To be just is to render to each what is owed: a manner of *giving*, which needs a giver, a recipient, and a before-and-after. With those removed, *God is just* loses its grip, and the doctrines built on it (atonement, inherited guilt, final judgment) inherit the difficulty.

*What the tradition holds.* The classical doctrine of divine justice assembles several reinforcing claims. God is *iustus* (just) and *iustitia* is among the divine names, identical with the divine essence on classical simplicity (Augustine of Hippo, (400–428) 1991), VIII.6; (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.21; Anselm, *Monologion* 16. Justice in the classical sense is *suum cuique tribuere*, the rendering to each of what is owed Ulpian, *Digesta* I.1.10, taken up into Christian moral theology at (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), II-II.58.1. The doctrine extends the predicate eminently across commutative, distributive, and retributive senses (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), II-II.61, and pairs it with the doctrine of impeccability: God is *incapax peccandi*, incapable of injustice as of any other moral evil (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.25.3 ad 2; (Thomas V. Morris, 1991); (Timothy Pawl, 2016).

Divine justice co-instantiates with divine mercy without contradiction (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.21.3–4; (Anselm of Canterbury, (1098) 1998), I.12, II.20; (Eleonore Stump, 2018) develops the contemporary form. Mercy itself is among the divine names: *misericordia*, the heart-toward-misery, identical with the divine essence on simplicity (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.21.3; (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), II-II.30; Augustine, *Enarrationes in Psalmos* 102.8. The Islamic tradition opens every Qur'anic surah but one with *al-Raḥmān al-Raḥīm* (the Compassionate, the Merciful) and reads the names as *dhātī*, essential rather than accidental al-Ghazālī, *al-Maqṣad al-Asnā*; (Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick, 1994). The Hebrew Bible pairs *ḥesed* (covenant-loyal love) with *raḥamim*, the visceral compassion whose noun-root is *reḥem*, the womb (Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, 1978); (Phyllis Trible, 1978). The doctrine holds mercy as a divine perfection co-essential with justice rather than its competitor: the Anselmian and Thomist tradition explicitly denies that mercy diminishes justice or that justice limits mercy (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.21.4; (Anselm of Canterbury, (1078) 1998), 9–11, and the classical impassibility doctrine reads mercy not as God's *being moved* by misery (the affective pole the predicate carries in its ordinary use) but as the divine *effect* of relieving misery, identical with the divine act (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.21.3; (Timothy Pawl, 2016); (Richard E. Creel, 1986).

The classical atonement extends justice's reach across persons: Christ's death satisfies the demands of divine justice on behalf of the guilty (Anselm of Canterbury, (1098) 1998), II; (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), III.46–49; for contemporary defenses, (Richard Swinburne, 1989); (Oliver D. Crisp, 2020); (Eleonore Stump, 2018). The doctrine of original sin extends justice's domain backward through generations: humans inherit guilt and corruption from Adam's act (Augustine of Hippo, (413–426) 1998), XIII.14; (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I-II.81; (Jonathan Edwards, 1758); for contemporary discussion, (Michael C. Rea, 2007); (Jesse Couenhoven, 2013). Each covenant is a distinct dispensation of the same eternal justice (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I-II.107; (John Calvin, (1559) 1960), II.10–11. The eschatological judgment renders the same justice across all who have ever lived (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), Suppl. 88; for contemporary form, (Jerry L. Walls, 1992).

The Jewish and Islamic traditions develop parallel claims: the Hebrew *ṣedeq* / *ṣedāqāh* names the right-ordering of communal life under covenant (Klaus Koch, 1955); (Moshe Weinfeld, 1995); the divine name *al-ʿAdl* (the Just) is held in the Muʿtazilī reading to be *dhātī*: essential to the divine being (George F. Hourani, 1985). The doctrine, at its most ambitious, names a being whose moral character renders the moral order itself (whose justice is not a property had alongside other properties but the structural truth about how moral reality is constituted) and whose every act toward creation, including those acts the believer finds difficult, is therefore necessarily just.

*What cannot be answered.* Eight questions take the doctrine of divine justice past what it can answer once recast in the form structural reasoning works with. Underneath, the concern is structural: the one the chapter has been pressing through the preceding attributes. *Just*, *merciful*, *equitable*, *fair*, *righteous* (the moral predicates the tradition applies to God) are manner-of-acting predicates. *Iustitia* in the classical sense, *suum cuique tribuere*, is a manner of giving; and giving requires the conditions of action: a substantive agent who gives (Φ), a target distinct from the giver who receives (S), and a temporal direction from not-giving to giving (T). The doctrine has defined the being whose actions the predicates describe as without T, S, or Φ. The eight pressures run at the level of what such a being can bear in the way of *justice*-predication at all, and at the level of what the auxiliary doctrines of atonement, original sin, covenant, and final judgment commit when the conditions the predicates depend on are taken seriously.

