Total Depravity

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

JONATHAN EDWARDS
"Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God"

I am someone who believes that ideas have consequences. Whether these ideas are true or false is beside the point. Those ideas influence your worldview and your behavior. For instance, if you believe that your job is your holy calling from the Almighty as the Puritans did, you will most likely do it with enthusiasm. If you believe that your job is merely exploitation as the Marxists do, you will most likely do it with considerably less enthusiasm. Those same worldviews may also effect your voting, your concern or lack of concern for the poor, and your own notions of self-worth. As such, ideas can have large effects on the quality of your life and your happiness. It is important that we get those ideas right.

I want to tell you a story about an idea. It may not seem like much of a big deal, but it is an idea that has had a huge impact on the way I live my life, how I regard other people, and my own happiness. This is the idea of total depravity.

Total depravity is an idea from the theology of John Calvin. It is the belief that all humans are hopelessly wicked. Now, many Christians believe in the doctrine of original sin, but total depravity goes beyond that doctrine. It is the belief that humans are incapable of doing anything good. It is a belief that humans are so hopelessly depraved that even the good things they do are utterly wicked since they are always done from impure motives. Calvinists cite many Scriptures in support of the doctrine. I will simply refer those interested in those Scriptures to the Wikipedia article here.

Total depravity is the kernel of Calvinism. It is the reason for the necessity of predestination. Totally depraved people are denied free will because their wickedness makes them incapable of ever choosing God. God must choose them. And this state of being totally depraved does not alter or change even after conversion as the taint of sin remains with the sinner always in the Reformation doctrine of simul iustus et peccator--simultaneously justified and sinful. This doctrine teaches that humans remain scumbags, but they are off the hook for the penalty for being scumbags. This is good news for those not wanting to go to Hell. It is not good news for those wishing to become saints. In a nutshell, you are diagnosed with a horrible and incurable disease that will disfigure you and turn you into a monster. But the good news is that the disease is no longer fatal. But the bad news is that you will be so hideous and disfigured from the disease that you will wish you were dead. (Remember this disease analogy for later. We will use it again.)

I will not get into whether or not this doctrine is actually correct at this juncture. Instead, I will simply tell you about the consequences of this idea. I came to believe in this doctrine at the time I was 21 years old or so. I was in college at the time, and a friend of mine lent me a compend of Calvin's Institutes. I would go on in later years to read the entire work, but that short treatment of Calvin's thinking was enough to influence me. My evangelical Baptist background was scant on doctrine, and this taste of Calvinism was like a revelation for me. As someone tinged by Arminian doctrines, I believed that I was a sinner, but I still retained enough goodness and free will to choose God's offer of salvation. Calvin obliterated such childish notions for me. Instead, I came to realize that I was a loathsome piece of shit that God wanted to flush down the toilet into the sewers of eternal damnation, and I believed in Him only because He chose me to believe in Him. The result of this revelation was a feeling of immense gratitude and love because I was so grateful for the salvation that I did not deserve and could never merit.

My Calvinist friend was delighted at my conversion to his way of thinking, and I would follow him later to a Calvinist seminary. I switched from being Baptist to Presbyterian. I drowned myself in this new world of Reformed theology reading as much as I could lay my hands on and putting Calvin and Luther alongside Jesus and the Apostles. I was also surrounded by likeminded Calvinists who I could always engage in bull sessions. But total depravity was working on me. It was polluting my soul and mind.

When you believe you are totally depraved, everything you do becomes a work of evil. You do good, but you always see in yourself the selfish impulse that made you do the good work. In time, your good works and bad works become indistinguishable. They all spring from a wicked heart. Now, it is always better to strive to be good rather than bad for no other reason than to live a sane life and be agreeable to your neighbors. But I was not living a sane life, and I was not agreeable to my neighbors. When you see yourself as a loathsome piece of shit, you become a loathsome piece of shit. This might seem like conscience working in you, but it isn't. It simply blunts your conscience in much the same way that constant trauma produces scar tissue or a callous.

Evangelicals practice a fake niceness and a form of plastic Christianity where their consciences are concerned about trivial things like tobacco, dancing, and rock music. Calvinists smirk at such things and become wise asses. Where evangelicals try to fake it until they make it, Calvinists are merely converted scoundrels who revel in scholarship and depression. They trade in the plastic for a cold hearted cynicism which is both serious but at times humorous. It is said that comedy springs from portraying people as being worse than what they really are, so Calvinists tend to have a sardonic funny bone. Most of my seminary professors seemed to compete with each other as comedians in a nightclub. But laughter in this vein is often a mask for crying inside. Depression is dark comedy if you can laugh. It is tragedy when you can't laugh.

When you believe in total depravity, you have to learn to cope with it. This is because you start to hate yourself. You also start to hate everyone around you as well because they are also totally depraved. The world becomes a darker place, and you want to be a better person. The only problem is that you can't. Prayer and church become acts of utter debasement as you grovel before an angry God who really hates your guts. The reason you inflict this pain on yourself is because you feel so good when it stops. The routine goes as follows. You are a piece of shit. God forgives you. Here's a little juice and bread as a reminder along with the sermon. Come back again when you forget that forgiveness. Leave now and return to your sinning, you miserable wretch. Hallelujah!

This is the Calvinist gospel. Like all heresies, it has some element of truth in it. But it is distorted. Yes, we are sinners. Yes, we deserve Hell. Yes, we will always battle with sin. But we are not wretches. We are not pieces of shit. And Christ really does save you, and this is not mere salvation from punishment for sin. It is also salvation from the corrupting effects of sin. It is a salvation that actually turns you  into a saint. It is salvation that actually makes you a better person. And your actions in this regard really do matter. But you can't get this salvation in a Calvinist church. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Calvinism is simply misanthropy elevated to a theology. It teaches you to hate yourself and by logical extension to hate your fellow man. At this point, Calvinists will balk and say this is a misrepresentation of their position and blah blah blah. But I was in it for years. Don't tell me I had it wrong. Don't tell me to be charitable to a heresy that is without charity. And don't tell me not to judge when Calvinism judges all humanity as fit for nothing more than as fuel for the fires of damnation.

My love affair with Calvinism ended with a tragedy. It was not my tragedy but someone else's. I was just a mere spectator as I watched helplessly as an idea reached its logical conclusion in someone else's life. His name was Ross. He was a fellow Calvinist and seminarian. He was also a housemate to me and a friend. We met in the commons area of our seminary where he would spend many hours smoking cigarettes and navel gazing as he contemplated his own depravity. He was a morose and depressed person. He was also wickedly funny and a thorough Calvinist. His intellect was immense. But that brain of his was doom. He always saw a little further and clearer than me. It is a mistake to think that depressed people are delusional. This is not true. They have a clearer picture of reality than you will ever know. Depression is the absence of delusion because it is delusion that nurses us along day by day.

Ross hated himself. Unlike most of the other seminarians, Ross had a secret. He never told me what it was, and I only discovered it after his death. Ross was homosexual. Now, it is the fashion these days to be open and accepting of these things, and this fashion was picking up steam in those days when I met Ross. But among people in the church, it was a scandal. Ross had plenty to hate about himself already, but this was a little extra to make it worse. Ross was the most devoted Calvinist I have ever known which means he saw himself as the most depraved. And there was nothing I could do to assuage that self-hatred because I did not know his secret, and I could not tell him a gospel he did not already know. So, one morning, I found him in his room dead from a self-inflicted injury. Ross had killed himself.

I always hate telling his story not because I find it traumatic anymore but because many people are stupid. They want to dwell on details involving blood and razors or whatever. But the shock for me was a spiritual shock. No one gets that, and I doubt anyone will. Ideas have consequences. Ross was the casualty of a bad idea. People want to go all Freudian on it and suggest maybe he needed meds, or they want to blame his mother or something. But this is all nonsense.

Imagine you have committed an unspeakable crime. Let's say you sexually molested a child. In our day and time, this is as awful as it gets. Even murderers and rapists will try and kill you in prison because they find it so abhorrent. Now, what would you do to yourself? Everyone I have ever asked said they would kill themselves if they had ever committed such an atrocious act. Once you get a true picture of total depravity, suicide becomes a very logical choice. It makes sense. It makes it right. You want to atone. You want to do something to undo what was done. You want absolution. You want forgiveness. You want release from this awful thing you have done.

Ross was not as evil as some child molester. If he was, I do not know. But he had such an acute sense of his own wickedness that he felt about himself the way you and I would if we had committed such an unspeakable act. Given a shallow gospel and the single sacrament of baptism and a sham communion with no way to confess and receive absolution, Ross destroyed himself. It is my sincere hope that God will grant him the mercy and grace he was deprived of in this life. I light candles for him and pray for him often. I can only hope.

