In his “Diatribe” Erasmus dwelt with emphasis and success on the fact that, according to Luther, not merely every good, but also every evil must be referred to God; this was in contradiction with the nature of God and was excluded by His holiness. According to Luther, God inflicted eternal damnation on sinners, whereas they, in so far as they were not free agents, could not be held responsible for their sins; what Luther had advanced demanded that God should act contrary to His eternal Goodness and Mercy; it would also follow that earthly laws and penalties were superfluous, because without free-will no one could be responsible; finally, the doctrine involved the overthrow of the whole moral order.
The scriptural passages bearing on the question, more particularly those appealed to by Luther in his “Assertio,” are examined with philological exactitude and with sobriety.
“Erasmus, in defending free-will,” writes A. Taube, a Protestant theologian, “fights for responsibility, duty, guilt and repentance, ideas which are essential to Christian piety. He vindicates the capacity of the natural man for salvation, without which the identity between the old and the new man cannot be maintained, and without which the new life imparted by God’s grace ceases to be a result of moral effort and becomes rather the last term of a magical process. He combats the fatalism which is incompatible with Christian piety and which Luther contrived to avoid only by his want of logic: he vindicates the moral character of the Christian religion, to which, from the standpoint of Luther’s theology, it was impossible to do justice.”
The work of Erasmus reached Wittenberg in September, 1524. Luther treated it with contempt and ostentatiously repudiated it. He wrote to Spalatin, on November 1, that it disgusted him; he had been able to read only two pages of it; it was tedious to him to reply to so unlearned a book by so learned a man. All the same, he did write a lengthy and detailed answer; that he delayed doing so until late in the following year is to be accounted for by the Peasant-War with its terrors, which entirely engrossed his attention; it was also the year of his marriage. In estimating the value of the reply, upon which he then set to work with great energy, we must bear in mind the state of the author and the inward and outward experiences through which he had just gone. The impression made on his mind by the events of those days has left its stamp in the even more than usually extreme utterances contained in his reply to Erasmus. When once he had begun the work he carried it to its end with a rush; he himself admits that it was composed in excessive haste. We also know to whose influence his final decision to take the work in hand was due, viz. to Catherine Bora. “It was only at her request” that he undertook the work, when she pointed out to him, “that his foes might see in his obstinate silence an admission of defeat.”
Luther’s Book “On the Enslaved Will” against Erasmus
The title “De servo arbitrio,” “On the enslaved will,” was borrowed by Luther from a misunderstood saying of St. Augustine’s. While the book which bears it was still in the press his friend Jonas commenced a German version and entitled it: “Dass der freie Wille nichts sei.”
However grotesque and exaggerated some of the principal theses of the famous work, Luther was at pains to declare therein that they were the result of most careful deliberation and were not written in the heat of controversy. Hence, as a Protestant historian says, “we must not seek to hide or explain them away, as was soon done by Luther’s followers and has been attempted even in our own day.” Another Protestant scholar, in the preface to his study on the work “De servo arbitrio,” remarks that “quite rightly it caused great scandal and wonder,” and goes on to point out that “the hard, offensive theory” which it champions was “no mere result of haste or of annoyance with Erasmus, coupled with the desire clearly to define his own position with regard to the latter,” but really “expresses the matured conviction of the Reformer.”
In this lengthy, badly arranged and rather confused work we see, first, that Luther gives the widest limits to his denial of free-will and declares man to be absolutely devoid of freedom of choice, even in the performance of works not connected with salvation, and moral acts generally. He does, indeed, casually remark that man is free “in inferioribus,” and that the question is whether he also possesses free-will in respect of God (“an erga Deum habeat liberum arbitrium”). “But it is doubtful whether we are to take Luther at his word.” For “as a matter of fact he shows clearly enough that he does not wish this limitation to be taken literally.” “That his intentions are, on the contrary, of the most radical character, is plain from many other passages where he attacks free-will everywhere, and represents all that we do and everything that occurs (‘omnia quæ facimus et omnia quæ fiunt’), as taking place in accordance with inexorable necessity.” He lays it down as a principle that God’s omnipotence excludes all choice on man’s part, and again supports this on an argument from the Divine omniscience; God from all eternity sees all things, even the most insignificant, by virtue of His prescience, hence they must happen. Even where God acts on man apart from the influence of grace (“citra gratiam spiritus”), according to Luther, it is He Who works all in all, as the Apostle says, “even in the impious.” “All that He has made, He moves, impels and urges forward (‘movet, agit, rapit’) with the force of His omnipotence which none can escape or alter; all must yield compliance and obedience according to the nature of the power conferred on them by God.”
In the same way as he here speaks of a certain “power” in the creature, so also, in the same connection, he refers to “our co-operation” in the universal action of God (“et nos ei cooperaremur”). By this, however, he does not mean any real free co-operation but, as he says darkly, only an activity of the will corresponding to its nature and governed by law, “whether in submission to the universal omnipotence of God in matters which do not refer to His Kingdom, or under the special impulse of His Spirit [grace] within His Kingdom.”
Luther’s main object in the book “De servo arbitrio” is undoubtedly the vindication of religious determinism.
His denial of free-will had its root in his mistaken conviction that man was entirely passive in the matter of his salvation and in his attempt to destroy all personal merit, even that won by the help of grace, as at variance with the merit of Jesus Christ. He is fond of dwelling with emphasis on the absence of any co-operation on man’s part in his justification, which is effected by faith alone, and on the so-called “righteousness” which had been effected in man by God alone even previous to man’s choice. Even that free-will for doing what is good, which is given back to the man who is justified, does not strictly co-operate — lest the merit of Christ should suffer.
“This, then, is what we assert: Man neither does nor attempts anything whatever in preparation for his regeneration by justification or for the Kingdom of the Spirit, nor does he afterwards do or attempt anything in order to remain in this Kingdom, but both are the work of the Spirit in us, Who, without any effort on our part, creates us anew and preserves us in this state.... It is He Who preaches through us, Who takes pity upon the needy and comforts the sorrowful. But what part is there here for free-will to play? What is left for it to do? — Nothing, absolutely nothing.”
Here we have a renewal of the attack on his old bugbear, self-righteousness, his dislike of which leads him to universal determinism; from his mechanical doctrine of faith alone it was merely a step to this mechanical view of everything.
We can only marvel at the ease with which, in his zeal for the supposed glory of the Saviour, he closes his eyes to the devastation which such teaching must work in the spiritual domain. He declares that he is not in the least afraid of the consequences. He fancies he has at last placed the whole motive force of human action in its true light and estimated it at its real value. For “it is above all else necessary and wholesome for the Christian to know that God foresees nothing conditionally, but that He knows all things beforehand unconditionally, determines them and carries them out by His unchangeable, eternal and infallible W
ill.” He builds up piety, humility and all consolation on the basis of this abnegation of the will. “Christian faith,” he says, would be “altogether destroyed, God’s promises and the whole gospel would be trodden under foot were we not to believe in God’s indispensable foreknowledge and that all happens through necessity; on the other hand, the greatest and only consolation for Christians in the trials they encounter is to know, that God does not lie but invariably performs all things, that there is no resisting His will and no possibility of change or hindrance.” Herein, according to him, lies “the only possibility of leading man to entire self-abnegation, and to perfect humility towards God.” Therefore “this truth must be proclaimed aloud, everywhere and at all times”; here, as in the service of the Word in general, any prosopolepsia, topolepsia, tropolepsia, or kœnolepsia is pernicious and damnable. The Protestant theologian from whom the last sentences are taken remarks: “We have here a peculiar form of piety, and it may remain an open question whether the same is to be judged pathologically or not.”
Luther seems to ignore — if indeed he ever was acquainted with them — the reliable solutions to the problem of the Divine prescience and omnipotence in relation to human free-will, furnished both by philosophy and by theology from the times of the Fathers. He dismisses with utter contempt the distinctions and definitions of the greatest theologians of earlier ages.
On the other hand, he turns upon Erasmus and the theology of the Church with the formal charge: “You have denied God Himself by taking away faith in Him and fear of Him, you have shaken all God’s promises and menaces.” Without being clearly conscious of the fact, he is actually changing the true idea of God and seeking to set up a Being, who governs with the blind force of fate, in the stead of a God Who rules with wisdom, controlling His own power and restraining Himself with goodness and condescension. Free-will, he says, belongs to God alone, Who alone is able to do what He wills in heaven and on earth.
How the ideas of free-will and of God are treated in Luther’s “De servo arbitrio” is made still more plain from the conclusions which he draws in this work from the denial of free-will, and deals with without the slightest reserve.
The first consequence is the absolute predestination of the reprobate to hell.
Luther here throws to the winds the will of God Almighty for the salvation of all men, and he does so, with regard to those who are delivered over to eternal death, with a precision which is quite shocking. They were incapable of being saved because God did not so will it. Owing to the reprobate, God has “an ‘æternum odium erga homines,’ not merely a hatred of the demerits and works of free-will, but a hatred which existed even before the world was made.” Hence He inflicts eternal punishment upon those who do not deserve it (“immeritos damnat”). And if sinners are thereby confirmed in their sins instead of being converted, this does not matter in the least, for the Spirit of God will nevertheless, in due season, lay hold of the elect and change them into children of God (“electi tamen manebunt”).
