coming, with signs and teachings and feasts; he rules as its sovereign, proclaiming his reign from the cross and displaying it in his enthronement as the Risen One. The Lord God sustains and directs creation towards this reign through the persistent, inexorable and victorious conformation of all things to their head, Jesus Christ. In his community, the Church, human creatures are conformed to Christ through their baptism into his death, that they make walk in newness of life. Their life becomes a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, a Eucharist; their death the final self-offering of disciples to their Saviour. In just this way, the ‘second death’ of all sinners is graciously exchanged with the ‘first’, true, sacrificial death of Christ. Just so, at our graveside, at the commendation of the body before burial, the congregation prays, ‘We are mortal, formed of the earth, and unto earth shall we return. For so thou did ordain when thou created me, saying, ‘Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’ All we go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: ‘Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.’ The doctrine of divine direction can be most readily seen, then, in the prayer, liturgy, sacraments and word of the Church. It is visible, recognized and praised there. Christ reigns as head and sovereign of the Church; his

FMurphy_07_Finals.indd 154

4/28/2009 10:37:24 AM

The Doctrine of Providence

155

disciples participate in his realm through their daily dying into his death, their daily walking in his ways. But the doctrine of providence cannot be simply and exhaustively reduced to ecclesiology. A proper doctrine of divine governance affirms the sovereignty of the Lord over all creation and all creatures, both within and beyond the Church, both within and beyond the human creature. It is the entire cosmos that is fallen; all creatures are caught up in and subject to corruption. ‘The glory of the Lord shall be revealed’, the Prophet tells us, ‘and all flesh shall see it together’. The divine direction must consider the mystery of God’s governance to the world as a whole. Here we must direct our attention to the principle mystery of creaturely life: the gracious and profoundly mysterious exchange between creatures and their Provident Lord. The primary relation between God and creatures is not static; it is not captured first and principally by the relation and distinction between creaturely death and divine, infinite life. When we consider the divine governance we should not view this relation as fundamentally structural, as though we are to take up the distinctive natures, powers and acts of these two realities, creature and governor, and compare them, each on their proper plane. Divine governance properly is not an ontology, precisely in this sense. Rather, it is the utterly unique relation of the Lord God to his world. Because it is sui generis, we do not address the doctrine of divine direction through an examination of various problems, conflicts and antinomies generated through the conceptual joining of the material and Immaterial, the finite and Infinite, the temporal and the Eternal. Rather, we turn to the doctrine of divine direction by contemplating and examining the divine works ad extra, seeking there the pattern for God’s gracious exchange with the cosmos. It is reflection upon God’s own conforming and directing work on and in us creatures. We begin with the primal fact and Name: Emmanuel, God with us. Almighty God is in fact present in our world, present and alive to us. This is the first principle of Christian life, the irreducible premise for creaturely life before God. We may leave open here whether this ground work is uncovered principally in our own lives or rather first in scripture. We are not considering here an ordo cognoscendi and its foundations. Rather we seek to explore the doctrine of divine governance through its reality, the ordo essendi: the divine working, manifest in the cosmos. When we turn our eyes to the world, we encounter the mystery of God’s mighty presence and command; urgent, beckoning, guiding and drawing us on. In holy scripture and in our lives, we see manifest the sovereign direction of God. Deus dixit, yes; but more, God governs and commands and confirms. This divine agency, moving towards Christ and him crucified is the proper subject and content of our doctrine.

FMurphy_07_Finals.indd 155

4/28/2009 10:37:24 AM

156

The Providence of God

Now, this direction belongs properly to the cosmos as a whole. The valleys are being exalted, those creatures cast down are being raised up, the rough places being made smooth. This ‘participial’ movement of the world points to the real, and manifest exchange that is the history of the world: all creatures are in movement towards ‘that thing which has come to pass in Bethlehem’. This is genuine history and genuine exchange. All events take place in true, creaturely fashion; providence teaches neither occasionalism nor fatalism. We need not settle here a proper doctrine of the will – though compatibilism is the traditional, and I believe, most fitting expression of human agency before God. But it does pertain to divine direction to note that creaturely history is not an illusion or stage show. There is not a secret history that goes on behind or underneath events, such that our world of passivity and agency, revolution and peace-making, intervention, accident and crisis – this world of animals, persons and things living, suffering and dying is all so much facon de parler. No, the mystery of exchange between Almighty God and creation takes place right on the surface, here in our midst, with us and for us. For this reason, there is no key to unlock a concealed history of the cosmos that explains, justifies and empties the calamity that is human history. Rather, the gracious exchange and direction take place just in the bewildering conflicts, disasters, oppressions and cruelties; in the mercies, deliverances and joys that are this daily lot. This divine direction is mystery. To discern how this world is becoming the kingdom of Christ, manifesting his death and victory, is the task of the Christian life. Consider the Christian life of prayer. In this fundamental act of the creature before the Lord, disciples take up the sufferings and acts of their life, their enemies and friends, the nations of the earth, their wars and cruelties and culture, the whole cosmos, and offer them – sacrifice them – to Almighty God. These are the petitions of the Lord’s prayer, beseeching God for bread, for pardon, for deliverance. The petitions of the Lord’s prayer move outward or better, upward: Thy kingdom come; thy will be done. Here, disciples of the Lord seek guidance in the ambiguities of their daily lives: What path should I follow in this next season of life? What job should I pursue? Is this relationship consecrated and hallowed of God? Can I forgive this act? Is this a fatal illness? What is your will for me this day? There is a moment, to be sure, of reception in Christian prayer. The petition that the Lord’s name be hallowed and, at times, for the Lord’s will to be done on earth: these can be statements of acceptance, affirmation, resignation or adoration. But providential prayer most fittingly takes the form of agency, of urgent pleading, intent listening, judging and weighing, risking and offering all. These acts are the hallmarks of the spiritual discipline of

FMurphy_07_Finals.indd 156

4/28/2009 10:37:24 AM

The Doctrine of Providence

157

discernment; they are predicated on the divine direction, that shaping, commanding and calling governance of God towards creatures. Prayer is a creaturely act that does not entail but rather waits upon divine guidance and answer. In this, disciples are one with the saints in heaven and on earth, one with the great movement of Israel and Church in scripture itself. To this petition of one’s very life, God answers. This is the great mystery of exchange between the directing God and his creatures. With Mary, we might very well ask, ‘How can this be?’ As in the Annunciation, so here we are brought into the realm and reign of the Holy Spirit, the mission of the divine person of the Spirit in the cosmos. As the divine missions are never solitary or divided, the movement of the Holy Spirit in and towards creatures is concomitantly the mission of the Son, the sending of the Father. The encounter of the Triune God with creation is itself the sovereign presence and act of God: the Relatio of God to the world is itself God. This is the holy mystery of the provident God. When we enter the mystery of God’s governance of creatures, we step into a realm, a kingdom of light, a sphere lit up from within by the Alpha and Omega of all things, the Spirit of the living Christ. In Jesus Christ, Almighty God has taken on and taken up historical time, has plunged deep within it, and has covered himself with the corruption that is our lot. When we stand before the Lord, in anguish and need, in petition and hope, we stand already within the Lord, the Spirit who is the mystery of our creaturely life before God. In that Spirit, the deep things of God are searched out; we are known and judged and broken open to the saving death of Christ. We are shown the foretaste of the last things: that when Christ comes, we shall be like him. In the end, a proper doctrine of divine governance must say that the last word in this doctrine is ‘victory’. Although there are other words and motives that must be sounded in the doctrine of providence, there is in the end, no other word than ‘victory’. It is not simply that at the close of the age, God will be all and in all; though that is true. It is rather that the Eschatos Adam, the Victor, has already come in great humility. Already the victory that is his rings throughout the cosmos; already he has made sacrifice for sin and has cauterized the deep corruption of our kind from within its ailing frame. Christ’s rising from death is his triumph over the second death. This victory is the Omega of history, proclaimed in the early light from Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb, radiating out on pathways and trade routes from Judea and Galilee, to Corinth and Rome and the seas beyond. The doctrine of providence is the grateful examination of this passion and victory as the claim, illumination and capture of all things for Christ, the Lord of this kingdom. As we began, so we end: the doctrine of providence is the mystery of the Lord’s governance of creation, from death into life.

FMurphy_07_Finals.indd 157

4/28/2009 10:37:25 AM

Chapter 8

On the Theology of Providence John Webster

I Providence is that work of divine love for temporal creatures whereby God ordains and executes their fulfilment in fellowship with himself. God loves creatures and so himself orders their course to perfection: mundum per se ipsum regit, quem per se ipsum condidit.1 A doctrine of providence is, accordingly, a conceptual meditation on the consolation and hope that this work of love generates. But it has commonly proved a point at which the gospel’s consolation is difficult to commend or receive; and the scandal is such that doing justice to the doctrine demands a greater than usual measure of resolution and clarity of mind in understanding the constraints and opportunities which attend its exposition. Providence is a permanently contrary doctrine. It is too simple to proceed on the assumption that the contrariety issues from an acute sense of unprecedented crisis – loss of confidence in epic readings of human history, a sense that we have witnessed a scale of horror unfelt by our forbears. If theology takes such outrage and unbelief seriously, it cannot placate them by modifying its concepts or eliminating embarrassing accretions; the contrariety is material, of the nature of the case; it must be seen through to the end or there can be no advance. Theodicy is a case in point. A theology of providence need not and cannot wait upon demonstration of the divine righteousness, because providence is not asserted on the basis of the insignificance of evil but on the basis of the belief that God outbids any and all evil. What makes evil problematic for providence is not its existence but the fact that we resist applying belief in providence to cases of it, especially those in which we are concerned. Theological answers to this will therefore be as much ascetic as argumentative: we need to learn what it is to apply belief in providence, and how to apply it, in order to be persuaded of the viability and fruitfulness of making the application. Reconciling providence and horrors is a task within fellowship with God; inability to commend and receive the proffered reconciliation indicates estrangement. ‘When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was stupid and ignorant, I was like a beast toward thee. Nevertheless I am continually with thee; thou dost hold my right hand’ (Ps. 73.21–3).

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 158

4/28/2009 10:37:08 AM

On the Theology of Providence

159

This is not a matter of theology evading responsibility to its setting, but of exercising it in the only way it knows. The task of a Christian theology of providence can be undertaken only by drawing upon the resources given to it by the gospel; it can only hear the prophets and apostles, and only speak after such hearing – otherwise it has nothing to say. What it is not permitted to do is to respond to its contrary situation by suspending its talk of providence until better instructed, until better warrants are provided to ensure a more fluent, less crisis-laden exposition. Release from the misery and dishonour of making this particular confession can only come at the price of abandoning the entire undertaking. The law of theology is the law of the matter, not that of its occasion. To follow the law of the matter and bear its contrariety is not self-protection but evangelical charity. ‘Since we have such a hope, we are very bold’ (2 Cor. 3.12). I proceed by, first, identifying three formal features of a theology of providence; second, considering the knowledge of providence; third, examining its material content, and fourth, concluding with reflections on its proper use.

II First, three formal matters: the location of the doctrine of providence, the relation of expositio to disputatio, and the Christian specificity required in its exposition. 1. Christian dogmatics has a double theme, God and the work of God, theology proper and economy. Though in the order of exposition the economy may be treated first and with great elaboration, in the material order theology proper is primary, and all other Christian teaching is suspended from it. This means that all Christian doctrines are functions of the doctrine of the Trinity (though it should quickly be added that this is to appeal not to some abstract principle of relationality but to the pure originality of God’s perfect life). God’s immanent triune perfection is the first and last object of Christian theological reflection and governs all else. And that perfection is abundant, giving life to and sustaining that which is not God, and which is the object of economic reflection. Providence is a distributed doctrine, straddling both theology and economy, because its theme is God’s government of created reality in execution of his will for creatures – what Aquinas calls ratio ordinis and dispositio et executio ordinis.2 It pervades dogmatics, because dogmatics treats the history of fellowship between the creator and his creatures in which God perfects that to which he has given life. Like the history of

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 159

4/28/2009 10:37:08 AM

160

The Providence of God

redemption which it accompanies and supports, providence is ubiquitous. Because of this, a materially separate treatment can only be for the purposes of exposition, and must not be allowed to obscure the linkages across the system of Christian teaching. This distributed character is something which providence shares with most other Christian doctrines; conceptualtopical treatment must be undertaken in such a way that the primary historical order of the canon in which all doctrines are being treated all the time is not set aside. Moreover, distributed in this way, providence is informed by other tracts of Christian teaching – most of all the doctrine of God, but also, for example, creation, soteriology and anthropology. Attending to these connections helps preserve Christian specificity; their neglect can issue in one of the most common disorders in an account of providence, namely, dominance by questions or modes of argument not derived from the Christian confession. Particularly since the eclipse of classical Christian cosmology, providence has attracted to itself a set of problems whose solution has been considered essential to a plausible account of the doctrine. Such problems include theodicy, the nature of divine action or the freedom of creatures in relation to divine determination; of such problems, the Christian doctrine of providence is considered an instance. Proposed solutions are often descriptively slender, making little appeal to the resources of Christian teaching, and instead looking for help to – for example – better theories of causality. The result is a stripped-down account of providence in which the identities of the agents – God and creatures – and the historical unfolding of their relations carries insufficient weight. The most effective counter to this is to resist the isolation and problematization of the doctrine: providence cannot be extracted from the corpus, cleaned up and then reinserted, for dogmatics is a whole, not an assemblage of discrete parts. Where, then, should providence be located? It can be divided between the doctrine of God and the doctrine of creation, as it is by Aquinas who treats providence proper in the context of discussing the divine will,3 government in relation to creation,4 and fate in connection with the order of the world.5 Or it can be reserved for unified treatment as part of the doctrine of God’s relation to creation, usually after predestination. The former placement has the considerable contemporary advantage of underscoring the relation of providence to the eternal divine counsel.6 The latter is probably most convenient, however, to display the coherence of the doctrine, provided that the all-important backward connection to the doctrine of God is retained. Retaining this backward connection is crucial to prevent the soteriological subjectivization of providence that we find in,

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 160

4/28/2009 10:37:08 AM

On the Theology of Providence

161

for example, Schleiermacher. Like Calvin, Schleiermacher is entirely correct to emphasize that the saving preservation of the community of redemption is the creaturely core of the doctrine of providence.7 But he lacks Calvin’s reference to the eternal divine will; though he speaks of ‘the Divine All-Sovereignty’,8 providence falls under the rule that, ‘for a Christian consciousness, all the things have existence only as they are related to the efficacy of redemption’.9 The lack of a theology of divine perfection eventually leads to the absorption of the doctrine into morals or history or attitude to life. Moreover, placing providence after the doctrine of creation has the further advantage of ensuring that the doctrine of creation is not simply an account of origins, but inseparable from God’s establishment of creatures with movement towards finality, superintended by his care. 2. As with all dogmatics, disputatio is subordinate to expositio. Dogmatics has a twofold task: an analytic-expository task, in which it attempts orderly conceptual representation of the content of the Christian gospel as it is laid out in the scriptural witnesses; and a polemical-apologetic task in which it explores the justification and value of Christian truthclaims. The latter external orientation is necessary but derivative from the first; it may not without serious damage become the ground of exposition. This is, once again, to prevent the problematization of Christian doctrine in which material dogmatic content is suspended rather than applied to make headway with disputed questions. This we shall try to indicate in the relation of providence to creaturely freedom. Further, dogmatics will have a free relation to the necessary conceptualities and languages of which it makes use in explicating its material, and will not expect them to bear all the weight in disputatio. Both dogmatic and apologetic problems can rarely be eased conceptually or by the improvement of terms: most often what is required is the clearing away of some dominant theory or concept by dogmatic description. In the doctrine of providence, the language of causality and agency is a matter in point, because refinement of such language is sometimes thought to be essential to successful exposition. The doctrine cannot, of course, manage without such language – all theology has is borrowings from elsewhere. But good dogmatics will be keen to retain a sense that the borrowing is ad hoc, not principled, and to let the real work be done by the matter itself. A doctrine of providence will best be conducted as an exercise in biblical reasoning, a conceptual, schematic representation of what theology is told by the prophets and apostles. 3. These first two points serve to indicate the Christian specificity required of a Christian doctrine of providence: at each point, the cogency of the presentation depends upon deployment of and governance by the

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 161

4/28/2009 10:37:08 AM

162

The Providence of God

Christian doctrine of God and its economic entailments. A Christian doctrine of providence is only derivatively a theory of history, a cosmology or an account of divine action in the world; most properly, it is a representation of how the Father’s plan for the fullness of time is set forth in Christ and made actual by the Holy Spirit among the children of Adam. In other words, the identities of the agents in the history of providence – this God and his creatures – are fundamental to determining its course and character. (Barth’s insistence on providence as God’s ‘fatherly lordship’ is surely the most extended modern attempt to account for this.10) Again, Christian specificity about the ends of providence is crucial to grasping its nature, for providence is not mere static world maintenance but teleological, the fulfilment of the ordered fellowship with God which is the creature’s perfected happiness. The key questions are not cosmological but theological, and their answers derive from specifications of the enacted name of God. A natural extension of this is the need for caution over the derivation of teaching about providence from the general concept of deity which forms part of a natural philosophy. Zwingli’s de providentia is commonly held up as an example of this, for – despite its Trinitarian content and its practical conclusion – it insists on the necessity of providence if there is a supreme good: For since it is of the nature of supreme truth to see through all things clearly, inasmuch as that which is divinity must see all things, and since it is of the nature of supreme might to be able to do what it sees, nay, to do all things, and, finally, since it is of the nature of the supreme good to will by its goodness to do what it clearly sees and can do, it follows that he who can do all things must provide for all things.11

The worry is reinforced by Zwingli’s appeal to Pico della Mirandola’s oration with its talk of God as ‘the great master workman’.12 Others stumble here: Turretin’s penetrating analysis is superb, but shadowed by a posteriori demonstrations of providence from a doctrine of God as supreme ruler,13 and by a concept of motion lacking in the required equivocation. If a theology of providence is to identify and steer away from the problem, it requires that analytic powers be set in the service of dramatichistorical description: only in this way can the identities and agents of the history of providence, their modes of actions and ends, be protected from formalization. The rule is: He upholds the universe by his word of power.14 With these preliminary orientations in mind, we move to reflect on the knowledge of providence.

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 162

4/28/2009 10:37:09 AM

On the Theology of Providence

163

III ‘We struggle and waiver in the matter of providence’, Zwingli tells us. ‘When it presents itself before our eyes so plainly that we are forced even against our will to see it, regard it, and execute its commands, we yet bid ourselves to hope for results according to our own desires.’15 Knowledge of providence, that is, is always a matter of mortification and vivification, the chastening and reordering of desire; the application of the intellect in the matter involves its renovation and illumination by the Spirit’s grace. Only in that movement of disappointment and trust is providence known. This is simply to say that the knowledge of providence is knowledge of faith: ‘it is not after the manner of men, or by the natural sense, that in our miseries we acknowledge God to have regard of us, but we take hold of his invisible providence by faith’.16 Faith is creaturely knowledge, assent and trust which correspond to the free communicative presence and action of God. Such knowledge accords with the essential character of creaturely being, which is had not a se and in se but ad extra, enjoyed and exercised not in the mode of possession but in an act of the referring of creaturely intellect to God. Providence is knowledge of God, and known as God is known, in the act of faith. The creaturely act of faith is the work of the Holy Spirit, a point at which reason is caught up in an antecedent gracious causality which enables the intellect to see God and all things in God by locating its operations coram Deo. This is why faith in providence is only derivatively ‘subjective’, an interpretation of and attitude towards the world. Primarily and strictly it is objective, generated and sustained by a movement from outside reason. Its objectivity is of a special kind, in that it is derived from ‘revelation’, that is, from those acts in which God makes himself present to disordered creatures in such a way that they are caused to know that against which they have blinded themselves. To acquire ‘objectivity’ in knowledge – truthful attention to reality – we are required to submit to chastening and correction. Objectivity is not self-generated knowledge, though we wish it were, and are restless when we discover that it is not; the restlessness is a further sign of the intellect’s disorder. To know providence, we need to be taught by the Spirit for, again, we know providence as we know God. One of the conditions under which faith exists is that of created temporality (this is why hope is faith’s extension of itself into the future). The knowledge of faith is not available apart from its acquisition and deployment over time; yet, because faith is faith in the omnipresence of God to whom all occasions are seasons of mercy, faith in providence is knowledge of what will be true in all occasions, namely: ‘necesse est ponere

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 163

4/28/2009 10:37:09 AM

164

The Providence of God

providentiam in Deo’.17 Without knowing our future course, faith in providence confesses that God orders our time. A cogent theology of providence will respect this particular kind of temporal objectivity. Bad doctrines of providence extricate knowledge of providence from the corruptions of temporality – by giving easy access to synchronic accounts of history, by neglecting the believer’s stance in medias res, by supplying history with a frame.18 Bad doctrines of providence abound, as do bad responses to them which try to reintroduce an element of indeterminacy by subtracting from divine determination or omnicausality, but faith’s knowledge of providence will neither underdetermine or overdetermine. It will not allow that provisionality goes all the way down (this simply makes a doctrine of providence redundant); nor will it import the notion of the tragic to disrupt complacent teleologies of history (because God is, there is lament but no tragedy). And, equally, faith in providence will be unwilling to associate certain knowledge of providence with knowledge secured by proofs (certainty contingent on proof is not possible, for proofs are not of infinite range or applicability). Instead, if it follows the movement of faith in God’s providence, dogmatics will pay attention to the particular kind of certainty of divine providence that is given to faith. That certainty originates wholly outside the believing subject; it is given to the believer as she attends to the works of God. We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son in order that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified. (Rom. 8.28–30)

‘We know’ is a function of God, who is for us, and shows himself such by not sparing his Son. To know providence is to know that event in its infinite range – God ‘gave him up for us all’, and so ‘will he not also give us all things with him?’ (Rom. 8.32). It is possible to say no to Paul’s question, or to say that we do not know; but those are not possibilities for faith in providence, which can only say that ‘If God is for us, who is against us?’ (Rom. 8.31). Providence is known as God is known – in liberation from mistrust and anxious certainty, from paralysis and hubris, a liberation effected by the glory of Jesus Christ by which all created being and time is illuminated. Faith, then, confesses what Calvin calls God’s ‘invisible providence’:19 ‘by faith we take hold of God’s grace, which is hidden from the understanding of the flesh’.20 Providence is mystery, known as such. Its invisibility

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 164

4/28/2009 10:37:09 AM

On the Theology of Providence

165

does not entail lack of intelligibility, but is a summons to a particular act of intelligence, one conformed to the manner in which God cares for creatures – not all at once, in the midst of their conflicts, miseries and distractions, drawing them to direct themselves to God in ‘sighs and prayers’.21 Through faith in providence we may come to attain the conviction of things not seen (Heb. 11.1). Knowledge of providence is practical knowledge, a work of reason whose end is attitudes and activities in which our creaturely vocation is enacted. It is a practical perception of the origin and order of temporal episodes, not simply an observation of the nature of things or a ‘world picture’.22 This is not to say that knowledge of providence is not scientia, but to specify the kind of scientia that it is. Troeltsch suggests that, because belief in providence is religious belief, it ‘can by no means serve to explain the world’ and ‘does not infringe on the scientific explanation of the world’.23 But faith is knowledge, and by it we may venture judgements. These judgements are not ‘pure’: they are aspects of disposing of ourselves in time. By them we attempt to read human time as the history of fellowship between the creator and his creatures, seeing particular episodes as instances of judgement and blessing, seeing the whole as directed to our good, deriving consolation from the order which is discerned but not imposed. Belief in providence is not simply a gloss on the course of nature, which could quite adequately be interpreted without reference to the divine plan and its execution. Rather, it is a belief that time is (and is not merely taken to be) ‘under [God’s] hand’, that it cannot be enclosed ‘within the stream of nature’,24 and so it is to learn how to live in time.25 This being so, it is scarcely possible to suggest that the doctrine of providence is a ‘mixed article’, discernible partly by natural reason, partly by faith; it is faithful reason’s receiving of the consolation that, from before the foundation of the world and through all its course, God is for us.

IV We now turn to the material content of the doctrine of providence. God ordains that there should be an order to creaturely being and creaturely history, and so administers or regulates creaturely being and history that they attain their perfection. ‘It is not only in the substance of created things that goodness lies’, Aquinas tells us, ‘but also in their being ordained to an end, above all to their final end which is the divine goodness. This good order existing in created things is itself part of God’s creation’.26 Providence is the divine work which enacts this order, both the immanent divine action

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 165

4/28/2009 10:37:10 AM

166

The Providence of God

of establishing the distinction of all things and the transitive divine action of temporal government.27 The doctrine of providence begins from the doctrine of God of which it is a function. It is important to begin far back in the doctrine of God – not simply with, for example, divine power or intelligence but with God’s perfect life which he is from and in himself as Father, Son and Spirit, that is, with the eternal plenitude of the divine processions in which consists the divine blessedness. Providence is an aspect of the wonder of the overflow of God’s abundant life. God’s perfection includes his infinite love; he is in himself an inexhaustible fountain of life; he bestows life in limitless generosity. That is, God is the maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. The free loving work of creation is ex nihilo: it is a work of absolute initiation, and entails no compromise of the unqualified aseity of God’s life. God does not create out of something; nor does he create out of need; nor does his bestowal of life entail any impoverishment or loss, for it is ingredient within his perfection. Since he is in need of nothing, is rich in all things, and is good and kind, nay is the Father of all the things he has made, it follows that he cannot be wearied or exhausted through giving, that he rejoices in giving, that he cannot help giving.28

In this act of generosity, God wills, establishes and perfects a reality beyond himself as a further object of his love. God’s acts of creating and governing are inseparable. Indeed, providence is in a certain way the special dimension of Christian belief in God the creator, because it specifies the act of creation as the beginning not simply of contingency but of faithful care. Calvin notes that unless we pass on to his providence . . . we do not yet properly grasp what it means to say ‘God is creator’. Carnal sense, once confronted with the power of God in the very creation, stops here, and at most weighs and contemplates only the wisdom, power and goodness of the author in accomplishing such handiwork.29

Creation, we might say, is not simply making. This can be seen in relation both to the creator and to the creation. In relation to the creator, the doctrine of providence indicates that God is no ‘momentary creator’;30 his relation to creatures is not simply initial but temporally extended. He gives not only substantia but finis; that is, creatures have an historical nature, being which is ordained to acquire a particular perfection over its course. This perfection is fellowship with

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 166

4/28/2009 10:37:10 AM

On the Theology of Providence

167

God. Creation is the love of God which bestows life in order that this fellowship may be (love as creativity); providence is the love of God which, corresponding to creativity, superintends the historical order of created being so that its relation to the creator may flourish (love as fidelity). As ordination, divine fidelity purposes the history of fellowship; as government, providence is that history’s execution. If we stand back a pace, two things are to be understood about these affirmations. First, like the doctrine of creation, the doctrine of providence is not only an aspect of cosmology. Although both treat of the metaphysics of the world order, neither can be restricted to that field. This is because, for the Christian confession, created being is not indeterminate but has a nature ordered towards relation to God. Creation is not simply making; providence is not simply maintaining. Both have to be viewed in relation to the specific Christian confession that the history of the creation serves the history of grace, because that is the kind of creation to which God gives being, a creation which may enjoy relation to him. Second, therefore, once again a great deal hangs on the identity of the maker and governor of all things – on seeing creation as love issuing in fidelity, rather than as manufacture. God does not simply provide the initial motion of nature, setting its inclination then allowing it to take its course; he is not a mere observer of creaturely time but an agent, one whose providence, as Calvin puts it, ‘pertains no less to his hands than to his eyes’.31 Providence cannot be restricted to foreknowledge, for God is ‘the ruler and governor of all things, who in accordance with his wisdom has from the farthest limits of eternity decreed what he was going to do, and now by his singular might carries out what he has decreed’.32 And this is so because God is triune; his works ad extra, though indivisible, manifest the properties of the persons to whom they may especially be appropriated. The Father determines the course of created time; the Spirit causes creaturely causes; the Son intervenes to draw creation back from ruin so that it may attain its end. Only because God is thus does creation issue in providence. That creation is not simply making can be seen, second, in relation to the creature. God creates what is not himself, life which is not in se, having no principle of life other than that of the continuing fidelity of the creator. Creaturely being needs conservation. ‘The esse of all creaturely beings so depends upon God that they could not continue to exist even for a moment, but would fall away into nothingness unless they were sustained in existence by his power’.33 To be a creature is to depend upon the creator not merely for coming-to-be, but also for historical persistence. This is not to espouse a theology of continuous creation in the strong sense that the world is remade moment by moment (a weaker sense of ontological

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 167

4/28/2009 10:37:10 AM

168

The Providence of God

dependence sometimes goes under the same term). Creation bestows being, and does not merely tantalize with the possibility of being. Once bestowed, the being of creation has its own relative independence; it needs no further creating (for to create is to call into existence) but does need to be sustained by providential care. Providence thus confirms created being, but does not secure it, as if it were ontologically precarious. Further, as a reality with its own being, creation cooperates with God under God in its own persistence in a way in which it could not cooperate in its own comingto-be. And so, again, the creator is not otiose once the act of creation is complete, but continues his love as the governor of what he has made. So much, then, by way of the relation between creation and providence. ‘Since it belongs to the same cause to give a thing its being and to bring it to completeness, i.e. to govern it, the way God is the governor of things matches the way he is their cause.’34 The Triune God is both creation’s efficient and also its final cause.35 How is God’s loving work of administration of the history of creation to be conceived? Once again, everything depends upon the identity of the agent and his ends in determining the nature of his acts. That a theological metaphysics of divine action is required is unquestionable (without it, belief in providence shrinks to a subjective disposition); but the metaphysics must follow the confession which it explicates, and so take some care to register the fact that words such as ‘motion’ or ‘cause’ are simply ministerial and not principial. With this in mind, something like the following might be said. 1. God’s administration of creation is the execution of his ‘plan for the fullness of time’ (Eph. 1.10). ‘The divine mind must preconceive the whole pattern of things moving to their end.’36 This seemingly dark and forbidding truth is of the essence of the gospel. How is it so? It is so because the pattern of things pre-exists, as Aquinas puts it, in mente divina, in the divine mind. This mind is the mind of ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (Eph. 1.3), the one who wills our good, who ‘destines us in love’ (Eph. 1.5), and whose works issue in ‘the praise of his glorious grace’ (Eph. 1.6). God’s external acts are in accordance with his inner nature; his providence expresses his omnipotent holiness and goodness and wisdom, his infinite resourcefulness in being for us. And so, to speak of God’s plan is to indicate God’s determination to bless creatures. For Calvin, to live by virtue of ‘a certain and deliberate will’, that is, ‘God’s ordinance and command’, is not a matter of fear or resentment but of comfort, for it means to be ‘under [God’s] hand’.37 This is why the Christian tradition spent much effort on distinguishing faith in providence from

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 168

4/28/2009 10:37:11 AM

On the Theology of Providence

169

fatalism. Fate is untrustworthy and capricious and has no goodness. But, by divine determination, creatures are ‘destined and appointed to live’ (Eph. 1.12), to fulfilment of being in praising the creator’s glory. That providence, in the strict sense of the divine plan, is not bleak destiny is above all decided in the fact that it is in him, in Christ – the one who is both the origin (Eph. 1.4) and the goal (Eph. 1.10) of what God’s love establishes for creatures. Providence is not a world system but the assurance that creaturely time has depth and direction, that it does indeed work for good. 2. God exercises his plan (providentia) in his work of caring for creatures (procuratio). This work is ceaseless and universal in scope. God’s love for creatures is infinite; it is not possible for there to be a creaturely occasion in which it is not at work, for providence is operative non in universali tantum sed etiam in singulari.38 ‘All things work together for good.’ But because the end of creation which providence protects is the fellowship of God’s rational creatures with himself, then general and special providence (i.e. God’s care for the world in general, and for all humankind) are subordinate to singular providence (God’s care for the elect or the Church). Calvin judged that providence is particularly God’s ‘vigilance in ruling the church’,39 and his judgement was a hallmark of Reformed theologies of providence.40 This is emphatically not to undermine the universality of providence, but to say that the Church is the special object of God’s care because it is the interim realization of the goal of rational creatures, namely, fellowship with the creator. In the Church the end of creation is being reached; that is why the history of the Church is the meaning of the world’s history, which is the unification of all things in Christ (Eph. 1.10). 3. Providence is thus directed to the creature’s good. With this we return to the rock of offence. How can this be when we suffer or watch inexplicable horrors? Here the gospel counsels us to endurance in which we may attain knowledge. Again: How can the governance of our ways be good if its cost is the creature’s freedom? How may believers with a good conscience take and offer gospel comfort? Here the gospel returns a longer answer. Creation (and therefore providence) is a work of love, that is, of divine power ordered to the bestowal of life upon another and to the perfection of that life, for God’s ‘power is the minister of God’s love and wisdom. It works with a teleological reference.’41 This already sets a theology of providence in the proper direction. If God is thus – if he is the Father who wills our good, the Spirit who gives integrity to created being, the Son who rescues it from self-chosen ruin – then how can the divine regulation of all things not be for our good? We do not need to win freedom back from God, because God is its ground, not its denial.

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 169

4/28/2009 10:37:11 AM

170

The Providence of God

Because it belongs to the best sort of being to achieve the best sort of effects, failure to direct the beings created to their perfection is not consonant with God’s absolute goodness. Now the highest perfection of any being consists in the attaining of its end. Hence it is appropriate to God’s goodness that, as he has brought things into being, he also guides them towards their end. That is what governing them means.42

To see this, however, requires that we strip the notion of ‘moving’ of any abstract ideas of sheer causal force, maximize its equivocal character and fill out its form with reference to the canonical portrait of the Lord of the covenant. Moreover, we need to deploy conceptual resources to try to show how the freedom and dignity of creatures are caught up in, not suppressed or eliminated by, the rule of God. A little more on this last point. God’s governance secures the creature’s freedom. If this fails to commend itself, it is because it contravenes a destructive convention according to which true freedom is indeterminacy and absolute spontaneity or it is nothing at all. To say that is to deny creatureliness. Freedom is existence in accordance with created nature and towards created ends, not self-authorship or aseity. This means that freedom is reception, but not passivity – that it is permission and summons, but not spoken by me, but to me by God. ‘God is the abiding cause of man’s being a cause able to determine the character of his existence.’43 The free person fulfils her self by perfecting a given nature. That perfecting is the work of providence which does not constrain but fulfils the creature’s self-determination, because God’s providence moves the creature’s will by what Aquinas calls an ‘interior movement’.44 Can a moved will be free? Yes, because to be moved voluntarily is to be moved of one’s own accord, i.e. from a resource within. That inner resource, however, may derive from some other, outward source. In this sense, there is no contradiction between being moved of one’s own accord and being moved by another.45

If we are to see that Aquinas’ argument is evangelically well judged, we need to grasp that divine providential acts are not simple compulsion (the archer sending the arrow) but rather intrinsic to the creature whom God moves, what Aquinas calls ‘a necessity of nature’,46 in which the creature is activated and not diminished.47 And to see this we also need to see that – as that astute reader of Aquinas, Turretin, puts it at the beginning of the modern period: ‘The fount of error is the measuring of the nature of liberty from equilibrium and making indifference essential to it. Liberty must be defined by willingness and spontaneity.’48 This points us to how, in the light of the gospel, providence dignifies creatures. As with creaturely freedom, so with creaturely dignity: it does

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 170

4/28/2009 10:37:11 AM

On the Theology of Providence

171

not consist only in being agens seipsum, one’s own director.49 To be moved by divine government is not to be beaten, but to be moved to act. Here the conceptuality of secondary causality proves immensely resourceful. God’s providential activity is omnicausal but not solely causal. His ordering of the history of creation includes the employment of creaturely ministers. Their ministerial operations do not threaten but draw life from divine sovereignty; divine sovereignty does not eliminate but generate creaturely operation. That creatures are so drawn into the ordering and moving of their own histories is a gift of love; it is of ‘the abundance of his goodness’ that God ‘imparts to creatures also the dignity of causing’.50 For not only is ‘operation . . . the goal of created being’, but ‘to deprive creation of its pattern of cause and effect . . . would imply lack of power in the creator, since an agent’s power is the source of its giving an effect a causative capability’.51 The creature’s ‘intrinsic power to act’ does not exclude ‘the extrinsic premotion of God’.52 Part, then, of seeing that providence is God’s goodness is grasping that God’s love of creatures includes his creation of them with a particular nature. They are creatures who are not a se; they possess causality; this causality is secondary or medial. As medial causes they are themselves caused; but – because God is who God is, the life-giver – caused causes are not non-causes but causes which exercise a specific mode of causality. ‘Secondariness’ is not a deficiency, a violation of creaturely agency, but a specification of the agency lovingly bestowed on us by God who summons us into his service. And further, self-subsistent agency, curved in on itself, is not our dignity but our resistance to nature. 4. From all this, we may sketch in the most minimal way the modes of divine providential activity. God is faithful to the creature, calling it into his service, and guarding it against disorder that it may obtain its promised glory. That is, through the Son and the Spirit, God preserves, acts with and governs the creature in its passage into the eternal Kingdom of God. God loves creatures faithfully in his work of preservation. He freely associates his being with that of the creature, continuing to bear up creaturely reality because he does not will that the creature should fail to attain its perfection. Creaturely history is thus stretched between its source and its end in God; yet its passage, though hidden, is not insecure because it exists under the divine promise. The inner court in which that promise is fulfilled is, of course, the mission of the Son; but its outer court is God’s providential service which makes possible the creature’s continuance in its goal of fellowship. God loves the creature in his work of concurrence. His agency does not cease with the last day of creation; nor does he preserve created reality

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 171

4/28/2009 10:37:11 AM

172

The Providence of God

merely as its passive ontological principium. He acts in partnership with the acts of creatures, serving them by determining them for his service. As the creature has itself in being with respect to God, so also it ought to have itself in working, for the mode of working follows the mode of being . . . now every creature depends upon God in being, therefore also in working.53

God loves the creature in his work of governance. Creaturely selfgovernment is destructive and enslaving, because it exchanges the divine necessity for some other self-imposed necessity, less wise and loving than that appointed by God, and leading not to our happiness but to decay. In his providence, God overrules this; he so orders creaturely history that – without our knowledge or consent – we are set free for our inheritance. This inheritance is not received apart from the saving missions of the Son and the Spirit. But these works, by which God’s kingdom is established, are anticipated by his providential government, which also accompanies and furthers the benefits which flow from them until in the fullness of time all things are united in God.

V Providence is gospel consolation, ignorance of which is, Calvin tells us, ‘the ultimate of all miseries’.54 Trust in providence signals the end of the evil self-responsibility which so afflicts much of our civil life (this we might expect), and of our ecclesial life (of this we should be ashamed). To embrace and trust ourselves to divine government is not resignation, but hopeful action towards the end secured for us by a loving creator. Calvin brooded on the fragility and transience of human life: A man cannot go about unburdened by many forms of his own destruction, and without drawing out a life enveloped, as it were, with death. . . . Yet, when the light of divine providence has once shone upon a godly man, he is then relieved and set free not only from the extreme anxiety and fear that were pressing him before, but from every care.55

We must reach that comfort at the right pace – not too fast, lest we treat it lightly, not too slowly, lest we be overtaken by melancholy. We are instructed by the doctrine of providence to look to God for comfort; to cast ourselves in a tragic role, to allow ourselves to think that there is no comfort, is to fall prey to unbelief. But belief is learned, not given all at once. No small

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 172

4/28/2009 10:37:12 AM

On the Theology of Providence

173

part of the office of dogma is to assist in that learning of the promises of God, describing them well and letting their goodness fill our sails. O God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth; we humbly beseech thee to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things which be profitable for us; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Notes 1 Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob XXIV.xx, CCSL 143B (Turnhout: Brepols, 1985), 1222. 2 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.22.1 ad 1. 3 Ibid., 1a.22. 4 Ibid., 1a.103–9. 5 Ibid., 1a.116. 6 Barth mounts a curious objection to Lombard and Bonaventure for placing the doctrine of providence in the doctrine of God, arguing that this imports God’s relation to the creation ‘in the being of God as though the creature too were eternally in God’: Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 5. He is certainly correct to argue that God ‘would be no less God if the whole of creation had never been done, if there were no creatures, and if the whole doctrine of providence were therefore irrelevant’ (ibid.). But to go on from there to say that ‘there can be no place of this doctrine in that of the being of God’ (ibid.) is to overstate – as he implies when he argues that as an opus ad extra providence rests on the opus Dei internum, the election of grace in Jesus Christ (6). 7 F. D. E. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928), 723. 8 Ibid., 144. 9 Ibid., 723. 10 See Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3, 3–288; a classic statement is, of course, that in the Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 10, Q/A 27. 11 Huldrych Zwingli, The Production from Memory of a Sermon on the Providence of God in On Providence and Other Essays, ed. W. J. Hinke (Durham: Labyrinth Press, 1983), 133–4. 12 See Zwingli, On the Providence of God, 160. 13 Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1992) VI.1.vii, vol. 1, 491. 14 The examples from Zwingli and Turretin suggest that the roots of what Charles Taylor calls ‘providential deism’ reach back into the theology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and so that we require a rather more probing analysis of the theological disorder which cleared a space for deistic doctrines of the world order; see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 221–69.

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 173

4/28/2009 10:37:12 AM

174

The Providence of God

15 Zwingli, On the Providence of God, 231. 16 John Calvin, A Commentary on the Psalms vol. 1 (London: James Clarke, 1965), 141 (on Ps. 13.1). 17 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.22.1 corp. 18 For an articulate reflection on these temptations, see Ben Quash, Theology and the Drama of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Further, see Rowan Williams, Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (London: SCM Press, 2007), 35–76. 19 Calvin, A Commentary on the Psalms, 141. 20 Ibid., 144. 21 Ibid., 141. 22 See Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3, 18. 23 Ernst Troeltsch, The Christian Faith (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1991), 205. 24 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (London: SCM, 1960), I.16.3, 200. 25 On this aspect of Calvin see Randall Zachmann, Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 73–104, and more generally, Cornelis van der Kooi, As in a Mirror: John Calvin and Karl Barth on Knowing God (Leiden: Brill, 2005). 26 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.22 corp. 27 Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology VI.1.2, 489. 28 Zwingli, On the Providence of God, 136. 29 Calvin, Institutes, I.16.1, 197. 30 Ibid., 1.16.1, 197; see also Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology VI.i.5, 490. 31 Calvin, Institutes, I.16.4, 202. 32 Ibid., 1.16.8, 208. Bavinck is thus correct to note that providence is to be attributed not only to the divine intellect but to the divine will: Reformed Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker: 2004), vol. 2, 596. 33 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.104. 34 Ibid., 1a.103.5 resp. 35 This is how Dorner relates the creative and providential works of God: System of Christian Doctrine (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1880–2), vol. 2, 44. 36 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.22.1. 37 Calvin, Institutes, I.16.3, 200. 38 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.22.2. 39 Calvin, Institutes, I.17.1, 210. 40 See, for example, Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 723; Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3, 38–9. 41 Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 2, 53. 42 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.103.1. 43 Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 2, 51. 44 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.104.4. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 1a. 103.1 ad 1. 47 Bavinck comments: ‘the world and every creature in it have received their own existence, but increase in reality, freedom, and authenticity to the extent that

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 174

4/28/2009 10:37:12 AM

On the Theology of Providence

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

175

they are more dependent on God and exist from moment to moment from, through, and to God’ (Reformed Dogmatics vol. 2, 608). Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology VI.5.13, 509. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.103.1 ad 1. Ibid., 1a.22.3. Ibid., 1a.105.5. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology VI.5.13, 509; see further Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, vol. 2, 45–9. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology VI.4.9, 503. Calvin, Institutes, I.17.11, 225. Ibid., I.17.11, 223–4.

