“God commanded vows to be kept, but Luther tears them to pieces. Christ commended those who renounced matrimony, but Luther praises those who wantonly violate chastity. Purity is pleasing in the sight of heaven, but to this height Luther cannot raise himself. Luther at one time renounced matrimony by a sacred promise made in the presence of God, but now he plunges into it because he, the monk, has been led astray by his passion for a nun. Whereas our Saviour lived unmarried, he, the unhappy and faithless man, desires to take a wife. Christ gave an example of humility, this man is proud and even rises in impudent rebellion against the authorities. He launches out into torrents of abuse and vituperation (“Maledictorum plaustris iniurius”). He heaps up mountains of insults, he burns the sacred laws and mocks at God and man in the same way as did the old tyrants of Sicily. Christ is the friend of peace, but this fellow calls to arms. He invites the raging mob to wash their hands in the blood of the clergy. He provokes and incites the masses under the screen of a false freedom so that they audaciously refuse to pay tithes, dues and taxes, and ruthlessly conspire against the life of the lords.” In Emser’s opinion it was Luther’s word and writings which caused the conflagration. “He persuaded the people to look on him as a prophet, and to set his foolish fancies on a level with the oracles of heaven. The German people, as though stupefied with drink, rise and follow him in a terrible tumult, turning their blood-stained weapons against themselves.”
The poet then directs the attention of the reader to the crowds of people massacred and the strongholds consumed by fire. “The priest, robbed of his means of livelihood and without a church, wanders to and fro; in the families grief and dissension reign; the nun who has forfeited her honour and her chastity, weeps. This, Luther, is the result of your fine writings. Whoever says that you took them from the Word of Christ and that the clear light of the gospel shines through them, must indeed have been struck with blindness. None is more fickle than Luther; nowhere does he remain true to himself; first he commits his cause to the appointed judge, then he refuses to abide by the decision or to acknowledge any jurisdiction on earth. At one time he recognises all the seven Sacraments, at another only three, and no doubt he will soon admit none at all.”
This man, Emser continues, Cordus presumes to compare with Moses, the sublime, divinely appointed leader of the Israelites! This audacious comparison he is at pains to disprove by setting the qualities of the one side by side with those of the other. He says for instance: Moses sanctified the people, “but your Luther gives the reins to sinful lusts. The people, after casting off all the wholesome restrictions of the ancient laws of morality, are bereft of all discipline, of all fear either of God or the authorities; virtue disappears, law and justice totter.... The heart of the German race has been hardened to stone; sunk in the mire, and given over to their passions, they despise all the gifts they have received of God. The children suck in the errors of their parents with their mothers’ milk and follow their example, learn to blaspheme, are proud and thankless and thus become the ruin of their country. To this has your unhappy Moses brought them.” And now Luther was seeking to make further conquests by means of a flood of popular writings, embellished with pictures, verses and songs so as to penetrate more easily into the minds of the unwary; with this aim in view he did not even spare the Bible, circulating false translations and explaining it by venomous glosses. “How many thousand souls have not his writings already brought to eternal perdition! They fancied that in them they found the truth, and were miserably deceived by such doctrines.” What confusion, he says, will not be occasioned in the future among those who hang upon his words, by his translation of the Bible.
“Go now, Cordus, and compare this man with Moses, the liar with the truth-loving saint, the wild stormer with the meek and patient leader of the people. Luther, desirous of leading us out of the Roman bondage, casts us into an unhappy spiritual bondage; he drags us from light into darkness, from heaven down to hell.”
