‘The Will of God’

Abstract

‘Doing the will of God’, or seeking to do it, is a notion close to the centre of, at any rate, Christian, Jewish and Moslem religion. So too is the notion of accepting happenings as God’s Will—Fiat voluntas tua. In the latter notion, God’s Will is something to be accepted rather than accomplished. Where the Will of God is something to be sought and accomplished, then it may be given as a final reason for doing what is believed to be in accord with it. Is it then connected necessarily or contingently with morality? If necessarily, then what is added to ‘This is right’ by saying ‘This is the Will of God’, at least as far as the content of the action goes? If the connection is contingent, then the moral judgement that this is right could conflict with the religious judgement that this is in accordance with the Will of God, and if both can be given as finalising reasons we could be faced with two conflicting ultimate demands. If there is a divergence, and the moral demand is said to be subordinate to the religious demand, this would be a claim that religion should in such cases supersede morality.

Parts of this chapter are adapted from an article of mine ‘On “Doing what is right” and “Doing the Will of God”’, which appeared in Religious Studies, vol. III, nos. 1 and 2 (1968). I am not concerned in this chapter with the metaphysics of theism, but with the moral bearings in the notion of ‘the Will of God’. These passages are used with permission of the publishers, Cambridge University Press.