The Apparent Contradiction
There is a longstanding tension in Christian theology concerning God’s sovereignty and human freedom. Calvinists affirm that God unconditionally elects those whom He will save, that the Holy Spirit effectually calls and regenerates the elect, and that those who come to Christ do so because God has graciously made them spiritually alive.
Yet Scripture also teaches that God commands all people everywhere to repent, that the gospel is genuinely proclaimed to sinners, and that those who reject God remain responsible for their rebellion.
How can these affirmations coexist?
Some suggest that Calvinists cannot consistently maintain both divine sovereignty and genuine human willingness without borrowing from Molinism, a theological framework that attempts to reconcile God’s providential governance with libertarian human freedom.
I think that conclusion overlooks something fundamental about regeneration, the human will, and the nature of sovereign grace. It also risks confusing God’s eternal decree, His sovereign election, and the ordinary means through which He brings His people to salvation.
The question becomes particularly interesting when we consider the biblical invitation to taste and see that the Lord is good, and the relationship between that invitation, the Passover, and the Lord’s Supper.
But first, we need to understand what Molinism actually proposes.
What Is Molinism?
Molinism takes its name from Luis de Molina (1535–1600), a Spanish Jesuit theologian whose Concordia (1588) sought to explain how God’s providential governance could coexist with genuinely free human decisions.
Its distinctive contribution is the doctrine of middle knowledge, or scientia media.
Classical Christianity affirms that God possesses perfect knowledge. Molinism offers a particular account of the logical relationship between God’s knowledge, His creative decree, and the decisions of free creatures.
Molinists commonly distinguish three logical categories of divine knowledge.
Natural knowledge encompasses everything that could possibly happen. God knows every logically possible state of affairs and every possible creaturely action.
Middle knowledge encompasses what any possible free creature would choose under any specified circumstances. God knows, for example, what Peter would freely choose if placed in circumstances different from those he actually experienced.
Free knowledge encompasses everything that will actually happen in the world God chooses to create.
These distinctions concern logical priority rather than chronological sequence. God does not learn, deliberate through successive stages, or acquire information over time.
The critical Molinist claim is that God knows what free creatures would do under various circumstances logically prior to His creative decree. He can therefore choose to actualize a feasible world in which His providential purposes are accomplished through genuinely libertarian creaturely decisions.
Libertarian freedom, in this context, means that a person’s choice is not causally determined by antecedent conditions in a way that precludes alternative possibilities.
Molinism thus offers an account of how God can sovereignly govern history while creatures make decisions that are not deterministically necessitated by His decree.
This is a serious theological proposal, and its proponents seek to preserve both divine sovereignty and human responsibility.
But does Scripture require this particular explanation of human freedom?
More specifically, does salvation require a willingness that exists independently of God’s regenerating grace?
I believe the biblical answer is no.
The Universal Call and Sovereign Election
Scripture begins with a universal human problem.
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23, ESV)
The condition is universal. Every sinner stands in need of God’s mercy.
And God’s command is likewise universal.
“The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.” (Acts 17:30, ESV)
God commands repentance from all people. That command is genuine, and those who reject Him remain accountable for their rebellion.
But a universal command does not logically establish universal election.
God’s command reveals what human beings ought to do. His sovereign election concerns what He has graciously determined to accomplish.
These are distinguishable categories.
Romans 9:15–16 grounds God’s saving mercy in His sovereign freedom. Romans 8:29–30 describes those whom God foreknew and predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son.
If God sovereignly elected no one, the entire fallen human race would remain justly condemned. No sinner possesses an inherent claim upon saving mercy.
The distinction here is between possibility and necessity.
God could justly condemn all sinners. He has graciously purposed to save His elect. His eternal decree establishes the certainty of His redemptive purpose, while His election concerns those whom He has chosen to save in Christ.
That certainty does not eliminate the moral responsibility of those who reject Him.
Nor does it mean that the elect are dragged unwillingly into salvation.
To understand why, we must examine what regeneration actually accomplishes.
Once You Have Tasted and Seen
Psalm 34:8 offers one of Scripture’s most beautiful invitations:
“Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!” (ESV)
Peter later draws upon this language when addressing believers who have tasted the Lord’s goodness (1 Peter 2:3).
There is something profoundly important here for understanding the relationship between sovereign grace and the human will.
Once someone has truly tasted and seen the goodness of the Lord, something fundamental has changed.
Their heart has been transformed. Their affections have been redirected. Their disposition toward God is no longer what it was.
Consider God’s promise through Ezekiel:
“And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you.” (Ezekiel 36:26, ESV)
God continues by promising to place His Spirit within His people and cause them to walk in His statutes (Ezekiel 36:27).
