For Luther and the Reformers the teaching about the bondage of the will was the hinge of the Reformation and an utterly vital point. The reason Luther thought that this was true was because “The whole work of man’s salvation, first to last, is God’s; and all the glory for it must be God’s also.” The real issue of the Gospel has to do with the glory of God. If salvation comes to man on the basis of his own will, then salvation is not totally of grace and comes to man to some degree on the basis of his own merit or choice. If salvation comes to man as a result of something he has done, then Romans 11:6 comes down on us in this by telling us that a work makes grace to be no longer grace. Salvation must be by grace alone because salvation is clearly to the glory of God alone.
Erasmus, who in a sense has the same spirit as so many today, refused to say that salvation is totally of God. While there are those today who will say that salvation is by grace alone, when they hold to the freedom of the will in reality they deny it. Erasmus and so many today want man to be saved with the help of God, but not by a will that needs much if any help from God. In this there is a great lesson for us today. Erasmus, a man who desired peace instead of tension, wanted to meet Luther part of the way. He wanted to diminish the amount of power that man can exercise so that the smallness of the power that man can exercise would show that there is almost no amount of merit that man can obtain apart from God. The Augustinian tradition that the Reformers held to was that there is no work a man can do that has any possibility of earning the slightest merit before God. Nothing man can do can put God under any obligation to respond to man with grace. The smallest merit destroys grace. But Luther saw what Erasmus was doing and went after him for that. Instead of getting closer to the teaching of grace alone, Luther thought Erasmus was really cheapening his own Pelagianism. Instead of standing for a lot of hard works for salvation as Pelagianism in effect teaches, Erasmus brought salvation down to one feeble effort of the will.
This is another place that people need to consider again the implications of what a free-will means. The position of a full Pelagian is that a person must work hard to obtain salvation. But the semi-Pelagian, while seeming to hold to something of grace, is able to obtain grace by a very small act of the will that for some reason moves God to save. This is not to move closer to the biblical teaching of grace alone, but instead it still holds to a view of the human will that is not biblical and it has a lower view of God. As B.B. Warfield states, that view tries to find a middle ground between grace and works and yet retains neither. This cannot be stressed too strongly. The enslaved will must look to Christ alone to deliver it and so salvation is by grace alone to the glory of God alone. The will that is allowed to have just enough to make one choice in reality cheapens both the standards of and the grace of God. It is not a true middle position at all, but rather is a position that has nothing of either to really commend it.
For Luther no form of Pelagianism could possibly be true because of the nature of man who is dead in sin and has an enslaved will. All that this person does is sin because this person can only be motivated by sin. The unregenerate sinner can do nothing but merit wrath. Another point that has to be stressed from Luther’s view is that for a person to do something that had merit to God the man must perform the act apart from God. But for Luther (and Scripture) there is nothing good that a human being can do that does not come from God in the first place. That utterly takes away any hope of merit for man. The only good that a man can do must be worked in the man by God. There is simply no hope for a human being to obtain merit from God on the basis of a good work or a good choice because anything good that can come from man must come from God first.
The power of the previous paragraph may not be obvious to those steeped in humanism. Let me give it another shot. The soul of a human being consists of the ability to think, to feel, and to choose. But the nature of that soul determines in some measure what is attractive to that soul. For an action to be pleasing to God that soul must love God with all of its being and intend God’s glory in the action it takes. But the soul that is dead has no spiritual life in it at all. Spiritual life is that life of the Spirit in the soul and God is the Originator of love. So the soul that does not have God has no love and no ability at all to love God. In fact, it hates Him. Once God makes a soul alive, then that soul has the capacity to receive from the Spirit and so it receives love from God and can love God in what it does. But there can be no merit in that action for the human soul because all the ability to do it came from God. This line of thinking, which is thoroughly biblical, destroys the Pelagian view of morality and merit. The enslaved will can never do the slightest thing that would please God. It is only when the will is set free from its slavery to the devil and sin that it can now do any good at all. But it is to the glory of God and not to the glory of free-will.
God Loves... Himself 
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