The Permissive Will of God: Does God Cause or Permit Evil?

The permissive will of God is His will to allow what He does not author, and sin is its chief case. God permits evil; He does not cause the evil in it. Permission is a real distinction, not a polite way of saying that God did it, but it holds only if God's knowledge and will stand to our choices in a particular order. So the question underneath is whether God's knowledge causes our choices. Here the answer is given in both halves: what God grounds, what the free creature fixes, and why that difference is the permissive decree.

Key takeaways

• The permissive will of God is His will to allow what He does not author: Aquinas says God "wills to permit evil to be done; and this is a good."
• Calvin called "bare permission" an evasion, and he was right that a God who merely watches from a watch-tower is not the God of providence.
• Aquinas holds that God's knowledge, joined to His will, is the cause of things, including what God "wills to be, or permits to be."
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) rests permission on God's sustaining of a finite freedom He is under no obligation to compel, where theological determinism lets the decree fix content and open theism gives up exhaustive foreknowledge. God grounds that the creature and its act exist, and in His ordinary providence the free act fixes which content God's one act comprehends.
• God permits what He does not author: He sustains the being of the act and the freedom that performs it, and the evil in a sinful act is the creature's, not His.

What is the permissive will of God?

The permissive will of God is His willing not to prevent an act He does not approve and does not produce as its author. It is one of the classical distinctions in the will of God. The decretive will is what God ordains to come to pass. The preceptive will is what He commands. God's permissive will names the way the decree reaches sin: God neither causes the sinful choice nor stands helpless before it.

Aquinas gives the formula. In the Summa Theologiae (I, q. 19, a. 9) he writes that "God therefore neither wills evil to be done, nor wills it not to be done, but wills to permit evil to be done; and this is a good." In the same question (a. 12) he lists permission among the signs of God's will: God shows His will "by not hindering the doing of a thing … In this respect the expression is called permission."

Scripture's clearest case is Joseph's word to his brothers:

"You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives." (Genesis 50:20, NIV)

One event, two intentions. The brothers meant harm, and the harm was theirs. God meant good, and the good was His. The psalmist states the same boundary from God's side: "For you are not a God who is pleased with wickedness" (Psalm 5:4, NIV). Whatever permission is, it cannot mean that God is pleased with the evil He permits. James guards the other side: "God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone" (James 1:13, NIV). The doctrine of providence has to hold both verses at once.

Volume Two argues the problem of evil from this distinction; see what it covers.

Is permission a real distinction or a dodge?

It is real, and it needs an account of how God's will relates to the choice. Without one, permission can become a word covering a gap.

Calvin pressed the charge hardest. In the Institutes (I.18.1) he complains that "recourse is had to the evasion that this is done only by the permission, and not also by the will of God." His verdict is sharp: "it is the merest trifling to substitute a bare permission for the providence of God, as if he sat in a watch-tower waiting for fortuitous events, his Judgments meanwhile depending on the will of man." The Westminster Confession (5.4) follows him: providence reaches even the first sin, "and that not by a bare permission," but with a "most wise and powerful bounding, and otherwise ordering and governing" of it.

R. C. Sproul, writing for Ligonier, names the danger on the other side. A permission that means God simply could not stop it leaves God "reduced to the role of spectator or cheerleader."

So the permissive will of God faces a dilemma. If God's will produces the sinful choice as it produces the sunrise, He is its author, whatever word is used, and James 1:13 is strained. If God merely watches, He is Calvin's God in the watch-tower, and His sovereignty is lost. The Calvinist keeps sovereignty and calls the sinfulness the creature's own; the critic of that view asks how a choice God's decree renders certain can be the creature's in the relevant sense.

The way between the horns runs through a prior question. What does God's knowledge do to the choice it knows? If His knowing causes the choice, permission collapses into authorship. If it does no causal work at all, it seems to collapse into spectating.

The whole argument begins in Volume One, and your copy is free.

Does God's knowledge cause our choices?

On Aquinas's account, God's knowledge joined to His will is the cause of things. On the account FICT holds, in ordinary providence God's one act of knowing and sustaining grounds that our choices exist; it does not fix which way they go. Theological determinism, Molinism and open theism each answer differently, and their answers follow below. The difference matters, and it has to be stated carefully.

Aquinas's text is direct (ST I, q. 14, a. 8): "The knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is to things made by his art." He adds the qualifier that matters: God's knowledge "must be the cause of things, in so far as His will is joined to it."

