Why I am Not a Molinist (Part 1)

As a Calvinist, there have been times when I have been attracted to Molinism and sought to explore this alternative model of divine providence. For those who do not know, Molinism is named after a Spanish Jesuit theologian, Luis de Molina, who was a counter-Reformer. His view is sometimes thought of as being somewhere between Calvinism and Arminianism.

Molinism teaches that God sovereignly controls everything that comes to pass (seemingly agreeing with Calvinism), but also holding that human beings have libertarian free will (seemingly agreeing with Arminianism). How can both ideas be reconciled? Molina accomplishes this by positing that God possesses scientia media or middle knowledge and that God is able to utilise this type of divine foreknowledge to have divine providential control over human free will choices (free in the libertarian sense). 

It works like this (according to Molinism).

God has three logical "moments" of divine foreknowledge. 

First, God has what is called natural knowledge. Natural knowledge is God's knowledge, in himself, of himself, and all logical possibilities that God could bring about. Natural knowledge contains everything that could happen.

Third, God has what is called free knowledge. Free knowledge is God's knowledge, after the divine decree of everything that will occur in the world God has decided to create. Free knowledge contains everything that will happen.  

Divine natural knowledge and free knowledge are accepted by all classical theists, including in Reformed theology and these are not controversial.

Molina's unique idea was to suggest that between the pre-decree natural knowledge and the post-decree free knowledge of God, there is something called middle knowledge, which is before the decree and prevolitional, i.e. not something that originates in God's will, but precedes it. Middle knowledge contains God knowledge of everything beings with libertarian free will would do in any possible circumstances. The best way to think of it is as a subset of God's natural knowledge of all possibilities. Middle knowledge are all the possibilities that could happen if human beings have libertarian free will. Middle knowledge is often summarised as containing everything that would happen.

Another way these three moments are sometimes described is that natural knowledge comprehends all possible worlds, middle knowledge (with libertarian free will granted) comprehends all feasible worlds, and free knowledge comprehends the one actual world God decided to create. 

This is a summary of what Molinism means. We will now outline the main reasons why Molinism is not a feasible view (pardon the pun) for the Bible-believing Christian in my view.

In summary, the problems with Molinism are the following:

1. Molinism denies the idea of an Exhaustive and Unconditional Divine Decree.

2. Molinism teaches a form of Creaturely Independence which contradicts Divine Aseity and God's Absolute Sovereignty.

3. Molinism relies on libertarian free will. Indeed, Molinism was created by Molina in an attempt to show that God's sovereignty could be harmonised with libertarian free will. Yet the Bible teaches that even human free choices are under the control of God's sovereign choice.

4. Molinism smuggles in a kind of semi-Pelagian anthropolgy whereby sinners are able to do good, including saving good, in response to God's grace merely if put in the right set of circumstances.

5. Molinism undermines divine simplicity and immutability. It makes God's knowledge partly dependent on his creation and makes his decree reactive rather than eternal and simple. 

6. Molinism weakens God's providence and efficacious grace. God is restricted and can only select from feasible worlds one which matches his desires as closely as possible rather than the biblical view that God's sovereign decree reflects God's own desires perfectly and the world perfectly matches God's desires and wishes.

7. Election in Molinism can only be a kind of conditional election, in that God chooses those he knows will believe when put in certain circumstances. This is not the unconditional election taught in the Scriptures.

8. Likewise, Molinism usually teaches that God choose to actualise the world in which the maximum number of people are saved, but that there were feasible worlds in which any other people would be saved, though no feasible worlds in which everyone is saved. Thus, person A's election in the real world does not rest on God's sovereign choice primarily, but on the fact that A was part of the maximum number of saved people in this world. On the other hand person B, might have been saved in another world, but he is lost in the real world merely because the world in which he would have been saved did not deliver as many saved people overall. This seems ridiculous compared with the Calvinist view that in the real world God saved everyone for whom he has saving love and desires to actually save.