The severity of his doctrine does not here differ in any way from Calvin’s cruel views, though, as the fact is less generally known, Luther’s name has not been so closely associated with predestination to hell as Calvin’s. Luther’s doctrine on this matter did not come so much to the front as that of Calvin, because, unlike the latter, he did not make capital out of it by means of popular and practical exhortations, and because the early Lutherans, under the influence of Melanchthon, who became an opponent of the rigid denial of free-will and of Luther’s views on predestination, soon came to soften their master’s hard sayings. Yet there can be no doubt that the book “De servo arbitrio” does contain such teaching quite definitely expressed.
The decree according to which God from all eternity condemns irrevocably to hell a great part of mankind, is, however, according to Luther, His “Secret Will” which we cannot investigate. With this His “Revealed Will” does not coincide. This distinction becomes a pet one of Luther’s, by means of which he fancies he can escape the embarrassment in which the many passages of the Bible concerning God’s desire that all men be saved, involve him. The “voluntas occulta et metuenda” of the “Deus maiestatis” determines man’s fate irrevocably; upon this we must not speculate, for it is beyond human investigation. We must, on the contrary, according to Luther, not go beyond the “voluntas Dei revelata” — which he also speaks of elsewhere as the “voluntas prædicata et oblata,” or “voluntas beneplaciti” — which, it is true, strives after the salvation of all men and the removal of sin. “From this we must conclude that God, as He is preached, is not in every instance the same as He Who actually works, and that in some cases in His revelation He says what is quite untrue.”
Thus the author is no longer content to place another meaning upon the biblical statements concerning God’s will that all men be saved, as he did in the “Assertio,” though even in the “De servo arbitrio” he still “attempts to place a different interpretation upon the passages of Scripture in question and to explain away by a desperate exegesis God’s will for the salvation of the whole human race as expressed in the New Testament.” Hence he takes refuge in the “voluntas revelata,” which differs from the “occulta.” Should the former not agree with the latter and revelation declare that God wills, whereas the “voluntas secreta” really does not so will, then the passages of the revealed word “are a proof that God is raised above our code of morality.” “The ‘voluntas occulta’ becomes entirely arbitrary.” The demand, Luther says, that God should act as we think right is tantamount to calling Him to account for being God. We must believe that He is just and good even when He transgresses the codes of Justinian and Aristotle. Is He, forsooth, only to condemn that man whom we think deserving of condemnation? Shall we look upon it as an absurdity, that He should condemn the man whose lot it is to be declared deserving of damnation? Shall we consider it wrong that He should harden whom He chooses to harden, and have mercy on whom He wills to have mercy? From the standpoint that we must simply accept the “secreta maiestatis” even when apparently most unreasonable, he pours out his scorn on the efforts of the olden theologians to harmonise free-will with eternal election to grace.
His last word is that all we say of God is imperfect, inaccurate and altogether inadequate. As a matter of fact, however, as a Protestant critic already cited says, “By the ‘voluntas occulta’ everything is called in question that Christian theology affirms concerning God on the authority of the gospel. Luther not only saw, but allowed, these consequences, yet as he was perfectly alive to the danger which they constituted, he is careful to warn people against going further into the question of the ‘Deus maiestatis.’ ‘Non est interrogandum, cur ita faciat, sed reverendus Deus, qui talia et possit et velit....’ Luther always held fast to the actuality and rights of the Secret Will. That he never forsook this standpoint even later, when the ‘voluntas beneplaciti’ alone was of interest to him, has been established by recent research. In his practice, however, we find but little trace of what was really an essential part of Luther’s theology.”
The same theologian is of opinion that the inconsistencies in which Luther at last finds himself entangled are the best refutation of his denial of free-will and the powers of the natural man.
A second consequence of his teaching may also be pointed out here. From his theory of the enslaved will Luther was forced to deduce that God is responsible for evil.
“It is indeed an offence to sound common sense and to natural reason to hear that God is pleased to abandon men, to harden and to damn them, as though He — He, the All-Merciful, the All-Perfect — took delight in sin and torment. Who would not be horrified at this?... and yet we cannot get away from this, notwithstanding the many attempts that have been made to save the holiness of God.... Reason must always insist upon the compulsion God imposes on man.”
According to Luther it is quite wrong to wish to judge of God’s secret, inscrutable action. Fly, he repeats again and again, from these stumbling-b
locks to faith. “Quærere non licet.” Adore the hidden ruling. “Adorare decet.”
It is true that the author, here as elsewhere, shows a certain reluctance to credit to God Himself the performance of what is evil; he prefers to speak of God’s action as though it merely supplied man, whose own inclination is towards what is evil, with the power and ability to act. The same theory is to be met with in Calvin. But, the critics in Luther’s own camp objected: “This does not settle the question, Luther must go further.... He admits that, after all, God not only has a part in the origin of sin, since owing to His omnipotence He is the cause of all things (‘causa principalis omnium’), but even made Adam to sin. And yet, precisely on account of the difficulty, faith will not relinquish it.” “Surely a ‘credo,’ not only ‘quamquam,’ but, ‘quia, absurdum.’”
Collected Works of Martin Luther Page 648