Jurisdictional Sovereignty: A Consent-Based Critique of Divine Authority

This paper develops and defends a framework — here termed jurisdictional sovereignty — for evaluating claims of divine authority through the analytical tools of consent-based political philosophy. Rather than engaging the dominant ontological question of whether God exists, the paper argues that the logically prior and practically more tractable question is whether any being — real or hypothetical, proven or merely posited — possesses legitimate authority over rational agents in the absence of consent. Drawing on the social contract tradition (Locke, Rousseau, Rawls), the political theory of legitimate authority (Raz, Wolff), and constructivist metaethics (Korsgaard, Scanlon), this paper constructs a three-axiom framework grounded in the independence of legitimacy from ontology, the principle of interactive accountability, and the consent constraint. Its most philosophically distinctive feature is ontological invariance: the framework's normative conclusions are sustained regardless of how the metaphysical question of God's existence is resolved. The paper carefully distinguishes the position from atheism, apatheism, and misotheism; addresses sophisticated theological objections from Thomistic participatory metaphysics, skeptical theism, and the free will defence; and engages non-Abrahamic theological structures including process theology, apophatic traditions, and Advaita Vedanta. A sustained treatment of the axiom of shared vulnerability — grounded in Korsgaardian reflective endorsement and Scanlonian contractualism — provides a secular ethical foundation that does not derive moral obligation from divine command. The paper concludes with a nuanced treatment of political implications, engaging the Rawls-Wolterstorff debate on public reason, and a candid appraisal of the framework's limitations. The position discussed here has also attracted the designation Omittoism — a term I have introduced in broader discourse to name the principled refusal of unjustified jurisdictional claims — though this paper proceeds strictly within the norms of systematic philosophical analysis. Keywords: divine authority, jurisdictional sovereignty, consent theory, political theology, social contract, Omittoism, ontological invariance, jurisdictional turn, philosophy of religion, political philosophy, ethics, metaethics