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LUTHER’S SWEET SERMON IN THE BONDAGE OF THE WILL
Marney Fritts
Free will is a fallacy.1 Truly fake news. The human free will is a deep fake, but God’s almighty predestinating and electing will is reality. And this is truly good news. But not at first. The question Formula of Concord, Article II: Concerning the Free Will and Human Powers is trying to respond to is the fundamental question of all theology, which is: “whether or not we have a free will”2 in relation to God’s justification, sanctification, and salvation. The answer the Formula writers eventually give is no, but the fact that Melanchthon’s students labelled this article “Concerning the Free Will,” instead of using Luther’s language of the bound will,3 simply demonstrates the existence of the dispute itself. Then, Formula XI: Concerning God’s Eternal Foreknowledge and Election starts out by saying there was “no public, scandalous, widespread conflict among the theologians of the,” Augustana.4 So, none of the Lutheran reformers believed in free will, and there was no widespread scandal over predestination and election. Right.
Now, I have the pleasure and honor to speak to you on these two topics, one of which doesn’t exist, and the other over which there is no notable dispute. And I do this in my office being a seminary professor, teaching people who are going to fill the pulpits. Why on God’s green earth would I agree to do this? Because we sinners believe our own snake oil semi-Pelagian sermons in which we tell ourselves that we are free, even if just a little bit (minimum quiddum = the least thing), when it comes to salvation. Why do this?
Because I, too, was once a seminarian. I, too, was, am, and shall continue to be a beggar. Why do this? Because a professor(s) once, and then repeatedly, gave me a sweet sermon that saved me from my own snake oil of semi-Pelagianism. Why do this? Because God’s necessitating, predestining, electing, almighty will, is the only true comfort for those bound and dead in their sin. Luther says it better, “the Christian’s chief and only comfort in every adversity lies in knowing that God does not lie, but brings all things to pass immutably, and that his will cannot be resisted, altered, or impeded.”5
If theology is for proclamation, and it is, then my thesis is simply this: the theology of the human bound will and God’s predestination and election is for proclamation. Election is to be preached. That is, preaching elects. It even elects seminarians. The bound will then also must be taught, addressed, declared, and confronted. Today I will be taking up this two-sided theological coin of the bondage of the will and election, which Luther often called a “sweet sermon.”6 Preaching on Exodus Luther writes, “This is how the LORD Christ always gets the eyes, thoughts, and hearts of his disciples fixed …on the humanity of Christ... then you will find a sweet sermon about why God hardens pharaoh’s heart and how He handles predestination … He also has the hearts of his enemies in his hand…There is nothing to worry about. Christ and the Father (whom I have) have everything in their hand and power.” The sermon is sweet because it quells God’s wrath against his sinners and leads the slaves out of captivity. When God preaches this sweet sermon, then he becomes sweet to us. He does not deal with us according to the law, with “Christ-less, Spirit-less”7 words. Nor does he leave us in the stench of our speculation. Regarding Isaiah 61:1, “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.” In addition, Luther sprinkles these words, “It is because of his humanity and his incarnation that Christ becomes sweet to us, and through him God becomes sweet to us.”8 You see, the root of offense that stinks to high heaven, is our reoccurring speculation, our unfaith, the attack of the conscience, that comes when we live in terror of God and his disposition toward us. And, as Moses notes, this can be triggered by something so seemingly insignificant as the “rustling of a leaf” (Leviticus 26:36). This terror, this offense taken against the predestining and electing God, is what Luther called the predestination sickness. And we all have it. God, however, is determined to cure you of this. For that, a little apocalypse and a bolus of mercy is required. Christ is coming in his preached word of law and gospel to slay our old, sick selves and raise up new creatures. Christ places you, the new creature of faith, into a lush meadow9 of freedom from the law, sin, death, the haranguing of the devil, to at last be at peace with God.
This terror, this offense taken against the predestining and electing God, is what Luther called the predestination sickness.
