During the last ten years or so, the steady twentieth-century departure from the well-tried doctrines of the protestant Reformation has been carried on as much by evangelical Arminians as by the Liberals of the past.   We will be examining why this is so in this first paper of two at this conference.  I want to consider a particular development  in the discipline of Apologetics, with which I have been forced to deal despite its relative intricacy, because despite its claim to reconciling God’s absolute sovereignty with an autonomist theory of free will, it actually contributes by a slow and inexorable drift, to what has been correctly labeled “finite godism,” an unpleasant but accurate term identifying the conclusion (if not the claim) that God must actually be a finite and so limited being, rather than the robust Omni-potent, Omni-scient, Omni-present and Omni-sapient being set forth in the system of Truth contained in the Scriptures.  This conclusion is primarily the case because it’s primary task is the attempt to justify belief in libertarian free will.

Lest anyone imagine that the doctrine of Middle Knowledge is something the Bible writers, much less the Reformers, would have recognized as plausible, we should first note that there is no hint of this curious theory in the Bible, nor in the post-apostolic church fathers, nor anywhere else until similar views were considered and rejected by Duns Scotus about twenty-five years after the death of Aquinas.  It then reappeared in full flourish under the hand of  the Jesuit Luis de Molina, who may have got it from one of his teachers who was apparently afraid to publish it because he thought it was wholly new, and anyway, it flew in the face of the dominant theology of the day, which took its cue from Thomas Aquinas. 

Today, Evangelicals are being regaled with what for us are fresh new theories about the meaning of free will.  Dr. Clark Pinnock and his friends want to replace the historic Christian doctrine of God’s attributes with their own “openness” view of God. In this theory, God is viewed as having limited knowledge of the future simply (and quite reasonably) because he could not in the nature of the case, have accurate knowledge of future events, depending (as so many of them do) on human autonomous choices.  The point here is that a future contingent event depending on an undetermined event cannot be known with certainty, and the action of an autonomous will is just such an undetermined event.

This of course was recognized in the Middle Ages by people like Aquinas and Duns Scotus.  Both agreed in their own way however, that both doctrines of divine sovereignty and an autonomous free will in man had be held.  If this was an apparent contradiction, well and good.  Both doctrines were found in the early church fathers and therefore had to be held as part of the apostolic tradition.  These two doctrines had to be held as a “divine Mystery of revelation,” and only a heretic would deny either one of them.

“Reconciling” The Contradictions

One of the most curious developments in recent Evangelical thought has been the revival of this ancient attempt to “reconcile” the Bible’s doctrine of full divine sovereignty with the “libertarian” theory of free will defined as “the freedom of indifference.”  The purpose of this paper is to simply outline the origins of this theory in the history of the Church’s grappling with the problem, and to suggest that there are causes and motivations involved in this revival which go far beyond the simple concern to give Christianity a means of solving an otherwise intractable dilemma in Christian Apologetics.  Important insights can be gained by investigating the origins of things we have taken for granted.  That is one of the main reasons for studying things historically, and one of the main reasons so many  people don’t have any idea why they believe the way they do in so many evangelical churches.  They do not bother to look into any history.  But history is where we came from; it’s why we are what we are….  And tradition is only understood from the standpoint of its historical development.  Much the same goes for philosophical opinions.

The Question Of Authority

Protestants in particular, are often very conscious that much that they have been told (and indeed acculturated) to accept as Christian tradition, can often be found first in the surrounding pagan environment, having been baptized into Christian service long ago and under very dubious circumstances, perhaps long before the Reformation.  This is the reason that Protestantism has spoken often of a principle of reforming the church called sola Scriptura, or “Scripture Alone,” by which we mean not that the Bible contains the only truth about reality, or that church tradition is of no value, but simply that God has given us in his infallible inscripturated Word, all the revealed truth  that is absolutely necessary for salvation.  That is, the Bible alone contains what God uses to supernaturally enliven and intellectually inform the mind and to bind the conscience in matters of faith and life.  Protestants start with that inspired text  as the inerrant source of necessary propositional truth.  Then with the due use of the appropriate means, including not only obvious things like translations and a willingness to do some homework on the original languages, but also the academic disciplines of history and philosophy, to say nothing of systematic theology and the results of almost 2000 years of the promised teaching ministry of the Holy Spirit, the believer who wants to do God’s will, can know of the doctrine whether it is from God, or whether someone is just making it up.  We know that this is true because Jesus himself said so in John 7:17.  Apparently impossible problems have eventually yielded to real and workable solutions in the past, and philosophy is just one of the intellectual gifts that God has used.  Nobody should imagine that the work of philosophers is useless or irrelevant to the life of the Church at large, however misleading some of them have certainly been.  Great and real progress has been made in the past as godly and devoted saints have struggled with problems arising from the faithful reading of the Word of God, and from the continuing task of  making that Word both clear and relevant in particular situations through the preaching of that Word.

