Providence: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Account

By Mark W. Elliott

Addressing a topic of perennial interest in Christian theology, this volume offers a constructive account of the doctrine of providence. Mark Elliott shows that, contrary to received opinion, the Bible has a lot to say about providence as a distinct doctrine within the wider scope of God's acts of salvation. This book by a leading scholar of Christian theology and exegesis is a capstone of years of research on the history and theology of the doctrine of providence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781493422180

Mark W. Elliott

Mark W. Elliott (PhD, Cambridge) is a teaching fellow in church history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He is the author of Song of Songs and Christology in the Early Church, 381-451 and the editor of The Dynamics of Human Life and (with Kent Brower) Eschatology in Bible and Theology.

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© 2020 by Mark W. Elliott

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

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Ebook edition created 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-2218-0

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016

Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations labeled RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Contents

Cover    i

Half Title Page    ii

Title Page    iii

Copyright Page    iv

Preface    vii

Abbreviations    ix

1. Is Providence Topical or Even Biblical?    1

2. Alternative Themes to Providence in the Bible    27

3. Providence and Divine Action, Viewed Biblically    57

4. Finding Providence across the Old Testament Genres    107

5. Providence as Set Forth in the New Testament    173

6. Systematic Considerations in the Light of Biblical Theology    197

Bibliography    223

Author Index    257

Scripture Index    264

Subject Index    271

Back Cover    277

Preface

This work was begun in Edinburgh, in the summer of 2016, although a preliminary sketch had been made as part of a master’s module, Creation and Providence, taught at St. Andrews. A paper on the New Testament material was given at Alphacrucis College, Sydney, hosted by Paul Oslington. A visit to Keble College, Oxford, with generous hosts Markus Bockmuehl and Nathan Eubank, and time in the Bodleian Library helped me to make a good start on the research. The chance to present something of what is contained in the first chapter as an inaugural professorial lecture at St. Andrews University was very welcome. There was opportunity to communicate another section at the research seminar of Konrad Schmid in the spring of 2017 at the University of Zürich, a place without equal for quality of hospitality. In October 2017 I read a paper at Highland Theological College on some biblical texts and received helpful feedback. I am grateful to Darian Lockett for the opportunity to present material on James at the SBL session he chaired in Boston in November 2017 and to Tinu Rupparel for hosting me in Calgary in January 2018, when I was able to deliver part of what became the final chapter. The National Library of Scotland, New College Library of Edinburgh University, and, of course, that of St. Andrews were the locations where most of the book took shape. Resuming teaching and other responsibilities at St. Andrews in August 2018 necessarily slowed the pace down, but also gave ideas time to percolate. I am grateful to the St. Andrews Laidlaw scheme for allowing me the sharp-eyed copyediting services of Autumn Lambert. Dave Nelson at Baker has been an encouragement at a number of stages in the process. Between delivering the first draft and the second I have changed employment and in early 2019 have taken up positions at the University of Glasgow and at the University of Toronto. I’m grateful to the leadership of both those places and for their close interest in what I do, including this project. However, I’d also like to acknowledge the scholarly and supportive context of my former work place, St. Mary’s College, St. Andrews, not least the administrative staff as well as sterling academic colleagues. Fifteen (and a half!) years at a place leave a mark, and I have benefited much. Looking ahead, I hope to be able to work a bit around the confines of overspecialization in academic departments today. I trust that this book offers one way of doing this, as I become increasingly aware of the importance of collaboration and theology as part of our common life of worship and wisdom, as response to our Providentissimus Deus.

Glasgow, March 2019

Abbreviations

one

Is Providence Topical or Even Biblical?

This book will treat the idea of providence as one that has a number of guises or expressions: it is the property of providence to operate outside the range of knowledge and full comprehensibility, but also even to elude faith’s perception and be beyond or behind revelation. So one has to look for traces of God’s action in the stories and expressed philosophies of biblical writers, where the glow of revelation shines more brightly and serves as a pattern for faithful glimpsing of providence today.

