The 500th anniversary of the Reformation sent me back to Luther and his debate with Erasmus. The two were among the most widely read authors in sixteenth-century Europe. In the early 1520s, they exchanged dueling treatises on free will. They raised recondite theological questions of biblical interpretation, divine foreknowledge, and God’s power, but the main topic was freedom. That’s something we need to think about in our own time, for freedom is on the wane even as talk of liberation gets louder and louder.
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