According to Luther, “the Spirit, who was promised to extol Christ, certainly cannot preach ‘free will’” as the Arminians understand it. The reason for the Spirit’s liberating power isn’t simply that it may give freedom for freedom’s sake, but that it may give freedom to flee to the second Person of the Trinity: Christ. Salvation is Trinitarian salvation. When we understand the work of the Triune God in the order of redemption, we begin to understand the absurdity of human free will: “For no man on earth, unless imbued with the Holy Ghost, ever in his heart knows of, or believes in, or longs for, eternal salvation.”

Since Martin Luther’s magisterial Bondage of the Will (1525), the issue of the freedom of the human will has remained a staple in modern theological discussion. How exactly does sin affect the will? Is it self-determining? Is it subject to the understanding?

In 1754, “America’s theologian” Jonathan Edwards addressed many of these same questions in his Freedom of the Will, and despite what their titles may suggest, the two theologians largely agreed upon the condition of the will. Where they differed was on the proper definition of “freedom.”

In light of the Fall, Luther believed that the phrase “free will” was an “empty term” and an “abuse of speech.” Sin has rendered us all captives to its power, therefore to insinuate any measure of liberty apart from the grace of God is semantic nonsense. According to the Wittenberg Reformer, human free will “without God’s grace is not free at all, but is the permanent prisoner and bondslave of evil, since it cannot turn itself to good.” Man’s will has been arrested and paralyzed by sin, and the sinner himself stands in need of God’s liberating grace in order to freely come to Christ.

While Martin Luther’s arguments against Erasmus have stood the test of time, and have been repackaged numerous times in the course of Protestant history, the current Calvinist-Arminian debate seems to have moved in a slightly different direction. The Enlightenment served to catapult the issue of the will, but it also partially divested this important discussion from its proper Trinitarian context. Luther’s Bondage of the Will (1525), while employing astonishing dialectical genius, is also a thoroughly Trinitarian treatise.

Many of the Reformer’s greatest arguments for the enslaved will are furnished in a Triune framework. For instance, challenging the idea that the will has a power of its own, Luther writes, “You do not realize what a mighty power you are ascribing to it by the pronoun ‘itself,’ or ‘its own self,’ when you say: ‘can apply itself’; for you completely exclude the Holy Spirit and all His power as if superfluous and unnecessary.” For Luther, the notion of a free will wasn’t simply incompatible with the fact of human sinfulness; it was completely opposed to the Trinitarian economy of salvation. Freedom isn’t found in man but in God. Arminians (an anachronistic term considering Jacobus Arminius wasn’t born until 1560) impugned the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit when they contended for human ability. According to Luther, “What need is there of the Spirit, or Christ, or God, if ‘free will’ can overcome the motions of the mind to evil?” For Luther, arguments for human autonomy weren’t simply brazen and self-centered; they were thoroughly anti-Trinitarian!  Continue reading…