.
Subsection
.
.
Order of Contents
Articles 16+
Quote 1
Knowledge of Future 3
Knowledge of Evil 1
Aquinas vs. Scotus 1
Historical 2
Latin 4
.
Articles
1500’s
Zanchi, Girolamo – ch. 3, ’Of the Foreknowledge & Predestination of God’ in Confession of the Christian Religion… (1586; Cambridge, 1599), pp. 14-18
Beza, Theodore & Anthony Faius – ch. 7, ‘Concerning the Knowlege that is in God’ in Propositions & Principles of Divinity… (Edinburgh: Waldegrave, 1591), pp. 13-14
These were disputations defended by theological students in Geneva were held under the presiding of professors Theodore Beza and Anthony Faius.
Perkins, William – ‘God’s Counsel [Foreknowledge & Will]’ in An Exposition of the Symbol, or Apostles’ Creed… (Cambridge, 1595), pp. 54-59
Perkins (d. 1602) was an influential, puritan, Anglican clergyman and Cambridge theologian.
.
1600’s
Alsted, Johann H. – ch. 24, ‘On the Knowledge of God’ in ‘God’s Intellect, Will, Power & Knowledge’, pp. 9-11 tr. by AI by Nosferatu in Theologia Scholastica Didactica: Exhibens Locos Communes Theologicos Methodo Scholastica, Quatuor in partes tributa Ref (Conrad Eifrid, 1618)
Rutherford, Samuel – Examination of Arminianism tr. by AI by Monergism (1639-1642; Monergism, 2024), ch. 2, ‘On God’ Latin
Title 1, On the Knowledge [Cognitione] of God: 1. Whether or not a living and right knowledge of God is commanded? We affirm against the Remonstrants, pp. 155-57
…
Title 4, On God’s Knowledge [Scientia], pp. 176-79
11. Whether there is a middle knowledge in God. We deny against the Jesuits and Arminians
12. Whether God foreknows future contingencies with certainty. We affirm against the doubting Remonstrants.
Voet, Gisbert
Select Theological Disputations, vol. 1, pt. 1 tr. by AI by Onku (Utrecht: Johannes a Waesberg, 1648) Latin
On God’s Own Knowledge 236
On the Conditioned or Middle Knowledge in God, pt. 1 251
. pt. 2 258
. pt. 3 268
. pt. 4 286
Leigh, Edward – ch. 7, ‘Of God’s Understanding, that He is Omniscient, & of his Will’ in A System or Body of Divinity… (London, A.M., 1654), bk. 2, pp. 160-67
Baxter, Richard – Catholic Theology (London: White, 1675)
4. God’s relations to the creature and denominations (thereupon) in his power, knowledge and will
5. Futurity and its pretended causes
6. God’s knowledge, and the co-existence of the creature
7. School curiosities and uncertainties about God’s knowledge
8. More of God’s foreknowledge and of permission of sin
Le Blanc de Beaulieu, Louis – ‘Divine knowledge: that which is in God and the object of it’ in Theological Theses Published at Various Times in the Academy of Sedan 3rd ed. tr. by AI by Colloquia Scholastica at Discord (1675; London, 1683), pp. 214-19 Latin
Le Blanc (1614-1675) was a French reformed professor of theology at Sedan.
Charnock, Stephen – Discourse 8, ‘On God’s Knowledge’ in Discourses upon the Existence & Attributes of God, vol. 1 (d. 1680; NY: Robert Carter, 1853), vol. 1, pp. 406-98
Owen, John – ch. 5, ‘Of God’s Prescience or Foreknowledge’ in Vindiciae Evangelicae; Or the Mystery of the Gospel Vindicated & Socinianism Examined (1655) in Works, 12.108-40
Turretin, Francis – 12. ‘Do all things fall under the knowledge of God, both singulars and future contingencies? We affirm against Socinus.’ in Institutes of Elenctic Theology, tr. George M. Giger, ed. James Dennison Jr. (1679–1685; P&R, 1992), vol. 1, 3rd Topic, pp. 206-34
van Mastricht, Peter – 13. ‘The Intellect, Knowledge & Wisdom of God’ in Theoretical-Practical Theology ed. Joel Beeke, tr: Todd Rester (RHB, 2018), vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, pt. 1, bk. 2, pp. 251-79
.
1700’s
Abernethy, John – Sermon 9, ‘The True Notion of Divine Omniscience, of its Nature, Manner & Extent’ on Ps. 147:5 in Discourses concerning the Being & Natural Perfections of God 3rd ed. (London: H. Whitridge, 1757), vol. 1, pp. 288-326
Abernethy (1680-1740) was reformed and was an Irish, presbyterian minister.
