Justified True Belief

(●) The scholar who published the first Greek New Testament, and then refused to join either side of the war it helped begin. + In March 1516 a printing house in Basel produced a book no one in Europe had yet been able to buy: the New Testament in the Greek it was written in, printed, portable, and set beside a fresh Latin translation that quietly corrected the Latin every priest in Europe had been reading for a thousand years. The editor was a middle-aged Dutchman with bad kidneys, no money of his own, and a horror of quarrels. Within five years his book was the raw material of a revolution he spent the rest of his life trying to slow down. Erasmus matters to a Christian reader for two reasons that pull against each other. He is the man who made it possible to check the church’s teaching against the church’s own oldest documents, and he is the man who, when that checking blew the Western church apart, could not bring himself to say which half was right. Luther called him the only opponent who had gone for the throat of the real question. He also called him a great many worse things. One signature fact tells you the scale of him: for the first four decades of the sixteenth century Erasmus was the best-selling author in Europe, and on the estimate historians of the book most often repeat, somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of everything sold on the continent in the 1530s was written or edited by him. Set against a figure that exact, the year he was born is oddly unsettled. He gave his own age inconsistently over the years, and scholars still argue for 1466, 1467, or 1469; 1466 is the year his earlier statements support and the one most reference works now follow. Every date in his life that is reckoned from his age carries the same uncertainty.

(●) c. 1466 AD: He was born in Rotterdam, the second son of a priest, with no lawful name to inherit. + His father was a priest named Gerard; his mother, Margaret, was a physician’s daughter and kept house for him. The two never married, because a priest could not, and the boy grew up carrying a fact that in canon law made him ineligible for church office and in ordinary society made him a target. He was born in Rotterdam around 1466, most likely on 27 or 28 October, and the town has been proud of him ever since; he himself spent his adult life signing his work with a Latin and Greek name he had made up, Desiderius Erasmus, both words meaning roughly "the longed-for one." He was schooled at Deventer, in the chapter school of St Lebuin’s and in the orbit of the Brethren of the Common Life, a movement of laymen and clergy in the Low Countries who lived together without vows, worked for their bread, and taught a warm, practical inward religion. It is the same soil that produced the Imitation of Christ, and it left permanent fingerprints on him. His verdict on his schoolmasters, delivered decades later, was that they beat Latin into boys and love of learning out of them; the one teacher he praised was Alexander Hegius, a headmaster who actually knew Greek. Then plague took both parents while he was still a teenager. The guardians left holding the two boys wanted the estate settled and their own hands free, so they parked Erasmus and his brother for two or three years at a school of the Brethren at ’s-Hertogenbosch, which he hated, and after that they pushed him toward a monastery. He went.

(●) 1487 AD: He entered the house of canons at Steyn, was ordained a priest five years later, and spent the rest of his life getting out of the cloister without ever quite leaving it. + Around 1487 he entered the house of Augustinian canons regular at Steyn, near Gouda. Canons regular were clergy who lived together under a rule much as monks did, keeping the hours of prayer, eating at a common table and owning nothing privately, but who were ordained to serve churches rather than to be shut away from them; the Augustinian houses were those that followed the rule carrying Augustine’s name. He professed his vows there in 1488, and on 25 April 1492 he was ordained a priest. He was miserable there, and said so for the rest of his life: the fasting wrecked a constitution that was never strong, the company bored him, and the library, which was the one thing he had wanted, was thin. What Steyn gave him was time. He read Latin poetry, taught himself to write it beautifully, and drafted the first version of a treatise on contempt for the world that argues, with a straight face, that the monastic life is best. Escape came the way it usually came in that century, through a patron. In 1493 the bishop of Cambrai took him on as a Latin secretary, which got him out of the house, and in 1495 the bishop sent him to Paris to study theology at the Collège de Montaigu, a college so severe about food and discipline that Erasmus, looking back years later in one of the Colloquies, the Latin dialogues he wrote for schoolboys and kept adding to all his life, remembered rotten eggs and sour wine, and said he had carried nothing away from the place but a body full of gross humours and his clothes full of lice. He left without much theology and with a lasting distaste for the way it was taught: schoolmen arguing over whether God could have become a cucumber, while the Gospels sat unread. He never formally left the order. Popes eventually dispensed him from the habit and from the residence, and he became that strange thing, a monk with a passport, but the vows followed him into every argument his enemies ever had with him.

