Political philosophers are generally sceptical about political obligation. Many see the standard stories about how states obligate their citizens as false. There is now a significant group of ‘philosophical anarchists’ in this field, those who believe the state altogether lacks the right to rule (e.g. Simmons Reference Simmons1981; Reference Simmons2000, ch. 6; Green Reference Green1988, 220–247; Raz Reference Raz2009, ch. 12; Huemer Reference Huemer2012).Footnote 1 Much of the work in political philosophy is devoted to answering philosophical anarchists with normative theories that answer their criticisms, and the debate has proved to be quite vexing.
Still, the debate about whether the state has the normative power to obligate its citizens is central to political philosophy.
Now, some think of God as an entity like the state. They see God as a legitimate authority who can tell us what to do, obligate us to obey his commands, and hold us accountable for our failures. This idea seems to explain the appeal of ‘divine command theory’, the view that all our moral obligations are explained in some way by God's commands (e.g. Adams Reference Adams2002; Evans Reference Evans2004 and Reference Evans2014; Baggett and Walls Reference Baggett and Walls2011 and Reference Baggett and Walls2016; Hare Reference Hare2015; Flannagan Reference Flannagan2021). This view relies on God having the legitimate authority to issue morally binding commands; without that authority, God lacks the power to create these duties:
[Divine command theory] requires that God possess legitimate authority, so that his commands (or expressed requirements) establish obligations for his human creatures. But it is clear that some normative principle or principles must be the basis of this authority. For a [divine command theory] to be plausible, there must be some reasonable answer to the question, ‘Why should a human being obey the commands of God?’ (Evans Reference Evans2014, 64)
In Evans's view, the question ‘Why obey God?’ is not prudential (e.g. ‘What is in it for me?’). The question is fundamentally normative: how does God have the power to obligate us?Footnote 2 What is the explanation of God's legitimate authority over us? If political philosophers are engaged in the problem of political authority, we can call this the problem of divine authority. The problem of divine authority is a problem for any theist who believes God has the normative power to generate moral obligations through his commands, regardless of whether divine commands exhaust the moral domain.Footnote 3
In my view, theists have paid too little attention to this problem. Many non-theists (and even some theists) have plausible reasons for thinking that there is no good solution to the problem of divine authority, often for reasons appealed to by the philosophical anarchists (Murphy Reference Murphy2002). This is not surprising: Both the state and God are cases where one party claims authority over another, so the objections to the former will often apply to the latter.Footnote 4 The objections have certainly piled on to the case of divine authority (e.g. Murphy Reference Murphy2002; Wielenberg Reference Wielenberg2016, ch. 2; Huemer Reference Huemer, William, Wielenberg and Johnson2021, 153).
Without a theory of divine authority that answers these objections, theists are without a coherent story of how God's commands obligate us, a feature most theists want to maintain about God. One goal of this article is to show that the problem of divine authority is still very much a problem.
The other goal of this article is to argue for the following solution to that problem: God's authority over us is explained by the fact that he is our parent. God is our parent because the causal account of parenthood is true, which is the view that someone acquires parental duties to a child if they are causally responsible for the existence of that child (Porter Reference Porter2012 and Reference Porter2014). In virtue of being our parent, God incurs specific duties towards us and certain rights over us that he needs to fulfil these duties. The content of divine duties, minimally, is to treat us consistently with our worth.
However, these duties are not unique to God since everyone has duties to treat one another consistently with their worth (Wolterstorff Reference Wolterstorff2008, ch. 11). The way God's duties are unique is that, in virtue of being causally responsible for our existence as our parent, he has a duty to enter a relationship with us.
In typical cases where someone has a duty to enter a relationship with another person, there is usually no barrier. Parents who procreate a child can start rearing their child; friends, given mutual consent, can begin being friends. However, things are different with God: He is holy, and we are not.
This means there is something about us – sinfulness, impurity, or some other feature – that God must change before we can have a relationship with him.Footnote 5 For God to make this change, he must have the requisite authority to make us suitable for a relationship with him. This authority, minimally, encompasses God's powers to issue morally obligatory commands directed at this change and hold us accountable for our obedience to them.
The rest of this article proceeds as follows. First, I sketch an account of what divine authority is. Second, I present my causal account of parenthood that grounds both the duties of procreators to their offspring and God's duties to those whom he creates as duties of respect. Third, I describe God's task – which gives him practical authority over us – as one of making us fit for a relationship with him given his holiness. Fourth, I show how my view has comparative advantages over other arguments for divine authority in the literature and how it has important payoffs for other problems in philosophy of religion. (Readers interested in the argument proper should just read up to (and including) the section ‘The relational problem of holiness’. The rest of the article consists of objections, comparative advantages, and payoffs of the view.)
Before I begin, let me make one important prefatory comment. While I am a Christian and have developed my view of divine authority with the Christian tradition in mind, what I say here applies to any tradition that sees God as holy, our creator, and our ultimate authority. If another tradition denies these three features, my argument either will not work or needs to be tweaked. For now, I assume these three descriptors (i.e. God is holy, authoritative, and our creator) all describe God.
Divine authority
Standardly, there are two kinds of authority: theoretical (or epistemic) and practical.Footnote 6 Theoretical authorities give us reasons for belief. The paradigmatic case of a theoretical authority is an expert in a field, someone we might say is an authority on a subject. In this view, Alexander Pruss is an authority on the principle of sufficient reason. If Pruss tells me some fact about the principle, then given his expertise, I have reason to believe that fact. On the other hand, If theoretical authorities give us reasons for belief, practical authorities give us reasons for action. Generally, parents count as authorities over their children in this sense.Footnote 7 If I tell my son to clean his room, my telling-him-so gives him a reason to clean his room that is, ceteris paribus, decisive.Footnote 8
The problem of divine authority concerns God's practical authority, not his theoretical (or epistemic) authority. Even if God's omniscience gives us decisive reason to believe what he says, it does not necessarily give us decisive reason to do what he commands. If God commands us to φ, we can rest assured that φ’ing is the right thing for us to do (Murphy Reference Murphy2002, ch. 2). But this is not sufficient to show God has practical authority because the rightness of φ’ing here is not explained by God's commanding us to φ. For God to count as practically authoritative, the rightness of φ’ing must be at least partiallyFootnote 9 explained by the fact that God commanded us to φ.
