Sovereignty is God's rule over everything: providence, election, the eternal decree. To govern a domain you have to have a grip on it: to know it and to act on it. So sovereignty inherits all the difficulties the knowledge and power sections already raise, now at the level where God is said to rule. The eternal decree and its unfolding in history add a further strain on a God who is supposed never to change.

*What the tradition holds.* The classical doctrine of divine sovereignty assembles several reinforcing claims. God is king (Psalm 47, 93, 96; Isaiah 6; Revelation 4–5 NRSVUE), with kingship the central political-theological metaphor for divine authority. God exercises providence, ordering all things to their proper end (Aquinas, *ST* I.22), and governance, the execution of providence in time (*ST* I.103). God elects: God has chosen some creatures for salvation, with the choice grounded in divine sovereign will rather than in any feature of the creatures (Augustine, *De Praedestinatione Sanctorum*; Aquinas, *ST* I.23; Calvin, *Institutes* III.21–24). Reformed scholasticism develops the architecture of decree theology: a single eternal decree determines every event in creation Turretin 1679–85; Owen 1647; (Paul Helm, 1993); (John S. Feinberg, 2001). On the most developed contemporary refinement, divine sovereignty grounds the modal structure itself: not merely what is actual but what is possible (Leftow, Brian, 2012). Each move tries to keep divine governance from being one regional jurisdiction among others. At its most ambitious, the doctrine reaches for a king whose decree is meticulous, eternal, and comprehensive, whose election constitutes those it falls upon, and whose reach extends to the modal structure within which any decree is intelligible at all.

*What cannot be answered.* Six questions ask of divine sovereignty what the doctrine, in the form structural reasoning can pursue, cannot answer. What drives them is local to sovereignty and cumulative across the chapter. Governance, on the analysis given, is the holding of a domain under determinative authority such that what occurs within the domain occurs by the authority's decree. The holding requires a jurisdictional being whose grip on the domain is structural, and grip is what [§6.4.2](<6.4.2 Knowledge.md>) (Knowledge) and [§6.7.1](<6.7.1 Power.md>) (Power) have already pressed. If the conditions for divine knowing and divine causing have been hard to reconcile with the doctrine of divine simplicity-and-atemporality at every step, the conditions for divine governing inherit those difficulties at the level where governance is exercised through knowing and causing. The six pressures run one at the level of jurisdictional grip, five at the level of the conditions sovereignty-talk runs on.

**Q1.** *How does a being keep its hold on a world it is no part of?* For a jurisdiction to extend, the being who holds the jurisdiction must stand in some real relation to what falls under it: must be able to know the domain, hold it within a determinative frame, and effect what the jurisdiction decrees. Helm -(Paul Helm, 1993), Feinberg -(John S. Feinberg, 2001), and Leftow -(Leftow, Brian, 2012) develop the most rigorous contemporary defenses of comprehensive divine governance. The concern here is that the difficulties run together: [§6.4.2](<6.4.2 Knowledge.md>) raises whether the conditions of divine knowing are coherent with the doctrine of divine simplicity-and-atemporality; [§6.7.1](<6.7.1 Power.md>) raises the parallel question for divine causing. Sovereignty exercised through knowledge and power inherits both. The reply that divine governance is direct rather than mediated by knowledge and power is the reply McCann -(Hugh J. McCann, 2012) develops as primitive divine causation; it preserves grip by leaving its mode unanalyzed. The present analysis registers the move and presses the cost: a primitive grip whose conditions cannot be examined is not a more thorough grip than the structural one but a different relation that has inherited the term.

