Bound Choice, Election, and Wittenberg Theological Method: From Martin Luther to the Formula of Concord

By Robert Kolb

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".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781506427102

Robert Kolb

Dr. Robert Kolb ist Professor em. für Systematische Theologie am Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis, USA.

Book preview

Fortress.

INTRODUCTION:

One of the Most Famous Exchanges in Western Intellectual History

Christian faith is entirely extinguished, the promises of God and the whole gospel are completely destroyed, if we teach and believe that it is not for us to know the necessary foreknowledge of God and the necessity of the things that are to come to pass. For this is the one supreme consolation of Christians in all adversities, to know that God does not lie but does all things immutably, and that his will can neither be resisted nor changed nor hindered.[1]

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. No one, he says, shall snatch them out of my hand because my father who has given them to me is greater than all [John 10:28-29]. So it comes about that, if not all, some and indeed many are saved, whereas by the power of free choice none at all would be saved, but all would perish together.[2]

Content and Method in Wittenberg Theology

These assertions can serve as summaries of the argument of the Wittenberg reformer Martin Luther in his classic face-off on the topic of bound choice with Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1525. Luther’s De servo arbitrio addressed a broad range of issues related to the capabilities of the human will and God’s grace toward his sinful human creatures. The Wittenberg reformers presupposed that the almighty Creator had fashioned his human creatures in his image. As creatures they depend on their Creator, and when they rebel against him they are unable to restore themselves to the fulfillment of their humanity. The Creator must re-create them. These axioms formed the framework of the Wittenberg theology, centered as it was on the person of God and on the fundamental questions regarding what it means to be God’s human creature.

Because Luther presupposed that God talks, that he creates and that he concretizes his will by speaking, words — just the right words — were vital for his way of practicing theology. Throughout his life he engaged in ongoing experiments on how best to express his insights into the relationship between God and his human creatures. At times his exegetical work led him to devise new expressions for his biblically based exploration of the teaching of the catholic tradition. As a child of the scholastic system of the medieval university, Luther also resorted to concepts formulated from traditional scholastic philosophical raw material to clarify and defend his teaching. His argument for the absolute necessity of all things, as products of the will of the Creator, is a prime example of this intellectual exercise in De servo arbitrio. The two citations above — the first from its early pages, the second from its conclusion — illustrate his expression of the governing concern which dominates this work and all others from the Wittenberg reformer’s pen.

Before he wrote De servo arbitrio in 1525, Luther had laid down fundamental elements of his understanding of how biblical revelation works in the lives of hearers. In 1518 at Heidelberg, before his Augustinian brothers, he had anchored his theology at the foot of the cross, in a theology that calls a thing what it is, that is, that squarely faces sin and evil because it trusts that God triumphs over them even though the pious mind cannot always grasp how he is working. Indeed, he works under appearances of the opposite, by accomplishing his good will through what seems evil, while human beings seeking the good find themselves entrapped in evil.[3] In On Christian Freedom (1520) he set forth his conviction that both as creatures and as sinners human beings live within limits, bound to God’s design for their humanity, bound in sin and unable to practice that humanity, which centers in trust in the Creator. The reformer sketched his understanding of the doctrine of justification in that treatise and asserted that God frees those in bondage to sin, death, Satan, and the law through Jesus Christ so they might be free to enjoy their humanity — freed to be bound to their neighbor in love.[4] Luther sought to foster trust and dependence on God’s promises, for he believed that God’s Word of promise restores the reality of the harmonious relationship between God and human creatures designed by the Creator in the beginning. He believed that trust in God, revealed in Jesus Christ, constitutes the core and foundation of true human living. Luther sought above all the consolation of the troubled conscience, and he was certain that such consolation comes only through the forgiveness of sins won by Christ in his death and resurrection. In the passages above the reformer singled out the certainty of God’s creative foreknowledge and inalterable decision to save his own chosen people as the basis for his peace. That peace rested firmly on God, specifically on his action in the saving event of Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection and on his action in delivering the benefits of Christ through his re-creating Word.

