The Plan Behind the Promise: Luther’s Proclamation of Predestination -- By: Robert Kolb
Journal: Reformation and Revival
Volume: RAR 12:2 (Spring 2003)
Article: The Plan Behind the Promise: Luther’s Proclamation of Predestination
Author: Robert Kolb
RAR 12:2 (Spring 2003) p. 41
The Plan Behind the Promise: Luther’s Proclamation of Predestination
Upon returning from a visitation in Lower Saxony, probably in 1543, Martin Luther’s Wittenberg colleague Caspar Cruciger had reported that he had met a person who was apparently a mutual acquaintance. This man had been “taken captive by strange and peculiar ideas regarding God’s predestination and had become totally confused.”1 He had wanted to commit suicide because he thought that he could not possibly have been predestined to salvation, and so Luther wrote him a letter to bring him away from the hidden abyss of God’s mysterious will and direct him to the comfort of the gospel of Jesus Christ.2
Luther Writing to a Friend
The biblical revelation of God presents him as a choosing God from Abraham’s call in Genesis 12 on. Paul struggled with his own conceptions of God’s plan for the chosen people of Israel, above all in Romans 9, and sought to deal with his own questions regarding the failure of many in Israel, God’s elect nation, to come to faith in Jesus the Messiah. The early Church shied away from the topic of predestination, for the ancient world suffered under a widespread fatalistic resignation. Augustine of Hippo placed predestination once again at the center of the Church’s concern, developing his
RAR 12:2 (Spring 2003) p. 42
doctrine of God’s choosing in reaction to the claims of Pelagius that sinners could contribute to their own salvation apart from God’s grace. Augustine confessed that human salvation lies wholly in God’s hands, that his grace alone predestined those whom he had chosen and ensured that the faithful would persevere until the end. Medieval theologians interpreted and applied Augustine’s position in a variety of ways, and by Luther’s time some had defused it by focusing on human contributions to the process of salvation in which grace played a key role but human works were not excluded.
As a young monk suffering from scruples that led him to a morbid introspection and sense of unworthiness before the wrath of the just God, Luther doubted that he was predestined to salvation. Johannes Staupitz, his monastic superior, pointed him to the wounds of Christ and led him to trust in God’s mercy rather than persist in focusing on his own sins. This led Luther to believe that great comfort for uncertain and troubled consciences should flow from God’s choice of human creatures to be his own children in the plan he made for human salvation in Christ before the foundations of the world. Th...
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