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Thomas M.
Gregory
Though
written many decades ago, the following quotation is an admirable
expression of the continuing concern of Reformed thinkers for the
doctrine of total depravity.
If the church and the ministry of
the present day need any one thing more than another, it is
profound views of sin; and if the current theology of the day
is lacking in any one thing, it is in that thorough-going, that
truly philosophic, and, at the same time, truly edifying theory
of sin, which runs like a strong muscular cord through all the
soundest theology of the church.1
John Gerstner expresses the same perennial Reformed
interest epigrammatically when he says to the contemporary world,
One cannot think of God’s holy ways
without thinking of our unholy ones. We cannot think of ourselves
without thinking of our sin. Sin is the most important conviction
any man can have. It is a bad theology which thinks man good.
Any good theology must start with man as bad.2
Gerstner and Shedd make remarkable assertions:
“a good theology must start with man as bad”; the church needs a
“truly edifying theory of sin.” Can any good thing come out of a
consideration of Sin? Reformed theology, going back through classical
theology to the Scriptures, answers earnestly, “yes.” To be saved
is to be saved from sin. If sin means total depravity, and if total
depravity means hell, then salvation can really mean amazing grace.
Yet, it is not sin itself nor total depravity
as precise definitions that are the real concern of the Reformed
thinker. Depravity and hell, grace and salvation, are empty, formal
ideas of no interest to the Christian if they are not related to
God. Our discussion of total depravity, following Calvin and Reformed
creedal sources as our guides in understanding Scripture, assumes
a context of discourse in which God is conceived as truly being
involved in both an experiential and a cognitive sense in human
life. In a paraphrase of Francis Schaeffer, when we talk about total
depravity, we tremble because of the God who is there, but we also
thrill in His grace, for He is not silent.
Reformed theologians have thus stressed the doctrine
of total depravity for centuries; the doctrine based explicitly
on the Scriptures could not be viewed otherwise. Yet, astute observers
may wonder how this doctrine could be discussed for even several
moments. If a person really is depraved, can he rationally discuss
depravity at all? or anything else? Others, impressed with many
deeds of unheralded kindness by innumerable individuals, maintain
that the Calvinistic claim has never had enough evidence to warrant
its acceptance. Pelagius in the fifth century spoke this way in
opposition to Augustine, an early defender of total depravity. Voicing
these same criticisms, rationalism and empiricism speak today. Is
this essay attempting the impossible: expounding a doctrine that
is both contradictory and unverifiable?
Neither of these criticisms touches on the core
of what the doctrine of total depravity in its full, biblical context
is concerned to assert, though both, nevertheless, need to be examined,
at the outset, to give a proper frame of reference. Arising out
of rationalism, the first objection assumes that depravity simply
means extreme irrationality and the consequent inability to communicate,
or to think, i.e., that sin means man ceases to be man. But such
a thought misses the point. As a sinner, man does not cease to be
man; he ceases to be good. The theist does not deny that a degree
of irrationality appears as a secondary effect of depravity, but
does deny that it is the main hallmark of depravity. As Baillie
puts it: “A completely unreasonable being would be as incapable
of wickedness as of goodness, for he would be simply non-moral.”3
In a theistic setting, the worst thing that can happen to a person
is not that he should become incoherent in irrationality (as undesirable
as this may be), but rather that, while remaining coherent and rational,
he be obdurate in his relationship to God. Rationality in itself,
in man, does not guarantee goodness. Rationalism as a philosophy
fails to see that various starting points and differing teleological
elements will give rise to a variety of rational systems, each with
its own criteria of moral and epistemic value. The shrewd rationality
of a man bent on evil is undoubtedly judged by God, while the fumbling
thought of a God-fearing peasant is undoubtedly blessed.
The second difficulty seems embarrassing to our
study because it suggests that theological ideas must be derived
from empirical observations of human behavior, and in the light
of such observations we should be constrained to conclude that man
is basically good rather than evil, or at least his good deeds outnumber
his evil. But such a criticism does not possess compelling weight.
Aside from empiricism’s problem in .knowing what the motives of
observed “good” human activity might be, a further difficulty in
measuring the consequences of various moral alternatives,4
another liability in this objection is evident. Speaking of human
action as good (or evil) assumes we already know and have used a
non-empirical criterion in naming an act as good or evil. Furthermore,
saying that a man is good because his good actions outweigh his
evil ignores the possibility of one evil act outweighing all the
good. The assumptions empiricism must make in order to project any
kind of a universal claim show its incoherence and render its discussion
of depravity highly suspect.