De Moor, Bernard – Continuous Commentary (d. 1780), ch. 4, ‘On God’
15. God as Intelligent Substance
…
34. Divine Knowledge
35. God’s Knowledge, a Most Pure Act
35. God’s Knowledge Eternal & Self-Sufficient
35. Perfection of God’s Knowledge
35. Perfection of God’s Knowledge Asserted from Hebrews 4:13
35. Perfection of God’s Knowledge Asserted from Romans 11 (by Voetius)
36. God’s Knowledge of All Things
36. God’s Knowledge of Himself
36. God’s Knowledge of All Things Possible, & of All Universals & Particulars
36. God’s Knowledge of Thing Great & Small, Good & Evil
36. God’s Knowledge of the Hidden Things of the Heart
36. God’s Knowledge of Free & Contingent Futures
36. The Socinian Denial of God’s Knowledge of Free & Contingent Futures
36. Remonstrant Hesitation concerning God’s Knowledge of Free and Contingent Futures
36. Answering Objections to God’s Knowledge of Free & Contingent Futures, pt. 1, 2, 3
37. God’s Knowledge of Vision, & of Simple Intelligence
37. Defense of God’s Knowledge of Vision, & of Simple Intelligence
38. Advocates of the Doctrine of Middle Knowledge
38. Verbal Dispute among the Reformed over Middle Knowledge
38. Middle Knowledge: Definitions & Clarification of the Question
38. Refutation of the Doctrine of Middle Knowledge
39. Answering the Molinists, pt. 1, 2
40. God’s Knowledge not properly the Cause of Things
Venema, Herman – ‘On God’s Understanding’ in Translation of Hermann Venema’s inedited Institutes of Theology tr. Alexander W. Brown (d. 1787; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1850), ch. 6, ‘Attributes of God’, pp. 145-55
Venema (1697-1787) was a professor at Franeker. Venema “maintained the fundamental line of confessional orthodoxy without drawing heavily on any of the newer philosophies… and maintained a fairly centrist Reformed position. Venema… evidence[s] the inroads of a rationalistic model…” – Richard Muller
.
1900’s
Wolter, Allan B. – Article 1, ‘On Intellectual Life’ in Little Summary of Metaphysics (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1958), pt. 3, pp. 96-100
Wolter was a Scotus scholar.
.
2000’s
Feser, Edward – ‘Omniscience’ in ch. 6, ‘The Nature of God & of his Relationship to the World’ in Five Proofs of the Existence of God (Ignatius Press, 2017), pp. 208-16
.
Quote
1600’s
John Norton
The Orthodox Evangelist… (London, 1654), ch. 1, Of the Divine Essence, pp. 16-17
“Wisdom is God understanding all things intelligible by his essence, 1 Tim. 1:17; Acts 15:18; 1 Jn. 3:20.
God comprehending his own essence sees all things, because all possibilities, futuritions and beings, that is, all things that might have been, shall be or actually be, are eminently contained in the divine essence. Whence, by the way it may appear that the divine essence as willing the futurition of things, is that increated idea of all things: which God comprehending, understands the creature better in Himself than it is to be understood in itself. God seeing Himself, sees all things, without exemption of any; always, without intermission; perfectly, without defect: at once, without succession. He is all eye, yet without an eye: all memory, yet without a memory.
God understands all things by his essence; angels are thought to understand by an infused habit of the species or images of things concreated with their nature. Men understand by the species or images of things abstracted and received from their objects.
Men understand by way of syllogistical discourse, viz. by reasoning; that is, by deducing and gathering conclusions from principles by several acts of their understanding: and by compounding and dividing: that is, by laying the subject and predicate together, or by taking them asunder: and thereby collecting what may be said, or not said truly concerning such a subject.
Those truths which men, by reason of the weakness of their understanding, apprehend not without discourse and by compounding and dividing (Thomas, pt. 1, quest. 58, art. 3-4; Polanus, Syntagma, bk. 5, ch. 11): Angels by reason of the quickness and strength of their understanding apprehend readily and as it were at first sight. Whence albeit they understand syllogistical discourse, composition and division, yet (at least compared with men) they may be said not to understand by discourse, nor by composition and division, but intuitively and as it were at first sight.”
.
On God’s Knowledge of the Future
See also on ‘Middle Knowledge’.
.
Quote
1600’s
Richard Baxter
Catholic Theology (London: White, 1675), pt. 2, 1st Day’s Conference, about Predestination
p. 6
“I suppose, we are agreed:
1. That God’s will is nothing but his essence denominated with respect to some good as its object.
2. And there was no object really existent from eternity but God Himself.
3. That understanding and will are not univocal terms spoken of God and of man, nor of the same formal conception.
And 4. That our formal conception of understanding and will is only of them as they are in man, and not as in God; and so this to us is the prius significatum [the first signification].
5. And therefore that God does not understand or will in our sense formaliter [formally], but only eminenter [eminently].
