Bondage of the Will

His most important works inaugurate the Reformation. Those works are fun to read; he goes for blood. Consider the title alone of one of them: The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. In that essay, Luther draws on the Old Testament narrative to argue that the Pope and his minions in Rome are the equivalent of the Babylonians who captured and enslaved God’s people. Jeremiah seems tame compared to Luther.

Great Writer. Important writer. We can all agree on that.

So, now explain Bondage of the Will.

The thesis is remarkably simple:

If then the prescience and omnipotence of God be granted, it, naturally follows, as an irrefragable consequence that we neither were made by ourselves, nor live by ourselves, nor do anything by ourselves, but by His Omnipotence. And since He at first foreknew that we should be such, and since He has made us such, and moves and rules over us as such, how, I ask, can it be pretended, that there is any liberty in us to do, in any respect, otherwise than He at first foreknew and now proceeds in action!

You have now read the whole argument. The book is 400 pages long, however. What are the other 399.75 pages doing?

Erasmus, the darling of the sophisticated intellectual Renaissance Christians, wrote a book attempting to refute Luther’s views on predestination; in it he argued that people have free will. Luther responded in a stereotypically Lutherian fashion with Bondage of the Will.

The structure of Luther’s book is the following:

Statement 1: Erasmus says verse X (choose 1):

a) proves there is free will, or
b) seems to oppose free will, but really does not.

Statement 2: Erasmus is a fool.

If statement 1 was option a): The verse actually opposes free will as anyone with even a small amount of reading ability and common sense and intelligence will obviously recognize.
If statement 1 was option b): The verse actually opposes free will as any idiot can obviously see.

Repeat. Ad nauseum.

In other words, this is an odd book, to put it mildly. The paragraph quoted above which states the thesis is actually philosophically interesting. In a well-written book, it would be good to add maybe a couple dozen pages of explanation and examples. In what world does anyone need 400 pages of the same?

Luther is like one of those lawyers who just keeps talking and talking until you finally cry out no mas and then he raises his hand in triumph.

This does not make you want to read the book. You may thank me at your leisure.

Setting aside the books stylistic failings, the question of determinism or predestination is, and has been for a very long time, fascinating. Luther isn’t the first to wrestle with this, obviously. Oedipus Rex is entirely about this problem. Homer wrestled with it before Sophocles did. What Luther brings to the table is an argument that Scripture answers the question. Decisively.

Is he right? In one of those ironic moments, we now have a wide swath of philosophers and scientists arguing that free will is dead. If you take a philosophy course these days, you will encounter a whole string of modern arguments that there is no will, that everything you do is done for purely deterministic reasons. Brain imagery suggest that you actually make decisions before your cognitive self is even aware you made them; all our cognitive selves are doing is rationalizing the decisions we have already made.

Luther would have loved these modern arguments. He would say they illustrated his point completely.  (He would not say they proved his point, because Luther was certain that Scripture already proved his point.) The next time you meet someone who believes that free will is done and buried, ask them if they have read Bondage of the Will. When they say they have not, recommend they get a copy because it says exactly the same thing. The walk away merrily.

Is this actually a really important question? Once upon a time, I thought it was. Indeed, I thought it was the single most important question. If you had talked to me during my sophomore year of college and asked what theological problem was the one the Church most needed to instantly resolve, I would have said, “It needs to realize predestination and not free will, is the Truth.” If you had cared enough about me in that conversation to gently chide me, you might have suggested that perhaps the Nature of Christ was a bit more important, but I would have airily dismissed your suggestion with a, “Well, everyone in the Church knows the Truth about Christ; that stuff is child’s play—we need to talk about real theology.”

My undergraduate self was not a very sophisticated thinker. One might even have called me sophomoric.

Over the years, I haven’t really changed my theology on this point all that much. But, I have discovered that it really is a very boring debate. We simply cannot reconcile predestination and human agency. Scripture clearly says God predestined us for adoption as his children. Scripture also clearly indicates the existence of human agency and responsibility for our decisions. It is hard to reconcile those passages cleanly; lots of people have reconciled them, but the fact that there are ever new attempts to reconcile them suggests that nobody is really persuaded that there is not a seeming contradiction.

The problem with all this debate is that it is attempting to reason out something that is, quite possibly, completely beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend. If we can’t understand time (and we can’t), then it is a fairly simple logical step to realize we also can’t understand predestination and human agency. It is one of those mysteries, comprehensible in the mind of God, but not in the human mind.

What then? This makes predestination one of those subjects which often fails to be an interesting subject of conversation because people don’t understand that every conversation is not a debate. If your goal in a conversation about predestination and determinism and free will is to prove your point so that the other party will be convinced by the force of your argument, then the conversation will be rather dull because in the end, this is a matter of faith, not reason. However, if the point of the conversation is to discuss the idea, not to convince people, but just for the simple exchange of ideas on it, then it is an incredibly fascinating conversation.

Problem left as an exercise for the reader: Was I predestined to write the above or was it my decision to do it?