Notes: Covenantal Solution to the Problem of Evil

Based on: “Objections to the Covenantal Solution to the Problem of Evil” by Dr. Owen Anderson

Philosophy professor Owen Anderson of Arizona State University (and also Substack) presents objections to his covenantal solution to the problem of evil. Covenant Theology, in the Reformed tradition, sees God’s plan of redemption as a series of covenants, rather than separate events or moral lessons. The Hebrew word for covenant, “berith,” is used throughout the Old Testament to describe the solemn relationship God makes with His people (e.g., Adam, Noah, Abraham, Israel at Sinai, David). It doesn’t seek to justify each evil event by pointing to a future good that outweighs it. Instead, it justifies permitting evil-as-a-consequence by pointing to a past event—the fall—and God’s faithfulness to the covenantal framework. The Fall introduced a disruption that led to corruption and alienation. God’s faithfulness to the framework He established means He respects the cause-and-effect nature of reality and the consequences of human choices. He doesn’t constantly intervene to erase every negative result of the Fall. However, God is not a bystander to the fallen world. He is actively working within it to bring about a cosmic good beyond any single event. Below, I outline the video, and my own comments and reaction are noted in italics.

Objections to covenant theology

• Isogesis vs. exegesis:

  • Objection: Critics argue covenant theology is an example of isogesis (reading theology into the text) because the phrase “covenant theology” does not appear in Scripture.

  • Anderson’s rebuttal: This objection mixes up the term with the actual idea. often uses “berith” and similar words to talk about God’s covenant dealings, which all lead to the New Covenant promised in Jeremiah 31 and fulfilled in Christ. Reformed theologians assert that covenant theology arises from exegesis by drawing out the Bible’s own categories because Scripture presents God’s work in history as covenantal from beginning to end.

• God creating evil directly vs. permitting evil:

  • Objection: Passages like Job 2:10, Job 1:21 and Isaiah 45:7 suggest God creates evil.

  • Anderson’s rebuttal: These verses, in context, refer to troubles, disasters, or punishment (natural evil), not moral sin. This distinction is based on the Hebrew word “rah,” which can mean disaster or judgment in contexts of covenantal discipline.

    • Job 2:10: Job rebukes his wife and affirms that both prosperity and suffering fall under God’s providence. “Evil” here relates to suffering and circumstantial wrath of God.

    • Job 1:21: Job acknowledges God’s sovereignty even in loss and calamity.

    • Isaiah 45:7: The Hebrew word “rah” can mean moral evil but often means calamity, disaster, or judgment. The context in Isaiah is God bringing covenantal discipline. Reformed commentators stress that these verses mean God sends disaster for judgment, discipline, and as natural evil, not that He creates sin.

  • Theological clarification (Reformed view): God is sovereign over all things, including calamity and suffering, which help fulfill His plan of redemption in a world affected by the broken covenant. Humans are under God’s wrath and curse, liable to suffering. However, God is not the author of sin. James 1:13 states God cannot be tempted with evil and tempts no one. These passages show that when calamity or judgment occurs, it’s not outside God’s control, and He directs everything toward His goals, even when people or demons do wrong.

    I have perhaps a different interpretation of these verses to mean that God permits natural evils, with morally sufficient reasons for doing so, but is not the direct cause of natural evil. God actively causes and wills the good. However, He only indirectly permits evil through the natural laws. He is sovereign over natural evil—able to limit it and use it for His purposes—but He is not its direct cause.

Accountability and impossibility of libertarian free will

• Definition of libertarian free will:

  • The ability to do otherwise: At any given moment, a person could genuinely choose A or not-A without being determined by prior causes; or,

  • Agent causation: The person (the agent) is the ultimate, uncaused cause of his or her own actions. Choices are not determined by external factors or even by one’s own nature.

  • Logically impossible: This view of the will requires an uncaused event. “All things being exactly the same” means nothing preceding the choice brought it about. This view insists on many uncaused events across every free choice. There are no uncaused events, as something being caused by non-being is impossible.

    Agent-causal libertarianism doesn’t necessarily propose an uncaused event from nothing, but rather a concurrent bottom-up substance causation by the agent, even if influenced or caused by prior reasons, including the top-down causation of God. A libertarian view typically argues that while there may be prior explanations, desires, influences, conditions, causes or reasons for a free choice, these are not logically sufficient to necessitate that free choice. Determinism is the idea that every event is guaranteed by the conditions that came before it so that the prior conditions are a logically sufficient condition for the final effect. If there are multiple logically possible events from the same prior conditions, then those prior conditions are not logically sufficient for only one specific effect.