Luther and his adherents in the next generation expressed their definition of the content of theology in a number of ways that pointed toward new methods of searching Scripture and of proclaiming the life its message offers. In part they grew out of what the reformer had labeled a theologia crucis in 1518. Luther called the theology of the cross our theology in the early 1530s;[5] a few years later the distinction between two dimensions of righteousness won that title.[6] The content of Luther’s refocusing the theological task to the relationship between God and his human creatures generated its own theological method. This method presumed that God actually effects his will through his Word, expressed in oral, written, and sacramental forms. In contrast to a scholastic search for the pure logical statement of the truth that could be objectively analyzed and proven, Luther’s theology of the cross sought ways to bring the seeming foolishness of the message of Christ’s death and resurrection to sinners (1 Cor. 1:18–2:16), so that they might be turned in repentance to the Crucified One. For this theology of the cross was not about suffering but about the Word which comes from Christ’s cross to kill sinners as sinners and to bring them to new life in Christ.[7] This rhythm of the dying and rising of daily repentance was to be accomplished through proper application and distinction of the law of God, which evaluates the sinner’s performance, and the gospel, which bestows forgiveness of sins and life upon the repentant sinner. In contrast to a scholastic presentation of well-argued information, this distinguishing two dimensions of righteousness and two forms of God’s Word compels believers to search for the proper way to drown the sinner and raise up a new creation in Christ (Rom. 6:3-11). Luther believed God’s Word does things. It executes his will. Its bearers or proclaimers are agents of God’s active resolve to restore the relationship with his chosen people that sin has broken. Thus, the practice of the theology forged in Wittenberg under Luther’s leadership required a new method for its fresh conception of God’s Word and how it works.

The question of whether Luther’s Reformation was conservative or radical is sometimes debated, and the answer reflects the focus and concern of the one who formulates it. As with all paradigm shifts, Luther’s view of the church and his understanding of the biblical message contained many older elements. His passing on of the tradition also contained many new perspectives and formulations. Indeed, Luther’s new understanding of faith affected his understanding of God’s grace. His new perspectives on justification reflected specific understandings of God and what it means to be human that departed from the Aristotelian framework and its questions which shaped much of the medieval scholastic theological deliberation. But however such issues of content are evaluated, the reformer’s method of distinguishing law and gospel in order to transform the identity of the sinner into that of a child of God did result in a different constellation to the body of doctrine which he put to use in the life of the church. His understanding of God and of the human creature, as well as his view of sin, required him to hold a series of elements in tension because he believed that to break through those tensions perverted or obscured fundamental components of the biblical message.

Luther, of course, did not think alone. No theologian ever does. He was part of a collegium at the Leucorea, the Graecized name for the university in the town dubbed white mountain. This group embraced Philipp Melanchthon, Johannes Bugenhagen, Justus Jonas, and a half-dozen others in their more or less immediate vicinity during the last quarter-century of Luther’s life.[8] Around them formed a cluster of followers, some of whom had never studied in Wittenberg, that may be called the Wittenberg circle.[9] It was a group with a common commitment to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ and to do so according to a model they adopted and adapted from their mentor. Together they were involved in experimenting with appropriate articulation of the biblical message. They influenced Luther while he lived, and he continued to shape their thought after he had died. But, as is always the case, hearers pass the message on in their own way.

These Wittenberg theologians believed that Christian doctrine does not merely report what is on the mind of God. They believed that doctrine functions, as a tool of God, as his act upon the life of its hearers. Because their practice of theology was shaped both by God’s Word and by the necessity of using it to bring a new generation of sinners to repentance and to bestow the forgiveness of sins upon the repentant, Luther’s adherents formulated new ways of saying what they believed he had passed on to them. Among other means to do this was their use of doctrinal synonyms. Within the body of doctrine, some members or topics can be used to accomplish the same goals or perform the same functions as others. In the treatment of God’s grace and human performance, both the doctrine of the bondage of human choice and the doctrine of God’s unconditional election express the same concern from different angles. In pursuing the goal of assuring believers of their salvation, the promise of God in the means of grace functions somewhat synonymously with the proclamation of God’s eternal choice of his own. Because they had no epistemological theory articulating how presuppositions shaped assertions in their own thought, individuals within the Wittenberg circle too often did not recognize that they shared concerns with their opponents but expressed them in a different manner or with a different topic or doctrine. Thus, the debates among Luther’s and Melanchthon’s followers serve as laboratories for observing how these students had learned to make their theology work. These controversies show the coincidence of the content of the Wittenberg message with its method (for instance, distinguishing law and gospel or formulating the Word to accomplish most effectively on the psychological level what it threatened or promised).