The initiative belongs to God. The transformation is accomplished by His Spirit. The resulting obedience is genuinely expressed through the renewed human person.
This is the essence of regeneration.
Jesus tells Nicodemus that unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God (John 3:3). Paul describes sinners as dead in trespasses before God makes them alive together with Christ (Ephesians 2:1–5).
Regeneration logically precedes saving faith because spiritual life is necessary for the sinner to respond savingly to God.
This logical priority does not require a measurable interval between regeneration and faith. It concerns the order of dependence.
And here is the critical point: The Holy Spirit transforms the disposition of the will itself.
The sinner who previously resisted God now genuinely desires Him. The person who once loved darkness comes to love the light. The regenerate believer willingly embraces Christ because grace has renewed the heart from which that willingness proceeds.
Paul captures the relationship in Philippians 2:13:
“For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” (ESV)
God works within the willing.
The human will remains genuinely active. Its desires have been transformed by divine grace.
The Election of the Willing
This is what I mean by the election of the willing.
The phrase requires careful definition because it could easily be misunderstood.
I am not proposing that God looks into the future, discovers which sinners will independently choose Him, and then elects them on that basis.
That would make God’s election contingent upon foreseen autonomous faith, which is precisely what I reject.
Rather, God sovereignly elects those whom He has foreknown in Christ, and the Holy Spirit regenerates them so that they willingly respond to His gracious calling.
Their willingness is the consequence of grace, not the independent cause of election.
This is consistent with Jesus’ teaching in John 6:37 that those whom the Father gives Him will come to Him, and with John 6:44, where Jesus teaches that no one can come unless the Father draws him.
The certainty of their coming rests in God’s gracious action.
And yet they really come.
They genuinely repent. They genuinely believe. They genuinely love the Savior.
God does not need to preserve an unregenerate disposition for the human response to be authentic.
Indeed, that assumption misunderstands the nature of redemption. Salvation includes the transformation of the sinner.
We do not ordinarily regard a person’s love as artificial simply because that person’s heart has been profoundly changed. Why should the transforming work of the Holy Spirit make genuine love for God less authentic?
The regenerate sinner embraces Christ willingly because the Spirit has made the heart willing.
This is effectual grace.
Taste and See: From Psalm 34 to the Lord’s Table
There is something profoundly fitting about the biblical invitation to taste and see that the Lord is good.
Throughout Scripture, God repeatedly employs the ordinary human experience of eating to communicate extraordinary spiritual realities. But the connection is more substantial than a shared metaphor.
Scripture itself provides the interpretive bridge.
Peter’s Inspired Interpretation of Psalm 34
In 1 Peter 2:2–3, Peter exhorts believers to desire pure spiritual milk so that they may grow in salvation, and then explicitly draws upon Psalm 34:8:
“If indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.” (1 Peter 2:3, ESV)
This is significant.
Peter takes David’s invitation to experience the goodness of the Lord and applies it directly to the continuing spiritual nourishment of believers.
The immediate context also matters. Peter has already described his readers as having been born again through the living and abiding word of God (1 Peter 1:23). He then calls those who have received new life to desire the nourishment necessary for spiritual growth.
The canonical progression is therefore explicit.
God grants new life. Those made alive have tasted His goodness. Having tasted, they are called to desire further spiritual nourishment.
This provides direct apostolic warrant for connecting regeneration, spiritual appetite, and sanctification.
And that connection becomes even richer when considered within the broader biblical theology of covenant meals.
The Passover: Redemption and Covenant Participation
At the first Passover, Israel was commanded to participate in a meal associated with God’s deliverance from judgment and bondage (Exodus 12).
The blood of the lamb marked the households spared from judgment, while the meal became an enduring memorial of God’s redemptive action.
Israel was to remember God’s deliverance through a tangible, embodied act of obedience.
Over time, Jewish Passover observance developed into the traditions associated with the Seder. We should avoid assuming that every feature of the modern Seder was already practiced in precisely the same form during Jesus’ earthly ministry. The biblical connection rests securely upon the Passover itself.
The theological significance is clear: God’s saving provision precedes the covenant meal through which His people remember and participate in the appointed observance of that deliverance.
The meal does not accomplish the original redemption. It commemorates God’s gracious action and reinforces the covenant identity of His people.
Christ, the Bread of Life
Jesus develops the imagery of spiritual nourishment in John 6.
He identifies Himself as the bread of life and declares that those who come to Him will not hunger and those who believe in Him will never thirst (John 6:35).
Notice the parallel.
Coming to Christ and believing in Him are expressed through the language of hunger and thirst being satisfied.
Later in the chapter, Jesus intensifies the imagery by speaking of eating His flesh and drinking His blood (John 6:51–58).
