Regents in Revolt

Every major doctrine in Christianity is cloaked in mystery. Some claims to “mystery” are actually excuses for not having to support your claims with arguments and evidence—many play the mystery card when their claims turn to outright contradiction. But Christianity is full of mystery. There are answers—real answers—but they only go so far, and even then, they’re adjusted in a manner that accommodates to our capacity.

One thing that makes these mysteries so mysterious is that they all contain a paradox at the heart. A paradox is not a contradiction (although a lot of people appeal to the former when they’re actually affirming the latter). A paradox says that there are two (or more) truths that appear contradictory at first but can be shown not to be in opposition. For example, how can God be one and yet three? Sounds like a contradiction, right? Not exactly—a contradiction would be to say that God is one in essence and three in essence, while the Christian claim is that God is one in essence and three in person.

Or take divine sovereignty and human responsibility. On one hand, Scripture tells us that God is in charge of everything, that he works everything (even the falling of a bird) according to his plan, and so forth. On the other hand (here comes the paradox), Scripture is just as clear in teaching that God has given human beings the freedom to choose and holds them responsible for their choices. Seems like a contradiction, right? No, it just feels like one. There is actually no conflict between those two statements, each of which has ample support in Scripture. But people have to sit a spell and hear out that argument; otherwise, they’ll go with their gut and assume it’s a blatant contradiction. It’s the same with the union of two natures in Christ’s person: again, this is a paradox and mystery far beyond our reason and imagination, but not a contradiction.

The Good Creation of the Bad Man

I begin this discussion of total depravity by reminding readers of this difference, because it belongs to one of those mysterious paradoxes of revelation. I’ve explored the biblical definition of creation and the fall in many places, but here I want to focus on the importance of embracing the tension between the two. Cheerfully embracing contradictions is the irrationalist temptation, while the rationalist temptation is to resolve the tension in favor of one side of the paradox. This is typically how we get our heresies: Jesus is divine or human, God is one or three, God is sovereign or we are responsible. Living in the tension is more difficult: listening where God has spoken but restraining our curiosity beyond his word.

Another paradox appears in the Bible’s view of human nature. Pelagianism and Manichean (Gnostic) heresies are easy to hold. You simply affirm either that human nature is inherently good or inherently evil. A Pelagian will tell you that although Adam’s sin was a speed bump (not to mention a bad example), you should get over it. Brush yourself off. Any talk of being depraved, helpless to save ourselves, ruined by sin, etc., is just negative thinking. A Manichaean will tell you that it’s no use. Evil is not the corruption of something good. Human nature as human—that is, material rather than spiritual, bound to time and space, creaturely rather than divine—is the problem. It can’t be redeemed. It can only be left behind.

It’s a simple solution to turn the switch toward Heresy A or Heresy B. What’s really tough is living in the biblical tension between the natural greatness of humanity as it was created and human depravity due to the fall. But as any playwright will tell you, it’s precisely the tension that makes for a believable plot.

Of all religions and philosophies, Christianity has the most affirmative view of human nature as such and the most sobering appraisal of our moral capacity after Adam’s sin. It’s both comedy and tragedy. We know intuitively how much of a mystery we are to ourselves and to one another. There isn’t a “good side” and a “bad side” to each of us—we are thoroughly great and thoroughly ruined, simultaneously. But, happily, we have more than intuition to guide us.

God’s Glorious Regents

It might surprise some readers that a Calvinist would say this, but Reformed theology has always affirmed with Scripture that human beings are basically good in their intrinsic nature, endowed with free will, with a beauty of body and soul, reason, and moral excellence. In short, we are created in God’s image. Now, that might not fit the stereotype, especially when the famous “TULIP” starts with “total depravity.” However, Reformed theology never starts with the fall, but with God’s good creation. Here is how the Westminster Confession (4.2) puts it:

After God had made all other creatures, He created man, male and female, with reasonable and immortal souls, endued with knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness, after His own image; having the law of God written in their hearts, and power to fulfil it; and yet under a possibility of transgressing, being left to the liberty of their own will, which was subject unto change. Beside this law written in their hearts, they received a command, not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; which while they kept, they were happy in their communion with God, and had dominion over the creatures.

Likewise, the Belgic Confession (Art. 14) teaches: “We believe that God created human beings from the dust of the earth and made and formed them in his image and likeness—good, just, and holy; able by their will to conform in all things to the will of God.” Luther’s Shorter Catechism (“The Creed,” First Article, Q. 1) confesses: “I believe that God has made me and all creatures; that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my limbs, my reason, and all my senses, and still preserves them.”

