Glory Without Apology
Why Molinism Reduces Divine Glory in Order to Save It
“In Him we live and move and have our being.”
There is a dangerous temptation in Christian thought to rescue God from responsibility by diminishing his sovereignty. Molinism is one of the most sophisticated modern attempts to satisfy that impulse.
Seldom would any Protestant feel inclined to explore the writings of a Roman Catholic Jesuit associated with the machinery of the Counter-Reformation. Yet one such figure has enjoyed a surprising resurgence in recent decades.
Luis de Molina (1535–1600) was a Spanish Jesuit theologian whose Concordia attempted to reconcile human freedom with divine, exhaustive foreknowledge. His solution came to be known as “middle knowledge.” Molina’s proposal was controversial, even within Roman Catholicism, provoking decades of bitter dispute with Dominican Thomists. That a system devised by a Jesuit of the Inquisition-era Church should now be championed as the most philosophically defensible Protestant option is one of the stranger turns in modern evangelical theology. Yet, here we are.
Leading the charge in this revival is William Lane Craig (WLC), whose philosophical apologetics have brought Molinism to a new generation of evangelicals as the most compelling way to reconcile human freedom and moral responsibility with divine election, predestination, and reprobation.
Many are drawn to Molinism not because it is the burden of Scripture, nor because it arises organically from the doctrine of God, but because it appears to exonerate God from ultimate responsibility for human fallenness, moral evil, and eternal loss. God, Molinism asserts, does not determine these outcomes. He merely foresees them, permits them, and chooses a world in which free creatures act with maximum possible freedom.
The appeal is obvious. And we should readily admit that the existential problem Molinism addresses is real. The question of God’s relationship to evil, suffering, and eternal loss is not a philosophical triviality. Those attracted to Molinism are often sincere believers seeking to honour both God’s innate goodness and human responsibility. The critique that follows is aimed at the system, not the hearts of its adherents.
But, as is so often the case with theologies constructed to relieve moral pressure, the relief comes at the cost of replacing the God of Scripture with something else entirely.
The Molinist Proposal
In the Molinist account, God’s knowledge of the future is fundamentally reactive. Reactive here does not mean temporally subsequent, but logically dependent: God’s knowledge is conditioned by external truths about what creatures would do, rather than grounded solely in his own will. This is categorically different from the Reformed claim that God knows all things by knowing his own will and decree, since in Molinism the relevant truths are neither decreed by God nor grounded in his nature, but confront him as given counterfactual facts. Logically prior to creation, God surveys a vast range of possible worlds. He knows, by so-called “middle knowledge,” what any free creature would do in any possible set of circumstances. Having observed these counterfactuals, God then selects a world that yields the best outcomes and aligns most closely with his purposes.
God does not decree actions; he foresees them.
God does not determine history; he chooses among histories already structured by creaturely freedom.
God, in Molinism, does not so much decree history as select it.
This formulation is often presented as a safeguard, a way to preserve libertarian freedom while maintaining divine providence. WLC believes this philosophical formulation produces the most defensible theodicy available.
In reality, it does neither.
Why This Does Not Produce Real Freedom
The description of God as a “perfectly informed chooser of a world in which free creatures act as they do” already concedes far too much. If God’s act of creation consists in selecting, from among feasible worlds, one in which he knows with certainty what every creature will do in every circumstance, then the creature’s “freedom” is no longer doing the work Molinism claims for it.
On Molinism’s own terms, all so-called “free” actions are still rigidly fixed prior to creation. Not by divine decree, perhaps, but by the counterfactual structure of reality itself. God does not determine what creatures will do, but neither do creatures determine it in history and personal experience. Their actions are settled in the logical order of God’s middle knowledge before they ever existed.
The oft-repeated claim that God “responds to future free actions without determining them” disintegrates under scrutiny. These are not genuinely open future actions. They are the most predictable actions available, given all possible circumstances and all possible agents, already exhaustively known and selected for. Once God actualises a world in which he knows that this person, placed in specific conditions, will infallibly choose a specific course of action, the outcome is as fixed as if it had been directly decreed.