Moreover, while practical authority requires a certain kind of control over reasons for action, it does not require merely causal control (Murphy Reference Murphy2002, 15). Bullies, for example, do causally control reasons for action when they threaten to beat students up for their lunch money. However, bullies do not count as practical authorities because the bully's demand for lunch money does not explain the rightness of handing over the lunch money. Instead, the reason students should hand over their lunch money is to avoid pain and suffering. But suppose a genuine practical authority commanded a student to hand over their lunch money. In that case, the fact that it is right for the student to hand over the money is at least partially explained by the practical authority's command itself.
There are, of course, ways to alter some features of this account. Natural lawyers will want to say the upshot of an authoritative command is a decisive reason for action explained in terms of acting reasonably or unreasonably, a concept fundamental to their explanations of moral rightness and wrongness. Positivists will deny this in favour of the view that authoritative commands give rise to moral obligations that are not reducible to acting reasonably. For simplicity, I will use the natural law convention of calling the upshot of an authoritative command a ‘decisive reason’ to obey.
However, readers sympathetic to other traditions may substitute whatever follows from authoritative commands on their preferred conception.
That is practical authority. Our next question is: how does someone acquire this authority over another person? One popular answer is that such authority is acquired through consent. Through a contract, I subject myself to the authority of my manager to do what she asks me while on the job.
By signing up with a personal trainer, I place myself under her authority to do a set of exercises while we are in the gym. And so on. But consent is not the only way someone can acquire practical authority. Some of the most significant relationships of authority do not depend on consent at all and make use of some other moral principle. For our purposes, we can consider the moral principles that justify parental authority.
The causal account of parenthood
The parent–child relationship is one where parents appear, just in virtue of being a child's parents, to have practical authority over their children. Parents may relate to their children in ways beyond being a practical authority (e.g. as an intimate friend, confidante, etc.). However, they are generally not less than someone who has the standing to tell their children what to do and hold them accountable for their obedience. Most see this as a fundamental feature of the parent–child relationship.Footnote 10
The big question about these relationships is: how do parents acquire this authority over their children? This is the problem of parental authority.Footnote 11 While the fact that parents generally do have rights is a basic commitment for most people, justifying the arrangement that grants parents the standing to make all kinds of demands and decisions for children is not straightforward.
Philosophers have tried to meet this problem by proposing several moral principles that justify the authority parents exercise over their children, one of which comes from the causal account of parenthood that I prefer.Footnote 12
The causal account finds its genesis in Kant. For Kant, procreation is the act ‘by which we have brought a person into the world without his consent and on our own initiative, for which deed the parents incur an obligation to make the child content with his condition so far as they can’ (Kant Reference Kant1999, 28). The idea, roughly, is that because procreators are the ones who are morally responsible for their child's vulnerable condition, they are the ones who incur the duties to make sure that child's life goes well (Porter Reference Porter2012, 66; Puls Reference Puls2016, 57).Footnote 13 This principle is commonplace in other domains, as when someone injures another person in a car accident, the person incurs duties to help the victim and make restitution to them (Puls Reference Puls2016, 58–59).Footnote 14 Just as perpetrators incur duties to make up for the ways they have made their victims vulnerable, so too do causal procreators incur duties to help their children through their vulnerabilities.
Of course, the difference between these two cases is that parental duties are substantially more demanding because children are vulnerable in many ways. Children need their parents to direct them in virtually every aspect of their lives for many years. Children need their parents to make all kinds of educational, medical, social, and other kinds of decisions on their behalf. Even when children get older and become more competent, they still rely on their parents for food, water, shelter, and the like. Parenting is demanding; to do it well, parents need relatively broad discretion over what they may and may not do with their children. If they have a duty to care for their children, they will need the authority to take them to the doctor's office, choose their meals, have them go outside (instead of staying inside all day), and the like. That is to say, if parents are going to fulfil their weighty parental duties, they will need some relatively wide parental rights (Anscombe Reference Anscombe1981, 145).Footnote 15 Parental authority at least contains all those rights parents need to fulfil these tasks.Footnote 16
Divine, causal parenthood
My central claim is that God counts as a parent in this sense over every human being.
Though procreators are the proximate causes of their child's existence, there is also a significant way in which God is the cause of the child, too. God has created everything, including the procreators and their procreative powers. Scripture, too, has strong evidence that God is in some way intimately involved in our development in the womb (e.g. Jeremiah 1:5). I will not settle on a robust account of how, exactly, God is the cause of our existence. However, I hope the view is intuitive enough for the reader to chart her way of affirming the point.Footnote 17
If this is right, what follows for God's relation to us? If procreators incur duties to their offspring in virtue of being causally responsible for their existences, and God is also jointly causally responsible for their existences, then a fortiori God also incurs duties towards the offspring as well. That is exactly my view. The way God has practical authority over us is not a function of his owning us, being able to punish us, or our owing debts of gratitude to him. Instead, God has practical authority over us because he needs it to fulfil the parental duties he incurred when he created us.
