On Free Will

Part 1, Freedom and Bondage, Then and Now

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Martin Luther's debate with Erasmus concerning free will. And last week, in discussing the theological issues at stake in the doctrine "once saved, always saved," I also talked a lot about free will, along with the Reformed rejection of free will. 

Those posts caused me to reflect on the role free will plays in theological systems. Lots and lots of theology depends upon where you land on free will. And obviously, as a psychologist, I find that fascinating.  Free will doesn't just show up in debates about grace, issues I talked about last week. Free will also does a lot of work in other debates, like those about hell or the problem of evil.

To start our musings about free will, I'd like to return to the debate between Luther and Erasmus. 

When Erasmus finally was dragged into a public debate with Luther, something he had resisted for many years, he picked an interesting fight. Of all the things Erasmus could have chosen to debate with Luther, he picked free will. In his "De Libero Arbitrio," Erasmus wrote:

By 'free will' here we understand a power of the human will by which man may be able to direct himself towards, or turn away from, what leads to eternal salvation.
...
Nearly the whole of Scripture speaks of nothing but conversion, endeavour, and striving to improve. All this would become meaningless once it was accepted that doing good or evil was a matter of necessity; and so too would all the promises, threats, complaints, reproaches, entreaties, blessings, and curses directed towards those who have amended their ways, or those who have refused to change ... What is the purpose of such a vast number of commandments if not a single person has it at all in his power to do what is commanded?
...
Why, you may ask, attribute anything at all to free will? To allow the ungodly, who have deliberately fallen short of the grace of God, to be deservedly condemned; to clear God of the false accusation of cruelty and injustice; to free us from despair, protect us from complacency, and spur us on to moral endeavour. For these reasons nearly everyone admits the existence of free will...

Luther didn't immediately respond to Erasmus because peasant uprisings caused by "the new gospel" were starting to break out. But when Luther did respond, he titled his book "The Bondage of the Will." In it, Luther famously described the will as a "beast of burden" that must be ridden and, critically, cannot choose its rider:

The human will is like a beast of burden. If God mounts it, it wishes and goes as God wills; if Satan mounts it, it wishes and goes as Satan wills. Nor may it choose to which rider it will run, nor which it will seek. It is the nature of the will to follow the stronger of the two.

For Luther, the human will is so fickle and weak it provides no security of salvation. Thus, Luther rejects its role in saving and sanctifying grace:

I frankly confess that, for myself, even if it could be, I should not want 'free-will' to be given me, nor anything to be left in my own hands to enable me to endeavor after salvation; not merely because in face of so many dangers, and adversities and assaults of devils, I could not stand my ground and hold fast my 'free-will' (for one devil is stronger than all men, and on these terms no man could be saved); but because even were there no dangers. I should still be forced to labor with no guarantee of success.

Again, I've recently talked about this debate between Luther and Erasmus, about some of the theological values and pastoral concerns at stake. And I've noted how this was a long standing debate, one that goes back to Augustine and Pelagius and was continued by Calvin and Arminius. 

But for today's post, I want to simply highlight a contrast between Luther's criticism of "free will" with modern, contemporary criticisms. What freedom of the will and bondage of the will looked like then and what it looks like now.

Borrowing from Charles Taylor, Luther lived in an enchanted age where the self was experienced as "porous." The porous self was vulnerable to spiritual powers that existed outside itself. And as can be seen in the quote above, for Luther and many pre-modern Christians, the biggest concern was demonic influence. 

In short, Luther's concern about the will had to do with its weakness and impotence in the face of these dark powers. As Luther says, "[I]n the face  of so many dangers, and adversities and assaults of devils, I could not stand my ground and hold fast my 'free-will'." Why? Because the "devil is stronger than all men."

This, as should be obvious, is not the modern concern about free will. Staying with Taylor, our secular age is "disenchanted" and the modern self isn't porous but "buffered," closed off from the external world. So the modern criticism of "free will" isn't about its weakness and vulnerability. The modern concern is, rather, with causality. In a mechanical, Newtonian, and deterministic universe is anything "free"? Isn't everything just following the "law of physics"? And is there any escaping those laws?

Phrased more biologically and neuroscientifically, isn't our "will" simply the product of brain chemistry? Where is "freedom" to be located in the facts of neuronal transmission? 

All this is to simply say that our debates about the freedom and bondage of the will have changed over time. In Luther's enchanted era, the concern was about the weakness of the will in the face of spiritual assault. In our disenchanted era, the concern is scientific determinism and materialistic reductionism.