The Provident Priesthood: The Ethical and Communal Imperatives for Teaching and Preaching the Doctrine of Providence

CTRF, AAR, November 2000

By Michelle Bartel

Christian doctrine is much more than a list of affirmations about God. It is the teaching that is good for the human being and for human community, grounded in scripture, teaching which nurtures the Christian person for the life of Christian discipleship. The doctrine of providence, no less than any other doctrine, helps the Christian to understand his or her relationship to the neighbor in addition to his or her relationship with God. Christian life is nurtured by this doctrine, leading the Christian individual into a life lived for God and for others. In this paper, I will propose that the doctrine of providence is wrongly construed when it is used to promote the idea of assurance as a substitution for acts of assurance witnessing to God who acts for the good of the whole world.

The Issue at Stake

The summer after my graduation from seminary, I traveled to Ecuador to visit my brother who was in the Peace Corps. Peace Corps folks are an interesting bunch. Much of their conversation is discussion of diseases and comparison of war stories. They are also an interesting bunch because these people come to serve, for different reasons, from so many different walks of life, different convictions about humankind, different levels of optimism and pessimism.

One day I was sitting with my brother and three of his friends on the busy Amazonas avenue in downtown Quito. While we were enjoying beverages and laughter, two little girls, about 3 and 5, tattered and torn, grimy-faced big-eyed beauties came begging to our table. As if on cue, these four men clicked into action: two of them collected money from the rest of us and went into the cafe to buy food. The other two stayed with the girls and chatted them up, joking with them, asking them their names, teasing them, pulling chairs to the table for them. Jonathan and Mike came back out with the food, and the four of them sat with those girls while they ate and had what appeared to me to be a delightful conversation (all I knew was "donde esta el bano" and "donde esta mi hermano"). The girls finally left having cleaned their full plates, with smiles on their faces.

It was common for children to beg on behalf of parents who then used the money for alcohol, so these Peace Corps workers acted on knowledge they had of current circumstances to provide for the girls. They talked with them like real people, treating them with respect and delight. These four men were a mix of atheism and agnosticism with my brother's Christian commitment thrown in. With elegance and ease they embraced the stranger and enjoyed themselves in return. And just a week before this I had graduated from a seminary where future pastors were so concerned about passing final exams that they refused to bring food to sick classmates or help them out. They had to keep their focus.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Peace Corps Volunteers had a far more grounded and authentic understanding of what providence is than the seminarians I had just been studying with. Truth is not only in assent to belief - it necessarily implies a way of life. It is not only Presbyterians who claim that "truth is in order to goodness." This is why Christopher Morse observes that every time Christians affirm belief, they simultaneously affirm a disbelief: to say that God is a God of love is to also say that God is not a God of hate. To say that God is a God of providing care is also to say that God is not a God of negligence. To claim Christian truth is also to claim that truth does not give license for untruth: in other words, one cannot claim that "God provides" and send someone away hungry.

What good is it, my brother's and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill," and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith without works is dead. (James 2:14-17)

Providence without providing is dead.

The question is pressed: toward what sorts of ethical actions should the doctrine of providence urge us? In this paper I will propose that the doctrine of providence encourages us towards much more than commentary on the situations in which people find themselves, and much more than speculation as to what God may or may not be doing. The doctrine carries with it certain imperatives for preaching and teaching which are not normally highlighted. This is because the doctrine of providence is way more than the one-sentence assurance that "everything will work out for the best." The Doctrine of Providence and Christian Life The doctrine of providence asserts that God provides for God's creation. This includes the work of God to bring God's plan for creation to fulfillment and the myriad ways and means by which God brings this about. God is at work to save the world and to fulfill God's plan of salvation. John Calvin asserts that our individual experience with God is part of this overall plan (Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.xvi-xvii). We are part of God's whole, and much is going on in our lives of which we are a part. We do not know, exactly, what the plan is. Indeed, what God knows is certainly visible to God, and is grounded in God's promise to us, but is hidden from our sight. Calvin even points out that while there is no such thing as fate or chance (everything happens for God's reason) events look fortuitous to us. To us, they look like luck or chance or coincidence. We cannot explain their interrelationships, but then, we are not required to. Response and obedience to God in the midst of our circumstances is what is asked of God's people, not that they have God's knowledge.

