Bound Choice, Election, and Wittenberg Theological Method

From Martin Luther to the Formula of Concord

Robert Kolb

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781506427096
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506427102
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Galvanized by Erasmus' teaching on free will, Martin Luther wrote De servo arbitrio, or The Bondage of the Will, insisting that the sinful human will could not turn itself to God. In this first study to investigate the sixteenth-century reception of De servo, Robert Kolb unpacks Luther's theology and recounts his followers' ensuing disputes until their resolution in the Lutheran churches' 1577 Formula of Concord.

CHAPTER I

“None of My Works Is Worth Anything, Except Perhaps De servo arbitrio . . .”: Luther and the Bondage of Human Choice

Erasmus and Luther: A Feud Waiting to Happen

When Martin Luther composed the thirty-sixth article in his Assertion of All Articles in 1521, summarizing his critique of medieval theology as it had developed in the preceding five years, he repeated and retracted a thesis he had asserted three years earlier in Heidelberg:

Free choice after [the fall of Adam into] sin is merely a term, and when [such choosing] does what it is able to do [facit, quod inse est], it commits moral sin. . . . So it is necessary to retract this article. For I was wrong in saying that free choice before grace is a reality only in name. I should have said simply: free choice is in reality a fiction, or a term without reality. For no one has it in his power to think a good or bad thought, but everything (as Wyclif’s article condemned at Constance rightly teaches) happens by absolute necessity.^[1]

As early as 1516 the Wittenberg professor had wrestled with the problem of justifying himself in God’s sight through the strength of his own will, and that struggle had led him to the conclusion, as he would later comment, that by his own understanding or strength he could not believe in Jesus Christ or come to him.^[2] In theses prepared for the promotion of Bernhard Bernardi in 1516, Luther had asserted that apart from the gift of God’s grace there can be no freedom for human beings, while at the same time he insisted that grace does not coerce the will.^[3] Already at this point he was making every effort to hold to God’s total responsibility for the salvation of sinners, to present God as the only agent of human salvation, and at the same time to preserve the integrity of human beings as creatures of God by insisting that they must be obedient creatures, exercising full responsibility for those tasks God entrusts to them.

The junior professor from Wittenberg did not invent the issue of the freedom of the will; it was, in the words of Karl Zickendraht, “in the air”^[4] when in 1521 he placed it toward the end of the Assertion, his digest of his own public teaching. The forthright simplicity of such radical statements seems to indicate that Luther was already convinced of the importance of the concept of the freedom or bondage of the will for the structure of his entire way of thinking. He could not have realized in 1521, however, that he was giving Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam the instrument by which three years later the great humanist would be able to separate himself from the reformer without rejecting his own call for reform.

Erasmus’s declaration of distance between himself and his erstwhile confederate in the efforts for reform occurred in those turbulent days when the currents propelling dreams for remedying the ills of Christendom in head and members were swirling in different directions. Clear concepts of what “Reformation” might mean had not yet crystallized in papally dominated Europe. There were reasons enough for people to have thought that the two intellectuals had common interests. The public debate over curing the church’s ills had not yet clarified the fundamental antagonisms between Erasmus’s program for a traditional reform of morals and institutional life and Luther’s conception of change centered on proper teaching and preaching of the biblical message. In fact, many intellectuals and ecclesiastical leaders knew that the two had corresponded,^[5] had used each other’s materials,^[6] and had criticized the same enemies of what each regarded as good order in the household of God. Therefore, the break between the two which Erasmus solemnly pronounced in his De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio, published in September 1524,^[7] came as something of a surprise in some quarters. In fact, it only confirmed the growing recognition by both men that their fundamental concerns and points of view differed radically.

Already in March 1517 the Wittenberg professor had written his friend Johannes Lang that he was “daily losing pleasure over Erasmus” because the great scholar was concerned with the human more than the divine.^[8] For his part, Erasmus’s pleasure at having in his wider circle this young German instructor in far-off Wittenberg, at the edge of civilization, was fading rapidly. The young monk’s brilliance was beginning to overshadow his own radiance, and this irritated the vain and proud prince of learning. In 1519 he made it clear that his abhorrence of controversy was leading him to worry about Luther’s modus operandi in seeking reform.^[9] He resented the publication of Luther’s “collected works” in 1518 and made such a fuss that printers feared his wrath and set aside plans for a second edition.^[10] The shift of commitment by his followers who were increasingly caught up in Luther’s movement unsettled Erasmus.^[11] Furthermore, he saw many of his own ideals threatened by the message and the manners of the Wittenberger. He feared that both Luther’s radical ideas and his boisterous advocacy of those ideas would alienate the powers and frustrate true reform, as he understood it.

Erasmus did not appreciate Luther’s initial attempt to establish personal contact between the two of them through the mediation of Georg Spalatin, for the younger scholar referred the elder scholar to passages where his Novum Instrumentum, which Luther had been using for his lectures, was in error. Luther had hoped to build a mutually profitable exchange of ideas through scholarly critique; in this case humanist flattery would have been better suited for the intended audience. The theologian was insensitive to the philologist’s prickly pride.^[12] As political pressures grew, Erasmus looked upon Luther with “mounting disquiet” according to Leif Grane.^[13] By 1521 Erasmus knew he could never come to Luther’s support, and both men began anticipating conflict between them.^[14] Having begun to feud publicly with one former ally by responding to Ulrich von Hutten’s provocation in 1523^[15] and increasingly bitter in his comments on other humanist supporters,^[16] Erasmus decided the next year that the time had come when he could not remain on the sidelines in the Luther affair any longer.

