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Today, the will has largely replaced the intellect. Defenders of abortion call themselves “pro-choice,” insisting that whatever the woman chooses—whether to keep her baby or have him or her killed in the womb—is right “for her.” Any sexual practice is considered moral as long as there is “consent”—that is, willed by everyone involved. Killing the sick is moral if the patient chooses to die. Not that the will justifies everything. All who would deny the person’s “choice,” such as pro-lifers or believers in objective morality, are evildoers who deserve punishment.
The triumph of the will, to use the Nietzschean phrase of Adolf Hitler’s propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, is evident beyond the postmodernist approach to ethics. Science, from the Latin word for “knowledge,” is increasingly subordinated to technology, the art of using scientific information to create what we want. According to postmodernists, truth-claims are nothing more than a construction, either by the powerful’s enforcing their will over others or by an individual’s creating his or her own reality by a personal act of the will. That extends even to a person’s own body, whose sex need not be the one “assigned at birth” but is the one that the individual chooses. Meanwhile, liberals champion sexual freedom, while conservatives champion economic freedom. Even Bible-believing Christians often reduce saving faith to an act of the will, to making a “decision” for Christ.
In today’s climate, it may be more important now than ever before to realize the biblical truth emphasized by the Reformers that the will is in bondage.
the slavery of sin
Martin Luther wrote two treatises that were catalysts for the Reformation and that need to be taken together: The Bondage of the Will and The Freedom of the Christian. But the best explanation of these concepts comes from the Bible, particularly from the words of Jesus Himself:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” (John 8:34–36)
The common assumption is that sin is liberating, and we commonly construe freedom in terms of being able to indulge in sin. But sin is actually enslaving. Sin takes away our freedom. A drug addict is not free. Neither is a porn addict. Or a compulsive gambler. But even less dramatic sins enslave us. Someone with a bad temper is a slave to the passions of anger and resentment that blow up against other people. Mental adulterers are slaves to their lust. Thieves and coveters are slaves to their greed.
In his Lectures on Romans, Luther says that our underlying problem is the condition of incurvatus in se, being curved in on ourselves. He writes, “Scripture describes man as so curved in upon himself that he uses not only physical but even spiritual goods for his own purposes and in all things seeks only himself.”
At the root of our sinful condition is our tendency to put ourselves first. Thus, our pride exalts us above our neighbors and even God. Our selfishness puts our own needs above those of everyone else. Our flesh demands the indulgence of our passions and pleasures, no matter who they hurt or what divine laws they transgress.
This curving in on ourselves causes us to violate God’s commands: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” says Jesus, and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:37, 39–40).
That summary of the Law and the Prophets indicates that there is a legitimate love of self. That our wills are in bondage does not mean that the will does not exist or that every act of the will is sinful. Choosing what to order from a menu based on what one would like to eat at the moment is not sinful. Planning a course of action that would be personally helpful but would not harm others or violate God’s Word is not sinful. Nor is pursuing our rational self-interest in the workplace, as our economic system requires, though temptations will arise.
The point is that our fallen nature tends to put our love of self above our love of God and above our love of neighbor. We often use other people for our own ends and gratification. We can even try to use God in that way. The context of Luther’s statement that man uses “even spiritual goods for his own purposes” was his critique of works-righteousness. Our good works are tainted and lose their moral significance, he argued, when we do them for our own benefit, as in trying to gain other people’s approval or to get in good with God so as to set ourselves up to merit an eternal reward instead of an eternal punishment.
To be sure, such outward virtue, even if its motives are curved in on themselves, is better than nothing. One of the uses of the law is as a curb, to restrain and control our external behavior so that sinful human beings can function in societies. According to classical ethics, the will along with the passions can lead us astray, so that we need to cultivate self-discipline. That means learning the art of self-denial—saying no sometimes to what we want—and governing ourselves by reason and by the virtues. A disciplined person could reason that though he might want to commit a particular sin, he will not because he fears getting caught, he would feel ashamed, his peers would think less of him, and so on, maintaining a beneficial outward virtue. Yet God judges not just our external actions but how we are on the inside, the churning of a sinful will that continues to condemn us (Matt. 5:21–30).
