The guardians of ‘free-will’ have exemplified the saying: ‘out of the frying-pan, into the fire.’ In their zeal to disagree with the Pelagians they start denying condign merit, and by the very form of their denial they set it up more firmly! By word and pen they deny it, but really, in their hearts, they establish it, and are worse than the Pelagians upon two counts. In the first place, the Pelagians confess and assert condign merit straightforwardly, candidly and honestly, calling a spade a spade and teaching what they really hold. But our friends here, who hold and teach the same view, try to fool us with lying words and false appearances, giving out that they disagree with the Pelagians, when there is nothing that they are further from doing! ‘If you regard our pretences, we appear as the Pelagians’ bitterest foes; but if you regard the facts and our hearts, we are Pelagians double-dyed.’ (Luther, Bondage of the Will)
The point cannot be made often enough (it seems) that we live in a day where people use the words “justification by faith alone” and yet mean something quite different than Luther did when he used the words. It seems that people think that because they use the same words that they are teaching the same thing that Luther did. There are even denominations that are named after Luther but do not mean the same thing (or at least don’t agree with Luther) that Luther did when speaking of justification by faith alone.
Luther wrote in his book The Bondage of the Will that man must deny his ‘free-will’ in order to be saved, yet that is not what is taught in the modern day. In the introduction of The Bondage of the Will it is driven home time after time that the bondage of man’s will is at the heart of the Gospel and is necessary to what Luther taught. Yet today we have people dismissing that very thought and adhering to something called “justification by faith alone” while having taken the very heart of it out. Oh they will say they believe in total depravity and man’s utter helplessness in sin, but they don’t believe it as Luther taught the Bible taught. This may be the result of men not understanding Luther rather than an attempt to simply please people, but the result is more or less the same. The Gospel of grace alone is being hidden from people by the use of orthodox language, which is a greater deception than simply teaching a false gospel in an open way.
On other points, they [Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Bucer] 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.’ The doctrine of free justification by faith only, which became the storm-center 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. The doctrine of justification by faith was important to them because it safeguarded the principle of sovereign grace; but it actually expressed for them only one aspect of this principle, and that not its deepest aspect. The sovereignty of grace found expression in their thinking at a profounder level still, in the doctrine of monergistic regeneration—the doctrine, that is, that the faith which receives Christ for justification is itself the free gift of a sovereign God, bestowing by spiritual regeneration in the act of effectual calling. To the Reformers, the crucial question was not simply, whether God justifies believers without works of law. It was the broader question, whether sinners are wholly helpless in their sin, and whether God is to be thought of as saving them by free, unconditional, invincible grace, not only justifying them for Christ’s sake when they come to faith, but also raising them from the death of sin by His quickening Spirit in order to bring them to faith. Here was the crucial issue; whether God is the author, not merely of justification, but also of faith; whether, in the last analysis, Christianity is a religion of utter reliance on God for salvation and all things necessary to it, or of self-reliance and self-effort. ‘Justification by faith only’ is a truth that needs interpretation. The principle of sola fide is not rightly understood till it is seen as anchored in the broader principle of sola gratia. What is the source and status of faith? Is it the God-given means whereby the God-given justification is received, or is it a condition of justification which it is left to man to fulfill? Is it a part of God’s gift of salvation, or is it man’s own contribution to salvation? is our salvation wholly of God, or does it ultimately depend on something that we do for ourselves? Those who say the latter (as the Arminians later did) thereby deny man’s utter helplessness in sin, and affirm that a form of semi-Pelagianism is true after all. It is no wonder, then, that later Reformed theology condemned Arminianism as being in principle a return to Rome (because in effect it turned faith into a meritorious work) and a betrayal of the Reformation (because it denied the sovereignty of God in saving sinners, which was the deepest religious and theological principle of the Reformer’s thought). Arminianism was, indeed, in Reformed eyes a renunciation of New Testament Christianity in favor of New Testament Judaism; for to rely on oneself for faith is no different in principle from relying on oneself for works, and the one is as un-Christian and anti-Christian as the other. In the light of what Luther says to Erasmus, there is no doubt that he would have endorsed this judgment. (“Historical and Theological Introduction” to Bondage of the Will)
In light of the words of Luther about how those who deny a view with their lips and yet still have that view in their hearts are worse than those who deny the truth openly, the long quote from the more modern Introduction to his book should strike us with great force. There are many, many people who think that Arminianism teaches justification by faith alone more or less the same as the Reformed do. In that they are correct if we use the word “Arminian” and “Reformed” in modern terms. But if we use the word “Reformed” as teaching what Luther taught the Bible taught on justification, then it is impossible for an Arminian to teach justification in the same way. If that is correct, then what we have today is a mass departure from the Reformation teaching of the Gospel of justification by faith alone and those who claim to teach justification by faith alone (whether Reformed or not) and yet have departed from it as guided by grace alone and the bondage of the will have betrayed the Reformation and more importantly, the Gospel itself. This is not a minor issue and no denomination is worth saving if it requires denying the Gospel of grace alone. Arminianism is a return to Rome and it cannot teach the Gospel of grace alone as Luther taught it and as the Bible sets it out. This is not a simple matter of two theological parties being in disagreement, but it is about two different views of the gospel while both are using the same language. May those who call themselves Reformed and yet have compromised or are so deceived that they think Arminians can preach the true Gospel wake up and see that they are worse than those who plainly teach a false gospel.
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