Luther on Grace, Free Will, and Union with the Divine: A Study in Theological Development

Taking as its starting point Risto Saarinen’s recent book Philosophical Justice and Reformation Righteousness , this article traces the developments in Luther’s thinking on grace, free will, and union with the divine, from his earliest annotations on Peter Lombard’s Sentences , to his lectures on Galatians. It notes a fundamental shift in Luther’s idea of the notion of free will, sometime in or shortly before 1517. Luther initially accepts a contracausal or libertarian account of free will; be comes to replace it with a compatibilist one according to which freedom simply requires non-coercion. Since being coerced is being made to do what one does not want to do, the new account of will is compatible with both necessity and inevitability, as Luther points out against various Catholic opponents (Latomus, Erasmus). The article argues that Luther’s account of “alien righteousness” is closely related to medieval accounts of actual grace, learned by Luther from Aquinas, through a summary of the latter found in Gabriel Biel. Throughout his career, Luther understands union with the divine in terms of God’s immediate operation in the believer.