How often do we Christians go about life as if we were practical agnostics, as if God were not a given? A major impetus of Modernity, that is, the Enlightenment movements that swept across Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, was to reject the historic Christian understanding of the world, to assert the autonomy of the human intellect and will, and to relegate God to an unnecessary hypothesis. Evangelicals have adapted to Modernity (and Late Modernity) by adopting a God-of-the-gaps approach: whatever cannot be explained naturally, they explain with the God hypothesis.
Confessionally Reformed Christians should reject Modernity (and Late Modernity, which is nothing more than the radically subjectivist turn of Modernity) and the God-of-the-gaps. We have a doctrine of providence in Heidelberg Catechism Lord’s Day 27:
27. What do you understand by the providence of God?
The almighty, everywhere present power of God, whereby, as it were by His hand, He upholds heaven and earth with all creatures, and so governs them that herbs and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, meat and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, indeed, all things come not by chance, but by His Fatherly hand.
According to ecumenical, catholic and Reformed Christianity, there are no gaps. God cannot “go” to the corner for a beer because he is omnipresent. Our rejection of God in the Modern West affects God not at all. We are the ones who have changed. We have sold our heritage for a pot of stew (autonomy). God is sovereignly orchestrating all that comes to pass. Read the full article by R. Scott Clark.