In 1958, Elizabeth Elliot moved to live with the Waorani tribe in the Ecuadorian rainforest – the very tribe that killed her husband two years earlier – in order to teach them the Bible.
In 2015, Nadine Collier declared, “I forgive you” to Dylan Roof, after he killed Collier’s mother and eight others at a weeknight Bible study at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
In 2018, Rachael Denhollander extended forgiveness to serial abuser Larry Nassar, while explaining that forgiveness “is what makes the gospel of Christ so sweet. Because it extends grace and hope and mercy where none should be found. And it will be there for you.”
These extraordinary stories of forgiveness are as scandalous as they are inspiring. What can move these real victims of violence to offer such mercy and grace to the perpetrators who meant harm against them?
One of Jesus’ most influential commands is his call to forgiveness and mercy toward one’s enemies; yet, what we often miss is that this call comes with a particular grounding. As Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:35-36).
Jesus’s teaching is astounding: we are called to love and be merciful toward our enemies for God is kind to the ungrateful and evil. There is no grounding, no power, and no greater motivation for the call to forgiveness and mercy without reckoning with Jesus’s teaching that humans have been ungrateful and evil. We are called to be kind to those who are evil, because God has been kind to us who are also evil.
As the West increasingly becomes a post-Christian culture, it often retains semblances of a Christian ethic without its Christian foundations. But the fruit without the root cannot be sustained so let’s examine the Reformed doctrine of sin, the so-called doctrine of total depravity. We will start with the doctrine’s biblical roots, expounds its theological claims, and show how the doctrine grounds the Christian ethic of grace and forgiveness, along with other pastoral implications.
The Biblical Origins of Depravity
Though God created everything good, humanity has chosen to turn aside from God’s good plan so that every man decides for himself how to live. Adam and Eve listened to the serpent and chose not to orient themselves to God but to lesser goods. Naked and ashamed, they hid from God, and when confronted, they shifted the blame and refused accountability.
Though God was kind toward them and delayed physical death, covering them with skin (Genesis 3:21), a real spiritual death has entered into humanity. The consequences are stark. Sin has marred the relationships we have with one another, the world, and God. A chapter later, we see the murder of a brother, and by Genesis 6 we see such moral decline in the world that God judged the world with the flood.
When the psalmists reflect on the fallen human condition, they describe it with sharp words:
They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds;
there is none who does good.
The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man,
to see if there are any who understand,
who seek after God.
They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt;
there is none who does good,
not even one (Psalm 14:1b-3; cf. Psalm 53).
In fact, the Psalms paint many grim pictures of sin. The only hope in the face of human wickedness is a salvation that comes from the outside – from God himself: “Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion!” (Psalm 14:7a). Sin is debilitating, such that sinners hate what is good (Psalms 34:21, 50:17-18). Evil deeds come from a love of evil (Psalms 11:5; 52:3-4). The wicked exult with “arrogant words; all the evildoers boast,” and spread social injustice: “they kill the widow and the sojourner, and murder the fatherless”, all the while denying God’s existence (Psalm 94: 4-7). Psalm 51:5 shows that sinners are such at conception: in sin we were conceived.
The Prophets echo the depth of human depravity and the corresponding necessity of God’s power and grace to renew sinners. Indeed, Jeremiah 17:9, the prophet exclaims that the “heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick, who can understand it?” God promises to write the law in human hearts in the new covenant, so that we might be able to obey God (Jeremiah 31:31-4).
Ezekiel records that God likens the restoration of his people to the enlivening of bones, a movement from death to new life (Ezekiel 37:14). Our nature has been so corrupted by sin that nothing short of divine intervention can restore it. These latter prophetic texts point back to the Deuteronomic witness that the human heart requires circumcision, a covenant sign that points to one’s death and resurrection, “so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.” (Deuteronomy 30:6).
In the New Testament, Paul follows the grain of the Old Testament witness concerning the human condition. From the one man, Adam, death and sin came into the world (Romans 5:12-21). Christians were those who “were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience …” (Ephesians 2:1-2). Due to our sin, every part of who we are has been corrupted: our minds are darkened, our hearts are hardened. We live in hostility against God, and nothing else short of God’s regenerating grace can change us.
Paul thus concludes that no one is good – indeed, all have sinned and fallen short of God’s righteousness (Romans 3:10-23). We may all have sinned in various ways, and tend toward different sorts of sins, but we are all sinners nonetheless. When it comes to the law of God, we are all in the same boat – sinners justly deserving God’s displeasure. It is no wonder, then, that Jesus says that no one can come to God unless they have been born again (John 3:3,7), and that salvation is impossible for man, but not for God (Matthew 19:26).
The Theological Claims of Depravity
With this brief sketch of the biblical teachings on sin in view, let’s examine the theological teachings they imply.
