Theological compatibilists have considered the will of God and creaturely wills to be aligned, such that divine election or determination does not undermine but rather preserves the free will of the creature. In the person of Jesus Christ this compatibility is held to be utterly flawless, and the human will of Christ to “follow after” or conform itself perfectly, and without sin, to the divine will. As a theological compatibilist I am persuaded by this largely Augustinian and Cyrillian Christology. However, critics may well wonder whether Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane does not make such a view implausible, perhaps incoherent, and leads to an undermining of a proper doctrine of atonement. This essay undertakes to examine the narratives of Gethsemane in light of this criticism, and to offer a reply.

Is it consistent to maintain that human free will is incompatible with determinism in the natural world while also maintaining that it is compatible with divine universal causation? On the face of it, divine universal causation looks like a form of determinism. And the intuitions that lead to incompatibilism about free will and natural determinism also lead to incompatibilism about free will and divine determinism. W. Matthews Grant resists this conclusion. Grant contends that we can understand all of God’s activity as an exercise of divine “libertarian” free will and can construe God’s actions as nothing over and above the (created) effects brought about. I argue that Grant’s attempted reconciliation of human free will and universal divine causation fails, and on two counts. First, Grant’s account of the interaction of divine and created agency is occasionalist; second, even if we assume Grant’s account successfully avoids the charge of occasionalism, it fails to reconcile divine agency with created free agency. The latter is illustrated by exploring the nature of the determination relation required by incompatibilist, agent-causal accounts of free will.

If theological determinism is true, then everything that occurs in our world is willed by God. Since there is clearly much suffering and sin in this world, the theological determinist seems forced to accept that suffering and sin are willed by God as well. This seems to lead to a troubling conclusion concerning our ordinary reactions to extreme suffering and serious sin in the world. Plausibly, we should be horrified by sin and suffering, but it also seems that we should be thankful whenever we believe God’s will is fulfilled. This sort of double-mindedness might seem problematic, either because it is conceptually or psychologically impossible, or because it is immoral to be thankful for sin and suffering. In this chapter, I argue that the problem of double-mindedness is not as bad as it might first appear, both because such a mental state seems appropriate in certain cases even if theological determinism is false, and because thankfulness for sins will not be common even in the lives of virtuous divine determinists.

The principle of sufficient reason (PSR) says that every contingent truth has an explanation. It is widely thought that if one strengthens "explanation" to "contrastive explanation," then the PSR entails modal fatalism – the view that no proposition is contingent. In a theistic context, this would force full theological determinism: of creaturely behavior by God and of divine behavior by the divine nature. I discuss about a dozen accounts of what could be meant by “contrastive explanation.” Some of them support these arguments and some do not. I argue, however, that we should not extend the PSR to contrastive explanation in any of the senses given.

According to the argument from gratuitous evil, if God were to exist, then gratuitous evil wouldn’t; but gratuitous evil does exist, so God doesn’t. We can evaluate different views of divine providence with respect to the resources they are able to bring to bear when encountering this argument. By these lights, theological determinism is often seen as especially problematic: the determinist is seen as having an impoverished set of resources to draw from in her attempts to respond to the argument from gratuitous evil. In particular, there is an important resource – an appeal to free will – that many have claimed is unavailable to the determinist. I argue that the determinist does not in fact suffer from this particular resource deficit. I do so by examining some recent work on determinist responses to the problem of evil, analyzing some of the ways in which they fall short, and proposing a new response that is informed by those shortcomings. This new response is built on an appeal to the reactive attitudes.

This essay attempts to provide a plausibly sound argument for theological incompatibilism, where (i) theological incompatibilism is the thesis that if theological determinism is true, then for any created agent S, any time t, and any true proposition p, it is not up to S at t whether p and (ii) theological determinism is the thesis that God’s willing what God wills necessitates and explains every other contingent fact. While the argument offered here is similar to other arguments for the same thesis, it is unique insofar as it invokes the technical notions of thorough ontological priority and metaphysically generative relations. In introducing and defining these technical notions, this essay draws on recent philosophical discussions of explanation, grounding, and ontological priority.

I raise two challenges for theological determinism. First, a prominent criticism of theological determinism holds that human moral responsibility is incompatible with theological determinism. Many theological determinists resist this criticism by maintaining that determinism is compatible with moral responsibility. I attempt to break new ground in this debate by arguing that the theological determinist cannot adequately avoid moral luck. I argue that opponents of theological determinism can embrace a truly luck-free notion of responsibility, on which nothing beyond the agent’s control impacts their praiseworthiness or blameworthiness. But theological determinists, insofar as they are not skeptics about human responsibility, are stuck accepting that luck impacts responsibility. Thus theological determinists are committed to intuitive unfairness, which their opponents can avoid. Second, although I grant that some free will theodicies are available to theological determinists, I argue that they cannot make use of the most attractive type of free will theodicy. Finally, I draw an interesting connection between my approach to moral luck and my preferred sort of free will theodicy.

