What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionThe outcome was settled before you arrived; sovereignty runs all the way down.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and Stoicism are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
Travels across4 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderStoicism · c. 301 BCE
Newest holderPresbyterianism · 1560 CE
Turns up as6 tenets · 1 figure
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 6 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
A
Augustine of Hippo — the North African who set the terms.
A bishop in what is now Algeria whose arguments about grace, will and sin became the operating system of Western Christianity. The Reformation was largely Augustine against Augustine; Calvin quoted him constantly, and so did the Council of Trent.
Meet them — context & 1 source →
God is sovereign — entirely.
Nothing, including your salvation, begins with you. History is authored, not improvised.
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Grace is unconditional.
Chosen before the foundation of the world: election rests on God's will, not foreseen merit.
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God's sovereignty orders all things.
The Calvinist inheritance held firm — election, providence, and the comfort both give.
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Cynicism
— one faith of this family holds it
Some things are up to us; most are not.
Judgement, impulse, desire and refusal are ours. Body, property, reputation and office are not, and treating them as if they were is the whole of what goes wrong.
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Islam
— one faith of this family holds it
God decreed it, and you will answer for it.
Both halves are asserted, and reconciling them is the oldest fight in Islamic theology. The Ash'ari answer is kasb — God creates the act, the human acquires it. The Mu'tazila and the Twelver Shia rejected that as making God the author of injustice, and hold human acts genuinely free.
⚖ contested within
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
Everything runs under hukam.
The second stanza of Japji states it flatly: everything is inside the command, and nothing is outside it. Hukam is not a sentence handed down but the order the world is already running on — the Sikh task is to read it and stop arguing with it.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
God decreed it, and you will answer for it.
Both halves are asserted, and reconciling them is the oldest fight in Islamic theology. The Ash'ari answer is kasb — God creates the act, the human acquires it. The Mu'tazila and the Twelver Shia rejected that as making God the author of injustice, and hold human acts genuinely free.
Go deeper — context →