(●) 1499 AD: In England, John Colet told him to expound Scripture, and he went away to learn Greek instead. + A pupil brought him to England in 1499, and the visit rearranged his life. At Oxford he met John Colet, who was lecturing on Paul’s letter to the Romans in a way nobody there had heard: not as a quarry for doctrinal propositions, but as a letter, written by a man, to a particular church, with an argument that runs from beginning to end. Colet pressed him to do the same for the Old Testament. Erasmus refused, and his reason is the hinge of everything that followed. He did not know enough. The Greek behind the Latin was closed to him, and he would not lecture on a text he could not read. He also met, in that same English winter, a young lawyer named Thomas More, and the friendship lasted until More’s head came off on Tower Hill thirty-six years later. It was More who took him to a royal nursery at Eltham to meet a boy of eight who would grow up to be Henry VIII. Back on the continent he set about Greek with the fury of a man who has found the door to his own house locked. Within a few years he could read it; within a decade he could edit in it. He wrote to a friend in those years that as soon as any money came in he would buy Greek books with it, and clothes afterwards.

(●) 1500 to 1511 AD: The Adages made him famous, and the Praise of Folly made him dangerous. + In 1500 he published a small book of 818 Greek and Latin proverbs with short explanations, the Adagia, and it turned into the work of a lifetime. By the great Venetian edition of 1508, printed by Aldus Manutius while Erasmus worked in the shop among the compositors, it had grown to more than three thousand entries, and some of the essays inside it had grown into pamphlets. English owes it several phrases people still use without knowing where they came from: to leave no stone unturned, to call a spade a spade, one swallow does not make a summer, in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. In 1503 came the Enchiridion militis Christiani, the handbook of the Christian soldier, written for a layman whose wife was worried about his soul. It is the first full statement of what Erasmus meant by the philosophy of Christ: an inward religion of the heart, fed on Scripture, for which pilgrimages, relics and fasting are at best a scaffold and at worst a substitute (T2). Then, in 1509, riding over the Alps back to England and stuck for weeks at Thomas More’s house in London with kidney trouble and no books, he wrote, by his own account in about a week, the thing everyone remembers him for. Moriae Encomium, the Praise of Folly, is a speech delivered by the goddess Folly in her own praise, and its title is a pun on his host’s name. For most of its length it is comedy at everyone’s expense, and then, quite suddenly, it stops being funny: theologians who argue about the Trinity like men counting teeth, monks who trust their cowls, bishops who forget the word bishop means overseer, and popes who fight wars while assigning the actual work of the office to Peter and Paul, who "have time enough to mind it" (T3). Published in Paris in 1511, it went through edition after edition, and it was quoted against him for the next century by people who thought a man who had written it had no business objecting to Luther.

