Defining Some Terms: Providence, Risk, Faith, and Even Luck
Sometimes words inflate and when they do they lose meaning. Take love, a word that has come to mean just about anything, as in “love is love,” which isn’t even a passable tautology. Yet we all know what “love is love” means, it’s a gambit to emotionally manipulate us. After all, who could possibly be against love?
I’m not trying to manipulate you. I’m just trying to communicate. To do that in our day of verbal vagaries I will have to define some terms, not because I’m the final word on them, but just because I want to be understood.
The first is providence, a word that is out of favor just about everywhere except in a little corner called, Reformed Christianity. Providence is God’s form of government and it doesn’t leave any room for risk. That’s because risk-taking is one of those things that God just can’t do, like lying. Risk is only possible when you’re in the dark about something. And because God’s omniscient he can’t take risks. To put it in philosophical terms, there’s no distinction between ontology (what is so) and epistemology (what God knows). He’s always in the know, because what he knows is necessarily so.
Here's a homely illustration. Sometimes we imagine God piloting our little boats through dangerous waters, and while that’s a comforting thought, he also guides the waters, and the dangers. And sometimes in his providence bad things happen to good people, which isn’t very comforting. (But don’t lose heart—more on why not later.) Nothing exists without him. He’s never at a loss for information because he’s the source of everything.
This brings me to a term I’ve used without taking the trouble to define it in the earlier installments in this series: risk. Risk is inevitable for anyone who isn’t God. That’s because we can’t know everything. We’re always somewhat in the dark. The Apostle Paul made it clear that so long as we’re waiting for perfection we see things dimly, like in a fogged mirror. (1 Cor. 13:10-12)
As I noted in an earlier essay some people find this intolerable and freeze, aka “the paralysis of analysis.” But they’re only fooling themselves because failing to act is the act of not acting. We’re on Time’s conveyor belt and it stops for no man. That’s why, like it or not, inaction is just as consequential as action.
Obviously, this doesn’t mean that all choices are equal. It is possible to have sufficient information for a good choice. How much is sufficient? That’s where science ends and art begins.
Even so, we can be overconfident when it comes to what we know. The Apostle James gets at this when he said, “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there and make a profit—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring.” (Jas. 4:13-14).
While that might lend itself to a kind of paralysis, for most of his letter James is trying to get his readers to do things, not just think things. He’s simply reminding us that God has the final say.
And so, by this circuitous path we arrive at the next term, faith.
Because we can’t know everything we’d like to know we have to take the risk of believing in something. Even materialists do that. They believe that matter and energy is all that there is. Then they extrapolate. The more modest among them know that this is an exercise of faith. This doesn’t mean faith can’t have a rational basis. Hebrews chapter 11 illustrates that biblical exemplars believed in a God they couldn’t see because there was no material explanation for the things they could see.
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. …By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.” (Heb 11:1&3)
When it comes to the risks that we inevitably take those of us who believe in God have faith in more than our abilities, or the law of averages. We know that the God who made the world out of nothing is invisibly at work in all things, even our lives. And even though our judgment can be poor, we can’t really lose in the final analysis because God is at work for the good of all those who are called by his good purpose. (Rm 8:28)
Last of all, I come to a difficult and ambiguous word—luck. Can luck mean anything for those of us who believe in providentially ordered world?
I imagine that you’re somewhat surprised to hear that I think that it can, but in a highly qualified way. What I’m about to say could easily be misunderstood. And I wouldn’t mention it unless I thought a narrow understanding of luck was useful.
We’ve all witnessed “beginners’ luck.” Maybe a little girl is taken fishing, and to the delight and consternation of a family of devoted anglers, she’s the only one who catches anything. In fact, she catches a trophy fish. Shouldn’t this be attributed to providence? Of course, but she was also lucky. She had no knowledge of the craft; she was given a hook with some bait and she blindly put it in the water, Then, suddenly, there was a fish on the line. We can call this luck without impiety because we’re not talking about God’s providence, we’re talking about a little girl’s ignorance. Events like this can have the appearance of randomness. According to this definition I’ve been lucky many times.
But I won’t belabor the point. If my reasoning doesn’t appeal to you, don’t sweat it. Just don’t say I don’t believe in providence. God orders all things and I believe it.
Now onto another dicey topic next time: predicting the future!