The Bondage of the Will

Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. JOHN 8:34

In 1524 the most famous scholar in Europe entered the argument. Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the editor of the Greek New Testament that Luther had used for his translation, had long sympathised with calls for reform, but he disliked Luther’s violence and feared his certainty. Pressed to take a side, he published a Diatribe on Free Will, a courteous, learned and moderate book arguing that human beings retain some small power to turn towards God or away from Him. Luther replied late in 1525 with The Bondage of the Will. It is the longest and fiercest of his theological works, and one of the most important. Late in life, he is remembered as saying that of all his books he would gladly see only this one and his catechism survive.

The heart of the matter

Luther began by thanking Erasmus. Everyone else, he said in effect, had attacked him on side issues — the papacy, purgatory, indulgences. Erasmus alone had gone to the hinge on which everything turns: the question of what the human will can do before God. Luther was right that this is the hinge. If fallen human beings can contribute something, however small, to their own salvation, then salvation is a partnership, and grace is God’s help to our effort. If they cannot, then salvation is wholly God’s work, and grace is everything.

There is none righteous, no, not one: there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. ROMANS 3:10–11

Luther did not deny that people make choices. We choose what to eat, whom to marry, how to work. In the things below us, he granted, we have a real freedom. But in the things of God — in turning to Him, trusting Him, loving Him — the fallen will is not free. It is bound. Not bound by force, as though we wanted God but were prevented, but bound by its own desires. We do what we want, and what we want, left to ourselves, is not God.

A captive will

Luther’s sermons say the same thing more briefly and warmly. In his sermon on the appearing of the grace of God, commenting on Paul’s words that Christ gave Himself to redeem us, he reasons simply: if Christ came to redeem us, we must have been captives.

“If we claim there is aught in us not bound in sin, we disparage the grace whereby, according to the Gospel, we are redeemed.”

And in the same sermon, looking at human reluctance to face the day of judgement, he asks pointedly: “Where, then, does human nature stand? where reason? where the free-will so much extolled as inclined to and potent for good?”

And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins. EPHESIANS 2:1

In The Bondage of the Will Luther uses a vivid, and much-debated, picture. The human will, he says, is like a beast of burden standing between two riders. If God rides it, it goes where God wills; if Satan rides it, it goes where Satan wills. It cannot choose its rider; the riders contend for it. The picture is meant to show that the will is never neutral, never poised in the middle choosing freely between God and sin. It is always already carried somewhere.

No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day. JOHN 6:44

Why it comforts

To many readers this sounds grim. Luther thought it the most comforting of doctrines. If my salvation depended on my will, he said, I could never be sure of it; amid so many temptations and dangers I would certainly lose it, and even if I did not, I would never know whether I had done enough. But because it depends on God’s will and God’s promise, I can be certain. My perseverance rests not on my strength but on His faithfulness.

For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. PHILIPPIANS 2:13

The bondage of the will also humbles us in the right way. It takes away every ground of boasting. And it teaches us to pray. If I cannot turn my own heart, then I must ask God to turn it. Luther’s whole life of prayer grew from this conviction.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. EZEKIEL 36:26

The hidden and the revealed God

The hardest part of the book comes when Luther faces the question that always follows. If God alone can turn the will, why does He not turn every will? Luther’s answer is to distinguish between God hidden and God revealed. There is, he says, a hidden will of God that we cannot search out, and we must not try. Our business is with God as He has revealed Himself in His Word — above all in Christ, who weeps over Jerusalem and invites all who labour to come to Him. Flee the hidden God, Luther counsels, and run to the God who is preached, clothed in His promises.

The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever. DEUTERONOMY 29:29

Reading it with care

The Bondage of the Will must be read with care. Luther wrote it in the heat of controversy, and he sometimes pressed his language of necessity so hard that he seemed to make God the author of everything that happens in a way Scripture itself does not. His own closest colleague, Philip Melanchthon, later softened his teaching on the will, and the Lutheran churches in their later confession steered carefully between Luther’s sharpest statements and Erasmus’s position. Many devout readers of Scripture, in every tradition, have believed that Luther went too far.

It must also be said that Erasmus had real points. He feared that such teaching would make people careless or despairing, and he loved the moral seriousness of the Gospels. Luther treated him with contempt he did not deserve. But on the main point — that salvation is from first to last the gift of God, and that we contribute nothing to it but the sin from which we need to be saved — Luther stood with Paul and with Augustine.

So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy. ROMANS 9:16

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Where do you still quietly believe that your salvation rests partly on your own willingness? Confess it, and thank God that He drew you.

2. If there is someone you long to see turn to Christ, stop trying to argue their will into faith and begin to pray daily that God would give them a new heart.

3. When your own heart feels cold, pray Philippians 2:13, asking God to work in you both to will and to do.

4. If you have been troubled by questions about God’s hidden will, take Luther’s advice: turn from speculation to the Christ of the gospels, and read one of His invitations aloud.

5. Consider how you argue with people you disagree with. Learn from Luther’s strength, but not from his contempt.

A PRAYER

Lord God, I confess that left to myself I would never have sought You, for my will was bound by my own desires.

Thank You that You drew me, quickened me when I was dead, and gave me a new heart.

Keep me from prying into what You have hidden, and hold me fast to what You have revealed in Your Son.

Work in me both to will and to do Your good pleasure, and let all the glory of my salvation be Yours alone. Amen.