The Problem With Arminian Middle Knowledge

Some young Calvinists I know are not sure how to respond to their friends who reject the Calvinist doctrine of God’s foreknowledge and predestination with a self-assured declaration, “No thanks, Calvinist predestination is theologically and logically problematic. I prefer Luis de Molina’s teaching of the “scientia media or middle knowledge as it is more coherent and persuasive.” These young Calvinists become unsettled and feel intimidated by the unfamiliar terminology thrown at them. However, a simple question would dispel the Molinist’s aura of sophistication. “As a Molinist, are you then a Jesuit or an Arminian? Since you are Protestant, I conclude that you are basically rebranding old-time Arminianism by using exotic language, granted that the idea of a divine middle knowledge is at the heart and soul of the Arminian view.”

This being clarified, we can focus on the theological problem with Arminian middle knowledge. To begin, classical theology referred to two kinds of divine knowledge:

(1) The necessary or natural knowledge of God is God’s knowledge of himself and all possible things based on his own all-sufficient omniscience and omnipotence. This includes knowledge of all necessary truths such as the laws of logic and knowledge of all possibilities. It is necessary not because it is compelled by a force above God but is in God’s perfect being itself. This knowledge is true in virtue of God’s nature, i.e., he knows them to be true by his very nature. Hence, this knowledge is also called God’s natural knowledge.

“There is, on the one hand a “necessary” knowledge that God has in the simplicity of the divine understanding that relates to all possibility: it is necessary inasmuch as God, who is omniscient, must have it. It is called “natural and indefinite” because it belongs naturally to God as a prior knowledge of possible existences that are not yet defined by God’s will as existent or actual. It is from this knowledge of possibility that God wills to bring into existence some things and not others. (Richard Muller, M 93)

(2) The free knowledge of God is God’s knowledge of the existing universal order, past, present and future. However, this knowledge is not of eternal necessity because God’s decision to create a particular world was a free decision. He could have chosen to create another possible world. His knowledge of the actual world is complete but is free because it results from God’s omnipotent decree applied in creation. Hence, it is the free knowledge of God.

“There is the voluntary or free knowledge that God has by “vision” or “sight” of all actual things: it is voluntary inasmuch as their existence depends on His will, free because His will is not constrained to actualize one particular set of possibilities rather than another. By this visionary or free knowledge, which is grounded in the eternal decree, God knows all things that He wills or permits and all that His creatures (as willed by Him) will or permit. It is, in short, God’s knowledge of all actuality.” (M 92-93)

Middle Knowledge. In addition to these two forms of God’s knowledge, Arminius adopted from Molina (16th century) a third category of divine knowledge – “middle knowledge” or scientia media which is neither the necessary knowledge nor the free knowledge of God.  It is knowledge of  certain things that would occur by the free determination of human will that is independent of God, when the appropriate conditions are obtained. It is what God knows His free creatures would do under all possible circumstances, or counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. Finally, since God knows all the outcomes of all the possible free choices that his creatures will make, he is able to create and actualize just those possibilities which work towards fulfilling his purposes.

Note that for Molinists and Arminians, the action or intervention of the creatures to actualize events is free in that the choices occur outside the general divine will or determination, and take priority over divine willing in the event of concurrence between human choices and divine permission. Critics of middle knowledge argue that the concept has no truth value because there is no actuality to ground the alternative possibilities or counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (the grounding objection). If there is no actuality in the postulated alternative circumstances, there is nothing for God to foreknow. Only what is decreed is actual and therefore included in God’s  foreknowledge. More signficantly, we shall see below how the priority of free human choices over divine determination is detrimental to the sovereignty of God.

Given below is Richard Muller’s critique of Arminian middle knowledge.
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“From the historical Reformed perspective, as from the Dominican, Thomist perspective, the notion of a divine foreknowledge of future contingents lying outside of the divine willing of actuality undermines the divine sovereignty, assaults the doctrine of salvation by grace, and in addition proposes an ontological absurdity. In the first place, if the salvation of human beings rests on divine foreknowledge, the human being is clearly regarded as the first and effective agent in salvation—and God is understood simply as the one who responds to an independent human action. In the second place, it must be asked whether future contingents lying outside of or prior to the general divine willing that actualizes all things are in fact possible. The Reformed orthodox enter the discussion with the assumption that God alone is original, self-existent, and necessary and that the entire contingent order depends on God for its existence. Or, to make the point in another way, prior to the act of creation, God alone exists as an actual or actualized being: the created order is simply a series of possibilities or potentialities in the mind of God. Out of all of the possibilities that God knows, God wills to create some. Once created, moreover, the things and actions of the finite order do not become self-existent, but continue to have their existence from God—or, to make the point in Thomistic language, all things have their existence by participation in the being of God. The power of being, self-existence, and potential for the existence of others, does not belong in any absolute sense to the created order…

