Total Depravity (Calvinism Series: Part One)

The Origins of Calvinism and the Five Points of Dort

Hi, this is Jimmy. On Theocast today, we are beginning a five-week series on the ever-debated topic of Calvinism and specifically the doctrine of total depravity. We talk about some confusion over its origins, what it is and what it is not.

We even address some proof texts that seem to oppose this doctrine and then aim to place those within the broader narrative of Scripture and hopefully point you to where we believe Scripture actually does teach the total depraved nature of man.

While we do all this, we seek to be charitable, accessible, and rich if this doctrine or even the five points of Calvinism are new to you, and then on our members' podcasts, we discuss those who claim to be Calvinists and yet perhaps deny total depravity in their preaching.

Often this can confuse our assurance, what justification is and what it's not, and even sanctification. We hope that you find this conversation helpful. Stay tuned. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed perspective. Our hosts today are John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and myself, Jimmy Buehler, pastor of Christ Community Church in Willmar, Minnesota.

Good to see you guys again. Good to be back. Good to be here. Justin, Justin, you are our cultural update today. What's going on in your world? Yeah, I am. Hey, Jimmy. So my cultural update today is on behalf of the three of us, really.

It's not just about me. So by the time this podcast goes live and you, the listener, are hearing this, it will already be the month of October. And in the month of October, Lord willing, we do plan to be going to San Diego and Metro LA.

We're going to be spending some time out on the West Coast, the three of us, the Theocast guys, we are going to be attending the Here We Still Stand Conference put on by the 1517 Network. We're really excited about that.

Thanks to Daniel Emery Price for the shout out to us and offering us the opportunity to come and be a part of everything that's going on there. That's October 17th through the 19th in San Diego. And so that's a Thursday through Saturday that the conference itself will be going on.

The Theocast guys are going to be out there from Wednesday through basically like Monday morning. So we've got several events lined up out there in San Diego and also in LA and then in Lancaster, which is north of LA.

So Wednesday night, we've got an event in San Diego. Saturday night, we're in LA. Sunday night, we're in Lancaster. So if you're in those areas, be planning to come meet us, hang out. We might be doing some live podcasts and some other fun stuff out there.

And so we hope to make the most of the trip. You can head over to Theocast .org and get more details on the plans for that West Coast trip. Look forward to meeting some of you.

Yeah, I think it's going to be a lot of fun. We've already heard from a lot of you. We've kind of sent some feelers out there just to see if people would be interested in. A lot of you have already signed up, so it's good to see you.

We've graciously have had several churches offer their buildings so that we could use them for the recordings and for meeting some of you. And we've got apparently several restaurants we're supposed to hit afterwards.

Some of you have made some great recommendations, so excited about that. I'm just excited. I'm always excited for restaurant recommendations. I love San Diego, LA. Yeah, and I actually grew up near Lancaster, so it'd be good to go there.

I used to play football there.

We tend to accept the recommendations that come with gift cards, so I'm just going to throw them out there. Said the church planner. Yeah, I know, right? Cheapskate. Let the listener understand. Said the poor church planner.

That's right, that's right. As a church planner, you learned to never turn down anything free. That's right, that's absolutely true. Yeah, space, communion elements.

Anything you want to give me, I'll take it. That's right, I'll take it. We'll find a way. Sometimes, though, sometimes it's a bad thing. Yeah, sometimes a bad thing is people tend to give away things that they just don't want to take the time to take to the dump.

So they're like, hey, do you want this? Yeah, now that's true. We're not talking about, you know, turning into goodwill or anything like that. We're talking about, like, really useful things. Could you use this hide-a-bed in your church plant?

Anyway, all right. Yeah, for the all-nighters. We got to get this moving. John, you want to introduce our topic for today?

The Synod of Dort and the Historical Meaning of the Five Points

So we are starting a new series on Calvinism or doctrines of grace. For those of you who may have received this podcast as a recommendation from a friend, or you were searching on Google or YouTube or your podcast app for Calvinism, this may have been helpful for you.

