Do I choose Jesus or did he choose me?
Before the fifth century dawned, Christians had discussed the freedom of the human will in the context of their long-standing dispute with paganism and gnosticism. Embedded within paganism was the widespread belief in astrology, and astrology taught a doctrine of fate—that individual destiny is controlled by the planets and stars.
Christian thinkers fought against this “astral determinism” by stressing God-given human dignity and freedom. Humans are responsible before God for their own choices and destinies; these are not forced on us by the despotism of fate or the power of the stars.
There was a similar issue with gnosticism. A strong vein of gnostic teaching held that only a special class of humans, the “pneumatics” (spiritual ones), had it within them to be saved. The rest of humanity, and even the pneumatics before their gnostic illumination, were compelled to sin by their fleshly natures, despite their rational wills. Gnostics considered matter the wellspring of all evil; fundamental, therefore, to the gnostic concept of salvation was the emancipation of the will from the tyranny of our material flesh.
To counter this, Christian thinkers affirmed, on the basis of the Son of God’s taking on a human nature, that salvation was available and accessible to all humans, not just to a specially endowed “spiritual” class. They also argued that no human is ever compelled to sin by any force outside the soul; sin is always voluntary, the self-moving action of the will that sins.
In these controversies, the church was defending a vital aspect of any well-founded Christian theology. A cool retrospective, however, enables us to discern that the dispute with astrology and gnosticism did not favor an intellectual milieu in which Christians could clearly discourse about the human will’s slavery to sin. To speak too overtly about the will’s bondage might have seemed dangerously akin to astrological or gnostic determinism.
This does not mean that early Christian theology entirely lacked any perception of “the bondage of the will,” but we find it only in scattered statements, without systematic consistency.
Affirmations of the will’s freedom and servitude sit uncomfortably alongside each other, propounded in mutually incoherent ways. Still, the weight of early patristic thinking certainly fell on the “freedom” side of the equation. There had not yet emerged any theological controversy to concentrate the Christian mind so that it might think out the “bondage” side of the equation with methodical clarity.
When Pelagius arrived on the scene, that controversy became a reality. Pelagius, almost certainly British, possibly a monk, achieved great popularity in Rome in the period 383–409 as a sort of “holiness” teacher. He took the church’s beliefs about human dignity and responsibility, formulating them into a theological system that (despite his denials) evacuated the need for God’s transforming grace in salvation. For Pelagius, human freedom meant that the will is suspended between good and evil, able to choose between them through the will’s God-given autonomy. Pelagius admitted the insidious influence of environment and habit to tempt the will, yet he ultimately held that the will always preserved its capacity for self-caused choice in both good and evil.
Augustine, the great bishop, preacher, and theologian of Hippo Regius in Roman North Africa, had held a similar conception of the will in his early days as a Christian. A more profound study of Holy Scripture, however, and the lessons of spiritual experience had led him to very different views even before the Pelagian controversy arose. Augustine saw that Pelagius’ idea of free will failed to engage seriously with the grim reality of human sinfulness and God’s glorious grace in Jesus Christ. Without Christ’s liberating grace, sinners were the tragic bondslaves of sin and Satan, not the splendid possessors of autonomous freedom that Pelagius made them. While Augustine conserved the earlier patristic belief in the voluntary nature of sin (we sin only because we will to sin), he married this to a far more wide-ranging and perceptive biblical account of the will’s radical fallenness (it is certain, apart from the grace of Christ, that we will always will to sin).
Although Pelagianism was condemned as a heresy at the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431, the church collectively could never quite make up its mind how far to embrace Augustine’s alternative vision. One option, favored in the Greek East, was synergism. That is, granted that the will is sick with sin and cannot heal itself, it can at least cry out to Christ the Physician to heal it. Synergists varied on whether this cry for salvation needed to be enabled by grace or was within the will’s native power. In the Latin West, most preferred some version of Augustine’s view of the sovereignty of grace but again varied on just how to articulate it. Did it require a belief in double predestination (election and reprobation)? Did it entail that Christ had died only for the elect? No monolithic answer was forthcoming. Still, the Western church was, by and large, convinced that Augustine was right in his affirmations about the will’s radical corruption and the absolute necessity of God’s transforming and liberating grace in Christ the Redeemer.
