1524–1525

The Controversy over Free Will: Erasmus against Luther and Zwingli (On Free Will, The Bondage of the Will)

Under pressure from the pope and others (González names Henry VIII and Adrian VI), Erasmus in 1524 came out against Luther with the treatise On Free Will – on a question on which he clearly and sincerely differed from him. In 1525 Luther answered with The Bondage of the Will, which he considered one of his best works, affirming humanity's complete dependence on grace and predestination; in the same year Zwingli attacked Erasmian free will in his Commentary on True and False Religion. Both reformers held that Erasmus's teaching leads to an overly optimistic conception of human nature. McGrath sees here the moment when the divergence of humanism and the Reformation became obvious to all.