By what logic did you learn these inferences? Why not the opposite—‘grace is preached; therefore, “free-will” is done away’? ‘The assistance of grace is commended; therefore “free-will” is abolished’? To what end is grace given? Is it that grace may be, as it were, the fancy dress in which ‘free-will’, proud and self-sufficient in its strength, blithely disports itself on May-days? Wherefore, though I am no rhetorician, I am going to invert your reasoning, by a sounder rhetoric than yours, as follows: ‘All the passages in the Holy Scriptures that mention assistance are they that do away with “free-will”, and these are countless. Therefore, if the matter is assessed by the number of testimonies, victory is mine. For grace is needed, and the help of grace is given, because “free-will” of itself can do nothing. (Luther, Bondage of the Will)
Erasmus tried to find a middle road, but his middle road led him to a dead end. He tried to make the inference that because grace was given that this established the freedom of the will, but Luther saw through that. Earlier Erasmus had tried to say that the will had almost no power at all and could barely do anything by itself. Luther had that advantage in terms of argument at that point and he continues to press that home. It is perhaps here that we see the truthfulness of Luther’s position at its clearest. Grace and ‘free-will’ are opposites and cannot abide together. To the degree that the ‘free-will’ is asserted is to that same degree that grace is denigrated. If salvation is by grace alone, then there is no room for ‘free-will’ in salvation at all. If salvation is by the ‘free-will’ to any degree, then it is not by grace alone at all. The intrusion of ‘free-will’ into the Gospel of grace alone is the intrusion of that which makes grace no longer to be grace (Rom 11:6).
The Gospel of grace alone reaches to sinners who are dead in their sins and trespasses and are by nature children of wrath (Eph 2:1-3). In their spiritual deadness they are dead to spiritual things and are not free in those things at all. The sinner must not look to his deadness in order to make himself alive, but instead see that he is dead and needs the power of grace and life to make him alive. Ephesians 2:4-10 speaks of grace and grace alone as making the sinner alive in Christ Jesus. There is no help from the free-will mentioned and there is also no room at all for it. God will not share the glory of His grace with no one. God saves sinners by grace alone because He saves to His glory alone. God saves sinners by His grace alone because there is nothing in the sinner in terms of merit or righteousness that can move Him to save them. God saves by grace alone because there is nothing that the will of those dead in sin can do to help or assist in saving themselves. Whatever is of grace is of grace and whatever is of works is of works. The two cannot mix in this way and at this point.
What is it that people think the ‘free-will’ can do anyway that grace cannot do? What power is there in the will that grace cannot do? What merit is there in an act of the will that Christ could not merit? What righteousness in the act of the will is there that the righteousness of Christ is not enough for? For an act of the will to assist in salvation the will would have to be perfectly holy for that to be acceptable to God. Surely, then, the biblical teaching of grace alone shines out with unfettered glory at this point. No act of the will can be acceptable to God unless it is perfectly holy or has perfect merit. No act of the will that is less than perfect can possibly assist in anything that God will accept. For the will to be truly free it must be free from sin and from grace. Yet the will is never free from sin and can do nothing apart from grace alone. So the teaching of grace alone utterly destroys any hope of anyone of being helped in salvation by ‘free-will.” For the Gospel of grace alone, then, to be preached, the hope in ‘free-will’ must be given up and the soul must look away from any hope in itself and all hope must be in Christ.
Luther has left us right where we need to be. By pointing to Scripture and grace alone he has utterly destroyed the teaching of ‘free-will.’ Yet in our day the vast majority of people do not see this as an important topic. So many who think of themselves as Reformed don’t see that by their holding hands with Arminians and Pelagians on this issue (working together) that they are standing against the Gospel of grace alone themselves. How can a man preach the Gospel of grace alone unless he seeks to destroy any hope that a person has in his own merit, righteousness, power, and therefore will? How can a man preach the Gospel of grace alone when he says that those who believe and preach ‘free-will’ preach the same Gospel that he does? These things cannot be and so they should not be. The Gospel of grace alone is what Christ has done and the Spirit does alone. A gospel that includes the ‘free-will’ is not something that is of grace alone. It may be of grace provided, but it is not of grace alone in procuring and applying salvation. The teaching of ‘free-will’ cannot point to grace alone because it necessarily points to the will as a player in the Gospel. Any amount of ‘free-will’ in the Gospel is a different gospel.
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