We are concerned here also with more controversial questions.  We will observe how presuppositions control our thinking, how believers get involved in programs of syncretism, in which biblical material is firmly wedded to nonchristian theories in the supposed interest of reaching the serious thinker for Christ, and of “building a bridge” to the unbelieving mind over which the Gospel of Christ might safely travel.  We will look also at the beginnings of wholly un-evangelical influences, indeed pagan influences, on the proclamation of the Gospel in past ages, and at the cheerful willingness of apparently sincere apologists to look to and even depend on theories designed originally by their inventors with the express purpose of undermining and neutralizing the achievements of the Reformation, apparently hoping that these sources could somehow be used in the service of Christ, to prepare  the unredeemed heart to accept Christ as its Savior.  I will argue that this is precisely what we see in the recent interest in the old Middle Knowledge theory.  But first, we will need some definitions. 

Some Definitions

By divine sovereignty we shall mean the very strong doctrine of creatorial Omnipotence which the Bible uniformly ascribes to God.  The Bible says repeatedly that God is the ultimate cause of everything that happens in his wholly dependent creation.  The world is what it is because God and his eternal purposes are what they are.  Both large events like the Flood of Noah and tiny events deemed insignificant by us, like the death of a sparrow, are all ascribed finally to God in the Bible.  This specifically includes so-called “chance” events, and also human choices.  Numerous examples of both of these are specifically ascribed to God’s decree and predetermining will by the Bible writers, as are some of the most horrifying evils that have ever occurred, including the judicial murder of God’s own Son.  You have heard lectures already on some of this biblical evidence for God’s full sovereignty as Creator and sustainer of the world. 

By free will we shall mean not the view of the Reformers (Zwingli, Luther, Calvin, and the reformed confessions generally), that the will of fallen people is by nature enslaved to sin, so that they willingly act in harmony with their comprehensive ethical corruption or depravity, and cannot by themselves respond spiritually to the grace of God, but the theory that in order to be human at all, people fallen or regenerate must be equally able to choose either way in any case of opposite alternatives set before them.   This “libertarian” theory of free will is roughly equivalent to the Greek idea that the soul is equally able to choose one way as well as the other, being autonomous from external control, and specifically, autonomous from divine predetermination of any kind.  This supposed ability of our wills to choose with equal facility either of any two alternatives presented to it by the mind, is the essence of the “liberty of indifference,” the free will theory which Aquinas found in the early post-apostolic fathers, and which Catholics, Pelagians, Arminians, and modern Evangelicals generally, think is the basis of our humanness and responsibility.

Origins In The Church

When we read those early church fathers who were closest to the Apostles (called the “Apostolic Fathers”), we quickly discover that these documents contain statements and interpretations of key passages in the Bible which might have come from a modern Arminian, and others that might have been written by a Calvinist.  These contrasting views only intensify as we read down to Augustine’s day, when the incompatibility of God’s sovereignty with free will became clear to Pelagius.  He attacked some statements in Augustine’s writings that he thought undermined human responsibility.  He thought that every man was his own Adam, with complete free will, with no deleterious influence on our human decision-making ability emanating from the Fall, and if born-again believers wanted to make the effort, they could keep God’s Law perfectly.  Our free will guaranteed that, and this free will was the basis of our responsibility.  God provided a universal saving grace which was intended to save nobody by itself, until supplemented by our human freewill response.