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 175

4/28/2009 10:37:13 AM

FMurphy_08_Finals.indd 176

4/28/2009 10:37:13 AM

Chapter 9

Providence and the Evolutionary Phenomenon of ‘Cooperation’: A Systematic Proposal Sarah Coakley

I. Introduction: How a Game Theoretical Account of Evolutionary ‘Cooperation’ Makes a Difference to Classic Darwinism In this chapter, I propose a theological reflection on divine providence and its relation to neo-Darwinian theory, but with a particular focus: that of the evolutionary phenomenon of ‘cooperation’, and its most recent theoretization in terms of a game theoretical calculus. The ambition to give evolutionary dynamics the precision of a mathematical explanation might seem, at first blush, to be a potentially reductive and even deterministic move, positively inimical to any theological meaning system that might be held in tandem with it. But in fact it will be argued here that a proper understanding of the significance of evolutionary ‘cooperation’, when mathematically understood, does not imply any such reduction. Indeed it may actually help us to clarify the sense in which evolutionary theory of this sort remains stochastic in status, while simultaneously attaining greater statistical precision; the matter of metaphysical explanation at a deeper causal level (such as Aquinas meant by ‘primary causation’) thus remains wide open to theological speculation. Moreover, such developments in understanding about ‘cooperation’ act as a positive check and balance, first, to a merely atavistically competitive vision of evolutionary processes; and may even suggest to us, finally, I shall argue, how to think more creatively than we usually do about the intrinsic relation of the doctrines of incarnation and Trinity to that of divine providence. In what follows I shall first give an introductory account of what game theorists mean by ‘cooperation’, and what difference such an understanding has made to classic Darwinism in the last few decades. In the main, second, part of the chapter I shall then move to chart some of the potential theological implications, as I see them, of this new mathematical understanding of evolutionary dynamics for a contemporary doctrine of providence, even though in the compass of this short lecture I can only operate with fairly broad brush strokes. My argument, to anticipate, will be that

FMurphy_09_Finals.indd 179

4/28/2009 10:36:43 AM

180

The Providence of God

classic Thomism fares particularly well as an accompaniment to evolutionary dynamics, so understood, but that it fares even better if we superimpose the template of the doctrine of the incarnation from the tertia pars already onto the basic assumptions of the prima pars, from the outset. Reading the Summa backwards may turn out, in other words, more richly creative for reflection on the contemporary science/religion debates than is most commonly assumed. Disposing of doctrinal complications such as incarnation and Trinity, in contrast, may mask a covert deism and paradoxically turn out to be a strategy that creates more problems than it solves in the science/religion debates. But first, a rather introductory, and necessarily condensed, account of the evolutionary phenomenon of ‘cooperation’ and its significance for current neo-Darwinian theory. (In this section, I draw heavily on the recent work of my Harvard colleague and collaborator in a current research project, Martin A. Nowak.) We probably do not need to be reminded, first, that evolution is based on competition between both individuals and species in populations. Prima facie this competition would appear to promote only selfish and self-interested behaviours, and indeed in a well-mixed population such behaviours do indeed win out in normal circumstances, at least for a while. Replication, mutation and selection are the basic principles of evolution so brilliantly highlighted by Darwin, and together they provide a convincing account (‘explanation’ may be too strong a word: we shall return to that) of how species change and evolve, and how weaker forms of life are weeded out in favour of stronger. But there is another phenomenon in evolution, so-called cooperation, without which the dynamics of life would not, as it turns out, go on as they do. Darwin, with extraordinary prescience, already hinted in The Descent of Man at the importance of tribal solidarity, for instance, for ongoing evolutionary development; but he could give no precise explanation at the time of its significance in relation to his primary principles of mutation and selection. It is only the advances in the mathematical understanding of evolutionary dynamics which have come about since the 1970s which have allowed an account to be given of how ‘cooperation’ in populations decisively affects evolution in distinctive ways. It is often observed that replicating individuals in the evolutionary spectrum at times ‘cooperate’ with one another – in a particular sense of the word which we must now clarify. ‘Cooperation’ in this context has a precise meaning that can be expressed mathematically in a game theoretical calculus such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma: it does not just mean ‘working together’ of any sort, as in ordinary language use, but a particular form of working together in which

FMurphy_09_Finals.indd 180

4/28/2009 10:36:43 AM

Providence and the Evolutionary Phenomenon

181

one individual loses out in terms of fitness (whether genetic or cultural) for the sake of another’s gain in conditions of social dilemma. Such ‘cooperative’ events are commonly observed in evolution, right from the level of bacteria to that of human behaviours. For instance, bacteria form colonies in which some cells give up the possibility of reproduction in order to feed others. Similarly, in multicellular organisms only a few cells reproduce (the germ line), while most cells are just there to ‘feed’ the germ line. Cancer, interestingly, can be explained as a breakdown of such a cooperation between cells (which in contrast suddenly do the opposite: they ‘defect’); mutated cells revert to their primitive programme of ‘selfish’ replication at the expense of other cells, ultimately causing the death of the organism. Social insects, as is well known, are masters of cooperation; but the undisputed world champions of ‘cooperation’ are we humans. Our forms of costly ‘cooperation’ range from the undertakings of parenting in small family units to the current grand possibility – which would involve an unprecedentedly worldwide scale of ‘cooperation’ – of saving the planet from ecological disaster. It should be noted, however, that the evolutionary phenomenon of ‘cooperation’, leanly defined as I have suggested, is essentially premoral; we should not make the mistake of presuming that ‘cooperative’ behaviours are intrinsically good and ‘defecting’ ones bad, since it is only when we reach the arena of human, linguistic, so-called cultural evolution that we can begin to have the meta-ethical discussion about what constitutes the good towards which we might aim in ‘cooperation’, and whether it is perceived in utilitarian, deontological or virtue terms (or some combination), let alone how it might relate to a (possibly existent) God. Note that it is in principle possible, then, to ‘cooperate’ in an evolutionarily costly way, precisely as defined above, yet for sadistic or murderous ends which would be judged immoral on most or any meta-ethical principles; the evolutionary existence of ‘cooperation’ does not as such, then, bespeak any naïve evolutionary meliorism such as proved tempting to an earlier generation of post-Darwinian American theologians of the late nineteenth century, who seized with delight on Comte’s newly designated phenomenon of ‘altruism’. That was, of course, all before the First World War and the rise of the Third Reich: now, we might say, we know better. Thus we need to distinguish, I suggest, between ‘cooperation’ in its mathematically clarified evolutionary sense, and ‘altruism’ as an additional motivational state which may nest into such ‘cooperation’ and add the explicit intentionality of self-sacrifice for a particular good. In practice, however, a huge and ongoing muddle is caused in debates between evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science (of various stripes) when the

FMurphy_09_Finals.indd 181

4/28/2009 10:36:43 AM

182

The Providence of God

word ‘altruism’ is used to cover, and smudge together, both what I’ve here called ‘cooperation’ and what I’ve called ‘altruism’.1 Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, I should note, in their justly celebrated Unto Others (1998), make a similar distinction as mine, but call the first ‘evolutionary altruism’ and the second ‘psychological altruism’; but much of the biological literature and popular scientific journalism fails to make this distinction at all, with gravely misleading ethical consequences and resultant philosophical confusion. It is morally vital, as I have indicated, that we distinguish these two categories, even though it is hard to say with precision when the capacity for the latter (‘altruism’) starts to emerge from the former (‘cooperation’) in the evolutionary scale. The higher apes, elephants and dolphins, for instance, appear to exhibit some behaviours that suggest empathetic understanding and even sacrificial choices; but it remains philosophically question-begging and speculative, of course, to attribute actual ‘altruistic’ intentionality to them in a prelinguistic context. Martin Nowak has recently provided a succinct mathematical résumé of five possible rules for the successful evolution and maintenance of ‘cooperation’, in an article in Science that surveys over 30 years of game theoretical research; and he provides there, and in accompanying materials on the web, the more precise mathematical formulations of what I shall now only briefly relay in words. J. B. S. Haldane was the first to identify the phenomenon of ‘kin selection’ (or ‘inclusive fitness’), first, whereby evolution could be shown to favour cooperation if the donor and the recipient of costly acts were genetic relatives and so passed on the tendency. It was Hamilton who formalized this first cooperative mechanism and it came to be called ‘Hamilton’s rule’. Trivers added to this, secondly, the notion of ‘direct reciprocity’, to show that even unrelated individuals or species could in some circumstances develop and maintain ‘cooperative’ practices: if one cooperated now, the other might later, and hence overall it might turn out to pay-off to cooperate long-term on account of the mutual benefit. (This second game-theoretic framework is known as the repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma.) The third principle of cooperation is termed ‘Indirect Reciprocity’ and relies heavily on what evolutionary biologists call ‘reputation’. One cooperates with another whom he may never meet again, but the behaviour is observed by others and eventually evolutionarily rewarded: natural selection turns out to favour strategies that base the decision to cooperate on the reputation of the recipient. A fourth circumstance in which cooperation wins out occurs in so-called network reciprocity, in which defection does not naturally dominate as in well-mixed populations, because cooperators here form clusters which protect and enhance the success of their cooperation (note that this was precisely the phenomenon

FMurphy_09_Finals.indd 182

4/28/2009 10:36:43 AM

Providence and the Evolutionary Phenomenon

183

already noticed by Darwin). It turns out that one can graph such clusterings of cooperation, and that a surprisingly simple rule determines whether ‘network reciprocity’ will favour cooperation: the benefit-to-cost ratio in fitness terms must exceed the average number of neighbours per individual. Fifthly, and lastly, there is the controversial ‘group selection’ tout court, where a population is divided from the start into groups and in some cases groups of cooperators fare better than groups of defectors. The reasons for this continue to be debated, and much depends on how one models ‘group selection’ mathematically. However, in a competition between cooperator groups and defector groups, pure cooperator groups can be shown to grow faster than pure defector groups, even though – in a standard well-mixed population – defectors will still win out. What conjoins all five of these different evolutionary mechanisms, concludes Nowak, is a pay-off matrix in which ‘cooperation’ can be shown to be favoured in repeated choices between the two basic strategies of cooperation and defection. And what is particularly fascinating about this discovery is that it explains the paradoxical fact that – whereas defectors always win out initially in a well-mixed population – they do so at the cost of declining average fitness. ‘Cooperation’, then, in its various forms, is the mysterious key to the regeneration of fitness; it may even lead us to say a little hyperbolically – and counterintuitively, to be sure, given classic Darwinism – that down the road evolution ultimately favours sacrificial, forgiving and non-punitive behaviours. As a result of the mathematical clarification of these cooperative mechanisms, Nowak has recently gone so far as to describe cooperation as a ‘third principle’ of evolution, alongside mutation and selection, although he is well aware of the still-controversial nature of his claim. A final point in this lengthy Introduction is worth making as a bridge to our specifically theological reflection on evolution and providence based on the foregoing analysis. Fears are regularly expressed by believing Christians that neo-Darwinian theory promotes either reductive physical determinism, on the one hand, or else – this is a rather paradoxical combination – a frighteningly erratic ontological randomness. Both of these features would seem, prima facie, inimical to a belief in any providential divine guidance of the evolutionary process. However, it should be stressed that the game theoretical explication of the principles of evolutionary dynamics is of a stochastic sort: it enlightens us about statistical regularities in the processes of evolution, regularities that should precisely soothe fears about totally erratic ‘randomness’ (whatever that is); but at the same time it does not, on closer reflection, provide any ontology at all, whether deterministic or otherwise. That is, ‘evolution’ is, on Nowak’s and

FMurphy_09_Finals.indd 183

4/28/2009 10:36:44 AM

184

The Providence of God

other similar game theorists’ understanding, neither a metaphysical principle, nor even an ‘explanation’ of evolutionary events in the strictest sense. Rather we might describe evolution from this perspective as a complex form of sorting process. It leaves completely unanswered the deeper metaphysical questions about causality, whether created or divine. And to these issues we must now turn in the second main half of our chapter.

II. A Thought Experiment to Link Classical Christian Theism (in the Thomistic Tradition) and Evolutionary ‘Cooperation’ I have taken this amount of time in providing an introduction to game theoretical accounts of evolutionary ‘cooperation’, because I find in contemporary popular discussions of evolution and religion that these features of recent evolutionary theory are rarely discussed, or if they are, are often quite misleadingly represented. Our key question now, as we turn to the more important systematic/ theological part of the chapter is this: how, if at all, might this game theoretical understanding of ‘cooperation’ affect, colour or even change a theological account of the relation of divine providence and evolutionary development? (I’m well aware that those of you who are Barthians will object intrinsically to the way I’ve phrased that question, but I’ll come back at the end to give a certain retroactive defence of my modus operandi.) Let me divide what I want to say here into two main parts, with a hinge passage between them which will explain why I see most (popularly known) current options in response to the problem of evolution and divine providence as inherently unsatisfactory. In the first section (Section A), I shall examine what I see as the three most profound problems for Christian theism, and especially for its doctrine of providence, since the advent of Darwinism, so profound as to cause many to see Darwinism as a ‘defeater’ of Christian belief. These problems were certainly not absent before the discovery of evolution; indeed they are classic inheritances from Christian philosophical theology and apologetics which have exercised Christian thinkers from at least the third century, if not before. But evolutionary theory has certainly sharpened these issues in particular ways that – I would insist – responsible contemporary Christians cannot now avoid confronting. In my second section (Section B), I shall highlight the particular insights and nuances that a theological approach informed by the recent evolutionary theory I’ve just described can bring to the solution of these questions. In short, I want to suggest not only that we can effect

FMurphy_09_Finals.indd 184

4/28/2009 10:36:44 AM

Providence and the Evolutionary Phenomenon

185

a convincing response to the problems in Section A, but that, in addition, we can provide a distinctive and novel theological approach resulting specifically from our new understandings of the significance of ‘cooperation’ as an evolutionary phenomenon.

A. Three fundamental problems in the relation between the created realm and divine providence, given evolutionary theory In this chapter I am assuming a ‘classical’ understanding of the Christian God, that is, a God who is Being itself, creator and sustainer of all that is, eternal (i.e. atemporal, omnipresent), omniscient, omnipotent, all-loving, indeed the source of all perfection. One solution to the problems we confront in this section is to give up on one, or more, of these classical attributes for God; but for the meantime I shall not entertain that systematic option – since I suspect it results from a failure to think through the full logical implications of divine atemporality – even though it cannot, a priori, be ruled out. One of the deficiencies in many previous accounts of the problems addressed in this section, however, has been artificially to extrapolate the debates in science and religion from the Trinitarian and incarnational dimensions of this classical Christian theism, that is, covertly to assume that it is deism, rather than Christian theism, that is a stake in the attempt to construe the relation between ‘God’ and the created process. In what follows I shall attempt to avoid this mistake, anticipating some of the themes that the consideration of ‘cooperation’ will also bring to bear in Section B. What then are the three problems, already mentioned, that confront us when we try to see a coherent relation between a good, providential deity, and the unfolding created process? First, there is the issue of how we should understand the relation of God’s providence to prehuman dimensions of creation and their development. Second, there is the issue of how God’s providence can relate to the specific arena of human freedom and creativity. Then third, there is the problem of evil, the question of why what happens in the first two realms manifests so much destructiveness, suffering and outright evil, if God is indeed omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. Why does modern evolutionary theory intensify these problems? They were, after all, already confronted and tackled with considerable sophistication in classical Greek philosophy and in early Christian thought, and refined further in the much-ramified discussions of high scholastic medieval theology. But modern Darwinian evolutionary theory appears:

FMurphy_09_Finals.indd 185

4/28/2009 10:36:44 AM

186

The Providence of God

(1) to underscore the ‘contingency’ or ‘randomness’ of evolutionary ‘mutation’ and ‘selection’, and thus to render newly problematic the possibility of a coherent divine guidance of pre-cultural evolution; (2) to bring further into question the compatibility of divine providence with the human ‘freedom’ of the ‘cultural evolution’ stage, given the deterministic and reductive assumptions of much evolutionary theory – bolstered more recently by genetic accompaniments to the original Darwinian vision (‘Freedom’ now seems to look like little more than an ‘elbow room’ within a physically predetermined nexus (so Dennett); yet – paradoxically – one represented in much modern thought as straining towards an autonomous ‘will to power’ that would precisely compete with, and cancel, an undergirding divine impetus); and thus (3) modern evolutionary theory appears to intensify thereby the problem of evil intolerably. If God is, after all, the author and ‘sustainer’ of the destructive mess and detritus of both pre-cultural and cultural evolutionary processes, why is s/he so incompetent and/ or sadistic as not to prevent such tragic accompaniments to her masterplan? If intervention is an option for God, why has s/he not exercised it? A complete and detailed answer to these conundrums cannot be essayed here (for instance, I am not going into the complexities of divine ‘middle knowledge’ as one possible solution to the second problem); but some broad strokes and intuitions will help lead the way through to a preliminary solution which I lay before you. In the case of each problem there is a common contemporary misapprehension to be avoided, on the one hand, and some important enrichment and colouring from the Christian doctrines of Trinity and incarnation, on the other hand, to add crucially to our reflection. 1. First, then, it is vital to avoid, in the case of pre-cultural evolution, the presumption that ‘God’ competes with the evolutionary process as a (very big) bit player in the temporal unfolding of ‘natural selection’. No self-respecting Thomist would of course be even tempted in such a direction; but once we are released from that false presumption, ‘God’ is no longer – and idolatrously – construed as problematically interventionist (or feebly failing in such) along the same temporal plane as the process itself. Rather, God is that-without-which-there-would-be-no-evolutionat-all; God is the atemporal undergirder and sustainer of the whole process of apparent contingency or ‘randomness’, yet – we can say in the spirit of Augustine and Aquinas – simultaneously closer to its inner workings than it is to itself. And as such, God, we might say, is both intimately ‘within’ the process and ‘without’ it. To put this in more richly Trinitarian terms, inspired by Romans 8: God, the Holy Spirit, is the perpetual invitation and lure of the creation to return to its source in the ‘Father’, yet never without

FMurphy_09_Finals.indd 186

4/28/2009 10:36:44 AM

Providence and the Evolutionary Phenomenon

187

the full – and suffering – implications of incarnate ‘Sonship’. Now once we see the possibility of understanding the contingency of pre-cultural evolution in this way, we need not – as so much science and religion ‘dialogue’ has done in recent years – declare the evolutionary process as necessarily ‘deistically’ distanced in some sense from God to accommodate its ‘randomness’ (see, for example, John Polkinghorne, Science and Providence, 45: God gets out of the way so that evolution can happen contingently, and Polkinghorne unfortunately calls this phenomenon, ‘kenosis’). Rather, let me propose in contrast that God is ‘kenotically’ infused (not by divine loss or withdrawal, but by effusive pouring out) into every causal joint of the creative process, yet precisely without overt derangement of apparent ‘randomness’. How can this be, metaphysically? First, it can be so because God’s providential impinging on the evolutionary process, on this view, is not a miraculous or external additum, but the undergirding secret of the maintenance of the created order in being: it is ‘primary causation’ in Aquinas’s terms. And secondly, it can be so because we now know with ever-greater precision, given the aid of the mathematical calculus of game theory, that evolutionary processes do occur within certain particular patterns of development. Even epistemically, then, we can chart processes of remarkable evolutionary regularity; and ontologically, there seems no irrationality in positing the existence of a transcendent (and also immanent) divine providence, albeit one that kenotically – in my sense – ‘self-hides’ in the appropriate spirit of divine incarnation. But how, the sceptic might object, is evolutionary contingency, and (in a minute when we get to it) genuine human freedom, to be seen as logically compatible with this secret divine guidance? The intuition pump I want to propose here is what Peter Geach once called the ‘chessmaster model’ (even though the analogy as presented by Geach was notoriously imprecise). The basic idea, however, is this: God is (somewhat!) like a chessmaster playing an 8-year-old chess novice. There is a game with regularities and rules; and although there are a huge number of different moves that the child can make, each of these can be successfully responded to by the chessmaster – they are all already familiar to him. And we have no overall doubt that he is going to win. The analogy with God and the evolutionary process, or with human freedom, admittedly involves some stretching: for a start, God has created the whole game. Also God timelessly knows what will happen on any different scenario depending on what moves occur (at least if we buy Molinist ‘middle knowledge’ as an option). But there is a crucial difference here between God knowing what will occur and God directly causing what occurs;2 for on this model the contingent variables and choices occur at the level of secondary

FMurphy_09_Finals.indd 187

4/28/2009 10:36:45 AM

188

The Providence of God

causation (albeit undergirdingly sustained and thus primarily caused by God). 2. So now let’s apply this same model to the problem of divine providence and human cultural evolution, including the evolution of genuine (‘indeterministic’) freedom.3 The modernistic danger here is a slightly different – but closely related – one from the danger that we saw in the first problem (i.e. the danger of assuming that God is a mere item, albeit ‘big’, in the temporal universe itself). For the problem here, secondly, is to think falsely of God as making human autonomy competitively constrained by divine action, rather than thinking of true human freedom as precisely right submission to the graced will and action of God. In other words, once again we must think not deistically but trinitarianly and incarnationally of God. We can find Christ’s agony in the garden, or his submission to divine will on the cross, as the hallmark and pattern of achieved human freedom rather than its supersession. Once we see human freedom, in its truest and best sense, as freedom-for-God, rather than freedom-against-God, then much of the force of the second problem falls away. Not that suffering and sin do not remain in the evolutionary story, in apparently gross and unjustifiable quantities. And that brings us immediately to our third problem. 3. And here, once more, there is an equally seductive modern misapprehension to avert. And that is the presumption that dying, or indeed evolutionary ‘extinction’, is the worst thing that can happen to anyone (or thing). But that, again, I would contest. This point is not to be misheard, note, as a seeming justification for avoidable suffering, victimization or abuse; but it is to be heard Christologically, as an insistence that the deepest agony, loss and apparent wastefulness in God’s creation may, from the perspective of atemporal divinity (and yet also in the Son’s agony and ‘wasted’ death), be spanned by the Spirit’s announcement of resurrection hope. Evil, from this perspective, is mere absence of good; death is the prelude to resurrection. To be sure, the apparent risk God takes in human ‘freedom’ is the terrible risk that humans announce their false ‘autonomy’ in cruelty and destructiveness; yet this so-called risk is the one out of which the worthiest, and – again – most deeply incarnational, forms of participation in God can arise. To underscore my profound difference here from some of the forms of late nineteenth-century optimistic ‘meliorism’ that flourished in liberal theologies that seized incautiously on the recently discovered evolutionary phenomenon of ‘altruism’: cooperation, as an evolutionary development, implies (as we saw) no facile moral optimism. Cooperation can ultimately lead, in its transformed human state, to very great good or to very great evil: the Nazis were, I believe, well-trained – even fine – cooperators. The lesson seems to be this: the higher up the evolutionary scale we go, the

FMurphy_09_Finals.indd 188

4/28/2009 10:36:45 AM

Providence and the Evolutionary Phenomenon

189

greater propensity for ‘cooperative’ good, and the greater propensity for ‘cooperative’ evil.4 To sum up my argument so far: it is not that God has not ‘intervened’ in the history of the evolutionary process to put right the ills of ‘randomness’ and ‘freedom’; for in one sense God is ‘intervening’ constantly – if by that we mean that God is perpetually sustaining us, loving us into existence, pouring God’s self into every secret crack and joint of the created process, and inviting the human will, in the lure of the Spirit, into an ever-deepening engagement with the implications of the incarnation – its ‘groanings’ for the sake of redemption. God, in short, is always ‘intervening’; but only rarely do we see this when the veil becomes ‘thin’, and the alignment between divine, providential will, and evolutionary or human ‘cooperation’, momentarily becomes complete. Such, indeed, we might hypothesize, was Christ’s resurrection, which we call a ‘miracle’ because it seems, from a ‘natural’ and ‘scientific’ perspective, both unaccountable and random. Yet, from a robustly theological perspective, it might be entirely ‘natural’, the summation of the ‘cooperative’ capacity, indeed of the entire Trinitarian evolutionary process, and thus its secret key. Unsatisfactory options in the current debates about evolution and divine providence These thoughts, now briefly enunciated, help us to see why the particular range of options currently popularized in the press in response to the evolution/God debates, seem curiously inept alternatives. Dogmatic ‘scientific’ atheism, first (as Alister McGrath well highlights in the next chapter) constantly goes well beyond the empirical evidences of evolution itself, and can give no convincing account of its own pessimistic reductionism; it thus falls on its own methodological sword. (A suitably ‘apophatic’ Christian doctrine of creation, as Michael Hanby has recently pointed out in important article,5 is ironically far less ‘ideological and thus – dare we say it – more scientific’ than this sort of reductive neo-Darwinism.) Intelligent Design (with a capital I and D), in inverse contrast, tends to assume a God who only occasionally bestirs himself to special action; even if this were not already unacceptable theistically, its ‘solutions’ prove deeply problematic and vulnerable scientifically as well. (This is not to say that there are not remaining areas of uncertainty, even nascence, in current evolutionary theory; nor is it to deny a priori – as we have stressed already – the possibility of ostensibly interventionist ‘miracles’. The issue is one of divine coherence and consistency.) The third option, however, which we may here call the ‘no contest’ position (as evidenced in much fine Roman Catholic theology), also has its problems, about which we should not be coy.

FMurphy_09_Finals.indd 189

4/28/2009 10:36:45 AM

190

The Providence of God

Since our own view most closely approximates to this third option (of the three ‘popularly’ discussed), it is worth clarifying what is deficient about a certain sort of ‘no-contest’ position (let us dub it the ‘lazy no-contest’ stance) before we pass into our final comments and attempt to indicate how these problems might be rectified by a particular attention to the evidences of ‘cooperation’. Lazy ‘no-contesters’, I would suggest, threaten to undermine their own intellectual credibility in at least three, overlapping, ways. First, by hermetically sealing the boundaries between science and theology, they merely invite the (obvious) scientific response of Laplace that ‘I have no need of this hypothesis’. God, in other words, is so effaced from possible evidential discovery as to render her invisible, and thus fully dispensable, on ‘scientific’ grounds. Secondly, such a divide tends to reinforce an – admittedly often smudged – separation between church and state that in North America keeps religious commitment in a subjective realm of ‘preference’ rather than in a public realm of rational negotiation. Thirdly, and correlatively, the ‘lazy non-contestation’ view therefore implicitly encourages the presumption that religious belief is irrational, or ‘personal/affective’, rather than accountable and arguable (albeit within a realm that also embraces significant mystery). In short, the ‘no-contest’ position is to be affirmed for its right insistence that God and the evolutionary process are not on the same ‘level’, whether temporally or in ‘substance’. But we now need to consider, in our final section, how the discovery of ‘natural cooperation’ – as what Martin Nowak calls the ‘third fundamental principle of evolution’ (alongside mutation and natural selection) – might modify, or nuance, the ‘no-contest’ position. Only thus, I shall suggest, can one avoid the dangers and pitfalls we have just outlined, and to which the position is so often subject.

B. How ‘cooperation’ makes a difference to systematic reflection on providence I shall confine myself to two basic points in this last section. The two points form a pincer movement, in that they enunciate, both from a scientific and from a theological perspective, a necessarily dialectical pattern in the relationships between evolutionary and providential understandings of the world’s processes, and one therefore that cannot leave the ‘no-contest’ position unaffected, or in its ‘lazy’ stand-off posture. It causes me to propose a model of science and theology as disciplines that mutually inspire, but chasten, each other, even as they remain on structurally different levels

FMurphy_09_Finals.indd 190

4/28/2009 10:36:46 AM

Providence and the Evolutionary Phenomenon

191

of operation.6 In short, if my intuition is correct, then the ‘cooperative’ tendencies of evolution themselves suggest a ‘natural’ praeparatio in the processes of ‘selection’ for the potential later heights of proper ‘altruism’ and saintly human self-sacrifice (only ultimately comprehensible as a response to grace); whereas the ‘eyes of faith’, on the religious side (to use the Jesuit Pierre Rousselot’s terms), discern the phenomena of ‘cooperation’ as already indications precisely of Trinitarian and incarnational effects. What we have here, in other words, is a manifestation of a two-sided ‘bridging’ model of the relation between evolutionary biology and philosophical theology in which science acknowledges its explicative strengths and its limitations, and theology and metaphysics together strive to complete the vision towards which ‘evolutionary cooperation’ already seemingly gestures, albeit now at a different, and ‘primary’ level of causal explication. On the scientific side first, then, the phenomenon of cooperation, seen now to be as deeply inculcated in the propulsion of evolution – from the bacterial level upwards – as Darwin’s celebrated principles of mutation and selection, provides a significant modification of the ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ image that Darwinism early accrued to itself from Tennyson’s In Memoriam. There is no less suffering or ‘wastage’ on this model of evolution, to be sure; but what there is is an ever-present tendency against individualism or isolationism, which only the application of the game theoretical calculus has been able successfully to explicate. The fear, then, often expressed by the Vatican, that the embracing of ‘Darwinism’ somehow encourages hostile competitiveness or individualism has to be severely modified. At the very least, and in advance of any ascription of religious meaning to the phenomenon, evolution at significant and crucial junctures favours cooperation, costly ‘self-sacrifice’ and even ‘forgiveness’; it favours in due course a rudimentary human ethical sensibility (so Marc Hauser, in his recent Moral Minds), and thus delivers – already in the realm of the higher prehuman mammals – tendencies towards empathy, towards a desire to protect others close to one at the cost of personal risk. At the very least, then, this is the evolutionary seed-bed for higher, intentional forms of altruistic ethical ‘virtue’, although these latter (with their complex forms of human intentionality and freedom of choice) are of a distinctively different sort from the prehuman varieties of cooperation, and cannot in my view be reductively subsumed under mathematical prediction. (Therein lies the real danger of reductionism in this story – to a narrow utilitarian calculus of ‘gain’ such as many economists assume rather than argue in their current use of evolutionary game theory.) From the philosophical or theological side, on the other hand, and secondly, these same phenomena may suggest the possibility of some new

FMurphy_09_Finals.indd 191

4/28/2009 10:36:46 AM

192

The Providence of God

form of ‘moral/teleological’ argument for God’s existence.7 Not that such an argument could ever amount to a ‘proof’ in the deductive sense, but rather be a constituent in a cumulative set of considerations that would together mount a case precisely for an incarnational and Trinitarian God, a God of intimate involvement in empathy and suffering. In this sense, then, not only would the ‘no-contest’ view of science and religion be modified and enriched, but both sides of the ‘evolution’ and ‘science’ divide significantly transformed in their understanding of their relation. To be sure, the agnostic or atheistic evolutionary biologist would continue to question (if not actively resist), the ‘necessity’ of any such metaphysical speculation about the existence of divine providence; but the difference from an older perception of the two discipline’s relations would be the explication of at least a theoretical capacity for bridging (not merging) the two discourses by discussion of particular scientific evidences and their potential meanings. On the theological side, the great advance that this development would bespeak would lie in the intrinsic and immediate attention given to the doctrines of incarnation and Trinity, rather than to the covertly deistic God who has – to great spiritual detriment and imaginative constriction – so dominated the science/religion debates since the Enlightenment.

Notes 1 See Benjamin Kerr, Peter Godfrey-Smith and Marcus W. Feldman, ‘What is Altruism?’ in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 19, 3 (March 2004). 2 See Harm Goris, ‘Divine foreknowledge, providence, predestination, and human freedom’, in Rik van Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykow, eds, The Theology of Thomas Aquinas. Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 2005, ch. 5. 3 Eleonore Stump, Aquinas. New York, Routledge, 2003, esp. ch. 9. 4 ‘Cooperation’ could I believe be appealed to in a newly developed argument for ‘higher order goods’ along these lines. 5 Michael Hanby, ‘Reclaiming Creation’, Theology Today 62 (2006): 476–83. 6 Not exactly either ‘dialogue’ or ‘integration’, on Barbour’s terms (unless one could say ‘bi-level and dialectical integration’); nor as theologically Lindbeckian as McFarland presumes in his article on theology’s ‘compatibility’ versus ‘integration’ axis: the ‘type 2’ compatibilism that McFarland favours involves the supposition that ‘doctrine’s job is not to account for facts. . . . [S]cientific facts play no programmatic role in the formulation or elaboration of Christian beliefs’ (‘Conflict and compatibility: Some thoughts on the relationship between science and religion’, Modern Theology 19 (2003): 197). 7 So Alexander Pruss, in an intriguing forthcoming essay in a volume I am editing: Alexander Pruss, ‘Cooperation and divine existence: A moral/teleological argument’ in Sarah Coakley and Martin A. Nowak, eds, Evolution, Games and God: The Principle of Cooperation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. In preparation.

FMurphy_09_Finals.indd 192

4/28/2009 10:36:46 AM

Providence and the Evolutionary Phenomenon

193

Select Bibliography Sarah Coakley, ‘God and evolution: A new solution’, Harvard Divinity Bulletin Spring/Summer (2007): 8–13. Sarah Coakley, Reviews of E. O. Wilson, The Creation: A Meeting of Science and Religion. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006, and of Owen Gingerich, God’s Universe. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2006, in ‘Twin passions: Two scientists explore science and religion’, Harvard Magazine May/June, 2007, 22–6. Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984. Peter Geach, Providence and Evil. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Owen Gingerich, God’s Universe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Harm Goris, ‘Divine foreknowledge, providence, predestination, and human freedom’, in Rik van Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykow, eds, The Theology of Thomas Aquinas. Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 2005, ch. 5. Michael Hanby, ‘Reclaiming Creation’, Theology Today 62 (2006): 476–83. Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds. New York: Ecco, 2006. Benjamin Kerr, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Marcus W. Feldman, ‘What is Altruism?’, Trends in Ecology and Evolution 19, 3 (March 2004): 135–40. Ian McFarland, ‘Conflict and compatibility: Some thoughts on the relationship between science and religion’, Modern Theology 19 (2003): 181–202. Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Martin A. Nowak, Evolutionary Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2006. — ‘Five rules for the evolution of cooperation’, Science 314, 8 (December 2006): 1560–3. John Polkinghorne, Science and Providence. Boston: Shambhala, 1989. Alexander Pruss, ‘Cooperation and divine existence: A moral/teleological argument’ in Sarah Coakley and Martin A. Nowak, eds, Evolution, Games and God: The Principle of Cooperation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. In preparation. Pierre Rousselot, The Eyes of Faith. 1910; ET New York: Fordham University Press, 1990. Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, Chance or Purpose? Creation, Evolution, and a Rational Faith. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007. Brian J. Shanley, The Thomist Tradition. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002, ch. 4. Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution of Psychology and Unselfish Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Eleonore Stump, Aquinas. New York: Routledge, 2003, esp. ch. 9 Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, ‘Eternity’, in Thomas V. Morris, ed., The Concept of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 219–52.

FMurphy_09_Finals.indd 193

4/28/2009 10:36:46 AM

Chapter 10

The Secularization of Providence: Theological Reflections on the Appeal to Darwinism in Recent Atheist Apologetics Alister E. McGrath

I. ‘Universal Darwinism’ ‘The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.’1 This bold and sweeping judgement lies at the heart of the ‘new atheism’ which swept through Western culture in 2006.2 Purpose is a human invention, a desperate yet ultimately doomed attempt to impose meaning upon an unfeeling, uncaring universe. Scientific advance will ultimately eliminate such spurious notions, offering a purely naturalist account of reality. While attacks on the notion of divine providence have come from many scientific quarters, there is little doubt that the most significant challenges to the idea have come from evolutionary biology. Writers such as zoologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher of consciousness Daniel Dennett, and philosopher of science David Hull have expressed their view that the evolutionary process, as now understood, demands the rejection of obsolete notions of purpose and providence. As Hull comments, ‘the evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain, and horror.’ Any God who was in charge of such a world must be ‘careless, indifferent, almost diabolical’. This is not ‘the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray’.3 Similarly, Dennett argues that Darwinism is a ‘universal acid’ that erodes outdated, superfluous metaphysical notions, from the idea of God downwards. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), Dennett set out to show ‘why Darwin’s idea is so powerful, and why it promises – not threatens – to put our most cherished visions of life on a new foundation’.4 Darwinism, he asserts, achieves a correlation of ‘the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law’.5 The Darwinian world is devoid of purpose and transcendence, in that all can and should be explained by the ‘standard scientific epistemology and metaphysics’. Underlying this appeal to Darwinism as a defeater of the notion of divine providence is a significant cultural development, which has yet to

FMurphy_10_Finals.indd 194

4/28/2009 10:40:59 AM

The Secularization of Providence

195

receive the attention it deserves. The term ‘Darwinism’ has come to develop two quite distinct meanings in recent years. In the first place, the term refers to a scientific account of evolution, which is theistically neutral. In the second place, it has come to refer to a non-empirical world-view, based upon yet ultimately transcending the scientific account of evolution. Richard Dawkins has been one of the most outspoken advocates of the application of Darwinism to human cultural development as a whole. For Dawkins, Darwinism is simply too big a theory to be limited to the biological domain. What he terms ‘Universal Darwinism’ possesses an explanatory capacity which is capable of being extended far beyond these limits.6 Darwinism has thus morphed from a provisional scientific theory to a grand récit, a metanarrative, which makes rival world-views such as Marxism seem ‘parochial and ephemeral’.7 Incidentally, this aspect of Dawkins’ thought places him securely within a modernist approach to things, and helps explain his occasionally hyperbolic hostility towards all things postmodern. In dealing with the relevance of Darwinism to the question of providence, it is therefore necessary to be clear about the sense in which the term ‘Darwinian’ is being used. Darwinism qua scientific theory is an empirical theory, a genuine attempt to make sense of what is observed which is fully open to being revised in the light of new information. Darwinism qua world-view is a non-empirical dogmatic system, which has come to be detached from the empirical domain.8 Anti-theistic metaphysical presuppositions have been covertly grafted onto, or imposed upon, the science. In this second sense of the term, Darwinism can be said to have eliminated the idea of divine providence in two ways: first, through a purely naturalist account of causation within the natural order, which allows no conceptual space for divine action; and second, through its insistence that the evolutionary process has no intrinsic teleology. We may illustrate this from Dennett’s account of the significance of Darwinism. For Dennett, the Darwinian world-view simply eliminates transcendent causes and presences from the natural realm in general, and from scientific explanation in particular. In making this point, he devised a distinction between ‘cranes’ and ‘skyhooks’. Cranes are natural, yet complex, intermediary mechanisms that arise in the course of the process of evolution itself, and contribute to that process by enabling the emergence of still more complex structures. ‘Skyhooks’ are arbitrary, imaginary inventions, devised to evade purely naturalist explanations and accounts of the natural world and its processes. It will not come as a great surprise to learn that God is seen as the supreme example of such a superfluous ‘skyhook’. The increasing appeal to Darwinism by those wishing to invert William Paley’s approach and develop a natural atheology is of considerable

FMurphy_10_Finals.indd 195

4/28/2009 10:40:59 AM

196

The Providence of God

significance, in that it shows how a working assumption of evolutionary biology has been none too subtly transposed into a dogma of fundamentalist atheism.9 For Dennett, ‘everything in nature can all be explained without skyhooks’.10 Darwin solved the riddles that led previous generations to conclude that divine causality was the only explanation of the orderedness of the world. Earlier writers as John Locke or David Hume still held that it was simply inconceivable that design could arise without the influence of a creative mind. After Darwin, however, it became possible to explain how design can emerge by way of a purposeless, mindless, mechanical process.11

II. Darwinism as a Scientific Theory But what of Darwinism considered as a scientific theory? Is that intrinsically atheistic? Does that automatically eliminate any notion of purpose from within nature? Dawkins and Dennett certainly assume this to be the case; however, this ultimately represents the non-empirical imposition of a metaphysical system upon what is observed. In a sophisticated recent critique of the philosophical shallowness of much contemporary scientific writing, particularly in the neurosciences, Max Bennett and Peter Hacker direct particular criticism against the naïve ‘science explains everything’ outlook that Dawkins and Dennett advocate.12 Bennett and Hacker insist that scientific theories cannot be said to ‘explain the world’ – only to explain the phenomena which are observed within the world. Furthermore, they argue, scientific theories do not, and are not intended to, describe and explain ‘everything about the world’ – such as its purpose. There is a serious danger of these being pressed too far, and by doing so, to lose their scientific character altogether. Bennett and Hacker further argue that there are many questions that, by their very nature, must be recognized to lie beyond the legitimate scope of the scientific method, as this is normally understood. For example: is there purpose within nature? Dawkins regards this as a spurious non-question. Yet this is hardly an illegitimate question for human beings to ask, or to hope to have answered. Bennett and Hacker point out that the natural sciences are not in a position to comment upon this, if their methods are applied legitimately.13 The question cannot be dismissed as illegitimate or nonsensical; it is simply being declared to lie beyond the scope of the scientific method. If it can be answered, it must be answered on other grounds. Similarly Stephen Jay Gould was absolutely clear that the natural sciences – including evolutionary theory – had to be recognized as being

FMurphy_10_Finals.indd 196

4/28/2009 10:41:00 AM

The Secularization of Providence

197

consistent with both atheism and conventional religious belief.14 When properly applied, the scientific method simply could not engage the God-question without distorting its nature and transgressing its limits.

III. Providence and Human Observation So what place is there for providence in Darwin’s account of evolution? In turning to deal with this question, we must first note that providence is a complex notion, embracing both the nature of God and the human perception of what God is like, and how the divine nature is expressed within the historical process. Indeed, one might suggest that one of the more fundamental questions that need to be addressed in any attempt to engage with the idea of providence is this: why do some people view certain events as providential, while others regard them as a matter of happenstance or downright misfortune? Providence is a notion which engages the human process of perception, rather than a purely objective entity, existing in its own right. To speak of an event as bearing witness to divine providence clearly requires us to account for the human process of judgement that gives rise to that conclusion. Such a conclusion is not especially contentious. It does, however, require us to concede that two observers might view the same sequence of events, and come to very different conclusions concerning their significance. One sees a random series of events, the other a pattern of actions which points to divine providence. The discernment of providential action may thus require the development of certain habits of thought. It is a judgement of the theologically informed way of thinking that we call faith. This is a significant theme within the wisdom literature of the ancient Near East. True wisdom is about discerning the deeper structure of reality, lying beneath its surface appearance. The book of Job, one of the finest examples of wisdom literature, speaks of wisdom as something that is hidden, that is to be found deep within the earth, its true meaning hidden from a casual and superficial glance.15 The emergence of the discipline of semiotics has encouraged us to see natural objects and entities as signs, pointing beyond themselves, representing and communicating themselves. To find the true significance of things requires the development of habits of reading and directions of gaze that enable the reflective observer of nature to discern meaning where others see happenstance and accident. Or, to use an image from Polanyi, where some hear a noise, others hear a tune.16 This, of course, is entirely consonant with the point made earlier about the limits of the scientific method. One natural scientist might choose to

FMurphy_10_Finals.indd 197

4/28/2009 10:41:00 AM

198

The Providence of God

see Darwinism as intrinsically or implicitly atheist, where another might choose to see it as intrinsically or implicitly Christian. A central debate, of major importance to any Christian discussion of the nature of providence, is whether we can speak of ‘purpose’ or ‘goals’ in nature. This discussion emerged in the decades following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Some, such as Thomas H. Huxley, declared that ‘teleology, as commonly understood, had received its deathblow at Mr Darwin’s hands’.17 Yet others were more impressed by the overall directionality of the evolutionary process, especially its apparent tendency to lead to greater and greater degrees of complexity. Evolution thus appeared to be an ordered, lawlike process, capable of accommodation within a theistic framework.18 The debate continues;19 it seems, however, to be entering a new and potentially intriguing phase. The fact is that the concept of ‘teleology’ is slowly making a re-entry into professional biological discussions of evolution, despite the dogmatic insistence of some, wedded to a specific non-empirical metaphysic, that there simply cannot be purpose or goals in evolution. The emphasis on the ‘purposeless’ character of natural selection, found within many popular neo-Darwinian accounts of the process, is thus little more than an ‘unwarranted rhetorical flourish’, resting on ‘the reification of these foundational idealizations of population dynamics as realistic metaphysical claims about the world’. Within a Reformed theological framework, for example, ‘random’ can be translated as ‘non-predictable’, and thus contextualized within a generalized doctrine of divine providence.20

IV. Teleology in Nature Furthermore, whether evolution exhibits design, intentions or purposes or not, it unquestionably demonstrates a directionality.21 Organisms have generally become larger, more complex, more taxonomically diverse and more energetically intensive.22 Does this imply a teleology? Answering this question demands careful reflection on what the term ‘teleology’ actually means. There is widespread opinion that the use of the term is legitimate, at least in certain respects, within biology.23 Francisco Ayala argues that some kind of teleological explanation is fundamental to modern biology.24 It is required to account for the familiar functional roles played by parts of living organisms, and to describe the goal of reproductive fitness which plays such a central role in accounts of natural selection.25 A teleological explanation implies that the system under consideration is directively organized. For that reason, teleological explanations are

FMurphy_10_Finals.indd 198

4/28/2009 10:41:00 AM

The Secularization of Providence

199

appropriate in biology and in the domain of cybernetics but make no sense when used in the physical sciences to describe phenomena like the fall of a stone. Moreover, and most importantly, teleological explanations imply that the end result is the explanatory reason for the existence of the object or process which serves or leads to it. A teleological account of the gills of fish implies that gills came to existence precisely because they serve for respiration. If the above reasoning is correct, the use of teleological explanations in biology is not only acceptable but indeed indispensable. Natural selection itself, the ultimate source of explanation in biology, is thus for Ayala a teleological process both because it is directed to the goal of increasing reproductive efficiency and because it produces the goaldirected organs and processes required for this. Teleological mechanisms in living organisms are thus biological adaptations, which have arisen as a result of the process of natural selection. So why the hostility towards teleology in biology? Ernst Mayr (1904–2005), widely credited with inventing the modern philosophy of biology, especially of evolutionary biology, sets out four traditional objections to the use of teleological language in biology.26 1. Teleological statements or explanations imply the endorsement of unverifiable theological or metaphysical doctrines in the sciences. While Mayr has in mind Bergson’s élan vital or the notion of ‘entelechy’, formulated by Hans Driesch (1867–1941), it is clear that traditional Christian approaches to the providential direction of nature also fall within this category. 2. A belief that acceptance of explanations for biological phenomena that are not equally applicable to inanimate nature constitutes rejection of a physico-chemical explanation. 3. The assumption that future goals were the cause of current events seemed incompatible with accepted notions of causality. 4. Teleological language seemed to amount to an objectionable anthropomorphism. The use of terms such as ‘purposive’ or ‘goal-directed’ appears to represent that transfer of human qualities – such as purpose and planning – to organic structures. As Mayr points out, as a result of these and other objections, teleological explanations in biology were widely believed to be ‘a form of obscurantism’. Yet paradoxically, biologists continue to use teleological language, insisting that it is methodologically and heuristically appropriate and helpful. Why? Because nature abounds in processes and activities that lead to an end or goal. However, we choose to interpret them, examples of

FMurphy_10_Finals.indd 199

4/28/2009 10:41:01 AM

200

The Providence of God

goal-directed behaviour are widespread in the natural world; indeed, as Mayr himself points out, ‘the occurrence of goal-directed processes is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the world of living systems.’27 The evasion of teleological statements through their restatement in nonteleological forms invariably leads to ‘meaningless platitudes’.28 Although surrounding his conclusion with a thicket of qualifications, Mayr insists that it is appropriate to conclude that ‘the use of so-called “teleological” language by biologists is legitimate; it neither implies a rejection of physicochemical explanation nor does it imply noncausal explanation’.29

V. ‘Convergent Evolution’ So is there a directionality implicit within evolution, whether one chooses to interpret this teleologically or not? This particular phrasing makes it clear that we are posing a legitimate scientific, not a speculative theological, question. The view that evolution is open-ended, without predictabilities and indeterminate in terms of its outcomes, has achieved a dominant position in evolutionary biology.30 Many writers who adopt the standard Darwinian paradigm argue for the essentially random and contingent nature of the evolutionary process. For example, Stephen Jay Gould insists that ‘almost every interesting event of life’s history falls into the realm of contingency’.31 It is pointless to talk about purpose, historical inevitability or direction. From its beginning to its end, the evolutionary process is governed by contingencies. ‘We are the accidental result of an unplanned process . . . the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable product of any definite process.’32 As Gould famously puts this point, using the characteristically 1990s analogy of a video tape, if we were to replay the tape of evolutionary history, we would not see the same thing happen each time. The tape will disclose different patterns on each individual replay.33 Yet this view is open to challenge. The Cambridge evolutionary biologist Simon Conway Morris argues that the number of evolutionary endpoints is limited, and the evolutionary process constrained. ‘Rerun the tape of life as often as you like, and the end result will be much the same.’34 Evolutionary biology discloses ‘the recurrent tendency of biological organization to arrive at the same solution to a particular need’.35 Conway Morris here points to the significance of ‘convergent evolution’, in which two or more lineages have independently evolved similar structures and functions. Conway Morris’s examples range from the aerodynamics of hovering moths and hummingbirds to the use of silk by spiders and some

FMurphy_10_Finals.indd 200

4/28/2009 10:41:01 AM

The Secularization of Providence

201

insects to capture prey. ‘The details of convergence actually reveal many of the twists and turns of evolutionary change as different starting points are transformed towards common solutions via a variety of well-trodden paths.’36 And what is the significance of convergent evolution? Conway Morris is clear: it reveals the existence of stable regions in biological space. ‘Convergence occurs because of “islands” of stability, analogous to “attractors” in chaos theory.’37 The force of Conway Morris’s critique of Gould cannot be overlooked. While contingency is a factor in the overall evolutionary mechanism, it plays a significantly less decisive role than Gould allows. Evolution regularly appears to ‘converge’ on a relatively small number of possible outcomes. Convergence is widespread, despite the infinitude of genetic possibilities, because ‘the evolutionary routes are many, but the destinations are limited’.38 Certain destinations are precluded by ‘the howling wildernesses of the maladaptive’, where the vast majority of genotypes are non-viable, thus precluding further exploration by natural selection. Biological history shows a marked tendency to repeat itself, with life demonstrating an almost eerie ability to find its way to the correct solution, repeatedly. ‘Life has a peculiar propensity to “navigate” to rather precise solutions in response to adaptive challenges.’39 The point Conway Morris hopes to make in assembling his matrix of convergence is that the number of evolutionary endpoints is limited. Time and time again, evolution ‘converges’ on a relatively small set of possible solutions to the problems and opportunities that the environment offers to life. This leads Conway Morris to make the point that even an essentially random search process will end up identifying stable outcomes in biological space. While the means of finding such islands of stability may seem erratic, its outcome is ultimately entirely intelligible. Gould suggested that directionality within evolution could be compared to a ‘drunkard’s walk’, in which organisms wander into greater complexity.40 In effect, Conway Morris offers an alternative to the rigid dichotomy so often proposed between pure randomness (as seen in Gould’s ‘drunkard’s walk’) and tight directional progress towards a pre-established final goal. In making and defending this important point, Conway Morris offers an illuminating non-biological analogy. He appeals to the discovery of Easter Island by the Polynesians, perhaps 1,200 years ago.41 Easter Island is one of the most remote places on earth, at least 3,000 kilometres from the nearest population centres, Tahiti and Chile. Yet though surrounded by the vast, empty wastes of the Pacific Ocean, it was nevertheless discovered by Polynesians. Is this, asks Conway Morris, to be put down to chance and happenstance?