Erasmus did not choose the topic of the freedom of choice because it had served as a central point of his theological concern; his modest appraisal of the positive potential of the will was rather a necessary presupposition to his understanding of the practice of the Christian faith through the virtues of the philosophia Christi. Ernst-Wilhelm Kohls’s classic study of his theology, based largely on earlier writings, reveals how relatively seldom the topic of the free will had emerged in his thinking and how he had subjected the will largely to God’s grace, as he would in his Diatribe.^[17] But it is clear that Luther’s intense and adamant emphasis on God’s grace had rankled the older scholar and — within his constellation of theological axioms — jeopardized his passionate promotion of the ethical life. Furthermore, Erasmus’s English friends King Henry VIII and Bishop John Fisher had recently compared Luther’s view of the will to the “Manichaean” — deterministic^[18] — views of the English arch-heretic John Wycliffe; Zickendraht has shown that part of Erasmus’s treatise on the will rests upon Fisher’s writings.^[19] This topic of the freedom of the will enabled the Dutch scholar to address the “Luther question” in a manner that would be faithful to his own principles, would make the desired impression on the Roman Catholics who were pressing him to declare himself on the Luther affair, and would not jeopardize his own call for reform.

When Erasmus dropped the bomb of his Diatribe [Inquiry] or Discourse concerning Free Choice in the fall of 1524, Luther did not react publicly at first, in part because he perceived that Erasmus’s somewhat maladroit attack upon his ideas was expressed in a fashion that would be difficult to rebut without disparaging and deprecating his older and highly respected antagonist.^[20] Luther recognized Erasmus’s attack as a scholastic critique, formed within the thought world of the medieval scholastic process of scholarly exchange, similar to the challenges he had received from Jacob Latomus and others. Erasmus actually had little experience in that world, and his fine humanistic rhetorical thrust did not meet the university standards for skillful logical parrying. Therefore, Luther hesitated to enter the lists against a foe he deemed so ineptly armed. It was not only that: the usual distractions of university life — plus marriage and revolting peasants — during the following year also delayed Luther’s reply. Under pressure from colleagues, particularly Joachim Camerarius, who worked on Luther through his bride,^[21] he finally set pen to paper, and his De servo arbitrio appeared in print on December 31, 1525.

It is usually said that with De servo arbitrio Luther spoke his “last word” to Erasmus,^[22] but that is not true. Apparently Luther did write a letter to his adversary after the appearance of his own work, communicating his reasons for the sharp tone of his criticism, for Erasmus sent an answer on April 11, 1526.^[23] The appearance of the Diatribe had indeed galled the reformer, but his extant correspondence from 1526 is remarkably free of comment on his own reply to it, in contrast to his mention of other works and his dispatch of them to friends.^[24]

Erasmus replied publicly very quickly to Luther’s treatise, working day and night to have the first half of his Protector of the Diatribe [Hyperaspistes diatribae] available at the spring book fair in Frankfurt am Main.^[25] Luther was soon aware of both that work^[26] and also Erasmus’s attempt to quash Luther’s continuation of his attacks, for instance, by trying to enlist Elector John of Saxony for that purpose.^[27] When the second half of the Hyperaspistes appeared, Melanchthon urged moderation, suggesting that Luther not reply directly to Erasmus but treat the issue of the will and free choice in a detached manner.^[28] Indeed, the older Wittenberg colleague had other concerns on his mind as tensions rose with those he called “Sacramentarians” and “Schwärmer”^[29] in 1526 and 1527. Although the Hyperaspistes aroused his ire, he did not express apprehension about the impact these further assaults from Erasmus might have. But he did react. As often happened in his era, the professor took the battle first to the lecture hall, choosing to lecture on Ecclesiastes in the fall semester 1526 and to use its text as the basis for a further critique of Erasmus’s view of “skepticism” and of the freedom of the will. Luther focused in these lectures on the debilitating effect Erasmus’s view of the will’s freedom would have for the exercise of Christian vocation in daily life. Luther emphasized the need for human creatures to exercise responsibility for the part of the world God had placed in their care, on the basis of a firm faith in Christ, anchoring that faith in the mercy and providence of God. To have to strive to will correctly in order to please...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Bibliographical Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “One of the Most Famous Exchanges in Western Intellectual History”
• “None of My Works Is Worth Anything, Except Perhaps De servo arbitrio . . .”: Luther and the Bondage of Human Choice
• Drawing the Spirits in His Path: De servo arbitrio Wins a (Critical) Following
• Luther’s and Melanchthon’s Students Debate the Doctrine of the Freedom of the Will
• Luther’s Students Use De servo arbitrio in Teaching on the Freedom of the Will
• “Pious Explanations of Necessity”: Predestination as Problem in the Wittenberg Circle
• “God Has Predestined Those Who Cannot Be Lost”: The Formulation of the Lutheran Doctrine of Predestination
• The Formula of Concord
• Conclusion: The Wittenberg Circle’s Practice of Theology
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture References