For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.
Ephesians 2:8–9
To this point, we’ve looked at the understanding of grace prior to the Reformation. Why? Because I want to demonstrate that the biblical understanding of grace is something that was faithfully preserved and transmitted by many theologians throughout the ages. Protestants sometimes wonder where the church was before Martin Luther appeared in the sixteenth century, and one answer is that his understanding of grace was not radically new. It was not something he invented but something that finds antecedents throughout the ages. Even the Reformation notion of salvation by grace alone was not really an innovation, even though the Reformers developed and deployed it in new and significant ways.
It is no secret that classic, Augustinian grace was central to the Reformation, and this was made clear in 1525. In that year Martin Luther responded to humanist Desiderius Erasmus’s Diatribe on Free Will (1524).1 Erasmus had been under huge pressure from at least 1520 to make clear where he stood in relation to the theology emerging from the University of Wittenberg. This work was Erasmus’s attempt to distinguish himself from the Reformer and to reassure his Catholic critics of his ecclesiastical loyalty.
Erasmus’s work is little read by anyone but scholars today, yet Luther’s response has become a Christian classic. On the Bondage of the Will was perhaps his single greatest work and certainly one of only three of his books that he considered worthy of surviving his own lifetime. It is his masterful articulation of the notion that the human will is bound and that our intuitive sense of complete freedom with regard to decision making is an illusion when it comes to the matter of salvation. Yet in the conclusion of the work, Luther makes an unexpected and intriguing comment:
I praise and commend you highly for this also, that unlike all the rest you alone have attacked the real issue, the essence of the matter in dispute, and have not wearied me with irrelevancies about the papacy, purgatory, indulgences, and such like trifles (for trifles they are rather than basic issues), with which almost everyone hitherto has gone hunting for me without success. You and you alone have seen the question on which everything hinges, and have aimed at the vital spot; for which I sincerely thank you, since I am only too glad to give as much attention to this subject as time and leisure permit.2
To anyone familiar with the career of the Reformer, this is a startling statement. After all, indulgences and purgatory had first brought Luther to public prominence, and his attacks on the authority of the papacy had earned him excommunication. Yet Luther refers to these as trifles compared to the points underlying his debate with Erasmus. Further, it is the doctrine of justification by faith alone that most people associate with his name.3 So why did Luther believe that the issues raised by Erasmus were the central matters in the debate over the Reformation?
The argument of Bondage of the Will has two major—and related—focal points. One is the obvious issue of the impotence of the human will in matters of salvation. The other is the clarity of Scripture. The two are connected because Erasmus’s argument is that Scripture is obscure on the issue of the will (and on many other doctrines), and so we should not make this doctrine—or many others—an integral part of the faith. Luther’s response is to emphasize the vital doctrinal nature of faith and to assert Scripture’s clarity. He further argues that Christian certainty about salvation depends on salvation being all of God. Our will contributed nothing, which assumes that it is bound.4
Underlying it all, of course, was Luther’s conviction that his Reformation was fundamentally about the nature of grace. Indeed, he himself saw the struggle in his own day as a recapitulation of the battles between Augustine and Pelagius in the fifth century. While we might think of it first and foremost as a debate about justification or authority, Luther regarded both of those matters as consequences of prior convictions about grace.
The Late Medieval Background
Of all the major Reformers, Luther was the most medieval. He had a medieval calling as a monk. He was not trained as a Renaissance humanist but deeply schooled in medieval theology. Thus, to understand Luther on grace one must first understand the medieval background which formed him and against which he ultimately rebelled, albeit somewhat selectively.
In the last chapter we studied the view of grace offered by Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas and the Thomist tradition did not, however, provide the context for Luther’s thought. Indeed, he was trained in a school of theology which actually represented something of a critique of the Thomistic approach and which subsequent Roman Catholic writers have therefore held responsible for the Reformation.5
Several theological shifts took place in Western theology after Aquinas that had profound significance for the development of Reformation theology. The first was the rise of voluntarism as articulated by theologians such as the Franciscan Duns Scotus (ca. 1266–1308). This was the idea that God’s will, not God’s intellect, was the decisive factor in God’s actions. I recognize that this needs some unpacking. First, we need to understand that orthodox medieval theologians were convinced that God was simple (not composed of parts) and that distinctions made by human beings when they talked about God were not distinctions of parts. God was not justice in one part, mercy in another, for example. In fact, the human language of distinction in God functioned in a manner analogous to the multiple power of the number one: 1, 12, 13, 14, and so on. All have the same reference, the number one, but all are saying different things. The distinction between God’s intellect and God’s will is one created by theologians to enable them to speak and think meaningfully about God, similar to the difference between 1 and 12 to a mathematician. When we talk about God’s will and God’s intellect, we are in one sense talking about the same thing because God is simple, and that means that there is no one part of him that is will and another part of him that is intellect. Yet we are still saying something different when we use the two terms. We might say that we are talking about God as if he were complex, in a sense, in order to be able to grasp something of his nature.
