Although the paper by Cross and Judisch begins with a critique of my sola/solo distinction and then moves on to the issue of apostolic succession and the nature of the church, it is necessary to deal with the issue of the church first because presuppositions about the church color all of the rest. If one assumes the correctness of the Roman Catholic doctrine of the church, then the differences I allege between sola scriptura and solo scriptura become invisible, but if one does not assume the correctness of the Roman Catholic doctrine of the church, the differences can be discerned. It is necessary, therefore, to begin with a discussion of the claims of the Roman Catholic Church.

According to Molina, then, the basis for God's providence and for his foreknowledge of absolute future contingents is threefold:

(i) his pre-volitional natural knowledge of metaphysically necessary truths,
(ii) his pre-volitional middle knowledge of futuribilia, and
(iii) his post-volitional knowledge of the total causal contribution he himself wills to make to the created world.

By (i) he knows which spatio-temporal arrangements of secondary causes are possible and which contingent effects might possibly emanate from any such arrangement. By (ii) he knows which contingent effects would in fact emanate from any such arrangement. By (iii) he knows which secondary causes he wills to create and precisely how he wills to cooperate with them via his intrinsically neutral cooperating grace and general concurrence. So given God's pre-volitional natural knowledge and middle knowledge, he is able to choose a comprehensive providential plan; and given further his post-volitional knowledge of what his own causal contribution to the created world will be, he has free knowledge of all absolute future contingents.

Molina argues strenuously that this Bañezian doctrine is incompatible with human freedom and falls into the strict determinism advocated by the Lutherans and Calvinists. For even though the Bañezians, like Molina, insist that a free act of will cannot result by natural necessity from antecedently acting causes, they nonetheless assert that an act of will can be free even if God has predetermined to cooperate with it contemporaneously by a concurrence or grace that is intrinsically efficacious (or inefficacious). This Molina denies: 'That agent is called free who, with all the prerequisites for acting having been posited, is able to act and able not to act, or is able to do one thing in such a way that he is also able to do some contrary thing.' And numbered among these prerequisites is God's fixed intention to confer his general concurrence and grace. So if God has decided to confer only intrinsically efficacious (or intrinsically inefficacious) grace or concurrence in a given situation, the created agent's freedom is destroyed.