BIBLE TEACHES
THAT
EVERYBODY IS EVIL
THE BIBLE TEACHES TOTAL DEPRAVITY
TOTAL DEPRAVITY IN THE GOSPELS
TOTAL DEPRAVITY – ITS SINISTER
IMPLICATIONS
TOTAL
DEPRAVITY
A prophet or a religion that needs to pretend that people are completely bad
is slinging mud against himself or itself in public for a person or group that
indulges in that kind of wishful thinking is certainly evil for we know that we
are not that terrible.
And Bible Protestantism is just
that kind of religion.
Total depravity is the biblical and Protestant doctrine that the unsaved person can do nothing really good or deserving of salvation. “The Bible teaches total depravity, and I believe in total depravity. But that simply means that there is nothing good in man to earn or deserve salvation” (page 4, Why I Disagree with all Five Points of Calvinism). One sin in your heart defiles all you do until you repent and are pardoned by God. The saved are those who ask Jesus to save them and they are saved regardless of what they do after. Only the saved can do real good. This is the point made in Job 14:4 that says someone clean cannot come from someone unclean and the same holds true for works.
The apostle Paul in the Bible says at 2 Corinthians 3:7 that when Moses received the ten commandments carved into two stone tablets from God that he received the ministry of death. He means that God gave us the ten commandments on these tablets and these commandments minister death to us. This is a clear denial of the Roman Catholic doctrine that the ten commandments do not give us death but life. Paul meant they were death to us because we couldn't keep them.
Total depravity does not say that the unsaved will be like demons and kill and rape at every opportunity. Some supporters of the doctrine suggest they would if it were not for God's power. God exercises some influence on them to help them stop themselves from doing those things all the time. He helps control their behaviour that way. But that is only outward help. In their hearts they yearn to do evil. Total depravity states that people never ever do real good and even their so-called good works are malign and pleasing to Satan. Total depravity also suggests that if people don’t behave like complete monsters it is for their own selfish reasons so they are complete devils inside. For example, a person who would like to kill might not do it. His not doing it is not done for a noble reason but out of selfishness – the fear of shame and punishment. He does not refrain out of the love of God. Calvin (page 95, The Institutes of Christian Religion) and Luther never taught that human beings were totally unrestrained in their actions but only in their hearts – only in what they wish they could do but dare not. (Incidentally, this is a good argument against the occult and psychic powers for if people had them or believed they had them they would be trying to do terrible things with them.)
The doctrine says we are rotten inside. We only act good at times because there is something in it for us (meaning we only pretend to be good), or perhaps because God has had to do things to stop us being as bad as we can be. Some believers accept both of these. Others accept one of them. If we are as evil as the doctrine says, clearly the only way God can stop us from becoming vileness incarnate is not by changing us from the inside but by forcing us from the outside. We would be like people willing to murder but who cannot for fear of the law.
The doctrine says that each
person cares mostly for himself and not for God which is sin. This sin is the basic one from which all the
others proceed. The person has a bad
attitude and wants to be independent of God and right and wrong and determine
for himself what right and wrong are.
This attitude is at the root of sin therefore it makes no sense to agree
with the Catholics that there are sins that do not imply a total rejection of
God like venial sins and there are sins that do that are called mortal sins and
which deserve the eternal hell unlike the former. Why?
Because if the reason you commit a mortal sin is because you want to be
independent of God then it follows that the attitude that brought the sin to
birth is a mortal sin itself. If you
steal John’s sweet because you hate John’s guts that is
a mortal sin though it does little harm to John – the attitude expressed in the
sin makes it mortal. When the attitude
causes mortal sin it cannot cause venial for then all sin would be mortal for
the attitude is seriously wrong. To have
the attitude is saying: “I accept this attitude though it will lead me to many
sins even if it leads me to murder and apostasy”, so it is very seriously
hostile to God. It has to be
mortal. Total depravity means that
eternal damnation is where you belong.
We know by experience that total depravity is true for we do not want to be ruled by God. Yes we might like to be ruled by a God we make in our own image for he suits us but we don’t want any being telling us how to live. Even when I undergo some sacrifice it is because I feel like doing it though there is another side that hates doing it. I am still caring only for what I want. This in essence is what the doctrine of total depravity is about, us exercising our self-will and having no reverence for the will of God. Total depravity also implies that anybody who does not believe in it is simply a hypocrite who will not admit the truth. It is impossible to see how Christians could consider Roman Catholics who deny total depravity to be Christians. Roman Catholicism would then be a diabolical superstitious hoax that stands for a gospel that opposes the truth of total depravity and therefore opposes Jesus Christ. Roman Catholicism would be refusing to accept Jesus as the way to God via his atonement for sin which he made in our stead and which is available only to those who deny salvation is by faith and good works but who hold that salvations is by faith alone not by good works.
According to the doctrine of total depravity, the reason then people stay in Hell forever is because nobody can manage to live up to the moral law of God properly and it is because they cannot put things right that they need to suffer forever in Hell.
