Nick Hadsell's Parental Theory of Divine Authority

Nick Hadsell, looking like a Fabian socialist

I. The Problem of Divine Authority

The problem of divine authority is one of the most underrated problems in philosophy of religion. Ordinarily, theists think that God has practical authority over all human beings, meaning God can cause us to have moral duties we wouldn’t have had otherwise, simply by telling us to do things. (For example: most theists think that if God told you to drive on the left, you’d become obligated to drive on the left, even if you wouldn’t have had this obligation had God stayed silent.)

The difficulty in explaining why God has this authority over you—when I, a mere peasant, don’t have this authority over you—is the problem of divine authority. So far, I don’t think anyone’s given a convincing account of why you’d be obligated to drive on the left just because God told you to.

To convince you that this is a real puzzle, here are three proposed solutions to it, and why they’re unconvincing.

1. The Omniscience Solution: According to the Omniscience Solution, you should do what God says because, being all-knowing, he always knows what’s best. In reply: this explains why it’s practically rational to do what God says, but it doesn’t explain how God could create brand new obligations, out of whole cloth, simply by issuing commands.

2. The Gratitude Solution: According to the Gratitude Solution, the reason why you should do whatever God tells you to is that you owe him a debt of gratitude; after all, he created you, and gave you everything you love. In reply: all this shows is that if we’re not already under God’s authority, we have a strong reason to place ourselves under it and obey his edicts. It doesn’t explain why we’d be under his authority automatically. As Hadsell writes, “gratitude might require me to give my friend my baseball card collection after she saved my life, but the collection is not hers until I transfer the collection over to her.”¹

3. The Property Solution: According to Lockean theories of property, if you create something, it becomes your private property, meaning you have authority over it. According to some, this reasoning should be extended to God’s creation of human beings. Since he creates us, we’re literally his private property; hence God can tell us to do whatever he likes, and we have no moral right to refuse since, if we did, we’d be violating God’s right to private property. In reply: even if the Lockean theory of property is true, it doesn’t seem like it applies to people. Imagine: If God didn’t exist, or didn’t create the universe—as some pantheists might believe—would mothers own their babies, since they’re responsible for creating them? Intuitively no.²

Other solutions have been proposed, but I don’t think they fare well either.

II. The Parental Theory of Divine Authority

Just when we thought there wouldn’t be a viable solution, Nick Hadsell came in swinging with his paper, “Divine authority as parental authority”, published in Religious Studies. According to Hadsell, God the Father is like your human father—a that’s why he has authority.

(Hadsell, btw, has a Substack: you should drop everything and subscribe to it here. I also interviewed Hadsell on my YouTube channel, where we talked about divine authority, and I tried to articulate my objection to his view. It was a great conversation, and you can check it out here.)

Anyway. Here are the steps of his reasoning:

1. First, Hadsell says that when you’re responsible for making a baby, you acquire strong obligations to look after her, in virtue of the fact that you caused her existence. As Hadsell puts it: “[t]he idea, roughly, is that because procreators are the ones who are morally responsible for their child’s vulnerable condition, they are the ones who incur the duties to make sure that child’s life goes well.”³

2. Second, Hadsell argues, this principle applies not just to parents, but to God. Just like a human parent, if God creates someone but then doesn’t meet their basic needs, he’d be the divine equivalent of a deadbeat dad, slacking on his custodial obligations.

3. Next, Hadsell assumes—with the Christian tradition—that humans are built with a natural yearning or need for God, such that union with God is the fulfilment of our wellbeing. More controversially, Hadsell assumes that this yearning or need is a necessary part of our identity. If your yearning or need for God as the fulfilment of your wellbeing were removed from you, you would literally cease to be the same person.

4. But now, there’s a problem. God is holy, and we’re not. This means, according to Hadsell, that there’s a relational barrier between God and us. So long as God is holy and we are unholy, we can’t come into union with God.