Sweet Sermon of Predestination
When Luther preaches on Exodus in 1524 (some ten years after his lectures on Romans), he clearly understands that just the utterance of these words–predestination, election–cause the old sinner to bristle, exposing his bondage. “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren” (Rom. 8:29). Luther writes, “These words—elect, predestined and foreknew—form the central matter of theology because they inevitably lodge in the conscience, and either terrorize or comfort. Everything in this doctrine of predestination, and in life, depends upon whether those words of Paul are taken as speculation or proclamation…Predestination is the doctrine of God’s mercy prior to and beyond any justice according to the law. It is precisely justification apart from the law.”10 This means that teaching predestination to seminary students elicits at least one bristled, scared creature to ask, “Dr. Fritts, I believe all that we are justified by faith alone, and that we are saved by grace, etc., but I have a hard time believing that God elects us without our acceptance and does so by preaching. I just can’t believe we don’t have some say in the matter” or “But we do have to accept it?” or “Can’t we reject it?” Strange question, isn’t it? or “Doesn’t that make God a determinist, which would mean there’s no reason to do anything good, or anything at all, since he controls everything?”
But how one replies to these kinds of offenses and confessions is a matter of life and death – death and life. When Luther preaches on Exodus 7: 3-5, “But I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, Pharaoh will not listen to you. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and bring my hosts, my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great acts of judgment. The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the people of Israel from among them,” Luther immediately identifies the card we keep hidden close to the chest, until we have no choice but to play it: “If God is doing the hardening, then who else can be blamed?”11
Seelsorge of a Seminarian
During my first semester in Luther Seminary in 2000, I was sitting in the Lutheran Confessional Writing’s class during the precept hour on the first level of Gullixson Hall, and Dr. Nestingen and Dr. Forde were answering questions on the Augsburg Confession, specifically the Fourth Article. Dr. Forde once again, expounded on the fact that, “we are justified by faith alone, apart from works of the law.” But I thought I might be able to trap Dr. Forde. So, I raised my hand and he called on me. Loaded for bear, sure and certain that I would land him in the trap he himself had set, I confidently asked, “But isn’t faith our work?”
Now, I have to tell you, that he was slow to respond as he looked up at me, and with a grin that seemed to say, “Thank you. Now who’s caught?” the hunter had become the hunted. In his quiet, gentle, monotone voice he said, “How can it be since you are dead in sin?” At that moment, something particularly biblical happened: I was astonished, yes, but it was more than that. I was apocalypsed, slayed and raised into a lush meadow of freedom and peace - just by a simple sentence. A sweet sermon, which in typical Forde fashion, was brief.
At that moment, something particularly biblical happened: I was astonished, yes, but it was more than that. I was apocalypsed, slayed and raised into a lush meadow of freedom and peacejust by a simple sentence. A sweet sermon, which in typical Forde fashion, was brief.
Faith, Not “Free Will”
The correlate to justification by faith alone apart from works of the law is not just that we lack free-will, but that we are in bondage. This is why our chief doctrine is bristly and why there comes a point, fairly quickly in fact, when free willers are confronted with the radical nature of this teaching. Because Lutherans are the only ones who say “no, not even a little bit,” when it comes our own influence concerning the things of God. Dr. Forde called this desire for a modicum of spiritual free will, the “Christianity of little bits.” For Erasmus, it was minimium quiddam (the least part).12 But these are simply the labels of semi-pelagianism. “The truth of the gospel is that our [justification] comes by faith alone, without works of the law. The falsification or corruption of the gospel is this, that we are justified by faith but not without works of the law.”13 The free will depends upon an uncertain future because it believes that the law is given to instruct it on how it might align itself with God’s will. With just a little bit of striving, and with just a little bit of grace to help along the way, along with some spiritual disciplines, the will can apply itself to the law, becoming more and more like God. In his debate with a full-fledged Pelagian, Augustine argued that not a single soul has ever managed to accomplish this. We have to repeatedly go back to scripture to hear what the purpose of the law is: to reveal sin (Galatians 3:19), not to make us righteous before God. The strength of the law, Paul says, is sin. The strength of the gospel, however, is the creation of faith, ex nihilo, out of nothing. The law brings wrath (Romans 4:15), but the gospel brings peace. Unlike the pipe dream of the free will, faith has a certain future because it is not based on the law and the power of the human will, but upon the necessitating mercy of God in his unthwartable promise. This is the assurance of faith, the plerophorium that we hear about in Colossians 2:2, “to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery, which is Christ,” and in 1 Thessalonians 1:5, “because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full assurance,” and, again, in Hebrews 10:22, “let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” It’s not even with some assurance or occasional assurance, but each time it is full assurance. Because it is based on the promise which comes from Christ’s blood.
