doctrine of election history

David Wayne provides a brief yet fact-filled and interesting history of the phrase 'total depravity'. I agree with his sermon providing the Scriptural reasons to support this doctrine but here I just wanted to capture the history.

The phrase “total depravity” is not found in the Bible but the concepts are, and one of the earliest debates about those concepts happened in an exchange between the church father Augustine and a British monk known as Pelagius.

Pelagius believed:

* Man is basically good
* Man has a will that is capable of choosing good or evil w/o divine aid
* The effect of fall was to set a bad example for Adam’s progeny, but did not cause the corruption of man’s nature
* It is possible for man, through his own efforts to live a sinless life that would lead to salvation.
* Grace was an added advantage, but not necessary.

Augustine countered that:

* We are sinners by nature
* Grace is necessary for salvation and good works.
* Affirmed the doctrine of original sin.

I’ll speed through about a thousand years of church history to mention another key moment in the history of discussions on the will of man and that was a debate between Erasmus and Martin Luther on the freedom of the will.

Erasmus was a great catholic scholar who was mostly friendly toward Luther, but he was bothered by some of Luther’s teachings and one of the things he was bothered about was Luther’s view of man’s will. So he wrote a treatise on free will whereby he sought to distance himself from Luther, while not falling into the extreme views of Pelagius.

Erasmus

* Free will is “a power of the human will by which a man can apply himself to the things which lead to eternal salvation or run away from them.
* Notice – man has it within himself to choose God, apart from a work of grace

Luther:

* Sin incapacitates man from working out his own salvation.
* Man is completely unable to bring himself to God.

Just a little aside on this – if you think the rhetoric and bombast of modern debate gets a little out of hand and if you ever listen to talk radio I just want you to know that, compared to Luther, everyone alive today is an amateur when it comes to the cutting remark.

Here’s a snippet from Luther’s introduction in his response where he compares Erasmus’s book to a prior one written by his friend Phillip Melanchton:

Compared with it, your book struck me as so cheap and paltry that I felt profoundly sorry for you, defiling as you were your very elegant and ingenious style with such trash, and quite disgusted at the utterly unworthy matter that was being conveyed in such rich ornaments of eloquence, like refuse or ordure being carried in gold and silver vases.

That was just kind of a warmup for Luther as he went on to argue for the bondage of the will.

Those two debates, the Augustinian-Pelagian and the Luther-Erasmus are a good backdrop to the controversy that gave us the formulation and phrase “total depravity.”

In 1618-1619 the Synod of Dordt was held to settle a controversy in Dutch churches regarding the spread of Arminianism and it’s conflict with Calvinism. Interestingly the two parties after whom the terms were named were dead by then – it was followers of Jacob Arminius and John Calvin who engaged the debate and the first salvo in the argument came from the Arminians, or remonstrants as they were also known.

The Remonstrants objected to some teachings in the Belgic Confession and some of the teachings of Calvin and his followers. They drew up five articles.

1. Election based on foreseen faith.
2. A universal atonement.
3. Partial human depravity.
4. Resistible grace.
5. The possibility of falling from grace.

The synod met and found all five of those teachings out of accord with Scripture and they published a response known as the Canons of Dort which refuted each one. These five refutations came to be known as the Five Points of Calvinism and have been known since then under the acronym TULIP. And they are:

* Total Depravity
* Unconditional Election
* Limited Atonement
* Irrestistible Grace
* Perseverance of the Saints

The word depravity refers to man’s sin nature, the dispute between the Arminians and the Calvinists were over the extent of sin – the one saying it was partial, and the other saying it was total.

At this point I’m going to bring us a little bit further along into history and just briefly highlight the formula of the Westminster Confession of Faith in Chapter 9 on Free Will:

"Man, by his fall into a state of sin, has 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."

When we say that man is totally depraved what we mean is that man is unable, in and of himself, and apart from a work of God on the heart, to will himself to do good or to believe in God, or to even prepare himself to do so.

This may sound nitpicky, but it’s important – the confession states that man is unable even to prepare himself to believe, contra Erasmus and the Remonstrants.

I like RC Sproul's rewrite of the phrase. Rather than Total Depravity he suggests Radical Depravity is more precise. In any case, whether Arminian, Calvinist, whatever, I think we all agree man is in desperate need for God and His grace.

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