is determined to rule. But it rules without the cross, and that is the strongest proof by which I overcome it. … Without the cross, without suffering, the faithful city is become a harlot, and the true kingdom of Antichrist incarnate.[652]
He concludes, congratulating himself upon his having given Holy Scripture its rights.
Scripture is “full” of the doctrine on grace described above, but for at least three hundred years no writer has taken pity upon grace and written in its defence, on the contrary all have written against it. “Minds have now become so dulled by their habitual delusion that I see no one who is able to oppose us on the ground of Holy Scripture. We need an Esdras to bring forth the Bible again, for [the Popish] Nabuchodonosor has trampled it under foot to such an extent that no trace of even one syllable remains.”[653] He is grateful for the cheering “revival of the study of Greek and Hebrew throughout the world,” and is glad to think that he has turned this to good account in his biblical labours. With this consolation he writes his final “Amen” at the end of this curious document on the religion of the captive will.
Since Luther in the above “Assertio” against the Bull of condemnation sets up Scripture as the sole foundation of theology—he could not well do otherwise, seeing that he had rejected all external ecclesiastical authority—we might have anticipated that, in the application of his newly proclaimed principle of the Bible only, he would have taken pains to demonstrate its advantages in this work on free-will by the exercise of some caution in his exegesis. It is true that he declares, when defending the theory of the Bible only: “Whoever seeks primarily and solely the teaching of God’s Word, upon him the spirit of God will come down and expel our spirit so that we shall arrive at theological truth without fail.” “I will not expound the Scripture by my own spirit, or by the spirit of any man, but will interpret it merely by itself and according to its own spirit.”[654] And again: It often happens that circumstances and a mysterious, incomprehensible impulse will give to one man a right understanding such as is hidden from the industry of others.[655] Yet when, on the basis of the Bible only, he attempts to “overthrow his papistical opponents at the first onslaught,”[656] he brings forward texts which no one, not even Luther’s best friend, could regard as having any bearing on the subject.
He quotes, for instance, the passage where the believer is likened to the branch of the vine which must remain engrafted on Christ the true vine, in order to escape the fire of hell, and finds therein a proof of his own view, that grace completely evacuates the will, a proof so strong that he exclaims: “You speak with the voice of a harlot, O most holy Vicar of Christ, in thus contradicting your Master who speaks of the vine.”[657] Another example. In Proverbs xvi. it is written: “It is the part of man to prepare the soul and of the Lord to govern the tongue,” hence man, reasons Luther, who cannot even control his tongue, has no free-will to do what is good.[658] There too we read: “The heart of man disposeth his way, but the Lord must direct his steps,” and further on: “As the divisions of water, the heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord, whithersoever He will He shall turn it.” After adducing these texts, which merely emphasise the general Providence of God, Luther thinks he is justified in demanding: “Where then is free-will? It is a pure creation of fancy.”[659]
The saying of the clay and the potter (Isa. lxiv. 8) which manifestly alludes to the Creation and expresses man’s consequent state of dependence, he refers without more ado, both here and also later, to a continuous, purely passive relationship to God which entirely excludes free-will.[660] When Christ says (Matt. xxiii. 37; Luke xiii. 34) that He wished to gather the children of Jerusalem like a hen under His wings, but that they would not (καὶ οὐκ ἠθελήσατε), Luther takes this as meaning: They could not; they did not wish to, simply because they did not possess that free-will which his foes believe in. It might however be said, he thinks, that Christ only “spoke there in human fashion” of the willingness of Jerusalem, i.e. “merely according to man’s mode of speech,” just as Scripture, for the sake of the simple, frequently speaks of God as though He were a man.[661] It is plain from his explanation that Luther, as an eminent Protestant and theologian says, “was seeking to escape from the testimony to the Divine Will that all men be saved.”[662]
The best text against the hated free-will appeared to him to be Ephesians ii. 3, where St. Paul deals with original sin and its ethical consequences. “We were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.” “There is not,” so he assures his readers, a “clearer, more concise and striking testimony in the Bible against free-will”; “for if all by reason of their nature are children of wrath, then free-will is also a child of wrath,”[663] etc.
He handled Scripture as an executioner would handle a criminal. All unconsciously he was ever doing violence to the words of the Bible. We naturally wonder whether in the whole history of exegesis such twisting of the sense of the Bible had ever before been perpetrated. Yet we find these interpretations in the very pages where Luther first exposed his programme of the Bible only, and declared that he at least would expound the Word of God according to its own sense, according to the “Spirit of God,” and setting aside all personal prejudice. The old interpretation, on the other hand, which was to be found in the book of Lyra, with which Luther was acquainted, gave the correct meaning retained among scholars to our own day, not merely of the texts already quoted, but of many other striking passages alleged by Luther then or afterwards against free-will.
Luther proceeds rather more cautiously in the German edition of the “Assertio,” which speedily followed the Latin.
It deals with the denial of free-will at considerably less length. Perhaps, as was often the case with him, after he had recovered from the first excitement caused by the condemnation of the articles, he may have been sobered, or perhaps he was reluctant to let loose all the glaring and disquieting theses of the “Assertio” in the wide circle of his German readers, whom they might have startled and whose fidelity to his cause was at that time, after the sentence of outlawry, such a vital matter to him. In later editions of the Latin text some of his sayings were softened even during his lifetime so as to avoid giving offence.
Luther had been careful in the “Assertio,” just as he had been in his previous treatment of the subject, not to take into consideration the consequences involved by his denial of free-will; that, for instance, it follows that it is not man who actually does what is evil, but rather God who works in him, and that many were condemned merely on account of the necessity of sinning imposed upon them by God. Of this he has as yet nothing to say, though he was, shortly after, to make an attempt to obviate the difficulties.
In his translation of the Bible, in 1522, he had to render the passage of the First Epistle to Timothy (ii. 4): “God will have all men to be saved (σωθῆναι, ‘salvos fieri’) and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” This he translated: “God wills that all be assisted.” He sought to escape the doctrine of the Divine Will for the salvation of all men, by attributing to the principal word a “comprehensive and somewhat indefinite sense,” for that “all be assisted” may only mean, that all are to be preached to, prayed for, or assisted by fraternal charity.[664]
In a letter written at that time he even declares, that the Apostle says nothing more than that “it was God’s will that we should pray for all classes, preach the truth and be helpful to everyone, both bodily and spiritually”; that it did not follow from this that God called all men to salvation.[665] “And even though many other passages should be brought forward, yet all must be understood in this sense, otherwise the Divine Providence [i.e. prevision, predestination] and election from all eternity would mean nothing at all, whereas St. Paul insists very strongly upon this.”[666] Thus his own interpretation of Paul, the wholly subjective interpretation which he thought he had received through an interior revelation, was to govern the Bible as a rule admitting of no exception; it was, for instance, to elucidate for him the Epistles of Peter. In a sermon delivered about February, 1523, on the Second Epistle of Peter, he says of the passage: “The Lord is not willing that any should perish, but that all should return to penance,” that this was “one of the verses which might well lead a man to believe this epistle was not written by St. Peter at all,” at any rate, the author here “fell short of the apostolic spirit.”[667]