One finds these traces in the biblical corpus—and ready to be picked up by subsequent interpreters—in such themes as the hand of God, the face of God, the blessing, the kingdom, the plan of God, life, breath, enduring order, judgment, protection, and the hidden God. These will be dealt with in such a way that much of the canon of the Bible across both Testaments is allowed to bear witness. In the final chapter the findings will be made to speak to the concerns of systematic and practical theologians.

In this introductory chapter (1) I commence with looking at why some might object to the idea that providence has any relevance in modern times. Next (2) I deal with the objection that providence is not a biblical theme by addressing the biblical evidence and trying to come to a working definition on that basis. Then, (3) elaborating providence as part of the content of faith, which seeks understanding as to what God does and doesn’t do, I offer a conception that is neither utopian nor a thing of mere comfort, with a consideration that if providence implies living meaningfully, prudentially, and carefully, then it is (4) bigger than theodicy, since it includes thinking about blessing and gift, freshly dispensed to human agents, that is finally much less theoretical than it is lived.

Modern Resistance to Any Idea of Providence

Providence is not so much so last century as it is so nineteenth century. The rhetoric of providence accompanied a Victorian age of God-led imperialism and colonization, as per the title of Stewart J. Brown’s book Providence and Empire.1 From about the middle of the nineteenth century, however, a certain suspicion of providence grew deeper, as reflected in literature, just as in the previous centuries philosophers, many of them less radical than Hume and Voltaire, had questioned its existence. Doubting providence was now in the public domain, as it were. The poet Robert Browning believed one could know the divine only through a collage of insights from various great figures in history. Yet here, according to literary critic J. Hillis Miller, is Browning’s gloomy conclusion: The infinite variety of human lives has one universal meaning: the distance of all lives from God.2 It seemed that there were losers as well as winners in life and that, in fact, the former were possibly in the majority and the happy minority simply lucky. Of course novelists are meant to write about this life and not to be dealing directly with theological or any such matters, but they do have, and moreover often do betray, their background beliefs.

The loss of the traditional sense that there is a providence at one end of life in terms of creation (conception and birth) and at the other end (death and resurrection of just and unjust) can be seen in the fin-de-siècle representation by Thomas Hardy, who appeared to assume that life was in no sense to be considered a gift, and a fortiori there was no gift of a life to come in prospect. Correspondingly there was little room for much blessing in Hardy’s kingdom of Wessex. Gillian Beer comments: Maladaptation, the FAILURE OF THINGS to be what they are meant to be, obsesses Hardy.3 And yet, as she goes on to report, there is a loud note of joyous affirmation of what Derrida called the free play of the world and even an affirmation of delight in the plenitude of experience. Working, even struggling, against Nature’s less-than-benign plot, happiness and hap form the two poles in his work.4 This means an ironic or sarcastic version of providence as summed up in Hardy’s poem The Convergence of the Twain, but one without reference to a divine plan or reckoning.

Nearly contemporaneous with Hardy’s Wessex novels was Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1900), with its foregrounding of the family motto, Deus providebit (God will provide), set over the entrance of the offices of the venerable but doomed family firm in Hansestadt Lübeck. Behind the Heidelberg Catechism, whose recitation provides the drama in the opening scene of the novel, stands Matthew 10:19–20//Luke 12:11–12 (when the disciples are on trial, the Spirit will give them the words to say), which, with Genesis 22:8, 14 (God supplying a ram after testing Abraham with a command to offer Isaac) in the background, makes one think of providence in the context of testing and sacrifice.5 But what happens when the Lord for inscrutable reasons seems not to provide, or compensate for, a sacrifice, such as that made by the protagonist, Toni (Antonia) Buddenbrooks, of her beloved? The moral of the novel seems to be that God most helps those who help themselves.6 Or consider Mark Twain’s short story of the drunken man who ascribed both his falling overboard and his rescue to divine providence and who, when reporters asked him about the heroic ship’s captain who rescued him, declared that the latter was merely the tool of providence.7 Honoring human responsibility is a good thing, whether the effect of that responsibility is a cure for disease or a life of service. Yet in assessing the significance of human responsibility, it’s essential to get the balance right: those who, whether in literature or life, ascribe sole credit to human agency for their responsible service are often people who ascribe it to people like themselves, and one finds it hard to call them gracious.

