232 - The Pattern of Providence

The Pattern of Providence
By Waldo Beach

AN attempt to frame and defend a statement of the Christi doctrine of providence as a plausible category for philosophy of history is beset by immediate embarrassment. The doctrine of providence is not generally popular in contemporary theology and is positively disreputable among general practitioners history, who relegate it to the museum of archaic curiosities. Duties the Reformation and into the Puritan era, it was the grand and of the Calvinists. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was gradually supplanted by the axiom of progress as the motif of history. To the major philosophers of history of the nineteen century the operations of an immanent and beneficent progress, work ing toward an inner-worldly consummation of human happening seemed a much more cogent category for understanding history than the theories of providence and eschatology. The doctrine of providence, laughed out of the courts of the "scientific" historians, came to be observed perhaps only by the pious, for whom "providence meant "good fortune" in private affairs. It became a quaint term of folk-religion, a belief that "the good Lord will provide," rather than the axiom for the general interpretation of history.

But latterly one of the most marked shifts in the whole climate of opinion between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reflected in current philosophy of history, is the abandonment of the doctrine of of progress. It persists as a residue, to be sure, in the images a slogans of American culture, within the Republican Party chambers of commerce, but among cultural analysts, theologians a philosophers, prophets and seers, the doctrine of progress has lapsed. Into its place, as a master-image, has come a kind of murky nihilism, especially in Europe, the bewildered or angry disavowal of any and all grand schemes of history. In this vacuous situation may not be amiss to take a look again at the Christian doctrine of providence.

233 - The Pattern of Providence

A preliminary word about method is in order. It is a working assumption of this paper that in philosophy of history faiths and facts are always in polar relation to each other. Sheer factual data itself, quantitative sequences of happenings, yield no meaning in themselves. To discern what happens in what happens one must make use of interpretative, qualitative "faiths" or categories of meaning, which are not simply a posteriori conclusions derived inevitably from the observation of the data, with which any historian in his right mind must concur, but are rather more a priori principles of meaning, inevitable generalizations which are brought to the analysis of the data. Yet these "faiths" about history must not be purely arbitrary whimsies of the philosopher, irresponsible to the data. The categories of meaning which the philosopher brings to his reflections on history are to be corrected and challenged, by others and by, himself, by reference to categories of coherence, adequacy, and comprehensiveness. As faiths they remain always in one sense dogmatic and arbitrary. Sheer facts cannot adjudicate between the faith in progress and the faith in providence. But the explication of these faiths must go on by constant reference to the myriad range of events which are the raw stuff of history.

These categories of meaning inevitable to philosophy of history-inevitable, indeed, even to the "scientific" historian who claims immunity from them-are mythological. "Myth" means here, of course, not "fake" or "hocus-pocus," but a graphic or poetic or dramatic which in a synoptic form makes sense out of a welter of data. Philosophy of history must have recourse to such "poetry" if it is to say anything at all. Its language is therefore one of analogy, metaphor, anthropomorphic imagery. The categories of providence, fate, progress, "challenge and response" (to cite a favorite of Toynbee's), or the pictures of time as a line, a circle, or a point, are all qualitative myths.

I

The doctrine of providence enters the arena of philosophy of history,with no apologies, then, for being "mythological." Yet it does enter the field at an historical disadvantage. As an explanation of history, it is susceptible to ready and common abuse. It becomes necessary to try to distinguish the normative meaning of providence

234 - The Pattern of Providence

from the various reasonable facsimiles and secular replicas with which it is generally confused.

First, providence and fate. A providential and a fatalistic view of history share at least the starting-point conviction that there is an ordering power beyond men which controls their destinies and ends, But they soon diverge. The fates are usually imagined as oblivious to man's needs, "implacable and blind," to use the common language of fatality. It would be false to construe the essential difference as a contrast between the "kindness" of providence and the "cruelty' of fate, for providence can be harsh and stern, and fate can be conceived as "chance" or "fortune" which may bring luck. The roof difference lies rather in the impersonality of the character of fate, against the personal character of the Christian God of providence.