As is always the case, the members of the Wittenberg circle formulated their biblical teaching out of a number of elements, not only Luther’s insights. For instance, neither Luther nor his disciples completely escaped medieval habits of the practice of theology. They did abandon certain questions that had occupied medieval thinkers, and they foreswore the use of much scholastic teaching and method. Furthermore, their humanistic training at Wittenberg led them to attempt to convey their ideas in the best rhetorical style possible and to be concerned about effective communication skills for the sake of the gospel. Their theological education cultivated the ability to distinguish law and gospel properly, for the condemnation of sin and the nurturing of faith in Christ. But some old wineskins still had their appeal, and sometimes the followers of Luther tried to shore up their ideas with Aristotelian patches. In spite of them, however, his students did live with the tension that lay at the heart of Luther’s interpretation of the biblical message.

Controversies over the proper interpretation and best use of Luther’s legacy broke out particularly in the realm of Luther’s most daring reassessment of medieval theology. He struggled to tell as much as he could on the basis of Scripture about God and about the human creature without trespassing the limits placed on rational thinking about the mystery of God and the mystery of humanity. Likewise, he tried to hold himself back from too much explanation of the mystery of how evil can exist since God is almighty and absolutely good and the accompanying mystery of why evil continues in the lives of the baptized, reborn children of God. All Christian systems of thought are compelled to come to terms somehow with these mysteries. All Christian theologians slip into some concessions to harmonize and homogenize the biblical data regarding God the Creator and the human creature, who is also sinner. Wittenberg theology attempted to hold in tension the total responsibility for all things that belongs by definition to the Creator with the limited but complete responsibility he has assigned to his human creatures within their own spheres of activity. God is lord of all, and the human creature is morally bound to carry out the Creator’s will. Wittenberg theology strove to keep these two assertions in a paradoxical tension, emphasizing one or the other in response to specific agendas imposed by their immediate situations. The practical elaboration and application of these axioms took place under the implicit acknowledgment that the nature of the human creature as a creature remains ever a mystery in part, as does the existence of evil, especially its continuation in the life of the baptized, who must struggle against it in a life in which God’s law and his gospel produce daily repentance.

Sorting out those two total responsibilities, God’s and the human creature’s, has led most Christian thinkers to formulations that balance the roles of God and human beings by assigning each a part of an abstract responsibility for order in the universe and peace in human hearts.[10] The Wittenberg theologians had learned from Luther and Melanchthon that trying to find a reasonable balance between God’s actions in behalf of sinners and human attempts to reach out to God could only place burdens on troubled consciences. Their disciples instead attempted to continue maintaining the Wittenberg tension between the two responsibilities, each total, as they addressed the vital human questions regarding who God is and what it means to be human. The distinction of law and gospel allowed them to do so in their preaching even if that art is difficult to execute in practice. This study focuses on their attempts to do so, with primary attention aimed at the ways in which they used (or did not use) one of Luther’s key works on the tension between the two responsibilities, his De servo arbitrio.

The Reception of De servo arbitrio as a Theological Issue

Some individuals have swayed history and shaped cultures by their deeds, others by their words, still others by the contributions of both active careers and persuasive pens. Martin Luther’s acts of confessing his theology publicly in themselves altered opinions and decisions of both the powerful and the peasants, but his Reformation is often viewed as a success because the printing press stood at his disposal, and he learned to exploit it effectively. Thus the assessment of his overall impact (Wirkungsgeschichte) involves in part the study of the impact of specific works he wrote (Rezeptionsgeschichte).

Great books have histories of their own. Some individual publications make such a revolutionary or controversial impression upon contemporaries and succeeding generations that the study of their influence upon others and their use by others can reveal to the historian much about the circumstances and thought of these later scholars as well as the reasons for the author’s significance. John W. O’Malley calls Erasmus’ challenge in 1524 to Luther’s teaching on justification and Luther’s acrid response the next year one of the most famous exchanges in western intellectual history. O’Malley is correct when he observes that the bibliography on the ‘debate’ is immense, though in fact he is not so correct when he adds, almost every book that treats at length of either of the protagonists has something to say about it.[11] That may have been true in the twentieth century but was not in the sixteenth.

