Theological Determinism and the Relationship with God

Abstract

Increasingly, theists have come to see their relationship with God as anological to an exemplary human relationship. Seeing it this way would be difficult, supposing a traditional theological determinist view of providence in which God elects some to salvation in heaven and others to eternal damnation. But, as Derk Pereboom explains in this esssay, if one accepts universal salvation and denies divine retribution, both libertarianism and theological determinism accommodate a good relationship with God. Each of these positions can secure trust in God by a developmental account for why God permits evil, and by a sufficiently strong notion of divine providence can be used to respond to the problem of evil. The challenge that valuable love for God is ruled out by theological determinism can be answered by reflecting on what sorts of loving responses we ordinarily cherish.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.