In graduate school one of my five fields of study was ancient and medieval history. That equipped me to teach church history, and I maintain a genuine interest in the subject. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives is one of the classic ancient texts, and of the best recent works I’ve read explores the parallel lives of two monumental men in Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind (New York: HarperCollins, c. 2018; Kindle Edition), by Michael Massing. Desiderius Erasmus (the Christian humanist and biblical scholar) and Martin Luther (the Protestant reformer) were contemporaries, and Massing tells their stories with journalistic skill, putting the two men’s stories in chronological, alternating chapters. Doing so enables him to provide illumination on their tumultuous era and insight into ours, for: “These two schools remain with us today. The conflict between Erasmus and Luther marks a key passage in Western thinking—the point at which these two fundamental and often colliding traditions took hold. The struggle between them continues to shape Western society. On one side are Erasmus-like humanists: seekers of concord, promoters of pluralism, believers in the Bible as a fallible document open to multiple interpretations, and advocates of the view that man is a fully autonomous moral agent. On the other are Lutheran-style evangelicals who seek a direct relationship with God, embrace faith in Christ as the only path to salvation, accept the Bible as the Word of God, and consider the Almighty the prime mover of events” (p. xiii).
Erasmus was a Dutchman born out of wedlock in 1467 in Rotterdam. He attended a renowned Latin school in Devanter where both Geert Groote and Thomas a Kempis had studied. The latter’s Imitation of Christ prescribed the Devotio Moderna, an important “reform movement” calling for a vibrant relationship with God through pious practices. But what most impacted Erasmus at Deventer was the classical literature of Rome (Terrence, Horace, Virgil) so central to the humanistic Renaissance. He would find in Petrarch an example of “critical textual editing” that he would apply to biblical studies. Luther was born in Eisleben, Germany, in 1483, the son of a miner who became prosperous enough to provide his son with a solid education, initially designed to enable him to become a lawyer. At the University of Erfurt Luther encountered the philosophical works of William of Ockham, absorbing his nominalism and rejecting the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, who was deeply influenced by Aristotle. Accordingly, Luther despised Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, calling it “‘the worst of all books’ and charging that it ‘flatly opposes divine grace and all Christian virtues.’ Luther’s great revolt would spring in part from his fierce reaction to this work” (p. 82).
After earning his doctorate in theology Erasmus became an itinerant scholar, publishing a number of works that made him a celebrated figure in Europe. He was especially interested in “exploring the fathers” of the Early Church such as Jerome and translating their works. In 1500 A.D. he published his first book, Collected Adages—an assortment of quotations (with commentary) from Plato, Cicero, Horace, Virgil, and others. He also began to study Greek, determined to read the New Testament in its original language, and would in time publish his enormously influential Greek New Testament text, with extensive annotations, many of which questioned traditional doctrines. “Erasmus’s text would become the foundation for all Western scholarship on the Greek New Testament for the next three centuries” (p. 255). Though conventionally religious, Erasmus was above all a Christian Humanist, impressed with man’s innate abilities and convinced that he could work out his own salvation in communion with God.
At the same time Luther (in 1505) abruptly decided to pursue the religious life in an Augustinian monastery after surviving a traumatic moment in a thunderstorm. The monastic life failed to resolve his spiritual disquiet, but he was encouraged to become a priest and ultimately earned a doctorate in theology. Deeply troubled by his understanding of the justice of God—justitia Dei—he never felt righteous enough to please Him. Teaching at a new university in Wittenberg, Luther began studying and lecturing on the Bible. He was especially drawn to the Psalms, and while reading Psalm 85 he awakened to the fact that “it was not because Christ did righteous deeds that he was righteous; rather, it was because he was righteous that he did righteous deeds. The same was true of man. A person cannot be righteous simply because he behaves in an upright fashion. He must first become righteous; virtuous deeds will then follow. Luther was here turning Aristotle on his head. In the Nicomachean Ethics, the Greek philosopher had proposed that man becomes good by doing good deeds; it is through his moral conduct that he shows he is a moral person. For Luther, one must first become a righteous person; righteous deeds will then follow. In these rough notes on the Psalms, one can see the foundations of Western Christianity beginning to shift” (p. 190). Soon thereafter, studying Romans, he found that the Gospel shows that “the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” Luther felt born again! Righteousness comes from God as a gift of faith. We are justified by faith alone!
