God has preserved his written word by his singular care and providence, with great accuracy and in great purity. Despite its complexities, preservation by ordinary providence in both special and general modes (though we cannot always discern the difference between these two) seems to be the best theological account of providential preservation based on the biblical data.

Christians believe that all Scripture is inspired by God (2 Tim. 3:16). But what has God done to preserve his written word? In particular, what is the relationship between God’s work of preservation and the work of sometimes sleepy scribes, whose pens might slip, and whose parchments might disintegrate? The concept of “providence” can help us here. What does it mean to say that God has preserved the text of Scripture “providentially”? And what degree of textual preservation does a biblical assessment of the work of providence give us reason to expect?
What is Providence and How Does it Work?
“Providence” is not itself a word found in the Bible. But it is a theological term that sums up Scripture’s teaching about one particular work of God. This work includes the biblical concepts of God’s purpose (prothesis, πρόθεσις), foreknowledge (prognōsis, πρόγνωσις), and predestination (proorismos, προορισμός). The word “providence” itself (which has the etymology of pre-seeing) is sometimes linked to the introduction of God as “Jehovah Jireh” or “the Lord who sees/provides” in Genesis 22:14.
The thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas defined providence as God’s ordering of all things towards their end. He further distinguished two parts to this “ordering”: (1) God’s eternal arrangement of all things, and (2) his temporal execution of that order by means of his government of the universe (Summa Theologica, I.22.1). After the Reformation, many Protestant theologians basically accepted Aquinas’s definition, commonly discerning three elements of God’s work of providence in the world: preservation, concurrence (i.e., co-operation with secondary causes), and government. It’s important to notice that providence encompasses all things: in the most basic sense, if something is (or happens), it is (or happens) providentially.
Two Methods of Providence
Can we be any more specific? Here we may introduce two useful distinctions, which are frequently misunderstood or confused. Theologians distinguish first between “ordinary” and “extraordinary” providence. This distinction is about the method of providence. “Ordinary” providence perhaps sounds boring, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate something humdrum: the term comes from the Latin ordinarius, which means “according to rule.” In this case the “rule” is God’s own, which we find established in the divinely given laws of nature. In his ordinary providence God works through and according to creaturely means. For example, your birth was hardly a boring or everyday event, but it was very much part of ordinary providence.
Extraordinary providence, on the other hand, is outside, above, or against regular, creaturely means. We see this in the biblical miracles. When Jesus walks on water, that is outside or beyond God’s normal way of ruling over the physics of water. The really key thing to remember is that, whether God’s providence is ordinary or extraordinary, it does not change the fact that God is always working, and his work is always praiseworthy. All God’s works praise him, and should lead us to bless his name (Ps. 145:10).
Two Modes of Providence
A second distinction (found, for example, in the Westminster Confession of Faith, 5:7) is sometimes made between “general” and “special” providence.
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The attempts to redefine sex and marriage are nothing less than calling good evil and evil good. Sadly, many Christians didn’t realize how slippery the slope really was whenever they began to bend their convictions on matters like premarital sex and divorce. As we have seen from church history, we should hope to grow in doctrinal clarity through the present challenge. 

According to His long-term providence, God always uses heresy and false teaching to doctrinally sharpen His church. Don’t get me wrong. Heresy and false teaching are always bad news, and we should by no means take joy or delight in them. However, when we are forced to face them (which will prove to be inevitable in this life), we should take comfort that if we hold fast to Christ and His Scriptures we will be sharpened and refined through the challenge.
That was the case with the New Testament era of the church. Since the church began in Jerusalem, it began as a pointedly Jewish movement. Soon, however, the gospel began to go into the all nations, just as Christ commanded. And although Paul always made a point of preaching first in whatever synagogues he found, he usually went on to find much better reception with the Gentiles. Thus, it was natural that one of the first major questions facing the church would be regarding its relationship to Judaism. Particularly, where Gentile Christians required to be circumcised and practice other Jewish rites like the dietary restrictions? The Apostles’ answer was unanimous and very clear: no, “for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6).