6. And lastly, that mortals know not just how God’s eminent intellection and volition differ from the formal in man.
All this you must grant me, or be singular and ignorant.”
.
pp. 8-9
“I will make your cause better than you have made it, but not by making other men’s worse, but by opening the reconciling truth.
I. I shall tell you in what sense God’s will and decrees may and must be said to have an extrinsic cause, without change in God. (Predestinatio nihil ponit in praedestinato inquit [Predestination places nothing in the one who is predestined]; Aquinas, pt. 1, q. 23, art. 2)
1. Know therefore that God’s essence is his will, but not as essence. To say that God is God, and that God wills this or that, are not terms of the same signification.
2. God’s will is his essence denominated from some amiable good as the object; and so there is ever quid respectivum [in that respect] in the notion of will.
3. As God wills Himself, the act being perfectly immanent, his will is called Himself much more properly than his will of things extrinsic (which is ever either effectively, or at least objectively transient), because it is God that wills, and that is willed or loved (which made many ancients say that this was the Third Person in the Trinity).
4. But as God wills things ad extra [to things outside Himself], though it is his essence that so wills them, yet it is unfit to say simply that this will is God; e.g. that to will Peter’s salvation is God, because the name ‘will’ here includes the thing willed.
5. And therefore when we speak of God’s will in the universal notion, as abstracted from all particular objects and acts, it is less inconvenient to say simply that this will is God than when we speak of his will in act ad extra.
By this time you may see that though God’s will, as his essence, has no cause, yet his will as denominated extrinsically from the object may have some kind of cause, that is objective, which is quasi materia actus [the matter of the act, as it were], and the terminus sine quo non [end-without-which-nothing] (Alvarez himself says that by a ’cause’ he means also any objective condition or reason of the act); that is, God’s will is not denominated a complacency in Christ existent or in Peter regenerate, or his understanding a seeing that the world was good before any of these things did exist.
(This is all that Ruiz’s reasons prove, Of the Will of God, disp. 115, sect. 4, p. 102, who says that there is more than extrinsic denomination; et relatio rationis quam realis formalitas [and a relation of reason rather than a real formality]. But he does but show by his quodammodo [in some way], that he knows not what to say.)
So that by extrinsic denomination, without any change in God, He may and should be said de novo [of new] to know things to be existent, to be past, to will things as existent with complacency or will them with displicency: But not to will the futurity of men’s damnation de novo; but yet his will of the futurity of men’s damnation has several degrees of the objective cause, from whence it is denominated:
As in esse cognito [known being], the person who is the object is in order of nature first a man, a subject, and then a sinner, and a despiser of mercy, and then a damnable sinner. And so these are indeed conditions in the object, or causae sine quibus non [causes without which nothing], or objective material-constituent causes, not in themselves, but the foresight of them, not of God’s will as his essence, nor of his will as a will, but of his will as extrinsically denominated: a decree to damn Judas, e.g. because no otherwise is Judas an object capable of giving such an extrinsic denomination to God’s will.”
.
Historical
On Thomism
Quote
Allan B. Wolter, Little Summary of Metaphysics (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1958), p. 98, fn. 28
“A distinction must be made between the doctrine of Thomas himself and that of Thomists [i.e. Banesians], for according to Aquinas God knows the future by reason of his eternity, for by virtue of his eternity God is present to every moment of time, whether that moment is present, past, or future (ST Ia q.14 a.13).
By contrast, Scotus rather than Thomas was of the opinion that God knows creatures that are actual by decrees of his will. The opinion of the Banesians is founded on this opinion of Scotus, to which they add the principle rejected by Scotus that ‘whatever is moved is moved by another’.”
.
On early James Arminius
Richard Muller, “Arminius’s ‘Conference’ with Junius & the Protestant Reception of Molina’s Concordia” in eds. Ballor, Gaetano & Sytsma, Beyond Dordt & De Auxiliis: the Dynamics of Protestant & Catholic Soteriology in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries (Brill, 2019), p. 120
“Despite this disclaimer, Arminius goes on to explain the modus of divine knowing: inasmuch as God knows all things in a manner such that all things are present to Him in eternity, it is clear that God knows ‘future contingencies certainly and infallibly’ in his ‘Now of eternity.’ This ‘Now of eternity’ or Nunc aeternitatis reflects the traditional language, rooted in Augustine’s Confessions, that distinguishes ‘now’ into the nunc stans or ‘standing now’ of the divine existence and the nunc fluens or ‘flowing now’ of all finite, creaturely existence, assuming the ontic participation of the passing nunc fluens in the ontological stability of the eternal nunc stans.
