Luther's Magnificence

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Randy Kluth

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Luther's magnificence.

For years I admired Luther, having been raised a Lutheran, and then going through the throes of evangelical reformation as he did. By this I mean that I went through what Luther went through, in seeking justification without a thorough repentance of independent human works.

He called this the "Bondage of the Will," but I don't prefer that language, since it tends to render human will impotent in the matter of responding to God's word. I prefer to call Luther's sense of the "Bondage of the Will" a true sense of Born Again living.

What do I mean by this? Luther discovered, as I did, that the will is incapable of presenting Christ as a New Nature in our lives until we have abdicated self-effort by committing to work only in partnership with Christ. Until we lay down our own self-autonomy, we are cursed to continue to live a hybrid life between doing our own will and doing Christ's will.

This cannot reflect a New Nature, and cannot please God, since nothing strictly of our own will can please God. As a result, our will remains in bondage to sin. We either capitulate to the sins of the flesh, or we display the sin of rebellion against God's word.

At any rate, we do not display a completely new nature, which Christ's sinless life represented, and we only sporadically represent Christian virtue, at other times allowing the vices of a corrupt heart to dominate us, such as hate, envy, and vengeance.

And so, Luther realized that the human will is in bondage as long as it remained mixed with itself, as opposed to resigned to live in association with Christ, and even more, in deference to Christ. Nothing we do should be without consideration of God's higher will, and nothing we do must lack the virtues of Christ, which is accomplished when we live in conformity with his love on a continuous basis.

And so, Luther was not so much about the bondage of the human will, philosophically, but more, about the theology of our need to work in conjunction with Christ, to do the works of Christ exclusively by submitting our entire will to him. As such, we are committed to a whole New Nature, without any admixture of our own selfish volition. We commit to Christ who knew only the will of God and nothing of our carnal self-will.

Self-will truly is in bondage, and that's what I think Luther meant. He agreed with the biblical notion that we must "put on Christ," which is a New Nature fashioned after him. None of this means we have to be perfect, but it does mean we can connect to Christ himself, a perfect standard of love and grace. And we can *remain* in him, as a testimony of our ability to sustain our New Nature.
 
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