John Calvin is making a comeback. On a related note, you may be interested in this audio file of a few men talking about Calvin’s legacy in the church.
John Calvin is making a comeback. On a related note, you may be interested in this audio file of a few men talking about Calvin’s legacy in the church.
Do you really think Satan is strong enough to make God’s image wholly depraved?
I’m not sure it’s correct to say “god’s image” is wholly depraved, but it is flawed as we represent it. Nonetheless, we are totally depraved in heart, mind, and soul, meaning we cannot love God without help from Him nor recommend ourselves to Him in any way.
“The LORD looks down from heaven on the children of man,
to see if there are any who understand,
who seek after God.
“They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt;
there is none who does good, not even one.” (Psalm 14:2-3)
“But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed.
“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:5-6)
Oh, I forgot to mention that the choice in Genesis 3 is our’s, not Satan’s. He did nothing but encourage us to distrust God the Father.
Yes, it’s always a mistake to say Satan caused anything. His only power is that of deception (he’s an advertising man. I try to say this again and again in my novels). God’s gift of free will was a genuine gift of a genuine thing. Man almost immediately made the wrong choice. It’s all on Adam, and, through him, on us.
Phil: Nonetheless, we are totally depraved in heart, mind, and soul, meaning we cannot love God without help from Him nor recommend ourselves to Him in any way.
Ori: I’m not sure I follow you. I can’t love God without oxygen either. If I didn’t have oxygen, I’d spend a few minutes frantically trying to get it, not thinking about God at all. Then I’d be dead, and barring God’s grace dead and gone and unable to love God either.
So what? That’s like saying that there is something wrong with a baby because the baby needs the mother’s milk. We can’t exist without God’s grace, but God made us that way, and He provides the grace to us, ahem, graciously.
When reading the Psalms, or anything else in the Old Testament, you have to remember they were written by Israelites, a people whose nearest cultural cognates in today’s world are Arabs. Arabs are known to use hyperbole as a matter of course. Israelites were probably the same way.
Good point about Genesis 3. Yet I’m sure God knew it was going to happen.
Yes, God’s grace abounds for all. It’s wonderful.
But the argument from Scripture is that His common grace is not what saves us. Because of Adam’s disdain for God, all of us are separated from him. We need to submit to the Lord in faith in order to be saved from this separation. You can read that stated in Romans 4-5, but you can also see it in a story Jesus tells in Matthew 22:1-14.
In that story, a king invites many people to the prince’s wedding, but they give him excuses for not coming. Drama ensues, and when the feast is held, everyone is given a wedding garment to wear–taking on the king’s clothes as it were. When they find a man who isn’t wearing his wedding clothes–wanting to enjoy the feast on his own terms–he is thrown out.
That’s because all who come to the Father must come through Jesus, who will cloth them in righteousness and remove the sin that separates them from the Father.
I think I understand your argument. I do not accept it, but that’s because I’m Jewish and so don’t accept the New Testament as scripture.
For Jews it’s hard to conceive of anything being truly separated from God. One formulation is “He is the place of the world, and the world is not His place”. God may hide his face from us, but it’s more like a parent pretending to ignore a child (for example, because the child is throwing a temper tantrum) than anything else.
Calvin? Huzzah! Oh, wait, my theological slip is showing.
Regarding the total depravity issue, I always thought there was plenty of textual evidence for the doctrine long before Christ showed up.
Yes, that’s why I quoted from the Old Testament first, but if you are going to tell me every bold statement in Scripture is an exaggeration, we won’t get anywhere.
Why did most of the Israelites die in the wilderness? Why were the northern tribes wiped out by Assyria and the southern tribes taken by Babylon? Was it because they thought all the prophets telling them to repent were exaggerating?
Phil: Yes, that’s why I quoted from the Old Testament first, but if you are going to tell me every bold statement in Scripture is an exaggeration, we won’t get anywhere.
Ori: I know. However, Psalms are poetry. Biblical poetry cannot always be literally true. For example, Judges 5:20 says that the stars fought against Sisera from their courses. Psalm 10:5 says that the wicked man is always prosperous (and later the poet asks God to change things, with no implications that they’ll actually change). Psalm 14:5 says (NIV): “for God is present in the company of the righteous”, which implies there are righteous people (the Hebrew implies a righteous generation, BTW).
Loren’s quote makes more sense to me. If by “total depravity” you mean “commits any sin”, then yes – all people are totally depraved. Is that what the term means?
I thought about what might be a better way to explain my point. Christianity seems to be a Boolean thing. Either you end up in Heaven, or you end up in Hell. You’re either saved or damned.
Judaism believes that it’s vanishingly rare to find a person who is either totally good or totally evil. Therefore, any statement saying people are complete sinners, or complete saints, is hyperbole.
I can’t help thinking that the doctrine of total depravity reflects a kind of pride on the part of men – that man’s original sin was so grievous that it actually effaced God’s creation of man in His own image. People are always ready to boast of their sins if those sins have a certain cachet. But perhaps original sin should be seen as more pathethic than cosmic. Calvin’s faith is that of a lawyer. God is a lover.
Total Depravity isn’t just a term for being sinful. It’s a term for our separation from God. We are born dead in our sins b/c of Adam’s original sin, and because we are dead, we are unable to obey the Lord, unable to trust him for salvation, without his enabling grace.
That’s what the sacrifice in the temple represents. We can’t just do our best to please God because our sin effects all of our being. Nothing we do is without the stain of sin. That’s what total depravity means. Original sin has separated from God completely.
It isn’t a matter of being totally good or totally evil. It’s an understanding that no one is good but God.
Only Christ’s atonement can unite us to God again. He is the final sacrifice that has made the temple obsolete.
Yes, it seems to me that more than a division between “good” and “bad” people (that’s a distinction that Christian theology pretty much never makes), it’s a statement that God has subjected all men to sin and the law (that’s from Paul, but I can’t find the reference right now).
It’s like Solzhenyitsin’s statement about how the line between good and evil runs, not between nations and political systems, but through every human heart. The monster dwells within each of us. The nicest guy you ever met might kiss his wife and children in the morning, and then go to work as a guard at Dachau. The Christian gospel addresses this unbearable wrongness by taking the solution out of human hands altogether, and allowing God to fix it, through radical, unilateral action.
More precisely, I think total depravity would be defined as every part of the person being touched by sin. That’s why we keep doing it.
I have no doubt that we are tempted by evil. I simply do not believe that we are evil, which is what it seems to me this doctrine suggests. If that were the case, what would be the point of the redemptive act? Christ saved us, not because we were evil, but because we are fundamentally good, made in the image and likeness of God, but fallen away. We were in bondage to sin, but not one with it. And I am no Pelagian. I do not think we can do anything without God’s help, but the doctrine of total depravity, it seems to me, gives far more credit to Satan and his works and pomps than they deserve.
In sin like the adult action of a murderer, or like the temper tantrum of a three year old? A murderer can be considered irredeemable by human society, and executed to protect the rest of us. A temper tantrum, while it appears serious to the child, is really just a minor annoyance to the parent. It does not render the child irredeemable, merely human.
Frank, from the above link:
Consider the illustration of three glasses of water. The first glass contains clean, pure water and represents Adam in his perfect state before the Fall. Now consider a second glass which contains this same clean, pure water. We can put one drop of deadly poison in that glass and it renders that entire glass poisonous so that if you were to drink it, you would quickly drop dead. That one drop extended to every part of the glass even though the entire vessel is not filled with poison. This represents humans after the Fall. While they are not wholly corrupt, the corruption they do have extends to every part. And finally consider a third glass which is filled entirely with poison. From top to bottom there is nothing but deadly poison. This represents Satan, who the Bible portrays as being absolutely corrupt so there is no good left whatsoever, but this does not represent humans here on earth. Humans are not as depraved as they could possibly be.