Reformed theologians also clearly reject the
allegations of rationalism and empiricism as set forth in the preceding
paragraphs. Without denying that the totally depraved man engages
in reasoning, R. C. Sproul points out that his effort is “futile”
reasoning, “because it proceeds from a primary premise that is faulty
and produces only the final fruit already present in the initial
bias. . . . It ends in darkness because it abhors the light at the
beginning. . . . Brilliant and erudite reasoning may produce abhorrent
conclusions if they proceed from a faulty starting point.”5
A further indication of what the Reformed thinker is about
is found in the writing of Addison Leitch. Rather than trying to
assess the relative degree of goodness or badness in every action
of a man, or in the sum total of all his actions, so that depravity
can be equated only with a surplus of evil action over good action,6
the Reformed thinker, as Leitch puts it, says depravity “does not
concern itself so much with the sins as with SIN, a condition of
the whole person who is lost and incapable of returning to God until
God acts in a saving way. . . . If sin were blue in color I would
be blue all over.”7
Surfacing in these two objections to total depravity
is a common motive. Both objections can be seen as arising from
an attempt to minimize the evil of man in the sight of God. The
one over- exaggerates the function of evil in one of man’s faculties
and thereby hopes to discredit the possibility of evil as fatally
affecting man. The other under-exaggerates the extent of the penetration
of evil into all of human activity and thereby hopes to restrict
evil to relatively insignificant phases of life. Reasons for seeking
to minimize evil in these diverse ways suggest themselves to us.
Proponents of both of these views clearly perceive that if total
depravity is true, then God has sufficient reason, from a human
point of view, for condemning all men to eternal death. For them,
the logical course of action must be to minimize consistently the
evil of man, because, for them, God cannot conceivably be granted
the freedom of judging men eternally for sin. The view of a God
of judgment is said to offend human rationality. Man’s nature, thus,
is seen to be essentially good with an occasional lapse into evil,
and so God could conceivably be spared from making anything more
than an ameliorating plea. It is suggested that God could pardon
an individual on the grounds of a partial “goodness,” and thus His
love would exhibit its saving character, and no judicial sentiments,
human or divine, would be offended.
Sincere as such conceptions might be, they are
still bad views of sin, rather than good. They misunderstand the
seriousness of sin, declared by God Himself to be an affront to
His majesty as the Holy Law-Giver. They veil the expression of God’s
justice and holiness which appear in His decree of eternal punishment.
They prevent the display of the magnificent grace of God in saving
sinners. A true doctrine of sin, recognizing that man’s depraved
nature sets him against God, can be seen as good because it preserves
both the holiness of God in justice and the love of God in grace.
A bad doctrine of sin does not aid in understanding God, nor in
relieving man’s guilt. Biblical writers had all of these concerns;
God is the holy God whose grace alone provides escape from the prospect
of deserved judgment.
When the biblical writers make numerous statements
like these, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in
the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart
was only evil continually”; “The heart is deceitful above all things
and desperately corrupt”; and “The wrath of God is revealed from
heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their
wickedness suppress the truth. . . for although they knew God they
did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became
futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened,”8
anyone who understands English can comprehend the force and significance
of the words used. For the Christian, such words constitute God’s
definition of every man apart from grace. They comprise a matrix
of reality which provides meaning for understanding the doctrines
of election, definite atonement, and irresistible grace. But prior
to being in a state of grace before God, man is in a state of rebellious
corruption before God.
Given in ordinary language, these verses from
Scripture speak clearly to the mind about man’s moral condition
in God’s sight. For many, such words are a threat of undeserved
punishment and thus become offensive. For others, verses like these
are not accepted as factually true, and, thus, labelled as meaningless.
But, in any case, it cannot be denied that the language of the Bible
is understood, or else no reaction could take place at all. Even
the positivist has to understand the claim of these verses in order
to make a meaningful judgment that the words are meaningless. More
commonly in religious circles, men such as Paul Tillich will seek
an understanding of such words in terms of a correlation with a
“real” existential situation. Now, while it is difficult, if not
impossible, to tell the difference between a “real” and an “inauthentic”
situation, without being informed by a third party, which in the
best sense would be God, the problem is even more intense once it
is judged that a situation is authentically existential. Since any
authentic situation is unique and individual, no relation to the
Bible’s statements can be made. No understanding can result and
the clear judgment of Scripture is reduced to ambiguity by an attempted
correlation. In a more pious vein, some men, like Karl Barth, will
seek to understand the Scripture’s imperious judgment of sin in
human life by a christological principle. Biblical judgments as
to the nature of sin and depravity will be found useful or “true”
because of the antithesis to something experienced in a relationship
to Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, the filigree of such a relationship
is tenuous, and one’s judgment of what is inconsistent with a christological
principle turns out to be little more than a contemporal cultural
prejudice. It begins to appear that we have been carrying on a monologue
with ourselves, as Cornelius Van Til put it, which produces as its
main observable consequences the whittling down and disarming the
offense of the biblical statements about man’s sin.
A bad doctrine of sin has serious consequences.