Returning briefly to Hardy: in her conclusion Beer shows little Darwinian sangfroid regarding the greater good of the species when she writes, Hardy’s texts pay homage to human scale by ceasing as the hero or heroine dies. The single life span is no longer an absolute but polemical. That is one formal expression of [Hardy’s] humanism. It opposes evolutionary meliorism or pessimism by making the single generation carry the freight of signification.8 One may wish to qualify that judgment. For it seems that what does continue and endure to carry the freight is the place, Wessex, even as an imaginary, and the idea of the collective will.9 Indeed, the theme of a breaking of the nations that echoes Jeremiah 51 comes to the fore: on Christmas Day 1914 Hardy wrote that the present times are an absolute negation of Christianity.10 He meant, however, that war was the opposite of a gospel of peace and that large-scale institutions were destroying civil society as they competed for power. This privatization of meaningfulness into the collective community (Gemeinschaft) over against artificial conglomerations, although perhaps in part a protest of late Romanticism, was perhaps as much cause then as it seems effect now of the desolation of twentieth-century mass carnage and the consequent evaporation of meaning from twentieth-century political and popular history. As cause, such privatization seems to have been complicit in the depreciation of civil religion into civic religion, and not only in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s. This is hardly to blame providence; it is instead to outline what providence had to contend with.

Yet, as Vernon White observes, for all Hardy’s bleakness, one hundred years later providence is not so much mocked as it is simply ignored. In short, when [Julian] Barnes replaces Hardy, when entropy takes the place of evolution and radical epistemological uncertainty replaces confidence in scientific method, the outcome for any purpose in history seems bleaker than ever.11 Charles Taylor and John Gray have noticed a prevalent popular disgust with explanation of things too: if the economic crash of 2008 is disputed in terms of causes and effects, what chance for giving any sense to the phrase the meaning of life?

After the Second World War the Swiss theologian Karl Barth held (appropriately) fairly sober claims for providence: God’s activity in the world as the history of the covenantal relationship (not continuous creation nor the history of humanity as such)12 meant limiting the evidence for providence to a few in-house things: the history and preservation of the Bible, the church, and the Jewish people, as well as, curiously, the temporal limit of human life. Providence meant a possibility for individuals rather than a universal actuality. Therefore my life consists in the possibilities offered by this movement [of ascent and descent].13 One says too much, Barth claims, when one says the creation is the theater or mirror or parabolic likeness, or even a parable, of God’s action,14 for in the world as it is, too much negativity (das Nichtige) presses in against God’s action for any such clear reflection to be possible. Yet one can at least say that in one’s own life the Word of God’s power holds things in place, and also that God accompanies his creatures (das göttliche Begleiten).15 As Barth puts it punchily: Es geht ihm als Herr zur Seite [He is the Lord who is happy to accompany].16 God accompanies each of us, as the Lord beside us. At the beginning and the end of life there is not yet or no longer any place for self-determination, and Barth uses this as the reminder to every person that at both points there is a disposing (Fügung) or limitation (Begrenzung), with reference to Psalm 31:15 and Job 14:5, such that even in life as it runs its course one is subject to the forces of coming and of going. Barth’s main point is that although the framework of life and death or beginning and end of an eon matter for a right understanding of providence, the operation of providence is firmly located in the here and now, not moments in the future or past that can be joined together in a trajectory. Barth may justifiably be criticized for some slippage of meaning in his favored terms of propulsion (Antrieb) and decline (Gefälle), or for implying that death is purely to be understood as something neutral, even good, in that it gives one a sense of a fixed amount of time to help one to recognize possibilities. It might well be that life in its systole and diastole simply seems to witness to the dispensability of individual human lives, not their meaningfulness. Yet raising the issue of mortality should at the very least cause us to be humble before the possibilities for what might constitute the framework into which human lives and human history fit.

