All of this produces a different picture of divine providence. Instead of imagining God constantly micromanaging history, intervening at every step to move individual pieces into place, we can imagine Him establishing conditions that actual history must ultimately satisfy.
In the familiar picture, God governs history the way a person might play chess against the world: constantly intervening, moving each piece, adjusting at every step to keep everything on course. Providence, in that picture, is micromanagement. This model offers another.
The Interacting Causes
History then develops through the interaction of:
- genuine agency,
- natural law,
- circumstance,
- divine influence,
- and divine constraint.The last item in this list was cut off in the source text and has been completed editorially; it should be checked against the author’s original.
Each of these is real. Agents really choose. Natural law really operates. Circumstances really shape what is possible. God really influences hearts and minds. And above all of them, God’s declared purposes set the conditions that the whole of history will meet.
The Whole, Not the Step
The key shift is from thinking about providence one step at a time to thinking about it as a property of history as a whole. Physics offers a picture of this: in the principle of least action, the path a system actually takes is the one that satisfies a condition on the whole path, not merely a push at each step.
Most of us learn to think of motion step by step: a ball is here, a force pushes it, and a moment later it is there. But physics also offers another, equally valid description, the whole-path one just mentioned. (More precisely, the principle is one of stationary action, since the actual path is not always the one of least action.) Light passing from air into water bends along the route that takes the least time overall.Fermat’s principle, formulated by Pierre de Fermat in the 1600s. You can describe that light moment by moment, or as the one path that satisfies a condition on the whole journey. Both descriptions are correct.
The history of this idea is worth knowing. Fermat stated his principle for light in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth, Maupertuis, Euler, and Lagrange extended the idea to mechanics, and in the nineteenth William Rowan Hamilton gave it the general form physicists use today: of all the conceivable paths a system could take between a starting point and an ending point, the actual one makes a quantity called the action stationary. The step-by-step equations of motion and the whole-path principle are mathematically equivalent. Neither is more “real”; they are two faces of one law.
In the twentieth century, Richard Feynman’s path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics gave the idea a striking twist. In it, a quantum system is treated as if it explores every possible path, each contributing to the result, and the classical path emerges because the contributions near the path of stationary action reinforce one another while the rest cancel out. The parallel with Chapter Two is hard to miss: all possible histories are in view, and the actual one is singled out by a condition on the whole.
Nothing in such a journey is pushed around by an outside hand at each instant. Yet the whole journey satisfies a global condition. This model suggests that providence may be something like that. God does not need to push history at every instant. He can establish conditions on the whole, and actual history, unfolding through real choices and ordinary natural law, will be a history that satisfies them.
Where the analogy stops. A light ray does not choose. In classical mechanics, once the endpoints are fixed, the path is fully determined, which is the opposite of the openness this model insists on. What is being borrowed is only the form of explanation: a condition on the whole that selects among possible paths, rather than a push at every step. In the theological picture, God’s decrees play the role of the global condition, but they leave a great many histories still open, and the selection among those is made by free agents.
What This Explains
Seen this way, providence is not less powerful; it is more elegant. God is not rushing from crisis to crisis repairing what free agents have broken. He sees every possible history, establishes what must be true of the history that becomes actual, and lets real agents, real causes, and His own gentle influence do the rest.
This picture also explains something we often notice about God’s hand in our lives: it is usually clearer looking back than looking forward. Providence, on this view, lives in the coherence of the whole. We see it best when enough of the story has become actual for the pattern to show. The next chapter looks at three examples where that pattern shows unusually clearly.