The “voluntarism” of Luther and Calvin, and before them of William of Ockham, holds that morality and justice, even goodness, have no objective reality, but are simply whatever God declares them to be, i.e., God is free to establish any moral law He chooses, and that choice then serves as the very definition of morality or justice. There are no higher norms existing independently of God’s choice, no Platonic “forms” to which God’s commands must conform. If we humans entertain concepts of morality and justice that we think of as universals rather than as arbitrary divine commands, we deceive ourselves. If we attempt to apply those concepts to explain or to judge God’s sovereign laws, we inevitably will judge wrongly – for human reason cannot comprehend God’s ways.
Example: Suppose God had not stayed Abraham’s hand before he plunged a knife into Isaac. That would simply mean that Abraham would have acted morally and justly in sacrificing his son. We may applaud the staying of Abraham’s hand because it happens to conform to our notions of morality and justice, but in this case “our” notions just randomly happen to coincide with “His” notions, and it is His notions that define the genre and could have defined it differently. If we find it unjust when God “punishes the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation” (Num. 14:18, Ex. 34:6-7), we apply human notions of “justice” that do not coincide with His, and for that reason we do not apply true justice. God, in other words, cannot be unjust because His will is the test of justice rather than because He habitually chooses that which is independently just.
I have difficulty agreeing with the voluntarist viewpoint. The issue can be framed this way: Is goodness that which God ordains, or does God choose to ordain what is good because He is Himself good? In his Euthyphro, Plato explores whether the gods command something because it is right or whether it is right because they command it. He concluded that moral ideals, like other forms, exist independently.
