God is in Control
Welcome to the third installment of our module on systematic theology. We’ve been working with this definition of systematic theology, which we’ve been saying is about combining what we can know from scripture with what we can know from nature, to build a system of thought about God and his creation.
We started doing this last week. We saw how God being the creator is the foundational fact we need to understand about him, and that this is true regardless of whether we’re reading scripture or reasoning from nature. We saw how both approaches lead to somewhat similar conclusions, although each provides a unique perspective on God.
This week, we’re going to be thinking about divine providence—sometimes called divine sovereignty—which is God’s control over human history. We mentioned last week that for the Biblical authors, divine providence is part of God’s job description as the supreme and good creator over everything. And in fact, it’s also a consequence of God being the purely actual actualizer of everything, but that’s not going to be our focus here tonight. Rather, our aim is to look at another way in which scripture and philosophy can work together to form a complete picture about reality.
Scripture: God is in control
When we reflect on the world around us, it seems that the different parts of nature are operating more-or-less on their own—rain comes and goes as a result of the water cycle, trees produce oxygen, animals graze or hunt other animals, and so on. When we reflect on ourselves, it seems that something similar is true of —we are the originators of our choices, and are responsible for the decisions we make.
Scripture confirms both of these ideas in how it talks about creation, and how it treats human beings. God treats us as responsible for our actions—either judging us for disobedience or rewarding us for obedience; he commands us to act in certain ways and exhorts us to choose him; and scripture talks about how we rebel against God and sin.
But scripture also teaches that God works through all of nature to bring about what it does, including our day-to-day human choices. Last week, for instance, we looked at Paul’s speech in the Aeropagus. After introducing God as the supreme creator of everything, he goes on to explain that this creator organizes people’s lives so that they might seek him out and find him. “Yet,” Paul goes on to say,
… he is actually not far from each one of us, for “In him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:27)
And in his letter to the Ephesians, Paul describes God as him who works all things according to the counsel of his will (Eph 1:11). A few chapters earlier in Acts, before Paul was on the scene, the disciples were praying to God and say the following:
… for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. (Acts 4:27–28)
These disciples understood something profound, namely that even the evilest action in history—the murder of God in Jesus—was governed by God’s sovereign control over history. And this way of thinking about God’s control didn’t just appear in the New Testament times. In Proverbs, for instance, we have this lesson:
The heart of man plans his way,
but the Lord establishes his steps. (Prov 16:9)
The language of establishing our steps is idiomatic for directing the path our steps take. The Psalmist uses it to ask God to help keep him from sinning (Ps 119), and in Jeremiah it’s used to describe how God is ultimately in control of our destiny (Jer 10).
Going all the way back to Genesis, we have the story of Joseph and his brothers. You’ll recall that Joseph’s brothers conspired to kill him and eventually sold him into slavery. But through a series of fortunate events over the years he eventually becomes the prime minister of Egypt, where he is able to save many people from an oncoming famine. When his brothers come to Egypt because of the famine and realize not only that he is alive but also the prime minister they are terrified about what he might do to them:
His brothers also came and fell down before him and said, “Behold, we are your servants.” But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. (Gen 50:18–20)
Joseph understood that in all the events that had led up to this, including all the sinful actions of his brothers and the people he met along the way, that God was in control working to bring about good. God was not the source of the evil actions, but he could still use them to bring about his good plans. We see a similar distinction in the letter of James, where he says that God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no-one, rather every good gift comes from him. (Jas 1:13–14, 16–17)
So, scripture teaches or confirms four important facts:
Humans are responsible for their actions
God is in control of history (including human choices)
God is the source of all good
God is not the source of evil
There are of course many more passages that could be mentioned in defense of these, but we mention these only to make our point briefly. For a comprehensive overview of these passages, see DA Carson’s book Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility.
Under-Determination by scriptural data
Last week we saw both scripture and philosophy teach us the same fundamental things about God as the creator—that he exists, that he sustains everything in existence, that he is powerful, and that there is only one of him. But the doctrine of divine providence we have something different: in this case, scripture teaches us that these four facts are all true, but it does not tell us how they are all true. In these cases we say that the scriptural data is under-determinative, it gives us the bounds of what’s acceptable to believe, but leaves us to fill in the gaps if we want a more complete picture.
