Then it will follow that neither does God elect any man, nor is there any place left for election; but man’s Freewill alone elects, by accepting or rejecting forbearance and wrath. But deprive God of his wisdom and power in election, and what do you make him but a sort of phantom of fortune, whose nod is the rash ordainer of all things? 489 Thus, we shall at length come to this: that men are saved and damned without God’s knowing it, seeing that he has not separated the saved and the damned by a determined election. Rather, bestowing on all, without distinction, first a kindness which bears with them and hardens them; and then a pity which corrects and punishes them — He has left it to men to determine whether they will be saved or damned; and God himself, meanwhile, has just stepped out, perhaps to a banquet of the Ethiopians, as Homer describes him. 490
255 [long note]
Aristotle also paints just such a God for us, 491 as one who sleeps, for example, and allows any who will, to use and abuse his goodness and his severity. 492 And how can reason judge otherwise of God, than Diatribe does here?
For just as she herself snores away, and despises divine things, so she judges even of God, that in some sort he snores away; and having nothing to do with the exercise of wisdom, will, and present power 493 in electing, separating, and inspiring, He has committed to men this busy and troublesome work of accepting or rejecting his forbearance and his wrath. This is what we come to, when we covet to mete out and excuse God by the counsel of human reason. Instead of reverencing the secrets of His Majesty — overwhelmed with his glory — we break in to scrutinize them. Instead of uttering one single plea in excuse for Him, we vomit forth a thousand blasphemies! We also forget ourselves meanwhile, and chatter like mad people, both against God and against ourselves in the same breath — even though our design is to speak with great wisdom, both for God and for ourselves.
You see here, in the first place, what this trope and gloss of Diatribe’s makes of God. But do you not also see how vastly consistent she is with herself in it? Before, she had made Freewill equal and alike in all, by including all in one definition. But now, in the course of her disputation, she forgets her own definition, and makes one a cultivated Freewill, and another an uncultivated Freewill — setting out a diversity of Freewills according to the diversity of works, habits, and characters. There is one that can do good, another that cannot do good: and it does this by its own powers, before grace is received. By these powers of its own, she had laid it down in her definition, that Freewill could not of itself will anything good. Thus it comes to pass that, if we will not leave to the will of God alone, both the will and the power to harden, and to show mercy, and to do everything, then we must ascribe to Freewill herself, the power to do everything without grace: even though we have denied that it can do anything good without grace.
The simile of the sun and rain, then, has no force as to this point. A Christian will use that simile with far greater propriety, by considering the Gospel as the sun and rain (as in Psalm 19, and Hebrews 6); the cultivated ground as the elect; the uncultivated ground as the reprobate. The elect are edified and made better by the word; the reprobate are offended and made worse. Whereas Freewill, left to herself, is in all men the uncultivated ground; indeed, the kingdom of Satan.
SECT. 9. Erasmus’ two causes for tropicizing are considered.
Let us also look into her reasons for imagining this trope in this place. It seems absurd, says Diatribe, that God, who is not only just but also good, should be said to have hardened a man’s heart in order to manifest his own power by the man’s wickedness. So she runs back to Origen, who confesses that God gave occasion for the induration, but flings the blame back upon Pharaoh. Origen has remarked, besides, that the Lord said, “For this cause I have raised you up:” He does not say, ‘for this cause have I made you.’ No: for Pharaoh would not have been wicked if he had been the way God made him; God beheld all his works, and they were very good. So much for Diatribe.
Absurdity, then, is one of the principal reasons for not understanding Moses’ and Paul’s words in their simple and literal sense. But what article of faith is violated by this absurdity, and who is offended by it? Human reason is offended. And truly, she who is blind, deaf, foolish, impious and sacrilegious in her dealings with all the words and works of God, is brought in here to be the judge of God’s works and words. On the same principle, you will deny all the articles of the Christian faith; for it is the most absurd thing possible, and as Paul says, “to the Jews it is a stumbling block, and to the Gentiles, foolishness,” that God should become man, the son of a virgin; that he should have been crucified; that he should be sitting at the right hand of the Father.
It is absurd, I say, to believe such things. Let us therefore invent some tropes like those of the Arians, to prevent Christ from being God absolutely. 494 Let us invent some tropes like those of the Manicheans, 495 to prevent his being a real man; and let us make him out to be a sort of phantom, which glided through the virgin ‘like a ray of the sun through a piece of glass,’ and was crucified. A nice way of handling Scripture!
And yet these tropes get us no further forward, and they do not serve to evade the absurdity: for it still remains absurd in the eye of reason that this just and good God should demand impossibilities of Freewill; and when Freewill cannot will good, but serves sin by necessity, that it should nevertheless impute it to her. And so long as he withholds the Spirit, God would not be a whit more kind or more merciful than if he were to harden or permit men to be hardened. Reason will again and again repeat that these are not the acts of a kind and merciful God. These things so far exceed her apprehension, and she so wants power to take even her own self captive, that she cannot believe God is good if he were to act and judge so. But setting faith aside, she demands to be able to touch and see and comprehend how it is that God is just and not cruel. Now, she would have this sort of comprehension if it were said of God, ‘He hardens nobody, he damns nobody; on the contrary, he pities everybody, he saves everybody;’ so that hell would be destroyed, and the fear of death removed, and no future punishment would be dreaded. Hence it is, that she becomes so boisterous and so vehement 496 in excusing and defending the just and beneficent God.
Faith and the Spirit, however, judge differently. They believe that God is good, even if he were to destroy all men. And of what use is it that we are wearied to death with these elaborate speculations, that we may be enabled to remove the blame of induration from God to Freewill. Let Freewill do what she can, with all her means 497 and exercising all her might, she will never furnish an example of avoiding being hardened, where God has not given his Spirit — or of earning mercy, where she has been left to her own powers. For what difference does it make, whether she is hardened or deserves to be hardened, since hardening is necessarily in her, so long as that impotency is in her, by which she cannot will good; and this is according to Diatribe herself. The absurdity is not removed by these tropes; or if it is removed, then it is removed only to make way for greater absurdities, and to ascribe all power to Freewill. Away with these useless and misleading tropes, then, and let us stick to the pure and simple word of God.
SECT. 10. That God made all things very good, is not a sufficient reason.
‘The other principal reason why this trope should be received, is that the things which God has made are very good. And God does not say, I have made you for this very thing,