Faith is not the work of a so-called free will; the “free will and the Holy Spirit are not identical.”14 Faith is not my gift up to God. This is precisely what Paul is unpacking from Deuteronomy in his letter to the Romans, chapter 10 verses 6-7: “But the righteousness based on faith says, ‘Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ (that is, to bring Christ down) “or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead).” Faith comes from heaven above to earth below, in the form of the Holy Spirit preaching a sweet sermon – the contents of which is the unconditional absolution of sin, on account of Christ and his cross, for you.
Faith is not something like a divine spark within you that needs to be cultivated. This is what Fredrick Schleiermacher suggested is going on. He suggests faith is the “feeling of complete dependence on God.”15 One of the problems with Schleiermacher is that faith is not a feeling, but what Paul calls a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). Feeling may accompany faith from time to time, but it is not merely that nor is it dependent on that. The other problem is that faith for Schleiermacher is a feeling of complete dependence on God, without the external preaching of the sweet sermon. It is a dependence on God, even if one is not sure who this God is. This is problematic because Paul clearly states that faith comes from hearing a sermon on Christ (Romans 10:17).
Nor is faith defined as a “tripartite division of knowledge (notitia), assent (assensus), and trust (fiducia) so that fiducia is the essential quality of regenerative faith, whereby one not only knows of and assents to the universal merit of Christ, but also ‘appropriates His merit to oneself,’”16 as 17th century Lutheran Orthodoxy, exemplified by the theologian Johannes Andreas Quenstedt, would have it. In this view, faith was reduced to epistemology: understanding the correct doctrine and accepting it as true. This understanding puts doctrine where Christ belongs, knowledge where faith belongs, and human assent to doctrine where the descent of God in the sweet absolution belongs. Doctrine is useful for preaching, but it is not, strictly speaking, the content of proclamation. Doctrine does not justify and save, only Christ does.
Desiderius Erasmus believed that faith and salvation are attained through the workings of the free will. Erasmus was chiefly interested, as were all Renaissance Humanists of a specific Mediterranean sort, in “manners and morals, seeking in scripture and other ancient literature the ideal patterns of personal and public life.”17 As a humanist, he approached scripture with two unchecked presuppositions. First, that scripture is unclear and must be clarified by an interpreter. And second, that the Bible is primarily a book of laws, an instruction book for cultivating the moral human creature. Erasmus then proceeds to go through the text, “collecting passages and authorities for and against the issue at hand and then weighing them and totaling up the ‘box score.’ It was kind of a ‘word study’ method…but numbers do not and cannot settle the matter of the free will.”18 Erasmus finds what he thinks are only two passages against free choice, which he labels as “a contemptible little rabble:”19 First, Exodus 9:12, “The Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” and, second, Malachi 1:2-3, “Jacob I have loved, Esau I have hated.”
Erasmus’ clarification of what he believes is the ambiguity of God hardening Pharoah’s heart is a remarkable inversion of what Scripture actually says.
