11. Total Depravity

Essentials

The Consequences of Sin

Among the Most Misunderstood Two Words in Christianity

by Benjamin Dean

History began without sin. Almost all of it since has been under sin. Adam and Eve briefly knew life without it; Christ was without personal sin, though he lived and died in creation’s state of sin. The rest of us know life exclusively as sinners in a sinful world.

It does not mean all people maximise their evil inclinations.

How It Spread

The first human sin didn’t stay put. Its effect reached the next generation, escalating to cold-blooded murder (Gen 4:8), and violence increased until it ‘filled’ the earth (Gen 6:11-12). Before the flood the diagnosis was total: ‘every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually’ (Gen 6:5). After it, unchanged (Gen 8:21).

Paul explained the sequence as cause and effect: ‘sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned … by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners’ (Rom 5:12, 19).

Adam’s sin was a catastrophe transmitted to all. The reason we sin and die traces back through the generations to our first parents, since his descendants were born ‘in his own likeness, after his image’ (Gen 5:3). Corruption is congenital. We share Adam’s status — we too are sinners, and must die.

What the Phrase Doesn’t Mean

At the start of Romans, Paul sketches a ‘debased mind’ (Rom 1:28): humanity ‘filled with all wickedness, evil, greed, spite, envy, murder, strife, guile, suspicion, rumour-mongering, slander, haters of God, arrogant, proud, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious to parents, mindless, faithless, heartless, ruthless’ (Rom 1:29-31).¹

That grim estimate came to be called ‘total human moral depravity’² — and it’s easily misunderstood.

‘Paul is not saying that all people, at all times, in all places behave like this in every detail. Nor is Paul denying that men and women can and do act nobly. Rather, he is commenting “broad brush” that observable behavior … has departed from the Creator’s intention for ordered and decent human relationships.’³

The Bible recognises different kinds and levels of sin: ‘unintentional sins’ (Lev 4:2) and presumptuous ones (Psa 19:13); ‘greater’ sins (John 19:11) and sin that’s unforgiveable (Matt 12:31). Uncontrolled anger and murder sit on the same continuum, but murder is obviously far graver. ‘All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad.’⁴ Augustine put it neatly: ‘But it matters how much. Although every crime is a sin, not every sin is a crime.’⁵

And manifestly some people are better or worse than others. Scripture distinguishes ‘the righteous’ from ‘the wicked’ (Psa 1; 37), and Paul still marks a categorical difference between those patient in ‘well-doing’ and those ‘self-seeking’ and ‘evil’ (Rom 2:6-10).

When It Does Go All the Way

Some do become as bad as possible — irretrievably hardened (Exo 7:13; Rom 11:7). God himself is said to harden and blind people, confirming their hearts in obstinacy (Isa 6:10). ‘When his Spirit is taken away, our hearts harden into stones.’⁶ Tragically, some deteriorate to calling ‘evil good and good evil’ (Isa 5:20) — a perversion terminating at unforgiveable blasphemy of God’s Spirit (Matt 12:31), where Christ’s work is attributed to Satan, effectively putting ‘God in Satan’s place and Satan in God’s place.’⁷

Why It Isn’t Worse Than It Is

Here’s the part that explains the world you actually see. Varying degrees of virtue or vice are due not to ourselves but entirely to God’s restraining grace. He usually keeps evil within bounds, and depravity is checked by natural affection, family love, community, education, civil government, reputation, and conscience.

‘[J]ust as the fire in the earth is kept under control by the hard crust of the earth, and only now and then … bursts out in awful volcanic explosions, so the evil thoughts and lusts of the human heart are suppressed and restrained from all sides by the life of society.’⁸

Fallen humanity can’t accomplish ‘saving good’⁹ — restoring relations with God. But by grace, sinners do achieve considerable good: healthcare, welfare, cultural advancement. Some people do beautiful things.

Those goods are real, but limited. They may subdue evil but can’t eradicate it, and whatever is praiseworthy can’t attain to good before God. Sin spoils even our seeming best: ‘Although the works of man always seem attractive and good, they are nevertheless likely to be mortal sins.’¹⁰

‘The doctrine … does not mean that all people maximize their evil inclinations; nor that they are incapable of accomplishing many “natural goods.” It only refers to the deepest inclination … the fundamental directedness of human nature and confesses that it is not turned toward God but away from him.’¹¹

Universality and Depth

The phrase points to two things.

Universality. ‘There is no one who does not sin’ (1 Ki 8:46). More emphatic is the apostolic pastiche: ‘None is righteous, no, not one … no one does good, not even one’ (Rom 3:10-12). ‘All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Rom 3:23). Corruption and guilt are global: ‘the whole world lies in the power of the evil one’ (1 John 5:19).

And sin can’t be understood in exclusively individual terms — we sin in solidarity with Adam and one another. ‘There are particular, individual sins, but there are also general social sins. And thus too there is individual guilt, but also common social guilt.’¹² Racism, inequality and poverty result from sins greater than any isolated individual’s.

Depth. No part of a sinful person is immune; we’re not partially but completely fallen. The image of God isn’t destroyed but marred — it ‘remains but has turned into its own caricature.’¹³ Sin reaches into body, soul, reason, will, emotions, desires. It is ‘total extensively, not intensively: there is nothing intact, everything is more or less damaged.’¹⁴

Sin is deprivation and lack, but more than mere defect. Our energies aren’t neutral — they tend away from God. It is not just weakness but ‘a specific evil,’¹⁵ an active power turning every good aspect of human nature against God.

And It Has a Grip

There’s a remarkable intensity to sin too. It enslaves: ‘everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin’ (John 8:34). It disorders our loves — we act wrongly because we love falsely, and here’s the sting: we love loving falsely. People love darkness ‘rather than the light’ because their works are evil (John 3:19). There is ‘not only the inevitability of error but also the love of error.’¹⁶ Sin is deceitful. We try to conceal it and cannot escape it. The human heart has an astonishing capacity to harbour hypocrisy, conceit and despair — and temptation feeds on exactly that.

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1
The translation is that of Paul Barnett, Romans: The Revelation of God’s Righteousness (Christian Focus, 2003), 49. ↩︎
2
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics. Abridged, 366. ↩︎
3
Barnett, Romans, 49. ↩︎
4
Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way it’s Supposed to Be; cited by Henri Blocher, ‘Sin,’ in Gerald McDermott ed., The Oxford Handbook of Evangelical Theology (Oxford University Press, 2010), 139. ↩︎
5
Augustine, ‘On Forgiveness of Sins in the Church,’ Enchiridion, 17.64; trans. Outler, 377. ↩︎
6
Calvin, Institutes, 2.4.3; 311-12. ↩︎
7
Bavinck , Reformed Dogmatics. Abridged, 379. ↩︎
8
Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith, 250. ↩︎
9
Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith, 251. ↩︎
10
Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation, 3, in Luther’s Works, American Edition, Volume 31, eds. Harold J Grimm and Helmut Lehman (Fortress Press, 1957), 39, 43-44. ↩︎
11
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics. Abridged, 366. ↩︎
12
Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith, 245. ↩︎
13
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics. Abridged, 374. ↩︎
14
Henri Blocher, ‘Sin,’ in Gerald McDermott ed., The Oxford Handbook of Evangelical Theology (Oxford University Press, 2010), 139. ↩︎
15
Vos, Reformed Dogmatics. Single-Volume Edition, 242. ↩︎
16
Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith, 231. ↩︎