Total Depravity Quotes

The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.

But that we are so totally depraved, is a truth which no one ever truly learned by being only told it.

Totally drained he could only manage one but he made it a good one tongue included. “Delicious ” he murmured. “So depraved ” Colton muttered. “Thank you.” “Get off me.” “Mine ” “Stings.” “Boohoo.

It is when my umbrella turns inside out that I am convinced of the total depravity of inanimate things.

If man is a totally depraved being, can he possibly take the first step in the matter of his return to God?

It's very contradictory for a man to teach about the murder in corporate capitalism, to isolate and expose the murderers behind it, to instruct that these madmen are completely without stops, are licentious, totally depraved — and then not make adequate preparations to defend himself from the madman's attack. Either they don't really believe their own spiel or they harbor some sort of subconscious death wish.

I want to do what little I can to make my country truly free, to broaden the intellectual horizon of our people, to destroy the prejudices born of ignorance and fear, to do away with the blind worship of the ignoble past, with the idea that all the great and good are dead, that the living are totally depraved, that all pleasures are sins, that sighs and groans are alone pleasing to God, that thought is dangerous, that intellectual courage is a crime, that cowardice is a virtue, that a certain belief is necessary to secure salvation, that to carry a cross in this world will give us a palm in the next, and that we must allow some priest to be the pilot of our souls.

Redemption is as comprehensive as creation or fall.

On the other hand, if God's moral judgement 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 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. - The Problem of Pain, pp. 28 - 29

According to Scripture, it was not man's flesh that fell into sin, but the whole man. The doctrine of total depravity means that the extent of the Fall is total, that every aspect of man's being is tainted by sin, and that the root of it is the 'heart' of man, in his mind, nature and being. To seek refuge in the spirit to escape from the flesh is to seek sanctity in the capitol of sin, for it was and is man's desire to be as God, to be his own god, determining good and evil for himself, which is the essence of original sin (Gen. 3:5). The ascetic quest thus took refuge in sin from sin! It flew from the suburbs of temptation into the central city of sin and was then bewildered to find the enemy there.

To teach men that they possess the ability to turn from sin when they choose to do so is to hide the true extent of their need.

So then, let "Deserved" be written on the door of hell, but on the door of Heaven and life, "The free gift" (68).

The regulative principle may therefore be seen, in a particular sense, as a natural inference from the doctrine of total depravity.

Standing near the wall, surrounded by what looked like a group of total fratty jockish dudes, was a man. A very fine man. He looked a few years younger than me, with brown hair that fell all over his head in an artfully messy way that looked like he might have just rolled out of bed, but you knew was done on purpose. He had thick, pretty lips that were made for sin, stretching into a delicious smile that showed even teeth. Dimples. Fuck me up, we have dimples! Deep, deep dimples that I wanted to put my tongue into. I blushed a fire red, but I didn’t stop my depraved up and down assessment.

If I had a single wish, I would wish sixty seconds of total depravity upon myself. For one of the greatest gifts of all is to have ‘nothing’ so that I can finally learn how to appreciate ‘everything’.

If Scripture teaches the imputation of sin, we should not stumble when we find it affirming the imputation of righteousness.

Though religion would check the masses, Adams did not believe “in the total and universal depravity of human nature, I believe there is no individual totally depraved….

I have lived all my life among shadows and broken images.

We're a tragic mix of imago dei and total depravity. Holding this tension rescues you from utopianism and hedonism, nihilism and cynicism. If you want to treat humans well, you must understand what we humans are. And what we are all, right now, is a mashup of these twin natures. The best person you know is a seat of depravity. The worst person you know is an image-bearer of our Creator.

Man is no helpless invalid left in a valley of total depravity until God pulls him out. Man is rather an upstanding human being whose vision has been impaired by the cataracts of sin and whose soul has been weakened by the virus of pride, but there is sufficient vision left for him to lift his eyes unto the hills, and there remains enough of God’s image for him to turn his weak and sin-battered life toward the Great Physician, the curer of the ravages of sin.

Our Christian faith - and correlatively, our account of apologetics - is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in the recognition of truth.