What is pleasing in the long poem, apart from the smooth Latin verse, is the generous recognition which Emser bestows on the numerous other defenders of the Church, who, like himself, as he says, have withstood Luther vigorously and successfully with their pen. Among these he singles out for special mention Eck, Faber, Cochlæus, Dietenberger and others. His frank admission that much in the Church stood in need of improvement and that a real Catholic reformer would be welcome to all, is also worthy of notice. He shares the desire, which at that time was making itself so strongly felt in Catholic circles, that the Emperor, as the highest temporal authority, should now lend his assistance to the Church and give the impetus necessary towards the accomplishment of the longed-for renewal. “ But though we do not defend the old abuses, yet we condemn Luther’s foolish new doctrines. The rule of the earlier ages of the Church ought to shine in front of us to guide our life as well as to determine dogma. We must cling to the narrow way of the gospel and to the apostolic precepts, the decrees of the Fathers and the written and unwritten tradition as taught by the Holy Ghost who guides the Church. For the success of the reform it is certainly not necessary to overthrow the existing human and divine order of things, or to fill the weary world with noisy strife. The Emperor has it in his hands, let him only follow the example of so many of his predecessors who helped the Church to renew her youth, particularly Charles the Great and his pious son Lewis.”
Luther, meanwhile, was straining every nerve in the cause of the intellectual revolution of which the plan floated in his mind. It seemed as though he were incapable of fatigue.
His numerous labours, his constant cares and the excessive mental strain are apparent from his letters. He writes of a supposed portent in the world of nature. “The omen fills me with fear, it can presage nothing but evil.” “I am altogether immersed in Erasmus,” he says, “I shall take care not to let anything slip, for not a single word of his is true:” he writes thus to Spalatin.[613] “Every day I am overwhelmed with complaints from our parishes,” he laments to the pastor of Zwickau: “Satan is busy in our midst. The people absolutely refuse to pay anything towards the support of the preachers.” He intends, he says, to persuade the Elector to organise a visitation of all the churches throughout the land, he is also anxious to introduce uniformity in matters of ritual; all this involves him in a hundred difficulties.[614] Disagreements with the Zwinglians of Strasburg cause some trouble. At the same time the negotiations with the Teutonic Order call for his whole care and attention, the apostasy and marriage of Albert, the Grand Master, greatly raising his hopes.
It was in this frame of mind, and in the midst of all this manifold business, that Luther threw himself into the controversy on man’s free-will. It was his object to establish a literary foundation for his new doctrines as a whole by vindicating a pet doctrine on account of which he had been so mercilessly attacked.[615]
That the will is free is one of the most indisputable facts of our inner consciousness. Where there is reason there must needs be a corresponding freedom, i.e. freedom from interior necessity.
Freedom is the basis of all worship of God, and if external compulsion is rightly excluded from the idea of religion, surely still more opposed to it is the assumption that the will lacks freedom when it seeks and serves God. The true dignity of the soul’s worship of God consists in the voluntary payment of homage to the highest of all beings in the natural as well as the supernatural order. “God has made you without your co-operation,” says Augustine, “but He will not save you without it.”[616] God’s greatness and omnipotence are enhanced by His creation of beings gifted with the power of self-determination, who can will or not, who are free to choose this or that and are in a position to embrace what is good instead of what is evil.
The consensus of the human race as a whole in the belief in free-will finds its expression in the acknowledgment of the sense of duty. Virtue and vice, command and prohibition are written on every page of history since the world began. If however there is such a thing as a moral order, then free-will must exist. The misuse of the latter is followed, owing to the spontaneous protest on the part of nature, by a feeling of guilt and remorse, whence Augustine, the champion of grace and free-will, could say: “The feeling of remorse is a witness both to the fact that the individual who feels it has acted wrongly and that he might have acted aright.”[617]
The doctrine of the Church before Luther’s time was, that free-will had not been destroyed by original sin, and that, in one who acts aright, it is not interfered with by God’s grace. The fall of our first parents did not obliterate but merely weakened and warped the freedom of moral choice by giving rise to concupiscence and the movements of passion. Among the many proofs of this appealed to in Holy Scripture were the words spoken by God to Cain: “Why art thou angry?... If thou do well, shalt thou not receive? but if ill, shall not sin forthwith be present at the door? but the lust thereof shall be under thee, and thou shalt have dominion over it.”[618] It was well known that Scripture always credited even the fallen will with power over the lower impulses, as well as with the choice between good and evil, life and death, the service of God and the service of idols.
Seeing that Luther, in teaching the contrary, appealed to the power of divine grace which ostensibly does all, obliterating every free deed, it is worth our while to point out the scriptural proofs by which the Church vindicated man’s liberty even under the action of grace.
