When we
despair of ourselves, we repent of these self-justifying schemes and allow
ourselves to be shaped by God, covered in Christ’s righteousness, and reborn
with a new heart.
In an exchange
with Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1525, the reformer Martin Luther debated the
matter of free will with the great Humanist thinker. At the end of his
treatise, De Servo Arbitrio [On the Captive Will], he told Erasmus, “You and
you alone have seen the question on which everything hinges, and have aimed at
the vital spot.” [1] For Luther, how you understand the human will is
imperative for understanding how God works through the gospel to bring faith.
What does it
mean to have a bound will? To answer this question, we must take a step back.
For Luther, humans are creatures of the heart, that means that everyone is
captivated by something or another. Whatever we make of the will, it is
beholden to the heart. And this captivation is not an easy ride. The human
heart is stormy, swaying under the spell of four different emotions:
A human heart
is like a ship on a wild sea, driven by the storm winds from the four corners
of the world. Here it is stuck with fear and worry about impending disaster;
there comes grief and sadness because of present evil. Here breathes a breeze
of hope and of anticipated happiness; there blows security and joy in present
blessings. These storm winds teach us to speak with earnestness, to open the
heart and pour out what lies at the bottom of it. [2]
For the
Reformer, we are not natural born Stoics indifferent to our emotional reactions
but instead we are creatures under the spell of our passions.
Whatever we
think about the will, it is not neutral, like a customer choosing options in a
big box store or a diner at a buffet line but instead as indebted to and driven
by fear, grief, hope, and joy. But there is good news. The gospel comes to open
our hearts, enjoy Christ, and liberate us from our defenses. Luther likened us
to beasts of burden ridden by either God or the devil and our hearts as being
controlled by the one holding the reins. Throughout the Scriptures we learn
that God loves his own. Given that truth, our hearts should be captivated by
God, but they become ensnared in idols, projections of our sense of value and
worth. For the most part this projection is tied to merit. We use our idols to
verify to our weak egos that we matter (see The
Denial of Death by Ernst Becker).
All humans are
captivated by something or another and look to that power to uphold them and
validate the meaning of their lives
Preachers must
be vigilant with how they address their hearers. Your hearers, of course, live
in a context, whether a city, suburb, or the country, driven by a political
stance, and beholden to whatever glitter or entertainment that captures them.
To be sure, all humans are captivated by something or another and look to that
power to uphold them and validate the meaning of their lives. All humans live
from an ideal that gives them meaning. But there is evidence that purely
secular approaches to establishing meaning, such as the quest for authenticity,
are no longer working. Otherwise, why would so many be anxious and depressed?
In Luther’s day
and in some versions of religion, it is impossible to untether “free will” from
the attempt to acquire merit. In this perspective, Christ is, at best, an
accessory. Speaking some years ago in a local church about the theology of the
cross (for which Christ is never an add-on), a man countered me by saying, “You
can talk all you wish about a theology of the cross, but I have landed a
well-paying job, a great house in the burbs, and a beautiful wife. I just don’t
experience a theology of the cross.” I instinctively replied, “take your
pulse!”
Bound to
Justify Yourself
All people with
bound wills will look at Christ as an accessory. In Moralistic Therapeutic
Deism, secular people evaluate religion in a twofold way: they see religion,
first, as making people ethical and, second, as helping people emotionally.
Now, this way of looking at religion reduces it to its utility. It has no sense
of honoring God for his own sake and possibly little sense for loving your
neighbors for their own sakes. But the gospel as a promise cannot be reduced to
its usefulness. It is God’s means to rescue people from sin, death, and the
devil. It is not translatable into a program to help us successfully navigate
life, let alone accrue merit for eternal life. Of course, if our lives are
grounded in the gospel, we can have access to the assurance that they are lived
out wholly within God’s embrace. That can afford us a modicum of security in
this life. The point is, whenever you preach, you are preaching to an audience
of bound wills.
The gospel as a
promise cannot be reduced to its usefulness. It is God’s means to rescue people
from sin, death, and the devil.
How should that
shape your preaching? All those to whom you preach are folks captivated by
something or another. That means, everyone to whom you preach lives as if they
have a crush on someone or something. (Do you remember the hold that crushes
had on you when you were an adolescent?) We are creatures of desire. Augustine
was right that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. That which we
desire provides us with our sense of meaning, value, and purpose.
Paradoxically, there is a sense that our desires choose us rather than we
choose them. Not only do they choose us, but they possess us. Some years ago, a
class gave me pushback that they were all individuals who “did their own
thing.” My response to them was, if that is the case, then why are you all
wearing the same designer label jeans? In their imaginations they were striving
to be unique individuals and thereby become authentic. But what was really
driving them was the unrecognized desire to fit in with their peers.
Luther taught
that God’s law, if taken seriously, would prove to us our inability to keep it
from the heart and so prevent us from using it to achieve merit. He showed that
the law would give us “self-knowledge,” the awareness of our inability to make
ourselves to be no longer incurvated, turned-in-on-ourselves, and love God for
his own sake. The more the law hammers this truth home, the more likely we
would despair of ourselves. Again, paradoxically, such self-despair is a good
thing. It shows us that self-justification will never give us the security in
our relationship with God that we crave. It shows us the futility of attempting
to justify ourselves and so allows us to become open to God’s work on us. That
is, God can really begin to work his mercy and goodness in Christ for you when
you stop trying to prove your worth. We experience a “new intellect and will”
giving us the power to “curb the flesh and to flee the righteousness and wisdom
of the world.” [3] Of course, this means that Christian life is a battlefield
between old and new.
