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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