St. Augustine in his extensive “anti-pelagian” writings, demolished Pelagianism so thoroughly both exegetically and philosophically, that in 431 A.D. the Third Council of Ephesus condemned it as a heresy and the orthodox church has never formally returned to it.  From the fifth century to the Reformation, the Catholic Church was essentially augustinian, and St. Augustine was treated as the greatest teaching father of the patristic age.  His writings inspired the great mediaeval synthesis between Nature and Grace of which Thomas Aquinas was the prime expositor.   The Reformers of course, were Augustinian to a man.  In fact, it can reasonably be argued that the Reformation was the final breaking apart of the inner tensions within catholic augustinianism, tensions caused by a high doctrine of grace and predestination (amounting to a form of Calvinism) on the one hand, and an incipient Semi-pelagianism involved in dependence on sacramental grace (amounting to a form of Arminianism) on the other.  The Reformers attacked this Semi-pelagianism rather vigorously.  Both Luther and Calvin wrote books refuting the free will theory.

And what exactly, was Semi-pelagianism?  It was a reaction against Augustine’s increasing theological consistency, starting in the last years before his death in 430 A.D.  In the last three years of his life he began a detailed refutation of Semi-pelagianism as it was developing in the works of Julian of Eclanum  and John Cassian.   The only books he completed in this area were On The Predestination of the Saints, and About The Gift Of Perseverance (428 and 429),beginning what looks very much like the first two of a series on what were later called the “fivepoints” of Calvinism.  In these works, as in his Retractions,  he tightened up his denial of free will in the face of divine sovereignty, and virtually admits that he was inconsistent in trying to reconcile them in his earlier writings.  In other words, the more he proceeded into his critique of Semi-pelagianism, the more “calvinistic” he became.  This was the reason that first Luther and then Calvin, both took time out to demolish freewillism once and for all (Luther in 1524, and Calvin in 1545 and 1552).  They both took their cue from Augustine, who they were happy to agree was the greatest teacher of theology that the early church produced.  But unlike the Catholic Church, they were under no obligation to an infallible Tradition handed down apart from the Bible, and so were free to critique free will in terms of the Bible alone as their final authority.  And they took this task very seriously.

The Pelagians then proceeded to adjust their errors to accommodate the condemnation of Pelagius himself in 431.  Some of them came to agree with Augustine’s doctrine of how original sin influenced free will, and the need for prevenient grace.  But they continued to maintain that the beginnings of our response to saving grace remained within the capacity of the free will, and they also decided that God’s election of some to be saved was really based on God’s foreknowledge of who would believe and who then continue to persevere in Grace.  In such representatives as John Cassian, we begin to see the distinctive doctrines we call Arminianism today.  This controversy continued for another hundred years after Augustine’s death, but the Semi-pelagians were finally condemned as heretical by the Synod of Orange in 529 A.D.  This synod was then elevated to the status of an ecumenical Council by the approval of Pope Boniface II in the following year.  The Eastern Orthodox churches refused to follow the Western Church in its increasing augustinianism, and have remained with John Cassian to this day.

Thereafter, Augustinianism rapidly became the framework for the catholic doctrines of grace and predestination in the Middle Ages.  But apart from the failed attempt of a monk called Gottschalk to reform the consolidation of augustinian thinking in the ninth century,  and the efforts of the Jansenists in the 1600s to reintroduce augustinian standards of piety and theological consistency (that looked to the Jesuits like some kind of crypto-Calvinism), serious Augustinianism rapidly declined in catholic circles after the Reformation.  The Catholics finally were forced to recognize that the fountainhead of protestant predestinarian theology was actually their greatest theologian St. Augustine, and the papal encyclical Unigenitus of 1713not onlycondemned Jansenism but much of augustinian thought as well.  Since then Augustine has been relegated to the status of just another church father, instead of  functioning as the great inspirational well of catholic truth that he was felt to be before the Reformation.  As a result, most catholic theology has been more or less semi-pelagian in practice, until modern Liberalism took over after Vatican II.

So where did the Middle Knowledge theory come from?  And what is it “mid-way” between?

Thomists And Molinists

By the era of the Reformation, the Dominicans were strongly augustinian because they were Thomists, while they accused the Franciscans of  Semi-pelagianism.  Since the Reformers were thoroughly predestinarian and denied free will in the libertarian sense, someone had to step in and save Catholicism from the logical results of taking St. Augustine’s doctrine of sovereign grace too seriously. 

