Bavinck on the Attributes of God Pt. 2: Calling All Molinists!

The intensity of the debates about open theism may have died down, but questions about God's knowledge (especially his knowledge of the world) seem perennial.

Bavinck offers at least two grounds for confessing divine foreknowledge, but he also calls into question the very notion of it as a really distinct category of divine knowledge. First, he believes that all time is present to God, making it straightforward that God would know all things about the future. Second, Bavinck robustly articulates the doctrine of divine aseity (God has life in and of himself, independently of any created entities) and infers from this that, as one aspect of God, God's knowledge doesn't depend upon any happenings in the created order. God has knowledge of these before they come to pass. Yet, as mentioned, Bavinck makes us think twice about the very notion of divine foreknowledge. As with aseity, his confession of divine simplicity (essentially, God is not composed of parts) leads to an inference about God's knowledge, namely, that it is not composed of parts. In other words, we're not permitted to carve up God's knowledge as if it were composed of knowledge of the past, knowledge of the present, and knowledge of the future. Rather, God's singular knowledge includes these as aspects.

Important thoughts, I think, but the title of the post promised something about Molinism, a. k. a. middle knowledge, a perspective on divine foreknowledge traced to Roman Catholic thinker Luis de Molina and advocated today by the likes of William Lane Craig of Talbot. In order to uphold God's sovereignty over the details of his creation and his allowance for libertarian freewill, Molinists assert that God conceived of all possible events, persons, etc. and, knowing just how in all cases one thing would lead to another, chose to create such that he set in motion the course of history so that the best possible world results given the liabilities of libertarian freewill for human beings. (Please check me on this if it is a caricature.)

At the ETS conference last year Craig said middle knowledge is a versatile and useful doctrine, full of potential for answering difficult questions or objections to the Christian faith. In light of this, and in light of the fact that some of my most enjoyable theological conversations have been with a Molinist friend who might respond to this post (!), here goes Bavinck's critique of Molinism in a nutshell:

"God does not derive his knowledge of the free actions of human beings from his own being, his own decrees, but from the will of his creatures. God, accordingly, becomes dependent on the world, derives knowledge from the world that he did not have and could not obtain from himself, and hence, in his knowledge, ceases to be one, simple, and independent - that is, God."

(Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, p. 201)

Is this one a softball for Molinists/middle knowledgers? What do you make of it?

P. S. If you are a Molinist and regard this as a softball, don't let it drive you away from Bavinck on the whole; his Dogmatics is magisterial.