For
It is commonly objected that it
is impossible to be a sinner if you cannot stop sinning until God gives you the
desire to stop for that implies that you are forced to sin. The idea of being forced to sin is
contradictory. Suppose a person won’t
repent of constant sin. That person is
trapping themselves in sin by their own freedom. They just won’t repent until they feel like
it which will be never for their sin will be a habit. There is no contradiction. If this seems ridiculous then remember that
sin is in the will. Killing a person is
not sin if you don’t mean to do it. If
you mean it, it is murder. And if you
intend to kill but cannot the act of will that makes it murder is the same
meaning that you are a murderer. The
Bible is right to say that a person who wants his neighbour dead is a murderer
or the same as a murderer (1 John
Christians believe that though
God cannot do evil and can only do good he is still voluntarily and freely good
so it is possible to be a sinner and incapable of good and still be to blame
for your sin (The Institutes of Christian Religion, page 97). They say God does good
because of his boundless goodness and not because he is forced so we can do
evil because of our boundless evil and not because we are forced. It is certain then that belief in God opens
up the way for total depravity to be true for it denies that inability to do
something means you are not responsible for it.
Those who hold that belief in God is bad for humankind will have
something else to go on.
Calvinists say that God does
not command what cannot be done in one way and does command what cannot be done
in another. We cannot do good without God’s help and we are responsible for we will
not accept his help. It would be immoral
if God punished us for not being able to create the world when he did not give
us the power to create. But he has given
us help to conquer sin and we will not take it.
A free person acts on the things he or she is aware of. For example, if there are three options, A,B and C you can choose A and B
freely if God stops you thinking of C so if A and B are sins you are still a
sinner though you could not think of
C. The Catholic Church holds that God
cannot hold you accountable for sin when you cannot do good
without his grace. But it says that
God’s main command is, “Do not sin at all and keep your life pure from sin from
birth to death”. Yet it says we cannot
keep this commandment and are blamed when we break it. They might as well believe in the Calvinist
God. It would be more honest if they
admitted their God was the same unsavoury character as Calvin worshipped.
While it is true that Calvin
and Luther did not hold that the good works of the unsaved person are sins they
still believed that the works were destroyed by other sins so it was not the
acts that were bad in themselves but the sin that polluted them (page 48, The
Catholicity of Protestantism). In
other words, when an unsaved man tells the truth that is good but it is the
attitude which is separate from the work but which is still the cause of it, “I
have sins for which I am not sorry and I do this good deed because it suits
me”, that creates the problem and is the reason the man deserves no
praise. So it is both a sin and not a
sin.
Bad or good the doctrine of
total depravity is in the Bible. We will
see later which one of these it is.
THE BIBLE TEACHES TOTAL DEPRAVITY
The Bible plainly teaches the total depravity doctrine that unsaved
people are capable only of sin when it says that salvation is a gift from God.
Jeremiah said that the heart is
full of deceit and is wicked beyond belief (Jeremiah 17:9). According to him you can be surprised at how
wicked you are if you take a good look at yourself.
The apostle John declared that
if he or anybody else says that there is no sin in themselves they are wrong at 1
John 1:8. Some say he is contradicting
the notion that some people have that they have never sinned and is not
thinking of people who claim to be freed from sin now and to be Catholic style
saints. But he
included himself and he certainly believed that repentance put you right with
God but not completely right.
David said that he was biased
towards sin from his conception (Psalm 51:5).
If we really are biased then we will sin rather than do good most of the
time.
A number of times the Bible
says that we are all sinful all the time unless we get saved (Job
In Isaiah 64:6, the prophet
says that we and all our right ways are filthy rags before God. He says we so he included himself too. And he would have lived like a holy man and
he claimed to be totally evil.
Jeremiah
The Book of Proverbs states that nobody can claim to be free from all sin (20:9). It uses the present tense and tells me that I can’t say now or anytime that my heart is clean from sin.
Paul at Titus 1:15,16 makes it clear that those who do not become proper Christians are to be considered to have nothing good at all in their minds or consciences and are worthless for any good work and are "detestable and loathsome".
The Bible says we all sin
always (1 John
If God exists then it is
possible for him to keep us from sin at least sometimes. If we have him then we will not sin because
we will be so happy and will not want to spoil it. So, if we could achieve perfection in this
world and have ever done it, we would not be here. We would be taken to Heaven lest we stain our
white robes for as long as we cannot perceive God directly we can sin. So the doctrine of God infers that we are
never free from sin. Our good works
would be sins because a sinner cannot do real good.
IGNORANCE
AND TOTAL DEPRAVITY
One thing that could have stopped Calvinism and all religions which
accepted total depravity from gaining greater popularity is the problem of
people who are said to have been unsaved who cannot find anything bad on their
consciences at times. For the doctrine
to be correct it is necessary that you sin always until you are saved.