When the voluntarists prioritized God’s will over his intellect, they were making an epistemological point. God does what he chooses to do. We cannot predict in advance, based on the way the world is, or appears to be, how God will act. This is significant because it effectively breaks the causal chain that lay at the heart of Aquinas’s understanding of grace and salvation. We cannot predict in advance what God must or must not do in order to bring about a particular result. Where Aquinas thought that the sacraments were necessary because they were the means by which God infused grace and transformed the individual, for the voluntarists that was no longer the case.
Along with the rise in voluntarism came a second influential stream of thinking, that of nominalism, which represented a way of thinking about words. A key figure in this development was another Franciscan, William of Occam (ca. 1287–1347). The problem of predication, of how words can be applied to things, is as old as philosophy itself and tends to be resolved in one of two ways. First, there is realism. Realism makes the case that a word such as “dog” can be applied to an individual being because that individual participates in some greater, universal reality which we might characterize as “dogginess.” Thus, it is inappropriate to call a cat a “dog” because the cat does not stand in this relationship to universal dogginess. Dogginess is real, and to the extent that some individual thing participates in, or resembles, that dogginess, to that extent it can be called a dog.
Nominalists, however, take a very different approach. They regard individuals as constituting reality, and thus words that refer to general concepts or to universals—dogginess, humanity, and so on—are really linguistic constructs that we have made. Thus, an individual is called a dog because in doing so we are ascribing it to the set of things we wish to refer to as dogs. We are not implying that there is a real category of dog that has any kind of existence beyond, or independent of, the various individuals we assign to the class of dog.
The affinity between voluntarism and nominalism is that both undermine the significance of what we might call empirical reality in shaping the understanding of what is actually real. For voluntarists, reality becomes intrinsically unpredictable because God’s will is the only thing that really matters. Teleology of the Thomist variety is rendered irrelevant. Ends are not a function of the intrinsic nature of a thing; they are merely a function of what God decides to do with each thing. And for nominalists, reality becomes a linguistic construct. Something may look like a dog; but if God declares it to be a cat, then a cat is what it is. God’s speech, not our observations of empirical reality, is the decisive factor.
Voluntarism and nominalism were mediated to Luther in large part through the writings of Gabriel Biel (ca. 1420–95), whose Canon of the Mass formed part of Luther’s basic education. Biel, wrestling with the question of how an individual could attain a state of grace, formulated the idea of a pactum, or a pact, between God and human beings. The basic idea was that God had committed himself to bestowing a state of grace on those who, literally, did what was in them (i.e., did their best).6 This initial “doing what they could” was called congruent merit because it was only accepted on the basis of the pactum. Once the individual was in a state of grace, they could then produce condign merit—intrinsically good works that were performed by grace. This approach is often characterized in the scholarly literature as representative of the via moderna (lit. “the modern way”), as opposed to the via antiqua (lit. “ancient way”).7
What should we make of Biel’s thinking here? First, Biel clearly assumes a certain freedom of action in the human will. It would be unfair to characterize his position as Pelagian because the pactum does make it clear that no individual is meriting salvation in a strict sense. Unless God had first established the pactum as a mechanism for allowing human beings to merit grace, there would be no merit. God has gracious priority in the scheme. Nonetheless, the works done in the context of the graciously established pactum are freely performed by the individual. The choice to act or not to act lies within the power of the person concerned.
Second, the criteria for attaining a state of grace are subjective and thus offer no real basis for assurance. This was not a particular problem in the medieval church because assurance of salvation was not the expected norm for Christians anyway. But it became an acute problem with Martin Luther, for whom the existential question of his status before God was all-consuming.
Third, a clean break is made in the matter of justification between the intrinsic qualities of the Christian and the question of his status before God. This is a clear point of affinity with the Reformation theology of Martin Luther. For Luther, the justified person is the one who is declared to be righteous by God on the basic of the extrinsic and imputed righteousness of Christ. Thus, with Luther, as with the system of Biel, there is no necessary connection between intrinsic quality and external denomination. For all of Luther’s repudiation of what he was taught in the medieval classroom, it was Gabriel Biel’s theology that set the stage for the Reformation on a number of key points.
Luther’s Development to 1518
Luther’s Reformation theology was the result of three things: an intense personality, a pressing existential quest, and a theology that was incapable of answering the questions raised by the first two.