In seeking to minimize his sin, man sins all the more. The Bible
verses quoted, and numerous others, are constitutive for working
out a Reformed doctrine of total depravity. They trace the source
of sin to man. It is in attempts to find the cause of sin outside
himself that man develops a bad doctrine of sin. It has been wisely
observed that, “To go on looking for external causes of our badness,
whether inherited or otherwise, is to quiet our consciences with
excuses and hence to make more remote than ever the chance of our
becoming better.”9 Gerstner puts it more strongly: “For
us to reject the verdict of the Word of God about sin is a dread
act of sin; . . . the very best proof of sin in our hearts is that
we deny the sin of our hearts.”10 Going a step beyond
these observations, can we not conclude that the wise man is the
one who by the grace of God accepts the biblical judgments about
himself as true? On the assumption this individual also knows of
the atoning work of Christ, his rational comprehension of God’s
truth concerning depravity forthwith leads into a doxology of praise
and a changed life. For Christians, singing is called for, when
we consider our creeds and confessions. To learn God’s truth and
to experience God’s grace clamors for such a celebration.
Reformed thought has always stressed the prerequisite
of a deep sense of sin in order to appreciate redemption. John Murray
remarks that, “Salvation, however, is basically salvation from sin,
and our concept of salvation is, therefore, conditioned by our view
of the gravity of that to which salvation is directed.”11
John Calvin exhibited such a pattern in his celebrated Institutes
of the Christian Religion. This work began with an admirable
generalization that “True and substantial wisdom principally consists
of two parts, the knowledge of God, and the knowledge of ourselves.”12
When put into sharper focus, however, the self-knowledge of the
unbeliever is seen to be very disconcerting. Having set himself
at odds with the will of God, hell is looming before the unbeliever.
Calvin thus speaks of “the miserable ruin into which we have been
plunged by the defection of the first man.” Yet, man is not without
hope. This “immense mass of deformity” which we discover within
can produce in man such “a consciousness of his own infelicity as
to arrive at some knowledge of God.” Some good can come out of sin;
an awareness of God, even if only as judge, is progress, since it
is preliminary to knowing God as redeemer. The knowledge of God
found at this level certainly does not include an awareness of redemption,
but seems to Calvin to be a necessary preliminary posture for later
appreciating a knowledge of God as redeemer. We cannot “really aspire
toward him,” Calvin says, “till we have begun to be displeased with
ourselves.” In a later century, concerning the Christian life Kierkegaard
says, “only through the consciousness of sin is there entrance to
it, and the wish to enter in by any other way is the crime of lèse-majesté
against Christianity.”13 How to become conscious of sin
and, therefore, “displeased with ourselves” is not the central consideration
in this essay, though frightfully important for salvation and Christian
living. Our concern is more with delineating that experience in
our non-Christian past which is now seen as the most loathsome aspect
of our displeasure with ourselves. To put our finger on this will
be to get to the heart of Reformed theology’s development and understanding
of the doctrine of total depravity, as well as lead into the consideration
of the other distinctive doctrines of Calvinism.
Calvin’s full development of the doctrine of
total depravity comes only after he shows how some men in “vile
ingratitude not only suppress the knowledge in their hearts of God,”14
but also “grow vain in their own superstitions of what God
is like,” while others “revolt from God with intentional wickedness.”15
Sin is a dynamically negative moral relationship to God. Its development
only makes things increasingly worse. Soon the effect upon the individual
himself is felt as anguish and guilt. Calvin depicts the unbeliever
as trying to do the impossible by seeking to eradicate from his
consciousness all thought of God. Attempts to suppress the awareness
of God16 lead to the constructing of false ideas of God. But the
“instincts of nature” which speak of the true God cannot be silenced
or satisfied. Fearful tensions develop. Instead of seeking to make
peace with the one offended, man attempts to eliminate his guilt
by constructing a view of reality in which guilt has no existence,
or imagining a God in whom there is no holy wrath or vindicativeness.
But these attempts are vain and become a boomerang. They do not
even relieve man’s dreadful guilt before God. The self, seeking
to save itself, becomes increasingly self-destructive. Luther’s
account of this stage of total depravity is very similar to that
of Calvin. He discusses it in his Bondage of the Will under
the topic of “God’s method of hardening man.” Martin Luther points
out that the ungodly man is “wholly turned to self and to his own,”
and becomes outraged and furious if anyone stands in his way. This
fury and rage toward that which opposes man’s self-seeking is all
the stronger when it is perceived that God’s Word (through Moses
or Christ) is the obstacle. What Luther speaks of as the “galling
of the ungodly” occurs, and in consequence man’s antipathy to God
greatly increases, and he “grows far worse as his course away from
God meets with opposition or reversal.”17 All of this
vivid analysis of man’s experience by Calvin and Luther is the context
for moving into the full understanding of total depravity.
