Scott Warren, ETS National Conference, November 17, 2005
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substance of the issue raised by Erasmus in this text, and continued to insist on the
inability of sinners to obey.
As with Augustine, distinguishing ability from inclination and employing
language that focused on human wickedness rather than human weakness would
have put him in a much better position to defend the certainty of sin without
continued insistence on "inability" and its inherent problem related to moral
responsibility.
On the other hand, Erasmus' focus
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on the matter of human freedom
betrays the belief that successfully establishing freedom, accomplishes his
objective. However, since free actions require an inclination as well as ability, he
also would need to successfully demonstrate that free natural sinners have the
inclination to do the things of God. This he scarcely considers. In each of their
works, the issues of freedom and inclination are terribly obscured. Both Erasmus
and Luther persist in making "ability" the issue, even in instances where the context
makes it plain that the inclination of the will is in view, rather than its freedom. As
a result, their debate was much more muddled than it needed to be.
Two centuries later, Jonathan Edwards provided an excellent analysis of
the issues at question in his treatise on the Freedom of the Will. Edwards did a far
better job than his predecessors, in my opinion, in distinguishing the root of sin
from the ordinary notion of human ability, which he calls "natural ability." To do
so, he introduced a new term, moral ability (and its corollary, moral inability).
In my view, Edwards coined a term to describe what existing and familiar
language says more clearly. In his own words, "moral inability consists in the
opposition or want of inclination."
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While in matters of substance I am in
agreement with this Edwardsian assessment, I think that his continued use of the
word "ability" fails to eliminate the unnecessary confusion in the debate and to shift
the focus to human inclination, where it belongs. Rather than say that sinners lack a
"moral ability" I find it much more natural to say that they lack the inclination.
Rather, they have a fundamental inclination away from the things of God. They
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And that of others; Erasmus has much company in this line of thinking.
42
Edwards, Freedom of the Will, op. cit., p. 159.