Freedom here is reduced to counterfactual inevitability, which isn't freedom at all.
The agent could have done otherwise only in a different possible world, a world God chose not to create. In the actual world, the agent cannot do otherwise without falsifying God’s middle knowledge, which is impossible. The freedom preserved is therefore not libertarian freedom in any meaningful sense, but a thin modal abstraction: freedom-in-another-world-that-never-was.
In short, Molinism does not preserve freedom at the point where freedom matters: in the concrete, lived, historical act and experience. It preserves freedom only at the level of unrealised possibilities, while securing certainty at the level of actual history. The cost of exonerating God is the quiet redefinition of human freedom into something indistinguishable, in practice, from a soft determinism dressed in modal language.
God may not determine the choice, but he is the ultimate determiner nonetheless. Molinism has not removed divine determination; it has merely pushed it back one step and given the creature the illusion of choice. God selects the entire story in which that choice is inevitable. He chooses the experience that gives the creature a maximal sense of freedom. But this is not real freedom, because in the historical experience of the agent, there is no genuine alternative. The creature could not have done otherwise in the world God chose to actualise. The “freedom” exists only in worlds that were never created.
What Molinism offers, then, is not libertarian freedom at all but the mere sensation of it. This is the unavoidable conclusion of the system.
The Moral Collapse: Competing Freedoms
The deeper problem with Molinism emerges when it is pressed beyond abstraction and into the moral texture of real history.
Free agents do not act in isolation. One person’s “freedom” regularly annihilates another’s. Violence, coercion, abuse, and manipulation are not peripheral anomalies; they are central moral realities in a fallen world. Any account of freedom that cannot reckon honestly with this collision of agency has already failed.
On the Molinist scheme, God is said to actualise the “best feasible world,” a world balanced on the knife-edge between maximal creaturely freedom and inevitable moral loss. Collisions of agency, violations of autonomy, and real suffering are treated as the unavoidable cost of preserving libertarian freedom. Molinism is quite clear about this.
But clarity is not the same as justification.
Appeals to a “best feasible world” do not resolve the moral problem; they merely rename it. The issue is not whether some creaturely freedom must be compromised in any fallen world; of course, it must. The issue is why this compromise rather than another. Why this loss, this victim, this configuration of suffering rather than a different one?
Here Molinism runs aground. Because it grounds God’s world-selection not in his own righteous purposes but in counterfactual truths about creaturely behaviour, it cannot say why this pattern of suffering was chosen except that it arrived bundled with the right balance of freedoms. That is not a moral answer. It is a procedural one. And a God who selects tragedy on procedural grounds has not been exonerated; he has been stripped of moral agency.
So Molinism must answer a question it is structurally incapable of answering:
On what basis does God prefer the freedom of one agent over the freedom of another?
If God actualises a world in which one person freely commits violence, he simultaneously actualises a world in which another person’s freedom is overridden, violated, or destroyed. God does not merely permit this configuration; he selects it, preferring one arrangement of freedoms over another.
How does God justify that preference? How does he balance the freedom of one agent to act against the freedom of another to remain unharmed? Under Molinist assumptions, something in the system’s structure requires God to favour the perpetrator's autonomy over the victim’s.
At this point, Molinism is driven toward a freedom-optimising calculus. God is imagined as choosing the world in which the greatest number of free agents exercise the greatest number of free choices possible within a limited time-space continuum.
But freedom is not a quantity to be maximised. It is not a moral currency that can be redistributed to justify suffering. Any theology that explains evil by appealing to freedom-optimisation has already surrendered the moral coherence it set out to preserve.
On Molinist assumptions, creation itself begins to look morally suspect. A God who refrains from decree, consults counterfactuals, and then brings into being a world of inevitable suffering because it was the “best available option” starts to resemble a cosmic systems designer rather than the holy Creator. If this is the God Molinism offers, one is left wondering whether such a being (as Molinists describe him) ought to create at all — and that question exposes the system’s deepest failure.
What WLC presents as the most defensible theodicy thus turns out to be one of the most theologically precarious.
