The 2nd Edition of Robin Parry’s The Evangelical Universalist includes several new appendices, one of which addresses the issue
of so-called “middle knowledge” as argued by William Lane Craig exhaustively
(but not exclusively) in “No Other Name”: A Middle Knowledge Perspective on theExclusivity of Salvation Through Christ.
At its root, middle knowledge is an attempt to reconcile the
issues of 1)divine omniscience and foreknowledge, 2)the love of God, and
3)human freedom.
None of these, of course, have self-evident meanings. They all require significant clarification
and nuance, a project which Parry seeks to undertake in his book and which
Craig seeks to elucidate in his own work.
I am under no illusion that I could improve upon either project or that
I have anything to add to the logic of Parry’s arguments. My intent here isn’t to pick apart Craig’s
Molinist logic, but simply to acknowledge it’s ramifications. I’d like to take a closer look at two
particular aspects of middle knowledge: 1) Transworld damnation and 2) a
utilitarian eschatological perspective in which the bliss of the blessed is
weighed against the misery of the damned.
**********
First of all, what do I mean by the two particular aspects
of middle knowledge that I identified earlier – transworld damnation and a
utilitarian eschatological ethic?
Craig’s argument for transworld damnation is presented as
point #9 in Parry’s appendix:
God has actualized a
world containing an optimal balance between the saved and the unsaved, and
those who are unsaved suffer from transworld damnation.
What exactly is transworld damnation?
Middle knowledge is closely tied to the idea of ‘possible
worlds’, which is basically a grappling with the implications of both human
freedom and divine providence. To be
frank, I have little sympathy for the hypothesizing that goes into the idea of
“possible worlds’. From a practical standpoint, however, it’s hard
not to grapple with the impact of
time and place upon who we are and who we become. Who has not considered the possibility that
they might be a different person if they had been born to different parents, or
in a different time or place, or if this or that had or had not happened?
Relevant to the matter at hand we might ask “Why did I
accept Christ while another did not?”
Leave aside the evangelical idea of “accepting Jesus” if you find it
distracting or unhelpful (as I do) and substitute something else. You might ask, why did I “join the
church”? Whatever the form of the
question and whatever the associated answer, that answer will be inseparable
from the people and events in our own history.
Who would we be without these particular people and circumstances? We cannot know.
What if things had been different? What if I had been born to a pagan moon
worshipping family 3,000 years ago? And
that boy had been born in my place?
Assuming the possibility of final perdition as Craig does, how might our
eschatological destinies be different?
We cannot know.
Within the theory of middle knowledge and possible worlds,
God knows. That’s not because God
overrides our brains and makes his chosen people think certain thoughts or
perform certain actions that qualify as “saving faith. The omniscient, omnipotent, and
omnibenevolent God calls and woos in a providential way that leads to a free choice. Essentially, God knows what we’ll need to
freely choose to “accept him” and providentially chooses to create the world in
which that happens. Again, I find the
language of “acceptance” and “choosing a world” to be problematic, but set that
aside as best you can.
The big question is, in a best possible world, why would God
provide the things that one person needs to be “saved” but not provide them to
another? Are there some possible worlds
in which I am saved and other possible worlds in which I am not? Did God choose to actualize a possible world
in which I am saved but my daughter is not, but he could have chosen a world in
which we were both “saved”?
Why? How is that the
best possible world, or in the language of the appendix the “optimal” world?
It seems quite cruel.
Cruelty aside, the assumptions of middle knowledge lead to
the following conclusion: if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent
and desires the salvation of every single human being, then God chooses to
actualize the best possible world. So
either (1)the optimal world is one in which some people are saved while others
are not but may have been had things been providentially different, or (2)there
are people who would not “choose to be saved” in any world that God could create.
All possible worlds lead to damnation – transworld damnation.
**********
Related to ‘transworld damnation’ is a utilitarian view of
salvation in which the bliss of the saved is measured against the misery of the
damned.
How so?
Craig asks:
“Is it not at least
possible that such a world is less preferable to God than a world in which
great multitudes come to experience His salvation and a few are damned because
they freely reject Christ?”
In other words, is it not possible that we err in assuming
that the misery of the damned cancels out the joy of the saved either in part
or in full? Perhaps 10 saved and 10 lost
is less acceptable to God than 50 saved and 500 lost. Perhaps the price of the salvation of 1 is
worth the transworld damnation of 100.
Or 1,000. Who are we to
say?! How we could measure such
things?
The thing is, Craig’s hypothetical scenario of “a few” being
damned does not represent his actual position.
He unambiguously states that “if
we take Scripture seriously, we must admit that the vast majority of persons in
the world are condemned and will be lost forever.”
Since the actualized world = the optimal world, he states
that the “cost” of transworld damnation must be worth it. He states:
“It is possible that the terrible price
of filling heaven is also filling hell and that in any other possible world
which was feasible for God the balance between saved and lost was worse. It is
possible that had God actualized a world in which there are less persons in
hell, there would also have been less persons in heaven. It is possible that in
order to achieve this much blessedness, God was forced to accept this much
loss.”
I don’t know whether the above quote represents a
hypothetical possibility or if the
language of “possibility” is designed to obscure what is truly meant to
function as a theodicy of hell. I
believe that his thinking necessitates the latter (though Craig explicitly
states otherwise), but in the end it doesn’t really matter.
Staying within Craig’s framework, I think it safe to say
that the above statement is and must be true of the optimal world. Of the
infinite number of worlds that God could have actualized, the optimal world is
the one in which the vast majority of
persons are condemned and lost forever.
By what sort of measurement is this sort of world the optimal
world? We may not know the math, but
it’s a purely utilitarian formula in which Optimal World = Bliss(Saved) –
Misery (Damned).
Regardless of whether this optimal world is conceived of by
ration or in absolute terms of saved and lost, is God a utilitarian who counts
units of pleasure? Or a mathematician
solving equations? A mad scientist
unconcerned with the leftover remnant of his experiment?
**********
So take those two ideas – transworld damnation and
utilitarian salvation – and just ponder them in the context of the parable ofthe prodigal son in Luke 15:11-32.
Look at Rembrandt’s painting of the scene.
Ask yourself the following questions:
Is transworld
damnation compatible with this scene?
Is the heart of the
father in the parable compatible with a God of transworld damnation?
What qualifiers do you
have to add to the parable make it compatible?
After adding those
qualifiers, what is really left?
The son is always a son.
A lost son perhaps. A dead son
who comes alive. But always a son.
How can God actualize
a world compatible with transworld damnation?
How can God weigh the salvation of the son against the son's damnation in
an "optimal world"?
I don’t dismiss the philosophical questions or frameworks
that define middle knowledge (or any theological perspective for that matter). To be honest, I don’t think we can. Reason is not the enemy of faith.
But if the grammar of Christian faith is to have any
substantive meaning at all, transworld damnation cannot be true.
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