When Origen says that a thing is not future because God knows it, Aquinas reads him "according to the cause of consequence, and not according to the cause of essence." And a few articles on (a. 9, ad 3) he ties knowledge and permission together: the knowledge of God, joined to His will, is the cause of things, and this necessity holds "as regards what He wills to be, or permits to be." Permission is inside Aquinas's causal account, not outside it.

On future contingents (a. 13) he adds that "all things that are in time are present to God from eternity," so that contingent things are "infallibly known by God" while remaining "future contingent things in relation to their own causes."

The Reformed confession states the decretal order. God "freely and unchangeably" ordains "whatsoever comes to pass," yet "neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures" (WCF 3.1), and He has not "decreed anything because he foresaw it as future" (3.2). Theological determinism, defended by Paul Helm in The Providence of God (1994), reads this as a no-risk providence in which the decree settles each choice and the creature remains responsible because it acts willingly.

Two rivals refuse that reading. Molinism gives God middle knowledge of what free creatures would do in any circumstance, so He can choose a world without determining choices. Open theism holds that God's knowledge of free choices waits on the choices, so that, in the Stanford Encyclopedia's summary, His aims are achieved "by taking risks."

For how foreknowledge sits beside freedom, see does God know the future.

The order of grounding: how FICT answers both questions

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single formal error. God's frame is atemporal, simple and a se. Ours is sequential, composite and contingent, and God's frame is the ground of ours and sustains it. Predicates whose content involves time, modality, agency or value are said of God and of us analogically, and treating such a term as if it meant the same on both sides is the Many Beings Fallacy. Against theological determinism, FICT holds that finite freedom is libertarian, while holding with it that divine sovereignty is exhaustive. Against open theism, it holds that God's knowledge of what is future to us is exhaustive and settled.

Its answer to the permissive will of God is derived in Volume One's chapter on sovereignty and free will, and Volume Three restates it as two relations over one reality in its chapter on foreknowledge.

The first runs downward. God grounds that the event is: "nothing exists, Peter and his freedom included, except as God holds it in being." Volume One draws the conclusion in plain terms: God's sustaining holds the event in being and His knowledge comprehends it, without replacing the creature as the one who acts.

The second runs upward, and it concerns content. In God's ordinary providence the free creature determines which way its contingent act goes, and God's knowledge perfectly reflects the act rather than producing it. Volume Four adds a guard: this concerns what God knows, not His being, for He is a se, and the free act produces nothing in Him. Volume One sets out why.

Volume Three's image is a thermometer, which reads the heat without causing it. The book then limits its own image: a thermometer is an effect of its room, and God's knowledge is not; the comparison "illustrates infallible correspondence, never ontological dependence."

Now the permissive will of God has a place to stand. God wills and sustains the freedom itself. Volume One says He "does not merely 'permit' it out of a lack of obligation. Rather, God actively wills and sustains this finite indeterminacy as an objective reality." He sustains and enables the good the creature does. The evil He permits: Volume Two states the asymmetry as "God sustains and enables the finite good, whereas finite evil He permits without ever authoring it." Volume One places sin within the decree "by wise permission, not by his being the author or efficient cause of sin." Where He intervenes extraordinarily, Volume One adds, "He determines that act rather than sustaining it as contingent."

Peter's sermon holds both relations in one sentence:

"This man was handed over to you by God's deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross." (Acts 2:23, NIV)

The plan is God's. The wickedness is theirs. Volume One gives two reasons together for why permission is real. God sustains finite freedom as contingent, and "to sustain a contingency is not to necessitate its content." And in God's frame, fallen finite freedom is no rival to His sovereignty: measured against His own freedom to uphold righteousness, it is bondage, so He is "under no ontological obligation to causally compel or eliminate it." Being and content are grounded in two directions, and God is the ground of the first.

Volume One carries this into libertarian free will; read it free.

Objections, answered

The account has been pressed from the Reformed, Thomist and Molinist sides, in the literature and against the Many Beings books themselves. Six follow, each with its answer.

If God causes every moment, how is the creature the cause of its choice?

By a different axis of causation. God causes the being of every moment; in ordinary providence the creature causes the choice within it.

