Luther On Bound Choice: Celebrating The Recovery Of The Doctrine Of Sola Gratia (Part 1)

by on April 28, 2025 | Comment

In 1580, when the Lutherans and the Reformed met at Montbeilard, when the topic turned to predestination, Theodore Beza (1519–1605) rose, lifted his copy of Luther’s Concerning Bound Choice (De servo arbitrio), and said, “We stand with Luther.”1 The Lutheran representatives suggested that the discussion move on. 2025 is the 500th anniversary of the book Beza held up at Montbeilard and it is time once again to lift it up.

Recovering On Bound Choice

We should lift up this work again since Luther himself regarded it as “one of his two or three very best works.”2 It was one of the more important books of the Protestant Reformation. Yet, my experience suggests that relatively few have actually read it.3

There are a few reasons why this important work has not been as widely read as it should have been. The first of these is the form. The first two-thirds of the work is a point-by-point response to Erasmus’ 1524 Learned Discussion or Discourse Concerning Free Choice.4 Only in the last third of the work did Luther lay out his own view more straightforwardly. Unless one first reads Erasmus, one is left to piece together his’ view while reading Luther. If one reads Erasmus first, then one has yet to read Luther’s reply. A second hinderance to a wider reading in the Modern English-speaking world may be that it seems to have appeared in English for the first time only in 1823, in Henry Cole’s translation.5 A third reason it has not attracted the sort of attention that it might have is because of its doctrine. It is flatly at odds with Modernity. The god of Modernity is not sovereign. He is not the god of Exodus 3:14, “I AM that I AM.” The god of the Modern theologians and philosophers is a god who is in process, who is becoming. Process theology and Open Theism are Modern theologies but the theology of the Luther’s De servo is strange to Moderns.

The God about whom Luther wrote in De servo is the God of Genesis 1, who spoke into nothing and made all that is, who sent the flood “in the world that then was” (Gen 7:6; 2 Pet 3:6; ASV). He is the God of the Exodus, who sent plagues and parted the waters. He is the God who hardened Pharoah’s heart (Ex 9:16; 10:1, 20, 27; 11:10; Rom 9:18), raised Jesus from the dead, and turned a violent opponent of Jesus into an Apostle and martyr. The God about whom Luther wrote in De servo is the God about whom Augustine wrote against Pelagius, and about whom Gotschalk wrote, and about whom Thomas Bradwardine and the other neo-Augustinians wrote. That is not the God of Modernity. That the Modern world largely ignored De servo is to be expected and is perhaps one reason why Luther is viewed so differently than Calvin regarding the doctrines of grace. Finally, it has largely been left to the Reformed to promote this work and we are a small lot, only a fraction of the number of confessional Lutherans in North America.6

Though Luther’s Bound Choice was published after Erasmus’ Diatribe, Erasmus was responding to things Luther had already said and he said them because his rediscovery of Augustine’s anti-Pelagian theology. So we start with his rediscovery of Augustine in his first lectures in the Psalms.

Luther’s Journey Back To Augustine

Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) is rightly regarded as the most important theologian in the Western (Latin) church. Even he, however, had to become an anti-Pelagian. By that I mean that, when we read his earliest works after his conversion from Manichaeism to orthodox Christianity, when he touched on the doctrine of salvation, he did not always sound the way he would later on. It was not until the British monk Pelagius reacted to his saying in Confessions 10.19, “Give what thou commandest, and command what thou wilt,” that Augustine was forced to think through the implications of what he had written and what Pelagius had written.7 Of course Augustine responded with a barrage of anti-Pelagian writings. Pelagius denied Adam’s federal headship and that, as the Colonial congregationalists put it, “In Adam’s fall we all sinned.” For Pelagius, Adam and Christ were but two examples whom we are free to follow, even after the fall. For Pelagius, we only become sinners when we sin. Augustine distinguished between life before the fall and after and between nature and grace. Pelagius did not. For Augustine, after the fall, our faculties are profoundly corrupted and we are, apart from God’s prevenient, sovereign grace unable to do anything toward our own salvation.

Augustine and his followers won the day in North Africa and nominally in the Western church but when a Synod in Jerusalem had opportunity to convict the Pelagian Coelestius they were unable or unwilling. This was a harbinger of things to come for both the East and the West. In the early sixth century, the Second Council of Orange stood solidly with Augustine against Pelagius and against the semi-Pelagians, those who sought a middle way between Augustine and Pelagius. The semi-Pelagians affirmed that in Adam’s fall sinned we all but they did not agree with Augustine that the human will is, by nature, enslaved to sin. Over time, the semi-Pelagian view would come to dominate the Western church.

Gottschalk of Orbais (c. 804–69) found out the hard way that, by the 9th century, Augustine’s anti-Pelagianism was out of fashion. A wealthy young monk, he went on a trip that took him through Italy and the Balkans and during that trip he did what few had done for some time: he read Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings and he was set on fire. He became Young, Restless, and Augustinian. One of his traveling companions, however, informed on him to his (already hostile) abbot and Gottschalk would be recalled and would be condemned by a Synod, beaten, and placed in a monastic jail for the rest of his life merely for daring to repeat in his day what Augustine had said in his.

Anti-Pelagian Augustinianism had its proponents but they were a decided minority through most of the middle ages. For most of the period between Augustine and the Reformation most of the Western church became convinced that sinners are able to cooperate with divine grace toward salvation. The doctrine of a relatively free, unencumbered ability to choose freely to obey, became widely held. Indeed, the anti-Pelagian Augustine became so lost and the corpus of Augustinian writings so corrupted with pseudo-Augustinian texts that one could think that one was faithfully following Augustine while actuallydisagreeing with him rather profoundly.