Some might balk at the thought of God having duties, let alone to us. Classical theists, for example, might object to this proposal because it would either require seeing God as a moral agent (Davies Reference Davies2006, 88–101; Feser Reference Feser2009, 125–126; Pouivet Reference Pouivet2018, 6) or because it is incompatible with one of God's perfections (Murphy Reference Murphy2017, 70–75). Divine command theorists, too, might object because God having obligations implies that he is subject to an authority above him to whom he is accountable (Alston Reference Alston and Beaty1990; Adams Reference Adams2002, 158) or that God can somehow command himself to do something (Maitzen Reference Maitzen and Sterba2017, 145).Footnote 18 Fortunately, there is an alternative account of God's parental authority that at least sidesteps the worry that God cannot have any duties to us.
One duty God might have is a duty to himself always to act in accordance with his character. For example, any action incompatible with love is an action that is off-limits for God to perform in virtue of this duty he has to himself. Now, when God elects to create a person, God creates a highly vulnerable person with various needs. If God were to abandon this person and his needs forever, we might plausibly think that God is not acting lovingly – but, instead, cruelly – in doing this. In fact, we might think the only loving action in this circumstance is for God to (in some way) take care of this person by seeing to it that his life goes well. After all, humans are people with deep worth, and God's creating someone with deep worth and then choosing not to engage with that person might be disrespectful and wrongful (Wolterstorff Reference Wolterstorff2008, 296–299). God, then, incurs an additional duty to himself to take care of the person he created, which means he also needs a certain set of rights over the person to properly fulfil this duty, even if that duty is to himself alone. This bundle of rights would constitute God's authority over the person and would be justified in virtue of God's duties to himself rather than to the child.
Once we decide whether divine duties are to God himself or to others, we can ask: what exactly are these duties to do? We have a general idea of what it looks like for procreative parents to fulfil their duties to their children, but it is not forthcoming as to how God would fulfil his parental duties to us. We would think that parents often have duties to prevent certain kinds of suffering for their children. In contrast, God may not (e.g. parents who were somehow capable of preventing their child from dying of cancer might have a duty to prevent this, whereas God may not have this duty even if he is omnipotent). So, determining the content of divine duties is admittedly a bit of a mystery to me.
Duties of respect
Nonetheless, we can start with a general duty that everyone has: Respect others. I follow Nicholas Wolterstorff and Jean Hampton in thinking that what it is to wrong another person is to treat them disrespectfully, which is to treat them as less than what they are worth. In their view, ‘A person wrongs another if and only if (while acting as a responsible agent) she treats him in a way that is objectively. . . disrespectful of [that person's] worth’ (Murphy and Hampton Reference Murphy and Hampton1998, 52; author's italics). Wolterstorff offers several clarifications of Hampton's claim: First, disrespect is determined by the victim's actual worth and not merely by what she believes her worth is; second, disrespectful actions are often determined by context (e.g. my shaking your right hand may count as respectful in some cultures, disrespectful in others); third, disrespect always focuses on some good-making feature of the person (e.g. refusing to bow to a king disrespects him as king).Footnote 19
I take it as a primitive fact that all human beings are very valuable, though I am agnostic about why we are valuable.Footnote 20 Sufficient for my purposes is the thought that humans are at least valuable enough to where their parents disrespect them if they refuse to enter a relationship with them without good reason (Olsaretti Reference Olsaretti, Sobel, Vallentyne and Wall2017, 72). This idea seems to support the widespread condemnation of fathers who abandon their families as ‘deadbeat dads’. Among other things, deadbeats disrespect their children by refusing to have a relationship with them for insufficient reasons (e.g. because they want another life, because children are too much work, etc.).Footnote 21 I maintain, then, the following thesis:
Relationship: If someone is causally responsible for a child's life, they have a duty to enter an intimate relationship with that child. To fail this duty without good reason disrespects the child.Footnote 22
Now, procreation entails the creation of deeply vulnerable persons. While the vulnerabilities are most obvious concerning a baby's physical needs, humans also have deep relational needs that stick with them their entire lives. On this score, Olsaretti writes
To be morally responsible for a child's existence is not only to create a vulnerable creature: it is also to create a vulnerability of a particular kind, due to the fact that in virtue all of an infant's needs, and many of a young child's ones, both immediate and developmental, have a strong relational component. By [this], I mean that the . . . satisfaction of these needs requires that they be met in the context . . . of an ongoing, stable relationship with one or few caring adult persons. (Olsaretti Reference Olsaretti, Sobel, Vallentyne and Wall2017, 74)
This fact is widely granted as a justification for the family – as opposed to some other institution like a kibbutz – and supported by work in adolescent psychology (e.g. Gerhardt Reference Gerhardt2004). The first thought, then, is that persons are vulnerable due to their relational needs.
Moreover, those responsible for the existence of a given person stand in a non-fungible relationship with that person. Their love and affection for their child is not the same as anyone else's, even if, in principle, an adoptive parent can come along and love the child just as well in their own intimate relationship.Footnote 23 This idea is intuitive. For example, if I injure another person through reckless driving, my visiting them in the hospital expresses something differently from, say, my sending a proxy on my behalf. What makes it unique for me to visit is that I caused the victim's predicament. If I fail to visit the victim, my failure is plausibly disrespectful towards her. I placed this person under a serious need and, without any good reason, I chose not to visit them. I have abdicated my duty to them that I incurred by causing their neediness.
Something similar happens in procreation. Parents create a relationally needy child. There are, of course, ways adoptive parents can meet the child's relational needs, but there is something distinct about the procreator's failure to meet those needs that can plausibly be viewed as disrespectful towards the child (Moschella Reference Moschella2017, ch. 1; Olsaretti Reference Olsaretti, Sobel, Vallentyne and Wall2017, 75). Unless the procreators have sufficiently weighty reasons – whatever those may be – that justify the procreators placing their children in an alternative childrearing arrangement, children are justified in feeling rejected and disrespected by their parents.Footnote 24 They can rightfully feel hurt by the fact that their parents chose to live their lives apart from them.