Ecclesiastical writers, even in the days immediately before Luther’s time, were fond of laying stress on the words of the Apostle of the Gentiles: “We exhort you that you receive not the grace of God in vain”; or, again, on that other passage where he says of himself: “His grace in me was not void, but I laboured more than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God in me.” It was because he was conscious of freedom and of the power of abusing grace that the Apostle exhorted the Philippians as follows: “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”[619] Catholic writers likewise pointed out that the same inspired teaching concerning the liberty of choice in those called to the state of grace was also to be found in the Old Testament: “Choose therefore life that thou mayst love the Lord thy God,” an exhortation prefaced by the most solemn assurance: “I call heaven and earth to witness this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing.”[620]
True Catholic mysticism also laid great stress on free-will, and if some mystical writers, led astray by semi-pantheistic or quietistic ideas, erred from the right path, at any rate their views were never sanctioned by the Church. Some mystics also were not rightly understood and the denial of free-will was attributed to them, whereas all there is to censure in them is their vague mode of expression. This is the case with the “Theologia Deutsch,” which Luther esteemed so highly but did not rightly comprehend. What the Frankfurt knight of the Teutonic Order says in this work, viz.: “When a man is in the state of grace and agreeable to God, he wills and yet it is not he who wills, but God, and there the will is not its own,” may sound equivocal, though it really is perfectly harmless, for the words which follow show that he does not deny man’s will, and that when he says that God Himself wills in man he is merely emphasising the harmony between the human and the Divine will: “And there nothing else is willed but what God wills, for there God wills and not man, the will being united to the Eternal Will.”[621] The will which thus acts in union with the Eternal Will is the free-will of man on earth.
If Luther, instead of endeavouring to find support for his opinions on such misunderstood passages, had examined with an open mind the teaching of the Church as expressed by Augustine, the greatest teacher on grace, he would have found, that Augustine holds fast to the liberty of the will notwithstanding that in his defence of grace he had to lay greater stress on the latter than on free-will. This Doctor of the Church brilliantly refutes the assertion of the Pelagians, that the Catholic doctrine did not allow to free-will its full rights. “We also, teach freedom of choice (‘liberum in hominibus esse arbitrium’),” he says, for instance. “On this point at least there is no difference between us and you. It is not on account of this doctrine that you are Pelagians, but because you exclude from free-will the co-operation of grace in the performance of good works.”[622]
The Catholic doctrine represented all good-doing on man’s part—by which he rendered himself pleasing to God, attained to the state of justification and the right to an eternal reward—as an act organically one, effected equally by God’s Grace and by man’s free co-operation. Even in the preparation for the state of grace both elements were held to be essential, actual grace, and human effort supported and carried on by such grace. Concerning such preparation, theology taught that man thereby made himself in some way worthy of justification and of heaven, that he merited both, though not indeed in the strict sense, rather that, so to speak, he rendered himself deserving of justification as an unmerited reward, bestowed through the bountiful goodness of God (i.e. not “de condigno” but “de congruo”). Further examination of the scholastic teaching on this point would here be out of place, nor can we discuss the principle to which the Church ever adhered so firmly, viz. that God gives His grace to all without exception, because He wills to make all without exception eternally happy, according to the assurance of Holy Scripture: “God wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.” But as regards man’s free-will or want of free-will under the action of grace, which is the background of the present phase of Luther’s history, according to the Church and her Doctors man’s freedom of choice, far from being deranged by the action of God’s grace, is, on the contrary, thereby assisted to arrive at a wholesome and unfettered decision. “Free-will,” says Augustine, in his striking and thoughtful way, “is not destroyed because it is assisted by grace; it is assisted because it has not been destroyed.”[623]
The position which Luther had assumed in the Commentary on Romans in 1515-1516 concerning the doctrine of human free-will has already been discussed in detail (vol. i., p. 202 ff.). It is of the utmost importance to follow up his other statements on free-will dating from that period, and the subsequent advance in his views during his public struggle till the publication of the decisive book “De servo arbitrio” in 1525. It not only affords a deep, psychological and theological insight into his train of thought, but also shows how his denial of free-will was the central point of his whole teaching. At the same time we shall notice certain emphatic statements which he makes, but which do not usually occupy a due place in descriptions of his theology and which accordingly might easily be regarded by our readers as not his at all, were they not attested conscientiously and in detail by Luther’s own writings. We refer to such assertions as the following: “Everything happens of necessity”; “Man, when he does what is evil, is not master of himself”; “Man does evil because God ceases to work in him”; “By virtue of His nature God’s ineluctable concursus determines everything, even the most trivial,” hence “inevitable necessity” compels us in “all that we do and everything that happens,” “God alone moves and impels all that He has made” (“movet agit, rapit”), nay, “He decrees all things in advance by His infallible will,” including the inevitable damnation of those who are damned.—We shall hear these views expounded below by Luther himself as the core and kernel of his teaching (“summa causæ”); with spirit and energy he advocates them through some hundred pages in one of his principal works, against the greatest of the Humanists, who had dared to attack him; to question his fundamental dogma was, says Luther, to “place the knife at his throat.”