The Bible claims that if you
cannot find a sin on your conscience you will find plenty of sins committed in
ignorance. For example, if you forget to
send the poor money it is a sin or if you have not thought of attempting to
convert a bad person it is a sin. God
told the Jews that he expected those who inadvertently committed a sin to
repent of it and ask forgiveness for it turn him against them for they become
guilty of sin (Leviticus 4,5). God said a person who breaks his Law and does
not know it is guilty and shall bear his sin (Leviticus
It is naïve to reject this
teaching on the grounds that ignorance means that you don’t know what you are
doing when you do wrong so you cannot be to blame. You know that neglecting or hesitating to
educate yourself in right and wrong and to try and figure out what could go
wrong in the day and the right way to handle it is wrong. Ignorance could lead you to cause somebody’s
death or some other awful disaster so by embracing it you are really saying
that you don’t give a toss about anybody.
Your good works are mockeries in that case. Also, anybody you care about is not really
cared about – it is the feelings you have for them you are worried about and
not them.
Even the anti-Calvinist tome, The
Other Side of Calvinism, accepts the claim that ignorantly doing evil is
sinful (page 100).
TOTAL DEPRAVITY IN THE GOSPELS
Jesus regarded all people as being totally depraved.
He taught that if your eye is evil then you will be full of the darkness of evil (Matthew 6:22). This implies that you can have no good in you at all. You can act good but you are still totally evil.
A man came up to Jesus calling
him good teacher. Jesus said that nobody
was good only God: “Why do you call me good for nobody is good but God?” (Mark
10:17,18). 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 man called Jesus a good
teacher. Yet Jesus rejected this. It was not flattery for Jesus was famous as a
teacher. The man meant it. Jesus just didn’t
like being called good by anybody human for he thought
that humans have an unclear idea of what good is and don’t understand real
goodness as represented by almighty God.
He thought humans were too sinful to have a clue about what it meant to worship
God as good.
There are other interpretations
but they don’t fit the Christian faith.
For example, we could hold that Jesus rejected the compliment for he was
a sinner like everybody else. Some say
Jesus only meant that the man was flattering him and didn’t mean it which was
why he rejected the compliment. But
there is no hint of that in the text. You
don’t say, “Why do you call me good for nobody is good but God?” to somebody
that is flattering you. You say, “You
flatter me.” And besides
the man asked him about how to inherit everlasting life and Jesus answered him
thus acknowledging him as sincere not as a flatterer.
A slave is a person who is
forced to work for nothing. Jesus said
that anybody who sins is a slave to sin (John
Jesus said that it was easier
for a camel to pass through the eye of needle than for a rich man to enter
God’s kingdom. He claimed that with man
entry is impossible but not with God. So
God must change the rich man’s desires to save him. The rich man is too bad to want the happiness
of Heaven enough to turn to God without God’s help. That is extreme badness meaning that the man
couldn’t deserve anything else but everlasting punishing in Hell showing Jesus
certainly taught an everlasting Hell.
The rich man could see to it that he will have entry into the kingdom
when he is dying for he is going to lose all he has anyway. Jesus says no – it’s still impossible. The rich man must be totally depraved and
only God can get him out of that state.
The reason then people stay in Hell forever is because nobody can manage to live
up to the moral law of God properly and it is because they cannot put things
right that they need to suffer forever in Hell.
Salvation is declared to be difficult and sincerity is obviously declared
to be insufficient for eternal salvation for you could sincerely believe there
is no sin in being rich. Also, the
problem Christ has with being rich is that the rich person will prefer the
riches to God and one can be poor and still prefer something that is not God to
God so they are in the same mess as the rich.
Luke 16 has Jesus saying that whoever
can be trusted in tiny things can be trusted in bigger and whoever cannot be
trusted in tiny cannot be trusted in bigger.
He said whoever is dishonest in tiny things will also be dishonest in
bigger things. He said that if you
cannot be trusted in earthly riches nobody will trust you with heavenly
riches. He said that if you cannot be trusted
with somebody else’s property nobody will give you property of your own (verses
10-12). The Bible says we all fall in
little things (James 3:2). Jesus made
the law of Moses even tougher – wilful desires or temptations are declared to
be sinful which means there has to be a lot of sinning every day. Jesus said our failures however small mean we
cannot be trusted and if we cannot be trusted then we are totally depraved.
Christ told the Pharisees and
scribes that they were literally nothing but hypocrites (Matthew 23:5), they
wanted everybody to be eternally lost (Matthew 23:14,15),
they were blind – don’t see at all (Matthew 23:19) and they were full of greed
and badness (Matthew 23:25-28). If they
were full of wickedness then there was no good in them at all. Some would say a person is full of themselves
without meaning that they are really full of arrogance and pride. But it is wrong to exaggerate like that and
it is abusive. The Christian has to take
Jesus literally. Jesus did not talk as
if he meant some of the Jewish leaders.
