Luther and Erasmus: Human Agency in the Divine Plan

History is full of rebels good and bad, those who fought for unheeded interests and for the liberation of their people. If one were to walk down a hallway lined on either side with statues of the greatest among them, he would walk past the likenesses of Spartacus, Buddha, Cassius, Malcolm X, Hitler, Marx, Gandhi. He would find statues of saints and sinners, of those who died martyrs and those who came to embrace tyranny. Among these statues, one would eventually find one of a German monk of the sixteenth century who rejected the authority of a Roman Church given over to corruption. In his rejection of the Catholic concept of free will, Luther came to face one of the greatest scholars of his time, Desiderius Erasmus and argued furtively against him.

In the Sixteenth Century, the Renaissance was siring sweeping intellectual changes in Italy, and the European world was on the borders of some very real changes. One of these changes hit hard when an unknown junior professor at a small German university named Martin Luther posted the Ninety-Five Theses on the local church door. What began criticizing the morally dubious sale of indulgences set off a wildfire of theological controversy. By the year 1537, “Martin Luther was perhaps the most famous man in Europe. He was 53 and the undisputed leader of Protestantism.” He stood as the mouthpiece in a war against the Church of Rome, which he came to regard as Satan’s instrument that had hijacked the church of God, and, with the aid of the printing press, he had quite a way of gathering followers to his cause.

Luther’s weapon of choice became biblical fundamentalism. This weapon came when Luther received a copy of Desiderius Erasmus’s Greek translation of the New Testament, Novion Instrumentum, in 1516 “and profited by it almost daily. Many of his theological suspicions found confirmation in Erasumus’s Greek New Testament.” Luther, appropriately, held Erasmus in high regard and attempted to win him over to the Lutheran cause.

Erasmus was a famed mind of the era, over the course of his life, accomplished such feats as to have “taught at Cambridge, served as personal tutor to Charles Hapsburg, prince of Spain, grandson of Emperor Maximilian, and the future Holy Roman Emperor, and he had published his first edition of the Greek New Testament, Novum Instrumentum. He was close friends with Thomas More and a treasured dinner guest at the finest tables of Europe.” At least initially, this man regarded as the greatest scholar in Europe approved of Luther’s writing. The two had some sympathies with one another. In agreement with Luther’s position on the sale of indulgences, Erasmus wrote that “if someone admonished us saying, for example, that it would be safer to put more trust in good works than in papal dispensations, one is not condemning his dispensations in any case, but preferring what according to Christ’ s teaching is more reliable.” Despite these similarities, the two men came to a heated theological debate that still divides Christianity to this day.

As it turns out, Erasmus had not read everything of Luther’s theological writings. Once he had read more of it, “he began to have significant misgivings about the totality of Luther’s thought. In that vein, he wrote to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz stating that he believed that Luther was ‘overly rash.’ He also wrote to his Basel printer, Johann Froben encouraging him to stop publishing the works of Luther.” However, he did not desire to enter into open confrontation with Luther, going so far as to attempt total neutrality. A major disagreement fell on the issue of free will. Luther regarded human will as totally subject to the will of God, believing that “there was no righteousness in works outside of those done in faith.” Erasmus, on the other hand, held a different way of looking at the issue. In a commentary on Romans, he states, “some part depends on our own will and effort, although this part is so minor that it seems like nothing at all in comparison with the free kindness of God.” While Luther believed that God executed the entirety of salvation by bringing corrupt humans to do good, Erasmus held to the Catholic belief that God offers salvation and humans must freely accept it. Erasmus only violated his desires for neutrality when, in 1523, Pope Adrian wrote to his old friend, imploring him to rise against the heresies of this wolf in sheep’s clothing, saying “Beloved son, you are a man of great learning. You are the one to refute the heresies of Martin Luther by which innumerable souls are being taken to damnation.” At the request of the pontiff himself, Erasmus penned On the Free Will: A Diatribe, and attacked Luther’s violation of the human spirit.

