And what about Martin Luther's tour de force "On the Bondage of the Will"? Are we sweeping Luther's real Christianity under the carpet in order to please the crowds with the sugar-coated humanistic fables of Erasmus? Luther told the truth: there is no such thing as human free will.
+The Professor I appreciate your comment. For me, the absence of free-will poses a different problem. One must ask then, are humans morally responsible creatures at all? If we have no free-will to choose to do either morally good or evil acts, then how can it be said that we are responsible for them? Indeed, this would place all the burden of sin on God who would be entirely responsible for all evil committed if that were the case. I think I agree with a kind of pre-destination of some kind, where God does not control individual and mundane acts, but does control who is saved by his divine authority. So the act of being saved would not be of our own doing but out of God's grace, but all other actions would be those of our own free-will. Am I sure of this? I am open to any other viewpoint, but I think this is probably the case, as it seems most consistent with biblical theology.
+The Professor, Luther wasn't arguing against the fact that humans are created with freedom as the Imago Dei, but that the free-wills of men are bound to sin, and thus cannot attain salvation by the means of the exercise of our free wills. What Pearcey is arguing against is rather determinism, saying that humanity has NOT been created with the capacity to make moral judgments (i.e. being robotic), and therefore cannot be held accountable for actions. Determinism is false. But I am sure that Pearcey would heartily agree with Luther that our wills are bound by sin, and can only be brought to life by the free action of God regenerating us by the power of the Spirit. Thus Luther most certainly taught and believed in human free will, but proved that those wills are now bound to sin since the fall, until set free by the grace of God. After all, he was merely following Augustine on this point.
Morne Marais "Free will is a downright lie!" wrote Martin Luther. He also wrote, "free will is plainly a divine term", and also, "free will does not belong to scripture", and "free will is a mere empty term". I could go on, but you get the picture. Now you're telling us that "Luther most certainly taught and believed in human free will". Yeah right. You're also telling us that "determinism is false". How can you tell? I don't know if you even read Luther, but if you did, I'd recommend that you take another look, and with fresh eyes if that is at all possible. What's in evidence here isn't Luther's views as such but your perception of his views, which perception is seriously biased by your Molinist priors. You cannot read Luther through the lens of modern choice theory of the kind featured in economics textbooks. Received doctrine leaves unexplained the nature and origin of the "preferences" and "expectations" which are subject to "constraints" in the kind of "optimisation" envisioned in such theory. Luther, on the other hand, focuses on the sources of those preferences and expectations, which are spiritual in nature. That's the human will, and it is always in bondage and never free. The one choice that (possibly) exists is whether to accept grace, which is tantamount to choosing one's master: without grace, man's will is entirely in the grips of the devil and his unholy spirits; with grace, man becomes a bond-servant of Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit. There is no such thing as free will, and Luther was right on the mark in calling it "a mere empty term". The implicit point of my comment, to spell it out, was that Molinism has poisoned basically all of Western Christianity. Luther fended off Erasmus' assault on Christian doctrine, but the devil waited for Luther to pass away before putting the Jesuit Molina on the job. With Luther gone, there was little opposition and the poison could be introduced to slowly work its way into the limbs of the church. Free will isn't Christian doctrine; it's Jewish doctrine. Same with the other motto of modernity, "equality", which comes out of the legal and commercial doctrine of the Salamanca School. Another witches' brew out of the same Iberian cauldron. It is little wonder that "freedom and equality" is the leading slogan of the Illuminist agenda of destroying Christianity and imposing a "new world order" of global communism under Jewish rule.