There is a marked contrast in psychological responses to providence on the one hand and to fate on the other. The human response to the sense of being in the grip of fate, "in the fell clutch of circumstance," seems to be one of revolt or endurance. The response to being in the hands of Providence is one of acceptance cooperation, and inspired action. It is a curious historical phenomenon, often noted, that Calvinism, in which a central tenet was an omnipotent and omnipresent Providence, produced-contrary to strict logic-a release of human energy. Providence proved a stimulus to action, rather than the paralysis of despair. The fatalism current in the late Roman Empire, on the other hand, proved debili tating; the reflex action of fate was a "failure of nerve," or at best the brave despair and the magnanimous endurance of a Marcus Aurelius.

Second, providence and predestination. At the basis of the doc trine of providence is the belief that God is Lord of history. It is the belief "in the sovereignty of God as demonstrated in history."¹ It means the operation of a divine purposive will through and Hi human events. But the context in which the Christian view God's lordship in history arises is that this lordship is not a "push over," or "shoo-in," but that history is a cosmic drama of contending forces in which the lordship of God is countered by an opposing force, usually understood as man's sin, or pride, and that the cot

¹ Roger Shinn, Christianity and the Problem of History (N. Y.: Charles Scribner's SW 1953), p. 248.

235 - The Pattern of Providence

summation is expected which will vindicate this sovereignty in a final way.

Now, the perennial problem is how to square such a lordship with the human freedom and the natural contingencies which would seem to be ingredients in a Christian view of man. All sorts of answers are given, of course. Augustinians and strict Calvinists will state the sovereignty of God in the most thoroughgoing way. for them God's providence entails foreordination and predestination of the sort which delimits man's freedom. Other theologians attempt to hold in the same room radical human freedom and responsibility along with the sovereignty of God. A modern Christian like Herbert Butterfield suggests, in a very dangerous metaphor, that history is like a symphony which is being written by a kind of divine improviser. We human beings in the orchestra, in freedom and sin, are constantly playing the wrong notes, but "the composer himself is only composing the music inch by inch as the orchestra is playing it," ² taking into account our mistakes as he writes. This image gives too large a say to human initiative, and puts God at the mercy of human wills. It is as unfortunate an image on one side as is the Biblical image of potter and clay on the other.

No attempt here is suggested for even a proximate way out of this recurrent problem. The only point to be noted in passing is that providence, even when read through Calvinistic glasses, is to be differentiated from the sort of predestination that makes history the automatic unrolling of a story in which the end is prefigured in the begining and there is no real foil, no real drama, no cosmic issue joined. What makes the difference between providence and predestination is precisely the honor that must be paid to genuine human freedom. Normatively, providence should be construed in such wise that God's sovereignty includes, or "over-rules," man's freedom, without cancelling it out. The folk-wisdom of Proverbs catches this insight: "A man's heart may devise his ways, but it is the Lord who directs his steps" (Prov. 16: 9).

Third providence and eschatology. The Biblical belief in providence takes distinctive form in relation to the issue of present evil and eschatological hope. The major premise of the Biblical argument is that a just and merciful God is Lord of history. The minor

² Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1949), p. 125.

236 - The Pattern of Providence

premise is that justice is not presently done; the righteous suffer an(' the evil flourish. The challenge to faith which this problem pose is a trust in an eschatological outcome in which God's lordship wit be consummated and the raggedness of present justice will be made even. It is significant that the Biblical faith was asserted in the teed of the catastrophic and irrational, when current events seemed to counter so perversely any notion of a providential order. Yet it is also significant that where the Hebraic mind took time and evil so seriously that it became the enemy of God's providence, then eschatology became the final theodicy. If the chronicler reports that God is not now apparently the Lord of history, then faith replies that he will be, some great day.

