In basing their entire lives on sola scriptura, though, Luther and Calvin never devolved into nuda scriptura (“naked Scripture”). Rather, they believed that we read the Bible in community, learning from other sinners — alive and dead — how to understand the teachings of Scripture better and how to correct the blind spots in our biblical interpretation. Tradition never trumps Scripture, but it is a very useful tool in checking our biblical hermeneutics and doctrinal formulations.

ABSTRACT: Luther’s and Calvin’s Catholic contemporaries argued against Reformed doctrine because it disagreed with the teaching of Rome. The Reformers argued, first, that their doctrines agreed with Scripture, but they also appealed to church history. Predestination and the other doctrines of grace were, according to them, not novel teachings, but teachings held as far back as the church fathers — especially Augustine.

Protestants in the Reformed tradition have not been shy about championing the doctrine of predestination, God’s gracious and sovereign choice to save individual sinners for his own glory.

In Martin Luther’s (1483–1546) masterpiece, On the Bondage of the Will (1525) — one of only two works Luther wrote that he thought were worth posterity’s interest — Luther grounded his doctrine of sinful humanity’s bondage to sin in God’s sovereign predestination: “If we believe it to be true that God foreknows and predestines all things (Romans 8:29), that he can neither be mistaken in his foreknowledge nor hindered in his predestination, and that nothing takes place but as he wills it (as reason itself is forced to admit), then on the testimony of reason itself there cannot be any free choice in man or angel or any creature.”¹

John Calvin (1509–1564) pithily defined divine predestination as that “by which God adopts some to hope of life, and sentences others to eternal death.”² More fully, he professed,

We call predestination God’s eternal decree, by which he compacted with himself what he willed to become of each man. For all are not created in equal condition; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others. Therefore, as any man has been created to one or the other of these ends, we speak of him as predestined to life or to death.³

The international Synod of Dort (1618–1619), convened to address the erroneous views of Arminianism, defined election as “God’s unchangeable purpose by which . . . before the foundation of the world, by sheer grace, according to the free good pleasure of his will, he chose in Christ to salvation a definite number of particular people out of the entire human race, which had fallen by its own fault from its original innocence into sin and ruin” (1.7).

Finally, the most important compendium of doctrine in the English-speaking Protestant tradition, the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), says this of predestination: “By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death” (3.3).

Sola, Not Nuda

First- and second-generation Reformers like Luther and Calvin, however, were immediately and constantly challenged by their Catholic opponents about their gall in teaching doctrine not in accord with the Catholic teaching of their day. The Reformers began by arguing, as we would hope they would, that they believed these things because the Bible taught them. Who can forget Luther’s defiant words at the Diet of Worms? “Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason — I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other — my conscience is captive to the Word of God.”⁴ Throughout Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion and in his voluminous sermons and commentaries, he likewise displays his belief in the Bible’s supreme authority.

In basing their entire lives on sola scriptura, though, Luther and Calvin never devolved into nuda scriptura (“naked Scripture”). Rather, they believed that we read the Bible in community, learning from other sinners — alive and dead — how to understand the teachings of Scripture better and how to correct the blind spots in our biblical interpretation. Tradition never trumps Scripture, but it is a very useful tool in checking our biblical hermeneutics and doctrinal formulations.

In fact, Luther and Calvin found solace in the fact that their views, though not the mainstream teaching of the Catholic Church of their day, had historical precedents. In Luther’s Disputation Against Scholastic Theology of 1517, which predates his more famous 95 Theses, he argues at length against all kinds of soteriological errors of his day, including the “modern way” of Gabriel Biel and the standard view of the church of his day, which he labeled Pelagian.⁵ Instead, he wrote, “Man, being a bad tree, can only will and do evil” (Thesis 4). “The best and infallible preparation for grace and sole disposition toward grace is the eternal election and predestination of God” (Thesis 29). Explaining his developing views to a group of Augustinian monks at the Heidelberg Disputation in 1518, Luther exclaimed, “Free will, after the fall, exists in name only” (Thesis 13). His proofs of the theses are peppered with references to Augustine, such as “St. Augustine says in his book, The Spirit and the Letter, ‘Free will without grace has the power to do nothing but sin’; and in the second book of Against Julian, ‘You call the will free, but in fact it is an enslaved will,’ and in many other places” (proof of Thesis 13).

Later, while preparing for his 1519 Leipzig debate against a Catholic opponent, Luther happily referred to Gregory of Rimini (d. 1358) and called him Augustine’s one true disciple among the medieval scholastic theologians: “It is certain that the so-called ‘Modern Theologians,’ in this point of grace and free will, agree with the Scotists and Thomists except for one whom all condemn, Gregory of Rimini. . . . Also these theologians made it absolutely and convincingly clear that they are worse than the Pelagians.”⁶ Luther took comfort that Gregory was on his side in holding to God’s sovereign predestination of helpless, dead sinners.

On numerous occasions, Calvin challenged his Catholic opponents on their charge that his teaching was novel. Throughout his “Reply to Sadoleto,” for example, Calvin claims against his Catholic opponent that “our agreement with antiquity is far closer than yours,” ushering several teachers from the first centuries of the church who espoused Protestant, not papal, doctrine.⁷ When he defends his teaching on divine predestination in his Institutes, Calvin regularly appeals to Augustine as one who believed the same doctrines. At one point, he notes, “If I wanted to weave a whole volume from Augustine, I could readily show my readers that I need no other language than his. But I do not want to burden them with wordiness.” Instead, Calvin here simply agreed with Augustine’s reflection on Romans 9: “God’s grace does not find but makes those fit to be chosen.”⁸

These comments by Luther and Calvin lead us to ask exactly what the state of “Calvinism” was before the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Though Calvinism touches on more than the doctrine of God’s sovereign predestination, we will focus our attention there.

Fathers to Augustine

The earliest Christian writers after the close of the New Testament canon did not stress God’s predestination of his elect. In fact, until the days in which Augustine (354–430) felt compelled to respond to the heretical ideas of Pelagius (who, among other things, denied the biblical truth of original sin) and the later semi-Pelagians (who taught that, though persons inherited sin from Adam, they were still able on their own to do some spiritual good to which God would respond in grace), the church did not stress the gracious predestinarian chords of Paul or Jesus.

Why did some great thinkers in the history of the church (people like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Athanasius), who thought deeply and wrote thoughtfully, not address a doctrine that seems so apparent throughout both the Old and the New Testaments? Several reasons may contribute.

First, even though many Christians thought deeply during this period of time, Christians faced intermittent and sometimes empire-wide persecution up until the reign of Constantine as the emperor of Rome. Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 finally granted Christians freedom of religion. Believers fighting for their lives are deprived of the luxury to reflect as deeply on God’s word as they wish they could. In addition to this pressure from persecution, Roman authorities sometimes destroyed Christian writings, especially believers’ copies of the Scriptures.

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