Divine duties of respect
What does Relationship mean for God? Straightforwardly, since God is causally responsible for our existence, Relationship says he has a duty to enter a relationship with us. I think this is true, but I think the justification for why Relationship applies to God is slightly different from why it applies to human procreators. As I mentioned, babies have deep relational needs to be cared for by parents who love and nurture them. But humans, throughout all stages of their development, have relational needs that are only satisfiable by God himself.
Saint Augustine, for example, famously said that our hearts are restless until they find rest in God himself. Similarly, C. S. Lewis claimed that we have a deep-seated desire that nothing in the world can satisfy, which was evidence that God existed as the only thing that could satisfy it.Footnote 25 We do not need to endorse Lewis's argument for theism from this desire to get this point; after all, I have been assuming that God exists. However, the fact that we have a deep-seated desire for something beyond ourselves – something that we recognize nothing purely natural could fully satisfy – is well attested by many people.Footnote 26 Given Relationship, God appears to have a straightforward way of fulfilling his duty to us. He satisfies our deepest relational needs by entering an intimate relationship with those he created.Footnote 27
The relational problem of holiness
There is, however, one obstacle to God's entering a relationship with us: God is holy, and we are not. The finer details of how God's holiness is an obstacle to his relating to us will depend on how we understand holiness.Footnote 28 Plenty of extant accounts of holiness see this attribute in different ways. God's holiness might mean God's divinity (Tillich Reference Tillich1978, 215; Sproul Reference Sproul1985, 38), his being set apart (Harrington Reference Harrington2001, 14–18), his moral perfection (Kant Reference Kant1999, 4:449), his personality (Jones Reference Jones1961, 144), or his being the highest possible instance of the highest possible kind of being (Smith Reference Smith1988, 511–513).Footnote 29 God's holiness might also pick out those features God has that make our overwhelming attraction to and separation from God fitting (Murphy Reference Murphy2021, ch. 2 and Reference Murphy2023, 404). I will not take a stand here on a robust account of holiness; instead, I just want to focus on a relatively uncontroversial fact about holiness that is compatible with these accounts: Our unholiness is a relational barrier between God and us. Insofar as this is true, we have a problem that only God can solve.Footnote 30 Call this the relational problem of holiness.
What does the divine solution to the relational problem of holiness look like? Well, holy beings can only relate to holy beings. So, if unholy beings will ever relate to God, God must make them holy. At least in the Christian tradition, God making us holy is a central part of the religious life.Footnote 31 Of course, we need not accept the idea that the goal of the religious life is merely to become morally perfect; that is a view of holiness under serious scrutiny as of late, and we have already seen that the Kantian view of holiness is only one among several ways of understanding holiness (Murphy Reference Murphy2021, ch. 2). But we can say, minimally, that a fundamental part of the Christian life is God's task of making us into the sort of beings that overcome our weaknesses and vices so we can properly be in a relationship with him. Christians call this process sanctification, whereby we become holier through divine assistance. Again, while extant accounts of holiness differ in their finer details, they all seem to converge on our sanctification including an improvement in our characters.
My contention is that God cannot fulfil this task – namely, the task of sanctifying us – without having practical authority over us. If God cannot give us decisive commands and hold us accountable for our compliance with them, then there is no way he will be able to shape our characters and desires in the ways that they ought to be shaped. This idea may strike those with a high view of divine omnipotence as false. Indeed, we might think God could transform our character through divine fiat. However, I defer to the large group of philosophers of religion who think God cannot override our wills in this way without violating our dignity or insufficiently forming our characters correctly (e.g. Walls Reference Walls1992; Judisch Reference Judisch2009, 170; Timpe Reference Timpe2018). If these philosophers are right, God cannot merely zap us into holiness; he must engage our wills and form us into becoming holy.Footnote 32
So, God must engage our wills and shape our characters so that we may become holy. He does this by providing a moral education, whether directly through revelation or indirectly through human teachers.Footnote 33 To do this, he gives us recognizable, authoritative commands to do the sorts of things befitting of holy people. This is just a standard, Aristotelian sort of moral education where an authority helps her pupil obtain a set of virtues through the pupil's obedience (e.g. Kristjánsson Reference Kristjánsson2015). Perhaps when the pupil matures, she need not rely on a stringent list of rules to guide her conduct because she is so in tune with God's will for her in complex circumstances that she can act without her teacher's assistance. But the goal is for God to form our wills towards holiness through a moral education led by his authoritative commands. Depending on how naturally suited we are to becoming holy, we may not be able to complete this process until sometime in the afterlife (e.g. Walls Reference Walls2012 thinks libertarian sanctification requires purgatory).Footnote 34 But as we progress further and further in our sanctification, we will get closer to the optimal union with God that our final end calls us to.
Contingent or necessary authority?
Now, from here, God may have practical authority in two ways: Either God has practical authority over us necessarily or contingently. If God is necessarily authoritative over us, then whether he is authoritative does not depend on our willingness or consent to be in a relationship with God. On this construal, God's creating beings with deep relational needs is sufficient to ground God's authority over us. But if God is only contingently authoritative over us, then God's authority will depend on something else (e.g. whether we choose to consent or not). This construal would be a much weaker thesis that most theists – including myself – would reject as paying insufficient respect to God's standing over us.Footnote 35 Minimally, it seems strange that there could be a large set of people over whom God lacks authority. Luckily, I think the upshot of my argument is that God necessarily has authority over us: When God creates beings like us, he incurs the duty to enter a relationship with us that gives him the authority to make us into fitting participants in that relationship regardless of our consent.Footnote 36
However, we might wonder whether God's necessary authority is compatible with the nature of his task, which requires (in large part) our submission to his will. If sanctification requires our consent, God's authority over us may appear contingent because it depends on our will. Indeed, many Christians believe sanctification requires our free giving of ourselves to God.Footnote 37 On this way of thinking, God cannot change us by divine fiat because our changing into new kinds of people necessarily requires an engagement with our wills.Footnote 38 While I agree with this view, I do not think this spells trouble for God necessarily having practical authority over us. Whether we comply with God's attempts at forming us into this kind of person – that is, whether we freely submit our wills in the way Lewis suggests – does not change whether God has authority.