This is not a peripheral difficulty for Molinism. It is the inevitable consequence of any system that treats freedom as an ultimate good while insisting that God selects the entire world in which those freedoms collide.
The Hidden Cost: A Lesser God
Why, then, does Molinism remain attractive?
Because it promises to absolve God.
It reassures us that God is not really responsible for the world as it is. That human failure, suffering, and loss are ultimately traceable not to divine purpose, but to autonomous creaturely decisions God merely foresaw.
But this exoneration is achieved only by diminishing God.
The Molinist God is no longer the eternal I AM who grounds all reality in himself. He becomes a responder to possibilities, a processor of counterfactual data, a chooser constrained by facts external to his own being. His knowledge is no longer prescriptive but observational. His will is no longer the ground of history but a reaction to it.
This God appears strangely passive. Strangely dependent. Strangely creaturely.
And, above all, less than maximally glorious.
As we see so often with these less-than-biblical theologies, what people end up with is an entirely different god: one who is passive, who appears desperately creaturely, and who is always less than sovereign and maximally glorious.
Here lies the deepest irony. Molinism’s adherents must make a choice, and it is a choice, that they would rather be tricked into feeling free, and worship a God safely distanced from the harder edges of human evil, than reckon honestly with Scripture’s relentless presentation of divine sovereignty: maximal, unimpeachable, and directly causal.
This is not a neutral philosophical preference. It is a theological trade. And the trade is this: exchange the God who works all things according to the counsel of his will for a God who merely selects among options he did not author. Exchange the Lord who forms light and creates darkness, who makes peace and creates calamity, for a God who only permits what free creatures would have done anyway.
The Molinist may feel more comfortable. But he has purchased that comfort by quietly editing the God of Isaiah, of Romans, of Ephesians, into something more manageable.
The Classical Reformed Honesty
Classical Reformed theology refuses this entire manoeuvre.
It does not pretend that God’s creative and providential freedom leaves creaturely autonomy intact. It has never been argued that God creates a world in which human freedom is maximised, preserved, or protected as an ultimate good.
That notion is a myth. A façade.
Any act of creation is an act of exclusion. To create this world is to exclude innumerable others. To place creatures in bodies, cultures, histories, and fallen conditions is already to delimit freedom. No theological scaffolding escapes this reality, regardless of how one frames their systematic theology.
The difference is not whether freedom is constrained, but whether one admits it honestly.
Reformed theology does not deny the constraint. It denies that freedom is the point.
But this does not mean Reformed theology produces automatons. The creature genuinely wills, genuinely chooses, genuinely acts. What Reformed theology denies is that this willing occurs in a vacuum sealed off from divine purpose. Human agency is real precisely because it is grounded in God’s sovereign ordination, not despite it. The alternative, a freedom that floats free of divine intention, is not biblical freedom but metaphysical fantasy.
In a world where materialists reduce the mind to neurochemistry and secular idealists dissolve the self into social construction, only a theology that begins with God as the ground of all reality can preserve human agency as something real rather than epiphenomenal.
Eternity, Not Calculation
The Reformed doctrine of God begins where Molinism cannot: with divine eternality.
God does not exist in time. He does not stand at the beginning of a long temporal corridor, peering forward to see what free creatures will do. Eternity is not infinite duration but tota simul, the complete, simultaneous, and perfect possession of life.
God does not learn. He does not deliberate. He does not calculate outcomes. He is pure act, not acted upon, not even by disparate data possibilities outside of himself that he must process to achieve a specific end.
His knowledge is not conditioned by history. History is conditioned by him.
The classical and Reformed view of God’s foreknowledge is that it is prescriptive. Firstly, because God stands outside of time. Secondly, because God is pure act and is not acted upon, not even by external possibilities he must survey and respond to.
“I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure.’”
His knowledge does not wait upon history. His counsel does not adjust to creaturely decision. He declares the end from the beginning because he is the ground of both.
And because God is not a solitary monad but eternally Triune, his eternal life is relational. Father, Son, and Spirit dwell in unbroken communion. And at the heart of that communion is covenant.