FMurphy_10_Finals.indd 201

4/28/2009 10:41:01 AM

202

The Providence of God

Possibly. But probably not. Conway Morris points to the ‘sophisticated search strategy of the Polynesians’ which made its discovery inevitable. The same, he argues, happens in the evolutionary process: ‘Isolated “islands” provide havens of biological possibility in an ocean of maladaptedness.’ It is these ‘islands of stability’ which give rise to the phenomenon of convergent evolution.42 Because organisms arrive repeatedly at the same biological solution, there appears to be a degree of predictability to the evolutionary process, which can be understood in terms of a ‘metaphorical landscape across which evolution must necessarily navigate’.43

VI. ‘I believe in design because I believe in God’ So where do these lines of thought take us? It is clear that most of the traditional objections to the appeal to the notion of teleology in biology noted by Mayr reflect a belief that an a priori metaphysical system, often theistic, is imposed upon the process of scientific observation and reflection, thus prejudicing its scientific character. The natural sciences rightly protest about the smuggling of preconceived teleological schemes into scientific analysis. But what if they arise from the process of reflection on observation? What if they are a posteriori inferences, rather than a priori dogmatic assumptions? Conway Morris’s analysis suggests that a form of teleology may indeed be inferred a posteriori, as the ‘best explanation’ of what is observed. This may not directly map onto a traditional Christian doctrine of providence; nevertheless, there is a significant degree of resonance with the notion which merits closer attention. John Henry Newman’s enlightening remark is of relevance here: ‘I believe in design because I believe in God; not in God because I see design.’44 Might not the evolutionary process, despite its contingency, still be consonant with the achievement of purpose on the part of a creator God?45 So what model might be offered for understanding how evolution is subject to divine providence? One approach that merits close attention is the classic Christian doctrine of creation enunciated by Augustine of Hippo during the period 401–15.46 This consists of five elements, of which the fifth alone is shaped by the scientific assumptions of the late classical period. 1. God brought everything into being at one specific moment. 2. The action of creation included the embedding of causalities within the world, which would emerge or evolve at a later stage, as and when appropriate conditions pertained. These rationes seminales play a highly

FMurphy_10_Finals.indd 202

4/28/2009 10:41:01 AM

The Secularization of Providence

203

significant role in Augustine’s concept of an emerging and developing creation.47 3. This process of development is to be seen as directed by God’s providence. 4. The image of a dormant seed is an appropriate, but not exact, analogy for these embedded causalities. 5. The generation of these dormant seeds leads to fixed and determinate biological forms. This is now known to be wrong, but it was part of the intellectual furniture of Augustine’s world. The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) created new intellectual space for Augustine’s approach, not least in that Darwin himself explicitly created space for divine action through secondary causes in his account of natural selection.48 It is an approach that calls out for further exploration, not least on account of its proposal of a nexus between creation and providence. Jürgen Moltmann has already blazed such a trail, for those wishing to follow him: ‘God acts in the history of nature and human beings through his patient and silent presence, by way of which he gives those he has created space to unfold, time to develop, and power for their own movement.’49 Or, to quote the words of Charles Kingsley, as he reflected on the implications of Darwin’s theory of natural selection for a Christian natural theology: ‘We knew of old that God was so wise that He could make all things: but behold, He is so much wiser than even that, that He can make all things make themselves.’50 So has the idea of providence been neutralized through the rise of Darwinism? I see no reason for believing that this is the case. As I have argued, the contemporary exclusion of the language of providence, goals or teleology from biology is primarily due to prejudice against metaphysics in general within the sciences, and especially the imposition of a priori metaphysical schemes on the scientific data. Yet providence may be inferred by the scientifically informed eye of faith. I concede the inadequacy of some ways of conceiving how the notion of providence is to be correlated with the evolutionary process. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s attempt to develop a ‘Point Omega’ to allow the language of providence to be mapped against the biological domain was unquestionably to be welcomed, even though it is now regarded as inadequate.51 Yet the essential building blocks, both theological and scientific, are in place for those who wish to undertake this constructive and synthetic task. Perhaps this collection of articles might stimulate the emergence of a new synthesis in this important area of reflection and dialogue.

FMurphy_10_Finals.indd 203

4/28/2009 10:41:02 AM

204

The Providence of God

Notes 1 Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (London: Phoenix, 1995), 133. 2 See Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell : Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006). 3 David L. Hull, ‘God of the Galapagos’. Nature 352 (1991): 485–6. See also George C. Williams, ‘Mother Nature is a Wicked Old Witch!’ In Evolutionary Ethics, ed. Matthew H. Nitecki and Doris V. Nitecki, 217–31 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). 4 Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 11. 5 Ibid., 21. 6 See especially Richard Dawkins ‘Universal Darwinism’. In Evolution from Molecules to Men, ed. D. S. Bendall, 403–25 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 7 For a vigorous statement of this position, see Dawkins’ essay ‘Darwin Triumphant: Darwinism as Universal Truth’, in Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2003), 78–90. 8 For reflections on how this might have taken place, see Timothy Shanahan, ‘Methodological and Contextual Factors in the Dawkins/Gould Dispute over Evolutionary Progress’. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 31 (2001): 127–51. 9 See Abigail Lustig, ‘Natural Atheology’. In Darwinian Heresies, ed. Abigail Lustig, Robert J. Richards and Michael Ruse, 69–83 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 10 Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 394. 11 Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 83. 12 M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 372–6. 13 Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, 374: ‘It is wrong-headed to suppose that the only forms of explanation are scientific.’ The entire section dealing with reductionism (355–77) merits close study. See also Peter B. Medawar, The Limits of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 14 Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge’. Scientific American 267, no. 1 (1992): 118–21. 15 Paul S. Fiddes, ‘”Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?” Job 28 as a Riddle for Ancient and Modern Readers’. In After the Exile: Essays in Honor of Rex Mason, ed. John Barton and David Reimer, 171–90 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996). 16 Michael Polanyi, ‘Science and Reality’. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 18 (1967): 177–96, esp. 190–1. 17 Thomas H. Huxley, Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews (London: Macmillan, 1870), 330. 18 John Beatty, ‘Teleology and the Relationship of Biology to the Physical Sciences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’. In Newton’s Legacy: The Origins

FMurphy_10_Finals.indd 204

4/28/2009 10:41:02 AM

The Secularization of Providence

19 20

21

22

23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

205

and Influence of Newtonian Science, ed. Frank Durham and Robert D. Purrington, 113–44 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); John F. Haught, ‘Darwin, Design and the Promise of Nature’. Science and Christian Belief 17 (2005): 5–20. For some helpful perspectives, see Ernan McMullin, ‘Cosmic Purpose and the Contingency of Human Evolution’. Theology Today 55 (1998): 389–414. For an intriguing account of the apparent death and subsequent revival of notions of divine providence within a Darwinian context, see John Hedley Brooke. ‘Science and the Fortunes of Natural Theology: Some Historical Perspectives’. Zygon 24 (1989): 3–22. The specific case of the American conservative Protestant theologian Benjamin B. Warfield (1851–1921) merits attention here: David N. Livingstone, ‘B. B. Warfield, the Theory of Evolution and Early Fundamentalism’. Evangelical Quarterly 58 (1986): 69–83. See the provocative discussion in William R. Stoeger, ‘The Immanent Directionality of the Evolutionary Process, and Its Relationship to Teleology’. In Evolutionary and Molecular Biology: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, ed. Robert J. Russell, William R. Stoeger and Francisco Ayala, 163–90 (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Publications, 1999). For comment on these points, see John T. Bonner, The Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry. The Major Transitions in Evolution (Oxford: Freeman, 1995). For context, see Evelyn Fox Keller, Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors and Machines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 135–45. Francisco J. Ayala, ‘Teleological Explanations in Evolutionary Biology’. Philosophy of Science 37 (1970): 1–15. Ibid., 12. Ernst Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 38–66, esp. 39–41. For comment on Mayr’s appeal to history in this work, see John C. Greene, ‘From Aristotle to Darwin: Reflections on Ernst Mayr’s Interpretation in the Growth of Biological Thought’. Journal of the History of Biology 25 (1992): 257–84. For his more recent exploration of the same theme, see Ernst Mayr, What Makes Biology Unique? Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 39–66, esp. 46–7. Ibid., 44–5. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 59. Pier Luigi Luisi, ‘Contingency and Determinism’. Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 361 (2003): 1141–7. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: Norton, 1989), 290. Ibid., 101–2. Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 1019–20. Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 282.

FMurphy_10_Finals.indd 205

4/28/2009 10:41:02 AM

The Providence of God

206 35 36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43

44

45

46

47

48

Ibid., xii. Ibid., 144. See the listing of such examples at 457–61. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 24: ‘Despite the almost crass simplicity of life’s building blocks, perhaps we can discern inherent within this framework the inevitable and pre-ordained trajectories of evolution?’ Ibid., 225. For the image, see Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony Books, 1996), 149–51. For comment, see Peter A. Corning, Nature’s Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 150–1. Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, 19–21. The island was also ‘discovered’ by Admiral Roggeveen on Easter Day, 1722. Ibid., 127. See Conway Morris’s reflections in his 2005 Boyle Lecture: Simon Conway Morris, ‘Darwin’s Compass: How Evolution Discovers the Song of Creation’. Science and Christian Belief 18 (2006): 5–22. John Henry Newman, letter to William Robert Brownlow, 13 April 1870. In The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman. 31 vols, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963–2006, vol. 25), 97. See further Noel Keith Roberts, ‘Newman on the Argument from Design’. New Blackfriars 88 (2007): 56–66. A similar approach is taken in the excellent study of Ernan McMullin. ‘Cosmic Purpose and the Contingency of Human Evolution’. Theology Today 55 (1998): 389–414. See also William E. Carroll, ‘At the Mercy of Chance? Evolution and the Catholic Tradition’. Revue des Questions Scientifiques 177 (2006): 179–204. For an analysis of the doctrine of creation in Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecism and its relation to the phenomenon of ‘fine tuning’, see Alister E. McGrath, A Fine-Tuned Universe? Science, Theology and the Quest for God (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2009), 95–108. There are obvious and important parallels with the notion of the logos spermatikos here. See the classic study of Michael J. McKeough, The Meaning of the Rationes Seminales in St Augustine (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press), 1926. Darwin’s remarks towards the end of the Origin of Species merit close study: ‘Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes.’ Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection. 2nd edition (London: John Murray, 1860), 489. On this point, see further Armand Maurer, ‘Darwin, Thomists, and Secondary Causality’. Review of Metaphysics 57 (2004): 491–515, noting especially his comment (497) that Darwin’s ‘argument for evolution by secondary causes’ actually belongs to ‘natural theology, for it concerns God the creator and the laws he has implanted in matter’. The parallels with Augustine are evident.

FMurphy_10_Finals.indd 206

4/28/2009 10:41:03 AM

The Secularization of Providence

207

49 Jürgen Moltmann, ‘God’s Kenosis in the Creation and Consummation of the World’. In The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John Polkinghorne, 137–51 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman), 2001. Quote at 149. 50 Charles Kingsley. ‘The Natural Theology of the Future’. In Westminster Sermons, v–xxxiii (London: Macmillan, 1874). 51 It still has its defenders: see the interesting analysis in Günther Schiwy, Ein Gott im Wandel : Teilhard de Chardin und sein Bild der Evolution (Dusseldorf: Patmos, 2001); David Grumett, ‘Teilhard de Chardin’s Evolutionary Natural Theology’. Zygon 42 (2007): 519–34.

FMurphy_10_Finals.indd 207

4/28/2009 10:41:03 AM

Chapter 11

Creation, Predestination and Divine Providence Nicholas J. Healy

In his 1995 Encyclical Letter Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II follows closely in the footsteps of the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et spes (1965), which focused the attention of the Church ‘on the world of human beings, the whole human family along with the sum of those realities in the midst of which that family lives’, with the aim of ‘bringing to mankind light kindled from the Gospel’ (GS, 2, 3). In the face of what Gaudium et spes calls ‘anxious questions about the current trend of the world, about the place and role of man in the universe’ (GS, 3), both documents undertake a discernment of the ‘signs of the times’ in the light of the gospel. Both documents address contemporary threats to human life and human dignity with particular attention given to the question of atheism as well as the relation between the gospel and culture. Most importantly, both documents suggest that the heart of the Church’s encounter with contemporary culture is a renewed understanding of God’s plan to unite all things in Christ. In the words of Gaudium et spes, by revealing the mystery of the Father and his love, Christ ‘fully reveals man to himself and makes his supreme calling known’ (GS, 22; EV, 2, 29). And, as John Paul II writes elsewhere, ‘[t]he Incarnation . . . signifies the taking up into unity with God not only of human nature, but in this human nature, in a sense, of everything that is “flesh”: the whole of humanity, the entire visible and material world.’1 And yet, despite the many similarities between Gaudium et spes and Evangelium Vitae, it is difficult to deny that there is a fundamental difference in John Paul II’s reading of the ‘signs of the times’. Where Gaudium et spes suggests in 1965 that ‘modern man is on the road to a more thorough development of his own personality and to a growing discovery and vindication of his own rights’ (GS, 41), John Paul II discerns in 1995 that ‘a new cultural climate is developing and taking hold . . . [in which] broad sectors of public opinion justify certain crimes against life in the name of the rights of individual freedom’ (EV, 4). Where Gaudium et spes suggests that we can speak of a new age of human history. New ways are open, therefore, for the perfection and the further extension of culture. These ways have been prepared by the enormous growth of natural, human and social sciences, by progress in technology . . .. (GS, 54)

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 208

4/28/2009 10:40:46 AM

Creation, Predestination and Divine Providence

209

the author of Evangelium Vitae claims that in relation to life at birth or at death, man is no longer capable of posing the question of the truest meaning of his own existence, . . .. He is concerned only with ‘doing’, and, using all kinds of technology, he busies himself with programming, controlling and dominating birth and death. . . . Nature itself, from being ‘mater’ (mother), is now reduced to being ‘matter’, and is subjected to every kind of manipulation. This is the direction in which a certain technical and scientific way of thinking, prevalent in present-day culture, appears to be leading when it rejects the very idea that there is a truth of creation which must be acknowledged. (EV, 22)

Finally, where Gaudium et spes suggests that ‘we are witnessing the birth of a new humanism, one in which man is defined first of all by his responsibility toward his brothers and toward history’ (GS, 55), Evangelium Vitae describes the emergence of a veritable ‘culture of death’ which ‘denies solidarity’, and which, at its deepest level, is characterized by ‘the eclipse of the sense of God and of man’ (EV, 21). Given the obvious continuity between Gaudium et spes and Evangelium Vitae, especially in terms of the relation between Christology and anthropology, what accounts for the difference in their respective readings of the ‘signs of the times’? A partial answer to this question can be given in terms of various changes in the moral and culture landscape that occurred in the intervening years. But I think the difference between the two documents lies at a deeper level. In order to clarify this difference it is necessary first to recall the theological renewal that preceded and informed the writing of Gaudium et spes. The crucial background for understanding why the Second Vatican Council entered into a dialogue with modern culture is the renewed emphasis in Ressourcement theology on the universality of Christ’s mission and the unity of creation and redemption (nature and grace) within the mystery of Christ. The mission of Christ and his Church extends to every human being, all of human culture, and ultimately all of creation. Of particular importance here is Henri de Lubac’s understanding of communion as the authentic medium of human existence and in some sense as the meaning of all worldly reality – a communion that originates in the Triune God and that is gratuitously given to us is through the mystery of Christ and his Church. In both form and content de Lubac’s first book, Catholicism: The Social Aspects of Dogma (1938), signalled the recovery of an authentically universal or catholic theology. As Fergus Kerr notes, in the eyes of Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger among others, de Lubac’s Catholicism is ‘the key book of twentieth-century Catholic theology, the one indispensable text’.2

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 209

4/28/2009 10:40:46 AM

210

The Providence of God

Arguing against the narrow individualism that characterized a good part of neo-scholastic anthropology, de Lubac displayed a more traditional understanding of human solidarity in the light of Christ and the mission of the Church. In her innermost essence, the Church exists not for herself but for the salvation of the world. In her dogma, her sacraments, her interpretation of scripture and her hope for eternal life, the Church expresses, and participates in, God’s gift of universal communion. In the words of de Lubac, ‘Christianity is universal not only in the sense that Jesus Christ is the Savior of all men but also in the sense that all of man finds salvation in Jesus Christ.’3 Granting the Second Vatican Council’s explicit Christocentrism and renewed emphasis on God’s universal salvific will, what was less clear in 1965 was the extent to which the very idea of creation and divine providence had been attenuated by the leading assumptions of modernity. Hence the texts cited above from Gaudium et spes regarding the birth of a new humanism through advances in science and technology. Presupposing the normative givenness of nature, the questions raised by Gaudium et spes concern how best to use technology and advances in science to extend the benefits of human culture in accord with God’s providential plan. But what happens when the order of creation ceases to offer any guidance to human freedom? What if the very naturality of the world as created is no longer intelligible? In 1968, just three years after the promulgation of Gaudium et spes, the National Academy of Sciences in the United States conducted a comprehensive survey of the life sciences; the result of the survey was issued as a report titled Biology and the Future of Man. The final and closing paragraph of their 900-page study reads as follows: Man’s view of himself has undergone many changes. From a unique position in the universe, the Copernican revolution reduced him to an inhabitant of one of many planets. From a unique position among organisms, the Darwinian revolution assigned him a place among the millions of species which evolved from one another. Yet, Homo sapiens has overcome the limitations of his origin. He controls the vast energies of the atomic nucleus, . . . extends the powers of his brain with those of the digital computer, and influences the numbers and genetic constitution of virtually all other living species. Now he can guide his own evolution. In him, Nature has reached beyond the hard regularities of physical phenomena. Homo sapiens, the creature of Nature, has transcended her. From a product of circumstances, he has risen to responsibility. At last, he is Man. May he behave so.4

Notice the double inversion: instead of being a creature of God, man is described as emerging as a ‘creature of Nature’. Secondly, and closely

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 210

4/28/2009 10:40:47 AM

Creation, Predestination and Divine Providence

211

related to the first, human nature ceases to be given, that is, the order of creation ceases to offer any guidance for human freedom, and instead becomes the product of man. What are the implications of this double inversion for the meaning of human freedom and the nature of divine providence? Gaudium et spes had emphasized the importance of man’s vocation to exercise dominion over the whole of creation, ‘to develop the earth so that it can bear fruit and become a dwelling worthy of the whole human family’ (GS, 57). When ‘nature’ is collapsed into the product of human beings, our dominion and responsibility for creation will, by an irresistible logic, take the form of our taking responsibility for the production of man himself. Precisely those areas that seem to offer the most resistance to this project – the mystery of human conception and birth or what the text cited above calls ‘the limitations of origin’ – become the focal points for the assertion of humanity’s power over nature. This is the new situation addressed by John Paul II and recently by Benedict XVI. In his Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi Benedict calls on Catholic theologians to acknowledge that modern Christianity, faced with the successes of science in progressively structuring the world, has to a large extent restricted its attention to the individual and his salvation. In so doing it has limited the horizon of its hope and has failed to recognize sufficiently the greatness of its task.5

In going to the roots of what he calls our present-day ‘crisis of Christian hope’ Benedict argues that ‘we must take a look at the foundations of the modern age’. ‘These appear with particular clarity’, he continues, ‘in the thought of Francis Bacon’.6 As a result of Bacon’s ideal of scientific knowledge as power over nature, ‘“redemption” . . . is no longer expected from faith, but from the newly discovered link between science and praxis’.7 ‘It is not that faith is simply denied’, Benedict notes, ‘rather it is displaced onto another level – that of purely private and other-worldly affairs – and at the same time it becomes somehow irrelevant for the world’.8 And here I arrive at the thesis of my chapter: the great vision of Gaudium et spes regarding the link between anthropology and Christology and the universal salvific will of God both presupposes and reveals an understanding of the gift of creation, including what Maximus the Confessor calls the logoi of creation. The continuity as well as the difference between Gaudium et spes and more recent Catholic teaching regarding the ‘signs of the times’ turns on a growing recognition that the understanding of the natural world that we have inherited from the founding fathers of modernity (especially Francis Bacon and Descartes) is deeply antithetical to a Christian understanding of creation and God’s providential care for

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 211

4/28/2009 10:40:47 AM

212

The Providence of God

the world. Jesus Christ is the providence of God insofar as he reveals the original goodness of the Father in God’s plan to create a world with a view to communicating his own life in the Holy Spirit. The world in its entirety is predestined in Jesus Christ, whose life, death and resurrection confirms the original goodness of creation. In the unsurpassable words of Maximus the Confessor, ‘the Logos . . . when he became man established himself as the innermost depth of the Father’s goodness while also displaying in himself the very goal for which his creatures manifestly received the beginning of their existence.’9 The contemporary discussion among scientists and ethicists regarding the promise and limits of genetic engineering is particularly helpful in bringing to light key assumptions about the givenness of nature and the cultural task of humanity relative to divine providence. Accordingly, in what follows, I will begin by sketching the argument of a recent book in the area of human genetics. One of the first thinkers to recognize the threat to human dignity entailed in modern science’s drive for power over nature was the Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas. Drawing on the writings of Jonas, Section II will trace the history of the collapse of nature into artifice in the writings of some of the founding fathers of early modern science. In Section III I will suggest that Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of creation together with the real distinction between esse and essentia offers the most adequate response to the reductive account of nature sketched in Sections I and II. At the same time there is a crucial ambiguity in Aquinas’s teaching on creation and predestination. Accordingly, Section IV will introduce a question that has emerged within Thomism regarding negative reprobation and the relation between predestination and providence.

I. Designing Humans ‘We know’, writes Gregory Stock, ‘that Homo sapiens is not the final word in primate evolution, but few have yet grasped that we are on the cusp of profound biological change, poised to transcend our current form and character on a journey to the destinations of new imagination’.10 The journey that Stock outlines in his programmatic book Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future (2002) is the widespread use of genetic engineering or what he prefers to call ‘germline choice technology’ to produce better or ‘enhanced’ offspring, that is, children who are less susceptible to disease, who live longer, and who generally are smarter, stronger and more attractive. A few citations will serve to introduce the main lines of Stock’s thesis. Perhaps it is worth noting in advance that these

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 212

4/28/2009 10:40:47 AM

Creation, Predestination and Divine Providence

213

passages are not the reflections of an overly imaginative science-fiction writer, but the vision of the esteemed director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at the University of California at Los Angles. Emerging technology in the area of in vitro fertilization and human genetic modification, Stock claims, will write a new page in the history of life, allowing us to seize control of our evolutionary future . . .. The arrival of safe, reliable germline technology will signal the beginning of human self-design . . . but it will transform the evolutionary process by drawing reproduction into a highly selective social process that is far more rapid and effective at spreading successful genes than traditional competition and mate selection.11 The biggest challenge will be our changing image of ourselves. These new technologies [will] force us to examine the very question of what it means to be human. As we follow the path germline choice offers, we are likely to find that being human has little to do with the particular physical and mental characteristics we now use to define ourselves, and even less to do with the methods of conception and birth that are now so familiar. . . . As we move into the centuries ahead, our strongest bond with one another may be that we share a common biological origin and are part of a common process of self-directed emergence into an unknown future. . . . Remaking ourselves is the ultimate expression and realization of our humanity . . . this is the human destiny.12

Of course, the project or dream of taking control of our own evolution is not new.13 The significance of Gregory Stock’s book consists neither in the novelty of the proposal nor the strength of its philosophical reasoning. What is truly alarming in Stock’s book is his repeated assertion that genetic engineering merely extends current practices such as in vitro fertilization and the genetic screening of embryos with a view to selective abortion – practices that are widely used and widely accepted. He writes: The coming possibilities will be the inadvertent spinoff of mainstream research that virtually everyone supports. . . . Researchers and clinicians working on in vitro fertilization (IVF) don’t think much about future human evolution, but nonetheless are building a foundation of expertise in conceiving, handling, testing, and implanting human embryos, and this will one day be the basis for the manipulation of the human species.14 Using preimplantation screening, we can avoid having a child with certain genetic diseases. Using sperm-sorting technology, we can choose the gender of the child we conceive . . . early technologies for directly altering our children’s genes will overlap with coming versions of today’s techniques for screening and selecting embryos.15

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 213

4/28/2009 10:40:48 AM

214

The Providence of God

The logic of Stock’s argument is clear. Already today parents decide on the timing, the conditions and increasingly the features of their offspring. Assuming, as Stock does, that parents want their children to succeed in life, and assuming that parents want to endow their children with all of the advantages that will foster success, why wouldn’t parents endow their children with genetic enhancements that might help them live longer and healthier lives? Stock is correct in claiming that as genetic screening for diseases becomes more sophisticated, parents will have more choices to make regarding the genetic make-up of their offspring. Stock is also correct in noting that arguments about the viability and safety of this procedure of modifying the germline miss the more fundamental point. No scientist and no parent would advocate using germline choice technology until such interventions are safe and reliable. (Stock thinks that we are two to three decades away from mastering the technology necessary for ‘safe’ interventions.) The real question is whether the givenness of nature is normative for the meaning of being human or whether, as he writes, ‘remaking ourselves is the ultimate expression and realization of our humanity’.16 Stock’s advocacy of genetic engineering helps bring into focus the crucial point that the cultural acceptance of contraception, in vitro fertilization, and genetic screening with a view to selective abortion have made it increasingly difficult for scientists and for parents to see the difference between procreation and production, between being born and being made, between nature and artifice. Thus it is not surprising that Stock claims that ‘this distinction between the natural and the unnatural is an illusion. We are as natural a part of the world as anything else is, and so is the technology we create.’17 Nor is it surprising that Stock advocates moving conception ‘from the bedroom to the laboratory’. Again, the practice of in vitro fertilization is paving the way forward: ‘With a little marketing by IVF clinics’, Stock tells us, ‘traditional reproduction may begin to seem antiquated, if not downright irresponsible. One day, people may view sex as essentially recreational, and conception as something best done in the laboratory.’18 Part of an adequate response to the project of Redesigning Humans consists in uncovering the connection between Stock’s understanding of human nature and his uncritical acceptance of the scientific ideal of knowledge as ‘manipulation’. In a revealing passage, Stock notes that ‘over the past hundred years the trajectory of the life sciences traces a clear shift from description to understanding to manipulation . . ., we have moved from observing to understanding to engineering’.19 What is the source of this ‘trajectory of the life sciences’ and what are the implications for attempts to recovery an authentic understanding of divine providence?

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 214

4/28/2009 10:40:48 AM

Creation, Predestination and Divine Providence

215

II. Hans Jonas on the Loss of Nature in Early Modern Science In an introduction to a collection of essays published in 1974, Hans Jonas sketches in a few short pages his intellectual journey from his days as student of Heidegger in 1920s undertaking a comprehensive study of ancient Gnosticism to his writings in the 1960s on the philosophy of nature and the foundations of ethics: Five years of soldiering in the British army in the war against Hitler ushered in the second stage in my theoretical life. Cut off from books and all of the paraphernalia of research, I had to stop work on the Gnostic project perforce. But something more substantive and essential was involved. The apocalyptic state of things, the threatening collapse of a world, the climactic crisis of civilization, the proximity of death, the stark nakedness to which all the issues of life were stripped, all these were ground enough to take a new look at the very foundations of our being to review the principles by which we guide our thinking on them. Thus, thrown back on my own resources, I was thrown back on the philosopher’s basic duty and his native business-thinking.20

The result of this ‘rethinking of the fundamentals’ was a growing conviction that the development of early modern science was premised on (1) the ideal of knowledge as power over nature (Francis Bacon), and (2) Descartes’s separation of reality into the mutually exclusive realms of res cogitans and res extensa. It is essential to grasp the connection between these two points: the ideal of knowledge as power presupposes and helps to ensure the elimination from nature of the interior principles of formal and final causality, hence, the transformation of nature into mere res extensa. As Leon Kass argues, ‘[t]he new science sought first power over nature, and derivatively, found a way to reconceive nature that yielded the empowering kind of knowledge: Seek power, and you will devise a way of knowing that gives it to you.’21 Under the gaze of knowledge conceived in terms of power, what is seen is precisely nature as dead matter or extended stuff. Anything that might offer real resistance to man’s desire to put nature to use is excluded a priori as irrelevant to scientific knowledge. ‘A new vision of nature’, Jonas argues, ‘not only of knowledge, is implied in Bacon’s insistence that “the mind may exercise over the nature of things the authority which properly belongs to it”. The nature of things is left with no dignity of its own.’22 For Aristotle, natural things are distinguished from products of art by virtue of having ‘an interior principle of motion and rest’.23 Natural objects differ from artificial objects precisely by virtue of the interiority of form

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 215

4/28/2009 10:40:48 AM

216

The Providence of God

and finality. Unlike artefacts, natural entities are endowed with a capacity for self-movement, such that the action of any part is the action of the whole moving the whole. Artificial wholes, by contrast, have forms that are simply posterior to the parts. Aristotle illustrates the difference between a natural object and an artefact with the example of Antiphon’s bed: if you planted a bed in the ground and the rotting bed acquired the power of sending up a shoot, it would not be a bed that would come up, but wood. Unlike the bed, an acorn will develop into a tree by virtue of an unfolding of its interior form, which is another way of saying that the whatness of the acorn (its nature or interior form) is already a tree. A human embryo will develop into a human being because it already is a human being. In other words, natural objects have an immanent teleology. This immanent teleology grounds the key distinction that Aristotle draws between natural and violent motion; only the former will be expressive of what the nature is. Corresponding to this notion of nature and natural motion is a certain conception of what it means to know. The manipulation of nature for our own ends will not disclose what a thing is in its depth and dimensionality. For Aristotle, our knowledge of the natural world is fundamentally contemplative, and it thus requires a disposition of wonder. The book which announced and helped to usher in the new scientific method was Francis Bacon’s Great Instauration (1620). In a preface to this work, Bacon admonishes his reader to consider the true end of knowledge – the benefit and improvement of mankind’s estate. Knowledge is essentially the ability to put nature to use: ‘And so those twin objects, human knowledge and human power, do really meet in one.’ Among the chief obstacles or ‘idols’ that stand in the way of man’s conquest of nature is the ‘prejudice’ of final causality. ‘The final cause’, Bacon writes, ‘corrupts rather than advances the sciences’.24 As Hans Jonas argues, this elimination of formal and final causality is counterfactual; it requires a considerable effort to deny the evidence of the natural world: ‘their rejection’, he writes, ‘is a methodological principle guiding inquiry rather than a statement of ascertained fact issuing from inquiry . . . the mere search for them was quite suddenly, with the inauguration of modern science, held to be at variance with the scientific attitude.’25 The reason for the methodological elimination of form and finality from nature is that the understanding of these immanent principles is ‘barren of works’; that is, form and finality offer little help and, in fact, considerable resistance to the project of asserting power over nature. Descartes shares Bacon’s core assumption regarding the end and meaning of scientific knowledge. His contribution to the project of putting nature to use consists in the application of mathematics to nature, now

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 216

4/28/2009 10:40:48 AM

Creation, Predestination and Divine Providence

217

conceived exhaustively in terms of the attributes of matter and motion. Descartes’s decision to distinguish the soul and the body as two things, res cogitans and res extensa, has far-reaching implications for both the meaning of the human soul and for the entire order of nature. The concept of soul ceases to be ‘a principle of life and thus action’ and becomes ‘a principle of pure subjectivity – a dimension rather than a principle’.26 The soul is powerless to truly move the body. It follows that the movements and actions of the body reveal nothing of the soul. More generally, the entire order of nature is reduced to extended ‘stuff’, bereft of any nature and reduced to its measurable dimensionality. The only secrets that the natural world has to reveal and this will be the contribution of Newton – are the laws that account for the predictability of the mechanical forces governing the distribution of bodies through space. One of the clearest indications of Descartes’s reductive understanding of nature is his utter inability to account for organic life, especially the life of animals. For Descartes, animals are essentially machines that happen to be so constructed that they give the illusion to human onlookers of having inwardness (e.g. the capacity to feel pain), but in fact are nothing but matter and motion. It is not surprising that, like Gregory Stock, Descartes is unable to see any difference between nature and artefact: the example of certain bodies made by art was of service to me, for I can see no difference between these and natural bodies . . . all of the rules of mechanics belong to physics, so that all things which are artificial are thereby natural.27

Also lost in Cartesianism is the distinction between natural and violent motion. We are accustomed to thinking of the beginning of the technological revolution as coincident with the widespread use of industrial machinery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a development that prepared the way for further advances in electromagnetics, atomic energy, and so on. Hans Jonas has argued convincingly that the real revolution occurred two centuries earlier. ‘It was’, he suggests, ‘a change in theory, in worldview, in metaphysical outlook, in conception and method of knowledge.’28 At the heart of this revolution was a new understanding of nature; a nature devoid of form and finality. The only meaning left to nature is what Jonas calls ‘manipulability’. ‘The very conception of reality that underlay and was fostered by the rise of modern science, i.e., the new concept of nature, contained manipulability at its theoretical core and, in the form of experiment, involved actual manipulation in the investigative process.’29

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 217

4/28/2009 10:40:49 AM

The Providence of God

218

What are the consequences of this new vision of nature as ‘manipulable’? Given the limits of this chapter, I will briefly suggest three implications that pertain directly the idea of divine providence: 1. The exclusion of interior principles from nature entails the effective loss of God’s presence in the world. For Thomas Aquinas, God is innermost in all things by virtue of being the transcendent source of all being. In wake of the new science, God is no long the creator in the true sense of the word; at best he is the One who initiated the process and who serves to guarantee the laws of nature. 2. For natures wholly devoid of form and finality, the only relation possible is one of mechanical force: things pressing and pulling against other things from the outside. The most bitter fruit of this reduction of causality to mechanical force is an inevitable competition between human freedom and divine freedom. The logic of mechanical force entails that either human freedom is replaced by God’s power, or – the road more easily travelled – human freedom is preserved by placing it outside the order of God’s universal causality. 3. Thirdly, the dream of taking power over nature parodies the Christian promise of a redemption. Here I simply want to recall the argument of Benedict XVI in Spe Salvi cited in the introduction: Francis Bacon’s new correlation of experiment and method enables man to arrive at an interpretation of nature in conformity with its laws and thus finally to achieve ‘the triumph of art over nature’. . . . This is also given a theological application: the new correlation between science and praxis would mean that the dominion over creation – given to man by God and lost through original sin – would be reestablished . . . this ‘redemption’, the restoration of the lost ‘Paradise’ is no longer expected from faith, but from the newly discovered link between science and praxis. It is not that faith is simply denied; rather it is displaced onto another level – that of purely private and other-worldly affairs – and at the same time it becomes somehow irrelevant for the world. This programmatic vision has determined the trajectory of modern times and it also shapes the present-day crisis of faith which is essentially a crisis of Christian hope.30

III. Thomas Aquinas on Creation and the Real Distinction between Esse and Essentia As I suggested in the Introduction, and as confirmed by Gregory Stock’s book, it is not accidental that the project of taking power over nature is increasingly directed towards taking control of human procreation. The

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 218

4/28/2009 10:40:49 AM

Creation, Predestination and Divine Providence

219

very forcefulness of the contemporary assault on the meaning of human conception and birth suggests that the reality of childhood provides an essential point of reference for recovering the truth of creation. The Baconian-Cartesian understanding of nature, we have said, sees it as res extensa, devoid of the interiority that, in our ordinary experience, things reveal insofar as they exist in themselves and for their own sake. The existence of a child is a phenomenon that seems to resist this evacuation of nature. Almost every parent recognizes that a child can never be reduced to a product of their making or manipulation; the miraculous arrival of a child reveals a mysterious excess at the heart of the parent’s reciprocal giving and receiving that points to God as the true origin and end of both their love for each and fruit of that love. In all of its frailty and vulnerability, the child’s very existence is a gift that calls for a respectful acknowledgement of its existing for its own sake. The child exists in and for itself in a way that places an intrinsic limit on every attempt to treat the biological specifics of its generation as res extensa to be manipulated at will. Attention to the phenomenon of the child thus allows us to recover something of the Aristotelian account of nature, which accords a central place to form and finality, that is, to existing in and for oneself. At the same time, the language of ‘gift’ strikes a note that is not heard, at least not explicitly, in Aristotle. In this sense, it enables us to retrieve Aristotle while going beyond him into the new depth that opens up with the dawning of the notion of creation out of nothing. Christianity goes beyond Aristotle’s account of the givenness of nature with the idea that nature is created; that is, nature itself is a gift. ‘God alone’, Thomas Aquinas writes, ‘is the most perfectly liberal giver, because He does not act for His own profit, but only for his own goodness’.31 Creation is the absolutely unowed, but not at all arbitrary or random, bestowal of being itself as sheer gift. There is some debate about whether and to what extent Aristotle glimpsed something of the mystery of creation. Be that as it may, it is at least clear that, when we thematize this type of production, when we speak of creation out of nothing, we are making existence in and for oneself radically dependent on God’s free gift. It is also clear that, when we do that, we are not denying existence in and for oneself, but, rather, building into it a type of ‘modification’ that is unique with respect to the sort of modification that happens within the world. For, as Thomas says, creation, looked at passively, that is, from the point of view of what is created, is not a mutation, but a relation. The stability of nature, being in and for oneself beyond the grasp of any manipulation from the outside by one’s fellow creatures, is shot through with, and dependent upon, a kind of movement, a movement that is not a physical

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 219

4/28/2009 10:40:49 AM

220

The Providence of God

change, but a radical relatedness or referentiality to God. Creatures stand in being, in and for themselves, because they are radical relatedness to God. At the heart of Thomas Aquinas’s account of the relation that is creation is the act-character of being. Creation is the act by which ipsum esse subsistens establishes participation in itself by bestowing being on that which is not ipsum esse subsistens. Now, because the essence of ipsum esse subsistens is nothing other than esse itself, the created substance in which esse attains subsistence must differ from esse by essence. It follows from this that in every created being, esse is distinct from that being’s essence. There is, Aquinas argues, a real distinction between esse and essence in every created being. What is most unique in Aquinas’s doctrine of creation is the idea that the gift of esse is the source of all the perfections within every created entity – it is, he says, the perfection of all perfections and the actuality of all acts – and yet, paradoxically, created esse is itself dependent upon essence to attain subsistence. ‘Esse’, writes Thomas, ‘signifies something complete and simple, but non-subsistent’.32 This insight of Aquinas is magnificent, and endlessly rich in its implications for the relation between created and divine freedom. Esse creatum cannot be the simple fullness of actuality except as always united to a non-identical essence. All the perfections of finite being – indeed, all of the being of finite being comes from a creature’s esse, even as esse itself is completely dependent upon essence. Esse, then, is a unity (it contains all the perfections of being) that, without ceasing to be one, contains a polarity within itself. We could express this polarity in the following way: Esse, because non-subsistent, cannot be ‘itself’ except insofar as it belongs to something else that is other than it by essence. At the same time, the inscription of dependence in created esse distinguishes it from the divine esse, not as one thing is distinct from another, but as God’s own fullness as ‘givenaway’ is distinct from the Giver. The fact that created esse cannot be the fullness of actuality without being simultaneously exercised as the actuality of what is not esse by essence, signifies neither a decomposition of the unity of being nor a diminution of being’s simple fullness, but is the sign within creation of a limitless generosity that allows true otherness to come from itself. Following Ferdinand Ulrich, we can describe this paradoxical dependence of created esse upon essence as poverty, or rather the unity of poverty and wealth that Ulrich takes to be a sign of true love.33 Esse is rich in being the image and mediation of God’s supreme perfection, and yet poor in its non-subsistence, which again points back to God as the ultimate ground of both esse and essence in their reciprocal relation.

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 220

4/28/2009 10:40:49 AM

Creation, Predestination and Divine Providence

221

Aquinas’s unique understanding of esse as ‘complete and simple, but non-subsistent’ allows him to hold together the total dependence of creation in every respect upon God, who is truly all in all, and the goodness of creation in its otherness from God – a gift which culminates in beings who exercise a participatory or ‘secondary’ causality in relation to God. The contribution of Hans Urs von Balthasar in regards to the Thomistic ‘real distinction’ is a more explicit reflection on how the deepest meaning of esse’s non-subsistent fullness is revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the burden of Balthasar’s claim that Christ is the concrete analogia entis: ‘[Christ] constitutes in himself, in the union of his divine and human natures, the measure of every distance between God and man.’34 This means that the incarnate Son has been given the task of representing to humanity a perfect image of his Father while simultaneously representing to God the true form of humanity, and ultimately the whole of creation. This twofold representation does not fracture into a dualism because both as man and as God, the Son receives his being in gratitude from the Father who is the ‘ever-greater’ (Jn 14.28) source of his existence. The Trinitarian analogy writes Balthasar enables the Son, without abolishing the analogia entis, simultaneously to do two things: he represents God to the world – but in the mode of the Son who regards the Father as ‘greater’ and to whom he eternally owes all that he is – and he represents the world to God, by being, as man (or rather as the God-man), ‘humble, lowly, modest, docile [tapeinos] of heart’ (Mt 11:29). It is on the basis of these two aspects, united in an abiding analogy, that the Son can take up his one, unitary mission.35

Not only does Christ reveal the mystery of the Father, but he reveals the true meaning and integrity of creation in its distinction from the divine nature. In more concrete terms, Christ perfectly reveals the Father to the world in the event of his ‘laying down his life’ by loving the world to ‘the end’ (Jn 13.1): ‘As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you’ (Jn 15.9). At the same time, Christ presents to God a perfect human obedience that culminates in a Eucharistic offering of the substance of his life. Through the mystery of the Eucharist and the mediation of the Holy Spirit, Christ is able to gather the created world into his body and thus bring to light for the first time the truth of the original meaning and eschatological destiny of creation. All things were created in and for the Son, and his mission is to return to the Father with every human being, and ultimately the whole of creation. This brings me to the final point, the relation between providence and predestination.

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 221

4/28/2009 10:40:50 AM

222

The Providence of God

IV. Predestination in Christ There are many objections to Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of creation and divine providence. For some, the very idea of God’s universal causality is incompatible with human freedom. I think these objections are misguided; often they are premised on a mechanistic notion of causality that is foreign to Aquinas. A more profound objection has been raised by Jacques Maritain, who directs his critique at the sixteenth-century Dominican, Domingo Bañez, and the neo-Bañezians of the twentieth century, particularly Garrigou-Lagrange and Jean-Hervé Nicolas.36 Maritain’s overarching concern is safeguard the absolute innocence of God in relation to evil. He argues that these disciples of Thomas have failed to appreciate adequately the dissymetry between the line of the good and the line of evil. In the line of the good, God is the first and transcendent cause of our liberty and of our free decisions, so that the free act is wholly from God as first cause and wholly from us as second cause; because there is not a fiber of our being which escapes the causality of God.37

Whereas in the line of evil, it is a human being who is the first cause and who has the first initiative of moral evil. ‘Evil’, Maritain notes ‘is the absence of being, privation of being or of good. It is a nothingness which corrodes being.’38 Obviously, no Thomist denies either the universal causality of God or the idea that evil is a privation. So where does the problem lie? Maritain raises several objections to the Bañezian account of physical premotion and the related idea of God’s antecedent permissive decrees. But the core of his objection concerns negative reprobation. He writes: these Thomists taught not only that unthinkable thing . . . that one calls ‘negative reprobation’, which precedes any demerit, but they made it consist in the positive exclusion of beatitude. Just as God predestines the elect to glory ante praevisa merita, without consideration of their foreseen merits, so likewise . . . He decides to exclude [the others] from beatitude ante praevisa demerita, without consideration of the foreseen demerits.39

I think that Maritain has correctly identified the Achilles’ heel of Aquinas’s doctrine of divine providence – limited predestination and its corollary, negative reprobation ante praevisa demerita. In the prima pars of the Summa, the question on predestination follows the question on divine providence. For Aquinas, predestination is part of providence. ‘Predestination’, he writes, ‘is a kind of type of the ordering of some persons towards eternal salvation, existing in the divine mind.’40

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 222

4/28/2009 10:40:50 AM

Creation, Predestination and Divine Providence

223

In the third article of this question, he asks whether God reprobates any man. It is important to stress that reprobation for Aquinas does not mean a positive ordination to hell; it is a function of God’s permissive will. It is the creature who turns away from the good, and it is the creature who bears the responsibility. Aquinas writes: ‘It is part of providence to permit some to fall away from that end; this is called reprobation.’41 The first objection reads as follows: It seems that God reprobates no man. For no one reprobates what he loves. But God loves every man [He proceeds to cite a favourite text from Wisdom], ‘Thou lovest all things that are, and Thou hatest none of the things Thou hast made.’ Therefore God reprobates no man.