The ones he had for acquaintances like Joseph of Arimathea
and Nicodemus were not said to be good or to be exceptions. If the Jewish leaders were all bad despite
all the spiritual training they got and all the unpleasant things ministers
have to accept as part of their calling then the laypersons must have been
worse not better.
Top of the Document
TOTAL DEPRAVITY IN PAUL
The doctrine of human inability to love God without divine assistance
comes out most clearly in Paul.
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.
Romans 3 quotes Psalm 14 in part. We cite it in full and have underlined the parts he cites.
The fool says in his heart that there is no God. They are corrupt and they do terrible things and there is no one that does good. The Lord looks down from Heaven to see if there are any that act wisely among the children of men. To see if there are any that seek God. But they have all gone astray and they are all corrupt the same. There is not one that does good - not a single one. Do they know nothing at all all those evildoers who eat up my people as they eat bread and do not call upon the Lord? There they shall be in great terror for God is with the righteous generation. You would ruin the plans of the poor but the poor have refuge in the Lord. O that deliverance for Israel would come out of Zion! Israel shall be gladdened and Jacob shall find joy when the Lord restores the fortunes of his people."
It is said that Paul has misread this Psalm. The Psalm is said to have two groups in mind. One group is the fool, corrupt and evil. The other is the righteous, Israel and poor. The Psalm is said to promise that the righteous will be delivered not the wicked whereas Paul thought that the wicked would be delivered from sin. The point of him looking for quotes to say that all on earth were bad was so to be able to say that God would save sinners. He was saying the opposite of the Psalm. He used the quotes to argue that Jews and Gentiles were just as bad as one another and there was no difference in their sinfulness and need for salvation (Romans 3:9). So it seems Paul distorted the Psalm. He knew the Old Testament too well for it to have been a mistake.
If Paul distorted a Psalm that denies that all are necessarily sinful to cherry pick it to get an out of context statement to make it say the opposite then he clearly did believe that there was no such thing as a good person on earth. The righteous in the Psalm would mean people who did sin but who were repentant and who were now reformed and good. But Paul doesn't want to see that at all. He did teach total depravity.
It might be argued that Paul was a prophet and so was giving the correct meaning of the Psalm before the Psalm was corrupted by Jewish copyists. This safeguards his infallibility and his integrity.
It might be argued that the righteous poor in the Psalm are hypothetical. In that case, the Psalmist is not saying there really are righteous people but saying what would happen if there were! This is what Christians would have to believe.
Paul said that one time his Ephesian Christians were dead in their transgression
(Ephesians 2:1). Dead means separated
from God (Luke
ROMANS 7
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).
This material is one of the main
reasons why justification by faith despite sin as long as some good works were
done because of faith and not to earn salvation was accepted by the reformers. It says we are too bad to be able to
contribute anything to our salvation and so the work has to be all done by God
for us.
The Catholic Church falsely
claims that this was based on the mistaken assumption that Paul meant that the
justified Christian who had been saved by faith was still entirely sinful and
depraved and fit only for eternal seclusion from God so God has to pretend the
sinner is righteous in order to be able to let him into Heaven (page 227, Reasons
for Hope).
The Church lies because Paul uses the present tense
all the time. The Church cannot admit
that total depravity is taught in the Bible for the Church denies the
Protestant doctrine that man is so bad that only if a saviour does all the work
for him that he can get into Heaven. It is
like somebody paying a fine for you which is credited
to your account and you are made right with the law of the land though you did
nothing for yourself.
The reformers interpretation
followed that of none other than the great St Augustine himself (who adopted it
in later life) proving that he must have believed in salvation by faith alone
in the reformation sense (ibid, page 227).
Read the chapter and you will see that Paul writes in it of himself as
an example of what the rest of us are like in the present tense. The Catholic idea that he meant himself
before conversion is false and is an attempt to avoid admitting that Paul did
not believe that justification actually made you righteous but only declared
you righteous.
Paul said that the Law provokes
evil passions in us but now we are delivered from them (v5). This is supposed to support the Catholic view
that he meant he was saved from them now and was saying he was depraved before
that. But he only says that we are free
to do good but he never said we would do much of it or
any of it. We are delivered from our
evil feelings and desires in the sense that we don’t have to follow them
anymore. But being a Christian doesn’t mean we cannot sin.
Later he cries for somebody to
deliver him from his body of death that leads him to inability to do good and
then he thanks Jesus as if Jesus delivered him (v 24,25)
which is supposed to prove that he was on about when he was unsaved before and
wanted deliverance from the body of death.
He said that the sinner who is a
slave of sin is not the sinner but the sin in him is because it makes the
sinner sin when he or she doesn’t want to (verse 20). Sin for Paul is not necessarily an free act of evil but a power that resides in the person
and makes God consider the person unrighteous and unworthy of Heaven. This power makes all your good works bad too
for they are not done in a state of purity.