The goal behind this is a simple conversation, really, with three friends who have all wrestled. At one point, we were not Reformed. We were not Calvinistic. We did not understand historically or the understanding of God's sovereignty and then have shifted to it.

And we probably have read and heard everything you shouldn't say that is offensive and not helpful, and then we've come across a lot of what has been extremely helpful to really tackle and wrap your mind around God's sovereignty and the salvation of man.

So that's what this podcast is about. We're actually going to walk through the historic understanding of what we call Calvinism or the five points of Calvinism and then walk through each point. So total depravity would be the one that we cover today.

And if you're new to the concept of Calvinism, you may not even know what the five points are. So we'll walk through what each five point is and why historically and theologically we hold to them. And then we will then try and give you some practical understandings of how this applies to things like your assurance, the way in which you evangelize, the way in which you see your hope before God, and you relate to your brothers and sisters in Christ.

So that's the overview of the next five podcasts. Today, we're going to start with, really, most people, they kind of have heard all kinds of different histories of where Calvinism came from. And believe it or not, before I throw it over to Justin, John Calvin actually did not come up with the five points of Calvinism.

That's kind of shocking, shocking. So Justin, why don't you give us, just so the listener that may not know, why don't you give us a brief overview of the history and really the importance behind the history of this movement?

Justin Perdue. This will be a brief sort of drive-by treatment of the history of the five points of Calvinism. There will be more information in the show notes for the listener if you want to do some reading on this from a historical and theological perspective.

But just for our understanding, before we really launch into the rest of this conversation, in the year 1610, the followers of a theologian named Jacob Arminius wrote a manifesto, a large document known as the Remonstrance, in which they were challenging a number of the major doctrines of what was understood in that era to be historic Orthodox Christianity.

And so in the years 1618 and 1619, a number of theologians convened at a meeting known as the Senate of Dort to discuss not only just the assertions of the Arminians in the Remonstrance, but then to rebut those and to posit good theology from their perspective.

And so that Senate, known as the Senate of Dort, produced a number of doctrines, a number of heads of doctrine. And so what the five points of Calvinism are is a synopsis of the five heads of doctrine of the Canons of Dort.

And so this is well after John Calvin is dead. John, to your point that you made, Calvin died in the mid 1500s. And so this is happening over a half century after Calvin's death. So he certainly was not the one that articulated the five points of Calvinism.

It's again, the five heads of doctrine of the Canons of Dort summarized with this acronym TULIP, Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited or Particular Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and the Preservation or Perseverance of the Saints.

So we're talking about total depravity today and real talk. There's a lot of confusion out there about what total depravity is. And so we're going to chop it up for just a few minutes about total depravity and what it isn't before we move into what it is.

Yeah, before we moved on from the history.

So what you're saying is that this is not something, the five points is not something, a system that someone created and said, okay, I am now going to teach these, it's actually five points that a group of men said, we are going to challenge the church at large that these five points are not consistent with scripture.

Is that accurate? I would even say, John, I would even say that it's a defense of orthodoxy is really what it was because you had people rising up, you know, again, after Arminius where, I'm just going to go and say this briefly, Arminian theology is a synthesis of post-enlightenment rationalism and historic orthodox Christianity.

And so what these men were doing who gathered at the Synod of Dort, they were gathering to refute these new ideas, you know, these very rationalistic ideas that were asserted by the Arminians in their remonstrance.

And so it was a defense of orthodoxy. It was not some offensive like assault upon what everybody else already thought. You know, it was more, again, a defense of orthodox theology. And that's where these things even came from in the first place.

I think that's super helpful because a lot of times when people combat this theology, they think it's created by a man, it's not from the Bible, and it was some guy who said, listen, this is what I think God is.

