Rome has, indeed, assailed “the article with which the Church either stands or falls.”  All its other errors, crass, grotesque, and repulsive though they are, are mere child’s play in comparison with this damning and destructive error of justification by works.  Luther rightly estimated the virulence of this abysmal heresy when he said that those who attacked his teaching of justification by grace through faith alone were aiming at his throat.  Rome’s teaching on justification is an attempt to strike at the vitals of Christian faith and life.  It sinks the dagger into the heart of Christianity.

16.  The Fatalist Luther.

Catholic writers have discovered a fatalistic tendency in Luther’s teaching of justification by faith without works.  They declare that Luther’s theory of the utter depravity of man by reason of inherited sin and his incapacity to perform any work that can be accounted good in the sight of God kills every ambition to virtuous living in man.  They argue that when you tell a person that he is not capable to do good, he is apt to believe you and make no effort to perform a good deed.  The situation becomes still worse when the divine predestination is introduced at this point, as has been done, they say, by Luther.  If God has determined all things beforehand by a sovereign decree, if there really is no such thing as human choice, and all things occur according to a foreordained plan, man no longer has any responsibility.  He is reduced to an automaton.  Free will is denied him; he cannot elect by voluntary choice to engage in any God-pleasing action; for he is told that his natural reason is blinded by sin and his understanding darkened, rendering it impossible for him to discern good and evil, and leading him constantly into errors of judgment on what is right or wrong, while he is made to believe that his will is enslaved by evil lusts and passions, ever prone to wickedness and averse to godliness.  As a consequence, it is claimed, man must necessarily become morally indifferent:  he will not fight against sin nor follow after righteousness, because he has become convinced that it is useless for him to make any effort either in the one direction or in the other.  The doctrine of man’s natural depravity and the divine foreordination of all things, it is held, must drive man either to despair, insanity, and suicide, or land him hopelessly in fatalism:  he will simply continue his physical life in a mechanical way, like a brute or a plant; he merely vegetates.

These fatal tendencies which are charged against Luther are refuted by no one more effectually than by Luther himself.  As regards the doctrine of original sin and man’s natural depravity, Luther preached that with apostolic force and precision.  That doctrine is a Bible-doctrine.  No person has read his Bible aright, no expounder of Scripture has begun to explain the divine plan of salvation for sinners, if he has failed to find this teaching in the Bible.