The hero who stepped into this gap was Luis de Molina, a Spanish Jesuit who decided that to save the catholic view of grace, it was necessary to reconcile the previously unreconcilable doctrines of absolute divine sovereign grace versus a libertarian free will with each other.  Thomas Aquinas had left the situation in tension as a “divine mystery” of the catholic Faith,  but Molina explained in his own writings that something new was needed  in order to refute the attacks of Martin Luther and John Calvin on the idea of a libertarian or autonomous Free Will.  In the next paper, I will explain what was wrong philosophically with trying to reconcile libertarian freewillism with God’s sovereignty.  In Molina’s day however, it seemed that the doctrines of predestination and free will in Augustine led necessarily to either the Calvinism or the Arminianism of the Protestants, and neither were a satisfactory option for a Jesuit trained in the thinking of the great Thomas Aquinas.  De Molina therefore looked for a new way to reconcile absolute predestination with an absolute autonomy of the will, rather than inviting a choice between them, as the Protestants Calvin and Luther demanded we do.

So Luis de Molina claimed to be a faithful Thomist who simply wanted to offset the strength of the Reformer’s augustinian predestinarianism, thereby wrecking the views of Luther, and more especially of  John Calvin, who the Jesuits had early focused on as being their real intellectual enemy.  De Molina saw that in Aquinas’ view of how grace worked there was a serious question of consistency.  Thomas had asserted both a free will and strict election and predestination as articles of catholic Faith which he thought emanated from the apostolic age.  Neither could be questioned, so they should be held in tension as a “mystery of the Faith.”  The Reformers had repudiated the free will theory as incompatible with a real doctrine of grace, and they had treated its denial as essential to the Gospel.  Of course Luther and Calvin and all the others spoke of  our having “free will,” but instead of free will as a metaphysical autonomy, they affirmed a “freedom of spontaneity” in which the will could only act in harmony with the character or “nature” of the person choosing.  The will was not a separate mechanism in the head, but a true manifestation of the character.  

According to the Reformers, the wills of fallen sinners were in bondage to their sin-nature.  They were not autonomously free to believe (or even understand) the Gospel without God’s regenerative grace intervening.  Augustine had called this “prevenient grace” and so did the Thomists.  That is, the catholic position since 529 at Ephesus was that regenerating grace had to precede the exercise of saving faith, not follow it.  Today we think of the notion that regeneration must come before the exercise of saving faith as a distinctively calvinist doctrine in contrast with Arminianism, but it was in fact a standard Catholic doctrine for a thousand years before the Reformation.

Middle Knowledge ?

Molinism however, postulated a theory of God’s “middle” knowledge, so-called because it was supposed to stand midway between God’s exhaustive knowledge of all future events as they will in fact occur, and his foreknowledge of future contingent choices to be made arising from an autonomously free will.  This was supposed to allow God to foresee who will come to faith by their free will under the circumstances he predetermines out of all the possible states of affairs that he omnisciently knows could possibly exist, without thereby undermining either God’s sovereign predestination or our (libertarian) free will.  This “middle” knowledge was not his knowledge of everything that would actually occur, nor his foreknowledge of exactly who would in fact come to faith, but  it was his knowledge of how each of us would exercise our autonomous wills under all possible sets of circumstances.  The idea was that God could then choose to actualize (i.e., to create) the world he wanted to exist in order to both guarantee the salvation of the Elect, and also preserve their freewill (i.e., fully autonomous) decisions.    There is not much doubt that de Molina  really thought that he was producing a new form of more consistent Thomism by this philosophical move.

Now because I believe that God’s Omniscience requires that he does indeed have exhaustive knowledge of all possible choices we might conceivably make under all possible conditions, I agree with de Molina that God has this kind of knowledge.  The question we will agitate in the next paper will be about exactly how God could have knowledge of such future contingent events.  It is at this point that I think Molinism collapses as an accurate account of God’s knowledge, not because I think that God has knowledge of all possible worlds in which future choices might be made.  I take that as virtually self-evident.  God’s knowledge of all pure possibility must necessarily be as exhaustive as all his other knowing of created reality.

We shall see in the next paper whether this is an intelligibly coherent idea or not.  For now, it is only necessary to observe the historical point, that de Molina was simply trying to avoid an inconsistency in Aquinas that he had inherited from the earlier Augustine, and which the Reformers had taken advantage of  to give up the free will theory.  But does he really succeed in avoiding the heresy of Semi-pelagianism that the Catholic Church had finally condemned as a heresy at the Synod of Orange in 529 A.D.?  I think not, and neither did the Thomists he was trying to impress. 

