What Is Molinism?

Question 2057.

What Molinism teaches has attracted considerable attention among evangelical theologians over recent decades, and it deserves both a fair explanation and a careful assessment rather than a caricature in either direction. It is a framework developed to explain how God can know and providentially work through history with certainty while human beings retain genuine freedom of choice.

I think it asks a genuinely important question, even where I am not convinced its particular answer is required by Scripture. Let me walk through what Molinism actually proposes, where it came from, and where I land on it.

Its Origins

The framework was developed by Luis de Molina, a Spanish Jesuit theologian working in the sixteenth century, whose major work Concordia was published in 1588. Molina was wrestling with a real tension. If God foreknows all things and His purposes are certain, how can human choices remain genuinely free rather than simply determined by that foreknowledge? And if human choices are genuinely free, how can God’s purposes for history be certain rather than contingent on what people happen to decide?

That tension can feel impossible to hold together without collapsing into either determinism on one side or an uncertain, reactive God on the other. Molina’s proposed solution was a particular category of divine knowledge sitting logically prior to God’s decision to create.

What Molinism Teaches About Freedom

What Molinism teaches, at its centre, is that God possesses what is called middle knowledge, His knowledge of what any free creature would do in any possible set of circumstances, including circumstances that never actually occur. Molina placed this between what he called natural knowledge, God’s knowledge of every logical possibility, and free knowledge, God’s knowledge of what will actually happen once He has decided which world to create.

On this scheme, God surveys every possible world containing every possible free choice any creature could make in any circumstance, and then selects, from among these, the actual world to bring into existence. Human choices remain genuinely free within that world, according to Molinism, because God is not causing the choice, only knowing in advance what the choice would be and building His plan around it.

What Molinism Gets Right

I want to be fair to what Molinism teaches before I raise concerns. It takes human freedom seriously in a way that some deterministic frameworks do not. It refuses to make God the direct author of every human choice, sin included, which is a concern I share entirely. And it takes God’s exhaustive foreknowledge with full seriousness, refusing any suggestion, as Open Theism does, that God’s knowledge of the future is somehow incomplete or probabilistic.

On both of those fronts, Molinism and my own position share common ground. I affirm genuine human freedom. I affirm exhaustive divine foreknowledge. I reject Open Theism outright.

Where I Hold Back

Where I hold back is on the mechanism Molinism proposes to hold those two truths together. Scripture states plainly that God knows all things, including every choice that will be made and every choice that could have been made but was not. It does not, as far as I can find, explicitly teach the specific category of middle knowledge, a logically prior knowledge of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom that God consults before deciding which world to actualise.

This is a case where a philosophically elegant solution to a genuine theological puzzle may be reaching further than the biblical text explicitly warrants. I am content to affirm both truths, God’s exhaustive foreknowledge and genuine human freedom, without insisting on the particular mechanism by which they are held together. Scripture asserts both. It does not fully explain how both fit, and I am not convinced Molinism actually closes that gap so much as gives it a more precise philosophical name.

A Simpler Alternative

My own preference is closer to what is sometimes called simple foreknowledge. God simply knows, exhaustively and without error, everything that will happen, including every free choice every person will ever make, without that knowledge being the cause of those choices. This affirms the same two truths Molinism affirms, genuine freedom and complete foreknowledge, without requiring the additional philosophical machinery of counterfactuals of freedom that Molina proposed.

I recognise this leaves a mystery, namely how exhaustive foreknowledge and genuine freedom actually cohere at the level of mechanism. I am comfortable leaving that mystery in place rather than resolving it with a category Scripture does not explicitly teach.

Why This Discussion Still Matters

Even where I do not adopt Molinism’s mechanism, engaging with what Molinism teaches is worthwhile, because it forces me to hold both truths, freedom and foreknowledge, with equal seriousness rather than collapsing one into the other. Determinism protects God’s certainty at the cost of genuine freedom. Open Theism protects genuine freedom at the cost of God’s certainty. Molinism at least attempts to hold both, even if I think the biblical evidence supports holding both without the particular apparatus it supplies.

How Molinism Differs From Calvinist Determinism

What Molinism teaches stands in deliberate contrast to Calvinist and Reformed accounts of providence, which typically ground certainty about the future in God’s unconditional decree rather than in His knowledge of what free creatures would do. Molinists, like me, want to preserve genuine human freedom rather than reducing human choices to the outworking of a prior divine decision that determines them from eternity.

This is genuine common ground between what Molinism teaches and my own non-Calvinist convictions. Both reject the idea that God causes every human choice, sin included. Where we differ is on the philosophical machinery Molinism introduces to explain how genuine freedom and divine certainty are held together, machinery I do not think Scripture actually requires.

How Molinism Differs From Open Theism

What Molinism teaches also stands in sharp contrast to Open Theism, which limits God’s knowledge of the future to what is knowable given genuinely open, undetermined human choices. Molinism insists, rightly in my view, that God’s knowledge is complete and certain, extending even to counterfactuals of freedom that never actually occur.

I share this conviction entirely. Open Theism compromises God’s perfections in a way Scripture will not permit, since passages like Isaiah 46:9-10 have God declaring the end from the beginning with total confidence. Whatever I make of the specific mechanism Molinism proposes, what Molinism teaches about the completeness of divine knowledge is far closer to the biblical picture than Open Theism’s more limited account.

A Closing Word on Charitable Disagreement

I want to close this discussion the way I try to close every disagreement among fellow evangelicals. Molinists are not compromising on Scripture’s authority, and this disagreement is not remotely comparable to the far more serious departures I address elsewhere on this site, Open Theism or process theology among them. It is an in-house discussion between believers who agree on the fundamentals and differ on a genuinely difficult philosophical question Scripture does not fully resolve for us.

I would rather model that kind of careful, respectful disagreement than pretend the question is simple, or treat fellow believers who land on Molinism as though they had abandoned orthodoxy. They have not. They have simply answered a hard question differently than I have.

Why Ordinary Believers Do Not Need to Resolve This

I want to be honest that what Molinism teaches is unlikely to come up in most ordinary pastoral conversations, and that is exactly as it should be. This is a technical, in-house debate among theologians attempting to explain a genuine mystery with more philosophical precision than Scripture itself supplies. An ordinary believer trusting God with a hard decision this week does not need a settled opinion on Proverbs 16:9, where a man plans his way but the Lord establishes his steps, in order to trust that verse and live by it faithfully.

What Molinism teaches is worth understanding if you enjoy theology, as I clearly do, but it was never meant to be a test of orthodoxy, and I would gently discourage anyone from making it one, in either direction.

A Closing Note on Foreknowledge

The Greek behind foreknowledge in passages like Romans 8:29 is proginosko, to know beforehand. Whatever mechanism ultimately explains it, this is the word Scripture actually gives me to work with, and it is enough to build genuine confidence on even without settling every philosophical question Molinism raises.

So, now what?

You do not need to resolve every philosophical puzzle about how God’s foreknowledge and your freedom fit together in order to trust Him with your choices today. Scripture gives you both truths plainly. God knows everything you will choose, and you are genuinely, truly free and responsible when you choose it. Hold both, even where the mechanism remains mysterious, and let the mystery drive you to worship rather than anxiety.

Whatever you decide today, God already knows it, has already accounted for it in His purposes, and remains completely able to work good through it. That is a steadier place to stand than any philosophical system, however elegant, could ever offer on its own.

“For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?”

Romans 11:34 (ESV)