_2_The Relation of Divine Providence to the Causae Secundae

The causae secundae (second causes) are the means through which divine Providence operates. God operates, and the means operate. Ps. 127:1: The Lord builds the house, and the builders build the house. But the relation between the operation of the means and the operation of God is this: The operation of the means is not co-ordinate with the operation of God, but subordinate to it, and subordinate to that extent that the means work only that which God works through them, and they work only as long as God works. For “except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.”

We speak indeed of the natural constitution, movement, power, and working of the creature. But what the creatures do naturally, e. g., that the worm crawls, man walks, the sun shines, the tree grows and bears fruit after its kind, medicine heals, bread nourishes, the watchman protects, etc., they do because of God’s influence on the creatures (Dei in creaturas influxus). Gerhard elaborates on this point (Loci, locus “De Provid.,” § 62.63): “What is more natural to man than that he moves? And still we move in God (Acts 17:28). What is more natural for the sun than that it rises day by day? And yet ‘God maketh His sun to rise’ (Matt.5:45). Though the creatures possess these attributes by nature, it is only by divine power that they, so to express it, have their being and life (essentientur et vegetentur). Ps. 104:29-30: ‘Thou hidest Thy face, they are troubled; Thou takest away their breath, they die and return to their dust. Thou sendest forth Thy spirit, they are created; and Thou renewest the face of the earth.’ Deut. 8:3 and Matt. 4:4 we are told that ‘man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord.’ This not only tells us that God may nourish and sustain man without means, but it also informs us that the power to nourish does not so inhere in the bread that it could nourish man if the Word, by which it was originally created and was given the power to nourish, were retracted. The continuous influence of the Word, which creates, as it were, and sustains life, is needed if the bread is to exert the nourishing power given to it. The same obtains in the sphere of medicine. Man is not healed through the herbs, but through the Word of God which originally gave the herbs their healing property and day by day maintains their power.” Our table prayer (“Speak Thy blessing on the gifts,” etc.) and the prayer we utter when taking the medicine have the same meaning. It was the meaning expressed by the doctor who said concerning his patient: “I bandaged him, but God healed him.”

Maintaining this truth, our Lutheran teachers say that the operation of God and the operation of the second causes are not “duae” actiones, but “una” numero actio. This one operation must not be divided in extent, as though God performed one half of the action and the secondary cause the other half; nor separated in time, as though God first exerted His influence, and then afterwards and later the means or the creatures wrought by means of a power which was given them.5 To ward off the conception of operations separated by time, the dogmaticians explicitly say that the operation of the causae secundae is not the result of an actio Dei praevia (a preceding action of God), but the result of a continuus Dei in creaturas influxus (of an uninterrupted operation of God on the creatures and through the creatures). (Quenstedt I, 780.) If we know this, we shall say with Job (ch, 10:8): “Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about” and confess with Luther in the Small Catechism: “I believe that God has made me [not only Adam] and all creatures, has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still preserves them.” We received our soul and body with all their members from our parents as the causae secundae, and at the same time we know that God is our Creator and Father. Luther expresses it thus: “It is God that makes the skin; it is He who makes also the bones; it is He who makes the hair on the skin; it is He also who makes the marrow in the bones; it is He who makes every particle of hair; it is He who makes every particle of marrow; He must make everything, both the particles and the whole” (St. L. XX:804). Again: “He who made a man out of the ground also creates men to this day from the blood of the parents” (St. L. I:155). And to guard against the thought as though God, working through means, is by these means separated from the world, Luther says: “God does not send out bailiffs or angels when He creates or preserves a thing, but all that is the direct work of His divine power. But if He is to create and sustain it, He Himself must be present and must form and sustain His creature both in its most inward and its most external parts.” (St. L. XX:804.)

Quenstedt expresses the same truth when he writes against the deists, who separate God from the operation of the means through the interposition of the “laws of nature”: “It is wrong to say that the second cause [the means through which God works] separates the first cause [God] from the effect, since the effect is the immediate result both of the first cause and of the second cause” (Systema I, 781). The so-called “laws of nature” are not something which differs from God’s will and operation, but are God’s will and operation itself in its relation to the existence and operation of the creatures.6