At times, scripture extolls God’s limitless sovereignty and monocratic governance. At others, it depicts God governing through intimate mutuality and covenantal accountability. Reformed Christians of many stripes have long wavered between these seemingly competing notions of God’s sovereignty and their implications for human freedom. Their long running disagreements reveal a recurring temptation to cast God in the role of an unaccountable sovereign. As they aim to maximize God’s freedom, these accounts risk allowing divine dominion to curtail humanly freedom. Or so goes one common response within the Reformed tradition by those who advance a variety of potential strategies for resisting that urge.
In recent years, Katheryn Tanner’s account of metaphysical non-competition between divine and human agency has attracted attention as one such potential strategy for preventing divine domination and securing creaturely freedom. I argue that many aspects of her account agree with key Reformed insights about God’s enabling acts of concursus. The result is a compelling account of how divine and human freedom can coordinate without competing across a range of pursuits. But I also argue that this account is not self-sufficient and should be expanded in two directions by drawing from other Reformed strategies for resisting divine domination. First, Reformed Christians will need more to say about the interplay of divine and human freedom when the two are starkly opposed, as Reformed Christians have long held they often are by virtue of sin. Second, Tanner’s account of metaphysical non-competition is too normatively slight to account for God’s positive governing freedom. More must be done to expound and ground our normative descriptions of how God’s political overruling of the world secures our flourishing rather than enabling our domination.
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