**Q1.** *Can mercy and justice co-instantiate?* The classical doctrine holds God as perfectly just and perfectly merciful, with no diminution of either by the other (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.21.3–4; (Anselm of Canterbury, (1098) 1998), I.12, II.20. The concern here is the content of the two predicates. Justice, in the sense the doctrine wants, renders to each what is owed; mercy suspends or remits what is owed in favor of unearned good. The two predicates name opposed directions of moral motion on the same input: justice tracks desert; mercy tracks gift-against-desert. The Anselmian reply (that mercy operates within justice, since Christ's satisfaction pays the debt justice requires) preserves co-instantiation by relocating mercy from *suspension* of justice to *means* of justice. The relocation costs the predicate's ordinary grammar. Mercy, on the reframing, is no longer the unearned remission of debt; it is the redirection of debt to a third party. The structure of *gift-against-desert* has been replaced by the structure of *transactional substitution*, and the substitution's evaluation as just is the very question Q4 takes up. Stump's contemporary development (Eleonore Stump, 2018) handles the tension by identifying mercy with second-personal love that, in seeking the beloved's good, includes the work of restoring desert-relations the beloved has violated. The structural concern returns: second-personal love, on the analysis [§6.8.2](<6.8.2 Relatability.md>) runs, requires the relational structure between distinct loci the doctrine elsewhere has factored out. The two attributes co-instantiate at the cost of relocating one or both of them past the contrast that gave them informative content. Three further pressures on mercy-predication sharpen the same concern.

*The impassibility pressure.* *Misericordia*, on its ordinary grammar, is *cor ad miseriam*: heart-toward-misery, the structure of being-moved-by another's suffering. The classical doctrine of divine impassibility holds God as *actus purus*, not subject to being moved by anything outside the divine essence (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.9; (Weinandy, Thomas G., 2000); (Dolezal, James E., 2017). The two grammars conflict on the affective pole: mercy in its first-person human use names *being affected by* the other's state, and impassibility denies the affective structure. Aquinas's reply (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.21.3 preserves co-instantiation by reading divine mercy as the *effect* alone — God produces the relief of misery without undergoing the being-moved that constitutes mercy in the creaturely case. The relocation costs the predicate's structure: mercy without the affective pole is the verbal predicate without the structure that gives it content; what remains is a class of effects classified after the fact as merciful, not the manner-of-being-moved the predicate ordinarily reports. The reply parallels the move [§6.8.2](<6.8.2 Relatability.md>) identifies on *love* (the second-personal structure factored out) and the move Q7 below identifies on *just* (the discernment factored out): preserving the verbal predicate by removing the relational condition the predicate's content runs on. (Mullins, R. T., 2016) develops the contemporary form of the impassibility-mercy tension; the contemporary defenses (Dolezal, James E., 2017); (Helm, Paul, 2010) preserve impassibility by accepting Aquinas's effect-only reading, which is to accept that *mercy*-predication, on the doctrine, names something different from what it names in the cases that gave the predicate its content.

*The grace–mercy distinction.* The tradition often treats mercy and grace as overlapping divine acts toward the unworthy, but the structural difference matters for predication. Mercy responds to misery: its target is the suffering subject, and its act is the relief of suffering. Grace, in the strict sense, is unmerited favor whose ground is not the recipient's state at all but the giver's free generosity (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I-II.110–111; (Barth, Karl, (1932) 1975), IV/1. If divine mercy is genuinely mercy in the substantive sense, it requires the relational structure of object-in-misery; if it collapses into grace (gift-without-precondition) then *mercy* is the wrong name for what the doctrine picks out, and the contentful relation between the predicate and the structural feature its vocabulary tracks has been silently swapped. The doctrine cannot have both a strong mercy whose object-of-misery structure runs and a strong grace whose ground is the giver alone without admitting that what the tradition calls *mercy* is, at the level of structure, grace operating on a recipient who happens to be in misery: a different relation under a borrowed name.

*The necessity-of-misery horn.* If mercy is a necessary divine attribute and mercy requires recipients-in-misery, the field horns from Q2 sharpen further on the mercy side. The intra-Trinitarian construal that handles justice (Q2, horn three) cannot run for mercy: the Trinitarian persons are not in misery, and the predicate's object-condition is not met. The field-co-necessity horn that conflicts with creation-ex-nihilo on the justice side conflicts more sharply on the mercy side, because what becomes co-necessary with the attribute is not merely *recipients-with-dues* but *recipients-in-misery*: the doctrine inherits a necessary field of suffering as the ontological condition of the divine attribute, which the standard theodicy literature treats as the result to be avoided rather than embraced. The horns that remain (contingency of exercise or mere disposition) weaken the necessary-attribute claim on the mercy side in the same way they do on the justice side, and with a sharper bite, because mercy without recipients-in-misery has no Trinitarian-internal escape of the same kind.