And they assume that the Calvinistic perspective historically was the minority perspective, but that simply just wasn't the case back in the 15th century. Not at all.

So even in my own research, looking at different books and resources, you know, I wanted to get the other side of this. I wanted to see what people really thought about this. And I was reading a review of a book that a gentleman wrote against Reformed or Calvinistic theology.

And in his own intro, he talks about how 500 some years ago, when Calvin boiled down Christianity into five points. And I stopped right there and I said, I can't take the rest of this book seriously because this guy, this particular author doesn't even understand where these five points came from.

Just poor scholarship. That's right.

Very poor scholarship. Indeed. Yeah. And I find that unfortunately a lot of evangelicals are ignorant of church history and ignorant of historical theology.

And we need to understand too that the term Calvinism, when it was coined, was a derogatory term. Absolutely. So it's not as though it's like, oh, John Calvin and his followers were just like proudly putting on the badge and waving the flag around.

That's not at all how this happens historically. The men who identified themselves with even the canons of Dort and some of the, certainly the guys who came after Calvin who embraced not only his theology, but just kind of Orthodox Christian theology were labeled as Calvinists over and against Arminians and others who were in the church at that time.

Total Depravity Is Not Utter Depravity

So along with the history of being confused, I would say there's also a history of confusing point one, which is understanding the depravity of man or total depravity. So I think it'd be helpful at this point to, we had just explained what Calvinism historically was not, and now we're going to move to, okay, let's, before we explain what total depravity is, it's going to be helpful to explain what it is not.

This is where I think Michael Horton, professor out at Westminster Seminary in California, is really helpful. He has a little book called For Calvinism, and under a section called how total is total depravity, he writes this, total depravity is often misunderstood as understood in Reformation theology, it does not mean that each of us has committed every possible sin or that everyone is equally depraved in terms of outward actions.

In other words, what I think Michael Horton is pointing out there and what historic Christianity would say in terms of total depravity, what we are not saying is utter depravity. And what I mean by that is that every single human across the globe is completely carrying out every possible sin that they can think of.

That's exactly right, Jimmy. What we are not saying is that human beings are as bad as we could possibly be. We are also not saying that there is no inherent good in the human race. Because we are made in God's image, there is still inherent good in man.

Now that image of God has been tragically marred and corrupted through the fall. And we're going to be talking about that more later, but we don't want to be misunderstood. I'm going to quote one other theologian.

We're going to be giving you mostly Bible throughout this podcast episode, but it's good for us to quote some guys who have gone before us so that you don't think that this is just new with us. Here's another Reformed theologian named Herman Bovink speaking to this very issue.

He talks about the fact that Calvin and the Reformed have often honored the virtues of unbelievers. And he says this, not only are many sinful deeds restrained by the sword of the government, common civil decency, public opinion, the fear of disgrace and punishment and so on, but a variety of factors such as the natural love still inherent in every person, the moral character fostered by upbringing and struggle, favorable circumstances of constitution, environment or job and so on, all these frequently lead people to practice beautiful and praiseworthy virtues.

Note, however, here's the key, that while these factors may subdue the sinful disposition of the heart, they do not eradicate it.

The Noetic Effects of Sin and the Bondage of the Will

So this is where the freedom of the will comes in because someone hears, okay, wait, John, Jimmy, Justin, you were making it sound like that man does not have the freedom to choose, but yet every single day I see humanity choose to do evil or to do good.

And I'm having a hard time thinking that what you're saying when you say total depravity, it means that people, unless they're a Christian, unless they're a Christian, they don't have the capacity to choose to help the old lady across the street.

So Jimmy, how would you respond to that?

I think it's in understanding what do we mean by free will? What do we mean by will in general, particularly in terms of our conversation today, when we think about total depravity, we are not, again, we're not saying utter depravity, but in terms of our will, what we are saying in total depravity is that every single part of our personhood has been affected by the fall, has been affected by sin.

