To become Christian a person must be born again, born into God’s family. We all were “children of wrath, even as others” (Ephesians 2:3), and we had to be reborn as children of God. Obviously this is something a man cannot do. When one is “born of the Spirit” (John 3:6), it is the work of the Spirit. A baby cannot initiate its birth. This is the act of its parents. No baby chooses or decides to be born. This is why the spiritual change from the death of sin to newness of life is pictured as a birth. The picture of resurrection teaches the same lesson. We are raised from the dead, but we do not raise ourselves; it is the act of God. Hence the will of man has nothing to do with this in the least. Arminian dependence on the human will simply makes salvation impossible. Some Arminians may have indeed been saved – by blessed inconsistency. But Arminian preaching, such as that of the evangelist Charles G. Finney, is an unmitigated tragedy. Earlier, as John Wesley sank deeper and deeper into his semi-Romish, anti-Biblical persuasion, George Whitefield wrote a letter of condemnation. It would prove instructive if contemporary Christians, who by and large have never learned the lessons of the Reformation, would read and consider carefully the warnings of the saintly George Whitefield.
Gordon H. Clark. Predestination (Kindle Locations 1334-1343). The Trinity Foundation. Kindle Edition.
The following quote is from the conclusion of the introduction to J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston's translation of Martin Luther's treatise, The Bondage of the Will. However much modern semi-Calvinists try to water down the doctrine of absolute predestination, it is obvious that Luther himself believed that the bondage of the will to sin was in fact God's eternal will. Luther said that all things happen of necessity, yet modern semi-Calvinists only want to talk about sovereign and eternal decrees of God in terms of unconditional election and neglect the fact that reprobation is also a divine decree that is eternal and irreversible. Be that as it may, salvation is all of God and all of grace.
Some of Luther's arguments are hard to follow unless the reader has some background in philosophy, logic, and the doctrinal issues Luther is discussing. But be aware that Luther, unlike modern Van Tilian Calvinists and irrational Lutherans, did not reject the law of contradiction or systematic and propositional logic in doing theology. What is interesting is how emphatic Packer and Johnston were at the time of this translation. Unfortunately, Packer at the least has compromised and now seeks to have ecumenical union with the Roman Catholic Church and he has in reality become a compromiser with high church Anglo-Catholic and semi-Pelagian churchmen in the Anglican Church of North America where Packer is now an ordained minister. Packer may not be active anymore due to his age. I am sure he must be in his 90s by now. The following extended quote was written by Packer and Johnston in conjunction presumably.
V. Conclusion
What is the modern reader to make of THE BONDAGE OF THE WILL? That it is a brilliant and exhilarating performance, a masterpiece of the controversalist's difficult art, he will no doubt readily admit; but now comes the question, is Luther's case any part of God's truth? and if so, has it a message for Christians to-day? No doubt the reader will find the way by which Luther leads him to be a strange new road, an approach which in all probability he has never considered, a line of thought which he would normally label 'Calvinistic' and hastily pass by. This is what Lutheran orthodoxy itself has done (1); and the present-day Evangelical Christian (who has semi-Pelagianism in his blood) will be inclined to do the same. But both history and Scripture, if allowed to speak, counsel otherwise.
Historically, it is a simple matter of fact that Martin Luther and John Calvin, and, for that matter, Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Bucer, and all the leading Protestant theologians of the first epoch of the Reformation, stood on precisely the same ground here. [This would include Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the father of the English Reformation. Charlie.] On other points, they had their differences; but in asserting the helplessness of man in sin, and the sovereignty of God in grace, they were entirely at one. to all of them, these doctrines were the very life-blood of the Christian faith. A modern editor of Luther's great work underscores this fact: 'Whoever puts this book down without having realised that evangelical theology stands or falls with the doctrine of the bondage of the will has read it in vain.' (2) The doctrine of free justification by faith only, which became the storm-centre of so much controversy during the Reformation period, is often regarded as the heart of the Reformers' theology, but this is hardly accurate. The truth is that their thinking was really centred upon the contention of Paul, echoed with varying degrees of adequacy by Augustine, and Gottschalk, and Bradwardine, and Wycliffe, that the sinner's entire salvation is by free and sovereign grace only. The doctrine of justification by faith was important to them because it safeguarded the principle of sovereign grace; but it actually expressed for them only one aspect of this principle, and that not its deepest aspect. The sovereignty of grace found expression in their thinking at a profounder level still, in the doctrine of monergistic regeneration--the doctrine, that is, that the faith which receives Christ for justification is itself the free gift of a sovereign God, bestowed by spiritual regeneration in the act of effectual calling. To the Reformers, the crucial question was not simply, whether God justifies believers without works of law. It was the broader question, whether sinners are wholly helpless in their sin, and whether God is to be thought of as saving them by free, unconditional, invincible grace, not only justifying them for Christ's sake when they come to faith, but also raising them from the death of sin by His quickening Spirit in order to bring them to faith. Here was the crucial issue; whether God is the author, not merely of justification, but also of faith; whether, in the last analysis, Chrisitianity is a religion of utter reliance on God for salvation and all things necessary to it, or of self-reliance and self-effort. 