Clearly, the Fall was not just an isolated act of disobedience that could be quickly mended. Every part of God's good handiwork was marred by the human mutiny. This is why the Reformers described human nature as "totally depraved." They did not mean that human nature is completely corrupted, for in the midst of our sin, we still bear the image of God, just as a child's sweet face shows through smudges of mud and dirt. Total depravity, according to the Reformers, means that every part of our being-intellect, will, emotions, and body-shows the effects of sin. No part remains untouched by the Fall.

Humbled I ought to be, to find I am so totally depraved; but not discouraged, since Jesus is appointed to me of God, wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption; and since I find that, in the midst of all this darkness and deadness, he keeps alive the principle of grace which he has implanted in my heart.48

In sixteenth-century Geneva, Protestant theologian John Calvin spun a complex theological web around two simple threads: the absolute sovereignty of God and the total depravity of human beings. Like Calvinists, Muslims go to great lengths not to confuse Creator and created. Glorifying in the servility of human beings before Allah, they refer to themselves in many cases as "slaves" of the Almighty. But unlike Calvin, Muslims do not believe in original sin. Every human being is born with an inclination toward both God and the good. So sin is not the problem Islam addresses. Neither is there any need for salvation from sin. In Islam, the problem is self-sufficiency, the hubris of acting as if you can get along without God, who alone is self-sufficient. "The idol of yourself," writes the Sufi mystic Rumi, "is the mother of (all) idols." Replace this idol with submission to Allah, and what you have is the goal of Islam: a "soul at peace" (89:27) in this life and the next: Paradise.

Venison stinks when you chew it, it stinks in your gullet. The putrid meat expands in your bowels, it constricts the intestines, it constricts the appetite—it murders you slowly, clogging your organs with its horrifying stink. It constricts the spirit, nothing but a foul and rotten meat that constricts the soul. But, of course, there is no soul, there can be nothing holy in us—there cannot be anything of heaven in us, because we are depraved, because we are no better than the foul venison. We are the meat that rots, the rotten meat on the bone, and we stink from birth until death, from when no soul is wrought to when no soul escapes.

Or could one seriously introduce the idea of a bad God, as it were by the back door, through a sort of extreme Calvinism? You could say we are fallen and depraved. We are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing; or worse than nothing—the very fact that we think something good is presumptive evidence that it is really bad. Now God has in fact—our worse fears are true—all the characteristics we regard as bad: unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty. But all these blacks (as they seem to us) are really whites. It’s only our depravity that makes them look black to us. And so what? This, for all practical (and speculative) purposes, sponges God off the slate. The word good, applied to him, becomes meaningless: like abracadabra. We have no motive for obeying him. Not even fear. It is true we have his threats and promises. But why should we believe them? If cruelty is from his point of view “good,” telling lies may be “good” too. Even if they are true, what then? If his ideas of good are so very different from ours, what he calls Heaven might well be what we should call Hell, and vice-versa. Finally, if reality at its root is so meaningless to us—or, putting it the other way round, if we are such total imbeciles—what is the point of trying to think either about God or about anything else? This knot comes undone when you try to pull it tight.41

As I listened to him describing the scene of the procurer seducing the young girl, I found myself torn between two conflicting emotions, between a powerful desire to laugh and an overwhelming surge of indignation. I was in agony. Again and again a roar of laughter prevented my rage bursting forth; again and again the rage rising in my heart became a roar of laughter. I was dumbfounded by such shrewdness and such depravity; by such soundness of ideas alternating with such falseness; by so general a perversity of feeling, so total a corruption, and so exceptional a candour. He saw how agitated I was. 'What's the matter?' he asked. ME: Nothing. HIM: I think you're upset. ME: Indeed I am. HIM: So what do you think I should do? ME: Talk about something else. What a wretched fate, to have been born and to have fallen so low! HIM: I agree. But don't let my state affect you too much. In opening my heart to you, it was not my intention to upset you. I've managed to save a little, while I was with those people. Remember I wanted for nothing, nothing whatsoever, and they also made me a small allowance for incidentals. [Here he began to strike himself on the forehead with his fist, bite his lips, and roll his eyes like a lunatic, then he said:] What's done is done. I've put a bit aside. Time's passed, so I'm that much to the good. ME: You mean to the bad. HIM: No, to the good. Live one day less, or have an ecu more, it's all the same. The important thing is to open your bowels easily, freely, enjoyably, copiously, every evening; 'o stercus pretiosum!' That's the grand outcome of life in every condition. At the final moment, we're all equally rich - Samuel Bernard who by dint of theft, pillage, and bankruptcy leaves twenty-seven millions in gold, and Rameau who'll leave nothing, Rameau for whom charity will provide the winding-sheet to wrap him in.

Lifting a goblet of wine to her lips, Evie glanced at him over the rim as she drank. “What is in that ledger?” “A lesson in creative record keeping. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that Egan has been draining the club’s accounts. He shaves away increments here and there, in small enough quantities that the thefts have gone unnoticed. But over time, it totals up to a considerable sum. God knows how many years he’s been doing it. So far, every account book I’ve looked at contains deliberate inaccuracies.” “How can you be certain that they’re deliberate?” “There is a clear pattern.” He flipped open a ledger and nudged it over to her. “The club made a profit of approximately twenty thousand pounds last Tuesday. If you cross-check the numbers with the record of loans, bank deposits, and cash outlays, you’ll see the discrepancies.” Evie followed the trail of his finger as he ran it along the notes he had made in the margin. “You see?” he murmured. “These are what the proper amounts should be. He’s padded the expenses liberally. The cost of ivory dice, for example. Even allowing for the fact that the dice are only used for one night and then never again, the annual charge should be no more than two thousand pounds, according to Rohan.” The practice of using fresh dice every night was standard for any gaming club, to ward off any question that they might be loaded. “But here it says that almost three thousand pounds was spent on dice,” Evie murmured. “Exactly.” Sebastian leaned back in his chair and smiled lazily. “I deceived my father the same way in my depraved youth, when he paid my monthly upkeep and I had need of more ready coin than he was willing to provide.” “What did you need it for?” Evie could not resist asking. The smile tarried on his lips. “I’m afraid the explanation would require a host of words to which you would take strong exception.

Satan and that man is still man even after 1000 years of the righteous, benevolent rule of Christ on earth. Even under the most ideal circumstances imaginable, man is still totally depraved and in desperate need of a new heart by the regeneration of the Spirit of God.

When the late Dr. Chafer (founder of Dallas Theological Seminary) was once asked why God loosed Satan after he once had him bound, he replied, “If you will tell me why God let him loose in the first place, I will tell you why God lets him loose the second time.” Apparently Satan is released at the end of the Millennium to reveal that the ideal conditions of the kingdom under the personal reign of Christ do not change the human heart. This reveals the enormity of the enmity of man against God. Scripture is accurate when it describes the heart as “desperately wicked” and incurably so. Man is totally depraved. The loosing of Satan at the end of the 1,000 years proves it.1

true evils to fouls, but the depraved habits of thefe are the fources to them of their depraved energies. But every energy, though it proceeds with depravity into the univerfe, is under the direftion of prefiding Gods, and of a more total or partial providence. For it becomes, fays PJotinu^, an unjufh adion to him who does it, fo far as pertains to the doing it, but jufl: to him who fuffers for it, fo far as he fuffers. And fo far as an adion of this kind is atheiftical, it originates from a partial caufe, which gives perfedion to an atlion full of paflion; but fo far as it is good, it obtains from prefiding powers its proper end. For it is neceffary that the authors of the greatell: crimes fhould fume time or other be called to punifliment; but this would never take place, unlefs their depravity received its completion. Many habits therefore, remaining unenergetic, render thofe by whom they are pofTefled incapable of obtaining their proper cure. Hence, on the Gods coiifulting concerning bringing the war to an end, and faving the Trojans, the Goddefs who prefides over juftice prevents any energy of this kind, that the Trojans may more fwiftly fuffer the punifhment of their crimes; and Minerva, who cooperates with this divinity, excites to the violation of the oath, that, energizing according to the whole of their depravity, they may receive the punifliment of the whole of it. For neither was it good for them to remain without a cure, nor that their latent depravity fhould be healed prior to their fecond offences.

As one can hardly find any thing in a house where nothing keeps its place, but all is cast on a heap together; so it is in the heart where all things are in disorder, especially when darkness is added to this disorder: so that the hear t is like an obscure cave or dungeon, where there is but a little crevice of light, and a man must rather grope than see No wonder if men mistake in searching such a heat, sand so miscarry in judging of their estate (304).