My faith in God died with Ross. I could not understand how God could allow someone like him to endure such torment and anguish. It was a needless tragedy. I became convinced as I remain convinced to this day that Ross died as a consequence of his erroneous beliefs. Having no correct belief to turn to, I turned to the only one available to me. I chose to stop believing. I stopped praying. I stopped going to church. I dropped out of that seminary. And leaving all of that felt like sweet relief. I traded heresy for atheism. Atheism is not much better, but it is like trading cyanide for heroin. Heroin kills you slower.

So, is humanity totally depraved? Of course not. This is ridiculous. The nature of this heresy is by design to put you in an inescapable trap of self-hatred. The Catholic Church utterly condemns this heresy. The documents from the Council of Trent and the Catechism declare this doctrine of total depravity to be anathema. If we are totally depraved incapable of doing anything good, why do anything? But 1 Corinthians 15:58 says, "Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast and unmoveable; always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labour is not in vain in the Lord." If all our works are depraved, how can they not be vain?

Original sin can be seen in two ways. It is here that I will return to my disease analogy from earlier. In the Calvinist view, you have been infected with an incurable disease that will be with you all your life. This is sin, and it will never leave you but infect everything you do. In the future, this disease will be taken from you, and you will be restored to perfect health. In the Catholic view, you have a disease, but it does not infect all that you do. It will kill you, but there is a cure. It is called grace. This grace cures the disease and also removes the scars and effects of this disease. Deprived of grace, the disease will increase in you once more and kill you. Partaking of grace, this disease will fade away until it is no more. You will not be finally cured until you reach Heaven, but you aren't confined to a hospital bed either. You can't cure yourself. But you can take the medicine. The more you cooperate with the treatment the better you will feel and become.

Why did Calvin teach total depravity? The answer to that is obvious. Deprived of the real cure, the quack doctor must sell you a counterfeit and explain why it isn't working. His "cure" is a repeated promise that he hopes you will buy. Keep reminding yourself of that promise. This is why no Calvinist can be a saint in much the same way that Kool-Aid can never cure cancer. Grace is not an empty promise. It is a efficacious cure for what ails you. And you won't need to be reassured that it is working because you will see it working in you.

St. Paul gives it away in Philippians 1:

I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always offering prayer with joy in my every prayer for you all, in view of your participation in the gospel from the first day until now. For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. For it is only right for me to feel this way about you all, because I have you in my heart, since both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel, you all are partakers of grace with me. For God is my witness, how I long for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus. And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve the things that are excellent, in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ; having been filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

Folks, this is not total depravity. In every bit of this passage, you see Paul exhorting his flock to continue in the grace and good works they already have. The good work has already begun in them and will be perfected in glory. He prays that their love will abound even more than it already does. They are to be sincere and BLAMELESS until the day of Christ. They are filled with the fruit of righteousness.

Calvinists are not righteous people. They do not abound in love. They are not sincere and blameless. They are death in a whitewashed tomb where they meet each Sunday. And how do they know they are one of the elect? Because they make a lot of money. They do get one thing right. This is depravity. Fortunately, for them, God does not make garbage and even they can be saved from these errors and put on the right path.

There are no Protestant saints. There are some nice people in Protestant churches just like there are some nice atheists. Naturally, there are lots of bad people in churches including the Catholic Church. But if you want saints, you have to look to Catholicism. This is because it is grace that makes you a saint. It is God's cure working in sinners to make them whole. If God can work in them, He will certainly work in you. Salvation is a process. It isn't the mere legal declaration of Luther and Calvin. It is the living God abiding in you and changing you and transforming you from a monster into the best version of yourself. This is what God wants for you.

I see people in this error, and it breaks my heart. I see my old departed friend in all of them. But I love them, and I forgive them because they don't know any better just as I didn't know any better. But once you know the truth, to reject it is evil. It is easy to pardon ignorance, but there is no pardon for those who know and reject the truth. This rejection hardens the heart and closes the ears. But we must always hold out the hope for their repentance.

I am a sinner, but I am not slime. Do not ever hate what God loves. This means you should not ever hate yourself because God loves you. He really loves you.

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NOTES

1. Catholic Church vs. Protestant Reformers on Original Sin, Concupiscence, and Total Depravity

2. Total Depravity--just not biblical

3. CC on the Fall and Original Sin

4. Council of Trent on Justification

5. Total Depravity--Wikipedia

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