Christians have historically disagreed about the precise sacramental implications of this passage. Its immediate context strongly emphasizes receiving Christ by faith, while its imagery also resonates with the Lord’s Supper.
The essential point remains: spiritual life and nourishment are found in Christ Himself.
And those whom the Father gives to the Son will come to Him (John 6:37).
Once again, sovereign grace and willing participation appear together.
The Lord’s Supper: Communion with the Redeemer
Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper in the context of Passover.
Taking bread and wine, He identified them with His body given and His blood poured out, establishing the new covenant in His blood (Luke 22:19–20).
Paul makes the Passover connection explicit when he identifies Christ as our Passover lamb (1 Corinthians 5:7).
He subsequently describes the cup and bread of the Lord’s Supper in terms of participation in Christ’s blood and body (1 Corinthians 10:16).
The redemptive pattern is unmistakable.
God provides redemption through the Lamb. Those who belong to Him participate in the covenant meal established by Christ.
Within Reformed sacramental theology, the Lord’s Supper is a genuine means of grace through which believers spiritually partake of Christ by faith through the Holy Spirit.
The physical elements do not possess independent regenerating power. The Supper nourishes the spiritual life that sovereign grace has already brought into existence.
And here the connection to Psalm 34 becomes especially meaningful.
David invites God’s people to taste and see the Lord’s goodness. Peter explicitly applies that language to believers who have been born again and now desire spiritual nourishment. Christ identifies Himself as the bread of life, and He establishes a covenant meal through which His people remember His sacrifice and enjoy communion with Him.
The connection between Psalm 34 and spiritual nourishment is explicitly apostolic. The relationship to the Passover and Lord’s Supper is a canonical and typological synthesis grounded in Christ’s fulfillment of the Passover and Paul’s teaching concerning communion.
The theological progression is coherent.
The Spirit regenerates the sinner, awakening an appetite for Christ. The believer tastes the goodness of the Lord through faith, desires continued spiritual nourishment, and participates in the covenant meal Christ instituted for His church.
The same grace that awakens the appetite also provides the nourishment.
Once we have truly tasted and seen the goodness of the Lord, we return to His table because we have come to love the One who first loved us.
Outward Participation and Inward Grace
The Passover-to-Lord’s-Supper connection also illuminates an important distinction between outward covenant participation and inward spiritual transformation.
An Israelite could participate outwardly in the Passover observance without necessarily possessing genuine saving faith.
Likewise, a person can outwardly partake of the Lord’s Supper without spiritually receiving Christ.
Paul warns the Corinthians about partaking of the bread and cup in an unworthy manner (1 Corinthians 11:27–29). His warning would make little sense if participation in the physical elements automatically communicated saving grace.
The outward ordinance is genuinely instituted by God. Its spiritual benefit depends upon the gracious work of the Holy Spirit and its faithful reception.
This distinction matters because it preserves both the significance of the means of grace and the sovereignty of the One who makes those means effectual.
The preached Word, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper are not empty religious performances. God has ordained them for His church. Yet their efficacy cannot be reduced to the mere performance of outward actions.
The Spirit gives life.
The Spirit produces faith.
The Spirit nourishes and sanctifies those whom He has made alive.
The outward means are real, but their saving and sanctifying efficacy rests in God’s gracious operation.
The Gospel as the Normative Means of Grace
This brings us to another important distinction: the necessity of Christ’s redemptive work and the ordinary means through which God brings sinners to conscious faith.
Paul asks:
“And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?” (Romans 10:14, ESV)
He concludes that faith comes from hearing through the word of Christ (Romans 10:17).
The gospel is God’s normative, divinely ordained means of calling sinners to repentance and faith.
This is why evangelism matters. Christ commands His followers to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:18–20). The church has no authority to neglect that commission.
But the gospel is a proclamation of Christ’s saving work and a summons to repentance and faith. It is not a proclamation that God is incapable of sovereignly electing someone who has never heard of Christ.
Jesus tells Nicodemus:
“The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8, ESV)
The Spirit acts sovereignly.
And because the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit possess one undivided divine will, the Spirit’s regenerating work is perfectly consistent with the Father’s election and the Son’s redemptive accomplishment.
The three persons are distinguishable in their personal operations, yet the saving purpose of God is one.
The Westminster Confession of Faith recognizes the distinction between outward gospel proclamation and the Spirit’s sovereign regenerating activity. Chapter 10.3 addresses elect infants dying in infancy and other elect persons incapable of being outwardly called through the ministry of the Word.
That provision does not establish a general doctrine of salvation for unevangelized, morally accountable adults. Their case requires separate biblical examination.
It does, however, demonstrate that the Reformed tradition itself has recognized circumstances in which God’s regenerating work cannot be reduced to the ordinary outward administration of the gospel.