Levi Bekesza: A belated reply to your comment. For some reason, I wasn't notified when you submitted it. The questions of determinism and predestination are intimately connected and also quite tricky. Much of it is hidden to us in a mystery, which is also where Luther stood on the matter. This is the residual uncertainty that separates Luther from the all-out "Calvinist" standpoint. A key point here is that we need to distinguish between the ontological and the epistemological sides of the matter. Ontologically, everything that happens in this world must have a determining cause, so determinism is baked into that pie. The free-will proposition involves carving out some real estate, as it were, for human free will to work independently of the will of God. As per my other comment today, Luther rejected this notion of free will. Restating Luther's point, we can think of human will as either aligned or misaligned to the will of God. Either way, human will is governed by external spiritual forces to which man is subject and indeed enslaved. The one hole I see in Luther's defence wall against free-will doctrine is that man may have the choice to accept or reject grace, which is freely on offer from God through Christ. Thus there may be an element of choice, but only between which master to serve. This choice will obviously have pervasive ramifications down the line, but it operates on an altogether different and much deeper level than the ordinary depiction of choice through human free will (viz. through optimisation of preferences under a set of constraints). Thus the ordinary choice problems which man supposedly faces in his daily activities are illusory, and they are so because the preferences and expectations which guide those choices aren't independent variables, but are determined by spiritual forces acting upon the human heart and mind. The question remains as to whether the choice between salvation (accepting grace) and damnation (rejecting grace) is also illusory, i.e. whether there is true predestination or not. If Luther were alive today, my best guess is that he would say that we don't know. The answer lies hidden in a mystery beyond our reach. As to the relationship between free will and moral responsibility, the question is: "Who says?" That is, who says there is such a direct correspondence? The answer, I think, is that we have invented this relationship out of our own notions of morality. What we are saying is something like this: "If God were to hold men accountable for deeds they did not commit out of their own free will, then God would be unfair." But then, of course, because God isn't unfair, we conclude that the correspondence must hold. Moving one step forward down this chain of arguments raises the next question: "Who are we to tell?" The serpent in the Garden of Eden promised us that our eyes would be opened, but the reality is that our moral vision is far from 20/20. The snake lied. Imagine that! Point is, even if we have a rudimentary sense of good and evil, we are not equipped to see ultimate good and evil. A lot of what we perceive as good may turn out to cause damage to ourselves as well as others down the line, and vice versa for things we perceive as evil. Only God has 20/20 vision. The ultimate nature of good and evil remains hidden from us, in another (but intrinsically related) mystery. We cannot presume to know these things. All we can do is put our fate in the hands of God and constantly work on strengthening our faith upon which everything rests. God will then guide us through life by sending the spiritual goods to our hearts and minds. This is possible once we're connected to God through grace and faith in Christ. When you think of it, this also defines the scope of our responsibility, which is in keeping with what Jesus said about the matter: « Then they asked him, "What must we do to do the works God requires?" Jesus answered, "The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent." » (John 6.28-29) Our job is to believe in Christ, to constantly work on strengthening our faith. Everything else follows as a by-product from that faith. So there is the scope of our responsibilities, for which we will be held accountable when that day comes. This, I think, sums up where I stand on these issues, and I think that's in keeping with Luther. I was born and raised Lutheran, in a Lutheran country. My family and entire ancestry has been 100% Lutheran for five centuries, going all the way back to the 16th-century Reformation. What I'm saying here is that a lot of this doctrine is just a matter of spelling out one's presuppositions, which one has absorbed through osmosis in this environment. Pardon long comment. I'm hoping it will be of interest to you, and I thank you for your thoughtful reply.
And what about Martin Luther's tour de force "On the Bondage of the Will"? Are we sweeping Luther's real Christianity under the carpet in order to please the crowds with the sugar-coated humanistic fables of Erasmus? Luther told the truth: there is no such thing as human free will.
+The Professor I appreciate your comment. For me, the absence of free-will poses a different problem. One must ask then, are humans morally responsible creatures at all? If we have no free-will to choose to do either morally good or evil acts, then how can it be said that we are responsible for them?
Indeed, this would place all the burden of sin on God who would be entirely responsible for all evil committed if that were the case.
I think I agree with a kind of pre-destination of some kind, where God does not control individual and mundane acts, but does control who is saved by his divine authority. So the act of being saved would not be of our own doing but out of God's grace, but all other actions would be those of our own free-will. Am I sure of this? I am open to any other viewpoint, but I think this is probably the case, as it seems most consistent with biblical theology.
+The Professor, Luther wasn't arguing against the fact that humans are created with freedom as the Imago Dei, but that the free-wills of men are bound to sin, and thus cannot attain salvation by the means of the exercise of our free wills. What Pearcey is arguing against is rather determinism, saying that humanity has NOT been created with the capacity to make moral judgments (i.e. being robotic), and therefore cannot be held accountable for actions. Determinism is false. But I am sure that Pearcey would heartily agree with Luther that our wills are bound by sin, and can only be brought to life by the free action of God regenerating us by the power of the Spirit. Thus Luther most certainly taught and believed in human free will, but proved that those wills are now bound to sin since the fall, until set free by the grace of God. After all, he was merely following Augustine on this point.
Morne Marais "Free will is a downright lie!" wrote Martin Luther. He also wrote, "free will is plainly a divine term", and also, "free will does not belong to scripture", and "free will is a mere empty term". I could go on, but you get the picture.
Now you're telling us that "Luther most certainly taught and believed in human free will". Yeah right. You're also telling us that "determinism is false". How can you tell?
I don't know if you even read Luther, but if you did, I'd recommend that you take another look, and with fresh eyes if that is at all possible.
What's in evidence here isn't Luther's views as such but your perception of his views, which perception is seriously biased by your Molinist priors.
You cannot read Luther through the lens of modern choice theory of the kind featured in economics textbooks. Received doctrine leaves unexplained the nature and origin of the "preferences" and "expectations" which are subject to "constraints" in the kind of "optimisation" envisioned in such theory.
