The Liberal and the Conservative.

Who was right?  The agent of change or the agent of peace? The liberal or the conservative?

Erasmus tried to play down the drama of the protestant movement by his path of moderation.  Luther was then forced to make the discussion more heated, lest the flames of religious revolution grow cold.

When Erasmus wrote to defend free will from Luther he wrote midst religious upheaval.  Martin Luther, three years prior, had been excommunicated from the Catholic Church and lived under the protection of newly protestant German princes.  His denunciation of church authority cleaved the Catholic Church in twain.  Erasmus, under pressure from the church, wrote his arguments to their defense. His language seeks to calm the outrage that caused masses to abandon the Catholics:

Resisting Change

It is therefore by no means an outrage to dispute over one of his dogmas, especially not, if one, in order to discover truth, confronts Luther with calm and scholarly arguments.

To avoid pulling people apart he represented the Catholic church as neither extremist nor controlling.  He wrote:

I merely want to analyze and not to judge, to inquire and not to dogmatize... I would rather persuade mediocre minds not to argue too stubbornly on such matters. It harms Christian concord more than it helps piety.

It was a good strategy.  The people were already part of the Catholic faith, and so, required intense arousal to leave what they already knew.  This is conservatism’s advantage and Erasmus played to it.

Luther, on the other hand, wanted a sharp divide between the reformers and the Catholic Church.  He wrote to arouse strong emotions and divisions so that the fight would burn in people’s hearts.  Observe his opening:

The Fire of Separation

Your book is, in my opinion, so contemptible and worthless that I feel great pity for you for having defiled your beautiful and skilled manner of speaking with such vile dirt.

He uses strong pugnacious language and calls every reader to fight as a proof of their Christianity, we read him argue:

Not to delight in assertions is not the mark of a Christian heart.

Further note how the following quotation applies to the debate over free will but expresses Luther’s designs with the continuation of religious change as well:

The case is not bettered, nor anything gained by this middle way.

As he sought to change Europe he knew he would need to be strong and even rude to inspire people to act.  The the Treatise on Free Will was an exemplary piece of persuasive literature; a battle between radical change and a conservative church.

(Emphasis added on quotes.)