ERASMUS, Desiderius, Sylvester Hassell One of the most interesting events of the sixteenth century was the controversy between Desiderius Erasmus, of Rotterdam, and Luther, on the Freedom or the Bondage of the Will. Erasmus’s book, De Libero Arbitrio (Of Free Will), was published Sept., 1524; and Luther’s reply, De Servo Arbitrio (Of the Bondage of the Will), was published Dec. 1525. Erasmus (born 1466, died 1536) was the finest scholar and critic of his age, the chief of Humanists, the literary precursor and then the cowardly deserter of the Protestant Reformation.
He published, in 1516, the first complete edition of the Greek New Testament, from which Luther and Tyndall made their vernacular versions, which became the most powerful levers of the Reformation in Germany and England.
In his Praise of Folly (1510) he heavily satirized the superstitions, follies and vices of the monks and schoolmen; but, when the Beast of Rome showed his teeth, he sarcas-tically confessed that he was not of the stuff that martyrs are made of, and he said that he was willing to accept any doctrine that the church received. He seems to have been an utter stranger to a genuine spiritual experience; and he died at last in bitterness and darkness. His Defense of Free Will, which contains the usual arguments of conditionalism, is admitted to be the weakest of his writings, and is really Pelagian in its nature; as may be seen from his defining free will to be “a power in the human will, by which a man may apply himself to those things which lead unto eternal salvation, or turn away from the same.” “In attacking Luther,’ says M.D’Aubigny, “Erasmus selected the point where Romanism is lost in Rationalism—the doctrine of free will, or the natural power of man.” “I must acknow-ledge,” said Luther, “that in this controversy you are the only man that has gone to the root of the matter; for I would rather be occupied with this subject than with all those secondary questions about the pope, purgatory, and indulgences, with which the enemies of the gospel have hitherto pestered me.”
Erasmus’s treatise was so weak that Luther hesitated at first to reply to it. “What! So much eloquence in so bad a cause!” said he; “it is as if a man were to serve up mud and filth in dishes of silver and gold. One can not lay hold of you. You are like an eel that slips through the fingers; or like the fabulous Proteus who changes his form in the very arms of those who wish to grasp him.” Luther’s book is one of the most powerful of his writings, and one of the two (the other being his catechism) that he never regretted. An English translation of it was published by Elder James Osbourn, at Baltimore, in 1837. In the preface of this edition, Elder Osbourn truly remarks: “From the early part of the sixteenth century, the church of Christ has derived manifold blessings from the pious labors of this disting-uished servant of the Lord.”
This work of Luther, and Jonathan Edwards’s “Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of the Freedom of the Will,” present an array of solid arguments, from Scripture, reason and fact, in proof of the particularity and efficacy of Divine grace, and of the goodness and holiness of God, which no rationalist, either in or out of any religious organization, has ever been able to answer. Upon an unprejudiced man who admits the perfect inspiration of the Scriptures, or who even admits that there is a God, and that he is omniscient and omnipotent, the effect of these arguments is simply overwhelming.
Erasmus, both in his first and his second work (Hyperas-pistes, published in 1526), “treats the dispute entirely from the outside,” says the Encyclopedia Britannica. The fact is that Arminian writers, as Luther said of Doctor Eck, “skim over the Scripture almost without touching it, as a spider runs upon water.” Erasmus’s second book, Luther never thought of sufficient force to call for a reply. (Hassell’s History ppg 482,483)