<i>God Works for Good with Those Who Love Him</i>: The Church as a Sacrament of Providence, Predestination, and Divine Goodness

Abstract While various parts of St Thomas’ work have been suggested as places to discern a Thomistic ecclesiology, this article tries to situate the Church in a discussion of creation and the communication of divine goodness that is at the heart of the mystery of providence and predestination. Despite the assurance that God works for good with those who love him, our understanding of divine providence must begin with the frank admission of a tension between our intuition that creation must be ordered, and our experience of contingency. By understanding the Church’s place within creation, in a hidden and shadowy way from Abel until its manifestation in the Lord’s Paschal Mystery, we can see how God’s loving purposes are worked out both in the implicit faith in a Mediator, which finds its expression in a belief in God’s providential care of creation, and in the life of the visible Church where the mystery of predestination is worked out in the lives of the faithful until all is at last made manifest at the end of time. Such an ecclesiology allows us to see the fundamental importance, and mystical meaning, of the visible hierarchical Church.