(●) 1516 AD: He printed the Greek New Testament, and Europe could suddenly check its Bible against the original. + The book appeared from Johann Froben’s press in Basel in March 1516, under the title Novum Instrumentum omne. On the left-hand page stood the Greek; on the right, a new Latin translation Erasmus had made himself; behind both stood a thick block of Annotations explaining why he had changed what he had changed. He dedicated it to Pope Leo X, who thanked him warmly. A Greek New Testament had in fact been set in type two years earlier in Spain, as one volume of Cardinal Jiménez’s polyglot Bible at Alcalá. A polyglot is a Bible printed with its languages in parallel columns, so that a reader can run his eye across from the one to the other on the same page. That volume, though, sat waiting on papal permission, and it did not go on sale until 1522. The first Greek New Testament anyone could buy was Erasmus’s. Consider what that meant for an ordinary parish priest. For a thousand years the Bible of the West had been the Latin Vulgate, and a reading in the Vulgate was simply what the Bible said. Now a man could set his finger on the Latin and look across at the Greek. Where the Vulgate had Gabriel greet Mary as "full of grace", the Greek said "favoured one"; where it told readers to "do penance", the Greek said "repent", which is a change of mind before it is anything a priest administers. Erasmus was not attacking the sacraments, and he said so at length. But he had put the evidence on the table, and evidence on a table has a life of its own. The first edition was made fast and it shows. Erasmus had only a handful of late Greek manuscripts to hand in Basel, none of them old; for the closing verses of Revelation his manuscript was defective, so he translated those verses out of the Latin back into Greek and printed the result, a patch scholars have been picking at ever since. He revised the text four more times, in 1519, 1522, 1527 and 1535, and the second edition of 1519 is the one that mattered most, because it is the book Luther had open in the Wartburg, the castle where friends hid him in May 1521, weeks before the Emperor declared him an outlaw. The same years carried the rest of his scholarly programme: a nine-volume edition of Jerome, whose letters he loved and whose bad temper he forgave, and after it Cyprian, Hilary, Irenaeus, Ambrose, Augustine, Chrysostom and Origen. A generation of Christians on both sides of the coming split read the church fathers in his editions.

(●) 1524 AD: He wrote against Luther on free will, and lost the friendship of both camps at once. + When Luther’s theses went up in 1517, Erasmus’s first reaction was cautious sympathy. What the theses attacked was the selling of indulgences, and an indulgence is a grant by the church remitting the temporal punishment a Christian still owes for sins already forgiven; the trade in them had reached the point where a preacher in Germany could give a villager to understand that a coin in the box would lift a soul out of purgatory. Much of what the friar was saying about indulgences and about the Bible he had been saying himself, more elegantly, for fifteen years. He wrote to Luther kindly. He refused, repeatedly and to increasingly angry correspondents, to write against him, and when the Emperor and the theologians of Louvain pressed him he answered that he had not read enough of the man to condemn him. That position became impossible. Louvain treated him as Luther’s ghostwriter; the Lutherans treated his silence as cowardice; his own preference, an ecumenical settlement in which both sides gave ground, had no constituency anywhere. In 1521 he left Louvain for Basel, and in 1524, after six years of being pulled at, he published De libero arbitrio, a discussion of free choice, and chose the one question on which he thought Luther plainly wrong (T4). Luther’s reply, De servo arbitrio, came in December 1525 and is one of the fiercest books in Christian literature. It is also, oddly, full of respect: Luther thanks him for having gone straight to the real issue instead of quarrelling about indulgences and purgatory, and then spends four hundred pages taking him apart. Erasmus answered with Hyperaspistes in two parts, in 1526 and 1527, and after that the two men were finished with each other. He had lost Luther, he had not satisfied Rome, and he had, in his own estimate, told the truth about the one thing he was competent to judge.

(●) 1536 AD: He died in a city that had gone Protestant, still a Catholic priest, twenty-three years before Rome banned his books. + In 1529 Basel adopted the Reformation, the images came out of the churches, and Erasmus, who would not live under a settlement he had not agreed to, packed his library and moved across the Rhine to Catholic Freiburg. He was ill most of the time now, writing on peace in the church and on preparing to die, and burying friends. In 1535 he learned that John Fisher had been beheaded in London, and then Thomas More. He went back to Basel that year, to be near Froben’s press while his book on preaching went through it, and stayed. Pope Paul III, wanting his name for the reform party, moved to make him a cardinal; Erasmus declined, pleading his health and pointing out that he had nowhere near the income a cardinal was required to have. He died in the night of 11 to 12 July 1536, in a rented house in a Protestant city, attended by Protestant friends, and having received no last rites, which his enemies noticed. One account of his final words has him speaking not in Latin or Greek but in his own Dutch: Lieve God, dear God. They buried him in the Basel Minster, a cathedral that no longer said Mass. Twenty-three years later Pope Paul IV’s Index of 1559 placed every one of his works, present and future, among the forbidden books.

