In preparation for the fifth centenary of the Reformation in 2017, the Vatican and the World Lutheran Federation are preparing a joint document on the course of events in the early sixteenth century. The Humboldt University in Berlin is also building up to the centenary with lectures and discussions. I was honored to take part in a disputatio with Professor Notger Slencka, a foremost connoisseur of Luther’s work, under the auspices of the Romano Guardini foundation, on May 7, 2012, in which I took the side of Erasmus as we re-argued the famous discussion on free will between the Humanist and the Reformer.
The epoch of the Renaissance and the Reformation sought to overcome scholastic metaphysics by a return to the sources, a purification of language, and a new encounter with the realities of human experience and biblical revelation. Overcoming metaphysics in theology means protecting the biblical language and the biblical phenomena against the insidious falsification brought about by metaphysical habits of thought. The late scholasticism that both Luther and Erasmus resisted lives on today in the USA among analytical philosophers of religion who believe that it is the sole business of theology of puzzles over metaphysical riddles such as a the apparent incompatibility between divine simplicity and the multiplicity of divine attributes and actions, or between divine omnipotence and the existence of evil, or between divine foreknowledge and predestination and the reality of free will. These philosophers think that modern theology has lost its intellectual grip through its strategy of avoiding these hard problems.
Thanks to the Reformation and to historical biblical scholarship, theology today is more richly based in Scripture than was the case in the Middle Ages. Before getting caught up in metaphysical conundrums, theologians test them against the biblical vision of God and the world. They discern that the God of analytical neoscholastic philosophy is very remote from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the living, saving God presented in church preaching. The analytical debate about God is a factory for producing refined philosophical concepts and arguments, but its value for Christian theology remains slight.
In his Ratio verae theologiae (1519), Erasmus taught that Scripture contains all Christian doctrine and dogmas. He influenced his fellow humanist and Luther’s comrade in arms, Philip Melanchthon, who in his Loci communes (1521) sought to draw all the essential theological truths from an exegesis of the Epistle to the Romans. Erasmus felt he stood on solid ground, then, when he challenged Luther’s denial of free will exclusively on the basis of biblical texts, in his Diatribe de Libero Arbitrio (Discussion on the freedom of the will) in 1524. Luther’s powerful riposte, in De Servo Arbitrio (On the bondage of the will) in 1525, showed that he understood the return to the Bible in a far more radical sense than Erasmus did. A truly biblical view of God and humanity, he showed, would overthrow not only the scholastics but also the quiet humanistic reasonableness of Erasmus. Luther finds Erasmus to be radically defective as a theologian, due to a lack of existential authenticity, and an evasive and diluting attitude to the claim of the biblical word.
Both Luther and Erasmus thought that they had left scholastic metaphysics behind, but both of them reached back to scholastic distinctions in the course of their discussion. Paradoxically, Luther, the scorner of philosophy, uses starkly metaphysical arguments to bolster his biblical case. His deep sense of human weakness and divine power leads him to adopt a primitive metaphysical determinism that both reflects and reinforces a deeply problematic aspect of his thinking. Defenders of De Servo Arbitrio try to play down this metaphysics and the extremism it reflects, focusing instead on Luther’s witness to biblical realities.
Luther himself saw this text, along with the Commentary on Galatians (1531/1535), as his most important work, so the stakes are high. Luther was certainly a great witness to the Gospel and offered the Church a priceless treasure in his doctrine of Justification. But there is also a dark and unwholesome side to his thought, and it is on display in this classic text. I shall formulate three criticisms of his metaphysical utterances: they override the dignity of human freedom; they imply a fatalistic, deterministic view of reality; they project a monstrous image of God.
The Dignity of Human Freedom
Erasmus is usually seen as a great loser in the history of theology, yet today his tolerance and humanism seem a blessed oasis amid the violence and fanaticism of the sixteenth century. Luther’s reaction to Erasmus’s mild and modest intervention augured ill: ‘I will kill the Satan with my feather, as I killed Münzer, whose blood lies at my throat.’ Erasmus was doomed to lose, for the age of humanistic reason was ceding to one of sectarian absolutism. His very long reply to De Servo Arbitrio, the Hyperaspistes or ‘Shield,’ has received shamefully little attention.