Thomas replies: God loves all men and all creatures, inasmuch as He wishes them all some good; but He does not wish every good to them all. So far, therefore, as He does not wish this particular good – namely, eternal life – He is said to hate or to reprobate them.42

Borrowing a distinction from John Damascene, Aquinas teaches that God wills the salvation of all antecedently, but this will is conditional. His consequent and infallibly efficacious will is for the salvation of only some. Why? The reason for the predestination of some, and reprobation of others, must be sought for in the goodness of God. Thus He is said to have made all things through His goodness, so that the divine goodness might be represented in things. Now it is necessary that God’s goodness, which in itself is one and undivided, should be manifested in many ways in His creation. . . . Thus it is that for the completion of the universe there are required different grades of being; some of which hold a high and some a low place in the universe. That this multiformity of grades may be preserved in things, God allows some evils, lest many good things should never happen, as was said above. . . . God wills to manifest His goodness in men; in respect to those whom He predestines, by means of His mercy, as sparing them; and in respect of others, whom he reprobates, by means of His justice, in punishing them. This is the reason why God elects some and rejects others.43

I think that Maritain is correct to object to this aspect of Aquinas’s theology. Like Maritain, I do not see how this teaching is compatible with the idea of God’s universal salvific will, a doctrine that has always been affirmed by the Church, and that has received a new emphasis in recent centuries.44 This is not the occasion to enter into the details of Maritain’s

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 223

4/28/2009 10:40:50 AM

224

The Providence of God

complex proposal regarding ‘shatterable’ or ‘resistible’ grace. Instead I want point to a contribution to the debate that is at once more simple and that has the advantage of hewing closely to the New Testament. It was, of course, Augustine the Father of Western theology, who formulated the classical account of predestination. For Augustine, predestination was the divine will to grant an invincible grace to a particular group of individuals chosen from the massa perditionis into which humanity had been launched on account of original sin. The doctrine of predestination allowed Augustine to maintain the absolute gratuitousness of grace: that which distinguished the one who attained eternal glory from the one who did not was the divine choice from all eternity before any consideration of merit. During the Pelagian and semi-Pelagian controversies, the Church sided firmly with Augustine regarding the absolute gratuitousness of grace, and has bestowed on Augustine the title doctor gratiae. However, as Margaret McCarthy notes, ‘[the Church] did not espouse the Augustinian doctrine of predestination, opting instead to exercise a prudent suspension of judgement.’45 Only twice was the doctrine of predestination an object of the Church’s formal teaching, at the Councils of Quiercy (853) and Valence (855), when in opposition to the notion of a positive predestination to damnation before the foreknowledge of demerits, predestination was limited to the elect (a group about which the Church said nothing).46

The question that has proved insoluble for Catholic theology is how to discriminate – how to account for the difference – between those who predestined and those who are reprobate. If human freedom plays a role, however slight, in discriminating between the saved and damned, then the absolute gratuitousness of grace would seem to be called into question. On the other hand, if, in His inscrutable freedom it is God who elects some and reprobates some without consideration of the response of human freedom, then it would seem that the universal salvific will has been unduly attenuated. The story of how the Dominicans and the Jesuits came to blows over this question in the sixteenth century is well known. Pope Paul V brought the debate to halt in 1607, and he indicated that the Holy See would resolve the question at an opportune time. We are still waiting. The very fact that the debate could not be settled on the terms that were assumed by both sides suggests that it may be helpful to reconsider the original meaning of ‘predestination’ in the New Testament. Recent exegesis and recent magisterial teaching have recovered the essential link between predestination and the idea of creation in Christ. We read in the letter to the Ephesians: ‘God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 224

4/28/2009 10:40:51 AM

Creation, Predestination and Divine Providence

225

before him in love, having predestined us to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace’ (Eph. 1.3–6). Commenting on this passage, John Paul II writes: This choice, together with the decision that puts it into effect, namely, the plan of creation and redemption, pertains to the intimate life of the Most Holy Trinity: it is made from eternity by the Father together with the Son in the Holy Spirit. It is a choice which, according to St Paul, precedes the creation of the world, (‘before the foundation of the world’, Eph 1:4), and of man in the world. Man, even before being created, is ‘chosen’ by God. This choice takes place in the eternal Son (‘in him’, Eph 1:4), that is, in the Word of the eternal Mind. Man is therefore chosen in the Son to participate in the same sonship by divine adoption. In this consists the very essence of the mystery of predestination, which manifests the Father’s eternal love (‘in love, having destined us to be his sons through Jesus Christ’, Eph 1:4–5). . . . In this sense predestination precedes ‘the foundation of the world’, namely, creation, since this is realized in the perspective of man’s predestination. By applying to the divine life the temporal analogies of human language, we can say that God ‘first’ willed to communicate himself in his divinity to man called to be his image and likeness in the created world. ‘First’, he chose him, in the eternal and consubstantial Son, to participate in his sonship (through grace) and only ‘afterwards’ (‘in its turn’) he willed creation, he willed the world to which man belongs. In this way the mystery of predestination enters ‘organically’ in a certain sense into the whole plan of divine providence.47

There are several essential differences between this interpretation of ‘predestination’ and the Thomistic account. In the first place, for John Paul II predestination is not a determination of the final condition of a portion of mankind; it is the reason why God creates a world. Secondly, and this follows from the first point, predestination is universal: every human being and indeed the whole of creation is predestined in Jesus Christ. John Paul II confirms this universality in Mulieris Dignitatem where he writes ‘predestination concerns all human persons, men and women, each and every one without exception’.48 For John Paul II (and, it need hardly be said, for Hans Urs von Balthasar) universal predestination is not incompatible with the real possibility of eternal damnation. It is of the innermost essence of his gift that God respects the freedom of the creature to the very end. Thirdly, predestination in Christ is not merely one part of divine providence; it pertains to the whole of God’s plan for the world. ‘The predestination of man and of the world in Christ’, John Paul II argues, ‘confers on the whole doctrine of divine providence a decisive soteriological and eschatological characteristic.’49 We cannot understand God’s providential care for the world, if we forget that this governance passes through the risen and exalted Christ – the one in whom and for whom the world was created.

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 225

4/28/2009 10:40:51 AM

226

The Providence of God

With this last point we return to the thesis of Pope Benedict in Spe Salvi regarding the unity of creation and redemption in Christ. One of the questions posed by Benedict is the following: ‘How could the idea have developed that Jesus’s message is narrowly individualistic and aimed only at each person singly? How did we arrive at this interpretation of the “salvation of the soul” as a flight from responsibility for the whole?’50 As noted above, Benedict develops an answer to this question in the light of the transformation of our understanding of the natural world at the origin of the modern age. The loss of a sense of creation as gift has made Christian faith a ‘purely private and other-worldly affair . . . somehow irrelevant for the world’.51 Given this situation Christians have a particular responsibility for affirming the goodness and non-manipulability of creation, especially human life in its most vulnerable stages. Thomas Aquinas’s account of the act of being provides an indispensable foundation for an encounter between Christian thought and modernity, including modernity’s reductive understanding of nature. At the same time, Aquinas’s teaching on predestination needs to be rethought in the light of the twofold theme of creation in Christ and the universality of Christ’s mission. Christ died for all and all are predestined in Christ. Christ is the centre that holds all things together. His death, descent into hell and resurrection confirm the original goodness of creation despite the evil that has been unleashed by the misuse of created freedom. We can and we should say that God can draw straight with crooked lines, and that he can draw good out of evil. But evil is not part of the providence of God. It is not intended by God either directly or indirectly. The New Testament teaches us that God may permit some to damn themselves, but this is not what God desires. What He desires is the salvation of all. The final meaning of God’s providence is hidden in the gift of the Spirit and Eucharist. This hiddenness corresponds to an infinite discretion on God’s part. This same discretion permits the weeds grow up with the wheat until harvest time; by the same discretion God veils himself in the form of bread and wine. It is the Holy Spirit who gathers creation into the Eucharistic body of the Christ, who, in pouring out his life for the salvation of the world offers to return to the Father in communion with the all that Father has created.

Notes 1 John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantem (1986), 50. 2 F. Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 71. Balthasar describes de Lubac’s Catholicisme as ‘a work of genius

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 226

4/28/2009 10:40:51 AM

Creation, Predestination and Divine Providence

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20

227

that marked the breakthrough to new Catholic thought’ (In the Fullness of Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 9). In a ‘Foreword’ to the English translation of Catholicism, Ratzinger is even more explicit: ‘in late autumn of 1949 a friend gave me de Lubac’s book Catholicism. For me, the encounter with this book became an essential milestone on my theological journey. For in it de Lubac does not treat merely isolated questions. He makes visible to us in a new way the fundamental intuition of Christian Faith so that from this inner core all the particular elements appear in a new light. He shows how the idea of community and universality, rooted in the Trinitarian concept of God, permeates and shapes all the individual elements of Faith’s content. The idea of the Catholic, the all-embracing, the inner unity of I and Thou and We does not constitute one chapter of theology among others. It is the key that opens the door to the proper understanding of the whole.’ H. de Lubac, ‘The Authority of the Church in Temporal Matters’, in Theological Fragments (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 211. Biology and the Future of Man, ed. Philip Handler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 928. Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi (2007), 25. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 17. Ibid. Maximus the Confessor, Quaestiones ad Thalassium, 60. G. Stock, Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 1. Ibid., 2–3. Ibid., 196–7. In an essay written shortly after Second World War, de Lubac called attention to the ‘search for a new man’ through science: ‘Thanks to progress in biology, man could now direct his own biological evolution, and he had to do so if he wanted to be on top of the tasks that awaited him. It would not be a question only of negative measures, like preventing certain undesirable procreation through processes such as sterilization; more must be dared: it was necessary to produce in a positive way a superior race’ (The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 407). The same year that de Lubac warned of the ‘search for a new man’, C. S. Lewis published in England an essay titled The Abolition of Man. Lewis takes contraception and eugenic breeding as paradigmatic instances of man’s quest for ‘power over nature’. ‘What we call Man’s power over nature’, he argues, ‘turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument’ (69). Stock, Redesigning Humans, 5. Ibid., 110. Ibid., 197. Ibid. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 7. H. Jonas, Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974), xii.

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 227

4/28/2009 10:40:51 AM

228

The Providence of God

21 L. Kass, Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002), 282. 22 H. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 192. 23 Aristotle, Physics II, 1. 24 F. Bacon, Novum Organum, II, 2. 25 Jonas, Phenomenon of Life, 34–5. 26 Ibid., 60. 27 Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, n. 203. 28 Jonas, Philosophical Essays, 47. 29 Ibid., 48. 30 Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 16–17. 31 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia, q. 44, a. 4 ad 1. 32 Thomas Aquinas, De potentia dei, q. 1, a. 1. 33 Cf. F. Ulrich, Homo Abyssus: Das Wagnis der Seinsfrage (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1961). 34 H. U. von Balthasar, Theology of History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 69–70. 35 H. U. von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. III, The Dramatis Personae: The Person in Christ (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 230. 36 A recent article by Steven A. Long, ‘Providence, Freedom, and Natural Law’ Nova et Vetera 4 (2006), attempts to rehabilitate Bañez’s account of predestination and physical premotion. Long’s article suffers from the same defect noted by Maritain; an inability to reconcile antecedent negative reprobation with the constant teaching of the Church on the universal salvific will of God. 37 J. Maritain, God and the Permission of Evil (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing, 1966), 10. 38 Ibid., 9. 39 Ibid., 14. 40 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia, q. 23, a. 2. 41 Ibid., Ia, q. 23, a. 3. 42 Ibid., Ia, q. 23, a. 3 ad 1. 43 Ibid., Ia, q. 23, a. 5 ad 2. 44 Cf. Bernard Sesboüé, Hors de l’Eglise pas de salut (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2004). 45 M. McCarthy, Recent Developments in the Theology of Predestination (Rome: Pontifical Lateran University, 1995), 2. 46 Ibid. 47 John Paul II, ‘The Mystery of Predestination in Christ’, General Audience, 28 May 1986. 48 John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem (1988) 9. 49 John Paul II, ‘The Mystery of Predestination in Christ’. 50 Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 16. 51 Ibid., 17.

FMurphy_11_Finals.indd 228

4/28/2009 10:40:52 AM

Chapter 12

From Prudentius to President Bush: Providence, Empire and Paranoia1 Stephen H. Webb

I. Political Theory Needs a Doctrine of Providence Christians are called to lay up their treasure in heaven, but they are also issued a building permit, in the guise of the doctrine of providence, to make constructive contributions to the kingdoms of the earth. Providence and politics, I want to argue, go hand in hand. By organizing the Christian experience of history, the doctrine of providence provides evidence of God’s action in the world, prompts judgements about the patterns of God’s activity, and proposes lines of human response that are congruent with those patterns. Thus construed, providence is the Christian way of demarcating the political from other spheres of human endeavour. I would even go so far as to say that the doctrine of providence is the Christian way of being political. As such, it is one of the most intellectually demanding of Christian teachings, because it asks the faithful to consider where God is leading history and what people, events and institutions God is using to get there. Because it compels Christians to take sides in the political arena, this Christian teaching carries great moral risk. If the doctrine of providence enables Christians to enter into the political arena theologically fully armed, as it were, then the political conceived apart from providence should appear to be a pretty dismal state. That is exactly what we find in Carl Schmitt’s definition of the political as that activity which is made necessary by the friend–enemy distinction.2 According to Schmitt, the persistence of enmity is a fundamental fact of social life. Enemies, by definition, threaten the existence of a social group, and thus they demand collective action. That action, however, cannot be the product of purely rational reflection, which is always able to postpone any decision with endless analyses of second thoughts and serious doubts. At the end of the day, Schmitt argues, political action must be the decision of a sovereign authority rather than the product of procedural deliberation. Schmitt did not deny that every attempt to define the political is a moral and even theological act. Indeed, his definition of the political as the decision of a sovereign authority that responds to the emergency of enmity smacks of

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 231

4/28/2009 10:40:32 AM

232

The Providence of God

theological significance. His intention behind this account of social life, however, is to raise the concept of the political to the order of a transcendental category, with its own autonomy and clarity. For Schmitt, the existence of enemies is both necessary and sufficient to generate political activity. Schmitt always insisted that his point – that the political is made necessary by the ineradicable possibility of conflict – is logical, not empirical, although it is hard to imagine any period of history that would falsify it. His many critics have accused him of smuggling moral assumptions into his philosophical argument by turning a condition into a norm, and even his ideological allies, like Chantal Mouffe, are prodded by the modern ambivalence towards enemies into diluting his directives with postmodern talk of constitutive differences, rather than irresolvable conflicts.3 Nonetheless, if the political is brought about by mere differences, rather than menacing enmity, then it is hard to imagine why the political should exist as a category set apart from philosophical or economical solutions to the problem of competing self-interests. Philosophers might be confident that reason alone can adjudicate clashing world-views, while economists typically insist that markets can manage competition over scarce resources, but only an exercise of political will can handle a collective struggle to survive the threat of social death. From a philosophical point of view, Schmitt makes sense. The boundaries of the political are drawn by the inevitable violence of enemies from without and the compromising perfidy of friends from within. From a more broadly historical point of view, however, the political is ordinarily given a purpose greater than simple social survival. In the West at least, given the dominant examples of Rome and Israel, that purpose stems from ideas about divine providence. When poets tell the story of how a people conquers their enemy by establishing a successful form of governance, for example, some form of providential thinking typically provides the plot line, as Virgil’s Aeneid attests. A central text for Church Fathers coming to terms with the history of Rome as well as the vagaries of providence, the Aeneid tells the story of Aeneas, who loses his home and wife in the sack of Troy, only to be chosen by the gods to be the founder of Rome. Commissioned by the Emperor Augustus, Virgil’s Aeneid assured the Romans that their ‘empire without end’ was founded on piety, duty, and, most of all, the favour of the gods. Without this doctrine of providence, Rome as a political entity could never have been imagined, let alone defended and expanded. Perhaps we could say that Schmitt’s definition is correct in terms of the synchronic structure of politics, but giving Virgil his due suggests that providence is its diachronic form.4

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 232

4/28/2009 10:40:32 AM

From Prudentius to President Bush

233

II. The Doctrine of Providence Needs Political Events Providence, then, has played a role as crucial as enmity in elevating and clarifying the political domain, but it should also be pointed out that the political is as important for providence as providence is for the political. Just as the political cannot be conceptualized apart from the doctrine of providence, the doctrine of providence carries little serious intellectual weight apart from the work it does in interpreting political events. Special providence is the name theologians give to specific, individual interventions of God into the plane of history, and theologians have long acknowledged that special providence is neglected to the point of being abandoned in modern Christian thought. One reason for this neglect is the rather deistic view most Christians have of God’s involvement in history. If God acts politically at all, most Christians seem to believe these days, it is in a distant and uniform manner. God’s relationship to the political must be as steady and uneventful as God’s relationship to nature. That is, God does not take sides, which is another way of saying that God is not really related to the political at all. Leo Strauss, an early critic of Schmitt, understood that secularism begins with the decline in a robust doctrine of providence, and he traced that decline to the work of Edmund Burke. Strauss accused Burke of secularizing the doctrine of providence by collapsing God’s moral will, which Strauss thought should be read from the natural law and not the historical record, into God’s providential will.5 In other words, Burke, according to Strauss, equated God’s intentions for history with what we can observe of the historical record. Where history goes is where God must be leading it! The result, according to Strauss, drains providence of its mystery by reducing political judgement to the calculation of political success. Strauss’s solution to this problem was to insist on the ancient philosophical identification of God’s providential will with the universal law of nature that is accessible to reason alone, yet this too leaves providence with little to recommend it as a relatively independent source of political wisdom. Francis Canavan has ably defended Burke from these charges by exposing their flimsy basis in a low point in Burke’s life when he thought that the French Revolution might be destined by providential decree for success.6 Burke, who was one of the Western world’s most thoroughly providential thinkers, certainly knew that God uses the heathen and the infidel for his own purposes without asking us to change our purposes by affirming and joining them. Strauss is so far from being fair to Burke that one suspects he is taking aim not at Burke but at a broader target, namely, the disaster of historicism that ruined the universal reach of his beloved

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 233

4/28/2009 10:40:32 AM

234

The Providence of God

ancients. Still, Strauss’s analysis does indicate the danger of sliding from a providential to a legitimating interpretation of history.

III. Augustine and The City of God Given Strauss’s concerns, any amendment of Schmitt that includes providence as one of the conditions of a fuller account of the political must have a further qualification. To say that providence is the necessary condition of a Christian political theology is not to say that it is a sufficient condition for Christian political judgements. No theologian, for example, could accept Virgil’s contention that the pagan gods destined Rome for eternal glory, but some could argue that providence is the foundation of the political, even though Rome itself was not built to last forever. The classic Christian response to the Aeneid is Augustine’s City of God, and according to the standard reading of the City of God, best represented by the work of R. A. Markus, Augustine thought that Virgil was as wrong about providence in general as he was about Rome in particular.7 According to Markus, Augustine confined sacred history to scripture in order to counteract Christians who were sympathetic to Virgil’s sacralization of Rome. Augustine reasoned that if Rome in its glory was not a foretaste of the Kingdom of God, then Rome in its fall was not a sign of the last judgement. The case of Rome, for Augustine, could provide evidence for neither a progressive nor an apocalyptic account of history. For Markus, Augustine did not stop with scoffing at the apologists of the Imperium Romanum, just as he did not stop halfway in developing any of his thoughts. Markus thought Augustine envisioned a strict divide in history, with Rome, like all earthly cities, minimally governed by general providence, while special providence is reserved for the heavenly city of the elect. We could say that Markus thought Augustine was trying to take the city out of the Church as well as the Church out of the city. Augustine certainly rejected attempts to synchronize the worldly history of Rome with the sacred history of divine revelation, but this left his understanding of general providence severely underdeveloped.8 If God had a role for the Roman Empire, and that empire coincided with the emergence of Christianity, then surely those two historical processes were not unrelated. Nonetheless, it is going too far to think of Augustine as viewing the space demarcated by general providence in homogeneous terms. Contrary to much pagan cynicism about the cyclical ups and downs of all human endeavours, Augustine believed that history has a purpose, and that movement towards a goal can be detected in both cities. In the city of God,

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 234

4/28/2009 10:40:33 AM

From Prudentius to President Bush

235

revelation comes to a climax in the incarnation and becomes increasingly known afterward, while in the city of man, the construction of political order can lead to many benefits, including benefits for the Church. Augustine’s concern about the providential interpretation of political order was primarily pedagogical. He wanted to warn his readers about how easy it is to confuse the material comforts and worldly goods produced by political order with the spiritual goods available only in the Church. Augustine also wanted to remind his readers that the benefits of political order are purchased at a very steep price. Augustine thought of progress in terms of promises and their fulfilment, and he thought that only the Church could deliver on the promise of peace, and even then only partially. Regarding Rome, he saw too much promise and too little fulfilment, even at the height of the Pax Romana.9 That Augustine found confirmation for this view in Virgil should not be surprising, since the Aeneid is about the rage of Juno as well as the promise of Jupiter. Rather than fight Virgil head on, Augustine turned the Aeneid, in the words of Sabine MacCormack, into ‘an authoritative historical narrative’ because it ‘described reality in ways that Augustine found decisive’.10 He accepted Virgil’s descriptions of the violence at the heart of Roman history but denounced the vainglory that violence served, just as he accepted Virgil’s stories of manipulative and devious gods only to identify them as demons. Augustine was able to subvert rather than simply reject Virgilian providence by defining political communities according to their common objects of love, which, as Oliver O’Donovan reminds us, means that Augustine also thought that social order entailed forms of hatred. Every determination of love implies a corresponding hatred. For a community to focus on this constellation of goods is to withdraw its love from that. Every concrete community, then, is defined equally by the things it does not love together, the objects it refuse to accept as a ground of its association.11

The Romans were special, Augustine admits, but only because God allowed them to pursue their love of glory beyond any reasonable limits. Their disordered love made their peace a sham and their political order indistinguishable except in scale from a gang of criminals. Rather than trying to restrict the range of providence, then, Augustine should be understood as doing something very similar to Schmitt in trying to circumscribe the concept of the political. A key to Augustine’s position on Rome is his argument that such is the instability of human affairs that no people has ever been allowed such a degree of tranquility as to remove all dread of all hostile attacks on

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 235

4/28/2009 10:40:33 AM

236

The Providence of God

their life in this world. That place, which is promised as a dwelling of such peace and security is eternal, and is reserved for eternal beings.12

Augustine was prudent to take this Schmittian position, given the uncomfortable position he found himself in when pagans began blaming Christians for Rome’s collapse, but that should not distract us from the fact that Augustine saw what Schmitt saw – that the political is made necessary by persistence of enmity. Indeed, Augustine talks about enemies frequently and fluently throughout the City of God, which suggests that the theological, as well as the political, is never without enmity. For Augustine, the Church and the state both have enemies, and they can have the same enemy, but they must treat their enemies differently. ‘She must bear in mind that among these very enemies are hidden her future citizens; and when confronted with them she must not think it a fruitless task to bear with their hostility until she finds them confessing the faith.’13 The city of man has no choice but to treat enemies as enemies, just as the city of God must hope that among the enemy is some of the saved. The enemies of the two cities can be one and the same, in Augustine’s mind, and he thought they were one and the same in the conflict with the Donatists, who not only led Catholics astray but also were guilty of murder and plunder. In this case, Augustine thought using government coercion for purposes that were both religious and political was appropriate – a decision that challenges Markus’s thesis that Augustine developed an essentially secular account of the state. He solves this problem by arguing that for Augustine, it is the Christian magistrate, not the state itself that can use force for the good of the Church. John Milbank has been one of the most notable theologians to see that there is a problem with Markus’s interpretation of Augustine, but he only goes halfway towards a solution. For Milbank, the Donatist controversy demonstrates that Augustine held the visible, institutional church in such high regard that he cannot be credited with an essentially secularist privatization of faith.14 Milbank accuses Markus of reading into Augustine the modern liberal view of the Church as a private organization completely separated from the secular realm of politics.15 That is no doubt true, but Markus also applies his privatizing account of the Church to the political sphere in order to maintain that Augustine kept the two apart even when he advocated the use of one for the good of the other. Milbank faults Markus for his individualistic understanding of Augustine’s ecclesiology, but he is quite happy to join Markus in reading into Augustine the modern liberal view of the state (i.e. that political institutions should not serve religious ends).

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 236

4/28/2009 10:40:33 AM

From Prudentius to President Bush

237

Milbank recognizes that Augustine does not secularize the Church, but he does not see that Augustine also does not secularize the state. Augustine thought that the Church embodies the peace of God much like the polis is the source of social stability and order, but for that very reason the Church cannot provide the protection we need here and now that we can only obtain from the state. Milbank cannot see this because he thinks the Church itself is the true polis, and therefore the polis has nothing to give to the Church. He has a ‘one city’ theology of history: ‘All political theory, in the antique sense, is relocated by Christianity as thought about the Church.’16 This leads him to conclude that the city of man plays no constituent role in the history of the city of God, which is contrary to Augustine’s insight that the two cities are so interwoven that the political establishment of social order can be positively related to the visible unity of the Church. Otherwise, how could Augustine lapse into a perfectly Virgilian moment when he writes, ‘It was God’s design to conquer the world through her, to unite the world into a single community of the Roman commonwealth and the Roman laws, and so to impose peace throughout its lengths and breadth.’17 The history of the world, its unified governance and its redemption are essentially related in Augustine’s mind, even though he saw their constellation in the particular case of Rome as the product of unprecedented vanity.

IV. Prudentius and Providence While Augustine was trying to distance the Messianic ideal from any possible exemplification in Roman history, other theologians, like Eusebius and Ambrose, could not believe that the coordination of the birth of Christ with the reign of Augustus was mere coincidence. These theologians are sometimes referred to as ‘the party of progress’, which is going too far in connecting them to later Western developments in the transformation, to use Strauss’s terms, from providence to historicism,18 but it would be just as wrong to call them ‘the party of providentialists’, because that implies that Augustine did not have a robust theory of providence. Although one of them, Orosius, was a student of Augustine, they should not be reduced to the image of the imperial boosters that the City of God constructed in order to rebut. They also were not uncritical in their relation to Virgil. Orosius, who wrote a universal history that culminated in a Christianized Rome, relies on Virgil primarily for rhetorical embellishment.19 Prudentius was more deeply engaged with Virgil, and since the case can be made that

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 237

4/28/2009 10:40:33 AM

238

The Providence of God

his poem, Against Symmachus, was the greatest of the early expressions of Christian providentialism, it can serve as an exemplary alternative to Augustine’s attitude towards Rome. Prudentius is mainly remembered today for his application of pagan allegorical reading strategies to scripture in works like the Psychomachia. Unfortunately, he is frequently neglected by systematic and historical theologians alike in their focus on the great doctrinal debates of the fourth century, and the recent interest among theologians in a plain or commonsense reading of scripture further marginalizes his crucial cultural achievement in locating Christian writing in the tradition of Virgil, which in turn made possible the achievement of Dante. In studies of the protracted negotiation among the Church Fathers over the extent to which the Christian faith should appropriate pagan culture, Augustine’s prose always trumps Prudentius’ poetry. Yet Prudentius’ more optimistic and assimilative view of the doctrine of providence was surely as influential in its own way as Augustine’s – and is surely just as relevant today. Nonetheless, Contra Symmachum, which is the text I will examine, is rarely read as a complement (let alone an alternative) to City of God. As a young man, Prudentius witnessed Julian’s pagan revival, but its failure did not lessen his concern about the proposal of Symmachus, a prominent pagan politician who had recommended Augustine for his teaching position in Milan, to reinstate the statue of Victory in the Roman Senate. Prudentius completed his poem in 403, seven years before the Visigoths sacked Rome, which provides the context for, even if it does not excuse, his confidence in the future of Christian Rome. Prudentius made Constantine and Theodosius, not their predecessors, the true recipients of Jupiter’s promise of an eternal city, but in his more sober moments, he made Christ the only hope for a peaceful politics: Do we still doubt that Rome to Thee, O Christ, Has given herself and yielded to Thy laws, And that with all her people and great men She now extends her realm beyond the stars?20

Prudentius knew that only God ‘has no limits’ (126, I, 326). Along with other Christian providentialists, Prudentius thought that Rome was eternal only in the sense that it provided the conditions for the triumph of the Church. God willed to join the peoples and the realms Of different languages and hostile cults Under the same empire and make all men

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 238

4/28/2009 10:40:34 AM

From Prudentius to President Bush

239

Accept the bonds of one harmonious rule, So that religion might unite all hearts. For there can be no union worthy of Christ Unless one spirit reigns throughout the earth. (159, I, 586–92)

Prudentius thought political order was a gift from God, that Rome had been a gift to the Church, and that the Church was a gift to the world. The charge that Prudentius was providentially promiscuous is neither charitable nor accurate. He did not simply adopt Virgil’s optimism, and his attack on Virgil’s theology is arguably more straightforward than Augustine’s.21 He maligns pagan providence by ridiculing its multiple, confusing and competing gods as well as its abstract and rigid sense of destiny. Fate ‘flees before Christ’s face’ (156, II, 487). He also did not think, simplistically, that providence always and everywhere favoured Christians or Christianity. Beneath one sky the just and the unjust All dwell, the good and evil breathe one air . . . The breath that governs life For priest and gladiator is the same. (165, II, 783–7)

Nevertheless, as he slyly points out, ‘Sharing air and sky does not create the same religion’ (166, II, 820–1). Priest and gladiator might be treated the same by the outward show of providence, but the course of history is moving to the point where it was time to abolish the gladiatorial games altogether, since the ‘slaughter of men no longer entertains’ (176, II, 1188–9). Prudentius did not have a general theory of progress, though he does accept the idea, common in the patristic period, that the history of the world has six ages before it reaches the eternal rest of the seventh. For Prudentius, history shows evidence of forward movement only because pagans can be persuaded to leave behind their traditions and join the Church. Now when it profits us to lay aside The manners of the past for newer ways, We take delight in the discovery Of things not known before; the life of man Grows and improves by long experience. (151, II, 312–16)

Paganism is a false religion because it cannot account for the way Christianity has supplanted it. Do you not see how ancient customs change And waver in their course from age to age? (152, II, 362–3)

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 239

4/28/2009 10:40:34 AM

240

The Providence of God

Rather than developing a general theory of evolutionary progress, Prudentius applies the dynamic of conversion to history. History has progressive movement because pagans can be moved to become Christian. Although he did not agree with Augustine that Rome was a bastion of brigandage, Prudentius did picture her as more than slightly pathetic, having been ‘enlightened in old age’ (132, I, 511) into feeling shame for the idolatry of her misspent youth. Augustine criticized those pagans who claimed that Rome had seen better times before the onset of Christianity, but Prudentius followed this criticism to its logical conclusion by arguing that Christianity had made Rome a better empire. He thought Christian Rome was favoured by God because ‘No place is there for spite, no one is forced’ (135, I, 613) to convert. Those who turn away from the old gods ‘are convinced, and follow, not commands, but reason’s choice’ (135, I, 615). This is an idealized view of Christian Rome, of course, but even exaggerations can have a kernel of truth. The Roman Empire, for Prudentius, gave Christian freedom its proper sphere of influence, just as the Church gave Rome the opportunity to live up to what truth it already possessed. If we were to delineate Prudentius’ political theology of providence, we could make four points. First, political order is the goal of history. Although it is easy for Americans to take political stability for granted, Prudentius knew it was a precarious achievement. Nonetheless, he thought that God wove political order into the very fabric of human striving. Second, God chose Rome to be the means of satisfying that striving. God put Rome in the right place and right time to serve God’s plan. After all, Rome was not Carthage. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the triumph of Christianity in the Mediterranean world without Roman victory in the Punic Wars. Third, the ordering of the world is not possible except through the use of force. Prudentius thought pagan Rome was violent in a way that Christian Rome was not, but he was confident that God ‘blessed the Christian victor’s arms when he advanced on Rome and into Tiber’s stream the tyrant hurled’ (131, I, 482–4). Fourth, the ordering of history is the work of Christ, who is also its goal. Political order is evidence of the human unity that is made possible by and only fully realized in Christ.

V. George W. Bush: The Providential President I propose taking these points as a template for examining the current debate over providence that is raging in America today, in conditions that are not unlike those in which Prudentius wrote. President George W. Bush has been called the providential President, and not just due to reports that

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 240

4/28/2009 10:40:34 AM

From Prudentius to President Bush

241

he thinks providence elected him President. Although all American presidents have been immersed in the assumptions of American exceptionalism, Bush appears unique in making providence his native tongue. It might be instructive to try to find in Bush’s providentialism the principles correlative to Prudentius. First, for President Bush, freedom, not political order, is the goal of history. This is one of the President’s core convictions, and he has proclaimed it on several important occasions. In the 2004 State of the Union Address, for example, Bush said, ‘I believe that God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom’ and he ended the 2005 State of the Union Address with an even bolder statement: ‘The road of providence is uneven and unpredictable – yet we know where it leads: It leads to freedom.’22 Second, like Prudentius before him, President Bush thinks that God calls nations for different tasks. For Bush, God has given America the special task of being the primary bearer of political freedom in the world today. Although in a 2003 message, Bush insisted that, ‘The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to humanity’, it is just as clear that the President thinks, as he puts it in the 2003 State of the Union Address, that ‘there is power, wonder-working power’ in the idealism of the American people. In that same speech he said that ‘this call of history has come to the right country’, and in remarks he made to the nation on 11 September 2002, he stated, ‘I believe there is a reason that history has matched this nation with this time.’ Third, President Bush thinks that the defenders of freedom have enemies, and thus the goal of freedom cannot be achieved without the use of force. The President, in fact, has been explicit in framing the conflict over freedom in terms of good and evil, most famously in his reference to the ‘axis of evil’ in the 2002 State of the Union Address. In that same speech, he said that ‘evil is real, and it must be opposed’, and in remarks made at the National Day of Prayer in the National Cathedral, on 14 September 2001, he boldly suggests that ‘our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil’. Bush believes the sides are clear because God takes sides. As he told the Joint Session of Congress on 10 September 2001, ‘Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.’ Fourth, President Bush agrees with Prudentius about the role of Christ in history, though, as President, he does not have a poet’s license to be so explicit about this. Interestingly, some evangelical pundits have criticized Bush for a failure of religious nerve, or worse, in his presidency, offering as evidence the omission of the name of Jesus in the Presidential Christmas Message of 2004 and Bush’s assertion that Muslims and Christians

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 241

4/28/2009 10:40:34 AM

242

The Providence of God

worship the same God. The evidence that Bush’s providentialism is Christologically grounded, however, is pretty strong, and extends beyond his well-known story of how Jesus helped him to give up drinking or his identification of Jesus Christ as his favourite political philosopher in 1999. Clearly, the personal is providential for Bush, but so is history, and both the personal and the historical are guided by Christ. The secular left has criticized President Bush for encoding his religious beliefs in public remarks for subliminal affect, but his religious allusions and rhetorical intentions are too obvious to sustain such suspicion. Two examples of this demonstrate his connection of Christ and providence. On the first anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks at Ellis Island, President Bush conflated the ideal of freedom with the logos of the prologue of the Gospel of John: Ours is the cause of human dignity; freedom guided by conscience and guarded by peace. This ideal of America is the hope of all mankind. That hope drew millions to this harbor. That hope still lights our way. And the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness will not overcome it.

And in remarks made on Goree Island, Senegal, in 2003, he stated, ‘In America, enslaved Africans learned the story of the exodus from Egypt and set their own hearts on a promised land of freedom. Enslaved Africans discovered a suffering savior and found he was more like themselves than their masters.’ This comment, written by Michael Gerson, widely recognized as one of the finest speech writers to put words into any President’s mouth, commingles a providential and Christological interpretation of African-American history.23 Gerson, a graduate of Wheaton College, has been portrayed as President Bush’s muse, translating his theological wishes into moving words, although a recent article by one of his colleagues accuses him of taking credit for lines that were produced collaboratively.24 Bush’s critics charge him with something much more sinister. According to the loudest voices on the political left, President Bush wants nothing less than a theocracy at home and an empire abroad, which would make Gerson the chief ideologue for an Americanized version of Christianized Rome. In fact, this charge would make Bush a modern day Constantine and Gerson his Eusebius, although Gerson keeps his words focused on America, whereas Eusebius focused his purplish prose on Constantine. Constantine has been the subject of much theological criticism in recent years. By making the world safe for Christianity, so the argument goes, the first Christian Emperor made Christianity a danger to the world. Christian soldiers replaced bleeding martyrs as the altar fused with the sword. Bush’s critics apply this same argument

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 242

4/28/2009 10:40:35 AM

From Prudentius to President Bush

243

to America: by trying to make the world safe for democracy, Bush has made America the greatest danger to world peace. Bush intones his speeches with a Texan flatness. Gerson embosses them with biblical cadences. What makes them a good team is their shared conviction that freedom and faith are interdependent, and both are a gift of God – to everyone. The most prominent example of Gerson’s influence occurred during the 2003 State of the Union address, when Bush made the remark about the wonder-working power of the American people. To the secular media, this is an example of a new political Gnosticism, with Gerson planting code words that appeal only to those in the know. I can testify that there was nothing subliminal about Gerson’s use of a phrase drawn straight out of a revival meeting. When I was growing up, evangelicals warned about the satanic messages obscured in garbled rock lyrics. Now it is liberals who are most likely to show symptoms of paranoia. The ‘wonder-working power’ phrase was a rhetorical failure because it was too obvious, not too enigmatic. Gerson is better when he works through allusion rather than quotation. Clinton too could talk like a preacher, but Bush’s tone has a matter of fact quality that makes his religious references seem less metaphorical. Al Gore could talk about a global civil war between resistance fighters on the environmental frontlines and those who have lost faith in the future of the earth, but the political left is convinced that it is Bush’s war on terrorism that is unnecessarily apocalyptic and morally obscure.25 The reason for these diverse reactions must have something to do with more than the stylistic significance of Bush’s notorious swagger. President Bush is arguably more indebted to the doctrine of providence than any President since George Washington, who, as Michael Novak has demonstrated, made a vibrant and not just deistic idea of providence the central religious focus of his life.26 Indeed, America is a nation that was invented by the idea of providence, as the title of a new book suggests, though the Vietnam War cast providential rhetoric to the margins of politics.27 Drawing from Virgil, I have argued that all nations have a providential story to tell about themselves, but that does not mean that all of these stories are the same, or that every nation gives its providential self-understanding the same value. Perhaps because the War of Independence left America with such high hopes and yet severed America from its past, Americans have been especially susceptible to a providential self-understanding. Virgil has left his mark, literally, on American history through the use of two of his phrases on the Great Seal of the United States, but it is the Virgil of Prudentius, not the Virgil of Augustine. ‘Annuit Coeptis’ from the Georgics, placed above the eye of providence, declares God’s favour for America’s undertakings,

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 243

4/28/2009 10:40:35 AM

244

The Providence of God

and ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum’ from the Eclogue expresses the belief that we have entered the era of a new American order. By speaking Prudentian rhetoric fluently, President Bush has touched on what is arguably the most definitive ideological structure in America’s self-understanding about its role in the world. President Bush has put providentialism at the forefront of American politics at just the time, providential or not, when criticisms of America’s role in the world are at their height.

VI. ‘Paranoid Politics’ That such criticisms border on the paranoid is no coincidence. Paranoia and providence are structurally similar in providing an organizational scheme for making sense of events that are otherwise only randomly or episodically construed. Nonetheless, while the doctrine of providence is an attempt to make sense of how history can be better than it seems, paranoia’s connection to extremist politics shows how it is a framework for understanding how history is worse that one could ever imagine.28 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his essay ‘Paranoid Politics’, for example, connected paranoia to the far left, bemoaning the ‘delirious interpretations’ that inflicted European communists after Second World War, while Richard Hofstadter, in his famous essay on the paranoid style in American politics, connected paranoia to the nativist right.29 Even Strauss, with his insistence that philosophers are always barely one step ahead of the political mob, teetered on a conspiratorial understanding of philosophy and a paranoid view of politics. James Piereson has made the case that since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy mainstream liberalism has increasingly tethered itself to the paranoid line.30 Worry over theocracy emerging from the omnipresence of religion in America is not unlike the worry that communism was behind the widespread fluoridation of municipal water supplies, and debates over what would have happened had Gore beaten Bush are not unlike the insistence that Trotsky would have saved Russia from Stalin.31 John Hampsey, a literary critic, has tried to relate paranoia and providence sequentially, arguing that ‘the warm hands of providence’ originated as response to the fears and pains of paranoia.32 Hampsey depicts paranoia as the thinking person’s antidote to the boredom of contentment and providence as society’s attempt to rationalize and regulate paranoia. The association of paranoia with individuals and providence with communities is unwarranted, but it does lead Hampsey to the interesting insight that providence can sublimate but never extinguish paranoid impulses. Because

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 244

4/28/2009 10:40:35 AM

From Prudentius to President Bush

245

paranoia gives rise to providence, providence is the more stable interpretative framework, but because people are never content with stability, providence is always in danger of slipping back into individual fears and suspicions. Hampsey’s fascination with the creativity of paranoia should not lead us to downplay its psychological terror. Perhaps Kierkegaard best caught the difference between the two in his retelling of the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac. If Abraham had hesitated – if he stopped to wonder who or what was really in charge of his existence – then he would have resigned himself to paranoia, instead of trusting in providence. The paranoid read history as an overdetermined set of signs each pointing them in the wrong direction. The paranoid can also, as Cervantes’ knight errant demonstrates, suffer from feelings of grandiosity – after all, they think all of those signs are ultimately pointing at them – and though providence does not appear to give rise to this phenomenon in individuals, it can, when pushed in a paranoid direction, encourage a grandiose ethos in nation-states. Paranoia is fuelled by the conviction that the order of history can be perceived only at the cost of a disordering of the political. To be more specific, we could say that the paranoid is to politics what the ugly is to art. If so, the way that much elite art has been captured by political paranoia just as much of modern politics does not even bother to cover up its bare ugliness is cause for alarm. From a Freudian point of view, paranoia multiplies, obscures and melodramatizes causation in the pursuit of a perverse yet pleasurable correlation between distorted self-knowledge and the quotidian reality of nature and history. Freud’s most systematic reflection on paranoia can be found in his notes on the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, who described his own condition in the fascinating book, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Freud never met Schreber, but he read the medical reports describing Schreber’s elaborate mythology of multiple levels of God and heaven, from which he hypothesized that paranoia is a process in which suppressed internal perceptions are projected onto the external world. Hampsey thinks that Freud missed the ‘beauty and idiosyncratic splendor of Schreber’s vision’,33 but Freud was more interested in demonstrating the links between paranoia and mythology in order to legitimate the demythologizing method of psychoanalysis. Freud concludes his notes suggesting that ‘the mythopoeic forces of mankind are not extinct, but that to this very day they give rise in the neuroses to the same psychical products as in the remotest past ages.’34 For Freud, paranoia presents the closest modern analogue to the unreflective religious fantasies of the pagan world.

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 245

4/28/2009 10:40:36 AM

246

The Providence of God

VII. Providence Displaces Paranoina Whether Freud is right that private neuroses are the return of the repressed, we can still think of Christian providence as a displacement of pagan paranoia, which might also illuminate why Christians could be paranoid in their reactions to surviving pagan practices in the late Middle Ages. Prudentius criticized paganism as a kind of paranoia, with its inconstant and unpredictable gods exercising hidden and devious powers.35 While the providentialist traces all causation to a good source that is revealed to all, the paranoid needlessly multiplies causes that are both hidden and evil. At one point in his poem, Prudentius blames the devil for causing pagans to project false beliefs onto the world. A hellish fiend is worshiped, who transports You to the sky and makes you venerate A star as god. (127, I, 370–2)

From Prudentius we could say that Satan, the father of lies, works through paranoia in the same way that God works through providence. To be more precise, paranoia is the way that Satan tries to outwit divine providence. For both the providentialist and the paranoid, nothing is accidental, but the moral lessons they draw from this perspective are radically different. The providentialist is humbled by history because God’s will cannot be read from historical events in any straightforward way. As a result, the providentialist resists the temptation of self-aggrandizement as well as the tendency to blame historical forces for one’s own failures. The paranoid, by contrast, is convinced that the secrets of history can be revealed by strenuous individual effort and that, once opened, history will establish the paranoid’s moral superiority to all of those who have been fooled by common wisdom. Take as an example of this phenomenon the way some theologians have made the paradoxical claim that the Bush administration is outrageously inept and incompetent in all of its actions except in the way it so expertly orchestrated the terrorist attacks on 9/11 that only a handful of theologians have been able to figure out the plot. If that sounds like a caricature of the anti-Bush intelligentsia, listen to Michael Northcott, professor of Christian ethics at the University of Edinburgh, who wonders, in a recent book, about ‘the coincidence between the events of September 11 and the need for a major security crisis to enable the Bush administration to achieve its geopolitical intent’.36 He seriously ponders reports that Pentagon officials cancelled their travel plans on 11 September. Lest he be accused of flippant anti-Americanism, he goes much further

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 246

4/28/2009 10:40:36 AM

From Prudentius to President Bush

247

than Augustine in disallowing any providential interpretation of history. ‘After the Resurrection and Ascension no nation, no polity, any longer has the right to rule’ because ‘Christ is the only true ruler’,37 a position that would make the Anabaptists look like rabid nationalists. John Milbank’s criticisms of President Bush are similar to Northcott’s. Take his assertion that the United States has deployed the terrorizing and murder of civilians . . . as a primary instrument of military and political policy. Cumulatively, this reveals the relatively genocidal tendency of specifically Republican imperialism . . . and it amounts to an atrocity almost on a level with the Holocaust and the Gulags.