What He Taught

(T1) Scripture should be read in the language it was written in by scholars, and in his own language by everyone else. + Picture a weaver at his loom in 1516. He has heard the Gospel read in Latin at Mass all his life, in a language he does not speak, by a priest who may not read it much better than he does. Erasmus wanted that man humming the words of Jesus over the noise of the shuttle, in his own tongue, from memory. This was not a fringe opinion but it was not a safe one either, and Erasmus argued for it on two levels. The first was scholarly: the Latin Bible in use was a translation, and translations drift, so the church that wants to obey Scripture has to be able to see Scripture. That is why he learned Greek, why he taught himself some Hebrew, and why the Annotations that came with his New Testament run to hundreds of pages of patient argument about single words. The second level was pastoral, and it is the one that got him into trouble. If the text can be checked, it can be checked by anybody, and Erasmus was willing to say out loud that anybody should. He called the thing he was after the philosophia Christi, the philosophy of Christ. A modern reader hears "philosophy" and thinks of a technical subject; he meant something closer to a way of life drawn straight from the Gospels, the sort of thing a fisherman could hold and a professor could spend his life failing to reach the bottom of. His preface of 1516, the Paraclesis (Greek for a summons or an exhortation), is where he says so most plainly, and the Bereans who checked Paul’s preaching against the Scriptures every day were exactly the readers he had in mind (Acts 17:11; 2 Timothy 3:16-17). He never made a vernacular translation himself. What he did was print the original, argue for the principle, and hand the tools to the men who would.

(Q) "I wish that even the weakest woman should read the Gospel and the epistles of Paul... I long that the husbandman should sing portions of them to himself as he follows the plow, that the weaver should hum them to the tune of his shuttle, that the traveller should beguile with their stories the tedium of his journey." + Source: Erasmus, Paraclesis, the preface to the Novum Instrumentum of 1516, in Philip Schaff’s translation, History of the Christian Church VI. The sentences between the two halves quoted here ask that the Scriptures be turned into every language, so that they may be read "not only by Scots and Irishmen but also by Turks and Saracens." Schaff prints the passage as one paragraph in his account of Erasmus and the Bible, and cites the Basel edition of the collected works.

(T2) Religion is an inward thing, and the relic worth keeping is the example of a holy life. + A man walks a hundred miles to venerate a saint’s finger bone and comes home unchanged. Erasmus thought that was the most ordinary religious failure there is, and the Enchiridion of 1503 is one long attempt to cure it. His method is not to abolish the finger bone. It is to ask what the saint would want. The book is built on a division a reader has to hold onto: the visible and the invisible, the outward act and the inward disposition. Every outward thing in the Christian religion, he argues, is good in the measure that it carries the soul up to the invisible thing it stands for, and dangerous in the measure that it stops there and becomes a substitute. Holy water that does not wash the mind is wet and nothing else. This is the ancient prophetic complaint restated for the fifteenth century, and it is thoroughly biblical: the Lord sees what a man is, not what he is seen doing (1 Samuel 16:7). Two consequences made him enemies. The first is that a layman with a plough and a Bible may be further along than a canon in choir, because the vows are a way of living and not a rank of holiness; the Latin tag from the Enchiridion that his opponents never forgave him, monachatus non est pietas, says exactly that. The second is that the honour we owe the saints is imitation, and that anything less is a kind of insult dressed as devotion. Both halves of the coming split would use this argument, and they pulled it in opposite directions. Protestants took it as a reason to strip the outward things out of the churches altogether. Catholic reformers took it as a reason to give the interior life a discipline, and the Spanish translation printed at Alcalá in 1526 made the Enchiridion, for a decade, the devotional book of educated Spain. Ignatius of Loyola is the exception worth naming. Urged at Alcalá to read it, he is reported to have declined, on the ground that there was already argument about the author and no shortage of books nobody argued about. The deepening of the inward life was the reading Erasmus wanted; the emptying of the churches was the one he got as well.