Erasmus reasoned that the human must have a free will since God has given us his law. And if God gave us the law, then we must have a will which can fulfill it. After all, it would be unjust of God to give us a law that we could not obey! For if we cannot keep the law, how can we be responsible for sin? The result of Erasmus’ clarification of what he believes is the ambiguity of God hardening Pharoah’s heart is a remarkable inversion of what Scripture actually says. Luther writes, “When God says: ‘I will harden Pharoah’s heart,’ is ‘thrown topsy-turvy…and taken thus’ ‘Pharoah hardens himself by my longsuffering’! God hardens our hearts means: ‘we harden ourselves while God postpones punishment.’”20 In order to protect free will, Erasmus turns the text inside-out to mean: wrath is when God comes near, here in the present, and imposes his will on us, and mercy is God withdrawing to give time and space to the free will to apply the law correctly, and to repent. In this case, He gives time and space for Pharoah to let God’s people go! Luther draws out the implications of Erasmus’ interpretation:
"Your ‘figures’ will ultimately bring you to the point of saying that God had mercy on the children of Israel when he sent them to Assyria and Babylon because he punished the sinners and invited them to repentance by means of affliction; but when he brought them back again and set them free, he did not then show mercy towards them, but hardened them; that is, he gave them occasion of hardening by his own longsuffering and mercy.
So, too, his sending Christ the Savior into the world will not be called God’s mercy, but God’s hardening, because of this act of mercy he gave men an occasion of hardening. But his destroying of Jerusalem and scattering of the Jews, even to this day, that will be an act of mercy on them, because by punishing those who sin he invites them to repentance!
Furthermore, his carrying his saints into heaven at the day of judgement will be an act, not of mercy, but of hardening, because by his goodness he will give them an occasion of abusing goodness! But he will be showing mercy to the wicked whom he thrusts down to hell, because he is punishing the sinners! Pray tell me, who ever heard of such acts of Divine mercy and wrath as these?"21
This is what happens when we think that God’s will is the law and that we are truly human when we are applying our free will, with a minimum quiddum of grace to that law, and in so doing that we are aligning our will with God’s will. This notion, however, is nothing but hot garbage. It’s not even a steaming pile of manure. That at least would be useful. This is also why I make sure to tell my students that there is nothing more antievangelical than to preach, “Are you ready to meet your maker? Well, if not, now is the time to surrender your life to Christ. Time is running out! Hurry before it is too late!” That is not the gospel, but what comes out of a preacher who is under the curse of the law and the fallacy of the free will and subsequently binds their hearers to their sin and condemnation. It rejects the God who is all in all, who is the almighty and electing God. With this so-called preaching, “God will elect nobody…But if God is robbed of his power and wisdom in election, what will he be but just that idle chance, under whose sway all things happen and randomly? Eventually, we shall come to this: that men may be saved and damned without God’s knowledge!”22 We finally come to the pipedream of the free will theologian: God elects no one, but he is waiting on you to accept or reject his offer.
This is the Christianity of minimum quiddum (little bits), also known as semi-Pelagianism or synergism, which was asserted by Johann Pfeffinger and opposed by Nicolas von Amsdorf in their famous 1558 debate. This dispute over synergism is what Formula II hoped to resolve. Instead of the snake oil of semipelagianism, the muscle of Article II assists preachers in handing over the goods by preaching a sweet sermon:
In spiritual and divine matters, the mind, heart, and will of the unreborn human being can in absolutely no way, on the basis of its own natural powers, understand, believe, accept, consider, will, begin, accomplish, do, effect, or cooperate. Instead, it is completely dead to the good completely corrupted. This means that in this human nature, after the fall and before rebirth, there is not a spark of spiritual power left or present with which human beings can prepare themselves for the grace of God or accept grace as it is offered. Nor are they capable of acting in their own behalf or of applying this grace to themselves or to prepare themselves for it. Nor do they have the ability, on the basis of their own powers, to help, act, effect, or cooperate—completely, halfway, or in the slightest, most insignificant way—in their own conversion; they cannot bring it about or cooperate in it “of ourselves, as coming from us” (2 Corinthians 3:5). Rather they are “the slave of sin” (John 8:34) and prisoners of the devil, by whom they are driven (Ephesians 2:2; 2 Timothy 2:26). Therefore, according to its own perverted character and nature, the natural free will has only the power and ability to do whatever is displeasing and hostile to God.23
In other words, the human will is bound in sin; on its own it does only evil continually (Genesis 6:5). “The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God. They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one” (Psalm 14:2-3). And the chief good which is not accomplished by the human will is faith in Christ and his cross. God himself creates faith in us, while we were yet sinners, by sending his son to die for us and sending us a preacher of the word of Christ, who delivers a sweet sermon, the absolution from our hostility to God and the freedom to enter the lush meadow which is Christ and his righteousness for you. God elects when you hear that sweet sermon, the absolution, extra nos.24 And this is true for the infant being baptized, the seminary student, the seasoned pastor, the convert baptized at fifty-nine, or the believer on his death bed. And this is because faith, justification, and salvation are entirely out of our hands and in God’s hands. “For I believe that I cannot by my own understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him. But the Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, and sanctified and kept me in true faith” (Luther’s explanation of the Third Article of the Apostle’s Creed).