We can see this by considering the rebel.Footnote 39 The rebel says, ‘I do not want to be made holy, I do not want a relationship with God, and I do not want to do the things God is telling me to do.’ If God only has authority over us to make us fitting for a relationship with him, what happens when the rebel refuses God and denies that he wants to be in a relationship with him? In response, I reaffirm a common assumption in various strands of traditional Christian anthropology: every person God creates has the final end of union with God.Footnote 40 If this idea is true, the rebel does, in her heart of hearts, long for union with God. The rebel's occurrent desires may fog this dispositional desire of hers, and conceptual confusion about what satisfies those desires can occlude this desire, but it is there.
If we stick with the parent–child analogy, the rebel is in the position of an especially disobedient child who is still vulnerable and in need of parenting, and the parent has her work cut out for her. Even if a parent somehow knows that her child will always be vicious, she still retains the authority to continue giving authoritative commands to her child. I see the same dynamic occurring between God and us. God may never get the rebel to repent, but he still has the authority to try. And in both cases, disobedience only says something about the authorities' success in achieving their goals, not whether they have the authority to carry out their tasks. So, even if most people fail to submit themselves to God, that says nothing about whether God has authority over them. God's authority only relies on his duty to enter a relationship with us and the nature of the task he must complete to fulfil this duty, even if we end up being rebels.Footnote 41
Is parental authority too different from divine authority?
My account of divine authority is set apart from others because it takes the idea that God has revealed himself to us as our parent very seriously. The natural objection to the account is that divine authority is too different from parental authority for the latter to serve as a coherent model for the former. For example, some claim that parental authority appears to run out throughout a child's lifetime, whereas divine authority should remain constant (Aronson Reference Aronson2022, 17). Locke, for example, famously thought that parental authority only lasted until children developed their faculty of reason (Treatises II 59, 67–68; see also Layman Reference Layman2014, 111).
However, it is not obvious that merely human parental authority disappears in the way Locke and others suggest. Rivka Weinberg, for example, has argued that parents have duties to minimize the risks they have imposed on their child through procreation, and these risks plausibly last (to varying degrees) for the child's entire life (Weinberg Reference Weinberg2018, 55). There are good reasons to think that the parental task lasts for a lifetime. However, the way parents fulfil this task will look different depending on their child's development. God's task is especially of the sort that lasts for our lifetimes. His task is to make us holy, and unless Wesleyan perfectionism – (i.e. the view that we can become perfectly holy in our antemortem lifetimes) is true, we cannot achieve perfect holiness in this lifetime. So, my view says God's task will last our entire lifetime in a way that pays due respect to the structure of parental authority in standard cases. Just as parental authority lasts for as long as their task remains incomplete, so does divine authority.
Another candidate reason to reject divine authority as parental authority is that the scope of divine authority seems much wider than parental authority (Aronson Reference Aronson2022, 18). Whereas God seems able to command various ritual sacrifices, it seems implausible that parental authority allows human procreators to demand these sorts of actions of their children (Aronson Reference Aronson2022, 18). But my account defines God's task as making us holy, which is seemingly much more demanding and robust than the one merely human procreators have for their children. Minimally, human procreators appear to have duties to provide for their children's basic material needs and help them become virtuous in an important set of ways. However, holiness seems like a task only God is fitted to fulfil, even though human procreators may play a supplemental role in making their children holy. The difference in tasks for each kind of parent provides a plausible explanation of why the scopes of authority have different sizes.Footnote 42
Comparative advantages
I now want to show how my argument solves or avoids many problems characteristic of other arguments for divine authority. Let me start with two quick rejections of common (but false) arguments for divine authority; after these, I will move on to more substantive arguments in the literature.
Omnipotence and omniscience
First, my argument denies that God is authoritative over us because he has the power to punish us – this would only get us merely causal control of reasons for action (Baggett and Walls Reference Baggett and Walls2011, 34; Huemer Reference Huemer, William, Wielenberg and Johnson2021). In my view, God has the right to hold us accountable for our obedience to his commands, but such a right is not the explanation why God has authority over us. Second, my argument denies that God is authoritative over us because he is omniscient and therefore knows what is good for us to pursue – this would be merely theoretical authority (Murphy Reference Murphy2002, ch. 2). I affirm God's omniscience. This perfection ensures that God will never lead us wrong in his attempts to make us holy. But again, omniscience plays little role in my argument for why God has authority over us.
Gratitude
Now for the more substantive arguments. God might be authoritative over us in virtue of the infinite debt of gratitude we owe to him (Evans Reference Evans2014, 64). Given that children are generally under debts of gratitude because of the goods parents have given them, we are under an infinite debt of gratitude to God since he is the beneficiary of every good we have. But the upshot of this argument is something other than divine authority. Arguments for divine authority from gratitude only grant God authority over us contingent on whether we act on appropriate expressions of thanksgiving. Gratitude gives us a powerful reason to submit to God's authority, and we would be acting like ingrates if we refused to act on this.