The Thomists Respond

The Thomists looked at Molinism with a jaundiced eye.  To begin with, this whole discussion had been worked over before.  This was nothing new to them, even if it seemed like a new discovery to Luis de Molina.  The whole argument had already been considered and refuted by none other than John Duns Scotus a mere twenty-five years after Aquinas had died.  The Thomists therefore drew to some degree on Duns Scotus in order to refute de Molina.  They were not of course interested in advertising Scotus’ own refutations of their pet theologian, but they did notice that involved in Scotus’ criticisms of Aquinas there was also implied a response to Molinism.  And any stick the Dominicans could find to beat the Jesuits with was sure to be used by somebody.  The rivalry between these two teaching orders was pretty considerable in those days, when compared with the more liberal and friendly approach of catholic orders to each other in our own day.  The Dominicans and the Jesuits do not think of each other as bitter rivals any more.

In the course of his consideration of the attributes of God, Duns Scotus had shifted the Thomists’ emphasis on the Knowledge of God to the Will of God.  Thomas had  spoken of the priority of God’s intellect over against his will, and this involved the consideration that God’s knowing preceded his willing.  This is the Thomist doctrine of “the priority of the Intellect,” over against Scotus’ “priority of the Will.”  It seemed to Duns that the Thomists kept the knowledge of God separate from his willing in an artificial way.  The upshot was that Scotus emphasized what we might call God’s “willing knowledge,’ so that God could not know something as real without also willing it to exist as real.   In fact, the “reality” of anything God thought of as possibly existing could only move from possibility to actuality by the will of God, by which the act of Creation occurred.  Anything really existing, whether in the present or the future, could only be real because God’s willing knowledge made it so.  For Duns, the will of God was so important that it had to be considered in every discussion of how God did anything, including his knowing.

The Thomists looked at this and saw that this consideration made de Molina’s “middle knowledge” theory impossible as a solution to the sovereignty versus free will controversy.  We will see why this was so in more detail in the second lecture, but here we must observe that the Thomists rejected Molinism for reasons they saw made the theory destroy free will.  Remember that the whole point of the exercise was to reconcile an apparent contradiction between divine sovereignty and free will, so any demonstration which showed that de Molina not only did not reconcile the two, but that in fact his theory destroyed free will made de Molina a heretic.  As understood by the mediaeval church, free will was de fide.  That is, itwas a necessary article of the catholic Faith.  Free will was a dogma that could not be questioned.  You were allowed to call it “a divine mystery,” but you could not deny either side of the dilemma involved.

As a matter of fact, there came a point in the controversy when as many as 22 separate propositions found in de Molina’s works were actually condemned by a special congregation of cardinals called together for this very purpose by the Pope.  But no final pronouncement was confirmed, and even today, Molinism is a permissible opinion within the framework of otherwise Thomist catholic thought.

A False Dilemma

This is all very well for someone who stands in the orthodox catholic thomistic position.  But why pray, should anyone think it worthwhile to reconcile the Bible’s doctrine of full divine sovereignty with  free will considered as the “liberty of indifference”?   No such theory is found in the Bible after all.   It is like trying to reconcile the Trinity with the existence of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.  Why bother?  From a Christian standpoint these three Hindu gods do not even exist.  You cannot “reconcile” something that exists with something that is not even there!  Well, it is the same with libertarian free will.  No proof of its existence has ever been offered, even by Arminians or Catholics.  It’s just a dogma pure and simple.

Calvinist Evangelicals in particular, should not become entangled in a program designed to “reconcile” Arminianism with Calvinism.  Arminianism presupposes the pagan myth of an autonomous free will.  No such animal exists.  Dressing it up in pious ambiguities about “responsibility” and “significant choices” and the “integrity of the individual,” etc., etc.,  just won’t do.   The free will theory is not a biblical idea at all. 
 