Some claim that Luther detected in Erasmus a champion of what was to be the great heresy of the modern world, a proud emphasis on human autonomy. In reality there is nothing revolutionary about Erasmus’s recognition of ‘a power of human willing, through with man can turn to that which leads to eternal salvation or can turn away from it’ (Ausgewählte Werke, Darmstadt = AW IV, 37). This is little more than a quotation from Origen, who in the third century defended free will against a Gnostic determinism based on inborn ‘evil natures’ (De Principiis III, 1, 18). For revolutionary modernity in this period, one should look rather to Pico della Mirandola, who sees humans as created without fixed identity, called to be self-shapers and self-surpassers, an ideal that recurs in Fichte and Sartre. Schleiermacher is a follower of Luther when he objects to Fichte that there is no unconditional sense of freedom, but that freedom is always subordinate to a sense of unconditional dependence (on God).
Luther might score valid points against the modern absolutization of freedom-from at the expense of freedom-for. Nonetheless, what Luther saw as heresy is the orthodoxy of the modern world. ‘Man is born free,’ wrote Rousseau in 1762 (The Social Contract), ‘and everywhere he is in chains’—chains he can break. Who remembers Archbishop Christophe Beaumont and Cardinal Gerbil, defenders of Original Sin against Rousseau? Who would wish to return of Bossuet’s view that ‘all men are born subjects’? We have embraced the credo that ‘all men are created equal,’ with rights to ‘Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ (Declaration of Independence, 1776). The inviolability of human freedom is a central theme of Christian preaching today. There is no stepping back to a pre-modern mentality of subservience.
How did Luther understand the words: ‘For freedom Christ has set us free’ (Gal 5:1)? ‘It is freedom from the Law, sins, death, from the power of the devil, the wrath of God, the last judgment,’ and all other freedoms are but droplets in comparison with ‘the majesty of theological freedom’ (Weimarer Ausgabe = WA 40/II, 3). This freedom is negatively defined, in relation to fear that is overcome, and in strict distinction from ‘freedom of the flesh’ and ‘political freedom.’ In the De Servo Arbitrio we do not hear much even about this negative freedom. Luther had found warmer tones in On the Freedom of a Christian (1520), but in the year of the Peasants’ Revolt, in which he had played a grisly role, he was no longer so freedom-friendly.
An enslaved will, moved by grace as if it were a puppet, would be a travesty of evangelical freedom, ‘the glorious freedom of the children of God’ (Rom 8:21). Erasmus celebrates instead the freed will of the redeemed. He holds that human digntiy and also the dignity of the Holy Spirit require that grace acts only though awakening and empowerment of human freedom. He follows Origen, who saw the multiplicity of human characters and the corresponding multiplicity of divine handlings of the human soul. As souls are innumerable,’ wrote Origen, ‘so are the mores, decisions, movements, drives, desires of each one’ (De Principiis III, 1, 14). He uses Greek philosophical words, êthê, protheseis, kinêmata, hormai, epiboulai, giving them a pluralistic twist. This pluralism of experience is not irreconcilable with the conviction that everything depends on God’s grace, or that justification consists only in believing acceptance of the merits of Christ. Luther, too, seems to respect the dignity of human freedom when he writes: ‘through his spirit we are made slaves and captives (which however is royal freedom), so that we want and gladly do what he wants’ (WA 18, 635). He suggests that just as the sinner is not free to break with sin, so too, as long as the Spirit and grace last, the saint is not free to turn away from God, both are enthralled by their own willing dedication. Unfortunately, there follows immediately the image of the draught animal (iumentum), whom either God or Satan rides, which again undermines human dignity, and also implies a Manichean equilibrium between God and Satan.