Till thou hast learned to suffer from a saint a well as from the wicked, and to be abused by the godly as well as the ungodly, never look to live a contented or comfortable life, nor ever think thou has truly learned the art of suffering (383).

Yes, it is hard to conceive of orthodox Christian faith without the idea of original sin. That’s a sign of just how successful Augustine’s ideas have been in the Western church. But that does not make the idea biblical or right. One can acknowledge the universality of the human proclivity toward sin without affirming either Calvin’s total depravity or Augustine’s original sin. One merely has to accept simple human fallibility. We’re neither immortal nor perfect. We’re fallible. We make mistakes. And we die.

Grigory Yavlinski, the head of the political movement Yabloko, commented that “lack of faith is the prologue to corruption and bureaucracy, which produce terrorism…. Economic reforms in a nation that does not believe in God are totally impossible.” The writer Valery Ganichev, chairman of the Russian Union of Writers, proclaimed his fears that “Russia is cloning the cells of immorality that it grasped from Western culture” and called for popular demand that the government “help save the nation from depravity.” These tensions were further reinforced by the bitter so-called Uniate controversy, still ongoing, between Catholicism and Orthodoxy over who should control the Nestorian and Monophysite churches in Ukraine and Belorussia—an issue now inevitably entangled in the geopolitical struggles between Russia and the West.

For example, humanism, the central philosophy of our schools and society, teaches that man is above all else, that he alone is the center of meaning. Teaching that man has meaning totally apart from God, humanism leaves morality, justice, and behavior to the discretion of “enlightened” man and encourages people to worship man and nature rather than God. Living without God’s divine truth, humanity sinks lower and lower in depravity, blindly following a philosophy that intends to heighten the dignity of man but instead lowers him to the level of animals.

Romans has been called the “systematic theology” of the New Testament, and Paul began by exploring the total depravity of humankind in 1:18–3:20.

The doctrines of total depravity and endless punishment were born of bad cooking and dyspepsia.

Then Peter said, “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk." —Acts 3:6       The story in Acts 3 and 4 of the healing of a congenital cripple is the story of my life and yours. This man had been looking for a handout, nothing more. Like him, we tend to think that money will solve our problems and make us happy. The truth is, a little more money cannot fundamentally help us at all. Why not? Because our problem is sin. Sin has crippled us—it has radically affected our thoughts, wills, and affections so that by nature we are arrogant, proud, and at enmity with God. Sadly, we are not interested in being rescued from our total depravity; we just want to make more money.

It is not that we can’t do good. We do. It’s just that we can’t keep from doing bad. In theological terms, we are “totally depraved.” Though made in God’s image, we have fallen. We’re corrupt at the core. The very center of our being is selfish and perverse. David said, “I was born a sinner—yes, from the moment my mother conceived me” (Ps. 51:5 NLT).

Manton said: "Sin knows no mother but our own heart." "And sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death":

The development of wickedness is one thing; the presence of any measure of holiness or virtue is another.

Because one stage of depravity is lower than another, this does not warrant the denial that the first stage is degraded. The development of wickedness is one thing; the presence of any measure of holiness or virtue is another. The absence of certain forms of sins does not imply any innate purity. It might as well be affirmed that a recent corpse, which is less loathsome, is therefore less dead than one which is far gone in decay and putrefaction.

Mental tranquility and physical health are coveted, not the approbation of the Lord.

The total depravity of human nature does not mean that it actually breaks forth into open acts of all kinds of evil in any one man.

Behold the eyes of Omniscience ransacking the globe, and prying among every people and nation. He who is looking down knows the good, is quick to discern it, would be delighted to find it; but as He views all the unregenerate children of men His search is fruitless, for of all the race of Adam no unrenewed soul is other than an enemy to God and goodness. "They are all gone out of the way." Without exception, all men have apostatized from the Lord their Maker, from His Laws, and from the eternal principles of right. Like stubborn heifers they have sturdily refused to receive the yoke. The original speaks of the race as a totality, humanity as a whole has become depraved in heart and life. "They have altogether become filthy." As a whole they are spoiled and soured like corrupt leaven, or, as some put it, they have become putrid and even stinking. The only reason why we do not more clearly see this foulness is because we are accustomed to it, just as those who work daily among offensive odours at last cease to smell them.