We know exactly where this notion of a free will came from; there is no mystery here.   The early church fathers found themselves struggling with the materialistic cosmic determinism of the Stoics on the one hand, and the appeal to a background of pure atomistic chance by the Epicureans on the other.  In order to steer a safe middle course between these two erroneous views, they opted for an idea transmitted by both Stoics and Epicureans to the discussions of the second and third centuries from the history of Greek ethical views about human nature, the doctrine of an autonomously Free Will .  But this meant that they were relying on the pagan concept of free will over against the pagan concept of a materialistic determinism on the one hand, and an equally pagan concept of a primeval Chaos on the other.   One can readily understand why they did this.  They correctly perceived that an autonomous free will was incompatible with determinism, that it refuted materialism, and made the notion of a background Chaos unnecessary.  For the early fathers these looked like solid gains.

The Cost Of Syncretism

But there is always a price to pay for a philosophical short cut.  The assumption of an autonomist free will carried with it further implications which undermined Christianity at other points.   To begin with, the Bible said nothing of free will.  It spoke of Freedom in several readily understandable senses, and it used several words for the Will.  But there were no verses supporting any kind of freewill theory.
The standard word which came to be used for “free will” (autexousia, the self-determining power), was not even found in the Bible.

To make free will plausible as a fact of christian theology, one had to ----

1. accept it as a pure assumption, a presupposition which should not be questioned, since it cannot be rationally proved,
2. claim with the Stoics and Epicureans that responsibility was based on free will,
3. treat it as a basic quality of what it meant to be human,
4. quote verses from the Bible in which human choices were commanded or recorded, and treat these as if they referred to free will,
5. assume it to be so perfectly obvious that only a crazy person would question it, and  finally,
6. appeal to it as the only solution to the problem of Evil existing in a world made by a good God.

All these things were done by the church fathers of the age preceding Augustine, and they are still being done by Evangelicals today.     They are in fact, the special province of Arminianism and of the apologetic methodology dependent on it, and of any other form of popular freewillism.  They constitute the primary intellectual barrier between modern Evangelicalism and the theology of the Reformers and the Puritans.

Presuppositional Suicide

The Apostle Paul warned his charges that Greek philosophy represented a world view incompatible with the world view of the Bible (as in Acts 17 and 1 Cor 1-3).  He warned them and us, that “the wisdom of this world” was incapable of giving us any reliable information about God, yielded self-contradictory ideas of human nature, and was incapable of  a rational interpretation of human experience of the Cosmos.  It could not even wean the Athenians away from idolatry, which the philosophers despised.

In his famous confrontation with the Greco-Roman world of philosophy and religion at Athens, Paul took pains to show that the reason they could not make a dent in Greek idolatry was because the philosophers were themselves idolatrous.  They worshiped and served the creature, the Cosmos, Being-in-general, and not the God of the Bible, the Creator who was really “there.”  Their presuppositional reference-point was not the God of the Bible, and therefore it could not bear the weight of a rationally coherent interpretation of human experience.  It could not even give an intelligible account of the problem of pantheism versus polytheism.  If you start with the wrong presuppositional reference-point, no amount of Logic, and no consideration of “the Facts” will be any help at all, in the long run.  Presuppositions are like the International Rules in the game of chess.  These rules determine what counts as a possible move all across the board.  If  you change the rules you are no longer playing chess by definition.   Presuppositions are like these rules.  They control what is possible in any argument depending on them.  If the believer starts by combining Christian truth with presuppositions incompatible with the Bible’s view of God, the result will inevitably become increasingly unlike the contents of the Bible itself, the more consistent one tries to be.  Eventually, it will, like all non-christian systems, disintegrate under the weight of its own internal tensions, and be replaced in the flow of philosophical thought by some new theory.

Syncretism An Apologetic Cul-de-sac

Why then would a Bible-believing Christian want to reinterpret human nature, the work of salvation,  the nature of the Cosmos, and finally the biblical attributes of God Himself, in terms of a pagan presupposition for which no rationally-argued proof has ever been offered ?  Yet this is what the believer in autonomist free will is actually doing.  In their favor, it can only be observed that sincerely wanting to reconcile two things they believe to be true, they have strong motivation to continually resurrect theories like Molinism as possible options.  The idea in practice resembles someone who is convinced that pure arsenic oxide will kill anyone who takes it, so decides to combine it with milk and a good meal, in the hope that in a less pure form it will do more good than harm.  The realistic response to this sort of thinking is that the mere presence of arsenic oxide will kill you however carefully it is combined with otherwise good food.  The crazy presupposition that if “properly administered,” arsenic oxide will improve the food situation must be itself challenged.  The poison must be recognized and wholly excluded.  This move is not negotiable if we want to stay alive…..

