Eremos Magazine – No. 162 April 2025 – pp 13-18
The question of divine providence – what exactly God provides for us in response to all those prayers we endlessly pray – has always been where the rubber hits the road as far as the maintenance or otherwise of our faith goes. What I mean is that if we start to develop a general feeling over time that our prayers aren’t being answered, we’re probably on that wide, slippery slope sliding down to a complete loss of faith – suddenly, one day, we look around and realize that we stopped believing in God long ago, and that it would be good to stop pretending to ourselves that we are anything but a common or garden agnostic/atheist, like just about everybody else!
Yes, the question of providence is very controversial. There’s Providence 1.0, the old doctrine of providence, which, in the Christian tradition is based on the Hebrew Old Testament version of God, but is basically common to religions world-wide. Then there’s Providence 2.0 (so-called by me) which, I would contend, supersedes or replaces the old version, and is something very much to do with the remarkable activities of one Jesus of Nazareth about 2000 years ago.
Our problem, it seems to me, with providence, and therefore with faith, is that the old idea still hangs around in the background, distracting and misleading our thinking, even when we’ve started to get a handle on the new one that comes through Jesus. But let me now try to explain all this, starting with an exposé of the old doctrine of providence, after which, you can rest assured, I’ll go to town on the new one.
Providence 1.0
So, what is the old doctrine of providence about? Well, without particularly being aware of it, we attempt to activate it nearly every time we pray to God. Most of our prayers – mine included – are requests to God to intervene in the world in some way, on our behalf, in our favour. Have you not noticed?! We ask for healing, for ourselves or others; we ask God to watch over and take care of us, or others; we ask for help, guidance; we pray for peace, for resolution of conflicts small or big; we ask God to alleviate suffering, poverty, injustice; and so on. Even if we’re progressive Christians who (like Nick Cave) officially don’t believe in an interventionist God, we still find ourselves praying for this sort of thing all the time! We can’t help ourselves – what else are we supposed to pray for?!
I’ll answer that last question later. But, yes, Providence 1.0 imagines an inscrutable, omnipotent God who creates the world and everything in it, more or less intact, complete and perfect, from the outset, then continues to intervene in it to uphold, sustain and control it. A control-merchant, puppet-master God, if there ever was one! This is the God we hope exists when we call on them for personal favours in prayer, as we so often do, or at least when things aren’t going the way want them to – a God whom we hope loves us, has our best interests at heart, especially mine.
It’s not rocket science: for a great, very accessible survey, see Brad East’s feature article, Our Strength and Consolation, in Christianity Today, November-December 2024; or you can’t go past the Wikipedia article on Divine Providence. But this idea of God’s providence lands you, as it has landed theologians and Christian apologists for the last 2000 years, in instant hot water. If God created the world holus-bolus, and continues to pull the strings to this day, why is it that terrible things happen in the world, not just occasionally, but nearly all the time? Right at the moment, for example, there’s war in Ukraine and the Middle East, the world is warming alarmingly, there’s a cost-of-living crisis, my dear friend has just been diagnosed with cancer, I’ve lost my job, I’m lonely, my footy team won the wooden spoon again last year…. Go figure!?
You keep pounding away at those prayers, and even though they often don’t seem to be answered, you refuse to lose hope. Sometimes, of course, they do seem to be answered: you get the job you’ve been praying for, your friend recovers from their life-threatening illness, finally there’s a ceasefire in Gaza. I’ll explain why that might happen later – why our prayers do sometimes seem to be answered – but it turns out that it’s nothing to do with God’s direct intervention the old-school, Providence 1.0 way; rather the result of new-school Providence 2.0.
Or, more likely, you do lose hope, and find yourself on that slippery slope I referred to in the first paragraph, eventually, one day, coming to your senses and realizing that the God you’re praying to just doesn’t exist – ah, that’s how the present-day cultural dominance of atheism comes about, that’s why just about all my family and friends are agnostic or atheist! The God who doesn’t exist* (I call them): if you want to stay a believer, you’re forced to concede that the God you thought loved you has a significant side hustle in judgement, punishment and retribution; or perhaps, even worse, they’re simply indifferent to a whole lot of things that go on in the world. A God who is indifferent? – I’d sooner have one who doesn’t exist!
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive …. ourselves! I’m referring to the problem of theodicy, as it is known in theology, the attempt to vindicate God’s providence in the face of the real evil that seems to exist in the world – again, see a great Wikipedia article on the topic – an apparent contradiction which continues to present an amazing challenge to the faith of even the most determined believer, despite theologians having long since come up with fancy formulas to get around it.
