As long as Pelagianism and synergism exist to tempt the religious mind, Luther’s response to Erasmus will remain a trumpet call to summon God’s people to embrace the biblical and Augustinian view of the bondage of the will and the life-giving grace of God in Jesus Christ, lost humanity’s only Deliverer.

Before the fifth century dawned, Christians had discoursed about the freedom of the human will in the setting of their long dispute with paganism and gnosticism. Embedded within paganism was the widespread belief in astrology, and astrology taught a doctrine of fate—that individual destiny is controlled by the planets and stars. Christian thinkers fought against this “astral determinism” by stressing God-given human dignity and freedom. Humans are responsible before God for their own choices and destinies; these are not forced on us by the despotism of fate or the power of the stars.

There was a similar issue with gnosticism. A strong vein of gnostic teaching held that only a special class of humans, the “pneumatics” (spiritual ones), had it within them to be saved. The rest of humanity, and even the pneumatics before their gnostic illumination, were compelled to sin by their fleshly natures, despite their rational wills. Gnostics considered matter the wellspring of all evil; fundamental, therefore, to the gnostic concept of salvation was the emancipation of the will from the tyranny of our material flesh. To counter this, Christian thinkers affirmed, on the basis of the Son of God’s taking on a human nature, that salvation was available and accessible to all humans, not just to a specially endowed “spiritual” class. They also argued that no human is ever compelled to sin by any force outside the soul; sin is always voluntary, the self-moving action of the will that sins.

In these controversies, the church was defending a vital aspect of any well-founded Christian theology. A cool retrospective, however, enables us to discern that the dispute with astrology and gnosticism did not favor an intellectual milieu in which Christians could clearly discourse about the human will’s slavery to sin. To speak too overtly about the will’s bondage might have seemed dangerously akin to astrological or gnostic determinism.

This does not mean that early Christian theology entirely lacked any perception of “the bondage of the will,” but we find it only in scattered statements, without systematic consistency. Affirmations of the will’s freedom and servitude sit uncomfortably alongside each other, propounded in mutually incoherent ways. Still, the weight of early patristic thinking certainly fell on the “freedom” side of the equation. There had not yet emerged any theological controversy to concentrate the Christian mind so that it might think out the “bondage” side of the equation with methodical clarity.

When Pelagius arrived on the scene, that controversy became a reality. Pelagius, almost certainly British, possibly a monk, achieved great popularity in Rome in the period 383–409 as a sort of “holiness” teacher. He took the church’s beliefs about human dignity and responsibility, formulating them into a theological system that (despite his denials) evacuated the need for God’s transforming grace in salvation. For Pelagius, human freedom meant that the will is suspended between good and evil, able to choose between them through the will’s God-given autonomy. Pelagius admitted the insidious influence of environment and habit to tempt the will, yet he ultimately held that the will always preserved its capacity for self-caused choice in both good and evil.

Augustine, the great bishop, preacher, and theologian of Hippo Regius in Roman North Africa, had held a similar conception of the will in his early days as a Christian. A more profound study of Holy Scripture, however, and the lessons of spiritual experience had led him to very different views even before the Pelagian controversy arose. Augustine saw that Pelagius’ idea of free will failed to engage seriously with the grim reality of human sinfulness and God’s glorious grace in Jesus Christ. Without Christ’s liberating grace, sinners were the tragic bondslaves of sin and Satan, not the splendid possessors of autonomous freedom that Pelagius made them. While Augustine conserved the earlier patristic belief in the voluntary nature of sin (we sin only because we will to sin), he married this to a far more wide-ranging and perceptive biblical account of the will’s radical fallenness (it is certain, apart from the grace of Christ, that we will always will to sin).

Although Pelagianism was condemned as a heresy at the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431, the church collectively could never quite make up its mind how far to embrace Augustine’s alternative vision. One option, favored in the Greek East, was synergism. That is, granted that the will is sick with sin and cannot heal itself, it can at least cry out to Christ the Physician to heal it. Synergists varied on whether this cry for salvation needed to be enabled by grace or was within the will’s native power. In the Latin West, most preferred some version of Augustine’s view of the sovereignty of grace but again varied on just how to articulate it. Did it require a belief in double predestination (election and reprobation)? Did it entail that Christ had died only for the elect? No monolithic answer was forthcoming. Still, the Western church was, by and large, convinced that Augustine was right in his affirmations about the will’s radical corruption and the absolute necessity of God’s transforming and liberating grace in Christ the Redeemer.

Throughout the next thousand years, in the medieval West, different controversies arose concerning Augustine’s legacy. Some wanted to loosen it in the direction of synergism; some wanted to tighten it into a strict system of double predestination and limited atonement; others preferred a “moderate” Augustinianism that would not push out into perceived extremes.

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