Van Til on Middle-Knowledge

I was re-reading one of my top 5 favorite books of all-time, which happens to be (I argue) Van Til’s most important (and less popular) work, when I came across a brief treatment of middle-knowledge. Since the subject of molinism has taken the evangelical world of apologetics by storm, it would be more than appropriate to cite from one of the 20th century’s most biblically-committed Christian philosophers:

“Because God’s knowledge is to be thought of as analytical, we reject what is usually spoken of as the mediate [middle] knowledge of God. It is contended that in the case of certain circumstances, God’s knowledge depends upon certain conditions that are to be fulfilled by man. So, for instance, in I Samuel 23:11, when David inquires of the Lord whether the men of Keilah would deliver him to his enemies if he remained among them, it seems that the Lord’s answer depends upon a condition over which he has no control. Or again, when Jesus said that, if the mighty works that he did elsewhere had been done in Tyre and Sidon, these cities would not have been destroyed, it seems as though there is a condition over which he had no control. Against this notion of mediate knowledge, Hodge rightly contends that there is no other category beside that of the possible and the actual and that God controls them both completely. God’s foreordination controls whatsoever comes to pass. If God had to wait for events to happen independently of himself before he could know them, he would be a finite God. His knowledge would then be inferential.

The same objection also holds against the Arminian notion that God’s knowledge may be separated from his foreordination. This would mean that events take place in this universe independently of the plan of God. God’s knowledge of such events would be inferential, post-eventum knowledge. There is no third alternative. Either one thinks of God as the wholly self-conscious being for whom there are no brute facts, or one makes God dependent upon brute facts. It is on the basis of his own decree with respect to the world that God has full knowledge of the world.

If we keep this biblical notion of the knowledge of God before us, we shall think of human knowledge as analogical of God’s knowledge. And only if we do this, can we have a truly Christian apologetic. Arminianism, with its salvation on the basis of foreseen faith, and Roman Catholicism, with its semi-Pelagian doctrine of human freedom, rest their thinking upon a false notion of divine knowledge. Accordingly, they are not able to offer an effective argument against idealist philosophy when it reduces the personal God to an abstract a priori principle that needs as its complement an equally ultimate a posteriori principle. This has become newly apparent in the writings of C.S. Lewis, C. Bartlett, and John Thomas.”  374-375, Intro to Systematic Theology

And, of course William Lane Craig, Paul Copan, Alvin Plantinga, William Hasker, and my apologetics professor James Beilby…Space does not allow for Van Til’s thorough treatment of a truly Christian epistemology here (I am citing from the end of Van Til’s book), but in a 21st century world fallen prone to the presuppositions of the three 20th century Germans, Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel,  Van Til’s Intro to Systematic Theology should be a first for those wanting a genuine Christian philosophy of knowledge.