The purpose of the law is not to produce in sinners the delusion that they can obey the law in their own natural strength but to convict them of their inability to do so.
Throughout the next thousand years, in the medieval West, different controversies arose concerning Augustine’s legacy. Some wanted to loosen it in the direction of synergism; some tried to tighten it into a strict system of double predestination and limited atonement; others preferred a “moderate” Augustinianism that would not push out into perceived extremes.
Martin Luther had embraced Augustinian views of sin and grace early in his monastic career through the influence of that great medieval Augustinian, his mentor Johann von Staupitz. Staupitz was in full reaction against the then-prevalent school of thought known as the Via Moderna (the modern way), flowing in large part from the fourteenth-century English scholastic theologian William of Ockham. Ockham had revived a form of Pelagianism in which everything rested on the natural power of the human will. Some faithful Augustinians strove against the Via Moderna; these included the distinguished English Archbishop Thomas Bradwardine and the Oxford Reformer (perhaps Bradwardine’s disciple) John Wycliffe. Staupitz stood in this line of thinkers, and so did Luther. Most of Luther’s negative rhetoric against medieval theology was due to the Pelagian character it had acquired from Ockham.
Desiderius Erasmus, the “Prince of Humanists,” had never been an Augustinian. He had done much to prepare the way for the Reformation by critiquing the practical abuses that disgraced church life and popularizing the study of the Greek New Testament as the true fountain of Christian knowledge. It is debatable, however, to what extent Erasmus had a coherent doctrinal theology, at least beyond the bare essentials. He saw Christianity much more in terms of a moral and spiritual lifestyle. He did not, therefore, take very positively to the Augustinian theology of Luther and his fellow Reformers; he thought they were endangering the cause of practical moral reform by their militant insistence on a full-blooded theology of sin and grace based on Augustine’s anti-Pelagian insights.
As the Reformation made huge progress in Germany and Switzerland and the conflict between the Reformers and Rome became ever more intense, Erasmus became deeply disturbed. He disliked the Augustinian doctrinal fervor of Luther and his co-laborers, but he also deplored the way that those loyal to Rome were condemning the Reformers as damnable heretics. This disunity was the last thing Erasmus wanted. After long hesitation, he decided to do what he could to draw both sides back toward Christian unity. He published three works in 1524: (1) a colloquy or dialogue titled Inquisitio de Fide (An Inquiry into Faith), aimed at persuading Rome to cease from condemning Lutherans as heretics; (2) a treatise on free will, De Libero Arbitrio (On Free Will), aimed at persuading Lutherans to moderate their stance on Augustinian theology; (3) a sermon, De Immensa Misericordia Dei (On the Immense Mercy of God), extolling God’s mercy over all His works.
Much of Erasmus’ De Libero Arbitrio is not actually on free will but is a plea for a sort of principled Christian skepticism about matters beyond those explicitly set forth in the Apostles’ Creed. Concerning the truths of the creed, we can enjoy certainty, but all else required a humble diffidence—including Augustinian views of sin and grace. When Erasmus does deal with free will, his lack of theological rigor makes it unclear what he is trying to say; all that is clear is his distaste for the Augustinian view of the will’s bondage, which he felt acted as a practical disincentive to moral endeavor. Erasmus did, however, attempt a definition of free will as “an ability of the human will whereby a human being can either apply himself to those things which lead to eternal salvation, or turn away from them.” At best, this was a poorly phrased form of synergism; at worst, it was sufficiently vague to allow a Pelagian of the Via Moderna to subscribe to it. Some of Erasmus’ arguments also have a Pelagian ring to them, especially his thesis that if God commands anything, humans must be able to do it. But as Augustinians had always pointed out, God commands all people to love Him with all their hearts—the supreme requirement of His law. Does this mean that we can do it? If so, what need is there of spiritual rebirth, a new heart, the Spirit of Christ as sanctifier?