According to Erasmus, Origen teaches that ‘whether we turn to salvation or turn away lies in our hand’ (Hyperaspistes II, Opera Omnia, Louvain, X, 1501D). In Origen’s own words: ‘there is placed in us the power to give ourselves either to a praiseworthy or a culpable life’ (De Principiis III, 1, 1). This does suggest an underestimation of the bondage of the will and the power of grace. Elsewhere Origen is anxious to tie election to merits, accrued in past lives, which led St Jerome to characterize him as the father of Pelagianism. But the common Lutheran perception of Erasmus as (at least) a Semi-Pelagian is unfair. Erasmus can cite Augustine with empathy, and he distances himself from his friend St John Fisher, who claimed that man could contribute to his salvation ‘from merely natural powers’ (1480A). He holds that the fallen will was ‘so degraded that it could not recall itself by its own resources to a better course, but having lost liberty was forced to serve sin, to which it voluntarily bound itself’ (AW IV, 40). He explains: ‘I ascribed nothing to free will except that it responds to the grace that knocks, cooperates with the grace that operates, and that it can turn away from both’ (1480B). ‘When I say that free will does some good, I link it with grace; as long as it obeys grace it is happily acted on and acts; when it resists, it merits to be deserted by grace, and when deserted it does only evil acts’ (AW IV, 414-16). Here he presents not a neutral, independent will, which decides sovereignly by itself whether to obey grace or its own vices, addictions, obsessions, and bad habits. The unfreedom of the will lies deeper than these, in the fundamental option by which one’s life is directed. Erasmus does not preach a will that always remains free to choose between the proud, self-centered motivation and the orientation to God’s will and his Kingdom. He sees that the will can be freed from self-bondage only through grace, though he lacks Luther’s concrete feeling for this tragic servitude and for how little we have the power of choice in our own hands.
Luther was shocked that Erasmus referred to the question of the role played by free will in the process of salvation as a matter of superfluous speculation. The genre of the diatribe gave the impression that he wanted to treat the role of free will as a quaestio disputata, in which the Pelagians also were given a respectful hearing. His defense of free will sounds as if it is merely a question of correct, approved opinion, rather than a matter of ultimate concern. Luther found this detachment intolerable. This was not because the Bible had given a clear and unambiguous answer, as Luther wanted to believe, but more because Augustine and the Church had detected and denounced the Pelagian error of giving the primary role in salvation to our free will. Luther’s years as an Augustinian monk and theologian shaped his reception of Scripture. Erasmus must also claim, like Luther, that the Bible gives a clear answer, since the Holy Spirit ‘cannot fight with itself’ (AW IV, 156), and he, too, underestimates the plurality and contradictoriness of the biblical statements.
Luther shows that the sinner is totally enslaved, and he gives to the righteous only a freedom that comes from outside, the freedom of passive obedience, not that of creative cooperation with divine grace. A synergy between human freedom and divine grace in the event of Justification is what he most vigilantly excludes, and perhaps there is no real contradiction on this particular issue between him and Erasmus, Trent, and modern Catholic theology. But that grace works in and through creative human freedom is the best insight of Christian humanism, which Luther, at least in De Servo Arbitrio, holds at a distance. It is true that the text does refer occasionally to cooperation between God and human freedom, but only in a muted and concessive way, emphasizing so massively the asymmetry between the divine and human element, that the latter scarcely attains any vivid profile. Only grudgingly and in subclauses does he use expressions such as ‘whereby the creature cooperates with God who operates’ (18, 753), whereas it is with great rhetorical and existential force that he declares, ‘our freedom is nothing’ (18, 720).
Had Luther made an effort to build on what he and Erasmus had in common, the future of Lutheran and ecumenical theology might have been brighter. Erasmus notes Luther’s concessions, but likewise fails to build on them, preferring to see them as contradictions: Luther said first that free will had only the power to sin, then that ‘it is nothing at all,’ and finally, that ‘as if reborn, free will cooperates with grace in good works and with the aid of grace can do all things’ (1480).
Luther uses weak metaphysical arguments to boost his case. He asks how the will can be free if neither angels nor humans can exist for a moment by their own power (18, 662), as if it were impossible for God to create and sustain free beings. Even Adam and Eve, made in the divine image, had no free will. The Fall is not a loss of free will but a consequence of its absence. Adam and Eve were unhappy that God had given them no power of free decision in regard to their relationship with him. Even the editors of the Weimar edition note that Luther’s claim that Augustine was totally on his side (WA 18, 640) comes to grief here, since Augustine denies the necessity of Adam’s sin. Luther’s thesis of the non-existence of free will is not biblical, and needs to be shored up by metaphysical arguments, which are constructed ad hoc. Erasmus saw that when Luther spoke as a scholastic, in defense of his exaggerations, he had lost the authentic biblical perspective. Later Melanchthon, who remained on good terms with Erasmus to the end, would considerably tone down this radical denial of freedom, and he met no resistance from Luther, who had perhaps realized that the metaphysical claim was not so important or so certain as he had claimed.
Aquinas distinguishes between a necessitas consequentiae and a necessitas consequentis. What God knows from eternity cannot fail to happen, but in the realm of secondary causes contingency and freedom remain real. Luther dismisses this as vain words (WA 56, 382), and indeed it does seem rather feeble. He himself tends to emphasize a stark contrariety between divine power and human freedom. But in scarcely noticeable concessions he seems close to the scholastic distinction in that he denies that God’s predetermination of our acts implies any compulsion (coactio). Yet he also uses deterministic language that seems to deny human freedom altogether, even the normal freedom we enjoy in everyday affairs, which he generally upholds.
Erasmus also speaks contemptuously of the scholastic distinctions: ‘it was wrong to plunge with irreligious curiosity into those recondite, not to say superfluous matters— whether God foreknows something contingently, whether our will effects something in the things that pertain to eternal salvation, or merely undergoes the action of grace’ (AW IV, 12). However he let his colleague Louis Ber persuade him to use the scholastic distinction in defending the freedom of Judas, who contingently, freely betrays Christ, though the act is necessary in view of divine foreknowledge. Luther sees this as a concession to his own view: ‘They are compelled to concede that all things are done by necessity, with the necessitas consequentiae (as they say), but not with the necessitas consequentis. Thus they elude the violence of this question’ (WA 18, 616). He himself denies that Judas suffers any necessitas coactionis, and affirms rather a necessitas immutabilitatis, a necessitas infallibilitatis ad tempus, which does not impinge on Judas’s freedom (720-1). Here again Erasmus might have built on a rough agreement between Luther and himself, but instead he rejects Luther’s proposal as philosophically feeble (X, 1424). In tit for tat style he mocks Luther as a metaphysician in several places, and pounces on his inconsistencies: ‘Judas willingly betrayed the Lord, Luther admits, though he elsewhere teaches that the human will performs nothing either in good or evil’ (1424). What turned Judas from being a faithful apostle into a traitor? Luther would answer, ‘the divinely willed withdrawal of grace.’ Erasmus sees this as ‘a kind of force,’ and insists that ‘Judas could have not taken up the will to betray, or having taken it up he could have put it down again’ (1425). This sounds self-evident, but for Luther it is blasphemy, not only because it underestimates the power of sin to bind the will and the inability of the will to free itself, but because it takes the salvation or damnation of the sinner out of God’s hands. Yet in insisting that Judas is nonetheless not forced, Luther implicitly refers to the same double register that he has denounced as eluding the violence of the question.