The biblical necessity of Christ remains absolute. The normative character of gospel proclamation is firmly established. Whether Scripture exhaustively restricts every possible operation of sovereign grace to prior conscious exposure to the gospel is a further question.
We should be careful about imposing limitations upon God that Scripture has not clearly established.
The Fruit Reveals the Root
If regeneration transforms the heart and will, we should expect that transformation to become evident in the life of the believer.
Paul identifies the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22–23: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
These qualities are evidence of the Spirit’s sanctifying work.
Regeneration and sanctification are distinguishable. Regeneration grants spiritual life. Sanctification progressively conforms the believer to the image of Christ.
The latter flows from the former.
This is why Romans 8:29 is so important. God’s purpose in election includes conformity to His Son.
The elect are not simply individuals assigned a future destination. They are people whom God has purposed to transform.
Their perseverance and growing spiritual fruit provide evidence of that transformation. Neither is the meritorious ground of salvation, and neither implies sinless perfection in this life.
A profession of faith without corresponding spiritual life warrants examination. James 2:17 warns that faith without works is dead. Jesus teaches that a tree is recognized by its fruit (Matthew 7:16–20).
The fruit reveals the root.
And the root is God’s gracious work of regeneration.
Does Calvinism Need Molinism?
We can now return to the original challenge.
If Calvinists affirm both sovereign election and genuine human willingness, are they implicitly borrowing from Molinism?
I do not see why that conclusion follows.
Molinism attempts to explain divine providence through God’s knowledge of counterfactuals concerning libertarian creaturely decisions.
The Reformed account of regeneration addresses a different, though related, question: how a sinner who is spiritually dead comes genuinely and willingly to embrace Christ.
The answer is that God transforms the sinner’s heart.
The Spirit regenerates. The renewed person willingly believes. The resulting faith is genuinely human and graciously enabled.
No appeal to middle knowledge is required to explain this relationship.
This does not, by itself, refute Molinism as a general theory of providence. A complete critique would need to examine whether counterfactuals of libertarian freedom possess determinate truth values independently of God’s decree, what grounds those truths, and how they relate to divine sovereignty.
Those are serious philosophical questions.
But the claim that Calvinists must secretly depend upon Molinism simply because they affirm genuine human willingness does not follow.
The argument would first need to establish that genuine willingness necessarily requires libertarian freedom.
And that is precisely the premise the Reformed account disputes.
The renewed will is genuinely willing because the Spirit has transformed its desires.
A sinner need not possess an autonomous power to resist effectual grace under identical conditions for his love of Christ to be sincere.
The Reformed account explains the certainty of saving faith through God’s effectual grace and the renewal of human desires. It does not require us to resolve every philosophical dispute about determinism before affirming that the believer genuinely and willingly comes to Christ.
The Question Beneath the Question
There are legitimate difficulties in the relationship between God’s universal call, His sovereign election, the extent of the atonement, and human responsibility.
We should acknowledge them rather than pretend every theological question has been settled.
For example, Christians disagree about whether Christ’s atoning death was intended to secure salvation particularly for the elect or universally for all people in the same redemptive sense. We must distinguish the infinite sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice, its saving intention, and its actual application.
Likewise, God’s command that all repent raises important questions about the relationship between His revealed will and His eternal decree.
These questions deserve careful biblical examination.
But theological difficulty does not itself establish logical contradiction.
The universal command to repent does not entail universal election. The certainty of God’s decree does not entail that the elect respond unwillingly. And the logical priority of regeneration does not make faith artificial.
Once we recognize that saving grace transforms the will itself, the supposed contradiction between sovereign election and genuine human response loses much of its force.
And when we follow the biblical imagery from the invitation to taste and see, through the Passover, to the Lord’s Table, another dimension emerges.
God provides redemption.
God grants spiritual life.
God awakens the appetite for Himself.
And God graciously nourishes those whom He has made alive.
The believer’s response is genuine at every stage. We willingly repent, willingly believe, willingly worship, and willingly come to the Lord’s Table because the Holy Spirit has transformed our hearts.
This brings me back to the invitation of Psalm 34:8.
Taste and see that the Lord is good.
The sinner who has been made spiritually alive sees what was previously obscured, desires what was previously resisted, and willingly embraces the Savior whom grace has revealed as altogether worthy.
God’s sovereign grace accomplishes precisely what fallen humanity cannot accomplish for itself.
It gives life.
And those made alive willingly come.
The question is whether genuine human freedom requires independence from God’s transforming grace, or whether the highest expression of a redeemed human will is precisely its newfound freedom to love the God for whom it was created.
I believe Scripture points us toward the latter.
And that is why I find no necessity for Molinism in explaining the willing response of God’s elect.