I remember when I was in high school, and I first came across these passages in the Bible that talk about God’s control over human choices. But when I asked people around me how this could be if we have free will, and I was repeatedly told in different ways that it was just a “mystery.” Now, there’s no doubt that there will always be some mystery in the picture, since God’s working through nature is unlike anything we can possibly in our day-to-day lives. But it’s a mistake to say that we have no idea how to think about it: over the centuries Christians have proposed a number of different philosophical models to make sense of divine providence, with new ones still being proposed in our lifetime. In the past 10 years my own views have switched between four of these models.
So what do we do when we have multiple options? First we want to filter out any models that aren’t inline with what we think scripture teaches. Even though each of these models have been proposed and defended by Christians, it seems to me that the criteria laid down by scripture excludes some of them from consideration. Any of the remaining models will be satisfactory, and so we are free to believe the one we find most plausible or compelling.
With that in mind, we’re going to take a tour through a view that I think is the best approach to this question from a philosophical perspective.
Philosophy: Omni-instrumentality
I call this model “omni-instrumentality”, because it’s based on the idea that all natural things are God’s instruments, when we understand that in a particular way. It was originally outlined by medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, and in the last century some of the details have been fleshed out into a more comprehensive model.
I’m going to state the overall approach upfront, so that you can get a general sense of where we’re going: we can’t get directly at how God works through nature as his instruments, because the instruments we’re familiar with instruments are artificial rather than natural. Thus, we have no direct reference point for thinking about providence, but we can get at it indirectly by establishing a one-to-one mapping between the cooperation we have with our artificial instruments and the cooperation God has with his natural instruments. When done properly, this one-to-one mapping enables us to use the artificial instruments we’re familiar with in our everyday lives to reason about the way God works through nature. This one-to-one mapping can be depicted in the following diagram, which we’ll unpack bit-by-bit.
Human instruments: artifacts with thin existence
In the technical sense we’re using here, an instrument is something that is caused to cause something else. In order to understand what this means, consider the ways two things can cooperate with one another:
Coordinate cooperation is when two things combine their efforts together. For example, two people pick up a box, or two teams play a game of tug-of-war.
Accidental cooperation is when one thing makes another able to act. For example, you throw a brick so that it can break the window, or pick up someone so they can reach something.
Essential cooperation is when one thing causes another to cause. For example, pushing a stone with a stick, or writing on a blackboard with a piece of chalk.
It’s the last of these that involve instruments in our technical sense. The instrument is the thing that’s caused to cause something, while the agent is the thing that causes the instrument to cause that thing. Everything an instrument does is because an agent essentially cooperates with it, acting through it to being about various results.
Now, whenever human agents work through instruments, we do so by using existing materials in new ways. Whenever we do this, we can distinguish the existing materials we use, which we can call the “underlying thing”, from the new thing that comes into existence because of our new usage, which we can call an “artifact”. For example, when we use a stick to push a stone, then it becomes a prodder. When we use chalk to write on a blackboard, then it becomes a writing instrument. When we sit on a rock to rest, then it becomes a chair. And when we organize beads and pieces of wood appropriately they become an abacus.
Artifacts as such don’t exist outside of our shared ideas about them or our usage of them—it’s only because we treat an underlying thing in a certain way that the artifact exists at all, or continues to exist moment to moment. There’s nothing special about rocks that make them ordered to being chairs, there’s nothing intrinsic to wood that makes it represent numbers, and there’s nothing in chalk that makes it a writing implement. It’s because of the ways that we use each of these things that they become and continue to exist as artifacts. It’s because of this that we give artifacts a broken line in the diagram—they have a “thin" existence, constantly depending upon our shared human conceptions and usages to exist.
So that’s the left-hand side of our diagram: we essentially cooperate with artificial instruments, when we act on pre-existing materials in new ways so that we can act through the resulting artifact. It’s by this cooperation that we give the artifact the powers it has, and govern the actions it performs.
Divine instruments: natural things with thick existence
Something similar happens with God and nature, except at a more fundamental level. Just as artifacts depend on us to exist and act, so too do we depend on God’s essential cooperation with us to continue existing and acting. As Paul said, in God we live and move and have our being.
But there’s an important difference between God’s instruments and our instruments: our instruments are artifacts with a thin existence, but God’s instrument are natural things that have what we could call a “thick” existence. Natural things don’t just exist in our minds—or even just in God’s mind—but have a concrete existence in reality. As the creator, God creates and sustains everything that exists in being, and so he does not work on pre-existing materials like we do. If he acts on anything, we’d have to say that he acts on our constitutive principles. These are those things which do not exist of themselves, but only when they are brought together in the real existence of natural things. Think, for instance, of your essence and existence—neither of these exist by themselves, but only when they come together in an individual. Or, more concretely, think of the activity that makes you alive—it does not exist independent of the matter than it organizes to make your living body.
