Martin Luther vs. Erasmus (and Adventism)

KASPARS OZOLINS

Toward the end of his life, the famous German Protestant Reformer Martin Luther remarked that he would not care much if most of his theological writings were forgotten after his death, except for two works: his two catechisms, and a lesser-known book titled On the Bondage of the Will. The latter was published in 1525 as part of a fierce ongoing theological battle between Luther and the celebrated Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus. Why did Luther so regard this work? The answer lies in the fact that this issue––the sovereignty of God––was in reality at the heart of the two major controversies raised by the Protestant Reformation: the authority of the Word of God (sola Scriptura) and faith as the sole instrument of salvation (sola Fide). For Luther, to get the sovereignty of God wrong was to ultimately abandon sola Scriptura and sola Fide. We shall see that the relevance of this claim extends even to Seventh-day Adventists and former Adventists (as well as other Christians). 

The sixteenth-century context

While the outlines of the life of Martin Luther are broadly known to many Christians, the same is not usually true of Desiderius Erasmus. Who exactly was this figure, this giant of scholarship in his own time? He was born in 1466, some decades before the Reformation took off, and died in 1536, when Luther’s work had already shattered Europe and was being felt all over the continent. Above all else, Erasmus was a humanist, a man of letters and a lover of classical Greek and Latin works. (The term “humanist” in those days did not refer to a skeptic or atheist, but rather one who was deeply engaged in the study of literature and the humanities.) 

Perhaps the greatest crowning achievement of Erasmus was his 1516 Greek edition of the New Testament (Novum Instrumentum omne). The printing press had only been invented in the middle of the previous century, and thus it was that this printed Greek New Testament––the first of its kind in history––was to jump-start a flood of vernacular Bible translation all across Europe. Martin Luther himself made use of Erasmus’ Greek New Testament when he set upon the task of translating the Bible into his own native German. No longer did the transmission of the Bible depend on the painstaking and time-intensive labors of obscure monks copying the Word of God letter by letter. The Bible was soon to spread rapidly and cheaply all over the continent thanks to the printing press and Erasmus’ work. 

In fact, Erasmus was often seen as something of a Reformer himself. It is certainly true that he desired to reform the Catholic church and was even often scathing in his attacks on the many abuses of the pope and papal authority. Nevertheless, this celebrated Dutch humanist was born a Catholic and would die as a loyal elite member of the Church. It was Luther and Reformation leaders of his ilk for whom Erasmus reserved his ultimate ire. In this context, Erasmus wrote a diatribe against Luther in 1524 titled The Freedom of the Will, partly encouraged to do so by Pope Clement VII, and partly also as a way of buttressing his Catholic bona fides. It was this work which Luther responded to in the next year with his On the Bondage of the Will. 

At this point some of you might be wondering what all these obscure sixteenth-century facts have to do with Seventh-day Adventism! The answer lies in the fact that nothing is truly new in history, especially church history. Rather, the same controversies and theological debates seem to reappear over and over again. The same opposing sides, the same heresies, the same attitudes toward Scripture. While they may be nuanced and modified somewhat to match the spirit of each age, at bottom, each generation is confronted with the same issue: will we trust what God says in his Word concerning our condition and turn in faith to his Son whose redemption alone can rescue us from our condemnation? 

To get right to the point: Seventh-day Adventist theology and the statements its leaders have made bear an uncanny resemblance to the arguments of the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, in his diatribe against Luther. Note the amazing irony of this fact, for Adventist leaders from the very beginning have styled themselves as the proud and rightful heirs of Martin Luther and the Reformation (indeed they claim to have continued the unfinished work of the Reformation). And thus it is to history that we turn, in order to gain insight and clarity about the fundamental theological issues that the church has always faced.

The clarity and authority of Scripture

At the very outset, Erasmus aimed to cast doubt on the sovereignty of God in his polemic with Luther. For him, this doctrine (like many others) was a harsh teaching and difficult to accept. His means of accomplishing this was to subtly downplay the authority and clarity of Scripture. Erasmus painted a picture of the task of scriptural interpretation as being almost insurmountable. He pointed to the lack of agreement among interpreters throughout church history. He questioned whether the arrogant Luther was right to claim to have arrived at the truth. 