Massing ably retells Luther’s role in birthing the Protestant Reformation. And he rightly sets forth the inevitable conflict between the common sense reforms proposed by Erasmus and the radical theological views of Luther, including the positions that: “‘Free will collapses, good works collapse, the righteousness of the Law collapses. . . . Only faith and the invoking of God’s completely pure mercy remain.’ This ran directly counter to Erasmus’s belief in human agency and the ability of men and women to use their reason and willpower to show modesty, forbearance, and other Christlike traits” (p. 346). He believed the 10 Commandments applied to Christians, whereas Luther considered them part of the Law no longer required. Erasmus would famously declare: “Christ I recognize, Luther I know not.” Though they never met and were never colleagues, Erasmus and Luther had for years supported each other’s endeavors, working to reform the Church. But as Luther’s views turned more radical the two men parted ways. At the Diet of Worms in 1521, Luther laid down the gauntlet in his famous declaration: “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason—for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves—I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me! Amen.” Luther then severed ties with Rome, becoming the “pope of Wittenberg,” while Erasmus remained a loyal son of the Church.
The two men most sharply disagreed about free will. Luther believed that “never for a single moment” are things “under our control.” Thus, it follows, “all things occur by absolute necessity.” Erasmus, after extensive study in both Church Fathers and philosophy, published The Freedom of the Will: A Diatribe or Discourse, insisting on its reality, defending the traditional Catholic view. The God whom Erasmus conjures up “is caring, wise, reasonable, and, above all, just” (p. 604). The treatise elicited favorable reactions throughout Europe, but Luther would respond angrily. He “felt that his entire gospel was at stake” and penned The Bondage of the Will, “one of his last important theological tracts.” A “central tenet of Luther’s theology—that the sinner is justified by faith and grace alone, without the works of the law” was at stake. He insisted “that humans are incapable of finding salvation through their own acts. If an individual could choose to perform deeds that merited God’s favor, Luther’s whole system would collapse” (p. 671). God alone does everything “‘by his immutable, eternal, and infallible will. Here is a thunderbolt by which free will is completely prostrated and shattered’” (p. 672). Ultimately, says Massing; “The deities described in Erasmus’s and Luther’s dueling tracts could hardly be more dissimilar. Erasmus’s God is an even-tempered rationalist who sagely judges men and women by how they behave in the world. Luther’s God is an inscrutable being who acts according to his own unfathomable logic, apart from human understanding and expectation. Erasmus’s God requires the existence of free will to ensure that his rule is just; Luther’s God has to reject free will to make sure his power is unbounded. Whereas Erasmus wanted to protect the freedom of man to choose, Luther wanted to safeguard the freedom of God to act” (p. 675).
Thenceforth the Renaissance and Reformation took different trajectories. Erasmus had stood for a moderate, reasonable religion, holding that: “Believers are justified by faith, but works of charity are necessary as well. Confession can be beneficial, as long as one does not dwell excessively on one’s sins and resolves to do better. On fast days, those who eat should not insult those who abstain, and those who abstain should not condemn those who eat. More generally, Erasmus urged Christians to ‘do nothing by violent or disorderly means, nor inflict on anyone anything for which, if done to us, we should call on heaven and earth and sea; nor force on anyone a new form of religion which he finds abhorrent’” (p. 753). But his approach was rejected in northern Europe. “As the great schism opened up in Christendom, a sort of religious lunacy had set in, with apostles and zealots of every stripe declaring theirs to be the only true creed and ready to slash and flay anybody who followed a different one” (p. 737). Catholic and Protestant princes went to war. The Christian world quickly fractured into increasing numbers of combative factions. When Erasmus died, Luther said: “‘He lived and died as Epicurus, without minister and consolation.” In fact: “He went to hell.” In his declining days, before dying in 1546, Luther also lashed out at Zwinglians, Calvinists, and Jews. It would lead to the “fatal discord” Erasmus feared.
