Toward A Non-Deterministic Theology Of Divine Providence -- By: Robert E. Picirilli

Journal: Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry
Volume: JBTM 11:1 (Spring 2014)
Article: Toward A Non-Deterministic Theology Of Divine Providence
Author: Robert E. Picirilli


Toward A Non-Deterministic Theology Of Divine Providence

Robert E. Picirilli

Robert E. Picirilli served as Academic Dean and Professor of Greek and New Testament at Free Will Baptist Bible College (now Welch College) in Nashville, Tennessee.

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.

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Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust him for his grace;
Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.

- William Cowper

In his history of the Northern Free Will Baptists, I. D. Stewart writes of the denomination’s founder: “[Benjamin] Randall’s horse stumbled and precipitated him upon the ground. He acknowledged the hand of Providence that kept himself from injury, but the loss of his horse, by a fracture of the shoulder, was a loss indeed, since he was unable to supply its place, and, without one, he could no longer travel and blow the gospel trumpet.”1

Similarly, when my wife died not long ago, all five of my daughters were for other reasons present in the city (where two of them did not live) and with us in the room. I said, more than once during the next few days, that it was providential that all of them were there. I am confident that it was.

Randall and I could have added, of course, that it was just as providential that he lost the horse on which he depended and that I lost my wife of almost fifty-nine years. But we do not usually attribute negative things to providence. And therein lies the need for a more thorough study of a subject that does not receive the attention it deserves. As Albert C. Outler—not a friend to a Biblicist theology—has observed, “Belief in the providence of God as the ultimate environment

of human existence” is “the linchpin of traditional Christian doctrine.”2 Providence is, he writes, “God’s active ‘presence’ in this world—personal and gracious—in the continuance of creation, in the vicissitudes of history, as the divine love in which we live and move and have our being.”3

Introduction: The Traditional Doctrine

I turn first to Louis Berkhof, as I often have since those days long ago when I first encountered him in graduate school. His is a substantial work, and he devotes a chapter to providence, appropriately, as part of his treatment of t...

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