Luther himself shared O’Malley’s assessment of the importance of his own work.[12] Many of his contemporaries apparently did not, although his first biographer, Johannes Cochlaeus, his arch-foe, did mention it in his polemical study of Luther’s life, the first longer bibliographical treatment it received.[13] This fact should have propelled Lutheran biographers to defend De servo arbitrio in their biographical apologiae. It did not. Writing in 1565, two decades after his mentor’s death, Johannes Mathesius, the reformer’s former student and most important sixteenth-century biographer, commented on Luther’s activities in the 1520s and 1530s with but one brief mention of conflict between Luther and Erasmus — and then not on their dispute over the human will. Instead, the relatively less important critique of Erasmus’s ecclesiology, which Luther composed in 1534, commanded the biographer’s attention: Meanwhile our Doctor continued to preach faithfully and lecture assiduously at the school; he wrote interpretations of many wonderful psalms, comforted many troubled individuals and cities, and undertook a presentation of his opinion on the explanation of the Creed of Erasmus of Rotterdam, warning everyone of the rude and dangerous man’s writings, as his letter to Amsdorf clearly shows.[14] Although Mathesius presented Luther’s life in detail, he did not report anything of their dispute in the mid-1520s.

That Luther’s colleague and confidant Philipp Melanchthon avoided mention of this conflict in his two biographical sketches soon after Luther’s death is quite understandable; neither his preface to the second volume of Luther’s Latin works nor his public oration at Luther’s death can be categorized as a thorough biographical survey of its subject’s life and thought.[15] That Johannes Sleidan’s account of the state of religion and the republic under Charles V noted only that Luther had reacted to Erasmus’s defense of free choice with De servo arbitrio and offered no details of their dispute or the contents of their works may be explained by Sleidan’s focus on the political events of the entire Reformation.[16] Mathesius was different. His homiletical biography was designed to present the course of events that constituted Luther’s life, including his major literary works, and yet its author ignored De servo arbitrio.

So had Ludwig Rabus when he composed an overview of Luther’s life, particularly of his literary production, a decade earlier (1556). The encounters with Erasmus earned but a very brief mention in Rabus’s treatment of 1524-26, none at all in 1534-35.[17] Rabus corrected this omission in 1572, when he prepared the second edition of his accounts of the lives of those who had given witness to the faith, but the dispute over the bondage of the will still received scant attention. His first mention of their strife fell under the year 1526 (the work appeared, according to our reckoning, in the last part of 1525, which some sixteenth-century Germans would have counted as the beginning of 1526). In a throwaway line, introducing other polemical writings, Rabus explained why the reformer had not gotten around to writing against the Sacramentarians in that year: because he answered the book on the free will by Erasmus of Rotterdam. In 1534, Rabus reported, Luther and Erasmus again exchanged views on the free will, thus failing to note that ecclesiology and not the powers of the will occasioned this exchange.[18] In view of the extensive quotations that fill Rabus’s pages, the absence of excerpts from De servo arbitrio is telling. Either the book had little or no significance for the martyrologist, or he believed its contents would not edify his readers.

Although different in style and purpose from Mathesius’s and Rabus’s works, the twenty-one semiannual paeans Cyriakus Spangenberg preached and published between 1562 and 1573 on the Man of God, Martin Luther could be expected to contain extensive reference to Luther’s dispute with Erasmus, for Spangenberg, a fervent disciple of the reformer, emphasized precisely the positions of De servo arbitrio in his own work.[19] But also in Spangenberg’s homilies, organized around metaphorical descriptions of his mentor, the dispute was seldom mentioned, and the content or argument of De servo arbitrio was not put to use at all.[20]

Two of Luther’s disciples wrote guides to aid students and pastors in their reading of Luther. That of his former student Joachim Mörlin failed to mention De servo arbitrio. Advising his own readers to peruse Luther’s writing diligently, Conrad Porta, pastor in Eisleben, mentioned De servo arbitrio, along with his comments on Psalm 51, as the place to look for Luther’s treatment of original sin and bound choice, but Porta did not make further observations about the work.[21]

Compared to many of Luther’s works, De servo arbitrio initially commanded widespread interest[22] but then utterly disappeared from the market. It appeared in some eight printings within its first year (in influential printing centers, including Nuremberg, Augsburg, Strasbourg, as well as Wittenberg),[23] and thereafter during the sixteenth century, in Lutheran circles, only in the reformer’s collected works. The German translation was issued twice in Wittenberg in 1526 and thereafter only in 1554, apart from the Wittenberg edition of Luther’s works (1553).[24] Actually, De servo arbitrio remained in comparative obscurity for a quarter-millennium. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Calvinists cited it more prominently and favorably than Lutherans, and Lutherans understood the work in the context of the reformer’s own correction of his position in his comments on Genesis 26 some fifteen years later.[25]