There are a lot
of ways that people use to justify themselves. As seen above, some might use
their belief in their financial success at improving their relationship with
God. Others might find their ultimate meaning in the politics which they hold
dear. Others might find it in their success in whether they are movers and
shakers in their place of employment or their families. In all these schemes,
Christ is marginalized as an accessory. When we despair of ourselves, we repent
of these self-justifying schemes and allow ourselves to be shaped by God,
covered in Christ’s righteousness, and reborn with a new heart.
As Luther
points out in his Postil for the 3rd Sunday after Easter, many of those to whom
you preach wrestle with God in hiddenness. [4] They deal with the deus
absconditus, perhaps even stronger, a Christus absconditus. Christ no longer
seems present and kind. Instead, he seems to have disappeared. Such an absent
Christ leaves us exposed to the law’s accusations of not living up to its
goals. Many people suffering from the experience of an absent Christ find
themselves caught or trapped in temptation, anxieties, adversities, and many
forms of suffering. Christ is present as merciful when he is preached.
Preachers as
Fools for Christ
Luther
interprets this experience as a way by which God reinforces the reality that an
exercise in our free will to secure our worth falters. Certainly, Luther is an
advocate of good works. But works are only good when they are done neither from
a slave mentality which fears punishment in hell nor from the quest to secure
payment or reward in heaven like a hireling. Instead, works are good when we
live to supply our neighbor’s needs and not use our neighbor for our own
benefit. In faith, God’s love, which is ever gushing, flows through us to
accomplish good in our various vocations in the world. When experiencing God in
hiddenness, we discover that our works cannot secure Christ’s presence. Only
the word can do that. Our wills may be bound to believe that through our
choices we can accrue merit. But merit does not cut it with a God who is
committed to be merciful. Echoing Paul, Luther believes we encounter our own
foolishness in this thought. Yet Christians also embrace the foolishness of
trusting in Christ alone: we become fools for Christ.
Again, as
preachers your job is to hand over the goods. Give Christ to your people.
Luther often preached as if his mouth was Christ’s own. It is an effective tool
for delivering the gospel.
Placing
Salvation in the Best of Hands
When I preach,
some tell me how much they appreciate that I emphasize that God’s grace is “for
you.” Too many other preachers present the gospel as if it were a program for
either personal or social improvement. Bound wills need to hear that Christ
forgives them and plants a whole new heart within them.
Renewed men and
women to whom the Spirit has brought faith will work to make the world more
just and peaceful.
Preaching to
bound wills is less about offering the congregation a program for
self-improvement and more about delivering Christ’s benefits, bringing the
goods of forgiveness of sin, life, and salvation. Many preachers are rightfully
concerned that Christianity can impact social health within the world. The best
way to do this is to secure anxious consciences in Christ and bind up those who
are deeply wounded. Renewed men and women to whom the Spirit has brought faith
will work to make the world more just and peaceful.
A preacher who
understands the nature of the will as the crux of theological understanding and
especially how it impinges on the preaching task might join in rejoicing with
Luther at the end of his treatise on the will, in one of the greatest passages
in all his writings:
For my own
part, I frankly confess that even if it were possible, I should not wish to
have free choice given to me, or to have anything left in my own hands by which
I might strive toward salvation. For, on the one hand, I should be unable to
stand firm and keep hold of it amid so many adversities and perils and so many
assaults of demons, seeing that even one demon is mightier than all people, and
no one at all could be saved; and on the other hand, even if there were no
perils or adversities or demons, I should nevertheless have to labor under
perpetual uncertainty and to fight as one beating the air, since even if I
lived and worked to eternity, my conscience would never be assured and certain,
how much it ought to do to satisfy God. For whatever work might be
accomplished, there would always remain an anxious doubt whether it pleased God
or whether he required something more, as the experience of all self-justifiers
proves, and as I myself learned to my bitter cost through so many years. But
now, since God has taken my salvation out of my hands into his, making it
depend on his choice and not mine, and has promised to save me, not by my own
work or exertion but by his grace and mercy, I am assured and certain both that
he is faith and will not lie to me, and also that he is too great and powerful
for any demons or any adversities to be able to break him or snatch him from
me. [5]
God’s mercy is
nothing that a “free will” would choose. But mercy is what sinners need and
what God offers them for Jesus’ sake. To deny “free will” is no downer.
Instead, it affirms that everything is in the best of hands in God’s will. “Not
my will, but thine be done” (Luke 22:42).
So, preachers: Be bold in your calling as one of God’s delivery guys. No other
message in today’s world is as important as preaching the gospel as God’s
promise to forgive sins for Jesus’ sake
by Mark Mattes is associate professor of religion and philosophy at Grand
View College in Des Moines, Iowa. He is the author of "Martin Luther’s
Theology of Beauty," "The Role of Justification in Contemporary
Theology," "Imaging the Journey," and "Law and Gospel in Action."