Calvin believed that freedom of choice was an important gift of God to humans in creation: “In this integrity man by free will had the power, if he so willed, to attain eternal life. Here it would be out of place to raise the question of God’s secret predestination because our present subject is not what can happen or not, but what man’s nature was like. Therefore Adam could have stood if he wished, seeing that he fell solely by his own will.” There is no inherent propensity toward sin in human nature as God created it, no dangerous lure of the lower self. Adam’s faculties “were rightly composed to obedience, until in destroying himself he corrupted his own blessings.”1

Created as God’s viceroys, human beings were placed over the rest of creation to extend God’s own reign of love, stewardship, and justice. And, significantly, God made us in his image as male and female. Unlike pagan creation myths, all human beings share equally in the dignity of this majestic nature. It is this high view of human beings as creatures of a good God that provided much of the impetus in the modern age for human rights and dignity.2 Each person must “freely embrace the other as his own flesh.…Any inequality which is contrary to this arrangement is nothing else than a corruption of nature which proceeds from sin.”3

If we begin with the fall, then we run the risk of giving the impression that human nature itself, as created, is weak and even prone to sin. A biblical view of human nature must therefore begin with a good Creator and his good creation. In fact, the Reformers and their heirs have criticized Roman Catholic theology for locating sin in an alleged weakness of human nature itself. According to this view, human beings are related to God and the angels by virtue of their “higher self”—the mind or soul—but are related to other animals by virtue of their “lower self”—the appetites associated with the body. This idea, influenced by Plato, gave rise to the notion of concupiscence: that is, the desires of the body for sensual pleasure. Concupiscence is not itself sin until it is acted upon, but it does suggest a weakness or defect in human nature as created by God.

Aquinas, following Augustine, spoke of this concupiscence as the “kindling wood” for the fire of passion that leads to actual sins. However, this inclination is not itself sinful, and free will—though weakened—is still able to cooperate with grace toward its healing.4 The married life is not evil, but it is lower than the contemplative life of the monk; and sexual relations within marriage are for procreative purposes alone, not for sensual pleasure. It is this sensual (animal) aspect of our constitution that drags us down from the heights of pure spiritual contemplation.

The most fundamental problem with this view, says Calvin, is that it attributes sin to human nature as God created it. Against those “who dare write God’s name upon their faults,” Calvin says, “they perversely search out God’s handiwork in their own pollution, when they ought rather to have sought it in that unimpaired and uncorrupted nature of Adam.” It is not God but we who are guilty “solely because we have degenerated from our original condition.” Our mortal wound comes not from nature itself but from its corruption through the fall.5 The depravity of human nature “did not flow from nature,” he says. “Thus vanishes the foolish trifling of the Manichees [Gnostics], who, when they imagined wickedness of substance in man, dared fashion another creator for him in order that they might not seem to assign the cause and beginning of evil to the righteous God.”6

Concerning Adam’s fall, Calvin adds,

For not only did a lower appetite seduce him, but unspeakable impiety occupied the very citadel of his mind, and pride penetrated to the depths of his heart. Thus it is pointless and foolish to restrict the corruption that arises thence only to what are called the impulses of the senses; or to call it the “kindling wood” that attracts, arouses, and drags into sin only that part which they term “sensuality.” In this matter Peter Lombard has betrayed his complete ignorance. For, in seeking and searching out its seat, he says that it lies in the flesh, as Paul testifies; yet not intrinsically, but because it appears more in the flesh. As if Paul were indicating that only a part of the soul, and not its entire nature, is opposed to supernatural grace!

Rather, says Calvin, Paul teaches that the whole person is created in God’s image and in that same wholeness is fallen as well as redeemed.7 So Calvin rejects the body-soul dualism that tends to identify sin with the former. Rather, the image of God pertains no less to the body than to the soul, and it consists primarily of “righteousness and true holiness” (Col. 3:10; Eph. 4:23). Though not yet confirmed in everlasting immortality and holiness, Adam and Eve were good creatures, reflecting the moral attributes of the Triune God.8 Just as the dignity of the image of God settled upon the body as well as the soul, after the fall “no part is free from the infection of sin.”9 The mind is no less fallen than the affections or the body. Our fall in Adam has placed our glorious will in bondage to sin and unbelief, our excellent mind in a condition of disorder and rebellion, and our bodies under the ravaging effects of decay and death.