What Luther advanced in his Commentary on Romans, against man’s power of choice for what is good, has been summed up as follows by Johann Ficker, the editor of the Commentary: Luther allowed nothing to deter him from following up his new theories, nor did he even shrink from setting up the proposition of “the absolute impossibility of any good in the natural sphere,” or from “stating in the strongest terms of determinism the exclusive power and action of the salutary and unconditional Divine Will.”[624]
In his sermon on the Feast of St. Stephen, in 1515, Luther had spoken of the inward voice in man (“synteresis”), which urges him towards what is good and to true happiness, thereby implying the admission of free-will in man. This, he says, is capable of accepting or refusing God’s grace, though he is careful to add that the remnant of vital force represented by the synteresis does not indicate a condition of health nor afford any cause for boasting in God’s sight, the whole state of man being one of corruption; the synteresis, in fact, constitutes a danger to us because it leads us to trust in our own powers (“voluntas, sapientia”), so that we are readily induced to regard our restoration by grace as unnecessary. Such confidence in his own powers leads man to place himself on the side of those who crucified Christ, for such a one has a wrong opinion of righteousness and looks on Christ as superfluous, who is the source of righteousness. “Thus it comes about,” he cries, “that grace is most strongly opposed by those who boast most of it”; a paradoxical saying which often occurs in Luther’s early sermons and which plainly owes its origin to his quarrel with the “Little Saints.”[625]
Not here alone, but frequently in the sermons of those days, we hear Luther warning the people against misusing the synteresis. His opposition to man’s natural powers leads him at times so far that he represents the synteresis merely as a vague and practically worthless faculty. It is true he declares that he simply wishes to obviate an irreligious over-esteem of free-will, but he really goes further, now admitting, now rejecting it; his explanations let us see that “here there is an unsolved contradiction in his theology. He fails to explain how the remnant of vital force still in us is to be made use of by Divine grace so as to produce health,” and how “it can be of any importance or worth for the attainment of salvation in the domain of reason and will.” “Is there, then, no right use for the synteresis? Luther not only tells us nothing of this, but the natural consequence of much that he says is an answer to the question in the negative, although it should undoubtedly have been answered in the affirmative.”[626]
If we cast a glance at the other sermons which coincide in point of time with his Commentary on Romans, we shall find in certain remarks on the regeneration of man a foretaste of his later teaching regarding free-will. He says, for instance, of the attainment of the state of grace, that here regeneration takes place not only “without our seeking, praying, knocking, simply by the mercy of God,” but also that it resembles natural generation, where the child does nothing (“ipso nihil agente”); no man can be born for heaven by his own operation and merits (“sua opera suoque merito”). He contrasts those who are generated of God “in the spirit” with those who live after the flesh, and who often “make a great show of spirituality”: they are, he says, “carnal-spiritual” and, “with their horrid, hypocritical spirituality, are doomed to destruction.”[627]
According to these sermons it is plain that God is the only worker in the man who is thus born of God. In him free-will for doing what is good does not come into account, for the good works of the righteous man are God’s works, and his virtues and excellence are really God’s. “He works all in all, all is His, He, the One Almighty Being, does all things,” so we read in Luther’s sermon on August 15, 1516, the Feast of the Assumption, i.e. at a time when by his study of the Epistle to the Romans he had been confirmed in his bias against man’s natural powers.[628]
The Wittenberg Disputation in 1516, “On man’s powers and will without grace,” immediately followed his lectures on the Epistle to the Romans; here we find it stated in plain words, that “man’s will without grace is not free, but captive, though not unwillingly.”[629] To complete what has already been said (vol. i., p. 310 ff.) we may add that the proof of this is sought in that the will sins in everything, and that, according to Scripture, “Whoever sins is the slave of sin.” We learn also from the Bible, we read, that we are then truly free when the Son (of God) makes us free. The natural man without grace is an evil tree, as such he can only desire and do what is evil. This degradation of the human will was intended to form the basis for a new appreciation of the grace and merits of Christ.
