John Calvin's Institutes in a Year

Luther will not treat the cause as a dispute over money, to be settled for the peace of the street. The peace of the flesh, he says, is with Erasmus a greater matter than faith, conscience, salvation, the word of God, the glory of Christ, and God himself. He has not held the cause for money, or glory, or the life of his body. He is not stone. He chooses temporal tumult for the word’s sake rather t...

Luther asks where Erasmus’s moderate theology leads. It calls men off from the foreknowledge of God, and calls the desire to know it irreligious. That is to teach an ignorance of God, to leave the promises, and to account the consolations of the Spirit nothing. The Sophists have defiled the gold with dung. The gold is not to be cast away with the dung. Then Erasmus says that some truths, though tr...

Luther will not let Erasmus write on free will and throw away the parts of the subject. What the will does, and what God does or foreknows, are the substance. Without them the book is a title with an elegant cover. Then comes the thunderbolt. God foreknows nothing by contingency. He foresees, purposes, and does all things according to his immutable will. By that, free will is thrown prostrate. Era...

Luther will not let free will be filed among the things a Christian need not know. Erasmus’s form of piety, he says, could have been drawn up by a Jew or a Gentile who had never heard of Christ. If it is irreligious to ask whether the will does anything toward salvation, or is only passive under grace, then nothing remains to be known, neither God, nor Christ, nor gospel, nor faith. Then he sets t...

Luther will not let Erasmus keep the name of reverence and the wish to be a skeptic in the same breath. If the doctrines are useless, the liberty of doubting is no news. If they are necessary, the wish to assert nothing is impious. What can the church decree that is not already decreed in the Scriptures? To submit, and then to add “whether I follow or not,” is to commit the injunctions to the wind...

Luther concedes the eloquence and refuses the argument. Erasmus, he says, has said nothing on free will that the Sophists had not already said, and has left the case worse than he found it, like the woman in the gospel whom the physicians only make sicker. He answers not from fear, but because the brethren press him, and because silence would abandon the office of a debtor to the wise and the unwi...

Erasmus grants the answer that silences a creature complaining of its kind. A man is not wronged because he was not made an angel, nor a frog because it was not made a peacock. The spider is wonderful in its own kind. Then he says the question before us is not that question. The frog is not told to become a peacock. The man is told to turn, to hear, and to choose life. He will not have God crowned...

Erasmus grants the speech that carries the hearer. Let a man claim no praise, and call himself a living organ of the Spirit, and transfer the glory to Christ. He applauds it, even to the point of hyperbole. Then he asks what the warnings are for, if we do nothing, and God works the willing and the accomplishing by a will that cannot change. Why pray for what is already decreed? Why spend the marty...

Erasmus will not let the figure of the grass stand for the whole man. The breath of the Lord dries the flower of a people’s boasting, in the temple, in circumcision, in wisdom. It does not dry up the will that hears and turns. Not every affection is flesh. Reason often judges badly. It does not cease to judge. He then keeps the two halves of the sentence that the assertion pulls apart. It is for m...

Luther asks how God can be said to work evil in us, as he is said to harden us. God works all in all. Satan and man being fallen cannot will good, but are ever turned the way of their own desires. God moves and does all in them as they themselves are. He drives the lame horse as the horse is. God cannot do evil, but he uses evil instruments. The fault is in the instruments. The wicked man cannot b...

Erasmus does not deny the hand of the potter. He denies that the figure was brought in to prove that the will is a title without a reality. Paul uses the clay to shut the mouth of the Jews who murmur against God. He uses the vessels of a great house to call a man to cleanse himself. Take the figure without remainder, and a chamber pot is told to make itself a vessel of honor, and an axe is called...

Today we continue Erasmus’s On the Freedom of the Will , examining his argument that Scripture’s commands, warnings, and promises imply a meaningful human response. When God says “Turn,” “Choose,” and “If you will,” does this establish our ability to respond, or can such commands reveal our dependence on grace without proving that ability? Erasmus presses the question through passages concerning r...

