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This is the third post in my series on predestination. Prerequisite reading can be found here.

Before continuing to defend the doctrine of predestination, I need to take a look at a couple background issues. The first issue has to do with the state of humankind after the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This doctrine is commonly called ‘total depravity’, but I prefer the phrase ‘utter inability’. They both mean the same thing, so don’t let it throw you.

God created Adam and Eve in a state of perfection, and gave them authority and dominion over the rest of creation (Genesis 1:28-31). Everything they did was perfect, and they enjoyed perfect fellowship with God. After they ate of the fruit of the tree which God had prohibited, however, everything changed. Their relationship to the land, to each other, and to God was irretrievably corrupted. In Romans 5:12-21 (as elsewhere in the Bible), Paul teaches that through this sin, Adam plunged the entire human race into sin—he sinned on behalf of us all.

We must be clear about the result Adam’s sin had on the rest of humanity. Did it make us spiritually dead, or just sick? The Bible’s clear teaching is that through the sin of Adam, we are all utterly unable to do anything good. Let’s look at a number of passages that talk about the state of humanity after the fall:

• ‘Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.’ – Psalm 51:5
• ‘We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.’ – Isaiah 64:6
• ‘Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit.’ – Matthew 12:33
• ‘as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”’ – Romans 3:10-12
• ‘Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.’ – Romans 5:12
• ‘The natural person 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.’ – Corinthians 2:14
• ‘And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved’ – Ephesians 2:1-5

In addition to these passages we should note that a great deal of the narrative in Scripture illustrates the testimony of these passages in the lives of men and women.

From these passages it is clear that each person is sinful from the point of conception—that is, as soon as they exist at all. This means that we can do nothing good, everything we do is thoroughly tainted by sin. Because of our innate sinfulness no one is good in God’s sight. In fact, no one even tries to do what is good in God’s sight; no one seeks God at all. The result of this is death—both physical and spiritual—resulting in eternal separation from the God with whom we were created to live in perfect community. Instead of seeking the things of God, all of us are opposed to God and his purposes, thinking them utter folly.

This does not mean that every person is as bad and he or she could be. It is obvious to us that some people are worse than others. But it does mean that everything we do is thoroughly tainted by sin. The fall affected the whole of our beings—our will, intellect, desires and emotions. We cannot do anything that is good in God’s sight, nor do we even want to. We still retain the ability to make choices and do what we want, but our desires are corrupt, so we really only have the power to choose between greater and lesser evils. We never do anything inconsistent with our desires, because our desires are just as fallen as the rest of us. As Loraine Boettner says,

[Man’s] will is free in the sense that it is not controlled by any force outside of himself. As the bird with a broken wing is “free” to fly but not able, so the natural man is free to come to God but not able. (Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, 62)

When we talk about free will, then, we must hasten to add that not only is our will free, it is also fallen.

Jesus said in John 3:19, ‘And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil.’ Jesus came to save the world, and the world hated him. What a stark contrast with the picture of Adam in his innocence, enjoying fellowship with God. But this highlights the extent of our fallenness—not only are we incapable of following God’s will, we don’t even want to. Again, Boettner says,

To assume that because man has ability to love he therefore has ability to love God is about as wise as to assume that since water has the ability to flow, it therefore has the ability to flow up hill; or to reason that because a man has power to cast himself from the top of a precipice to the bottom, he therefore has equal power to transport himself from the bottom to the top. (62-3)

I should probably note that there is nothing controversial about what I have said to this point—at least there shouldn’t be. This is the orthodox position of the church for 2000 years. Even Arminians (those who aren’t Calvinists) agree with Calvin on this point. In fact, it is heresy to deny humanity’s utter inability. You may have heard of someone named Pelagius. He was an opponent of St. Augustine, and his teaching was condemned as heresy by the church in 416, and then again in 418, just for good measure. The only difference between the teaching of Pelagius and the teaching of Arminius and his followers is that Pelagius denied our utter inability. Anyone who wishes to deny utter inability, then, is walking on shaky ground.

Arminius (officially) believed in utter inability, pretty much as I have laid it out. The simple fact, however, is that most Christians today are Arminians, and most would balk at such an idea. The reason for this is that Arminius and friends weren’t very consistent when it came to their views on free will. They didn’t begin their explanation of God’s work in salvation with utter inability; it was the third point in their system. While this might seem like a minor issue, it actually makes quite a difference, because by the time they get to point three, man’s utter inability, they have already said that salvation is based on the faith produced by the individual. Having said this, when they get to utter inability they have a bit of a problem. They are faced with a choice between heresy (denying utter inability) or a logical contradiction (accepting utter inability but continuing to affirm that individuals can produce faith in their state of inability). Given these options, I suppose they made the right choice; inconsistency is undoubtedly preferable to heresy.

If, however, we begin looking at God’s work in salvation by considering the state of man when God saves him, we have a completely different picture (and, bonus, no logical inconsistency!). Since the Bible clearly teaches that the natural man (that is, man apart from the work of God in his life) is thoroughly corrupt, it defies not only logic but also the testimony of inspired scripture to say that salvation is based on anything in the individual. The biblical doctrine of man’s utter inability takes predestination, which is detestable to our senses, and turns that sentiment on its head. What seems like foolishness—the idea that God would choose to save some people only because he wanted to and not because of anything special about them—becomes the Good News. Given the fact that we are utterly incapable of doing anything good, we would be eternally lost were it not for God’s predestination. What seems to many like a cold, sterile doctrine is in truth the full expression of God’s grace and mercy.

When predestination is (properly) viewed against the background of our utter inability, there are two possibilities: continuing into eternal death or being saved to life because of God’s work in election. Salvation coming as the result of our decision to believe in Jesus is not a possibility, for what dead man ever decided to do anything? Given this background, many of the common objections to predestination lose much of their weight. I’ll take a look at these soon, but before that there remains another background issue to discuss. I’ll do that soon. If you’re still with me, feel free to leave a comment.

This entry was posted by Bryce on Friday, March 11th, 2005 at 12:59 am. This entry was tagged with Predestination, Theology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.