A disturbing doctrine to man, total depravity
might be deprived of some of its shaking effects upon the consciousness
if it could be shown that some members of the human race managed
to escape its debility and guilt. Rather than searching through
endless pages of history for such illusive evidence, Calvin turns
to the beginning of human history and investigates the scriptural
record of the first man and woman. Perhaps ambiguity in the account
would give some basis for mitigating the dreadful relationship of
alienation to God. What a search of history could at best only have
suggested, is found in Scripture to be an unfailingly certain moral
disposition in all men.18 A “primitive integrity” also
is discovered, however, which gives another kind of hope. Nevertheless,
man’s disobedience was of such overriding influence that all of
Adam’s original adornments of “wisdom, strength, sanctity, truth,
and righteousness” were replaced by the “dreadful pests of ignorance,
impotence, impurity, vanity, and iniquity.”19 Furthermore,
our first parents did not suffer alone, but plunged all of their
posterity into the same misery by bequeathing to them a “hereditary
pravity and corruption of nature, diffused through all parts of
the soul.”20 And even in its first manifestations, depravity
was as contemptible of God as in its later expressions in human
history. Depravity appeared at first and remained a “foul insult
to God,” with man doing “his very utmost to annihilate the whole
glory Of God. Calvin was forced to conclude that “we are, merely
on account of such corruption, deservedly condemned by God.”21
Such a judgment by God is perfectly just, for our “nature is not
only utterly devoid of goodness, but so prolific in all kinds of
evil, that it can never be idle.”21 This quotation from
Calvin is remarkable; it is an epitome of most of the emphases Christians
wish to make concerning total depravity.
In Calvin’s day as well as in our time, efforts
to understand human behavior frequently utilized a method of dividing
human nature into various parts or functions. Such parts could be
studied in their intercausal relationships in a quasi-scientific
or rationalistic manner and give rise to much presumptive information.
Assuming such a division would lead naturally to the question: how
are the parts and their relationship affected by sin? Calvin’s answer
forms the basis for all subsequent Reformed thought. Rejecting the
Roman view that sin affected only parts of man’s nature, Calvin
insisted that the scriptural revelation of man’s sin is that every
aspect and function of his being is affected by the fall.
Calvin’s description of man in this quotation
also stresses that sin is not merely the absence of a positive quality
or two that results in a privation or defect in human nature. Instead,
in his corruption man cannot be idle, but is incessantly active
in conducting a campaign of reaction against God’s laws. Sin is
a variegated performance that invariably ends in praise of human
wisdom rather than divine.
Attention is further focused on these words of
Calvin because they express a concern that any moral man would feel.
How can a God of mercy punish a person and display wrath toward
unrepentant sinners? Calvin is clearly concerned to argue that man
is deservedly condemned by God, who in so doing reveals His justice.
With the Psalmist, Calvin is jealous for the integrity of God. Sin
is against God, and any judgment He makes upon man is deserved.
“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is
evil in thy sight, so that thou are justified in thy sentence and
blameless in thy judgment.”22
Man is conscious of God’s displeasure with his
sin, but in his unregenerate state he will not throw himself upon
God’s mercy and plead for forgiveness. Instead, he constantly offends
God all the more by making light of his guilt and by attempting
to suppress his knowledge of God. The earliest history of man, as
seen in the Bible, confirmed, rather than mitigated, the heinous
character of sin. Moreover, examination of Adam’s sin revealed that
all of his descendants were immediately implicated in his transgression
and that “Everything which is in man, from the intellect to the
will, from the soul even to the flesh, is defiled.”23
Like a contemporary wholist, Calvin burst out, “the whole man is
in himself nothing else than concupiscence.”23 Denying
the unity of man in his depravity, Semipelagians like Erasmus suggested
that reason might be exempt from sin, if only to a degree, and could
initiate at least enough concern about spiritual things to warrant
the application of grace by God. Contemplating the possibility that
reason in some sense is immune from the effects of sin started Calvin
off on the last leg of his discussion of depravity.
Accepting a widely held view of reason and its
relationship to the will, Calvin asserted that reason, known also
as the understanding, has the function of discriminating between
objects as appropriate or inappropriate for personal good. The will,
then, theoretically chooses and follows what the reason has pronounced
to be good and avoids with abhorrence what is condemned.24
Reason is, thus, integrated into the decision of the will. Translating
this philosophical claim into theological dogma, Calvin stated that
“God has furnished the soul of man, therefore, with a mind capable
of discerning good from evil, and just from unjust; and of discovering,
by the light of reason what ought to be pursued or avoided . . .
to this he has annexed the will on which depends the choice.”25
So reason, like a lamp, illuminates the human behavior and belief
with its counsel. Surely, one would suppose, reason would furnish
the will with appropriate guidance once it discerned the exceeding
wickedness and foolishness of rebellion against the God who not
only sustains the depraved person in his own being, but is also
a relentless judge from whom man cannot escape.