Luther holds the Diatribe fast. The scape-gap of tropes profits nothing. The word of God is to be understood according to the plain meaning of the words. If the Diatribe cannot prove a trope, the words stand as they are. I will harden the heart of Pharaoh. He has mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardens. Why have you made us to err? The liberty of interpretation confounds all things. Mer...

Erasmus sets the schools in order, and then names the two he means to contest. Augustine, he says, calls the first stirring operative grace, and the charity that stays with the one who endeavors cooperative grace. Grace leads the work. It is not a companion. He distinguishes a grace common to all, a grace that stirs the sinner who has merited nothing, a grace that makes the will effectual, and a g...

Luther comes to Paul, the most determined enemy to free will. Or do you despise the riches of his goodness, not knowing that the goodness of God leads to repentance? How can the despising of the commandment be imputed where there is not a free will? The conclusions recoil upon the Diatribe. If they prove anything, they prove that free will can do all things. The apostle’s intent is to bring the im...

Erasmus leaves the preface and begins the comparison. He defines free choice as a power of the will by which a man may apply himself to what leads to eternal salvation, or turn away from it. The first witness is Sirach: God left man in the hand of his own counsel, and set water and fire before him. From that he reads Adam, the angels, and the wound passed to their children. The will was lamed, he...

Erasmus finishes the preface by refusing to measure the truth by a count of votes, and then refusing to hand the meaning of Scripture to a private spirit. He grants that Scripture alone outweighs every human voice, and adds at once that both sides embrace the same Scripture and dispute its sense. Against Wycliffe he does not ask what is left to grace. He asks what is left to our prayers and our en...

October 31 is the eve of All Saints. In 1517, on that eve, a Wittenberg professor sent out ninety-five theses on indulgences, and the Western church has marked the day ever since as the start of the Reformation. Those theses were not yet about the will. This reading is what the argument became eight years later, when Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther wrote the two books that have to be heard to...

Erasmus does not open with a proof. He opens by refusing a fight. He has never sworn to Luther’s words, he will not match him sword for sword, and he would rather leave the labyrinth of free choice unentered than publish, before everyone, the claim that whatever we do we do by sheer necessity. The first reading stays inside that preface: the fly and the elephant, the Corycian cave, what he thinks...

We are stepping aside from the regular sequence for a while. Not leaving it. Setting it down until this next reading is finished. October 31 is the eve of All Saints. In 1517, on that eve, Martin Luther sent out ninety-five theses on indulgences, and the Western church has marked the day ever since as the start of the Reformation. Those theses were not yet about the will. What we are taking up now...

Calvin will not let the command to serve Nebuchadnezzar be treated as a special case for Israel. The ground is the gift of the kingdom. On whomsoever God confers it, him the subject is bound to serve. Exiles are told to pray for the peace of the city that carried them away. David, already anointed, will not stretch out his hand against Saul, because Saul is the Lord's anointed. Mutual duty does no...

Calvin has described the magistrate as he ought to be: father of his country, pastor of the people, guardian of peace. Then he turns to the prince who is none of these things. Some live in sloth. Some sell judgments. Some pillage the poor and spend the plunder. Natural feeling hates the tyrant and loves the just king. Scripture goes farther. The unjust prince also holds his power from God. The goo...

Calvin answers those who condemn every appeal to a judge. Paul claimed the rights of a Roman citizen and appealed to Caesar. That was not revenge. Revenge is the private desire to return evil for evil. The magistrate's sword is God's vengeance, exercised by the ministry of man. Turning the other cheek remains. A Christian is born to bear injury, to pray for the one who curses him, and to overcome...

Calvin turns from the magistrate to the laws. Without them the office is empty. Without him they are dumb. Some will have every commonwealth ruled by the judicial law of Moses. He will not. The moral law stands for every nation and every age: worship God, and love your neighbour. Ceremony was a tutelage. The Jewish polity was a form of equity for that people. Other nations may punish theft, murder...

Calvin answers the hard question. Christians are forbidden to kill. How, then, can a pious magistrate shed blood? He does not act for himself. The Lawgiver who forbade murder puts the sword in his minister's hand, so that murder does not go unpunished. Mercy still sits on the throne. Severity that only wounds, and clemency that lets the wicked run, are both cruelty. The same office reaches war, wh...