**Q2.** *Does justice admit application without a field of objects?* Justice, in the classical sense, is *suum cuique tribuere*: the predicate is structurally tri-place, requiring an agent who renders, a recipient to whom rendering is owed, and the due that is rendered. The doctrine holds justice as a *necessary* divine attribute, identical with the divine essence on simplicity (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.21.1. The concern here is the modal status of the field. The necessity has to be pinned down before the horns bite: read *de dicto* (necessarily, justice-if-instantiated requires recipients-with-dues), the claim is the innocuous conditional the horns work on; read *de re* (there is a field of recipients-with-dues that exists necessarily), it just is horn one, which collapses creation into necessity. The doctrine wants the *de re* strength (a genuinely necessary attribute with real relata) at the *de dicto* price, and that gap is what the four horns exploit. If justice is necessary and justice requires recipients-with-dues, then one of these horns must give. *Horn one.* Recipients-with-dues are necessary too: the field is co-necessary with the attribute. The horn collapses creation into necessity and conflicts with creation-ex-nihilo, the doctrine's standing position on contingent creation (Pruss, A. R., 2011); [§6.2.2](<6.2.2 Unity.md>) develops the unity-side correlate. *Horn two.* Recipients-with-dues are contingent, and the attribute's exercise is contingent on them; what is necessary is the *disposition* to render rather than the rendering. The horn weakens the strong-necessity claim and surrenders the contentful relation between the predicate and any divine doing: the disposition's name without its exercise. *Horn three.* The field is internal: the Trinity renders dues among its persons, and the modal status of justice rides on the necessity of the intra-Trinitarian relations rather than the necessity of any external recipient. The construal Aquinas in places suggests (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.21.1 ad 3 preserves the necessary attribute at the cost of whether *due-ness* among consubstantial persons retains the contrastive structure justice requires: the persons' shared essence factors out the relational asymmetry on which *suum cuique* runs. *Horn four.* Justice is a mere disposition without necessary instantiation. The horn retains the verbal predicate at the cost of the contentful relation between the predicate and any divine act. The four horns together cover the available options on the modal status of justice's field, and each costs a load-bearing commitment elsewhere. The necessity-cannot-transfer-to-a-being result of [§6.3.1](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>) applies in justice form: the modal status of a tri-place relational structure belongs to the field within which the relation obtains, not to a relatum stipulated outside the field.

**Q3.** *Does universal desert preserve the predicate's informativeness?* The Christian doctrine of universal sinfulness Romans 3:23 NRSVUE; (Augustine of Hippo, (413–426) 1998), XIV; (John Calvin, (1559) 1960), II.1; for contemporary discussion, (Jesse Couenhoven, 2013) holds that every human, from the fall onward, stands in a state of culpable corruption. The doctrine has structural consequence for justice-predication. If every human deserves condemnation, then every act of divine condemnation (from natural death to plague to flood to eternal punishment) is the rendering of due. The verdict, in the doctrine's strong form, is uniform across input. The concern here is what *justice* picks out under a uniform-verdict regime. A predicate that returns the same value across every input is not tracking the structural feature the predicate is supposed to track; it is a constant function whose name still carries the appearance of differential content. The classical reply (that justice operates within the *category* of the deserved, and that mercy is what differentiates outcomes within that category) relocates the differential work from justice to mercy, and concedes that justice itself is not the locus of moral information about divine action. What *justice* does, on the relocation, is set the categorical floor against which the only contentful moral attribute (mercy) operates; what *justice predicates* is the floor's universal applicability rather than any differential rendering. The doctrine has preserved the predicate's name and surrendered its informative content. The structural cost compounds when the move is paired with Q7: the believer who cannot discern divine reasons cannot discern *which* punishments fall within universal desert as opposed to outside it, and the floor's name is the only thing the predicate carries.

