What If God Could Break Every Promise — and It Still Be Good?
The Friar Who Died Asking Questions
In 1349 a Dominican friar named Robert Holkot was visiting the sick in Northampton, England, when he caught the plague and died. He had always been drawn to questions that made other thinkers nervous. Holkot grew up a commoner—he once remarked that the most capable people often came from humble beginnings—and joined the Dominican order, where he studied logic, Aristotle, and theology at Oxford. There he lectured on the Bible and wrote commentaries that would puzzle and provoke readers for centuries.
Holkot lived in a century when many Christian thinkers were wrestling with a single overwhelming idea: if God is truly all-powerful, then almost everything could be other than it is. Holkot pushed that thought harder than almost anyone. He took the tools of a philosopher named William Ockham (c. 1287–1347) and sharpened them until they cut into the deepest assumptions about knowledge, morality, and the logic of faith itself. The central question he left behind is as unsettling as it is practical: if God isn’t bound by any promise, any law, or any predictable order, how can a human being trust anything—and still live a good life?
Can God Break His Own Rules?
Holkot believed that God’s power is so unlimited that He can do anything that does not involve a contradiction. But that power, he thought, doesn’t mean God acts randomly. Instead, God freely chooses one set of compatible possibilities—a collection of rules and events that don’t clash with one another—and puts that system into place. Medieval thinkers called the plan God actually chose His ordained power. The infinite menu of other possibilities they called God’s absolute power.
What made Holkot stand out was his insistence that God isn’t obliged to keep the current plan. He argued that God can set aside existing laws without doing anything evil, the way a king who is above the law can revise his own legal code. Divine promises, revelations, and commands are not forced on God by His goodness. If God were to replace the Ten Commandments with an entirely different moral framework, Holkot claimed, He would not be breaking a duty—because God’s goodness doesn’t depend on keeping any particular arrangement with creatures.
That sounds terrifying, but Holkot found a steady footing inside the uncertainty. He held that God works through a covenant, a kind of agreement. Under the covenant of the New Law, God will not deny salvation to anyone who sincerely does their best to follow His commands and hold to the articles of faith. The worth of your actions isn’t built into the acts themselves; it works more like money—a currency whose value comes from an agreed-upon system, not from the paper it’s printed on. The real foundation, Holkot said, is trust in a God who is free to do otherwise but has chosen to bind Himself to reliable promises for now.
When Logic Needs a Second Set of Rules
If God can rewrite the moral landscape, what happens to logic? Medieval thinkers treated Aristotle’s logic as the gold standard of reason—a set of rules that applied everywhere, grounded in the principle of non-contradiction: you can’t have a statement be both true and false at the same time in the same way. Holkot agreed that the principle is absolute, but he ran into a wall when he considered the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which says God is three Persons but one Essence.
Here’s the problem. A perfectly valid piece of reasoning seems to produce a heretical conclusion when you plug in Trinitarian terms:
The divine Essence is the Father.
The divine Essence is the Son.
Therefore, the Father is the Son.
Holkot refused to water down the identity relation to escape the conclusion. He thought earlier distinctions that tried to block the argument didn’t work. Instead, he concluded that Aristotle’s logic is not universal on its own. There must be two systems of logic: one for the natural order, which Aristotle captured, and a logic of faith with a few extra principles supplied by revelation. These extra rules are rational—they still obey the principle of non-contradiction—but they are needed because Aristotle couldn’t have known about a three-personed God.
Holkot’s move was bold but careful. He compared Trinitarian syllogisms to everyday arguments about particulars. If you say “a human being is running” and “a human being is bald,” you can’t conclude “a bald human being is running” unless you know you’re talking about the same person. The logic of faith simply adds a few guardrails so that talk about the divine Essence doesn’t slip into talk about the Persons in a confused way. Faith, for Holkot, doesn’t abandon reason; it extends it.
What If You’re Being Deceived?
Because God can alter the ordained system, Holkot faced an even knottier question: could God deceive people? He thought the answer was yes—and that scripture shows cases where God did so, for reasons we may not understand. Holkot wasn’t suggesting that God is a trickster demon, but he admitted he couldn’t rule out being deceived about any particular thing he believed. That sounds like a recipe for panic, but Holkot stayed calm.
He told the story of a simple old woman who comes to church to hear a new teaching from her bishop. The bishop, confused, explains the exact opposite of what the faith actually teaches. Must the woman believe the bishop’s mistaken words? Holkot’s answer was no. What matters, he said, is not the content of her belief but her intention—her sincere will to do what is right and to obey God. Under the covenant, God cares more about a person’s genuine effort to conform her will to God’s than about whether she gets every fact right. Even if her teachers are misinformed, her intention to trust God and do her best is enough.
The same logic produced a story that sounds startlingly modern. Holkot passed along an account of a learned heretic who was challenged by a Dominican lay brother: if you believe in immortality and it’s true, you gain everything; if you believe and it’s false, you lose nothing. That’s a version of what later became famous as Pascal’s Wager. For Holkot, forming an intention to believe counted as doing one’s best, and God would reward that effort with the grace to come to genuine faith. In a world where even divine communication might be unknowingly mistaken, your own honest intention becomes the solid ground beneath your feet.
A Debate Where You Agree to Play Along
The idea that the world could be different filtered into Holkot’s thinking about time and knowledge, too. If God knows from eternity that Socrates will freely choose to tell a lie tomorrow, does that make the lie inevitable? Holkot tackled puzzles like this using a technique he knew from the university classroom: the obligational debate.
In an obligational debate, one person proposes a starting claim—often a counterfactual or something whose truth is uncertain. The other person accepts it as true for the sake of the argument. As new claims are added, the respondent must either agree, disagree, or express doubt, depending on whether the new claim follows from what’s already been accepted. If someone tries to sneak in the opposite of the first claim, Holkot said, that’s just starting a whole new debate. You don’t have to accept it.
Holkot thought the relationship between a believer and God’s revelations works the same way. When you accept God’s revealed words as true for this life, you obligate yourself to them—even though, as contingent truths, it’s possible they could have been otherwise. If God were to issue a new command that contradicts the old one, the new obligation would simply supersede the old, the way a fresh debate restarts the rules. During the time the obligation is in force, reason is needed to figure out how to live consistently with what you’ve accepted. Faith isn’t blind; it’s a decision to enter a structured game and play by its rules, relying on God’s covenant promise that your sincere participation is what counts.
Why It Still Matters: Trusting in the Middle of Uncertainty
Holkot never pretended that his vision of a universe held together by God’s utterly free choices was comfortable. He knew it meant you can’t prove the deepest truths with unaided reason, that your teachers might be wrong, and that even the rules you live by might someday be replaced. Yet his answer to that vertigo is exactly why he still matters.
He argued that what you can control is your intention to do the best you know how, to act with goodwill, and to trust that a God who made a covenant with you will keep it—even if God is under no outside compulsion to do so. That means your honest effort to be good, to seek truth, and to keep faith is never wasted. You don’t need to be certain about every detail; you need to be wholehearted in your attempt to get it right. Holkot’s world is one where serious uncertainty and steady commitment can sit together, and that’s a world that looks a lot like the one you wake up in every day.
Think about it
- If you found out tomorrow that the rules of a game you’ve played your whole life had been replaced, would it be enough to know you had always tried to play fairly? Why or why not?
- Suppose a friend sincerely but mistakenly gives you bad advice. If you follow the advice with a good heart, is the outcome your responsibility, the friend’s, or a bit of both?
- Is there a difference between trusting a person because you have evidence they’re reliable and trusting them because you’ve committed to do so? Which kind of trust, if either, feels stronger to you?