When he reached for the weapons of metaphysics to defend grace from the claims of human autonomy, Luther thought he could use them tactically, in the service of the biblical matter, without having to bow to the rigors of classical metaphysical logic. He often imaginatively gives scholastic terminology a surprising new concrete and biblical meaning, but at the price of much inaccuracy and ambiguity. In De Servo Arbitrio his high-handed way with metaphysical terms and arguments boomerangs on him, causing a distortion of his message, which takes on the monstrous appearance of a metaphysical determinism. His true aim was not to profess a metaphysical determinism but to make grace alone the cause of salvation, excluding any contribution from human agency. This sounds like a false problem, solved long ago by Augustine, who saw grace as acting through the free acts whereby sinners are enabled to respond to it. In any case, his metaphysics led Luther into a view of freedom that has little to do with sin or grace. He argues that humans are unfree, not because of sin or the sovereignty of grace, but because God’s infallible foreknowledge entails that all things happen of necessity. The drama of sin and grace is flattened out and becomes one instance of the deterministic character of God’s rule. What led Luther into this unbiblical blind alley?
Can Luther’s philosophical determinism be cleanly separated from his theological concern? ‘Everything we do, everything that happens, even when it seems to us to happen mutably and contingently, in reality happens necessarily and immutably, if one considers God’s will... To happen contingently, however, means... not that the work itself happens contingently, but rather that it happens through a contingent and mutable will, such as is not found in God’ (WA 18, 615-16). Here Luther makes the same kind of distinctions as Boethius and Aquinas, leaving free play to contingency and putting the necessity of the divine will in the background. This ultimate necessity does not seem to affect the foreground realities of freedom and choice at all. Luther could have presented the phenomenology of the enslaved will just as effectively without drawing on it at all.
A short work on free will by the humanist scholar Lorenzo Valla, edited in 1518, had an influence on Luther’s deterministic thinking. Valla finds the medieval harmonization of omnipotence and free will to be shallow, and quotes Romans 9:11-21 to show that the contradiction between them is unsolvable for human thought. ‘God lays no necessity on us, nor does he rob us of freedom of will, when he hardens the one and has mercy on the other, for he does this in great wisdom and holiness. The basis for it, however, he has as it were stored away and hidden in a treasure chamber.’ This is intended as a blow against the metaphysical complacency of Boethius and others who serenely harmonized omnipotence and free will. Humility before the unsearchable divine mystery and trust in Christ is the path that opens up when our thinking is thus left in the lurch by philosophy. Yet Valla’s own account of the abysses of predestination is more a metaphysical construction than a datum of biblical revelation.
Luther praised Valla’s ‘steadfastness and sincere zeal for the Christian faith’ (WA 6, 183). Melanchthon followed Valla in his Loci communes of 1521, in which he sharpened the deterministic ideas he received from Luther, but in the last edition of the Loci he declares that Valla’s rejection of freedom and contingency comes from Stoic philosophy and has no place in the Church. Melanchthon also rejects the ‘Stoic necessity’ of the Geneva theologians, which in Calvin’s eyes meant that Melanchthon had fallen away from biblical thought back into metaphysical rationalism. Justification as a free act of divine mercy is an event that cannot be brought under a philosophical concept. For Calvin, predestination and the eternal divine decree are the seal of the gratuity of this event, but many Lutherans see theorizing about predestination as a falling back into the search for metaphysical grounds. Luther himself, from 1528 on, played down the predestinarian excesses of De Servo Arbitrio. In a sermon of 1540 he says that to think that God does not give blessedness to everyone is despairing or godless. The believer looks to Christ and find in him assurance of divine election. A preaching that undermines this confidence in a skeptical way must be problematic. Karl Barth’s judgment is telling: the thesis on the bondage of the will is not a decision for determinism: ‘that this is not clear in Luther‘s De servo arbitrio is the objection that one cannot fail to make to this famous text, and also to the conceptions of Zwingli and Calvin’ (Kirchliche Dogmatik IV/2:559).
