Part 4: Are God and Human Beings Competing Causes?
In Part 3, we asked a more foundational question: What kind of God governs history?
We considered the God of Scripture as omniscient, omnipotent, wise, holy, transcendent, and utterly distinct from His creation. That Creator-creature distinction matters because one of the easiest mistakes to make in thinking about divine sovereignty and human responsibility is to imagine God and human beings as though they were two causes competing on the same level. If God does more, must man necessarily do less? If God is fully sovereign, must human agency become less real? The Reformed tradition has consistently answered: No.
Scripture itself gives us the theological grammar. Paul declares that God “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:11), while Proverbs can simultaneously say, “The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps” (Proverbs 16:9). Human beings plan. Human beings choose. And God sovereignly governs. This is where the classical theolgoical distinction between primary and secondary causation becomes important.
God is the primary cause—the Creator, Sustainer, and sovereign Governor of all things. Human beings, however, are genuine secondary causes. We think, desire, deliberate, intend, choose, act, obey, rebel, and remain responsible for what we do.
The Westminster Confession expresses this balance carefully: “God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass.”
Yet it immediately adds that God is not “the author of sin,” nor is violence done to the creaturely will. The confession later speaks even more directly of secondary causes, affirming that God orders events to occur “according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently.”
This is not fatalism. Nor is it a picture of human beings as puppets. It is the doctrine of divine concurrence: God sovereignly sustains and governs creaturely action while creatures genuinely act according to their own natures, desires, intentions, and faculties.
Calvin likewise refused to picture providence as God merely watching history unfold from a distance. He wrote that “nothing happens but what he has knowingly and willingly decreed.” Yet Calvin was equally insistent that the wickedness of sinful actions belongs to the creature, not to God.
That takes us back to Joseph. His brothers truly intended evil. Their jealousy and betrayal were their own. Yet Joseph could still say: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.” — Genesis 50:20
One event. Two intentions. Two forms of agency. But not two rival gods fighting for control of history.
The same pattern appears in Acts 2:23. Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God,” yet those who crucified Him were still morally accountable for what they did.
Divine sovereignty does not erase human responsibility. Human responsibility does not place events outside divine sovereignty. Perhaps, then, we have been imagining the problem incorrectly. If God and creatures are not rival causes operating on the same plane, could the same event be truthfully described at more than one level? Could an action be described theologically, morally, psychologically, historically, and even probabilistically without those descriptions cancelling one another?
That question brings us another step closer to the interdisciplinary territory behind Theoikophysignosis. But we are not ready to unveil the framework yet. First we need to ask whether looking at the same reality from different levels might help us understand how divine and human agency can both be affirmed without collapsing one into the other.
Next: Part 5 — What If We Are Looking at the Same Reality from Different Levels?
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The relationship between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility is not merely a theological puzzle to be discussed, it touches the very way we understand providence, choice, accountability, suffering, and the unfolding of our lives before God.
If this short article has stirred in you a desire to explore more deeply how divine sovereignty, human agency, concurrence, and secondary causation may be understood together, continue the journey with us at Reformation Conference Cebu 2026. When selecting your breakout session, choose: DECODING THE DIVINE DILEMMA
Explore how the Reformed doctrine of providence and divine concurrence provides the theological foundation for thinking about God as the primary cause while human beings remain genuine secondary causes and morally responsible agents. The session will also introduce Theoikophysignosis as an interdisciplinary framework for illuminating this enduring theological tension without reducing mystery to mechanism, or allowing interdisciplinary models to displace the authority and priority of biblical theology.
Continue the Journey at Reformation Conference Cebu 2026
𝐁𝐄𝐇𝐎𝐋𝐃 𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐆𝐎𝐃 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔
October 21–23, 2026
Hosted by Bradford United Church of Christ, Inc.
𝗥𝗘𝗚𝗜𝗦𝗧𝗘𝗥 𝗛𝗘𝗥𝗘:
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𝗥𝗘𝗚𝗨𝗟𝗔𝗥 𝗥𝗔𝗧𝗘:
Php 1,000.00
September 1–October 15
Registration is inclusive of the conference kit only. Food and accommodation are not included.
Come and behold the glory of our ever-present God through the faithful proclamation of His Word, Christ-centered worship, and fellowship with His Church.