In the following centuries, the church faced a number of Christological threats, the most well-known being Arianism in the early 300s. Arius was an elder in Alexandria who argued that Jesus was the first and supreme created being but He was not God. The bishop of Alexandria, Alexander, maintained that Jesus was truly God, and the theological rift between Arius and Alexander soon spread throughout the Eastern Roman Empire. To resolve this debate, Emperor Constantine summoned bishops from across the empire to gather at Nicaea and settle the matter. That counsel wrote the Nicene Creed, and although Arianism did not vanish entirely (indeed, it is still with us today via Jehovah’s Witnesses), the deity of Christ, which most Christians had always believed by assumption, was given greater clarification. The Athanasian Creed would go on to clarify explicit belief in the Trinity, and the Chalcedonian Definition would clarify the hypostatic union of Christ.
During the time of the Reformation, salvation and worship were the theological battlegrounds. Things were irrevocably set in motion when Luther posted his 95 Theses, issuing a challenge for a theological debate, particularly over the selling of indulgences. For Luther, the struggle was for the scriptural reality that our salvation is through faith in Christ alone. The Reformers rooted their arguments in Scripture and expressed that glorifying God ought to be every Christian’s ultimate goal. We, therefore, rightly associate the Reformation with the five solas: Scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, and God’s glory alone. Clarity again followed. Calvin wrote the Institutes of the Christian Religion to make instruction on the basic doctrines of the faith accessible to everyone, and while the Institutes are still very much worth the time it takes to read them, the confessions that we produced in the following hundred or so years better achieved his goal. Of course, Calvin and most of the other Reformers also wrote catechisms. Calvin went so far as to say in one of his letters:
Believe me, Monseigneur, the Church of God will never preserve itself without a Catechism, for it is like the seed to keep the good grain from dying out, and causing it to multiply from age to age.Letters and Tracts Volume V, 191
To be honest, I think that is a slight overstatement, since Christ will ensure the preservation of His Church; however, I do agree that catechisms can play a significant role in maintaining doctrinal fidelity in the church.
Of course, you may be wondering what exactly is a catechism, and since we are studying through a catechism, that would be a helpful matter to define. Gordon gives good summary:
Creeds and confessions were originally written to provide summary truths of the Christian faith in the face of great theological error. Catechisms in particular provided short, concise summary statements, in question-and-answer format, on some particular doctrine of the Christian faith. These documents are intended to help Christians, especially children and those new to the faith, to have their minds trained in what Scripture teaches on a given point of Christian doctrine.Page 7
Interestingly, the origin of creeds and catechisms appears to be one and the same. Ben Myers gives a wonderful description how the Apostles’ Creed was originally as baptismal catechism:
On the eve of Easter Sunday, a group of believers has stayed up all night in a vigil of prayer, scriptural reading, and instruction. The most important moment of their lives is fast approaching. For years they have been preparing for this day.
When the rooster crows at dawn, they are led out to a pool of flowing water. They remove their clothes. The women let down their hair and remove their jewelry. They renounce Satan and are anointed from head to foot with oil. They are led naked into the water. Then they are asked a question: “Do you believe in God the Father Almighty?” They reply, “I believe!” And they are plunged down in the water and raised up again.
They are asked a second question: “Do you believe in Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who was born of the Holy Spirit and Mary the virgin and was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was dead and buried and rose on the third day from the dead and ascended in the heavens and sits at the right hand of the Father and will come to judge the living and the dead?” Again they confess, “I believe!” And again they are immersed in the water.
Then a third question: “Do you believe in the Holy Spirit and the holy church and the resurrection of the flesh?” A third time they cry, “I believe!” And a third time they are immersed. When they emerge from the water they are again anointed with oil. They are clothed, blessed, and led into the assembly of believers, where they will share for the first time in the eucharistic meal. Finally they are sent out into the world to do good works and to grow in faith.
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“Conservatives”—another term for which I have diminishing tolerance—see no need to make a stink about gay marriage today, at least not at actionable scale. This means the issue is thoroughly embedded in the public reason. It makes sense and is unquestioned in any real sense. Even if some people don’t like it there are now bigger fish to fry, fish that coalitions can be built around. And so, the root cause, the first defeat and its externalities, is forgotten.

