When we despair of ourselves, we repent of these self-justifying schemes and allow ourselves to be shaped by God, covered in Christ’s righteousness, and reborn with a new heart.
In an exchange with Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1525, the reformer Martin Luther debated the matter of free will with the great Humanist thinker. At the end of his treatise, De Servo Arbitrio [On the Captive Will], he told Erasmus, “You and you alone have seen the question on which everything hinges, and have aimed at the vital spot.” [1] For Luther, how you understand the human will is imperative for understanding how God works through the gospel to bring faith.
What does it mean to have a bound will? To answer this question, we must take a step back. For Luther, humans are creatures of the heart, that means that everyone is captivated by something or another. Whatever we make of the will, it is beholden to the heart. And this captivation is not an easy ride. The human heart is stormy, swaying under the spell of four different emotions:
A human heart is like a ship on a wild sea, driven by the storm winds from the four corners of the world. Here it is stuck with fear and worry about impending disaster; there comes grief and sadness because of present evil. Here breathes a breeze of hope and of anticipated happiness; there blows security and joy in present blessings. These storm winds teach us to speak with earnestness, to open the heart and pour out what lies at the bottom of it. [2]
For the Reformer, we are not natural born Stoics indifferent to our emotional reactions but instead we are creatures under the spell of our passions.
Whatever we think about the will, it is not neutral, like a customer choosing options in a big box store or a diner at a buffet line but instead as indebted to and driven by fear, grief, hope, and joy. But there is good news. The gospel comes to open our hearts, enjoy Christ, and liberate us from our defenses. Luther likened us to beasts of burden ridden by either God or the devil and our hearts as being controlled by the one holding the reins. Throughout the Scriptures we learn that God loves his own. Given that truth, our hearts should be captivated by God, but they become ensnared in idols, projections of our sense of value and worth. For the most part this projection is tied to merit. We use our idols to verify to our weak egos that we matter (see The Denial of Death by Ernst Becker).
All humans are captivated by something or another and look to that power to uphold them and validate the meaning of their lives
Preachers must be vigilant with how they address their hearers. Your hearers, of course, live in a context, whether a city, suburb, or the country, driven by a political stance, and beholden to whatever glitter or entertainment that captures them. To be sure, all humans are captivated by something or another and look to that power to uphold them and validate the meaning of their lives. All humans live from an ideal that gives them meaning. But there is evidence that purely secular approaches to establishing meaning, such as the quest for authenticity, are no longer working. Otherwise, why would so many be anxious and depressed?
In Luther’s day and in some versions of religion, it is impossible to untether “free will” from the attempt to acquire merit. In this perspective, Christ is, at best, an accessory. Speaking some years ago in a local church about the theology of the cross (for which Christ is never an add-on), a man countered me by saying, “You can talk all you wish about a theology of the cross, but I have landed a well-paying job, a great house in the burbs, and a beautiful wife. I just don’t experience a theology of the cross.” I instinctively replied, “take your pulse!”
Bound to Justify Yourself
All people with bound wills will look at Christ as an accessory. In Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, secular people evaluate religion in a twofold way: they see religion, first, as making people ethical and, second, as helping people emotionally. Now, this way of looking at religion reduces it to its utility. It has no sense of honoring God for his own sake and possibly little sense for loving your neighbors for their own sakes. But the gospel as a promise cannot be reduced to its usefulness. It is God’s means to rescue people from sin, death, and the devil. It is not translatable into a program to help us successfully navigate life, let alone accrue merit for eternal life. Of course, if our lives are grounded in the gospel, we can have access to the assurance that they are lived out wholly within God’s embrace. That can afford us a modicum of security in this life. The point is, whenever you preach, you are preaching to an audience of bound wills.
The gospel as a promise cannot be reduced to its usefulness. It is God’s means to rescue people from sin, death, and the devil.
How should that shape your preaching? All those to whom you preach are folks captivated by something or another. That means, everyone to whom you preach lives as if they have a crush on someone or something. (Do you remember the hold that crushes had on you when you were an adolescent?) We are creatures of desire. Augustine was right that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. That which we desire provides us with our sense of meaning, value, and purpose. Paradoxically, there is a sense that our desires choose us rather than we choose them. Not only do they choose us, but they possess us. Some years ago, a class gave me pushback that they were all individuals who “did their own thing.” My response to them was, if that is the case, then why are you all wearing the same designer label jeans? In their imaginations they were striving to be unique individuals and thereby become authentic. But what was really driving them was the unrecognized desire to fit in with their peers.