Sometimes we might honestly want to do what is right. It would seem that our will is properly directed. Yet somehow willpower is not enough. We still sin, even against our will. This is the frustrating struggle that the Apostle Paul describes:
For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Rom. 7:18–25)
We cannot just choose to stop sinning. The will, however much it may yearn to break free, is in bondage to sin. But we have a deliverer in Christ our Lord. “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).
but if the son sets us free
Jesus frees us from the bondage of the will by His cross and resurrection. The Apostle Paul, for whom freedom is a major theme in his epistles, explains how that happens. He takes up the connection between sin and slavery that Jesus makes in John 8 and develops it further:
Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. . . .
. . . But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. (Rom. 6:16–18, 21–22)
Here the question is: Who is your master? Whom do you obey? Sin or God? We have been set free from the slavery of sin, so now we are slaves of God. Paul is using the imagery of a slave’s being sold from one master to another. As he says elsewhere, we have been “bought with a price” (1 Cor. 6:20; 7:23)—namely, the blood of Christ. Therefore, we belong to Him (Rom. 7:4).
This new Master—the Son—intends to set us free, indeed, to make us sons, by adoption, and heirs (Gal. 4:1–7). Our full emancipation awaits the life to come. Now is the time of our sanctification, when we must learn whom to obey. But insofar as we become slaves of righteousness through the gospel, paradoxically, we become free.
The Christian life is one of freedom: “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1). Why does Christ set us free? “For freedom.” Freedom seems to be good in itself.
The gospel of Christ frees us not only from sin and death (Rom. 8:2) but also from the law: “You also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God,” Paul writes. “But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code” (Rom. 7:4, 6).
Paul puts it strongly, saying that “we are released from the law,” and yet this does not mean that we cease to do good works. Rather, he says that the very reason that we are released from the law’s captivity is so that “we may bear fruit for God.” If we are no longer under the law, why must we “bear fruit”? That sounds like a contradiction, or at least a puzzle. Paul’s answer is that now “we serve in the new way of the Spirit.”
“Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor. 3:17). The Holy Spirit, by bringing us to faith and sanctification, sets us free. Because Christ has atoned for our sins, we no longer obey the law out of guilt, a fear of punishment, a desire merely for reward, or other self-interested motives. Rather, we do good works freely. As Brad Littlejohn puts it in his book Called to Freedom, we can do what is right “because [we] want to, not because [we] have to.”
Knowing ourselves as recipients of God’s unmerited grace, we are able to love God. And knowing ourselves as the objects of Christ’s love despite our sin, we are able to love others despite their sin. The Holy Spirit, who brings us to faith and to sanctification, thus enables us to “love the Lord [our] God with all [our] heart and with all [our] soul and with all [our] mind,” and to “love [our] neighbor as [ourselves].”
No longer curved in on ourselves, we are changed from the inside. The bondage of the will is broken. Because of Christ, we are “free indeed.”
justified by faith
In his treatise The Freedom of the Christian, Luther explores how we are both bound and free. He begins with a paradox: “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” He explains:
Every Christian is by faith so exalted above all things that, by virtue of a spiritual power, he is lord of all things without exception, so that nothing can do him any harm. As a matter of fact, all things are made subject to him and are compelled to serve him in obtaining salvation.
Yet “insofar as he is free he does no works, but insofar as he is a servant he does all kinds of works.” This fallen world is still in bondage to sin, which applies both to non-Christians. But the Christian can take on another kind of bondage, the bonds of love, emulating Christ:
Just as our neighbor is in need and lacks that in which we abound, so we were in need before God and lacked his mercy. Hence, as our heavenly Father has in Christ freely come to our aid, we also ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be Christs to one another and Christ may be the same in all, that is, that we may be truly Christians.
A slave must serve his master, and the devil is a cruel taskmaster who twists our will so that we harm both others and ourselves. But there is another kind of service, the service of love, which requires the subordination of our will to benefit those we love. The Son of God, the King of kings and Lord of lords, took “the form of a servant” (Phil. 2:7) and tells us to do the same:
“Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:43–45)
“We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbor,” Luther says, summarizing his treatise. “He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbor. Yet he always remains in God and in his love.”
So the Christian life is one of both freedom and bondage at the same time. Because of our fallen nature, we must still struggle against the bondage of the will to sin, but we are helped to do so because of another kind of bondage. Justified by faith, we are free in Christ, because Christ bound Himself to us. In response, we likewise are bound to our neighbors in love.