Okay, so the topic of our conference this morning is divine providence.

It's an extremely important topic. It's important in the spiritual life. It's important for

how we understand bigger issues, much bigger issues in theology, the economy of salvation, and the supernatural order, all of these notions are

related in one way or another to divine providence. So we want to get clear on what we're

talking about when we speak of divine providence because a lot of people in our contemporary context do not have it spelled

out for them very carefully and they don't have a notion of divine providence in their mind

in a very robust way we could say so that's what we're going to discuss this morning is the

providence of God.

There's a couple of presuppositions that we have on the table in order to continue to discuss it.

Some things we have to presuppose. So number one, we're presupposing that God knows.

That's an important presupposition. Aquinas doesn't just take it for granted. In his natural

theology, he gives arguments for the claim that God knows, but we aren't going to rehearse those

arguments here. Second, and more importantly, we're presupposing that God knows himself.

That's the second big presupposition that's on the table when we discuss divine providence.

And it's important to consider that God knows himself for reasons that we'll get into.

And also, we are in a way presupposing that God knows all, okay, knows everything.

So at a certain point in our conversation, I suppose you could stop me and say, wait, but

you're presupposing that God knows, or you're presupposing that God knows himself, or presupposing

he knows everything. Yes, I'm just taking all that for granted up front.

Okay?

And with those presuppositions on the table,

we can then proceed to consider divine providence.

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