The objection comes from Reformed concurrence. Volume Three says that "the finite agent is the efficient cause of the finite choice," and elsewhere that "God causes every single moment of time directly and immediately." Put the two together and one of them seems false. Either God's causing is total, or the creature's causing is real.

Volume Three answers with a distinction between vertical and horizontal causation. Vertical causation is God's: it "strikes the timeline at a 90-degree angle," sustaining each coordinate at once. Horizontal causation is the creature's: one event bringing about the next inside the timeline.

The book names the two errors that collapse the axes: the deist, who reduces God to the first domino, and the occasionalist, who "assumes God moves every single domino directly," making secondary choices "mere illusions."

The chapter on foreknowledge carries the same distinction. God grounds that the event is; the free creature determines which way it goes, and "God's single eternal act knows-and-sustains the whole." The two relations run over different aspects of one reality, so they do not compete.

Volume Three's chapter on causation is described on its page.

Doesn't this run the Reformed decree backwards?

It departs from one reading of the decree at one point, and it says so. God's sustaining grounds the being of every act, and His decree comprehends it; the content of a free act is fixed by the creature and incorporated by the decree.

The objection cites Westminster 3.2 and Turretin: God does not decree anything because He foresaw it. If the free choice grounds the truth and the truth grounds God's knowledge, the order looks Molinist or Arminian, and God looks like a bare observer. The same objection is pressed against Volume Four's chapter on prayer, which says that without the prayer, the eternal answer would have been different.

Volume Four's answer is precise. The upward grounding runs "to the content of the eternal knowledge that the decree incorporates, though never to the selection of its means, which are willed as the conditional form of the one act, not chosen in light of what they will produce." God's sustaining grounds the being of the prayer downward, and the decree "incorporates" the free act "as an ordained means." God is no observer; He is the One who holds the whole in being.

What remains is a declared position. Theological determinism holds that the decree fixes content too; FICT holds libertarian finite freedom and says so. The Reformed pedigree it claims is the archetypal and ectypal distinction and the scope distinction between the necessity of the consequence and of the consequent, not every thesis of the confession.

Doesn't it invert Aquinas: knowledge as the cause of things?

No, because FICT keeps Aquinas's claim on the side of being and adds a distinct relation for content. God's one act grounds that each creature and act exists, and the upward grounding concerns which contingent content that act comprehends.

The objection comes from the Thomist, and a Molinist has pressed it as well. The Many Beings books claim Thomist analogy for their semantics, yet say the free act settles what God's knowledge reflects. Aquinas says the reverse: God's knowledge, like an artificer's, is the cause of things. The thermometer image seems to make God's knowledge an effect.

The books keep the Thomist's point on the side of being. God's one act, in which knowing is one with willing and sustaining, grounds that each creature and act exists: that is the downward relation. The thermometer image is limited in Volume Three itself: "To make God's knowledge an effect of creatures would deny His aseity, and would itself commit the Many Beings Fallacy of predicating creaturely, object-caused knowing of the Creator." Volume Four applies the same guard: the upward relation concerns what God knows, not His being.

Aquinas's own texts leave room for the index. He reads Origen's order as a cause of consequence, not of essence, and he has contingent things known "in their presentiality" while contingent in relation to their causes. FICT does not claim he holds its upward grounding. It adds an index that says which relation is in view.

Aquinas's place in the argument is traced on the Thomism page.

Doesn't a God who tracks our acts depend on us?

No. The creature fixes content; it produces no effect in God.

The objection is from aseity, and it has force. God is a se: He holds what He is from Himself and does not receive it from another. Aquinas says God knows all things through His essence. If Peter's choice anchors what God knows about Peter, a creature is part of the ground of a divine perfection, and the doctrine of aseity is breached.

Volume Four answers with the thermometer's caveat. "The tracking is perfect, the dependence zero: God's knowing is His own eternal act, not an impression the world stamps upon Him." And more briefly: "The creature fixes content; it causes nothing in God."

Volume Three's wording makes Peter's choice the epistemic anchor for the content of God's apprehension, while the very being of that state, Peter and his act alike, is grounded downward by God's sustaining.

The "direction" is itself frame-relative. Sequential priority belongs to the human frame. In God's frame, sustaining and knowing are one simple act, and there is no univocal arrow to read off it.

Doesn't it reverse archetype and ectype?

No. God's archetypal knowing remains His own simple act. The creature fixes which contingent content that act comprehends, and "grounds" is said of that relation analogically.

