The doctrine of total depravity does not mean that we will do all the violence we can do but that all the good we do is really just hypocrisy and we do all the evil we can and only act good so that we can carry on with our addiction to sin.
The Bible says God is love. God and love are somehow the same thing. Sin is the opposite of love according to the Bible. If God is goodness then he cannot dwell in a sinful heart.
The total depravity doctrine teaches
that people may think they love God but they don’t for nobody can love God
unless God helps them to do it. It
teaches that we have no ability to love God on our own or to love at all. The fact is that if we are all sinners as the
Churches say and that as the first epistle of
Jesus regarded all people as being totally depraved.
Jesus said that the main commandment was to sacrifice self in love for God and to do it with your whole will and being. Nobody will ever do that. Would you suffer forever if God asked you to do it to benefit others? No matter how good we are, there is always a defect in what we would do for God. The greatest commandment says nothing about loving yourself. Because it is the greatest commandment, better even than the rule not to commit murder, to break the commandment is to commit the greatest sin. So we commit this greatest sin all the time. But you may say if you commit murder you are not loving God so murder must be one of the greatest sins in that sense. True. But the murder is one sin and the lack of love for God it expresses is another. The sinner is not considered deserving of everlasting torment and infinitely long punishment for stealing a pencil so much as for what it says about their attitude to God.
The greatest commandment to love God implies that every sin is a failure to love God and therefore breaks this commandment. So murder breaks it and stealing and adultery and so on for these commandments tell you what failing to love God entails doing.
If God is infinite love, then he hates sin infinitely so all sin no matter how small it seems insults him infinitely and offends him infinitely. This seems to deny that there could be a greatest commandment. It makes all sin equal as far as God is concerned. Sin is equal in what it deserves. But there are different levels of importance of sin. For example, stealing a pencil and committing murder are not on the same level as regards the harm they do to people. But they are on the same level before God for they break the greatest commandment and God hates sin unlimitedly or infinitely. That is the solution.
The second greatest commandment is to love your neighbour as yourself which is very difficult and demands heroic sacrifice. Only by sacrifice can you know if you really love others. The commandment takes it for granted that we love ourselves but it doesn't say it approves of this self-love. We do good for ourselves because of the way we feel about ourselves. Jesus means that we should have feelings of love for others too as we do for ourselves. If we don't feel that way about them then we are in danger of putting ourselves before them.
A man came up to Jesus calling him good teacher. Jesus said that nobody was good only
God. Christians say that the man thought
Jesus was a good man and Jesus was telling him that he could only be good if he
was God. If right their interpretation
would mean that all are sinners and cannot stay out of it. And the same interpretation holds true if
Jesus was just telling him that his idea of good was wrong and that only God
knows what good is and lives that goodness.
The story says that the man knew what good was and said he kept all the
commandments so Jesus was saying the man knew what God’s goodness was. Nobody can say then that Jesus just had a
problem with the man using the word good and not knowing what it meant.
The third chapter of Romans declares that there is not even a single
righteous person, that nobody understands that they should love God alone and
that nobody is truthful or honest. Even
the good they do is dishonest and a lie for it is a mask. They are full of cursing and bitterness. Their kind words are bitter curses. For example, to praise one person while
denigrating another in your heart is to really insult
the one you praise for it is unjust discrimination and is asking her or him to
approve. A person can claim to fear God
and not do it right. A person who lives
well out of fear of retribution is one who wants to sin and wills sin but who
avoids it because of selfish fear. The
chapter emphasises that all means literally all. No one can argue that the alls are not
literal on the grounds that all do not curse or lie or whatever for it is done
internally when it is not obvious. The
passage certainly teaches the total depravity of humanity because it mentions
no exceptions and plainly says it means all.
Paul said that none of the Jews were able to be put right with God by
keeping God’s Law because they could not observe it fully (Romans 3). If they were not totally depraved they would
have been able to fulfil it at least for short periods. But when Paul said that God had to give another
way of salvation, the way of faith, to do what Law keeping could not we know
that according to him they were never holy.
The Jews were the one true religion according to the Bible and the
Gentiles were all non-Jews.
Paul said that there was no distinction or difference between the two
groups for they were “all sinful” – he then said that not one person was good
showing he meant all individuals. The
heathens who murdered and raped and left babies exposed on hillsides to die of
cold were not more evil than the Jews who did not. He listed the sins. He said that their mouths were full of
curses. If we adhere to sin then our
sweet words are really bitter curses for they are not said out of goodness but
out of a spiteful desire to gain human adulation at the expense of God.
Paul examined his heart and inside it he claimed that he found was
nothing good in it. “I know that nothing
good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh.
I can will what is right, but I cannot perform it. [I have the intention and
urge to do what is right, but no power to carry it out]” (Romans 7:18). He knew what sin was and tried to refrain
from it but always ended up doing that which he detested. “I find it to be a Law (a rule of action of
my being) that when I want to do what is right and good, evil is ever present
with me and I am subject to its insistent demands" (Romans 7:21). This is not just saying that his evil urges
are always with him because he makes a distinction between evil and its demands
or urges. Evil here is sin. Sin cannot be always with you unless you are
giving in to it all the time. This is a
clear statement of the doctrine of total depravity. He may have acquired this pessimistic
doctrine of human badness from Genesis where God complains that human beings
were continually evil and their imaginations full of evil at the time of the
flood (Genesis 6:5; 8:21).
Total depravity means that the only way God can save us is by doing all
the work for us. We are made right by
faith alone but faith itself is only showing that God has saved us so it is not
a good work that earns salvation or a human work at all that saves. The reason some are not saved is because they
are not predestined to salvation.
Because we have nothing to offer God, if he saves us it is because he
has chosen us not because of any good in us but because of his mercy, this is
called unconditional election.
The doctrine implies that human beings are so good at religious deception and seeming saintly that we should only trust those who are born-again Christians. Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and Roman Catholics would be examples of excluded people.