(Q) "Thou honourest saints and art joyous and glad to touch their relics, but thou despiseth the chief relics which they left behind them, that is to be understood the examples of pure living." + Source: Erasmus, Enchiridion militis Christiani, chapter XIII, the fifth rule, in the anonymous English translation of 1533 (reprinted by Methuen in 1905 as The Manual of the Christian Knight), pages 165 to 166. The spelling and grammar are Tudor, and "despiseth" here is simply "despisest": you despise. A few lines later he adds that there is no honour more pleasant to Mary than that a reader should copy her humility, and that to imitate the faith of Peter and the charity of Paul is a greater thing than to run to Rome ten times.

(T3) A corrupt church should be laughed at and mended from the inside, not broken in half. + Anyone who has sat through a meeting knows the difference between the colleague who says the unsayable thing as a joke and the one who says it as an accusation. Both may be right. Only one of them is still in the room afterwards. Erasmus made a career, and eventually a tragedy, out of being the first kind. The satire is real and it is savage. In the Praise of Folly and in the Colloquies, a set of Latin dialogues that began as classroom exercises and grew into the sharpest social criticism of the age, he goes after indulgence sellers, relic merchants, warlike popes, ignorant preachers, and pilgrims who cross Europe to see a piece of the cross while ignoring the words of Christ at home. A dialogue of 1526 sends two travellers to the shrine at Walsingham and lets them work out, politely, that the milk of the Virgin on display there is chalk. What he refused to do was draw the further conclusion. Abuses, in his account, are the barnacles on a ship, and the answer to barnacles is scraping, not scuttling. He held that the unity of Christendom was itself a good commanded by Christ, that most of the disputed questions were less certain than either side was claiming, and that a settlement in which both parties surrendered something was worth more than a victory. In 1533, with Germany already lost, he was still writing a book on mending the peace of the church. There is a strong case that he was wrong, and Luther made it: some barnacles are holes below the waterline, and a man who will not say which is which has decided nothing. There is also a case, made ever since by Christians on both sides of the Reformation who wish the sixteenth century had gone differently, that the road he wanted was real and that nobody would walk it.

(Q) "Now as to the popes of Rome, who pretend themselves Christ’s vicars, if they would but imitate his exemplary life... what order or degrees of men would be in a worse condition?" + Source: Erasmus, Moriae Encomium, The Praise of Folly, in John Wilson’s English translation of 1668. Folly is explaining, in mock sympathy, how much the popes would lose if they took the office seriously: the preaching, the poverty and the hunger of Christ’s own life would cost them their revenues, their armies and their retinues, and leave the head of the church with nothing but a bag and a stick. "Pretend" in 1668 English means claim or profess, not counterfeit. The book was dedicated to Thomas More, whose name is the pun in the title; the popes it has in view are the warrior pontiffs of Erasmus’s own lifetime, and a later tradition reports that Leo X and Cardinal Jiménez both read it and found it funny.

(T4) Grace does the saving, and a real human will can take hold of it or turn away. + A father holds out both hands to a toddler across a room. The child cannot walk without him and did not think of walking on his own, and yet the child is the one who lets go of the chair. That is close to the picture Erasmus draws near the end of De libero arbitrio, and it shows both what he was claiming and how modest the claim was. The technical term is free choice, liberum arbitrium, and by it he means a power in the will by which a person can turn toward the things that lead to salvation or away from them. Note what that does not say. It does not say the will is strong, or that it earns anything, or that grace is optional; Erasmus assigns almost everything to grace and gives the will the smallest share he thinks Scripture will allow. His argument is mostly an argument about commands. Scripture is full of them, and full of promises attached to obedience and warnings attached to refusal: choose life (Deuteronomy 30:19). Commands of that kind, he argues, presuppose that the person commanded can respond. Otherwise God is asking of us what he knows we cannot do, and then holding us responsible. He also thought the question was one where certainty is not available, that Scripture pulls in both directions, and that the church had never settled it in the way Luther’s position required. Hence the form of the book, which he called a diatribe, meaning a discussion rather than a verdict, weighing texts on both sides. That mildness was itself the target of Luther’s reply, which held that the will in the things of God is not free at all, that grace is sovereign and unassisted, and that a Christian who will not assert what Scripture asserts has stopped being a Christian. Both men were reading the same verses, and the argument has never gone away. Paul tells the Philippians to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling, and in the very next breath says it is God who works in them both to will and to work (Philippians 2:12-13). Which half of that sentence governs the other is, in essence, what these two were fighting about.