His early years in the cloister were haunted both by the fear that his monastic vocation was a huge disappointment to his father (it was) and by a growing anxiety concerning his inability to stand before a holy and righteous God. In this context, the theology of Biel proved experientially inadequate because of the pressing doubt that it cultivated with regard to whether one had ever really done one’s best and thus achieved a state of grace. The question of personal assurance was a pressing one for the young Luther, and to be told, in effect, simply to do his best was no answer. This was a subjective criterion that itself generated further doubts in Luther’s mind about what his best might be and how he might know that he had achieved it.
It was not simply existentially inadequate. It was also theologically inadequate. As a young university professor, Luther was required to lecture on books of the Bible. In 1515–16 he lectured through Paul’s letter to the Romans. These lectures were lost for many years, but a copy was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century in the Vatican Library. This, together with various sets of student notes and another copy in the University of Berlin, formed the basis for the critical edition of the text. What this volume does, of course, is offer significant insights into Luther’s thinking on Paul during the key years of his development immediately prior to the indulgence controversy.8
Several themes emerge in these lectures that indicate that Luther is moving decisively away from via moderna constructions of grace. First, in his argument on Romans 5 he is careful to draw the close connection between sin and death. Sin is that which hands human beings over to death. Grace is thus the answer, or the counterpart, to this death.9 As with Augustine, Luther sees Adam’s sin as binding the individual into a kind of death cycle, committed only to doing works that can never merit before God.
This corresponds to his new view of baptism. Far from seeing baptism as reparative or restorative in terms of improving on a good that already exists in the baptismal subject, he sees baptism as finding its meaning in death and resurrection. Thus in a comment on Romans 6:4 he declares:
They are baptized “into death,” that is, toward death, which is to say, they have begun to live in such a way that they are pursuing this kind of death and reach out toward this their goal. For although they are baptized unto eternal life and the kingdom of heaven, yet they do not all at once possess this goal fully, but they have begun to act in such a way that they may attain to it—for Baptism was established to direct us toward death and through this death to life—therefore it is necessary that we come to it in the order which has been prescribed.10
This is a significant development because it moves Luther toward the point that he says is vital and that Erasmus focuses on: the bondage of the human will. Dead men tell no tales. Nor do they do anything else. If the human existential and religious problem is death, then only an external action on the part of someone more powerful than death can actually resolve the difficulty.
This points toward Luther’s key breakthrough relative to the pactum. If human beings are dead in trespasses and sins, then what could possibly constitute fulfillment of the pactum’s condition? Luther gives the answer in his comment on Romans 2:
The whole task of the apostle and of his Lord is to humiliate the proud and to bring them to a realization of this condition, to teach them that they need grace, to destroy their own righteousness so that in humility they will seek Christ and confess that they are sinners and thus receive grace and be saved.11
In other words, the condition of the pactum, the condition for the reception of grace, is fulfilled by the individual coming to the realization that they are dead in their sins and can do nothing to merit God’s grace. It is that state of utter despair in oneself that provides the context for the reception of grace as a passive act. This is what we might call Luther’s theology of humility: the idea that it is this despair of oneself and one’s own ability that fulfills the condition of the pactum.
This is the theological shift that drove Luther at the time of the indulgence crisis of October 1517. In September of that year, in his Disputation against Scholastic Theology, Luther specifically attacked the theology of Gabriel Biel, arguing that the pactum’s condition could only be met by a prior act of grace rooted in God’s predestination and manifested in a turning toward God.12 Thus, the notion that God’s grace could be bought by human effort was already anathema to him, a powerful point when it came to the matter of indulgences as sold by Johann Tetzel.
Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses are now regarded as an act of protest. This is certainly true in part. But more than a protest, they were what they professed to be: a call for a focused debate on the connection between the practice of selling indulgences in the manner of Tetzel and the church’s official position on the same. In short, Luther wanted clarity of what exactly indulgences were and how they connected to the church’s teaching on grace. While the Ninety-Five Theses contain no explicit attack on the traditional understanding of pactum theology, it is the theology of humility noted above that clearly undergirds a number of the theses, not least the very first: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”13
The issue became explicit in April 1518, when Luther presided over a disputation held at a chapter meeting of the Augustinian Order in the city of Heidelberg. Luther himself was the author of the disputed theses, which culminated in his famous distinction between the theologian of glory and the theologian of the cross. Prior to that, however, thesis 16 reads as follows: “The person who believes that he can obtain grace by doing what is in him adds sin to sin so that he becomes doubly guilty.”14
In Luther’s published explanation of the thesis he writes:
On the basis of what has been said, the following is clear: While a person is doing what is in him, he sins and seeks himself in everything. But if he should suppose that through sin he would become worthy of or prepared for grace, he would add haughty arrogance to his sin and not believe that sin is sin and evil is evil, which is an exceedingly great sin. As Jer. 2[:18] says, “For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that can hold no water” that is, through sin they are far from me and yet they presume to do good by their own ability.15
Underlying this explanation is Luther’s understanding of sin. We noted above that he regards it as giving the sinner the status of death. Yet the sinner remains alive in the sense that she can still do things. Here we see Luther’s existential understanding of sin as that which turns the person in on herself and thus renders her incapable of doing anything that does not ultimately feed the active, sinful nature. The idea that one could fulfill the condition of the pactum by doing what is in oneself, i.e., doing one’s best, as the basis for obtaining grace, is thus nonsense. What freedom the sinner has is freedom between different types of acts of sinful self-righteousness, not the freedom to move toward God in even the most minimal way without the prior gracious action of God.