God’s glory is not dependent on the manifestation of any one attribute, but on the manifestation of each in its proper time and place, and in full harmony with the others.

The depravity of mankind makes evident the infinite patience of God. "The LORD is slow to anger, and great in power" (Nahum 1:3).

There has to be the putting forth of divine power also if the purpose of grace is to be accomplished. And it can be no ordinary power, but, as Scripture affirms, "the exceeding greatness of his power to usward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power" (Eph. 1:19). It calls for the exercise of far more might to recreate a fallen creature than it did to create the universe out of nothing. Why so? Because in that there was no opposition, nothing to resist God’s working; whereas in the case of fallen man there is the hostility of his will, the alienation of his heart, the inveterate enmity of his carnal mind, to be overcome. Furthermore, the malice and opposition of Satan must be neutralized, for he endeavors with all his might to retain his hold on his victims. The devil must be despoiled of the advantage which he had gained, for it is not consistent with the glory of God that he should be left to triumph.

And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins" (Eph. 2:1). As John Gill said, "The design of the apostle in this and some following verses, is to show the exceeding sinfulness of sin, and to set forth the sad estate and condemnation of man by nature, and to magnify the riches of the grace of God, and represent the exceeding greatness of His power by conversion.

We heartily agree with Charnock: "In that one word love, God hath wrapped up all the devotion He requires of us.

Christ is the grand center of all the divine counsels, and the magnifying of Him is their principal design. Had God kept Adam from sinning, all his race would have been eternally happy. But in that case Adam would have been their savior and benefactor, and all his seed would have gloried in him, ascribing their everlasting blessedness to his obedience. But such an honor was far too much for any finite creature to bear. Only the Lord from heaven was worthy of it.

Charnock said, there is "not a moment of a man’s life wherein our hereditary corruption doth not belch its froth.

While men are rational creatures they are justly accountable for all they do, whatever the disposition of their hearts.

All by nature are essentially evil, nothing but "flesh"; everything in us is contrary to holiness.

Human responsibility is the necessary corollary of divine sovereignty.

As Thornwell so aptly expressed it, "Holiness was the inheritance of his [man’s] nature—the birthright of his being. It was the state in which all his faculties received their form.

Even in Christendom the average churchgoer is fully satisfied if he learns by rote a few of the elementary principles of religion. By so doing he comforts himself that he is not an infidel, and since he believes there is a God (though it may be one which his own imagination has devised) he prides himself that he is far from being an atheist. Yet as to having any living, spiritual, influential and practical knowledge of the Lord and His ways he is a stranger, altogether unenlightened.

Charnock said, "Water and fire may as well kiss each other, and live together without quarreling and hissing, as the holy will of God and the unregenerate heart of a fallen creature.

Hence, as John Owen said: Sin’s proper formal object is God It hath, as it were, that command from Satan which the Assyrians had from their king: "fight neither with small nor great, save only with the king of Israel," that sin sets itself against. There lies the secret, the formal reason of all opposition to good, even because it relates unto God.... The law of sin makes not opposition to any duty, but to God in every duty.

Since the mind occupies so high a place in the scale of our beings, and since it is the most active of our inward faculties, ever working, then what a fearful state for the soul to be blind! John Flavel said it is "like a fiery, high-mettled horse whose eyes cannot see, furiously carrying his rider upon rocks, pits and dangerous precipices.

Intelligence begins with principles that must be accepted and not explained; and in applying those principles to the phenomena of existence, apparent contradictions constantly emerge that require patience and further knowledge to resolve them. But the mind, anxious to know all and restless under doubts and uncertainty, is tempted to renounce the first principles of reason and to contradict the facts which it daily observes. It seeks consistency of thought, and rather than any gaps should be left unfilled it plunges everything into hopeless confusion. Instead of accepting the laws of intelligence and patiently following the light of reason, and submitting to ignorance where ignorance is the lot of his nature as limited and finite, and joyfully receiving the partial knowledge which is his earthly inheritance, man under the impulse of curiosity, had rather make a world that he does understand than admit one which he cannot comprehend. When he cannot stretch himself to the infinite dimensions of truth, he contracts truth to his own little measure. This is what the apostle means by vanity of mind.