Whatever case may rightfully be made for a real eschatology as the final theodicy, it is here contended only that providence cannot IX absorbed into eschatology. One must stick with the major premise God is Lord of the nations. Though a doctrine of providence must reckon with the ambiguities and "drag" of time and the injustice of judgment which seem to sweep in the innocent and the guilty indiscriminately, it must at the least delineate a rough justice operating within time. God does not save up providence for the last act or reserve the catharsis in nemesis for the end. There is a measure of catharsis and nemesis taking place all along the way, as every moment in time is equi-distant from eternity. Else one would be to conclude that time itself is God's insurmountable foe, and only by cutting time off at the end of history can God's will be done on earth as in heaven.

Fourth, providence and miracle. In common language the providential is almost equated with the miraculous and the fortuitous An event wherein one is spared from death by a fluke, or one is blessed in holding the lucky number, is regarded quite spontaneously and devoutly as providential. But to equate the providential with the miraculous does serious damage to a consistent and coherence theology of history.

Much hangs on the meaning of the word "miracle." In the "open' universe which is the characteristic Christian cosmology, a belief in the divine freedom elevates the power of providence over a deism which eliminates the miraculous by definition, and rules that "miracles cannot happen." But there is even greater peril to faith in the opposite mistake of treating the operations of the divine will as

237 - The Pattern of Providence

of erratic interventions, for this violates a prior trust in the dependability and integrity of God. Providence is indeed a mystery, the sense that the patterns of God's lordship over the course of events elude all human definition and measurement. Indeed, one in which men "fly in the face of providence" is by plotting God's curves for him. But to say that providence is a mystery is not to say at it is "miracle," defined as a series of interventions into a natural order which send a fog over Dunkirk, or put a prayer book in such a place in a soldier's tunic as to deflect a bullet's ricochet, or open the Sea in good Cecil B. DeMille style. If this be the heart of providence, we have jeopardized the faithfulness of God's rule, and belief in an ordered universe. Without precluding room for the miraculous, might not one believe in the operation of providence through, not against, the natural order?

This may make clearer sense by thinking in terms of primary and secondary causation. Primary causation would refer to the dynamics "inner history" which the Christian faith would read providentially. Secondary causation would refer to the dense interworking 'outer factors" which converge on events, what Morris Cohen peaks of as the "multi-dimensionality" of history: geography, climate, economic and political powers, temperaments and aspirations en, etc. The relation of primary and secondary causation is an involved mystery itself. The only case here made is that primary "causes " work through, not against, the secondary. For these are seen be levels of a created order; as one moves up the ladder of create here is greater contingency and freedom in the factors that cause" history, more fixity in the lower levels of creation. Men are more moveable by faith than mountains. Yet at whatever level, the providence of God works within the natural, with inscrutable but purposive design. Providence, then, should not be the name for jumping-off place of historical explanation, or a concept appropriate to explain the "gaps" in natural happenings. In order for the theologian to make intelligible conversation with the historian, same such understanding of providence as this is needed as common ground for dialogue.

Something may now be suggested of the way in which providence, delineated above, might be said to operate within history. Although we have both refined the term from its too loose and broad

238 - The Pattern of Providence

usage and also enlarged the idea to mean the total manner of God sovereignty in history, still the pattern of this rule needs to be further delineated at three main levels.

Providence may be considered first as creation and sustenance The literal root meaning of the word, provision, is another way putting the doctrine of continual creation. By divine initiative there is provided, ex nihilo, the givens of nature, all the vitalities and structures of human nature. There is a given scale of creation with levels of freedom and dignity. There is a given order of community, where individuals and groups stand in harmonious relation with each other, both in independence and interdependence. The, is no point in history, past or ahead, where this simple order of creation obtains in pure form, because history is also always "fallen," but the order of creation is present by necessary inference from the very fact of disorder and disharmony.