    With non-determinism, God’s unchanging decree (or just God, per divine simplicity) is the necessary (but not logically sufficient) cause of all free creaturely acts. The identical prior conditions along with God’s unchanging decree could have caused an agent who chooses A or not-A. If so, then the identical prior conditions along with God’s will (which is is simple and unchanging) are not logically sufficient for only one given effect, since God’s could will an agent who chooses either A or not-A while His will and other prior conditions remain unchanged.

    Expressed as a syllogism:

    P1. If determinism is necessarily true, the identical antecedent conditions always entail only a single given effect.

    P2. Per divine simplicity, the identical antecedent conditions do not always entail only a single given effect.

    C1. Therefore, determinism isn’t necessarily true. (MT)

    P3. If true, then libertarian free-will is logically possible.

    C2. Therefore, libertarian free-will is logically possible. (MP)

    Libertarians don’t think libertarian free choices are uncaused. Instead, it’s because the ultimate cause of all creation is simple and unchanging that makes libertarian freedom possible and disproves that all events are necessarily determined. This differs from the video’s characterization of libertarian free will as an “uncaused event” in the sense of something arising from nothing.

    A second commitment of libertarian free will is that an explanation (e.g., a desire, condition, cause or reason, etc.) need not entail what is to be explained. The video links causation to determination, suggesting that if a will is caused, it is therefore determined. However, libertarians can argue that there is an explanation (including a cause) for a choice (the event to be explained) without determining or entailing it. For example, John might choose to help a neighbor because he values friendship (the explanans), but this desire or cause does not logically necessitate John helping the friend in that particular moment—John could have chosen otherwise. John helped a neighbor because of reasons, so it’s not arbitrary. This distinction allows for genuine libertarian freedom of choice even in the presence of explanatory reasons, without resorting to choices being arbitrary or utterly without cause. The explanation provides understanding without dictating the outcome. To ask what caused John to choose those reasons is to presume a specific type of causality where every event, including a mental decision, must be deterministically caused by an antecedent, which begs the question against the simultaneity of agent causation. As a free agent who possesses an inherent power to choose which reason(s) to act upon, John is the cause that makes some given reason(s) efficacious, not the other way around. The act of choosing is the cause, which was ultimately nondeterministically caused by God.

    Under a divine timelessness model of libertarian freedom, God’s universal causality is the very foundation of human freedom, not an obstacle to it. God does not decree how a person acts—He decrees an entire history of the logically possible ways reality could be, which consists of the so-acting-person acting according to his or her own powers. From Adam’s perspective, existing and acting within time, the future was genuinely open (not determined since the antecedent conditions were not logically sufficient). At the moment of choice, he had both the ability and the occasion to do otherwise. His freedom consisted in this real capacity for alternative action, not in the unpredictability of its outcome. Adam genuinely could have done otherwise because his nature as a free agent in time allowed for it. God’s free and necessary decree is eternal and unchanging, but the contingent object of God’s decree (the world with the so-acting-Adam) is expressed by His timeless decision to actualize the specific reality where Adam, in his freedom, in fact didn’t do otherwise. God’s sovereignty was expressed in His choice to create the specific reality where He knew that Adam would freely sin. Adam could have done otherwise in the full libertarian sense: his alternatives were real within time. God’s eternal knowledge does not remove their openness but simply knows them as eternally complete. Divine timelessness means that God’s causality encompasses freedom itself, not as constraint, but as the condition by which free acts can exist at all.

    Another model of libertarianism is divine concurrence, where God makes the so-acting-person be by sustaining the agent in the very act of their free choice. The agent is the one who determines the character of the choice (to sin or not to sin). God’s concurrent action is what gives that choice its being and actuality. Without God’s sustaining power, the person could not act at all; but what they do is their own determination.

    Regarding possible worries that libertarianism would introduce composition to God’s will or knowledge, even under divine simplicity, God can have extrinsic accidental properties, like having the extrinsic accidental property of being a creator or not. One extrinsic accidental property of God could be eternally knowing the proposition “God created a world where Adam sins at time t.” It’s extrinsic because the property describes God’s relationship to the world (something external to Him), not a change or feature within His own essence. God knows contingent facts through His intrinsic will, but the resulting knowledge of contingent facts itself is understood as an extrinsic, relational property. God’s one and simple will is intrinsic. The created order exists outside of God. God’s “knowledge of the created order” is simply His eternal awareness of His own intrinsic causal act in relation to its specific extrinsic effect. Therefore, while God’s knowledge of the created order is grounded in an intrinsic act, that knowledge is defined by its relationship to an extrinsic object, and is therefore itself extrinsic. For an eternal being, that relationship is timeless.