This argument from moral equivalence shows symptoms of paranoia when Milbank remarks that ‘the sheer convenience of war and military emergency’ leads him to suspect that ‘forces were, subconsciously or consciously, urging war’ over oil, of course, to the point where 11 September ‘may even have been a preemptive strike by some Islamic forces’. In the same breath he equates President Bush’s address to Congress after 9/11 with ‘Hitler’s announcement of the Third Reich’ and laments the ‘terrible symbiosis arising between Zionism and the American Protestant and un-Christian literalistic reading of the Old Testament in the Puritan tradition’. Milbank is convinced that nation-states cannot be carriers of God’s purposes and thus the only just response to the terrorist attacks would have involved bringing them ‘before the International Court in the Hague, which could have sponsored many effective means to reduce their influence’. Milbank’s anti-providentialism even leads him to label as idolatry any ‘nontypological and noneschatological reading of God’s “free election of Israel”, as if really and truly God’s “oneness” meant that he arbitrarily prefers one lot of people to another (as opposed to working providentially for a time through one people’s advanced insight – as Maimonides rightly understood Jewish election.’ Israel for Milbank earned God’s favour by its ‘advanced insight’, but that lasted only ‘for a time’, which suggests that Israel was wise enough to choose God, not that God chose Israel.38 One might think that Milbank has effectively eliminated the doctrine of providence when applied to nation-states, but then on what ground does Milbank place his hope that international organizations can embody ‘an eternal order of justice’ and thus create ‘a shared overarching global polity’ with ‘continuously revisable structures dedicated to promoting the common good insofar as this can be agreed upon’? These utopian ideals demonstrate that Milbank actually has greater providential hopes than those who are usually associated with this doctrine. Far from being a strict

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 247

4/28/2009 10:40:36 AM

248

The Providence of God

opponent of American providentialism, then, Milbank treats it in a way that is similar to Augustine’s treatment of Virgil. That is, Milbank stands it on its head. He accepts the story of American chosenness only to substitute evil for the good Americans think they do and demons for the God Americans think they worship. America is the representation of liberty, he admits, but ‘Pure liberty is pure power – whose other name is evil.’ While accusing most Americans of being purely Virgilian in their understanding of providence, he outdoes Augustine by comparing America, unfavourably, to Rome, because ‘it pursues no substantive goals of the political and social good (however deluded the ones of the old empire may have been) and seeks instead both for pure economic exploitation and for the absolute imposition of American signifiers.’39 Evidently, the spread of capitalism by businessmen entails a more dangerous distortion of Christian freedom than the slave economy imposed by the Roman legion. Perhaps the lesson to be learned from theologians like Milbank and Northcott is that America is so immersed in providentialism that her critics must resort to providential logic if they wish to redescribe America’s role in the world. Jean Bethke Elshtain has argued that ‘Anti-Americanism is the form that nationalism takes in many European countries.’40 If so, and if all nationalisms are variants of providentialism, then anti-Americanism does not escape the logical sphere of America’s providential self-understanding. We can go further than Elshtain by suggesting that on a psychological level, anti-Americanism is a collective form of paranoia, and that on a theological level it is a distorted form of the doctrine of providence that has its roots in a Marcionitic treatment of the people of Israel. Whenever a contemporary theologian has a problem with the doctrine of providence, the problem is usually in his or her reading of Augustine, and this is the case with Milbank. Milbank thinks that Augustine’s definition of evil as privatio boni precludes the assignment of any positive ontological value to violence. ‘Christianity, uniquely, does not allow violence any real ontological purchase.’41 Violence, that is, contributes nothing positive to the realization of the true or the good. Milbank claims to draw this conclusion from the City of God, but it is more likely that he is projecting a modern attitude towards violence onto Augustine, who recognized the need for political order, its necessary violence, and, as in the case of the Donatists, the benefits of enforcing that order for the Church. Joan Lockwood O’Donovan has noted the ‘Erasmian overtones in Milbank’s theological polemic against the Western political tradition’,42 pointing out similarities between Milbank’s conception of redemption in terms of a poetic participation in the perfections of Jesus Christ and Erasmus’s plea for a heavily Platonized rhetoric of peace as a remedy to theological

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 248

4/28/2009 10:40:36 AM

From Prudentius to President Bush

249

conflict that was quickly overwhelming Europe. Like Erasmus, Milbank identifies Christianity with a rhetoric of peace, and he rejects dialectical reasoning for being grounded, like Virgil’s Aeneid, in conflict.43 He can hope for a politics without violence only by idealizing international law (and reviving the dreams of socialism) as a kind of churchly superstate that conflates the two cities Augustine worked so hard to keep distinct. Most anti-providentialism in America, I should note, does not rise to such an apocalyptic level. Timothy Melley attributes political paranoia in America to what he calls ‘agency panic’, which is anxiety over social issues that have no identifiable cause.44 We can also think of agency panic as caused by anxiety over the political burdens that have been placed on America after the end of the Cold War. The paranoid isolate America as the single and unified cause behind most of the world’s problems, but there are some forms of anti-providentialism that prefer to avoid thinking about America’s unique responsibilities altogether. Many of Bush’s critics denounce him for his relative inattention to multilateralism and place their hope for the future in the rule of international law, not the will of nations.45 Prudentius, interestingly enough, attributed the harmony Rome established to Roman law: To curb this madness, God has everywhere Taught nations to accept the selfsame laws. (159, II, 602–3)

Nonetheless, Prudentius had no illusions about the Roman might that made that law effective. Walter Russell Mead, who has reflected deeply about the necessity at this point in world history for the American project of defeating terrorism and establishing a global system of religious, economic and political freedom, writes, Although many critics of Bush’s foreign policy have criticized what they see as a failure of the administration to follow a more multilateral approach, one only needs to turn to the liberal wing of the Episcopal Church to see how shallow this principled multilateralism actually is.46

The dream of global governance without national power is a dream of politics without enmity. Oliver O’Donovan, who has emphasized the doctrine of providence in political theology more than any other recent theologian, helps us to understand how even international law can be constructed, imposed and enforced only by authorities acting within nations and by nations acting authoritatively over other nations. Like Schmitt, O’Donovan defines the political in terms of judgement, which is the act of a sovereign authority, and he closely

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 249

4/28/2009 10:40:37 AM

250

The Providence of God

connects this definition to the doctrine of providence. Social contract theories thus accomplish in the political realm what Darwin accomplished in the natural: the abolition of final causes from public deliberation. Political liberalism for Schmitt constitutes a denial of the political, but for O’Donovan it is also a denial of providence, because it seeks to abolish the need to ground political authority in the actions of God by abstractly universalizing the question of right and justice.47 Combining Schmitt and O’Donovan suggests a link between the denial of the tragic persistence of enmity in politics and a resistance to a providential interpretation of nation-states. For O’Donovan, the missionary impulse of the Church necessarily gives rise to a providential interpretation of history, so that the Great Commission constitutes a decisive linkage of the theological to the political, unless Christians are to think that the world would be better off if their mission failed. Contrary to Hauerwas and company, then, genuine Christian social engagement is based on conversion, not martyrdom. O’Donovan avoids the temptation of triumphalism by insisting that, along with developing the skills of providential interpretation, Christians should be able to discern the false claims for universality that take the form of the Antichrist. The Antichrist represents totalitarian political claims that leave no room for the freedom of faith, while its discernment demonstrates the ease with which providential interpretations of history can slide into paranoia. O’Donovan thus helps us to see what is at stake in the providential interpretation of America. If the paranoid has a false view of causality, it is because he does not know where he is. For Oliver O’Donovan, ‘to have a political identity means accepting the contingent determination of one’s society by the decrees of God’s historical providence, which allows no justification or criticism.’48 To reject a strongly providential reading of political history is to literally uproot our social instincts, which leaves the political vulnerable to the blowing winds of the prejudices of the mass media and the fantasies of the cultural elite. The ongoing viability of the doctrine of providence, then, depends on an appropriate theological response to what O’Donovan calls ‘a loss of moral confidence in relation to place’.49 Prudentius agrees: Indeed, what place could there have been for God In such a savage world and in men’s hearts Filled with discord and different views of right? (160, II, 623–5)

Our worship of a God who created space as well as time and implanted a need in us to be situated in space justifies providential interpretations of

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 250

4/28/2009 10:40:37 AM

From Prudentius to President Bush

251

history. That is why debates over religious freedom in America are so crucial for world history. O’Donovan says that the first amendment ‘can usefully be taken as the symbolic end of Christendom’.50 That is true, of course, only if first amendment absolutists are right that America was designed to be free from religion, rather than free for religion. By dismissing worldly powers from their responsibility to the Church – in O’Donovan’s words, ‘a state freed from all responsibility to recognize God’s self-disclosure in history’51 – first amendment absolutists created a political space that can never be brought into harmony with God’s designs for world history. We can give Prudentius, in a concise, Burkean statement that sums up the Christian providentialist tradition, the last word: ‘Concord alone knows God’ (159, II, 593).

Notes 1 My reflections on providence and politics are meant to be a complement to my essay, ‘Eschatology and Politics’, in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, ed. Jerry L. Walls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ch. 29, 500–17. My reflections also develop and supplement some of the ideas I worked through in American Providence: A Nation with a Mission (New York: Continuum, 2004). 2 Carl Schmitt, Concept of the Political, expanded edition, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 3 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (New York: Routledge, 2005), 14. 4 We could also say that enmity provides the philosophical and providence the theological boundaries of the political, but that is not quite right, since the political is inherently a theological problem precisely because it always involves enmity. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 294–6. 5 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 294–6. For my reflections on Schmitt’s relationship to Strauss, see my ‘Review of Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem’, in Political Theology 8/4 (2007): 497–503. 6 Francis Canavan, Edmund Burke: Prescription and Providence (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1987). 7 R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 8 Lidia Storoni Mazzolani highlights two contradictory themes of City of God: ‘One sets out to controvert the ancient assumption that religion is the shield of the fatherland, and that a god will, if correctly propitiated, protect one city, and only one; the other sets out to oppose those who follow the Sceptics, Stoics and Epicureans in regarding the gods as remote and indifferent beings.’ The Idea of the City in Roman Thought: From Walled City to Spiritual Commonwealth, trans. S. O’Donnell (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1970), 253. 9 This point is important, because it suggests that Augustine was judging Rome on the basis of how it understood itself, not by an abstract measure of justice or peacefulness.

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 251

4/28/2009 10:40:37 AM

252

The Providence of God

10 Sabine MacCormack, The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil in the Mind of Augustine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 174 and xviii. Also see Albertus Mahoney, Vergil in the Works of Prudentius (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1934). 11 Oliver O’Donovan, Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), 22. 12 Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 743–4 (XVII, 13). 13 Ibid., 45 (I, 35). 14 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 402–3. For another analysis of Milbank’s departure from Markus, see Michael J. Hollerich,, ‘John Milbank, Augustine, and the “Secular”’, in History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination: New Essays on Augustine’s City of God, ed. Mark Vessey, Karla Pollmann and Allan D. Fitzgerald (Bowling Green: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1999), 311–26. Hollerich notes that Milbank’s ‘corrective [of Markus] does not invalidate the still persuasive account Markus has given of Augustine’s disenchantment with a Christian legitimation of the Roman Empire’ (326). 15 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 402. 16 Ibid., 405. 17 Augustine, City of God, 787 (XVIII, 22). 18 Christopher J. Berry, ‘On the Meaning of Progress and Providence in the Fourth Century’, Heythrop Journal 18 (1977): 257–70. 19 ‘In contradistinction to those of the ecclesiastical writers who looked upon Vergil as an omniscient authority, Orosius used him as a source for rhetorical embellishment or general knowledge, and never as corroborative testimony for any doctrine involving the Christian faith.’ Harrison C. Coffin, ‘Vergil and Orosius’, The Classical Journal 31/4 (January 1936), 240. 20 The Poems of Prudentius, vol. 2, trans. Sister M. Clement Eagan (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1965), 134 (I, 587–90). All further citations will be in the text. 21 Even while criticizing pagan theology, Prudentius can be playful when it comes to Virgil’s poetry and appreciative of pagan art. See Martha A. Malamud, A Poetics of Transformation: Prudentius and Classical Mythology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 90–3. 22 All of President Bush’s quotations are easily found on the web. 23 Some of what follows develops my review of Michael Gerson, Heroic Conservatism, on First Things website, posted 20 Feb. 2008 www.firstthings. com/onthesquare/?p=977. 24 Matthew Scully, ‘Present at Creation’, The Atlantic Monthly (September 2007): 77–88. 25 Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1992). For this point, see Paul Kengor, God and George W. Bush: A Spiritual Life (New York: ReganBooks, 2004), 180. 26 Michael Novak and Jana Novak, Washington’s God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of Our Country (New York: Basic Books, 2006). 27 Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607– 1876 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Also see Webb,

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 252

4/28/2009 10:40:37 AM

From Prudentius to President Bush

28 29

30

31

32 33 34

35

36

37 38

39

40 41

253

American Providence, ch. 2: ‘Providence American Style: A Short History of the Construction of the Idea of America’. See Robert S. Robins and Jerrold M. Post, Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 253, and Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), ch. 1. ‘In the years and decades after the assassination, nearly all the elements of the far right that had so unnerved the liberals of the 1950s moved across the political spectrum to the far left, including a fascination with conspiracies, the use of overheated and abusive rhetoric to characterize foes, and expressions of hatred for the United States.’ James Piereson, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (New York: Encounter Books, 2007), 199. For my response to the charge of theocracy, see Webb, ‘The Dastardly Peril of Conservative Christianity’. Review article of Damon Linker, The Theocons: Secular America under Siege, in Conversations in Religion and Theology 5/1 (May 2007): 65–72, and Linker’s response, 86–90. John C. Hampsey, Paranoia and Contentment: A Personal Essay on Western Thought (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 58. Ibid., 74. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 82. Also see John Farrell, Freud’s Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion (New York: New York University Press, 1996). See Friedrich Solmsen, ‘The Powers of Darkness in Preduentius’ Contra Symmachum: A Study of his Poetic Imagination’, Vigiliae Christiannae 19 (1965), 249. For a much more positive view of Prudentius’ appropriation of pagan authors, see Marc Mastrangelo, The Roman Self in Late Antiquity: Prudentius and the Poetics of the Soul (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), which I review in Reviews in Religion and Theology, 16/1 (March 2009): 268–71. Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire (London: I. B. Taurus, 2004), 91. For more, read my review of this book in Religion and Theology 12/2 (April 2005): 270–2. Ibid., 43. John Milbank, ‘Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror’, in Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 79, 74, 77, 67, 71, 80 and 70. Ibid., 81, 65 and 66. Milbank thinks that Christians have the obligation to ‘strive still to abolish capitalism’. ‘Socialism of the Gift, Socialism by Grace’, New Blackfriars 77 (December 1996): 544. See my critique of Milbank’s views on economics in ‘New Theology, Old Economics’, in First Things (April 2007): 11–13. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 147. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 432.

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 253

4/28/2009 10:40:38 AM

254

The Providence of God

42 Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, ‘The Christian Pedagogy and Ethics of Erasmus’, Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics, Past and Present (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), 121. Another of her comments about Erasmus can be applied, with various qualifications, no doubt, to Milbank: ‘His rhetoric of civil government particularly suffers from theological incompleteness in its failure to recognize as a distinct Trinitarian work ad extra the Father’s preservation of the sinful human community by the lawful use of coercive power and to relate this work to the universal rule of the risen Christ through the Holy Spirit. Thus he fluctuates (despite his avowed intentions) between handing over civil rule to pagan writers and assimilating it too closely to the spiritual rule of Christ in the church’ (136). Interestingly, Marc Mastrangelo’s reading of Prudentius as a protohumanist in love with the power of language puts him in the company of Erasmus. 43 See Elizabeth Agnew Cochran, ‘At the Same Time Blessed and Lame: Ontology, Christology and Violence in Augustine and John Milbank’, Journal for Christian Theological Research 11 (2006): 51–72. 44 Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 6. 45 For my reflections on American foreign policy, theology, and globalism, see ‘Whittaker Chambers Looks at Islam’, in Reviews in Religion and Theology 13/4 (2006): 611–18 and ‘On the True Globalism and the False, or Why Christians Should Not Worry So Much about American Imperialism’, in Anxious about Empire: Theological Essays on the New Global Realities, ed. Wes Avram (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004), 119–28. 46 Walter Russell Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 93–4. 47 Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 229. 48 Oliver O’Donovan, Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), 43. 49 O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection, 300. 50 O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, 244. 51 Ibid., 245.

FMurphy_12_Finals.indd 254

4/28/2009 10:40:38 AM

Chapter 13

Providence and Political Discernment Charles Mathewes1

I begin with two facts about our world. On the basement level of the White House – more like the ‘garden room’ level – there is a complex of rooms known colloquially as the ‘Situation Room’. From one of several conference rooms in this complex the President of the United States, or his deputies, can instantaneously call up real-time satellite imagery of almost any spot on the globe (parts of Antarctica take a little longer). The immediate resolution on these images is relatively grainy – I believe the declassified resolution is measured in inches – but given several hours, significantly better resolution can be guaranteed. These images are not the only things available to the President in the Situation Room. He or she has access to an almost unbelievable range of statistics, information and analysis, of the sort that any leader of even 40 or 50 years ago would have never imagined possible. Biometric monitoring technologies are being developed to identify people’s emotions and mind-set from their body movements and temperature. To borrow from another context, soon they’ll know when you are sleeping, they’ll know when you’re awake – and much, much more. What could the President do with this information? Well, lots of things. But here’s one: in the past several years reports have emerged of a new weapons technology under, if not development, at least exploration. This weapons system would consist of a series of 20-foot long shafts made out of tungsten – an extremely hard metal – and launched into low-earth orbit on satellites. The satellites would then work as ballistas, and the shafts as missiles. Released from space, the shafts would survive re-entry and hit the earth’s surface travelling at approximately 36,000 feet per second – the speed of a meteor. There is no warhead, nothing but the velocity and mass of the shaft would communicate the destructive force; but a single shaft would have the explosive power of a low-yield earth penetrating nuclear device without the radioactive fallout, probably disrupting the crust of the earth down to several hundred feet – enough to crush any hardened underground facilities, which would presumably be the target (the surface damage, while extensive, would be merely collateral). The length of time, from decision to use the weapons system to impact on the surface, would be about 15 minutes. The name of the system? ‘Rods from God’.

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 255

4/28/2009 10:40:12 AM

256

The Providence of God

Omniscience and omnipotence are historically the province of divinity. But as the examples above make clear, humans are coming ever closer to certain kinds of at least parodic simulacra of such attributes. The image of an all-knowing, all-seeing entity has escaped the Foucauldian imagination to become a realizable goal of some technologists; and the idea of a Zeus-like deity hurtling thunderbolts from the heavens – well, we already have shock and awe. And yet, with all of our power, all our knowledge, humanity seems more anxious about the future than we have ever been; facing the prospect of a war on terror without end, awakening to the live prospect of environmental cataclysm, ever more deeply sensitive to the fluctuations of the now global economy, we are more aware of our vulnerability, our susceptibility to powers beyond our control, than ever before. As the old images of divine providence have become perhaps frighteningly materialized, that is, the content of that faith has seemed to dissolve. Some of this is due to cultural changes. Despite the fact that politics in Europe and North America today is demonstrably more accountable, more transparent and more fair than ever before – just, that is, when the prospects for genuine democratic action are at their most potent – the past few decades have seen a seemingly inexorable rise in cynicism and despair about politics. Furthermore, we seem to have lost confidence in the significance of history and time itself. We find it harder and harder to find the necessary cultural resources to articulate a vision of history as meaningful or significant. In this situation, the idea of providence becomes vestigial, and may atrophy without even really being directly considered at all. Our lamented practical deism is, perhaps more than we recognize, the consequence of our practical nihilism. Can a providentialist faith be viable in this world? How can we faithfully inhabit politics, when we seem necessarily to be mastering the future? Assuming that there is no technology of political deliberation available here, and no successful exploitation of providence for divination or geopolitical meterology, our answer can only be oblique – illuminating the practice indirectly, by highlighting some aspects of its successful practice. Here I try to do just that. I want to offer an exposition, a picture of how political deliberation and discernment should go forward with a vivid faith in God’s proper ordering. I do this because there is a certain lack of appreciation of how fruitful providentially shaped politics can be. Many theologians explore and bemoan certain dubious misuses, conscious or unconscious, of providence talk, historically and today. Yet it seems to me that we also need some sense of how a lively and traditional faith in providence should

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 256

4/28/2009 10:40:13 AM

Providence and Political Discernment

257

work in shaping our political deliberations. And I agree with Philip Ziegler2 that its work can be substantial indeed. Of course to do that we need to know what we affirm when we affirm providence. And to do this requires some real attention to the shape of the divine providence which is to be affirmed. So I turn to that next.

I. Theological Prolegomena: What is Providence? The categories of providence and political discernment are deeply intertwined. Historically, understandings of divine providence emerged in significant part from reflection on rule and politics. The leader was the wise person who listened for God’s purposes; also, much of doctrine of providence emerged from Israel’s reflections on God’s governance of world affairs (including Gen. 50.20). Even today, when we think about providence, we typically think about the course of nations, peoples and empires.3 These connections are not accidental, for theology and politics are deeply and possibly irremediably entwined; the language of idolatry and worship emerges as much from political settings as from theological ones. This is so even in modernity, whose theopolitical pretensions are legion. Claims to know providence, ‘historical inevitability’ or destiny pervade modernity. And this should not be surprising. Any attempt to make sense of history will inevitably involve claims to know the course of history, especially as our sensibility of nuances and contingencies of history grows. Everyone who thinks about life in time – that is, everyone – has some functional equivalent to the doctrine of providence – some way of giving the shape of history or time meaning and purpose. And anyone who thinks about time and history, in our world, thinks about politics. More specifically, three aspects of providence are especially relevant for how it can affect political discernment. First of all, Christian providence affirms that God is the electing God whose first gift to us is our own selves. As God gave Abraham his name and identity, and guided him all the days of his life, so God gives all of us our lives. Providence, that is, is about God’s providing for us (see Gen. 22.14). Second, providence is about judgement and election. But these two are one; God’s judgement is for our election – but the election is also a selection, a decision for the one true form of us versus the manifold alternative selves that we draft in our attempts to avoid becoming who we are called to be. Third, and emerging from this election and judgement, God gives us newness, the New Creation. God is ever a living God, always giving us a new thing. Providence is about new life, and life abundant – a life to which human reflection and action is

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 257

4/28/2009 10:40:13 AM

258

The Providence of God

always trying to catch up, which is always ahead of us, which we follow, if at times at a distance. What does all this amount to? Well, providence is, as Barth puts it, the execution of God’s decree of election. The work of providence is God’s holy superintendence of all things, God’s cunning prudential governance of a world that does its damndest to not want to be God’s creation. The aim of providence is to turn that world aright and transfigure it in Christ, so that, in God’s good time, humanity can come to receive creation as creation, and enter into the communion with God which is our eschatological destiny. In all these things the God we see is Christ – electing and elected, judging and judged, first-born of all creation and the end of all creation. Of course providence speaks of the absolutely unconstrained form of God’s sovereign love and care for creation. Yet it is not sufficient to say that God will be God. We must also say that God has decided to be God for us and eternally so as a decree of God’s inmost being. The immanent Trinity has taken Jesus as a human into the Triune life. Christ as incarnate suggests that the core of God’s providence is the taking up of an already gratuitous creation in a still more, scandalously gratuitous manner, into God’s own life abundant. Hence to know God’s providence is simply to know the Triune God’s good freedom, which has determinate form in the decree of the election of humanity in Jesus Christ. In this way Christ radically transfigures the temptation towards voluntarism that so firm an insistence on the absolute sovereignty of a radically transcendent God might suggest. Christ is not a secondary or accidental modification of God’s prior decree; because all is created in Christ and through Christ, and because Jesus Christ is first-born of all creation, God has elected to be fully and radically present in creation as the transcendent God of creation. Yet the gratuitous presence of this God does not mean that creation is not gratuitously eccentric; indeed the gratuitous presence of God as a gift if anything underscores God’s radical freedom in all dealings with creation. In sum, then, providence is God’s way of dealing with the world – it is God’s prudence, in fact, and the terms are etymologically linked. This providence is both a decree of election and of judgement, and is incarnate as Jesus Christ, who is our end and our liberation. As God’s loving superintendence of the world, providence operates immediately at all levels, from a grain of sand to nations and empires and the cosmos. But providence is not simply about God, it is also about the world: To think about providence is to think both about God and about God’s creation in the most intimate way we can.

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 258

4/28/2009 10:40:13 AM

Providence and Political Discernment

259

II. Providence and Politics Now, what are the implications of confessed belief in providence for our political life and deliberations? I will suggest three ways in which it should shape our inhabitation of that life, ways that correspond to the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. Before I do that however, I think it is worth saying something about the relationship between divine and human agency, from the perspective of humans. That is, while many in this book discuss the nature of divine causality, and in ways that I largely agree with, I want to say something about how this issue cashes out in understandings not of divine but of human agency. This is arguably at least as important as understanding divine agency aright, for it has a more immediate affect on how we understand our own lives.4 It is all the more important, because it is the way we understand our own lives – the typical modern depiction of human agency – that in fact crucially obstructs our appreciation of the traditional understanding of providence. This typical modern understanding of human action depicts us as wholly self-making agents, acting into the world through simple choice, radically unconstrained by any conditions that the world might attempt to set on our agency. I call this the ex nihilo understanding of agency, to highlight how it models human agency on a particular understanding of divine action – the radically unconstrained, ex nihilo action of God in creation. It’s at least arguable that this picture builds on a problematic theological interpretation of God’s ex nihilo activity; but in any event it is clear that this is a Promethean vision of the human – a vision that emphasizes the human’s capacity to act while ignoring or downplaying the constraints on the human’s dependency on forces and persons beyond themselves. This modern picture may sound like a great trumpeting of human magnificence, an ‘Oration to the Dignity of Humankind’; but note how deeply pessimistic are its implications about the prospects of human relations. It offers no way to acknowledge our enmeshment with, participation in, or vulnerability to, one another; it assumes we are fundamentally separate from each other. On this account, love appears as nothing but the negotiation of our individual, private happinesses. We talk, that is, as if we do not believe that love is the core of our being; as if we believe that the world is ultimately a matter of sheer power, of conflicting wills, without respite; as if we want to be left wholly alone.5 Beneath our latent Promethean idolatry is a deep existential despair, a sense of being alone, of being abandoned. In contrast, the traditional providentialist account of human action understands human action as not fundamentally self-starting, but as

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 259

4/28/2009 10:40:13 AM

260

The Providence of God

responsible, in two ways. First there is the ordinary sense in which we are morally responsible, held responsible by others and especially God; we will be called to account before God, to justify what we have done. But second and more fundamentally, we are also ontologically responsible; our actions are best understood as fundamentally responses to actions upon us. Humans are more acted upon than acting, Luther says somewhere in his Table Talk. This has several interesting implications to understanding human behaviour. First of all our first ‘act’ is receptivity, a form of discernment. We listen, we seek and beseech a word.6 Secondly, integral to that discernment is confession: Our discernment reveals how we understand not only our world, but it also reveals who we are and who we hope to be in the future. That is to say, action is not fundamentally sheerly, brutally physical but ineliminably meaning-laden: it is intelligible, responsive, one moment in our ongoing intellective engagement with the cosmos and our fellow humans. This inquiry is narratively structured, and our actions become what they are by finding their place in a story – we are storyformed creatures, and to know who we are, both for ourselves and for others, is to know the shape and texture of the story of who we are. In this way our actions reveal how we understand ourselves to be in a ‘dialogue’ with those around us, and with the cosmos as a whole: in short, with God.7 (This is captured in the Hebrew word hinneni, loosely translatable as ‘here I am’, said primarily to God though at several points to other humans, which means that the speaker offers him- or herself as available to the other person.) This is not simply a subjective report about what we feel; our self-knowledge is inextricably implicated in an assessment of the world we inhabit, and the God before whom we stand. Nonetheless, as I will now argue, this discernment is always provisional and ambiguous, especially so in politics, and underscores the importance of a humble confessionalism.

A. Discernment and moral clarity Confessionalism brings us to the first virtue: faith. A providential faith leads us both to faithful confessional openness, and eager confidence in seeking God’s presence in all things. Because politics, as a historical reality, is under God’s governance, God’s judgement, this judgement is itself historically manifest, if not necessarily readily legible. History has meaning – it is the bearer of God’s work of salvation, the medium God uses to tell and enact God’s story of the love of creation – but it is only eschatologically finalized.

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 260

4/28/2009 10:40:14 AM

Providence and Political Discernment

261

None of this entails any simple legibility of providence. It is, as Philip Ziegler puts it below, inscrutable.8 It shapes our faith, giving us confidence in God’s aim; not directly our knowledge. Providence should evoke in us, as Hans Reinders argues, ‘trust and hope’.9 Still, it shapes epistemology indirectly, by inducing a kind of healthy paranoia. For our apprehension of it in this life will remain perennially incomplete. We cannot be sure what will be significant and how it will be so – so we must live without blinders, resisting ideological lenses. God sends rain on the just and the unjust, and success does not always go to the deserving. We must look not just at the Goliaths of our world, but also at the Davids, hiding in caves; and we should seek God’s plan not just in the palaces of the high and mighty but in the stables of the poor and lowly. Such a deeper exploration of history and memory will lead to deeper appreciation of our need of God, and deeper sense of helplessness in history, without an anchor in history to something in some sense exceeding it.10 And yet this is not escapist, because God is going to redeem all of history, not just a selective part of it, and so we must never forego attention to the scrutiny of the fine-grained texture of individual events. Here is where the all too often Orwellian language of ‘moral clarity’ becomes quite relevant. For the setting and experience of political life effectively smothers the felt ambivalences that are the immediate experience of a minimally reflective person in our world; because of this, the rhetoric of ‘moral clarity’ is typically used to efface the real complexity of a situation, to make us focus on some points and disregard others. In contrast, real moral clarity teaches a deep appreciation for the breadth of the relevant facts about the world, an appreciation that should produce in us a deep and complicated ambivalence. A providence-informed faith offers moral obscurity, moral difficulty. It doesn’t make things clearer, but rather more vividly ambiguous and complicated.11 For example, one relevant way in which moral clarity can provide some interesting insight is in the extremely fraught question of the value of nation-states in the emerging global era. Many identify nation-states as the fundamental cause of the violence and divisions of modernity, and blame unthinking identification with some group or other – whether ethnic, religious or national, but fundamentally national – as the cause of our ills. Especially since so many of our problems are supranational – from global flows of capital markets and multinational corporations to ecological and economic problems of international inequality – such critics argue that the nation-state, and the patriotism it entails, is not only impotent, but positively pernicious in our world.

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 261

4/28/2009 10:40:14 AM

262

The Providence of God

But in fact a clear-eyed assessment of our situation suggests as much of a case for the nation-state as against it. After all, the larger structures people point to as possible alternatives to the nation-state system, such as regional associations like the EU, or international associations such as the UN (let alone multinational corporations, some of whom have private armies, some of whom rent out national armies, and some of whom simply are armies) – are in fact less democratically accountable and more sclerotic than the nation-state system itself. Nation-states remain, for all their imperfections, the most effective bit of political technology humans have yet invented. They are typically ‘close’ enough to their inhabitants for those inhabitants to have some real power over their behaviour, yet large enough for that behaviour to have some real effects in the world.12 This renewed perception of the ambiguities and complexity of our world may lead to a renewed appreciation for the urgency and messiness of real politics, as a way of people coming to confront the many differences and semi-divergences that they collectively possess, and trying to manage them as best they can together. This is not simply a matter of the pragmatic negotiation of interests; it is more deeply than that, a sharing of hopes and fears. This process of real politics – of exposing your fears, and hearing others, and letting your own be reshaped by that exposure – is disturbing and disquieting. But that’s what negotiations are. The word ‘negotiation’ actually comes from the Latin nec-otium, ‘unquiet’. It’s supposed to upset you. But the management of one’s own upset, not the absence of it, is part of what it means to be a grown-up. And part of what it means to live in a political world – which we manifestly do.

B. Judgement as mercy and repentance If faith in providence provokes in us an ever-deeper appreciation of the bewildering richness of our situation, a hopeful appreciation of the content of that providential governance helps us undergo the ordeal of the fulfilment of God’s judgement as mercy. Mercy is not just about our dealings with others; it is more primordially about God’s dealings with us. Our political lives are always in part the struggle between receiving this mercy and our anxious attempts to evade recognizing our need for it by presuming that politics can repair the damage we have done and thus render us beyond God’s call to repent and seek mercy. This is not easy to see, especially for rulers. Given the terror properly involved in any act of judging, in the presumptuous exercises of authority that politics entails – a terrible presumptuousness that cannot be far from

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 262

4/28/2009 10:40:14 AM

Providence and Political Discernment

263

the consciousness of any authority – it is not surprising that many seek to avoid acknowledging the way that they are not their own sources, but are responsible beyond themselves to another. That is why we so typically fall into presumptuousness as authorities. All such authorities, inasmuch as they attempt to grasp authority, fail to grasp it: they both fail to grasp the concept of authority (and hence fail to understand themselves as vessels through which authority works and so fail to understand the inner nature of authority itself) and they fail actually in their attempt to become a wholly self-legitimating authority. The classical – indeed, the post-lapsarian – vision of stern authority, with its apparent marble confidence in the controlling hand of the master, is always cunningly subverted by God’s uncanny and merciful providence. That is why, for Augustine (for example), the first act of ‘judgement’ must be an ‘inner’ act of self-judgement – a constant self-lacerating assessment of the reasons for one’s continued acceptance of this terrible burden. Augustine says, ‘judge yourself first’ – you must make yourself be tortured ‘on the rack of your heart’.13 Indeed, it is only after exploring the presumptuousness of judging – when those in authority had been brought to recognize their sinful continuity with those who would stone the woman caught in adultery, and their implication in the paradoxical human condition of working out our salvation in fear and trembling – only, that is, when the authorities can begin to feel in their guts the presumption of their offices – it is only after these several chastising swipes at political rulers are given, that Augustine turns to the text that had already by his own time become one of the most fundamental New Testament texts for Christian political understanding, namely, Romans 13 (‘let every soul be subject to the higher authorities, for there is no authority except from God’, etc.), to explain the logic and aim of the various offices of authority in human society. Because of the intrinsic obscurity of the events we are called to scrutinize, and because of the flawed and frail ways we undertake that scrutiny, we must always recur to what we do know with confidence, which is the fundamental mercy of God’s providential plan. Politics is definitely and finally about power; but the human exercise of that power should always be marked by the quality of mercy for which the human executor should herself hope. God desires mercy, not sacrifice. This is so because the point of political judgement is found in crucial part in its salvific benefits, its ability to serve the redemptive purposes of God. Political judgement is part of the larger judgement of God.14 Certainly in our fallen world, the time of political authorities is at best largely occupied with securing whatever modicum of a parody of true

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 263

4/28/2009 10:40:15 AM

264

The Providence of God

justice and peace as is allowed them by the exigencies of the day. But political authorities – and as citizens, all of us are in some sense political authorities – are put in their offices15 to secure justice and be merciful in their dealings with those who are subject to their authority – as God will be, they hope, with them. One can prudently use one’s authority, only when one knows one’s own sinfulness and one’s temptations towards pride, and knows that one will, in the end, be judged for them. We borrow our authority ultimately from God, the only true authority and judge, and we are all at best ‘occasions’ for the exercise of authority, not ourselves instigators of it.16 As God has given out this authority, God will take it back; and so all will be judged, even those who exercise authority, and all must act in fear and trembling. As all human authority is borrowed, it should be exercised humbly, hesitatingly and above all mercifully. The exercise of mercy by authorities is a persistent theme in Augustine’s writings: again and again, in his treatises, in his sermons and above all in his letters to political authorities, he underscores the need to recognize the pre-eminence of mercy in judging, and he calls political authorities to unheard-of levels of forbearance, including his insistence – astonishing for an ancient writer – that rulers should avoid capital punishment except when completely forced into it.17 Yet at the same time Augustine is no laxist; rightly understood, punishment is itself a form of mercy. Rulers should understand their role as analogous to a loving father who ‘has care’ of his whole family, and who uses discipline – including beatings – only when necessary for the family’s whole good. Eschewing such discipline, Augustine argues, is actually a cruel form of cowardice or indifference.18 One must allow oneself to be compelled by the duties of one’s station appropriately to punish those in one’s care when they stray. How such compulsion can be understood in providentialist terms is the topic of the next section.

C. Love and compulsion Along with faith and hope, the confession of love is shaped deeply by faith in providence. Here we can identify one way in which this happens by thinking about how love understands itself to be compelled into action (or inaction) in certain ways. And as with action in general, so too can we understand the nature of political action under the canopy of divine providence through the idea of compelling necessity, the fact of our enmeshment in the necessities of the world. (One of Augustine’s favourite scriptural passages – appearing again and again when he thinks about politics – is Ps. 25.17, ‘From my necessities deliver me!’) Those who are

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 264

4/28/2009 10:40:15 AM

Providence and Political Discernment

265

authorized politically are those who have been put in a situation downstream from history, as it were – in the most fundamental sense they are responsible to and for the way that the past constrains and orients our action in the present and for the future.19 On this picture we are always in medias res, with lines of filiation and obligation (and occasionally enmity) drawn before we have a chance to agree to them. We are always constrained by course of history, global and local. The twentieth-century political thinker Hannah Arendt puts it well: When Napoleon, seizing power in France after the Revolution, said: I shall assume the responsibility for everything France ever did from Saint Louis to the Committee of Public Safety, he was only stating somewhat emphatically one of the basic facts of political life. It means hardly more, generally speaking, than that every generation, by virtue of being born into a historical continuum, is burdened by the sins of the fathers as it is blessed with the deeds of the ancestors.20

The idea that authority bestows power, understood as something like unconstrained freedom to act as we will, is one of the saddest of delusions about political life, and typically one of the first surrendered by even moderately intelligent authorities when they gain office. The more power we possess, the more we find ourselves bound in necessities. Of course, we must be very careful to talk about necessity here. After all, talk about necessity is complicated by God’s free providence. Providence is God’s prudence; it is how God deals with the world. But this does not constrain God – far from it; it reveals how utterly unconstrained and free God is. God acts wholly without principle. In Gethsemane, Jesus does not say that his coming death is necessary, but that God wills it. When Augustine uses necessitas, he does not mean inevitability or determinism, much less pagan fortune or fate, but the will of God.21 Hence this ‘necessity’ is properly visible as the right kind of necessity only through a vibrant faith in God’s providential ordering of the world.22 This ordering is not simply over the fundamentally local particularities of any individual political situation; we are embedded also in a history defined by the great drama of creation, fall, redemption and sanctification, and we will be made to answer for this drama. Our action is part of our larger interchange, our ‘dialogue’, with God, and through God, with the world and our neighbour – a story stretching far back behind our birth, and far forward into the future. We are responsible not just for current structures of order, but for the past as well; we have inherited guilt, as it were. Perhaps the most vivid example of what I am getting at here is found in Christian just-war reasoning. Christian just-war tradition should not be understood as an exculpatory moral algorithm, check-list, or any sort of

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 265

4/28/2009 10:40:15 AM

266

The Providence of God

relatively portable set of criteria, a geopolitical–ethical style of deliberation applicable by just anybody. Instead, it is part of a theology of justice and judgement that requires properly formed – morally and religiously – agents to operate within it. And part of the formation of these agents is their coming to see both themselves and the world they inhabit as malformed, irremediably corrupted, in ways that should shadow their every exercise of political power.23 God’s justice and judgement is beginning to be worked out in history, the tradition insists, and we are to inhabit history as the site where and medium whereby that judgement and justice are deployed. Central to this ‘working out’ is an emphasis on suffering and crucifixion. Where secular applications of the tradition have generally moved at the level of policy decisions, the Christian just-war tradition is more comfortable at the level of existential asceticism – not with the decision, but with the deciders, and those who go forth to enact the decision. Because of this, at its heart the just-war tradition is not exculpatory but obligatory. It does not permit our intervention; it insists that we acknowledge our prior implication in the situation and our responsibility to confront it as best as possible.24 It is not finally concerned with licensing our desire for war-making, or unleashing our tendencies towards violence (‘cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war’); it is rather about obliging us, about how a proper apprehension of the situation, compels us to undertake terribly difficult actions; it is about putting particular moral actions within a rich theological narrative frame in order to understand properly where you stand – what necessities are forcing your hand, and what judgement you stand under.25 It does not excuse or whitewash the actors, nor does it simply permit and excuse; it obligates, it compels. This may sound horrific. Isn’t it enough to permit one to use violence? What is gained by making it obligatory? But in fact, the idea that one needs only permission to go to war is morally more troubling than the thought that one needs a command to do so. A ‘war of choice’, so understood, is an avoidable war; and a war that can be reasonably and morally avoided, should be. This is why Augustine, for example, criticized Moses for killing the Egyptian overseer, and Peter for cutting off the right ear of the High Priest’s servant, because both exhibited ‘hasty zeal’.26 Obligation is a more realistic, and ironically also more gentle, merciful and humane, way to think about a war’s rationale, than via a language of ‘permission’. This is what a thinker like Paul Ramsey means when he speaks of the Christian just-war tradition originating ‘in the interior’ of the Christian ethic of love: on this account, war is done out of the compulsion of love – it is not a freestanding ex nihilo act, but emerges from the recognition of prior relation

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 266

4/28/2009 10:40:15 AM

Providence and Political Discernment

267

and responsibility – recognition of our implication in the violence of the world. The just-war tradition depicts us as necessarily part of the world, and as such part of the terrible and awesome unspooling of God’s providential judgement on the world. Far from absolving political agents of responsibility, this love-based account means to accentuate their sensitivity to the fraught character of their actions. For these reasons, the Christian just-war tradition insists that the decision to go to war can never be a light one; if war is thinkable, that means it demands hard consideration, prayerful discernment and persistent mercy. And that hard consideration involves realizing that one may be obligated to do something that is, in some way, potentially morally distasteful, perhaps even compromising. This may seem like it is a concession to human autonomy outside of divine sovereignty – as if humans at last have an autonomous role to play, a vote in the action itself. But in fact what it means is that the command of a living God cannot be captured in a neat algorithm, and that at any particular moment space must be given for those of proper discernment to discern what God is calling them to do. A discerning political actor may come to apprehend the fine-grained conditions ‘on the ground’, so to speak, in such a way as to compel them – as they experience the force of their apprehension of the situation – to engage in violence. That is to say, they may freely decide they are compelled. For the wise, it is hard to imagine a more painful decision. But that is how political action (at this extremity, anyway) is understood. What normative source undergirds this recognition of the troublingess of violence? For Christians it is the eschatological vision of the peaceable Kingdom of God. Our recognition of the tragedy of war, our sense of our moral implication in its necessity and in the particular implications of its waging, is decisively shaped by our eschatological sense that ‘this’ – how much horror pressed into one bland word! – is not how things should be, and it is not how things will finally be. Our moral remorse and regret are or should be in large part informed by the very disquieting idea that we will be made to answer for our complicity in these events; that we will be held to account, if not here on earth in some final court of justice; that justice is not forever deferred; that the blood of the innocent cries from the ground; that God is not mocked forever. (Incidentally, the absence of this eschatological tone in the public justwar rhetoric made me (among others) decry the light way in which Americans took the 2003 Iraq war, as if we Americans were not complicit in the accidental deaths of innocents, and the intentional deaths of combatants. There was no public proclamation of a day of fasting, a day of

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 267

4/28/2009 10:40:16 AM

268

The Providence of God

mourning, a day of public, if diverse, forms of remorse. Not only does this miss a chance at good foreign public relations, not only does it suggest that we do not really live in a republic where the whole citizenry are responsible for the state, but, most troublingly, it reveals a deep moral disconnect from the acts done in our names, with our dollars, by us, our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters – a disconnect which suggests that we simply do not realize we live in a real world, that ours was a real war, and that people really died in it. And that we, indirectly, were and are responsible for these things.) Of course, the just-war theory offers a quite distinct understanding of what ‘peace’ means, one that cannot be identified with much of what our world imagines ‘peace’ to be. Many people seem unable to imagine anything that could be worth going to war over, that peace – or rather, the absence of combat involving their nation’s soldiers – trumps all other goods. The just-war theory disagrees: A peace in which children are tortured systematically by their government is no peace; and those who insist that it is, are morally misguided. Peace is the end of war – even the wicked, Augustine insists, seeks peace. But what sort of peace? Of triumph and subjugation, or of right order? We must beware seeking the peace of mere indifference, the peace of the dead. The peace Christians are called on to seek is eschatological, the peace of those who have been resurrected.27 All of humanity are called to participate in Jesus’s peace, which is Jesus Christ’s union with the Father in the Holy Spirit. But we are at war with ourselves, so we do not have this peace fully; and we cannot see each other’s hearts, so we do not have this union with one another.28 So in a real way, just war is pacification, and has as its end peace, true peace, the tranquility of order. This end is not merely extrinsic to combatants’ behaviour in war; it plays a crucial role in determining the means that are suitable as well. The war must be waged with justice throughout, for the more just it is, the closer the approximation of peace can be in the end. One cannot win a war by annihilating an enemies’ civilian population, and expect that anything like ‘peace’ has been achieved. One must have a mind for the goal sought when one determines the way to get there. The end depends upon the beginning. This is the point of Augustine’s urging of Count Boniface to ‘wage war peaceably’, and the just-war tradition sees no overwhelming paradox in that phrase, much to its benefit.29 Yet here again, just as the secular variants of the just-war tradition do not recognize the tragic complexity of the actual situations in which human beings find themselves when at war, it also has a very hard time recognizing the real transcendence and the eschatological idealism of the goal of the historical just-war tradition. It trims away, from historical forms of

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 268

4/28/2009 10:40:16 AM

Providence and Political Discernment

269

just-war reasoning, their lowest notes and highest aspirations. In contrast, the Christian tradition’s account operates within an explicitly eschatological frame. So as with faith and hope, a vigorous providentialism gives determinate form and content to the Christian virtue of love, especially in how that virtue informs Christian political deliberation and action. Furthermore, it offers a richer, and – because more encompassing – more realistic, picture of the realities of our political life than a narrowly (and self-proclaimedly ‘realist’) secular account will allow.

III. Conclusion I have said enough. Let me conclude with some final comments. First of all, the proposal offered here is not advice simply for statesmen or rulers, but for citizens. That is to say, the dispersal of political sovereignty in modernity is one significant development of which theological political thought typically takes insufficient notice. The possession of sovereignty brings with it obligations, obligations which can be lived as part of a larger ascetical orientation of soul-formation in which churches have a central pedagogical role. Secondly, this practice of ascetical formation turns us towards God, the neighbour and creation as a whole, by luring us out of our condition as curved in upon ourselves – incurvatus in se. It rests on a diagnosis of sin as fundamentally escapism, flight, isolation from God, world, others and concomitantly even from ourselves. These practices of inhabiting a political world governed by providence are practices whereby our temptations towards escapism are named and counter-patterns of patient and loving attention to what lies outside of ourselves are inaugurated. And central to such a genuine inhabitation of our world, for very many of us, is political engagement. To borrow from the underappreciated theologian Bob Dylan, ‘we live in a political world’. And so long as we understand politics in a properly capacious sense, this is a powerful truth. That we do not so properly understand politics – that we have a degenerate understanding of it – is a large part of our problem – perhaps a large part of the problem with revivifying belief in providence today. Third and finally, this attention to political reality may be more central to the Christian gospel, and to God, than we usually realize. After all, the eschaton is typically characterized centrally in political terms: the reign of God, the Kingdom of God, the city of God, the republic of grace. This reminds us that the goal of politics transcends mundane political realization.

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 269

4/28/2009 10:40:16 AM

270

The Providence of God

To associate faith, hope and love with politics is not to denigrate the former, but to realize the true depth of the latter. Politics is not simply a mundane thing; among its many motivations – getting along in the world, organizing social energies, protecting ourselves against bad people, whether they are others or ourselves – is a curiously non-instrumental one: we long for real encounter with others, an encounter that is best described in terms of communion. Civic action also moves towards communion, genuine engagement. The encounter with the other (which is what politics in this world is all about) and the longing for communion (which is what politics always aspires to be) is always shadowed by this anxiety about judgement; so all efforts at attaining the communion of love are always fraught by an anxiety we would be well advised to acknowledge. And yet we do want genuinely to see each other and to be seen, even as we recognize that this hope, this longing, is not finally realizable in the world as we have it; it is an eschatological hope.30 A political psychology based on love recognizes these facts, and is more realistic, more worldly wise, than one that does not. In both these ways, politics is about judgement and communion, and their necessary interrelation as partakers in the fundamental theological reality of creation. Politics has a place in the economy of salvation, and all this suggests something of the character of God’s being towards us. For God in Christ is judge, forgiver and commander – all at once. We are judged and found wanting, in all details, with nothing not exposed; forgiven those transgressions, as fully and completely as they were acknowledged; and commanded to do a new thing, to sing a New Song. This is all not just simultaneously proclaimed, but rather all three of these proclamations are facets of a larger action of God for us and towards us; they do not happen simultaneously so much as they are the same thing. We cannot be commanded unless we are forgiven, and we cannot be forgiven unless it is clear what we have done. They express and enact the coherence of God’s action, and the derivative coherence of God’s creation. This gets at the fundamental question of ‘New Creation’, which signifies both a rupture with our past, but also a kind of continuity (coming to appreciate the mystery of how this happens is one way to approach appreciating the mystery of the Trinity). This teaches us not simply about God, but about what we are called to do in politics as well. We must learn to see politics as about exposure, about vision – about recognition and acknowledgement – and about our simultaneous fear of it and longing for it. Most fundamentally, what we must hear is the judgement that we are loveable. This is a matter of hearing it, from outside ourselves – for on the inside we cannot know whether we are loveable or not. To hear this judgement and to be resurrected are

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 270

4/28/2009 10:40:17 AM

Providence and Political Discernment

271

related – for in hearing God’s judgement addressed to you, you hear a recognition of a relationship that is still there: you are really connected to God.31 We hear judgement, then, we hear the Word, we hear that God has chosen to be in love with us. This does not mean that God is under any helpless compulsion; God need not do this. Yet it is not properly understood as just a whim of God’s that can be revoked, or the totally arbitrary affliction of us by God’s love. We were created by God for this communion, and so our being resonates with this call, even as we quail from it. A providential politics, then, is not a triumphalist politics; it is, in certain crucial ways, the opposite of it. Being chosen does not mean an unambiguously happy ending. And yet the ambiguity must be ambiguated; for if providence is the material cause of our nature as doxological creatures, creatures who pray and praise, then the fact that such praise can be possible in the realm of politics gives us good reason to believe that providence can shape our immediately political behaviour. For after all, providence both liberates us and obligates us, lifts us up and brings us low, drives us to our knees and causes us to say, ‘this is the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in our eyes.’

