An excellent passage on the bound will by Gerhard Forde from his classic Where God Meets Man. If we take Forde at face value, he seems to be suggesting more of a “binding” will and a “bound” sinner:
“It is because we do not really know God that we must, in the second place, construct a theology that enables us basically to place our trust in ourselves. The point of Luther’s writing On the Bondage of the Will is that as sinners we are bound by our own will to do this. The bondage of the will does not stem from the fact that because God is almighty we are therefore forced to do things ‘against our will’…No, the bondage of the will Luther was talking about was much more actual. It is something of our own making. We will not accept a mighty God and so are bound by our own will to construct a theology based on our own freedom. We are the problem, not God. We are bound to the folly of taking our fate into our own hands.”
Paradoxically, we are most bound in believing we are free and asserting our own agency. For Forde, the bound will does not so much lead us into external sins as it consigns us to our continual attempts at self-justification. Our wills do this not because they are powerless, but because they constantly demand we trust in ourselves.
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4 responses to “Bondage in Autonomy: Gerhard Forde on the Will”
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He asserts this same understanding in great detail in “On Being a Theologian of the Cross” as he unpacks theses 13-19 of Luther’s Heodelburg Disputation. I really appreciate Forde.
Great quote!
Insightful quote!