• Reformed theology’s view of moral freedom:

  • Moral freedom is the ability to act according to one’s desires without external restraint. A person is free when they can will and do what they want, even if their wants are corrupted by total depravity.

    I disagree that moral freedom is only about external constraint. In economic and political freedom, constraints are external because they deal with interpersonal actions, whereas moral freedom has the added complication intrapersonal actions. Interpersonal actions involve government regulations, taxes, prohibitions and coercion from others that prevent you from freely producing, trading or consuming. Moral freedom is both internal and external. For instance, a person experiencing an unforeseeable mental crisis (an internal constraint) wouldn’t be as morally culpable as someone who premeditatedly commits the same act. A driver suffering an unforeseeable seizure would likely face reduced or no criminal penalty, although they would still likely be civilly liable. Guilt is binary, but culpability can be a spectrum. The state of one’s own mind is key to moral freedom, making it a fundamentally different and more personal concept than freedom in the political or economic spheres.

  • The libertarian view is seen as akin to the serpent’s temptation: the desire to be one’s own cause, to be one’s own god, to determine good and evil for oneself, outside of God’s causation.

    The libertarian framework doesn’t claim that humans are their own cause. Instead, it argues that God is the Primary Cause who creates and sustains agents with a specific, delegated power: the power of free choice. Theological libertarians view our freedom as a created and dependent reality. It exists only because God continually holds us in being. The freedom is not to invent the moral rules, but to either align your will with your proper or ultimate end (God) or rebel against your proper or ultimate end. The sin of Adam was not in possessing free will, but in using that God-given faculty to choose self-interest over self-giving obedience to God. The libertarian view argues that the ability to make that choice is precisely what makes love and virtue meaningful.

• Objections to original sin

  • Objection: “I didn’t choose to be born a sinner.” This argument implies that Adam’s sin being imputed to all humanity (due to him being our covenant head) undermines free will because we inherit guilt and corruption we never personally chose.

  • Anderson’s rebuttal: This is an objection to existence itself. We constantly inherit conditions we do not choose (e.g., families, nations, traditions, even existence itself). We are born into God’s world with inherent obligations or consequences. Being born with obligations or consequences is not an infringement of freedom; freedom means acting without coercion according to one’s nature/wants. A sinner sins freely because they want to sin, not because God forces them.

    This view assumes that the compatibilist definition of freedom is the only logically possible view. As I mentioned earlier, determinism (the view that all events are determined or entailed by prior conditions) isn’t necessarily true. Your family history, genetics and nationality are non-moral conditions. They shape who you are but are not inherently morally blameworthy. Under the doctrine of original sin endorsed in the video, you inherit moral guilt and culpability. You are not just born into a difficult situation; you are born condemned before you have made any personal choices.

    I hold to the doctrine of origin sin as expressed in the The Apology of the Augsburg Confession as the “lack of original righteousness.”¹ Original righteousness meant meant having perfect health in body and mind but also the gifts of certain knowledge of God, fear of God, and confidence in God. So God did not transmit sin or guilt, but rather did not transmit the gift of original righteousness. Since Adam and Eve lost their original righteousness, the consequence is that their heirs are all without it and ipso facto in a state of original sin (that is, unbelief or distrust of God and given into material lust).

• Objections to total depravity:

  • Objection: “If I’m totally depraved, I cannot choose God.” This removes meaningful freedom, as real choice requires the ability to do otherwise.

  • Anderson’s rebuttal: Sinners aren’t forced from outside; they sin because they want to sin. Total depravity means the will is in bondage to sin, but they choose to be enslaved. The restraint is internal moral corruption, and people are still accountable for it. Examples like a drunkard or compulsive liar illustrate responsibility for actions driven by internal compulsions that alter one’s nature. Sinners love darkness rather than light, lacking holy desire, and complain about consequences rather than their desire to sin.

• Objections to regeneration:

  • Objection: “If God must first change my heart before I believe, then my faith isn’t free; it’s predetermined.” This view assumes free will is an uncaused event.

  • Anderson’s rebuttal: Regeneration isn’t about forcing; it’s about setting us free. Before grace, the sinner does not want Christ. Regeneration changes the heart so the sinner freely and gladly comes to Christ. Freedom in Scripture is not the bare power of contrary choice but the freedom to follow our new desires without hindrance (Augustine: “Grant what you command, and command what you will”). God makes the unwilling willing; He does not drag the unwilling against their will. The video asserts that no one in this life or in hell genuinely wishes to love God but is prevented.