Notes 1 Many thanks to Martien Halvorson-Taylor, Paul Jones and Karen Guth for conversations regarding this essay, and to Francesca Aran Murphy and Philip Ziegler for hosting the conference at which this first was presented. I should also mention that whatever insight this chapter provides is largely due to my appreciation for the work of two somewhat different contemporary theologians’ reflections on politics, namely Kathryn Tanner and Oliver O’Donovan, and a sermon of St Augustine’s, Sermon 13, easily accessible in Augustine: Political Writings, ed. R. J. Dodaro and E. M. Atkins (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 2 See Chapter 16, ‘The Uses of Providence in Public Theology’. 3 For discussions of the connection between prophecy and kingship in Israel and Judah, see Joseph Blenkinsopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel, 2nd edition (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1996), 66–72; and Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 223–37. 4 I have learned pretty much everything I know on this topic from Kathryn Tanner’s work on Divine and human action. See especially her God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) and The Politics of God: Christian Theologies and Social Justice (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992). 5 Oliver O’Donovan is especially good on this. 6 This is fundamentally ruminative, contemplative, retrospective – characteristics not normally considered salutary in contemporary political life. (The ideal

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 271

4/28/2009 10:40:17 AM

The Providence of God

272

7

8 9 10 11

12

13 14

15 16

prince in today’s Machiavellian world seems to be someone with the attention span of a puppy with attention deficit disorder, hopped up on espresso, and with the integrity of a Frito.) This condition applies to all actions, but especially to certain kinds of particularly morally charged actions. So the way a country fights a war – if it recognizes the humanity of its enemy by not carpet-bombing their cities, for example – reveals much about how it understands God, the neighbour, and the way the world should run. See, Chapter 16, Philip G. Ziegler ‘The Uses of Providence in Public Theology’. See, Chapter 15, Hans S. Reinders, ‘Why This? Why Me? A Theological Reflection on Ethics and Providence’. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Scribner’s, 1952). See Cass Sunstein, republic.com.2.0 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) and Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). While Augustine is often accused of escapism – of disallowing any final literality to things, thus making them not really anything in themselves – in fact Augustine criticizes others as escapist, because they select some things as real and ignore others. The process of selection is what he is opposed to, in terms of Rome, and in terms of ecclesial purists (who do not see the mixed nature of church) and apocalypticists (who preselect out certain moments or events in history as significant and blind themselves to the others). For him you have to see everything, which means that nothing is simple, nothing is straightforward (Orosius, sometimes used as an example of an authentic Augustinian, is actually quite far from him on these matters; in fact he only seems to have known the first ten books of the City of God). A similar case can be made for patriotism’s power. A real patriotism can mobilize people in ways that are far stronger than any larger entity will, yet in ways far more manageable and less exclusionary than any other form of identity, such as religion, ethnicity or language. Of course such a patriotism would be significantly different than what passes for patriotism among us today; but this is the topic of another chapter. Sermo 13.7. This is how he understands the Caesar’s coin story: ‘just as the image of Caesar on the coin is restored’ to Caesar, Augustine says, so we should ‘restore to God the image of God in the human being’ (Sermo 13.4). The revealing root sense of the word Augustine uses in these matters – namely, officium – is of course ‘duty’. This is perhaps most clearly visible to us in a classroom setting, where authority is inescapable. And indeed, in Augustine’s discussion of his own education in the Confessions, he describes how education does things to the students that neither students nor teachers fully comprehend, and plants seeds that neither can control. See Conf. 1 and, later, the example of Alypius being warned away (futilely) from the games by an offhand remark of Augustine’s, an event that Augustine did not intend to apply to Alypius (Conf. 6.7.12). For more on this see Charles Mathewes, ‘The Presumptuousness of Autobiography and the Paradoxes of Beginning’ in Confessions Book One’, in Augustine Confessions:

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 272

4/28/2009 10:40:17 AM

Providence and Political Discernment

17

18 19

20 21

22

23

24

25

26 27

273

Critical Essays, ed. Kim Paffenroth (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2003). Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of St. Augustine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), makes this point very well. For Augustine on capital punishment, see Sermo 13.8. Sermo 13.9. See also Epistle 138.2.14, serm. 1.10.63. On the related metaphor of the use of force as medicine, see Epistle 93.2–4, 185.7, 33–4. Some of the most potent Christian critics of the just-war tradition have missed this point, led astray by the way this theological dimension of the tradition has been increasingly occluded by its defenders in recent decades. They see it as essentially part of a vision that imagines that we are in charge of the world. Early Christians held no such views. It should be enough to note that Augustine, no one’s go-to guy for radical human independence from God, was central to the just-war tradition; but if you want a pre-Constantinian representative consonant with this view see Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 5.24.2. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 1964), 298. See City of God 5.9–11. What stands between Augustine’s use of necessitas and any such of our own is the modern understanding of determinism and messianism, whether Hegelian or Marxist or ‘Manifest Destiny’. Possibly the only great modern political thinker who has understood this is Abraham Lincoln. So Frederick Russell says, ‘Augustine’s just war thinking was permeated with divine activity’ (The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 23). That is to say, the emphasis on love is couched within a realistic assessment of human sin. Just-war theory emerges out of an account of human fallenness without which just warriors may delude themselves into assuming that they are ever other than significantly morally compromised. The ‘justice’ in just-war theory should never be claimed to be more than relative justice. That is, just-war theory is not only based on the ‘Christian universalism’ of egalitarianism and universal concern that lies at the basis of international law, as many point out; it is also based on that other, less palatable, Christian universalism, unacknowledged in international law but even more basic in international relations: the universalism of sin. Of course, some people can well have a ‘vocation’ that makes them immune to such a calling – such as monks and priests have historically been understood to be forbidden the use of the sword. But the point of such a vocation is that it shapes a whole life; such people are not excused from God’s calling, they have simply been called in another way. As Frederick Russell puts it, Augustine’s own account is not so much a systematic theory as it is really ‘clusters of ideas grouped around the central theme of sin and punishment’. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages, 25. Augustine, contra Faustem 22.70. Epistle 155.10 – two different kinds of peace, ordinary understanding as ‘freedom from suffering’, and then Christian und, modified via theo virtues, promoting peace as ‘blessedness in God’. See also Rowan Williams, The Truce of God (1983; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005).

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 273

4/28/2009 10:40:17 AM

274

The Providence of God

28 Augustine, tractatus in Ioannem 77:3–4. 29 Augustine, Epistle 189.6; see also ep. 93.8. 30 For an account of how liberalism itself bears the marks of this universal ecclesia, see Jeanne Morefield, Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 31 This is true more generally than just theologically – it is true about arguments with your spouse or your friends. A relationship has ended when they’re not talking to you but about you, to others. A similar thing is true of God’s judgement; but God always speaks the judgement to you first and foremost.

FMurphy_13_Finals.indd 274

4/28/2009 10:40:18 AM

Chapter 14

Patience and Lament: Living Faithfully in the Presence of Suffering John Swinton

I come to the issue of providence from the perspective of the discipline of practical theology. It is fair to say that practical theology has come a long way from the days when it was defined primarily in terms of handy household hints for ministers! My first lecture on practical theology comprised of an hour-long lecture which in essence instructed us not to ‘throw stones at coffins when doing funerals as it tends to upset the relatives’! We have moved on a bit from that. It will be helpful to begin by clarifying what I mean by the term ‘practical theology’. Practical theology, at least as it is performed within the University of Aberdeen,1 is a rigorous theological discipline that takes seriously both theology and practice as they work together to form faithful practices within Christian communities. Put simply, practical theology is theological reflection on the practices of the Church as they interact with the practices of the world with a view to enabling faithful discipleship. I use the term ‘Christian practices’ here to refer to forms of divinely inspired individual and communal action that have deep theological meaning and radical practical import in relation to the purposes of God. Christian practices provide a physical space within which theoretical and practical knowledge come together to enable faithful living. The meaning and implications of these moments of embodied theology is not always immediately apparent. A primary task of practical theology is to explore the practices of Church and world in order that the theological meanings of our practices can be understood and worked with intentionally in the service of God. The area of practical theology I want to focus on in this chapter is the pastoral ministry of the Church. The pastoral ministry comprises a set of practices carried out by the Church community aimed at enabling faithful living in the midst of times of peacefulness and joy as well as brokenness and sorrow. I therefore approach the issue of providence with the intention of exploring how a theology of providence might help in the task of enabling faithful discipleship in the midst of times of peacefulness and joy as well as brokenness and sorrow.

FMurphy_14_Finals.indd 275

4/28/2009 10:40:02 AM

276

The Providence of God

In this chapter I want to focus on how pastoral care should frame and respond to the issue of human suffering in the light of the doctrine of divine providence. For pastors and those who seek to care for Christian communities, there is probably no more pressing question than how to understand and deal with suffering.2 The voluminous literature on pastoral care draws on a variety of perspectives to offer responses and strategies to suffering and a variety of ways in which we can frame the reasons why God allows suffering. This literature is of course important. It is only right that a compassionate church should do what it can do to bring healing and comfort to a world that experiences suffering deeply and daily. However, contemporary pastoral care in its academic mode has at least two problems. First, it is often difficult to see the difference between the Church’s pastoral practices and the practices of secular psychology. Rather than determining the nature and shape of the practices that Christians engage in, all too frequently theology is relegated to providing a theoretical underpinning for the attitude of the carer who may or may not use the language of incarnation, cross, resurrection, God, Jesus and Church as she seeks to offer care. The assumption is that secular technologies can simply be uncritically baptized into the service of pastoral care without any necessary reference to the theological tensions they bring with them. Consequently there is a tendency to focus on ‘care in a Christian context’ rather than care that is distinctly and recognizably Christian. When this happens the gist and focus that the Christian tradition offers to the pastoral task is lost. The second problem is deeply related to the first. The majority of the literature seems to see suffering per se as the primary problem. The focus is on overcoming the pain, isolation, anxiety and fear that suffering brings as if such things were what Christians should primarily be concerned with overcoming. Thus the goals of the pastoral ministry often bear a remarkable similarity to the goals of liberal society and Enlightenment medicine3 in particular; the focus being on eradicating the clearly identifiably ‘black spot’ of suffering in order that a person (perceived as a discrete autonomous individual) can be returned to health and happiness, understood primarily as an absence of a broad understanding of human suffering.4 Suffering is presumed to have little or no meaning or purpose beyond the constant quest to eradicate it. All of this is of course understandable. If we suffer we want to cease suffering! It seems quite obvious really; until that is, we encounter modes of suffering which are interminable. How do we minister to the terminally ill, the chronically ill, the victims of dementia if our primary goal in dealing with suffering is to develop and utilize particular

FMurphy_14_Finals.indd 276

4/28/2009 10:40:02 AM

Living Faithfully in the Presence of Suffering

277

technologies to get rid of it? We then find ourselves drifting into asking questions such as ‘why has God allowed such suffering?’ or ‘how could a God of love allow such suffering?’ Questions which I will suggest emerge from a misunderstanding of the goals of the pastoral ministry. If we begin with our perception of what ‘the problem of suffering’ is, rather than with the nature of God and our attitude before God, theodicy appears to be the only response to human suffering. However, if we begin the discussion with a focus on the faithfulness of God and the practices of faithful discipleship, then we will discover a different mode of pastoral care within which reflection on the doctrine of providence becomes not only an option, but possibly a necessity. In order to make this point clear it is necessary for us to reframe the problem of suffering. It is not my intention to focus on the ‘obvious’ question of theodicy – ‘why does a God of love and power allow suffering’, – a question which I would argue is not only unanswerable, but, as Terrence Tilley has argued so convincingly in his book The Evils of Theodicy can in fact become a locus for evil and suffering.5 Rather, it is my conviction that the pastoral task in the face of suffering begins with the issue of learning what it means to love and to worship God and to learn to recognize God as faithful and loving even in the face of suffering. Put slightly differently, the problem of suffering finds its response not in abstract philosophical argument but within the practices of faithful discipleship. Within such a frame providence becomes of great importance. The question I want to work with in this chapter can be stated thus: how can we be enabled to love God and to hold on to the reality that God is love, that God is faithful and that God loves us even in the midst of our sufferings. Framing this question in this way is important for at least three reasons: 1. First, it takes seriously the Westminster shorter catechism’s powerful assertion that ‘Human being’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy God for ever.’ The primary goal of human beings and the true nature of human well-being are not defined by the absence of suffering, anxiety or happiness, but by the presence and faithfulness of God and the possibility of human beings entering into relationship with their creator. The question assumes with Augustine that ‘You have made us, O Lord, for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.’6 This is an important pastoral principle which I will return to as we move on. The idea of responding to suffering by learning to love God and be loved by God marks the approach of this chapter out as different from theodicy. Theodicy seeks to defend God in the face of suffering through the use of abstract philosophical

FMurphy_14_Finals.indd 277

4/28/2009 10:40:02 AM

278

The Providence of God

arguments, the assumption being that once the logical formulation has been worked out, we will be able to understand why a God of love and power allows suffering. This of course might be helpful in some situations and for some people. However, solving the logical problem is as far as we can get with theodicy. There is no necessity within the theodical enterprise for anything other than clarity of concepts and argument which may or may not enable people to love God and to deal faithfully with the realities of their suffering. The goal of theodicy is primarily the solving of intellectual dilemmas about God, rather than perceiving itself as a vehicle for enabling people to love God and learn what it means to be loved by God. The question as I have framed it takes suffering into the realms of the pastoral thus taking seriously the fact that the problem of suffering is not primarily a conceptual or philosophical argument, but rather it is first and foremost a very practical and relational experience which occurs within the lives of real human beings who are attempting to relate with the reality of God’s love in the midst the experience of suffering. Such a position is not in any way intended to be anti-intellectual. It simply seeks to take seriously the critical tension between practical and theoretical knowledge highlighted by John Webster earlier in this book. Theoretical knowledge is inextricably connected with being and being requires action. 2. Secondly, in distinction from the Cartesian bent of certain strands of theodicy, the question does not begin from a position of doubting God’s love, goodness and faithfulness. Rather, it begins from a position of faith seeking understanding, taking seriously the reality and the pain of suffering, but holding that recognition within the boundaries of the writer to the Hebrews assertion that faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we cannot see.7 Faith is a given. Rather, like the psalms of lament, it assumes a position of confused faith in the face of human suffering. 3. Thirdly, by addressing suffering as a practical rather than a philosophical problem, the frame of my question prevents us from slipping into idolatry. John Howard Yoder’s reflections on theodicy are helpful on this point. Theodicy, he suggests, in some way or another means ‘that someone holds that there exists a criterion whereby some kind of human process of adjudication . . . will test whether God measures up’.8 The problem is that when we engage in such practices, the criterion, by which we choose to measure God becomes, at least in function if not intention, our God. In other words, God is judged by an external criteria which, if appropriate for judging God, becomes God in itself. Or, to quote Yoder, ‘. . . the person doing the measuring has become functionally god!’9

FMurphy_14_Finals.indd 278

4/28/2009 10:40:03 AM

Living Faithfully in the Presence of Suffering

279

I. Reframing the ‘Problem of Suffering’ In the light of the arguments presented thus far, the key task that should underpin the pastoral ministry of the Church might be summed up in Mt 22.37–40. Here Jesus says: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.

If enabling such a threefold way of love is central to the gospel and to the lives of those who claim Jesus as their saviour and seek in some sense to embody that gospel, then the ‘problem of suffering’ cannot simply be defined by the presence or absence of the constituent parts which make up the definition of the term ‘suffering’ (pain, anguish, alienation, brokenness and so forth). A cross centred faith can hardly be surprised at the existence of suffering; scripture does not promise that Christians will not experience suffering or provide any consistent reasons for why it exists.10 The existence of suffering may be mystery, but in and of itself it is not an intellectual problem. But the Matthew passage does throw up the possibility that it may be a locus for problems which are deeply spiritual and theological. Elaine Scarry in her reflections on the effects of pain notes that: ‘Pain comes unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed . . . whatever pain achieves it achieves in part through unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through resistance to language.11 Pain is the enemy of community. Precisely the same can be said of many forms of suffering. Suffering pushes us away from one another and alienates us from God, self and others. The pain, the sense of injustice, the isolation the depression and anguish of suffering easily destroys faith and our love for God and for others, both in those who experience suffering and in those who are forced to be spectators at the event of another’s suffering. As we experience pain, illness and suffering within our own bodies it can be very difficult to continue to love God with heart, mind and soul. As we watch a loved one eaten away by cancer or dying slowly in the latter stages of AIDS or dementia, it can be very difficult to hold on to the love of God and to worship God as creator, healer and sustainer. Suffering easily destroys trust and love for God and for one another. This being so, the real problem of suffering is not an intellectual dilemma, but a practical and theological encounter. The real problem of suffering is suffering’s ability to separate human beings from recognizing, accepting and

FMurphy_14_Finals.indd 279

4/28/2009 10:40:03 AM

The Providence of God

280

understanding the love and faithfulness of God and the crucial fact that they are loved by God at all times and in all circumstances. If this is so, then what is required is a practical response that fully understands the theological implications of the experience of suffering and is equipped with the theological tools (conceptual and practical) to enable people to love God and one another in all things and at all times.

II. A Pastoral Theology of Divine Providence How then might we go about beginning to answer the question: how can we be enabled to love God and to hold on to the reality that God is love, that God is faithful and that God loves us even in the midst of our sufferings? I want to suggest that what is required to sustain such hope is a doctrine of providence that affirms the certainty of God’s continuing goodness even in the presence of suffering; an embodied doctrine which requires and inspires particular forms of Christian practices that are based within an eschatological conception of time that is rooted in the assurance that God is working all things to the purpose of his will (Isa. 40.28; Ps. 139.13; Rom. 8.28). I don’t have time here to do anything other than gesture towards the types of practice that might be required to sustain such a hope. Nevertheless, I trust that what follows, will at least open up fresh possibilities worthy of further consideration. In the next section I want to draw attention to the importance of patience and the psalms of lament as particular forms of Christian practice within which we can begin to understand the significance of the doctrine of providence for faithful pastoral care in the face of ‘the problem of suffering’ as I have defined both thus far.

III. Lament Psalms as the Language of Providence in the Face of Suffering Nowhere in scripture is the human experience of suffering more clearly and profoundly expressed than in the psalms of lament. The disturbing honesty of these prayers forces human suffering before the face of God in ways which are raw, awkward and at times disturbing. Yet, in all of their rawness, they remain practices of prayer, and more mysteriously, they remain prayers of worship. In Psalm 13 the psalmist offers his reader an insight into the nature of his suffering and his feelings of deep alienation from God: 1 How long, O LORD ? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?

FMurphy_14_Finals.indd 280

4/28/2009 10:40:03 AM

Living Faithfully in the Presence of Suffering

281

2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? 3 Look on me and answer, O LORD my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death; 4 My enemy will say, ‘I have overcome him’, and my foes will rejoice when I fall. 5 But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. 6 I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me.

At one level what we discover in the psalmist’s lament is a repeated cry of pain, rage, sorrow and grief which emerges in the midst of his deep suffering and sense of alienation from God. Yet, the psalmist’s lament is much more than simply enraged catharsis although it may be that. In line with the majority of the lament psalms, the remarkable thing about Psalm 13 is its conclusion in praise. It is raw talk towards God, but it is also worship. At first the worship dimension of the psalms seems to make little sense. How or why might a person worship God in the midst of suffering? Expressions of anger, confusion and angst seem wholly apposite, but praise? And yet, somehow the psalmist manages to make a profound movement from feelings of alienation from God to the experience of praising and trusting God even in the midst of his sufferings. What might this be about?

IV. The Formfulness of Suffering In his writings on the lament psalms Walter Brueggemann makes an important observation. Suffering is ‘formful’.12 In other words, suffering takes on its shape and form according to particular contexts and experiences. Put more starkly, we don’t just suffer; all of us are taught how to suffer. Brueggemann argues teaching us how to suffer faithfully is precisely what the psalms of lament are intended to do. They are intended to give us a language and a frame for our suffering and in so doing, to teach us how to suffer well. A community’s, and indeed an individual’s, regularized use of language such as the psalms creates and sustains the contours of the community’s life-worlds. Brueggemann puts it this way: Such regularized speech activity serves both to enhance and to limit the experience so that dimensions of it are not lost and to limit the experience so that some dimensions are denied their legitimacy. This suggests, applied to the

FMurphy_14_Finals.indd 281

4/28/2009 10:40:03 AM

282

The Providence of God

lament form, that its regularized use intends to enable and require ‘sufferers’ in the community to experience their suffering so that it can be received and coped with according to the perspectives, perceptions, and resources of the community. Thus the function of the form is definitional. It tells the experience the shape of the experience that is legitimate to be experienced.13

Thus the psalms of lament are not designed merely to express human pain and suffering, but also to form human pain and suffering. The function of the psalms of lament is to provide a structure for crisis, hurt, grief or despair; to move a worshipper from hurt to joy, from darkness to light, from desperation to hope. This linguistic movement from hurt to joy is not intended only to evoke a psychological or liturgical experience, although it does includes those. It is also not a physical deliverance from the crisis, although that is often anticipated. The movement ‘out of the depths’ from hurt to joy is a profoundly spiritual one. Calvin puts this point in this way: ‘the psalms principally teach and train us to bear the cross . . . by doing this, we renounce the guidance of our own affections, and submit ourselves entirely to God.’14 The psalms remind us that the shape of Christian existence is cruciform. In bringing to our attention this central insight, they open the way for us to begin to be trained in the practices of faithful suffering. Such practices are intended to enable us to continue to praise God from out of the depths of our sorrow and sufferings. Perhaps what is most startling about Psalm 13 and indeed most of the lament psalms,15 is the movement from the expression of anger, pain and disaffection towards praise of God. The lament psalms are seen to have a very specific internal movement from ‘articulation of the hurt and anger, to submission of them to God, and finally to relinquishment’.16 In Brueggemann’s terms, this structure maps the person’s or the community’s movement from orientation to disorientation to reorientation. In terms of the way that the psalms function in the life of the community, the articulation of the pain and its submission to God are prerequisites for the third phase of relinquishment. Without the third phase of the lament, there is no possibility of a movement towards praise. The form and the function of the laments are thus intricately connected. But, if we return to Psalm 13, we might ask, precisely what is it that brings about this strange movement from rage and angst to praise and worship? The psalmist says: ‘my enemy will say, “I have overcome him”, and my foes will rejoice when I fall. But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me.’ The first thing to note is that the psalmist’s lament is clearly not a statement of doubt, at least not about the existence of God. The fact that the prayer is spoken at all makes this point. The problem is not one of doubt

FMurphy_14_Finals.indd 282

4/28/2009 10:40:04 AM

Living Faithfully in the Presence of Suffering

283

although it is certainly an expression of anger and frustration that ‘people are now faced with what it means to meet in covenant when the gift of covenant is broken, when response to covenant is called forth but is instead denied or destroyed.’17 Nonetheless, the psalmist’s turn to praise indicates that he remains convinced of God’s unfailing love and the certainty of God’s salvation. In spite of his circumstances the psalmist remains convinced of God’s providential goodness and faithfulness. God remains worthy to be praised even in the midst of profound suffering. Lament then is a way of keeping hope alive in the midst of suffering. The problem the psalmist wrestles with is the delay. The question raised by the psalmist’s cries relate to the frustration that encompasses what it means to live in the ‘time between’; in that historical space wherein the Lord has not yet returned but the promise of his immanent presence remains a central feature of the hope of God’s people. God’s people remain convinced of God’s providential goodness, but are inevitably frustrated by their experiences in the present. Lament is the language of providential hope in the face of suffering and the delay between what is and what will be. The psalmist’s problem is primarily a problem of patience and time not theodicy.

V. Patience and Lament: Living Patiently, Living Faithfully In his commentary on Psalm 13, John Calvin notes that the psalmist rises above his complaint of being neglected by God and in faith is able to apprehend God’s invisible providence. when we are for a long time weighed down by calamities, and when we do not perceive any sign of divine aid, this thought unavoidably forces itself upon us, that God has forgotten us. To acknowledge in the midst of our afflictions that God has really a care about us, is not the usual way with men, or what the feelings of nature would prompt; but by faith we apprehend his invisible providence.18

In Psalm 13, Calvin judges David to have beautifully united ‘affections which are apparently contrary to each other’.19 ‘By asking not simply how long God will be hidden to him but whether this hiddenness will last “forever”, the psalmist holds on to hope and gives us an example of what Calvin calls the “exercise of patience”.’ Calvin’s introduction of the practice of patience is important for current purposes. It is patience that sustains the sufferer in the ‘time between’. But the patience Calvin and the psalmist gesture towards is not simply a matter of waiting and passing time until something finally happens. Patience is more akin to the active

FMurphy_14_Finals.indd 283

4/28/2009 10:40:04 AM

284

The Providence of God

waiting we encounter in Jas 5.7 when the apostle urges ‘Be patient, then, brothers, until the Lord’s coming.’ The lord has not yet returned, but the Holy Spirit remains to guide us through the interim period. The patience Calvin articulates and the psalmist works towards is a gift: a providential gift of the Holy Spirit. For Calvin such patience is based in the certainty of God’s providential care. True, providence is sometimes hard to discern. ‘Confronted with the disorder of history, the mind’s eye squints and strains to see Divine justice but cannot penetrate or transcend the present confusion which hides providence from its limited and fallen view.’20 Yet, in faith, as he puts it: ‘Gratitude of mind for the favourable outcome of things, patience in adversity, and also incredible freedom from worry about the future all necessarily follow upon this knowledge.’21 Patience is thus rooted in the certainty that God cares for the world and is actively guiding it towards its eschatological goal. This recognition frees us from worry about the future, but not from responding honestly to the pain and discomfort of the sufferings of the present. Lament therefore finds its necessary theological context within the doctrine of providence. Providence does not exclude the need for lament but it prevents us from seeing creation as a tragedy.

VI. Mirroring the Patience of God Such patience mirrors and is inspired by the divine patience that God in God’s mercy shows to human beings in all of their sinfulness. Lament is a way in which Christians can answer the call to embody divine patience in the midst of their sufferings. Cyprian puts this point thus: as servants and worshippers of God, let us show by spiritual homage the patience that we learn from heavenly teachings. For that virtue we have in common with God. In Him patience has its beginning, and from Him as its sources it takes its splendour and dignity. The origin and greatness of patience proceeds from God its Author. The quality that is dear to God ought to be loved by man.22

Importantly, Augustine reminds us that the mirroring of divine patience can never be a mere human achievement. Humans can be patient for all the wrong reasons. For patience to be virtuous and faithful, it must come from the Holy Spirit. Patience is thus seen to be an irrevocable aspect of love. Augustine says: Without [love] in us there cannot be true patience, because in good men it is the love of God which endureth all things, in bad men the lust of the world.

FMurphy_14_Finals.indd 284

4/28/2009 10:40:04 AM

Living Faithfully in the Presence of Suffering

285

But this love is in us by the Holy Spirit which was given us. Whence, of Whom cometh in us love, of Him cometh patience.23

It is important to note the way in which such an understanding of patience both human and divine does not seek to exclude the reality of suffering or the need for humans to deal with it and endure it with faithfulness and love. Rather patience is an inspired gift that requires faithfulness, trust, love and practice. Patience relates to the fallenness of creation and as such is shaped and formed by the human experience of suffering and sadness. Such sadness is to be lamented rather than denied. Stanley Hauerwas, reflecting on the thought of Thomas Aquinas states that: Patience taken as a ‘natural virtue’ cannot be shaped by the appropriate sadness and joy constitutive of Christian patience. For Aquinas a true understanding of our place as creatures must include an insuperable sadness and dejection about out condition. Christ’s suffering on the cross exemplifies the sorrow that must be present in every Christian’s life. Christians must be saddened by their own frailty, by the suffering of the present in the world, and by their inability to change either fundamentally. From Aquinas’s perspective, the problem is how to prevent sadness, which we appropriately feel, from becoming depression, despair, or apathy. And this falls to patience. ‘Patience is to ensure that we do not abandon virtue’s good through dejection of this kind.’ It makes us capable of being rightly saddened without succumbing to the temptation to give up hope. A patience formed sadness can be held together with joy, because each is the effect of charity. Holding such a joy we rightly ‘grieve over what opposes this participation in the divine good in ourselves, or in our neighbours, whom we love as ourselves.24

It is precisely this patience formed sadness that we witness in the psalmists turn from angst to praise. The delay between God achieving what the psalmist knows God will achieve through God’s providential promise and continuing care for the world, and the reality of his current sufferings is overcome as he learns what it means to worship God faithfully through the practice of lament and patience formed sadness. Lament and patience then are critical Christian practices engaged in by disciples and in particular those disciples who are practising and teaching the pastoral ministry of the Church. Engaging in such practices has of course more to do with the receiving of God’s graceful gift than the achievement of particular human goals or desires. It is only as God in God’s providential grace comes to those who claim to love God that such lament and such patience becomes a meaningful possibility. The lament psalms provide the language through which God is called upon to do what God longs

FMurphy_14_Finals.indd 285

4/28/2009 10:40:04 AM

286

The Providence of God

to do: to create and sustain a patient people who will wait faithfully until the Lord returns.

VII. Living in God’s Time: Patience and Lament in the Fullness of Time Of course, as Hauerwas correctly points out, those committed to living in the world without God will find no time for patience . . . our ability to take time to enjoy God’s world, when we are well as when we are sick, depends on our recognition that it is indeed God’s world.25

This observation is pastorally important and takes me to my final point. In order to understand the significance of lament, patience and providence we need to understand some things about time. One of the problems with theodicies that deal with suffering is that they tend not to be done within God’s time. Rather they are created within a space that is ruled by ‘reasonable time’ rather than by Godly time. Within this space the world and its suffering inevitably makes little sense; indeed if Paul is correct in suggesting that divine wisdom will inevitably sound like foolishness to those who do not understand God’s purposes and time.26 then there will inevitably be aspects of creation that cannot make sense in the ways we desire them to. Within God’s time, suffering is experienced as a mystery to be lived with rather than a puzzle to be solved. In the next chapter, Hans S. Reinders notes that ‘western culture is dominated by a secular notion of time, which entails that time has no meaning other than the meaning it acquires through human plans and purposes.’ If we work with the concept of what Reinders describes as ‘empty time’, suffering will inevitably make no sense. However, if we take seriously the notion of providential time, an idea that suggests that in the cross and resurrection of Jesus, time has been redeemed and that we now inhabit an eschatological space that has a chronology that is radically different from the chronology of the world, then things begin to look different. Indeed, Philip Kenneson27 in his reflections on Stanley Hauerwas’ use of time, makes a strong case for the ideas of ‘empty time’ and ‘redeemed time’ as being that which defines the difference between the Church and the world. The two live in different perceptions or modes of time. Within time that has been redeemed we cannot but live differently. Recognition of redeemed time means that even the alienation and apparent meaningless of human suffering can be perceived as meaningful and expressed hopefully even if the depths remain deep and the darkness

FMurphy_14_Finals.indd 286

4/28/2009 10:40:05 AM

Living Faithfully in the Presence of Suffering

287

remains dark. The patient, crucified One who has redeemed time has provided us with a providential language in the lament psalms within which we can narrate suffering in the context of prayer and worship as we wait patiently for the Lord’s return. The Spirit of that same God gifts us with the patience to remain faithful and loving even in the midst of suffering. This truly is a providential gift.

VIII. Conclusion In conclusion, it has become clear that the pastoral responses to suffering embodied in the practices of lament, patience and timefulness are fully rooted in the doctrine of providence. Lament, patience and timefulness make little sense without an understanding of God’s continuing providential care of the world. One of the rather strange implications of what I have presented is that the pastoral response to the problem of suffering begins long before the actual crisis of suffering hits an individual or a community. In order to respond to suffering in terms of lament, patience and timefulness, we need to be the kind of people who do these things; a lamenting community; a patient community; a timeful community. A pastoral response to the problem of suffering is not an issue for crisis management, but for spiritual development: spiritual formation. I earlier described the pastoral ministry as comprising of a set of practices that are carried out by the Church community aimed at enabling faithful living in the midst of times of peacefulness and joy as well as brokenness and sorrow. I have tried to give an insight into what that might actually look like. It is as we engage with powerful practices like lament and patience in our preaching, our teaching, our fellowship, our mission and evangelism, that we become people for whom suffering can really become a place where we can learn faithfully to shout and to rage at God and to worship God; a people who have learned what it means to love God in all things and at all times and to wait patiently in God’s time for God to return in God’s own time.

Notes 1 John Swinton and Harriet Mowat, Practical Theology and Qualitative Research (London SCM Press, 2006). 4–5. For a further discussion on practical theology at Aberdeen University, see: www.abdn.ac.uk/divinity/staff/Aberdeenschoolofpracticaltheology.shtml.

FMurphy_14_Finals.indd 287

4/28/2009 10:40:05 AM

288

The Providence of God

2 For a fuller discussion on the key points outlined in this chapter see my Raging with Compassion: Pastoral Responses to the Problem of Evil (Grand rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006). 3 Colin Samson notes that: ‘Enlightenment medicine reflected a confidence in scientific methods of observation and experimentation to control nature and intervene to correct ailments that seemed to cut short life. . . . The approach to sickness advocated by the medical profession has now become almost a monopoly by virtue of its legitimization by the state in all Western countries as well as other societies’ (Health Studies: A Critical and Cross-Cultural Reader (London: Blackwell, 1999)). 4 For a further development on the history and impact of ‘Enlightenment medicine’ on contemporary healthcare practices see John Swinton, Spirituality and Mental Health care: Rediscovering a ‘Forgotten’ Dimension (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2001). 5 Terrence Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1991). Tilley suggests that theodicists are like the whispering friends of Job who torture rather than help. Their theoretical arguments hide real evils rather than lead persons to a concrete response to the sufferer. 6 St Augustine Confessions, Book 1.1, trans. H. Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 7 Hebrews 11.1. 8 John Howard Yoder, ‘Trinity versus Theodicy: Hebraic Realism and the Temptation to Judge God’ (1996). www.nd.edu/~theo/research/jhy_2/ writings/philsystheo/THEODICY.html. 9 Yoder, ‘Trinity versus Theodicy. 10 For a rigorous overview and critical discussion of the Bible’s inconsistency in its explanations of evil and suffering see Bart D. Ehrman, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2008). 11 E. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4. 12 Walter Brueggemann, ‘The Formfulness of Grief’, in The Psalms and the Life of Faith, ed. Patrick D. Miller (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 84–97. 13 Walter Brueggemann, The Psalms and the Life of Faith, ed. Patrick D. Miller (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1995), 86. 14 John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms volume 1 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1847–50), xxxvii–xxxix. 15 This is not of course the case for all of the lament psalms. Psalm 88 for example ends quite starkly: ‘You have taken my companions and loved ones from me; the darkness is my closest friend.’ Pastorally these psalms remain highly significant. The sense of deep abandonment by god is precisely how many people with, for example, depression feel. As part of a pastoral strategy those lament psalms which do not end in praise remain important insofar as, somewhat paradoxically, they continue to provide a theological language for those who experience alienation from God to continue to dialogue with God in the midst of their alienation. 16 Ibid., 100. 17 Ibid., 64.

FMurphy_14_Finals.indd 288

4/28/2009 10:40:05 AM

Living Faithfully in the Presence of Suffering

289

18 John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries, vol. 8: Psalms, part I, trans. John King [1847–50], at sacred-texts.com. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.17.7, 219–20, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960). Emphasis added. 22 Cyprian, De Bono Patientia: A Translation with an Introduction and Commentary, by Sister M. George Edward Conway, S.S.J. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1957). I am indebted throughout this discussion on patience to Stanley Hauerwas’ essay ‘Practising Patience’ in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2001), 348–70. 23 Augustine, On Patience, Christian Classics Ethereal Library: www. haywardfamily.org/ccel/fathers2/npnf103/npnf1047.htm [accessed 29 Aug. 2008]. 24 Hauerwas, ‘Practicing Patience’, 359–60. 25 Hauerwas, ‘On Patience’, 362. 26 1 Corinthians 1. 27 ‘Taking Time for the Trivial [:] Reflections on Yet Another Book from Hauerwas’, Asbury Theological Journal 45.1 (Spring 1990): 65–74.

FMurphy_14_Finals.indd 289

4/28/2009 10:40:05 AM

Chapter 15

Why This? Why Me? A Theological Reflection on Ethics and Providence Hans S. Reinders

There are but three alternatives for the sum of existence: chance, fate, or Deity. James Douglas

I. Connecting Ethics and Providence The first task of this chapter is to explain in general terms the connection between the doctrine of providence and ethics. To fix ideas I will say that ethics, roughly, is the systematic reflection about what people consider to be important goals in their lives, how their concern for other people is part of these goals, how their concern for their natural environment fits in, and how institutions and practices must be shaped if these concerns are to guide their moral lives. Next, the doctrine of providence, generally speaking, offers a religious explanation of why what happens in the world happens, such that it answers questions about whether singular events are part of, or manifestations of, a divinely instituted cosmic order, whether or not there is a role for chance, or fortune, and, if so, how they may affect the notion of cosmic order. Within the perspective of Christian theology the content of these ideas differs. Christians believe that God is both creator and Redeemer of the universe, such that, as far as ethics is concerned, the moral life for Christians is shaped as responding to what they have received from God. There is no important goal in their lives that is not determined by that question. Similarly, the doctrine of providence is not merely about how singular events can be explained as part of a divinely instituted order. Instead it is about the question of how to discern what happens in the universe as testimony of who God is and what he does. As a theological doctrine the concept of providence refers to how the Triune God governs the world. With regard to the connection between the two, it follows that from a theological point of view, the connection between ethics and providence is perception. In order to discern how to respond to God we have to be able to discern how he is present in our lives, both as our Redeemer and as our creator. Do we see what is happening in our lives as making manifest God’s

FMurphy_15_Finals.indd 290

4/28/2009 10:39:49 AM

Theological Reflection on Ethics and Providence

291

will? Do we see it as a gift? What about the misfortunes people ordinarily do not reckon as gift? Is there fortune and misfortune apart from God’s willing? When Christian ethics is properly conceived of as responding to God, the primordial question is: how do we discern that which God wills us to respond to? In what follows I will reflect upon these matters by turning to a particular kind of moral experience that I have been studying for quite a while, the experience namely of living with a disability, or sharing one’s life, or part of one’s life, with a disabled person. In order to show how this experience raises questions that relate moral response to perception, we will consider some first-person accounts of it. Being confronted with the birth of a disabled child virtually all people cry out in lament: ‘Why this? Why me?’ The question itself, as well as its universal occurrence, indicates the notion of disrupted order. The example that immediately comes to mind is the language of genetic ‘disorder’. When a child is born with a genetic disorder people use expressions like ‘a stroke of bad luck’ in the ‘natural lottery’. Such expressions indicate the view that life ordinarily follows reliable patterns, but occasionally there is a disorder of which there is no account except that it is distributed at random. Expressions such as ‘bad luck’, or ‘blind fate’, or ‘natural lottery’ hints at question whether or not life’s contingencies are in some way governed by a higher principle, which is the question of providence. The providential understanding of people’s experience in having a child with a disability comes up time and again in their stories. So their accounts will put us in the position to enter a theological reflection, for which I will turn to John Calvin’s theology of providence. Calvin did not accept fortune and chance, because he believed the universe to be governed by the will and decree of God who governs all things happening in the world. This doctrine earned his theology the reputation of an ‘iron cage for iron believers’, as Karl Barth once put it. As I will show, however, Calvin’s theology of providence is not about power and control, but about trust and hope. It is therefore an eminently pastoral attempt to find guidance in our lives, which provides a useful context for thinking about providence in connection with Christian ethics.

II. Introducing the ‘ Why? ’ Question In a book full of stories about the spiritual lives of disabled children, Brett Webb-Mitchell tells the tale of his friendship with Joshua. Joshua is a little boy whose disabling condition is assessed as ‘autism’. Autism is a condition

FMurphy_15_Finals.indd 291

4/28/2009 10:39:50 AM

292

The Providence of God

that is characterized by, among other things, strongly repetitive and self-centred behaviour. Like other autistic individuals, Joshua is difficult to communicate with in direct conversation. To circumvent the difficulty Mitchell organizes ‘music sessions’ with him during which the boy shows a remarkable talent for piano playing. From the repertoire of songs that Joshua is capable of playing, there is one song in particular that keeps coming back, the author tells us. It has these opening lines: ‘there must be some misunderstanding; there must be some kind of mistake.’ Unsurprisingly, these lines capture Mitchell’s attention and they induce him to ponder about the meaning of this song. Here is what he says: I began thinking that these words state the problem I have in understanding the problem of autism. God, who created us, probably agonizes over the plight of anyone who is autistic, a condition that cripples and limits a child’s relationship with self and the world. But since there is autism in the lives of children ‘there must be some misunderstanding; there must be some kind of mistake.’ Is Joshua’s disabling condition a cosmic mistake?1

The question of whether the lives of disabled human beings like Joshua are to be seen as a cosmic mistake introduces the issue of perception, the perception namely of order that is breaking down. When people tell how they experienced becoming the parents of a disabled child, for example, they frequently use expressions indicating that their world fell apart, at least initially. There was some sort of order that abruptly ceases to exist. The life they thought they were living no longer adds up. For example, Brianne Jourdin-Bromley, mother of Kenadie, a five-year-old girl with primordial dwarfism, tells that giving birth to a disabled child did not affect just a part of her, but her entire life: ‘your plan is gone’, she says. Looking at the literature that comes out of this experience one finds the same question over and over again. ‘Why is this happening to me?’ ‘What did I do?’ ‘What does it mean?’ A father of a boy with Down’s syndrome recalls how that happened. Why has our son one chromosome too many? It is a fact about which also medical specialists have no satisfactory story. They can explain it medically, all right, but why does it happen to our child? These revolting questions regarding his life resounded for a long time.2 As this father indicates, people turn to specialists – medical or otherwise – for answers to their questions. But most of the time the answers given by specialists fail to offer much comfort. They can explain the factors that are causally responsible for the disabling condition and predict, to the extent that they know, the outcomes that these factors may produce. Specialists, this is to say, explain causes and effects. My ear was crushed to the phone.

FMurphy_15_Finals.indd 292

4/28/2009 10:39:50 AM

Theological Reflection on Ethics and Providence

293

–‘I’ve been looking things up’, said Judy. ‘About Down syndrome. The foetus you’re carrying is a typical trisomy-twenty-one.’ –‘What does that mean?’ I said. –‘It means that at conception, one of the haploid cells, either the egg or the sperm, failed to fully divide before fertilization. Then, when the cells combine, you get three chromosomes in the twenty-first position instead of two. The foetus has forty-seven chromosomes, instead of forty-six, and –’. –‘I know that!’ I barked into the phone, not caring how rude I was being. ‘I’ve taken biology, for God’s sake! I said what does it mean?’3

What people want to understand is not ‘how?’ but ‘why’? They are not asking for a scientific explanation of the cause but for an answer about meaning or a purpose. Their world is falling apart, so what’s the point of carrying on? Particularly when there is a newborn child involved, the why-question not only indicates a strong sense of catastrophe, but also of injustice. Again there are striking examples of this to be found in the literature. I believed in the idea of external cause. If there was a problem, it must necessarily have a source, a reason, an explanation. If Adam’s cognitive ability was permanently limited, as every evaluator seemed to agree, I wanted a culprit to accuse, a disease to blame, a named pathology. I had the kind of anger that could be ameliorated only through understanding; that could be accepted only after every stone had been upturned.4

In order for an accusation to make sense, there must be an ‘external cause’, something – or someone. This perceived externality of the cause generates the experience of being assaulted. ‘Bad luck’ seems too indifferent a word to express this feeling. I leaned back against the wall and covered my face with my hands, trying to control myself. I felt as though some evil ogre had killed my ‘real’ baby – the baby I’d been expecting – and replaced him with an ugly, broken replica. My grief as losing that ‘real’ baby was as intense as if he had been two years old, or five, or ten. The whole thing seemed wildly unfair to me: my baby was dead, and I was still pregnant. I was suddenly seized by a rage so strong I wanted to bash the elevator walls.5

Justice and injustice, in this context as well as in any other, are about equations. This opens the possibility of different considerations of what on the face of it appears as incredibly unjust. For example, even though the circumstances at present look bleak, there is the possibility of hope that the

FMurphy_15_Finals.indd 293

4/28/2009 10:39:50 AM

294

The Providence of God

apparent disadvantages that inevitably will burden a disabled child’s life will be made ‘good’ in some ways. I never doubted, at least I never acknowledged doubt that Adam would be found in some way ‘gifted’ and looked forward to hearing what off-the-scale talents he might possess. I believed, at that point in my life, in a kind of cosmic fairness, in the idea that for every disability there was an equal or greater ability. Adam was an innocent if ever there was one, and innocence could not be penalized.6

In this case, a father faces the violation of innocence of his son born with a disability. He maintains that this violence is just too horrific not to be repaired somehow. There must be a ‘cosmic kind of fairness’, he believes, because innocence ‘cannot be penalized’. Or again, a mother who can imagine that giving birth to her disabled son is her fair share of bad luck, but certainly not her son’s. I have been the beneficiary of so much improbable good fortune in my life that it’s only logical I’d have some bad luck as well. What I did ask myself that day, however, what I continue to ask myself as I watch Adam go out into a frightening world in all his gentleness, sweetness, and hope, is, ‘Why him? Why him? Why him?’7

Based on a belief in cosmic justice, and remembering that justice is about equations, people apparently can live with the fact that there is good and bad in the universe, and each of us will get a share of both. So, when I had my share of the good, why should I not get a fair share of the bad as well? But that does not hold for an innocent child.

III. Silence As these accounts indicate, justice provides a helpful focal point to reflect upon what people are saying in raising the ‘why?’ question. ‘Bad luck’ or ‘misfortune’ are indications of resignation; ‘injustice’ indicates being wronged. Therefore the ‘why?’ question cannot be taken as an expression of rage about injustice when the universe is taken to be governed by fortune. The goddess of fortune is commonly conceived to be blind in her distribution of good and evil, which means she visits people as if they were patients in a double blind randomized trial. There is no equation in fortune’s measurement; there is no proportionality either. Therefore there is no ground for protest. A stroke of bad luck, or a lucky escape, they foreclose questioning; there is nothing to be infuriated about, or to be grateful for.