We need to recall that a presupposition cannot in the nature of the case be “proved.”  If it could be proved it would be a conclusion derived from previously assumed presuppositions, not a presupposition.  Presuppositions must be “chosen,” not “proved.”  And no system of interpretation can derive its own axioms.   The Christian of course, accepts his or her presuppositions as gifts of Grace from the revealing mouth of God (Mat 4:4).  The Bible-believing Christian reads the most basic presupposition of all in Genesis 1:1, that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”  This Creator-creature distinction is the presupposition, the foundational  axiom of all Christian rationality.  Unless this as accepted, the whole nature of  “proof” itself is in question.

So why would a Bible-believing Christian want to assume without question the pagan concept of an autonomous human consciousness?   It is simply inexplicable -- unless of course, you take into account both the Fall and original sin, and especially the effects that Reformed theologians call the “noetic” effects of sin.  This surely, is what gives the libertarian free will theory its privileged position as an opinion that nobody dares to question these days.  It seems that people will do and believe almost anything at all rather than question the dogma of an autonomist free will.

Well, I’m questioning it.  And I’m asking the Molinist why on earth he thinks it would appeal to me as a calvinistic ex nihilo creationist, to be told that some Jesuit has at last “reconciled” free will and God’s sovereignty?  Such a claim is incredible on the face of it.  He must first show that his idea of free will is itself a coherent idea.  Otherwise there is nothing here to discuss.  Then he must show me that it does not contradict particular verses of the Bible that I think are in direct conflict with the assumption of autonomy.  Then he must show me that it really can be reconciled with the attributes of God, without appealing to convenient “mysteries” and “paradoxes” and “antinomies” in order to cover up the contradictions involved.  The next paper will cover that ground, God willing.

Summary of Conclusions?

We must stop here, but let’s summarize the main points:

1. Molinism claims to provide by its conception of God’s Middle Knowledge, a reconciliation between the theological idea of divine sovereignty and the idea of libertarian free will.
2. It started out as an attempt to clean up a problem in Thomism in order to offset the protestant Reformers’ denial of free will as being incompatible with the doctrines of God’s sovereignty and salvation by grace that they found in the theology of St. Augustine.
3. Duns Scotus in the thirteenth, and the Thomists of  de Molina’s day provided detailed answers to his idea of Middle Knowledge as soon as it appeared. 
4. Whether de Molina’s description of Middle Knowledge can really explain how God’s sovereignty is compatible with an autonomous free will therefore remains a problem.
5. If libertarian free will is not a Christian conception, any syncretism between it and the Bible’s idea of God will necessarily fail, and merely generate further problems and inconsistencies for Christian theology to deal with.
6. Syncretisms between Christian and nonchristian systems of thought are precluded by the nature of God and the teachings of the Bible.  Incompatible presuppositions yield nothing but incoherency, and unresolvable tensions.
7. Libertarian freewillism is a pagan notion introduced into Christian thinking mainly from Stoicism by the early church fathers before Augustine.  It is not in found the Bible, and functions today as a sop to Arminianism, and a red herring across the path of the evangelical theologian.
8. Therefore Christians should give it up as a pagan intrusion, and not allow it to molest the peace of the saints any further.
   
   

Sources For Further Study

The following is a selection of easily available sources for the historical background to the recent resuscitation of Molinism among evangelical Arminians.

Hastings’ Encyclopedia of Religion And Ethics  remains a useful source for historical accounts of old theological problems.  It has good articles on Arminianism, Pelagianism and Semi-pelagianism, and Molinism too, among other things.  Because it was completed by 1926, it represents the growing confidence of the “modernists” of  that era, and some articles are not very sound from the Calvinist’s point of view.  Nevertheless, because it is found in just about every library in the world, it’s a good place to start.  Many competent conservatives like B. B. Warfield and James Denney contributed articles, as well as people we would think of as liberals today.  The fascinating list of contributors appears at the end of the Index volume, and is an education in historical theology by itself.

