A Review of David Fergusson’s The Providence of God

For the Academic Paper form with full citations, see here.

In our day of theological retrieval, the Reformed disagree amongst ourselves on virtually every part of the doctrine of God that is being reexamined. That is the case even if only on matters of approach, source, and ordering the attributes. The doctrine of God’s providence is typically not up for debate unless one is engaging with an author who is a professing Molinist or Open Theist. That makes The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), by David Fergusson, a most thought provoking work. Fergusson is Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. 

The summaries of the traditional Reformed view through this work are as fair as one could discover in such a critical thesis toward it. Indeed Fergusson made things rather hard on himself by acknowledging how exegetically grounded, how practically minded, and how logically sophisticated, the classical doctrine had been. Ultimately he is left with five criticisms that, I will argue, he does not deliver on about the Reformed doctrine: 1. It was too philosophical; 2. It is unattractive to modern sensibilities; 3. It subsumes providence to the eternal decree of predestination; 4. It reduces providence to God the Father, ignoring those “two hands” of God’s working, namely, the Son and the Holy Spirit; and 5. It lacks a corrective to prevent it from being wielded by those in power to resist necessary social change. 

Much is also said about the frontiers between theology and science, or, in other words, how divine causation and natural causation relate to each other. Here Fergusson is less critical of the classical view as he is given over to the present options in either quantum mechanics or chaos theory—that is, as options of how one need not posit strong determinism in a way where nature is a “closed system,” entirely preserving free choice. I do not list this as a point of absolute disagreement for Fergusson, as he seems to allow that the classical view has a strong card to play here in its concept of dual agency. Nevertheless the attempt to envision either of those two present models of contemporary physics as a means of divorcing our cosmos from the totalizing divine decree wind up in a dead end. 

This review will proceed by first offering a summary of the book’s structure and substance, then we will analyze Fergusson’s historical arguments, then his logical-doctrinal arguments, followed by his practical arguments, and then finally we will end in a critique of what I will call his “concessive causality” model of providence.  

SUMMARY OF THE BOOK

The first chapter is a historical reconnaissance of where the traditional Christian understanding came from. The sources of classical providentialism had more to do with Greek philosophy than with a word that was clearly spelled out, let alone defined, in Scripture. Fergusson recognizes the clear difference between the Christian conception and the Stoic, for whom theology “is generally pantheistic, materialistic and impersonal.” Causality, punishment, free will, moral significance, and a single ordering principle, are each shown to have building blocks in a Philo or a Plotinus. What the classical Christian doctrine neglects is this: “Divine providence is not perfectly instantiated everywhere. It follows a narrative shape and is temporally distributed.”

Chapter Two more specifically differentiates between East and West. In the Middle Ages, following Augustine in the West, we find: 1. a more systematic doctrine, and 2. a maximization of divine causality. Worse yet, providence was harmonized with Fate. The views of Aquinas, Calvin, Turretin, and others are explored here. While the author fairly attempts to show the sophistication of the classical use of primary and secondary causation—how they avoid the zero-sum game in matters as diverse as evil and prayer—nonetheless their account “seems to require an account of special providence which cuts across the divine between primary and secondary causality.”

Chapter Three continues the walk through history into the Enlightenment. Here general providence and the regularity of nature were amplified. From Spinoza to Feuerbach, “since” natural events go on as they do, the notion that God is guiding them is mere human projection. Moreover, confidence in God’s designs in all affairs equated to confidence in one’s own ability to decipher that exact design. As this design gave way to closed nature, so too this confidence settled upon the local destiny, whether of culture or nation. With Deism’s mortal wound in the Lisbon earthquake, and its obituary written by Voltaire, what was left of providence was to justify white man’s burden and survival of the fittest. 