Calvin’s investigation reached its deepest level
when he probed the noetic effect of sin. To his utter consternation,
man continuously chose evil. Moreover, the choice was voluntary
and not by constraint.26 Reason remained an integral
and essential aspect of man, vitiated but not destroyed, still capable
of guiding (misguiding) the will and providing formal justification
for belief and action. Will continued to function as the preceptor
of action inseparable from the nature of man, but now “fettered
by depraved and inordinate desires.”27 In this sad but
amazing discovery apprehended in his experience, described in Scripture,
and prompted by the Holy Spirit, man found out what he really was
in the sight of God. Now the most loathsome element in our understanding
of total depravity emerges. Incredulously, the choice of evil was
approbated by reason and em braced by will. Calvin speaks of it
as the “grand point of distinction” and explains, “that man, having
been corrupted by his [Adam’s] fall, sins voluntarily, not with
reluctance or constraint; with the strongest propensity of disposition,
not with violent coercion; with the bias of his own passions, and
not with external compulsion: yet such is pravity of his nature,
that he cannot be excited and biassed to anything but what is evil.”28
The simple truth of this “grand point of distinction” is that our
whole nature, in part and functions, is set in its own way, and
as such loves to sin against God, and therefore must sin against
God.
A consideration of reason has put the cap on
the doctrine of total depravity. Man’s reason not only could offer
to the will no positive inducement to embrace God’s Word, but also
in retaining its natural functions it prohibited man from using
irrationality as an extenuating circumstance excusing sin. Gordon
Clark summarized it well when he wrote, “When Adam fell, the human
race became, not stupid so that the truth was hard to understand,
but inimical to the acceptance of the truth. Men did not
like to retain God in their knowledge and changed the truth of God
into a lie.”29 So, if anything, reason compounded the
guilt of man before God by enabling him to fabricate idols that
placed no moral demands upon him and to manufacture rational schemes
in justification of recalcitrant behavior. One is led to agree that
Meredith Kline’s judgment is not too severe: “The Fall, therefore,
might have been followed at once by a consummation of the curse
of the covenant. The delay was due rather to the principle and purpose
of divine compassion by which a new way of arriving at the consummation
was introduced, the way of redemptive covenant with common grace
as its historical corollary.”30
Analysis of total depravity, arising out of Scripture,
witnessed to by countless events in history, and confirmed in an
honest appraisal of personal experience after one has received God’s
grace in renewal, led to a common creedal formulation in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. These creeds, as Shedd put it, “never
shrank from affirming that the ultimate form of sin is a nature,
that this nature is guilty, and that the wrath of God justly rests
upon every individual of the human race because of it.”31
Protestant thought thus was echoing Paul’s when he said men are
“by nature children of wrath.”32 The Belgic Confession
states that man “willfully subjected himself to sin” and thereby
“separated himself from God” and “corrupted his whole nature.”33
This activity by man was so “vile and abominable in the sight of
God that it is sufficient to condemn all mankind.”34
The canons of the Synod of Dordt are no less specific when they
declare that man “entailed on himself blindness of mind, horrible
darkness, vanity, and perverseness of judgment,” and “became wicked,
rebellious, and obdurate in heart and will, and impure in all his
affections.”35 Nevertheless, man “retains some knowledge
of God . . . and of the difference between good and evil.” This
knowledge, as in Calvin, is not sufficient to bring man to a saving
knowledge of God and, indeed, cannot even be used aright in the
ordinary affairs of life. Man, in fact, corrupts this light and
“holds it back in unrighteousness.”36
In historical Presbyterian circles the Westminster
Standards reflect the same views of total depravity as those developed
above, and have been greatly significant in establishing the classical
Christian view. The Shorter Catechism speaks of the corruption of
man’s whole nature with the resultant misery of being made liable
to death and “to the pains of hell forever.”37 In the
Westminster Confession of Faith, total depravity is presented more
fully than in the Shorter Catechism, but without diminishing the
nuances or exceeding the rigor of Calvin and sixtenth-century doctrinal
and creedal formulations.
The Reformational doctrine of total depravity
seen especially in Calvin can be stated summarily in these sentences:
1. Sin is the responsible
choice of man to violate God’s law.
2. Sin is a depravity of the whole nature of man.
3. Sin conveys guilt before God for man’s personal and Adam’s
representational sin.