But providence is not only about an overall plan. The doctrine also refers to the way in which God's provision is intimate and personal - the assertion on the part of Christians is not that human beings are mere cogs in the machine of God's work, but actual individuals whom God cares for more deeply than we can imagine, as precious as the bird that falls from the tree. In other words, human beings can understand themselves as precious to God as individuals in God's community. God's providential care for any one person is bound up in God's providential care for others. We are part of a whole, indispensable parts of the whole, but parts of the whole.

Thus Calvin assures his readers that no matter what we are suffering through at a given time, it is nothing so great that we can be removed from God's care, nothing so terrible that God is not at work through it. Calvin, clearly, takes Romans 8 very seriously, reminding his readers that nothing can separate them from the love of God. Providence is about God's care for the Divine creation, care premised on and worked through God's sovereignty. God is Lord of the universe and the Spirit interceding for us with sighs too deep for words. God's rule is comfort because it is the rule of a God who loves us and can number the hairs on our heads. No doubt this was pure grace to some of Calvin's listeners, as economic forces were moving people from one socio-economic level to another, many becoming urbanized poor. And what a comfort to people who risked their lives every day by simply breathing air. Without antibiotics and other medical treatments which we take for granted, every time you touched another person your life was at risk.

So the doctrine becomes even more necessary for reassurance when Calvin also emphasizes the fact that providence does not in any way absolve us from responsibility to neighbor nor give us any leeway to rationalize evil and sin. We might want to say "well, I won't touch them because I don't want to get sick, and if they're sick, it must be God's will" but we would be giving license to sin. For clearly, Calvin argues, providence is a doctrine of assurance and comfort, not a doctrine which says "it doesn't matter - you don't have to obey God any more." Bonhoeffer's essay on the difference between cheap grace and costly grace brings up just this point (The Cost of Discipleship). In recognition of God's work in our lives through faith by grace, we are re-oriented towards following Christ. This is costly, both to Christ and ourselves, for it involves every fiber of our being. Providence is, essentially, pure grace. As such, we are left with the seeming contradiction of acting in response to divine forces beyond our control, forces which themselves initiate our action.

God's Providence (Action) in Human Providing (Acting)

This is why Paul Lehmann wrote that Christian ethics is essentially parabolic in nature. Because God is the primary ethical actor, Christians' actions cannot create or do ethics. Ethics is God's activity, and we respond to the activity of God by living and acting in such a way that our actions and lives paint a picture and point the way toward God. This is not unlike the folks on the runways at airports who do not, in fact, make the huge planes come into the gate, but wave the orange wands that say "that way, that way."

According to Lehmann, Christian ethics are actions that wave the wand saying "that way, that way." John Calvin took this same concept seriously when he observed that the Christian belief in providence is no license for us to accept whatever happens as fate. It is ironic, however, that just this response on the part of Christians is so prominent. Providence is a doctrine asserted against fate, assuring the believer that all that is happening is according to God's plan, hidden from our sight but nonetheless real. Yet Christians very often take this up in a fatalist manner, saying to themselves and one another, "well, whatever happens, it's for the best." No doubt these words can be said with authenticity, conviction and comfort. What I am speaking to here is the wide-spread tendency to say this with a shrug of the shoulders in such a way that we see ourselves or others relieved of responsibility. This doctrine is good for teaching God's people as God's people. In other words, this doctrine, deprived of its communal grounding, loses any ethical import. Any doctrine, construed as strictly individualistic, with no necessary ramifications for community, loses its compelling substance.