God elects when you hear that sweet sermon, the absolution, extra nos.
God Not Preached is Bitter Death, God Preached is Sweet Freedom
When Luther is writing to Erasmus, he recognizes that Erasmus is not merely his most formidable debate partner, the one who finally focused on the will (the hinge upon which all theology turns),25 but that Erasmus was in need of actual pastoral care, Seelsorge. This was not a mere academic exercise for either of them, but only Luther recognized what was really happening between them. Fortunately, for Erasmus’ sake, and also for ours, Luther realized this and knew what to say. “If I seem too bitter against your Diatribe, you must pardon me. I do not act so out of ill-will; but I was concerned that by the weight of your name you were greatly jeopardizing the cause of Christ… And who can always so govern his pen as not on occasion to show warmth?... we must freely pardon each other.”26 He understood that Erasmus was inflamed with anti-predestination sickness, the disease of the soul when one has been infected with the fallacy of the free will. The only remedy for this disease is this the grace of God in forgiveness, and thus his mention of “freely pardoning” one another. But that’s not all, for Luther sought to fully cure Erasmus’ soul. Very early on for Luther, in his commentary on Romans, he identifies the key tool for the preacher, professor, and fellow Christian in the cure of a soul: an ear that hears the creature waiting. When Luther comments on Roman 8:19 (“For the expectation of the creature waits for the revelation of the sons of God,” Luther’s translation), he pauses to point out that, “The apostle… does not speak of the ‘essence’ of the creature, and of the way it ‘operates,’ or of its ‘action’ or ‘inaction,’ and ‘motion,’ but using a new and strange theological word, he speaks of ‘the expectation of the creature.’ By virtue of the fact that his soul has the power of hearing the creature waiting, he no longer directs his inquiry toward the creature as such but to what it waits for.”27
Erasmus was caught in the death spiral that is a result of life without a preacher of Christ. He was steeped in a world of abstractions and generalizations about predestination and blinded by his speculation on what God was doing with scripture. For him, God was not preached, and it was a bitter death for him, not least of which because he believed himself to be alive and well. In one of the most famous observations in in Luther’s response to Erasmus, he shines a bright light into the grave of the free will theologian, “Scripture sets before us a man who is not only bound, wretched, captive, sick and dead, but who, through the operation of Satan his lord, adds to his other miseries that of blindness, so that he believes himself to be free, happy, possessed of liberty and ability, whole and alive.”28 Luther’s pastoral cause for concern in Erasmus was that he identified this double malady of bondage and blindness within him, so much so, that he knew he had to deliver the God preached goods which would lead Erasmus out of bitter death to sweet freedom and life. He sprinkles Erasmus with the blood of Christ29 as we hear in Isaiah 52:13 and Hebrews 12:24 because it “speaks a better word than the blood of Abel,” because it is not a curse but a promise which brings the age-old curse to an end. An immutable, almighty, predestining promise.