In the 14th and 15th centuries there was even an outbreak of what can only be regarded as Pelagianism in Oxford and elsewhere. William of Ockham (c. 1285–1347) radically downplayed the necessity of saving grace and what we think of a divine sovereignty in salvation. He spoke of two aspects of God’s will, one of which was his will to decree something into being. That was more or less an empty set. He taught that God had set up a system whereby he was prepared to cooperate with those who actuate what all humans have been given. Like Pelagius, he collapsed nature into grace. He held that every human had the unencumbered ability to choose spiritual good. A fellow Franciscan theologian, Gabriel Biel (c. 1420–95) formulated Ockham’s doctrine into a slogan: “To those who do what lies within themselves, God denies not grace.”8 As a university student, Luther was taught this Pelalgianizing theology.

Fortunately for young Martin, the Vicar General of his Augustinian monastic order, Johann von Staupitz (c.1460–1524), was a not only a follower of the Augustinian monastic rule but also a devout Augustinian in the doctrine of salvation.9 He preached messages in chapel, which Martin heard, which heralded God’s sovereign grace. Those messages combined with Luther’s own reading of Augustine as he lectured through the Psalms in 1513–14 would produce in him a revolution.

Gradually, as lectured through the Psalms, under the influence of Augustine, he began to see that Biel was wrong. God has not covenanted to reward with grace those who do their part. He began to see that, when Adam died we all died, that humans are, by nature, in Adam, “dead in sins and trespasses” and “children of wrath” as Paul says in Ephesians 2:1–4 (ESV). The pieces of his new Augustinian theology would come together more clearly as he lectured through Romans, then Galatians, Hebrews, and the Psalms again.

In that period, in May, 1518 Luther attended a meeting of his Augustinian order in the beautiful university town of Heidelberg. He defended 28 theologian theses (propositions). He began where Augustine had left off in his seminal On the Spirit and the Letter,10 where he had begun to recognize a theological distinction between the Law as a killing letter (2 Cor 3:6) and the Gospel and life-giving message. At Heidelberg, Luther contended the “law of God, the most salutary doctrine of life, cannot advance man on his way to righteousness but rather hinders him.” 11 He affirmed the Augustinian anti-Pelagian view of natural ability after the fall. Though our good works “always seem attractive and good” in reality “they are nevertheless likely to be mortal sins.”12 Those who say that “works without Christ are dead but mortal” do not sufficiently fear God.13

In theses 13 through 21 Luther became a publicly Augustinian theologian. He declared, “Free choice, after the fall, exists in name only, and as long as it does what it is able to do, it commits a mortal sin.”14 Here he began to attack the theology he had been taught as an undergraduate. We do have free choice but not the sort of free choice relatively unencumbered by sin that so many had come to imagine since Augustine. What is within us is not what Ockham and Biel thought. It is sin and corruption and we freely choose sin and corruption. After the fall, free choice “has power to do good only in a passive capacity, but it can always do evil in an active capacity.” Good is done through sinners but, of themselves, they actively choose to do evil. In thesis 16 he flatly denounced the Pelagianizing theology he had been taught. After the fall we cannot “obtain grace by doing what is in him” and when we try we add “sin to sin” and becomes “doubly guilty.”15

Erasmus would get wind of what Luther was beginning to teach and write and he did like the smell of it and it is to him that we turn next time.

  1. Jill Raitt, The Colloquy of Montbéliard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 207–10.
  2. Philip S. Watson, Introduction, in Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 33: Career of the Reformer III, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 33 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 5.
  3. Martin Luther, De servo arbitrio (Wittemberg, 1525).
  4. Desiderius Erasmus, De libero arbitrio, ΔΙΑΤΡΙΒΗ, sive collatio, Desiderii Erasmi Roterdami (Basle, 1524)
  5. Martin Luther, On The Bondage Written in Answer to the Diatribe of Erasmus on Free Will, trans. Henry Cole (London, 1823). I am unable to find any earlier edition via Early English Books Online (EEBO) or anywhere else.
  6. Reformed people first published an English translation of De servo and it was the Reformed who brought it to light again in 1957 in the J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston edition of The Bondage of the Will. Martin Luther, On The Bondage of the Will, trans. J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 1957).
  7. Augustine of Hippo, St. Augustine’s Confessions, Vol. 2, ed. T. E. Page and W. H. D. Rouse, trans. William Watts, The Loeb Classical Library (New York; London: The Macmillan Co.; William Heinemann, 1912), 149; ” da quod iubes et iube quod vis” in ibid., 148.
  8. “Facientibus quod in se est Deus non denegat gratiam.
  9. See David C. Steinmetz, Misericordia Dei: the Theology of Johannes von Staupitz in Its Late Medieval Setting (Leiden, 1968)
  10. See R. Scott Clark, “Letter and Spirit: Law and Gospel in Reformed Preaching” in R. Scott Clark, ed. Covenant, Justification and Pastoral Ministry: Essays by the Faculty of Westminster Seminary California (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2006), 335–36.
  11. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 31: Career of the Reformer I, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 31 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 39. When Luther said “righteousness” he was not referring to sanctification but to justification.
  12. Ibid., 39.
  13. Ibid., 39.
  14. Ibid., 40. I have revised the Luther’s Works translation of arbitrium as will to choice, since that is more accurate way to capture the issue Luther was addressing.
  15. Ibid, 40.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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    R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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