You might also find it strange, @DineshDSouza (many will surely find it ironic here) that Martin Luther—who championed the Reformation’s key idea that salvation is received by faith alone—preached God’s unconditional election of individuals to salvation years before John Calvin was even a Protestant.
Does this mean that Luther himself attacked the Reformation? That would be strange, wouldn’t it?
And yet, on August 19, 1527, a little over a month after Calvin’s 18th birthday, during the year by which his friends were acquainting him with Luther’s teachings for the first time, Luther preached the following on 1 Peter 1:1:
> “St. Peter declares that they are chosen. How? Not by themselves but according to God’s arrangement. For we shall not be able to bring ourselves to heaven or to create faith in ourselves. God will not admit all men to heaven; He will count His own very exactly. Now the human doctrine of free will and of our own powers no longer amounts to anything. Our will is unimportant; God’s will and choosing are decisive.”
> — *“Sermons on the First Epistle of Peter,” Luther’s Works (LW) 30:6.*
Calvin (1509–1564) was a young humanities student at the University of Paris’s Collège de Montaigu when Luther (1483–1546) preached this. He wouldn’t become a Protestant for another five or six years (late 1532 or 1533).
Luther, on the other hand, was still serving as Professor of Theology at the University of Wittenberg and as a preacher at the Wittenberg City Church:
- nearly 10 years after he posted the Ninety-Five Theses,
- going on 7 years since his clear declaration of justification through faith alone in *The Freedom of a Christian*,
- nearly 6½ years after his stand at the Diet of Worms,
- and coming up to 2 years after he published *The Bondage of the Will*, in which he referred to:
> “…that hidden and awful will of God whereby he ordains by his own counsel which and what sort of persons he wills to be recipients and partakers of his preached and offered mercy. This will is not to be inquired into, but reverently adored, as by far the most awe-inspiring secret of the Divine Majesty, reserved for himself alone and forbidden to us…”
> — *LW 33:139.*
And, of course, *The Bondage of the Will* was Luther’s contribution to the Luther-Erasmus debate you said you were studying 11 days ago, and as you scored it, “Luther wins on points” (although you said you’d “rather have dinner with Erasmus”).
Your remark here is interesting since *The Bondage of the Will* is an extended polemic against the notion that the fallen human will can do anything good, which includes having true saving faith, apart from a sovereign act of God’s supernatural grace. In it, Luther wrote:
> “Now take the saying of Christ in John 6[:44]: ‘No one comes to me unless my Father draws him.’ What does this leave to free choice? For he says that everyone needs to hear and learn from the Father himself, and that all must be taught by God. He plainly teaches here, not only that the works and efforts of free choice are fruitless, but that even the message of the gospel itself (which is what this passage is about) is heard in vain unless the Father himself speaks, teaches, and draws inwardly. ‘No one can come,’ he says, ‘no one’; and thus that power by which a man is able to make some endeavor toward Christ, or in other words, toward the things that pertain to salvation, is asserted to be no power at all.”
> — *LW 33:285–286.*
Thus, for Luther the only way a sinner can have true faith in Christ is if God gives it to him, and the only sinners He gives it to are those He’s chosen—the elect, or predestined.
So, is Luther “attacking” his own Reformation? Or is he perhaps just being inconsistent?
Neither, as far as he was concerned. In fact, he believed he was being eminently consistent because he considered sinful man’s total inability to be the actual heart of the matter concerning salvation, so much so that he was grateful to Erasmus for bringing it into the spotlight by challenging it:
> “Moreover, I praise and commend you highly for this also, that unlike all the rest you alone have attacked the real issue, the essence of the matter in dispute, and have not wearied me with irrelevancies about the papacy, purgatory, indulgences, and such like trifles (for trifles they are rather than basic issues), with which almost everyone hitherto has gone hunting for me without success.”
> — *LW 33:294.*
Yes, the same Luther who inspired the adage, “Justification is the article by which the church stands and falls” (though that’s not an exact quote of what he said) also repeatedly declared that the sinner’s inability to believe is an even more fundamental truth:
> “You and you alone have seen the question on which everything hinges, and have aimed at the vital spot; for which I sincerely thank you, since I am only too glad to give as much attention to this subject as time and leisure permit.”
> — *Ibid.*
More people probably know that Calvin regarded man’s inability to believe as foundational than know that Luther affirmed the same view. Fewer probably know that Calvin used the same “hinge” metaphor that Luther uses here for that inability, except to declare the importance of the doctrine of justification by faith alone:
> “The theme of justification… is the main hinge on which religion turns…”
> — *John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 3.11.1, Battles translation, 1:726.*
This is because Calvin wasn’t “attacking” the Reformation any more than Luther was. He was getting right to the heart of the matter. Justification by faith alone is vital to true religion because it establishes the means of our right standing before God in Christ. The self-induced (and therefore totally culpable) Total Inability that results from our Total Depravity is foundational to understanding why God must give us that faith that justifies us in Christ.
It’s tragic how few long-time professing Christians today have even the slightest awareness of this.