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life. And Semi-Pelagians moved in the same direction, though they did not all go equally far.
Some of the Scholastics considered the conservation of God as a continuation of His creative
activity, while others made a real distinction between the two. Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of
divine providence follows in the main that of Augustine, and holds that the will of God, as
determined by His perfections, preserves and governs all things; while Duns Scotus and such
Nominaltists as Biel and Occam made everything dependent on the arbitrary will of God. This
was a virtual introduction of the rule of chance.
The Reformers on the whole subscribed to the Augustinian doctrine of divine providence,
though they differed somewhat in details. While Luther believed in general providence, he does
not stress God’s preservation and government of the world in general as much as Calvin does.
He considers the doctrine primarily in its soteriological bearings. Socinians and Arminians,
though not both to the same degree, limited the providence of God by stressing the
independent power of man to initiate action and thus to control his life. The control of the
world was really taken out of the hands of God, and given into the hands of man. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries providence was virtually ruled out by a Deism which
represented God as withdrawing Himself from the world after the work of creation; and by a
Pantheism which identified God and the world, obliterated the distinction between creation
and providence, and denied the reality of second causes. And while Deism may now be
considered as a thing of the past, its view of the control of the world is continued in the
position of natural science that the world is controlled by an iron-clad system of laws. And
modern liberal theology, with its pantheistic conception of the immanence of God, also tends
to rule out the doctrine of divine providence.
2. THE IDEA OF PROVIDENCE.
Providence may be defined as 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. This definition indicates that
there are three elements in providence, namely, preservation (conservatio, sustentatio),
concurrence or cooperation (concursus, co-operatio), and government (gubernatio) Calvin, the
Heidelberg Catechism, and some of the more recent dogmaticians (Dabney, the Hodges, Dick,
Shedd, McPherson) speak of only two elements, namely, preservation and government. This
does not mean, however, that they want to exclude the element of concurrence but only that
they regard it as included in the other two as indicating the manner in which God preserves and
governs the world. McPherson seems to think that only some of the great Lutheran theologians
adopted the threefold division; but in this he is mistaken, for it is very common in the works of
Dutch dogmaticians from the seventeenth century on (Mastricht, à Marck, De Moor, Brakel,
Francken, Kuyper, Bavinck, Vos, Honig). They departed from the older division, because they
wanted to give the element of concurrence greater prominence, in order to guard against the