For Lehmann, being a "believer in Jesus Christ and a member of his church" (Ethics in a Christian Context, 45) means being part of the koinonia. These are the ones who not only have communion with Christ but know it, and can speak about it, identify it, proclaim it and nurture their lives to live according to that knowledge. Being a Christian for Lehmann is being an individual within a community, saved and claimed as a precious child of God into the community of Jesus Christ and a new way of life. There is no way we can construe our lives as Christians as individualist in any sense. Are we individuals? Certainly. And this cannot be subsumed or subordinated in any way, for that would be to deny the Creator of this vast universe. However, this does mean that our lives are caught up with the body of Christ, with the members of whom we are individually members "each of the other."

Lehmann describes Christian maturity, according to Ephesians, as an organic growing-up together, in such a way that there is nothing as a "mature Christian" apart from a mature community. One cannot become mature on one's own, but only because one has grown up with and through others into Christ who is the head. And, taken seriously, this means that maturity will not be reached until every last member of that body is growing with every other member in a healthy way. If any member of the body is sick or working improperly or not caught up to the other body parts, the body cannot function in a healthy and mature manner. This is why teenagers cannot wait for their gangly limbs or other bodily aspects to catch up with the others - they want to grow into maturity and they know that it will not happen unless everything fits together.

Thus, for Lehmann, Christian health and maturity is developed as "self-acceptance through self-giving" (Lehmann, 45-63), the declaring and identity of the self through giving of the self to others. In this, the individual accepts and celebrates his or her individuality in such a way that the necessity of the person for the health of the body is recognized (and vice versa). This is thanksgiving and duty all wrapped up in one. In thanks for the self one senses responsibility for the self for the sake of the Creator and the body of Christ. Lehmann observes that this is no misanthropic principle, either, which "self-giving" can imply. The point is not to destroy one's self for the other but to put the body of Christ, with all its individual members, at the center. This is the mind Paul encouraged the Philippians to have: the mind like Christ's mind, Christ who did not count equality with God as something to claim as his rightful rule, but emptied himself of this rule and took on the form of one who serves even to death on a cross. It is deliberate choice for the other, not sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice. For Lehmann, no good exists without the good of everyone. The point of self-acceptance through self-giving is the good of all in the good of each.

The Doctrine of Providence as Resource for Life

Of course, Ephesians is not the only Biblical resource for the scriptural injunction to remember our identity as members of the people of God (as opposed to a collection of separate individuals), and the celebration and responsibility that ensues from such an affirmation. In light of these abundant resources pressing us towards this truth, why do we still insist, in teaching and preaching in churches, that many doctrines, including the doctrine of providence, are statements that have existence only in our minds and hearts? Why does not doctrine in general, and this one in particular, exhort us sui generis toward a life lived for others?

Perhaps because theology is so often construed, directly or indirectly, as a lifeless truth, the sort of abstract and timeless idea which Barth and Bonhoeffer argued so vociferously against. Their argument takes shape on their claim that Jesus Christ as Word is address to human beings, a conversation with us in which we are encountered and by which we are caught up (i.e., Bonhoeffer's Christ the Center). The word of God to human beings is not lifeless or timeless or abstract, but concrete and real and always bound up in the communio sanctorum. Theology is not a dead, abstract, formal word about God, but a way of thinking through and helping us to articulate what God's word is for us.

Nor is the law, the call to godly living, an abstract, isolated law. It is intimately connected to the law-giver, structuring human life with others and with God. Bonhoeffer and Lehmann both address the common Christian appeal to conscience and reject the notion that conscience can justify us. Bonhoeffer approaches this by saying that conscience is not the be-all and end-all of Christian ethics, since conscience merely justifies us to ourselves (Ethics, 24-26). Lehmann points us towards a theonomous context for the conscience: our conscience is not in ourselves (Bonhoeffer's point construed differently) nor outside ourselves in the law (which is also separate from God, a heteronomous conscience) but a conscience grounded in God Godself. We cannot absolve ourselves of responsibility by appealing to our fulfillment of a list of rules. Fulfillment of the law is fulfillment of every part of the law and the law completely (James 2:8-13, Matthew 5:17-20), for God in Christ is the law.