Nonetheless, it does not follow from merely possessing this powerful reason that we are under God's authority (Murphy Reference Murphy2002, 118). Compare: gratitude might require me to give my friend my baseball card collection after she saved my life, but the collection is not hers until I transfer the collection over to her (Murphy Reference Murphy2002, 118). Until I give away my collection to my friend or until I submit myself to God's authority, I am only acting like an ingrate. This is certainly an indictment of my character, but the indictment is not explained by someone having practical authority over me in these cases. My argument, however, does not face this problem. Whereas arguments from gratitude can only grant God contingent authority, my argumentative upshot is that God necessarily has authority over us regardless of whether we appropriately respond to his goodness. God has a parental duty to us and acquires the practical authority over us to fulfil this duty, and nothing about this process obtaining relies on whether we recognize or submit to it.Footnote 43
The highest good
Another argument is that God might be authoritative over us because a relationship with him is our highest good, and following God's commands will enable us to flourish (Evans Reference Evans2014, 65).Footnote 44 But this is insufficient for the kind of divine authority I am after. Suppose we know of a personal trainer who would overwhelmingly change our lives for the better if we submitted to his authority. From this fact alone, though, it would not follow that the trainer is authoritative over us (Darwall Reference Darwall2013). This argument only proves that submitting to the trainer's authority would be good for us, but it fails to establish that the trainer's say-so can generate reasons for action for us.
Similarly, from the mere fact that submitting to God's authority would be good for us, it does not follow that we are, therefore, under God's authority.
David Baggett and Jerry Walls make a similar argument, though they appeal to all of God's perfections as a reason to think God has authority (Reference Baggett and Walls2011, 122–123). They write, ‘In view of his nature as a perfect being, there are no good grounds for doubting his authority . . . If all rational withholdings are blocked, we ought to accept God as an authority’ (Baggett and Walls Reference Baggett and Walls2011, 123). But there are two ways of reading the upshot of this argument. The first is that since God is perfect, he is authoritative over us. But this does not follow unless authority is among God's perfections or authority is entailed by God's perfections, and there are good reasons to reject both possibilities (Murphy Reference Murphy2001). The second way of reading this upshot is what I think follows: God's perfection means we have good reasons to accept him as an authority over us for our good, and we would be acting unreasonably if we failed to do so. But that is not the same thing as claiming that God, in virtue of being perfect, is authoritative over us. Instead, all Baggett and Walls have proven is that God's perfection gives us reason to submit to God's authority. They have not proven, however, that God is, therefore, authoritative over us. There is a gap they must fill in. My argument does not rely on God being our highest good (even though it certainly does not deny it). Sufficient for my purposes is that God has a task and the practical authority to fulfil it.
Property rights
The last argument is that we might be under God's authority because we are his property (Evans Reference Evans2014, 65–66). Just as Locke thought (under certain conditions) we own something when we mix our labour with it, we might say God owns everything in virtue of creating all things ex nihilo (Evans Reference Evans2014, 66). The main reason this argument is unsuccessful is that ownership-rights do not entail practical authority over what is owned. At least on the Lockean picture Evans is drawing from, all that follows from the fact that I am God's property is that ‘no one may take me from God or otherwise prevent God from doing as he likes with me unless God grants permission’ (Layman Reference Layman2014, 108).Footnote 45 To get divine authority, though, we would have to pair the Lockean account of property ownership with another normative principle that would generate duties of obedience upon the possessed.Footnote 46 My view does not rely on God owning us (even though Locke – the paradigmatic causal theorist about parenthood – seems to have thought this). God's authority over us starts not with a right (like the property account does) but a duty. Given Relationship, our worth requires God to enter an intimate relationship with us. Downstream from this duty comes God's rights as a practical, parental authority over us that is aimed at making us holy persons capable of a relationship with him.Footnote 47
Payoffs
In this last section, I show how thinking of divine authority as parental authority has significant payoffs for other problems in philosophy of religion that are not directly about the problem of divine authority.
The problem of abhorrent commands
My argument solves the worry that God could abuse his authority to give morally abhorrent commands. Some have objected to divine command theory that it implies we would have a moral obligation to do something vile if God commanded it (Antony Reference Antony, Garcia and King2009, 71). The general reply to this objection is that God's necessary goodness precludes him from ever commanding anything inconsistent with his goodness (e.g. Evans Reference Evans2014, 92). But this reply seems only to kick the problem back: even if God would not command some morally abhorrent action, ‘divine command theory still implies the counterfactual that, if God did command us to [do a vile action], then we would have a moral obligation [to do so]. That is absurd’ (Sinnott-Armstrong Reference Sinnott-Armstrong2009, 106; also Wielenberg Reference Wielenberg2005, 41–43, 48–49).Footnote 48 For these critics, one desideratum of our theistic ethics is that God necessarily – that is, in all possible worlds – will not command abhorrent actions, which is something divine command theorists seem unable to guarantee.
Some divine command theorists have advanced a tu quoque reply to this objection. That is, any normative theory – divine command theory, natural law, and the like – that counterfactually requires us to do something morally abhorrent does not change the moral status of that action (e.g. Pruss Reference Pruss2009, 437–439). So, the problem of counterfactual, morally required abhorrent actions is a problem for every normative theory and is not unique to divine command theory. If critics of divine command theory were to reject divine command theory because of this counterfactual, they would be proving too much by having to reject virtually every other moral theory. There is, however, a good amount of pushback against divine command theorists who have taken this route (e.g. Choo Reference Choo2019, 375–376; Reference Choo2023). Perhaps divine command theorists have overestimated just how many companions in guilt they really have.
One nice feature of my account, then, is that it offers a different way of solving this problem without relying on such a controversial solution. On my account, God's authority is strictly limited to those commands that will make us into beings fitting for a relationship with God. This is because God's authority over us is only to fulfil the task of making us holy; there is no other purpose for divine authority over us. Therefore, morally abhorrent commands – the sort of commands that would make us unfit for a relationship with a perfect God – are ruled out as possibilities for God.