But if you are saved it puts good power in you so that your good works
are really good. That was how Paul was
able to describe the good works of unsaved people as bad but he would have
still told them to carry them out. After
all the sick still had to be looked after and so on even if in doing so you
were preferring good as you want it not as God wants it. So after being saved the works are known as
really good works good in their results and in the sight of God too. So the same work when done by an unsaved is
bad but when done by a saved is good.
The two powers, the sin power and
the genuine good works power, both co-exist in the saved person.
Elsewhere Paul says
that Jesus saved us from sin and death
meaning that though we will still sin and die Jesus has done something about
them that will not take effect until after they happen. He ends with saying he is a slave to God’s
Law but that his sinful nature is a slave to the Law of sin (v25). The Catholics say that this proves that he
was talking in the chapter about his unsaved and pre-Christian life for he said
he was not a slave to the Law or to sin anymore and that his sinful nature had
been changed to a holy nature that makes him a slave to God.
He said he was a slave to the Law and to sin
in his sinful nature and also a slave to God’s law in his mind (verse 25).
Then immediately
after, he says that because of this fact, he uses the word therefore, there is
no condemnation for those who are in Jesus Christ immediately. So where does
the therefore come in? It can only mean
that because Paul is still a slave to the Law of sin and a slave to sin God
cannot condemn him.
But you wouldn’t say that because somebody is
a sinner they are regarded as right with God?
True if you think people have to be really righteous to be saved. But if you believe that God just regards them as holy though they are not all because Jesus paid the price for their sins you would. Paul taught the reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone as understood by Luther and Calvin. No wonder Christianity took off with such a lazy doctrine. There is not a single hint that Paul meant what the Catholics say. He taught the Protestant doctrine that the only thing you can contribute towards your salvation is your sins and you give them to Jesus to atone them.
Only those who have been saved are real slaves to the Law in the sense that they obey it vicariously through Jesus (that is Jesus’ obedience to it is paid to your account).
Paul said that he was sold to
sin (Romans
Romans 7 unmistakably
teaches total depravity.
DOES
BIBLE CONTRADICT T.D.?
Are those Christians who claim to find texts that challenge the doctrine
of total depravity right?
Jesus said in the Sermon on the
Mount that we being evil still know how to do good. Does this deny that we are naturally only
evil for it was spoken to people who were not Christians or saved and who were
evil? But every sin is good in a
sense. It is a warped sense of the
good. When you rebel it is because you
want something good. The Jews would have
known that Jesus did not mean righteous good for their own scriptures and
reason said that a person who harbours a sin cannot please God no matter how
much good he does (Isaiah 64:6; Psalm 39:5; Job 14:4). If I help a sick person and in my heart I
will the act not to please God I am doing good but not
in my heart.
In Acts 10 we read about Cornelius
who is praised in this book as a just man who served God. He is supposed to be proof that the unsaved
can do good. It
is taken for granted that Cornelius was not saved because when Peter preached
the Spirit came down on the listeners and they were baptized in water. But Peter told Cornelius that he knew he knew
about Jesus and the gospel. The Spirit
coming down sometimes means the Spirit you already have giving you a new grace. Christians believing they have the Spirit
still ask for him to fall afresh on them.
So the notion that Cornelius contradicts total depravity is just reading
into the Bible what is not there.
Acts
TOTAL INABILITY
Calvinists believe in more than just total
depravity. They mean that the sinner is
so hostile to God that he cannot accept God’s salvation. Many get the wrong idea when they see cannot
here. It is cannot in the sense that a
stubborn person cannot give in. We can
call this total inability. Calvinists
themselves often get confused about what it means and one comes away with the
false impression that they do not believe in free will. When a person thinks only of doing bad for a while that person has become unable to be good
because he or she cannot think of doing good for as long. In a way, that person has no free will
anymore but is still responsible for her or his evil actions. Calvinists affirm that the unsaved are all
the same way.
It is sad that total inability
is called total depravity for they are two separate things. A person can be able to repent and be totally
depraved or not able to repent and totally depraved. In other words, a wholly evil person can be
unable to repent because of being too busy sinning to think of it and a wholly
evil person can be able to repent because of being aware of the need to do it.
Calvinists seem to deny that we
act voluntarily but if Calvinists used more illustrations or parables like I
use their doctrine would be understood and accepted better.
“Calvinism teaches that men
make choices according to their own desires.
They are not “determined” by God like puppets on a string” (page 194, All
One Body). Determinism is the
doctrine that we have no free will but are programmed exactly like
machines. Luther taught “that even the
faith by which a man believes is God-given.
Of course, man’s will is involved in salvation, but it is God acting on
the will that causes the man to seek God.