**Q4.** *Can guilt transfer across substantive bearers?* The doctrine of penal substitution (that Christ's death satisfies divine justice on behalf of guilty humanity) requires guilt to move between persons. Five moves license the transfer; each has structural cost. *The imputation move* federal-Reformed; (John Murray, 1955); (Oliver D. Crisp, 2020) treats guilt as a legal property reckoned to Christ and righteousness as a legal property reckoned to the believer. The concern here is what *reckoning* names. In the human case, reckoning is a courtroom procedure whose justice depends on the reckoning tracking the substantive moral relation between agent and act; reckoning that does not track (that imputes a property whose substantive ground is absent) is what the predicate ordinarily marks as miscarriage. The doctrine preserves transfer by emptying the reckoning of substantive tracking. *The participation move* mystical-union; (Eleonore Stump, 2018); Athanasius, *De Incarnatione* on incorporation treats believers as ontologically united with Christ such that guilt becomes genuinely Christ's and righteousness becomes genuinely theirs. The fork sharpens: either union is metaphysically sufficient to transfer the moral properties (in which case Christ becomes genuinely guilty during the union, and the impeccability claim of Q3-at-[§6.9.1](<6.9.1 Benevolence.md>) fails for the duration), or union is metaphorical (in which case reckoning has returned in disguise). *The consent move* (Anselm of Canterbury, (1098) 1998), II.11 treats Christ's willing submission as licensing the substitution. Consent licenses some transactions — gifts, contracts — but consent does not manufacture *desert*, which is the property justice tracks. A judge who accepts a willing volunteer in place of the convicted has not done justice; the judge has substituted a willing victim for a deserved one, and the substitution's voluntariness does not change the verdict's miscarriage. *The satisfaction move* (Anselm of Canterbury, (1098) 1998), I; (Richard Swinburne, 1989) treats the cross as paying a quantitative debt owed to divine honor or moral order. The reframing shifts justice from punishment-of-the-guilty to debt-payment-on-behalf-of-the-guilty; the two are not equivalent moral structures, and treating them as equivalent equivocates on the predicate. *The Christus Victor move* (Gustaf Aulén, 1931); (Hans Boersma, 2004) treats the cross as defeat of cosmic powers rather than satisfaction of justice. The justice-language drops out: the cross is rescue, not desert-tracking. The concern across the five moves is the same. Guilt, on the moral phenomenology, is a property of substantive agents whose acts the property tracks; it attaches at Φ. Transfer across Φ-distinctions is what the predicate ordinarily marks as injustice in every other application. The doctrine preserves transfer by relocating *guilt* from agent-tracking property to bookkeeping-property, to courtroom-fiction, to debt-token, or to rescue-narrative. Each relocation preserves the verbal predicate; each surrenders the substantive structure justice was supposed to track.

**Q5.** *Can culpability attach without action?* The doctrine of original sin (Augustine of Hippo, (413–426) 1998), XIII.14; (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I-II.81; for contemporary discussion, (Michael C. Rea, 2007); (Jesse Couenhoven, 2013) holds that humans are culpable, from conception, for an act they did not perform. The concern here is the relation between culpability and action. Culpability, on the moral phenomenology, tracks the agent's action: A is culpable for X just in case A performed X under conditions of knowledge and freedom that license the attribution. The doctrine relocates culpability past the conditions of agent-action: A is culpable for B's act in virtue of A's metaphysical, biological, or representational relation to B. Three accounts try to license the relocation. *The federal-headship account* Reformed; (Jonathan Edwards, 1758); (John Murray, 1959) treats Adam as legal representative. The disanalogy with human representation is decisive against the move: representation in human politics requires either consent of the represented or exit-availability under the system the representative acts within; Adamic representation supplies neither. Representation without consent or exit is conscription, which is the moral structure the relocation was supposed to avoid. *The seminal-realism account* (Augustinian-Traducianist) treats human beings as metaphysically present in Adam at the time of the act. The account requires (i) the metaphysical claim that potential persons share in actual persons' acts, which generalizes to make every descendant complicit in every ancestor's act, and (ii) the moral claim that seminal presence licenses culpability, which is just to redefine culpability away from the action-condition the predicate ordinarily tracks. *The inherited-corruption account* (some Arminian and Orthodox readings) treats humans as inheriting a *condition* (concupiscence, mortality) but not *guilt*; subsequent acts under the condition generate the culpability. The account is the most morally defensible, but it (a) shifts the doctrine substantially from its Augustinian-Reformed form, and (b) leaves a different injustice in place: why is *the condition itself* just, if no act of the condition's bearer brought it about? The bite case the doctrine constructs to handle is the unevaluated death of children: in flood, in plague, in famine, in eternity. Strong original-sin makes the death deserved; weaker original-sin makes the death undeserved suffering of a condition the sufferer did not author. Either horn is an injustice on the standard moral phenomenology; the doctrine selects the horn by selecting the version of the doctrine, not by removing the structural problem. The abstract-versus-narrative question this case raises — whether the dead-children horn is met by structural analysis or owes theodicy-through-narrative — is addressed methodologically at [§6.9.1](<6.9.1 Benevolence.md>): the preclusion runs prior to narrative theodicy and holds however it fares.

