Themes of Broken Bonds: Free Will

Photo by Jared Sluyter

Anyone who has parented a small child has, at one point or another, known the abject terror of watching them run through a store without a care in the world, swinging their arms this way and that. With every breath, we fear a collision: that something valuable will be thoughtlessly cast to the floor. Before our mind’s eye pass visions of carefully stacked products cascading toward destruction, one striking another until they become an avalanche of humiliation and expense.

Despite these fears, most children’s exploits result in little substantive damage. But a recent disaster at the Reuben and Edith Hecht Museum in Haifa, Israel is likely to inflame parents’ nightmares anew, for it was there that four-year-old Ariel Geller recently collided with a 3,500-year-old jar. While his mother was momentarily distracted, the Bronze Age artifact was knocked to the floor and shattered.

Fortunately for young Ariel, he will not be spending the rest of his life in prison. The museum invited him back a week later to see the repaired jar, and I suspect they will rethink their policy of leaving certain artifacts within reach of youngsters.

But while news reports stressed the uniqueness of the vase – it is the only one of its kind from a certain geographical area in a certain historical period – earthen vessels are not exactly rarities in antiquities departments. They are, in fact, one of the most common categories of historical objects archaeologists recover for a simple reason: ancient people used them for everything. Oil lamps were made of clay. Bowls were made of clay. Even many of the buildings were made of clay!

Every other material had to be mined (in the case of metal) or hauled (in the case of wood or stone). Plastics certainly didn’t exist. Clay was the cheapest and most versatile material they knew, and thus even the smallest village anywhere on earth was bound to have a potter.

It therefore should not surprise us that the Christian Scriptures, which come down to us from the ancient world, should prominently feature pottery-related metaphors. Along with agricultural, pastoral, and meteorological symbology, the concept of a potter working a wheel was entirely familiar to our distant ancestors. Therefore, along with sheep, wheat, and grapes, the Bible compares human beings to earthen vessels worked upon the divine wheel.

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The eighteenth chapter of Jeremiah contains the story of the prophet’s visit to the potter’s house. “Arise and go down to the potter’s house,” the Lord tells him, “and there I will announce My words to you.” One there, Jeremiah watches as the potter works clay upon the wheel, then realizes it is spoiled. The potter breaks the clay down again, reforming it into a different vessel “as it pleased the potter to make.”

The Lord minces no words with the prophet. “Can I not, O house of Israel, deal with you as this potter does? … Like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel.” There is therefore a divine right over the nation of Israel to do with them as he wills. However, he does add that if a nation “turns from its evil, I will relent concerning the calamity I planned to bring on it.” And if another nation “does evil in My sight by not obeying My voice, then I will think better of the good with which I had promised to bless it.” Based on these words, it would seem like the clay spoiled in the hand of the potter has only itself to blame, for it represents a people that did not turn from their sins.¹

The prophet Isaiah also used the language of pottery. “You turn things around! / Shall the potter be considered as equal with the clay, / That what is made would say to its maker, ‘He did not make me.’” (Isaiah 29:16) And again the prophet says, “Woe to the one who quarrels with his Maker—An earthenware vessel among the vessels of earth! Will the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you doing?’ Or the thing you are making say, ‘He has no hands’?” (45:9) In these cases, the Lord is again casting judgment based upon the deeds of man, but there is also a sense (as in the Jeremiah passage) that the Creator has a right to deal with his creatures however he sees fit simply because he is their Creator.

It is in the writings of St. Paul that we receive the starkest image of God as a potter at the wheel. The apostle speaks of how God favored Jacob over Esau “though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad.” (Romans 9:11) Simply based upon the Lord’s choice, he had declared, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.” (v. 13) Anticipating his readers’ objections, Paul continues,

“What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there? May it never be! For He says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’ So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, ‘For this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.’ So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires. You will say to me then, ‘Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?’ On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, ‘Why did you make me like this,’ will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use? What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles.” (Romans 9:14-24)

The implications of this passage are staggering if one takes it at face value. Not because of any human actions, decisions, or intentions of the heart, but simply because of God’s free choice, some humans are created as “vessels of mercy” and some as “vessels of wrath.” It is God alone who categorizes the saved and the damned. A substantial portion of humanity is subject to God’s wrath because he chooses for it to be so. Nothing in this passage, when taken at face value, seems to accord with our notions of fairness or justice.

Which is probably why few people have ever taken it at face value.

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Erasmus of Rotterdam spent much of his middle age tracking down Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. When he had received enough to comprise the entire collection of books, he set to work on a new Latin translation more than a millennium after that of St. Jerome became the official version of the Western Church. As he painstakingly translated sentence after sentence, word after word, Erasmus could not help but notice something: Scripture called upon men to repent, and it seemed to assume that they could do so.

This was hardly a new revelation in the history of Christianity. While the Church had held since at least the time of St. Augustine that humans are born with original sin and thus need the assistance of divine grace to perform works of righteousness, it had also taught that the human will cooperated throughout the process, choosing good rather than evil. Erasmus did recognize that Augustine had gone rather far in stressing the necessity of grace, so much so that he left little room at all for human initiative. This was likely part of the reason why Erasmus favored the works of Augustine’s contemporary and frenemy, St. Jerome, in addition to the fact that Jerome had far more respect than Augustine for the Greek language.

To be human was to have free will: this Erasmus believed in his bones. It was, in his opinion, part and parcel of being a rational, thinking agent. Without free will, the commands of Scripture made no sense. Who would call a man to do what he was patently incapable of doing? It would be cruel, barbarous, monstrous! Such a God would be far more worthy of hate than love.

So, when two years after Erasmus’ Greek/Latin New Testament was released, Martin Luther began declaring that free will exists “in name only,” it was naturally alarming.² And when Luther later corrected himself and said that “a fiction,” it grated upon Erasmus’ person.³

Of course, such opinions had been previously mooted, sometimes among Christians but most prominently among the Stoics of ancient Greece who held to absolute determinism, the belief that everything that happens is entirely determined by fate and human beings are in no way free actors. That level of determinism was considered a heresy among Christians, but when Luther said that free will is a fiction, he was not referring to every action taken by a human being, but specifically those things pertaining to eternal salvation.

Even so, Erasmus was thoroughly perturbed. He imagined what would happen if preachers began telling their congregants, “All your actions are out of your control, and nothing you do can earn God’s favor.” Such people would surely behave in an entirely licentious manner! Even if free will was a fiction, it was a necessary fiction, or so Erasmus believed.

This was the way Erasmus viewed his literary debate with Luther: as a fight over whether God’s revelation of himself in Scripture held any weight. For God declared himself a God of love and justice, and neither of those things could be true if Luther’s view was correct, at least not according to any standard definition of the terms. To love another person was to grant them the freedom to choose—thus Erasmus reasoned along with most of modern humanity. But for Luther, the opposite was true.

This issue is central to my forthcoming novels, Broken Bonds and Face to Face. Check back next week for my final article in this series, where I will cut to the heart of how Luther understood human salvation.

Click here to pre-order Broken Bonds for delivery on November 12.

1. The two previous paragraphs quote from Jeremiah 8:1-10 in the 1995 New American Standard Bible, copyright The Lockman Foundation. All biblical quotations in my articles use this translation of the Bible unless otherwise stated.

2. Thesis 13, Heidelberg Disputation of 1518. https://thebookofconcord.org/sources-and-context/heidelberg-disputation/

3. Luther said this in his response to the papal bull “Exsurge Domine,” which was titled “An Assertion of all the Articles of Martin Luther Condemned by the Latest Bull of Leo X.”