Molinism

Molinism holds that God knows, by a “middle knowledge” (scientia media) standing between his knowledge of all possible things and his knowledge of what he has decreed, what every possible free creature would freely choose in any circumstance he might place it in, and that he decrees the world by choosing which circumstances to actualize rather than by decreeing the creature’s choice itself.¹ Named for the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, the view is held today by Roman Catholic and confessing Protestant theologians alike who affirm libertarian human freedom alongside God’s exhaustive foreknowledge.²

Historical Origin

Luis de Molina, a Spanish Jesuit born in 1535 and a professor of theology at the University of Évora in Portugal, introduced the doctrine of middle knowledge in his 1588 work Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis (The Compatibility of Free Choice with the Gifts of Grace).¹ Molina devised the distinction to explain how God could certainly foreknow what his free creatures would do without that foreknowledge resting on a prior decree determining their choice, since he held that a decreed choice could not remain genuinely free.¹ The Portuguese theologian Peter Fonseca is credited alongside him as a co-originator of the idea.³ Within Roman Catholicism, the position occasioned a long controversy between the Jesuit “Molinists” and the Dominican order, which held to Thomas Aquinas’ own account of divine causality; the dispute over which side better represented the church’s teaching was never conclusively settled by Rome.⁴ Reformed theologians of the same era engaged Molinism as a live rival account of providence and foreknowledge: Petrus van Mastricht devoted a section of his own dogmatics to stating and rebutting it directly.³ Bavinck notes that the Reformed tradition rejected the view even as it gained lasting acceptance among Roman Catholic Jesuit theologians.² In the twentieth century the position found new defenders among Protestant philosophers and theologians, who have continued to argue for it as a way of holding divine sovereignty and human libertarian freedom together.

Core Tenets

Molinism distinguishes three logical moments in God’s knowledge.¹ Natural knowledge is God’s knowledge of everything that is possible, grounded in his own nature rather than in anything outside himself. Free knowledge is God’s knowledge of the actual world he has decreed, grounded in that decree. Between the two, Molinism places middle knowledge: God’s knowledge of what any free creature would actually choose in any circumstance that creature might be placed in, a knowledge that, on this view, is grounded neither in God’s own nature (since its object is not merely possible but a specific future choice) nor in his decree (since the creature’s own will, not God’s decree, is what settles which choice would be made).¹

Mastricht states the concern this construction was built to answer: Molina and his fellow Jesuits wanted “to more conveniently protect God’s certain foreknowledge of future free events against the Pelagians and Socinians but also hold intact an independent indifference of free choice.”³ In plain terms, they wanted a way to affirm that God truly knows the future in advance without that knowledge depending on God himself having settled what a creature would freely do. Middle knowledge, on this account, supplies that: God surveys, prior to any decree of his own, every “feasible world,” every combination of free creatures and circumstances together with what each creature would actually choose in it, and then decrees to create the particular world whose outcomes he desires by choosing which circumstances to bring about.¹ Because the creature’s own will, not God’s decree, is what makes one of these counterfactuals true rather than another, Molinism holds that the resulting freedom is genuinely libertarian: at the moment of choosing, the creature retains a real ability to have chosen otherwise, an ability the doctrine of middle knowledge is meant to preserve intact even under God’s exhaustive foreknowledge and providential governance.

Comparison with the Reformed Baptist Confession

The confession states that God’s “knowledge is infinite, infallible, and independent upon the creature, so as nothing is to Him contingent or uncertain.”⁵ Molinism’s middle knowledge does not fit this description as the confession states it: on Molina’s own account, what God knows by middle knowledge, namely what a given creature would freely choose in a given circumstance, is settled by the creature’s own will rather than by God, which is exactly the kind of dependence upon the creature the confession denies of any part of God’s knowledge.

The confession states elsewhere that God “hath decreed in himself, from all eternity… whatsoever comes to pass,” extending his decree to every event without exception.⁶ Molinism reverses the order Reformed theology gives to God’s knowledge and his decree: rather than everything that comes to pass, including a creature’s free choice, following from God’s own decree, Molinism has God’s decree respond to and select among choices whose content middle knowledge already supplies, logically prior to and independent of that decree. Mastricht’s Reformed rebuttal presses this same point: since a middle knowledge would require God’s intellect to draw its content “from elsewhere,” it would make God’s knowledge dependent upon his creatures rather than his creatures’ history dependent upon him.³ Bavinck states the same conclusion in different terms: middle knowledge tries “to harmonize the Pelagian notion of an indifferent free will with God’s omniscience and thus is incompatible with a decree of God.”²

Related Doctrines

References

Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 8, “Attributes of God,” questions 42-43. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), “Living, Acting God.” ↩ ↩² ↩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,” 307-9. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 6, “Comparison of Systems.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 2. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 3, “Of God’s Decree,” para. 1. ↩