Hello, Matthew Stuckey here from Verity Baptist Church Manila and Verity Baptist Church Pampanga
just making a quick video addressing the subject of, was Martin Luther a Calvinist?
Was Martin Luther a Calvinist?
Now this is a very common question that people debate about.
It's one of those questions where everybody kind of likes to claim Martin Luther.
The Calvinists claim him, the Armenians claim him, just about everybody claims him.
And the reason why people aren't sure about whether or not he was a Calvinist is because
he came before John Calvin.
And so if you had talked to him about Tulip or about Calvinism, he would not have known
what you were talking about.
So to find out whether or not Martin Luther was a Calvinist or not, you really have to
kind of read his writings to figure these things out.
Now I've actually done a lot of research on Martin Luther because the Protestant Reformation
is a topic that's really interesting to me.
And so I've read the entire commentary from the book of Galatians and the book of Romans
from Martin Luther.
I've read his book, The Jews and Their Lies.
And I read another very famous book, not all of it, because it's a very long book,
but some of it called The Bondage of the Will by Martin Luther, and I'll talk about that
here in a second.
But I want you to understand that in 1524, there's a man by the name of Erasmus who wrote
a book called The Freedom of the Will.
Now Erasmus, you might know his name because he's very, very famous and important in terms
of getting the Bible into the English language.
You know, he putting out the Bible in the Greek language was kind of a forerunner to
help us eventually get the King James in the English language.
And Erasmus was a Catholic, but he was trying to reform the Catholic Church from within.
Martin Luther left the Catholic Church, it was trying to reform it from without.
So instead of being able to be friends and working together, they actually became enemies
from one another.
But in 1524, Erasmus wrote a book called The Freedom of the Will.
The Freedom of the Will, basically saying we have free will.
And so then the next year, in 1525, Martin Luther wrote a book called The Bondage of
the Will.
The Bondage of the Will.
Now, just from the title alone, that should kind of give you an idea of what was Martin
Luther's ideas about free will.
I mean, he wrote an entire book to blast the position of having free will.
And so in the book of The Bondage of the Will, there's quote after quote after quote, where
he's talking about how you cannot come to Christ unless you're drawn and the Spirit
brings you.
And he clearly would have agreed with most of the points and the sovereignty of God and
how you cannot become saved on your own.
You can't do it.
You've got to be chosen.
He did not believe you had the free will.
That's what the entire book was about.
Now, this was a very important book and a very important debate, because some people
consider that the most important book in the Protestant Reformation.
So the book, The Bondage of the Will, maybe even more so than 95 Theses, was like a big
turning point in a big battle where basically he said, you know, we do not have free will.
We cannot choose God on our own.
And, you know, I'd recommend if you want to double check me on that, you're welcome to
read it.
I've read not half of it, probably a third of the book of The Bondage of the Will.
I want to finish it, but it's a long book and I'd rather read books by, you know, godly
people rather than heretics.
So I haven't finished that book, but, you know, there's a lot of information.
You can see the fact that Martin Luther does not believe all the books of the Bible were
inspired and just a lot of different heresy and just weird teachings and things such
as that.
But what I want you to realize from the book, I believe, from my opinion, that he would
have believed the T, the U, the L, and the I.
And you say, but wait, wait a minute.
If he would have been like Calvinistic, why would he have not agreed with the P?
Well, let me just read you this quote, and you're going to understand why it's not just
four points of Calvinism, but kind of a morphed and really bizarre view that Martin Luther
had.
Here's what he says in his book, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.
He says, we see then how rich a Christian or baptized man is.
Now he says baptized man because he considers a Christian basically a baptized man.
And we'll talk about that here in a second.
Since even if he would, he cannot lose his salvation.
Now that sounds good.
He cannot lose his salvation by any sins, however great, unless he refuses to believe.
What he's saying is you can lose your salvation if you stop believing.
You can basically throw away your salvation.
For no sins whatever can condemn him, but unbelief alone.
All other sins, if faith in the divine promise made to the baptized man stands firm or is
restored, are swallowed up in a moment through that same faith, yea, through the truth of
God because he cannot deny himself if thou confess him and cleave believingly to his
promise.
And so he goes on and on and on.
Now what you'll see here is that he keeps talking about baptism because what Martin
Luther believed is that when your parents baptized you as an infant, what's going to
take place is faith starts to get implanted inside of you and that guarantees that you're
going to end up putting your faith in Jesus one day.
So basically baptism is what starts the faith and it's a guarantee because that's God's
mode of drawing you.
You're going to be one of the elect or chosen because you got baptized.
You're going to have that faith.
But what he did believe, which you can tell from this quote or his commentary on Galatians
I'd recommend, you can check that out, is that you could still throw away that salvation
later on.
So basically he didn't believe in perseverance of the saints.
Now the difference would be that a Calvinist would look at someone who basically just completely
stops believing and say they were never saved.
Now I personally would agree with that.
That if a person just became an atheist then they were never really saved.
Because the Bible says you have the spirit of truth inside of you.
But what Martin Luther believed was that a person could be saved.
If they were baptized then they would be saved and chosen.
But they did have the free will.
They were no longer under the bondage.
They had the free will to stop believing and thereby lose their salvation.
And this starts at the process of infant baptism.
And so when you really look at Martin Luther's beliefs, it's worse than Calvinism.
I mean it's a really bizarre, I mean I believe he was the biggest Christian heretic who ever
lived.
He wanted to take books out of the Bible.
A really weird, weird view on salvation.