Therefore a person is saved not because he had of himself the desire or
ability to believe but because God chose him and acted on his will to bring him
to faith. For Luther, salvation was
wholly of the Lord” (page 168, All One Body – Why Don’t We Agree?). Luther
and Calvin agreed on predestination though Luther was a bit too extreme at
times. But this is the same as what
Calvin taught about how a man gets saving faith or faith that destines him for
Heaven. “When the unregenerate man sins,
he does so freely, as a free agent, and in accordance with his own wishes; and
it is this which makes him responsible” (page 40, 41). The Calvinist book, The Grace of God in
the Gospel says, “A sinful nature imposes a moral inability as inflexible
as prison bars, yet the sinner is responsible to do that which his own fallen
nature renders impossible” (page 40).
While Calvinists say that we are not controlled by God like puppets on a
string we are controlled by the manipulation of our free will. There is a huge difference.
The teaching that a sinner is
totally against the Lord God is said to be contradicted by the notion that he
or she can repent but won’t and never does and won’t until God attracts her or
him with irresistible grace. It is
assumed that if a person can turn to God then he or she is not totally unable
even if she or he will never repent.
This is wrong because evil is the wrong kind of good. They are depraved because they won’t avail of
the power they have. They make it a sin
to have it and not use it.
In Romans 3 we read that all
people are unrighteous and none seek after God.
This does not prove total inability because they may just freely choose
not to seek God. But it makes it very
likely that they have total inability.
If a class sits a maths exam and all fail time and time again it is
nearly absolute proof that they cannot do maths.
It is argued that since the
Bible says we are dead in sin (Ephesians 2:1) and that since a dead person
cannot do anything it follows that we are totally dependent on God. But that analogy may not be meant. Even the saved person is called dead (Romans
6:2; Colossians 3:3). A dead person does
not have the life of God in him so a living person estranged from God can be
said to be spiritually dead – without God’s life. It is not said that he or she is like a dead
person in all respects. But you could be
dead in sin and useless in yourself and still be alive and useful because of
the work Jesus did for you as if he were you so that you could earn salvation
through him. You can be totally depraved
and still saved at the same time but only if a substitute pays for your sins
and your depravity in your place.
According to the Bible, we are
in bondage to sin (eg. John 8:34).
Sin has taken away our freedom. Arminians and Romanists contend that this just means that
we are only free when we are good. That
is mistaken because sin can be freedom and no two people agree on exactly what
is sinful. It is how it makes us feel
that determines if sin is freedom or not.
The slave who wants to be a slave is not really a slave. The Bible must and can only meant that we are unable to repent when we are in sin. This means we are totally unable to repent
and turn to God – he has to throw us the water wings to stop us from drowning.
The argument that since getting
saved is becoming born again (see John 3) and you cannot help being born it
follows that you cannot help being saved is dreadful. It denies the Calvinist teaching that God
enables you to choose his salvation for there is no choice in this. In natural birth, a baby who knows nothing is
born but it is need not be the same in the new birth which refers to adults.
In Mark 4 Jesus claims that God hid the
understanding of the good news from some people to prevent them from being
forgiven. This does not prove total
inability for we could be talking about mere influence here and not God causing
disbelief directly. Anti-Calvinists
would say that when God needed to hide the understanding they must not have had
total inability. They fail to understand
that total inability does not deny free will but works with it.
1 Corinthians 2:13 says that
Christians understand the message or the things of God.
1 Corinthians 2:14 says that the
natural or unsaved or unspiritual person cannot
receive or know the things of God, the gospel.
Is this saying that we are unable to turn to Jesus in the Calvinistic
sense in which you cannot turn to God unless he gives you the power to do it? (This would mean that you will not become a
Christian except when God decrees it or predestines it and many are never
predestined.) Or is it saying that the
natural man has the grace to do it but resists it?
The verse before says that God so
Paul is creating a contrast. There are
only two groups so there are no natural men who do understand. Only the saved understand so Paul is indeed
saying that only the predestined get the grace to repent and they cannot resist
it. The unspiritual
person cannot comprehend the things of the Lord because she or he is
sinful. If she repents she will be able
to receive the word but this is silly for that would mean she believed before
she could believe. This makes it more
likely that the Calvinistic understanding is correct. We are talking about the writings of a man
who experienced salvation and would have known what he was talking about.
He doesn’t say that the natural
person sometimes understands the things of God but won’t follow them. He says there is no light in them at all that
comes from God. This is total depravity.
In John 6, Jesus says that no
man can come to him unless God draws him.
Nobody can come to God unless he helps them to. This certainly teaches that you cannot earn
salvation or come to God without God making the first move. If God
inspires you to believe it means you know that the gospel is true before you accept
his gift of supernatural faith. The
Christian faith says that if you have natural faith in God and in Christ it is
no good. You need faith that is inspired
by God and caused supernaturally to be able to go to Heaven. So the natural belief should be transmuted
into supernatural faith. So God inspires
you to accept supernatural faith. But your
good works are no good. No matter how
good you are, you will not be accepted into Heaven unless you turn to God in
faith.