The great Jewish philosopher of the Holocaust of the 1940s, Emil Fackenheim, presented an understandably even starker view of things when he wrote: "And the modern Jewish and Christian theologian cannot affirm God’s presence in history but at most only His providence over it—a providence caused by a God who may somehow use nature and man in history, but who is Himself absent from history."17 In such an account God has retreated to watch over events from a safe distance, such that divine providence in the sense of action has given way to self-care by the human race: "There is no externally superintending divine Providence, compelling human freedom and using evil for its own good purposes. Divine Providence is immanent in human freedom and consists of its progressive realization. Meaning in history lies in its forward direction—one in which human freedom raises itself ever higher toward Divinity, and evil comes ever closer to being conquered. There is either this kind of meaning in history, or else there is no meaning in it at all."18

From the founders of the state of Israel, who took matters into their own hands, through to those who work today to eradicate disease on the planet, human beings seek to fill the situation left vacant by the deity. Of course in Fackenheim’s Zionist solution there is a Utopia, albeit of a particular sort, in which humans promise to build Jerusalem—literally. And yet this view of providence resonates not only with that of Barth but also with that of ancient Israel—as we shall see in later chapters—in one respect at least: providence is not about reaching a universal goal of history; it is about a particular people being kept safe in a particular place, with their example possibly providing some benefit to the rest of the world.

It is not uninteresting that Fackenheim, while dismissing any idea of divine presence in such a dark world, nevertheless, wished to hold on to some notion of divine providence, if only providence by proxy. With Christian theologians it is normally the other way around: if there is such a thing as providence, it cannot be pointed to and named; nevertheless, God is somehow present, albeit in a passive or a neutral voice. For Frances Young, God’s presence and providence are to be seen as themselves aspects of the divine otherness. Neither can be like the presence or purposive action of created beings.19 What she wants to resist is the idea of an intervening or an interventionist God, and so she argues in favor of One who holds things together and makes space for each: The absence or withdrawal of God . . . is not meant to imply deism—with the cosmos wound up and left to get on with it. Rather, it is presented as the prior condition for the existence of beings other than God, and therefore the necessary condition for relationship between ‘others,’ as distinct from the coercive absorption of creatures within the deity.20 Even presence itself is reduced to a presence in absence, the traces or clues left by one who has long since fled the scene of the crime. The note of noncoercion in classic liberal, if not quite Hegelian, phrasing is made to serve the notion of the freedom of mutual love.

Or, to hear the words of recent Christian apologist David Bentley Hart: Providence, then—and this is what it is most important to grasp—is not the same thing as a universal teleology.21 Hart is crystal clear that innocent suffering can never be a means justifiable by an end, no matter how worthy the end. In other words, one cannot like-click the bon mot wrongly attributed to Stalin that an omelet necessitates the breaking of a few eggs, especially if these metaphorical eggs are the lives of young children. That there is a transcendent providence that will bring God’s good ends out of the darkness of history—in spite of every evil—no Christian can fail to affirm. But providence (as even Voltaire seems to have understood) is not simply a ‘total sum’ or ‘infinite equation’ that leaves nothing behind.22 However—and here Hart announces his alternative—The Christian eye sees (or should see) a deeper truth in the world than mere ‘nature,’ and it is a truth that gives rise not to optimism but to joy.23 Reality is not what it seems, and it is much better than visible circumstances.

However, surely even more than this delight in an invisible reality or higher world that hides Platonically behind our actual world, to be inhaled like a comforting ether, providence means a care that guards and preserves and guides on to safer places, and particularly rather than universally. Something is done on the ground or to a piece of it. Now, of course, as both the Wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible and the more reflective ones of the New Testament affirm, if there is a purpose to divine active care, it is not something that can be pointed to as a goal of a project or a mission or a movement: so-called goals will always be in some sense subordinate, and means rather than ends, not least because they tend to be inchoate, corrupted, and deflected. Perhaps the best that can be hoped for is to be kept safe long enough for some human flourishing to take place, and some good and surprising things might then happen. So one can accord with Hart’s suspicion of teleology without thinking that God is not moving things around in order to protect and correct. This action by God is not teleological in the sense of a merely this-worldly goal, but it is still purposeful, with a purpose in the here and now. Granted, God did not seem obviously all that active between, say, 1940 and 1945, and also at many other times and places in the remote and recent past; but what made things better then was at least a concerted trust by those who opposed chaos and evil that (without self-righteousness) they could put their hand in the hand of a just and higher cause that God would enlist one for, a cause bigger than pure national self-interest, even if that just cause was not fully aware of the horrors of the Shoah.24

As we seek to formulate definitions of a term like providence, we should not expect ancient texts and their writers to have exactly the same conceptual furniture as we do or to understand providence as what we might mean by it. However, we do next need to consider the source of our understanding of the term before concluding with a working definition.