Secondly, providence means judgment. It is this facet of prudence, more than any other, which has intrigued modern theologian like Reinhold Niebuhr and historians like Butterfield and Toynbee History is the repeated account of man's habitual defiance of the created order of community in his pretensions and prides and grabs for power. The story of history is one of warfare, the strife of men and systems, man against nature, and man against men, all reflection of the ultimate strife of man against God. In the continual "fall history is the contest between man's pride and God's love.

Human sin, whose myriad variations make up the dynamic stuff of history, does not carry man out from under the providence" God; it only holds him under providence in the form of judgment. Now providence becomes the "limiting" factor, the nemesis which falls upon undue pretensions and idolatry, the divine "come-up-pance," which sooner or later befalls all human glory and pride.

There are several forms of this judging, limiting process which are discernible to the eyes of faith. One form is the self-frustration of sin, the failure of private imperialisms to achieve the satisfaction they seek. Arrogance aggravates rather than overcomes the in security which is its spring. Or providential judgment may take the form of retaliatory power, when one nation may over-reach its and invite the response of countervailing power which will check it, Here God makes use of Assyria, against his chosen people Israel.

239 - The Pattern of Providence

What is particularly to be noted in either of these forms of judgment is that sin brings on itself its own ruin, or as the Wisdom of on has it, "a man is punished through the things by which he sins." We execute judgment on ourselves, though the inexorability consequences is of divine making. A cumbersome name for it might be "consequential" judgment, as contrasted with "interventionist" judgment. Butterfield makes much of this Biblical motif. times God has only to withhold his protection and let events take their course-I will hide my face from them, I will see what their end will be and the penalty comes from his formidable non-intervention. ³ The Wisdom of Solomon expresses it thus: "For creation, ministering to thee its maker, straineth its force against unrighteous for punishment" (16: 24).

The other important matter, on which Butterfield rightly lays stress universality of judgment in history. The sharpest judgements fall on those who exempt themselves from judgment, who the moral line between their own righteousness and the sin of others, and make history the contest of good men against bad men. processes of providential limitation and chastisement which the Christian can make out in history, he makes out in another nation use he first knows it in himself.4 He may pass judgments on other nations and systems, but only as under universal judgment, knowing "with what measure you judge you shall be judged."

The third level at which providence is to be seen is in grace and mercy. It would be a quite inadequate Christian reading of providence to affirm that the final form of God's magnificence is the it he sets to the power of evil, his making the devil to tremble, and scattering the proud in the imagination of their hearts. For God redeemer, and the intention of his chastisement is restoration. History under his rule is the story of continued judgment, but also of continued promise and hope.

One reading of the doctrine of providence makes it solely or primarily a matter of grace. Roger Shinn claims, "Hence the Christian doctrine of providence in its deeper forms cannot be primarily theory of historical causation. It is rather a confidence that God's grace is sufficient to any occasion, that he cares for his people in the

³ Ibid., p. 80.
⁴ Butterfield, Christianity and History, Ch. 3; History and Human Relations (London: Collins, 1951), Ch. 4.

240 - The Pattern of Providence

midst of the contingencies which buffet their lives, that he is Lord of History-not the main efficient cause. The final aspect of providence … will be known less in the rise and fall of nations than in divine grace which may be found whatever the course of events." ⁵

This view shrinks the scope of providence to make it an operation of grace despite the limits of judgment. It would seem preferable to affirm here grace beyond judgment. Providence "shapes our ends in judgment, but also providence brings renewal of life out of the death of kingdoms and systems. How it acts as grace is more, none less, than how it acts as judgment.

Grace is certainly not obvious in history, even to the eyes of faith But a providential view of human affairs will be quick to detect the signs of renewal, even in the darkest times. "Man's extremity God's opportunity." The paradox of the Biblical doctrine of providence is its contention that grace makes its appearance at the most dire and desperate times, in the "time of troubles."

