Scriptorium Daily
Most people know that I am a Calvinist (see my blog here for explanation). In fact, my good friends who are not Calvinists tease me about it—but I think they just have election envy.
Calvinists use a handy acronym called TULIP to outline the points of our theology. These stand for:
-Total depravity (that everyone, without exception, is sinful).
-Unconditional election (that God sovereignly chooses people not based on any merit of them).
-Limited atonement (that Christ died for the elect).
-Irresistible grace (that if God calls you to Himself, you have no choice but to come).
-Perseverance of the saints (once saved, always saved—you can’t fall away from the faith).
Arminians, however, refute Calvinism. Instead of stressing God’s sovereignty, they stress human responsibility. So some Arminians have come up with a DAISY to counteract the TULIP! This stands for:
-Deliberate sin (it is humans who make the choice to sin, not because we have a sinful nature), e.g. Isaiah 53:6.
-All-encompassing call (salvation is available to everyone who seeks or desires it), e.g. Revelation 22:17.
-Infinite love (God desires for everyone to be saved, not just the “elect”), e.g. 2 Peter 3:9.
-Spontaneous faith (faith comes not from God but from within a person), e.g. Romans 10:10.
-Yieldedness of the Saints (assurance of salvation comes from constantly watching/checking oneself, not from an automatic “pass”), e.g. 2 Peter 1:10.
However, there have been people who have tried to navigate a middle path between Calvinism and Arminianism, between the TULIP and the DAISY, who think that there must be a happy medium between divine sovereignty and human responsibility.
One such way is called Molinism, named for a Renaissance Jesuit theologian, Luis de Molina, from Spain. He advocated something called “middle knowledge” in which he maintained that predestination and free will are not incompatible. Biola professor William Lane Craig is a modern-day proponent of this theology. Basically, “middle knowledge” maintains that though some truths are necessary (such as definitions of things), and other truths are contingent (God is the cause of certain things), there lies a third category in between these which says that some things are true without God being the primary cause of them. This gives validity to human responsibility without taking God entirely out of the picture. It keeps God’s omniscience intact by recognizing that He knows what we will do in any given situation, so all He has to do is create the circumstances in which we will act in the way He wants us to do without forcing our hand.
A new book just came out last month by Kenneth Keathley called Salvation and Sovereignty: A Molinist Approach. Keathley came up with this handy acronym for Molinism called ROSES which stands for:
-Radical depravity
-Overcoming grace
-Sovereign election
-Eternal life
-Singular redemption
Cute. But isn’t Molinism, at the end of the day, just a modified form of Calvinism?