Erasmus tried to “complicate” the many passages from Scripture which were disagreeable to him. From Luther’s perspective, Erasmus was muddying the waters by attempting to explain away God’s absolute sovereignty with the use of illegitimate metaphors and similes. Luther’s own approach to Scripture was fixed: “We should adhere everywhere to the simple, pure and natural meaning of the words, according to the rules of grammar and the habits of speech which God has given unto men.”

Even beyond that, Erasmus made it clear that he disapproved of clear doctrinal assertions and distinctions. He stated: “So great is my dislike of assertions that I prefer the views of the skeptics wherever the inviolable authority of Scripture and the decision of the Church permit—a Church to which at all times I willingly submit my own views, whether I attain what she prescribes or not.” In other words, Erasmus deliberately attempted to be an innovator and step out in his own direction, wherever possible. Erasmus downplayed the importance of right belief, while emphasizing the importance of right morals. His view of Christianity, which he called philosophia Christi (“the philosophy of Christ”) was one which gave priority to following the moral teachings of Christ and of the apostles in right conduct and behavior. Christianity was all about an ethic, and less about a bloody cross. 

Erasmus, although he did not explicitly acknowledge it, needed to “domesticate” the Word of God because of its hard teachings (which were hard to accept for Erasmus). So he superimposed the authority of councils and popes on Scripture. He cast doubt on whether Scripture really was all that clear and understandable, especially when it came to God’s sovereignty and man’s deadness in sin. He professed to disliking hard doctrinal assertions, all the while smuggling in his own worldview and human-centered theology.

Many analogies can be applied here to Seventh-day Adventism (as well as other aberrant theological movements). Like the serpent in the garden, Adventism makes a pretense of piety while whispering about Scripture: “Did God really say…?” It claims to dislike creeds, yet superimposes the voluminous writings of its unbiblical prophetess over the Word of God. It tempers the forcefulness of Scripture by claiming that the writers of the Bible were inspired to merely give the “thoughts” they had in their heads about God. 

The sovereignty of God

Erasmus’ polemic, of course, was aimed at attacking Luther’s doctrine of the sovereignty of God. After having cast doubt on the authority and clarity of Scripture, he proceeded to give examples from the Old and New Testaments of individuals exercising their “free will” in order to turn to God. Additionally, he made an inferential argument from the presence of many commands in Scripture. These commands, he stated, indicate that mankind truly does have the ability to follow and obey God (with the help of the Holy Spirit). Thus Erasmus retorts: “If we can do nothing, what is the purpose of all the laws, precepts, threats and promises in the Bible? All these precepts are useless if nothing is attributed to the human will. If it is not in the power of every man to keep what is commanded, all the exhortations of Scripture are of necessity useless.”

To all this Luther responded forcefully by arguing that the apostle Paul points to the Mosaic law as ultimately giving the knowledge of our sin, but never the ability or power to avoid it. The presence of imperatives in the old covenant never implies ability; rather, it only serves to emphasize our inability: 

The whole nature and design of the law is to give knowledge, and that of nothing else save of sin, and not to discover or communicate any power whatever. This knowledge is not power, nor does it bring power, but it teaches and shows that there is no power here, but great weakness. And what else can the knowledge of sin be, but the knowledge of our weakness and evil? He does not state that through the law comes knowledge of power or of goodness. All the law does, according to Paul’s testimony, is to make sin known. It is from this passage that I derive my answer to you: by the words of law man is admonished and taught what he ought to do, and not what he can do.

For Luther, if our entire salvation depended even in the slightest on our ability to respond to God in the deadness of our sin, it was utterly doomed to fail. One of Luther’s key realizations at the dawn of the Protestant Reformation was that sin was not so much a human disease, but rather a status––the status of death. To give an analogy, a woman is either pregnant or she is not pregnant. While her baby may be growing in her, her fundamental status has not changed. For Luther, our status apart from Christ is death. So one is either dead in trespasses and sins (Eph 2:1), or alive in Christ. In this light, perhaps my favorite words outside of Scripture are these ringing statements from the pen of Martin Luther: 

Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death, and damnation. Now let faith come between them and sins, death, and damnation will be Christ’s, while grace, life, and salvation will be the soul’s; for if Christ is a bridegroom, He must take upon Himself the things which are His bride’s and bestow upon her the things that are His. If he gives her His body and very self, how shall He not give her all that is His? And if He takes the body of the bride, how shall He not take all that is hers?