4. Sin is the actively developed apostasy of man against God.
5. Sin is a full warrant for eternal punishment.38
Reasserting each of these principles, the Westminster
Confession maintains that our first parents (no. 1 above) “being
left to the liberty of their own will,”39 fell into sin,
and thereby became “dead in sin, and (no. 2 above) wholly defiled
in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.”40 This
first sin not only brought guilt upon the original couple, but also
(no. 3 above) “the guilt of this sin was imputed . . . to all their
posterity.”41 As in Calvin, the enormity of this depravity
and guilt is all the more loathsome when it is seen as constituting
man as (no. 4 above) “utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite
to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil.”42 The
eminently fair judgment man brings upon himself, since his sin is
a violation of the holy law of God, is that, in the apt words of
the confession (no. 5 above), “he is bound over to the wrath of
God, and curse of the law, and so made subject to death, with all
miseries spiritual, temporal, and eternal.”43 So the
seventeenth-century Calvinism of the Westminster Standards echoes
the sixteenth-century faith.
Going back to the brief statements regarding
man’s corrupt nature and God’s judgment, the Shorter Catechism comes
across as a softened re-run of its companion catechism in the United
Presbyterian Standards. For in the Heidelberg Catechism, of 1563,
it asserts that we are by nature “prone to hate God and my neighbor,”44
and “daily increase our guilt.”45 This “willful disobedience”46
makes us liable to a “just judgment in time and eternity.”47
And in order that no one may mistake what the Heidelberg Catechism
means here, the 11th Question asks, “Is, then, God not also merciful?”
“God is indeed merciful,” and the answer continues, “but he is likewise
just; wherefore his justice requires that sin, which is committed
against the most high majesty of God, be also punished with extreme,
that is, with everlasting punishment both of body and of soul.”48
In a similar fashion the Westminster Confession
reinforces the thought of two earlier creeds which became companion
confessions when adopted by the United Presbyterian Church in the
United States of America in 1967. In a briefer but fully as rigorous
a statement, the Scots Confession of 1560 presents the sin of man
as a “conspiring against the sovereign majesty of God.”49
This “fearful and horrible departure of man from his [God’s] obedience”50
resulted in an “everlasting death” that “has had and shall have,
power and dominion over all who have not been, are not, or shall
not be reborn from above.”51 The Second Helvetic Confession
(1566), the other sixteenth-century companion creed to the Westminster
Confession, sets the tone for the later product when it asserts
that man is “immersed in perverse desires and adverse to all good.”52
In an interesting psychological insight, it also maintains that,
being “Full of all wickedness, distrust, contempt and hatred of
God, we are unable to do or even to think anything good of ourselves.53
Calvin’s “grand point of distinction” is put in epigrammatic form:
Our enslaved will “serves sin, not unwillingly but willingly. And
indeed, it is called a will, not an unwill (ing).”54
This concise survey of the Reformational creeds
in the United Presbyterian Book of Confessions shows an unquestionable
consensus of belief about sin and total depravity. The Westminster
Standards, coming almost a century after the other creeds, are an
integral part of a Calvinistic confessional tradition that is remarkable
in the richness of diversity with which a fundamental unity is proclaimed.
The claims that the Westminster Standards “do not belong to the
Reformation but are products of Puritanism and Post- Reformation
scholasticism,” and that they reflect a legalism, moralism, and
rationalism that is foreign to the Confessions of a century earlier,”
are scarcely understandable. If such claims are supportable in other
doctrinal areas, they ought not to be allowed to obscure the fact
that there is a continuity and an identity in witness to the scriptural
principles concerning sin in the older Reformation creeds and the
Westminster Standards of the United Presbyterian Church.
The sixteenth- and seventh-century creeds in the
United Presbyterian Church’s Book of Confessions are unambiguous
and united in what they assert as the biblical doctrine of sin.
Is the confessional production of the last decade by the United
Presbyterian Church homogeneous with its older companion confessions
in this important area? While there are those who would maintain
that there is very little continuity in thought” with the older
Calvinistic creeds, it cannot be denied that in the phrases and
sentences, at least, some kind of a family resemblance is evident.
As in the older documents, in the Confession of 1967 a strong indictment
of sin occurs. It is declared that evil in men is “sin in the sight
of God,”57 and that “all men, good and bad alike, are
in the wrong before God” and “fall under God’s judgment.”58
Furthermore, though the statement on the sin of man is brief, it
does include insightful characterizations of sin as a futile self-mastery
which results in rebellion, despair, and isolation, and as a proud
self-interest which is more often an expression of hostility than
virtue. Man also falsely claims he is guiltless before God when
he is exploiting and despoiling the world. All of these allusions
to sin in a contemporary setting are very important, and need only
a norm to be valid and true. They call attention to the solidarity
of the race and to sin in the areas of social responsibility. As
such, the pervasiveness of sin called for by the doctrine of total
depravity is reflected.
Although some continuity with Calvinistic sentiments
is found in the Confession of 1967 in its phrases and sentences,
in its paragraphs only an asymmetrical relationship is discernible.