FMurphy_15_Finals.indd 294

4/28/2009 10:39:50 AM

Theological Reflection on Ethics and Providence

295

The response to fortune, it appears, is resignation. Why resent what one cannot change? A father remembers being caught between resentment and resignation. Where was the fine line between acceptance of a condition I could never change and despair or, worse, indifference? When did I stop wanting, demanding, feeling that Adam had been cheated?8

Another father took a more pragmatic approach. He told me that he had given up on the ‘why?’ question as a question about meaning. Nobody is going to answer it for you anyway, and besides, there are sufficient practical worries everyday that need attention. So, why waste energy on an unanswerable question that is better used for other things? This pragmatic posture notwithstanding, however, this father did not say that the question of meaning was longer there. Not many other parents that I have spoken to would say that either, it is just that they have given up on paying attention to that inner voice. You have to get on with your life, so that continuing to question the inevitable does not seem to be of much help. The apparent lack of a satisfactory answer suggests that ignoring it is the wisest thing to do. This response indicates something like the Stoic virtue of not letting oneself being affected by what one cannot change. Why allow yourself to complain, when you need all the energy you can muster to advocate for your child, and protect its life? On the other hand, however, resignation from the ‘why question’ may not be akin to the posture to misfortune taught by the Stoics; it can also be inspired by modern scepticism. In this respect, our contemporaries seem to share the view of the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard who contends that the ‘why question’ leaves us speechless because the experience of blind fate has no vocabulary.9 According to Lyotard, speechlessness is not necessarily generated by the experience of being struck by disaster but by the fact that there is no language to express what people experience. There seems to be no address, no court of appeal that one can turn to, to file a complaint. The injustice, says Lyotard, is in the fact that there is no one there to be held accountable; the ‘why question’ is no longer cried out loud because it gets smothered in silence. When there is no language to express the injustice of what people experience, however, the consequence must be that the things happening in our lives are mere ‘events’. The notion that there is no address, no court of appeal, implies that whatever happens to us is nobody’s doing. There is no agent involved, and therefore no action. What remains are events. A universe that consists of sequences of events has no purpose, nor has it

FMurphy_15_Finals.indd 295

4/28/2009 10:39:51 AM

296

The Providence of God

any meaning other than that what happens, happens. Upon this view, the things that are happening to us are either prearranged by fate, or they happen as a matter of mere chance. Beyond these two, there is only one possibility left, which is that the universe is not left to its own devices, but answers to the will of its creator. Within the Christian tradition, the notion of divine providence has been used to oppose the belief in blind fate or mere chance as the causes of what happens in our lives. Most Christians know hymns such as ‘He’s got the whole world in His hands.’ Contrary to what such hymns apparently suggest, however, providence does not necessarily answer the question of who is in control. It is certainly a doctrine that addresses that question, but not in the sense that it explains why God did send this or that contingency in our lives. On the contrary, I suspect that it is precisely the misapprehension of divine providence as a doctrine of ultimate power that accounts for why many of our contemporaries seem to have lost interest in it. The ‘why?’ question is a lament indicating that people long to be comforted; they are not trying to find out who did it. Given its reputation, there is hardly a more suitable candidate to prove this point than Calvin’s understanding of providence. The tradition that followed Calvin came to be seen as a grim creed for iron believers, primarily because its doctrine of providence was received as the crudest example of theological determinism. A careful reading of Calvin’s texts will show that this is a mistake. Providence is not about control, but about hope that is grounded in promise. In the liturgy of the Church there are prayers and benedictions promising that the Lord will provide, the locus classicus of which is the Old Testament scene where Abraham binds his son Isaac on the alter. ‘The Lord will provide’ is a promise that Abraham wants to be remembered, wherefore he gave the place where Gods tested him the name of this promise.10 The important question in view of the connection with ethics is what difference the belief in this promise makes for how we respond to what happens in our lives. The language of providence properly understood is a language of hope against resentment and resignation that our lives will be recreated. To make the argument for this claim I will now turn to John Calvin’s theology of providence.

IV. The Mistake of Ancient Poets and Philosophers His mature doctrine of providence is found in the final edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion that starts with describing the position that Calvin rejects. This is the position that separates the creation of the

FMurphy_15_Finals.indd 296

4/28/2009 10:39:51 AM

Theological Reflection on Ethics and Providence

297

universe from its continued governance by the divine will. God is not merely a momentary creator who once and for all started and finished his work, as he is regarded by ‘profane men’, because the presence of divine power shines as much ‘in the continuing state of the universe as in its inception.’11 Poets and philosophers from Antiquity have looked up to the stars in heaven and arrived at the reverence for divine creativity, according to Calvin, but they have understood this activity as the initiating power that sets nature in motion. When they speak of divine creativity, they regard it as a ‘divine energy bestowed from the beginning sufficient to sustain all things’.12 However, God did not only create nature by giving it its own patterns of motion, according to Calvin, but he also continues to sustain and care for everything he has made. By neglecting divine sovereignty in all things happening in the universe, the profane mind deprives God of his glory, and itself from a most ‘profitable doctrine’.13 In believing that God allows ‘all things a free course according to a universal law of nature’, people are left in the miserable position of believing that they are exposed to whatever natural events bring them.14 The profane mind replaces God by the nature itself. Instead of being led to praise God by the wonders of the natural world, including the world within us, poets such as Virgil and Lucretius set God aside and put ‘nature’ in his place.15 They attribute to nature a divine spirit that animates all things. Calvin comments that nature is not its own ground, and therefore not divine, because nature is not God. Faith ought to penetrate more deeply, namely, having found him Creator of all, forthwith to conclude he is also everlasting Governor and Preserver – not only in that he drives the celestial frame as well as its several parts by a universal motion, but also in that he sustains, nourishes, and cares for, everything he has made, even to the least sparrow (Mt. 10.29).16

Even though providence is testified by ‘the whole workmanship of the universe’,17 this does not mean, Calvin warns his readers, that people will arrive at proper understanding on their own account. Human reason – Calvin speaks of ‘carnal sense’ – will arrive at best at a notion of providence within which God is the originating force of motion.18 The order of creation may even be admired by the ‘unwilling’, but that is as far as their insight goes. They fail to see that God as our creator not only has set into motion all things, but that he directs all that is happening in the world as its governor and preserver. To explain the difference with the view he ascribes to Antiquity, Calvin crafts the distinction between a ‘general’ and a ‘special’ providence.19 God’s rule does not only entail that he watches over the order of nature as he

FMurphy_15_Finals.indd 297

4/28/2009 10:39:51 AM

298

The Providence of God

himself has installed it, but rather that ‘he exercises particular care over all of his works’.20 It is particular this second perspective, which identifies ‘the most important thing about providence’ that is named ‘special’. Special is the way in which God cares for all beings, human and otherwise, as a loving Father. Special providence, in other words, is providence of the Triune God of whom scripture speaks, according to Calvin. In this connection Calvin repeatedly refers his readers to the Letter to the Hebrews 11.3, which says: ‘Only by faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God.’21 Even though providence is testified by ‘the whole workmanship of the universe’,22 this testimony does not point beyond what Calvin coins a general conception of providence. This explains why the notion that God sustains the world directly with love and care for his creatures is generally met by unbelief. People prefer to believe in fortune rather than in God’s governance. It has been commonly accepted in all ages, and almost all mortals hold the same opinion today, that all things come about through chance. What we ought to believe concerning providence is by this depraved opinion most certainly not only beclouded, but also almost buried.23

The distinction between a ‘general’ and ‘special’ conception of providence as a distinction between two ways of seeing is important to understand what Calvin is saying. On the face of it, he simply seems to insist on replacing the force of chance and fortune by that of God’s will, which is supported by his explicit use of the language of power as sovereignty, but this language only clouds the theological substance of what he intends to say. One way to find access to this theological substance is to understand why he characterizes the doctrine of providence as ‘knowledge of the heart’.

V. Knowledge of the Heart Apparently, ‘what we ought to believe’ is anything but self-evident, which is precisely what Calvin repeatedly says. The limited capacity of human reason in understanding God means that on the level of ordinary human experience there is nothing self-evident about God’s providential care. Reading Calvin’s reflections on the matter, one is tempted to say that rather the opposite seems to be true. Ever so often the first cause of things – the ‘ever-present hand of God’ – is deeply hidden, which is why Calvin can speak of ‘God’s secret providence’.24 God governs the world according to a secret plan, he says, which makes the things happening to us seem fortuitous, given our limited understanding.

FMurphy_15_Finals.indd 298

4/28/2009 10:39:51 AM

Theological Reflection on Ethics and Providence

299

Since the sluggishness of our mind lies far beneath the height of God’s providence, we must employ a distinction to lift it up. Therefore I shall put it in this way: however all things may be ordained by God’s plan, according to a sure dispensation, for us they are fortuitous. Not that we think that fortune rules the world and men, tumbling all things at random up and down, for it is fitting that this folly be absent from the Christian’s breast! But since the order, reason, end, and necessity of those things which happen for the most part lie hidden in God’s purpose, and are not apprehended by human opinion, those things, which it is certain take place by God’s will, are in a sense fortuitous. For they bear on the face of them no other appearance, whether they be considered in their own nature or weighed according to our own knowledge and judgment.25

This passage needs some unpacking in order to see what Calvin is saying here. Apparently, there are at least two fundamentally different descriptions of things happening in the world. Something happening before our eyes appears as a chance occurrence, but within the hidden scheme of God’s purpose, it can be perceived as willed by him. There are always these two possible perspectives on one and the same event. What from the perspective of our limited understanding and judgement appears as fortuitous can be seen from the perspective of God’s will to be determined by his purpose. Calvin takes as an example a young man wandering in the field who is struck by lightning. Considered for what it is – ‘in its own nature’ – and for all that we can tell, this is a chance occurrence that would be adequately reported in a local paper as an unfortunate accident. Since for a Christian no such thing as fortune exists, the true description of what happened must be different. God, not fortune rules the universe. Nonetheless, it would be quite reckless for a Christian reporter to write that a young man has been killed by the wrath of God. Notwithstanding the fact that this description could be true, to write it in the newspaper the reporter must know for a fact that it is true. Calvin does not rule this possibility, but he is very reluctant to assert it: ‘as far as the capacity of our mind is concerned, all things therein seem fortuitous.’26 The larger scheme within which this unfortunate event occurred – the reason why it happened, the end for which it happened, or why it had to happen – ‘lies hidden in God’s purpose’. This being so, it is not surprising that most people would call it an accident. What, then, will a Christian think at this point? Just this: whatever happened in a death of this sort he will regard as fortuitous by nature, as it is; yet he will not doubt that God’s providence exercised authority over fortune in directing its end.27

From the perspective of our understanding, then, contingency is an inevitable aspect of human perception. That is why Calvin suggests a double

FMurphy_15_Finals.indd 299

4/28/2009 10:39:52 AM

300

The Providence of God

perspective on the causation of natural events: the first regards what the human mind can ‘see’, the second regards what the heart ‘will not doubt’. In Calvin’s theological perspective the order of these different views of causation is reversed, however. What is believed to be effected by God’s will is named as ‘primary’ cause; what is effected by the properties and conditions of natural objects – including human beings – is named as ‘secondary’ cause. God’s will as primary cause never erase the effects of secondary causes; in fact it lies hidden behind what there is for the eye to see. What God wills must take place, even when the occurring event itself is neither unconditional nor necessary as far as its own nature is concerned.28 To return for a moment to the accident of the young man described above, there may have been any number of circumstances that explains its occurrence. For example, while the young man went deliberately into the field to meet his girlfriend, his girlfriend phoned him to cancel their appointment at the moment he closed the door. Had he decided to pick up the phone at that moment, he would have been in a different spot. The occurrence of these circumstances is purely coincidental. In other words, there is nothing in the event itself which points directly to God’s will. That is why events in our ordinary world do not wear their providential nature on their sleeves. It also explains why Calvin maintains that divine providence can only be distinguished from the perspective of faith. ‘What for us seems a contingency, faith recognizes to have been a secret impulse from God.’29

VI. Discerning ‘with Becoming Humility’ The next step is to see that the limitations Calvin observes in human understanding are in his view related to moral character. These limitations regard dispositions of the heart rather than the mind, so to speak. Without appropriate disposition we can hardly avoid entangling ourselves in ‘inscrutable difficulties’, Calvin warns us, which indicates that in his view figuring out divine providence is not a mind-game for clever people.30 It is about the ability to respond faithfully to adversity and uncertainty. It is the rebellious part of human nature, which is ready to hold God accountable for his miserable ways of ruling the universe, or at least that part of it which burdens our own lives. Whenever the thought creeps in that we are tossed and turned by blind fortune, ‘the flesh incites us to contradiction, as if God were making sport of men by throwing them about like balls.’ If only we had ‘quiet and composed minds, ready to learn’, we would see that God always has the best reason for his plan.31

FMurphy_15_Finals.indd 300

4/28/2009 10:39:52 AM

Theological Reflection on Ethics and Providence

301

By referring his readers to notions like a ‘hidden purpose’, a ‘secret impulse’ or ‘matters unknown’ to us, Calvin seems to move into dangerous territory because such notions evoke the dubious image of a darker side in God. This is not what he wants to say, however. He asserts that for the faithful there is no deep abyss to be afraid of, because ‘God illumines the minds of his own with the spirit of discernment.’32 What he wants to say, then, is not that God’s will has two sides, one revealed, the other hidden, but that as far as we are concerned the one divine will speaks to us through his commandments. Whether or not we will move beyond our limited understanding depends on whether God illumines our spirits. Moses ‘has beautifully expressed both ideas in a few words’, says Calvin: ‘The secret things belong to the Lord our God; but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of his law.’33 There is wisdom that is known to God alone, and there is ‘a portion of wisdom prescribed for men’. The aim of the distinction is no other than to ‘humble our minds’. Therefore, since God assumes to himself the right (unknown to us) to rule the universe, let our law of soberness and moderation be to assent to his supreme authority, that his will may be for all of us the sole rule of righteousness, and the truly just cause of all things.34

To avoid all misunderstanding at this point Calvin distances himself from the idea that there is a hidden will in God that is separated from his revealed will. There are no two separate wills in God, because this would mean that one of them would not be in accordance with God’s justice. Otherwise they could not be separate. There we ought to reject the scholastic doctrine of absolute divine might, Calvin asserts, which clearly indicates that he wants to stay away from providence as a doctrine about ultimate power. God’s will is not ‘that absolute will of which the Sophists babble, by an impious and profane distinction separating his justice from his power’. It would be easier, Calvin argues, to take the sun’s light from its heat than to separate God’s power from his justice.35 The reason is that, unlike heat, which is a quality of the sun, God’s justice is not a quality. God is his justice, just like he is love, and perfect goodness. Therefore, without the identification of God’s secret plan with his eternal justice it is inescapable that God’s rule will be seen as identical with blind fortune. For that is what blind fortune does: it distributes good and bad without any consideration of justice. In other words: allowing the position he ascribes to the ‘Sophists’ to do any work would mean that the doctrine of providence looses its point as part of the Christian gospel. No human

FMurphy_15_Finals.indd 301

4/28/2009 10:39:52 AM

302

The Providence of God

being could ever find any consolation in such a doctrine. There would be no life without despair. Rather than questioning God’s justice, Calvin leads his readers towards submitting themselves God’s unknown plans ‘with becoming humility’ so as not to inquire into things beyond their own judgement. Important as this may be, however, his readers may not be convinced unless Calvin is prepared to say more. If the doctrine of providence is to have any practical meaning at all, there must be a way to discern God’s purpose. Left to our own devices – our limited ways of human understanding – we would again have no ground to distinguish providence from fortune. Then we could find no comfort in it either.

VII. ‘Provided Our Eyes Be Pure’ In considering this problem Calvin spends many pages on eradicating the mistake that it suggests, namely that the task is to find a way to differentiate what does come from God, and what not. The mistake in such attempts is that discerning divine providence is never about distinctions between domains of action, one attributable to humans, the other to God, or between domains of causes, one attributable to nature’s laws, the other to God’s will. Providence, as indicated before, is about seeing with a faithful heart, the truth about God as our loving Father. Discerning ‘with becoming humility’ the faithful heart understands that its prime responsibility is not to hold a presumably benign creator accountable for all the things that go wrong in the world, but to look for how he may provide to see his flock through whatever hardships befall them in their lives. Leaving aside the ‘calumnies’ of the ‘inquisitive mind’, Calvin focuses on how the Christian heart will receive its ‘best and sweetest fruit’. The Christian heart, since it has been thoroughly persuaded that all things happen by God’s plan, and that nothing takes place by chance, will ever look to him as the principal cause of things, yet will give attention to the secondary causes in their proper place. Then the heart will not doubt that God’s singular providence keeps watch to preserve it, and will not suffer anything to happen but what may turn to its good and salvation. (. . .) As far as men are concerned, whether they are good or evil, the heart of the Christian will know that their plans, wills, efforts, and abilities are under God’s hand; that it is within his choice to bend them whither he pleases and to constrain them whenever he pleases.36

This knowledge of the Christian heart will give us the strength, according to Calvin when our experience gives us plenty reason to doubt divine providence. The servant of God ‘will raise his heart unto God, whose hand

FMurphy_15_Finals.indd 302

4/28/2009 10:39:53 AM

Theological Reflection on Ethics and Providence

303

can best impress patience and peaceful moderation of mind upon us’.37 In practising patience, he turns away from the evil that fell upon him, and in doing so will succeed to transform himself. Calvin refers to the Joseph saga in order to explain what he has in mind. Had he remained focused on their treachery, Joseph would never have been able to find gentleness and compassion for his brothers. In turning his heart to the Lord, Joseph could forget the injustice and even find words to comfort his brothers in acing their guilt. It had been God’s will that he had been sold to Egypt in order to safe the lives of Jacob’s clan. ‘Indeed you intended evil against me, but the Lord turned it into Good’ (Gen. 50.20). Therefore, there is great benefit in believing that God’s providential will cares about the well-being of his creatures even in circumstances that things appear to the contrary. For those who put their trust in God’s caring hand, Calvin asserts, ‘gratitude of mind for the favourable outcome of things, patience in adversity and also incredible freedom of worry about the future all necessarily follow upon this knowledge’.38 Since it relates directly to the topic of the present inquiry, let me conclude with a passage that shows precisely this. Having argued that God does not kick human beings around like balls as if he were playing a game with them, Calvin admonishes his readers to trust that God has always the best reason for what he does. The faithful heart will trust God’s justice because it knows that God’s justice goes beyond retribution. In the Gospel, he reminds us, Christ claims for the Father’s secret plan a broader justice than simply punishing each one as he deserves. In regard concerning the man born blind, he says: ‘Neither he nor his parents sinned, but that God’s glory may be manifested in him’ (John 9:3). For here our nature cries out, when calamity comes before birth itself, as if God with so little mercy thus punished the undeserving. Yet Christ testifies that in this miracle the glory of his father shines, provided our eyes be pure.39

There can be no point in punishing those whose lives have not yet begun, according to Calvin, wherefore there is reason not to silence the voice of lament. Therefore, there is reason not to turn away from God, because what appears as evil may turn out for the good. The condition that Calvin adds in making this claim – ‘provided our eyes be pure’ – is crucial, however. The doctrine of providence is a doctrine of faith. Discerning how God’s will governs our lives is the work of the Spirit, Calvin insists, without which ‘understanding’ means very little. Therefore he admonishes his readers to learn from scripture ‘under the Spirit’s guidance’.40 He recommends a ‘pious and holy meditation on providence’ so that we may receive the ‘best and sweetest fruits’. Consequently, Calvin speaks of the force of providence in the elect ‘who are ruled by the Holy Spirit’.

FMurphy_15_Finals.indd 303

4/28/2009 10:39:53 AM

304

The Providence of God

VIII. Conclusion The connection between ethics and providence lies in perception, I said in my introduction, because there are different ways of looking at whatever it is that befalls us in our lives. In the eyes of the world, good and bad things happening to people are a matter of fortune and chance. In the case that I presented here, the confrontation with disability, the universal response is one of lament, but in view of chance and fortune the question ‘Why this? Why me?’ is silenced, because accepting chance and fortune people know there is no answer. There is nobody in control; therefore there is no address. It is very well possible that providence has lost much of its meaning in the daily lives of many Christians today because of the suggestion that it is ultimately about control. I chose to discuss John Calvin’s views on the matter because his theology, and the tradition that followed it, is generally believed to represent precisely that view. My reading of his theology, however, suggests otherwise: providence is not about absolute power, but is about trust that God will not forsake his promises. Belief in divine providence, according to Calvin, is the ground of consolation and gratitude for the faithful, because they trust that things may be different from what they appear on the face of it. In a sense one could argue that providence in Calvin’s understanding is like a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is in perceiving how adversity may look within the perspective of God’s promises that people may find consolation and strength to respond in ways that enable them to embody that promise, as Calvin’s explanation of Joseph in Egypt indicated. Believe in God’s providential will is empowerment by trust, which according to Calvin is its ‘sweetest fruit’. The question ‘Why this? Why me?’ is a lament that is not necessarily smothered in silence. But neither is answered discursively as offering insight in why God did what he apparently decided to do. Instead the ‘why?’ question is answered performatively by those who trust that good may come out of evil because God will not abandon them and will send his Spirit. The fruit of trusting God’s providential will, therefore, is the embodiment of his promise.

Notes 1 Brett Webb-Mitchell, God Plays Piano Too: The Spiritual Lives of Disabled Children (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 2. 2 O. de Wagt, Mijn zoon en ik. Leven met een gehandicapt kind. Translated by the present author (Bloemendaal: Nelissen, 1994), 16. 3 Martha Beck, Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic (New York: Berkley Books, 2000), 184.

FMurphy_15_Finals.indd 304

4/28/2009 10:39:53 AM

Theological Reflection on Ethics and Providence 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13 14

15

16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

305

Michael Dorris, The Broken Cord (New York: Harper Collins, 1989), 76. Beck, Expecting Adam, 196. Dorris, Broken Cord, 71. Beck, Expecting Adam, 194. Martha Beck here indicates a way in which the ‘why question’ never goes away; the child to whose existence it is attached continues to live the life that provokes the question in the first place. Beck continues with this insight: ‘The hardest lesson I have ever had to learn is that I will never know the meaning of my children’s pain, and that I have neither the capacity nor the right to take it away from them.’ Dorris, Broken Cord, 260. J. F. Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). Genesis 22.14. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977), 1.16.1, 197. Ibid., 1.16.1, 197. Although Calvin does not mention Aristotle in this connection, the entire section appears to be directed against philosophers who see God only as the first cause of all motion. He only mentions the ‘Sophists’ – Sophistae – which term in his days was used to refer to the scholastics (1.16.3, 200). Ibid., 1.16.3, 200. Calvin may have had in mind the thought that providence only regards the order of the universe and the general motion of things at large. The thought is explicit in the second book of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum (ed. Arthur S. Pease, Darmstadt: WBG, 1968) where he claims that the gods mind great things but neglect the small (magna di curant, parva neglegunt, DND II, 167). Calvin, Institutes, vol.1, 1.5.4, 56. Calvin may have had Cicero in mind who quotes from Ennius the phrase of nature as the ‘father of gods and men’. The quote is found in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, II, 2, 4. Ibid., 1.16.1, 197–8. Ibid., 1.5.2, 53. Calvin has a quite effective array of metaphors to indicate the nature of the task of proper understanding. Even though as human beings we lack ‘the natural ability to mount up unto the pure and clear knowledge of God’ we cannot pretend ignorance, he argues, because this is not going to work. There is no excuse as ‘for a man to pretend that he lacks ears to hear the truth when there are mute creatures with more than melodious voices to declare it’; or ‘to claim that he cannot see with his eyes what eyeless creatures point out to him’; or ‘to plead feebleness of mind when even irrational creatures give instruction’ (1.5.14, 69). Ibid., 1.16.1, 197. Ibid., 1.16.4, 202–3. Ibid., 1.16.4, 203. Ibid., 1.16.1, 197; also 1.5.14, 68. See note 17 in this chapter. Ibid., 1.16.2, 198. Ibid., 1.16.9, 209. Ibid., 1.16.9, 208. Bouwsma takes this remark to indicate that ‘as a practical matter, Calvin’s providence is not far from Machiavelli’s fortune’ (Bouwsma,

FMurphy_15_Finals.indd 305

4/28/2009 10:39:53 AM

The Providence of God

306

26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

John Calvin, 168). To show why this comment is incorrect is the burden of the present section. ‘In fact, with regard to those events which daily take place outside the ordinary course of nature, how many of us do not reckon that men are whirled and twisted about by blindly indiscriminate fortune, rather than governed by God’s providence?’ (Institutes, 1.5.11, 63). Ibid., 1.16.9, 209. In the same section: ‘As far as the capacity of our mind is concerned, all things therein seem fortuitous’ (ibid.). Ibid., 1.16.9, 210. Ibid., 1.16.9, 210. Calvin formulates this aphorism after he used as elucidation the story of David hiding with his men for King Saul in the fields of Maon. Saul’s army was clamping down on David and his men and about to seize them when a messenger arrived to inform Saul that he had to return immediately because the Philistine army was raiding the country. Calvin comments: ‘Not always does a like reason appear, but we ought undoubtedly to hold that whatever changes are discerned in the world are produced from the secret stirring of God’s hand (ibid.). Ibid., 1.17.1, 210. Ibid., 1.17.1, 211. Ibid., 1.17.1, 212. Deuteronomy 29.29, quoted from RVS. Ibid., 1.17.2, 213–14. John Calvin, ‘A Defence of the Secret Providence of God’(1552) in Calvin’s Calvinism: Treatises on the Eternal Predestination of God and the Secret Providence of God, trans. Henry Cole (London: Sovereign Grace Union, 1927), 248. Calvin, Institutes, 1.17.6, 218. Ibid., 1.17.8, 220. Note that this admonition would make no sense if it were to presuppose that adversity is necessarily willed by God as punishment. Ibid., 1.17.7, 219. Ibid., 1.17.1, 211. Ibid., 1.17.3, 214–15.

FMurphy_15_Finals.indd 306

4/28/2009 10:39:54 AM

Chapter 16

The Uses of Providence in Public Theology Philip G. Ziegler

You are convinced that God will have you act on. But only consider how you shall act. Sexby, The Putney Debates, 62

I. Introduction In the autumn of 2007, Gordon Brown delivered a speech on the theme of liberty in Britain. It was felt to be remarkable in many ways – though the absence of reference to divine providence was not one of them. The Labour prime minister began his remarks with an extended sketch of freedom as a theme in the history of British political thought. It was in this connection, that he made mention of the ‘civil wars and revolutions of the 17th century’. These events, he said, represented a ‘pivotal struggle against arbitrary and unaccountable government’ whose positive aims were freedom from hierarchical rule, human rights and the rule of law. Tellingly, religion figured in this story solely in connection with the emergence of the idea of toleration, the ‘right of dissent’ and the ‘gradual acceptance of pluralism’; which is to say, religion was cast as one of the problems which the secularizing liberal tradition in British politics managed to sort over time.1 Now, whatever is right in that view of things, it certainly occludes something decisive. The seventeenth-century political struggle which drives forward the history of liberty in Britain was nothing if not a ‘revolution of the saints’, in which questions of human rule, and right and law were inextricably entangled with those of divine rule, right and law.2 Discerning and honouring providence – the outworking of the present purposes of God in the political life of the people – rather than accommodating pluralism was the heart of the issue for those actually involved. For the puritan Christians in the lead of this struggle, the achievement of human liberty and acknowledgement of divine providence were taken to be inseparable; the former should it emerge, was nothing but a mercy bestowed by the outworking of the latter. That there might be distinctive theological lessons to be learned for politics from these early modern Calvinists, is intimated by Kathryn Tanner in a discussion of divine providence in her book, The Politics of God.3 Cromwellian Protestants quietly march through the footnotes of her study,

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 307

4/28/2009 10:39:35 AM

308

The Providence of God

and they do so with good reason. For Tanner’s work recommends something which those same Christians knew well, namely that the doctrine of providence can underwrite and animate a critical politics of social and political change. ‘In the seventeeth century’, Christopher Hill observes, ‘God was the principle of change’ and history was nothing less than ‘the story of God in action’.4 When the course of human affairs is referred to providence, rather than to the creation per se, Tanner argues, the attention of Christian political theology shifts to discerning ‘the manifestation of God’s will in a moral ordering rather than in a moral order with some static and immutable character’.5 The origins of the existing order of things become less important than acknowledgement that all such orders are themselves subject to the dynamic exercise of divine sovereignty in the present. The path of divine governance and the unfolding of the divine will may cut across or even against things as they stand. Christians thus know no final obligation to uphold and maintain any given worldly order; rather, on this account, their proper obligation is to keep abreast of the present ruling of the God who is ever free according to his good purposes ‘to will a world in which human efforts alter human social orders’.6 Accordingly, the chief matter for Christian political discernment becomes God’s intentions within contemporary events, that is, tracing the ‘straight line’ of divine causality running ‘through all the darkness, confusion and disorder of this world’ as Cromwell’s chaplain, John Owen, put it.7 For reckoning the significance of God’s providences – the meaning of this judgement or that mercy – is the crucial condition for identifying ‘one’s responsibilities here and now as an agent of God’s will’ in the political sphere.8 If such discernment is the chief matter it is also, of course, the chief problem.9 Just how well are we able to trace that line of divine intent amidst the flux of events? To what extent is present divine providence actually perspicacious? To whom, and by what means is it so, if it is so? And if answers to these questions elude us, or else prove unconvincing or unsound, what then? Is Christian politics then required to join in modernity’s ‘advancement of the clay against the potter’ and piously honour the modern household god of contingency?10 Or, might the doctrine of providence perhaps still provide crucial orientation to the political life of Christians, even if not as was once hoped and ventured? In this chapter I want to begin to explore some of these questions. To do so, I want first to return to the case of those puritan revolutionaries, and see what can be gleaned from them on this matter. From the wealth of materials to which one could turn, I will limit myself largely to the recently republished transcripts of the Putney Debates of 1647.11 The central issues

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 308

4/28/2009 10:39:36 AM

The Uses of Providence in Public Theology

309

involved in the politics of providence during the time of the ‘Great Rebellion’ – honouring the complexity of causality, motivating human action, and discerning of divine action – are then brought forward and considered in a most aggravated form, by reflecting on the place of providence in the German Church Struggle of the 1930s. This latter history raises very serious questions about the continued viability of recourse to providence in Christian political theology. On the back of these explorations, I conclude with some comments regarding the use of providence in contemporary public theology which recommend a thoroughly chastened providentialism, whose renewed Christological concentration at once warrants Christian political life, even as it deflates the expectations attached thereunto.

II. Two Cautionary Histories of the Politics of Providence A. Providence, politics and political change in seventeenth-century England It was in the Church of St Mary in Putney, that the General Council of the New Model Army met in the fall of 1647 in the wake of their victory in the first civil war. In the midst of what was essentially a prayer meeting extending over several days, counsellors and regimental agents debated the terms of the settlement that parliament had put to the king. In fact, it was to be an alternate set of terms drafted by army radicals under the title, An Agreement of the People which preoccupied the debate. At issue in any case, were the principals of a new draft constitution, the fundamental shaping of the polity itself. The transcripts of these debates are remarkable documents, not least because they reveal the thoroughgoing commitment of all those involved to the political pertinence of providence. For all their disagreements, everyone could concur with Edward Sexby’s remark that ‘we have been by providence put upon strange things, such as the ancientest here do scarce remember’.12 The text of the Agreement itself13opens with this: Having by our late labours and hazards made it appear to the world at how high a rate we value our just freedom, and God having so far owned our cause as to deliver the enemies thereof into our hands, we do now hold ourselves bound in mutual duty to each other to take the best care we can for the future to avoid both the danger of returning into a slavish condition and the chargeable remedy of another war.14

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 309

4/28/2009 10:39:36 AM

310

The Providence of God

In this fight, common people hazarded ‘all that was dear to us. And God has borne witness to the justice of our cause.’ A just constitution would therefore be ‘the fruits and ends of the victories which God has given us’ and the army pledges itself to continue to uphold the parliamentary cause by ‘all other vigorous actings for your good that God shall direct and enable us unto’. The petition concludes by expressing the hope that, the righteous God will, not only by this our present desire of settling an equal government but also by directing us unto all righteous undertakings simply for public good, make our uprightness and faithfulness to the interest of all our countrymen shine forth so clearly that malice itself shall be silenced and confounded.

Those opposed to the radical agenda of the Agreement were yet willing to consider the possibility of that it might prove true to God’s providential purposes. Thus, one counsellor admits, when I see the hand of God destroying king, and Lords, and Commons too, or any foundation of human constitution, when I see God has done it, I shall, I hope, comfortably acquiesce in it. But first, I cannot give my consent to it, because it is not good.15

Such caution could, however, also be chastised as ‘but a distrust of providence’.16 And still other aspects of the idea of providence are put into play when another deputy (Sexby) castigates the conservative pariliamentarians, saying, as regards the ‘working and actings of God within us’: The Lord has put you into a state, or at least suffered you to run yourselves into such a one, that you know not where you are. You are in a wilderness condition. Some actings among us singly and jointly are the cause of it. Truly I would entreat you to weigh that we find in the word of God, ‘I would heal Babylon, but she would not be healed’. I think that we have gone about to heal Babylon when she would not. . . . We are going about to set up that power which God will destroy; I think that we are going about to set up the power of kings, some part of it, which God will destroy.17

Then there is Cromwell’s own intense and outspoken appreciation of divine providence. Only ‘a very atheist’, he considered, could treat as ‘bare events’ the series of ‘marvellous dispensations which God hath wrought’ in the Civil Wars; honesty required that God be properly ‘owned’ in the victories of the parliamentary cause.18 Time and again he recounted the mercies ‘let down to us from God Himself’, that chain of ‘issues and events’ which could ‘not to be outmatched by any Story’19 not least because it could ‘not have been forecast; but were sudden Providences in things’.20

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 310

4/28/2009 10:39:36 AM

The Uses of Providence in Public Theology

311

What was patently discernable in the advance of the parliamentary cause was nothing less than very ‘the appearance of God’.21 While the accomplishments of battle and parliament were undoubtedly hard won human ones, Cromwell was constrained to admit that ‘God hath made these Revolutions’, and that they are the very ‘Revolutions of Christ himself’.22 Or, to change the metaphor, such events constituted together ‘a fair lecture’ and ‘clear speaking’ the very ‘testimony of God’ by means of which ‘we have found the Cause of God by the works of God’.23 The imperative of history is to dispose oneself according to this truth: that ‘when God makes a change in times it becomes us to make a change also.’24 Across all of these instances, we note the apprehension of God’s effective proximity to the present situation, and the clear acknowledgement of past, and expectation of present and future, divine action. Note too, how readily invocation of divine governance is interwoven with clear recognition of human moral obligations and ‘vigorous actings’: there is simply no correlation between acknowledgement of divine superintendence and moral or political quietism, quite the opposite in fact. Moreover, deep complexities of action and interaction can and must be entertained: God can act within or without us, can bring about something or merely permit something to come about; and what comes about thereby can also be said to be caused by various human ‘actings’; so too can humans be about a business which is inimical to God’s purposes and thus set for future failure. And yet how did one scry the purposes of God? How did women and men listen to God’s ‘fair lecture’ spoken in and by events? For all their confidence, puritans freely admitted the difficulties involved. At Putney, Cromwell intervened with this caution: As to the dispensations of God, it was more particular in the time of the law of Moses than in the time of the law written in our hearts, that word within us, the mind of Christ. And truly . . . we have no other more particular impression of the power of God going forth with us . . . [so] let us not make those things to be our rule which we cannot so clearly know to be the mind of God . . .: that ‘this is to be done; this is the mind of God; we must work to it.’25

Yet, there were aides to hand. ‘God has given us reason’, Cromwell held, so that Christians could exercise their duty to ‘consider the consequences’ of proposed policy.26 And Christians could be assured that God was neither ‘the author of contradictions’ nor required sinful or lawless action. Putney showed itself irresolved because while surely setting forth ‘something of God’ the conversation remained beset by open contradictions.27 Precipitous calls to dispatch the lords and the king as enemies of the people could not reflect a true reading of providence since, ‘God can do it without

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 311

4/28/2009 10:39:36 AM

312

The Providence of God

necessitating us to do a thing which is scandalous, or sin, or which would bring a dishonour to his name’; and so the radicals must ‘wait upon God for such a way when the thing may be done without sin, and without scandal too’.28 The struggle to cooperate with providence could not, thought Cromwell, set Christians against the plain ordering of their lives by the gospel and law. The question of discernment frequently turned upon apt and compelling typological extensions of the patterns of the biblical narrative into present history.29 In the end, recollection of the promises and claims of Christ was key to discerning against the ‘feigned necessity’ which bedeviled proper honouring of providence.30 With this before us, we can summarize three salutary tensions within this view of providence. First, as already observed, the puritan imagination saw the interface between divine and human action in the political sphere to be complex. The human doing embraced by providence could run with or against the grain of divine purposes; divine agency was variously thought of as immediate, mediated through secondary causes (with or without their concurrence), active or patient; the perspectives in which all this was discerned could also be shorter or longer, and thus discernments themselves change over time. So, there could be no facile identification of God’s providence with simple worldly success. As one parliamentarian puts it, ‘no good Christian can argue from events’ since ‘what God doth providentially, He not always approves’.31 And Milton similarly avered on this basis that ‘a cause is neither proved good by success, nor shown to be evil’.32 Such nuanced appreciation of the complicated nature of providence severely chastened the kinds of claims which could be made for it within the political sphere. Second, we recall that here providence and revolution keep close company, as do recogntion of divine superintendence and sharp motivation to political action. Robust affirmations that God was powerfully afield in the world gave no warrant to adopt a quietistic attitude towards public affairs. For, as puritan preachers frequently stressed, there could be no ‘tempting’ of providence: God alloweth, nay requireth that we shall use all lawful means; for us to neglect to use the means, or obstinately reject the means, we are self-enemies, and it is just with God to withhold the mercy we desire, or to bring the judgments upon us we would avoid. To neglect, slight, or contemn any lawfull means, is a tempting of God; that man shall cast off all means, and say he will rest upon providence, neither believes there is indeed an overruling providence, nor can rest providence upon any Scripture ground.33

The commitment to pay fitting attention to ‘ordinary means’ and ‘secondary causes’ – not despite but because of the reality of divine providence – passed

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 312

4/28/2009 10:39:37 AM

The Uses of Providence in Public Theology

313

into puritan theology from Calvin himself.34 With it too are bound up seventeenth-century impulses in the natural and human sciences. It must be said that puritan providentialism takes secondary agency with great seriousness, fearing itself always threatened by ‘false trust’ and impious ‘diffidence’.35 The lively tension is well expressed in the slogan, attributed to Cromwell ‘put your trust in God; but mind to keep your powder dry’,36 or more fully by his contemporary Richard Sibbes: ‘We must not put all carelessly upon a providence, but first consider what is our part; and, so far as God prevents [i.e. goes before] us with light, and affords us help and means, we must not be failing in our duty.’37 Finally, the third salutary tension is that between the inscrutability and perspicuity of divine providence. Among the puritans were those – like Cromwell’s teacher Thomas Beard, author of The Theatre of God’s Judgments (1631) – who believed that the hand of the Lord was not only allpervasive but fully perspicuous and thus readily decipherable.38 Others of course were more sanguine, even to the point of castigating the presumption of any to be able to penetrate the divine will at all.39 The question was ever one of the possibility of meaningful discernment of the course of God’s purposes. And as we’ve seen in our few examples above, such discernments in political debate were always suspended between God’s secret and God’s patent providence and therefore ever contestable. Importantly, to my mind, one of the responses to this particular tension was to drive Christians firmly back upon the ordinary means by which they received and oriented their lives in faith. Exemplary in this regard is the counsel of the Belgic Confession: God’s power and goodness are so great and incomprehensible that He orders and executes His work in the most excellent and just manner, even then when devils and wicked men act unjustly. And as to what He does surpassing human understanding, we will not curiously inquire into farther than our capacity will admit of; but with the greatest of humility and reverence adore the righteous judgments of God, which are hid from us, contenting ourselves that we are pupils of Christ, to learn only those things which He has revealed to us in His word, without transgressing these limits.40

In short, the perils of negotiating the providential periphery of the Christian life demanded consistent recourse to the clarity to be had at the Christological centre of faith. In the words of the Scottish divine, Samuel Rutherford: ‘Duties are ours, events are the Lord’s.’41 Set down firmly within the nexus of these three tensions, Cromwellian protestants recognized fully that in their political life to ‘trust wholly in

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 313

4/28/2009 10:39:37 AM

314

The Providence of God

God’s providence, while yet not trusting wholly to it, required a delicate balance not easily struck’.42

B. The providence of God and the ‘German Hour’ We have, to this point, tried to identify certain formative tensions intrinsic to the politics of providence by considering examples from seventeenthcentury puritan England. In an effort to grasp these tensions at their most intense, we now jump from early to late modernity, to a period in which theological debate regarding providence, politics and Christian public life was once again both focused and frought: namely, to the time of the German Church Struggle in the 1930s. Notably, providence was one of the few elements of Christian doctrine readily taken over into the rhetoric of early twentieth-century German nationalism and later into the so-called positive Christianity of the Nazi party and its ecclesiastical affiliates.43 At issue in the years following 1933, as ever with providence, was the move to identify determinate historical realities with the upsurge of the will of God – in this case, the historical advance of Deutsche Volkstum and the rise of German fascism. The effect, in this case, is a profound volitization of the Christian substance of the doctrine of providence in the service of political transformation. At the heart of the German Christian platform was the affirmation that ‘in race, peoplehood and nation we see orders of life given and entrusted to us by God.’44 Together these orders of life constituted God’s dynamic provision for the German state; together their historic unfolding must structure political life; and, by the will of God, they were together pitched in a present struggle [Kampf] to secure and shape German destiny. In their historical dynamism race, peoplehood and nation constituted a law, the law of the German Volk; and this law was, as Friedrich Gogarten contended, simply identical with the law of God.45 Similarly Paul Althaus argued that the theological significance of the Volk lay precisely in the register of divine creation and providence. Glossing the catechism’s question on the meaning of creation, he wrote, The belief that God has created me includes also my Volk. . . . God has determined my life from its outermost to its innermost elements through my Volk, through its blood, through its spiritual style . . . and through its history. My Volk is my outer and my inner destiny . . . [yet] life in the Volk is not our eternal life; but we have no eternal life if we do not live for our Volk. This is not a question of the absolute value of the Volk, but of our absolute obligation to the Volk.46

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 314

4/28/2009 10:39:37 AM

The Uses of Providence in Public Theology

315

Others were more audacious yet: ‘The church is asked’, another theologian declared in 1933, not by a party outside or within itself, but rather by history, whether it has the inner strength to interpret a great turning point in German destiny as coming from the hand of God, and to take a creative part in it. If the church ignores this question, or if it does not summon up this power then . . . [it] has certainly forfeited the intrinsic right to play a role in German history for the foreseeable future.47

Indeed, if ‘the living location of the God-question is in the human being’s relation to social-political reality’, Emmanuel Hirsch contended, then the total relevance of Christian theology turns on its capacity and willingness to see and grasp the hand of God on the tiller of the Kulturkampf, the rise of National Socialism and other volkish resurgences.48 Thus the Christian who looks upon ‘the steps of the Lord of history’ will discern ‘the moment now given to him, the hour of Volk and state’, and see in it the will and work of God.49 ‘What we are, we have become’, Hitler declaimed, ‘not against, but with, the will of Providence’ so that ‘National Socialists, too, have deep in our hearts our own faith. We cannot do otherwise. No man can mould the history of peoples or of the world unless he has upon his will and his capacities the blessing of Providence.’50 Such sentiments find immediate echoes in church confessions at the time which declare that the Führer ‘is now the way of the Spirit and Will of God for the church of Christ amongst the German nation’.51 And so however horrified we cannot be surprised by the new psalms sung in celebration of the Nazi revolution as God’s providential gift: ‘Lord, our Lord, how glorious is thy name in all the earth. . . . You have practiced your work on our people . . . although we neither earned nor deserved it. You have led us throughout our history according to your counsel and your will, although we may not always have understood your guidance;’ lately you have saved us from the ‘enslaving chains . . . of people of alien blood and an alien race;’ ‘send us the Führer [to] lead his Germany in faith into the young dawn.’52

Paul Tillich nicely summarized the ‘logic’ of all this when said that such robust providentialism effectively ‘moved the year 1933 so close to the year 33’, that it ‘acquired salvation-historical significance’.53 On display here is the unrestrained volitility of providence in political theology. For the term now becomes a hollow cipher for the irresistible power at work in the world which is known solely because it manifests itself as irresistible power. For present purposes, however, what needs to be

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 315

4/28/2009 10:39:38 AM

316

The Providence of God

stressed is that in the view of Hirsch, Gogarten, Althaus and the like, ‘the political revolution became a principle of theological epistemology – the starting point for a way of theological thinking which felt that it had to understand itself anew from this point;’ thus identified as the outworking of the present will of God for the German people, the National Socialist movement demanded Christian support and commitment ‘not for political but for theological reasons’.54 The volatility of providence is intimately connected with the strong claims made here for political history as a distinct, autonomous and sufficient source of theological insight and political obligation. Just what made the emergence of such confident and deeply troubling providentialism possible at this juncture is a very complex question. But among the factors which made it a live theological option is undoubtedly the impact of the earlier Luther-renaissance. As has been well demonstrated by others,55 the Luther who emerges from Karl Holl’s reconstruction advocates (in addition to justification by faith) two key doctrines: first, the centrality of human conscience in the experience of God as, in Fichte’s words, ‘an oracle of the eternal world’, and, second, God’s effective and inescapable (if hidden) omnicausality. Catalysed by the political and cultural tumult and ecclesial anxieties of the Weimar Republic, the admixture of these two doctrines produced the hypertrophy of providence – conscience is the organ both capable and commanded to discern the agency of God within contemporary events, especially those wherein the very orders of life reassert themselves and demand decision. Conscience confronts God directly within the world. On such a scheme, there is simply no essential need for biblical revelation. For the German Christians, it had no crucial place (pace Luther): indeed, as Hirsch argued, a proper appreciation of God’s providential direction of German destiny ‘liberated’ the ideas of grace and revelation ‘from mere Christological narrowness’.56 Untethered from the scriptures, the discourse of providence was left bereft of any critical canon or ‘principle of falsification’ – and at the immediate interface of conscience and the history of the party was discerned the providential governance of God, and so finally the divine legitimacy of the Third Reich.57 Almost all the salutary tensions by which seventeenth-century providentialism was riven have here been dissolved. Gone is the tension between the specific and clear counsel of the scriptures and the contested discernment of the directive power within the tide of events; gone, the tension between the perspecuity and inscrutability of divine activity; gone too, the fruitful tension arising from a fulsome appreciation of the complex and diverse ways in which divine purposes and human actions might be correlated. What survives the dissolution of these earlier tensions is a

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 316

4/28/2009 10:39:38 AM

The Uses of Providence in Public Theology

317

providentialism which is as naive as it is dangerous; a view in which providence can only stand proxy for raw power, and thus, one in which historical and political ascendency is the sole sacrament of divine presence and purpose. Within the context of the Church Struggle, it fell to the Confessing Church to offer a retort to this declination of the doctrine of providence and its political use. The response was not to challenge divine omnicausality and governance of world-historical events itself, but rather to deny that Christians had either warrant or capacity to read the outworkings of divine providence off contemporary history.58 Negatively, this involved repudiating the theology of orders of creation, the German Christian volksnomostheologie and theologies of history, and a critique of conscience, all of which went to the question of the perspecuity of providence. Positively it meant reasserting biblical revelation as the sole source of Christian knowledge of God and his present purposes, and so the provision of a cardinal ‘principle of falsification’59 by which to scourge all providentialism. It also meant asserting an alternate view of the political in relation to providence and the history of redemption. We’ll return to this this last point in a moment. So, the first thesis of the Barmen Declaration repudiates ‘the false teaching that the church can and must reconigize other events, and powers, figures and truths as divine revelation alongside this one Word of God [i.e. “Jesus Christ as he is attested in scripture”].’60 Indeed, by effectively reasserting the Reformation solas the Declaration as a whole meets the challenge of ideological proventialism by fixing Christian attention to its true sources (Christus, scriptura) and denying that present providence is a matter of sight (fides). This is not a denial of the reality of providence, then, but a strong affirmation of its inscrutability and so also an assertion of its illegitimacy as a parallel or autonomous source of Christian knowledge of God and his purposes. As Barth commented in relation to Barmen I, What was to be said here is this: we do not know God in these figures, events and powers in such a way that we could point a finger at them and say, ‘Here he is’, or such that this knowing could become a knowledge alongside the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ, e.g., the knowledge of the ‘German hour’! We just are not given to know this.61

Globally, what is at issue is the legitimacy of appeals to purported providences as ‘a principle of theological epistemology’. Continued protests that the policies and actions of the State required the Church ‘to allow the Word of God and a human word to stand together and to combine in its preaching’, had behind them a comprehensive repudiation of claims that

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 317

4/28/2009 10:39:38 AM

The Providence of God

318

the positive purposes of God for the life of the German nation were patently disclosed in recent events. Such claims were but a highly ambiguous ‘human word’ and thus impossible as a source of church confession and witness.62 Neither the form nor the content of Christian political engagement can rest upon ‘an exegesis of these events and power, [figures] and truths’.63 The significance of God’s superintendence of human political life cannot be preached, that is, from a reading of the book of history if it is to remain Christian proclamation. Thus the Confessing Church’s posture is close to that of the Belgic Confession already noted: for it counsels great humility towards ‘the righteous judgments of God, which are hid from us’, and advocates for the sufficiency of ‘contenting ourselves that we are pupils of Christ, to learn only those things which He has revealed to us in His word’.

