Providence of God

He upholds the universe by the word of his power.

— Hebrews 1:3

The providence of God is his ongoing preservation and government of everything he has created, by which he upholds every creature in existence and directs all things, down to their smallest details, to the end for which he made them (Heb. 1:3; Col. 1:17).¹ This is distinct from the decree of God, his timeless plan for all that would come to pass, and from sovereignty in the broader sense: providence is that plan carried out in time, God governing what he has already, eternally, decreed. Reformed theology distinguishes three aspects of this single activity: preservation, concurrence, and government.²

Confessional Witness

Westminster’s Shorter Catechism defines the doctrine this way:

God’s works of providence are His most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures and all their actions.³

The 1689 London Baptist Confession states the same doctrine at greater length, in substantial agreement with Westminster’s own chapter 5:

God the good Creator of all things, in his infinite power and wisdom doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures and things, from the greatest even to the least, by his most wise and holy providence, to the end for the which they were created, according unto his infallible foreknowledge, and the free and immutable counsel of his own will; to the praise of the glory of his wisdom, power, justice, infinite goodness, and mercy.⁴

The confession goes on to distinguish God’s decree from its execution: all things come to pass immutably because God has foreordained them, yet by that same providence he “ordereth them to fall out according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently.”⁵ God ordinarily works through means, but is free to work without, above, or against them.⁶ And his providence extends even to the sinful acts of angels and men, not by “bare permission,” but without God himself being the author of sin: “the sinfulness of their acts proceedeth only from the creatures, and not from God, who, being most holy and righteous, neither is nor can be the author or approver of sin.”⁷ The confession closes the chapter by noting that providence, general toward all creatures, cares for the church “after a more special manner.”⁸

Reformed theology names three aspects of this one activity rather than three separate works. Preservation is God’s continually upholding every creature and power in being, so that nothing exists for a moment except from, through, and to him.² Concurrence is God’s cooperating with creaturely action itself, so that a creature’s own acts remain genuinely its own without ceasing to be, at the same time, what God is doing.⁹ Government is God’s directing all things toward the goal he has determined for them. Bavinck writes that these “do not divide the work of providence into materially and temporally distinct and successive parts, for they are always integrally connected. From the very beginning, preservation is also government, and government is concurrence, and concurrence is preservation.”² Providence, on this account, is “a positive act, not a giving of permission to exist but a causing to exist and working from moment to moment.”¹⁰

Biblical Basis

Scripture presents God’s ongoing care for creation as more than a claim about the past. Christ “upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3), and “in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). Paul tells the Areopagus that “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). The psalmist attributes the continued existence of the natural order directly to God’s ongoing action, not merely to his having made it: “When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground” (Ps. 104:30; see also vv. 27-29). Nehemiah confesses the same of the whole created order: “you have made heaven… the earth and all that is on it… and you preserve all of them” (Neh. 9:6).

This care reaches to particulars, not only to the general order of nature. Not one sparrow “will fall to the ground apart from your Father,” and “even the hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matt. 10:29-30). The book of Job answers Job’s complaint not with an explanation of his suffering but with an extended display of God’s own governing care over creatures Job cannot even control himself, from wild goats calving to the raven’s food (Job 38:39-41; 39:1-4). And Joseph reads God’s own hand behind the very evil his brothers intended against him: “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Gen. 50:20; cf. 45:5-8).

Historical Development

Augustine answered the same charge the doctrine still draws today: that it is only fatalism by another name. Writing against the accusation that his own teaching amounted to Stoic fate, Augustine distinguished God’s ordering of all things by wise counsel from the Stoics’ “perpetual chain of causes.” John Calvin, defending the same doctrine against the same charge over a millennium later, cites Augustine’s own defense directly:

Those who would cast obloquy on this doctrine, calumniate it as the dogma of the Stoics concerning fate. The same charge was formerly brought against Augustine… We do not with the Stoics imagine a necessity consisting of a perpetual chain of causes… but we hold that God is the disposer and ruler of all things.¹¹

Calvin also rejects “Fortune” and “Chance” as categories a Christian should reason with at all, citing Basil the Great’s judgment that both are pagan terms: nothing happens to a creature that does not come from God’s own hand, whether as blessing or as curse.¹¹

The Reformed confessions codified this in the following century. The Westminster Confession (1646) devoted its own chapter 5 to providence, and the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession (1677/1689) followed it closely, adapting the same chapter for Particular Baptist use with only minor differences in wording.⁴ The doctrine’s classical threefold division into preservation, concurrence, and government took its settled Reformed form in this same confessional and scholastic period, developed at length by the Reformed orthodox systematicians who followed.