In the three brief paragraphs on sin, the attempt to derive all
formulations about sin simply as antitheses to the reconciling work
of God in Jesus Christ falls far short of the breadth in thought
found in earlier confessions, which drew material from the entirety
of Scripture rather than from one central doctrine. Plausibly, God’s
work of reconciliation is a biblical teaching of sufficient scope
to provide ample context for developing the full-orbed Reformed
doctrine of sin. Unfortunately, in an unaccountable fashion, the
authors of the Confession of 1967 delimited the formulation of the
crucial reconciliation theme by their failure to utilize the full
range of biblical evidence.59 Hence, in formulating a
doctrine of sin (or any other) weakness might be expected, for,
actually, only selected aspects of the theology of reconciliation
were employed. Conceivably, the writers of the early Presbyterian
creeds could have derived their doctrine of depravity from the doctrine
of reconciliation, too, but they first would have taken care to
develop a full scriptural account of reconciliation from which they
could subsequently derive other doctrines. Surely they would not
have appealed to ambiguous sentiments of reconciliation surfacing
in the culture of their time in order to gain the acceptance of
their product.
Further discontinuity of the new formulation
with the old is evident in the current reference to an experience
of reconciliation as the basis for a consciousness of sin. Such
elements in our consciousness are undoubtedly important aspects
of Christian experience, but if our consciousness of reconciliation
and of sin are unnaturally separated from the cognitive understanding
of their nature, then the culture of the time in which one lives
will supply the definitions of reconciliation and sin, which probably
would not be biblical. The writers of the Confession of 1967 seem
to have made this bifurcation of experience and understanding and
hence give modern man the opportunity to excuse himself by making
his own definition of sin. This is a lamentable turn of events,
never evidenced in earlier creeds, because the laudable purpose
of aiding modern people in being more responsible in their societal
relationships is thwarted by the ambiguity and equanimity that occurs
when reconciliation and sin are made experiential without definite
reference to God’s law, or seen as sociological analysis without
personal guilt before God.
In the Reformation age, people who converted
to Protestantism were excommunicated and put under the threat of
everlasting destruction if they did not return to the Roman Church.
Dissatisfied with a church that in a complacent manner unofficially
said “no one is perfect,” but officially condemned individuals to
perdition for a violation of church order,60 the Reformers never
tired of affirming a sterner and more consistently biblical notion
of sin as a perverse outgrowth of transgression against God’s law,
stemming from a sinful root, for which one could justly be condemned
to eternal destruction. Taking this biblical view of the deadly
taint seriously, the Reformers averred, could become a way of edification
for an individual that far outclassed the meager value of the ministrations
of the Roman Church. For the man lost in sin, despairing of heaven,
and under the wrath of God, it is clear that nothing human or natural
can meet his need. From the bottom of the bottomless pit, as Augustine
once put it, the only hope that can become a comfort is that the
unmerited grace of God will pluck him out.
Notes
- William G. T. Shedd, Theological
Essays (New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Co., 1887), p.
264. The signers of “An Appeal for Theological Affirmation,”
Hartford Seminary, January 26, 1975, though not writing in a
specifically Reformed context, show something of what Shedd
was pleading for when they state their “false Theme 7: ‘Since
what is human is good, evil can be adequately understood as
failure to realize human potential,’” and answer that “This
theme invites false understanding of the ambivalence of human
existence and underestimates the pervasiveness of sin. Paradoxically,
by minimizing the enormity of evil, it undermines serious and
sustained attacks on particular social and individual evils.”
Reprinted in The Presbyterian Layman, March, 1975, p.
5.
- John H. Gerstner, Theology for Everyman
(Chicago: Moody Press, 1965), p. 31.
- John Baillie, Our Knowledge of God
(London: Oxford Press, 1939), p. 32.
- Gordon H. Clark, “Can Moral Education
be Grounded on Naturalism?,” Bulletin of the Evangelical
Theological Society I, no. 4 (Fall, 1958).
- R. C. Sproul, The Psychology of
Atheism (Minneapolis: Bethany Fellowship, Inc., 1974), p.
65.
- Gordon C. Clark, What Do Presbyterians
Believe? (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing
Co., 1965), p. 77.
- Addison H. Leitch, Beginnings in
Theology (Pittsburgh: Geneva Press,1957), p. 36.
- Genesis 6:5; Jeremiah 17:9; Romans
1:18, 21; all Revised Standard Version.
- Hugo Maynell, Sense, Nonsense and
Christianity (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964), p. 75.
- Gerstner, Theology for Everyman,
p. 35.
- John H. Skilton, ed., Scripture
and Confession (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co.,
1973), p. 137.
- John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian
Religion, trans. John Allen, I, i, 1.
- Søren Kierkegaard, Training
in Christianity (Princeton University Press,1944, p. 71.
