Divine Providence as Fulfilled in Christ | Fr. Timothy Bellamah, O.P.

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4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Fr. Timothy Bellamah explores divine providence as God's vision and causation of all things fulfilled in Christ, explaining that Christ's incarnation, passion, death, and resurrection serve as God's ultimate response to the problem of evil, particularly the suffering of the innocent.

This lecture was given on February 22nd, 2024, at Dominican House of Studies.

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About the Speaker:

Fr. Timothy Bellamah, O.P. (Commissio Leonina) was born and raised in Washington, D.C. He entered the Order of Preachers in 1991 and was ordained a priest in 1998. He studied at Wake Forest University (B.S., 1982), the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception (M.Div. and S.T.B., 1997; S.T.L, 1999) and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, (Ph.D., Section des sciences Religieuses, 2008). He has previously taught at Providence College in the Department of Theology and the Department of the Development of Western Civilization. From 2010 to 2018 he served as editor of The Thomist and is a member of the Leonine Commission, a team of Dominican scholars responsible for the production of critical Latin editions of the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. He is also currently preparing a critical Latin edition of the Commentary on John’s Gospel by one of St. Thomas’ Dominican contemporaries, William of Alton.

Keywords: Adam, Angels, Augustine, Boethius, Divine Providence, Grace, Incarnation, Original Sin, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Timistic Institute podcast.
0:06.2	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.7	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.3	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:24.6	We've heard a few things about divine providence without having gone into an extensive discussion
0:31.6	of divine providence. But notice that divine providence is the word providence, probidare, its root, would suggest is God's vision of all things that will ever happen, or ever have happened.
0:46.4	And notice we were talking about boethias earlier today that boethias shows us with some seriousness, some rigor, that there is no anteriority or futurity in God.
0:59.0	It's all now. It's all present. And that's divine provenance.
1:03.0	But notice, the divine provenance is also causative. God brings about what will happen in this world. Now, he talks about, Thomas
1:15.6	talks about providence in many of his works, the most famous would be that Summa Theologia
1:20.6	we've heard about. Early on in the first part of it, in question 20, questions 22 and 23,
1:26.6	he talks about Providence quite explicitly. Then later in that same first part of it, in question 20, questions 22 and 23, he talks about Providence quite
1:28.3	explicitly, then later in that same first part, and I think it's question 103 and maybe
1:34.0	104 after that, he talks about it again.
1:36.7	And even there, he says, we're not finished with this yet.
1:39.8	Some objector has basically pointed out that the existence of evil, especially the suffering of the
1:47.5	innocent, would argue against the benevolence of God. And Thomas, well, perhaps surprisingly,
1:56.4	concedes that this is the most difficult objection that the atheist can put to the believer.
2:03.6	The suffering of the innocent is arguing against the benevolence of an omnipotent God.
2:09.6	And he's just discussed these matters in previous questions with some rigor, with some seriousness. And then he points out that we will
2:20.1	come back to this question, this matter later. And that later is in the third part of the
2:27.5	Summa Theologia, the same work, that last part of it that was left incomplete,
	...

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