Covenant, Not Exoneration
Before the foundation of the world, not before time in a temporal sense, but within the eternal life of God himself, the Father and the Son covenanted concerning redemption. The Father appointed the Son as mediator. The Son delighted to undertake the work. The Father promised the Son a people as his inheritance.
Election is not reaction.
Redemption is not adjustment.
The cross is not Plan B.
This covenant belongs to the nunc stans of divine life. And yet it breaks into history. What is eternally purposed is historically accomplished and personally applied.
Here, Reformed theology is unembarrassed. It does not attempt to rescue God from responsibility. It confesses that the sovereign God of infinite perfections orders all things according to his will, not to maximise creaturely autonomy, but to magnify divine glory.
Glory as the True End
This is the final, decisive contrast.
Molinism assumes that God’s moral credibility depends on preserving maximal freedom. Reformed theology insists that God’s glory is the ultimate good, and that the good his glory produces in creation is not diminished by his sovereignty, but grounded in it.
The consistently theistic view of God’s freedom, his creative purpose, and his eternal sovereignty is that God produces a world where maximal glory is his, not where he has attempted to preserve the maximal freedom of creaturely agents. Molinism speaks as though freedom were the point. It is not. Glory is the point. Freedom serves glory, not the reverse.
To whatever degree human freedom contributes to the manifestation of divine glory, God is committed to it. But freedom is never the terminus. It is always instrumental. A creation ordered toward creaturely autonomy as its highest end would not be a theatre of divine glory. It would be a democracy of competitors.
A truly sovereign God of infinite perfections must ultimately be about his glory and the good that his glory produces in his creation.
A God who must justify himself by appeal to creaturely freedom is not sovereign.
A God who reacts to history is not eternal or immutable.
A God who distances himself from responsibility is not glorious.
A God whose supreme motivation is anything other than his own superlative glory is not God at all. He is derivative. He is creaturely. He is an idol dressed in theological language.
The God of Scripture does not apologise for his rule. He reveals it.
“He does all things according to the counsel of His will.”
“For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.”
“To Him be glory forever.”
The Choice Before Us
Molinism offers a god who appears safer, more defensible, more palatable to modern moral intuition. But he is smaller, weaker, and ultimately less worthy of worship.
Classical Christianity offers no such comfort. It gives us a God who is utterly sovereign, eternally faithful, covenantally committed, and maximally glorious, a God who does not need to be exonerated, because his glory is the very source of all that is truly good.
The question, then, is not whether God can be defended.
It is whether we are willing to let God be God.
Soli Deo Gloria.
Appendix: Replies to Three Common Molinist Objections
The preceding argument has focused on the internal logic and moral implications of Molinism rather than on its intentions or motivations. What follows is not an attempt to extend the debate indefinitely, but to address three objections that Molinists consistently raise when the system is pressed at its foundations. These objections are not peripheral. They represent the last and strongest lines of defence available to Molinism. When examined closely, however, each collapses into the same underlying difficulty identified in the main text.
Objection 1:
“God is not morally required to give you the kind of explanation you are demanding.”
This response is frequently offered as a way of deflecting the demand for a morally substantive account of why God created this world rather than another. And taken on its own terms, the statement is true. God is not accountable to creatures, nor obligated to justify his purposes before the bar of human reason.
But this concession is fatal to Molinism.
Molinism exists precisely to provide a morally satisfying explanation for divine permission of evil that does not involve divine determination. It is introduced as a solution to the problem of evil, not as a retreat into mystery. The entire system was constructed to offer what classical theism allegedly could not: a defence of God’s goodness that does not implicate him in the causation of evil. If the Molinist now says that God is not required to offer a morally intelligible account of world-selection, then Molinism has surrendered the very explanatory burden it was designed to carry.
At that point, nothing uniquely Molinist remains.
Classical Reformed theology has always affirmed that God’s ways are righteous even when inscrutable, that his purposes are just even when hidden, and that he owes no justificatory explanation to his creatures. If inscrutability is the final answer, then Molinism offers no advantage over the position it was constructed to replace. Its elaborate machinery of middle knowledge and feasible worlds becomes an unnecessary metaphysical overlay upon a conclusion Reformed theology has never denied.