This anticipates what becomes explicit in Bondage of the Will, that there is not a bridge from wrath to grace. What is required is a sovereign, unilateral act of God. Luther makes this point at Heidelberg in his distinction between the theologian of glory and the theologian of the cross.16 The theologian of glory makes the assumption that the way the world operates is a fundamentally sound guide to the way in which God operates. Since human love is reactive, drawn out by something that already exists and that attracts it, so God’s love must be the same. A theologian of glory believes that justification, for example, must first of all be rooted in something within the individual. God would never declare someone to be righteous who was not actually righteous to some extent. And God would never be gracious toward someone who had not first demonstrated they were worthy of grace at some level. This, of course, is the logic which underlies the idea of Biel’s pactum.
The cross, however, stands as a direct contradiction to all of this. On the cross God acts in a manner that no human being would naturally have anticipated and that no human being can truly understand in their own power. Here the supreme sovereign Creator and ruler of the universe hides himself in weak, finite human flesh and dies on the hill at Calvary in a manner typically reserved for the criminal scum of the earth. The action of God is utterly unlike the logic of human action because it involves complete self-giving in a manner that is not dependent on receiving in return.
Luther is here articulating the position we find in Paul’s letters to the church in Corinth. The cross is foolishness to the world around, a contradiction of all it holds dear, and yet it is the power of God to salvation.17 Further, the radical work of Christ on the cross is such that the church and her constituent members are part of the new creation. This new creation is not perceptible through the outward criteria with which the world operates but is in fact a powerful reality visible only to the eyes of faith.18
The culmination of this theology is Luther’s definition of love, which comes in the final theological thesis: “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it.”19
This is, of course, the classic anti-Pelagian understanding of love, which we also saw in Thomas Aquinas. God’s love is prior and creative, and it roots election and the salvation that rests on it not in a foreseen intrinsic quality in the elect but in the prior sovereign and electing love of God. Here in the Heidelberg Disputation it comes at the very end of the argument, showing how such a view of God’s love solves the problem of human rebellion and sinfulness and prevents the humility or faith of the Christian from functioning as merit. God’s love is the foundation and cause of any humility or faith that the Christian may possess. It is also, as Luther stresses by juxtaposing it with human love in the thesis, the very antithesis of the latter. Thus, we are brought once again to the issue of knowledge, and of the morality of knowledge, which is key to the Christian. The theologian of glory thinks of God’s love as reactive, like his own. Only the theologian of the cross can see that God’s love is creative, like that of no other.
There is a sense in which Luther here stands in some continuity with his medieval voluntarist forebears, who would also have agreed with the fundamental unpredictability of God (from a human perspective) and thus with the need to focus on revelation. What Luther does, however, represents a distinct and important development in two particular ways. First, he makes the problem of the knowledge of God an acutely moral issue. We noted in Aquinas that the fall had an impact on human psychology, leaving the faculties disordered and thus throwing into doubt any human thoughts about God until they could be assessed by the standards of special revelation. Then, in later voluntarism the priority of God’s will made him unpredictable. But with Luther the problem is intensely moral at its very root. Human beings want to create God in their own image so that they can then justify themselves before him. This is why the theses dealing with the theologians of glory and the cross are preceded by theses dealing with the power of the law of God to expose human impotence and to force individuals to cast themselves on God’s mercy. Knowledge of God is a function of the human moral disposition, and the human being who is caught in his own sinfulness and turned inward on himself needs first of all to be broken by God.
This point is crucial to understanding Luther’s theology in general and his view of grace in particular. The existence of the law does not imply that we have the ability to fulfill it. We are commanded to be holy in order to show us our obligation before God. When we strive to fulfill it, the law then becomes the means of exposing to us our absolute impotence before God and is thus used by the Lord to drive us to despair of ourselves by acknowledging before him our status as those who are morally dead. As we saw in Scripture and in the work of Augustine and Aquinas, grace is a response to this basic fact of fallen human existence. For Luther, grace is thus defined by Christ and the cross.