Luther, on the other hand, focuses on the sources of those preferences and expectations, which are spiritual in nature. That's the human will, and it is always in bondage and never free. The one choice that (possibly) exists is whether to accept grace, which is tantamount to choosing one's master: without grace, man's will is entirely in the grips of the devil and his unholy spirits; with grace, man becomes a bond-servant of Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit. There is no such thing as free will, and Luther was right on the mark in calling it "a mere empty term".
The implicit point of my comment, to spell it out, was that Molinism has poisoned basically all of Western Christianity. Luther fended off Erasmus' assault on Christian doctrine, but the devil waited for Luther to pass away before putting the Jesuit Molina on the job. With Luther gone, there was little opposition and the poison could be introduced to slowly work its way into the limbs of the church.
Free will isn't Christian doctrine; it's Jewish doctrine. Same with the other motto of modernity, "equality", which comes out of the legal and commercial doctrine of the Salamanca School. Another witches' brew out of the same Iberian cauldron. It is little wonder that "freedom and equality" is the leading slogan of the Illuminist agenda of destroying Christianity and imposing a "new world order" of global communism under Jewish rule.
Levi Bekesza: A belated reply to your comment. For some reason, I wasn't notified when you submitted it.
The questions of determinism and predestination are intimately connected and also quite tricky. Much of it is hidden to us in a mystery, which is also where Luther stood on the matter. This is the residual uncertainty that separates Luther from the all-out "Calvinist" standpoint.
A key point here is that we need to distinguish between the ontological and the epistemological sides of the matter. Ontologically, everything that happens in this world must have a determining cause, so determinism is baked into that pie. The free-will proposition involves carving out some real estate, as it were, for human free will to work independently of the will of God.
As per my other comment today, Luther rejected this notion of free will. Restating Luther's point, we can think of human will as either aligned or misaligned to the will of God. Either way, human will is governed by external spiritual forces to which man is subject and indeed enslaved.
The one hole I see in Luther's defence wall against free-will doctrine is that man may have the choice to accept or reject grace, which is freely on offer from God through Christ. Thus there may be an element of choice, but only between which master to serve. This choice will obviously have pervasive ramifications down the line, but it operates on an altogether different and much deeper level than the ordinary depiction of choice through human free will (viz. through optimisation of preferences under a set of constraints).
Thus the ordinary choice problems which man supposedly faces in his daily activities are illusory, and they are so because the preferences and expectations which guide those choices aren't independent variables, but are determined by spiritual forces acting upon the human heart and mind. The question remains as to whether the choice between salvation (accepting grace) and damnation (rejecting grace) is also illusory, i.e. whether there is true predestination or not. If Luther were alive today, my best guess is that he would say that we don't know. The answer lies hidden in a mystery beyond our reach.
As to the relationship between free will and moral responsibility, the question is: "Who says?" That is, who says there is such a direct correspondence? The answer, I think, is that we have invented this relationship out of our own notions of morality. What we are saying is something like this: "If God were to hold men accountable for deeds they did not commit out of their own free will, then God would be unfair." But then, of course, because God isn't unfair, we conclude that the correspondence must hold.
Moving one step forward down this chain of arguments raises the next question: "Who are we to tell?" The serpent in the Garden of Eden promised us that our eyes would be opened, but the reality is that our moral vision is far from 20/20. The snake lied. Imagine that! Point is, even if we have a rudimentary sense of good and evil, we are not equipped to see ultimate good and evil. A lot of what we perceive as good may turn out to cause damage to ourselves as well as others down the line, and vice versa for things we perceive as evil. Only God has 20/20 vision. The ultimate nature of good and evil remains hidden from us, in another (but intrinsically related) mystery.
We cannot presume to know these things. All we can do is put our fate in the hands of God and constantly work on strengthening our faith upon which everything rests. God will then guide us through life by sending the spiritual goods to our hearts and minds. This is possible once we're connected to God through grace and faith in Christ. When you think of it, this also defines the scope of our responsibility, which is in keeping with what Jesus said about the matter:
« Then they asked him, "What must we do to do the works God requires?"
Jesus answered, "The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent." » (John 6.28-29)
Our job is to believe in Christ, to constantly work on strengthening our faith. Everything else follows as a by-product from that faith. So there is the scope of our responsibilities, for which we will be held accountable when that day comes. This, I think, sums up where I stand on these issues, and I think that's in keeping with Luther. I was born and raised Lutheran, in a Lutheran country. My family and entire ancestry has been 100% Lutheran for five centuries, going all the way back to the 16th-century Reformation. What I'm saying here is that a lot of this doctrine is just a matter of spelling out one's presuppositions, which one has absorbed through osmosis in this environment.
Pardon long comment. I'm hoping it will be of interest to you, and I thank you for your thoughtful reply.
The Professor Hey there! Would you be up for a conversation? Thank you!