Paul Helm blogs monthly and substantively. A certain entry concerns the question of God’s so-called “middle knowledge” (media scientia). He writes,

I’ve heard it said that many Calvinist writers currently favor some form of the doctrine of middle knowledge. I’ve also heard that among the roll call are the names of John Frame, and John Feinberg, but I have not checked this. I hope not. Terrance Tiessen and Bruce Ware have openly avowed their commitment to Calvinist middle knowledge.¹

First, as I will argue below, I have no idea what “Calvinist” middle knowledge is. So far as I know, the Calvinists of the seventeenth century, who faced the doctrine of middle knowledge directly, rejected it thoroughly. Second, that some evangelicals are embracing middle knowledge says more about the nature of contemporary evangelical theology, piety, and practice than it does about Calvinism or Reformed theology.

According to the Reformed understanding of Scripture, God’s knowledge may be described in two aspects: natural and free. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, some (mainly Jesuits) advocated a third aspect of divine knowledge; hence the adjective middle (between free and natural). According to advocates of middle knowledge, there is a middle term that is not unknown to God, but which is beyond his determinate will. He knows what free agents would do in any given circumstance, but his knowledge does not determine what those free agents do.

The debate has been revived in recent years, not by Roman scholars, but by evangelical philosophers such as William Lane Craig and others. This debate is being conducted mostly by philosophical theologians with little reference to historical theology. The exegetical theology by philosophical theologians is generally amateur and unconvincing. It seems to me that if I can find one case of a divine determination of any free agent, then middle knowledge fails—and there are dozens of such cases explicitly revealed in Scripture.²

Craig is a leading proponent of the renewal of the middle knowledge argument. He describes middle knowledge as a doctrine that is “astonishing in its subtlety and power. . . . Indeed I would venture to say that it is the single most fruitful theological concept I have ever encountered in my own work.”³

To defend middle knowledge, he appeals to the existence of “counterfactuals.” He says, “counterfactuals are conditional statements in the subjunctive mood.”⁴ He says, “[God] knows, for example, what would have happened if he had spared the Canaanites from destruction, what Napoleon would have done had he won the Battle of Waterloo, and how Jones would respond if I were to share the gospel with him.”⁵ According to Craig, the Reformed view inevitably makes God the author of sin, since it is he who moved Judas, for example, to betray the Christ—a scene that merits the hapless Jew everlasting perdition. But how can a holy God move people to commit moral evil, and moreover, how can these people then be held morally responsible for acts over which they had no control? The Augustinian-Calvinist view seems, in fact, to turn God into the devil.⁶

He recognizes that there are biblical passages that teach a “staggering assertion of divine sovereignty over the affairs of men.”⁷ He mentions that the crucifixion “happened by God’s plan based on his foreknowledge and foreordination.”⁸ But he re-defines foreknowledge as middle knowledge. He appeals to 1 Corinthians 2:8 and suggests it means that God arranged the circumstances such that free agents would do what they did, but that God did not directly control their actions.

The Reformed Response

As far as I can tell, the issues have not fundamentally changed since the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The neo-evangelicals defending middle knowledge simply do so without much reference to the Reformed orthodox critique. Craig’s summary of the post-Reformation discussion does not engage the Reformed orthodox critique of middle knowledge directly.

Part of the problem concerns the definition of natural knowledge. Craig so limits the definition of natural knowledge as to exclude counterfactuals. The Reformed, however, define natural knowledge so as to eliminate the need for middle knowledge. Further, the Reformed doctrine of concursus, whereby God is said to work through “free creaturely decisions,” essentially contradicts middle knowledge. It is not as if God is active in some events or choices and not in others. Any such view of God’s activity in the world would be virtually Manichaean.