Noah, when he came out onto a judgment-swept earth to be the new father of the human race, defiled his escutcheon at a very early date and brought a curse on his son.

It is the usage of the plural number in Genesis 1:26 which in our judgment intimates the first signification of the term "image." God is a trinity in unity, and so also is the man He made, consisting, in his entirety, of "spirit and soul and body" (I Thess. 5:23). While in some passages "spirit" and "soul" are used as synonyms, in Hebrews 4:12 they are distinguished. The fact that the plural pronoun occurs three times in the brief declaration of the Deity in Genesis 1:26 supplies confirmation that the one made in Their likeness was also a threefold entity. Some

This is always the effect of sin; it destroys our peace, robs our joy and brings in its train a consciousness of guilt and a sense of shame.

David declared, "Thy word have I hid in mine heart [to be awed thereby, to put it into practice] , that I might not sin against thee" (Ps. 119:11).

Until we really behold the horror of the pit in which by nature we lie, we can never properly appreciate Christ's so-great salvation.

Had not the guilt of Adam’s offense been charged to his posterity, none would die in infancy. Yet it does not necessarily follow that any who expire in early childhood are eternally lost. That they are born into this world spiritually dead, alienated from the life of God, is clear; but whether they die eternally, or are saved by sovereign grace, is probably one of those secret things which belong to the Lord.

Parenthood is an unspeakably solemn matter.

Immutability and impeccability (non-liability to sin) are qualities which essentially distinguish the Creator from the creature.

The Greek word for "figure" in this verse means "type," and in the scriptural sense of that term a type consists of something more than a casual resemblance between two things or an incidental parallel. There is a designed likeness, the one being divinely intended to show forth the other.

George Whitefield put it well: I beg leave to express my surprise that any person of judgment should maintain human depravity, and not immediately discover its necessary connection with the imputation, and how impossible it is to secure the justice of God without having recourse to it; for certainly the corruption of human nature, so universal and inseparable, is one of the greatest punishments that could be inflicted upon the species... Now if God has inflicted an evident punishment upon a race of men perfectly innocent, which had neither sinned personally nor yet by imputation [He would be unjust]; and thus while we imagine we honour the justice of God by renouncing imputation, we in fact pour the highest dishonor upon that sacred attribute.

How is it that men who want certain things done by brutal force can so often depend upon the mob? Total depravity, human hate and Schadenfreude, do not explain fully the mob spirit in America. Before the wide eyes of the mob is ever the Shape of Fear. Back of the writhing, yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim and lynch and burn at the stake, is a knot, large or small, of normal human beings, and these human beings at heart are desperately afraid of something. Of what? Of many things, but usually of losing their jobs, being declassed, degraded, or actually disgraced; of losing their hopes, their savings, their plans for their children; of the actual pangs of hunger, of dirt, of crime. And of all this, most ubiquitous in modern industrial society is that fear of unemployment. It is its nucleus of ordinary men that continually gives the mob its initial and awful impetus. Around this nucleus, to be sure, gather snowball-wise all manner of flotsam, filth and human garbage, and every lewdness of alcohol and current fashion. But all this is the horrible covering of this inner nucleus of Fear.

The lesson to be learned here is a deeply important one: the connection between Genesis 11 and 12 is highly significant. The Lord God determined to have a people of His own by the calling of grace, a people which should be taken into privileged nearness unto Himself, and which should show forth His praises; but it was not until all the claims of the natural man had been repudiated by his own wickedness, not until his utter worthlessness had been clearly exhibited, that divine clemency was free to flow forth on an enlarged scale. Sin was suffered to abound in all its hideousness, before grace superabounded in all its blessedness. In other words, it was not until the total depravity of men had been fully demonstrated, first by the ante-diluvians and then again by the concerted apostasy at Babel, that God now dealt with Abraham in sovereign grace and infinite mercy.

Here then is the divinely given reason why the death penalty is passed on "all men": "all have sinned," or, as the margin and the Revised Version more accurately render it , "in whom all sinned." The apostle is not here saying that all men sinned personally, but representatively. The Greek verb for "sinned" is in the aorist tense, which always looks back to a past action which has terminated. The curse of the law falls on us not because we are sinful, but because we were federally guilty when our covenant head sinned.