The Revolt That Led to Bondage

The problem with the philosophers, Calvin says (and he also has theologians in mind), is that they probe the question of free will without any reference to the fall:

Hence the great obscurity faced by the philosophers, for they were seeking in a ruin for a building, and in scattered fragments for a well-knit structure. They held this principle, that man would not be a rational animal unless he possessed free choice of good and evil; also it entered their minds that the distinction between virtues and vices would be obliterated if man did not order his life by his own planning. Well reasoned so far—if there had been no change in man. But since this was hidden from them, it is no wonder they mix up heaven and earth!10

Calvin’s point is crucial. When he (like Luther) speaks of the bondage of the will, it is in relation to sin, not to God’s sovereignty. As created, human beings were completely free to choose good or evil, truth or error, God or idols. God’s freedom is not a threat to human freedom but the very presupposition of the latter’s existence. After the fall, however, human beings are bent toward unbelief and sin. The heart chooses that which it approves and desires. A person who is “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1) and “does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14) has lost this freedom for righteousness before God.

At the same time, the fall has not destroyed the will any more than it has destroyed the mind, the senses, or any other faculty. Rather, it has corrupted every faculty. Adam and Eve had the freedom to choose immortal life; but in breaking covenant with God, they and their posterity became a race of rebels born in corruption, guilt, and death.

At this point, Reformed theology came to emphasize a crucial distinction between natural and moral inability. When we say that humans are unable to believe and obey apart from God’s sovereign grace in Christ and by his Spirit, we are not saying that we are naturally unable as human beings. Rather, we are saying that we are morally unable as sinners. It’s our moral capacity to will the good, not our natural capacity, that has been vitiated. It’s not that we no longer have eyes, but that we’re blind to spiritual things; not that we no longer will according to our own desires, but that our desires are deranged. It’s not that we cannot think since the fall, but that we use the unique excellence of our intellects and imaginations to conceive rebellion against God and one another.

Therefore, “total depravity” is something that happens to human nature, not something that arises from it as created by God. “This is the inherited corruption,” says Calvin, “which the church fathers termed ‘original sin,’ meaning by the word ‘sin,’ the depravation of a nature previously good and pure.”11 He appeals to the double imputation in Romans 5—i.e., the parallel between Adam and Christ. If human corruption is simply a matter of imitating Adam’s trespass, then salvation comes by imitating Christ’s good example.12 But original sin includes both guilt and corruption.13

Yet even in our fallen condition, there are still remnants of the image of God that we cannot wholly eradicate by disobedience. Again, all of our confessions make this point as well. The unregenerate are capable of doing, making, and saying wonderful things that we (that is, other sinners) judge good, true, and beautiful. Nevertheless, apart from being reconciled in Christ, all of these actions are being done by rebels in revolt against God and cannot merit anything but judgment.

“Total depravity” therefore refers to the extensiveness rather than the intensiveness of sin. It does not mean that no one does anything that others could count legitimately as decent and even noble. But it does mean that there is no spot in human nature that could become the Archimedean point for saving and restoring this fallen nature. We have to be rescued from outside of ourselves.

Still Totally Depraved?

So what of our condition after regeneration? Are we still totally depraved? Again, it would be easy to give up the paradox and resolve this tension with either an unqualified affirmative or unqualified negative answer. Instead, Scripture leads us to embrace the paradox not only of being “simultaneously justified and sinful” but of being simultaneously depraved in the whole person and regenerated in the whole person.

On one hand, Scripture offers abundant testimony to our ongoing sinfulness. Anyone who imagines having reached a state of sinless perfection “deceives himself and makes God a liar” (1 John 1:8). Our depravity remains total in its extensiveness: our hearts, minds, bodies, desires, and wills. On the other hand, Scripture is just as clear in announcing the good news that we are not only justified but that we are also regenerated and are being sanctified, being conformed daily to Christ’s image by the Spirit through his word. We were “dead in trespasses and sins,” but now “he has made us alive” (Eph. 2:5). We once despised God’s law; in fact, Paul could say that even though he still transgresses the law, he does not—cannot—despise the law itself. “For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being” (Rom. 7:22).

As Christians, we have a threefold paradox at the heart of our lives:

1. We are glorious creatures of God, image-bearers of God who reflect his intelligence, love, beauty, goodness, and power.

1. Our whole self is born bound by sin.

1. Our whole self has been raised in Christ to newness of life.

All three of these scriptural teachings are equally true of us as believers. One is either a justified covenant-keeper in Christ or a condemned covenant-breaker in Adam.

Like Jesus’ generation, which he compared to children who did not know either how to mourn or dance properly (Matt. 11:16–19), we seem to regard the verdict of the law as too severe and the verdict of the gospel as too good to be true. Our age does not seem to know either the grandeur of creation or the tragedy of the fall. However, the funeral game is just the warm-up for the wedding game! Only when we take seriously the glory of creation does the tragedy of the fall come into full view, and only in view of creation and the fall does the gospel appear to us in all of its glory.

Michael S. Horton is the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.