What you probably don’t notice, however, because it’s the last thing you want to accept about yourself, is that all those things you typically ask God to provide you are selfishly motivated. Shock-horror! I’ve hinted at this already: “personal favours”, “especially me”. When I ask for healing, for guidance, for a new job or a car park, for a better deal in life for me or for my family, my friends, my people, even my country or the whole world, am I not hoping for a God who will intervene in the world at my request, on my behalf, to provide, yes, special favours, for me, me, me? Even if I am truly oppressed, poor, sick – even if my people are truly oppressed, poor, sick – are we not still looking for a God made to order, a God who has our own interests especially at heart; a God fabricated, basically, in our own image; a projection, surely, of our own self-centred will? A God who most certainly doesn’t exist, in other words!
Finding Providence 2.0
So much for the bad news; now for the good stuff! Realizing what I’ve just explained – that the old idea of providence is basically just self-centred hopefulness – is the beginning of the cure for that very cause: our inveterate, implacable, very natural selfishness, the root of all our own and all the world’s troubles. The cure, the real providential provision for this terrible ailment? Why, Providence 2.0, of course, as threatened in the introduction! To find it we have to go right back to the beginning and completely unravel Providence 1.0 and, for that matter, the old God, the one who doesn’t exist.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” No they didn’t! God (the real one who exists) didn’t create the world – in seven days or seven years or any length of time – rather, put simply, God gave birth to it. Yes, it’s something we see all the time: we (human females and males) give birth to children on a regular basis, and right throughout the organic world living organisms give birth to baby organisms of all shapes, sizes and species. Science imagines the birth of the universe itself as a Big Bang – thus, a new baby universe is born, and while science can detect no trace of a divine parent mediating the birth, it has no actual explanation at all of the cause of the Big Bang, as you can verify by some quick internet research.
Divine parent: this is the enduring, and accurate, image for God. Mother/father if you like, as long as you don’t fool yourself into thinking that God is actually a lady or a bloke. The scientific narrative imagines monumental birth pangs of time, space, energy and matter exploding from a zero point, some 13.8 billion years ago; and, like a human baby growing from a single fertilized cell, the growth/evolution of the universe begins. At first all is pure, virtual quantum field – think The Force in Star Wars – but gradually atoms condense and bulk matter forms, eventually coalescing into celestial objects and organizing into planetary, solar and galactic systems. At a certain point, maybe about 4.5 billion years ago, organic life first emerges on planet earth. Yay! It’s unceasing change, growth, evolution from the outset; far from being born complete and perfect, the universe, like every human child and every organism of any sort, is born radically imperfect, incomplete.
What does the universe get when God births it? Ah, now we’re asking about Providence 1.0, the true version of it! Well, what does a human child get from its parents? It gets life, living agency: the child’s life or agency is, so to speak, a broken-off, separate, relatively autonomous piece of the parents’ life or agency – this is freedom or free will, if you like, although at this point the will the child gets is completely blind, unconscious. Through this agency – this will, this drive, this impetus, this vital élan – the child grows in body and soul, lives out a free, independent life of its own. Likewise, the universe as a whole gets what appears to be a free life of its own from its divine parent, amazing universal agency which drives all the evolution I described in the previous paragraph, the continual formation of more and more complex organized forms, culminating, perhaps, in the emergence of organic life. Freedom, free agency: that’s why God doesn’t control the universe thereafter – obviously!
This is the kernel of Providence 1.0, the freedom, the agency that the universe gets from God – and, as far as we’re concerned, the particular living agency that animates us. For a long time it seems to go pretty well, as far as we can tell, the universe evolving very nicely under its own steam (I mean agency), without any obvious interventions by God. Not that God couldn’t intervene, if they wanted to; it’s just that, presumably, gratuitous interventions wouldn’t be consistent with the free agency that God imparts to the universe at the start.
Until we get to humans, that is, when something pretty serious goes wrong. We, humans, somehow, amazingly, acquire the capacity for full-blown self-consciousness. We are the first organism to develop the ability to be explicitly aware of ourselves as selves, and other selves as selves – which may be what the biblical writers are trying to get at when they describe Adam and Eve as being made in imago dei, “in the image of God”.
Yes, something very serious now goes awry. Self-consciousness radically enhances our capacity to survive and turbo-charges our evolutionary development, so that in a few short hundred thousand years we develop practical arts, language, technology, science, industry, civilisation – we are culture-makers extraordinaire – to the extent that, almost overnight, we become unrivalled rulers of the planet and lord it over all the other species. That sounds great – for us – so quel probleme? Well, the other thing our unique self-consciousness gifts us is the capacity for conscious, intentional, wilful selfishness, and that, as I’ve already noted, is the root cause of all human woes – it makes us destructive, and self-destructive, on a potentially species-wide, even planetary scale.