He may only use his authority to make us holy, and commands not aimed at this end are not authoritative over us in all possible worlds. To those who object to there even being a counterfactual where God could rightfully command a morally abhorrent act, I deny the counterfactual. Any command not aimed at our holiness is not something God could rightfully give.
The problem of political authority
Philosophical anarchists think there is no good argument for why the state has a right to rule. Nonetheless, it seems to most people that the state is legitimate. Tyler McNabb and Jeremy Neill (Reference McNabb and Neill2019) have argued that these two facts – namely, there are no good secular arguments for political authority and the common seeming that the state is nonetheless legitimate – provide the foundation for an argument for theism from political authority. Suppose all secular arguments for political authority are implausible, and a theistic explanation of political authority – namely, one where God authorizes states to act in certain ways – is significantly more plausible. In that case, we have reason to think God exists and substantiates the widespread seeming that the state does have authority.
However, the problem with this argument is that it is incomplete. The argument says the state is authoritative because God authorized it, but it does not tell us how God has the authority to authorize the state. Moreover, McNabb and Neill's brief justification for divine authority is unsatisfactory. They write, ‘God does not need our permission in order to have authority over us. He has that authority just in virtue of being the world's creator’ (Reference McNabb and Neill2019, 5). But we have just seen that there is plenty of pushback against property-rights arguments like these in the literature. This is especially poignant in McNabb and Neill's case, as they co-sign Michael Huemer's arguments against political authority, yet Huemer himself explicitly denies the argument for divine authority they endorse.Footnote 49
So, we have an argument for political authority that needs to be completed. The proposal I offer here rounds off the argument in a way that should convince those wrestling with the problem of divine authority. Rather than relying on tendentious parts of the natural law tradition (or any of the other arguments I have surveyed in the previous section), my view thinks of God's authority over us as a legitimate parental authority. The problem of political authority can now be kicked back to the problem of divine authority satisfactorily for philosophical anarchists like Huemer.
Moreover, if McNabb and Neill are correct that political authority is authorized by God ‘from above’, so to speak, then we have a better understanding of what the job of political authority is (Wolterstorff Reference Wolterstorff2014). When we think about political authority – the paradigmatic kind of practical authority – every account starts with the same question: how do states become authoritative in the first place? The answer to this question usually provides the foundation for the rest of the story. If, for example, political authority is acquired by the consent of the governed, then the scope of the authority is likely to be limited to doing only those things to which the governed consent. If God's task is to make us holy, then his authorization of states to govern us should have something to do with making us holy. That does not necessarily mean these states will be anti-liberal; in fact, there are powerful reasons for thinking that liberal democracy is what we should expect if God authorizes states in this way (Wolterstorff Reference Wolterstorff2016). But because God may only use his authority over us to make us holy, the story about how states become authoritative through his authorization should have something to do with our holiness.
The duty to love God
William Bell and Graham Renz (Reference Bell and Renzforthcoming, 2) have recently argued that there is no moral obligation to love God. Their reasoning, in short, is that ‘relationships of intimacy should not be morally imposed, via duties and obligations, upon autonomous beings’. In their view, this common-sense principle governs all interpersonal relationships. For example, from the fact that Bob loves Alice, it does not follow that Bob has a right to Alice's reciprocated love.Footnote 50 Or, because I have sacrificed a great deal for you, it does not follow that I have a right to some expression of gratitude on your part. Your choosing not to thank me may show you as an ingrate, but you do not violate my rights just by acting like a bad person. The same sort of dynamic happens with God: from the fact God has a deep interest in a relationship with us, ‘it would be a leap of logic to conclude from this fact that God has a right to human beings’ seeking a union of love with him’ (Bell and Renz Reference Bell and Renzforthcoming, 5). Our refusing such a relationship may show us up as vicious, but God does not have a right to our entering the relationship. Therefore, the authors conclude that there is no duty to love God. If this is true, most traditional theists are mistaken in the widespread belief that we have a moral obligation to love God.
But my view offers a way around this critique that salvages this widespread belief. God's task, again, is to make us holy so that we may be in a relationship with him. This gives God the practical authority to command us to do whatever we need to do to become holy. One minimal requirement of becoming a holier person is to love what is good. If classical theism is true, then God is perfect goodness, and everything else good is only so through participation in God's perfect goodness. From this, it follows that a minimal requirement for becoming a holier person is to love God. And since God has the authority to command us to do something only if it will make us holy, it follows that God has the authority to command us to love him.Footnote 51 Christians believe God has done just that by giving the first and greatest commandment, that we should love God with all our being (e.g. Matthew 22:36–40).
Bell and Renz, however, might demur.Footnote 52 They may object,
Your view relies on a teleological account of duties, one where we have a moral obligation to love God because union with him is our final end (Bell and Renz Reference Bell and Renzforthcoming, 8). But we explicitly reject this view because it only gives us prudential reasons to love God, not the moral reasons we need to get a distinctively moral obligation to love God. On our deontological account, moral duties will perfectly correspond to moral rights (Reference Bell and Renzforthcoming, 3). So, it is not enough to show that loving God would be good for us because it fulfils our nature; more than this, we need to show that our duty to love God correlates with some right that God has against us. If your argument does not have this deontological conception of duties in mind, then your argument is not a solution to the problem we are raising.
In response, I have several things to say. First, while I deny my view relies on this account of duties, I understand why the objector thinks otherwise. After all, the fact that our final end is union with God plays an essential role in my account, which makes it easy to read this as the claim that we have a duty to pursue union with God because such a union will fulfil our nature. Still, this role differs from the final end's role in my argument. Instead, our final end's role in my argument is grounding God's parental duty to relate to us: God has created us with this final end, so he acquires a parental duty to see to it that we can fulfil it on pain of disrespecting us. So, our final end grounds God's duties to relate to us, not necessarily our duty to relate to him.