**Q6.** *Does the predicate retain identity across the covenants?* The Hebrew Bible records, and in places commands, acts the New Testament's ethic and contemporary moral intuition classify as deeply unjust: the *ḥērem* (the ban: total destruction devoted to God) warfare of the conquest (Joshua 6, 10; Deuteronomy 20), the destruction of Amalek including women and children (1 Samuel 15), the slaughter of Midianite captives (Numbers 31), capital punishment for Sabbath violation (Numbers 15:32–36) and for cursing parents (Exodus 21:17). The doctrine holds the same God, with the same justice, at work across the Old and New Testaments (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I-II.107; (John Calvin, (1559) 1960), II.10–11. The concern here is whether *just* names the same property at both temporal indices. Four moves try to preserve identity-across-time. *The progressive-revelation move* developed in different forms by Origen and Wesley; for contemporary versions, (Paul Copan, 2011); (Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, 2014) holds that God's commands accommodate the moral capacity of the age. If the underlying moral facts are eternal, the move forks: either the OT commands were unjust by the eternal standard (and God commanded injustice), or the NT ethic is a leniency relative to the eternal standard (and Christ countermanded what justice required). Either horn surrenders the moral character of one of the Testaments. *The dispensational move* covenant-administrative; for contemporary versions, (Robert L. Saucy, 1993) holds that the standard is constant but its administration differs by covenant. The reply rescues immutability of the standard at the cost of the means question: an omnipotent agent had alternative means to the pedagogical or covenantal ends, and the chosen means (mass killing including non-combatants) require positive justification beyond the dispensational frame. *The accommodation-rhetorical move* developed in ancient-Near-Eastern–contextual readings; for contemporary form, (David T. Lamb, 2022); (Douglas S. Earl, 2010) holds that the conquest narratives are ANE military rhetoric rather than literal command. The move dissolves the most acute cases at the cost of a general result: the texts long held as divine commands are conceded not to have been divine commands, and the selection criterion for which texts are accommodation and which are not cannot be *the ones we find morally tolerable* without making the reader the authority over the text. *The prerogative move* (God, as creator, has authority over creaturely life that humans lack) is the discernment-collapse horn (Q7) in another form. If *just*, predicated of God, tracks compatibility-with-divine-prerogative rather than the structural feature the predicate ordinarily tracks, then the predicate's content has been emptied; the predicate now reports something trivially true given the definition. The four moves together cover the available options, and each costs a load-bearing commitment elsewhere.

**Q7.** *Does discernment-collapse leave the affirmation standing?* The standard reply to the moral pressures on divine action runs through skeptical theism (Stephen J. Wykstra, 1984); (Michael Bergmann, 2001); (Daniel Howard-Snyder, 2009); for the most developed contemporary form, (Michael Bergmann, 2012). The believer concedes that some divine actions appear unjust by creaturely standards, and explains the appearance by appeal to the creature's limited epistemic access: we cannot see the divine reasons. The reply preserves *God is just* against the pressure of apparent counter-evidence. The concern here is what the reply commits at the level of affirmation. The affirmation *God is just* is contentful only if the believer can, in principle, discern justice well enough to identify *God is just* as a recognizable claim with definite truth-conditions. If divine action exceeds creaturely capacity for moral evaluation at the level the skeptical-theist reply requires, then *God is just* exceeds creaturely capacity for moral evaluation at the same level, and the affirmation, predicated by the believer, asserts what the believer is in principle unable to discern. The fork is sharp. Either the believer can discern justice well enough to apply the predicate to divine action (in which case the cases that appear unjust bear evidential weight against the predicate's truth, and the skeptical-theist reply fails); or the believer cannot (in which case the predicate's affirmation is the predicate's name without the discernment that gives the name content, and *God is just* is the verbal predicate without the substantive structure it requires). The reply rescues the predicate from counter-evidence at the cost of rescuing it from evidence in general: the affirmation no longer turns on what the believer is in a position to discern, which is what predication ordinarily reports. The dialectic in fact occupies a third position, and it is the least stable of the three: the skeptical discount is applied selectively. The deliverances of moral discernment are retained where they *confirm* the predicate (the acts the believer finds good are counted, without epistemic apology, as evidence of divine goodness) and suspended only where they would *disconfirm* it, the difficult cases alone being reassigned to the inaccessibility of divine reasons. The same faculty is ruled competent in the confirming direction and incompetent in the disconfirming one; the asymmetry is not a second epistemic thesis but the first applied in one direction only. Its effect is to convert *God is just* from a claim whose content is merely hard to verify into one nothing is permitted to count against. A predicate that draws support from the confirming cases while immunizing itself against the disconfirming ones is unfalsifiable in the strict sense (not underdetermined by the evidence but withdrawn from its reach) and an unfalsifiable *just* is the verbal predicate maintained by a rule about which evidence may bear, not by the structural feature the predicate reports.

*The local turn.* The most developed contemporary skeptical theism does not run globally. Bergmann's local thesis (Michael Bergmann, 2012) grants the believer ordinary moral knowledge intact and confines the skepticism to a single defensible claim: that our sample of the goods, evils, and entailment-relations in the total economy of value is not known to be representative of the whole, so the inference from *we discern no justifying reason* to *there is none* is blocked. Conceded at full strength, the local thesis survives the global fork above — it does not render *God is just* contentless, because it leaves first-order moral discernment standing and withdraws only the inference from non-discernment to the non-existence of reasons. The concern here is what magnitude the representativeness gap is a gap about. *Just*, in the *suum cuique* sense the section has held throughout, is fixed by what is owed to the affected party, the manner in which the act is rendered to the subject who receives it (Φ acting on S), not by the act's standing in the all-things-considered economy of value across the whole. The representativeness gap is a gap about the latter magnitude; granting it in full leaves the act-as-rendered-to-the-party exactly where it stood. To make the local skeptic's gap bite justice-predication, the reply must add that justice-to-a-subject *supervenes on* all-things-considered global value: that whether the child's death is rendered justly to the child depends on goods elsewhere in the economy the child has no part in. That addition is the relocation the section has diagnosed at every prior attribute: it moves *just* off the agent-recipient relation its content runs on and onto a global ledger, and a *just* that tracks the global ledger rather than what is owed the affected party is the predicate's name carried by a different structural feature. The bite cases bite as before: Q3's universal desert, Q5's death of children, Q6's *ḥērem* each press on what is owed the affected party, which the representativeness concession does not touch.