In marked contrast to its relative neglect in the period after Luther’s death stands a modern fascination with the work. In the nineteenth century followers and foes alike rediscovered De servo arbitrio, and it became the source of both severe criticism of the reformer’s theology and new insights into the nature of his thought. In fact, many of Luther’s partisans throughout four centuries have not known what to do with his treatment of the bondage of human choice. This not so much reflects on Luther’s argument as it raises at least two other factors. First, many nineteenthand twentieth-century scholars have not had sufficient understanding of the rhetorical and logical principles of scholastic debate to recognize how Luther was constructing his sophisticated argument; many were also insensitive to the ways in which the Wittenberg professor’s pastoral concern for God’s people shaped his use of scholastic methods. But even more, the scholarly lack of clarity over De servo arbitrio indicates how even great minds find themselves trapped within their own presuppositions — what cannot be in their own thought world could not have existed in the context of another, particularly if they admire and make use of a historical figure in ways that contradict that person’s own positions. Albrecht Ritschl could not do better than the judgment that De servo arbitrio is a wretched concoction (unglückliches Machwerk).[26] Some interpreters of Luther have indeed tried to save Luther for their own way of thinking and obligingly have provided a worthy way out of the reformer’s radical statements about God and the human creature in On Bound Choice, straying so far from the mark as to provoke Klaus Schwarzwäller to comment on one author’s attempt: "What some people don’t find in De servo arbitrio!"[27]

Since the appearance of Schwarzwäller’s survey in 1969, a goodly number of studies have continued the search for the real definition of the significance of De servo arbitrio,[28] but no assessment of the earliest influence and use of the work exists. This study endeavors to fill a part of that gap with an investigation of how Luther’s own students and their contemporaries in the quarter-century after his death used De servo arbitrio, particularly in the course of the synergistic controversy within the Wittenberg circle over the freedom of the will and, in the controversy’s later stages, over predestination or God’s election of his own people. The study begins by suggesting an outline of Luther’s views and Melanchthon’s positions on the topics that shaped their disciples’ teaching on the human will and God’s plan for the salvation of sinners. It concludes with an analysis of the solution to these controverted questions attained by the Formula of Concord, the final attempt in the sixteenth century to formulate a definitive definition or interpretation of Luther’s theology for the churches that claimed his name. To assess its answers to the critical questions of that age regarding the human will and God’s gracious choosing of his own people, readers need an orientation to the debates of that period as they were grounded in the thought of Luther and his colleague, Melanchthon. For students and followers synthesized what they had learned from Doctor Luther and the Preceptor, as they called the younger colleague. This study presumes that these two theologians and their disciples struggled to make clear that God, as the creator of all that is and the moving agent of all that happens, exercises total responsibility for everything in his creation, while at the same time they insisted that God has given every human being responsibility for obedience in his or her own sphere of life.

By focusing on the reception of De servo arbitrio, this study will examine the Wittenberg way of practicing theology. The struggles within the Wittenberg circle to express the biblical message regarding the Creator and the human creature illustrate how theologians experiment with expressions for their ideas, employing different terms and doctrinal synonyms in the search for the best way of proclaiming the Christian message, and how they attempt to solve the dilemmas of doing so effectively in different topical locations, sometimes on God’s side, sometimes on the human side. How these factors of content and method were held together in a creative tension within the thought of the Wittenberg circle in the sixteenth century is the story that is presented in these pages.

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WA 18:619.16-21; LW 33:43. ↵

WA 18:783.28-36; LW 33:289. ↵

WA 1:353-74; LW 31:39-70. ↵

WA 7:20-73; LW 31:333-77. ↵

In XV Psalmos graduum, 1532/33 (1540); WA 40.III:193.6-7 and 19-20. ↵

Preface to the lectures on Galatians, 1535; WA 40.I:45.24-27; LW 26:7. ↵

Heidelberg Disputation, WA 1: 350-74; LW 31: 39-70. ↵

See Timothy J. Wengert, Melanchthon and Luther/Luther and Melanchthon, LuJ 66 (1999): 55-88; Hans-Günter Leder, Luthers Beziehungen zu seinen Wittenberger Freunden, in Leben und Werk Martin Luthers von 1526 bis 1546, Festgabe zu seinem 500. Geburtstag, ed. Helmar Junghans (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1983), 1:419 (419-40). ↵

