Faith & Spirit Quote by William Ames

Ames compresses an entire Puritan worldview into a single, almost bureaucratic word: efficiency. God isn’t framed here as a distant mystery but as an active cause, the engine behind reality. In early modern scholastic language, “efficient” means the agent that produces effects. Ames takes that inherited philosophical tool and turns it toward a Protestant agenda: insisting that God’s action is not confined to a spectacular beginning (“creation”) but continues as sustained governance (“providence”).

The line’s power is its forced choice that isn’t really a choice. “Either...or” reads like a tidy classification, yet the subtext is expansive: whatever you point to - the existence of the world, the unfolding of events, the seeming randomness of fortune - can be folded into God’s agency. This is theology trying to pre-empt the loopholes. If you concede creation but treat the rest as autonomous nature or human luck, Ames answers with providence. If you talk about providence but want to soften divine involvement in the material world, he yanks you back to creation.

Context matters: Ames is writing in a Reformed tradition anxious about rival explanations of causality - Catholic sacramental mediation, emerging mechanistic science, and the human tendency to cordon off “religion” to the private sphere. His phrasing is calm, systematic, almost legalistic, because the goal isn’t poetry; it’s jurisdiction. The sentence draws a boundary around reality and quietly posts a sign: nothing happens outside the divine remit.