What Is Divine Providence? The Doctrine and Its Parts

Divine providence is the doctrine that God preserves everything He has made, acts in and through every creature's own acting, and directs the whole of it toward the ends He intends. The classical tradition divides it into three parts: preservation, concurrence and government. Christians agree almost entirely about the first and the third. Nearly every argument about providence that has been worth having is an argument about the second. The word itself misleads, because providentia means foresight and the doctrine is not about foresight. It is about governing. Preservation gives being, concurrence accompanies the creature's own acting, and government aims the whole at an end.

Key takeaways

• Divine providence is God's rule at work in time. Sovereignty is His right and power to rule; providence is that rule actually upholding, accompanying and directing creation.
• The classical structure is threefold: preservation (conservatio), concurrence (concursus) and government (gubernatio). The Reformed confessions and the Thomist tradition both use it.
• Concurrence is the contested joint. Whether your choice is yours, whether God stands behind a tragedy, and whether prayer alters anything are all questions about concurrence.
• Every account pays a price. Meticulous providence pays the authorship of evil, risk-taking providence pays the guarantee, and Molinism pays with a truth it struggles to ground.
• Deism is the limiting case, not a rival. It keeps a thin preservation and abandons concurrence and government outright.

What is divine providence?

The best short definition of divine providence in the Reformed dogmatic tradition belongs to Louis Berkhof, who calls providence "that continued exercise of the divine energy whereby the Creator preserves all His creatures, is operative in all that comes to pass in the world, and directs all things to their appointed end". Three verbs, and each one is a separate claim: preserves, is operative in, directs.

The etymology has done real damage here. Providentia in Latin and pronoia in Greek mean foresight, and a reader who arrives at the word through its roots will expect a doctrine about what God knows in advance. Calvin saw the trap and refused it in the Institutes, insisting that "the providence we mean is not one by which the Deity, sitting idly in heaven, looks on at what is taking place in the world, but one by which he, as it were, holds the helms and overrules all events". Foreknowledge is a doctrine about God's mind. Providence is a doctrine about God's hand.

The scope claimed is total. The Westminster Confession says that God "doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by his most wise and holy providence". Aquinas puts the same point as an entailment of being itself: "all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence". Whatever exists, exists on loan, and the lender is not absent.

That is why the meaning of divine providence a reader brings to the word, a lucky break or a happy coincidence, falls short of the doctrine rather than translating it. Luck is impersonal and has no ends. Providence has nothing else.

Volume One of the series is free, and it is where this argument begins.

What are preservation, concurrence and government?

Berkhof names the three elements with their Latin: "preservation (conservatio, sustentatio), concurrence or cooperation (concursus, co-operatio), and government (gubernatio)". The distinction is worth learning precisely, because it tells you which question two disagreeing theologians are asking.

Preservation (conservatio) is God's continuing gift of being, the act by which what exists goes on existing. It is not maintenance performed on a finished object. On the classical account, creating and conserving are one act met at two points in the creature's own sequence, which is why Paul can tell the Areopagus that God "is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else" and then that "in him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:25, 28, NIV), and why Colossians can say of Christ that "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17, NIV). Remove preservation for an instant and there is no instant.

Concurrence (concursus) is God's acting in and through the creature's own acting, so that one event has two causes without either being a fraction of the other. Aquinas states the guard that the whole doctrine turns on: providence "has prepared for some things necessary causes, so that they happen of necessity; for others contingent causes, that they may happen by contingency, according to the nature of their proximate causes". The contingent effect is contingent because God ordained a contingent cause, not in spite of Him. David Fergusson's survey of the doctrine in the St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology puts the classical settlement in a phrase: the two agencies work at different levels and are "complementary rather than competitive".

Government (gubernatio) is God's directing of the whole toward its appointed end. This is the teleological element, and it is what makes providence more than cosmic upkeep. Paul again, to the same Athenian audience: "From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands" (Acts 17:26, NIV). Nations have coordinates because someone set them.