It is probable that the three fragments, “On the unfreedom of the human will,” etc., which are in agreement with this last Disputation, date from the late autumn of 1516. Here “the captivity and slavery of the will” (“voluntas necessario serva et captiva”) with regard to the doing of what is good, i.e. “to merit and demerit,” is again emphasised. Freedom in respect of “those other, lower matters which come under the dominion of the will” is indeed conceded.[630] But as the modern Protestant editor of the texts in question remarks, “even this freedom is merely apparent,”[631] for Luther says briefly but meaningly: “I do not deny that the will is free, or rather seems to itself to be free (‘imo videatur sibi libera’)[632] by the freedom of contrariety and of contradiction with regard to its lower objects.” Here we already have a clear indication of the determinism which Luther was to advocate at a later date, according to which God’s Omnipotence works all things in man, even indifferent matters.[633] In these fragments it is, however, chiefly a question of moral actions. Where it is a question of acts having some moral value Luther’s answer is already quite definite: “The will when confronted with temptation cannot without grace avoid falling; by its own powers it is able to will only what is evil.”[634]
A year later the “Disputation against the theology of the Schoolmen” of September 4, 1517, which has been already described generally (vol. i., p. 312), laid the axe at the root of free-will in respect of what is good; its tenor is even more decided, and it greatly exaggerates the corruption of man by original sin: “It is false that the will is free to choose between a thing and its contrary [in the moral order]; without grace the human will must of necessity do what is opposed to the will of God.” Hence nature “must be put to death absolutely.”[635]
Concerning the Heidelberg Disputation in April, 1518, we need only recall the fact, that Luther caused the thesis to be defended, that, after the Fall, free-will is but a name, and that when man does the best he can, he simply commits a mortal sin. The doctrine of the sinfulness of the works performed by the natural man, which he had held even previously, he now supplements by an addition, in the nature of a challenge: “Liberum arbitrium post peccatum res est de solo titulo.”[636]
In the Disputation with Eck at Leipzig in the following year, owing to his views on the subject not yet being generally known, they were not directly discussed.
When, however, after its termination, Luther, in August, 1519, published the Latin “Resolutions” on the Leipzig Disputation, he proclaimed himself to the world as a most determined opponent of free-will, not even confining himself to attacking the power for doing what is good.
“Free-will,” he says here, “is purely passive in every one of its acts (‘in omni actu suo’) which can come under the term of will.... A good act comes wholly and entirely (‘totus et totaliter’) from God, because the whole activity of the will consists in the Divine action which extends to the members and powers of both body and soul, no other activity existing.”[637] In another passage of the “Resolutions” he says: “At whatever hour of our life we may find ourselves we are the slaves either of concupiscence or of charity, for both govern free-will (‘utraque enim dominabitur libero arbitrio’).”[638] Julius Köstlin is right when he sees in such words the complete renunciation of free-will. “Of man’s free-will in the ordinary sense of the term, or of any independent choice for good or for evil which should include the possibility of a different decision, there is, according to Luther, no question.” Köstlin points out that Luther does not here go into the question as to whether the sinfulness and corruption of the lost are to be attributed to God, Who did not cause His saving grace to be sufficiently efficacious in them.[639] Luther certainly contrived to avoid this dangerous objection, not only here, but also for long after when speaking on the subject of the will.
