More About Molinism: What Does Molinism Mean? - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 18, Part 2

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Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. This is part two of our discussion on Molinism.

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If you haven't watched part one, please go back and do it because this episode is not going to make a whole lot of sense unless you've watched part one.

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I'm with Jeff Laird, Got Questions employee, the administrator of our BibleRef .com commentary site, and we're just discussing

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Molinism, which is a fascinating explanation of how God's sovereignty works with human responsibility.

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So Jeff, start us off with just a quick refresher on what Molinism is, what middle knowledge is, and basically give the quick explanation so people can know what we're talking about.

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Yeah. The essential idea in Molinism is it's an attempt to kind of look at two different perspectives and to harmonize them.

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When we talk about something like Calvinism or Reform Theology, that's a very strong emphasis on God's sovereignty, that he is in control, that he is the one making all of the decisions, including things about our salvation.

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Arminianism places a very high emphasis on human free will and that we're being held accountable for making legitimate choices where we really could have chosen one way or the other.

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Molinism is effectively an attempt to say, I see both of those in Scripture. There's clear statements that we have the ability to choose and God wants us to choose.

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There's very clear statements that God is minutely in control of all things that happen in the universe, but also he's not the one who's responsible for sin.

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But we are responsible for what we do. Molinism uses something called middle knowledge to say

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God can be perfectly sovereign and humanity can have true free will.

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And the way it does that is by saying God innately, perfectly within himself as God, knows every possible combination of everything that could ever be or could ever happen.

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The infinite possibilities of everything, and that includes creation, how he could create or not create, what creation would be like, all of those things.

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Then God also knows what decisions free creatures would make in certain circumstances.

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He knows if I put this person who I've given free will in situation

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A, he'll make choice B. If I put him in X, he'll choose Y. And that is middle knowledge.

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In other words, this is God's omniscience, including not just all things and all possibilities, but it includes everything that a free creature could choose.

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God creates, and God has what's called his free knowledge, which is his actual understanding, his knowledge, his omniscience of everything that is.

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So, Molinism says God is sovereign. God does elect people to salvation.

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God is perfectly in control of everything that happens in the universe. And without contradiction, people are free.

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They actually have free will and they are freely making decisions. And the way that those are compatible is because God is able to say,

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I'm going to choose to create such that Shay or Jeff or this person will make such and such a free decision at a certain time.

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So that's the basic idea of Molinism. Now, when we're having these conversations, a lot of times the difference comes down to the question of Molinism versus Armenianism or versus Calvinism.

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And in Calvinism, there's a very famous acronym that's used, which is tulip. And that explains these five principles that people associate with Reformed theology.

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You can see something similar with Molinism, except instead of tulip, it's what's called roses.

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And without getting into all the really specific details, you have radical depravity, which is the idea that people are so tainted by sin that they can't even want to be saved unless God draws them into that desire.

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There's overcoming grace, which is the idea that God provides a call and an urge, but allows you the free will ability to resist it if you want to resist it.

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Sovereign election, which means that whether or not a person is actually saved is 100 %

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God's predestined and sovereign choice because of his middle knowledge and the way he chose to create.

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Eternal life. So we've got R -O -S -E. The eternal life is sort of the counterpoint to perseverance of the saints.

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From a Molinist perspective, eternal security doesn't really come into play.

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Now, that's not to say that it says it's not true or that it's false. It's more that in a Molinist framework,

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God knows whether or not you're going to be one of the elect. So there isn't necessarily a falling away or coming to moment that philosophically makes as much of a difference.

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And then the last S is singular redemption. That's the idea that Christ's death is accessible to everybody, but it's only applied to the people who actually believe.

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So when you put those together, you have roses and those get together. I've heard good analogies and bad analogies for some of those.

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I think one that's helpful that does a good job of explaining the Molinist perspective, maybe in general,

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I would like to say this is credited to Kenneth Keithley. I am not nearly as much of an expert on all the literature of Molinism as some folks are, but I believe it's

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Keithley who came up with what was called the ambulance analogy. And he was specifically talking about overcoming grace, which is different than the

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Calvinist irresistible grace. And this is all about how we come to the point of making a decision to fully become true born again believers.

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And his analogy was to say, if you can imagine waking up in an ambulance with a injury that is going to be fatal if it's not treated.

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And the ambulance driver says, I am going to take you to the hospital and they will be able to save you.

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If you want to get out, you can get out. But if you do nothing, if you just don't resist,

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I will get you to the hospital and you will be rescued. Now, what that means is if that person chooses to do nothing, then all the credit for their rescue goes to somebody else.

