What is the difference between general and special providence?

General providence is God's upholding and ordering of the universe and its regular processes, while special providence refers to God's particular care for specific events, persons, or peoples, including answered prayer and, on some accounts, miracles.

What is double agency?

Double agency is the view that one and the same event can be fully an act of God (as primary cause) and fully an act of a creature (as secondary cause), without competition between the two levels of causation.

Divine Action and Providence

The doctrine of providence concerns how God creates, sustains, and governs the world, and how divine agency relates to natural and free creaturely causes.

Definition

The theological account of God's ongoing creation, conservation, and governance of all things.

Scope

This topic covers creation out of nothing and continuous conservation, the distinction between general and special providence, the categories of preservation, concurrence, and government, and the long-standing problem of how God acts in a world describable by natural laws. It includes treatments of miracles, the relation of grace and predestination to providence, and contemporary discussions of non-interventionist divine action in dialogue with the sciences. The treatment is descriptive, surveying models rather than asserting how God in fact acts.

Core questions

How does God sustain the world from moment to moment?
How can God act in a world governed by natural laws?
What is the relation between divine concurrence and creaturely freedom?
Can special divine acts, including miracles, be reconciled with science?

Key theories

Conservation and concurrence: The scholastic account, developed by Aquinas, on which God not only creates but continuously conserves creatures in being and concurs as primary cause with their secondary causal activity, preserving genuine creaturely causation under God's universal causality.
Non-interventionist objective divine action: A family of contemporary proposals seeking to locate special divine action in indeterministic features of nature (such as quantum events) so that God acts objectively without violating natural laws.

History

Providence was elaborated by the Stoics and adopted into Christian thought by Augustine, then systematized in the scholastic distinctions of creation, conservation, and concurrence. The Reformers, especially Calvin, emphasized God's meticulous governance, while the rise of mechanistic science and Deism pressed the question of how God could act in a law-governed universe, a question revived in the late-twentieth-century theology-and-science divine action project.

Debates

Meticulous providence versus libertarian freedom: Whether God's governance extends in detail to all events, including free human acts (as in strong Reformed and Thomist accounts), or whether genuine creaturely freedom requires a more permissive divine governance.
Locating special divine action: Whether God's special acts require occasional suspension of natural regularities or can be understood non-interventionistically, and whether such proposals succeed without making God merely one cause among others.

Key figures

Augustine of Hippo
Thomas Aquinas
John Calvin
Friedrich Schleiermacher

Seminal works

aquinasST
calvinInstitutes
saunders2002

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between general and special providence?: General providence is God's upholding and ordering of the universe and its regular processes, while special providence refers to God's particular care for specific events, persons, or peoples, including answered prayer and, on some accounts, miracles.
What is double agency?: Double agency is the view that one and the same event can be fully an act of God (as primary cause) and fully an act of a creature (as secondary cause), without competition between the two levels of causation.