As Luther climbed the Santa Scala in 1510 on his knees in Rome, the principal thing on his mind was the possibility of salvation. The farthest thing from his mind was the certainty of salvation, and this was because, to that point, the only theology of salvation Luther knew taught him to count on two things: the freedom of the human will and the necessity of human cooperation with grace toward attaining salvation. Fifteen years later in 1525, Luther's understanding of salvation had changed completely, and he published a book that changed the landscape of Western Christianity: The Bondage of the Will.
Setting
Luther was not the first to discover the free, sovereign grace of God. In fifth-century North Africa, Augustine wrestled with the teaching of Pelagius and came to see that sin brings death and human inability and that grace is free and sovereign. In the intervening centuries, there were voices that kept this message alive, but they were a minority.
As a student, Luther learned a theology that downplayed the effects of sin in ways that would cause Pelagius to smile. His teachers held the view that God has promised to impute perfection to those who do their best, and that humans, even after the Fall, have it within themselves to do what God's law requires.
In the following century, there was a significant and vehement reaction to what was perceived as a resurgence of Pelagianism. Indeed, in his monastery the young Luther regularly heard a proponent of Augustine's doctrines of sin and grace, but it was not until he found those doctrines in Scripture for himself that they penetrated his heart. Thus it was a low view of sin and grace that Luther imbibed in university, and it was this view he took with him as he began his own teaching career.
In 1513-14, his first course of lectures as a professor took him through the Psalms and Augustine's homilies on the Psalms. He found that Scripture disagreed with the theology he had been taught in university, and he began to see that sin brought death and an inability to cooperate with grace. On Psalm 51 he wrote, "It is indeed true. For we are still unrighteous and unworthy before God, so that whatever we do is nothing before him" (Luther's Works, American ed. [St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1958], 10.236; hereafter LW ). Luther was moving in a Pauline-Augustinian direction. Years later he commented, "I did not learn my theology all at once, but had to search deeper for it, where my temptations took me" (LW 54.50).
After his lectures on the Psalms, Romans, and Galatians, Luther announced his recovery of the Pauline and Augustinian doctrines of sin, grace, and divine freedom. In the Heidelberg Disputation (1518), Luther expressed one of the central arguments of his later work The Bondage of the Will: "'Free will' after the fall, exists in name only, and as long as it is 'doing what is within it' it is committing mortal sin" (revised from LW 31.40). When, however, Erasmus read Luther's Protestant views, he did not like the aftertaste they left in his humanist mouth. In the treatise The Freedom of the Will (1524), Erasmus restated the dominant medieval view that downplayed the effects of the Fall, insisting on the ability and necessity of human cooperation with grace unto (final) justification (Roland H. Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom [New York: Scribner's Sons, 1969], 158).
In 1525, Luther responded, moving the Reformation to a new level of clarity about its most essential convictions: salvation by grace alone (sola gratia), through faith alone (sola fide), in Christ alone (solo Christo) and Scripture alone (sola scriptura) as the unique normative authority for faith and the Christian life.
God's Freedom and Our Bondage
The God that Luther announced in Bondage of the Will is sovereign, free, and had determined from all eternity those to whom he would freely give new life through the preached gospel and those whom he would leave in sin and death. For Luther, the existence of God's eternal determinations about humanity was revealed in Scripture but the particulars were not; many of God's ways and decisions are hidden to us. The God with whom we have to do is the God who reveals his Word to us in Scripture, his law and his gospel, which reveals to us everything we need to know about God and salvation (LW 33.138-147).
The work is in two parts. The first two-thirds of Bondage of the Will responded point by point to Erasmus. Along the way, he articulated the most essential biblical and Reformation truths. Erasmus had reasoned that if Scripture tells us to do something, it must be the case that we can do it or else God is unjust. Such reasoning demonstrated that Erasmus did not know how to distinguish between the principles of law and gospel in Scripture.
Now I ask you, what good will anyone do in a matter of theology or Holy Writ, who has not yet got as far as knowing what the law and the gospel is, or if he knows, disdains to observe the distinction between them? Such a person is bound to confound everything’heaven and hell, life and death’and he will take no pains to know anything at all about Christ. (LW 33.132)
According to Luther's criticism, Erasmus had managed to turn the good news into bad news!
Erasmus was guilty of a sort of rationalism, of sitting in judgment over Scripture, because he had not utterly abandoned himself to the teaching of Scripture, even when the Scripture presented hard truths. For example, on Exodus 4:21 concerning the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, Luther wrote: "The Divine Author says, 'I will harden Pharaoh's heart,' and the meaning of the verb 'to harden' is plain and well known….By what authority, for what reason, with what necessity is the natural meaning of the word twisted for me?" (LW 33.165). Luther repeatedly asserted and defended the essential clarity of God's Word on those points necessary for faith and life.
Luther found the same clarity of Scripture in Romans 9. It is not possible to "resist" God's will. People may feel and desire things to be otherwise, but Luther knew Scripture to be "transparently clear" on these points. God hardens whom he wills. He has mercy upon whom he wills (LW 33.187). God's eternal foreknowledge and omnipotence are "diametrically opposed to our free choice," and so much so that they "completely abolish the dogma of free choice" (LW 33.189).
It was not that Luther denied that humans exercise any sort of freedom; he only recognized a distinction between necessity and compulsion (LW 33.192-212). Whatever God wills happens necessarily, but humans are not forced to action or inaction. Fallen humans will freely according to their natures, without compulsion, and within the limits of God's wise and governing decree.
Conclusion
Luther was a pastor and recognized how difficult then (as now) these words are to hear. It was not as if he himself had not struggled with it: "I myself have more than once been offended [by this doctrine] almost to the very depth and abyss of despair, so that I wished I had never been created a man, until I realized how salutary was this despair and how near to grace" (LW 18.719).
He insisted on God's freedom and our natural, fallen inability to do anything except sin because he came to see how intertwined God's free, eternal choice is with grace. It is of the essence of grace (divine favor) that God be free. If it is true that God must save a certain person, then grace is no longer grace. If grace depends on our cooperation, then grace is no longer grace (LW 33.241-44).
He also insisted on this teaching because to say, as the medieval church had said, that a fallen sinner still has power to cooperate with divine grace, is to deny the necessity of Christ's work. For Luther, it was utterly perverse to say that the doctrine of unconditional election leads to doubt. Rather, it is the basis of our assurance. This is because there are two spiritual kingdoms in the world, that of Christ and the other of Satan. By nature we are citizens of the kingdom of Satan. We can become a member of Christ's kingdom only by the sovereign, free, gracious choice and work of God (LW 33.288). If we believe, it is only because of God's free, gracious choice, not our own. If it were my choice, "I should be unable to stand firm and keep hold of it amid so many adversities and perils and so many assaults of demons" (LW 33.288). Without this doctrine of divine free will, believers could never be assured or certain of God's favor because we might always lose it; but if we do come to faith, we can have firm confidence that it is because God has chosen us, made us alive, given us faith, and united us to Christ. He cannot lose us, and this is something of which we should have no doubt.