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They can't claim to have any part in being rescued from that injury. If they decide to get out of the ambulance, they bear 100 percent of the responsibility for that decision.

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That, I think, does a good job of capturing the Molinist approach to how people come to faith and how we can say

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God's sovereignty and free will work together in that if a person resists

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God through their free will, they bear 100 percent of the blame for that. If the person doesn't resist

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God and they come to salvation, they don't get to take any credit for that. So when we look at how these things work together, there are some parallels in there.

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But the the middle knowledge approach gives you something like that ambulance analogy, where there is a philosophical combination between free will and predestination that's not a contradiction anymore.

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So that's the basic idea of where Molinism comes from, or at least the way it approaches these issues.

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Yeah, I like that illustration in that, obviously, someone in an ambulance who knows they are going to die if they don't make it to the hospital would have to be completely stupid to get out of the ambulance.

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That does not remove the possibility that, hey, you have the free choice to do so if you want.

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So it's not like God is forcing them to stay in the ambulance. He's just presenting them with the opportunity.

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And the drawing of the Holy Spirit is analogous to all the reasons for you to stay in the ambulance, the work that God has done in your mind and heart to convince you of the claims of Christ and the gospel and so forth.

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So I know I really like that illustration. I've always wondered, though, why

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Calvinists have the tulip and Molinists have the roses.

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Why? I've never heard an Arminian summarize their points using a flower, because that evidently seems to be what you need to do if you're going to explain something difficult and theological and philosophical.

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You need to use an analogy using a flower to... They have one. They just don't talk about it very often.

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It's actually Daisy. Daisy. Okay. Yes. And just like you say, you don't ever like to do math in public.

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I'm an engineer. I'll do math in public, but I don't have enough memory to remember exactly what

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Daisy stands for. So the interested listener can most certainly find out what the Arminian Daisy refers to.

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Yeah. So we've got tulips and roses and daisies. Sounds like on Valentine's Day.

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Yeah, it's good. I know that when we do talk about those kinds of things, that is something that, like you said, with sovereignty and things like that, it frustrates a lot of people.

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I think most of the flack that Molinism seems to take comes from people who have a more Calvinistic viewpoint.

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And a lot of that comes because it's interpreted sometimes as this attack on God's sovereignty, that God is somehow submitting himself to human choice or that he's waiting for people to choose something before he does anything.

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And I understand to an extent why people would misunderstand that, that is what that is.

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When it comes to Molinism, that is a misunderstanding. It is not a claim that God is waiting or asking permission or being passive in any sense.

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Romans 9 applies in Molinism. If God chooses not to save somebody, he's not going to save that person.

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If God wants that person to be saved, he will. And if we're going to call God sovereign, we need to say that doesn't

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God have the right to say, I want people to come to faith by free will. Well, if he's truly sovereign, then he's able to do that.

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Where Molinism becomes really interesting and useful in a lot of ways is some of the pitfalls that come with what some people would call the extremes don't necessarily apply anymore.

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One of them that you very well is double predestination. So this is one of the logical traps in the hard Calvinist or reformed view, which is the idea if God is perfectly sovereign, if God is 100 % in control of everything in creation, if the only possible way anybody could ever come to faith is if God deliberately intervenes in turning their free will to make them be saved, then logically the only other option is that when

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God creates other people, he's creating them with the explicit intent that that person is going to go to hell.

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There's a lot of debate. There's a lot of discussion. There's a lot of nuance. A person doesn't have to reject

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Calvinism to reject double predestination, obviously. But it's a difficult thing. It requires a lot of wrangling to get away from that.

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Molinism solves that problem by saying that, no, God doesn't create anybody with the deliberate intent that they're going to go to hell.

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He creates everybody with the opportunity to make some sort of free willed decision. Does he choose to put some people in positions where they're going to freely choose to deny him?

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He's perfectly capable of doing that. If he wants to do that, he can do that.

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That's not something that contradicts his sovereignty. It doesn't remove his sovereignty, but it explains how his sovereignty can exist without him being responsible for sin, without him being responsible for a person going to hell.

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It actually helps with the Romans 9 attitude. Instead of somebody being able to say, look, you built me like a robot and now you're punishing me for doing exactly what you coded me for.

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You can say, you made the choice. You're the one who made the decision and that's it.

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On the other end of the spectrum, Molinism also helps a lot with issues like open theism. Open theism is this idea that God does not know or cannot know, or at best, that he just chooses not to know what people are going to do so that they can make their own free decision.