Luther taught that God’s law, if taken seriously, would prove to us our inability to keep it from the heart and so prevent us from using it to achieve merit. He showed that the law would give us “self-knowledge,” the awareness of our inability to make ourselves to be no longer incurvated, turned-in-on-ourselves, and love God for his own sake. The more the law hammers this truth home, the more likely we would despair of ourselves. Again, paradoxically, such self-despair is a good thing. It shows us that self-justification will never give us the security in our relationship with God that we crave. It shows us the futility of attempting to justify ourselves and so allows us to become open to God’s work on us. That is, God can really begin to work his mercy and goodness in Christ for you when you stop trying to prove your worth. We experience a “new intellect and will” giving us the power to “curb the flesh and to flee the righteousness and wisdom of the world.” [3] Of course, this means that Christian life is a battlefield between old and new.
There are a lot of ways that people use to justify themselves. As seen above, some might use their belief in their financial success at improving their relationship with God. Others might find their ultimate meaning in the politics which they hold dear. Others might find it in their success in whether they are movers and shakers in their place of employment or their families. In all these schemes, Christ is marginalized as an accessory. When we despair of ourselves, we repent of these self-justifying schemes and allow ourselves to be shaped by God, covered in Christ’s righteousness, and reborn with a new heart.
As Luther points out in his Postil for the 3rd Sunday after Easter, many of those to whom you preach wrestle with God in hiddenness. [4] They deal with the deus absconditus, perhaps even stronger, a Christus absconditus. Christ no longer seems present and kind. Instead, he seems to have disappeared. Such an absent Christ leaves us exposed to the law’s accusations of not living up to its goals. Many people suffering from the experience of an absent Christ find themselves caught or trapped in temptation, anxieties, adversities, and many forms of suffering. Christ is present as merciful when he is preached.
Preachers as Fools for Christ
Luther interprets this experience as a way by which God reinforces the reality that an exercise in our free will to secure our worth falters. Certainly, Luther is an advocate of good works. But works are only good when they are done neither from a slave mentality which fears punishment in hell nor from the quest to secure payment or reward in heaven like a hireling. Instead, works are good when we live to supply our neighbor’s needs and not use our neighbor for our own benefit. In faith, God’s love, which is ever gushing, flows through us to accomplish good in our various vocations in the world. When experiencing God in hiddenness, we discover that our works cannot secure Christ’s presence. Only the word can do that. Our wills may be bound to believe that through our choices we can accrue merit. But merit does not cut it with a God who is committed to be merciful. Echoing Paul, Luther believes we encounter our own foolishness in this thought. Yet Christians also embrace the foolishness of trusting in Christ alone: we become fools for Christ.
Again, as preachers your job is to hand over the goods. Give Christ to your people. Luther often preached as if his mouth was Christ’s own. It is an effective tool for delivering the gospel.
Placing Salvation in the Best of Hands
When I preach, some tell me how much they appreciate that I emphasize that God’s grace is “for you.” Too many other preachers present the gospel as if it were a program for either personal or social improvement. Bound wills need to hear that Christ forgives them and plants a whole new heart within them.
Renewed men and women to whom the Spirit has brought faith will work to make the world more just and peaceful.
Preaching to bound wills is less about offering the congregation a program for self-improvement and more about delivering Christ’s benefits, bringing the goods of forgiveness of sin, life, and salvation. Many preachers are rightfully concerned that Christianity can impact social health within the world. The best way to do this is to secure anxious consciences in Christ and bind up those who are deeply wounded. Renewed men and women to whom the Spirit has brought faith will work to make the world more just and peaceful.
A preacher who understands the nature of the will as the crux of theological understanding and especially how it impinges on the preaching task might join in rejoicing with Luther at the end of his treatise on the will, in one of the greatest passages in all his writings:
For my own part, I frankly confess that even if it were possible, I should not wish to have free choice given to me, or to have anything left in my own hands by which I might strive toward salvation. For, on the one hand, I should be unable to stand firm and keep hold of it amid so many adversities and perils and so many assaults of demons, seeing that even one demon is mightier than all people, and no one at all could be saved; and on the other hand, even if there were no perils or adversities or demons, I should nevertheless have to labor under perpetual uncertainty and to fight as one beating the air, since even if I lived and worked to eternity, my conscience would never be assured and certain, how much it ought to do to satisfy God. For whatever work might be accomplished, there would always remain an anxious doubt whether it pleased God or whether he required something more, as the experience of all self-justifiers proves, and as I myself learned to my bitter cost through so many years. But now, since God has taken my salvation out of my hands into his, making it depend on his choice and not mine, and has promised to save me, not by my own work or exertion but by his grace and mercy, I am assured and certain both that he is faith and will not lie to me, and also that he is too great and powerful for any demons or any adversities to be able to break him or snatch him from me. [5]
God’s mercy is nothing that a “free will” would choose. But mercy is what sinners need and what God offers them for Jesus’ sake. To deny “free will” is no downer. Instead, it affirms that everything is in the best of hands in God’s will. “Not my will, but thine be done” (Luke 22:42). So, preachers: Be bold in your calling as one of God’s delivery guys. No other message in today’s world is as important as preaching the gospel as God’s promise to forgive sins for Jesus’ sake.
