In the last post I quoted from Johnson and Packer’s introduction to Luther’s Bondage of the Will. This thought must be developed and seriously looked at. For the moment, however, the statement preceding that one must also be looked at.
Historically, it is a simply matter of fact that Martin Luther and John Calvin, and for that matter, Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Bucer, and all the leading Protestant theologians of the first epoch of the Reformation, stood on precisely the same ground here. On other points, they had their differences; but in asserting the helplessness of man in sin, and the sovereignty of God in grace, they were entirely at one. To all of them, these doctrines were the very life-blood of the Christian faith. A modern editor of Luther’s great work underscores this fact: ‘Whoever puts this book down without having realized that evangelical theology stands or falls with the doctrine of the bondage of the will has read it in vain.’
Luther’s great book, The Bondage of the Will (The Enslaved Will), was not just what Luther wrote about a metaphysical and abstract philosophical teaching. It was at the very heart of the Gospel. Apart from this teaching there is no justification by grace alone through faith alone. Apart from this teaching there is no Gospel of sovereign grace and nothing but pure and sheer grace. Apart from this teaching there is no grace that can make us break forth in true doxology as Paul did. Apart from this teaching there is no praise to the glory of His grace because it is grace that has been poured out and lavished on sinners who were dead in their sins and trespasses. Instead we have fallen into human-centered thinking and so we have lost the true idea of deadness in sin and of true grace.
All of the leading Protestant theologians at the beginning of the Reformation took up this issue and there they stood. The enslaved will was at the very heart of the Gospel of grace alone at the Reformation and it is at the heart of the biblical Gospel today. There is no true Gospel apart from it. It matters not how Reformed a person says that s/he is, apart from a whole-hearted acceptance of this doctrine at the core of the Gospel neither that person nor any other holds to the same teaching that the Reformers did. It is so easy to say that I believe in a certain doctrine here and those doctrines there, but apart from the enslaved will the true Gospel is not believed nor taught.
We must learn the depths of depravity before we can learn the heights of grace. We must learn our helplessness in sin before we can see the power of God in salvation. The sinner must see that s/he has no hope in self in order to rest completely on Christ alone. The sinners must see that s/he has no strength and no ability to trust in Christ in order that the very belief that must be exercised can be wrought in the sinner by God. Until a sinner is broken from any trust, hope, belief, or anything else in self that sinner will look to self for some little something that s/he can do rather than look to Christ alone. If all we do is tell sinners to believe and we don’t help them see their utter helplessness and inability in their sin, they will not look to grace alone for salvation. How important was this teaching to the Reformers? From Johnson and Packer’s introduction to Luther’s Bondage of the Will once again:
The doctrine of free justification by faith only, which became the storm-centre of so much controversy during the Reformation period, is often regarded as the heart of the Reformer’s theology, but this is hardly accurate. The truth is that their thinking was really centered upon the contention of Paul, echoed with varying degrees of adequacy by Augustine, and Gottschalk, and Bradwardine, and Wycliffe, that the sinner’s entire salvation is by free and sovereign grace only.
If the sinner’s entire salvation is by free (uncaused by the sinner) and sovereign (caused by God alone) grace alone, then there is nothing in the sinner that can move God and nothing that the sinner can do to move God to save him or her. The teaching of so many today that all a sinner must do is to have an intellectual belief in the facts of the Gospel is to go against the Gospel of the Reformation which taught that the sinner must be wholly saved (all aspects of the soul) and wholly by God. The faith that a sinner must have comes from regeneration and not from the sinner who is dead and cannot do it. The Gospel of grace as preached and taught by the Reformers who went back to Scripture as their primary source was that grace purchased and grace applied. The dead sinner can do nothing to purchase the smallest part of salvation and the dead sinner can do nothing to apply it either. It is God’s grace and grace alone that saves. The slightest work of the human soul (even so-called faith) makes grace to be non-grace (Rom 11:6). The slightest human work, therefore, makes for a salvation that is not of grace alone.
God Loves... Himself 
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