9.   Molinism rests on the concept of middle knowledge, which is not found in the Scriptures. It is merely a clever philosophical speculation. Calvinism does a better job of reconciling divine sovereignty, which is absolute, and human free will and responsibility, which is derived from God's decree and is compatible with God's determining all things.

10. The grounding objection has never been satisfactorily answered by Molinism. The grounding objection states that the central claim of Molinism is either completely incoherent or impossible. There is nothing in Molinism that explains (or grounds) why God possesses such knowledge of what people would freely choose to do in any circumstance in which they were placed.

11. Closely linked to this, Molinists cannot explain where middle knowledge comes from as it comes from creatures with free will before God has decreed to create such creatures. Middle knowledge comes across as a series of brute facts about the universe with no explanation of why such facts or truths exist as they do not come from God's will, not from the creatures. 

We will explore these eleven objections to Molinism, from a Reformed theological viewpoint, in Part 2.

Great Theologians 3: John Murray

John Murray (1898-1975)

John Murray was a Scottish-born Presbyterian theologian who spent most of his career at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He was an ordained minister of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC).

Born in Sutherland in the far north of Scotland in 1898. Murray served in the Black Watch regiment during the First World War, losing an eye in the war. After the war, he became a theological student at the University of Glasgow and was a member of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. He went to the USA to pursue further studies under J. Gresham Machen and Geerhardus Vos at Princeton Theological Seminary. In 1930, he broke with the Free Presbyterian Church and also moved with Machen from Princeton to the newly formed Westminster Theological Seminary, where he lectured in systematic theology for many years. He was also a trustee of the Banner of Truth Trust.

Murray never wrote his own systematic theology. His many essays and papers are published in four volumes of Collected Writings. His other major work was an excellent commentary on Romans in the New International Commentary series. He also wrote some popular-level works, including Redemption Accomplished and Applied which was the first book of Murray's that I read.

In my view, Murray's importance as a Reformed theologian lies not so much in the volume of writings he produced, but in some of the shorter works and essays he wrote. His short work The Covenant of Grace for example represents an important and novel approach to this key Reformed doctrine. The report he co-authored with Ned Stonehouse on The Free Offer of the Gospel is another short, but important and influential work.

After retiring from Westminster in 1966, Murray returned to Scotland to help look after his elderly sisters who still lived in Ross-shire. He joined the Free Church of Scotland and got married at the age of 69 in 1967 and had two children. Murray died on 8th May 1975 at the age of 76 and is buried in the Free Church Cemetery at Creich in the Scottish Highlands.

Great Theologians 2: W. G. T. Shedd

W. G. T. Shedd (1820-1894)

 

William Greenhough Thayer Shedd was a 19th century American Presbyterian theologian. Originally from Acton, Massachusetts, Shedd taught for most of his career at the Union Theological Seminary in New York.

His work reveals a sharp mind familiar with a wind range of academic disciplines, though his theology was staunchly Reformed and evangelical. 

He was an orthodox voice who argued for the doctrine of eternal punishment in his work The Doctrine of Endless Punishment (1885) and who argued against proposed revisions to the Westminster Confession of Faith to soften its Calvinist and predestinarian teachings, in Calvinism: Pure and Mixed.

Shedd's magnum opus is his brilliant work of systematic theology, Dogmatic Theology (1888), which was originally published in three volumes.

I first came across Shedd's systematic theology in the early 1990s and found explanations of a number of doctrines both clear and convincing as I read them in a theological library and was able to find a set to buy in a second hand bookshop. Much later, a new printing of the work was issued and I recommend it highly.

His work comes from a similar place on the theological spectrum from the Hodges at Princeton, but Shedd does not follow Hodge in all matters and I think is sometimes a clearer writer, though Charles Hodge often goes into subjects in greater detail than Shedd. More on Hodge later in this serious probably.

Any work you find by Shedd, whether his books of sermons, his commentary on Romans, or his theological works is well worth reading if you come across it. His writings on everlasting punishment in hell remain some of the key texts in the debate even now, whether the relevant chapter in Dogmatic Theology or his earlier work on the same subject.