Martin Luther on Original sin & the human will
Will in bondage; needs sovereign grace to be freed
Thus the human will is, as it were, a beast between the two. If God sit thereon, it wills and goes where God will... If Satan sit thereon, it wills and goes as Satan will. Nor is it in the power of its own will to choose, to which rider it will run.
THE POSITION
The will is not neutral and cannot turn itself. Luther is careful about what he means: not compulsion but 'the necessity of immutability' — the unregenerate man sins willingly and cannot stop wanting to. Against the scholastics he denies that fallen man has 'a free will to do good and omit evil' or can 'love God above all things' by natural powers, and calls hereditary sin so deep a corruption of nature that reason cannot grasp it and it must be believed from Scripture.
22 I was senseless and ignorant; I was a brute beast before You. 23 Yet I am always with You; You hold my right hand.
17 OTHERS HOLD THIS
ABOUT THIS FIGURE
Augustinian friar whose protest over indulgences opened the Reformation, and the theologian for whom justification by faith and the bondage of the will are the whole of the gospel. This entry rests on his own writings only — The Bondage of the Will (1525), the Smalcald Articles (1537), the Large and Small Catechisms (1529), Concerning Christian Liberty (1520), the Heidelberg Disputation (1518), the Church Postil and his biblical prefaces — and deliberately excludes the Augsburg Confession and the Formula of Concord, which are not his.
Cite this page
"Martin Luther on Original sin & the human will", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/luther/original-sin (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/luther/original-sin).