An historian like Butterfield finds providence as grace in the strange process which has the capacity to draw good out of evil which takes the folly and sin of man, and the catastrophic and irrational cruelties of time, and turns them again to beneficent end The fire of London is turned to superior reconstruction. The religious wars lead to public religious toleration as the unintended result. The American rebellion leads England to profit from experience and learn a new idea of empire. This redemptive process is the sort of history that "goes on over our heads." It seems to work human errors and sins together for good.

One might affirm this same belief in a gracious providence another way, by saying that there is no ultimately tragic situation in history where all roads are dead ends. Though by sin all choices of policy and action in history are in part bad, so that it is impossible for; nation or party or person to choose the purely good, by grace there is always a relatively better over a relatively poorer choice. The option for the divine good, and the empowerment to pursue it always present. This is what leads Paul Tillich to define providence as "a creative and saving possibility implied in every situation which cannot be destroyed by any event." ⁶ The resource of grace may I resisted, but it is never withdrawn.

⁵ Roger Shinn, Christianity and the Problem of History (N. Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons 1953), p. 250.
⁶ Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (N. Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948), p. 106.

241 - The Pattern of Providence

Still another way to try to describe the operation of providential grace in history is to affirm that the work of reconciliation of man to God, and man to man, is always going on. Break into history at any one era, and it is easy to see the disintegrative forces which destroy community and alienate man from man. But one can see also restoring or reintegrating forces at the same time, seeking new communities, and rebuilding within the rubble of the old orders. the disintegration of the Roman Empire is accompanied by the reintegration of life around the Church. The disintegration of the economic forms of the capitalist West, which starts in the nineteenth century, is accompanied by the search for new forms of community in Marxism and socialism. In the twentieth century, is it too much to say that grace is at hand in the form of the opportunity for international community as the way beyond the suicidal strife of nationates?

III

It remains now to suggest a test of this theory of providence by tying it against a particular stretch of history to see if an empirical confirmation is at all plausible. This is the most fool-hardy of all enterprises; any theologian must be prepared to be demolished by the technical historian, armed with data, when he tries to give historic reasons for the faith within him. Nothing looks more pathetic than a generalization punctured by a fact. Yet some sort of illustration of faith must be tried. The difficulty with most philosophy of history is that it makes no real connection with technical history. The discussion at one level, the philosophic, pertains a the cogency or rationality or even aesthetic charm of the concepts and images, as in a self-contained system of thought. At the other level, technical historians are preoccupied with scientific historiography, and their only recognition of what is going on at the philosophic level is a smirk or a dismay at the "irresponsible myth-making" if a daring thinker like Toynbee. The fun begins, and the fur flies, hen abstractions and facts are measured against each other.

In the dialogue between theologian and historian, one must beware much of the perils of an ardent piety that sees too quickly the and of God in history as of the perils of a closed skepticism that sees no hand at all. Professor Harbison is correct in saying, "The prophetic interpretation of history is more convincing in the prophets, who never stopped to write actual history, than in the chroniclers

242 - The Pattern of Providence

who did. It is easier to say that God acts in history than to say precisely where and when." ⁷

A major problem in application is this: how much of a stretch of. time does the Christian historian have to encompass to validate his, faith in providence? Though in a vulgar sense providence is treated with a highly individualized meaning, as momentary and atomistic "breaks" of fortune, a more serious account of providence would insist that the mills of God grind slowly, that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation, that the grace of forgiveness and renewal conforms to the "burning of slow time." The sowing of the wind in nineteenth century colonial imperialism reaps a whirl-wind of nationalisms in the Middle East in the twentieth century. It would seem to take a century, at least, for justice to be done. For the Biblical writers, in fact, it takes more time than a human history to vindicate God's sovereignty; an eschatology is required before the matter is settled.

Thus if one narrows the camera lens too far, one would miss the confirmation of the faith. What is needed is the macroscopic, synoptic, over-all view. But this is precisely what the technical historian, with his professional microscopic lens, finds difficult to use. If providence is present at all, it must be present in this battle, this treaty, this letter. It cannot be present in the large if it is not present in the small. The only rejoinder one can make to this is that the stance from which any judgment of meaning in history can be made, providential or nihilistic, is one made back away from the "man looking at temporality under the aspect of eternity.