Divine determinism has been an unpopular topic in recent theology – widely dismissed, habitually avoided. One might wonder, therefore, what a theological contribution to understanding this possibility might look like. Some have proposed that reflection on divine transcendence helps us avoid misunderstandings that put secondary, creaturely agency in competition with God’s. I argue that this “non-competitive” approach offers limited insight into the agential and theodical problems raised by divine determinism. Drawing on doctrines of election, I then explore the possibility that divine love itself might require determinism. If, having imagined specific characters in a particular story, God loves them and desires to bring them to life, God might find it necessary for history to take the directions required for them to come to be. This possibility challenges caricatures of a determining God as tyrannical and suggests that even divine authorship may face constraints in eliminating evil.

An important tradition of thinking about divine and human agency takes divine transcendence as key to reconciling human freedom with God’s universal causality. Proponents of this tradition, who often claim Aquinas as their inspiration, sometimes maintain that this “transcendence approach” (TA) offers a third way that defies classification as libertarian or compatibilist. I argue that, carefully defined, libertarianism and compatibilism are mutually exclusive and exhaustive options for those affirming free will, but that it is an open question whether a view that affirms free will alongside God’s universal causality is compatibilist or libertarian. I then consider the interesting strategies employed by proponents of TA and argue that they leave it unclear whether TA is a libertarian or compatibilist view. Finally, I argue that a consistent deployment of these strategies results in a version of TA that is clearly libertarian, but which maintains a strong view of divine sovereignty and providence.

The doctrine of creation ex nihilo gives some reason to support theological determinism. Intuitively, an eternal God who creates the entire history of the universe “at once” will determine every detail of the universe. Likewise, intuitively, a God who creates each time-slice of the universe will determine every detail of the universe. This conclusion cannot be avoided by supposing that creatures help determine the details of the universe, nor can it be avoided by supposing that God has middle knowledge of counterfactuals of freedom. It can be avoided by supposing that God issues non-specific decrees. However, this view yields a deity largely indifferent to the matters of concern to human beings.

Many philosophers are compatibilists about moral responsibility and (natural) determinism, which is to say that they think there can be morally responsible agents in worlds with deterministic laws. According to some of these philosophers, however, if God (rather than natural events/laws) determines everything that happens, then no human being is morally responsible for anything. On this combination of views, God’s setting everything up would undermine our moral responsibility, whereas being “set up” by chance would not undermine our moral responsibility. In this chapter, I argue that this combination of views is untenable, and my argument draws from recent work on the manipulation argument against (natural) compatibilism, especially from criticisms of the so-called “soft-line” reply to the manipulation argument.

In this chapter, I explore how an indeterminist/libertarian model and a determinist/compatibilist model fare with regards to understanding divine providence, with particular emphasis on the issue of the extent to which it is variously open on these views to hold that humanity (and each of us as individuals) is intended. Is it possible for someone who holds a view of divine providence that is “looser” than the meticulous view that comes when one sees the world through theological-deterministic lenses to see humanity in general and each of us as individuals as other than unintended? To what extent are we here “by accident”?

This Introduction serves to familiarize the reader with theological determinism, explaining what the view is, why so many past and present authors have found it fascinating, and how the chapters of this volume aim to explore it. It begins with a discussion of the view itself, especially focusing on the presence or absence of divine causation and intention within the definition of theological determinism. It then turns to the issue of motivation, noting that the view has found support from religious texts, a belief in causal determinism, and commitment to certain divine attributes, such as providence, knowledge, or aseity. The view has also had its detractors, of course. Historically, most objections have been rooted in one or both of two objections: that the view would eliminate the possibility of human free will and moral responsibility, and that the view would make God the author of sin. Recent work on this topic, including work in this volume, has expanded the scope of arguments, suggesting new reasons to accept the view, and new reasons to reject it. Finally, this Introduction provides an overview of the chapters of this volume.

This chapter explores the constraints that a commitment to the inevitability of sin places on an understanding of the existence and nature of human freedom, and the implications of this understanding for debates about divine providence. It is argued, first, that the New Testament univocally attests to the inevitability of sin, and second, that given this biblical witness, Christians should not be swayed by one reason commonly given for rejecting theological determinism: in order to preserve libertarian freedom for humans at large. Still, considerations regarding the inevitability of human sin leave untouched another common argument against theological determinism: that it makes God the author of sin. Considerations of the inevitability (and culpability) of sin, on the one hand, and concerns about divine authorship of sin, on the other, might push one toward an uncommon combination of compatibilism and theological indeterminism. However, given the apparent unfairness of punishing individuals for sins they could not have avoided committing, a position between standard compatibilism and free will skepticism is tentatively endorsed.

The reason the debate over divine providence has such a powerful resonance in the lives of ordinary people is that it touches deeply on their relationship with God, and in particular on the attitudes they have toward God: their trust in God, their love for God, their hope in God’s promises, and more. One way to approach the debate over divine providence is to start with an account of appropriate religious attitudes and reason about which accounts of divine providence can make sense of those attitudes. I focus on the religious attitude of trust in God. R. Zachary Manis has argued that theological determinism cannot make sense of certain types of trust in God that religious believers often do and should have: trusting God with their own salvation and the salvation of others whom they love. I argue that theological determinism can in fact make sense of these types of trust in God, drawing heavily on Kierkegaard’s idea that we ought to love others with God as the “middle term.” I go on to argue that views other than theological determinism also struggle to make sense of believers trusting God with their own salvation and the salvation of those whom they love.