I am using the term Wittenberg circle for all those who demonstrated allegiance to the theology advanced by Luther and Melanchthon as well as their colleagues and successors that grew out of the partnership of these two and their immediate associates in the 1520s-1540s. It includes all those later identified as Gnesio-Lutherans or Philippists as well as some that do not fit into this categorization. These terms themselves, in use since the late eighteenth century for two clearly identifiable but less easily definable parties within the Wittenberg circle, should not lead students of the period to conclude that there were firmly fixed opposing parties. All in the Wittenberg circle stood under the influence of both Luther and Melanchthon. Although the Gnesio-Lutherans opposed some of Melanchthon’s positions, they were all more or less under the influence of his method and many of his teachings. The positions of both parties developed during the quarter-century after Luther’s death. The Philippists underwent significant change around 1570 as the Wittenberg theological faculty turned to Christoph Pezel for leadership, a man who had studied for but one semester with Melanchthon and had never known Luther at all. ↵

I have chosen to apply the term responsibility to both God and human creatures to emphasize the tension within the thought of Luther, Melanchthon, and their students and followers. For the paradox with which they wrestled as they confessed the mystery of God and the mystery of humanity involved the assumption of responsibility for all within his creation that God assumed as he created and thus became the Lord of his creation, as well as the responsibility for the care of his creation that he made an integral part of what it means to be human. Thus, the integrity or wholeness or coherence of human life depends on the exercise of the responsibilities that God has made an integral part of human life. ↵

John W. O’Malley, Erasmus and Luther, Continuity and Discontinuity as Key to Their Conflict, SCJ 5, no. 2 (1974): 47. ↵

WA Br 8:99.7-8 (#3162). ↵

Cochlaeus, Commentaria de actis et scriptis Martini Lvtheri Saxonis, Chronographice, Ex ordine ab Anno Domini M.D.XVII. usque ad Annum M.D.XLVI . . . (Mainz: Franz Behem, 1549), 140-43, 158. ↵

Johannes Mathesius, Historien/Von des Ehrwirdigen in Gott Seligen thewren Manns Gottes/Doctoris Martini Luthers/anfang/lehr/leben vnd sterben . . . (Nuremberg: Heirs of Johann vom Berg and Ulrich Neuber, 1566), CXIXb. Cf. his sermon on the years 1522-25, XXXVIIIb-La, and on 1525, Lb-LXVIIa, which contain no mention of the dispute over the bondage or freedom of choice. See Luther’s letter of Mar. 11, 1534, which Nikolaus von Amsdorf had printed as a brief treatise shortly after Luther had written it to him: WA Br 7:2740 (#2093). In it Luther critically engaged Erasmus’s De sarcienda ecclesiae Concordia deque sedandis opinionum dissidiis (Basel: Hieronymus Froben and Nicolaus Episcopius, 1533). ↵

The texts are found respectively in CR 6:155-70, in which Melanchthon does mention Erasmus’s admiration for Luther along with his wish that the Wittenberger not express himself so sharply (163), and CR 11:726-34, in which Melanchthon cited Erasmus’s praise of Luther (729-30). ↵

Johann Sleidan, De statv religionis et reipvblicae, Carolo Qvinto, Caesare, Commentarij (Strasbourg: Wendelin Rihel, 1555), 59a. Sleidan noted also Erasmus’s earlier appreciation of Luther’s efforts at reform (17a). ↵

Ludwig Rabus, Historien. Der Heyligen Außerwo[e]lten Gottes Zeügen/Bekennern vnnd Martyrern . . . Der vierdte Theyl (Strassburg: Samuel Emmel, 1556), cxlixb-cla; cf. clxxxv. ↵

Ludwig Rabus, Historien der Martyrer/Ander Theil . . . (Strassburg: Johann Rihel, 1572), 167a, 183a. ↵

See chap. VI, pp. 198-220, below. ↵

The sermons were initially printed soon after they were preached, but were all gathered together and published as Theander Lutherus. Von des werthen Gottes Manne Doctor Martin Luthers Geistlicher Haushaltung vnd Ritterschafft . . . (Ursel: Nicolaus Heinrich, 1589). De servo arbitrio is mentioned as the source for Luther’s teaching on the false idea of the free will, 17a, and Erasmus as one of those whom Luther conquered as a spiritual knight, 34b. Erasmus’s praise for Luther’s exegesis of Scripture was cited in the sermon on Luther as an outstanding theologian, 152b. ↵