The Biblical Evidence for Providence

At first glance it seems that the God of the Bible initiates a number of things; other things he anticipates and responds to. Although God on several occasions is recorded as changing his mind, there is in biblical narrative little sense of God being taken by surprise or so shocked that he is prompted to declare: This isn’t what I expected. The fact that Old Testament prophecy is taken seriously by later parts of the Old Testament and by the New Testament as having declared things well in advance goes hand in hand with the belief that God anticipates future outcomes as well as giving some people a glimpse of these.

Providence in Early Postbiblical Judaism

Leaving a detailed consideration of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament for now, we find a reading of the biblical material that is markedly not Christian but is close in time to the New Testament in Philo of Alexandria, some point just before the New Testament was written. Philo is quite prepared to use the term πρόνοια. Prior to Philo, as a technical term for divine providence, pronoia goes back to Herodotus (3.108.2), then appears in Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus 1180), then famously in book 10 of Plato’s The Laws, and in Hellenistic Jewish writings it is present in Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon. For Philo in his treatise on providence pronoia is not the idea of God’s being transcendent simply as voyeur, but transcendent as an observer and as (efficient) cause.25 Abraham first grasped a firm and unswerving conception of the truth that there is one Cause above all (ἓν αἴτιον τὸ ἀνωτάτω), and that it exercises providence (προνοέω) for the world and all that is therein.26 Here divine action is the efficient cause of creation, with divine activity being in a sense separable from God’s transcendent nature. The well-run cosmos makes a prima facie case that God is provident. In Philo’s Quaestiones et solutions in Genesin 4.87 the combination is apparent: foresight and care (τὴν πρόνοιαν καὶ ἐπιμέλειαν); but in his De opificio mundi 171 it seems that providence is defined by care: God exercises forethought on the world’s behalf. For that the Maker should care [ἐπιμελέομαι] for the thing made is required by the laws and ordinances of Nature, and it is in accordance with these that parents take thought beforehand for children.27 This on the world’s behalf is the direct opposite of Fackenheim’s conception, which one might call providence by proxy. The last clause gives it away: caring means or demands foresight. The two aspects are mutually dependent: God foresees because God cares. The fact that creation has a beginning confirms its orderliness, even if matter is somehow preexistent. For Philo God’s action of forming, as a transcendent cause, is always about doing something with what is before him. Yet as a Jew he adds that what God creates he also can destroy: this is providence as judgement.28 The biblically revealed God is moral and takes history (i.e., what humans do with creation and how they respond to guidance) seriously, as if God is One who takes it personally.

