Re-assessing the legacy of Luis de Molina. A brief Commentary on Kirk R. MacGregor's Luis de Molina: the life and theology of the Founder of Middle Knowledge

Macgregor’s monograph on the scholastic theologian Luis de Molina (1535-1600) and his thought offers ample testimony of the revival – especially since the 1980s - of scholarly interest on the Spanish Jesuit as a major ecumenical philosopher of God’s omniscience and the problem of moral freedom. In particular, it offers testimony of the enduring interest of his famous thesis of “middle knowledge”, which allows for God’s foreknowledge of counterfactuals in relation to the free choice of all human beings in the face of their acceptance or the their rejection of faith. Middle knowledge stands logically (not temporally) between God’s “natural” knowledge of necessary truths and his “free” knowledge of actual contingencies in the created world. Hence, logically previous to God creating this particular world, he knew the full range of possibilities involving all human moral choices in all contingencies, in a kind of virtual series of parallel (but feasible) worlds. The Liberi Arbitrii com Gratiae Donis, Divina Praescientia, Providentia, Praedestinatione et Reprobatione Concordia (Lisbon, 1588) represents one of the major efforts in the history of western theology to make God’s omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence, and in particular the doctrine of salvation through efficacious grace, compatible with an idea of human moral freedom that is not illusory (what is conventionally known as libertarian freedom)