This is the second important development in Luther’s thinking: his focus on the cross as the center of theology. It is there, in the broken finiteness of Jesus’s flesh, as he hangs apparently powerless under the weight of God’s curse and abandoned by his Father, that God acts in grace to save fallen humanity and in so doing reveals himself as gracious. This is revelation hidden under the form of weakness. Just as the work of Christ is a work of God’s grace (for no mere creature could do it), so the understanding that individuals have of this work is also of God’s grace. Men and women are so naturally wrapped up in their own theologies of glory that the cross makes no sense to them unless God gives them the eyes of faith. It is clearly akin to Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 1: the cross is foolish to Greeks and an offense to Jews. We might say people are naturally superficial in the strict sense of the word, dealing only with surface and appearance and not penetrating to the reality beneath. That penetration comes only through looking at the cross through the eyes of faith and thus only through God’s gracious act, objectively at Calvary and subjectively in the heart of the individual. This also connects to Luther’s theology of the word as rooted in late medieval nominalism. In other words, one knows the cross as power because the word of God declares it to be so.
Above all, this is not simply a matter of human finiteness or creatureliness. It is a matter of the basic moral character and status of human beings. Luther is with Paul: our attitude to the cross is emblematic of our standing before God because our attitude to the cross is in a very real sense our attitude toward the God who is crucified there. If we think it is foolishness or offensive, then we are perishing because those attitudes reflect hearts that are opposed to God and his grace. If we see it as the power of God to salvation, then that is only because God has graciously worked to give us faith to grasp that fact. Such is a work of the Spirit, not of unaided human reason. It is an act of God’s grace.
Justification by Grace through Faith
At Heidelberg, Luther was clearly moving in the direction that culminated in his mature understanding of justification by grace through faith, which emerged around 1520 in works such as The Freedom of the Christian Man. We noted earlier that the conceptual framework of salvation is separable from the content of justification. Thus, one can have a predestinarian system that yet roots the formal cause of justification in qualities intrinsic to the person of the believer, as was the case with Augustine and Aquinas. For Luther, however, his understanding of predestination and his understanding of the formal cause of justification are intimately connected. This is because both are fundamentally external to the individual. For Luther, grace involves placing the believer’s salvation outside himself, in the action of God. The very fact that justification for Luther is a declaration of God, a word that comes from the outside, underscores and intensifies the idea that salvation is all of grace.
At some point between 1516 and 1520, the notion of humility that Luther had developed as the instrument of grasping God’s grace was transformed into the notion of faith. The connection between the two is very close. If humility involves despairing of oneself and casting oneself on God for his mercy, then faith can be said to comprehend all of that and to accent the dimension of trust. It is not discontinuous with it but rather an enrichment and extension of it. It also sharpens the focus in Luther’s theology on the word, on God’s promise. As faith becomes the instrument of justification, so God’s word, and indeed the declaration of that message in word and sacrament, becomes practically crucial in the life of the church.
The major statement of this position is Luther’s 1520 treatise On the Freedom of the Christian Man. This was the year (1520) when Luther laid out in detail his initial thoughts of what the Reformation might look like, ethically, sacramentally, and politically. The Freedom of the Christian Man was his ethical treatise, looking at how his new understanding of salvation transformed the practical life of the believer. His argument here does nothing less than turn on its head the typical medieval Catholic position on works and justification. Justification precedes works as an act of God’s grace so that works are subsequently motivated by gratitude for this unconditional favor.
Luther’s most famous and dramatic statement of the nature of justification reads as follows:
Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death, and damnation. Now let faith come between them and sins, death, and damnation will be Christ’s, while grace, life, and salvation will be the soul’s; for if Christ is a bridegroom, he must take upon himself the things which are his bride’s and bestow upon her the things that are his. If he gives her his body and very self, how shall he not give her all that is his? And if he takes the body of the bride, how shall he not take all that is hers?20
Here faith is the instrument of the joyful exchange (to use Luther’s phrase) whereby Christ’s righteousness freely becomes that of the sinner, and the sinner’s sins become Christ’s. The crucial point to notice is that the faith of the believer is not a constitutive part of this righteousness but merely the instrument by which the righteousness is grasped, and that by faith in the promise which is embodied in Christ. Faith unites to Christ, and Christ gives all that is necessary for the believer to stand justified before God. The declaration of God in justification is thus based not on anything the believer does but solely on what God has done in and through Christ, and that external to the individual. Luther’s theology thus has at its core a fundamental antipathy to any notion of merit as playing a part in the believer’s justification.