The Hidden God
Luther constructs, behind the phenomena of biblical revelation, a hidden story going on in the wings. He distinguishes between the God who is ‘preached, revealed, presented, and revered by us’ and the God who is ‘not preached, not revealed, not presented, not revered,’ with whom we have no concern (WA 18, 683). In other texts Luther celebrates the ‘joyous exchange,’ whereby Christ takes on our sins to share with us his own righteousness. But as if this good news were merely the surface, he now stresses that we must ‚keep separate the God who stands with us in exchange and sharing, insofar as he is preached and revered, and the God who is not revered and preached, that is, God as he is in his nature and majesty’ (685). We can rise above the preached God, but ‘nothing can rise above the God who is not honored, not preached, as he is in his nature and majesty, but all is under his mighty hand.’ But the Bible does proclaim the divine nature and majesty, and nowhere suggests that there is another way of seeing them. Luther goes on to say that we should not concern ourselves with the hidden divine majesty but only with God as he robes himself in his word. This preached God seeks to take away sin and death but the hidden God ‘neither laments death nor takes it away, but effects life, death and everything whatsoever,’ as a blind, indifferent force. The preached God wants all to be saved, but the hidden God does not intervene to save them, for inscrutable reasons of his own (WA 18, 685-6).
‘God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all’ (1 Jn 1:5). If Luther were to say that this text speaks only of the revealed God, he would be radically undercutting the integrity of biblical revelation much as the ancient Gnostics did. He would probably say, ‘I am obliged to believe that God is light, but when I think of his hidden face, I am tempted by the idea that God is darkness.’ The allegedly hidden face actually impinges forcefully on his imagination in the doctrine of predestination: ‘I myself have more than once been offended by it even unto the depth and abyss of despair’ (WA 18, 719). Only when the light of glory is given to us will we understand ‘how God damns him who is unable by his own powers to do anything other than sin and be culpable’ (785). Meanwhile we walk by faith and must trust, that despite the dark appearances, God is good. ‘This is the supreme degree of faith, to believe him to be clement, who saves so few, damns so many, to believe him to be just, who of his own will made us such as are necessarily to be damned’ (633).
Can this fearful God be really hidden, if we know so much about his activity? And whence do we know it? If from Scripture, then this is the revealed God, not a hidden one. Or we are dealing with a contradiction between two faces of the biblical God. In his struggle with this contradiction, Luther is a hero of faith. But it seems that we are not obliged to imitate this particular brand of heroism. Like Pascal and Kierkegaard he seems to have created unnecessary worries and anxieties for himself. Scripture invites us to dissolve this apparent contradiction. The difference between the good and the wicked in biblical scenes of judgment is always constructed in view of divine justice, and the accent generally falls on the positive side. The hope for universal salvation, strong in contemporary Catholic thinking and also in Barthian theology, has deeper roots than the simple reflection that if few are saved the Redemption was a flop. Belief in a God who reveals himself as an event of light and of love, and who does not lie, and who wishes all men to be saved, must overcome all other images of God that are produced by our anxiety, even if they seem legitimated by the letter of Scripture. In Luther the so-called hidden God overcomes the revealed God, which one might see as a regression to primeval heathen myth.
No doubt the projection of the hidden God is not merely metaphysical speculation, but has deep roots in Luther’s experience, and in the problem of evil. But Manicheanism and Gnosis also emerged from deep existential experience. Augustine faced down Manicheanism with his insistence that everything that is, insofar as it is, is good, and that in consequence evil has no real existence, being merely a deficiency of being. He seems to have lost sight of this wholesome metaphysics in his Anti-Pelagian writings. The phenomenon of God’s hiddenness, as the Bible deals with it, in the darkness of Golgotha, does not point to any other God than the one whose light shines in this darkness. God as judge of sinners hides his gracious face under that of his anger, in what Luther calls the opus alienum dei, as opposed to the opus proprium, the proper work of God, his saving mercy. But there is no fundamental contradiction between the two; the word of the Law and the word of the Gospel reveal the same God.