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G.K. Chesterton famously said: “Original sin is the only doctrine that’s been empirically validated by 2,000 years of human history.” Unlike other animals, there’s something deeply flawed in human beings. We’re not quite what we’re designed to be. That truth was evident to Edmund Burke two centuries ago. Writing to Adam Smith, the noted ethicist/economist, he said: “A theory like yours founded on the Nature of man, which is always the same, will last, when those that are founded upon his opinions, which are always changing, will and must be forgotten.” But to recognize that there is something wrong with us is not, necessarily, to say everything about us is utterly awful. That elementary fact generally eludes James Boyce, whose Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World (Berkeley, CA: Counterpart, c. 2015) endeavors to show original sin is a uniquely Western doctrine, crafted by St. Augustine in the fifth century A.D. Boyce insists that neither Jews nor Eastern Orthodox Christians believed man is born bad, holding that he is basically good but makes poor choices considered sinful. This position would be disputed by many Christian theologians and historians, but Boyce’s description of the doctrine’s development is generally accurate and certainly readable.
The story begins with St Augustine (354-430 A.D.), the “father of original sin,” who in his Confessions said he found within himself an “insurmountable depravity that must be accepted before grace, the unearned gift of God’s forgiveness, could be received. Augustine’s point was that the desire to sin could not be banished by human effort” (p. 17). He also found this truth confirmed by the story of Adam’s Fall as recorded in the book of Genesis. (Whereas Augustine believed biblical account is fully historical, Boyce dismisses it as sheer myth.) Most of Augustine’s pessimistic appraisal of man came as he struggled with the Donatists and Pelagians during last two decades of his life, when “he came to believe that human beings were so corrupted that they could not even choose to embrace the mercy of God: those who appeared to have chosen to be saved had, in reality, already been predestined by God for salvation” (p. 19).
In subsequent centuries Augustine’s position was never fully endorsed by Church scholars and councils, though belief in original sin remained firm. Numerous dissidents, such as Peter Abelard and Julian of Norwich, denied it, but the greatest Scholastic, Thomas Aquinas, was deeply Augustinian, though he defined original sin as a deprivation of goodness rather than an inherent depravity. “The stain of sin does not impose a nature on the soul, but only the privation of grace,” he said. We’re born with infirmities, much like blindness, and suffer a perpetual bent toward evil. Then came Martin Luther and the Protestant reformers, who pushed the doctrine beyond Augustine. In what he believed was “the unchangeable truth of God,” Luther denied the freedom of the will, insisting we continually sin in word, thought, and deed. Soon thereafter John Calvin “presented himself as a modern-day” Augustine, “seeking to defeat ‘the Pelagians of the present age’” (p. 75). Along with Luther, he believed “that to lay claim to even a residual goodness within human beings proffered the false hope that people could do something to save themselves, and that this was the well-trodden road to hell” (p. 76). Calvin’s stance informs the 1647 Westminster Confession of Faith: “Mankind is wholly defiled in all parts and faculties of soul and body … utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil.” Rejecting some of the Reformers’ dismal views regarding human nature, John Wesley, regarded by Boyce as the “founder” of Evangelicalism, “parted from Luther and Calvin in one highly significant respect: he rejected the teaching that the impact of the Fall was so profound that human beings were incapable of making real choices—first to be saved, and second to be sanctified” (p. 116). Sharing James Arminius’ critique of Calvinism, Wesley believed in a kind of synergism whereby God and man work together in the salvation process. Centuries later, as evident in Billy Graham, this kind of Evangelicalism became dominant in America.
In modern times, belief in original sin shifted. But it didn’t disappear! Boyce constructs a compelling case to show how it morphed into non-Christian views. Though probably an atheist, Thomas Hobbes’ belief “in the innate evil of human beings rivaled that of Martin Luther” (p. 106). Other eminent philosophers such as John Locke tended to blame the environment for man’s deviant decisions. Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought we are born good but get corrupted by society. Charles Darwin attributed evil to unavoidable evolutionary processes. “Original sin had always seen human beings as innately self-centred creatures whose nature was to pursue their own interests at the expense of others’. Charles Darwin provided a language in which this old religious idea could be renewed and given social scientific credence” (p. 151). (A contemporary Darwinist, Richard Dawkins even claimed there ice a “selfish gene” imbedded in our biology!) Sigmund Freud certainly found a depraved dimension to human nature! Indeed, his “ideas in some ways resemble those of Thomas Hobbes, but Freud’s focus on the divided self—in which even the most worthy action or good deed is corrupted by innate drives which are beyond the power of the will to fully control— s closer in theory and sentiment to Augustine. The fundamental similarity of the two men is accentuated by the importance each placed on sex” (p. 156).
