Luther on God's "Hardening" and "Softening" of Human Hearts
In scholastic theological discourse, 'moral suasion' and 'physical
influence' represent two different ways of getting someone to do something. If
my goal were, say, getting my four-year-old daughter to the dinner table, I
might employ 'moral suasion' by promising her that she'd find her favorite dish
when she arrived there, or by simply threatening her with consequences for refusing
to follow my instructions to cease and desist from playing and join us for
supper. I might, alternatively, employ 'physical influence' by simply picking
her up, compliant or not, and carrying her to the table.
This distinction finds expression, among other places, in
the Synod of Dort's explanation for how God brings his elect to faith and
repentance. "God," the Canons of Dort argue, "not only sees to it that the
gospel is proclaimed to [the elect] outwardly, ... [but] also penetrates into the
inmost being, opens the closed heart, softens the hard heart, and circumcises
the heart that is uncircumcised. God infuses new qualities into the will,
making the dead will alive, the evil one good, the unwilling one willing, and
the stubborn one compliant."
The Divines at Dort described God's act of 'physical
influence' upon the will in such terms to counter semi-Pelagians who professed that divine grace precedes
every positive movement of the human will towards salvation, but -- when pressed
-- were forced to admit that by 'grace' all they really meant was God inviting,
threatening, pleading with, and otherwise attempting to suade [sic] sinners to embrace the Gospel. The underlying
assumption of such persons was that sinners retain sufficient freedom of the
will to respond positively to the Gospel when it is properly set before them. Grace
in such a semi-Pelagian scheme need not entail any actual influence upon the will, and -- correspondingly -- remains something
which can be resisted by those whom it confronts.
Though Luther never employs the exact terms I've outlined
above ('moral suasion' vs. 'physical influence'), I believe this distinction
lies at the heart of the difference he posits, in his Bondage of the Will, between God's work of regenerating those whom
ultimately believe and God's work of hardening those whom ultimately perish in
unbelief.
So enslaved, in Luther's perspective, is every human
person's will to that human person's sinful nature -- i.e., so enslaved is every
person's will to sin (cf. John 8.34) -- that Luther, though admitting that
people sin freely and under no compulsion, is reluctant to attribute 'free
choice' to sinners at all. For sinners to exercise faith in Christ, then,
requires a divine act of physical influence upon their wills. "The ungodly does
not come even when he hears the Word [moral suasion], unless the Father draws
and teaches him inwardly [physical influence], which He does by pouring out the
Spirit. There is then another 'drawing' [namely, one of physical influence]
than the one that takes place outwardly [i.e., that of moral suasion]; for then"
-- that is, when God employs his Spirit to bring someone to faith -- "Christ is [so]
set forth... that a man is rapt away to Christ with the sweetest rapture, and
rather yields passively to God's speaking, teaching, and drawing than seeks and
runs himself."
For Luther, as for the Divines at Dort, 'moral suasion' and
'physical influence' coincide in the work of regeneration -- "it has thus
pleased God to impart the Spirit, not without the Word, but through the Word" -- but the latter is utterly indispensable to any right response to the Gospel.
Elsewhere Luther describes this "inward" work of God upon the will thus: "If
God works in us, the will is changed,
and being gently breathed upon by the Spirit of God, it again wills and acts
from pure willingness and inclination and of its own accord, ... willing and
delighting in and loving the good just as before it willed and delighted in and
loved evil."
But Luther employs decidedly different language when he
discusses God's hardening of Pharaoh's heart (and the hearts of all who die in
final unbelief) in Exodus 9:12 (cf. Romans 9:17-18): "[God] provoked [Pharaoh]
and increased the hardness and stubbornness of his heart by thrusting at him through the word of Moses,
who threatened to take away his kingdom and withdraw the people from his
tyranny, without giving him the Spirit inwardly but permitting his ungodly corrupt
nature under the rule of Satan to catch fire, flare up, rage, and run riot with
a kind of contemptuous self-confidence."
In other words, God hardened Pharaoh's heart through an act
of 'moral suasion' alone. God confronted Pharaoh with a word which required Pharaoh
to give up something he held dear, and in so doing provoked Pharaoh to cling
more tightly to that very thing. Luther again explains: "It is thus [God]
hardens Pharaoh, when he presents to his ungodly and evil will a word... which
that will hates -- owing of course to its inborn defect and natural corruption.
And since God does not change it inwardly by his Spirit, but keeps on presenting
and obtruding his words... from without,
... the result is that Pharaoh is puffed up and exalted by his own imagined
greatness, ... and is thus hardened and then more and more provoked and
exasperated the more Moses presses and threatens him."
Thus God "hardens" all who are exposed to the Word without a
corresponding work of God's Spirit to bring them to faith and repentance: "This
provocation of the ungodly, when God says or does to them the opposite of what
they wish, is itself their hardening or worsening. For not only are they in
themselves averse through the very corruption of their nature, but they become
all the more averse and are made much worse when their aversion is resisted or
thwarted." In Luther's judgment the Gospel proves the ultimate "provocation of
the ungodly," because it calls sinners to abandon their most prized possession
-- their own self-righteousness.
This basic difference between God's act of hardening (through
'moral suasion') and God's act of softening (through 'moral suasion' and 'physical influence') human hearts should
be carefully noted. It reminds us, among other things, that God is not the
author of corrupt nature or sinful human acts as such. If, in fact, God
hardened human hearts in some way analogous to how he softens them -- by an act
of physical influence upon them -- Scripture's claim that God is "too pure" even
to "look upon sin" (much less to be the culpable cause of sin) might seem to ring hollow. Persons who, like the
Divines at Dort, accept with Luther the biblical truth that God has in fact predestined
some (undeserving) sinners to eternal life (accomplishing their salvation in time) and predestined
other (deserving) sinners to eternal death (accomplishing, in a fundamentally different way, there
condemnation in time) would do well to articulate the difference in how God
ultimately achieves those respective
ends with as much precision and care as Luther.
Aaron Clay Denlinger is professor of church history and
historical theology at Reformation Bible College in Sanford, Florida.