Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 81:2 (Fall 2019)
Article: Free Will And The Descent Of The Protestant Reformation Into Narcissism
Author: Allen C. Guelzo

WTJ 81:2 (Fall 2019) p. 257

Free Will And The Descent Of The
Protestant Reformation Into Narcissism

Allen C. Guelzo

Allen C. Guelzo is Senior Research Scholar for the Council of the Humanities and Director of the Initiative in Politics and Statesmanship, James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.

The Protestant Reformation marked a decisive break with the Catholic Church over three issues: the magisterium, justification, and determinism. The last of these breaks was less obvious initially than the first two, since the first wave of Protestant Reformers considered themselves firmly within the arc of Augustine’s teachings on free will and predestination. But free will soon became fully as much a point of Protestant departure as the first two. Protestants were dependent on secular princely authority for protection, and secular princes preferred notions of human willing which relocated sovereignty on a human plane. The Enlightenment struck a second blow in favor of free will by posing a universe governed by irresistible natural law, and from which only indeterminism (in the form of an unfettered human will) offered a meaningful key to personal identity. In the American environment, the republican experiment placed human willing at the center of identity, either directly (through secular market forces or through varieties of free will theology) or indirectly (through the subtler distinctions crafted by Edwards and nineteenth-century Calvinist moral philosophers). The principal casualty was any sense of community, which was sacrificed to benevolence, influence, or interest. Modern American opinion on determinism, whether philosophical or theological, is dominated by a free-willism which supports a rabid narcissism wholly at odds with Augustine and divine predestination.

I.

The Protestant Reformation is remembered best for three significant innovations in Christian theology. The first two are the most obvious: the challenge to the authority of the Catholic Church’s magisterium (and especially that of the Roman pontiff) and the relocation of salvation from the personal experience of the believer in sanctification to the legal category of justification. What is less obvious is the third innovation, and that concerns the

WTJ 81:2 (Fall 2019) p. 258

problem of the human will. There was, at first, not very much in Reformation thinking on this subject that looked like an innovation. Martin Luther’s famous polemic against Erasmus on The Bondage of the Will, as well as John Calvin’s Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God (1552), the third book of Calvin’s Institutes (1559), and Ulrich Zwingli’s Commentary on True and False Religion (1524) all echo the un...