**Q2.** *What does history add to a decree already complete in eternity?* Reformed scholasticism holds that the divine decree is one eternal act in which God determines every event that will ever occur (Turretin 1679–85; Owen 1647). The execution of the decree unfolds in time. The concern here is the relation between the two. If decree and execution are one act, the temporal unfolding adds nothing the decree did not already contain, and the temporal world is a representation of an eternally complete decision. If decree and execution are distinct, divine immutability is pressured: God's decreeing is eternally complete, but God's executing is temporally extended. Stump and Kretzmann's -(Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981) ET-simultaneity addresses the difficulty by treating decree-as-eternal and execution-as-temporal as eternally simultaneous. The structural concern with the relation is pressed in other contexts at [§6.3.2](<6.3.2 Eternity.md>), Q2 and [§6.4.2](<6.4.2 Knowledge.md>), Q2. The point this section adds is that decree-and-execution is the doctrine's signature pairing, and the pairing is intelligible only if both terms have determinate content. Eternalizing the decree preserves immutability; temporalizing the execution preserves history; the doctrine has wanted to do both at once, and these are two commitments joined only by the term *one act*.

**Q3.** *How does God choose some over others, with no one yet there to be chosen?* The doctrine of election holds that God has chosen some creatures for salvation, with the choice grounded in God's sovereign will rather than in any feature of the creatures (*De Praedestinatione*; *Institutes* III.21). For election to discriminate, the elector must stand in a position from which the elected can be picked out and the unelected passed over. The classical reply is that God's election is not a temporal choosing-among but an eternal act in which the elect are constituted as such (Aquinas, *ST* I.23). The concern here is whether constitution-without-position is the form the doctrine of election asserts. If God's eternal decree constitutes who counts as elect, the elect are not picked out from a prior class but defined by the decree; the doctrine preserves the believer's sense of having been chosen by setting aside the *from-among* the choice ordinarily presupposes. Barth's (*CD* II.2) reframing of election as universal in Christ and Stump's -(Eleonore Stump, 2018) narrative reading register the difficulty from inside the tradition; the modal reading agrees that the difficulty is a real one and locates it in the constitution-without-position move the classical position depends on. Stump's *Atonement*, -(Eleonore Stump, 2018), ch. 6 narrative-relational reading of election offers a richer alternative: election is not primarily the selection of individuals for a soteriological status (a standing with respect to salvation) by an eternal decree, but the irreducibly particular character of God's second-personal relating to Israel-in-Jacob-and-his-descendants in a narrative whose particularity is what makes it election rather than general divine benevolence. On Stump's account, the *from-among* the classical doctrine needs is not secured by a positional distinguishing act but by the thisness of the relation: what it is in the relating, not in a prior act of positional picking-out. The concern for Stump's narrative election is whether the *thisness* of a second-personal relation has individuating content in the absence of spatial and temporal distinguishability: a narratively irreducible relation between God and Israel requires that the relata be distinguishable as the relata they are, and relational thisness at the narrative level trades on the same structural conditions of individuation the chapter has found constitutive of any relation at all.

