Robert Louis Stevenson was raised in Scottish Presbyterianism—what he termed the “dark and vehement religion,” which kindled “the great fire of horror and terror . . . in the hearts of the Scottish people.” That peculiar Protestant faith, as Scottish author Muriel Spark describes in her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, pervaded Scotland “in proportion as it was unacknowledged,” rooted in the devout, who believed “that God had planned for practically everybody before they were born a nasty surprise when they died.” What we are talking about is the religion of John Calvin, that French Protestant Reformer who famously (or infamously) taught double predestination, the idea that God predestines not only some for eternal life, but others to hell.
Yet as much popular imagination pegs Calvin as the quintessential sour-faced Scrooge, inspiring generations of Christians to suffer either a prideful elitism in their self-assurance as the elect or an overwhelming anxiety over the eternal state of their souls, Calvin was actually a disciple of another when it came to the subject of free will and predestination. That other, you may be surprised to learn, was Martin Luther.
Though later Lutherans such as the great sixteenth-century thinker Philipp Melanchthon sought to temper his rhetorical extremes, Luther’s position is manifest in his early polemical writings, such as “Assertions Concerning All Articles,” specifically Article 36, whose Latin version appeared in December 1520, with an altered German appearing in March 1521 (I will quote interchangeably from both below). “Unhappy free will!” Luther declares at the beginning of this theological essay. “Where is the free will here?
It is the prisoner of the devil, not, indeed, unable to act, but able to act only in conformity with the devil’s will.” Free will, says Luther, is “but a thing in name only.”