5. But if we can’t come into union with God, we can’t be truly fulfilled! This would be really, really peak for us.

6. Fortunately, there’s a process of becoming holy, so that we can relate to God like we’re meant to. In the Christian tradition, this is called ‘sanctification’—the process of becoming holy before God.

7. God wants us to become sanctified, of course, but he doesn’t want to do this by overriding our wills. That would be rude. Instead, he has to improve our characters by engaging our wills, in a way that doesn’t compromise our freedom.

8. “To do this, Hadsell assets, God “gives us recognizable, authoritative commands to do the sorts of things befitting of holy people. This is just a standard, Aristotelian sort of moral education where an authority helps her pupil obtain a set of virtues through the pupil’s obedience”⁴. For Hadsell, this is the only way God could improve our characters in a way that doesn’t compromise our freedom.

9. But to be able to do this effectively, God would need authority over us. After all: how could God give us “recognizable, authoritative commands”—meant to sanctify us and shape our character—if he didn’t have authority in the first place?

10. Therefore, says Hadsell, God’s authority just falls out of his parental duty to sanctify us, which he has because he caused us to exist in a condition where we necessarily need union with God to fulfil our wellbeing.

11. Hadsell concludes: “If God is our ultimate cause, he has a duty to be in a relationship with us. But because we are unholy and God can only relate to holy beings, he must have the practical authority over us necessary to fulfil this duty. Since God does have this duty to us, he also has the practical authority over us to make us holy.”

I think Hadsell’s paper is clever, well-written, and there’s a lot to get from it ethics-wise, even if you don’t find his theory convincing. With that in mind, here is why I don’t find his theory convincing.

III. The Core Problem

As I see it, the core problem for Hadsell’s argument is that, at most, it’s an argument that God has authority over us. It’s not a theory that explains why God has authority over us. Hence, it can’t solve the problem of divine authority, which is what Hadsell was trying to do.

Recall the conclusion of Hadsell’s argument:

But all that follows from this is that if God didn’t have divine authority, then it would be wrong for him to have created us, since he wouldn’t be able to sanctify us and bring us into union with him, thereby causing him to fail in his “parental” duties. Hence, given that we have been created, God must have practical authority over us.

But none of this explains why God has authority over us, which is the problem we wanted to solve. All it does is give us an argument that—if you accept Hadsell’s theological assumptions—you should also accept that God has authority.

To see why this doesn't count as a solution to the problem of divine authority, consider a parody “solution”:

According to the Bible, God has divine authority. But the Bible is God’s inspired Word, meaning that if God had let something false slip into the Bible, he would have been lying to us, which a perfect being can’t do. Hence, if you accept the theological claim the Bible is God’s inspired Word, you have to believe in divine authority.

This is a perfectly kosher argument for why Christians should believe in divine authority—“it’s in the Bible, so you should believe it”. But it’s not a solution to the problem of divine authority, since it doesn’t explain why God has his authority. As far as I can tell, Hadsell’s argument is the same: it shows why Christians who believe God has created us, believe God’s holiness creates a relational barrier between us and him, believes human beings are essentially such that we can’t be fully satisfied without God, and believes God can’t sanctify us without issuing authoritative commands should believe that God can issue authoritative commands (since otherwise, he’d be failing in his parental obligations). But as Hadsell writes, the problem of divine authority is the problem of answering the following two questions:

1. How does God have the power to obligate us?

2. What is the explanation of God’s legitimate authority over us?⁵

As far as I can see, Hadsell’s theory leaves these questions unanswered. Hence, it doesn’t solve the problem of divine authority.

1. Hadsell N. Divine authority as divine parenthood. Religious Studies. p. 10.

2. For more worries, see my paper “Libertarianism and Conjoined Twins”: https://philpapers.org/archive/WOLLAC-3.pdf

3. Hadsell N. Divine authority as divine parenthood. Religious Studies. p. 4.

4. Ibid. p. 8.

5. Ibid. p. 2.