LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

BAUE: THE CURRENT DEBATE ON PREDESTINATION 29
shine.” 45 Kolb finds in Luther what the Calvinist interpreters missed, namely
the proper distinction between Law and Gospel as a key to understanding all
Christian teaching, particularly difficult doctrines such as election:
Luther’s proclamation of predestination is what the Swedish Reformation
scholar Runne Soderlund has called a “broken” or asymmetrical doctrine of
God’s election of his own people …. [T]he Wittenberg Reformer held God’s
sovereignty and human responsibility in tension. He could do so because the
distinction of Law and Gospel governed his use of God’s Word.” 46
Here we see in Luther’s thought the true understanding of predestination—a
comforting doctrine centred in Christ’s work on the cross. According to
Kolb, Luther’s own Anfechtung was a contributing factor to his
understanding of election:
Luther loathed speculation about God’s hidden will because of the despair he
himself had endured when he had not been able to know what a distant and
veiled God might have in store for him. He found comfort only in the blood
and resurrection of Christ and in the promise of the Word in all its forms. 47
The Bondage of the Will demolishes the grounds for double
predestination. Calvinists who claim to find it there are reading into the text.
The burden of Luther’s argument is taken up with refuting Erasmus, who
propounded free will in his Diatribe (1524). This is not the same thing as
election, though it relates to it. Luther in a famous analogy says basically
that the idea of human free will is an illusion, that man is captive either to
God or the devil:
In short, if we are under the god of this world, away from the work and Spirit
of the true God, we are held captive to his will … so that we cannot will
anything but what he wills. … But if a Stronger One comes who overcomes
him and takes us as His spoil, then through his Spirit we are again slaves and
captives—though this is royal freedom—so that we readily will and do what
he wills. Thus the human will is placed between the two like a beast of
burden. If God rides it, it wills and goes where God wills, as the psalm says:
“I am become as a beast [before thee] and am always with thee” [Ps. 73:22
f.]. If Satan rides it, it wills and goes where Satan wills; nor can it choose to
run to either of the two riders or to seek him out, but the riders themselves
contend for the possession and control of it. 48
Thus if man has no free will, salvation must be entirely by God’s grace
through Jesus Christ. Salvation by works is rejected.
45 Robert Kolb, “Luther’s Proclamation of Predestination”, Reformation & Revival Journal
12.2 (2003): 47.
46 Kolb, 48.
47 Kolb, 50.
48 The Bondage of the Will (1526), AE 33:65-66.