The fourth chapter expands outward from providentialism of social causes to the relationship between divine cause and the material world. Scientific determinism has given way to models of indeterminacy. While Fergusson seems to acknowledge that scientific paradigms come and go, he does add to his critique of the classical from this ground. Its notion of God’s decree gives us a “block universe,” that is, a single predetermined set (or block) where no “entity or event awaits future causal determination.” While avoiding any explicit association with Open Theism, Fergusson clearly points away from determinism to an “unfolding” model, and uses the opportunity of the scientifically open universe to make a case for libertarian free will and divine temporality, the opposite of these having “close conceptual ties” to the block universe. Naturally biological evolution is canvassed in this same chapter. The teleological and altruistic elements must be discovered for anyone who would appeal to Darwin and his progeny for a model of how God can direct an open and living world.   

The fifth chapter wraps up his historical treatment with twentieth century reactions. Here he surveys Process, Neo-Orthodox, and Liberation views, alongside those holding on to the Thomist (Garrigou-Lagrange) and Calvinist (Bavinck and Berkhouwer) models. With these schools of providentialism, Fergusson also reviews four analogies for understanding the Creator-creature relationship in terms of action: 1. the grand chessmaster, 2. improvised theater, 3. Persian carpet-maker, and 4. family life. Each has “much pneumatological potential.” 

It is not until the sixth and final chapter where Fergusson leaves behind demolition and shows us what he would put in place. Providence must be about how God relates to creatures rather than how a distant God explains a block universe, leaving some “causal joint” between them insufficiently explained. “It must be a temporal willing—even “wrestling” with—rather than a timeless willing. His finished product is clearly Trinitarian, as it consists of three dogmatic categories: 1. Creatio continua; 2. Theologia crucis; and 3. Veni Creator Spiritus.

ANALYSIS OF HISTORICAL ARGUMENTS

Before treating what I am calling the “historical arguments” made by Fergusson, it would be useful to establish a criterion for a good kind of historical argument. The genetic fallacy easily emerges when exposing the sources of ideas in order to oppose them. This occurs when an idea is dismissed as false entirely on the ground of its origin rather than on its varied epistemological merits. Fergusson, to his credit, does not leave things at this level. However, what remains of his “source criticism” is not without error. Three lines of historical critique concern us here.

1. Classical providentialism was an adaptation of Platonism and Stoicism. Unlike the Epicureans and Aristotelians, these other two Greek schools of philosophy offered a robust notion of a singular pattern or plan for the world. Plato sketches out an assumption that will be with the classical doctrine all the way down into Modernity: “A wise ruler will attend to the details and order these according to the principles of justice to the good of the whole.” Now Fergusson recognizes some clear differences between the Christian conception and the pagan. For example, the Stoics took the Greek gods and Plato’s one form, and identified these “with a world soul or reason (logos).” 

If there was a main debate among the pagans, it was that between determinism and freedom. At the heart of this debate was the idea of Fate, or the fates, since these were really a polytheistic concept.

Philo has a more overtly personal element, an order in which “the righteous are rewarded and the wicked punished.” The One of Plotinus, by contrast, was not personally involved. The ordering of the world was due to its natural participation in Being. Evil was a deprivation of that same Being, yet in such a way that the whole was like “a musical score with discordant notes.” Although it was said that the word is not in the Bible, yet he then speaks to the times that the relevant Hebrew and Greek words show up in the text, and in such a way that “we can identify other terms which have close conceptual links with divine providence.” This is our first clue that Fergusson’s “fate-providence” construct is an overreach. Not only was the content of providence said to be conflated with Fate or the One, but noetically the doctrine became a mixed article of the faith that would find all of its defining categories from nature. At the end of the day, Fergusson is short on examples in the Latin Fathers and in the Scholastics of the equation of Fate to Providence. 

2. Classical providentialism was reduced to the eternal decree—even down to predestination. This second historical critique brings us to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Following the old Barthian reading of the Reformation, Fergusson cites the Reformed retaining Thomas’ top-down approach, yet inverting the order, “by prioritizing predestination and viewing providence as its means.”

In other words, whereas in the early classical model, the doctrine of providence was subsumed under God, now the Reformed narrowed providence down even more to being a set of predestination.

