Predestination, Free Will, and Why the Prosperity Gospel Gets Grace Backwards

Few theological controversies ran hotter, or ended more inconclusively, than the De Auxiliis dispute at the turn of the seventeenth century, when Dominican and Jesuit theologians argued before Rome itself over how divine grace and human free will fit together — and Pope after pope, faced with two serious schools of thought each claiming the other implicitly denied either grace’s necessity or the will’s freedom, eventually simply forbade either side from condemning the other and left the question formally open. It remains open today, and any honest treatment of grace has to say so rather than pretend the manuals settled it.

The Thomist or Bañezian position holds that God moves the will to its free choices through what is called physical premotion — a real, efficacious divine causality that doesn’t override freedom but constitutes the very ground of the will’s own free act, since for Aquinas God is the primary cause of all created causality, including free causality, without competing with it as one cause competes with another on the same level. On this view, when grace is efficacious — when it actually produces the good act intended — it is efficacious intrinsically, by the nature of the grace itself, not because the will happens to cooperate with what could equally have gone the other way.

The Molinist position, developed by the Jesuit Luis de Molina, holds instead that God’s grace is sufficient for every good act, and becomes efficacious specifically because God, through what Molina called scientia media or middle knowledge, knows with certainty how any possible free creature would freely respond in any possible circumstance, and providentially arranges to offer grace in just the circumstances in which he knows, without determining, that the human will would freely cooperate. On this view, the difference between sufficient and efficacious grace lies not in the grace itself but in the creature’s free response, foreknown but not caused by God.

Both schools agree on everything that actually matters doctrinally: that grace is genuinely necessary for any salutary act, that free will is genuinely real and not illusory, and that God’s sovereignty and human freedom are not, in the end, in competition. What divides them is a technical question about how, exactly, that compatibility works — a question Rome has judged important enough to take seriously and unresolved enough to leave to legitimate theological schools rather than settle by decree. A Catholic in good standing may hold either position.

What both schools reject just as firmly, and where the real doctrinal line is drawn, is any account of grace as something a soul earns by sufficient faith, sufficient effort, or sufficient positive confession — which is precisely the structure of the “prosperity gospel” teaching that material blessing, health, and wealth follow more or less automatically from strong enough faith or correctly-formulated prayer. Where Bañezians and Molinists disagree about the mechanism of grace, they agree completely that grace is, by definition, gratuitous — a free gift that cannot be purchased by the intensity of one’s belief or the confidence of one’s declarations, and that treats faith itself as a fruit of grace rather than a technique for extracting it. The prosperity gospel’s error is not a variant reading of a genuinely open question the way Thomism and Molinism are variant readings of one; it collapses a mystery the Church has deliberately left unresolved into a transactional mechanism the Church has never left open at all — and in doing so, it reduces grace to exactly the kind of wage-for-merit arrangement that Paul’s entire argument in Romans and Galatians was written to rule out.