The great and quite influential seventeenth-century Dutch Reformed theologian Gisbertus Voetius spoke of God’s “natural necessary knowledge” (scientia necessaria naturalis) as that

which precedes every act of will in the order of nature, and by which God knows at the first direct and highly necessary act (a) Himself in Himself and through Himself; then (b) all things possible, not in themselves but in His essence as their necessary cause, and (c) scientia libera [free knowledge], by which after the decree of His will He knows determinately all matters existing, in whatsoever difference of time they are, whether present, past or future.⁹

As Louis Berkhof summarized it, divine omniscience is “that perfection of God whereby he, in an entirely unique manner, knows himself and all things possible and actual in one eternal and most simple act.”¹⁰

Voetius said that God “knows all things of Himself, in Himself, through Himself” (Isa 40:13, 14; Rom 11:34).¹¹ God’s knowledge is eternal, unchangeable, without succession. God knows in a “single intuition” (Ps 7:10; 139:2–5; Jer 17:10;  Heb 4:13).¹² His knowledge is necessary even when dealing with “things free, contingent and . . . indeterminate in their nature; so that it cannot be liable to any ignorance, error or doubt.”¹³ His knowledge is not actuated by anything outside himself. His knowledge is exhaustive and eternal. Because he is simple (indivisible), there is no distinction between God’s knowing and his power. He knows while he wills and wills while he knows. His will is co-extensive with his knowledge—that is, he knows all he wills (though he cannot be said to have willed all he knows, since he knows things that might have been and are not, and if they are not, he has not willed them).

According to Reformed theology, anything that makes God contingent upon contingent beings denies divine simplicity, which is the biblical teaching that God simply is (he is not becoming), that he is fully realized (“I am that I am” or “I will be what I will be”), and that he is one. He is indivisible. God has no parts. According to middle knowledge, God is not what he is, but he is becoming.

Voetius argued:

From the points which have been so far upheld against middle knowledge it is clear that the whole difficulty in the present controversy reduces to this one point: Could free conditioned things, from eternity indifferent by nature to futurition or nonfuturition, have passed over into the state of a future event otherwise than by the divine decree? This is the fundamental of fundamentals, on which the whole weight of the case rests. This is that postulate, which both we cannot concede to our adversaries and they cannot prove to us. . . . Middle knowledge is effective and congruous for any end by its nature. Upon it God is forced to wait in the wise framing of His decrees, which are bound to have a fixed result. The truth or falsity of future conditioned free ones is not known from their causes or from the divine decree, but from the actual occurrence of the thing. Before every act of His will God can see certainty in things quite uncertain by their nature. In short, there is an ens independent of the supreme ens.

After quoting Voetius, Heinrich Heppe summarizes: “The main thing is, then, that for God there can be no possibility or object of knowing, which precedes His decrees and is independent of them.”

Voetius’ rejection of middle knowledge was shared universally by the Reformed orthodox. The great biblical scholar and theologian, Johannes Cocceius, concluded that middle knowledge reduces God to an “Homeric Jupiter who consults the fates.”¹⁵ According to Francis Turretin, there is only in God a necessary knowledge, grounded in the divine nature, and a free knowledge whereby God knows what actually exists because of his will (hence “free,” because it is voluntary).¹⁶ To teach that there is a middle knowledge that depends on the liberty of the creature is to support synergism. If God only knows hypotheticals, then our choice becomes essential for salvation. In this case, the biblical teaching concerning the utter graciousness of salvation is undermined.

The problem of middle knowledge was not purely theological or theoretical. The Calvinists met in ecclesiastical assembly to address problems such as middle knowledge (and many others) at the Westminster Assembly in the mid-1640s. As Helm reminds us in his post, they adopted language which addresses the problem of middle knowledge directly:

Although God knows whatsoever may or can come to pass upon all supposed conditions, yet hath He not decreed anything because He foresaw it as future, or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions. (Westminster Confession of Faith, 3.2)

The Westminster Confession of Faith was adopted by the Scottish Presbyterian Church and the American Presbyterian Church, and it continues to be confessed without substantial revision by confessional Presbyterians throughout the English-speaking world. The same doctrine is embraced by all the confessional Reformed churches. Middle knowledge is outside the bounds of confessional orthodoxy. While this fact means little or nothing to evangelicals who do not confess the Reformed faith, it ought to give pause to those who, ostensibly, still confess the Reformed faith. However attractive middle knowledge might seem to the philosophically inclined, the Reformed churches have considered and rejected it and therefore, unless the churches are convinced by biblical exegesis and sound theology to reverse course (and they have not been so convinced for more than three hundred years), then middle knowledge remains beyond the pale of Reformed orthodoxy.