The author is well aware of the scholarly work that has debunked the “Calvin versus Calvinists” and “humanist versus scholastic” era in historical theology. Yet what else can this criticism be but residue of the old Barthianism, since a third plank of its mode of thinking had predestination operating as a central dogma wielding its system.  

3. Classical providentialism tended toward Enlightenment Deism. Two shifts occurred to providentialism at the dawn of Modernity. First, the natural-versus-miraculous replaced the constant-versus-immediate as the basic categories for providence; second, parallel to the first, meaning in each event was replaced by a more general purpose or direction to history.

If everything was as good as it could be (as Leibniz said), then the miracle would be a concession to defect.

Fergusson rightly notes an anthropocentric turn in the idea of providence, in the turn from the seventeenth to eighteenth century. No longer was it a means to glorify God in trust and obedience. Now it was merely the barometer to secure the blessings of this life. The conclusion seems a Machen-like rebuke at first glance: “In deism, Jesus is an instructor who informs us how life is ordered, rather than a Saviour whose work is to re-order and remake it.” An irony is concealed. Where Machen cast the modern-liberal Jesus in the imperative, an example and moral teacher, with the biblical Jesus in the indicative, a Savior, Fergusson thinks it Savior-esque of Jesus to set us back up for the imperative of changing things, instruments in his hands no doubt. 

ANALYSIS OF THE LOGICAL-DOCTRINAL ARGUMENTS

1. The classical view reduced providence to the Father (or monarchical theism) alone. Essentially this is Fergusson’s argument that, “One of the deficits of classical theology is its tendency to appropriate providential action to the first person of the Trinity only.” But it is because “God’s work does not cease on the sixth day” that his work of providence must be a redemptive-historical work; and it is because there is fall and restoration that the “continual creation” of God’s “two hands” is eshatological and narrative. He makes Calvin his Exhibit A here: “All of the 270 uses of providentia in the Commentary on the Psalms seem to be attributed to God as Father.” 

2. The classical doctrine is vulnerable to the extremes of Deism or Pantheism. It gives the air of either a total machine without defect from beginning to end, or else all parts being part of the Machinist. By contrast, “The creation will only fully be under the divine sway at the end of time, though this is not the outcome of a linear progression.”

Fergusson’s recourse to quantum and chaos refuges for an alternative to classical dual agency is really a dead end. Chance is invested with metaphysical properties and causal power.

However, the theological import of the scientific excursus becomes clear: “Providence is more like a work in progress than a project that is complete and perfect ab initio.” 

3. It can’t articulate primary causation without God authoring evil. Fergusson balances the “counterfactual” passages well enough, but imagines Western theologians tending to “side with the more deterministic exegesis.” In its place he would maintain “co-dependence” between God and man’s part, even while granting an asymmetrical nature where God is primal. When Fergusson does take fullest critical aim against dual agency, he seems to say it tends, whether in Thomism or Calvinism, most toward Occasionalism. The traditional view he sees as one-dimensional: “Secondary causes here tend to become more ciphers for divine volition, their principal function being to rescue God from direct responsibility for sin and evil.” 

In summary, “My argument is that the reading of Scripture in the church’s theology of providence has been generally inadequate to the diversity of biblical materials, especially the preponderance of those passages which testify to divine interaction, creaturely causality, contingency and eschatological deferral.”

This seems to have neglected two questions about classical dual agency: 1. Does it succeed in showing that secondary causes are distinct in the relevant ways from primary cause? 2. Must it remain only an account of that distinction, or can it logically build outward to explicate the nature of the secondary cause?

If there is an easy enough Yes to these two questions, then the criticism has no force. 

ANALYSIS OF THE PRACTICAL ARGUMENTS

1. Classical providentialism is unattractive to the modern, relational concept of God. That is true as far as it goes. Modern religion has indeed preferred to make God more friendly only by pulling him down from any transcendent place. However, the Reformed would insist that the modern religionist is wrong.

For Fergusson, unexplainable pain requires a “future-oriented account.” The world not being as it should be, until the end, makes the notion of God’s will always being done problematic.