**Q4.** *How does God decree what is possible, if decreeing already needs the possible in place?* The deepest version of the doctrine extends divine sovereignty beyond the actual world to the modal space within which actuality is selected. Leftow -(Leftow, Brian, 2012) develops the position that what is possible is grounded in divine activity: there are no possibilities prior to God for God to range over. The position is engaged from the necessity side at [§6.3.1](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>), Q6, from the power side at [§6.7.1](<6.7.1 Power.md>), Q5, and from the agency side at [§6.7.2](<6.7.2 Causality.md>), Q7. The point sovereignty adds is that the deepest version of *governance* extends to the conditions any governance presupposes. To govern a domain is to exercise authority within structural conditions the domain provides. To govern the conditions themselves is to exercise authority over what makes any exercise intelligible. Modal invariance (§[§2.1.4](<2.1.4 Modal Stability.md>)–2.1.5) presses the same difficulty from the opposite direction: modal status is not a product of any agent's exercise. The modal account agrees that the deepest structural facts are not subject to anyone's decree. The doctrine that places them under decree, when its predicates are read in the structure that supports them, is reaching for the modal status of Nature and naming a sovereign beyond it. The same difficulty runs through the doctrine of necessary creator-status: if creating belongs essentially to God, then in every world in which God exists God creates; if God exists necessarily, creation is necessary. And creation, if coherent, can only be creation of an order instantiating T, S, and Φ (the three structural Conditions, borne by Time, Space, and Substance). The dichotomy is binary, not gradient. Whatever God could be said to create either has temporality, spatiality, and substantiality, or it has none. In the first case, the creature is Nature or part of it. In the second case, there is no duration over which the creature persists, no location at which it stands distinct from its creator, and no being that carries the property of having been created. The second branch does not describe a different kind of creature. It describes the absence of any feature by which a creature could be there to have been created. There is no third option. Sovereignty over a necessarily sustained domain is therefore not the elective decree the doctrine performs but the structural status of Nature itself. The modal-collapse concern is developed from the sides of power and agency at [§6.7.1](<6.7.1 Power.md>), Q1 and [§6.7.2](<6.7.2 Causality.md>), Q7; the same concern surfaces here as the pressure on sovereign election. Pruss and Rasmussen's necessary-creating/contingent-order distinction *Necessary Existence*, -(Pruss, Alexander R., and Joshua L. Rasmussen, 2018), ch. 5 carries to the sovereignty register: God necessarily creates *some* order (essential sovereign creator-status), but the content of the order is contingent on God's free selection among possible orders (the necessity attaches to the creator-status, not to the specific created order). On this reply, the dichotomy between necessary-creator-status-with-necessary-creation and contingent-creator-status-with-free-creation is dissolved. The concern in the sovereignty register is that the selection among contingent orders is itself a sovereign act: it requires a being positioned to select among alternatives (S), a transition through the selection (T), and a substantial sovereign who is the bearer of both the creator-status and the act of selection (Φ). The necessary-creating/contingent-order distinction preserves sovereign freedom at the level of what is created; the chapter's structural conditions of sovereign action apply at the level at which freedom is now located.

**Q5.** *How does a creature freely do what God decreed it would do?* The Augustinian-Calvinist tradition holds that God's eternal decree determines every event, including every creaturely free action. The Pelagian, Arminian, and Molinist traditions develop alternative positions on which creaturely freedom remains genuinely libertarian Arminius 1608; Molina 1588; (Flint, Thomas P., 1998). Compatibilist positions Edwards 1754; (Paul Helm, 1993) hold that determined actions can be free in a sense compatible with moral responsibility. Libertarian positions (Plantinga, A., 1974); (Flint, Thomas P., 1998) hold that genuine freedom requires alternative possibilities the decree must not foreclose. The concern here is parallel to [§6.4.2](<6.4.2 Knowledge.md>), Q9 (foreknowledge) and [§6.7.1](<6.7.1 Power.md>), Q6 (concurrence) at a different level: [§6.4.2](<6.4.2 Knowledge.md>) asks whether divine knowing fixes the future; [§6.7.1](<6.7.1 Power.md>) asks whether divine causing leaves room for creaturely doing; the present question asks whether divine *decreeing* can determine creaturely action without precluding it. Each of the three positions (compatibilism, libertarianism, Molinism) preserves one commitment at a price the doctrine had been holding the others against. None preserves the full classical bundle.

**Q6.** *What does a creature add, if God decrees the falling of every leaf?* Meticulous providence is the most thoroughgoing version of the doctrine: every event, down to the falling of every leaf, is decreed by God Calvin, *Institutes* I.16; (Paul Helm, 1993). The concern here is whether the doctrine leaves room for any genuinely creaturely contribution to what occurs. If every event is meticulously decreed, creaturely action is at best the executed expression of a decree creatures had no part in making. The classical reply is the concurrence-and-secondary-causation move [§6.7.1](<6.7.1 Power.md>), Q6 engages: divine sovereignty operates *through* creaturely agency rather than around it. The concern here parallels the earlier ones: whether the through-not-around relation has determinate content on a non-analogical reading, or whether the relation is doing primitive work the doctrine asks of it. Pruss -(Pruss, Alexander R., 2013) and Furlong -(Peter Furlong, 2019) develop contemporary attempts to give the relation more determinate content; the modal reading registers them as the most serious attempts and notes that each preserves the through-not-around relation by reintroducing structural conditions the doctrine of strong simplicity had removed. Hartshorne's process alternative presses from the other side: divine sovereignty is persuasive rather than coercive, the concrete pole genuinely responsive to the creaturely contributions meticulous providence cannot accommodate *The Divine Relativity*, -(Charles Hartshorne, 1948), and the coherence of that responsive sovereignty is pressed against dipolar theism at [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>) and [§6.7.2](<6.7.2 Causality.md>), Q1.