Westminster states all three in a single sentence without ever using the labels: God upholds (preservation), directs and disposes (concurrence), and governs (government). Learn the three terms and confessional prose stops being a rolling list of synonyms and becomes an argument with parts.

How is providence different from sovereignty, predestination and fate?

Sovereignty is God's right and power to rule. Providence is that rule at work. The distinction is not pedantry: a theologian can affirm sovereignty in the abstract and still owe you an account of how the ruling actually happens in a world of secondary causes. Our own treatment of the sovereignty of God sets out five Christian answers to the question of what God controls and concludes that each tradition saw something true in Scripture and defended it well. Divine providence is where those answers are cashed.

Predestination is the same doctrine narrowed to one subject. It is the providence of God applied to salvation, which is why the confessions treat election and providence in adjacent chapters and why arguments about one migrate so easily into the other.

Fate is the counterfeit. Fate is impersonal, indifferent and blind; it has no ends, only outcomes. Providence is personal, purposive and directed, and the difference is not one of degree. A fatalist and a Christian can agree that an event was unavoidable and still disagree about what the event was.

If the distinction interests you, the free volume takes it much further.

Where does the disagreement actually start?

The disagreement starts at concurrence, and seeing that reorganises the literature. Preservation is uncontested. No historic Christian tradition holds that creation persists under its own steam, and where a writer appears to, the idea is usually being forgotten rather than argued. Government is contested only in degree, over how tightly the end is specified and how much of the route God has fixed in advance.

Concurrence carries the entire dispute. When a reader asks whether his choice was really his, whether God stood behind a particular tragedy, or whether a prayer changed anything, he is asking about divine concurrence under three different names. When a Calvinist and an Arminian both say "God is in control" and then find they have agreed on nothing, the middle term is where they parted.

Berkhof draws the boundaries of the space with two failures rather than one: "Christian theism is opposed to both a deistic separation of God from the world and a pantheistic confusion of God with the world". Push concurrence toward zero and God becomes a spectator. Push it toward totality and the creature becomes a gesture God is making. Every serious account of divine providence is an attempt to stand somewhere on that line and explain why it does not slide.

Between the Calvinist and the deist ends of that line, the framework's own position is set out at the FICT page.

Meticulous providence: the case Calvin and Helm make

The strongest position on the field holds that God has foreordained every event, and that providence is the execution in time of that eternal decree. Calvin refuses any weaker reading with a directness the tradition never softened: "not a drop of rain falls without the express command of God". Nothing is left over. Nothing is merely allowed to happen while God attends to something weightier.

It would be a mistake to hear this as crude determinism, and the Westminster divines took some trouble to make sure nobody could. All things come to pass "immutably and infallibly", the Confession says, "yet, by the same providence, he ordereth them to fall out according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently". The decree does not flatten the creaturely order; it establishes it, including its freedoms and its contingencies. Paul Helm's The Providence of God is the sustained modern defence of this. Helm labels his position a "no-risk" view of providence, over against views in which God "takes risks", and, as John Frame observed in reviewing the book for the Westminster Theological Journal, God takes no risks on Helm's account precisely because He has foreordained all the events of nature and history.

What this buys is enormous, and that is the position's real attraction. Promises that cannot fail. A reading of Joseph that takes the text at face value, because when Joseph tells his brothers "You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives" (Genesis 50:20, NIV), he is not describing damage limitation. He is describing an intention that ran through their intention.

The price is the authorship of evil, and the confession names it rather than hiding from it. Providence extends "even to the first Fall, and all other sins of angels and men, and that not by a bare permission", it says, and then it draws the line: "the sinfulness thereof proceedeth only from the creature, and not from God". Whether that line can be held is exactly what critics of meticulous providence deny. If bare permission is too weak, and authorship is intolerable, the position needs a third thing, and the objection is that no third thing has been specified.

Volume One argues that a third thing is available.

