Is Agent Causation ex nihilo creation? - Divine Concurrence

Here are Arminius thoughts on concurrence:

IX. The last efficiency of God concerning the Beginnings of sin, is the divine concurrence, which is necessary to produce every act; because nothing whatever can have an entity except from the first and chief Being, who immediately produces that entity. The concurrence of God is not his in, mediate influx into a second or inferior cause, but it is an action of God immediately flowing into the effect of the creature, so that the same effect in one and the same entire action may be produced simultaneously by God and the creature.

Though this concurrence is placed in the mere pleasure or will of God, and in his free dispensation, yet he never denies it to a rational and free creature, when he has permitted an act to his power and will. For these two phrases are contradictory, "to grant permission to the power and the will of a creature to commit an act," and "to deny the divine concurrence without which the act cannot be done."

But this concurrence is to the act as such, not as it is a sin: And therefore God is at once the effector and the permittor of the same act, and the permittor before he is the effector. For if it had not been the will of the creature to perform such an act, the influx of God would not have been upon that act by concurrence. And because the creature cannot perform that act without sin, God ought not, on that account, to deny the divine concurrence to the creature who is inclined to its performance. For it is right and proper that the obedience of the creature should be tried, and that he should abstain from an unlawful act and from the desire of obeying his own inclinations, not through a deficiency of the requisite divine concurrence; because, in this respect, he abstains from an act as it is a natural good, but it is the will of God that he should refrain from it as it is a moral evil.

http://www.godrules.net/library/arminius/arminius28.htm

Our actions have two causes, us and God. We specify, God gives existence. If I choose to put on a blue shirt, I specify that the shirt is on me and not in my closet, and God causes the shirt to exist and not be nothing.

God is not acting through me to bring about the shirt being on me. That’s what Arminius means that God is not a mediate influx into the second or inferior cause. The reason for this is because God’s power to bring about the shirt’s being on me would be complete, lacking nothing. I wouldn’t contribute anything. So I would no longer be a secondary cause. If God influxes into secondary causes, He would be the only cause of everything, to the exclusion of all secondary causes.

Rather, as Arminius said, God acts immediately on the effect of the creature. The causation looks like this:

God > Me > Blue shirt
.......God.......^

I am causing the blue shirt to be on me, God is causing it to exist. So God alone creates and conserves. Freewill does not create, as the effects have a double cause, us and God. God alone gives existence.

Romans 11:36 For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen.

Acts 17:28 For in him we live, and move, and have our being

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