Grace, Christ, and Faith
This sets the stage for the clash with Erasmus and helps us understand why the matters raised by Erasmus were so important as far as Luther was concerned. First, we should note the existential significance of the argument. For Luther, if any element of justification lay decisively with the human will or with a human work, there could be no assurance of salvation. The individual would be left in a permanent state of uncertainty, as, we might say, the chain of assured salvation could only be as strong as its weakest link. Justification by an act of human will or by works would inevitably press the individual into looking within for assurance; and there was to be found nothing of absolute reliability. So Luther’s argument that justification is based on Christ’s objective works and righteousness finds its counterpart in his emphasis on the sovereignty of God’s will in salvation. Both are necessary for the Christian to have the real possibility of assurance. Put simply: the act of faith must itself be an act of God’s sovereign grace.
When it comes to the theological arguments of the debate with Erasmus, several points are noteworthy. First, there is the issue of salvation being “in Christ.” Nobody who makes any claim to be a Christian is going to disagree with such a statement, but for Luther it has a particularly radical implication. It excludes the whole idea that there can be free choice:
When Christ is called the way, the truth, and the life [John 14:6], and that antithetically, so that whatever is not Christ is not the way but error, not the truth but a lie, not the life but death, then it necessarily follows that free choice, since it is neither Christ nor in Christ, is included in the error, the lie, and the death. Where and whence, then, have we that intermediate and neutral thing, the power of free choice, which although it is not Christ or the way, the truth, and the life, must still not be error, or a lie, or death? For unless everything said about Christ and grace were said antithetically, so as to be set over against its opposite—for instance, that outside of Christ there is nothing but Satan, apart from grace nothing but wrath, apart from light only darkness, apart from the way only error, apart from the truth only a lie, apart from life only death—what, I ask you, would be the point of all the discourses of the apostles and of Scripture as a whole? They would all be in vain, because they would not insist on the absolute necessity of Christ, which in fact is their chief concern; and they would not do so because some intermediate thing would be found, which of itself would be neither evil nor good, neither Christ’s nor Satan’s, neither true nor false, neither alive nor dead, perhaps even neither something nor nothing, and that would be called “the most excellent and exalted thing in the whole race of men”!21
This statement is important. It points toward the primary concern of Luther, and of subsequent Reformers, in their articulation of grace and predestination: the outlawing of any notion of human merit in salvation. The ever-present danger in a theology that emphasizes justification by faith, and thus faith as the instrument of justification, is that faith itself will come to be regarded as a work or as somehow meritorious. The fact that I believe and thus receive Christ’s righteousness might well imply that I have done something prior to my being in Christ that, in a very real sense, merits my salvation. Luther wishes to preclude that possibility by excluding the idea of my decision as being in any sense autonomous.
By setting Christ forth in this way, Luther offers one line of argumentation against the possibility of thinking of faith as meritorious. Outside Christ, there is nothing of any salvific good whatsoever. Thus, we might say that there is no intermediate state or neutral term between being out of Christ and in Christ. That which is instrumental in justification and salvation—the believer’s faith—is itself grounded in the work of Christ. Even faith itself is an act of God’s grace, bound up in Christ. One believes because one has been given faith as a gift of God’s grace, and that itself is to be understood in terms of God’s gracious action in and through Christ.
Of course, Luther was a good student of Augustine, and, like Augustine, he regarded the fallen human will as incapable of moving toward God.22 Yet there is a significant difference between the two theologians on this point. If Augustine tends to see the fall as the watershed in this regard, with the human will being free prior to this, Luther believes that it is not so much God’s sovereign decree but his very being as the sovereign Creator and thus prior in every way to creation that eliminates the possibility of Adam’s free will from the outset of creation:
Granted foreknowledge and omnipotence, it follows naturally by an irrefutable logic that we have not been made by ourselves, nor do we live or perform any action by ourselves, but by his omnipotence. And seeing he knew in advance that we should be the sort of people we are, and now makes, moves, and governs us as such, what imaginable thing is there, I ask you, in us which is free to become in any way different from what he has foreknown or is now bringing about? Thus God’s foreknowledge and omnipotence are diametrically opposed to our free choice, for either God can be mistaken in foreknowing and also err in action (which is impossible) or we must act and be acted upon in accordance with his foreknowledge and activity. By the omnipotence of God, however, I do not mean the potentiality by which he could do many things which he does not, but the active power by which he potently works all in all [cf. 1 Cor. 12:6], which is the sense in which Scripture calls him omnipotent. This omnipotence and the foreknowledge of God, I say, completely abolish the dogma of free choice.23
The logic here is simple, straightforward, and devastating: God foreknows that which he foreordains; if he foreknows something, he must therefore (logically) first foreordain it; therefore all things come to pass by God’s foreordination.