In short: once this objection is granted, Molinism has surrendered its raison d’être. The system does not fail by being refuted. It fails by becoming superfluous.
Objection 2:
“God chooses the best feasible world, and that choice is morally sufficient.”
This is the most common Molinist reply and the one that initially appears strongest. God, we are told, surveys the range of possible worlds and actualises the best one available to him, given libertarian freedom. That choice, it is argued, is morally praiseworthy even if tragic outcomes result.
The difficulty lies in the phrase best feasible world.
“Best” is not a neutral term. It requires a morally authoritative standard by which worlds are ranked and selected. On Molinist premises, that standard cannot be grounded in God’s own righteous purposes, because the decisive features of the world are not decreed by God but supplied by counterfactual truths about what creatures would do. Nor can it be grounded in outcomes, since outcomes are precisely what God does not determine. What remains is a procedural ranking: this world is chosen because it represents the least bad arrangement compatible with libertarian freedom.
That is not a moral justification. It is an optimisation strategy.
And here lies the critical distinction: a procedural selection among tragic options does not confer moral meaning on the tragedy itself. It explains how a world was chosen, not why this world is righteous to create. The appeal to “best feasible” therefore relocates the moral problem without resolving it. It tells us that God chose efficiently, not that he chose justly.
If God’s goodness is to be morally intelligible, the justification for creation must terminate in God himself — his purposes, his ends, his glory — not in an abstract ranking of creaturely possibilities. The question is not whether God selected competently among options, but whether the selection itself is grounded in something worthy of worship. Molinism, by its own design, refuses to let the explanation end in God. It ends in the counterfactual data.
A god who optimises is not the same as a God who ordains. The former is an administrator. The latter is Lord.
Objection 3:
“You are judging Molinism by Reformed standards of sovereignty.”
This objection claims that the critique presupposes theological determinism or Reformed commitments about decree and causation, and therefore begs the question against Molinism from the outset.
But the argument does not require determinism.
It requires only one minimal theistic principle: that moral authority must ultimately terminate in God himself, not in facts external to him. Any account of creation that grounds God’s decisive act in realities he does not will, determine, or own cannot finally explain why creation is righteous rather than merely permissible.
This is not a Reformed peculiarity. It is a claim about what it means for God to be God.
If God’s creative decision is conditioned by counterfactual truths that do not arise from his nature or purpose, then moral authority has been delegated away from him. God becomes a selector rather than an author, a respondent rather than a sovereign. The critique, therefore, applies not only to Molinism but to any system that relocates the ground of history outside of God himself.
The disagreement, then, is not about Calvinism versus Molinism. It is not a tribal boundary dispute between competing Reformed and Arminian intuitions. It is about whether God’s sovereignty is purposive or procedural — whether he authors the story or merely curates it from materials he did not create.
Scripture, classical theism, and the Reformed tradition answer with one voice: God does not curate. He reigns.
Concluding Note
Each of these objections, when pressed to its foundation, concedes the same point: Molinism cannot ground the moral intelligibility of creation in God himself without ceasing to be Molinism. Either God owns the world he creates by reference to his own righteous purposes, or he selects among worlds whose decisive features originate elsewhere.
There is no third option.
The argument of the main text is simply that Scripture, classical theism, and the Reformed tradition have always chosen the former — and that Molinism, in attempting to avoid it, ends up offering less than it promises.
It promises to preserve freedom. It delivers only the sensation of it. It promises to exonerate God. It delivers only a smaller god. It promises theodicy. It delivers only optimisation.
The God who needs no defence remains. The question is whether we will worship him.
The "procedural ranking" insight is devastating. Molinism really does substitute moral justifaction with an optimisation calculus. Noticed this tension myself when wrestling through theodicy, the moment freedom becomes a maximised quantity rather than instrumental to glory, the entire framework collapses into utilitrianism dressed in Chalcedonian language.