Providence

A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Account

Elliott, Mark W.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781493422180
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Addressing a topic of perennial interest in Christian theology, this volume offers a constructive account of the doctrine of providence. Mark Elliott shows that, contrary to received opinion, the Bible has a lot to say about providence as a distinct doctrine within the wider scope of God's acts of salvation. This book by a leading scholar of Christian theology and exegesis is a capstone of years of research on the history and theology of the doctrine of providence.

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Is Providence Topical or Even Biblical?

This book will treat the idea of providence as one that has a number of guises or expressions: it is the property of providence to operate outside the range of knowledge and full comprehensibility, but also even to elude faith’s perception and be beyond or behind revelation. So one has to look for traces of God’s action in the stories and expressed philosophies of biblical writers, where the glow of revelation shines more brightly and serves as a pattern for faithful glimpsing of providence today.

One finds these traces in the biblical corpus—and ready to be picked up by subsequent interpreters—in such themes as “the hand of God,” “the face of God,” “the blessing,” “the kingdom,” “the plan of God,” life, breath, enduring order, judgment, protection, and the hidden God. These will be dealt with in such a way that much of the canon of the Bible across both Testaments is allowed to bear witness. In the final chapter the findings will be made to speak to the concerns of systematic and practical theologians.

In this introductory chapter (1) I commence with looking at why some might object to the idea that providence has any relevance in modern times. Next (2) I deal with the objection that “providence” is not a biblical theme by addressing the biblical evidence and trying to come to a working definition on that basis. Then, (3) elaborating providence as part of the content of faith, which seeks understanding as to what God does and doesn’t do, I offer a conception that is neither utopian nor a thing of mere comfort, with a consideration that if providence implies living meaningfully, prudentially, and carefully, then it is (4) “bigger” than theodicy, since it includes thinking about blessing and gift, freshly dispensed to human agents, that is finally much less theoretical than it is “lived.”

Modern Resistance to Any Idea of Providence

Providence is not so much “so last century” as it is “so nineteenth century.” The rhetoric of providence accompanied a “Victorian” age of God-led imperialism and colonization, as per the title of Stewart J. Brown’s book Providence and Empire.1 From about the middle of the nineteenth century, however, a certain suspicion of providence grew deeper, as reflected in literature, just as in the previous centuries philosophers, many of them less radical than Hume and Voltaire, had questioned its existence. Doubting providence was now in the public domain, as it were. The poet Robert Browning believed one could know the divine only through a collage of insights from various great figures in history. Yet here, according to literary critic J. Hillis Miller, is Browning’s gloomy conclusion: “The infinite variety of human lives has one universal meaning: the distance of all lives from God.”2 It seemed that there were losers as well as winners in life and that, in fact, the former were possibly in the majority and the happy minority simply lucky. Of course novelists are meant to write about this life and not to be dealing directly with theological or any such matters, but they do have, and moreover often do betray, their background beliefs.

The loss of the traditional sense that there is a providence at one end of life in terms of creation (conception and birth) and at the other end (death and resurrection of just and unjust) can be seen in the fin-de-siècle representation by Thomas Hardy, who appeared to assume that life was in no sense to be considered a gift, and a fortiori there was no gift of a life to come in prospect. Correspondingly there was little room for much blessing in Hardy’s kingdom of Wessex. Gillian Beer comments: “Maladaptation, the FAILURE OF THINGS to be what they are meant to be, obsesses Hardy.”3 And yet, as she goes on to report, there is a loud note of joyous affirmation of what Derrida called “the free play of the world” and even an affirmation of delight in the plenitude of experience. Working, even struggling, against Nature’s less-than-benign plot, “happiness and hap form the two poles in his work.”4 This means an ironic or sarcastic version of providence as summed up in Hardy’s poem “The Convergence of the Twain,” but one without reference to a divine plan or reckoning.

Nearly contemporaneous with Hardy’s Wessex novels was Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1900), with its foregrounding of the family motto, Deus providebit (God will provide), set over the entrance of the offices of the venerable but doomed family firm in Hansestadt Lübeck. Behind the Heidelberg Catechism, whose recitation provides the drama in the opening scene of the novel, stands Matthew 10:19–20//Luke 12:11–12 (when the disciples are on trial, the Spirit will give them the words to say), which, with Genesis 22:8, 14 (God supplying a ram after testing Abraham with a command to offer Isaac) in the background, makes one think of providence in the context of testing and sacrifice.5 But what happens when the Lord for inscrutable reasons seems not to provide, or compensate for, a sacrifice, such as that made by the protagonist, Toni (Antonia) Buddenbrooks, of her beloved? The moral of the novel seems to be that God most helps those who help themselves.6 Or consider Mark Twain’s short story of the drunken man who ascribed both his falling overboard and his rescue to divine providence and who, when reporters asked him about the heroic ship’s captain who rescued him, declared that the latter was merely the tool of providence.7 Honoring human responsibility is a good thing, whether the effect of that responsibility is a cure for disease or a life of service. Yet in assessing the significance of human responsibility, it’s essential to get the balance right: those who, whether in literature or life, ascribe sole credit to human agency for their responsible service are often people who ascribe it to people like themselves, and one finds it hard to call them “gracious.”

Returning briefly to Hardy: in her conclusion Beer shows little Darwinian sangfroid regarding the greater good of the species when she writes, “Hardy’s texts pay homage to human scale by ceasing as the hero or heroine dies. The single life span is no longer an absolute but polemical. That is one formal expression of [Hardy’s] humanism. It opposes evolutionary meliorism or pessimism by making the single generation carry the freight of signification.”8 One may wish to qualify that judgment. For it seems that what does continue and endure to “carry the freight” is the place, Wessex, even as an imaginary, and the idea of the collective will.9 Indeed, the theme of “a breaking of the nations” that echoes Jeremiah 51 comes to the fore: on Christmas Day 1914 Hardy wrote that “the present times are an absolute negation of Christianity.”10 He meant, however, that war was the opposite of a gospel of peace and that large-scale institutions were destroying civil society as they competed for power. This privatization of meaningfulness into the collective community (Gemeinschaft) over against artificial conglomerations, although perhaps in part a protest of late Romanticism, was perhaps as much cause then as it seems effect now of the desolation of twentieth-century mass carnage and the consequent evaporation of meaning from twentieth-century political and popular history. As cause, such privatization seems to have been complicit in the depreciation of civil religion into civic religion, and not only in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s. This is hardly to blame providence; it is instead to outline what providence had to contend with.

Yet, as Vernon White observes, for all Hardy’s bleakness, one hundred years later providence is not so much mocked as it is simply ignored. “In short, when [Julian] Barnes replaces Hardy, when entropy takes the place of evolution and radical epistemological uncertainty replaces confidence in scientific method, the outcome for any purpose in history seems bleaker than ever.”11 Charles Taylor and John Gray have noticed a prevalent popular disgust with explanation of things too: if the economic crash of 2008 is disputed in terms of causes and effects, what chance for giving any sense to the phrase “the meaning of life”?

After the Second World War the Swiss theologian Karl Barth held (appropriately) fairly sober claims for providence: God’s activity in the world as the history of the covenantal relationship (not continuous creation nor the history of humanity as such)12 meant limiting the evidence...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Is Providence Topical or Even Biblical?
• 2. Alternative Themes to Providence in the Bible
• 3. Providence and Divine Action, Viewed Biblically
• 4. Finding Providence across the Old Testament Genres
• 5. Providence as Set Forth in the New Testament
• 6. Systematic Considerations in the Light of Biblical Theology
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover