Bible Study Understanding Total Depravity.

[Little Owl]

Free From What?
by J.W. Hendryx

Hey John, how goes it? I enjoyed reading your article on "unregenerate will, self-determined but not free"

Question: I was wondering if you had anything else similar that you could recommend. I liked your illustrations and examples. I am still trying to find an article that has a good balance of depth, but is not over people's heads and covers the different types of wills, both mans and God's, in detail. Perhaps I wont be able to find everything I'm looking for in one article but I'm trying to put together something for a bible study class so I will be cutting and pasting stuff, hope that is ok?

Response: Thanks for your inquiry about the concept of free will. For clarity's sake, one important thing we must do when speaking to folks about this issue, I believe, is define the concept of "free will" up front. People come at this with different preconceptions so it is important to explain what you do and do not mean by the expression.

For example, if someone says they believe man has a free will, you may want to ask them, "free from what?" ... From sin? ... from God's eternal decree?

What the majority of people actually mean when they claim we have a free will is that they believe we are free from external coersion. This is a good place to start because it is a place that all can agree upon. But what most Reformed people actually mean when we explain that man has "no free will", is not that we are coerced by some outside force. (Coersion here meaning an outside force that would make us involuntarily choose something). No, rather, the Bible explains that the natural man, without the Spirit, is in bondage to a corruption of nature. The expression "bondage" to the natural man speaks of His lack of freedom. His nature is hostile to God and loves darkness (John 3:19, 20). In fact he is in bondage until Christ sets him free (Rom 6). We are either slaves to sin or slaves to righteousness, the Bible tells us. So coersion is not the only form of bondage, there is also bondage because our poor choices are made by necessity due to a corruption of nature. Coersion and necessity are, therefore, both equally valid ways to express that a person lacks free will. Just because we are not coerced into making desisions does not mean the will is free. One may also sin of necessity, due to the natural man's innate hostility to God, by which he will always flee from God, apart from grace.

Unregenerate man would never choose Christ apart from the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. This brings us to another question that is also important to ask other believers. Can a person believe the gospel apart from any work of the Holy Spirit? No, the Bible testifies that "no one says 'Jesus is Lord' apart from the Holy Spirit." (First Corinthians 12.3) The Spirit must turn our heart of stone to a heart of flesh that we might believe. Remember, in the Bible, freedom is always defined as holiness, not the moral ability to choose equally between the opposites of good or evil. Otherwise the saints in heaven and even God Himself would have less freedom than we do, since (being sealed in righteousnes and their inability to violate their own essential nature) they do not have a free will in the libertarian sense. Instead Jesus sets us free from the will and affections' bondage to sin ... which is the only freedom the Bible speaks of...

Also see *John 6:65 together with 6:37. No one will believe in Jesus unless God grants it and ALL to whom God grants it will believe. The Spirit gives life, the flesh counts for nothing. (John 6:63).

http://www.reformationtheology.com/logic/

Thought not a Calvinist I concur with its tenets because TULIP is an amalgamation of the scriptures teaching the Gospel and the nature of humans.

I believe Total Depravity comports with 1Corinthians 2:14+.

 

[Dave...]

This is a... convenient definition that is not naturally understood from the words "Total Depravity" - which is why Piper must provide his own definition. As I've already pointed out, Scripture doesn't give us a view of mankind that is actually universally and totally depraved and so "Total Depravity" must be "nuanced" by the Reformed proponent to account for this fact.

I wonder about Piper's definition: Paul the apostle wrote that every mentally-competent person has the testimony both of Creation and their own conscience to the existence of God (Romans 1, 2) and I think this could be argued to be a sort of "grace" of God in the way that God making the rain and sunshine to fall on the just and the unjust expresses a sort of general divine "grace." An awareness of God naturally restrains Man, which is why Man suppresses such an awareness in unrighteousness (Romans 1:18-22). Is there, then, actually a state in which Man can exist where the grace of God is truly, completely absent? I guess this would depend upon what one means by God's "grace." For myself, I don't think there is such a state - except in hell, of course.

What I see in evidence in the World is people choosing to suppress the knowledge of God which He has made them uniquely capable as earth-bound creatures of apprehending. People do so to varying degrees, some descending into violent, mad psychopathy, others choosing a shallower dive into darkness and sin, still others living in such a way as to make it difficult (on the surface of things, anyway) to distinguish them from born-again people. There is definitely not a uniform depravity that is in anything like a "total" degree in every unregenerate human being.

But if there were such a thing ordained of God, it would be only God who could be held properly responsible for it. And we shouldn't complain about such a God-decreed moral profligate, or urge them to better living since it is God's will, at bottom, that has made them as they are.

The substance of this discussion is not going to be solved by showing someone making a choice, or being given a choice, but rather the question at hand is what motivates the choices we make.

Ordained does not mean that God caused it. He is sovereign over it though.

Argument Against “Double Predestination” and Support for the Tripartite View

Argument Against “Double Predestination” and Support for the Tripartite View Many theologians reject the Calvinist doctrine of “Double Predestination,” which asserts that God has predestined some individuals to salvation (the Elect) and others to condemnation (the Reprobate). These theologians...

christianforums.net

This is such awful thinking displayed here. An unsaved man who rescues a child from, say, drowning has, in Piper's view, not merely done anything morally virtuous but is actually guilty, in preserving the life of the child, of having done evil. Wow. How twisted this view of things is! As far as I understand Scripture, the child-saving man might not have done anything spiritually profitable (1 Corinthians 13:1-3) in saving the child, but he is absolutely not guilty of having done evil in rescuing the child from death.

He was making a point. The same one that scripture made. If it's not of faith, it's sin. A bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Without Jesus we can do nothing good. It's literally everywhere in scripture.

But Romans 14:23 doesn't say "all men are in total rebellion" to God. And as Scripture indicates about Job, Noah, David, Simeon and Cornelius, though none of them were saved, none of them were in "total rebellion" toward God, either.

Yes it does. God gives the faith. The fruit of the Spirit is the only good that comes from us. The fruit of us is always sin. Without faith, always sin.

Techi, I appreciate your efforts, but your definitions of scripture and reasoning are not built on a context of a Biblical platform rather on a humanistic reasoning. It just doesn't hold up with Scripture.

Dave

 

[Tenchi]

Techi, I appreciate your efforts, but your definitions of scripture and reasoning are not built on a context of a Biblical platform rather on a humanistic reasoning. It just doesn't hold up with Scripture.

You have offered nothing to demonstrate that this is so except your say-so.