Total Depravity is probably the most misunderstood tenet of Calvinism.
When Calvinists speak of humans as "totally depraved," they are making
an extensive, rather than an intensive statement.
The effect of the fall upon man is that sin has extended to every part
of his personality -- his thinking, his emotions, and his will. Not
necessarily that he is intensely sinful, but that sin has extended to
his entire being.
The unregenerate (unsaved) man is dead in his sins (Romans 5:12).
Without the power of the Holy Spirit, the natural man is blind and
deaf to the message of the gospel (Mark 4:11f).
This is why Total Depravity has also been called "Total Inability."
That man, without a knowledge of God, will never come to this
knowledge without God's making him alive through Christ (Ephesians
2:1-5).
Total Depravity does not seek to say that there is no moral good in
man. By calling it total, we do not mean that men are from their youth
as bad as they can be at all times. Evil men and seducers wax worse
and worse, "deceiving and being deceived." (2 Tim. iii.13)
Nor do we mean that they have no social virtues towards their
fellowmen in which they are sincere. We do not assert with extremists
that because they are natural men, therefore all their friendship,
honesty, truth, sympathy, patriotism, domestic love, are pretenses or
hypocrisies.
What our Confession says is, "That they have wholly lost ability of
will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation." The worst retain
some, and the better much, ability of will for sundry moral goods
accompanying social life.
Christ teaches this (Mark x. 21) when, beholding the social virtues of
the rich young man who came kneeling unto him, "He loved him," Christ
could never love mere hypocrisies. What we teach is, that by the fall
man's moral nature has undergone an utter change to sin, irreparable
by himself. In this sense it is complete, decisive, or total.
Confession of Faith, Chapter IX, Section iii. "Man, by his fall into a
state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual
good accompanying salvation; so as a natural man being altogether
averse from that good, and dead in sin, is not able, by his own
strength, to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto."
By original sin we mean the evil quality which characterizes man's
natural disposition and will. We call this sin of nature original,
because each fallen man is born with it, and because it is the source
or origin in each man of his actual transgressions.
This rubs the flesh the wrong way for all those who trust in good
works such as will worship and Law keeping as a means to salvation as
well as explain the cause in the heart of those who claim there is no
God..
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