Sounds like original sin – and it is! But not a fall from a prior state of perfect innocence, rather an urgent, thorny problem thrown up by our evolutionary development. Our natural-born self-centredness binds up our personal agency, so that, in terms Calvin might concur with, where nature gifts us free agency, which is common to all life, culture enslaves our will. Or, as Luther would say, our will becomes incurvatus in se, curved in on itself, and we are unable to escape, off our own bat, the closed circle of our own selfish selves.
Horror of horrors! No human effort can solve this problem – we can’t just evolve our way out of it. A new divine intervention is required – God to the rescue, here comes Providence 2.0, just in the nick of time! In Christian parlance it’s known as the Plan of Salvation, a long tricky intervention which culminates in Jesus, the incarnation, cross, resurrection and ascension. Now, through faith in Jesus, we can escape the closed circle of our selfish selves, our agency is set free from the ties that bind, and we can begin to live an open, free life, no longer hindered by the sinful selfishness which vitiates all our merely human efforts to be good, selfless people.
Our agency unbound, truly free for the first time – ah, here’s the explanation of why our prayers for those things I listed earlier sometimes seem to work. We pray to God for ourselves or someone else to get healed, for example, and we might get better, not because God literally intervenes at our request in that moment, rather because the faith that motivates our making of such a request opens us up to Providence 2.0, and we take our eyes off ourselves for a moment, freeing up our personal agency so that we can see more clearly what we can do in relation to the thing that is ailing us, or the other person whom we’re concerned about.
Wonderful! We might just, in that moment, feel better, more positive more hopeful – which might just be enough, in some situations, to set us on the path to actual healing. Or it may only last not much more than that moment, and we don’t experience real healing in the longer term. The positive feeling might help us to think more clearly about the medical help we could get for ourselves, or could recommend for that other person. Can you see, in this way, how Providence 1.0 might seem to work sometimes but more often not work at all?
And so, too, for other things we might pray for ourselves or for others – for guidance, for provision of daily needs, for peace, for alleviation of world poverty. When our prayers seem to work it’s not because God literally intervenes in the world as per our requests, rather because in the act of faithful prayer real selflessness is incarnated in us which sets our personal agency free to live and act more positively in the world – even if the specific things we pray for might be actually selfishly motivated, and even in cases where our prayers don’t seem to work at all!
Praying the old way – presenting God with a list of things they can do for us – is not only unfruitful – it seems to work sometimes but more often doesn’t – in the long term it is damaging to our faith. Every time our self-centred prayers don’t get answered we find ourselves drifting further and further down that slippery slope I’ve been referring to, to complete loss of faith, to agnosticism and atheism. And this is the way the world has actually gone – a now faithless, Godless world which is the fallacy of Providence 1.0 fulfilled!
Pray instead, therefore, in a new way, one which activates something that actually works, Providence 2.0. Instead of giving God a list of what they can do for us, do the reverse: ask God what we can do for them! “Here I am, Lord; it is I Lord”: make ourselves available, in prayer, for whatever works of care and service for others might be needed in the world, and, most importantly, ask God to provide us the faith we’ll need to carry out such care and service, for, as we know, putting others first may be costly.
And care and service of others includes, by the way, faithful care of ourselves, for we are no use for God’s work if we neglect our own wellbeing. So pray to God for the selfless insight to discern the difference between our real personal and spiritual needs and the ephemeral selfish desires that invariably lead us down the path to self-destruction.
Plenty that we can fruitfully pray for, therefore – to answer my earlier question! But the key to this new understanding of providence, and prayer, is, I’m afraid to say, an evolutionary approach. There’s a lot to let go of here, and, yes, the first thing might be the old idea of a creator God, an omnipotent, control-merchant deity, to whom we are forced to ascribe, in order to explain the self-destructive selfishness that persists in human life, a nasty side hustle in judgement and punishment. But good riddance, I reckon, to the God who never actually existed!
The new God, the real God we open ourselves up to, when we let go of the old one, is a far, far more wonderful God than we could ever have imagined, more than a compensation for our loss: the divine parent who births the universe, so that the life, the freedom, that courses through our veins is one with all life, with God’s life. And then, at the critical moment, just when we, humanity, need them the most, the mighty intervention – Providence 2.0 – to set us free from our natural-born self-centredness and open us up to a wonderful new Kingdom life of living selflessly for others. What more could we want in a God?!
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*See, The God who doesn’t exist, out now through ATF Press, Vol 12, No.1 in A Forum for Theology and the World. For information about the book go to: https://antitheologia.com/books/ .
Teatured image by Benjamin Balazs from Pixabay