Concurrence

Concurrence is the doctrine that God works in and through every creaturely action, causing it to occur alongside the creature’s own causing of it, without either cause reducing the other. It is one of three classical divisions of God’s providence, alongside preservation (God upholding creatures in existence) and government (God directing all things to his own ends). An act can be fully caused by God as the first cause and fully caused by the creature as a genuine secondary cause at the same time, including a sinful act, without God thereby becoming that sin’s author.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states the doctrine in its chapter on providence:

“Although in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first cause, all things come to pass immutably and infallibly; so that there is not anything befalls any by chance, or without his providence; yet by the same providence he ordereth them to fall out according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently.”¹

Two claims are held together here rather than traded off against each other: God is the “first cause” of everything that happens, and creatures remain genuine “second causes,” acting freely or contingently according to their own nature rather than being reduced to instruments with no real agency of their own.

Biblical Basis

Joseph tells his brothers that the same act was both their sin and God’s own doing: “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Gen. 50:20), one event with two real causes rather than a shared or divided one. Paul locates all creaturely existence and activity within God’s own: “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), and tells believers that “it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13), a divine working that operates through, not instead of, the creature’s own willing and working. Isaiah has God name himself as the one “who frustrates the signs of liars and makes fools of diviners,” language that presupposes God’s active involvement in ordinary human affairs rather than mere passive foreknowledge of them (Isa. 44:25).

Historical Development

Bavinck states the doctrine’s basic claim plainly: “the providence of God does not cancel out secondary causes or human responsibility, a doctrine usually referred to as ‘concurrence.’”² He distinguishes concurrence from the errors on either side of it. Deism has no real concurrence at all, since it restricts God’s causality to the original act of creation and leaves secondary causes to run on their own from that point forward.² Pantheism collapses the distinction the other way, identifying creaturely causes with God’s own causality so completely that “there are only phenomena” and no true secondary causes remain.² Pelagianism excludes God from a creature’s willing and doing altogether, while semi-Pelagianism and synergism picture God and the creature as “associated causes working with and alongside each other, like two draft horses pulling a wagon,” a picture Bavinck rejects because it makes concurrence a partnership between comparable causes rather than the primary cause working in and through a genuinely subordinate one.²

Opposing Views

The alternatives Bavinck names above are worth restating as live options rather than only as errors to reject. Deism holds that God set the world in motion and now governs it only through the natural laws built into it at creation, without any further, ongoing causal involvement in particular events. Pantheism holds that there is, at bottom, only one real cause, God’s own, so that what looks like creaturely agency is not a second, genuine cause alongside God’s but simply God’s own activity appearing under a creaturely form. Both differ from concurrence by denying that two real, distinct causes, God’s and the creature’s, are both fully operative in the same event.

Objections and Responses

If God concurs in every act, including sinful ones, God becomes the author of the sin in them. Charnock answers with an illustration from ordinary causation. The sun and the earth act on every plant alike, yet “the sun and earth are not the cause of that poison which is in the nature of the plant,” since the same influence produces sweet fruit in one plant and poison in another depending on each plant’s own nature.³ In the same way, “if God did not concur to the motions of men, there could be no sinful action, because there could be no action at all; yet this concurrence is not the cause of that venom that is in the action, which ariseth from the corrupt nature of the creature.”³ God’s concurrence supplies the power by which an act occurs at all; the sinfulness in that act belongs to the corrupt nature of the creature who performs it, not to the concurrence itself, “no more than the sun and earth are the cause of the poison of the plant.”³

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 5, “Of Divine Providence,” para. 2. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 2, “Discourse XI: On the Holiness of God,” 159-60. ↩ ↩² ↩³