*The intervention parallel.* Maitzen's other signature argument presses the same point from the opposite epistemic end (Stephen Maitzen, 2009). Where the demographic argument (Q8) and the local skeptic turn on what the believer can and cannot discern, this one stipulates the favorable epistemic case and still bites: grant that the outweighing good is real *and* that the believer has access to it. Ordinary morality (the morality the believer relies on everywhere else) still obliges the bystander who can prevent a child's death from meningitis to prevent it, and does not release the bystander on the ground that the suffering may secure a greater good; the doctor who withholds treatment so that the ordeal may build the patient's character, or another's compassion, has acted wrongly by the standard the believer applies without hesitation in every non-theological case. So the greater-good defense of divine non-intervention forks: either ordinary morality is mistaken about the bystander's obligation (in which case the doctrine rests on overturning a moral datum more certain than any premise of the theodicy that overturns it) or the human/divine parallel breaks, and *just*, said of God's non-intervention, is not *just* in the sense said of the bystander. The fork is the section's fork in intervention form. *Just* is either univocal across the parallel (in which case the obligation that binds the bystander binds the divine agent, and non-intervention is unjust on the shared sense) or equivocal, in which case the predicate said of God has been cut loose from the sense that gave it content. The one principled way to break the parallel without bare equivocation is the prerogative move (that the creator holds an authority over creaturely life the bystander lacks) and that move routes directly back into the prerogative horn of Q6 and the discernment-collapse this question presses: an authority that converts what would otherwise be a failure to render what is owed into a rightful withholding empties *just* of the differential content the predicate reports. The reply generalizes across every *perfect-X* predicate the doctrine applies to God; the treatment of apophasis in [§6.8.3](<6.8.3 Describability.md>) identifies the structural form, and the present section identifies its specifically *justice*-form, where the form is most acutely self-undermining because justice is the predicate whose content the difficult-case literature presses on most directly.

*The demonstrated-mechanism sharpening.* The intervention parallel is ordinarily met by conceding that direct intervention on a resistant will might not be available to a being committed to preserving creaturely freedom, an empirical hedge the tradition's own narrative material removes. Exodus states, repeatedly, that God produces Pharaoh's resistance to the request Moses is sent to deliver (Exodus 4:21; 7:3; 9:12; 10:1, 20, 27; 11:10; 14:4, 8; see E.1.4, Free-Will Defense), and Romans 9 generalizes the mechanism into standing doctrine — "he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills" (Romans 9:18) — anticipating and overruling, rather than answering, the fairness objection it provokes (9:19–21). Once a tradition's own text reports the mechanism in successful use for a demonstrative purpose against a single ruler, the freedom-preserving hedge is no longer available to explain non-intervention at any later, larger scale: the question is no longer whether direct intervention on a human will is metaphysically available to this God, but why it was exercised for that stake and withheld at every greater one.

*The four-cell breakdown.* Where two human wills stand in live moral conflict — a perpetrator's and a resister's, at any scale — the same mechanism admits exactly four dispositions, and each costs a commitment the doctrine cannot spend twice. God may shape the perpetrator's will alone, which is Pharaoh's case at whatever scale the conflict runs, and makes God the direct author of the harm rather than its permitter. God may shape the resister's will alone, leaving the perpetrator's genuinely free, which requires an unstated selection principle for who receives the intervention and who does not, and cannot consistently credit the resulting courage as the agent's own without also crediting Pharaoh's resistance as his own, since both are installed by the identical mechanism; crediting one as authentic and voiding the other is asymmetric bookkeeping, not a difference in the cases. God may shape neither, leaving both wills free, in which case the intervention parallel above applies at full force, sharpened rather than softened by the demonstrated mechanism: the bystander obligation the believer honors everywhere else binds a God shown willing and able to intervene at far smaller stakes. Or God may shape both, authoring the conflict entire while its participants experience the whole of it, terror and resolve alike, as their own — the one cell in which the good the free-will defense sells (real agency, actually operating, somewhere in the transaction) is not merely outweighed but absent, leaving the suffering with nothing on the other side of the ledger to have purchased at all.

