Examining the Heidelberg Disputation - Thesis Thirteen

Free will ain't just a song by Rush

The Fates Gathering in the Stars (detail) by Elihu Vedder

HEAR YE! My newest book, Face to Face: A Novel of the Reformation, the sequel to Broken Bonds, is now available for pre-order for delivery on November 11.

Welcome back to my consideration of some of the key theses from Martin Luther’s 1518 Heidelberg Disputation. Today, will you choose a path that’s clear? Will you choose free will? Or are those just lyrics from a Rush song? Let’s take a look and see.

Thesis 13: Free will, after the fall, exists in name only, and as long as it does what it is able to do, it commits a mortal sin.

Here is another highly controversial assertion: the one Erasmus of Rotterdam would chiefly target in his polemic against Luther’s teaching, On Free Will. But when Luther says free will exists in name only, he means something different from what the ancient Greeks or present-day philosophers usually mean. Therefore, we must begin with a definition of terms.

“Free will” is the ability of human beings to use their reason and choose between different options without external interference. Within the context of Luther’s argument, we should understand it chiefly in terms of moral decisions, i.e. “Do I follow God’s commands or not?” We are not asking whether a person can choose to go to the toilet, put sugar in their tea, or even marry a certain individual. All of those decisions may be subject to greater or lesser external interference, but they are not what Luther has in mind. He is concerned with whether a person can choose Christ.

“The fall” refers to Adam’s sin in the Garden of Eden, through which he and all his descendants became sharers in iniquity and fell under the curse of death. It is the reason human beings are born with original sin, which as I explained in the previous article ensures that all humans have a sinful nature bent in on itself, unable to fulfill the commands of God.

“In name only” means that, while theologians may speak of the human will doing this or that in regard to salvation, it does not have the power to effect salvation. Rather, it is God working in the human being to push the will this way or that which accomplishes salvation. Like a hammer in the hands of a craftsman, the human will is directed by God in whatever way he pleases. The only thing the hammer itself could accomplish in this regard is to be defective, so that it does not produce a good result when swung. If it produces the desired result, it is not because the hammer directed things, but because the craftsman did.

Theologians in the tradition of Luther will talk about the role of the will in salvation, not as a truly active agent, but as a passive instrument wielded by the Almighty. Thus, we find seemingly paradoxical phrases like this one in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: “work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” (Philippians 2:12-13)¹

“What it is able to do” is a phrase pointing back to a saying of theologian Gabriel Biel: “To the one who does what is in him, God will not deny grace.” To do “what is in you” is another way of saying “what you are able to do by your own power.” Luther had encountered Biel’s theology while studying at the University of Erfurt, and much of his theology is a reaction against this strand of late medieval thought.

A “mortal sin” in Roman Catholic understanding is a sin which causes a person to fall away from grace and under divine condemnation. Grace in the Catholic understanding is not simply divine favor or a disposition of God (as Luther would end up arguing), but a substance or power infused into human beings that allows them to follow God’s commands and advance in Christlikeness. Committing a mortal sin causes one to be emptied of grace, whereas a venial sin is so minor, it does not have this effect. Luther would eventually reject both the understanding of grace as a substance and the distinction between venial and mortal sins.

Luther is therefore arguing in thesis thirteen that, due to the fact that all humans are born with original sin and a sinful nature, they are neither free nor able to perform truly righteous acts. The only thing they are able to do by their own power is sin. If they do anything righteous, it is by the power of God as a result of the work of Jesus Christ.

The really controversial bit, which Luther works out further in some of the other theses, is that even seemingly good deeds done by human beings become mortal sins if they are performed for the sake of being justified by God. This assertion seriously rankled Erasmus, who argued passionately that the will maintains some freedom to choose what it truly good.

“For although free choice is damaged by sin, it is nevertheless not extinguished by it. And although it has become so lame in the process that before we receive grace we are more readily inclined toward evil than good, yet it is not altogether cut out, except that the enormity of crimes which have become a kind of second nature so clouds the judgment and overwhelms the freedom of the will that the one seems to be destroyed and the other utterly lost.”²

Free will is damaged by original sin, but not altogether extinguished, according to Erasmus. It is more inclined toward evil than good, but not totally cut out. It only “seems to be destroyed.” Thus, there could be such a thing as a righteous pagan, like the ancient Greek and Roman authors Erasmus loved to study. But Luther says, “Nein!” The so-called free will can only perform evil. A person who is not spiritually resurrected and transformed by Jesus Christ cannot do anything righteous. The things they do that seem to be righteous are actually mortal sins.

Jesus Christ told his disciples that “everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin,” and only “if the Son makes you free” will you be “free indeed.” (John 8:34, 36) Or as St. Paul argues in his Epistle to the Romans, “Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness?” (Romans 6:16) Please appreciate the radicalness of this statement: every human being is a slave. You are either bound to sin or bound to righteousness, to Satan or to God. Whatever you obey is your master.

This does not sit very well with us in the 21^st century liberal democratic West (to the extent that the West is still liberal and democratic). We take great pride in our power of individual choice. We have outlawed slavery and see ourselves as the freest of the free. But St. Paul says we are all slaves on a fundamental level, serving either sin or righteousness. What makes us slaves to righteousness instead of sin is not any decision on our part, but a work of Jesus Christ.

As Paul writes earlier in the same chapter, “For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin.” (Romans 6:5-7) Crucifixion is not something a person does to themselves. It is by definition an act performed upon a person when they are forcibly nailed to a cross. There is no greater expression of passivity, and it is the metaphor Paul chooses to describe our contribution to our own salvation.

Therefore, as slaves to sin, the only thing we are freely able to do is commit mortal sins. Luther uses that term because he believes any sin, however apparently small, damns a person. St. James, never Luther’s most favorite biblical author, even wrote that “whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all.” (James 2:10) Hence, sinners can only sin, and all sins are mortal sins.

Can the will then be called “free”? Luther is willing to grant a small concession here, saying it exists “in name only.” By the time he wrote his response to Erasmus, On Bound Will, he was calling it a fiction. There is no substantive difference between these two things, for as I noted above, “in name only” means that the will is not truly doing anything. It is merely a passive instrument in the hands of God.

If this article is not controversial enough for you, do return next time as I consider another thesis from the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation.

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PUBLISHED ELSEWHERE:

• “The Strange Wedding of Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora” at 1517

• “Happy Anniversary, Martin and Katie Luther: The 500-Year Love Story that Changed History” at Modern Reformation

• A review of David Zahl’s book The Big Relief at Mere Orthodoxy

1. All Scripture quotations are taken from the 1995 New American Standard Bible, copyright The Lockman Foundation.

2. Erasmus, Desiderius. On Free Will in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, trans. and ed. E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969), 51.