Bulletin 7.27.25

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from conviction. "

-Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Yes, well, The Bondage of the Will is so meaningful to me in my own spiritual life. I spent a few months reading it because I really pondered every point he was making, And having read Erasmus' The Freedom of the Will before that, I could see that this doctrine, which is a great source of hope and relief for Luther, is itself a kind of bondage for Erasmus. He cannot see anything positive about it. Whereas for Luther, the fact that God chooses us, that God is sovereignly causing us to turn toward Him, is good news. For Erasmus, it's bad news because he can only see God as this monster putting us in chains.

And of course Luther's tract, The Freedom of the Christian, talks about the fact that as Christians, we are totally free yet we're also a servant of all.

We often value the urong kind of freedom. We want the maximum number of choices on offer, and as long as we're unimpeded in making those choices, we think that we're free. But actually, if we're fundamentally unable to make good choices, then it doesn't matter how many choices there are we're going to make the qmong one. And that's what Luther is arguing. The problem is that we are not capable of choosing God, that we qill always tum our backs on the cross because the cross is an offense, the cross tells us that we're sinners, that we need someone to save us. And the turn to God can only happen by grace.

-Amy Mantravadi, author of the novel Broken

Bonds as interviewed by MBird.com (7.3.25)