*What recurrent correction concedes.* Independent of which cell obtains in a given case, that the mechanism is exercised at all concedes something about the object it is exercised on. A creation whose ordinary operation reliably produced acceptable outcomes would not require its makers' hand returned to the controls; that it is returned, whenever the doctrine allows itself to say so, reports on the standing adequacy of what was made rather than on the isolated crisis being averted. The point mirrors the one already made of the fall's necessity (E.2.1, The Fall): a transgression that had to happen has no author but the design that required it; a creation that has to be periodically seized and corrected to avert catastrophe has no author, for that recurring fact, but the design that made the seizing necessary.

**Q8.** *Does morally arbitrary distribution of eternal stakes count as just?* Stephen Maitzen's argument from the demographics of theism (Stephen Maitzen, 2006); cf. (J. L. Schellenberg, 2007) on hiddenness; (Jason Marsh, 2008) starts from the empirical fact that the distribution of belief in any particular religious tradition tracks geography, era, and family of origin more strongly than it tracks rational inquiry, moral character, or evidential examination. If salvation is gated on belief in specific propositions, and the distribution of belief tracks morally arbitrary facts, then eternal-stakes outcomes are determined by morally arbitrary facts. The tradition's own practice concedes the distribution. A standing Great Commission (the centuries-long project of carrying the message to those who have not received it) is an admission, made in action, that the message has not in fact reached everyone, and that whether a person receives it turns on the contingent arrival of a messenger rather than on anything the person is or does. A ground adequate to its universal task would not require an army of messengers to complete it; that it must be carried concedes that, left to its own sufficiency, it does not arrive. The concern here is the fit between *arbitrary distribution of eternal stakes* and the classical predicate *just*. Five responses are available; each carries cost. *The Molinist response* (Plantinga, A., 1974); (William Lane Craig, 1991) holds that God knows what each person would freely do under any circumstance and arranges history so that all who would respond receive opportunity. The response imports the contested metaphysics of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom the grounding problem; (William Hasker, 1989), and entails the conclusion that those born outside the gospel's reach are condemned for *what they would have done* under different conditions: a counterfactual desert structure whose justice is itself open to the present question. *The inclusivist response* (Karl Rahner, 1976); for contemporary form, (John Sanders, 1992) holds that those who respond to whatever light they have are saved by Christ's work without explicit knowledge. The response dilutes the New Testament's apparent insistence on explicit faith (Romans 10; Acts 4:12) and transforms *salvation by faith in Christ* into *salvation by responsiveness*: a different doctrine. *The postmortem-opportunity response* for contemporary defense, (Bruce R. Reichenbach, 1982); (Harold Lindsell, 1949) holds that those who never heard receive opportunity after death. The response has thin biblical support (1 Peter 3:19 is opaque and contested), undermines the New Testament's stress on this-life response, and raises the question why this-life epistemic conditions are so asymmetric if postmortem opportunity is the real decision-point. *The universalist response* Origen, *De Principiis* III.6; for contemporary defense, (David Bentley Hart, 2019) dissolves the eternal-stakes asymmetry by removing the eternal-stakes verdict; the cost is departure from the historical mainstream and a substantial revision of the doctrine of judgment. *The hard-exclusivist response* (those who don't hear are lost; this is just because all deserve condemnation) is the universal-wickedness defense (Q3) deployed at eschatological scale, and carries the same structural cost: under uniform desert, *just* tracks nothing differential. Each response preserves the predicate by paying a doctrinal cost the standard package is unwilling to pay in full; the cumulative effect is that the predicate's application at eternal stakes requires one of universal-wickedness, contested counterfactual metaphysics, dilution of the explicit-faith doctrine, abandonment of this-life urgency, or universalism. The doctrine, in its standard form, cannot afford any of the five; the argument's force is in the cumulative refusal.

