To accept the principles which Martin Luther vindicates in The Bondage of the Will would certainly involve a mental and spiritual revolution for many Christians at the present time. It would involve a radically different approach to preaching and the practice of evangelism, and to most other departments of theology and pastoral work as well. God centered thinking is out of fashion to-day, and it recovery will involve something of a Copernican revolution in our outlook on many matters. But ought we to shrink from this? Do we not stand in urgent need of such teaching as Luther here gives us—teaching which humbles man, strengthens faith, and glorifies God—and is not the contemporary Church weak for the lack of it? The issue is clear. We are compelled to ask ourselves: If the Almighty God of the Bible is to be our God, if the New Testament gospel is to be our message, if Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, to-day and for ever—is any other position than Luther’s possible? Are we not in all honesty bound to stand with him in ascribing all might, and majesty, and dominion, and power, and all the glory of our salvation to God alone? Surely no more important or far-reaching question confronts the Church to-day (Johnson and Packer’s introduction to Luther’s Bondage of the Will).
The principles that Martin Luther set out (which all the pioneer Reformers agreed with) are diametrically opposed to the evangelism that is practiced today. If we simply take the two basic principles that were vital to the teaching of the Reformers in terms of justification by faith alone, it is apparent that something is terribly wrong with the evangelism of today. Two main principles of Bondage of the Will are man’s utter helplessness in bondage to sin and the sovereignty of God’s grace. Luther not only said that man was utterly helpless in sin, but that man must come to understand that in order to understand grace. This is a departure from the evangelism that is practiced in this century, but perhaps we should look at our own day and see it as a departure from orthodox evangelism.
Evangelism is practiced today with barely a mention of sin, though some still teach something about it. But the difference with Luther is stark. Today people are evangelized with some teaching on sin (those who do) in an effort to get them to see that they cannot pay for their sin and so need a Savior. Much of this is built on the premise that man can simply believe when he pleases and so come to faith. Professing Reformed people say that God must give the people a new heart but their evangelism is really no different than that of semi-Pelagians. They say that they believe other things but they keep that as a secret. But the older way was to tell people about their sin and attempt to drive them to the point where they lost all hope in self. This was referred to as legal humiliation. The soul had to be broken from its own ability and sufficiency in order to trust in the ability and sufficiency of Christ alone. This is a vital issue. If the soul is to be saved by grace alone, then the soul cannot look to itself or anything else but grace alone to be saved during the entire salvation. It must be grace that saves it from eternity past, to the cross, to imputed righteousness, to the application of salvation, and then to sanctification and eternity. An evangelism that does not instruct people to be completely broken does not teach a true Gospel of grace alone.
An evangelism that does not take a soul to contrition and brokenness does not take the soul to the experiential place where it can rely on nothing but Christ and grace. As long as the soul is not broken it is in bondage to sin which is to be in bondage to its pride and its own ability and sufficiency. As long as the soul has any hope in its own self it will not hope in Christ alone. As long as the soul has the least hope that it can believe in and of itself it will not look to God alone to give it a believing heart. The Bondage of the Will is a masterpiece in setting out the basics needed for evangelism as well as the Gospel. The two do, after all, go together.
The soul that still believes and adheres to its free-will is not a soul that will hold to grace for the whole of salvation. The will is not free but it is in bondage to self, pride, its own sufficiency, and the devil. If we do not preach and teach this to people in evangelism, we are not telling them the extent of their depravity and of the reality that has them in its grasp. If we don’t tell them the extent of their depravity, then we have no basis for teaching them about the truth of grace. After all, Romans 9 teaches with the utmost clarity that grace alone saves and that true grace is a sovereign grace. “For He says to Moses, “I WILL HAVE MERCY ON WHOM I HAVE MERCY, AND I WILL HAVE COMPASSION ON WHOM I HAVE COMPASSION.” 16 So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy” (vv. 15-16). Scripture is so clear that mercy and grace are sovereign and the will of man does not determine these things. Surely our evangelism must reflect that. An evangelism that does not reflect that is not Reformed and is not biblical.
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