Porta, Oratio continens adhortationem, ad assidvam Lectionem scriptorum Reuerendi Patris & Praeceptoris nostri D. Martini Lvtheri, vltimi Eliae & Prophetae Germaniae (Jena: Donatus Richtzenhan, 1571), B1b. Cf. Mörlin, Wie die Bu[e]cher vnd Schrifften/des tewren vnd Seligen Manns Gottes D. Martini Lutheri nu[e]tzlich zu lesen . . . (Eisleben: Andreas Petri, 1565). Cf. a similar list in the orientation to learning from Luther presented in the preface of Timotheus Kirchner’s collection of Luther citations arranged by doctrinal topic, Deudscher Thesaurus. Des Hochgelerten weit berumbten vnd thewren Mans D. Mart. Luthers/ Darinnen alle Heubtartickel/Christlicher/Catholischer vnd Apostolischer Lere vnd glaubens erklert vnd ausgelegt . . . (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Schmidt and Hieronymus Feierabent, 1568), A2a-A6a, where De servo arbitrio is recommended along with the Galatians and Genesis commentaries, the sermons on John 14–17, On the Councils and the Church, and Against Hans Wurst.↵

In the years before his death, a more prominent treatise by Luther might be published between three and fifteen times; certain works, such as his catechisms and postils, won far wider circulation; see Robert Kolb, Martin Luther as Prophet, Teacher, and Hero: Images of the Reformer, 1520-1620 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999), 156-59. ↵

WA 18:597-99. ↵

See chap. III below, p. 114. ↵

See his comments on De servo arbitrio in his Genesis lectures,WA 43:457.33–463.17; LW 5:42-50. See Gottfried Adam, Der Streit um die Prädestination im ausgehenden 16. Jahrhundert, eine Untersuchung zu den Entwürfen vom Samuel Huber und Aegidius Hunnius (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1970), 178-79; cf. 40-43, 92-93, 184-85. The very helpful study of Rune Söderlund on the understanding of predestination in Lutheran Orthodoxy, Ex praevisa Fide. Zum Verständnis der Prädestinationslehre in der lutherischen Orthodoxie (Hannover: Lutherisches Verlagshaus, 1983), also reveals no dependence of late-sixteenthand seventeenth-century Lutheran theologians on the work; for example, Johann Gerhard, Loci Theologici, ed. Eduard Preuss (Berlin: Schlawitz, 1863), 2:257 (De libero arbitrio, sec. III), worked to excuse Luther for his doctrine of absolute necessity. The Strasbourg Orthodox Lutheran theologian Sebastian Schmidt edited a commentary on De servo arbitrio to lead readers away from a Calvinist interpretation of the work: Beati Patris Martini Lutheri Liber De servo arbitrio, contra Desid. Erasmum Roterdamum: Cum brevibus Annotationibus, Quibus B. Vir ab accusatione, quasi absolutum Calviniorum, vel durius aliquod Dei decretum in libro ipso statuerit . . . (Strasbourg: Nagel, 1664).

Calvinists in the Palatinate republished the work, De servo arbitrio Martini Lvtheri, ad D. Erasmvm Roterodamvm . . . (Neustadt: Matthaeus Harnisch, 1591), with a preface by Jacob Kimedoncius, professor of theology in Heidelberg. The Calvinist polemicist Abraham Scultetus cited De servo arbitrio as proof that the Calvinists were right and the Lutherans were wrong in his Vitalia, das ist ein christlich und freundlich Reyß-Gespräch . . . (Hanau: Aubrius and Clement, 1618), 77-80. I am grateful to Herman Selderhuis for this reference. Seventy years later, the French theologian resident in the Netherlands, Pierre Jurieau, also cited De servo arbitrio in support of his doctrine of predestination in his De pace inter Protestantes ineunde consultatio. Sive disquisitio Circa quaestiones de gratia quae remorantur unionem Protestantium utriusque confessionis Augustanae & Reformatae . . . (Utrecht: Franciscus Halma, 1688), esp. 208-20. His Lutheran opponent, Samuel von Pufendorf, in his reply to Jurieau, Heiliges Religions-Recht/Darinnen angezeiget wird/in welchen Lehr-Puncten die Protestanten einig sind oder nicht . . . (Frankfurt an der Oder: Johann Völcker, 1696), did not discuss Luther’s work but did remark in passing that we are not pledged to Luther’s words or those of any other teacher (456). I amgrateful to Irene Dingel for these references.