The doctrine of providence is no more an abstract idea or law than any other doctrine, and the divine call to participate in God's work is no less fully binding than any other part of the divine call or law. In the doctrine of providence we assert that in the midst of whatever is happening, things will work out for the best, not because we can make things that way, not because we can see without a doubt what the meaning of a situation is, but because God has promised that all will work for the best. God is the one working "within you both to will and to work for God's good pleasure" (Philippians 2:13). As Calvin asserts, the events of our lives will always look fortuitous to us because we cannot see the final plan - that is hidden from us but clear to God. Providence is a doctrine that reminds us that we are part of a whole, part of a community, vision, and plan, that goes far beyond whatever we might be able to conceive, extends even further than time and space and matter. It is also the doctrine which assures us that human individuals matter, that we are indispensable means of God's creation. Bullinger wrote in the Second Helvetic Confession that it is precisely because we are assured God is at work in the world both to will and to work for God's good pleasure that the actions of our individual lives make all the difference - for we may be the means by which God accomplishes God's actions. What we do does matter.

What Providence Is, and What Providence Is Not: Discernment

Does this mean that God's providence depends on us? Not exactly, but it is worked through us. The question that we must take up, then, is how do we live parabolically (Lehmann), pointing with our actions to God's own activity in the world? How do we know we are living or are called to live according to the teaching of the doctrine of providence? Why is it not enough (although it may be helpful and true) to say to someone "it will be ok?" How do we search our appropriation of this Christian affirmation in such a way that it becomes part of the way by which we achieve self-acceptance through self-giving and the good of all in the good of each?

Christopher Morse in his volume Not Every Spirit: A Christian Dogmatics of Disbelief takes as fundamental for theological discernment the Johanine injunction to test the spirits. Not only must we test the spirits to see which are from God (John 4:1), separating out the true from the false spirits, but in addition, we need to test the true spirit so that we may discern the lies hidden within. Is it truthful for Christians to point out that someone is wrong in a way that dehumanizes that person? Do Christians have license to behave in any way they want because they are right? Can Christians simultaneously tell someone "go in peace, keep warm and have your fill" and not clothe or feed them?

The answer is a resounding no. Christians are called to a more complex and nuanced way of life which is perhaps more of a challenge than we might want to admit. "The Christian faith in acknowledging the sovereign claiming of human life by God refuses to acknowledge any claim upon human life which violates that of God. Such refusal is the disbelief of Christian faith." (Morse, op. cit., 8) Any abortion supporters or opponents who think they have God on their side and know they are right must proceed in a way consistent with the gospel: at least by enduring all things, being patient and kind.

M. Shawn Copeland in her essay "Saying Yes and Saying No" (Practicing Our Faith) echoes the nuances necessary for discerning how we are called to participate in God's work in the world. Acknowledging that saying no to something necessarily implies saying yes to something else (and vice versa), we are called to fine-tune our perception of what it is exactly that is entailed when we affirm or deny. So, when we are considering our prospective actions in the light of the doctrine of providence, we must fine-tune our affirmation of the general statement "God provides" while simultaneously fine-tuning our denial of "God does not provide." Action hinging on this discernment (action without which discernment is not complete) is action in tune with the affirmation and denial we have reached through discernment. When we affirm the Christian belief in the doctrine of providence, are we aware of what exactly it is we are saying no to and what we are saying yes to? Are we aware of what we say we believe and therefore what we also affirm we disbelieve? What could these affirmations and disaffirmations mean when examining the doctrine of providence?

If we say in the name of the providing God "go in peace, keep warm, and have your fill" we utter a truth about God. If, while uttering such, we send that person away empty, we have effectively denied God's providence by refusing to be a part of it. We say that God provides and we say that God does not provide. And then that person (who is cold and hungry) is left, perhaps alone, to discern what the true spirit of God is and what is the false spirit. Affirming the doctrine of providence is saying yes to God's providential care, God's caring plan, and God's providing work, while simultaneously saying no to a lack of care, provision, or acknowledgment of God's will for a future and hope for people. Our lives, if we take Lehmann and others seriously, must be parables of God's truth in Christ, pointing towards what God is doing in the world.

