The Theology of Providence
How might we relate current scientific theory to the theology
of continuous creation and special providence, in which God is
seen as acting in all the events of the world, in both nature
and human history. Can that be reconciled with a scientific account
of the universe without having to think that God must break the
laws of nature which God creates and upholds in order to bring
something genuinely new and decisive about?
The notion of God’s acting in the world is central to
the biblical witness. From the call of Abraham and the Exodus
from Egypt to the birth, ministry, death and raising of Jesus
and the founding of the church at Pentecost, God is represented
as making new things happen. Through these "mighty
acts," God creates and saves. Belief in divine providence
continued relatively intact, though deployed, not unproblemmatically
, in many and varied forms, throughout the Patristic period, the
Middle Ages, and well into the Protestant Reformation. Questions
about human freedom and the reality of evil were seen more as
problems requiring serious theological attention than as reasons
for abandoning belief in God’s universal agency.
The rise of modern science in the seventeenth century and Enlightenment
philosophy in the eighteenth, however, led many to reject the
traditional view of providence. Newtonian mechanics depicted a
causally closed universe with little, if any, room for God’s
special action in specific events - and then only by intervention.
A century later, Pierre Simon Laplace combined the determinism
of Newton’s equations with epistemological and metaphysical
reductionism to portray all of nature as an impersonal mechanism.
David Hume challenged the arguments for God as first cause and
as designer. In response, Immanuel Kant constructed a new metaphysical
system in which religion lies not in our knowing (the activity
of pure reason) but in our sense of moral obligation (the activity
of practical reason). The effect was to separate the domains of
science and religion into "two worlds", and this position
is still with us in the twentieth century as we’ve already
seen.
Protestant theology in the first half of the twentieth century
was largely shaped by Karl Barth who attempted to circumvent the
Kantian split by holding fast to the objective action of God in
creating and redeeming the world. The `God who acts’ continued
as a hallmark of the ensuing "biblical theology" movement
in the 1940s and 1950s. But to many theologians today, Barthian
neo-orthodoxy and the biblical theology movement did not finally
succeed in overcoming the "two worlds" problem or in
producing a credible account of divine action. Contemporary Roman
Catholic thought, still largely tied to a Thomistic metaphysics,
has encountered different but equally challenging problems in
dealing with objective special providence.
And so we find ourselves at the heart of the problem. Given
the scientific account of a closed, mechanical universe, and the
reductionistic philosophy which often accompanies it, it seems
as though there are but two options: either God must intervene
in order to act objectively in special events by breaking or suspending
the laws of nature, the "conservative" approach, or
else God only acts uniformly in all events to sustain them in
existence, the "liberal" approach. Is any other option
possible?
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| Contributed by: Dr. Robert Russell
|