In the “Resolutions” Luther had merely represented his opposition to free-will as the consequence of his doctrine of the corruption of human nature due to original sin, but subsequent to the appearance of the Bull of Excommunication he goes further and declares the denial of the “liberum arbitrium” to be nothing less than the fundamental article of his teaching (“articulus omnium optimus et rerum nostrarum summa”).[640] Among the propositions condemned by the Papal Bull was Luther’s thesis directed against free-will at the Heidelberg Disputation. It was given in Luther’s own words, viz. that free-will is a mere empty name, etc.
In defence of the condemned propositions Luther wrote, in 1520, the “Assertio omnium articulorum,” which was published in 1521. To prove his denial of free-will it is usual to quote his “De servo arbitrio,” but the “Assertio” already contains in substance all the strictures embodied in his later attacks.
After dealing with other subjects, he there declares that, as for the question of free-will, he had expressed himself far too feebly when speaking of the semblance of freedom; the term “liberum arbitrium” was a device of the devil; hence he withdraws his previous statement which erred on the side of weakness; he ought to have said that free-will was a lie, an invention (“figmentum in rebus”). “No one has the power even to think anything evil or good, but everything takes place agreeably with stern necessity (‘omnia de necessitate absolute eveniunt’), as Wiclif rightly taught, though his proposition was condemned by the Council of Constance.”[641]
Luther now appeals to the belief in fate with which the heathen were already acquainted. He also appeals to the Gospel which surely gives him reason, for does not Christ say (Matt. x.): “Not a sparrow shall fall to the ground without your Father in Heaven,” and “the very hairs of your head are all numbered”? And in Isaias xli. does not God mockingly challenge the people: “Do ye also good and evil if you can”? The Pope and the defenders of the Bull, with their doctrine of free-will, he looks upon as prophets of Baal and he calls to them ironically: “Cheer up and be men; do what you can, attempt what is possible, and prepare yourselves for grace by your own free-will. It is a great disgrace that you are unable to produce anything from experience in support of your teaching.”
“The experience of all,” he says boldly, “testifies to the contrary”; God has our life in His hands, and how much more all our actions, even the most insignificant. It is Pelagian to say that free-will is able, by means of earnest effort (“si studiose laboret”), to do anything good; it is Pelagian to think that the will can prepare itself for grace; Pelagian too, is the principle handed down in the schools, that God gives His grace to the man who does what he can. For if we do what we can, we perform the works of the flesh! “Do we not know the works which are of the flesh? St. Paul specifies them, Galatians v.: Fornication, uncleanness, immodesty, luxury, envies, murders, etc. This is what free-will works, i.e. what is of its nature, viz. works of death; for in Romans viii. we read: ‘The wisdom of the flesh is death and an enemy to God.’ How can we then speak of preparation for grace by enmity with God, of preparation for life by death?”[642]
In these somewhat disorderly effusions of his pen he repeatedly harks back to the Bible, strangely forcing his texts. Paul denies free-will, saying in Ephesians i.: “God works all in all,” thus confirming the fact “that man, even when he does and thinks what is wrong, is not responsible.”[643] “God even works what is evil in the impious,”[644] as is written in Proverbs xvi.: “The Lord hath made all things for Himself, the wicked also for the evil day,” and in Romans i., of the heathen: “God delivered them up to a reprobate sense to do those things which are not convenient.”
Room is also found for philosophical arguments: God as the highest Being cannot permit Himself to be influenced by man’s changeableness, in the way that free-will would involve; on the contrary, He must, by virtue of His nature, determine everything Himself, down to the very smallest matters; nor does He do so merely by the “influentia generalis” (“concursus divinus generalis”), which, according to the “chatterboxes,” alone assists our free-will; free-will must perish (“periit”) in order to make room for a strict and compelling influence. This applies to our pardon, for we cannot elicit or snatch this from God by our own efforts, as though we surprised Him in slumber. “O furor, furorum omnium novissimus!” he exclaims of the Papal Bull in the midst of this philosophical and theological digression: “All is of necessity, for we—every man and every creature—live and act not as we will, but as God wills. In God’s presence the will ceases to exist.”[645]
It is not surprising that Augustine also is made to bear witness in his favour.