Luther, needless to say, was quite disappointed in Erasmus’ ultimate allegiance. In response, he wrote On Bound (or Enslaved) Choice, which would later be called The Bondage of the Will when it was first translated into English in 1823. It begins with an ad hominem attack on the quality of Erasmus’ Diatribe, poetically reading, “Compared with it, your book struck me as so cheap and paltry that I felt profoundly sorry for you, defiling as you were your very elegant and ingenious style with such trash, and quite disgusted at the utterly unworthy matter that was being conveyed in such rich ornaments of eloquence, like refuse or ordure being carried in gold and silver vases.” In this, Luther shows a disrespectful contempt for positions not in agreement with his own, perhaps fostered by the sheer size of the Catholic Church and its power compared to his own fledgling movement.

The chief argument he has against free will lies in the very nature of God. In Luther’s eyes, due to God being omniscient and omnipotent, “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?” By the nature of God knowing what will happen in the future, Luther claims that free will is impossible due to it logically requiring a violation of the will of God. He continues, “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 this logic, in God’s infinite wisdom and love, He selects whom he wishes to receive his grace among the throngs of humanity, and they act accordingly, come to faith in Christ, and come to learn God’s ways.

Beyond this, dives into comparisons of their divergent interpretations of biblical texts. In one instance, he quotes Erasmus, “’ You will know them by their fruits,’ says the Lord [Matt. 7:16]. What he means by fruits are works, and he calls them ours. But they are not ours if they all happen by necessity.” (Luther, 82) He attacks the passage through an argument of semantics, arguing, “I ask you, cannot things rightly be said to be ours which we have admittedly not made ourselves but have received from others? Why, then, should not the works be called ours that God had given us through the Spirit? Are we not to call Christ ours because we have not made him but only received him?” In this, Luther claims that a human does not own his works as so much as is related to his works, just as any organ or limb is related to the whole body. These works are simply things we are created with or things we are created to do. Humans have no more choice in them than they do in their eye color.

From there, he attacks the notion of grace from God being a gift we accept rather than enlightenment we are struck with. Erasmus interprets John 1:12, “He gave them the power to become children of God” as “How can power to become children of God be given if there is no freedom in our will?” Luther responds, “John is not speaking of any work of man, either great or small, but of the very renewal and transformation of the old man, who is a child of the devil, into the new man who is a child of God. This man is simply passive (as they say) and does nothing, but becomes something, without qualification.” Conveniently sidestepping the specific word “power” in the passage, Luther makes clear that men do not morally relocate, but they do morally transform. It is rather like a metamorphosis into a saint instead of a path to salvation.

Later, Luther presents the case of Judas, who betrayed Christ, initiating the Crucifixion and the salvation of the world. He writes, “We know that the Father begets willingly and that Judas betrayed Christ by an act of will, but we say this willing was certainly and infallibly going to occur in Judas himself if God knew it.” Luther argues that God preordained Judas’ evil action of betrayal in order for the ultimate saving act could be achieved. He offers this as proof that there is no free will, as God willingly damned the Iscariot to a grave sin for the greater good. Thusly, in Luther’s world, God is essentially a deity writing poetry with human lives, and the lives are no more significant in their functions that the words in a poem. If one line is formed on the sorrow for the sake of contrast, so be it.

Luther’s assertions lay entirely on the notion of God being an independent actor in all things, unrestrained and in absolute control. God cannot be defied, as the nature of God as an omnipotent being will not allow it. It is in severing the divine gift of salvation from the human agency that Luther’s convictions are based around. This is at the very heart of the Protestant Reformation. When one severs human agency from the state of salvation, the idea of an ordained church hierarchy becomes obsolete. It is in this fell swoop that the Lutheran idea of Christianity severs itself from allegiance to the Papacy, the bishops, to centuries of religious tradition taking the forms of penitential rites and feasts. This is what makes Protestantism attractive. It allows religious independence from the human community in exchange for total dependence on the effervescent idea of God.

Bibliography

Luther, Martin. Bondage of the Will from Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, Timothy Lull, and William Rusell, eds. Third ed. Fortress Press, 1989.

Whitford, David M. “Chapter 5: Bondage of the Will” in Luther: A Guide for the Perplexed. London, Continuum Books, 2011.