III. Some Concluding Remarks on Providence and Politics Informed by these two tales of the political career of providence, let me venture some few concluding remarks regarding the use of providence in Christian public theology. It seems that faithful invocation of providence in public theology turns upon keeping it firmly within a determining and dialectical relation to the gospel of redemption. Two perils present themselves on this score: The first peril is dissolution of the relation between providence and the eschatological.64 This transforms providence into a sheerly formal category and recommends it as an autonomous source of theological knowledge and moral and political imperatives. Hereby, providence becomes a blank cheque to be cashed by any and all political programmes; it becomes exactly what analytical philosophy has sometimes taken all such religious and ethical talk to be: simply a way of saying ‘hurrah!’ to causes and event of which one approves. As a purely formal notion, it is impossible, finally, for providence to serve as anything but a cipher for our ratification of ascendent power. The second peril is collapse of providence into redemption without remainder, its assimilation into the eschatological gospel itself. The upshot of this is a strict identification of national or world history with salvation history, the effacement of any meaningful distinction between state/society and church, and so the transmutation of politics into liturgy, and civic virtue into piety.65 This default issues in a similarly abstract notion of providence, since the content of ‘redemption’ is readily filled out with the content of national political aspirations. When the difference divine election makes for Israel and the Church’s story vis-à-vis the stories of the nations

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 318

4/28/2009 10:39:38 AM

The Uses of Providence in Public Theology

319

is eclipsed in this way, properly human politics is freighted with an absolute weight it cannot bear. The politics of ultimacy which results is inevitably anxious, noxious and inhumane. Trust in divine providence is, Christianly speaking, an act of faith; it is ‘a hearing and accepting of the Word of God in the voice of his witnesses’.66 Precisely as such, providence is ordered to redemption within the ratio of faith, and the transition between providence and redemption remains, as Kierkegaard once remarked, ‘a transition eis allo genos; to this extent their relation remains dialectical’.67 Christian faith is never properly in providence but rather, in the God whose salvation comes to a world faithfully held in waiting, prepared and governed by him for his own sake. So God’s ‘name and his Word must be known to me in order that I may believe and acknowledge this’;68 In sum, our access to and appreciation of providence is properly indirect. I take one of the achievements of Barmen to be the reassertion of this differentiated relation between providence and redemption.69 Most crucially for politics, when the idea of providence is ordered to the identity and purposes of the God of the gospel of redemption – that is, when it is more strictly delimited by Christology – we find the point of providence drawn away from determinism and towards acknowledging a holy superintendence of all things whose aim is always to win room for genuine human freedom.70 Moreover, on this view, the forms this freedom faithfully may take in the political sphere will best be discerned from exegesis – or better, from a hearing – of the gospel, rather than of world-historical occurrence per se. Such hearing of the Word must remain the heart of the risky and necessary art of theopolitical discernment.71 Bonhoeffer spoke in this vein when he counselled that our own evaluation of our situation cannot make us see what is wise; only the truth of the Word of God can do that. The only thing that is always wise is staying with the truth of God. Here alone is the place where of God’s faithfulness and aid are promised.72

But such focusing of attention, does not renegue upon politics. For to talk of providence at all is to confess that the whole of creaturely life – including politics of all kinds – is ‘shot through with the liberating and widening reign’ of God whose purpose for his creation is its ultimate redemption.73 Christian faith, thought and life, as it struggles to keep abreast of this God, finds itself drawn inevitably beyond the congregation into the sphere of world-historical occurrence. Thus, despite roundly castigating providentialism, the Barmen declaration moves immediately to attest and uphold the reality of God’s unimpeded comprehension of the political. In its

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 319

4/28/2009 10:39:39 AM

320

The Providence of God

second article, Barmen explicitly repudiates any thought that ‘there are areas of our life in which we belong not to Jesus Christ’; For the Word of God is ‘God’s mighty claim upon our whole life’ by which Christians find themselves loosed from the ‘godless fetters of this world’ for ‘free and grateful service to God’s creatures’ (II). The dynamics of justification and sanctification at the heart of the Christian life exercise a centrifugal force, propelling believers into the wider sphere of the world, a sphere already superintended by the God of the gospel. But as faith drives into the political realm – and it does so ‘as surely as this realm also belongs to Him to whom has been given all power in heaven and on earth’ – Christians are asked ‘whether and to what extent our thinking, speaking, and actions, our unavoidable political responsibility have taken place in faith, as the decision of faith, as humble and resolute apprehension of God’s promise’.74 Third, and finally, something about Christian political expectations. A political theology is obviously not oriented simply by any one doctrine, and that includes providence. But to the extent that we allow providence to come to the fore in this regard, I think one of its peculiar contributions is to properly deflate Christian expectations for the political sphere. This observation is hardly new – Augustine’s Civitas dei instantiates something like it at length – but at a juncture when leading modes of political theology tend to inflate expectations, it merits fresh comment.75 Oriented by its eschatological centre, Christian faith acknowledges in God’s providence the preservation and preparation of the wide periphery of political life through what might be styled non-eschatological activity, that is, divine activity which preserves but does not itself save, which prepares but does not consummate the divine purposes for creaturely life.76 To this there corresponds a disposition towards political life whose expectations and endeavours are similarly subeschatological. Again, in this vien runs Barmen’s fifth article, which confesses that, ‘in the as yet unredeemed world in which the church also exists, the state has by divine appointment the task of providing for justice and peace . . . according to the measure of human judgment and human ability.’77 What befits human endeavour in the field of divine providence is pursuit of modicums of peace and justice such as can be humanly achieved – not less, but not more. I have come to think that Bonhoeffer’s exploration of the themes of the penultimate and ultimate in his fragmentary Ethics, is best read as an expansive gloss on this aspect of the political theology of Barmen. In it, Bonhoeffer considers Christian commitments to social and political as contributing to the decidedly penultimate sphere of the struggle for the ‘good’ and the ‘human’.78 Corresponding to the nature of God’s providential action, it is sphere which is itself decisively ordered to and constituted

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 320

4/28/2009 10:39:39 AM

The Uses of Providence in Public Theology

321

only by relation to the ultimate matters of salvation, but which as such involves ‘preparing the way for the word’. The politics which befits the penultimate – the politics which comports with the character of divine providence – patiently pursues ends which are salutary, but not salvific, good but not sanctified in a world understood by faith as ‘preserved and maintained by God for the coming of Christ’. 79 And this humble task of labouring to preserve the penultimate for the sake of the ultimate, is made more humble yet, by happy admission that in the end, When Christ comes he will make his own way . . . only the coming Lord can prepare the way, that Christ will lead people to an entirely new way of being human and being good, that the end of all the preparing the way for Christ must be the recognition that we ourselves can never prepare the way, and that therefore the demand that we prepare the way leads us to repentance in every respect.80

Could it be then that one of the unique services Christians may make to public life is to witness to the place of repentance in a properly human politics, to the need to allow our striving to be interrupted by the cross purposes of the Lord? A pastor in the Confessing Church, Heinrich Vogel, wrote a tract in the midst of the political tumults of 1937 called ‘A shortened course of instruction for a soldier of Jesus Christ’ wherein he made these three affirmations, which seem to capture the spirit of the kind of providentially oriented politics I have in view, and with these I end: ‘You have a living Lord.’ ‘There is no battle awaiting you in which he has not already been victorious.’ ‘It does not follow that you will be vindicated, but only that God will.’81

Notes 1 The full text of the speech can be found at the official webpage of the Prime Minister’s Office at www.number10.gov.uk/Page13630 [accessed 3 Mar. 2009]. 2 The phrase is, of course, taken from the title of Michael Walzer’s classic study, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1966). 3 Kathryn Tanner, The Politics of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 98–104. 4 C. Hill, God’s Englishman (Birkenhead: Weidenfeld Nicolson, 1970), 241. 5 Tanner, The Politics of God, 101. 6 Ibid.

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 321

4/28/2009 10:39:39 AM

322

The Providence of God

7 John Owen, Works of John Owen, VIII, 11, cited in Blair Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, Past and Present 109 (Nov. 1985), 63. 8 Ibid., 106. 9 Tanner, The Politics of God, 104: ‘The difficulty in identifying God’s will with the will of others is part of a general difficulty in determining God’s intensions on this account. 10 Cf. John Owen, Works of John Owen, VII, 30, 40; Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, 66. 11 The Putney Debates: The Levellers. Texts selected and annotated by Philip Baker (London: Verso, 2007). For rich discussion of the theme of providence and politics in this period, see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 12 Baker, The Putney Debates, 61. 13 Geoffrey Robertson’s introductory essay occludes this when it downplays the theological substance of the text of the Agreement and see it’s invocation of providence as insignificant because conventional – see, Baker, The Putney Debates, xi–xxii. 14 Agreement, in The Putney Debates, 53. For what follows, see 52–7. 15 Baker, The Putney Debates, 84; cf. 73. 16 Baker, The Putney Debates, 85. A radical deputy rejects as such the view that ‘if the poor and those in low condition were given their birthright it would be the destruction of this kingdom’ since those committed to this end ‘are as free from anarchy or confusion as those that oppose it, and they have the law of God and the law of their conscience with them’. 17 Baker, The Putney Debates, 99. 18 Cited from W. C. Abbott, The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 volumes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937–47), I, 377, II, 339 and I, 340. 19 T. Carlyle ed., Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (London: Ward, Lock and Bowden, 1892), 568. Speech from 1655. 20 Ibid., 580. 21 Ibid., 571. 22 Ibid., 580–1. 23 Ibid., 572. 24 Cited in C. Hill, God’s Englishman, 244. Cf. Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, ‘If I had not had a hope fixed in me that this Cause and this Business was of God, I would many years ago have run from it. If it be of God, He will bear it up. If it be of man, it will tumble. . . . And as this is, so “let” the All-wise God deal with it. If this be of human structure and invention . . . [and] not the Births of Providence, – then they will tumble’ (579). 25 Baker, The Putney Debates, 101. 26 Ibid., 64. On this theme, cf. Calvin, Institutes, 1.17.5. 27 ‘I cannot but think that in most that have spoke there has been something of God laid forth to us; and yet there have been several contradictions in what has been spoken. But certainly God is not the author of contradictions. The contradictions are not so much in the end as in the way. I cannot see but that we all speak to the same end, and the mistakes are only in the way.’ – The Putney Debates, 100.

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 322

4/28/2009 10:39:39 AM

The Uses of Providence in Public Theology

323

28 Baker, The Putney Debates, 102. 29 As Hans Frei has argued, it was precisely a commitment to divine providence and concomitant view of history it entailed, which underwrote and made sensible pre-critical figural exegesis of this sort. On this see Mike Higton, Christ, Providence and History: Hans Frei’s Public Theology (London: Continuum, 2004). 30 The vicissitudes of public life were thus occasions which demanded recourse to the sources of Christian insight and discernment, namely scripture and prayer, and thereby to self-examination, repentence and renewal of commitment. The practice of marking national fast days whose purpose was corporate discernment is an astonishing instance of this as a facet of public political life at the time – on this see Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, 55–99. 31 Cited by Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, 83. 32 J. Milton, Complete Prose Works, IV (New Haven: Yale Press, 1953–73), 652. 33 Smith, God’s Unchangeableness as cited in Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, 71. 34 Calvin, Institutes, I.xvii.7–9. 35 Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 261: ‘not, in reliance upon divine providence or even his own strength, to neglect the means and dare to tempt God’, or again, the Reformed faith confessed that ‘God aften acts without or against second causes . . . and has ordained their activity only to glorify His mighty power and to warn man against false trust in divine providence, which despises the use of natural means.’ 36 Cf. expression of the same view by other contemporaries: ‘Neglect not walls and bulwarks and fortification for your own defence, but ever let the name of the Lord be your strong tower’ – John Cotton, cited C. Hill, God’s Englishman, 232. 37 Richard Sibbes, Works I, 209. Cited C. Hill, God’s Englishman, 228. 38 John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions. The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 225. 39 Coffey identifies Thomas Hobbes as exemplary of this view; see Politics, Religion, 172. 40 Article 13 of the Belgic Confession – see Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche, ed. E. F. Karl Müller (Leipzig: A. Deicher Verlag, 1903),237. 41 Samuel Rutherford, Letters of Samuel Rutherford, 238, cited C. Hill, God’s Englishman, 231. 42 Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, 70. 43 Paragraph 24, Das Programm der N.S.D.A.P. (München: Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1931) and Paul Althaus, Die Deutsche Stunde der Kirche (Göttignen, 1934). On these themes cf. Friedrich Gogarten, Einheit von Evangelium und Volkstum (Hamburg, 1933) and Ist Volkgesetz Gottesgesetz? (Hamburg, 1934), to which the answer is, for Gogarten, ‘Yes’. 44 From the Richtlinien der Deutsche Christen, July 1932. 45 Cited from Einheit von Evangelium und Volkstum by K. Barth, in ‘Abschied von ‘Zwischen den Zeiten’”, in J. Moltmann, ed., Angfänge der dialektischen Theologie, Teil II (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1963), 317.

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 323

4/28/2009 10:39:40 AM

324

The Providence of God

46 Paul Atlhaus, Völker vor und nach Christus (Leipzig, 1937), 3–5, 8. On Althaus’ political theology more generally, see R. P. Ericksen, ‘The Political Theology of Paul Althaus: Nazi Supporter’, German Studies Review 9:3 (1986), 547–67. 47 Hanns Rückert, ‘The Revival of Reformation Piety in the Present’, lecture 17 May 1933, cited from Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, vol. 1, 417. 48 Cited from Hirsch by John Stroup in ‘Political Theology and Secularization Theory in Germany, 1918–1939: Emmanuel Hirsch as a Phenomenon of His Time’, Harvard Theological Review 80:3 (1987), 349; cf. also fnb 104, 349. Cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, 173. 49 Hirsch, Die gegenwärtige geistige Lage, 26, cited in Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, vol. 1, 419. 50 Taken from Hitler’s speeches of 11 August 1935 and 27 June 1937, see Adolf Hitler, Speeches and Proclamations, 1932–1945, vol. 2, ed. M. Domarus (Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Corducci, 1990–7). 51 Cited from A. Burgsmüller and R. Weth, Die Barmer theologische Erklärung. Einführung und Dokumentation (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1983), 34 by E. Jüngel, Christ, Justice, Peace: Toward a Theology of the State in Dialogue with the Barmen Confession (Edinbugh: T&T Clark, 1992), 22. 52 Cited in Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 48. 53 Paul Tillich, ‘Die Theologie des Kairos und die gegenwärtige geistige Lage’, (1934) cited in J. Luther Admas et al. eds., The Thought of Paul Tillich (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 364. 54 Klaus Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, trans. J. Bowden, vol. 1 (London: SCM Press, 1987), 430; cf. chapter 9 as a whole, ‘Theology in the Summer of 1933’, 414–40. 55 See Karl-Heinz zur Mühlen, Reformatorische Vernuftkritik und neuzeitliches Denken (Tübingen: Mohr, 1980); W. Tilgner, Volksnomostheologie und Schöpfungsglaube. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Kirchenkampfes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1966); J. Dillenberger, God Hidden and Revealed (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1953); and Stroup, ‘Political Theology and Secularization Theory’, 321–68. See also Robert Osborn, The Barmen Declaration as a Paradigm for a Theology of the American Church (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon, 1991), 30–4. 56 Hirsch, Die gegenwärtige geistige Lage, 26, cited in Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, vol. 1, 419. 57 Cf. Stroup, ‘Political Theology and Secularization Theory’, 341–7. Gogarten’s commitment to a more dialectical view of the relation between ‘God’s guidance through contemporary political events’ and the Word of God set him apart from others on this score; see Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, vol. 1, 423–4. for discussion of Gogarten’s position. 58 See Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, 178: Barmen I ‘does not deny the existence of other events and powers, forms and truths alongside the one Word of God, and that therefore it does not deny the possibility of natural theology as such. On the contrary, it presupposes that there are such things. But it does deny and designate as false doctrine the assertion that all these things can be the source of Church proclamation, a second source alongside and apart from the Word of God. It excludes natural theology from Church proclamation.’

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 324

4/28/2009 10:39:40 AM

The Uses of Providence in Public Theology

325

59 The phrase is from Stroup, ‘Political Theology and Secularization Theory’, 342. 60 Barmen Declaration, in J. Leith ed., Creeds of the Churches, 3rd edition (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1982), 520; translation altered. 61 K. Barth, ‘Die theologische Erklärung der Barmer Bekenntnissynode’, in Texte zur Barmer Theologischen Erklärung (Zürich: TVZ Verlag, 1984), 19; my translation. 62 Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 184. 63 Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, 178. 64 This corresponds to the dissolution of the tension between ultimate and penultimate by way of ‘compromise’ as Bonhoeffer describes it in his ethics MSS – see Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics. DBW 6, Ed. C. Green and trans. R. Krauss, C. C. West and D. W. Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 153–7. 65 This corresponds to what Bonhoeffer calls the ‘radical’ solution of same the tension between ultimate and penultimate – see Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 153–4. 66 Hans-Joachim Kraus, Systematische Theologie, 287. 67 S. Kierkegaard, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. and trans. A. Dru (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 171–2 (§602). 68 Systematische Theologie, 219. 69 See, Barmen VI – ‘We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.’ The principle of differentiated ordering is at issue here. 70 See Kraus, Systematische Theologie, 288, fnb 5. Cf. his parallel remark that, ‘Providentia is not a determination; it is the Creator’s “yes” to the course of those human beings covenanted to him’ (286–7). 71 On the centrality of this theme in at least one strand of recent Reformed theological ethics, see Christopher Morse, ‘Paul Lehmann as Nurturer of Theological Discernment’, Theology Today 64 (2008), 484–503. 72 D. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship. DBW 4, ed. G. Kelly and J. Godsey, trans. B. Green and R. Krauss (Minneaplois: Fortress, 2001), 194, from the section on the ‘suffering of the messengers’. 73 Kraus, Systematische Theologie, 219. 74 K. Barth, ‘The Sovereignty of God’s Word and the Decision of Faith’ in God Here and Now, trans. P. M. van Buren (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 24–5. 75 I am thinking of the likes of John Milbank, William Cavanaugh and Stanley Hauerwas in particular here, though especially Milbank. 76 See Wolf Krötke, ‘Gottes Fürsorge für die Welt’, Theologische Literaturzeitung, 108:4 (1983): 241–252. 77 Barmen Theological Declaration, article 5. 78 ‘[B]eing good’ and ‘being human’ – Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 165–70. 79 Ibid., 161, 163. 80 Ibid., 161, 166–7. 81 H. Vogel, The Iron Ration of a Christian, trans. W. A. Whitehouse (London: SCM, 1941).

FMurphy_16_Finals.indd 325

4/28/2009 10:39:40 AM

Epilogue David Fergusson

The wide variety of themes covered in this volume draws attention to the scope and richness of the doctrine of providence. Ironically, this is belied by the tendency in textbooks to treat it quite cursorily as a subdivision of the doctrine of God or, more often, the doctrine of creation. Yet providence is all-pervasive. On a vertical axis, it is required to connect creation as the making of the world with eschatology conceived as its remaking. On a horizontal axis, its scope includes not only the work of Christ, the Church and the Christian life but also extends outwards to comprehend culture, politics, history, non-human life forms and the heavenly spheres. In his famous Astronomical Discourses, Thomas Chalmers even speculated that angelic and other extraterrestrial beings would have their place in God’s great scheme of creation and redemption.1 One question that immediately arises is whether the doctrine of providence is made to do too much work with the result that it tends to be misapplied in different ways, some more harmful than others. This may be true a fortiori of Western theology with its tendency to appropriate the works of providence to the first person of the Trinity. Does providence here take up the slack that is caused by that pneumatological deficit so often perceived in the Latin tradition? Although Calvin has been called the ‘theologian of the Holy Spirit’, it is curious that his all-pervasive doctrine of providence seldom makes reference to the third person. It is treated almost everywhere under the first article. With its more robust theology of the Spirit, Eastern theology may have a corrective account of how providence is to be configured. In much of the tradition, one can discern versions of a classical doctrine of providence that proceeds along the following lines. The sovereign and wise God, who is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, not only creates the world but sustains, directs and brings it to its appointed end. This providential action governs all creatures and nothing can happen that lies outside its scope. Many of the chapters in this volume register some anxieties around features of this doctrine, yet there has been little sign of a wholesale abandonment such as we find in process theology or in theologies of embodiment that entail drastic abridgement of divine transcendence and action, or even open theism with its amended account of divine foreknowledge.2 Nevertheless, the difficulties confronting the classical doctrine are formidable. These can be grouped into three categories.

FMurphy_Epilogue_Finals.indd 326

4/28/2009 10:39:26 AM

Epilogue

327

How can we affirm the sovereign will of God over and under all things, without making God the author of sin and the cause of evil? To this, two types of answer are offered. In one of these, attention is drawn to the distinction between primary and secondary causality. As the primary cause, God is guaranteed control and sovereignty over the created order, yet it is those secondary and creaturely causes that are instrumental in effecting that primal will. These bear the moral responsibility, it seems, for sin and evil. As Calvin puts it in his striking image, the rays of the sun may cause the corpse to putrefy but it is the corpse and not the sun that stinks. Another type of answer avoids assigning any positive ontological status to evil, thus construing it as a privation of being, brought about by creaturely defection. These two moves are compossible. They draw support from the further claim that any positing of an autonomous agency outside the direct rule of divine providence inevitably slides into some form of dualism that, for good reason, has always been resisted by the orthodox doctrine of creation.3 A second and related difficulty surrounds human freedom. In securing the control of God over the world, does the doctrine of providence not slide into a determinism that threatens the liberty of rational creatures? Here again some anxieties are registered, and typically an appeal to a compatibilist theory of freedom is made. A voluntary action is one whose causes are internal, whereas a properly free action is one in which the will becomes obedient to God. This account prefers the liberty of spontaneity to that of indifference, and tends to reserve the language of ‘freedom’ for those actions in which the self is enthralled to God. We find this in Augustine, particularly in his reaction to Pelagius, again in Calvin and in a secularized form in David Hume. Our voluntary actions are ruled by the primary causality of God, so that we become free only as we concur and act in concert with the overriding intentions of the divine will ‘whose service is perfect freedom’. A compatibilist theory of freedom can thus be made consistent with the distinction between primary and secondary causality, as described above. These two moves thus mesh quite nicely, but do they banish the spectre of determinism and describe providence with sufficient scriptural specificity? This remains one of the outstanding questions for modern theologies of providence, and it may be that we have to tug at other strands in Aquinas and Maximus to have a more supple account that does justice to the relative and permitted autonomy of creaturely processes. A third focus of concern surrounds the pastoral dimension of providence. Can the classical doctrine function as a source of comfort, confidence and exhortation as Calvin believed? This dimension of the doctrine in the Reformed tradition is most tellingly expressed in the Heidelberg Catechism (1563).

FMurphy_Epilogue_Finals.indd 327

4/28/2009 10:39:27 AM

328

The Providence of God

What do you understand by the providence of God? The almighty and ever-present power of God whereby he still upholds, as it were by his own hand, heaven and earth together with all creatures, and rules in such a way that leaves and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and unfruitful years, food and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, and everything else, come to us not by chance but by his fatherly hand. What advantage comes from acknowledging God’s creation and providence? We learn that we are to be patient in adversity, grateful in the midst of blessing, and to trust our faithful God and Father for the future, assured that no creature shall separate us from his love, since all creatures are so completely in his hand that without his will they cannot even move.4

Despite this testimony, critics have found in the classical doctrine a more mixed message and one that has too often rendered the ways of God inscrutable, harsh or even soul-destroying. It is one thing to say that suffering is the result of misfortune, accident or error, and that the faith of Christ will always help us to endure it in patience, hope and love. But it is quite another to say that this is visited upon us by the will of God, the good purpose of which is certain if unknown and that in time it must be perceived to have been a blessing to us. This is one of the most neuralgic points of Scottish culture. In his novel Consider the Lilies, Iain Crichton Smith tells of the widow threatened with eviction from her ancestral home in the highlands during the Clearances. In seeking the help of her minister, she is told only that this is the will of God and that she must accede willingly to the laird’s policy. This practical application of a providential determinism results in an empty pew the following Sunday – the widow’s quiet protest at an inhumane theology. So the classical doctrine at the very least requires some careful handling and qualified expression if it is not to become pastorally counter-productive. As if that is not enough, there are two further problems that threaten historical formulations of providence. Is it adequate to the rich and varied testimony of scripture, particularly to the account that is offered of God’s dramatic struggle with the world that has been created? Here recent Jewish and Christian interpretation of the Hebrew Bible has drawn attention to the themes of rebellion, testing, improvisation, cooperation all of which variously characterize the covenant relationship.5 Does this call for some reassessment of the more serene and timeless model of divine control favoured by much of the tradition? This raises a subsidiary issue, though a highly important one, of whether the Church’s exegetical traditions offer a complementary account of providence alongside the one we find in the later textbooks, for example, the cruciform readings of Psalm 89 in the

FMurphy_Epilogue_Finals.indd 328

4/28/2009 10:39:27 AM

Epilogue

329

early church or the commentaries and sermons of Calvin which suggest a more interactive, even improvising account of providence than the one we find in the Institutes. One might even ask whether the doctrine of providence slides into an impersonal and relentless collectivism in the early modern period and the Enlightenment, as thinkers such as Leibniz and Hegel lose contact with these exegetical traditions. A further query surrounding the classical account concerns its provenance. How and where does it emerge in the early church and from what pagan sources does it borrow? Here there are issues about the extent of the church’s indebtedness to Stoicism and the tendency of writers such as Theophilus of Antioch and Theodoret of Cyrus to advance theories of providence on philosophical grounds that could have been equally well rehearsed by pagan thinkers outside the Church. To what extent does this set a series of trajectories that were not always to be helpful? In a good deal of what has been written recently on the subject of providence, one finds repeated castigations of deism and theodicy. There may be valid reasons for this. The appeal to an impartial human reason independent of tradition, context and revelation renders the leading impulse of deistic thought problematic. At the same time, its tendency to see the world as originally and permanently ordered belies the need for redemption. In itself, this functions as a kind of theodicy and might confirm Barth’s suspicion that natural theology, at least of this variety, is a bourgeois activity that acquiesces too readily in the status quo. To this extent, the hostility towards deism and theodicy may not be entirely unconnected. Nevertheless, it needs to be acknowledged that there are shades of deism along a spectrum of positions, some of which appear with a strong providentialist cast.6 The tendency to see the wisdom of God not so much in punctuated acts of divine intervention as in the order of natural and social life can move even quite orthodox theologies in a deist direction. At any rate, it would be a mistake to view deism as entailing an abandonment of convictions about divine providence. To a large extent, it is one of the few classical doctrines that persist. The nervousness surrounding theodicy is well placed for theoretical and pastoral reasons. Yet there is a danger that more ‘practical’ responses to the problem of evil will bring their own peculiar difficulties. To articulate a response to evil in terms of a discipleship patterned by the crucified and risen Christ carries the risk of an incipient Pelagianism that sets the bar very high for those who experience the worst excesses of suffering and evil. In an older Calvinist mind-set, all one had to do was to ‘thole it’ because suffering was sent either for our chastisement or humility. However, an overbearing insistence of a discipled suffering that bears witness to the

FMurphy_Epilogue_Finals.indd 329

4/28/2009 10:39:27 AM

330

The Providence of God

work of Christ may impose too much upon those who struggle with sickness, misfortune, guilt and bereavement. Here attention to the vicarious sufferings of Christ may enable a fuller stress upon the ‘once for all’ nature of his work, one outcome of which is a yoke that is easier and a burden that is lighter. Throughout these proceedings, two of the most important interfaces of the theology of providence have been explored. These are politics and the natural sciences. In engaging with science, we find a good deal of hostility towards theological notions of providence from those who would extend the explanatory power of Darwinian principles to religion itself. In face of this, there is a typically twofold response to defeat the defeaters and to show how Christian theology can coexist fruitfully with the insights of the natural sciences. This should not be lightly dismissed as an attempt to procure academic respectability, even if the science–religion debate is littered with examples of theological minimalism. The apologetic tasks of theology have been tackled at least since the second century, and there remains at a pastoral and congregational level a need to respond to neo-Darwinism, sociobiology and the new atheism. One of the ironies of approaches like those of Dawkins and Dennett is that they seek to show how human beings may be biologically hard-wired to act and think religiously. Yet, as Western intellectuals, these critics of religion seem to presuppose a strong version of the secularization thesis. According to this, it is assumed that under the conditions of modernity, religion loses its plausibility and point, and so must undergo an irreversible decline. However, they cannot have it both ways. If our evolutionary drives dispose us to religion, it is unlikely to disappear as societies reach a particular level of development. They cannot together be true, although they might both be false. A familiar strategy for showing that Darwinism does not tend against theological explanation is to argue that the science reveals an emergent complexity and fruitfulness that is at least as compatible with design as it is suggestive of randomness, futility and pointlessness. This was the route taken by many theological reaction to Darwin in the nineteenth century and it is assisted today by the work of Simon Conway Morris whose account of evolution suggests a direction and constraint in the story of life.7 This is not itself proof of design but it may show that there is no obvious incompatibility between scientific and theological explanation. These require a model of complementary types of understanding to do justice to the different domains of our language and experience. Any attempt to reduce these to one single type needs to be resisted for its totalizing tendency.

FMurphy_Epilogue_Finals.indd 330

4/28/2009 10:39:27 AM

Epilogue

331

The relation of providence to the polis is fraught with danger. In his recent study, Emilio Gentile notes how different secular regimes of the twentieth century arrogated to themselves the discourse and rituals of providence drawn from pre-existing patterns of religion.8 On the other hand, we cannot allow the providential action of God to be confined either to the Church or some private domain of experience. How then do we speak of divine providence in relation to politics and the nation-state? An important issue concerns whether the political order is to be conceived under God as exercising primarily an instrumental function in maintaining peace, executing justice and promoting the common good. Or is the nationstate an end in itself of providence – a goal of divine action, a particular work of special rather than common grace? And can we think of some nation-states as having a particular vocation bestowed upon them by the forward movement of divine providence in history? Or are there other possibilities? For several reasons, I am inclined to speak of political providence only in the first and more instrumental sense. One of these is the highly ambivalent treatment of kingship in the Hebrew Bible where its weaknesses and defects are frequently recalled. A second is the way in which Romans 13, following the Wisdom literature, speaks of the state as occupying a place in the divine order but not one that is too closely identified with the cause of the Church or Christ. In other words, it is closer to Augustine than Eusebius in this respect, the latter appearing egregious in the history of the early church. My suspicion may admittedly be driven also by a post-Christendom European mentality, particularly at a time when our prime minister, driven by his own providentialist convictions, took the UK into a war with Iraq without proper reference to his own political party, the House of Commons or the cabinet. When Karl Barth spoke about the signs of providence in human history, his list was quite short and cautious, adhering closely to the events of salvation history. His three signs of providence were the preservation of scripture, the rise of the Church, and the continuation through history of Judaism. There was nothing here about the emergence of Western democracy, the welfare state, or the appearance of the United Nations, good and right though these may well have been in important respects. On the other hand, one takes the point about the dangers of an overblown scepticism that can all too easily evacuate the public arena of the kind of critical support that our politicians require. At a time of voter apathy, public contempt of those elected to office, and single-issue politics, a positive ecclesial engagement with the political process is vital to the health of democratic society. However, I am less confident that the particular language of providence is a net gain when employed here.

FMurphy_Epilogue_Finals.indd 331

4/28/2009 10:39:28 AM

332

The Providence of God

Finally, there is the issue of how the discourse of providence is handled in the construction of personal identity. Here again corruptions of earlier forms of discourse abound. As Charles Taylor has argued, we are witnessing not so much today the demise of religion as the transposition of its categories into new forms of enchantment. A fuller treatment of this aspect of the topic would need to consider the ways in which human beings are incurably superstitious. Notions that we can manipulate God (or some pagan surrogate such as fate, destiny or fortune) abound in activities that are inherently unpredictable simply because of their complexity, or because we lack any adequate knowledge of causal processes, or because of the way in which outcomes are finely balanced. The National Lottery has played on this with its publicity suggesting that this may be the night when fortune has fingered us for a life-transforming windfall. Most of us will have little difficulty in recounting pastoral circumstances where people sought to manipulate divine providence by their actions, often with the very best of motives. We know that sports personalities are inherently superstitious, simply because this is thought to give them a competitive advantage. Some golfers will silently pray before making a crucial shot, as if God was likely to reward them for their piety, thus presumably neglecting or punishing an opponent who plays without such invocation. These notions of providential action require to be challenged not just by an incredulous scepticism but by a chastened theology of providence that teaches us what we might properly pray for in this world. What is required is a doctrine that is sufficiently strong and confident to express commitments vital to faith, yet alert to the dangers, past and present, of saying too much or assuming a vantage point that belongs only to God.

Notes 1 Thomas Chalmers, Discourses on the Christian Revelation viewed in connection with the modern astronomy (Edinburgh: 1885). 2 For example, Sallie McFague, The Body of God (London: SCM, 1993), John Sanders, The God Who Risks 2nd edition (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2007). 3 This is clear from the exposition offered by Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics (London: Allen & Unwin, 1950), 251ff. 4 Heidelberg Catechism (1563), Questions 27–8. 5 For example, Jon Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), Terence Fretheim, God and World in the Old Testament (Nashville: Abingdon, 2005). 6 A good example of this would be the philosophy of Thomas Reid which assumes a providentialist theism as the context in which human beings, despite their frailties and limitations, can live well in the world. See Nicholas Wolterstorff,

FMurphy_Epilogue_Finals.indd 332

4/28/2009 10:39:28 AM

Epilogue

333

Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 255ff. Charles Taylor has devoted a chapter to ‘providential deism’ in A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 221–69. 7 Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 8 Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 45ff.

FMurphy_Epilogue_Finals.indd 333

4/28/2009 10:39:28 AM

FMurphy_Epilogue_Finals.indd 334

4/28/2009 10:39:29 AM

Index of Persons

Adorno, Theodor W. 75, 103 Althaus, Paul 316, 318, 325–6 Alvarez, Diego 37, 54–5 Anaxagoras 80 Anselm, Saint 60, 90, 107 Aquinas, Thomas v, 1–3, 7–33, 36–7, 40, 46, 53–5, 60, 67, 92–3, 97, 107, 151–3, 161–2, 167, 170, 172, 175–7, 181, 188–9, 194–5, 214, 220–5, 228, 230, 287, 329 Arendt, Hannah 267, 275 Aristotle 31, 75, 207, 217–18, 221, 230, 307 Augustine, Saint 3, 4, 58–9, 62–3, 72–3, 76–7, 88–9, 91–3, 96–7, 100, 103, 106–7, 111, 140, 153–4, 188, 204–5, 208, 226, 236–42, 245, 249, 250, 253–4, 256, 265–8, 270, 273–6, 279, 286, 291, 322, 329, 333 Ayala, Francisco J. 200–1, 207 Baader, Franz von 75, 103, 104 Bacon, Francis 213, 217–18, 220–1, 230 Baker, Philip 324 Balthasar, Hans Urs von ix-x, 1, 72, 76, 78, 96–100, 102–4, 107–8, 211, 223, 227–8, 230 Bañez, Domingo 37, 39, 41–4 Barth, Karl x-xi, 1, 99, 126, 152, 164, 175–6, 186, 260, 293, 319, 325–7, 331, 333 Bavinck, Herman 2, 109, 112, 115–20, 126, 128, 176 Beard, Thomas 315 Beatty, John 206 Beck, Martha 306–7 Benedict XVI 211, 231, 220, 228–30 Benjamin, Walter 103

FMurphy_Index_Finals.indd 335

Bennett, M. R. 198, 206 Berkouwer, G. C. 113, 115, 127–8 Berry, Christopher J. 254 Billuart, Charles René 54 Blenkinsopp, Joseph 273 Boehme, Jacob 77, 86, 90, 93–4, 101, 105, 107 Boethius 153 Bonaventure 60, 107, 175 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 321–2, 327 Bonner, John T. 207 Boston, Thomas 126 Brooke, John Hedley 207 Brown, Gordon 309 Brueggemann, Walter 283–4 Buber, Martin 32 Burke, Edmund 235, 253 Bush, George W. vi, 233, 242–6, 248–9, 251, 254 Calvin, John 2, 36–7, 42, 50, 53, 109–21, 123, 125–9, 151, 163, 166, 168–71, 174, 176, 284–6, 290–1, 293, 298–309, 315, 324–5, 328–9, 331 Campbell, Lily 73 Campbell-Jack, Campbell 115, 127–8 Canavan, Francis 235, 253 Carroll, William E. 208 Chambers, Whittaker 256 Chardin, Teilhard de 205, 209 Chardonnens, Denis 25–6 Charlemagne 60, 63, 70 Cochran, Elizabeth Agnew 256 Coffey, James 325 Coggi, F. 28 Comte, August 183 Conway Morris, Simon 2, 195, 202–4, 208, 332, 335

4/28/2009 10:39:08 AM

336

Index of Persons

Cromwell, Oliver 60–2, 70–1, 309–10, 312–15, 324–5 Cyprian, Saint 286, 291 Darwin, Charles 2, 182, 185, 193, 196, 198–200, 205–8, 212, 252, 332 Dawkins, Richard x, 196–8, 206, 332 Dennett, Daniel C. 188, 195–8, 206, 332 Derrida, Jacques 75–8, 94–5, 97, 102–3, 107 Descartes, René 213, 217–19, 230 Dodaro, Robert 273, 275 Dorner, Isaak 176–7 Dorris, Michael 307 Dummermuth, A. M. 54 Eckhart, Meister 53, 56, 91, 106 Ehrman, Bart D. 290 Elshtain, Jean Bethke 250, 255 Emery, Gilles 26 Erasmus, Desiderius 250–1, 256 Farley, Benjamin W. 110, 127–8 Farrell, John 255 Feldman, Marcus W. 194–5 Fichte, Gottlieb 103, 318 Fichte, Immanuel Hermann 75, 103 Fiddes, Paul S. 206 Freud, Sigmund 247–8, 255 Frontain, Raymond-Jean 73–4 Funkenstein, Amos 145 Garrigou-Lagrange, Reginald 34, 37, 53, 224 Geach, Peter 189, 195 Gentile, Emilio 333, 335 Gerson, Michael 244–5, 254 Gibbon, Edward 79 Gingerich, Owen 195 Godfrey-Smith, Peter 194–5 Gogarten, Friedrich 316, 318, 325, 326 Gonet, Jean Baptiste 55 Gore, Al 245–6, 254 Goris, Harm 24, 26, 194–5 Gosselin, Edward A. 74

FMurphy_Index_Finals.indd 336

Gould, Stephen Jay 198, 202–3, 206–8 Greenblatt, Stephen 68, 72–3 Gregory the Great 175 Grumett, David 209 Guyatt, Nicholas 254 Hacker, P. M. S. 198, 206 Haldane, J. B. S. 184 Hampsey, John C. 246–7, 255 Hanby, Michael 191, 194–5 Hauerwas, Stanley 252, 287–8, 291, 327 Haught, John F. 207 Hauser, Marc D. 193, 195 Hegel, G. F. W. x, 2, 31, 75–108, 331 Heidegger, Martin 34, 52–3, 56, 75, 97, 103, 217 Hirsch, Emmanuel 317–18, 326 Hitler, Adolf 217, 249, 317, 326 Hoekema, Anthony A. 116, 127–8 Hoeksema, Herman 116, 125, 127, 129 Hofstadter, Richard 246, 255 Hollerich, Michael J. 254 Hull, David L. 196, 206 Hütter, Reinhard 145 Huxley, Thomas H. 200, 206 Iljin, Iwan 76, 88, 104, 106 Irenaeus, Saint 88, 107, 275 Jackson, Timothy P. 28–9 Jenson, Robert W. 145 Jonas, Hans 214, 217–19, 229–30 Journet, Charles 26 Kant, Immanuel 60, 76, 80, 90–2, 106–7, 149–50 Kass, Leon 217, 229 Keller, Evelyn Fox 207 Kennedy, John F. 246, 255 Kerr, Benjamin 194 Kierkegaard, Soren 75, 92, 95, 103, 247, 321, 327 Kingsley, Charles 205, 209 Klapwijk, Jacob 119, 128 Kline, Meredith 126 Kloosterman, N. D. 127–8 Kojéve, Alexandre 104

4/28/2009 10:39:08 AM

Index of Persons Kooi, Cornelis van der 176 Koslowski, Peter 104 Kraus, Hans-Joachim 327 Kretzmann, Norman 25, 195 Krötke, Wolf xi, 327 Kuyper, Abraham 114–20, 126–7, 129 Lamb, Matthew L. 25, 31 Leibniz, G. W. 75–6, 79, 81–5, 90, 93, 95, 101, 105, 107, 331 Lemos, Thomas de 54–5 Lessing, G. E. 82, 89, 106 Levenson, Jon D. 21–2, 28, 32, 72, 334 Lewis, C. S. 229 Lincoln, Abraham 275 Livingstone, David N. 207 Lombard, Peter 175 Lonergan, Bernard 53 Löwith, Karl 88, 106 Lubac, Henri de 59, 62, 64, 72, 73–4, 88, 99, 106, 211–12, 229 Luisi, Pier Luigi 207 Lukacs, John 63, 73–4 Lustig, Abigail 206 Luther, Martin 92, 120, 262, 318 Lyotard, J. F. 297, 307 McCarthy, Margaret 226, 230 MacCormack, Sabine 237, 254 McFarland, Ian 194–5 McKeough, Michael J. 208 Macleod, Donald 128–9 McMullin, Ernan 207–8 McWilliams, David B. 127, 129 Mahoney, Albertus 254 Maimonides, 25, 27–8, 32, 249 Malamud, Martha A. 254 Margeson, J. M. R. 73 Maritain, Jacques 26, 55, 224–5, 230 Markus, Robert A. 236, 238, 253–4 Marvell, Andrew 61–3, 70 Mastrangelo, Marc 225–56 Maurer, Armand 208 Maximus (The Confessor) 34, 45, 47, 53, 55, 213–14, 229, 329 Mayr, Ernst 201–2, 204, 207 Mazzeo, Joseph Anthony 72–4 Mazzolani, Lidia Storoni 253

FMurphy_Index_Finals.indd 337

337

Mead, Walter Russell 251, 256 Medawar, Peter B. 206 Melley, Timothy 251, 256 Mendelssohn, Moses 84 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 246, 255 Milbank, John 238–9, 249–51, 254–6, 327 Milton, John 314, 325 Mitchell, Stephen 7, 24 Moltmann, Jürgen 99, 205, 209, 325 Moore, Frank Cross 273 Moses 59, 268, 303, 313 Mouffe, Chantal 234, 253 Mouw, Richard J. 126, 129 Murray, John 109, 126, 129, 208 Nazarius, John Paul 55 Newman, John Henry 204, 208 Newton, Isaac 206–7, 219 Niebuhr, Reinhold 274 Northcott, Michael 248–50, 255 Novak, Jana 254 Novak, Michael 245, 254 Nowak, Martin A. 182, 184–5, 192, 194–5 O’Donovan, Joan Lockwood 250, 256 O’Donovan, Oliver 145, 237, 251–4, 256, 273 Origen 59, 62–4, 72–4, 106 Orosius 239, 254, 274 Osborn, Robert 326 Osborne, Thomas M. Jr 54–5 Paluch, Michał 26 Paul V (Pope) 226 Paul, Saint 8, 24, 29, 31, 55, 112–13, 125, 151, 153, 161, 170–1, 227, 282, 288 Perrier, Emmanuel 32–3 Philo of Alexandria 85, 90, 104–5 Piereson, James 246, 255 Plato 31, 208 Plotinus 80, 81, 88, 107 Polanyi, Michael 199, 206 Polkinghorne, John 189, 195, 209 Pope John Paul II 28, 210, 213, 227–8, 230

4/28/2009 10:39:09 AM

338

Index of Persons

Post, Jerrold M. 255 Powell, Samuel M. 107 Proclus 81, 105 Prudentius vi, 233, 239–43, 245, 248, 251–6 Pruss, Alexander 194–5 Przywara, Erich 43, 55, 97 Quash, Ben 176 Ratzinger, Joseph See Benedict XVI Ricoeur, Paul 90, 106 Robins, Robert S. 255 Roggeveen, Jacob 208 Ross, John Walter 127, 129 Rousselot, Pierre 193, 195 Russell, Frederick 275 Rutherford, Samuel 315, 325 Samson, Colin 290 Scarry, Elaine 281, 290 Schiwy, Günther 209 Schleiermacher, F. D. E. 149, 151, 163, 175 Schlitt, Dale M. 106 Schmitt, Carl 233–8, 251–3 Schönborn, Christoph Cardinal 195 Scully, Matthew 254 Sesboüé, Bernard 230 Shakespeare, William 1, 57, 60, 64, 67–8, 70–1, 73–4 Sibbe, Richard 315, 325 Smith, Iain Crichton 330 Sober, Elliott 184, 195 Socrates 31 Solmsen, Friedrich 255 Spinoza, Baruch 76, 79, 81–5, 90–3, 101, 105, 107 Staudenmaier, Franz Anton 75, 88, 104, 106 Stock, Gregory 214–16, 219–20, 229 Stoeger, William R. 207 Strauss, Leo 235–6, 239, 246, 253

FMurphy_Index_Finals.indd 338

Stroup, John 326–7 Stump, Eleonore 25–7, 29, 194–5 Sunstein, Cass 274 Tanner, Kathryn 152, 273, 309–10, 323–4 Taylor, Charles 175, 334 Til, Cornelius Van 119, 128–9 Tilley, Terrence 279, 290 Tillich, Paul 149, 317, 326 Torrance, Thomas F. 121–2, 128–9 Torrell, Jean-Pierre 26, 29 Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf 75, 103 Troeltsch, Ernst 167, 176 Turretin, Francis 2, 164, 172, 175–7 Ulrich, Ferdinand 222, 230 Veith, Gene Edward Jr, 73–3 Virgil 234, 236–7, 239–41, 245, 250–1, 254, 299 Voltaire 79, 81, 84 Wagt, Gabri de 306 Washington, George 245 Wawrykow, Joseph P. 26, 194–5 Webb-Mitchell, Brett 293, 306 Weinandy, Thomas G. 25 Weisse, Christian Hermann 103 Williams, George C. 206 Williams, Rowan 107, 176, 275 Wilson, David Sloan 194, 195 Wojcik, Jan 73–4 Worden, Blair 324–5 Yaffe, Martin D. 25 Yocum, John 25–8, 30 Yoder, John Howard 280, 290 Zachmann, Randall 176 Zizioulas, John D. ix, 145 Zwingli, Huldrych 117, 120, 151, 164–5, 175–6

4/28/2009 10:39:09 AM