Opposing Views

Deism

Deism holds that God created the world but does not continue to act within it, governing it instead through fixed natural laws he set in motion and then left alone. Bavinck describes the position’s own inner logic and its consequence for the doctrine of providence directly:

This is a most serious error; not only is God removed from the world, but divine providential power is conceived as being in competition with human freedom… An irreligious posture is the consequence; salvation for the Deist consists not in communion with God but in separation from him.¹²

Even a weaker version of the same error, which affirms that God governs the large-scale course of nature and history but denies that his care extends to particular events, still amounts to deism in substance. Augustus Hopkins Strong writes that “this view is indeed only a form of deism, which holds that God has not wholly withdrawn himself from the universe, but that his activity within it is limited to the maintenance of general laws.”¹³ Providence as Scripture and the confession describe it denies this at the root: God’s care extends to the sparrow and the hair (Matt. 10:29-30), not only to the movements of nations. Deism is treated at greater length in its own article.

Process theology and open theism

Process theology and open theism both revise the classical doctrine of providence by qualifying God’s power over, or knowledge of, what is yet to come. Craig Carter groups them together as departures from the church’s historic confession that God governs the future because he already knows and has determined it:

Everywhere we look we see novelty and startling departures from the classical tradition, such as the process theology widespread in liberal Protestantism, the dynamic panentheism of Moltmann, and the open theism of Pinnock and Sanders… we are told… that God changes his mind from time to time, gets angry, and does not know the future.¹⁴

Open theism’s own distinguishing claim, as one editorial note in Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics summarizes it, is “the conviction that God does not know future contingent events,” a position defended by writers including John Sanders, whose own book on the subject is titled The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence.¹⁵ If God’s knowledge of the future is genuinely open, his government of it cannot be the settled, comprehensive rule the confession describes; providence becomes, on this view, God’s ongoing response to a future not yet fixed rather than his ordering of a future he has already determined. Process theology and open theism are each treated at length in their own articles.

Objections and Responses

If God’s providence extends even to sinful acts, does that make God the author of sin? The confession answers this directly rather than avoiding the question: God’s determinate counsel reaches even to the first fall and to all the sinful acts of angels and men, yet “not by a bare permission… so as the sinfulness of their acts proceedeth only from the creatures, and not from God, who, being most holy and righteous, neither is nor can be the author or approver of sin.”⁷ The distinction is not merely verbal. Bavinck’s point that providence is “a positive act, not a giving of permission to exist” rules out a different, weaker answer some have offered, that God only permits sin rather than governing it at all; the confession’s own answer keeps both claims together, that God truly governs even sinful acts and that the sin in them is the creature’s own, not his.¹⁰

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth.” ↩
Bavinck, chap. 10: “Here we can speak of three aspects: ‘preservation,’ ‘concurrence,’ and ‘government.’ These do not divide the work of providence into materially and temporally distinct and successive parts for they are always integrally connected. From the very beginning, preservation is also government, and government is concurrence, and concurrence is preservation.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Westminster Shorter Catechism, answer to Question 11, quoted in Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1932), 25. ↩
A Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 5, para. 1. ↩ ↩²
1689 LBCF, chap. 5, para. 2. ↩
1689 LBCF, chap. 5, para. 3. ↩
1689 LBCF, chap. 5, para. 4. ↩ ↩²
1689 LBCF, chap. 5, para. 7. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 10: “The providence of God does not cancel out secondary causes or human responsibility, a doctrine usually referred to as ‘concurrence.’” ↩
Bavinck, chap. 10: “Providence, therefore, is a positive act, not a giving of permission to exist but a causing to exist and working from moment to moment.” ↩ ↩²
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-46), bk. 1, chap. 16, sec. 8. ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, chap. 10: “not only is God removed from the world, but divine providential power is conceived as being in competition with human freedom… salvation for the Deist consists not in communion with God but in separation from him.” ↩
Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907), 428. ↩
Craig A. Carter, “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 9. ↩
John Bolt, editorial note, in Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 17, “The Order of Salvation,” citing John Sanders, The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1998). ↩