How Deep Does the Ruin Go?
Every Bible-believing Christian agrees that a lost person is in desperate trouble. The debate is over one question. When the Gospel is preached, can he believe it? Or must God first give him new life so that he can?
Calvinists answer with the first point of TULIP, total depravity. They mean that a fallen person cannot believe until he is regenerated. We use the same two words, but we part ways at that one point, so the terms need care.
Sin has corrupted every part of the human person: mind, heart, will, conscience, and body. No part of us is untouched by sin, and no one can reform himself, stop sinning, or save himself by his own power (Romans 3:10–12; Jeremiah 13:23).
The Reformed teaching, included in their doctrine of total depravity, that fallen people cannot believe or turn to God until the Spirit regenerates them.
We confess the first and deny the second. Sin has reached every part of who we are, but that does not make us incapable of coming to God when He calls.
Total has never meant that every person is as wicked as he could be, and Reformed teachers say so as plainly as anyone. The Canons of Dort grant that a light of nature remains in fallen people, giving them some notion of God and of right and wrong (Third and Fourth Heads, Article 4). Your lost neighbor may be kind and honest. But no part of him is free from sin, and nothing in him can stand before God on its own merit.
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For Deeper Study
- Chosen by GodAmazon R. C. SproulReformed. A clear, popular case for the Calvinist view, including regeneration before faith.
- Freedom of the WillAmazon Jonathan EdwardsCongregationalist and Calvinist, unlike this platform. The classic defense of moral inability; demanding but important.
- Calvinism: A Biblical and Theological CritiqueAmazon David L. Allen and Steve W. Lemke, eds.Mostly non-Calvinistic Baptist scholars, with a few Arminian contributors. Opens with Adam Harwood's critique of total depravity.
- Grace, Faith, Free WillAmazon Robert E. PicirilliFree Will Baptist (Reformed Arminian). Clear on prevenient grace. We differ on conditional security.
- Anyone Can Be Saved: A Defense of “Traditional” Southern Baptist SoteriologyAmazon David L. Allen, Eric Hankins, and Adam Harwood, eds.Non-Calvinistic Southern Baptists explain and defend the 2012 Traditional Statement on sin, grace, and the free response of faith.
- Foxe's Book of MartyrsAmazon John FoxeThe classic Protestant record of those who died for the faith, from the early church to the English Reformation.
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The Fall and Its Effects
Through Adam, sin and death entered the world. Every person is born with a sinful nature, sins by choice, and cannot save himself.
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