Philip Melanchthon on Original sin & the human will

Depraved, but prevenient grace restores ability to respond

THE POSITION

Melanchthon changed his mind, publicly, and the corpus records the change rather than a settled view. The 1521 Loci denies free will outright on determinist grounds. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 holds a middle line — the will has real liberty in civil matters and none in spiritual ones. From the mid-1530s he taught instead that when the Word is preached and the Spirit draws, the will can assent or resist, and that this assent is a third concurring cause alongside Word and Spirit. That later position is what the locus calls prevenient: nature depraved, but grace restoring a real ability to respond.

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ABOUT THIS FIGURE

Luther's colleague at Wittenberg and the Reformation's systematizer. He wrote the first Protestant systematic theology (Loci Communes, 1521), drafted the Augsburg Confession (1530) and its Apology (1531), and then revised his own work far enough that the Formula of Concord condemned the later version seventeen years after his death. This entry rests on the Augsburg Confession read in Latin and English — Part I less Articles VI-VIII and XIV-XVI, plus Part II Articles XXII-XXIV and XXVIII — on the opening articles of the Apology in English, and on the successive editions of the Loci through Latin sentences preserved by Schaff and Bente; no edition of the Loci itself was read.