This Doctor of the Church, though in many passages he declares himself emphatically in favour of free-will, nevertheless frequently in his works against the Pelagians asserts (perhaps too strongly were we to consider his words apart from that heated controversy) that, without grace, and left to itself, free-will cannot as a rule avoid sin; on such occasions he does not always express the firm conviction he also holds, viz. that the will nevertheless of its own strength is able to do what is naturally good. In one passage, he says for instance, apparently quite generally: “Free-will in its captive state has strength only to sin; for righteousness it has none until it has been set free by God, and then only with His help.”[646] And elsewhere again: “Free-will can do nothing but sin, when the path of truth is hidden.”[647] This latter assertion Luther places as a trump card at the head of the discussion of his thirty-sixth condemned proposition, though he alters the wording.[648] As a matter of fact it is not difficult to prove, as we shall do below, that Luther was quite wrong in appealing to the Doctor of Hippo in support of his own teaching.
Of more importance for the present account is the significant position which Luther assigns to his supposed rediscovery of the doctrine of the captive will. He is full of enthusiasm for the idea of a religion of the enslaved will. This new religion of the enslaved will appears to him in the light of a “theology of the cross,” which, in return for his renunciation of free-will, descends upon man in order to point out to him the true road to God. “For what honour remains to God were we able to accomplish so much?” “The world has allowed itself to be seduced by the flattering doctrine of free-will which is pleasing to nature.”[649] If any point of his teaching, then certainly that of the captive will is to be accounted one of the “most sublime mysteries of our faith and religion, which only the godless know not, but to which the true Christian holds fast.”[650]
It fills one with grief and tears, he says, to see how the Pope and his followers—poor creatures—in their frivolity and madness, fail to recognise this truth. All the other Popish articles are endurable in comparison with this vital point, the Papacy, Councils, Indulgences and all the other unnecessary tomfoolery.[651] Not one jot do they understand concerning the will. Sooner shall the heavens fall than their eyes be opened to this basic truth. Christ, it is true, has nought to do with Belial, or darkness with light. The Popish Church knows only how to teach and to sell good works, its worldly pomp does not agree with our theology of the cross, which condemns all that the Pope approves, and produces martyrs.... That Church, given up to riches, luxury and worldliness, is determined to rule. But it rules without the cross, and that is the strongest proof by which I overcome it.... Without the cross, without suffering, the faithful city is become a harlot, and the true kingdom of Antichrist incarnate.[652]
He concludes, congratulating himself upon his having given Holy Scripture its rights.
Scripture is “full” of the doctrine on grace described above, but for at least three hundred years no writer has taken pity upon grace and written in its defence, on the contrary all have written against it. “Minds have now become so dulled by their habitual delusion that I see no one who is able to oppose us on the ground of Holy Scripture. We need an Esdras to bring forth the Bible again, for [the Popish] Nabuchodonosor has trampled it under foot to such an extent that no trace of even one syllable remains.”[653] He is grateful for the cheering “revival of the study of Greek and Hebrew throughout the world,” and is glad to think that he has turned this to good account in his biblical labours. With this consolation he writes his final “Amen” at the end of this curious document on the religion of the captive will.
Since Luther in the above “Assertio” against the Bull of condemnation sets up Scripture as the sole foundation of theology—he could not well do otherwise, seeing that he had rejected all external ecclesiastical authority—we might have anticipated that, in the application of his newly proclaimed principle of the Bible only, he would have taken pains to demonstrate its advantages in this work on free-will by the exercise of some caution in his exegesis. It is true that he declares, when defending the theory of the Bible only: “Whoever seeks primarily and solely the teaching of God’s Word, upon him the spirit of God will come down and expel our spirit so that we shall arrive at theological truth without fail.” “I will not expound the Scripture by my own spirit, or by the spirit of any man, but will interpret it merely by itself and according to its own spirit.”[654] And again: It often happens that circumstances and a mysterious, incomprehensible impulse will give to one man a right understanding such as is hidden from the industry of others.[655] Yet when, on the basis of the Bible only, he attempts to “overthrow his papistical opponents at the first onslaught,”[656] he brings forward texts which no one, not even Luther’s best friend, could regard as having any bearing on the subject.
