Voluntarism

Post last updated on November 19, 2024

Voluntarism refers to a philosophical assumption that initially arose in medieval Europe. It prioritizes will as the principal or dominant factor in the universe. The Franciscan friar, John Duns Scotus, for instance, extended his ideas about the significance of the will unto his description of God and divine action. “God could have chosen not to create, or to create a different world from this one. He could have given us different moral commandments. His laws are not rationally necessary. They are right because he commands them, not vice versa.”¹John M. Frame, A History of Western Philosophy and Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2015), 156.

Scotus’ influence in the 13^th century was eventually evidenced in men who would follow him, such as William of Ockham and Gabrel Biel. Together, they

“introduced a voluntarism that elevated God’s will over his intellect and privileged his absolute power to do anything at all (so long as the law of noncontradiction was not violated). In the hands of Ockham and Biel, the implications for salvation were momentous: God is not bound to reward an act of merit according to a fixed standard of righteousness and justice. Rather, God is free to enact a covenant that declares—simply by divine fiat and will—that if the sinner does his best, if he does what lies within him, then he will be accepted by God and rewarded with the further distributions of grace.”²Matthew Barrett, The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church (Grand Raipds, Michigan: Zondervan Academic, 2023), 9-10.

As Hans Boersma summarizes, “these fourteenth century Franciscans shifted the traditional balance between God’s ordained and absolute power by implying that perhaps God might actually use his absolute power to do things that were outside the scope of his ordained will.”³Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011), 77.

Edward Feser notes that this kind of theological voluntarism is connected to the denial of universals, the idea that there is a quality that truly belongs to an object by its created nature. “Ockham’s theological voluntarism—the view that the divine will is prior to the divine intellect—led him to resist the idea that there is anything in the nature of things that might put limits on what God could command.”⁴Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics : A Contemporary Introduction, Editiones Scholasticae Volume 39 (Heusenstamm: Editiones Scholasticae, 2014), 47. See Feser’s general discussion of voluntarism on pages 47-49, where he also makes connection of Ockham’s thought to that of the 18^th century philosopher David Hume. In theory, this would allow for God to command men to do certain things, even when those things were not good for us —inviting man to doubt the causal connections that ordinarily exist in the world. God’s will may, in fact, interrupt the general order of things without any reference to his nature or the nature of objects. In this scenario, God’s will may exist without any reason that is associated to God’s character.

The voluntarist impulse put such a strong emphasis on the freedom of God, above all else, that it all but disallowed the sense that intrinsic to God-reflecting relations within the world bear moral freight, disclosing the nature of God in such a way that it would make no sense for God—who is goodness itself—to ask anyone to go against it. For a thorough-going voluntarist, finding moral imperatives in inner-worldly relations would seem to place limits on God’s freedom.”⁵Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphsyics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 357-58.