Last week I wrote about a new case in Oregon wherein a would-be foster mother was denied the privilege because she was deemed an unfit mother with an unfit home, according to the established religion of Oregon. The mother in question is a Christian and she refused to affirm, as part of her foster/adoption application, that she would raise children in an affirming home, i.e., she would not commit to brainwashing them with queer dogma or facilitate the sacrifice of their flesh to the god of liberatory androgyny. I employed some Fustel (Ancient City) to show that instruction in and perpetuation of religion is, even in the ancient world, inseparable from parenthood. It’s part of the job. The Bible says so too. Our law still protects this right, for the time being, at least for natural parents, for now—part of my point was that the slippery slope is currently being greased. We instinctively know it.
My argument was not meant to be comprehensive but polemical, geared toward several provisional arguments, and concentrating on the constitution of familial life to draw out contradictions.
The basic, universal point is that if parents are not inculcating religion they are not parenting and if a family is irreligious, it is not properly a family, only analogously so. Just as Richard Baxter said a commonwealth is only rightly so called if it is oriented to true religion, and that those built on false religion or irreligion, insofar as the latter exists, are only analogously participatory in the essence of commonwealth.
And so, Fustel’s documentation combined with history and tradition of our own country combined with true religion of Christianity equals a proper family in every way, one serviceable to the nation because it is rightly ordered internally. That the family is the foundational socio-political unit, a precursor to and microcosm of, larger units is a basic Aristotelian insight that needs no explication here. (Interaction and interrelation between the little commonwealth and the large commonwealth, or the little church and the larger church, is a separate and later question.)
I did not suggest in my piece that the question of which religion was irrelevant, only that to deny Bates (the Oregon mom) her pedagogical duty was to deny her true parenthood. The two go together. The regime knows this. That’s why they’re doing it. It’s a very forward looking, shrewd sorting strategy too. But I won’t say anything of any replacement theories, of course. That would be crazy. What I will say, as alluded to already, is that the slope is, indeed, slippery. That’s how these things work. If the Oregon DHS policy is not defeated now, and on the basis of what I’m laying out as the proper family, it will soon—sooner than most expect—apply to the natural as well as the adoptive family. Note too that the fact that Bates is, in her case, only attempting to foster and not necessarily adopt, is irrelevant. The same DHS application applies to both scenarios; the same standard is applied to either case. For all intents and purposes, then, we are talking about adoption.
Now, none of this negates a state interest, in this private aspect of religious practice and childrearing, even as there is tolerance. (Ignore, for now, the somewhat artificial bifurcation of public and private.) There are always limits. The only question is one of standards and metrics.
The state has a legitimate interest, of course, in screening adoptive parents. It will do so according to established religion and morality. This is unavoidable. Again, the point I was making is that you can’t have parenthood without religious pedagogy, the perpetuation of the sacred fire.
So, when you deny religious instruction around the hearth you deny parenthood, full stop. Even if, let’s say, Bates had agreed against her conscience to the stipulations in the Oregon DHS application and then gritted her teeth and abided by them while providing all other maintenance for the foster children, she would not, properly speaking, be parenting. For she would not be perpetuating her household gods.
The foster or adopted children would not properly be initiated into the family—Fustel deals with adoption too. Moreover, to draw out internal contradictions in predominant thought, the piece was meant to challenge anti-Christian nationalists. What if the standard was Christianity? You would all howl in righteous indignation. That challenge is for people who still deny the inescapability of the which not whether choice always and everywhere before us.
But all this, at a grander level, is not just about Bates. Her case is illustrative of system level problems already mentioned. The regime is shrinking its range of toleration, and that regarding a key vector of evangelism, so to speak, of the previously predominant and therefore competitor religion. Smart move on part of the regime. People should recognize this. And while I am sympathetic, obviously, to “religious liberty” arguments for the sake of immediate and pressing goals, people should also recognize the relatively short, remaining life expectancy of said arguments. They were designed for a different world and, in some respects, contain the demise of Christian America within them, even as they were coded Christian from the beginning. You either like that end result or you don’t, but if you don’t then you are in a pickle. And this goes even for those less assertive than Christian nationalists. I mean those who still make the Christianity is necessary for liberal democracy and religious liberty but can’t be enforced argument.
In any case, and in this way, the responses went right where I wanted them to: the recognition of the inescapability of establishment.
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