The implications are profound and serve to make Bondage of the Will one of the most determinist treatises written in the history of the church. If one follows Luther in this argument, then one has to realize that the bondage of the will is an issue of human ontology, of the fact that we are creatures, and not the result of the fall. Further, it would seem hard to acquit God of full responsibility for evil. Granted, the origin of evil is a mystery—the serpent is simply there all of a sudden in the garden of Eden without any explanation—but other theologians, such as Augustine, have tried over the ages to at least nuance the relationship between God as sovereign and evil as a reality.
We perhaps do well, however, to understand Luther’s religious motivation in this context, even as we may find his theological articulation of the matter to be somewhat blunt and unsatisfying. Luther’s main concern is to deny any role to human merit in salvation and by doing so to offer a foundation for salvation on which true assurance can be built. In Bondage, Luther himself recalls how he strived for many years to achieve assurance of God’s favor through his good works. He notes that this was a fool’s errand, for as long as even one element in salvation remained dependent on him and his strength, he could never be certain that God would indeed ultimately be gracious to him.24
Thus, we here arrive at the antispeculative motivation for Luther’s thinking. It is all about assurance of salvation, and his radical development of an apparently determinist framework for grace must be seen as part of this. One obvious implication, of course, is that God predestines some to eternal life and others to eternal death, a conclusion from which Luther does not shy away.
In his challenge to Luther’s theology, Erasmus points to Ezekiel 18:23 and 32 where God declares that he takes no pleasure in the death of a sinner. Luther’s response is dramatic. He draws a distinction between God as he has revealed himself to be, as he is preached, where he is gracious and merciful and does not reprobate anybody (i.e., the revealed will of God), and God as he is in his majestic hiddenness, whereby he does indeed will the deaths of sinners (i.e., the hidden will of God).25
In one way, Luther has done no more here than build on the anti-Pelagian predestinarian structure that we noted in both Augustine and then in Aquinas. The difference between the one who is saved and the one who is not is rooted in an ultimate sense in the will of God. It is God’s decision that discriminates between elect and nonelect. Yet Luther’s approach is, for want of a better term, more brutal in that he seems to take a delight in contrasting the revealed will of God with the hidden will of God in a way others do not. Thus, for example:
The Diatribe, however, deceives herself in her ignorance by not making any distinction between God preached and God hidden, that is, between the word of God and God himself. God does many things that he does not disclose to us in his word; he also wills many things which he does not disclose himself as willing in his word. Thus he does not will the death of a sinner, according to his word; but he wills it according to that inscrutable will of his. It is our business, however, to pay attention to the word and leave that inscrutable will alone, for we must be guided by the word and not by that inscrutable will.26
So God wills one thing according to his revealed will and contradicts it according to his hidden (and ultimately decisive) will. The danger here is that, in preserving the graciousness of grace in order to provide a solid foundation for assurance, Luther has inadvertently undermined the very thing he wishes to establish. For if God’s revelation can itself be contradicted and is thus not the final word, then where is assurance to be found? It is arguable that the influence of late medieval voluntarism is still here at work in Luther’s theology.
Luther’s answer is typically paradoxical. He makes the dilemma itself into a component part of the definition of faith:
Thus God hides his eternal goodness and mercy under eternal wrath, his righteousness under iniquity. This is the highest degree of faith, to believe him merciful when he saves so few and damns so many, and to believe him righteous when by his own will he makes us necessarily damnable, so that he seems, according to Erasmus, to delight in the torments of the wretched and to be worthy of hatred rather than of love. If, then, I could by any means comprehend how this God can be merciful and just who displays so much wrath and iniquity, there would be no need of faith. As it is, since that cannot be comprehended, there is room for the exercise of faith when such things are preached and published, just as when God kills, the faith of life is exercised in death.27
This is a valiant attempt at solving the problem and certainly points to Luther’s understanding of justification as wholly an act of God, and that itself of grace. But it is ultimately unsatisfying because it presents the problem in Luther’s formulation as the solution. Can the revealed God be trusted? The answer, “Yes, even though he cannot be!” is problematic. Not to Luther, who reveled in such paradoxes and delighted in taunting his opponents with such. But the pastoral questions that such theology might well provoke are serious and not to be dismissed with a cavalier “So what?”
Conclusion
Martin Luther is in many ways the single most important figure in the theological history of Protestantism. He may not have been the greatest theologian or the most careful exegete, but his life and work set in place many of the concerns and priorities of the later Protestant traditions, Lutheran, Reformed, and evangelical. Certainly, his development of the doctrine of justification by grace through faith was crucial to the development of all five of the famous Reformation solas.