Now when Philo is discussing his own contemporary situation in his Legatio ad Gaium, he makes it clear that although providence exists universally for creation, it acts particularly for God’s people. It was no abstract doctrine for Israel. The theme of divine providence is sometimes more generally described by Philo as divine help, or perhaps protection, as in Legatio 220, whereas according to In Flaccum (170), writes Peter Frick, providence is equated with God as Champion and Defender.29 This protection might actually be what salvation amounts to, at least at a visible level. In Philo’s account, the Word of God or Logos, who in place of Plato’s demiurge has shaped and executed creation, gives insight—whether through prophecy or intellect.30 (Pneuma seems to integrate creation at a lower level.) Philo did not want to leave the biblical history out of account, and he aimed to tie protology to his present day by means of Israel’s history.31 God is (Leg. 1.18) continually creative because the world decays. Salvation history is part of providence, and it provides lessons: the patriarch Joseph is a type of Moses, and what their characters have in common is valuable. In other words, Philo’s is an Old Testament–informed view of history, and one wonders whether the New Testament writers would have thought very much differently. As he himself put it in De opificio mundi 10, the Father had in view the preservation of his children.32 The context would suggest that he is referring to all creatures. Opificio 24.77 speaks of a particular care for humans, God’s providing within creation; 46.135 speaks of how the intellect relates all humans to God. God works for the benefit of all humanity (Prov. 2.43); for example, natural motions like eclipses can serve as warnings (2.50). Creation is providence in the sense of God using things for the benefit of humanity according to an original plan. In De providentia Philo emphasizes the abundance of created good things (2.6). So in the same manner, God, who is the father of all rational understanding, takes care of all those beings who are endowed with reason, and exercises a providential power for the protection even of those who are living in a blameworthy manner, giving them at the same time opportunity of correcting their errors, and nevertheless not violating the dictates of his own merciful nature, of which virtue and humanity are the regular attendants, being willing to have their dwelling in the God-created world.33 God provided manna even for those grumbling and rebelling in the desert. One may here see Philo taking principles from the Old Testament concerning God’s actions toward Israel and applying them to humans and the wider world more generally, and more abstractly; for example, the soul is to migrate as Abraham did physically, and providence includes a spiritual leading into transcendence. Philo is concerned that material abundance might be received in the wrong way and lead to greed and pride (Prov. 12). As Peter Frick illustrates, Philo can take an incident from salvation history and draw from it a lesson about providence more generally. For example, regarding Exodus 3:3, in which an angel appeared within the flames of the bush, Philo supposes that the angel was a symbol of God’s providence (προνοίας ἐκ θεοῦ), which all silently brings relief to the greatest dangers, exceeding every hope.34 It seems that in the passage Philo prefers this understanding of the angel as a symbol of a divine real presence to any notion that the angel was an image of him who is as such. In other words, providence is about God being immediately present and active to creation rather than about something mediated through a created agent—as equally transcendent and immanent (so, Frick). Moreover, God is present in his power (6.397b16–20), not in his essence. A summary definition appears at De providentia 2.3, where Philo writes: God combines the two finest features of nature on the ground of fixed law in unbreakable union, that is, the leading and the caring for.35

To offer a simple stock definition with the help of Philo, himself relying on the Old Testament and the story of the people of Israel: providence is God taking care of things, which involves responding to humans in need and difficulty as well as ongoing supply of the goods of creation, and this according to some intentional, even planned action. Also, in Hellenistic Jewish literature from the period the order and harmony of creation is confidence-giving. Sirach agrees with the Stoics that all things have a purpose; and this appears to be a novum over against the Old Testament. God is no immanent principle, but one who exercises influence on the world, in the sense of a potter working on a pot from outside it toward something reshaped.36 On this model God is in charge of the cosmos, although how world history comes under divine control is still a moot point. In the Letter of Aristeas we find a Greek philosopher praising the Jewish concept of providence (201), and the concept plays a role in the Greek extra sections of Daniel and 2 Maccabees (and even more so in 4 Maccabees’ theology of martyrdom). However, by the time of Philo and Josephus pronoia had become a catchword to explain the actions of God and the cause of historical events (more generally or universally). Equally important, however, is the metaphor of the kingship of God, which seems to fulfill the same role, with a healthy amount of space for human free will in moral matters, as per the Hebrew חפץ, whereas רצון is the word in the Dead Sea Scrolls to denote the guidance of God over human affairs. . . . God’s care over humanity but not necessarily a predetermined order, and it seems to have the more basic meaning of that state of affairs acceptable in God’s sight.37 With reference to Sirach 33:7–15 it seems that free will is actually encouraged by providence, which assures it that the moral order exists.38 By 50:2239 God’s interest seems to extend to the history of Israel as a generous rule, one that invites human response and reciprocity. It seems to involve the whole cosmos, through association with particular Jewish history.

Now the standard line is that by way of contrast the biblical authors of the New Testament were not particularly interested in thinking about God’s running the cosmos.

But What about Providence in the New Testament?

One key word in the New Testament is προνοέω, which one New Testament dictionary defines as to give attention beforehand, to have in mind to do, foresight.40 This means to think about something