Risk-taking general providence: the case John Sanders makes

The strongest alternative refuses the trade at its root. John Sanders, in The God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence, argues that God has freely chosen to relate to creatures in genuine give and take, and that a relationship of that kind cannot be risk free. In his own words, quoted in Bruce Demarest's review for the Denver Journal, God "chooses not to govern the world without our input. Whether it is wise for God to do so is another matter". The corollary is stated just as plainly: "God is not behind every event that happens in life". Demarest characterises the move as replacing exhaustive sovereignty with a general sovereignty, and the label is apt, since what Sanders defends is general providence in a strong sense: God establishes structures, purposes and a project, and He does not micromanage the route.

Read this account at its best and the God it describes gains as much as He gives up. He improvises rather than reads from a script, and He answers petitions He had not already answered before the world began. And the pastoral relief is not rhetorical: on this view, nobody has to tell a bereaved parent that the death was planned, because it was not. The open view of the future that usually accompanies it, which we treat separately under open theism and find right about the human frame and wrong about the doctrine of God, is doing the same protective work from the side of knowledge.

The price is the guarantee. If no particular outcome is secured, then a promise about a particular outcome becomes a forecast, issued by an unmatched forecaster with an unmatched record. That may be enough for many purposes. It is not obviously enough for Romans 8:28. Sanders takes the objection seriously and judges the alternative worse.

The free volume is where the series takes up this trade.

Molinist providence: the case Thomas Flint makes

Molinism attempts to buy both. It holds that God possesses middle knowledge, which the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes as knowledge of what free creatures "would do if they were instantiated". Knowing that, prior to and independent of His creative decree, God surveys the worlds genuinely available to Him and actualises one. Providence is then as detailed as the Calvinist wants and as undetermined as the Arminian wants, because God arranged circumstances rather than choices.

Thomas Flint's Divine Providence: The Molinist Account is the fullest development of this, extending middle knowledge into prayer and prophecy. It is the only account on this list that keeps exhaustive providence and libertarian freedom without redefining either term, and that is an achievement rather than a clever evasion.

The price is the grounding objection, which the same encyclopedia states without embellishment: "there appears to be no good answer to the question of what grounds the truth of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom". The dilemma has two horns and both cut. If God grounds these truths, then what a creature would freely do is settled by God, and the freedom the theory was built to protect is gone. If the creature grounds them, then a being who does not yet exist is making true a proposition about himself.

Molinists have answers, and the best of them denies that a true counterfactual needs a causal ground at all, on the reasonable view that demanding one simply assumes libertarian freedom is false. Critics reply that this leaves the truths floating: true, prior to God's decree, about people who do not exist, with nothing in reality corresponding to them. Our fuller treatment of Molinism argues that the objection loses its target once "prior" is indexed to a frame, because the decree it asks about has no prior.

Volume One examines counterfactuals of creaturely freedom directly.

Deism: what is left when concurrence goes

Deism belongs here not as a rival but as a control experiment. The deist holds that a creator God established the universe and its laws and does not intervene in its operation, which is why the position historically discarded miracles, special providence and answered prayer along with the rest. Read against the threefold structure of divine providence, this is preservation kept in its thinnest possible sense, with concurrence and government abandoned outright. God wound it, and then left it running with no companion and no destination.

That is precisely what makes deism diagnostic. Subtract the middle term and the third, and what remains is recognisably not the God of Scripture, which tells you what those two terms were carrying all along. Berkhof's pairing of deistic separation with pantheistic confusion marks the two walls; everything argued above is an attempt to walk between them without touching either.

The free volume is the shortest route into how the series maps that space.

How does Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answer?

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas, including the one Calvin and Sanders answer in opposite directions, by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single formal error. It is the position of the Many Beings Framework, and its relevant conclusion is short: beings whose natures differ in kind apprehend reality in incommensurable ways, so predicates involving agency, time, possibility and value are said of God and of creatures analogically rather than univocally. Treating such a term as though it meant one thing in both frames is the Many Beings Fallacy.

Apply that to concurrence, and the four accounts of divine providence above stop looking like four temperaments. With Calvin and Helm, the framework holds that the decree is exhaustive and that nothing whatever falls outside it. With Sanders and Flint, it holds that finite human freedom is libertarian, a real choice among real alternatives.

