Why Providence Has Fallen On Hard Times

In communicating the truths of Christianity, few efforts are more greatly rewarded than understanding why and how those truths may be difficult to believe or make little to no sense to one's hearers. In this regard, David Wells comments on why the traditional Christian understanding of Providence has become downright unintelligible to many today. The following quotations come from God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams.

The question he asks is, “What is it in the modern consciousness that so militates against the historic Christian understanding of God’s sovereign, ‘inside’ relationship to creation, history, and our own personal narratives? The answer,” he says, “is complex because our social world is complex, but I believe it involves three main factors.”

Factor #1, from page 154:

First, there is little doubt that alongside the revelry that modern plenty and modern opportunity have provided [i.e. science, industry, capitalism, liberal democracy, innovative technology], a deep foreboding has also been churned up, an apprehension that our world has gone dreadfully awry, morally, socially, and spiritually. Our experience of the modern world produces the sense that there is no sure and steady purpose pervading life, that purpose, like life itself, has broken apart into small, unrelated fragments, that our daily routine is severed from the meaning that God once provided to it.

Factor #2, from page 158:

Second, the suffering and brutality arising out of man’s inhumanity to man [ironically, through his misuse of the plenty and opportunity that modernity has secured for us] have, as Wendy Farley says, "assaulted us in this century with terrible intensity. …" We gawk at more catastrophe than any previous generation has ever observed – perhaps more mayhem than the fragile human constitution can bear. Is it not the case that the sheer weight of all of this calamity also extinguishes our hope that somehow there must be some meaning that can be retrieved from these ashes?

Factor #3, from page 160:

Finally, divine providence was much easier to assert [it was not, however, necessarily easier to believe] when Western culture still believed in progress. Belief in progress [post-Enlightenment] was really a secularized version of belief in divine providence, … but it is now clear that it was never more than the opiate of Western intellectuals and had little basis in reality. … the death of the idea of progress has led many people to abandon all rationality, all purpose, all meaning. In this new context of general bleakness, talk about divine providence has a hollow ring to it for many people.

Knowing that these (and probably other) factors are influencing people's thoughts these days (including our own) is part of how we can become good listeners in order to be good helpers: we need to know how what we say is being heard if we are to say it in a way that can be helpful. And this won’t come by keeping people at arms length; it will require that we befriend and embrace all kinds of people that are (probably) already in our spheres of influence and who are just as in need of friendship, encouragement, help, and direction as we ourselves are.