Friday, 27 March 2015

Total Depravity

This chapter will have been misunderstood if anyone describes it as a reinstatement of the doctrine of Total Depravity. I disbelieve that doctrine, partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved, & partly because experience shows us much goodness in human nature.

Divine "goodness" differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child's first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning. This doctrine is presupposed in Scripture. Christ calls men to repent ­­ a call which would be meaningless if God's standard were sheerly different from that which they already knew & failed to practise. He appeals to our existing moral judgement "Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?" (Luke 12:57) God in the Old Testament expostulates with men on the basis of their own conceptions of gratitude, fidelity, & fair play: & puts Himself, as it were, at the bar before His own creatures: "What iniquity have your fathers found in Me; that they are gone far from Me?"

ANY consideration of the goodness of God at once threatens us with the following dilemma. On the one hand, if God is wiser than we, His judgement must differ from ours on many things, & not least on good & evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, & what seems to us evil may not be evil. On the other hand, if God's moral judgement differs from ours so that our "black" may be His "white," we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say "God is good," while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say "God is we know not what." And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) "good" we shall obey, if at all, only through fear -- & should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend. The doctrine of Total Depravity -- when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing -- may thus turn Christianity into a form of Devil-worship.



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