First, when theologians call this biblical doctrine of sin total depravity, they do not mean that all human beings are as bad as they can be. Indeed, God ensures that we do not all just follow our worst impulses. God is kind to us, restraining our sinfulness in various ways (Romans 1:18-32).
However, the doctrine means that every part of who we are is corrupted, or, as the “Westminster Confession of Faith” puts it, “wholly defiled” (WCF 6.2). Our intellects and wills are darkened, and we resist God and love evil. Because we are corrupted, therefore, though not all sins are equal in their weight, intention, or consequences, all human beings are equally guilty before God (“Westminster Larger Catechism” Q&A 151).
Second, the Bible describes the human condition as being dragged down by a kind of gravitational pull toward sin and away from holiness, “wholly inclined to do evil” (WCF 6.4). We are not just responsible for the sins we commit, but for the sinful desires and tendencies that we have. It isn’t just the act but also the lusts and hates in our hearts that render us vulnerable to Jesus’s judgment (Matthew 6:21-30).
We have a “body of death” (Romans 7:24), and it is our own desires that entice us (James 1:14-15). In contrast to Roman Catholic teaching, Reformed theologians argue that we are guilty for even our internal tendency toward sin (concupiscence) – not just the ones we consent to that lead to acts of sin (WCF. 6:5).
Third, because we are wholly corrupted and because we tend to love sin, we do not want to admit our own sins. We are often morally blind toward them, denying our responsibility and rejecting accountability.
As Jesus says, we tend to judge others, pointing out the “specks” in our brother’s eye, while failing to see the “log” in our own (Matthew 7:1-5; Luke 6:41-42). We embrace this selective blindness because it gets us “off the hook”, as it were, as we attempt to lay the blame on someone else. We saw it first when Adam blamed Eve and God for his own sin.
Fourth, because we are hostile toward God and have no natural inclination for him, God’s grace must intervene to change our hearts. God does not coerce us, but he has the unique ability to cause us to desire him. Along with the external gospel proclamation that Christ has died and risen for our sins, there must also be an internal, effectual calling that causes us to see our sin and Christ’s finished work, and to cling to Christ by faith. Regeneration, therefore, precedes and enables our act of faith (WCF 10).
Finally, though Paul says that we are “by nature” sinners (Ephesians 2:1-3), he is not so much saying that sin is “natural” as much as death is not natural. We should distinguish between the use of “nature” to indicate what is universal, in the contemporary fallen order, and what is creational.
Sin is not original or essential to creation. Sin has no essence in itself. It is parasitic on the good – it is as darkness to light, blindness to sight, disease to health, and death to life. Sin is thus a privation of something that is supposed to be there. We lack righteousness, and thus we are fallen, corrupted, vitiated creatures. We are not thus sinners all the way down, but image bearers of God that have been marred.
This is why Paul argues that when we are renewed by Christ’s Spirit, we are being reborn into the image of God (Colosians 3:10; Ephesians 4:24). Grace restores nature, and the renewal of Christ’s salvation refashions us to the creatures we were always intended to be.
Depravity and Forgiveness
This brings us back to the stories of forgiveness which introduced this essay. While we may be tempted to divide the world up into a binary of good and evil, oppressor and oppressed, perpetrator and victim, the Bible itself levels the plane of humanity. We are all guilty sinners.
The strength and willingness to forgive – and to display the extraordinary, even supernatural, courage of the figures introduced in those stories – depend on a deep sense of God first forgiving the unforgivable in us.
This does not mean that we merely excuse the real crimes and evils that perpetrators have carried out. The stories above show that forgiveness presupposes that a real evil was committed. Often civil justice should be pursued, and wrongdoing should be confronted.
Jesus himself calls out the enemy that he beckons us to love: the enemy has “abused”, “hated” “struck”, “cursed” the victim (Luke 6:27-29). But confrontation is not an end in itself; forgiveness is. The only way Christians can forgive is because God himself was kind to us while we were ungrateful and evil. We are called to be merciful because the Father was merciful to us (Luke 6:35-36).
There is a second implication here. Despite all of the evil and wrongdoing in the world, evil and sin presuppose that creation itself is good, and that image-bearers are good. The more evil and tragic a wrongdoing is, the more the goodness of the marred thing is displayed. We feel this instinctively when we sense the difference between accidentally stepping on an ant and snuffing out a human life.
Something is felt as tragic only if the thing impacted was precious, beautiful, and good. God, too, sees the evil and suffering in this world, and he is committed to restoring it. Our response to the depravity and evil around us should therefore not be that of despair but of action and hope, participating in God’s kingdom purposes as agents of reconciliation.
Gray Sutanto serves as associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.
Read the other articles in our Calvinism for a New Generation series here:
Perseverance in an Age of Anxiety
Irresistible Grace in an Age of Individualism
Limited Atonement in an Age of Shamelessness
Unconditional Election in an Age of Inclusivity
Calvinism for a New Generation