The Nature Of The Non-Confessional Evangelicals

One of the weirder aspects of the affiliation with aspects of Reformed theology by non-confessional evangelicals (and by some who are ostensibly “Reformed”) is the way they move (as it seems to me) like a ping-pong ball theologically. One of the movements I do not fully understand is the embrace by some in this class of the doctrine of middle knowledge. I do not understand the sort of theological instability that leads some, who just a few years ago were staunchly criticizing open theism, to embrace a view that is exegetically weak and theologically unnecessary, and which is only shades different from open theism.

Part of the explanation for this instability is that most evangelicals are not rooted in the Reformed tradition and they are not bound by confessional commitments. They do theology without much ecclesiastical oversight. Their “community” is fellow non-confessional evangelicals (e.g., the Evangelical Theological Society). To borrow a phrase from Van Til, they are like a man of water, in a body of water, climbing a ladder of water.¹⁷ They work in a sea of like-minded non-confessional evangelicals. They have no anchor outside their own non-confessional community.

Reformed theology, piety, and practice, however, is tethered, even anchored to a tradition which does not imagine that we are the first to face most problems. We have a resource that transcends the last thirty years. Our community of fellow readers of Scripture is diachronic as well as synchronic.

Further, we do theology in an ecclesiastical context as well as an academic context. As ecclesiastical theologians, we are committed to reading Scripture not only with the tradition but also with the church—that divinely-instituted organization charged with interpreting, preaching, and ministering God’s Word to his people in formal assembly and instruction. The church has confessed her understanding of God’s Word in ecclesiastically sanctioned, public, and binding documents (that are subject to revision according to the Word). Those documents are the Reformed confessions. Our theology, piety, and practice, is therefore not (or should not be) in a constant state of flux.

One of the great differences between the contemporary theology, piety, and practice of the evangelical church and that of the Reformed is the relative stability of the latter. It is subject to revision by the churches according to the Word, but it does not change willy-nilly from year to year. This is why we do not fit on the typical evangelical “liberal-conservative” paradigm, and the apparent growing fascination among some evangelical theologians with middle knowledge is an excellent illustration of the difference between predestinarian evangelical theology and genuine, confessional, Reformed theology. The former seems to be blown about and the latter might seem stodgy, but the biblical exegesis and systematic theology and ecclesiastical confession of the classic Reformed theology is not philosophical-theological ping-pong.

notes

1. Paul Helm, “Shunning Middle Knowledge,” Helm’s Deep (blog), May 1, 2009.
2. For examples of divine determination of free agents, see R. Scott Clark, “How Did We Come To Faith?”
3. William Lane Craig, “The Middle-Knowledge View,” in Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views, ed. James K. Beilby and Paul R. Eddy (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2001), 125.
4. Craig, “Middle Knowledge,” 120.
5. Craig, 120.
6. Craig, 135.
7. Craig, 134.
8. Craig, 134.
9.  This and other quotations of Voetius come from Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. Ernst Bizer, trans. G. T. Thomson (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007), 72.
10. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1996), 66.
11. Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 72.
12. Heppe, 69.
13. Heppe, 72.
14. Heppe, 80–81.
15. Johannes Cocceius, Summa theologiae, 10 §33. Quoted in W. J. Van Asselt, The Federal Theology of Johannes Cocceius (1603–1669) (Leiden; Boston; Köln: Brill Academic Pub, 2001), 167.
16. Francis Turretin, Institutes, 3.13.1.
17. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1972), 102.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on the Heidelblog in 2009.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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