 Divine omnipotence involves the absolute power to enact anything that does not involve a contradiction. But among the multitude of possibilities open to divine enactment, God chooses or ordains a subset of compatible possibilities that constitute the world and its history as we know it. The relationship between God’s absolute power and the ordained system in place at any given time provided a fault line for exploring questions of necessity and contingency. Thirteenth century theologians formulated the relationship as one between what God has done and what he could have done otherwise, safely relegating contingency to a now foreclosed past. Canon lawyers, however, appropriated the distinction to describe the powers of the pope to set aside “ordained” or enacted Church law through the “plenitude” or “absolute” power of his office. Because papal power transcended enacted law, and popes (and monarchs) who enacted laws were in some sense not subject to those laws, they could provide for exceptions or change enacted laws without contradiction. Such application of the distinction between absolute and ordained power raised the possibility that God might intervene in the ordained system through his absolute power. Beginning with Scotus, the formulation of the canonists began to enter into discussions of God’s exercise of absolute power. The appropriation of the legal tradition did not lead to the conclusion (at least for Scotus, Ockham and Holkot) that God uses his absolute power to act inordinately in the ordained system, but rather it enables God (as it did in the change from the Old to the New Law) to set aside one ordained system and replace it with another. Several different and incompatible systems of divine legislation have operated at different times during human history. God’s absolute capacity to transcend any given ordained system and replace it with another has made such a switch possible without involving God in a contradiction of his nature. Holkot also invoked this dialectical relationship between God’s absolute and ordained power to explain how God provides for dispensations from his laws in particular cases. God never acts inordinately, but the system of divine ordinations is complex and involves multiple incompatible subsets capable of being in place at any given time (Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 32–37).