The bondage of our will is not divinely determined, and texts such as the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart must be interpreted in line with this. They are about the impotence and self-imprisonment of the sinner. As Buddhism and psychoanalysis show, we are all unconsciously in the grip of the Three Poisons, attachment, aversion, and delusion. Where is God to be located in reference to these chains? Not as the one who forges them, but as the one we meet when we meet when we can break through to spiritual freedom, the one enabling that breakthrough. The Law held us bound in impotence and guilt, not with the purpose of keeping us captive forever, but with a view to the Gospel that breaks these chains. Hence it is characterized relatively mildly as a ‘pedagogue’ (Gal 3:23-5).
God is neither directly nor indirectly the cause of sin, Aquinas insists. He is the cause of our election, but ‘the first cause of the lack of grace is from us’ (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 112, a.3, ad 2). There is an asymmetry between election and damnation here, whereas Luther’s God seems to elect or condemn indifferently, with a preference for the latter. In the name of a biblical literalism, Luther overrides a basic principle of Christian ontology, namely, that a good God can never create evil or be responsible for sin. Luther may have felt that in doing so he was overcoming metaphysics in a liberating way, but in reality he instead becomes captive of a bad metaphysics. Confusing evangelical assurance with metaphysical certitude, he accuses anyone who queries his understanding of biblical texts of being a Pelagian and a doubter of divine omnipotence. Any objection to the arbitrariness he ascribes to God is seen not a criticism of himself but as an offense against God or an attempt to replace the active, free, sovereign God of Scripture with the cold and indifferent God of Aristotle. Luther sticks to his rigid metaphysics, to provoke and annoy the minds of those whose dislike of his doctrine is interpreted as a sign of rebellious resentment against God.
The Bible presents a God who is always working for the welfare and salvation of his creatures. Luther succumbs to a bad metaphysics when he probes behind this revelation, seeking its ultimate ground in the hidden depths of the divinity, which may even contradict the revealed, gracious face of God. But when believers think of the ultimate source of revelation, they should follow the lines of the biblical word that point back to the gracious mystery of the loving Father, rather than impose models of divine ineffability and incomprehensibility drawn from Platonism, or worse, from ancient ideas of cruel and inevitable Fate.
The biblical sense of gracious divine mystery may seem vague and soft to the hard-headed philosopher, but in the case of God we are always learning the basic phenomena, and are never ready to overleap them to an ambitious speculation on the workings of the divine mind. Schleiermacher’s location of God as the ‘whence’ of our existence, of whose absolute goodness it would be senseless to doubt, is ultimately saner and more biblical than the image of sinners caught in the hands of an inscrutable, unpredictable, and angry deity. Biblical passages such as Romans 9-11, which nourished so much predestinarian brooding from Augustine on, must be interpreted in this perspective of indubitable divine goodness. Dark pages such as John 8, which suggests that some are predestined by their very nature to be children of the devil, must be put aside, as we learn to know the gracious countenance of God ever better. ‘Scripture is its own interpreter,’ Luther taught; it is also its own corrector.
As always, when one reviews a bitter controversy from church history, one is left wondering if there was any value in the discussion and whether it has not become entirely meaningless today. It is depressing to think that so much ink, not to mention blood, was spilt over such arcane disputes. The best way to salvage something from that past is to focus on the most vibrant and persuasive witness offered by the disputants. Stefan Zweig has done this for Erasmus, in a monograph of 1935, where he upholds Erasmus’ tolerance and humanity over against the barbaric fanaticism of Luther. Karl Barth, known as a critic of Luther, is also his best defender, in that he quotes him two hundred times (often from De Servo Arbitrio) in the first part of the Church Dogmatics, using Luther to light up the experience of encountering the Word of God. For despite his vehemence, misstatements, and exaggerations, Luther did attest to the power of the biblical word, and did draw from it a luminous clarification of the gospel. His tragic vision of human weakness and bondage has enough truth to ensure its perpetual relevance, and his defense of the sovereignty of grace, in the spirit of Augustine, retains its power to free us from the prison of anxious Pelagian efforts at self-justification.
Published in The Japan Mission Journal, June, 2012