When it comes to grace, Luther stands firmly on the shoulders of Augustine. He even sees himself as fighting a modern-day battle against a revitalized Pelagianism. In pressing God’s sovereignty, human depravity, and the need for unilateral, divine intervention, he is a good representative of a tradition stretching back to the early church.
He develops the tradition in two specific ways. First, his concern with grace and predestination is driven by his desire to exclude even the slightest hint of merit in salvation. What Luther does—and where he is very helpful to pastors and lay Christians today—is reveal how important is the connection between grace, Christ, and justification. One cannot simply preach that justification is by grace through faith without reflecting on the relationship between grace and faith. For Luther, to fail to make faith itself an act of God’s grace is to subvert the whole notion, to smuggle a work in through the back door and to offer a view of salvation that is built in a very real sense on human merit. Theologically that derogates from the work of Christ, and pastorally it jeopardizes that most Protestant of pastoral distinctives, Christian assurance. If anything decisive at all is left in the power of the individual, be it faith or the performance of good works, then the chain of assured salvation is compromised such that assurance is effectively impossible.
Yet Luther also stands as a warning that, in our zeal for God’s grace and to give him all the glory in salvation, we must beware of allowing our imaginations and our rhetoric to run away with us. The way in which Luther seems to delight in Bondage of the Will in emphasizing the dramatic opposition between the revealed God and the hidden God has the ironic and unfortunate consequence of undermining the very thing he wishes to establish: assurance built on the revelation of God as gracious in the Lord Jesus Christ. Certainly, this is a distinction that was well established in theology by Luther’s time and that was also picked up by the Reformed. But to present one of the most difficult elements of the doctrine as if it were the most important part of it is problematic. The doctrine guards the mystery of God. It is therefore one thing to acknowledge that there are depths to God’s being that we, as finite creatures, can never fathom; it is quite another for Luther to revel in setting those depths in such stark contrast to his revelation that God appears to contradict himself in a profound and fundamental way. Preachers of grace must operate with a firm confidence in who God has shown himself to be and an appropriate modesty concerning those things which he has chosen to keep hidden.
1. For the life of Luther, see Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (London: Forgotten Books, 2012); Martin E. Marty, Martin Luther: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2004). At a more scholarly but still accessible level, see Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and Devil, trans. E. Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Scott H. Hendrix, Martin Luther: Visionary Reformer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). The best introduction to his theology is Robert Kolb, Martin Luther: Confessor of the Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
2. LW 33:294.
3. For a treatment of Luther on justification by faith alone, see Schreiner, Faith Alone, 37–53.
4. For an excellent discussion of the book’s origins, argument, and influence, see Robert Kolb, Bound Choice, Election, and Wittenberg Theological Method: From Martin Luther to the Formula of Concord (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005). For Luther on the clarity of Scripture, especially as expressed in Bondage of the Will, see Mark D. Thompson, A Sure Ground on Which to Stand: The Relation of Authority and Interpretive Method in Luther’s Approach to Scripture (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007).
5. The most recent scholarly example of this is Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2012).
6. The Latin phrase was facienti quod in se est, Deus gratiam non denegat (“to the one who does what is in him, God will not deny grace”).
7. The standard discussion of Biel’s theology and the via moderna remains the classic 1963 work by Heiko A. Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001).
8. On the history of the text, see LW 25:xii–xiii.
9. LW 25:49.
10. LW 25:312.
11. LW 25:191–92.
12. LW 31:9–16.
13. LW 31:25.
14. LW 31:40.
15. LW 31:50.
16. “19. That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened [Rom 1:20]. “20. He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross. “21. A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is” (LW 31:40).
17. 1 Cor 1:18–25.
18. 2 Cor 5:16–21.
19. LW 31:41.
20. This is from The Freedom of the Christian Man (LW 31:351).
21. LW 33:281–82.
22. One of the interesting things about Luther is that he clearly understands the Reformation as a recapitulation of the earlier struggle against Pelagianism. There are certainly affinities between the two, especially when we remember that Luther was initially taught by advocates of Gabriel Biel’s pactum theology. Their softer view of human depravity and the will was arguably semi-Pelagian at least. But the struggle at the Reformation over justification is really a struggle over the instrumentality of justification and the manner in which the righteousness of Christ was applied to the believer. That was not the point at issue in the Pelagian controversy of Augustine’s day.
23. LW 33:189.
24. “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 men, and no man 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 faithful 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 to snatch me from him” (LW 33:288–89).
25. LW 33:138–40.
26. LW 33:140.
27. LW 33:62–63.