*What is required.* Run together, the eight pressures register the structural conditions divine-justice predication depends on. *Just*, *merciful*, *equitable*, *fair*, *righteous* are manner-of-acting predicates whose grammatical content is adverbial: to give *justly*, to render *mercifully*, to judge *fairly*, to act *righteously*. The adverb requires the verb; the verb requires the conditions of action: a substantive agent who acts (Φ), a target distinct from the actor who receives the action (S), a temporal direction from not-acting to acting (T). The classical doctrine has defined the being whose actions the predicates describe as without T, S, or Φ, and has preserved the predicates by relocating them: from adverbial to substantive position, from differential to constant function, from agent-tracking to bookkeeping, from action-condition to representational structure, from time-indexed standard to constant standard under contingent administration, from discernment to skepticism-shielded affirmation, from desert-tracking to arbitrary-distribution-with-doctrinal-cost. Each relocation preserves the predicate's name; each surrenders the structural conditions the predicate's content runs on. The three pressures cluster cleanly. *Transfer.* The mercy-vs-justice tension (Q1), penal substitution (Q4), and hereditary guilt (Q5) require moral properties to move across the very distinctions the predicate's substantive structure depends on: between attributes and between substantive bearers. Either justice is the kind of property that can be transferred (in which case it is closer to a debt-token than to the structural feature *justice* ordinarily picks out), or it is not (in which case the doctrines depending on transfer fail). *Dependence and consistency.* The dependence problem (Q2) and the cross-covenant identity problem (Q6) require either a necessary field of objects (collapsing creation into necessity) or unstable definition across temporal indices (collapsing the predicate into either a changing morality or an empty constancy). *Discernment and arbitrariness.* Universal desert (Q3), discernment-collapse (Q7), and demographic injustice (Q8) push toward the same conclusion: in the standard package, *God is just* is either an unverifiable predicate or a vacuous one. If the believer cannot discern divine justice well enough to verify the affirmation, the predicate reports nothing the believer is in a position to know; if the believer can, the cases that appear unjust enter as evidence against it. What *justice* picks out, properly read, is the structural feature of right-ordering of subjects-acting-on-subjects to keep each other in being under the symmetry-of-extraction commitment (the Modal Convergence Theorem and the Subsistence definition, developed in Chapter 8; Chapter 9 develops the political form). What *mercy* picks out, properly read, is the same structural feature seen from the restoration side: subjects moved by the misery of subjects, acting to return the relational field to right-order when extraction or harm has displaced it. Mercy is the asymmetry-relieving direction within the same symmetry that *just* tracks from the constitution side; the two predicates name the constitution-pole and the restoration-pole of one structural feature, not two competing properties of one substantive bearer. Justice is what Nature does when mutual subsistence runs with proper proportion: when subjects render to subjects what their mutual subsistence requires. The predicate applies to the structural feature of subject-on-subject right-ordering, not to a being from which the conditions of acting have been stripped.

*What is inverted.* The Latin *iustitia* renders the Greek *dikaiosynē*. *Iustitia* compounds *ius* (right, law, what is owed) with the abstract-formation *-itia*; the noun names the practice of giving each what is right. *Ius* itself, on the older comparative reconstruction (Émile Benveniste, 1969) on Indo-European institutional vocabulary, derives from a root naming *binding* or *the bond*: justice is what binds the social fabric by holding each in proper relation to the others. The Greek *dikaiosynē* compounds *dikaios* (straight, right, conforming to *dikē*) with the abstract-formation *-synē*. *Dikē* itself, on the comparative reconstruction (Pierre Chantraine, 1968), derives from a root naming *pointing* or *direction*: what indicates the path subjects must follow if their actions are to maintain the relational order. The two principal classical vocabularies for the moral predicate the doctrine applies to God are built, in different ways, from the same structural feature: the right-ordering of subjects-acting-on-subjects within the relational field that hosts the action. *Iustitia* names the practice of holding-in-bond; *dikaiosynē* names the practice of straight-pointing within the relational structure. The Hebrew *ṣedeq* / *ṣedāqāh* parallel runs the same way: the noun derives from a root naming straightness or rightness-of-fit and names the structural feature of communal relations rightly ordered (Klaus Koch, 1955); (Moshe Weinfeld, 1995). The vocabulary of justice, across the three traditions the doctrine draws on, is built from the conditions of action and the structural feature of right-ordering within the relational field. The mercy vocabulary runs the same way. The Latin *misericordia* compounds *miseri-* (wretched, in misery) with *cor*, the heart; the noun names the practice of letting the heart be moved toward the wretched. The Greek *eleos* derives, on the comparative reconstruction (Pierre Chantraine, 1968), from a root naming *cry-out* or *lament*: what the sufferer does and what the merciful one responds to. The Hebrew vocabulary doubles. *Ḥesed* names covenant-loyal love, the steadfastness of relational bond under conditions of breakdown (Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, 1978); (Nelson Glueck, 1967); *raḥamim* names visceral compassion, and its noun-root is *reḥem*, the womb: the Hebrew mercy-vocabulary is built from the most embodied relational feature, the maternal interior (Phyllis Trible, 1978). The four classical vocabularies for mercy (*misericordia*, *eleos*, *ḥesed*, *raḥamim*) are built, in different ways, from the same structural feature the justice vocabulary tracks: subjects-acting-on-subjects within the relational field that hosts the action, with mercy naming specifically the restoration-direction within that field. Both predicate-families depend on the same structural conditions, and both run, in their original linguistic forms, through the relational field that the classical doctrine has factored out. The classical predicate has been pointing, across its formulations, at the structural feature of subjects rightly ordering subject-on-subject action while the doctrine has located that feature in a being from which the conditions that constitute it have been removed. Nature, in mutual subsistence under symmetry-of-extraction, is what *just* names; Nature, in the restoration-direction of that same mutual subsistence, is what *merciful* names. The structural result holds for both predicates jointly: the doctrine's God is out of joint with the relational field in which justice and mercy have purchase, neither just nor unjust, neither merciful nor unmerciful in any positive sense, but outside the conditions under which the predicates have differential content. What the predicates actually pick out is what Nature is when subjects rightly maintain one another and rightly restore one another.


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← [6.9.1 Benevolence](<6.9.1 Benevolence.md>) | [6.10 No Exit](<6.10 No Exit.md>) →
