De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio

De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio (literally Of free will: Discourses or Comparisons) is the Latin title of a polemical work written by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1524. It is commonly called The Freedom of the Will in English.

De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio was written expressly to refute Martin Luther and his teachings, specifically on the question of free will.

Erasmus had generally avoided involving himself in theological disputes until then; however, he was urged by many of his contemporaries, particularly by his good friend Thomas More, as well as by Pope Clement VII, to apply his skill and learning to answer Luther, who had become increasingly aggressive in his attacks on the Roman Catholic Church.

The disputation between Erasmus and Luther essentially came down to differences of opinion regarding the doctrines of divine justice and divine omniscience and omnipotence. While Luther and many of his fellow reformers prioritized the control and power which God held over creation, Erasmus prioritized the justice and liberality of God toward humankind.

Luther and other reformers proposed that humanity was stripped of free will by sin and that divine predestination ruled all activity within the mortal realm. They held that God was completely omniscient and omnipotent; that anything which happened had to be the result of God's explicit will; and that God's foreknowledge of events in fact brought the events into being.

Erasmus however argued that foreknowledge did not equal predestination. Instead, Erasmus compared God to an astronomer who knows that a solar eclipse is going to occur. The astronomer's foreknowledge does nothing to cause the eclipse—rather his knowledge of what is to come proceeds from an intimate familiarity with the workings of the cosmos. Erasmus held that, as the creator of both the cosmos and mankind, God was so intimately familiar with his creations that he was capable of perfectly predicting events which were to come, even if they were contrary to God's explicit will. He cited biblical examples of God offering prophetic warnings of impending disasters which were contingent on human repentance, as in the case of the prophet Jonah and the people of Nineveh.

...
Wikipedia