I have given an answer to all these considerations already. Nor do I either tolerate, or receive, that golden mean which advises (with good intention, I am willing to suppose) that we should concede a very small degree of power to Freewill, in order that the inconsistency of Scripture, and the forementioned inconveniences, may be more easily removed. The truth is, this golden mean neither assists the cause which it is meant to serve, nor gets us any further in the solution of difficulties. Unless you yield the whole and every thing to Freewill, as the Pelagians do, there remains inconsistency in the Scriptures: merit and reward are excluded, the mercy and justice of God are abrogated, and all those inconveniences which we aim to avoid by allowing a very small and inefficacious power to Freewill, remain in force, as I have already shown.
We must therefore come to the extremity of denying Freewill altogether, and referring everything to God. Then we will find that the Scriptures are not inconsistent with themselves, and that our inconveniences are either removed or rendered tolerable.
There is one thing, however, which I deplore, my Erasmus. And that is your persuading yourself that I plead this cause with more zeal than judgment. I cannot endure being charged with such hypocrisy, as to think one thing and write another. Nor is it true what you write about me, that I have been carried forward by the heat of self-defence to the point of now, for the first time, denying Freewill wholly, as if I had previously ascribed something to it. You will not be able to show this something, I well know, in any of my publications. There are theses and questions of mine, still available, in which I perpetually assert, to this very hour, that Freewill is a nothing, and a matter of mere name; such was the term I used about it. Overcome by truth, provoked and compelled by disputation, thus I have been brought to think, and thus I have been brought to write. I have discussed the matter with a considerable degree of vehemence. If it is a crime, it is a crime to which I plead guilty. Indeed, it is my marvellous joy that this testimony should be borne by me to the world, in the cause of God. May God himself confirm this testimony in the last day! So none will then be more blessed than Luther; who is so greatly extolled by the testimony of his own age, as one who has not pleaded the cause of truth sluggishly or deceitfully, but with a high degree, maybe with an excess, of vehemence. Then I will happily escape that judgment spoken of by Jeremiah: “Cursed is the man who does the work of the Lord negligently.” 678
Now, if I also seem a little severe upon your Diatribe, you must pardon me. It is not from ill-will toward you that I am so. Rather, I have been stirred up to it by the conviction that you were mightily depressing this cause, which is the cause of Christ, by your authority — while your knowledge, and the matter which you put forth, 679 are not such that they entitle you to any superior consideration. And then, who has such a command of their temper everywhere, as not to grow heated somewhere? Your desire for moderation has made you almost cold as ice in this treatise; but you not infrequently contrive to hurl fiery and exceedingly bitter darts, so as to seem absolutely virulent to your reader — unless he regards you with peculiar favour and indulgence. But all this has nothing to do with the cause. We should mutually forgive these asperities, 680 seeing that we are but men, and that nothing different from humanity is found in us. 681
PART V. FREEWILL PROVED TO BE A LIE.
SECTION 1. How Luther proposes to conduct the fight.
WE have now arrived at the last part of this treatise, in which, according to promise, I ought to lead out my own forces against Freewill. But I will not produce them all; for who could do this in a small work, when the whole Scripture is on my side, every point and letter of it. Nor is there any need to do so, since Freewill has already been vanquished and laid prostrate by a twofold victory: vanquished by my having proved that all is against her, which she thought was for her; vanquished again, by my having shown that all those proofs which she had a mind to confute, remain invincible. Besides, even if she were not already vanquished, it would be enough to prostrate her by one or two lances. For what need is there, when an enemy has been slain by some single weapon, to pierce him through and through with many more as he lies dead. I will therefore be short now, if the subject allows me; and out of the vast variety of armies which I might lead forth into the field, I will summon only two general officers, with a select portion of their legions. These are Paul and John the Evangelist.
SECT. 2. Rom 1.18 pronounces sentence upon Freewill.
Paul, writing to the Romans, thus enters his argument in behalf of the grace of God against Freewill. “The wrath of God,” he says, “is revealed from heaven upon all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness.” In these words, you hear a general sentence pronounced upon all men, that they are under the wrath of God. What else is this, if not that they are worthy of wrath and punishment? He assigns as the cause of this anger, that they do nothing but what is worthy of wrath and punishment; that all, truly, are ungodly and unjust, and hold the truth in unrighteousness. Where now is that power of Freewill which endeavours after something good? Paul represents it to be deserving of the wrath of God, and passes sentence upon it as ungodly and unjust. Now, that which is ungodly and deserves wrath, endeavours and has power, not for grace, but against it. 682
Luther will be laughed at here for his carelessness in not having examined Paul’s text sufficiently; and some will say that in this passage, Paul does not speak of all men, nor of all their endeavours, but only of those who are ungodly and unjust — those, as his words express it, who detain the truth in unrighteousness. And so it does not follow that all are of this character. I remark upon this, that for Paul, it is the same thing to say, ‘upon all ungodliness of men,’ as to say, ‘upon the ungodliness of all men;’ for Paul hebraizes almost everywhere. 683 So that his meaning is, ‘all men are ungodly and unjust, and detain the truth in unrighteousness; therefore all men are worthy of wrath.’
Besides, it is not the relative that is used in the Greek text — of those who — but the article, thus: ‘The wrath of God is revealed upon the ungodliness and injustice of men, detaining as they do the truth in unrighteousness.’ — So that this is a sort of epithet applied to all men: ‘That they detain the truth in unrighteousness;’ just as it is an epithet when it is said, ‘Our Father who is in heaven;’ it might otherwise be expressed this way, ‘Our heavenly Father,’ or ‘Our Father in the heavens,’ 684 For the expression is used to distinguish them from those who believe and are godly.
But let these suggestions be frivolous and vain, if the very thread of Paul’s argument does not constrain and prove them. He had said just before this, “The Gospel is the power of God unto salvation, to everyone who believes; to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”
The words used here are not obscure or ambiguous: ‘To the Jews and to the Greeks — that is, to all men — the Gospel of the power of God is necessary in order that believers may be saved from the wrath which is revealed.’ He declares the Jews — who excelled other nations in righteousness, in the law of God, and in the power of Freewill — to be without any difference, both destitute of the power of God, and also in need of it, that they may be saved from the revealed wrath. When he makes that power necessary to them, does he not reckon them to be under wrath, I ask? What men would you assume not to be liable to the wrath of God, when you are compelled to believe that the greatest men in the world — the Jews and the Greeks for instance — are not so? Again; whom will you except amidst those Jews and Greeks, when Paul embraces them all under one name, without any distinction; and subjects them all to the same sentence? Is it to be supposed that there were no individuals in these two most eminent nations, 685 who strove after honesty? 686 Were there none who endeavoured to the uttermost of Freewill? Yet, Paul does not heed this at all. He puts them all under wrath; he pronounces them all ungodly and unjust. Must we not suppose that the rest of the Apostles, by a like sentence, also cast all the other nations, and each individual of them