(Q) "Moreover I consider Free-will in this light: that it is a power in the human will, by which, a man may apply himself to those things which lead unto eternal salvation, or turn away from the same." + Source: Erasmus, De libero arbitrio (1524), his definition of free choice, as quoted and translated in Luther’s The Bondage of the Will, section XLI (Henry Cole translation, 1823). Luther prints the definition in full before attacking it, which is why the sentence survives in a public-domain English rendering: the words are Erasmus’s, given to English readers by his opponent’s translator. Luther’s complaint against it is that the phrase "free will" claims more than any creature can have, and that Erasmus states the definition bare and then refuses to unfold its parts.

(Q) "We have not all strength for martyrdom, and I fear if trouble comes I shall do like Peter." + Source: Erasmus, letter to Richard Pace, Brussels, 5 July 1521 (Allen, Opus Epistolarum, Ep. 1218), in J. A. Froude’s abridged translation, Life and Letters of Erasmus (1894), page 278. Pace was an English diplomat and a friend. Writing not three months after Luther stood before the Emperor at Worms, Erasmus is explaining why he had not put himself at Luther’s side: two lives would have been lost instead of one, and no good done. The comparison he reaches for is Peter in the courtyard, denying that he knew the man. Froude translates freely and abridges as he goes, so the English is his; the Latin says the same thing, that not everyone has strength enough for martyrdom, and that if trouble broke out he was afraid he would do what Peter did.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The text he printed became the Bible of the Reformation and, through it, of the English-speaking world. + In the winter of 1521 Luther was hidden in the Wartburg castle under an assumed name, and he translated the whole New Testament into German in about eleven weeks. The book on his desk was Erasmus’s second edition of 1519. The German New Testament that came out of that room in September 1522 shaped the German language, and it was made from a Greek text a Catholic priest had edited and dedicated to the pope. The same thing happened in England. William Tyndale, working in exile, translated from Erasmus’s Greek, and his English is the English that survives, through a chain of revisions, into the King James Version of 1611. The line runs Erasmus to Stephanus to Beza to the King James translators, and later printers gave the resulting family of editions the name it still carries, the Textus Receptus or "received text". It has been superseded; the manuscripts Erasmus never saw, some of them centuries older than anything available in Basel in 1516, now stand behind modern translations. But for four hundred years the Greek New Testament that Christendom actually used was his, and the habit he founded, of settling a disputed reading by going back to the oldest evidence, is now simply how the work is done. One phrase of his translation is worth pausing on, because it shows what he thought he was doing. At John 1:1 the Vulgate has Verbum, Word. In his 1519 edition Erasmus put Sermo, which is Latin for speech or discourse, a word with more of a living voice in it. Theologians howled. He wrote an entire defence of the change, arguing that a translator’s duty is to the Greek in front of him and not to the habits of the ear (John 1:1).

(†) Both sides claimed him, both sides disowned him, and both kept using his books. + A taunt went round the monasteries: Erasmus laid the egg and Luther hatched it. The reply attributed to him is the better line. Yes, he is reported to have said, but the egg I laid was a hen’s, and Luther hatched a fighting cock. Neither side quite knew what to do with him. Protestants were furious that a man who had exposed the abuses would not join the remedy; Luther in his later years wrote of him with real bitterness, and Calvin’s generation treated him as a scholar to be used and a theologian to be ignored. Rome went further. Spanish and Louvain theologians hunted his Annotations for heresies while he lived, and in 1559 the Index of Paul IV listed him in its first class, the authors whose entire output was forbidden. The Index published after the Council of Trent in 1564 softened this: instead of condemning the man wholesale it banned particular books, the Colloquies among them, and let the rest be read once the objectionable passages had been cut out. And all the while both halves of the divided church went on reading him. His editions of the fathers sat in Protestant and Catholic studies alike. His Paraphrases, plain retellings of the New Testament book by book, were translated into English and, by the royal injunctions of 1547, ordered to be set up in every parish church in England beside the Bible, so that a Suffolk farmhand in the reign of Edward VI heard the Gospels explained by a Dutch Catholic priest. Catholic reform drew on him too: the Enchiridion was among the books that formed the devotional temper of the Spain that produced Ignatius of Loyola, and the biblical scholarship of the Counter-Reformation was built with his tools.

