The term “providence” refers to God’s detailed rule of the universe, to His provision for all things. Why should He pay attention to details? In particular, why should He take notice of all our doings and govern what happens to us? According to a certain common view of God, He doesn’t. At most He exercises “general” providence, for example setting up space and time and the sorts of regularities that occupy physicists, but not paying attention to us. Our ability to govern even our own small affairs is limited. How then can a Being in charge of the whole universe take notice when each sparrow falls, and number each hair on our heads? Besides, the great among us do not trouble themselves much with the affairs of their underlings. So wouldn’t God be above all that sort of thing?

Chapter two analyses world views, conceptions of time and practices of war from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This chapter provides a comparison and contrast with the time after 1650 and after 1800. Medieval world views emphasized certainty and predictability since everything was a part of Divine Providence and history proceeded along a given trajectory towards the return of Christ. However, there was considerable room for human agency that brought about change in the world. Without a free will, there would be neither sin nor grace. Contemporaries created rules and norms to make war more predictable and to hem in the workings of chance. During the Renaissance, thinking about predictability and the limits of human control advanced dramatically. Humanists used terms like Fortuna, Virtù and Decorum to conceptualize chance, human capability and the necessity of adapting to circumstances. The Protestant reformers argued that the world is essentially predetermined by God and humans have no freedom of choice. Paradoxically, this world view galvanized Protestants to political and strategic action in England, France, Germany and Scandinavia.

Ralston compares the works of Schleiermacher and al-Ghazali on the relationship of gratitude with divine providence. Ralston illustrates the utter dependency of gratitude with Schleiermacher’s own reflections at the death of his young son, Nathanael.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Netherlands emerged from the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) a weakened state, and anxieties about the decline of Republic expanded as a result. That same year, an outbreak of cattle plague emerged in the Republic. Originating in the eastern European steppes, this panzootic spread slowly across Europe following networks of war and trade. Centuries of landscape transformation in the Netherlands set the stage for this disaster, and weather associated with a changing climate conditioned its severity. The disease killed hundreds of thousands of cattle in the Republic, impacting Dutch urban and rural livelihoods. Between 1713 and 1720, state authorities, moralists, and farmers struggled to understand and manage the disease. This chapter investigates the social and environmental origins of cattle plague, as well as cultural and state response. State authorities based their strategies in environmentalist and contagionist theories of diseases transmission that varied across scale. Its impacts were far from uniform, but moralists framed cattle plague as a problem that affected the entire country, which reinforced narratives of Dutch decline. This chapter argues that causal stories explaining the origins and meaning of the disease both reinforced pessimistic decline narratives and prompted a universalist approach to medical responses.

In this chapter I explore a number of different proposals for how to define ‘divine determinism.’ I settle on one to guide the rest of the book, which was first offered by Heath White. On this account, divine determinism is the conjunction of two claims: (i) The facts about God’s will wholly determine every other contingent fact and (ii) the facts about God’s will explain every other contingent fact. I then turn to a brief overview of some motivations for divine determinism. I begin with philosophical motivations, including motivations arising from consideration of the principle of sufficient reason, divine sovereignty, divine power, divine knowledge, divine aseity, and divine providence. I then turn to motivations that are more closely tied to particular religious traditions, including ones related to prophecy, scriptural authorship, and specific scriptural passages. Finally, I investigate two different varieties of divine determinism: primary divine determinism and Edwardian divine determinism.