Creation and Providence

Creation and Providence September 24, 2015

Ron Highland’s The Faithful Creator is “sustained argument with evangelical open theism, liberal process theism and other models of creation and providence that deny that God accomplishes his good will in all things.” All such paradigms, he argues, fail ‘to take God’s transcendence seriously enough, thinking that God cannot relate to creation unless God possesses certain properties, powers and activities in common with creatures.” These positions view “God and creation as inhabiting the same causal space, so that where God is active the creature must be passive and where the creature acts God must remain quiescent” (15).

Though it includes a polemical intent, the book is also a defense of classic views of creation and providence, with a pastoral twist. Highland hopes to offer believers encouragement in “an age of anxiety.”

His is not simply a restatement of standard treatments of providence, however. There are some nice, illuminating distinctions and turns in the argument. He defines providence, for instance, as God’s ordering and directing of creation, “not leaving creation to chance or fate or misguided freedom” (215). He recognizes that this definition leaves out two themes that theologically generally group under providence – sustenance and concurrence. The reason is that he thinks “sustenance and concurrence to fit better in the creation aspect of the God-creature relationship.”

He elaborates: “Creation would be meaningless apart form the duration of creatures. What would it mean to create something that instantaneously ceases to be. Sustenance is God’s continuous act of creation, or to put it another way, the Word through which God lets things be continues its effectiveness.” In the same way that “a creature cannot sustain its own existence by an act of will, it cannot act or sustain the effect of its act solely by its own will. Hence the concept of concurrence or cooperation is needed to describe fully the idea of divine creation. Concurrence is God’s continued act of creation as it empowers creatures throughout their action and sustains the effect of teir acts” (215-216).

He likewise stresses that providence extends to “every event in the history of creation, great and small, good and bad, contingent and necessary” (218), again bringing this back to God the Creator: “Who is Ron Highfield?” he asks. “Is he the baby born in June 1951 or the teenager who came of age in the 1960s? Am I the professor of religion at Pepperdine University in December 2014 who writes these lines?” He believes that he does “possess a definitive identity” that will give an answer to his original question, but this is because “the eternal God knows who I am definitively,” the definitive Ron Highfield who is still future. 

Which Ron Highfield does God create? His answer is right on target: “Surely the answer must be that God creates the total history whose name is Ron Highfield; for God’s relation to be is eternal, even though I am temporal and have come to be in the middle of God. So ‘when’ God creates me, God creates my entire history, everything that happens to me and everything I have done,” with each event and action having “a character appropriate to its nature – necessity, contingency or freedom” (220-1).


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