What Is Reformed Theology? with R. C. Sproul, Total Depravity Part 1, 7

The Historical Roots of the Five Points of Calvinism

As we continue now with our study of the core ideas that make up what we call Reformed theology, I think of an event that took place in history just a couple of years before the pilgrims landed on the shores of New England in the Mayflower, a controversy that spread throughout Europe and then around the world that had its roots in the Netherlands.

It began in a theological faculty of a Dutch institution that was committed to Calvinistic theology when some of the professors began to have second thoughts about issues relating to the doctrine of election and predestination and that sort of thing.

And this theological controversy erupted, and as it spread across the country it upset the church and it upset the theologians of the day until finally a synod was convened and issues were squared away and certain people were rejected in their views, among whom was a man by the name of Arminius.

But the group who led this movement against Orthodox Reformed theology were called the Remonstrants. They were called the Remonstrants because they were remonstrating or protesting against certain doctrines within their own theological heritage.

And there were basically five doctrines that were the core of the controversy, and what has happened as a result of this debate is that these five core theological issues became known in subsequent generations as the so-called Five Points of Calvinism.

And they are known through the very popular acrostic TULIP, T-U-L-I-P, which is a sort of clever way to sum up the five articles that were in such dispute. And I mention that historical event for this reason.

Why TULIP Is Not the Whole of Reformed Theology

As we've said all along, it would be a serious mistake to understand the essence of Reformed theology simply in light of these five doctrines because the Reformed faith involves many, many, many other elements of theological and ecclesiastical confession.

But these are the five controversial points of Reformed theology, and they're the ones that are popularly seen as being distinctive to this particular confession. So we're going to spend some time looking at the Five Points of Calvinism as they are spelled out in this acrostic.

And we remember that this acrostic TULIP uses the first letter of five different doctrines. The first is total depravity, hence the T, and the second is unconditional election, and hence the U. The L stands for limited atonement, the I for irresistible grace, and P for the perseverance of the saints.

And when I have lectured on these doctrines in the past, I have stated one or more objections to these subheadings as defining the doctrines because many of them, if not all of them, are somewhat misleading.

But they fit so nicely into this acrostic, people insist on using these abbreviations to define the five points. And so what we're going to do today is begin with a brief overview of the T of the TULIP, that which stands for total depravity.

Original Sin and the Meaning of Total Depravity

I remember many, many years ago I was teaching a course in theology at a college, and the students who were enrolled in the college did not come from a Reformed background by any means, and we were working through various doctrines, and I came to the doctrine of total depravity.

And I gave an exposition that went over about a week of classes, and at the end of that time I asked the students if they were persuaded that this indeed was the biblical view of human sinfulness. And everybody in the class raised their hand and indicated yes, they were convinced that this was the correct biblical view.

And I said, Are you sure? And they said, Yes, they're absolutely sure. So I went on the blackboard, on the top left-hand side of the blackboard, and I wrote a number there, the number of the students there, like 28 students, put it in a box, and I wrote next to it for the janitor, Please do not erase.

And I did that for a reason, that they were all committed. And then the next week we started in on the U of unconditional election, and there were howls of protest from the students who rebelled against that doctrine.

They didn't like that at all. And when I began to press them on the doctrine, I said, Now are you sure you still want to subscribe to total depravity as you did last week? And one by one I had to erase the names up there in the left-hand corner of the blackboard.

And I say that for this reason, that there's one sense in which if a person really embraces what is called the doctrine of total depravity, the other four points in this five-point system more or less fall in line.

They become duck soup and corollaries more or less of this first point. And so let's take some time to look at that. The historical situation where this doctrine first became a matter of great import and great controversy was early on in church history during the teaching ministry of St. Augustine.

And I'm sure you've heard a little bit about the so-called Pelagian controversy of the latter part of the fourth century and into the fifth century, which began when this British monk whose name was Pelagius protested against a statement that was in one of the written prayers of Augustine wherein in this prayer Augustine made this comment before God.

He said, O God, command what thou wouldst and grant what thou dost command. Let me say it again. Command what thou wouldst and grant what thou dost command. And of course Pelagius had apoplexy over this prayer.

Now the reason for his displeasure was not the first part of the prayer wherein Augustine said, O God, command whatever you want to command. Pelagius being a pious monk certainly agreed with Augustine that God had every right to exercise His authority over the creatures and to command what is deemed pleasing to Him.

But what exercised Pelagius was the second part of the prayer when Augustine asked God to grant what he commands because Pelagius said that assumes that the creature somehow is not morally able to do the will of God.

And so that created a lengthy controversy. Frankly, which controversy goes on even to this day? And we continue to have discussions about Pelagianism or semi-Pelagianism, Augustinianism and so on. In fact I just finished writing a book about the entire historical development of that controversy from Pelagius down to last week.

And so I will be going into that in much greater detail later on. But I hope to have a separate course just on that question. But by way of introduction and overview, the issue has to do with the question of original sin.

And the doctrine of total depravity reflects the reformed viewpoint of original sin. Now that term, original sin, is often misunderstood in the popular arena. Some people just assume that the term original sin must refer to the first sin, the original, the original that we've all copied in many different ways in our own lives.

That is the first sin of Adam and Eve. But that's not what is referred to historically in the church by the doctrine of original sin. Rather the doctrine of original sin defines the consequences to the human race of that first sin.