So, whereas we act on pre-existing materials, God acts on our constitutive principles. And whereas we act through artifacts, God acts through natural things. But, just as our essential cooperation with artifacts is the means by which they exist and act, so too God’s essential cooperation with us is the means by which we exist and act.
This is the one-to-one mapping that helps us understand divine providence from our experience with artificial instruments. And it can help to see where the flaw in our usual thinking about this goes wrong: when we hear that God controls our actions, we think that we just exist and God is somehow acting on our wills to make us decide as he wants. But this line of thinking doesn’t appreciate how dramatically we depend on God for our being and acting. God does not act on our wills as if they existed independently of his acting, rather it is God acting through us whereby we have and exercise our wills in the first place.
This one-to-one mapping doesn’t tell us exactly how God works on our constitutive principles, but it does tell us how God’s work through us is both similar and different to our work through artifacts. With this mapping, we can investigate God’s working through us despite not being able to get directly at the mechanics of divine providence—it enables us to study providence from a distance. The idea is that we can derive general principles about essential cooperation with instruments from our everyday experience, and then translate these ideas over to God and nature through this analogy.
The possibility of sin
One important question we can answer with this mapping is how God can be the cause of our actions without being the cause of sin.
The key thing to realize is this: whenever an agent works through an instrument, the instrument isn’t just sitting there idly, but needs to facilitate the influence from the agent. For example, when I use a stick to move a stone, the stick must retain its shape and not buckle under the pressure I apply. This is why sticks are good instruments for pushing stones, and a pieces of cooked spaghetti are not. But because the instrument must facilitate the agent’s influence like this, it’s also possible for it to limit the influence from the agent by not facilitating as fully as needed. The stick limits how hard I can push it without it buckling under the pressure, and a piece of chalk limits how precise I can draw a shape on a blackboard.
Applying this to God working through us, we’ve already said that God is the source of everything good. As the good creator he desires the well-being of all his creation, and his causal influence in any action is the good in that action. If we’re being precise, actions are not normally wholly good or wholly bad, but a mixture of both, and God is the source of any good in an action. But if God’s causal influence is the goodness of our action, then when we limit his influence through us, we’re limiting the goodness in our action, and are thereby introducing evil into our action. Thus, though God is working in the action, he is not the source of the evil aspects of the action, but only the good aspects of it.
Now we may wonder whether our limitation of God’s influence undermines his ability to guide history according to his will. But it doesn’t. Like any agent, God works with the limitations of his instruments to bring about what he wants, like a painter who is cognizant of the limitations in his paintbrushes, or a musician who knows what her musical instrument is capable of. But it does mean we can distinguish between three different relations God has to the components of the final action:
He most truly desires the good that he contributes to our actions.
He desires the final action as a whole in a secondary sense, since it is the effect of both God and the human through whom he is working. We might say that he plans the final action.
And he permits the evil that arises from the limitation of the creature.
So, using this one-to-one mapping, we were able to move from our experience of artificial instruments in everyday life, to God’s work through us, and explain how he is not the source of evil despite being in control of our actions.
Reflection
So, what does the doctrine of providence mean for our day-to-day lives? Imagine for a moment that God wasn’t in control like we’ve been saying. Picture the scene where Alice meets a nice guy Bob, they start dating, things get serious, and they start talking about getting married. Then, one day out of the blue, Bob leaves her without any explanation. Alice prays: “God why did you let this happen to me, why didn’t you warn me in some way.” And God replies: “Don’t look at me, I didn’t see it coming either!”
More seriously, the God we worship is not caught off-guard by bad things that happen in the world. And the doctrine of divine providence helps us to see evil for what it is, while at the same time giving us hope in God. When we experience suffering and evil in life we are tempted to either forget that God is in control, or question whether he is good. But divine providence teaches us that God is in control and that he has found a way to incorporate suffering and evil into his good purposes. “This is part of the infinite goodness of God,” said Thomas Aquinas, “that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.” (ST I Q2 A3 ad1)
But we mustn’t then run with this into the third trap of thinking that suffering and evil are somehow good things because God can use them. When scripture tells us to rejoice in suffering, it's not saying we should twist ourselves into people who derive pleasure from suffering or who actively seek it out. Nor are we to become cold-hearted, and think it’s ok to downplay someone’s pain with trite reassurances like, “don’t worry, God’s in control.” This is true, but suffering is still horrible and evil is still detestable. When someone is suffering it is right and good to lament with them (Rom 12:15); to come alongside them and do our best to comfort them (12:13); to share in their anger at the evil that causes their suffering (12:9); and to turn with them to the God in control to ask for strength and encouragement (12:12).