This is what we mean by total. Historically, this has been known as the noetic effects of sin, that every part of your personhood, whether it's your emotions, your will, your mind, even your body has been affected by the fall in some point.

So this is what we would understand in light of Ephesians 2, Ephesians 2 verses 1 to 10, where how does Paul describe the human condition pre-Christ? What does he say? You were dead. So it's not that you were broken, which is very popular language today.

It's not that you needed fixing, it's you needed resurrection because you were dead face down in the water, perhaps even better put, you were at the bottom of the ocean kind of dead, and so as we understand total depravity, again, what we are saying is that every part of us has been affected by the fall, even so when it comes to our will, when it comes to the decisions we make, we are free to make the decisions, am I going to like Coke or am I going to like Pepsi?

But in terms of our relation to God, we are dead to the things of God. We are dead in our spiritual state. We still have a will that we exercise and use. We obviously make all kinds of choices. We're not saying that the will is not free in that sense.

What we're saying is that the will after the fall of man is no longer good. And so again, to go back to Ephesians 2, we may pick up on this more later, but this is so incredibly helpful. Not only does Paul tell us that we were dead in our trespasses and sins, he tells us that we were following the course of the world.

He tells us that we were following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, namely we're slaves of Satan among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, so we're ruled by our passions and our desires, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and we're by nature like children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

That's what we're saying about the will. It's not that all human free will is just obliterated in terms of nobody's making decisions and you're just a robot walking around. But what we're saying is that your will has been tragically and irrevocably corrupted, meaning that you in and of yourself are unable to change yourself and you are going to do what it is in your nature to do, and you are, in fact, a slave to Satan, and you're a slave even to your own desires, and you're acting in accord with all of that.

Yeah, a good way to put this is capacity. So the scripture speaks of the capacity of a human. When you have the capacity to choose right and wrong, relatively speaking, in other words, to steal or not to steal, but you do not have the capacity to glorify and honor God, or I would say you do not have the capacity to perfectly obey God.

The reason we know this is that Genesis 6 -5 says, "...the Lord saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.". You can absolutely do a good deed with the intentions of your heart still being wicked.

Paul explains this very same concept in Romans chapter eight. He says, "...for the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to the law of God.". And this is the important key, "...indeed, it cannot," so he clarifies, "...those who are in the flesh cannot please God.".

What he means is those who are dead and only listen to their bodies, meaning that the natural state they find themselves, because he then contrasts it to those who are in the Spirit. Those who are in the Spirit live by faith, and it says, "...without faith, it's impossible to please God.".

So total depravity means you are dead without the capacity to be otherwise in your own power.

To place this back within its historical context, again, one of the things that Reformation theology was pushing against in Rome was this idea that Rome was putting forth that those who do what lies within, God denies not grace.

In other words, what that really means is that those who, again, John, speaking to your conversation and your words about capacity, those who take advantage of their own capacity to use modern language, those who pick themselves up by their bootstraps, God is going to help.

God helps those who help themselves. And really, again, this is what the five heads of doctrine in the Canons of Door were pushing against, particularly this first one, that there is no pulling yourselves up by your bootstraps.

There is no, again, if you will, cooperating with grace, because again, you are dead. We do not need a handshake with God that I will do my part and God will do his part. We need total and complete resurrection.

We need total and complete CPR because we are dead. Dead people don't shake hands. Dead people need to be brought back to life.

I think Jesus speaks to that very thing, Jimmy. In John 6, you have people who see him feed 5 ,000 people. He is turning water into wine. He's doing these amazing miracles and they just absolutely cannot accept the fact that he is the Messiah, he is God, and that the only way to the Father is through him, so this is what he finally tells them in John 6, verse 44.

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, meaning they are wandering in their depravity. They are wandering in their lack of capacity to see the Son of God standing before them in the flesh.

