This is the first installment in our article series, “An Introduction to the Bondage of the Will,” written to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Bondage of the Will.
When people think of Martin Luther, two events usually stand out in their minds: the nailing of the Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg and his appearance before Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms, in which he refused to recant his beliefs. These two events bound an evangelical narrative stretching between 1517 and 1521. It is the kind of plot I can appreciate as a novelist, with an inciting incident, redemptive character arc, and ultimate climax. In fact, it is such a good story that most people—including many Protestants—never bother to investigate further.
Yet, it was immediately after Luther’s appearance at the Diet of Worms that his story became most interesting. In contemporary terms, you might say the years 1517-1521 are Luther’s equivalent of Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. The hero discovers his purpose, becomes famous, and strikes a tremendous blow against his opponent. The remainder of the 1520s is the equivalent of The Empire Strikes Back: things get darker and the hero suffers setbacks, even as his understanding of his mission deepens. As any Star Wars fan knows, The Empire Strikes Back is peak Star Wars, and the year 1525 was peak Martin Luther. When Luther finished that year with the release of his book The Bondage of the Will, he made his strongest statement in defense of God’s grace in salvation, addressing the issue he believed to be the most important of the Reformation.
Following Luther’s condemnation at the 1521 Diet of Worms, he was sheltered within his native region of Saxony by his governor, Elector Frederick the Wise, who declined to enforce the imperial edict against Luther. The papacy had done its worst already, excommunicating Luther in 1520. There were no more official means to combat the doctrines Luther was promoting, and struggles against the French and the Turks prevented Emperor Charles V from proceeding militarily against Saxony. Some prominent figures loyal to Rome, therefore, devised another strategy: they would induce the most respected scholar of the day, Desiderius Erasmus, to oppose Luther in print.
Erasmus chose to attack Luther over the issue of human free will—not whether you can choose between pancakes and waffles for breakfast, but whether human desire and moral striving play any role in securing eternal salvation.
The story of the printing press is wrapped up with that of the Reformation. Johannes Gutenberg had invented his famed movable type press several decades earlier, but it was only around the time of Luther’s protest that books were becoming more easily available to the average person—or at least, the average merchant or university student. For the first time, it was possible to become a bestselling author, and no one sold more books in the 1520s than Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus. In other words, this feud was the big one: the supreme author smackdown. Imagine if Stephen King and J.K. Rowling wrote books opposing each other, and you will begin to understand the significance of Luther and Erasmus’ clash.
But while I would expect King and Rowling to clash over something political, Erasmus chose to attack Luther over the issue of human free will—not whether you can choose between pancakes and waffles for breakfast, but whether human desire and moral striving play any role in securing eternal salvation. Luther had argued as early as 1518 that this sort of free will exists in name only, for absent the working of the Holy Spirit, the human will is so bound to sin, it cannot perform true works of righteousness or move toward God in obedience. When a person has faith in Jesus Christ, it is only because God has resurrected them spiritually, justifying them based on the righteousness of Christ alone and forgiving all their sins.
The debate between Erasmus and Luther was not a matter of philosophical hair-splitting...It was a fight over the very nature of salvation.
Erasmus had made a career out of translating the works of ancient Greeks and Romans, who extolled the virtues toward which humans must strive. The Greeks placed the highest value on becoming good citizens, for only through the achievement of good civic character could a free society operate properly. This fit well with Erasmus’ understanding of Christian salvation: God extends grace, yes, but a human must cooperate with that grace, renouncing sin and performing the works of righteousness which will ultimately justify them. Not only does this move the person toward salvation, but it makes for an ideal earthly kingdom. Why else, Erasmus wondered, would the Bible be full of admonitions to repent and follow God’s commands?
Therefore, the debate between Erasmus and Luther was not a matter of philosophical hair-splitting, even though their works—The Freedom of the Will and The Bondage of the Will—seem densely academic to us. It was a fight over the very nature of salvation: Should we trust in our own good works, or the works of Christ? Are we justified before God once for all, or through an ongoing process that may or may not turn out the way we hope? Is grace something that comes and goes each time we sin and receive absolution through the sacraments, or is grace the continual favor of God toward those he loved before the foundation of the world?
The question of whether we have free will is always relevant to the present moment, and that was especially true when Erasmus and Luther were writing. In the autumn of 1524, the peasant class in Germany began revolting against abuses they had received at the hands of their feudal overlords. The identity of the rebellion’s participants and the motivations that led them to take up arms are subjects of continued debate among historians. Due to its grassroots nature, this movement was fairly chaotic, popping up in one region and then another, and identifying different complaints as the months passed. One thing is certain: by the spring of 1525, it had taken on a clear religious fervor, with peasants interpreting the reformational call for Christian freedom as a demand for feudalism to end immediately.
This was the immediate context in which Martin Luther wrote The Bondage of the Will. He had seen how one understanding of freedom led thousands of peasants to their death that summer as the German princes crushed the rebellion. Now, he had to convince Erasmus and the reading public that when he spoke of the freedom of the Christian, he was not promoting political anarchy, but a proper understanding of the gospel as taught in Scripture. Would anyone be receptive to the idea that we are not saved by our own good works at a time when people clearly needed an incentive to stop killing each other?
Luther argued that Erasmus’ understanding of free will was actually bondage. It forced humans to live in constant fear of divine judgment, condemned to the Sisyphean task of becoming morally perfect when they had no true ability to do so. It is only in admitting we are bound to sin and need a divine miracle to save us that we can experience true freedom, for the freedom God offers is complete reliance upon grace and trust in the imputed righteousness of Christ, who alone was able to fulfill God’s commands perfectly. The Christian’s freedom is used for the benefit of one’s neighbor, meaning that our righteous deeds are motivated by genuine love rather than fear of hell.
Many Protestants today may be shocked to learn that Luther considered the denial of free will a non-negotiable aspect of Reformation theology.
In short, Erasmus and the Roman magisterium had failed to properly distinguish the law of God from the gospel of God. In The Bondage of the Will, Luther gave them a lesson in how to do so. It was his boldest defense of the sovereignty of God over all things: a work that, years later, he still considered one of the few from his collection worth preserving, precisely because it hit upon the crucial point of his theology. “You and you alone have seen the question on which everything hinges, and have aimed at the vital spot,” [1] Luther told Erasmus, offering what he considered to be a serious compliment.
Neither Luther nor Erasmus seem to have gained many new converts from their efforts. The primary effect of their clash was to help solidify the opposing understandings of grace which would be codified in later Protestant and Catholic confessions of faith. Many Protestants today may be shocked to learn that Luther considered the denial of free will a non-negotiable aspect of Reformation theology, but Luther insisted on this point because his protest was always motivated by the questions, “How can I know that God is gracious toward me? How can I be justified before him?” He believed that if any part of his salvation was left up to him, damnation was certain.
Luther’s nailing of the Ninety-Five Theses, refusal to recant at Worms, and writing of The Bondage of the Will were all motivated by the same desire to cling to the gospel of Jesus Christ as revealed in the Word of God. But it was in his debate with Erasmus that Luther strove the hardest to simply let God be God and let Scripture be Scripture, proclaiming the truth of the will’s bondage though the whole world should deem him a liar. For he firmly believed that it would take such an argument to truly set captives free. Five hundred years later, it still does.
[1] Martin Luther. De Libero Arbitrio in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, ed. E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson, The Library of Christian Classics Ichthus Edition (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969), 333.
