I.
THE Sovereign Grace Union has issued, in splendid form, one of the greatest of the Reformation controversial treatises. The work has been carefully edited by Mr. Atherton, the energetic secretary, and the whole get up of the volume in its binding, typography, and excellent printing does credit to all concerned in its issue. It is to be hoped that the Union through the sale of this work will be encouraged to print others of the great Reformation polemics. In the controversy as set forth in this goodly volume we have two great geniuses wrestling with one of the most abstruse subjects ever tackled by the mind of man. On the one hand we have Erasmus, the great humanist, awakened to intellectual life by the mighty movement sweeping over the civilized world but whose soul was untouched by that life giving power which gave such an impetus to the actions of Luther and infused such life into his utterances. No one can read these pages without being carried along by the impetuosity of his attack on the polished, subtle but dangerous, reasoning of his great opponent. Luther himself willingly acknowledges that he is no match for Erasmus in power of eloquence and after gracefully paying him a few compliments he deals his opponent one sledge-hammer blow after another until Erasmus must have felt stunned by the pointedness of the blows and the vigour of the attack. It is in reading such a book as this that one realises what a formidable controversialist Luther was. The fire, the keenness of his intellect, the skill with which he detects an opponent’s false reasoning and the driving force of the man, are all fitted to make an impression on the reader. But Luther is not a mere intellectual gladiator enjoying the fight for the fight’s sake, delighting in the nice subtleties of debate and glorying in the overthrow of opponents as subtle as ever entered into the arena of debate; it is not for this purpose he has taken up his pen to expose the subtle fallacies of Erasmus but because he feels the truth of the “Christian doctrine is endangered” by the acute, but after all, learned trifling of his opponent. The occasion of this famous controversy was the issue in 1524 of Erasmus’s De Libero Arbitrio (Concerning the Freedom of the Will). Hitherto the non-committal attitude of Erasmus to the Reformation was gradually changing to that of hostility and in issuing his book on Free Will he made a direct attack on a central position in Luther’s theology. Erasmus was fully aware of what his book meant to the theology of the Reformation movement for in writing to Henry VIII. he said: “The die is cast. My book on Free Will has seen the light. An audacious villainy, as things now stand in Germany! I expect to be stoned.” Luther’s personal spiritual experience of sin and the divine righteousness seemed to him to necessitate the complete bondage of the will in fallen man and the utter worthlessness of human works for salvation. The question debated was not purely philosophical; it was not a question of the power of the will considered in itself but the power of the will in fallen man considered from a religious standpoint. Luther felt that Erasmus had struck a vital point for he acknowledges that he, of all his opponents, had laid his finger on a cardinal doctrine and seized him by the throat. The issue was a life and death matter to Luther. It was not simply the overthrow of a system of theology that was at stake but the whole groundwork of Luther’s salvation was overthrown if Erasmus was right. In reading his great polemic this is to be borne in mind and perhaps this to a great extent explains some of the positions taken up by Luther which in calmer circumstances he would have rejected and which in later years he did reject. The controversy on the Freedom of the Will has been one of the thorniest discussed in philosophy and theology. A great deal of confusion has arisen from a want of a clear, definite terminology and in the present controversy it is important to know what Erasmus meant by “Free Will.” Following Lombardus he defines it as the power which man may apply himself to those things which lead to eternal life or turn away from it. Man, though he lost his freedom through sin, argued Erasmus, has yet the light of reason and the power of the will which are not completely extinguished though the will was rendered inefficacious to do good. Though the will received a wound in the fall he held yet it was not completely destroyed. He would not take up the Pelagian position but adopted as the most probable view that salvation is almost wholly due to grace yet not totally denying the freedom of the will. “For my own part,” he says, “I prefer the opinion of those who attribute something to free will but most to grace.” It was this dangerous theological position Luther attacked with all his energy. He clearly saw that it imperilled the whole foundation upon which the doctrine of salvation by grace rested. If man had even the least part in this work then it was not altogether of grace and Luther from the knowledge he had of the Scripture and from his own personal spiritual experience knew that it was all of grace from the beginning to the end. Hence it will be seen that in the contest between these two giants we have something more vital than a mere logomachy or contest about the meaning of words and phrases.