In Acts 13:48, we read that
those who were destined to eternal life believed. Calvinists say that all who are destined or
chosen for eternal life believe because of God’s irresistible grace. Arminians say that
you are not destined to salvation unless you receive Jesus into your heart so
you do not believe because you are destined but are destined because you
believe. The verse says you believe
because you are destined.
Total inability implies that one is totally
depraved and the other four points of Calvinism. God causes total inability for he is
all-powerful and can get a person to act any given way by interfering with his
or her thought patterns. Those who abhor
the doctrines of total inability and inherent depravity should know that
thoughts cause free will if they have got it and not vice versa. You can never make a decision without some
thought causing it. We cannot help our
thoughts and even changing them is caused by a thought we did not ask for or
which we couldn’t force to come for many thoughts won’t come to us though we
try to get them. So if anybody sins it
is God that ordained the sin and caused it.
Calvin reiterated the Bible teaching that
you have to look into the face of God to see what God is and then look at
yourself as an essential part of seeking God and God cannot be sought with
sincerity unless you despair of yourself as a result of what you have learned
about your sinful tendencies and their extent (Book 1, chapter 1, The
Institutes of Christian Religion).
This implies that Roman Catholics who do not believe in despair are
heretics and dangerous to the gospel. It
implies that there is no hope of a better way of living unless you believe in
God and that attitude is totally out of line in these days of acceptance and
pluralism.
TOTAL DEPRAVITY – ITS SINISTER
IMPLICATIONS
What are the implications if the doctrine of total depravity is true?
The doctrine of total sinfulness implies that we cannot be saved unless God does something for us, unless he tries to pull us out of the cesspool. He has to forgive us and to make us able to do good works. It does not mean that the only way of salvation is by something suffering for our sins to expiate them in our place for this teaching means there is no forgiveness at all.
Believers in the Bible teach that one must be convicted of being incapable of doing anything to earn God's favour. It follows that our depravity should be stressed to us by believers if we are not one of them. If we get upset that is our problem for we don't want to know the truth about ourselves. We need the conviction because it is according to the Bible, the thing that makes us feel like total dirt and willing to turn to God to save us by faith alone. Every moment we feel self-esteem that is when our sinful nature endangers our salvation by making us feel in less need of it. We can't expect forgiveness from them for the wrong we do for it would be wrong to expect them to forgive what God still has against us.
If human beings are so evil and
cunning and prefer evil then how do we know that the saved person is not an
evil person tricking us? If total
depravity is true then the apostles were more likely to be lying about Jesus
and his return from the grave than telling the truth. If sinners are so bad that they would prefer
to go to Hell forever than not sin then the apostles could have willingly died
for their lies. Theologians say that
they could not have been lying because no sinner would invent a religion that
is so good and severe on sin. They would
if it was meant not to be practiced but for hypocrisy and to dishearten those
who believed that virtue was possible.
Evil people need to preach good religion so that people will know what
sin is and become as evil as they are.
The doctrine of total depravity means that by no stretch of the
imagination could the faith of Christians be reasonable faith. It is sheer guesswork. Believers of a different kind would see it as
idolatry. If there is a God then we must
believe what he says not what people say about him, but if we believe the
apostles we are trusting that they were delivered from
total depravity without any evidence and on that basis agreeing with their
religious doctrine. We are putting a
guess before God’s revelation if he has made one. The apostles are our real gods. How terrible it is to preach a faith that has
no evidence, because faith demands suffering and dedication and commitment.
And if human
beings are so terrible we dare trust nobody. The person who does not seem to be stealing
from us is only the person who has not got the chance or the nerve to do it or
has just not got caught. Should we
assume that people around us are saved from their sinfulness to be on the safe
side? But we are only assuming and there
is no comfort or security in that unless there is something wrong with us. And it is wrong to assume the best when the
worst is more likely.
It is easier to be happy to be a
person who can do nothing to please God when you do good works and insult him
by these works. The works are making you
happy and charming and reluctant to do good according
to his requirements which are that you must be washed of your sins and do them
by his grace before he will accept them. Your works are advertising your brand
of defiance of God and making it more desirable and attractive to others. It follows then that it is better to be
openly hateful and evil. It does the
divine cause less harm.
The total depravity doctrine
slanders the entire human race. We all
know that it is impossible for us to sin all the time. It is impossible to sin when you are
distracted from morality or religion.
The person who denies free will or the possibly of wrongdoing cannot
sin. The person who believes in sin but
who denies that we do it all the time when we are unsaved is branded a
liar. If true the doctrine proves the
world’s biggest religions to be swindles.
The Bible denies that baptism in water ends total depravity so the Bible
is telling us that the Catholic Church which officially and infallibly scorns
the doctrine of total depravity and holds that the unregenerate person can do
real good (though not good that God likes or rewards) is being fraudulent. He or she knows fine well that he or she is
entirely godless if he or she is because you cannot sin without knowing it.