It is at the cross of Jesus that we behold a revelation of God unlike any other. For there we see the real price of our sin and how much God abhors it. There, too, we see a love that is simply unfathomable. God condescended to humanity and suffered in our place in order to free us from bondage to sin. This is all his doing, not ours! Even our faith, the faith God grants to us (Phil 1:29), is only an instrument that unites us with Christ and his finished work. Because of Christ, Luther could boldly state: 

I frankly confess that, for myself, even if it could be, I should not want “free-will” to be given me, nor anything to be left in my own hands to enable me to endeavour after salvation; not merely because in face of so many dangers, and adversities and assaults of devils, I could not stand my ground; but because even were there no dangers, I should still be forced to labor with no guarantee of success. But now that God has taken my salvation out of the control of my own will, and put it under the control of His, and promised to save me, not according to my working or running, but according to His own grace and mercy, I have the comfortable certainty that He is faithful and will not lie to me, and that He is also great and powerful, so that no devils or opposition can break Him or pluck me from Him. Furthermore, I have the comfortable certainty that I please God, not by reason of the merit of my works, but by reason of His merciful favor promised to me; so that, if I work too little, or badly, He does not impute it to me, but with fatherly compassion pardons me and makes me better. This is the glorying of all the saints in their God.

Competing Visions of Christianity

Any religion that does not rightly describe the plight of man (dead in sin!) and God’s sovereign acting to save (Eph 2:5: “even when we were dead in our trespasses, [God] made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved”) has not arrived at the truth of the universal human condition, nor has it accurately appreciated God’s very nature. Yet Adventism, and Ellen G. White’s famous Steps to Christ, provide an eerily similar parallel to Erasmus’ philosophia Christi. In this work, she presented readers a program of moral self-reform: “God desires to heal us, to set us free. But since this requires an entire transformation, a renewing of our whole nature, we must yield ourselves wholly to Him…The yielding of self, surrendering all to the will of God, requires a struggle; but the soul must submit to God before it can be renewed in holiness.” As with Erasmus, God must cooperate with the willing heart in order to begin to do a work in the sinner.

At this point you, the reader, may have many unanswered questions. Perhaps in another blog post, I could discuss Arminianism vs. Calvinism, and how to understand God’s election in relation to human responsibility. Those are all valid discussions, but in some ways ancillary to the fundamental question of God’s righteous and loving sovereignty over his own creation and creatures. Toward the end of his work, Luther gives an unwitting Erasmus sincere commendation for having hit upon the heart of the issues driving the Reformation in his diatribe: 

“I give you hearty praise: alone, in contrast to all others, you have discussed the real thing, i.e., the essential point. You have not wearied me with those irrelevant points about the Papacy, purgatory, indulgences and such trifles.” 

So also it is the sovereignty of God in salvation which is a fundamental issue that divides Adventists from Christians (even when, admittedly, Christians fall on different sides in the Calvinist-Arminian debate). 

We could easily get lost in the weeds in our discussions over the Sabbath, the investigative judgement, and innumerable other topics. But the fundamental question facing Seventh-day Adventists and non-Seventh-day Adventists alike is the following: Are you going to trust God’s revealed Word in your life? Do you see the cross of Christ as lying at the very center of God’s purposes (indeed the reason for creation itself)? What do you think of God’s precious Son? Does his sovereignty extend to all things, yes, even his sovereignty in salvation?

As David confessed, “Salvation belongs to the LORD!” It is wholly a work of the triune God. To say anything less would be to blaspheme the finished work of Jesus Christ. Thus Augustine asked of God in his Confessions, “Give what you command, and command what you will!” And so also the old hymn says: “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling!”

Endnote

¹ Quotations taken from Ernst F. Winter’s translation (Erasmus-Luther: Discourse on Free Will, New York: Continuum, 2002).

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Kaspars Ozolins

Kaspars Ozolins was born in Latvia to an Adventist family. They moved to Los Angeles where Kaspars attended Adventist elementary and high schools in Glendale, California, and his father was an Adventist pastor. He met Ieva, his wife, while studying in Latvia before pursuing a doctorate at UCLA in historical linguistics. After Kaspars completed an M. Div. at The Master’s Seminary in Sun Valley, California, he served as a research associate at Tyndale House in Old Testament and the Ancient Near East. He is now on the faculty at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary as Assistant Professor of Old Testament Interpretation.

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