Talk about predestination is, as Luther observed, utterly nauseating and dreadful. But this is because talk about predestination does not accomplish the deed of predestining. To talk about it is only within the realm of speculation, or what Luther calls, God not preached. The old Adam gets hung up on the “pre” portion of God’s destining will and fights against God. “If God predestines before all-time, then why bother trying to obey the law? Why bother going to church? Why bother preaching at all? Isn’t this just determinism?” Dreadful, indeed. The first thing we need to understand is that this is a series of questions from the pit of hell, where the devil roams. He is a liar and a tempter. He is tempting us to despair and unbelief and other great and shameful sins.
Luther’s pastoral cause for concern in Erasmus was that he identified this double malady of bondage and blindness within him, so much so, that he knew he had to deliver the God preached goods which would lead Erasmus out of bitter death to sweet freedom and life.
The second thing we learn from such questions is how much they tempt us. Our human reaction to these and similar questions is to give an answer to the question, “Why?” But here is where we are actually being met with the limit of theology and its answers. An explanation appeals to reason and logic, but it cannot absolve and cast out the devil and rescue us from the pit of hell. For that, something else needs to take place. A doctor may be able to explain why you have the cancer you do, but that explanation does not remove the cancer. Nor does it bring ultimate comfort to the terrorized conscience. For that, a true healer with a different word is needed. The more explanations we receive, the worse we get, just like the woman who suffered for a dozen years with the flow of blood; the more the doctors treated her, the worse she became (Mark 5:26).
Erasmus, in dreadful fear that people might understand that their salvation comes solely through grace rather than also through personal morality, wrote “what a flood gate of iniquity would spread of such news open to people! What wicked man would amend his life? Who would believe that God loved him? Who would fight against his flesh?”30 But in listening to Erasmus’ words, which had intended to trumpet new life, Luther heard only a death rattle. The creature was waiting with great expectation, though unbeknownst to Erasmus it was not going to be an explanation. Rather, an apocalyptic thunderbolt from Christ in heaven, through the mouth of the preacher Luther, would put him out of the misery of his predestination sickness. Luther’s pastoral response would bring an end to Erasmus’ fallacy of the free will, his fear of the electing and predestining God, and instead grant him true Christian freedom. So who can justify himself? Luther wrote, “Nobody! Nobody can! God has no time for your practitioners of self-reformation, for they are hypocrites! The elect will be reformed by the Holy Spirit, the rest will perish unreformed… Who will believe? Nobody! Nobody Can! But the elect shall believe it.”31 Erasmus finally had God’s grace preached to him. This preaching first comes, however, by the law which exposes the root of sin and puts it to death. With Luther’s proclamation, Erasmus’ heart became God’s destination; at once, God’s predestination of Erasmus arrived though God’s electing preacher. The sweet sermon of the sprinkling of the blood reveals what glorious news this is that God rules all things by his immutable electing will. “For if you hesitate to believe, or are too proud to acknowledge that God foreknows and wills all things…how can you believe, trust, and rely on his promises? When he makes promises, you ought to be out of doubt that he knows, and can and will perform, what he promises! … And how can you be sure and certain unless you know that certainly, infallibly, immutably, and necessarily, he knows, wills, and will perform what he promises?”32
The sweet sermon of the sprinkling of the blood reveals what glorious news this is that God rules all things by his immutable electing will.
This is why Luther calls the hardening of pharaoh’s heart a “sweet sermon” for Israel. Because God has even his enemies in his hand, and this means mercy and freedom for his elect! When God is preparing seminarians, he is giving them the full assurance of their own salvation by the power of the Holy Spirit and the external word, so they have the chutzpah to set the captives free, by announcing the “promise of all promises called the office of the keys: Ego te absolvo, ‘I absolve you,’ which is to say Ego te opto, ‘I choose you.’”33 Luther lands his jumbo jet on a dime with the closing promise, the sweet sermon, the sprinkling of the blood of Christ:
I frankly confess that, for myself, even if it could be, I should not want ‘free will’ to be given to me, nor anything to be left in my own hands to enable me to endeavor after salvation; not merely because in the face of so many dangers, and adversaries, and assault of the devils, I could not stand my ground and hold fast my ‘free will’ (for one devil is stronger than all men, and on these terms, no man could be saved); but because, even were there no dangers, adversaries, or devils, I should still be forced to labor with no guarantee of success, and to beat my fists at the air. If I lived and worked to all eternity, my conscience would never reach comfortably certainty [plerophoria] as to how much it must do to satisfy God. Whatever work I had done, there would still be a nagging scruple as to whether it pleased God, or whether He required something more. The experience of all who seek righteousness by works proves that; and I learned it well enough myself over a period of many years, to my own great hurt.