He quotes, for instance, the passage where the believer is likened to the branch of the vine which must remain engrafted on Christ the true vine, in order to escape the fire of hell, and finds therein a proof of his own view, that grace completely evacuates the will, a proof so strong that he exclaims: “You speak with the voice of a harlot, O most holy Vicar of Christ, in thus contradicting your Master who speaks of the vine.”[657] Another example. In Proverbs xvi. it is written: “It is the part of man to prepare the soul and of the Lord to govern the tongue,” hence man, reasons Luther, who cannot even control his tongue, has no free-will to do what is good.[658] There too we read: “The heart of man disposeth his way, but the Lord must direct his steps,” and further on: “As the divisions of water, the heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord, whithersoever He will He shall turn it.” After adducing these texts, which merely emphasise the general Providence of God, Luther thinks he is justified in demanding: “Where then is free-will? It is a pure creation of fancy.”[659]
The saying of the clay and the potter (Isa. lxiv. 8) which manifestly alludes to the Creation and expresses man’s consequent state of dependence, he refers without more ado, both here and also later, to a continuous, purely passive relationship to God which entirely excludes free-will.[660] When Christ says (Matt. xxiii. 37; Luke xiii. 34) that He wished to gather the children of Jerusalem like a hen under His wings, but that they would not (καὶ οὐκ ἠθελήσατε), Luther takes this as meaning: They could not; they did not wish to, simply because they did not possess that free-will which his foes believe in. It might however be said, he thinks, that Christ only “spoke there in human fashion” of the willingness of Jerusalem, i.e. “merely according to man’s mode of speech,” just as Scripture, for the sake of the simple, frequently speaks of God as though He were a man.[661] It is plain from his explanation that Luther, as an eminent Protestant and theologian says, “was seeking to escape from the testimony to the Divine Will that all men be saved.”[662]
The best text against the hated free-will appeared to him to be Ephesians ii. 3, where St. Paul deals with original sin and its ethical consequences. “We were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.” “There is not,” so he assures his readers, a “clearer, more concise and striking testimony in the Bible against free-will”; “for if all by reason of their nature are children of wrath, then free-will is also a child of wrath,”[663] etc.
He handled Scripture as an executioner would handle a criminal. All unconsciously he was ever doing violence to the words of the Bible. We naturally wonder whether in the whole history of exegesis such twisting of the sense of the Bible had ever before been perpetrated. Yet we find these interpretations in the very pages where Luther first exposed his programme of the Bible only, and declared that he at least would expound the Word of God according to its own sense, according to the “Spirit of God,” and setting aside all personal prejudice. The old interpretation, on the other hand, which was to be found in the book of Lyra, with which Luther was acquainted, gave the correct meaning retained among scholars to our own day, not merely of the texts already quoted, but of many other striking passages alleged by Luther then or afterwards against free-will.
Luther proceeds rather more cautiously in the German edition of the “Assertio,” which speedily followed the Latin.
It deals with the denial of free-will at considerably less length. Perhaps, as was often the case with him, after he had recovered from the first excitement caused by the condemnation of the articles, he may have been sobered, or perhaps he was reluctant to let loose all the glaring and disquieting theses of the “Assertio” in the wide circle of his German readers, whom they might have startled and whose fidelity to his cause was at that time, after the sentence of outlawry, such a vital matter to him. In later editions of the Latin text some of his sayings were softened even during his lifetime so as to avoid giving offence.
Luther had been careful in the “Assertio,” just as he had been in his previous treatment of the subject, not to take into consideration the consequences involved by his denial of free-will; that, for instance, it follows that it is not man who actually does what is evil, but rather God who works in him, and that many were condemned merely on account of the necessity of sinning imposed upon them by God. Of this he has as yet nothing to say, though he was, shortly after, to make an attempt to obviate the difficulties.