If you believe in the Bible then
you have to be as evil as you can manage – inside your heart if you cannot
manage to be totally evil outside - before you can accept the salvation it
offers in order to subscribe to the total depravity doctrine. Telling prospective believers that they must
be totally evil for they cannot be saved until they see that they are which
they refer to as the Holy Spirit convicting you of sin. They are telling you to be evil to preserve
the integrity of the Bible.
The Catholic Church claims, and
refutes the sincerity of its sermons against sectarianism, that the unsaved can
do good works but these works are not pleasing to God though it says they are
not sinful which is an improvement on total depravity. It is a milder form of the total depravity
idea. Good works only merit a divine
reward and please God when they are done with his help and grace. The Church alleges that until original sin is
removed to make you a child of God in the sacrament of baptism you cannot merit
anything from God because the Bible says that there is no merit until Jesus
saves. But if God turns up his nose at
the good works of those who are unbaptised and they
are good then God is evil and unjust.
The people are doing their best.
A God who insults sincerity is truly malignant. If he is not then total depravity is true and
the good works are really hidden sins.
The doctrine of total depravity and the Catholic modified version are
both very hurtful and grossly politically incorrect. How can the Church be an effective voice against
racism with that sectarianism? The
Church can’t want to be as long as it maintains that God is good for giving
babies the grace of salvation in baptism though they have done neither good or bad and then refusing it to good men and
women and children just because they never got a sprinkle. How unfair this is!
Original sin is in essence my
self-will. It is the desire to get my
own way and not God’s. But that never
goes away because anything I do I know I do it to satisfy some urge in me. Even if I dash to the vet with my neighbour’s
sick dog I am doing it because I like to.
I like it enough to do it even if say and feel I hate doing it. I am not doing it for God but for my
feelings. I am like this all the time so
baptism is just a rip off because it does not forgive original sin. It is still there as strong as ever. Moreover, the more good I do the further I am
away from God’s will for then it is
harder to see that I am motivated by good my way and not his way. The person who does good
with a godless motive is nearly impossible to convert to God unlike the openly
defiant sinner who sees her or his blackness in all its infernal grandeur. It is my perception of good I care about not
his rules. Christian parents are only
wasting their time and are being foolish if they think some water on their baby
is going to help it and the world. All
it does is start the child on a regime that grooms it for self-deception with
all the harm that follows. What the
Church calls original sin, Humanism calls potential and actualised self-esteem
and proper self-esteem is the root of all human goodness so the doctrine of
original sin is totally destructive and any believer that escapes this
destruction escapes in so far as he or she accepts his or her right to be his
or her own God. Self-will or original
sin permeates all my thoughts and feelings and actions therefore the doctrine
of total depravity is true assuming self-will is depravity. But it is undeniable that we are wholly
anti-god. The Protestants have to
believe that the Roman Church knows that total depravity is true and still it
denies it so they would have to see it as a lying cult that blesses sin by
pretending not to notice it.
What kind of person would look
at a child in a cot that is not baptised and then genuinely love a God who
excludes that child and asks you not to want that child in Heaven with you
until it is baptised? Why Christianity
that says this thing is so popular is a mystery that warns us to pay no heed to
anybody who says there is evidence for the resurrection and all that other
stuff for many Christians are habitually unreasonable.
The Church says we must love
the sinner but hate the sin. The Bible
counsels that even when we are saved we are still frail creatures and the remains
of the former depravity are still in us especially in the early years after
being saved. So, assuming its possible, how then can we love the sinner and hate the
sin which requires a very advanced level in spirituality and
sanctification? Very few Christians
behave anything like saints. So
born-again Christians are being sanctimonious for they cannot really love
sinners and enjoy thinking they belong to the elite circle of the saved.
There is nothing to love in a
sinner so how could you love them? How
could they feel loved by a person who sees no good in them so what good would
the love do them?
Total depravity is an evil
doctrine that is inferred by Catholicism and openly preached by the Bible’s
religion. It is a misanthropist’s piece
of wishful thinking. It is the cynic’s
dream. It is the thrill of the masochist
and the sadist who enjoys degrading his or her fellow person.
To us it is a reason for getting
the Law to ban the Bible and pulpit pounding preaching that incites to hatred.
Total depravity teaches that we
willingly sin and make ourselves depraved and we cannot escape from this in the
sense that it is a bad habit we don’t want to break. It teaches we necessarily sin but we don’t
coercively sin (page 97, The Institutes of Christian Religion). This means then that salvation is a reward
for sinning because it involves God making us righteous not in ourselves but by
imputation. It would be different if we
were forced to sin but when you sin freely and God does that he is clearly rewarding
your sin. The claim that Jesus paid for
the sin and so it is not rewarded is just a cop-out. It is like a reward to the sinner therefore
it is a reward and is as bad as a reward.
CONCLUSION
The Bible God and Jesus are totally negative about the value of human goodness, it says it is really just disguised opposition to real goodness and to God. Thanks and appreciation and optimism are condemned as sinful.
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