And virtually every church historically that has had a creed or a confession has agreed that something very serious happened to the human race as a result of the first sin. That the first sin produced original sin.

That is as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve, the entire human race fell. And so that our nature as human beings since the fall is a nature that has been influenced by the power of evil. As David declared in the Old Testament, O God, I was born in sin and in sin did my mother conceive me.

He was not saying that it was a sinful thing for his mother and father to have born children, nor was he saying that he had done something evil by being born, but rather he was acknowledging the human condition of fallenness.

That fallenness that was part of the experience of his parents, that fallenness that he brings himself into this world. And so original sin has to do with the fallen nature of mankind. The idea is that we are not sinners because we sin, but that we sin because we are sinners.

We are by nature sinners. And we've all heard the axiom nobody's perfect. We might improve upon that a little bit by saying not only is no one perfect, but no one's even close to perfection. And so the doctrine of total depravity describes and defines a particular view of original sin that has its roots in the teaching of Saint Augustine.

And remember that Augustine was the patron saint of the monastery where Martin Luther was reared in the faith and where he taught at Wittenberg. He was an Augustinian monk, and also Augustine was the most revered mentor of John Calvin, so that the thinking of Augustine had an enormous influence in the shaping of the doctrine of the Protestant Reformation.

Radical Corruption: The Whole Person Is Affected by Sin

Now what total depravity does not mean in the Reformed tradition is what we call utter depravity, utter depravity. And we often use the term total as a synonym for utter or for completely. And so the notion of total depravity conjures up the idea that every human being is as bad as that person could possibly be.

You might think of some arch fiends of history like Adolf Hitler and say there was absolutely no redeeming virtue left in the man. But I suspect that he had some affection for his mother, and as wicked as Adolf Hitler was, we can still conceive of his being even more wicked than he actually was.

And so the idea of total depravity doesn't mean that every human being is as wicked as they could possibly be, but rather it means that the fall is so serious that it affects the whole person. Our fallenness that captures and grips our human nature affects our bodies.

That's why we become ill and we die. It affects our minds and our thinking. We still have the capacity to think, but the Bible speaks about the way in which the mind has become darkened and weakened. The will of man is no longer in its pristine state of moral power, but the will according to the New Testament is now in bondage.

We are enslaved to the evil impulses and desires of our hearts. And so the mind, the will, the spirit, the whole person has been infected by the power of sin. Now again, if that's as far as we would go with the definition of total depravity, most Christian communions would say yea and amen this far.

I mean most would agree that we're fallen and that the fall is a serious thing and that the human nature that we bring into this world has been so influenced by sin that it touches every part of our nature.

Again, most Catholic or universal creeds of Christendom would grant that much. So then the debate becomes over a question of degree. How far have we fallen? What is the degree of that human corruption?

Now I like to replace the term total depravity with my favorite designation, which is radical corruption. It's a concept that my friends find very easy to remember as they make their own acrostic for it.

They just abbreviate radical corruption by the initials RC. They take great delight in the ease with which this facilitates their memory as they have a living model before them of radical corruption. I remember a gym teacher I had in the seventh grade when he called the roll for the first day that he was there and called my name RC, as that's what I was called in grade school, and he said, oh rotten crab apple.

So in that instant I had a new nickname that I probably should not have mentioned because I'll probably hear it again in these days. But the reason why we use this term, although it completely ruins our flower garden here, the tulip now becomes rulep and nobody's going to remember that.

But the reason I prefer this is because of the term radical. Now again, there's another one of those words that we use bandied about in various ways in our culture, particularly in the political arena where we say somebody's on the radical left or on the radical right or so on.

But the word radical ironically has its roots in the Latin word for root, which is the word erotics, and it can be translated root or core. And the idea of the term radical is something that permeates to the core of a thing.

It's not something that is tangential or superficial, namely lying on the surface, but it penetrates into the core of the thing. In a recent poll done of professing evangelicals, the overwhelming majority of people who answered particular questions in this poll indicated that they agreed with the statement that man is basically good.

Now usually that phrase basically good means that the basis or the essence of humanity or the core of a person is good. And though we recognize that no one's perfect and all are sinners and that we all are marred and blemished by various imperfections, the problem with sin in the idea that man is basically good is that sin then is seen as accidental or peripheral to human nature.

And this of course is part of the optimistic view of mankind that is essential to historic humanism. The humanist acknowledges that there are problems, but basically what we need is more education, more government help, and we'll get better and better and better and erase those blemishes on the surface that produce crime and other forms of wickedness.

And it seemed to me when I heard that poll that perhaps what is happening is that those who are professing evangelicals are taking their cue for the basic nature of fallen humanity from the culture rather than from the historic biblical view.

The Reformed view says that the fall extends and penetrates to the core. The word that is used for core actually is a translation from the Latin word core, which means what? Heart. That is the idea is that our sin is something that comes from our hearts.

And in biblical terms that means from the core or very center of our existence. And so what is required for us to be conformed to the image of Christ is not simply some small adjustments or behavioral modifications, but nothing less than renovation from the inside, nothing less than regeneration, being made over again, being quickened by the power of the Spirit.

And so we see that the only way in which a person can escape this radical situation is when the heart. And even that change does not instantly vanquish sin. The complete elimination of sin awaits our glorification in heaven.

Now we'll look at some more aspects of this doctrine in our next session.