Indeed, man is incapable of doing any good. Are all unbelievers then wicked and repulsive men? Not at all. In our experience we find that the unbelieving world excels in many things. Precious treasures have come down to us from the old heathen civilization. In Plato you find pages that you devour. Cicero fascinates you and bears you along by his noble tone and stirs in you holy sentiments…It is not exclusively the spark of genius or the splendor of talent, which excites your pleasure in the words and actions of unbelievers, but it is often their beauty of character, their zeal, their devotion, their love, their candor, their faithfulness, and their sense of honesty. Who of us has not been put to the blush by the virtues of the heathen? It is thus a fact, that your dogma of total depravity by sin does not always tally with your experience in life. Well, my friends, by its doctrine of common grace Calvinism can hold on to both what the Bible teaches on human depravity and to what experience teaches about the virtues of the heathen.

The oneness yet triunity of God, the deity and humanity of Christ united in one Person, the everlasting covenant that secures the salvation of all the election of grace, the highway of holiness, and the only path that leads to heaven—are plainly revealed in Old and New Testament alike. The teaching of the prophets concerning the glorious character of God, the changeless requirements of His righteousness, the total depravity of human nature, and the way appointed for restoration there from—are identical with the Apostles’ teaching.

Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason; his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind. “All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identify it as a solid object; he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality. “Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth. “The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is: Yours. No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth—and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.

People often ask, ‘why do bad things happen to good people?’ and I say, ‘that’s only happened once and He volunteered.

Now we’re not good or evil; we’re good and evil. Nothing we do erases God’s image in us, and nothing we do is untouched by our sinfulness. We each now live in the tension of imago dei and total depravity—a tension that every other origin-story misses, yet one which explains the data of human history.

This acrostic (which we shall examine more closely in part 2) stands for total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints.

To this Augustine responded with the doctrines of original sin and of predestination. The image of God, impaired by human sin and weakness, could not—as Clement, Origen, and other Greek theologians had taught—be restored by means of a drawn-out, upward pedagogical process culminating in theosis; rather, the terrible reality of total human depravity demanded a radical conversion experience and an encounter with the irresistible grace of God in Christ.

No one but The Owner of All Infernal Names can faithfully claim to know if He is pleased more by the total aggregate of suffering distributed across all of His creation, or whether He is more circumspect and discerning in His pleasure taking, savouring discreet yet increasingly potent, increasingly more complex parcels of sophisticated and intimate misery. Whether it is a matter of quantity over quality, the enormity of the marketplace or the specialisation of product groups and services within that marketplace, or a depraved combination of both, no human mind can determine, or perhaps ever comprehend.

Until we really behold the horror of the pit in which by nature we lie, we can never properly appreciate Christ's so-great salvation. In man's fallen condition we have the awful disease for which divine redemption is the only cure, and our estimation and valuation of the provisions of divine grace will necessarily be modified in proportion as we modify the need it was meant to meet.

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. (2 Corinthians 4:16) Our outer self is wasting away. Our bodies don’t work correctly. They fall apart and fail us at the worst times. While we live in this fallen world, we live in bodies that are wasting away. I would argue that if we truly believe in total depravity, then we must accept mental illness as a biblical category. If I believe that sin has affected every part of my body, including my brain, then it shouldn’t surprise me when my brain doesn’t work correctly. I’m not surprised when I get a cold; why should I be surprised if I experience mental illness? To say that depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar, and every other disorder, are purely spiritual disorders is to ignore the fact that we are both body and soul. Mental illness is not something invented by secular psychiatrists. Rather, it is part and parcel with living in fallen, sinful world.

When, therefore, the Book of Enoch blames the angelic sons of God, rather than their earthly wives, for the depravity of relations said to exist between them as spirits and mediums, we may well ask if this be not a matter on which the writer of the Book of Enoch has carelessly accepted current legends. May it not be that he, too, believed all depraved psychical manifestations to be due to "evil sprits", and that he was totally unaware of the occult law which brings these things to pass with a medium who, ignorantly but persistently, fails in clear thinking or correct loving?