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There's a lot more meat to that complaint than there is to something like double predestination.

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Double predestination may be gross, but you can see how a person could see that in scripture.

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Open theism, you just cannot find support for that in scripture anyway. Even the idea that God is deliberately choosing not to know.

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Again, Molinism solves that issue in that God doesn't need to say,

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I'm going to wait and see what Shay is going to decide. I'm just going to hold off.

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It looks like Shay is going to decide to follow me. That means Shay is elect. That's not how it works in Molinism.

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God knows. He chooses. He elects and he selects, but he doesn't have to do that by forcing you to do that.

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Again, there's areas where these things rub up against other interpretations, but there's a lot of positive aspects to how

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Molinism approaches it. Exactly. I've always found

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Jesus taught in parables, which are essentially illustrations. Illustrations are extremely helpful, especially with something very complicated, philosophical, and theological like Molinism is.

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We've discussed this in the past. A couple of years ago, there was a hugely popular movie called

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Avengers Infinity War. Spoiler alert, if you haven't seen the movie yet, too bad.

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We're going to talk about it. Statue of limitations is pretty well over. One would think, yes. Long story short, there's a character named

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Dr. Strange who has access to the time stone, which allows them to see into the future.

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At one point in the movie, he goes into this weird trance like thing and sees 14 ,605 ,000 possible outcomes of the coming conflict with the big bad in the movie

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Thanos. Iron Man asked Dr. Strange, well, how many of those scenarios did we win?

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Dr. Strange says, one. The main point of that is how impossible it would have been for them to defeat

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Thanos, but then the rest of the movie and then also the follow -up movie to that end game shows how essentially

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Dr. Strange put things in motion so that one outcome would be the end result.

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Jeff, how is that a good illustration of Molinism and how is it not a great illustration of Molinism?

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It's good that you preface that by talking about parables. One of the things that I have to remind people all the time is that if every single nuance of a parable was identical to your life, then it's not a parable anymore.

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That's the whole point of a parable is there are some things that work and some things that don't, and we just have to know where they break down.

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So what happens in Infinity War with Dr. Strange is actually an extremely good understanding of the basic concept of middle knowledge.

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He's seeing all of the possibilities of what people are going to freely decide to do.

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Then after that, he makes a decision, several decisions actually, that when you're watching the movie at first, you think are ridiculous.

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Why don't you stop Star -Lord from being stupid? Why are you handing over your greatest weapon to our greatest enemy?

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Well, afterwards you understand why. He's making decisions because he's seeking that one solution.

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Where it obviously breaks down very quickly is God's understanding of the future is not anything nearly like Dr.

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Strange looking through his little green TV gem to see what's going on. God's ability to influence things is not nearly as haphazard as his.

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So we don't want to take it to that point to say that God is sort of hanging back there and hoping that if I do this and this and I keep trying, that I can make this happen.

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But it's a very good analogy for just middle knowledge in general. The idea that you can know and you can choose without logically forcing something to happen.

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Something you and I had talked about I think that's also important to remember is that we talked about parables and analogies and things like that.

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And that there's a point in time where we should be ready and willing to say,

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I don't fully understand this. And that's okay. Sometimes we hear the word mystery thrown around.

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And I at times get frustrated with people using mystery because very often people will use mystery as a way of saying, yeah, but let's just pretend that's not a contradiction.

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And then everything works. It would be like somebody saying, well, how can you claim you're faithful to your wife when you have three girlfriends?

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And they say, well, it's just a mystery of love. That's not a mystery. That's a contradiction and a lawsuit waiting to happen.

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When we look at the actual universe that we're in, there's certain things we just can't understand. With black holes, there's something called an event horizon.

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Once matter and energy goes past that event horizon, everything we know about it is effectively gone.

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It's just beyond human calculation. It's beyond human observation. That's not science throwing up its hands and saying, oh, blind faith.

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That's just the reality of that. So when I say, look, once something goes beyond the event horizon of the black hole, it's okay for me to say,

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I don't understand. And I don't know. When we look at something like Molinism, the mystery point of it goes outside the universe and it goes directly into God's main attributes.

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Basically it's saying, how is it that God could really know what I would freely choose? This is something that they call the grounding objection.

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How, how is it that God can know perfectly a free decision that I'm going to make?

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And that's a difficult question. And I'm not saying that anybody's come up with a good answer, but from what I've seen, that question is just like asking, how could

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God exist beyond a time or without time? I don't know. But that's not a question that involves my experience or the universe that I live in.

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That's just a question about the essential attributes of God. And that's something I shouldn't expect to understand.