Grace as Imperative for Teaching and Preaching the Doctrine of Providence

My concern as a theological ethicist is how this testing of doctrinal integrity has an impact on the lives of lay people. "The testing of spirits to distinguish the spirit that God has given from the spirit opposed to the will and way of God's gift involves the testing of prophecy or teaching, that is, of what is being said and otherwise signified within the community" (Morse, 7). How do we teach and preach that this doctrine of assurance is also a doctrine about how we live? How do we teach and preach the comfort and assurance of the doctrine and the call to participate in God's good work for human beings?

Let us use theological training for the pastorate as our pedagogical example. In M.Div. programs students are constantly pushing themselves to master academic disciplines in various areas so that they have theological credibility in their congregations and denominational structures. Of course, this emphasis and drive varies from denomination to denomination, from seminary to seminary. The classroom presents an interesting arena for our questions since in the classroom it is especially easy to separate the tenets of the doctrine of providence from the congregational member who presses you with her own question when she runs into you outside the grocery store. Certainly, it is vitally important that clergy be able to articulate all the different elements of this and every doctrine given the vast array of situations they will face and questions they will be asked. Indeed, seminary students are often pressed to address the pastoral concerns of doctrine. Lay people along with clergy and professors should press seminary students to understand that "Christian doctrines function pastorally when a theologian unearths the divine pedagogy in order to engage the reader or listener in considering that life with the triune God facilitates dignity and intelligence" (Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds,18).

Divine pedagogy is grace, the gratuitous action of God to be known by God's creation. How can this doctrine in particular be taught as grace rather than as dogma? It would seem that professors could, together with their students, explore the divine gift of this doctrine primarily as knowledge of God, rather than primarily as delineated dogma. Pastors (and Christian educators, and all other ministers of church life) take into their churches that which they have learned. If all they have learned about providence is how to recite its components, they have not learned how to proclaim it as a call from God for the community of faith. Grace itself is not an abstract idea, but the very being of a self-giving God who incarnate as the Son declared that "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Thus, moral formation under the influence of providence requires what all Christian formation requires: "emotional engagement with concrete models for emulation and a social context within which to practice them." (Charry, 26) Providence as grace is experienced with and through the community of the body of Christ.

For any doctrine, and certainly the doctrine of providence, to have any ethical import, that doctrine must be predicated on the grace of God. This is the premise of Calvin's theology, is it not, that we can know God because God knows us? That God graciously reveals Godself to us, and wills to be known, indeed provides the means by which we may know God? This revelation, the gift of Christ, our very connection to God is all grace, at God's initiative because God makes it possible. Providence is first and foremost about grace, about God reaching out to and caring for God's own creation. Any human response to God vis a vis this doctrine is a response to grace.

Living Under the Influence: the Provident Priesthood

That human beings can respond is grace as well - Paul encourages the Philippians to work out their salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in them to will and to work for God's good pleasure. We work, we respond, we point the way towards God's activity because Christians affirm God is already at work. God calls God's people to a life lived in a particular way to enable this response for others. Isaiah 43 is fascinating in this regard, as we read that God calls all God's children from the ends of the earth - those whom God loves, calls by name, finds precious - and declares them to be God's witnesses. This means they are being sent back out. The call to a life lived under the influence of the doctrine of providence is a life of recognizing that God's plans are hidden from our sight but certainly known to God. In this doctrine we learn that we are not only valued and loved as individuals, but God works through us for the sake of God's great eschatological work. To live under the influence of the doctrine is not only to live with comfort and assurance but to live as comforters and assurers.

Thus, the doctrine of providence is not thoroughly construed if it does not include its embedded connection to the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. God graciously provides for God's people to respond and to do God's work: Calvin points out that we are received as Christ's own companions in his priestly work (op. cit. II.xv.6 n15). There is no priesthood at all except as there is in Christ. Martin Luther made it possible in his treatise To The Christian Nobility of the German Nation to understand the vocational nature of all doctrine, for all the baptized are priests, every last one. Vocation is at once rendered mundane and extraordinary, drawing the Christian into the very work (leitourgia, "priestly service" in Philippians 2:17, inter alia) of Jesus Christ in the every day activities of life in the world. The priesthood of all believers refers to the fact that Christians have been drawn into Christ's work, those who do the work of God on behalf of God for the sake of God's people and creation.

