Contingency, Freedom, and the Nature of God

Sarah Coakley, crediting Peter Geach, offers a analogy for reconciling the power of God with contingency and human freedom:

God is like a chess master playing an 8-year-old chess novice. There is a game with regularities and rules; and although there are a huge number of different moves that the child can make, each of these can be successfully responded to by the chess master—they are all already familiar to him. And we have no overall doubt that he is going to win.

More:

Thus, it is not that God has not intervened in the history of the evolutionary process to put right the ills of randomness and freedom. For in one sense God is "intervening" constantly—if by that we mean that God is perpetually sustaining us, loving us into existence, pouring God's self into every secret crack and joint of the created process, and inviting the human will, in the lure of the Spirit, into an ever-deepening engagement with the implications of the Incarnation, its "groanings" (Romans 8), for the sake of redemption.