In our evangelical age there is a tendency to overcomplicate an issue. This is particularly true among pastors. We hear it in phrases like, “This doctrine is a mystery.” Or, “It’s complicated.” Or, “This is complex.” Or, “We need nuance here.” This, of course, is not to say there are no mysteries, nothing is complex, or that nuance is never needed. What I’m highlighting is the tendency among some evangelicals to make complicated what is clear simply because they may not like the truth or find its implications offensive to their conventional wisdom. Sometimes ambiguous language is used because the person speaking or writing is simply lazy or unintelligent. But at times, we must acknowledge, some teachers are engaging in obfuscation—the intentional effort to make something less clear. The Bible has a word for this: deception.
This is why we need the reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) reintroduced to the church. For in Luther, we find a pastor-theologian who prized clarity. This is not to affirm everything Luther said. But it is to say that we don’t have to wonder what Luther was claiming. He was clear. His clarity is all the more remarkable when one considers the sheer volume of his literary output. He wrote commentaries, disputations, treatises, tracts, meditations, sermons, letters, translations, catechisms, and hymns. His complete works fill 109 volumes in the critical “Weimar Edition.” Of this edition, Luther scholar Denis Janz notes, “Only a handful of experts today have read it all. Even Luther himself, toward the end of his life, was somewhat appalled at the sheer volume of his writings. ‘What a blabbermouth I am,’ he said.”[1]
1. Dennis Janz ed. A Reformation Reader: Primary Texts with Introductions, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2023), 77.
Luther’s clarity was on full display in his polemic against the Roman Catholic humanist Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536). As one of the most celebrated scholars of his time, Erasmus is perhaps best known for the production of the Novum Instrumentum (‘New Instrument’), a critical text of the Greek New Testament published in 1516. These two heavyweight theologians went toe-to-toe in the years 1524 to 1525 with the publication of their competing monographs on the human will. Erasmus went first with his highly praised On Free Will (De libero arbitrio) published in September of 1524. In it, Erasmus “champions the view that, though sin has weakened man, it has not made him utterly incapable of meritorious action.”[2] This semi-Pelagian view argued that people’s salvation “is actually determined by a particular meritorious act which they perform in their own strength, without Divine assistance.”[3]
2. James I. Packer and O.R. Johnston, “Historical and Theological Introduction,” in Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, trans. James I. Packer and O.R. Johnston (Grand Rapids, MI: Revell, 1957), 48.
3. Packer and Johnston, “Historical and Theological Introduction,” 48.
Just over a year later, in December 1525, came Luther’s response, On the Bondage of the Will (De servo arbitrio). In it, Luther denies “free will” in the sense that man, because of original sin, is utterly incapable of doing anything to please God. Sin has rendered man unable to contribute anything meritorious with respect to salvation. For Luther, “any formulation of the gospel which amounts to saying that God shows grace, not in saving man, but in making it possible for man to save himself, is to be rejected as a lie.”[4] And this is what, according to Luther, Erasmus did with his treatise: he peddled a lie.
4. Packer and Johnston, “Historical and Theological Introduction,” 48.
Their public dispute was years in the making as their theological differences became increasingly clear through mostly private correspondence. Erasmus sought to distance himself from Luther the “heretic” lest he appear to sympathize with him. And for the sake of continued reform of the church, Luther had no choice but to engage the leading humanist scholar of the age. As Heinz Schilling observes, “A public debate, ultimately unavoidable, was launched, and Luther had the undivided attention of the leading minds of Europe as he laid out for them the essence of his rediscovered evangelical theology.”[5] What Luther did with the “undivided attention of the leading minds of Europe” in instructive for us today.
5. Heinz Schilling, Martin Luther: Rebel in and Age of Upheaval, trans. Rona Johnston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 334.