But now that God has taken my salvation out of the control of my own will, and put it under the control of his, and promised to save me, not according to my working or running, but according to his own grace and mercy, I have the comfortable certainty [plerophoria] that he is faithful and will not lie to me, and that he is also great and powerful, so that no devils or opposition can break him or pluck him from me.”34
But now, I, too, must land this plane and say to you that God has taken your salvation out of the control of your own will, and put it under the control of his, and promised to save you, not according to your working or running, but according to his own grace and mercy. May you have the comfortable certainty [plerophoria] that he is faithful and will not lie to you, and that he is also great and powerful, so that no devils or opposition can break him or pluck him from you. Ego te absolvo, Ego te opto.
Welcome to the lush meadow of freedom in Jesus Christ, with no more law in it.
(This lecture was originally delivered at the LCMC’s Augustana District Convocation of the Cross on February 5, 2024)
Rev. Dr. Marney Fritts is an instructor of Systematic Theology for Saint Paul Lutheran Seminary. Her Ph.D. dissertation was “Responses to Gustaf Aulén’s Christus Victor and their Impact on the Doctrine of Atonement for Proclamation” (Luther Seminary, 2011). She has written an essay for the festschrift, Handing Over the Goods: Determined to Proclaim Nothing but Jesus Christ and Him Crucified (1517 Publishing: Irvine, California, 2018), in honor of Dr. James A. Nestingen, and is a regular contributor to the Connections magazine published by Sola Publishing.
Endnotes:
1Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, translated by J.I. Packer and O.R. Johnson (Baker Academic: Michigan, 1957), 52, 65, 271; Gerhard Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518 (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 1997), 52; Gerhard Forde, The Captivation of the Will: Luther vs. Erasmus on Freedom and Bondage (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2005), 47
2Steven D. Paulson, Doing Theology: Lutheran Theology (T & T Clark: London, 2011), 23
3Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, edited by Robert Kolb and Timothy Wengert (Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 2000), 543 n 53.
4Book of Concord, 640.
5The Bondage of the Will, 84
6Luther’s Works 62, 139
7The Bondage of the Will, 75.
8LW 17, 331, The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (Wheaton: Crossway, 2001), the ESV version is used throughout this article.
9LW 12, 162.
10Steven D. Paulson and Jerome Klotz, “The Promise of Predestination,” in Lutheran Quarterly, 30 no 3 Fall 2016, 250
11LW 62, 112
12The Bondage of the Will, 32.
13LW 26, 88.
14The Bondage of the Will, 257
15Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, edited by Richard Crouter (Cambridge University: Cambridge, 1996) 22-3.
16Paulson and Klotz, Promise, 269.
17Forde, Captivation, 1.
18Forde, Captivation, 24.
19The Bondage of the Will, 190
20The Bondage of the Will, 195.
21The Bondage of the Will, 196.
22The Bondage of the Will, 199.
23BC, 544, par. 6-7
24Gerhard O. Forde, Theology is for Proclamation (Fortress: Minneapolis, 1990), p. 132
25The Bondage of the Will, 78.
26The Bondage of the Will, 271-272.
27Martin Luther, Luther: Lectures on Romans, translated and edited by Wilhelm Pauck, in The Library of Christian Classics volume XV (Westminster Press: Philadelphia, 1961), 235-236.
28The Bondage of the Will, 162
29LW 17, 217.
30The Bondage of the Will, 97.
31The Bondage of the Will, 99
32The Bondage of the Will, 84.
33Paulson and Klotz, Promise, 257
34The Bondage of the Will, 313-314