IV

Take the American Civil War as a kind of test case in illustrating the doctrine of providence. Beneath the high degree of "chanciness" and randomness in the story, is there an inner moral logic which can be traced out as marking the work of providence? It is not meant to raise hypothetical questions about crucial happening, that might have turned out otherwise, if -. What if Grant had decided to go to Ford's Theater the evening of the assassination What if it had not rained when Lee tried his last desperate escape, What if Stonewall Jackson had happened to turn his horse the other.

⁷ H. Harbison, "The Problem of the Christian Historian," THEOLOGY TODAY, V (1948)

243 - The Pattern of Providence

way, and had missed being shot down by his own men? Surely the purse of particular things would have been altered. But these matters are outside the consideration of the workings of providence.

Taking the long look on the matter, there is no one point when le Civil War begins, unless it be in the Garden of Eden. Certainly not Sumter, nor Harper's Ferry, nor the Dred Scott decision. arbitrarily, one might say it begins-as distinct from the human civil war in general-when the institution of chattel slavery develops the economy of England and America, in violation of the original order of created equality. The violation of the created order by avery is aggravated by the development of regional prides and ecoomic self-interests, North and South, which compound the tragedy. But the mounting crisis of the forties and fifties is not to be read simply as God judging the wicked South through a virtuous North. he cotton economy necessitates for morally respectable reasons a interested interest in slavery. The righteousness of the abolitionist becomes the self-righteousness of the Yankee, whose aggressive condemnations of the South provoke retaliatory self-defensiveness and take the conflict "irrepressible." The war comes as the judgment God upon the sin of slavery and pride, for which both sides, the innocent and the guilty, must pay in blood and pain, and go on pay in an aftermath which stretches far over into the twentieth century. But providence is present throughout the story also in the form of grace and mercy. There is newness of life, the restoration of community, and the forgiveness of sins, in a process "going on over le heads" of all the human participants. After all, slavery was abolished, the union was preserved and strengthened, the South was stored (despite the perpetuation of war by the Radical Republicans), and the whole nation experienced a new birth of freedom.

More than the churchmen of the time, Lincoln had an astute grasp the operations of providence in the dark affairs of his era. He spoke and wrote frequently to take quiet but clear exception to their tribal theology which led them to interpret providence to mean that was on their side of the battle line. ⁸ What is notable in Lincoln, especially in the closing days of the war, is the increasingly religious of his mind and his profound sense of the providential.

"In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is

⁸ Cf. The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, edited by P. V. Stern (N. Y.: Random me, 1940), p. 720.

244 - The Pattern of Providence

something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the besides adaptation to effect his purpose," ⁹ he wrote in a meditation on the divine will.

Providence he understood as both judgment and grace. "Insomuch as we know that by his divine law, nations, like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, Mal we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which no! desolates the land may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?" ¹⁰

As one reads the Second Inaugural, one feels that Lincoln's PM found wrestling with the problem of providence in the war has comes to clear resolution: "The Almighty has his own purposes. 'Would unto the world because of offenses, for it must needs be that offense come; but woe to that man by whom the offenses come.' If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continue( through his appointed time, he now wills to remove; and that he give! to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?" ¹¹

Such a grasp of the moral logic of his time confirms the dictum that Lincoln was one of America's best theologians. He adds hi own testimony to a providential reading of human events, and, as foretold wrote in private correspondence, in the Civil War "impartial history will find … new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God." ¹²

⁹ Ibid., p. 728.
¹⁰ Ibid., p. 753 (Proclamation for a National Fast-Day). Cf. also his Thanksgiving Proclamation, 1863 (pp. 783-784).
¹¹ Ibid., P. 842.
¹² Ibid., p. 809.