• Objections to responsibility (ought-can principle):

  • Objection: Moral responsibility requires the ability to do otherwise (the “ought can” principle). If our will follows our corrupt nature, we cannot do otherwise, so we are not responsible. The illustration given is of a two-year-old who cannot run a marathon and thus is not morally responsible for failing to do so.

  • Anderson’s rebuttal: Scripture states we are “without excuse” (Romans 1:20) because unbelief is culpable ignorance. The unbeliever knows God through general revelation (Romans 1:19-21) and suppresses the truth. There are two senses of “able”:

    1. You are the kind of thing that can know God. Humans have a rational soul and are created in God’s image, making them capable of knowing God, unlike inanimate objects like tables or plants. You are able in this sense.

    2. You are not able independently of your intellect. This rejects doxastic voluntarism (the idea that you can believe whatever you want). Your will does not operate independently of your intellect. Belief is based on rational arguments and premises. The atheist’s false beliefs about what is good are inexcusable because the truth is clearly presented in creation and the Bible. Therefore, individuals are responsible for choosing not to seek God and suppressing the truth.

    By my reading, Romans 1:18-21 in context is saying that to men whom by their wickedness suppress the truth of what God has shown what can be known, those people are without excuse. It doesn’t necessarily state all unbelievers are without excuse.

    I agree that moral responsibility doesn’t necessary following from being able to do or think otherwise. Moral responsibility is founded on voluntariness. An act is a morally significant if it proceeds from two faculties working together: the intellect (which understands the action and rightly or wrongly presents it as a good to be pursued) and the will (which freely chooses to act based on the intellect’s judgment).

    But just because we can say that a person with a corrupted nature is fully responsible for evil actions, culpability isn’t a zero-sum concept.

    In a criminal and civil context, multiple parties can each be 100% culpable for the same event. A classic thought experiment is a scenario of overdetermination: Two assassins acting independently both shoot and kill the same victim at the exact same moment. Each assassin is fully responsible for the murder, as each act was causally sufficient to cause the victim’s death. Even if a person is 100% culpable for their actions, God may also be culpable since God’s decree (just God, per divine simplicity) is causally sufficient under determinism in producing whatever moral evils take place. (Theological libertarians would agree that God is a necessary cause of all creaturely acts, but God’s decree is not a sufficient cause for createrly free acts.) What the covenant defense of moral evils needs is a morally sufficient reason for permitting the cause of natural evils and permitting people to act as the direct cause of moral evil. After all, God could have upheld of the covenant with a different relationship to creatures that would have prevented moral evil. For example:

    • God could limit people’s freedom of action to not be able to do evil. They could still will evil, but they would be impotent to enact evil.

    • God could have created the Garden of Eden without the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

    • As Adam reached for the fruit, God could have paralyzed his arm, caused the fruit to vanish, or audibly commanded him to stop.

    It seems that in all of these logically possible scenarios, the enforcement of the covenant without allowing for moral evil fundamentally changes the nature of the relationship. If so, then a covenantal defense is incomplete without offering what morally sufficient reasons exist for why God established the precise relationships He did.

    My understanding is that a covenantal defense holds that permitting moral and natural evils serve God’s redemptive purposes, but on it’s own terms, the reason redemption from moral evil is needed is because God didn’t intervene in the first place to prevent moral evil.

    On an alternative view to covenantal defense, if God were to create beings who were physically or psychologically incapable of choosing anything but The Good (God), their connection to God would be automatic. A loving relationship is consensual to each member. Without free will to make morally significant choices in a real world in order to progress in our sanctification, we would be denied the greatest good of all (a mutually loving relationship with God) and suffer the worst possible state of affairs (an indefinite disunion from God). This alternative account for why evil is a unavoidable reality for yet-be-sanctified free persons and doesn’t require a covenantal theology. For natural evils on this view, God permits the natural laws as a means of curbing moral evils.

    This alternative defense of the existence of moral and natural evil is possibly more parsimonious than a covenantal defense because it rests on fewer fundamental assumptions and offers a more universal explanation. They both assume God’s existence, the value of a loving relationship, the necessity of some form of free will for that relationship, and the existence of natural laws. However, a covenantal defense also rests on a set of specific historical-theological claims, a controversial theory of imputed moral guilty, and a direct metaphysical link where the moral status of humanity directly alters the functioning of the physical world to inflict punishment. This alternative to a covenantal defense is also universal. It can explain the possibility of evil in any conceivable world inhabited by free creatures.

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1. “Art. II: Of Original Sin,” Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Book of Concord, https://thebookofconcord.org/apology-of-the-augsburg-confession/article-ii/#ap-ii-0032.