*What is required.* Six pressures bring the structural commitments of *governs* into view. Governance has to grip its domain: sovereignty exercised through knowing and causing inherits the difficulties pressed in the two preceding sections, and a primitive grip whose mode cannot be examined is a different relation that has inherited the term. Decree and execution have to be a determinate pair; eternal-decree-with-temporal-execution wants both terms with full content, and the *one act* terminology holds them together verbally rather than structurally. Election has to discriminate from-among: the constitution-without-position move sets aside the choosing-among the doctrine of election asserts, and the believer's sense of having been chosen depends on a prior class from which the elect were picked. The modal frame functions as a condition on governance rather than as its product: the deepest structural facts are not subject to anyone's decree, and the creator-status dichotomy collapses any necessarily sustained domain to Nature or to no creature at all. Decree and creaturely freedom have to be compatible without flattening either, and each of compatibilism, libertarianism, and Molinism preserves one commitment of the bundle by surrendering another. Through-not-around concurrence has to be more than a verbal predicate; meticulous providence preserves the verb by relocating the through-relation to a primitive whose work the doctrine has not specified. What *governs* picks out when its referent is examined is the structural condition under which jurisdictional grip obtains: T, S, and Φ in their lawful invariance, which is the modal status of Nature itself.

*What is inverted.* Sovereignty is the modal status of Nature. The English *sovereign* descends through Old French *soverain* from the Latin *super*, *above*. To be sovereign is to stand above the domain governed: to hold it under one's authority by virtue of a position that is not itself a position within it. The classical doctrine extends this *above* to its limit: God is above creation in every dimension, with no creaturely standing for divine sovereignty to be located within. The modal reading agrees that what is sovereign over the domain is not a domain-located being. What is sovereign over what occurs within T, S, and Φ is the structure of T, S, and Φ themselves: the lawful invariance that holds across every moment, position, and instantiation. Nature reigns over what occurs within it, not as a domain-located ruler, but as what makes the occurring lawful occurrence in the first place. Sovereignty's facet is self-rule: not merely that T, S, and Φ hold invariantly, but that nothing stands above them to govern the holding. The structure is not law-abiding but lawmaking; it answers to no higher frame, because there is no frame above the frame. The doctrine of divine sovereignty, however the tradition has framed it, locates this lawful invariance in a sovereign beyond Nature rather than in Nature itself.

With sovereignty inverted, it is worth marking what has now happened across four of the attributes, because the convergence is not an accident of exposition. Necessity, immutability, sovereignty, and perfection have each, run to completion, landed on the same structural fact under a different description: necessity on the structure's reach across every world, immutability on its constancy across all time, sovereignty on its answering to no higher law, perfection on its lacking nothing. These are four angles on one feature, the modal standing of T, S, and Φ, not four separate perfections of a being. That four of the tradition's greatest divine attributes collapse into facets of a single structural fact is not a redundancy in the argument; it is the inversion thesis showing its hand: the classical engine multiplied names for what is structurally one feature, and distributed them across a being, precisely because the feature seen whole is the modal character of Nature rather than the property of any bearer.


---

← [6.7.3 Interaction](<6.7.3 Interaction.md>) | [6.8 Reach and Contact](<6.8 Reach and Contact.md>) →