We must ask how, even on his account, God’s will is not still always being done, each thing driving to the future conquest of evil. His answer will be that many things stick out—“surd” elements, he often says—and that, in spite of these not being in God’s will, are overcome by God. We may venture a reply: How do we know that God will overcome these given this kind of a God-world relation?

2. Classical providentialism lends itself to power classes, elitism, and social apathy. The idea here is that the Christian is given nothing but acceptance for the way things are in society. “Considered ontically, Fergusson responds, “the providential rule of God sometimes works against nature and history.” He has the resurrection most centrally in mind, but clearly in a way that ripples out through God’s call to his people to undo much of the curse. What must be resisted from an ethical standpoint is “that God positively wills every outcome.”

But this fails to differentiate between the decretive, permissive, and prescriptive wills of God in terms of how all three bear on the question of God’s 1. willing of an evil act, 2. his hating of that same act, and 3. his determination, eschatologically, to judge that same act, punishing its relevant evil actors.

Anyone who thinks this cannot be reconciled in systematic theology has ignored how these are already brought together in various texts of Scripture. Genesis 50:20, Acts 2:23, and 4:27-28 are salient examples. 

3. Classical providentialism tends to speculate on God’s reasons in the specifics. Fergusson is especially hard on the Puritans at this point, who frequently resorted to tracing out God’s grace in the individual’s life. With Jonathan Winthrop, he notes the shift from a Puritan vision of providence for the church, to the forging of a new national identity. We must ask, how exactly does one know when the line is crossed in the over-interpretation of providence? Is it not Scripture that sets this line (cf. Deut. 29:29)? It seems to me that the skeptic of the early modern era was far more rash in his pronouncements of divine meaning than the Puritans ever were. There are quite a few pages on contemporary reaction to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Wesley’s sermon three years later reminds us of those more trustworthy words of Jesus in Luke 13 that make Voltaire’s complaint of no effect. If it is true that all deserve wrath and that God is free to dispense it to whomever he wills, then the comparison of one who is worthy of death over another is not really a comparison of one more “unworthy” of death than another (which was Voltaire’s starting assumption). 

CRITIQUE OF THE ‘CONCESSIVE CAUSALITY’ MODEL OF PROVIDENCE

Fergusson is clear that there must be a more holistic and narrative account. “We might say that providence is a theological term that needs to be narrated through a series of descriptions of how God relates to creatures, rather than defined in any essentialist manner.” Thus we ought to speak more adjectivally and adverbally, as in, “that God acts providentially.” One might ask Fergusson: “But what do you mean by that word?” And he will be forced to either buy more time with narrative descriptions to no end, or else circle back to words that mean things. A nominalistic providentialism can govern and provide nothing in particular.  

Fergusson seems to view God’s word and even God himself as entering a “struggle” to overcome dualism, and the evil that would be one of its two equal and opposite powers. While he says that the “Old Testament lives with the unresolved tension,” we may at least say that there is a divinely inspired sense of aporia that only the coming of Christ overcomes. Yet we would insist that all elements of the conflict in the Old belonged to that building “fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4), marching onward within one decree and personal directedness.

Although Fergusson never allies himself in any explicit way with the Process or Open Theists, a few summaries show him more obviously weighted in that direction than toward the classical view.

He writes, “The social and natural orders of the world are deeply connected in ways that affect God also,” and “the world is not yet a finished project; it remains a site under construction.” Further on, “The divine-human relationship is asymmetrical in terms of its setting, yet it is one in which God becomes reactive and in respects dependent upon what has been made.” 

Divine sovereignty must be weighted toward promissory terms and not controlling terms. Yet how will God guarantee what he promises without controlling what might otherwise prevent it? Or, in other words, how else do we understand Romans 8:28? This is all what is meant by “concessive” such that God’s providence is total, but there is always the concession made given how things are not presently what they are aimed at eschatologically. The older non-Reformed traditions (I think especially of Arminianism and Socinianism) would have set this in terms of the antecedent and consequent decrees of God, the latter being a concession to man’s shortcomings to respond well to the first. Fergusson extends this kind of a concept to the whole of history and nature. 