'Justification by faith only' is a truth that needs interpretation. The principle of SOLA FIDE is not rightly understood till it is seen as anchored in the broader principle of SOLA GRATIA. What is the source and status of faith? Is it the God-given means whereby the God-given justification is received, or is it a condition of justification which is left to man to fulfil? Is it a part of God's gift of salvation, or is it man's own contribution to salvation? Is our salvation wholly of God, or does it ultimately depend on something that we do for ourselves? Those who say the latter (as Arminians later did) thereby deny man's utter helplessness in sin, and affirm that a form of semi-Pelagianism is true after all. No wonder, then, that latter Reformed theology condemned Arminianism as being in principle a return to Rome (because in effect it turned faith into a meritorious work) and a betrayal of the Reformation (because it denied the sovereignty of God in saving sinners, which was the deepest religious and theological principle of the Reformers' thought). Arminianism was, indeed, in Reformed eyes a renunciation of New Testament Christianity in favour of New Testament Judaism; for to rely oneself for faith is no different in principle from relying on oneself for works, and the one is as un-Christian and anti-Christian as the other. In the light of what Luther says to Erasmus, there is no doubt that he would have endorsed this judgment.
These things need to be pondered by Protestants to-day. With what right may we call ourselves children of the Reformation? Much modern Protestantism would neither be owned nor even recognised by the pioneer Reformers. THE BONDAGE OF THE WILL fairly sets before us what they believed about the salvation of lost mankind. In the light of it, we are forced to ask whether Protestant Christendom has not tragically sold its birthright between Luther's day and our own. Has not Protestantism to-day become more Erasmian than Lutheran? Do we not too often try to minimise and gloss over doctrinal differences for the sake of inter-party peace? Are we innocent of the doctrinal indifferentism with which Luther charged Erasmus? Do we still believe that doctrine matters? Or do we now, with Erasmus, rate a deceptive appearance of unity as of more importance than truth? Have we not grown used to an Erasmian brand of teaching from our pulpits--a message that rests on the same shallow synergistic conceptions which Luther refuted, picturing God and man approaching each other almost on equal terms, each having his own contribution to make to man's salvation and each depending on the dutiful co-operation of the other for the attainment of that end?--as if God exists for man's convenience, rather than man for God's glory? Is it not true, conversely, that it is rare to-day to hear the diagnosis of our predicament which Luther--and Scripture--put forward: that man is hopeless and helpless in sin, fast bound in Satan's slavery, at enmity with God, blind and dead to to the things of the Spirit? And hence, how rarely do we hear faith spoken of as Scripture depicts it--as it is expressed in the cry of self-commital with which the contrite heart, humbled to see its need and made conscious of its own utter helplessness even to trust, casts itself in the God-given confidence of self-despair upon the mercy of Christ Jesus--'Lord, I believe; help Thou my unbelief!' Can we deny the essential rightness off Luther's exegesis of the texts? And if not, dare we ignore the implications of his exegesis?
To accept the principles which Martin Luther vindicates in THE BONDAGE OF THE WILL would certainly involve a mental and spiritual revolution for many Christians at the present time. It would involve a radically different approach to preaching and the practice of evangelism, and to most other departments of theology and pastoral work as well. God-centred thinking is out of fashion to-day, and its recovery will involve something of a Copernican revolution in our outlook on many matters. But ought we to shrink from this? Do we not stand in urgent need of such teaching as Luther here gives us--teaching which humbles man, strengthens faith, and glorifies God--and is not the contemporary Church weak for the lack of it? The issue is clear. We are compelled to ask ourselves: If the Almighty God if the Bible is to be our God, if the New Testament gospel is to be our message, if Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, to-day and forever--is any other position than Luther's possible? Are we not in all honesty bound to stand with him in ascribing all might, and majesty, and dominion, and power, and all the glory of our salvation to God alone? Surely no more important or far-reaching question confronts the church to-day.
Sola fide
Sola gratia
SOLA DEO GLORIA
J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston, translators. MARTIN LUTHER ON THE BONDAGE OF THE WILL: A NEW TRANSLATION OF DE SERVIO ARBITRIO (1525): MARTIN LUTHER'S REPLY TO ERASMUS OF ROTTERDAM. (Old Tappan: Fleming H. Revell, 1957). Introduction, pp. 57-61.
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