In this controversy one misses the sane and balanced judgment of Calvin. When Calvin writes the impetuous rush of Luther’s argument is absent but this is made up for by the sanity of judgment that characterised the writings of the great Reformed theologian. In asserting the bondage of the will Luther made what Dr. Cunningham calls “strong and rash statements” when he maintained that this bondage implied the necessity of men’s actions in every sense and denied to men liberty or freedom in any sense.
“Nothing happens,” says Luther, “by our will but by necessity, and that we do nothing by right of free will, but as God foreknows and brings to pass by His infallible and immutable decree and power.”
In view of the matter as presented in the Westminster Confession we deem it necessary to call attention to this rather intricate subject and to point out that the Reformed theologians while asserting in unmistakable terms the bondage of the will in spiritual matters allowed to the will of man a certain power of freedom in actions of an external, civil or merely moral character. The matter is clearly stated by Dr. Cunningham in the following words: “The Reformers did not deny that fallen man still retained the will or the power of volition as a mental faculty, that this continued with all its essential properties, as a part of the general structure or framework of the mental constitution with which man was created. They admitted that the exercise of the will as a mental faculty, or the exercise of the power of volition implied, in the very nature of the case, liberty or freedom, in a certain sense, i.e., what was commonly called spontaneity or freedom from necessity, in the sense of coaction or compulsion. This is the substance of the truth which is intended to be taught in our Confession of Faith, when it lays down, as its first and fundamental position upon the subject of free will, the following doctrine, viz., that ‘God hath endued the will of man with that natural liberty, that it is neither forced nor by any absolute necessity of nature determined to good or evil'” (Historical Theology, II. 573). The “liberty or freedom in a certain sense” referred to by Dr. Cunningham is clearly indicated by John Knox when he says: “Violence is done to the will of a creature when it willeth one thing and yet by force, by tyranny, or by a greater power, it is compelled to do the things which it would not” (Works, V. 144). Now, this is where Luther erred for while he rightly emphasised the bondage of the will he linked on to it his doctrine of the necessity of men’s actions in every sense and denial of liberty or freedom in any sense though, of course, he denies the necessity of compulsion. It is true that Luther and also Melanethon considerably modified their views on this point later on as is indicated in the words of the Augsburg Confession (1530) the most formal and solemn exposition of the doctrines of the Lutheran Church: “Concerning free will, they teach that man’s will hath some liberty to work a civil righteousness, and to choose such things as reason can reach unto; but that it hath no power to work the righteousness of God, or a spiritual righteousness, without the Spirit of God; because that the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God (I. Cor. ii. 14). But this is wrought in the heart when men do receive the Spirit of God through the Word” (Art. 18). This doctrine is in keeping with the teaching of our Confession in its well balanced statement in the 9th Chapter which we hope to deal with in a future article.
Though we have felt it necessary to criticize Luther’s doctrine of necessity as out of keeping with the position of the Reformed theologians and with the doctrine set forth in the Westminster Standards we do not wish any of our readers versed in such matters to go away with the idea that the doctrine maintained in his famous work is the philosophical doctrine of Necessitarianism. For while it is true that such famous theologians as Jonathan Edwards and Thomas Chalmers were Necessitarians as philosophers yet as Dr. Cunningham in his masterly criticism of Sir William Hamilton has shown the philosophical doctrine of necessity or determinism and the theological doctrine of the divine decrees are not the same.
Meantime we pass from this discussion of an abstruse subject by calling attention again to Luther’s famous work. It has been rightly described as: “A sustained piece of reasoning of a high order. In fertility of thought and dialectic power he is greatly superior to his opponent. Erasmus is a scholar and a critic, rather than a thinker. Luther is a thinker, rather than a scholar and a critic.”
(To be continued.)
*The Bondage of the Will, by Martin Luther, the Celebrated Reformer: Being his Reply to Erasmus. Translated by Henry Cole, M.A., with slight alteration from Edward Thomas Vaughan, M.A. Corrected by Henry Atherton. London: Sovereign Grace Union, 98 Camberwell Grove. Price, 10/6.