We must come to the Trinitarian structure of his model, which he describes in terms of the Christological cantus firmus, which he picks up from one of Bonhoeffer’s prison letters. In order to be both “Trinitarian and polyphonic,” the Father’s authoring of the narrative must be ongoing (Creatio continua), at its heart must be the Christ-centered element (Theologia crucis), and then the Spirit must always be engaged in renewal (Veni Creator Spiritus). A polyphony is the combining of parts, each forming a single melody that is in harmony. Christ’s work is conceived as the underlying melody: hence the justified language of their being a “Barthian” element.

Creatio continua. A Hebrew tension is recognized. The world was a place of beauty and order, and yet disaster—both natural and volitional—was frequently visited upon the nations and Israel alike. So the tension between the goodness of the world and pervasiveness of our sin lands the Old Testament in aporia if not for Christ. Julian of Norwich’s contemplation of the hazelnut is used as an image of this. One wonders how Fergusson could not avail himself of the idea so classical that it can be witnessed as early as Irenaeus, that of the eschatological perfection already designed (today, we might say “programmed”) into the original. The reason to me seems clear, as that would still be a “block” of totalizing decree. 

Theologia crucis. Fergusson makes Luther’s theology of the cross central. Given the Barthian (if not Luther’s own) equation of natural theology to the hidden God and thus a “theology of glory,” it is predictable how this will negatively function. But how does it positively function? Start with the “counter-intuitive character of the crucifixion.” God’s will is accepted with child-like trust. He bears the weight of all that has gone wrong, and “His rising from the dead is a victory for the gospel over the law of death.” 

Veni Creator Spiritus. While the Spirit’s focus may be said to be on the word, we also need to conceive him “as universal, active, and providential.” He spends some time on maintaining the paradox between the Spirit working grace in us and human responsibility. This parallels the double-agency questions in providence, but how does it belong to providence proper? From Adams, he expands upon the universal aspect of the Spirit as encompassing social interactions outside of us: not to be privatized. So “the interior work of the Spirit is often effective and connects us to the established practices in which the Spirit is already at work in the church and the world.” In this way the Spirit creates “atmospheric conditions,” within and without for the church to counteract those elements of evil and suffering in our world.  

Fergusson ignores or neglects the sense in which classical providence is both wholly determinative and yet continually unfolding, and this from the nature of the singular decree of God.

The eternal decree is not “at the beginning” in a linear sense, but is atemporal and thus is not faced with the choice of being “at” T-1 with its “block universe algorithm” versus being at each and every point on the space-time continuum, and at every moment of personal struggle for his saints.  

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The author’s  story of the young lady who studied at Aberdeen, saved from Pan Am Flight in 1988 but died in the tube suicide bombing of 2005, brings him to conclude that, nonetheless, “these should not be allowed to become the occasion for bad theology,” (and right when the reader is about to say Amen, he flips the script) “... even if some people appear to be consoled by the thought of an inscrutible divine volition that foreordains everything that happens.” Small wonder that his next breath does violence to Jesus’ point in Luke 13:4 and John 9:3. For Fergusson these show that God is not responsible for the bad that happened, which is most certainly not Jesus’ point.

What John Webster wanted, and others want, to appropriate from Barth’s doctrine of Scripture, it seems that Fergusson wants to do with providence. The common criticism is this: By “frontloading” the doctrine to some foundational status (epistemology for Scripture, eternity in God for providence), the thing is truncated, failing to be dispersed and life-giving to the rest of the aspects of the Christian faith.

The truth, however, is that providence is irreducibly an eternal act first, and is only secondly manifest in the ad extra works that we observe as provision to the creatures, governance of history, and the special good out of evil for Christians. If there are good limitations to over-interpreting the script of providence, then surely the worst limitation would be to suppose that the Author could be pulled down into the story on the terms of the characters. 

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David Fergusson, The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018)