Born Bad provides us an informative journey of intellectual history documenting the persistence of the doctrine of original sin. And though he would like to dismiss it as an erroneous view rooted in the “myth” of biblical teaching, he nevertheless demonstrate its enduring truth.
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Nadya Williams earned a PhD from Princeton University and worked as a professor for 15 years, teaching history and classics before leaving academia to homeschool her kids. To treasure marriage and children is, sad to say, countercultural in today’s America! Yet: “Compelling data exists, in fact, that it is married women with children who are the best off economically of all categories of women in modern American society. Study after study shows that while single unwed mothers are not flourishing economically, people in happy marriages are financially better off, happier, and healthier” (p. 4). More importantly, there is a deeply philosophical question we must ask: “What is a human life worth? Are some lives more economically beneficial to society than others? And are there not ways of estimating the worth of a life that are not economically driven at all? As a historian of the ancient world and the early church, I am reminded of the way the earliest Christians challenged the longstanding values of the pagan world around them to display a love of all humanity that was utterly radical—and costly. The early Christians’ pro-life stance included, at the economic level, a radically different and selfless use of money for the benefit of others. That we do not do so in our society today is a powerful reminder that the values of our society at large, including those of many confessing Christians within it, are values of the post-Christian culture all around rather than the church. Without God and without the understanding of the imago Dei within each human being, what is a human life worth? The pre-Christian Mediterranean world gives us a terrifying answer: it depends. Those same values were also the values of the pre-Christian culture. We are living in a crisis of devaluing all human life, and especially the lives of children” (p. 6).
Williams has recently published Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (Downers Grove IL: IVP, c. 2024; Kindle Ed). She seeks to address three questions. “First, in what ways does this devaluing of motherhood and children in our own society manifest itself? Just how deep does this problem go? Second—and this is where my historical expertise will particularly come into play—how might the history of the extraordinary and unconditional valuing of human life in the early church help us to get back on track?” (p. 13). Early Christians may very well give guidance to contemporary believers seeking to challenge the “culture of death” surrounding us. We must learn to revere persons as persons, not as cogs in an economic machine. “Third, where do we go from here?” (p. 14). For guidance she explores the works of three thinkers (St Perpetua, St Augustine and Wendell Berry) who push “us to see the preciousness of all humanity in ways that acknowledge the challenges of this present life while insisting on the eternal truth about the priceless value of every human life” (p. 14).
Evidence for the devaluing of human beings is everywhere evident. Consider the growing number of young folks who have no interest in having children, resulting in a growing “birth dearth” throughout the industrialized world. The worldview of Margaret Sanger has become the norm—sexual pleasure, birth control, population control, eugenics. The “difficult truth” we must address “is that contemporary US society utterly devalues children, motherhood, and the dignity of human life more generally. This devaluing is an invisible cancer within our society that has pervaded every system of the body politic, including even the church” (p. 24). But we find much the same in the ancient world. Women and children, slaves and strangers, the sick and deformed were not necessarily valued. Wars, such as Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, were often genocidal, killing the men and enslaving the women. Indeed: “we are looking at a world that saw no problem with the casually devastating cruelty of the strong toward the weak” (p. 89).
Into this world came Christ and His Gospel! Literally everyone—even “useless people”—had value. Women and children, widows and orphans found comfort in the Church. Jesus and the Church fathers promoted the physical and spiritual well-being of all peoples. As Williams explores ancient texts, including the writings of one of the earliest Christian martyrs, St Perpetua, and the greatest ancient theologian, Augustine, she finds how Christians both challenged pagan thought and provided a better way for mankind. She also finds in Wendell Berry (an “American Augustine”) a better way for our contemporaries, many of whom are rootless, needing to discover a way to flourish as human beings. Berry lived on a family farm in and defended deeply “traditional forms of flourishing, pushing back against the modern treadmill life as the only option, calling instead for ‘Nature as Measure, . . . Roots and rootedness, Berry’s writings repeatedly affirm, are key to human flourishing” (p. 197).
Scholarly excellence, mixed with motherly empathy, make Williams’ treatise a fine conjunction of historical inquiry and contemporary wisdom.
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