A. A. Hodge was the son of Charles Hodge, named after the first principal of Princeton Seminary, Archibald Alexander. In the following lecture he explains:
We are this afternoon to consider the general doctrine taught in the inspired Scriptures of the providence which God exercises over the world and its inhabitants. . . .
We can know only those parts of [God’s] nature, of his relations or of his ways which he has chosen to reveal to us. And at the best the creature can know even that which he is permitted to know only in part. At the same time, God is essentially omnipresent and active at the same time and in unbroken continuity in all his creatures. Our dependent being exists in him, and our dependent energies are ceaselessly recreated from the inexhaustible fountain of his life. All nature and all human history evolve in unbroken continuity through his guiding, cooperating will present in and working through the created dependent things themselves. None the less is God separate from the world, existing alike extensively and intensively infinitely above and beyond it. . . .
He presides over the physical universe and over communities of men as a person exterior and superior to all. He controls all events by his interior confluent energies according to a plan, one and universal, formed before the beginning of the world. He has formed a great moral government over his intelligent creatures as men and angels, and governs them by commands and motives objectively presented, and by his providences and by his word. He at times, and for purposes evidently subsidiary to his general plan and to his ordinary methods, acts upon the system of second causes from without, working miracles, or signals to his intelligent children, thus arousing their attention, instructing their faith and determining their action. He has revealed the great end of his whole system of works, to which all things, in all eras and in all spheres, work together, to be the giving of objective expression to the perfections of his own nature, or, as we usually phrase, it the manifestation of his own glory.
In all our religious experience, when we work and when we study and when we pray, God is always at once beyond us and above us and before us and within us at once the source of all life and movement, the authority binding all consciences, and the sublime object of all personal love and worship. (“The Scripture Doctrine of Divine Providence” – These excerpts are taken from Popular Lectures on Theological Themes)
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