Even so, all finite objects of knowing throughout all time, including all contingencies, are known to God ‘in the infinite Now of eternity embracing all time.’ Reflecting the generally acknowledged Aristotelian assumption that future contingencies, considered simply as future, are unknowable inasmuch as they do not yet exist and as contingent [effects] cannot be known in their causes, Arminius notes that events regarded by human beings as future are in fact eternally present to God and as present are knowable. God can, therefore, know future contingents.”
.
On God’s Knowledge of Evil
Quote
1900’s
Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange
Reality: a Synthesis of Thomistic Thought (St. Louis: Herder, 1950), ch. 9, God’s Knowledge, p. 99 Lagrange was a Neo-Thomist.
“This divine knowlege [of what God decrees] is the cause of things, since it is united to God’s free will, which, among all possible things, chooses one particular thing to exist rather than another. God’s knowledge of possible things, since it presupposes no decree of the divine will, is called simple intelligence. But his knowledge of actual things, since it does presuppose such a decree, is called ‘knowledge of approbation,’ approbation, not of evil, but of all that is real and good in the created universe.
How then does God know evil? He knows it by its opposition to the good wherein alone evil can exist. Hence God knows evil by knowing what He permits, what He does not hinder. No evil, physical or moral, can come to be unless, for a higher good, God permits it to be. Knowing what He permits, God knows by that permission all evil that has been, is, or will ever be.”
.
On the Teaching of Thomas Aquinas vs. John Duns Scotus
Article
1600’s
Macedo, Francisco – Collations of the Teachings of St. Thomas & Scotus, with the Differences between the Two… vol. 1 tr. AI by Vertias (Padua: Frambotti, 1671), bk. 1 A more detailed ToC is given at the beginning of the volume.
Collation 9
2. God’s knowledge of creatures in all its ideal character 488
…
4. Cognition of future things: Whether they are known by God as present in eternity 537
Collation 10
1. Necessity of this existence of things as a means for knowing future contingents 548
2. Root of contingency 569
3. Divine foreknowledge 587
4. Conditional knowledge 594
Collation 11
4. Whether predestination was made after the foreknowledge of merits 747-93
Macedo (1596-1681), known as S. Augustino, was a Portuguese Franciscan theologian. While exercising independent judgment, he tends to lean original-Scotus. He had a very good knowledge of Aquinas’s works (and of Thomists and their works) through his life (vol. 2, p. 424).
.
Historical
On the Middle Ages
Hoenen, M.J.F.M. – Marsilius of Inghen: Divine Knowledge in Late Medieval Thought in Studies in the History of Christian Thought, vol. 50 Buy Ref (Brill, 1992) 287 pp.
Kelley, Carl Franklin – Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge (Yale Univ. Press, 1977) 300 pp. ToC
.
On the Post-Reformation
Muller, Richard – in PRRD, vol. 3
Heppe
1800’s Lutheran Anthology
.
Latin Articles
1500’s
Zanchi, Jerome – ch. 2, ‘Of the Knowledge [Scientia] or Wisdom, and Foreknowledge of God’ ToC in Of the Nature & Attributes of God, bk. 3, ‘The Attributes’ in The Theological Works, vol. 2 (Heidelberg, 1577; n.d.)
Zanchi (1516-1590)
.
1600’s
Voet, Gisbert
Syllabus of Theological Problems (Utrecht, 1643), pt. 1, section 1, tract 2, I. ‘Of God’, 4. Attributes of God in Specific, 2nd Kind Abbr.
(1) Intellect or Knowledge [Scientia] of God
. Appendix: Of Ideas in God
Disputation 14, ‘Of the Knowledge [Scientia] of God’ in Select Theological Disputations (Utrecht: Waesberg, 1648-1669), vol. 1, pp. 246-64
.
1700’s
Holtzfus, Barthold – A Theological Tract on God, Attributes & the Divine Decrees, Three Academic Dissertations (1707) 210 pp.
6. Of the Life, Intellect & Knowledge [Scientia] of God 55
7. Of the Distinctions in Divine Knowledge [Scientiae], in Theory & in Practice, Natural & Free, of the Knowledge of Simple Intelligence & Vision, & so of Conditional, Middle Knowledge & of the Wisdom of God 71-106
Holtzfus (1659-1717) was a reformed professor of philosophy and theology at Frankfurt.
Roy, Albert – Theological Exercitation 23 on the Knowledge [Scientia] of God (Bern, 1717)
Roy (1663-1733) was a reformed, professor of Hebrew, Catechesis and theology at Lausanne, Switzerland.
.
.
.
Related Pages
Of God, his Attributes & Man’s Knowledge of God
Absolute & Relative Attributes
Christ did not Experience the Beatific Vision in his Earthly Life
Against the Ubiquity & Multi-Presence of Christ’s Human Nature
On the Communication of the Properties of Christ’s Human & Divine Natures
Christ’s Mediatorial Operations, Divine & Human, unto the Same Work
On the Person of Christ, his Human & Divine Natures & the Hypostatic Union