Theopedia

Middle Knowledge

Definition

Middle knowledge (Latin scientia media) is a proposed kind of divine knowledge, distinct from God’s knowledge of all possible things and his knowledge of what he has decreed, by which God knows what any free creature would freely choose in any given circumstance, prior to and independent of his own decree. It is called “middle” because it is said to occupy “a middle ground between the knowledge of simple intelligence and the knowledge of vision.”1

Historical Origin

The distinction was introduced by Luis Molina (1535-1601), a Jesuit theologian at the University of Evora, Portugal, “for the purpose of explaining how God might certainly foreknow what his free creatures would do in the absence of any sovereign foreordination on his part, determining their action.”2 On this scheme, God’s foreordination of individuals to salvation or condemnation depends on his foreknowledge of their faith and obedience, rather than his foreknowledge depending on his own prior decree. Molinism takes its name from this proposal and develops it into a full tradition; this article covers the concept of middle knowledge itself rather than restating Molinism’s own history and tenets.

Objections and Responses

Middle knowledge cannot actually be knowledge, since it has no determinately true object prior to God’s decree. Van Mastricht presses this point at length: if a future free act is foreseen “before” God’s decree, that event “would, since it precedes the divine decree, not be subject to the divine will,” producing, he argues, “a concept of fate worse than that of Stoicism, a fate that God himself is entirely unable to turn.” Since the event has no determined truth apart from God’s own decree, Van Mastricht concludes this supposed knowledge “will be more correctly called conjecture than knowledge,” even “error.”3

Doesn’t Scripture itself show God predicting free choices under conditions he never decreed (1 Sam. 23:11-12; Matt. 11:21)? Van Mastricht answers that both passages are explained by God’s own free knowledge, following from his decree to govern the world through its ordinary providential order, not by a third, independent kind of knowledge. God predicted the men of Keilah would deliver up David because “it is the order of things in this world that an enemy delivers up an enemy, if he can” (cf. 1 Sam. 24:19), not because he foresaw an undecreed free choice standing outside his own ordination.4

Isn’t middle knowledge necessary to reconcile human freedom with God’s foreknowledge and decrees? Van Mastricht traces this supposed necessity to “a perverse definition of free choice,” one that excludes any certainty or dependence on God’s decree from the outset. Once free choice is properly defined as “the faculty of acting from counsel” rather than sheer uncaused indifference, he argues, “all the disagreement ceases”: God can decree free, contingent acts through free causes without needing a knowledge independent of that decree.5

A Compatibilist Variant

Not every proposal to use middle knowledge pairs it with libertarian free will. Bruce Ware, in God’s Greater Glory, argues that combining middle knowledge with a compatibilist account of freedom, rather than a libertarian one, avoids the central Reformed objection above: if creatures possess compatibilist freedom, they reliably choose according to their own strongest desire in any given circumstance, so God’s knowledge of a person’s nature and circumstances is sufficient, without needing a knowledge independent of his own decree, to secure exhaustive certainty about what they would freely do. On this account, God can order circumstances so that a person’s own settled nature reliably yields the outcome God has determined, while the person remains responsible because the choice is genuinely their own. Ware finds this pattern in Acts 4:27-28’s account of Christ’s crucifixion: the rulers of Jerusalem acted according to what they already were, and God, through his knowledge of that, “predestined to take place” exactly the circumstances in which they would do so. Matthew Barrett’s Reclaiming Monergism independently corroborates that Ware has argued at length, “even if indirectly,” that “Scripture actually has much to say in support of the doctrine of compatibilist freedom.”6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 147. ↩

  2. Hodge, 148. ↩

  3. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 13, “The Intellect, Knowledge, and Wisdom of God,” 308. ↩

  4. Mastricht, 309. ↩

  5. Mastricht, 309. ↩

  6. Matthew Barrett, Reclaiming Monergism (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2011), 336. ↩