If Christians are the priests of Christ, then they certainly misunderstand the doctrine of providence if they allow themselves or others to be merely passive receptors of God's providence. Certainly, there is a way in which we are passive in relation to God, just as we are passive in relation to many things: we are caught up in forces and dynamics beyond our control, forces and dynamics we did not create. But God Godself calls us to something more than passivity. We have to come out of ourselves and go beyond ourselves to be human and to be Christian. Christians, as believers in Jesus Christ and members of his body are called to an active life of response to God. Keeping the body of Christ at the forefront of our minds reminds us of this. Those passages in Ephesians, Romans, and 1 Corinthians exhort Christians to lives lived for the sake of the other members of the body.

What we are compelled to do is recast our identity. For us who are caught up in the individualism of Western culture, this means recasting our sense of self from a self who is individually related to God, to an individual self who is communally related to others and God through God. We are not related to God except through others because God has declared it so: we do not respond to God except through others.

Providence is a doctrine we can draw on as a priesthood of all believers. Teaching and preaching the doctrine must simultaneously call Christians to the joy of a God who is at work in our lives in good or ill, and to the doxological way of life this joy calls out of us. To truly preach the doctrine of providence is to do much more than assure congregants that God cares about them and when things are hard, everything will turn out for the best. Indeed, perhaps the primary teaching should instead be that as people who live in the blessed expansiveness of divine providence, we are called to a life that points towards that providence: we must provide in the ways we can, at the points when we are called upon to do so.

James put it starkly, and one can hear his harshness - and Luther's later rejection of his thought! James wants to know how we can say to someone "God will provide" and then send them away hungry. The work of feeding and clothing the one in need is so vital, that James asks can our faith save us if our faith is dead. The truth that is asserted when a Christian avers that "God provides" falls dead on the ground (like salt that has lost its saltiness) when the Christian does not in action live a life pointing towards the reality of God's providence. That God provides was an undeniable and joyous truth in Quito, and a specious claim in the seminary hallways.

A writer friend of mine observed that what she finds most interesting about the doctrine of providence is that it gives us places, concrete places, to look for God. When things are confusing, difficult, heartbreaking, joyous, or perfect (since all is included within the doctrine) Christians are called, just at those points, to look for God. Christians affirm that God is at work: in these special situations we are especially privileged to see the search for God's presence demarcated.

The parable of Matthew 25:31-46 reminds us that this search for God is all around us, every single day. Those who do the will of God, who actually meet God, see God, feed God, clothe God, comfort God, touch God are those who feed the hungry, visit those in prison, give something to drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, tend the sick. Augustine said that our love of neighbor is a sort of cradle for our love of God. We learn how to love God and respond to God's love and care for us by loving and caring for God's own people. Providence is not merely an idea that makes us feel better, but a reality which is vast and rich. By asserting the doctrine of providence we assert that God is at work in all, absolutely all of life. At those times when we question or praise God's work, we have received the gift of being able to look for God.

Which makes the priesthood all the more significant, for then the church, the koinonia is the demonstration of discerning God's providence by parabolic acts of providing. In the church, these things are taught and they are witnessed to. God's providence is not an idea, separate from the body of Christ and protected from the world. The providing God calls the baptized as companions in the priestly work of Christ as members of the body of Christ, Christ who provides for the world.

Bibliography:

Bass, Dorothy C. Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1997.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Ethics. New York: Collier Books, 1986.

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Library of Christian Classics, Volume XX. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960.

Charry, Ellen T. By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Lehmann, Paul L. Ethics in a Christian Context. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1963.

Luther, Martin. Three Treatises. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970.

Morse, Christopher. Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief. Valley Forge, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 1994.