The objection draws on Franciscus Junius and Turretin. Archetypal theology is God's own knowledge, the exemplar; ectypal theology is the creature's derived copy, and dependence runs from archetype to ectype only. Volume Four names Junius, Turretin and Bavinck as the pedigree for its axioms, then says the free act grounds the truth that God knows. That would make an ectype ground an archetype.

Volume Four's chapter on the classical pedigree answers from the distinction itself. Archetypal theology is "God's knowledge of Himself," held in God's frame and "identical with His essence"; ectypal theology is the same truth received in the creature's mode.

The upward grounding does not touch that relation. It concerns which contingent state God's one act comprehends, not the ground or mode of His knowing, and Volume Four states the content-versus-being guard alongside it. The archetype stays prior in being and in mode.

The Reformed pedigree is weighed in Volume Four.

Is the permissive decree shown, or only claimed?

It is derived in Volume One, and the later volumes cite it by design rather than re-derive it.

The objection is that Volume Three's chapter on foreknowledge asserts that "God is under no obligation to determine finite human free-will choices" but supplies no decree at that point, so sovereignty floats free.

The charge misreads the order of the series. Volume One's chapter on sovereignty and free will derives the permissive sustaining behind the decree in steps: finite freedom is "permissively sustained by a God under no obligation to compel it," and "to sustain a contingency is not to necessitate its content."

Volume Three cites the result and points back. Faulting the later chapter for not repeating the earlier derivation asks each volume to be the whole series.

Sovereignty and free will are argued in Volume One.

How the positions compare

Each position keeps something true. The table sets out what each says God's knowledge does, what permission means on it, and what it costs.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between God's perfect will and His permissive will?

In popular usage, God's perfect will is what He desires and commands, and His permissive will is what He allows against that desire. The older terms are the preceptive will (what He commands) and the decretive will (what He ordains). Perfect will vs permissive will is a real distinction as long as permission means God does not author the act He allows. It is not a second plan God falls back on when the first one fails; both name aspects of the one will by which He governs the world.

Is God the author of sin?

No. Scripture says God "cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone" (James 1:13, NIV), and the Westminster Confession says He neither is nor can be "the author or approver of sin." On Frame-Indexed Classical Theism, God grounds the being of the act and knows it exhaustively, while in ordinary providence the creature fixes its content and bears its evil. Volume One separates two senses of "determined": fallen humanity is determined in its moral course by what its own nature lacks, not by God forcing the specific act. Theological determinism has the decree fix the content as well, and open theism denies that God knows the free act before it is done.

Does God cause evil or allow it?

He allows it. On Aquinas's formula, God "wills to permit evil to be done; and this is a good." The good is the permission, ordered to His ends, not the evil permitted. On the account defended here, God still sustains the being of the act and the freedom that performs it; what He does not supply is the evil, which is a privation in the creature's act rather than a thing He makes.

What is an example of the permissive will of God in the Bible?

Joseph's brothers are the classic example (Genesis 50:20): they intended harm, and God intended the same events for good. The crucifixion is the greatest: Jesus was handed over "by God's deliberate plan and foreknowledge," and wicked men put Him to death (Acts 2:23, NIV).

Does God's foreknowledge cause our choices?

Not as the cause of which way they go. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism holds that God's one act grounds that the choice exists, while in His ordinary providence the free act fixes its content, which God knows infallibly. Molinism answers with middle knowledge and open theism denies exhaustive foreknowledge; the argument against fatalism is set out in theological fatalism.

Where to go from here

The permissive will of God is not a dodge. It is the name for what follows when God grounds that every creature and act exists, and, in His ordinary providence, the free creature fixes which way its act goes. Calvin was right that a bare permission would leave God in a watch-tower. It does not have to be bare. God holds the act and the freedom in being, orders the whole to His ends, and permits the evil He does not author. The same order answers whether His knowledge causes our choices: it grounds that they exist, and in ordinary providence the free creature settles which way they go.

The two-way order behind the permissive will of God runs through the neighbouring questions. It answers theological fatalism, and it keeps libertarian free will intact under an exhaustive sovereignty. It answers the grounding objection without middle knowledge, and what becomes of creaturely freedom once the saints are glorified is taken up in free will in heaven. Whether God's own decree to create was free is the separate question of modal collapse, and the doctrine behind God's one act is divine simplicity.

The series begins with Volume One, which is free to read.