(†) The question he forced, whether the will is bound, is still where Christians who agree on everything else divide. + Luther thought Erasmus had picked the right fight, and said so in the closing pages of The Bondage of the Will: alone among his opponents, Erasmus had gone for "the grand turning point of the cause" instead of skirmishing about indulgences and purgatory. Whatever else that exchange was, it was two serious men on the one question that decides how a person understands his own conversion. The lines drawn there are still on the map. The Council of Trent, in its decree on justification in 1547, taught that grace goes first and that the will, moved by grace, genuinely consents and can refuse. Justification is the old word for how a sinner comes to stand right with God, and it was the question under everything else in that century. Reformed confessions in the following century taught that grace, when God gives it savingly, is not finally refused. Between them, and within Protestantism, the argument ran again a century later between the followers of Jacobus Arminius, who held that saving grace can be resisted, and the Synod of Dort, the Dutch assembly that answered them for the Reformed churches, and it runs today between Christians who read Philippians 2:12-13 with the accent on the working out and Christians who read it with the accent on the God who works. It is worth being exact about who owns what here. Erasmus is not the father of the Arminian position, which is a later and more developed thing built by Reformed theologians out of Reformed materials, and he would have been startled by parts of it. What he did was insist that the question be asked from the texts rather than settled by authority, and put the case for the freer will in a form strong enough that the greatest polemicist of the age answered it at book length. Christians on every side of it have been arguing from those two books ever since.

(†) Where he fell short: he would rather leave a question open than pay for an answer. + The charge against Erasmus is not that he lacked courage in general. He printed a Greek New Testament that corrected the church’s Latin in a hundred places, mocked warrior popes in a book everyone read, and told Europe that ploughmen should have the Gospels. It is narrower than that, and it comes out of his own writing. - He made not-asserting a virtue. In the preface to De libero arbitrio he wrote that he took so little pleasure in assertions that he would sooner go over to the skeptics, if only the authority of Scripture and the decrees of the church allowed it. Luther seized on the sentence and was right to: some things are certain because God has said them, and a faith that will not be pinned down has nothing to confess. Scripture treats confession as part of salvation itself, not an optional temperament (Romans 10:9-10; Matthew 10:32). - He said plainly that he was not built for martyrdom. The letter to Pace (Q) is not a slander invented by his enemies; it is his own estimate of himself, written down and sent. He was watching men die on both sides for positions he thought overstated, and he judged that his own gift was the pen and not the stake. Thomas More, his closest friend, made the other choice fourteen years later. - He printed a verse he did not believe. His first two editions omitted the words about the three heavenly witnesses at 1 John 5:7, the sentence naming the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit as bearing witness in heaven and saying that these three are one, because no Greek manuscript he knew contained them. Under sustained attack, and after a Greek manuscript containing them was produced in England, he put them into the third edition of 1522 while recording in his own annotation his suspicion that the manuscript had been written to order. His judgement of the evidence was right, and modern editions do not print the words. Printing them anyway, against that judgement, because the pressure had become uncomfortable, is the exact opposite of what his own method required. Fairness cuts the other way too, and Christians have never agreed on the verdict. What looks like evasion from one angle looks from another like a man refusing to burn his neighbour over a proposition neither of them could prove, in a century that burned people readily. He kept translating, editing and printing to the last month of his life, and much of what both sides used to fight each other came out of his workshop. But by his own account of himself, the thing he lacked was not sight. It was nerve.