Why Claim Total Depravity When People Do Good All the Time?
Two Doctrines Together
I think this is a good example of not studying a doctrine in isolation. If you study the doctrine of total depravity on its own, you may be led to think that an unbeliever cannot do any good in society. And yet that is incongruent with our own experience of unbelievers; they do good all the time. And so I think the other doctrine that you need to study total depravity with is the doctrine of common grace.
First, we need to understand total depravity correctly. It’s not saying that people are as sinful as they possibly could be. It’s just saying that every facet of the human person is tainted by sin. But the doctrine of common grace says that what is in operation in the world is God’s restraining, gracious power on people’s lives, keeping them from being as sinful as they possibly could be. So we should not deny or downplay total depravity and say, Well, maybe people aren’t sinners because they do good in society, or maybe they’re just not as sinful as we think they are.
Ruined Sinners to Reclaim
David Gibson, Jonathan Gibson
With contributions from more than two dozen well-respected Reformed theologians and church leaders, this volume offers a comprehensive defense of the doctrine of total depravity from historical, biblical, theological, and pastoral perspectives.
No, we want to affirm total depravity and say that people are sinners and they really are bad sinners, and they are sinners in every aspect of their life. But we also want to affirm God’s common grace. In his grace, God restrains people from being sinful in certain aspects and enables them to do good in certain aspects of their lives.
It’s not that in common grace the antithesis between good and evil is removed. Some people tend to think that when God expresses his common grace, he basically removes the antithesis between good and evil. The antithesis is always there. People are always evil, and yet people are doing good. What common grace says is that God restrains that antithesis. He restrains the evil that they’re capable of and enables them to do good.
Jonathan Gibson is coauthor with David Gibson of Ruined Sinners to Reclaim: Sin and Depravity in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective.
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