Contingent things and events lying outside of the divine will cannot consistently be argued to exist—unless we overturn the whole doctrine of creation and argue that some things existed prior to and apart from the creative work of God and continue to exist outside of God’s providence. This problem appears in the Molinist and Arminian view of divine concurrence: Molina and Arminius after him argue that the divine action or concurrence that supports the existence of works or effects brought about by contingent agents enters the finite order of events in the effect, not in the secondary or finite cause. God thus supports the effect and gives it actuality while not strictly bringing it about or willing it. The finite agent acts independently in bringing about the action or effect

In response, the Reformed (and the Thomists) note that this theory may claim to account for the effect, but actually falls into ontological absurdity, because it does not account for the existence or action of the finite agent: it is impossible for any finite being to bring either itself or anything else from potency to actuality without the divine concurrence. In other words, freedom and contingency are not only compatible with an eternal decree that ordains all things, they depend upon it… he ability of creatures to have their own “quality and nature” and “follow [their] own inclination” depends on the divine ordination and conservation of their existence…

Thus, from the Reformed (and the Thomistic) perspective there can be no “middle knowledge” inasmuch as its proposed objects cannot exist. The two original categories of divine knowing—necessary and voluntary—are exhaustive: they refer to all possibility and all actuality. On the assumption of the divine creation of the world out of nothing, moreover, there can be no actuality that arises apart from the divine will.

As Voetius argued, since all actuality ultimately rests on God’s willing, there is nothing outside of the divine willing: the object of middle knowledge, therefore, is nothing. Knowledge of nothing is no knowledge at all—and middle knowledge, so-called, cannot exist any more than its purported objects. In order for future contingents to exist there must be an effective divine will that actualizes them as contingents—and the divine knowledge of future contingents must be an absolutely certain knowledge, eternally in God, of those possible contingents that God wills to actualize. From the Reformed perspective, a middle knowledge is not necessary to account for future contingents or for the divine knowledge of future contingents: the free or voluntary knowledge of God is an eternal knowledge of all actual things, whether (from the perspective of the creature) past, present, or future, and whether necessary, contingent, or freely willed.”

[Note the [Westminster Confession] discussion of providence, “In relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first cause, all things come to pass immutably and unerringly; yet, by the same providence, he orders them to come about according to the nature of secondary causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently.”]

“The Reformed orthodox theologians view this argument as far more sound and consistent—and certainly far more in accord both with Scripture and with the demands of soteriology—than the Arminian claim of a scientia media, inasmuch as middle knowledge, with its corresponding view of divine concursus, presupposes that some events belong to chains of cause and effect that lie outside of the divine willing. How, one wonders, if such events can actually occur, can they belong to or be drawn into God’s plan of salvation? From the Reformed perspective, the Arminian God is an interventionist, not in control of His own world, and not particularly successful in effecting His will to save all human beings.”(Emphasis added, M 95-99)

“An ineffective will cannot be attributed to God, since it would imply either a divine ignorance, which does not know events that are not going to follow, or an impotence, which is not able to effect what it intends.” (M 107)

Concluding Remarks
“The foreknowledge of God, in the Arminian view, consists in part in a knowledge of contingent events that lie outside of God’s willing and, in the case of the divine foreknowledge of the rejection of grace by some, of contingent events that not only thwart the antecedent divine will to save all people, but also are capable of thwarting it because of the divinely foreknown resistibility of the gift of grace. From the early modern Reformed perspective, the Arminian God is locked into the inconsistency of genuinely willing to save all people while at the same time binding Himself to a plan of salvation that He foreknows with certainty cannot effectuate His will. This divine inability results, presumably, from the necessity of those events that lie within the divine foreknowledge but outside of the divine willing, remaining outside of the effective will of God. Arminian theology posits the ultimate contradiction that God’s antecedent will genuinely wills what He foreknows can never come to pass and that His consequent will effects something other than His ultimate intention. The Arminian God, in short, is either ineffectual or self-contradictory. Reformed doctrine, on the other hand, argues the ultimate mystery of the infinite will of God, affirms the sovereignty and efficacy of God, and teaches the soteriological consistency of the divine intention and will with its effects, while at the same time positing contingency and a dependent freedom of rational creatures in the world order.” (M 110)

Source
M Richard Muller, “Grace, Election, and Contingent Choice: Arminius’ Gambit and the Reformed Response,” in Providence, Freedom, and the Will in Early Modern Reformed Theology (Reformation Heritage Books, 2022).