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Trying to say, how can, how can God create me knowing that I cannot choose to do otherwise and still hold me accountable and not be responsible for sin?

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That's a little bit more inside the universe. That's a more difficult thing to explain when it comes to mystery.

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So with parables and with analogies and everything else like that, it's okay for us to say, look,

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I'm just doing the best I can to get as close as possible to the truth and get the idea.

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But I have to understand at some point, this, this is like, this is like ants trying to understand reality

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TV. There's just going to be a limit to, to how much understanding we can have of God's fundamental nature.

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And we shouldn't use this as an excuse to tear each other down or pick at each other because none of us are going to have a perfect understanding.

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Agreed. I think that's the right perspective, the right attitude to have. And in summary, like this is where I've come to on Molinism.

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I find it extremely fascinating. I find it to be a plausible explanation for how

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God works, how God's sovereignty works together with human responsibility and free will. I find it,

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I don't find any contradictions between Molinism and scripture. I find a few instances that you mentioned in part one, where scripture seems to indicate this, this middle knowledge.

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So then the question then becomes to what extent does God use this middle knowledge to orchestrate his plan?

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So that's sort of the mystery. Again, Molinism debated.

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It seems like Calvinists don't like it. Armenians don't like it. A lot of people misunderstand it, misrepresent it, but the way we've described it today,

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I think just presents it. Look, this is a possible way of thinking through these issues that seems to fit and seems to answer the questions and definitely answers them in a different way than most people are used to.

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That's what I find most interesting. So definitely worthy of study. So Jeff put a nice bow on this discussion.

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What do people really need to take away from this? And what's maybe a couple of really good resources for people if they want to study

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Molinism further? I think probably the best summary that we can give for this is that there are things we see in the

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Bible that are sometimes held in tension. I think God very often presents us instead of giving us a point or a line to focus on.

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He gives us boundaries where he says, stay away from this side, stay away from that side. His goal for us is somewhere in the middle, but he knows how hard it is for us to focus and understand something down there.

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So I think instead of God giving us an absolutely ironclad laser beam explanation of free will and sovereignty, he chooses to give us these brackets where he says, you can't go beyond saying

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God is not sovereign. You can't go beyond saying man doesn't have free will.

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But at the same time, there's going to be aspects of that we can't fully understand. So when we try to understand how can

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God be sovereign? How can I have free will? Molinism provides one of many different ways that people will look at that issue and try to understand how those things fit together.

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A great number of philosophers, especially fine Molinism, to be extremely robust.

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And that's where it has a lot of value. Paul talked about becoming all things to all people. He used language and understanding that people grasped.

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I think if a person is having a hard time understanding things like, for example, how can people who've never heard about Jesus be held accountable for not accepting the gospel?

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You can offer them a Molinist perspective. This is something again for listeners and readers to check out called trans world damnation.

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The idea basically that Molinism allows for a God who says, I create people and put them in circumstances where they'll freely choose.

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Some people will never freely choose. That could mean, it doesn't necessarily mean, but it could mean that the people who never hear about Jesus, God put them there because he knows there is no possible universe in which they were ever going to accept

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Christ. Tons of controversy about that. Good thing to check out. For a resource standpoint,

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I mentioned a gentleman named Kenneth Keithley. I believe his book is called sovereignty and salvation.

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If you look for Keithley and his name, his is an excellent resource. William Lane Craig is probably the most common and well -known defender of Molinism.

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Alvin Plantinga is a major philosopher who subscribes to Molinism. I'm not saying

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I don't recommend his material, but I will caution you that if you're not extremely philosophically minded, he's going to go right over and right through your head.

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It's still good stuff, but he is writing at the very highest levels of this. So those are some things that people can look at.

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In short, Molinism is an attempt to say, yes, God is 100 % sovereign, and yes, human beings really do have free will.

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It's not a denial of anything in Scripture. It's not a rejection of anything in Scripture. It's just another sincere attempt to rightly divide the

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Word and for us to understand a God who's higher than us as best we can.

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That's a great discussion, Jeff. I found it hugely helpful. Those books that you recommended,

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I'll include those in the YouTube description field and also on the podcast .gotquestions

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.org page when this podcast goes live so people can check out those resources. I hope this conversation has been helpful for you to understand a little bit better about what

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Molinism is and how the full Calvinist and full Arminian perspectives are not the only ones out there that provide explanations for how this might possibly work.

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Again, I hope you found this beneficial. That's always Jeff and I's goal in these discussions to just take something that can be really complicated and put it in a way that we can all understand.