- Calvin, Institutes, I, v, 4.
- Ibid., iv, 1.
- This thought, originating in Geneva,
came to expression again at Lausanne in 1974. “We recognize
that all men have some knowledge of God through his general
revelation in nature. But we deny that this can save, for men
suppress the truth by their unrighteousness.” Lausanne Covenant,
art. 3.
- Martin Luther, The Bondage of the
Will, J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnson, trans. (Westwood:
Fleming H. Revell, 1957), p. 205.
- Cf. Jonathan Edwards’ method in his
Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended.
- Calvin, Institutes, II, 1, 5.
- Ibid., 8.
- Ibid.
- Psalm 54:1, RSV.
- Calvin, Institutes, II, i, 8.
- Ibid., I, xv, 7.
- Ibid., 8.
- Ibid., II, ii, 7.
- Ibid., 12.
- Ibid., iii, 5.
- Howard Vos, ed., Can I Trust the
Bible? (Chicago: Moody Press, 1963), p. 28. Chapter I, Gordon
H. Clark, “How May I Know the Bible Is Inspired?”
- Meredith Kline, The Structure of
Biblical Authority (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), p. 155.
- W. G. T. Shedd, Theological Essays,
p. 215.
- Ephesians, 2:3b, RSV.
- Belgic Confession, article XIV.
- Ibid., art. XV.
- Canons of the Synod of Dordt, 3rd and
4th Heads of Doctrine, art. I.
- Ibid., art. IV.
- Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 18,
19; (7.018 and 7.019). All decimal notations are from the Book
of Confessions, which is part I of the Constitution of the
United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.
- In 1642 John Owen made the following
summary of original sin in “a Display of Arminianism”:
- “It is an inherent evil, the fault
and
corruption of the nature of every man.” - “It is a thing not subject or conformable
to the law of God, but hath in itself,
even after baptism, the nature of sin.” - “By it we are averse from God and
inclined
to all manner of evil.” - “It deserveth God’s wrath and damnation.”
The Works of John Owen, ed. William
H. Goold, (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1967), X, 70.
- Westminster Confession of Faith, chap.
IV, sec. 2 (6.023).
- Ibid., chap. VI, sec. 2 (6.032).
- . Ibid., sec. 3 (6.033).
- Ibid., sec. 4 (6.034).
- Ibid., sec. 6 (6.036).
- Heidelberg Catechism Q. 5 (4.005).
All quotations are from the Nevin text found in Philip Schaff,
The Creeds of Christendom, vol. III.
- Ibid., Q. 13 (4.013).
- Ibid., Q. 9 (4.009).
- Ibid., Q. 10 (4.010).
- Ibid., Q. 11(4.011); cf. also
Q. 87 (4.087).
- The Scots Confession, chap. 11(3.02).
- Ibid., chap. IV (3.04).
- Ibid., chap. III (3.03).
- The Second Helvetic Confession, chap.
VIII (5.037).
- Ibid.
- Ibid., chap. IX (5.043).
- Arthur G. Cochran, Reformed Confessions
of the 16th Century (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966),
p. 30. For a more thorough refutation of Cochran’s opinions,
arising out of a study of the extra-confessional writings of
the authors of the Westminster Confession, see Jack B. Rogers,
Scripture in the Westminster Confession (Kampen: J. H.
Kok and Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1966), pp. 443ff.
- Edmund P. Clowney, “The Broken Bands,”
in Skilton, ed., Scripture and Confession,” chap. VII.
- The Confession of 1967 (9.12).
- Ibid. (9.13).
- Skilton, ed., Scripture and Confession,
pp. 196-200. Failure to use all of the Bible in developing a
doctrine of reconciliation is not really “unaccountable,” for
if the Bible is not identified with revelation, as is the case
in the Confession of 1967, it would seem unreasonable to accept
any part of its notion of reconciliation that runs counter to
widely held cultural views.
- A curiously similar parallel in the
United Presbyterian Church, without the overtones of hell, is
a broad latitudinarianism in moral and theological matters,
but a narrow intolerance in applying the Book of Order as seen,
for example in the Kenyon case. See “Decision of the Permanent
Judicial Commission of the General Assembly,” Remedial Case
No. 1, November 18, 1974. For a comprehensive analysis of this
new turn in the history of the UPCUSA see “Candidate Denied
Ordination,” by John H. Gerstner, in The Presbyterian Layman
VIII, no. 1 (February, 1975).
Author
Dr. Thomas Gregory is a professor of philosophy
at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. Dr. Gregory
received his B.A. from Temple University, his B.D. from Westminster
Theological Seminary, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University
of Pennsylvania.
This article was taken from SOLI DEO GLORIA
Essays in Reformed Theology, published by Presbyterian and Reformed
Publishing, Nutley, N.J. (1976).
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