Total Depravity, reprised

For those that don’t know, Total Depravity (TD) is the view in reformed theology that says man is corrupt in all his parts and faculties. It is not meant to say that man is as bad as he could be; merely that in everything that he actually is, he cannot please God.

What follows is the adaptation of a conversation in which I argued that TD unhelpfully twists the scriptural view of people onto an individualised ‘typical man’, whose inward state is revealed as being totally depraved. Over against this inward state, the gospel is construed as a call to be converted – the means thereof being the sovereign will of God moving through the Spirit.

Main Point

IMHO, TD places emphasis unhelpfully on the individual, making him isolated from the covenant in some way.

The story

(1) The way TD is expressed in scripture is in terms of exile, not the ‘isolated individual’. The story begins with humanity being exiled from God, because humanity’s king was unfaithful. Humanity in Adam was removed from the place of God’s presence, without the ability to restore itself. Then, even though God chose Israel to be restored to a new garden (Canaan), the gentiles remain the strangers & aliens to God. So, what we have is people seen either as part of God’s household or not. This is the language of Paul in Ephesians.
(2) Israel, of course, is undone because she repeats Adam’s unfaithfulness. As Adam’s kingship failed, so Israel’s line of kings fails. She cannot function as a new beginning for man; she cannot be the cause of man’s restoration to God. She is an unfaithful wife for God, or (in another image) a failed son.
(3) Christ, being true Israel, is the chosen son in whom all the families of earth find restoration. God showed His approval of Christ’s claim to effect a new beginning for man by resurrecting him, thus breaking the exile-mold that Adam had set for man. Christ, then, is the new and faithful king, the second Adam.
(4) Christ had represented himself to Israel in terms of the story she told about the expected restoration. Only YHWH could make this happen. Christ cast himself in the story as YHWH, doing what only YHWH was expected to do. While the Jews killed him for this blasphemy, the church followed the story, believed the testimony of the resurrection, and confessed Christ as the sent Son of God, bridging the previsouly unbridgeable divide.
(5) The creation of a new household, with Christ as elder brother, therefore began. To belong to this household was to have the exile removed, at least in principle. Christ was therefore proclaimed to Israel and presented to the world by the apostles as the means of restoration to God. To become a son of God’s household is to be ‘in Christ’, and to have one’s TD removed. Now, to understand what this looks like, we should look at where the language comes from.

The prototypes

(6) Scripture doesn't have a picture of a 'typical' man, with characteristics that are always true. Whie the state of both Jews and gentiles are discussed, for instance by Paul in Romans, these occur as a demonstration that a new begining was needed, and was not hitherto provided by either group. Paul's discussion does not function as a timeless analysis of an archtypical homo sapiens. Rather, the dominant scriptural image is of a person in relation to his or her group, and that group in relation to God. This relationship of the group to God is often summed up in, or determined by, the relationship of God to its leader – the one ‘in whom’ (or, because of whom) the group exists.
(7) Thus (for instance), all humanity was ‘in Adam’, and was exiled because its king was unfaithful. The primary grouping in the biblical story is therefore Adam’s people. It is against the destruction of this people that Noah, who pleased God, was saved in the ark. But Noah’s sons and their wives were also included, because they were ‘in Noah’. They were his group. Yet in that primary example of restoration (or salvation), there is no discussion of whether the sons or wives 'got to heaven' – nor even mention of whether they, too, pleased God. That sort of individualised view is never the point.
(8) Again, all the men and boys of Abram's household were circumcised and became part of God's new household – the beginnings of Israel. This is not presented as being because God had overcome a basic part of their character (TD) by 'converting' them, but simply because they were part of Abram's group, and were included in the new relationship that God made with Abram. Consider also Abram's argument with YHWH about Sodom. God said he would save the city because if 5 righteous might be found there. All those in the city would therefore experience this salvation - simply because they were in the group that belonged to the city, which YHWH was prepared to say belonged to the righteous. (This is a great example of how the righteous are meant to function as salt and light, as the agents of God's grace for others.)

Of course, it is perfectly possible to speak (and we should) of all these acts of God being of pure grace. But what grace works against is not an internal deficiency of the 'typical' human, but the exile of a people who have been estranged from God & from the place He dwells – the garden, later seen as ‘the land’ and ‘the city’.

The cautions

(9) Now of course, this doesn't mean that there is nothing 'internal' that happens to people. There is. The breath of God enters us, as it did to Adam when he was dust, and makes us new creatures. But this way of speaking is built straight upon native Scriptural imagery, and that imagery isn't concerned with the inward mechanics of individualised 'conversion' in the way that we have made it a central pillar of Calvinist theology.
(10) This shows some of the differences between themes in a theological system, and themes in a developing story. The two can be quite different. For us, scripture is the story, and theology is the system.
(11) We must be aware of the dangers in a system, which often perverts or twists the way the story works, because of the environment in which it was shaped and the particular questions it was trying to deal with. Thus, our inheritance from the reformation is a concern with how the isolated individual gets made right with God. Both Rome and Geneva agreed that the focus was individualised; they disagreed about how the mechanics worked: synergistic infused grace or imputation of alien righteousness? Here, TD came into play: if man in all his parts is dead in sin, then as an isolated individual, he must be acted on by God in sovereign grace in order to convert him. Thus, the gospel becomes salvation-by-grace-through-faith-alone: the mechanism of conversion.
(12) But this individualised TD picture doesn’t really get at the way the scripture sees man, which is relational rather than individualised, and visible rather than inward. The gospel is not a description of how we get converted, but the proclamation (in word and deed) that Christ is king. Although TD does have some important points to make (and we should affirm its basic thrust of grace), it makes them 'at an angle' to the way the scriptural story works. The pictures provided by the story have been taken up and placed behind funny-coloured lenses, so that they now work quite differently - and ironically enough, are held out as 'orthodox'.

Conclusion

In my view it's very important that we recognise the distinction between the story and the system. It would make us far more humble in our dealings with other Christians and far 'nicer' people when defending 'the truth'.

There is obviously much more that could be said. This is merely a taste and a suggestion of ideas.