The old Catholic Encyclopedia is from the same era as Hastings’.  It represents a quiteconservative pre-Vatican II scholarship, and is very helpful on historical studies of catholic doctrines.  Naturally, an article like the one on Predestinarianism or Calvinism will have a heavily catholic bias, but that is to be expected and discounted.  This work has the great advantage of being on the WEB, so articles can be easily printed off for your own use.  One finds articles on Free Will, Augustine,  Molinism, and the later Jesuit scheme of  Congruism, among others.  It is a very good introductory source for mediaeval theology.  Of course, these encyclopedias are recommended with full awareness that their articles constitute only a starting-point for the topics involved, and over seventy years’ of modern scholarship has gone under the bridge since 1926.   But beginners need to start with something convenient, and nobody should imagine that recent Molinists have much new to offer.  The major problems pointed out by the Thomists in the 1500s still remain, even if you believe in libertarian free will.

A good source for the recent arminian use of Molinism is the work of William Lane Craig, who did his doctorate on this topic.  His thesis was published by Brill as The Problem Of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom From Aristotle to Suarez, in 1980.  Craig’s article presenting Molinism as a solution to the free will-sovereignty problem was A Calvinist-Arminian Rapproachment? in  Clark Pinnock’s collection of  1989, called The Grace of God, The Will of Man; A Case for Arminianism.  He has produced other books in the field since these, and has a helpful website containing some of his recent articles.

Several articles have appeared refuting Craig’s position, but we should observe first that the encyclopedia articles referred to above, contain the original Thomists’ objections to Molina’s ideas.  Then see  J. A. Crabtree’s article Does Middle Knowledge Solve The Problem Of Divine Sovereignty? In volume two of  The Grace of God, The Bondage Of the Will, edited by Thomas Schreiner and Bruce Ware (Baker Books, 1995, now unhelpfully o.p).  See also Paul Helm’s comments on Molinism in his recent Banner Of Truth book, The Providence Of God.

Luis de Molina’s material is largely locked up in the original Latin, but fortunately there is an English version of part of his main work (the Concordia ) by Alfred J. Freddoso,  called On Divine Foreknowledge (1988).  It remains a great tragedy that the vast wealth of mediaeval theology and philosophy is still inaccessible to those of us unable to read Latin fluently.  People do not even realize that Thomas Aquinas’ real love was not apologetics, but expounding the Scriptures verse by verse, and few of his commentaries are in English.  Evangelicals can find much of value in his commentary on John’s Gospel, which has appeared in English.

Douglas Langston produced God’s Willing Knowledge (Penn State , 1986) explaining why Molinism did not adequately respond to Duns Scotus on the Middle Knowledge concept.
My own book  No Place For Sovereignty  (Intervarsity Press, 1996)  begins a challenge to any form of libertarian freewillism by refuting the arminian idea of a liberty of indifference from the Bible, supported by some historical background and the basic philosophical objections to autonomism.  No consideration was given to Molinism or Congruism in this book, because I did not then (and I do not now), consider that any attempt to “reconcile” freewillism with the Bible to be worth the effort, since freewillism is nonsense.

The opinions of the Reformers on freewillism are very important for understanding what they thought the Gospel was, over against the humanistic ideas of the sixteenth century humanists, and of the Catholic Church of the Renaissance era.  See Martin Luther’s The Bondage Of The Will, in many editions, of which the most useful is probably that of Westminster Press, conveniently containing also Erasmus’  The Freedom Of The Will in defense of a view that Luther considered nothing but renaissance humanism (of course he didn’t use the term “renaissance,” which was only invented much later).

John Calvin wrote a large two-volume work against the freewill theory, of  which the second part (on divine providence, called Concerning The Eternal Predestination of God, (1552) has been in English for over a century as Calvin’s Calvinism, translated byH. Cole, and often reprinted.  The first part (On Free Will, 1543), was a detailed refutation of the theories of Albertus Pighius, a Dutch catholic theologian who took a special interest in attacking the doctrines of the Reformers.  It finally appeared in English for the first time in 1996, as The Bondage And Liberation Of The Will, (Paternoster and Baker, 1996), so I was unaware of it as my own book came out.  It is very thorough, quite ferocious, and  quite devastating theologically to the opinions it refutes.  I could hardly put it down once I started reading it.  It’s Calvin at his most incisive and entertaining.