Ori, one catechism defines sin as “any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God,” and I think that fits pretty well with the Mosaic code .
I’m glad we can talk about this together.
This idea is also called Total Inability, and maybe that label helps focus it on the process of salvation. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” That’s not to say that men are not good in human terms, so we aren’t arguing that all men are evil at their core. We are saying that no one can wash away the stain of his original sin by his own effort. We are, as you say, in bondage to sin. Our only hope for liberation from that bondage is Christ’s atoning sacrifice on the cross.
That’s what Isaiah 53 is getting at:
“But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.”
Whether we murder or throw tantrums, steal or hold grudges, we do so because we are in bondage to sin from birth, which separates us from eternal life with the Father. That’s our fallen nature, and that’s what keeps us from God.
So Total Depravity is the starting point in our relationship with God. It’s a position before the Lord. It isn’t to say men can’t do good things. You remember the rich young man who had kept the commandments but went away sad because Jesus had suggested he sell his possessions? It wasn’t that the man was evil, but that he loved his wealth more than God. That’s what Jesus calls unacceptable.
Perhaps I might mention a point of theology which convicts me, personally, very deeply. The Christian view is that God did not create human beings to be “pretty good.” He created us to be (in the words of C.S. Lewis in Screwtape) “saints, gods, things like Himself.” In the Christian view, pretty good doesn’t cut it. It falls too far short of what God intended. What He wants to see (and will bring into being) is people who continually die (through repentance) and are reborn in Christ, becoming–through time and submission to Him–beings whose goodness we can’t imagine at this stage. It’s impossible, but, as Jesus said, “What is impossible to man is possible with God.”
Thank you for this discussion. It’s great mental food. Total Inability is a term that makes more sense to me. However, being Jewish, I’m not sure if the sense I’m getting is the correct one or not.
We are unable to do anything, or even exist, without God’s grace. So isn’t Total Inability tautological?
There are different kinds of grace. I haven’t made a study about it, but (if I remember correctly) “common grace” is the sort of thing that comes with being a human and enjoying God’s blessings to all His creation. Love of family, pleasure in beauty, joy in friendship. That sort of thing. “Special grace” (that may not be the right term) is the grace that God bestows through Christ’s work, and is only available to those who give up on their own righteousness and trust in His finished work.
I think that special grace is what’s on display in the temple sacrifices. All of Israel existed (exists even) by the liberal grace of the Lord, but he required them to offer sacrifices to atone for their sins, even sins they could not name. Living itself was enough to need atonement for sin (b/c of what we’ve said earlier).
So mankind is completely devoid of options for eternal life. We are totally dead in our sins. We need God’s graceful gift of life through faith in Christ to be saved. Yes, saved means go to heaven, but also commune with God now. Eternal life begins now for those who follow Christ.
A friend sends along a comment from C.S. Lewis that seems eminently pertinent:
“If God’s moral judgment differs from ours so that our ‘black’ may be His ‘white’, we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say ‘God is good’, while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say ‘God is we know not what’. And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) ‘good’ we shall obey, if at all, only through fear–and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend. The doctrine of Total Depravity–when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing–may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship.”
True Calvinists tell me that Lewis misunderstands the meaning of Total Depravity in this passage.
Thanks, Lars. I was going to say that Lewis isn’t right about everything–darn it. And I think we’ve addressed the point in Lewis’ quote already, that we are not saying man is incapable of doing anything remotely good. We are saying he is incapable of recommending himself to God for salvation.
Salvation is by faith alone, not by works lest anyone should boast. It is by faith, and faith itself is a gift of God. Even the greatest philanthropist is no more reconciled to God without faith than the most vile tyrant. But that’s the beauty of it, because even the most vile tyrant can be saved by repenting of his sins and putting his faith in Christ. He doesn’t have to work up to a point of acceptance over time. Like the thief on the cross next to Jesus, he can repent at the end of his life in faith and be saved.