Second, I do not mean for my argument to rely on the kind of teleological duties Bell and Renz speak of; in fact, I have good reasons for trying to avoid those duties altogether. After all, I reject arguments for divine authority from God being our highest good because it seems to presuppose this account of duties: even if our submission to God would be very good for us because it fulfils our nature, it does not follow from this that we are therefore under God's authority. I try to close the gap between what is good for us and what is required of us by arguing that God has the rightful authority to issue morally obligatory commands to us aimed at our holiness, which means we have a correlative duty to obey those commands. In closing this gap, we do not need to worry about facts about our nature-fulfilment. Additionally, I affirm that everyone – even God – is obliged to respect others, and I say nothing about the fulfilment of our natures that would explain why this duty holds. This is especially important since God does not (necessarily) share our human nature, yet he has the same duty of respect as we do. So, I do not mean to ground the duty of respect in fulfilling some part of human nature.
But third, even with these considerations, I still intend my account to be able to accommodate both deontological conceptions of duties and the kind of duties Bell and Renz reject. We can see this by replacing my explanation of the duty of respect from an earlier section with that of other competitors. There are several possible meta-ethical explanations of how duties come about:
(1) Natural lawyers might say our duties are grounded in facts about what fulfils our natures so that we have a moral duty to φ if φ’ing fulfils an integral part of our nature.Footnote 53 (2) The Wolterstorffian account (that I have endorsed in this article) begins with facts about our value and works up from there to norms restricting how we are supposed to respond to those values (Reference Wolterstorff2008, 296–297). This is a value-first meta-ethic where value is the fundamental normative concept that grounds all our other downstream normative concepts (Wodak Reference Wodak2020).
But there is, lastly, (3) the reasons-first view, one where ‘the only fundamental elements of the normative domain, other notions such as good and ought being analyzable in terms of reasons’ (Scanlon Reference Scanlon2014, 2; quoted in Wodak, Reference Wodak2020, 49). On this view, our other normative notions (e.g. value) are downstream from the existence of reasons (Wodak Reference Wodak2020, 49). With this Reasons First framework in mind, we can explain why we have a duty to respect others by relying on our reasons. Because humans are reasoning creatures, we must treat them as such – that is, we are required to respect them – by acting on justifiable reasons (Scanlon Reference Scanlon1998, 177–178; Wong Reference Wong2020, 262).Footnote 54 If this is correct, then perhaps God's abandoning us counts as disrespectful, not because he is treating us as less than we are worth, but because he is failing to act on reasons that are justifiable to us.
Alternatively, perhaps our disobeying God is disrespectful because we cannot do so while acting on reasons justifiable to any other rational agent.
I think the Wolterstorffian story is true, and I have my own independent reasons for rejecting the natural lawyer and Reasons First explanations. Nonetheless, my argument does not strictly require the Wolterstorffian story. The natural lawyer can explain God's duty of respect by some fact about God's nature or our duty of respect by some fact about the fulfilment of our nature. Similarly, the Scanlonian Reasons-Firster can ground the duty of respect in the existence of the reasons we have. Either way, the duties of respect I rely on in this argument will play the same role: They will require God to give us the chance to relate to him. However, the cost of substituting the Wolterstorffian view with one of these conceptions is that the argument may lose out on its advantages over other extant arguments for divine authority. Especially if we use the natural lawyer's view, the argument no longer avoids the error of the ‘Highest Good’ argument for divine authority in the previous section and fails to address Bell and Renz's argument. So, while I reject the natural law view because it is too costly, readers who do not share these concerns are free to accept the view and plug it into my argument.
Beyond these meta-ethical worries, my view also better explains our duty to love God than other current views. For example, John Hare argues that our duty to love God is a necessary fact that is ‘known to be true just by knowing its terms’ (Reference Hare2015, 17). In Hare's view, the idea that we have a moral duty to love God is a fact that is analytically true from the fact that God is our highest Good and that we should love what is good. But others have rightly objected that Hare does not explain why we have a duty to love what is good (e.g. Choo Reference Choo2019, 377). This is a problem, as divine command theorists like Hare argue their view is preferable to rival meta-ethical theories because divine command theory's explanation of moral obligations is explanatorily better than, say, a secular moral realism that claims moral obligations are just irreducible features of reality (e.g. Shafer-Landau Reference Shafer-Landau2003; Wielenberg Reference Wielenberg2016; Huemer Reference Huemer, William, Wielenberg and Johnson2021). But once we include that God's task is to make us holy and his authority is circumscribed to accomplish this task, the explanatory lacuna is filled. We have a duty to love what is good because doing so is a necessary part of our becoming holy, something we have a duty to do to enjoy a union with God.Footnote 55
Conclusion
I have argued that seeing God as our parent solves the problem of divine authority and has significant payoffs for other parts of philosophy of religion dealing with theistic ethics. If God is our ultimate cause, he has a duty to be in a relationship with us. But because we are unholy and God can only relate to holy beings, he must have the practical authority over us necessary to fulfil this duty. Since God does have this duty to us, he also has the practical authority over us to make us holy.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Anne Jeffrey for her insightful guidance on the main argument behind this article and for reading every previous draft of it. Thanks also to my friends who gave me especially helpful input on this article at the Baylor Philosophy Department's weekly colloquium and the 2023 annual Evangelical Philosophical Society meeting. In particular, I thank Alex Pruss, Todd Buras, Harrison Lee, Joel Chopp, Nicholas Noyola, and Adam Lloyd Johnson for helping me think through my argument at these presentations. I am also grateful to Mark Murphy, Jonathan Rutledge, and Jordan Wessling for the helpful feedback they offered me over email. And, of course, I thank both reviewers who not only offered great feedback that improved the article but also offered incredibly kind words of encouragement in their reports.
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