Eloquent Nonsense and its Peril
For the purposes of this brief essay, my interest in the debate between Erasmus and Luther is not so much for the theological arguments in themselves, but with the use of language. Luther took direct aim at Erasmus for his obfuscation. He accused Erasmus of being purposely vague and evasive with his words. For example, Luther sees in Erasmus’s work dangerous doctrine cloaked in eloquence: “your book . . . struck me as so worthless and poor that my heart went out to you for having defiled your lovely, brilliant flow of language with such vile stuff. I thought it outrageous to convey material of so low a quality in the trappings of such rare eloquence; it is like using gold or silver dishes to carry garden rubbish or dung.” But Luther informs Erasmus that he is not unaware of his schemes: “I suppose, your conscience warned you that, whatever literary resources you might bring with you into the fray, you would not be able to impose on me, but I should see through all your meretricious verbiage to the vile stuff beneath.”[6]
6. Luther, The Bondage of the Will (trans. Packer and Johnston), 63.
According to Luther, Erasmus was the worst kind of teacher: one who engaged in deception. Erasmus knew what he was doing: “I forbear at the moment to mention the further fact that, in your usual way, you have taken vast pains throughout to be slippery and evasive. You are more canny than Ulysses in the way you suppose yourself to be steering between Scylla and Charybdis—you would have nothing actually asserted, while yet you would seem to assert something!”[7] I have to image Luther, who had deep knowledge of the early church fathers, had the observation of Augustine (354–430) on “eloquent nonsense” in mind as he leveled the above charge against Erasmus. In his famous treatise giving counsel to Christian teachers, Augustine warned:
7. Luther, The Bondage of the Will (trans. Packer and Johnston), 64.
We must beware of the man who abounds in eloquent nonsense, and so much the more if the hearer is pleased with what is not worth listening to, and thinks that because the speaker is eloquent, what he says must be true . . . A man speaks with more or less wisdom to the extent he has made more or less progress in the knowledge of the Scripture not just in knowing them but especially in understanding them correctly . . . It is more important to speak wisely than eloquently.[8]
8. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 104–105.
The main reason Luther had so much disdain for Erasmus’s work was because Luther knew what was at stake. His indignation stemmed from the concern he shared with Augustine, namely, that “the hearer is pleased with what is not worth listening to, and thinks that because a speaker is eloquent, what he says must be true.” For Luther, what Erasmus was saying—with all his sweet eloquence—was damning. It was akin to the Siren Song in Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey and would leave people’s faith shipwrecked on the rocks of error. He warns Erasmus: “Confidence in your own ability drives you along here; you think that by your eloquence you can so dupe the public that nobody will realize what you cherish in your heart and what you are trying to achieve by these slippery writings of yours. But God is not mocked, and it is not good policy to run against Him!”[9]
9. Luther, The Bondage of the Will (trans. Packer and Johnston), 77.
What was so contemptable about Erasmus’s obfuscation was how it left people ignorant of God himself and, therefore, of salvation. Again, in Luther’s words:
Now, if I am ignorant of God’s works and power, I am ignorant of God himself; and if I do not know God, I cannot worship, praise, give thanks or serve Him, for I do not know how much I should attribute to myself and how much to Him. We need, therefore, to have in mind a clear-cut distinction between God’s power and ours, and God’s work and ours, if we would live a godly life.[10]
10. Luther, The Bondage of the Will (trans. Packer and Johnston), 78.
The Open Statement of the Truth
R.C. Sproul’s perceptive phrase “studied ambiguity”—which he often and rightly used against Roman Catholics—has left an indelible mark on me. Sproul was decrying the practice of being purposefully vague so that a particular doctrine could have the most elastic interpretation. You say a lot without actually saying anything—the very thing Luther accused Erasmus of doing. We must beware of this kind of teaching for it leaves churches rudderless such that they are “tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes” (Eph. 4:14).
More than Luther, we need the apostle Paul and his reminder about what the Christian teacher has resolved to do: “But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God” (2 Cor. 4:2). No ambiguity, no eloquent nonsense. Just an open statement of the truth trusting God to give the increase to our gospel labors.
