Robert Louis Stevenson was raised in Scottish Presbyterianism—what he termed the “dark and vehement religion,” which kindled “the great fire of horror and terror . . . in the hearts of the Scottish people.” That peculiar Protestant faith, as Scottish author Muriel Spark describes in her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, pervaded Scotland “in proportion as it was unacknowledged,” rooted in the devout, who believed “that God had planned for practically everybody before they were born a nasty surprise when they died.”
What we are talking about is the religion of John Calvin, that French Protestant Reformer who famously (or infamously) taught double predestination, the idea that God predestines not only some for eternal life, but others to hell.
Yet as much popular imagination pegs Calvin as the quintessential sour-faced Scrooge, inspiring generations of Christians to suffer either a prideful elitism in their self-assurance as the elect or, alternatively, an overwhelming anxiety over the eternal state of their souls, Calvin was actually a disciple of another when it came to the subject of free will and predestination. That other, you may be surprised to learn, was Martin Luther.
Though later Lutherans such as the great sixteenth-century thinker Philipp Melanchthon sought to temper his rhetorical extremes, Luther’s position is manifest in his early polemical writings, such as “Assertions Concerning All Articles,” specifically Article 36, whose Latin version appeared in December 1520, with an altered German appearing in March 1521 (I will quote interchangeably from both below).
“Unhappy free will!” Luther declares at the beginning of this theological essay. “Where is the free will here? It is the prisoner of the devil, not, indeed, unable to act, but able to act only in conformity with the devil’s will.” Free will, says Luther, is “but a thing in name only.”
Not only does Luther deny free will in the sense that man is capable of choosing the good, but he also asserts that man “does not even have the power to make its own paths evil.” He makes his meaning clear in the next sentence, arguing that “God does even bad deeds in the wicked,” citing Proverbs 16:1-4 and Exodus 9-16-18 to support his position. “For no one has it within his control to intend anything, good or evil, but rather, as was rightly taught by the article of Wyclif that was condemned at [the Council of] Constance, all things occur by absolute necessity.”
The concept of free will, alleges Luther, was diabolically introduced to the Church by Satan, “in order to seduce men away from God’s path into his own paths.” Indeed, he asserts that the words “free will” never appear in Holy Scripture. Thus had the Church been in error to teach that man in any respect can freely turn to God, because “the will tries to escape from grace and rages against it when it is present.” Free will, he concludes, “is a special doctrine of Antichrist.”
As Catholic scholar Thomas P. Scheck observes in an acclaimed recently published translation not only of Luther’s Article Thirty-Six, but the English martyr-bishop St. John Fisher’s refutation of Luther, the German theologian in time retreated from his doctrine of the total annihilation of the human will and of fatalistic necessity, as is visible in The Bondage of the Will, published in 1525. Pressed by such Catholic scholars as Fisher and Erasmus (who relied on Fisher), Luther began distinguishing between what he called the “necessity of coercion” from the “necessity of infallibility,” affirming the latter to obviate allegations that his teaching obliterated free will.
Even if Luther’s protégé Melanchthon moderated what came to be understood as the classical Lutheran understanding of human will, Calvin, whose influence over Protestantism is arguably just as important, embraced Luther’s early position. In his work The Bondage and Liberation of the Will: A Defense of the Orthodox Doctrine of Human Choice Against Pighius, Calvin affirms Luther’s Assertion of Article 36, declaring that he defends it “just as it was put forward by Luther and others at the beginning.” Even saints, claims Calvin, sin by necessity, like how “an untamable wild animal constantly fights against God’s grace.” And, as he declared in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, “there could be no election without its opposite reprobation . . . whom God passes by he reprobates, and that for no other cause but because he is pleased to exclude them from the inheritance which he predestines to his children” (3.23.1). That teaching is made even more terrifying in that the reprobates are “affected by almost the same feeling as the elect, so that even in their own judgment they do not in anyway differ from the elect” (3.2.11).
St. John Fisher’s response to Luther’s original teaching on free will is a tour de force, reprinted many times in the sixteenth century and hailed by many, including Lord Acton, as one of the most important Catholic texts refuting Lutheranism. After demonstrating that Luther has gravely misread St. Augustine on free will, Fisher rightly observes that Luther’s seemingly Manichean view approaches fatalism. Rather, the English bishop argues, free will is “helped by the grace of the Spirit, not overthrown; it is aroused, not overwhelmed.” Moreover, he posits, Holy Scripture is consistently insistent that men have the freedom to accept or reject grace (see Acts 2:38-39, 8:17-19; 1 Tim. 4; 2 Tim. 1). The Patristic witness is soundly in favor of free will, with Fisher leveraging not only Augustine, but also St. Jerome, Origen, St. Ambrose, St. Leo, and St. John Chrysostom to defend his position.
Though the Catechism of the Catholic Church makes no mention of John Fisher’s writings, Scheck writes that its emphasis on “the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions” (1730) conforms well with the English bishop’s arguments. While the grace of justification makes the sinner right with God, prevenient grace “prompts” and “invites” the sinner, preceding, preparing, and eliciting the “free response of man” (1994, 2022). This understanding of grace recognizes the sovereignty of God while also preserving free will.
The fruits of Luther’s early repudiation of free will have had a dramatic effect on the story of Protestantism, particularly channeled through the rhetorically capable Calvin, who not only embraced the former monk’s teaching, but triggered its spread across Europe, including in Scotland, whose rigorous Presbyterianism was the inheritance of Stevenson and Spark. “Although popular conceptions of Calvinism were sometimes mistaken,” Spark writes in her novel, “in this particular there was no mistake, indeed it was but a mild understanding of the case, he [Calvin] having made it God’s pleasure to implant in certain people an erroneous sense of joy and salvation, so that their surprise at the end might be the nastier.” Yet in fact Calvin was only extrapolating from what he had learned from the progenitor of all Protestantism.