What is the Common Providence

New blog on the kid : What is the Common Providence · Creation vs. Evolution : What Does Creation Mean - Answering Carl Krieg

Carl Krieg was making a point, or he thought so, here:

Fifty Years Later – Part 7
Is God Alive and well?
by Carl Krieg on October 3, 2022
https://progressivechristianity.org/resources/fifty-years-later-part-7/

Creation and the health and activity of God go together. Christian theology rejects the astrological assertion that the stars control our destiny [fatalism] and also rejects the notion that God did once create, but now is sleeping on the other side of the universe, not involved with us at all. Instead, Christianity asserts that we all live in the context of a divine providence that…does what? and how? and includes whom?

Fine, good for you to reject Fatalism and Deism.

Divine Providence does what?

Basically everything. It gets things done through created beings, but gets THE things done that God wants done, either because He prefers them for themselves, or because He prefers them in relation to something we did with our freewill we shouldn't have done. The one thing God doesn't do is actually chose our sins.

How?

God's palette involves:

• divine fiat,
• angels obeying Him,
• demons defying Him,
• men using and abusing our freewill,
• natural processes under the control of any or all of above.

It includes whom?

As purposes in themselves : all who love or will love God.

And we know that to them that love God, all things work together unto good, to such as, according to his purpose, are called to be saints.
Romans 8:28

As means to these purposes : all things, including themselves and each other.

And this is exactly where Carl Krieg gets things wrong:

What God was doing was working to create equality and justice on this planet, but the success of the plan seemed in question. The Kingdom of God on earth did not appear to be a realistic and achievable goal, but I wasn’t in favor of the alternative idea that individual souls would fly off to heaven.

He definitely should have been. Souls that love God in the moment of their death do get to heaven. Individually.

Souls that don't love God are not creating all the inequality (some inequality is actually good), but are together with the devils and demons responsible for the injustice there is. And injustice is one of the things that God uses, not as preferred state, but as means to fix certain things. The injustice inside a soul is worse than the injustice around a body. Whatever injustice I am suffering, and whenever it will be ended (it could be when I die) is used by God to either fix injustice inside me, or inside someone else dealing with me, or both.

If I die loving God, this will have been for my benefit. If I do not so die, but die in defiance of God, this will have been for the benefit of someone else who loves God.

Loving God for eternity is what life is about. Justice on earth is a means to it. In some cases, to illustrate the injustice in some who do not love God, or to correct it, injustice is a less preferred but sometimes more effective means.

Fighting for social justice may be a given man's earthly vocation, but it is not even for him the real meaning of his life. If he makes earth a paradise and goes to Hell (not likely combination, but some choices may come with real or false tags attached on either of these sides), he will not benefit for long that earth is a paradise. And for the rest of us, we are supposed to enjoy social justice as a likelier means for us to make both earthly happiness and eternal bliss within our reach. Not so that we shall also be endlessly dragged into fighting for social justice. This means, there are some social justice issues, where I think I have a contribution to make, and I refuse to be dragged into fighting everyone's and anyone's else's preferred social justice fight or list of social justice fights. I am mainly here to keep the commandments, desire heaven, fear hell and don't care (at least not too much) about this world.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Bridget's Day
8.X.2022