On the Bondage of the Will

Now, that becomes more difficult through the course of discussions.

But, you know, if you're just reading Luther and Luca and you're reading, you know, De Servo Arbitrio, you think, well, yeah, this is what we say.

Right.

And you don't really see any massive difference.

Martin Luther wrote the second in 1525.

He called it the bondage of the will.

He was in Wittenberg, in his early forties, already the name attached to the breach in the Western Church.

He had asked Erasmus for an answer.

Erasmus did not want this book.

He said a fly should not contend with an elephant, and he meant himself.

Luther, near the end of his life, named the bondage of the will among the few of his books he thought worth keeping.

The mild book and the fierce book are not equal in the author's own reckoning.

Go to bed.

Pick out a great classic like John Calvin's Institutes or Martin Luther's Bondage of the Will or Commentary on Galatians or John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress or Jonathan Edwards' Religious Affections or some great book you've just been itching to read and say, oh, there's no way, and read it at 15 minutes a day.

A big tree can be chopped down with lots of little chops.

That's a great incentive, I think, to get wisdom.

So the same thing happened when I wrote this.

And as I was writing, I really did begin trying to work with Luther on the bondage of the will and his response to Erasmus on the freedom of the will.

And from that, then this began to grow into the outlaw God.

And by the time I was done, I sent it into the editor and the editor said, what am I supposed to do with this? This is way too long.

only the shortest gospel.

So anyway, yes, that one is getting to be probably even more than three volumes, but that will start to come out soon.

But it's also true that Luther's outlaw God needed to be three in the same way that Luther's real treatise work that he also said was the only thing that he would really want to preserve if everything else went away, the bondage of the will, of course, and then also the Ten Commandments, the creed, and the sacraments.

And when he gets to the small catechism, then he realizes that he needs to do theology.

It's looking like the same thing for a reason, I think.

And one day someone stood up to them.

He wasn't the first person to stand up to them.

Other people had tried doing this before and had paid with their life.

As part of that, she takes vows of silence.

By the age of 16, she's agreed to strict isolation in her life.

Under this convent she was in, they were not allowed to talk to one another outside of religious details.

She wasn't really allowed to have friends.

I wasn't highly familiar with conservative Lutheranism or confessional Lutheranism, but I had read some Luther and Melanchthon.

I had read The Freedom of a Christian, The Bondage of the Will, the Loki Communis, and I knew that confessional Lutherans definitely believed in grace alone and faith alone.

I knew they taught the inerrancy of Scripture and that the sacraments are means of grace.

So with respect to the things that I mentioned earlier, wanting a Protestant tradition that was friendly towards the life of the mind, that was rooted in history, and that was highly sacramental, Lutheranism seemed to definitely have what I was looking for, had all that.

So they're constantly, you know, helping one another to discover things.

And I mean, Luther loves Melanchthon's early writing so much in his preface to the bondage of the will that he, in typical Luther fashion, he states things in exaggerated ways.

And he says that Melanchthon's Loki is worthy of canonization because it's so good.

And that's a, you know, the... first edition of that.

And so there are certain liturgical things that you're going to see that differ there.

That's probably the most obvious substantive difference.

There is an argument that Melanchthon departs from Luther's view on the bondage of the will.

I will say at the very least, Melanchthon is at least more careful.