To bring in a Lutheran perspective, here is the second article of the Augsburg Confession.
Two noteworthy statements stand out to me. First, Sin is defined as the absence of the Fear of God. In other words all other sins begin with the violation of the First Commandment. Second, the Lutheran reformers understood that denial of original sin obscured the glory of Christ’s merit. If we fail to see our sin, it becomes harder to see the goodness of the Good News of the Gospel.
I like that. It would be harder to see the goodness of the gospel because we credit ourselves even slightly for raising ourselves up from the sin’s grave. Salvation is entirely a gift from the Father. He does not give a little grace to help us choose him. He does not wake us from the death of our sin in order to ask us if we want to stay alive. He claims us, gives us new life–a new heart to replace our useless one.
To all the people who try to put on a happy face at church, who think they have to pray or sit or perform the right way to get God’s blessing, this has to be great news.
Well I, for one, never put on a happy face in church.
I think Lewis may have been confused by the same thing I was – the word “depravity”. It might have changed meaning in the last few centuries, to mean now evil rather than inability.
Phil, if God claims us, does it excuse the tyrant who is not so claimed?
Lars, why don’t you put on a happy face in church? Don’t you ever hear good news when you’re there? 😉
I almost never smile. It’s not comfortable for me. I’ve learned late in life that it’s poor policy, but it just feels hypocritical and obsequious to me.
No one has an excuse.
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”
Lars, what makes perfect sense. IIRC, hypocrites were some of Jesus’s least favorite people. Being hypocritical in a church is probably a really bad idea.
Phil, why would God choose one person and not another?
That’s great question, but we have no answer. Why did God go to Abraham in the beginning? Was he better than other men? Did he even worship God already? No. God chose Abraham out of His mercy. He did not choose other men out of judgment, I guess.
And no he is not choosing everyone. The army of Egypt drowned in the Red Sea are in hell. The Israelites (maybe not all of them) who dropped in the desert during their 40 year trek are still dead in their sins. All those prophets of Baal killed by Elijah are suffering for eternity.
Phil, the Jewish answer to the Abraham question is 180 degrees from yours. The story in the Midrash (post biblical text, supposedly preserving an oral tradition that dates back to Sinai) is that Abraham realized by his own mind that there can only be one God. If you’re interested, this is a good summary.
Of course, since the Midrash wasn’t written down until after the Judeo-Christian split in the first century, you have no reason to treat it as anything other than “thoughts by some other monotheists who are wrong on a bunch of really important stuff”.
So the entire world has been blessed because one man finally wised up?
Pretty much. God would have given the same rewards earlier if anybody had earned them earlier.
The Jewish belief is that God wants to give us the best. He just wants us to earn it because it’s better for us.
I have been preoccupied with a family visit, so am only now catching up. I think this comment has been excellent, a model of how one can discuss differences having to do with matters one takes very seriously (to say the least) without rancor. After I had some time to digest what has bee said recently I hope to return with something further. I will also bump the post on my blog so more people can take a look. I will note, of course, that as a Catholic, I believe (with Saint James) that salvation is by faith and works.
Thanks, Frank. I’m going to be out for a while too, but not just yet. It will be the end of the week.
Thank you, Frank. I think in my case it helps me that I don’t believe it’s terrible if people get this wrong. I once argued with my four year old son whether a word is spelled “Phone” or “Fone”. I believe God is as amused by our mistakes, as long as they don’t cause us to do evil things.
You’re going away at the end of the week, Phil? I’m going away at the beginning of next week. Will Brandywine Books languish? Will we go days without posts and shed readers? Is this the beginning of the end? Please advise.
Just going with my gut-feeling on this . . . it’s the beginning of the end.
WOE! WOE!