Luther responded to the De Libero Arbitrio in 1525, with his classic De Servo Arbitrio (On the Enslaved Will). Luther later said that this treatise and his Small Catechism represented the very best of his writing; let everything else perish, but if these survived, the world would know what Luther stood for. From a literary point of view, De Servo Arbitrio was a masterpiece. Even in English translation, we can sense its vibrant emotional energy, its torrential force of argument, and its sheer existential conviction that the issues under discussion cannot be dismissed as trivial or somehow lacking in significance for Christian theology and life. De Servo Arbitrio is theology as passionate manifesto.
Luther responded to Erasmus because (in part) he had grown weary of sparring with Rome’s polemicists over matters he regarded as secondary. Famously, he said to Erasmus in De Servo Arbitrio:
I give you great praise, and proclaim it—you alone, in pre-eminent distinction from all others, have entered upon the thing itself; that is, the grand turning point of the cause; and have not wearied me with those irrelevant points about popery, purgatory, indulgences, and other like baubles, rather than causes, with which all have hitherto tried to hunt me down—though in vain! You, and you alone saw, what was the grand hinge upon which the whole turned, and therefore you attacked the vital part at once; for which, from my heart, I thank you.
For Luther, the questions of the true nature of God’s grace in Jesus Christ and how the gracious God saves sinful humans was central to the Reformation. Erasmus had at least focused on this, giving Luther an opportunity to set out his convictions with clarity and cogency.
The biblical heart of Luther’s argument (the bulk of De Servo Arbitrio) has stood the test of time, retaining an ever-fresh vitality and validity against all forms of Pelagianism and synergism. Luther depicts humanity separated from Christ as helplessly fallen and in servitude to Satan. This, however, does not result in a dualism whereby Satan has an independent kingdom outside God’s control. God is actively all-powerful, ruling all things by His providence. While, therefore, He does not cause evil, He works in and through Satan and evil men, using them as He finds them:
He uses evil instruments, which cannot escape the sway and motion of His Omnipotence. The fault, therefore, is in the instruments, which God allows not to remain action-less, seeing that the evils are done as God Himself moves—just in the same manner as a carpenter would cut badly with a saw-edged or broken-edged axe.
Luther also expounds the role of God’s law in the life of unregenerate humanity. The purpose of the law is not to produce in sinners the delusion that they can obey the law in their own natural strength but to convict them of their inability to do so, owing to their radically fallen nature. This conviction is then instrumental in God’s hand in driving sinners to Christ, to find in Him a life and power they lack in themselves.
If God in Christ is the sole author of salvation, why does He not save everyone? This, Luther argues, is the holy mystery of divine election. We should not presume to understand this but should focus instead on what God has revealed—His promises, the freeness of salvation, the assurance that all who believe will be accepted and protected. To focus on unrevealed mysteries will awaken confusion and despair. But to know from God’s illuminating Word that God in Christ sovereignly saves all who desire salvation is to enjoy peace and assurance. Election is a comfort to the storm-tossed struggling believer:
As to myself, I openly confess, that I should not wish “Free-will” to be granted me, even if it could be so, nor anything else to be left in my own hands, whereby I might endeavor something towards my own salvation. And that, not merely because in so many opposing dangers, and so many assaulting devils, I could not stand and hold it fast (in which state no man could be saved, seeing that one devil is stronger than all men); but because, even though there were no dangers, no conflicts, no devils, I should be compelled to labor under a continual uncertainty, and to beat the air only. . . .
But now, since God has put my salvation out of the way of my will, and has taken it under His own, and has promised to save me, not according to my working or manner of life, but according to His own grace and mercy, I rest fully assured and persuaded that He is faithful, and will not lie, and moreover great and powerful, so that no devils, no adversities can destroy Him, or pluck me out of His hand. “No one (saith He) shall pluck them out of My hand, because My Father which gave them Me is greater than all” (John 10.27–28).
To this one can only utter a joyous amen.
When I first read De Libero Arbitrio, its impact sealed my loyalty to the Reformation understanding of salvation. Luther the biblical expositor and doctrinal theologian meets us here with unparalleled splendor of energy and effect. As long as Pelagianism and synergism exist to tempt the religious mind, Luther’s response to Erasmus will remain a trumpet call to summon God’s people to embrace the biblical and Augustinian view of the bondage of the will and the life-giving grace of God in Jesus Christ, lost humanity’s only Deliverer.
Dr. Nicholas Needham