It declines Molinism's middle knowledge and it declines the open future that Sanders and the wider open theist school require. The reason it can decline both is that it locates the trade-off in an assumption neither Calvin nor Sanders questioned: that God's causing and a creature's causing are the same kind of causing, said twice, so that more of one must mean less of the other.

If they are not the same kind, the arithmetic dissolves. God governs the human frame by sustaining its indeterminacy, not by overriding it, and sovereignty is exercised through that sustaining rather than in competition with it. To sustain a contingency as contingent is not to determine its content. What Helm calls foreordination and what Sanders calls risk are then both answers to a question that was mis-stated, because the eternal fixity of the decree carries no necessity down into the creature's own deliberating. Evil follows the same pattern: God permits what He does not author, and the determination the framework affirms from God's side is teleological, a matter of what the creature's nature lacks, never the mechanical forcing of a particular act.

The rest follows. Creating and sustaining are one act met at two points in the creature's sequence, so a miracle is extraordinary in our frame and nothing new in God's. Prayer is a real cause with full counterfactual weight on our side and no change whatever on His. What the framework gives up, and it should be said plainly, is the demand that "govern" and "cause" mean one thing across the gap. Molinists and open theists reasonably ask whether the index is applied wherever an argument is losing. The answer is that natures fix it, and the framework names in advance which predicates carry it.

Volume Seven applies this where the stakes are highest, to quantum indeterminacy, and the FICT page states the position in one place.

How the accounts compare

Each account protects something real, and each is pressed at a different joint.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between general and special providence?

General providence is God's continuous upholding of existence and of the natural order, the ordinary regularity by which seasons arrive and causes produce effects. Special providence is His particular action in the life of a person, a nation or an event, including what Scripture calls His mighty acts. The distinction is about scope, not two divine activities: on most classical accounts it is one act described at two levels of resolution.

Does divine providence mean God causes everything, including sin?

The classical accounts deny that God causes sin, and they differ sharply over what to put in its place. The Westminster Confession says providence reaches the Fall and every subsequent sin "not by a bare permission", while insisting "the sinfulness thereof proceedeth only from the creature, and not from God". Sanders avoids the problem by denying that God stands behind every event. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism holds that God permits what He does not author, and that the determination affirmed of Him is teleological rather than mechanical.

Is divine providence the same as fate?

No, and the difference is in kind rather than degree. Fate is impersonal and has no ends; it produces outcomes without intending them. Providence is the purposive action of a personal God directing creation toward the ends He intends, which is why Joseph can say of a real crime that God intended it for good. A fatalist and a Christian may agree an event was unavoidable and still disagree about every question worth asking.

Does providence make prayer pointless?

Only if prayer's efficacy depends on changing God's mind, and no major account holds that it does. The Reformed answer is that God ordains means along with ends, so the asking is one of the ways the outcome arrives. Open theists answer that petition alters what God decides. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism holds that the petition is a real finite cause whose content the one eternal act incorporates, so the prayer carries real counterfactual weight while nothing in God changes.

Volume Four takes up interaction with a changeless God, prayer included; see Resolving Immutability & Interaction.

If God sustains my choices, are they really mine?

Yes, on every account that takes concurrence seriously, because sustaining a contingency as contingent is not the same act as determining its content. Aquinas made the point by noting that God prepares contingent causes so that their effects "happen by contingency". The worry usually arises from picturing divine and creaturely causation as two hands on one lever, competing for the same work. Classical theology denies that picture: the two agencies are complementary rather than competitive.

Volume One makes this argument at full length.

Where to go from here

The gain from the threefold structure is diagnostic. Pick up any book on divine providence and ask which of the three terms it is actually arguing about. It is almost always the second, and that question saves more reading time than any summary of the positions.

The multi-view volumes, of which Four Views on Divine Providence is the standard example, put four essays between two covers and leave the reader to adjudicate. The series argues one position straight through instead.

Get your free copy of Volume One, or start with Resolving The Free Will Dilemma.

Related reading

• Does God Have Emotions? What Impassibility Really Claims
• Does God Change His Mind? The Relenting Texts Explained