↵

Albrecht Ritschl, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, Bd. 1 (Bonn: Marcus, 1870), 221. ↵

Klaus Schwarzwäller, sibboleth. Die Interpretation von Luthers Schrift de servo arbitrio seit Theodosius Harnack. Ein systematisch-kritischer Überblick (Munich: Kaiser, 1969), 27: Was man nicht alles in Dsa. finden kann. ↵

A bibliography that lists many recent studies is found in Thomas Reinhuber, Kämpfender Glaube. Studien zu Luthers Bekenntnis am Ende von De servo arbitrio (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000), 244-59. ↵

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 God takes the focus of human effort off the neighbor’s need and places it on the actor. Trust in God as the giver of righteousness in relationship to him frees those bound in sin to love other people for the sake of those neighbors, not for the sake of attaining one’s own salvation. Other matters continued to distract Luther in the period after the completion of the lectures, and they were not prepared for publication until 1532.[30] Whether Erasmus noticed that the discussion was being continued is not clear. The reformer also took pen in hand to challenge Erasmus’s suggestion for the restoration of the unity of the church in 1534, and that marked the end of their public exchange.[31]

Whatever he may have thought of Erasmus’s effort, Luther certainly did not regard his own De servo arbitrio as one book among many. He had had time to consider the matter by 1537, when he wrote to Wolfgang Capito that along with his catechism the treatment of bound choice was his best work: none of my works is worth anything except the catechism and De servo arbitrio, he said.[32] He thought so a decade after its appearance, undoubtedly for the same reasons for which he thanked Erasmus in the volume itself. His opponent had focused attention on precisely this vital element of his theology. It is not irreverent, inquisitive, or superfluous, but essentially salutary and necessary for a Christian to find out whether the will does anything or nothing in matters pertaining to eternal salvation. . . . this is the cardinal issue between us, the point on which everything in this controversy turns, he told Erasmus.[33] In concluding the book, he reiterated the point: 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.[34]

The Nature of De servo arbitrio

Several considerations must govern any assessment of this document. Readers must recognize that De servo arbitrio is an occasional work, a polemical work, a somewhat narrowly focused work set in the larger framework of Luther’s thought within its historical development, a work fashioned by Luther’s scholastic rhetorical training, and a work that emerged within the engagement of two great thinkers who did not summarize their entire theological point of view even if modern scholarly attention has focused much attention on their debate.

First, De servo arbitrio was an occasional writing — though certainly not only that.[35] As Schwarzwäller observes, labeling a book an occasional writing does not tell us much about its purpose and context;[36] every occasion is unique. The term occasional writing does not help identify the literary form or method of argument; it does not designate a certain genre. Such publications are responses to a wide variety of specific occasions and situations. Thus, they take on the character of other genres. In Luther’s case, on the basis of his understanding of theology as the proclamation of God’s Word, a great deal of his writing and speaking took on the character of a confession or testimony of his faith, as he described his first Galatians commentary when it appeared in print in 1519.[37] Luther followed Erasmus’s lead in casting their debate in the form of a scholastic disputation, but in that form Luther was not conducting an academic search for truth. In fact, the opening argument of De servo arbitrio points to one fundamental difference between the scholar from Rotterdam and the Wittenberg professor: their understanding of the task of the public teaching of God’s Word. Luther was confessing his faith in this polemical confrontation, and he scorned Erasmus’s praise of skeptical distance over against difficult questions. When God had spoken in Scripture, Luther could not refrain from bold assertion, from a constant adhering, affirming, confessing, maintaining, and an invincible persevering of and in the faith, as he himself defined assertion.[38] Reinhuber calls attention to the broad range of meaning that assertio had gained in late medieval Latin usage and focuses on three aspects that help explain what Luther meant with this term that became so important for his practice of theology. His assertion grew out of and expressed the promise of God, his promise to be at work through the Word that is the Holy Spirit’s instrument. Assertion was for Luther, secondly, his own personal confession of faith, a description of the reality God reveals. Thirdly, it stated a commitment to God’s Word and his action which is designed to deliver the reality of the Word’s working to other people.[39]

Second, to refine the description of this occasional writing, De servo arbitrio is, as Schwarzwäller points out, a polemical occasional writing.[40] That is not merely a judgment regarding its tone but much more regarding its genre. That the assertion of a theological position naturally involves polemic was more obvious to early-sixteenth-century academics than to twenty-first-century readers. In fact, from the Old Testament prophets through the later scholastic theologians, Luther’s predecessors and models had practiced the art of condemning false teaching, for they believed that the content of their message could not be properly understood in many cases if readers did not comprehend its setting and significance in the immediate historical context. That required a clear presentation of what was not meant as well as what was meant, a clear distinction of truth from falsehood. To explain what is not meant by a statement in a specific context clarifies the speaker’s or writer’s point of concern and lessens the possibility of the hearer or reader