Scripture tells us to rejoice in suffering not because it is something good, but because our joy is in a good God whose plans are not thwarted by evil. We rejoice in suffering because we know that God will bring good out of it on the other side — he will use it to make us more like Jesus, and because Jesus suffered and died he will one day make everything new without any sin or evil or suffering. So, as Paul says, we are to
Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. (Rom 12:12)
These are all possible because our God is in control. We can rejoice because we know his plans are secure. We can be patient because we know that tribulation is temporary. And we must be constant in prayer because the one in charge cares about us and will listen to us.
One of the things that has become more clear to me as time goes on is that the best time to reflect on God’s providence is when we’re not suffering. When we’re suffering, the last thing we want is a philosophy lecture or a doctrine that does nothing to alleviate our pain. But if when we’re not suffering, we make a habit of reflecting on it in light of what scripture teaches us about God’s providence, then we will be preparing ourselves to trust God in the face of difficulties rather than resent him for them. We will enable ourselves to sing these words with the Psalmist:
Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my salvation and my God. (Ps 42:5–6)
And if we’re lucky, we might even begin to understand how these words could ever have been written by a prisoner in Auschwitz:
There is grace, though, and wonder, on the way; only they are hard to see, hard to embrace, for those compelled to wander in darkness.
Appendix: Short answers to anticipated questions
What about passages that say that God is the cause of evil?
Like this one from 1 Samuel:
If someone sins against a man, God will mediate for him, but if someone sins against the Lord, who can intercede for him?” But they would not listen to the voice of their father, for it was the will of the Lord to put them to death. (1 Sam 2:25)
It comes down to the precision the author is speaking about. Sometimes biblical authors wish to emphasize the role of God in things with respect to good and evil, other times they simply which to indicate his guidance of things according to his will without necessarily getting into the details.
Strictly speaking, we should say that God is the cause of evil actions, but that he is not the cause of the evil in those actions. He causes the action and permits the evil within it.
How does grace fit into all of this?
In these sorts of discussions, grace typically refers to something that God does over and above his normal working through nature. We have been focusing exclusively on the latter.
What about doctrines of grace, like the five points of Calvinism?
Theological debates over the doctrines of grace often get tied up with philosophical positions about God’s providence, but this is not strictly necessary once we appreciate the difference between nature and grace. While certain theological positions have been associated with certain philosophical models, technically-speaking almost any view of divine providence is compatible with almost any theological position. For example, even if we accepted the simple foreknowledge view of divine providence—which says that God does not control any natural actions—we could still have the full-blown five points of Calvinism if we accept that grace is something God does over-and-above his work through natural powers.
Do we have free will?
Generally speaking, something is free when it is not constrained. But what this means depends on what the thing in question is: a horse is less free if it cannot gallop or eat, but it is not less free if it cannot fly. Unlike flying, galloping and eating are part of the horse’s nature, and so it is to the extent that these are impeded that the horse’s freedom is infringed. Thus, if we want to discuss free will, we first need to clarify what we mean by “will”.
Your will is your faculty for desiring things you perceive to be good—good actions, good people, good food, good music, and so on. Your will is free, then, to the extent that you are able to desire things that are truly good, rather than things that are superficially so. When achieving something you desire, your choice is your faculty for deliberating between multiple alternatives and decide which of them to pursue. Your choice is free, then, to the extent that you are able to choose between the alternatives that are best without being artificially constrained—nothing outside the parameters of the choice is forcing your hand. You may often hear the idea suggestion that free will depends on being able to have chosen otherwise. This is partly true: if there is only one viable option then there can be no choice (and therefore no free choice), but if it is still desirable then it is still freely willed.
Now, it seems that we often find desire things that are truly good for us, as well as deliberate between various alternatives for achieving our desired ends. Thus, unless we have some strong reason for rejecting it, we should accept that we have free will and make free choices.
If God causes our actions, does that undermine our free will?
Only if he acted on our wills, so as to force us to will or choose one way or another, would it run the risk of undermining our free will. But we have said that God acts through us, and thereby establishes our natures and actions, including when we exercise our will and choice.