You know what Jesus doesn't say? He doesn't simply say, well, if you're having a problem believing, well, then just listen to me a little bit longer. No, he says very clearly that you are not capable unless the Father does something through the Spirit, unless he draws you.

This is John 3, verse 16 as well. We always say, well, it says right there, and that's the first verse, right? I mean, Justin, how do you answer that? First verse, someone's going to go to it and say, well, I mean, I'm just going to say what Jesus says because for whosoever believes, they're saved.

So isn't that just free will right there?

Jesus says a number of things with respect to this, even in the context of John chapter 3, immediately. Eight verses prior to John 3, verse 16, Jesus tells Nicodemus how the new birth, how conversion even happens.

He tells him that the wind, he compares the working of the Holy Spirit to the wind. He says the wind blows where it wishes. You hear the sound of it, but you don't know where it comes from or where it's going, so it is with all those who are born of the Spirit, and then even later on in John's gospel, in John chapter 6, Jesus will put these two things right next to each other in terms of the whosoever will piece, but then he also gives the kind of grounding underneath that.

In John 6, verse 37, he says, all whom the Father gives to me will come to me. All right, so there's that. And then whoever comes to me, I will never cast out. So you have that in one verse, whosoever will may come, but then also the reason and the ground underneath that as to why they came in the first place.

So what we're saying in this conversation about total depravity is that we, in and of ourselves, are unwilling and unable to do anything about our spiritual condition. So apart from the sovereign grace of God, apart from the sovereign working of the Holy Spirit of God to give us life in our dead condition, we will remain as we are.

And practically, you see people talk all the time in a way that denies this reality. Jimmy, you already picked up on what was being said in the medieval church. Well, in the centuries that have transpired since that time, people have said all kinds of things that sound quite similar.

People, I think the common instinct for folks in the evangelical world is that, yeah, we're messed up and we're sinful and all those kinds of things, but we still can take a step towards God. We can make a move towards God.

Like, yes, we need grace, and we can't save ourselves based on our own merit. We get that. We need God's help. We need his grace and his mercy. But I can make a move toward God, which biblically, from the perspective of total depravity, we're saying, no, that's actually not true.

Jimmy, like you said, you're a dead person in your own casket, and you can't open that casket. Dead people don't do stuff in that sense. God is the one that has to do it.

We're excited to announce that we have a new free e-book available at our website called Faith vs. Faithfulness, a Primer on Rest. And we, the hosts, put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ.

And how one leads to rest, and how the other often to a lack of assurance. And you can get this at theocast .org slash Primer. And if you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us.

You can do that by joining our Total Access membership. That's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry.

And you can do that by going to our website, theocast .org. We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

The Bondage of the Will and the Necessity of Grace

If total depravity was embraced in its fullness, if total depravity was believed upon by the masses, I would just make a prediction that the Christian self-help section in Barnes Noble or whatever bookstore you may have, it would just be completely eradicated.

Because what we would realize is that we do not change our own hearts. We do not change our own natural dispositions. We need an outside of us alien work in the spirit of God to do that. John Calvin writes this, because of the bondage of sin by which the will is held bound, it cannot move toward good, much less apply itself thereto.

For a movement of this sort is the beginning of conversion to God, which in scripture is described entirely to God's grace. Nonetheless, the will remains with the most eager inclination disposed and hastening to sin for man, when he gave himself over to this necessity, was not deprived of will, but this is key, what John Calvin says next, was not deprived of will, but of soundness of will.

Therefore, simply to will is of man, to will ill of a corrupt nature, to will well of grace, and so it's important, again, to keep this conversation in context, that total depravity, as much as it points to the wickedness of man, ultimately, what it points even more so to is the grace of God in the salvation of sinners.

Great point. This is to continue on in John with the concept of the depravity of man. Jesus multiple times has to inform his disciples just about their lack of capacity, and often he's asked, so there's the Pharisees are standing there, they hear, I think they're actually beginning to understand what Jesus is saying, not that they believe, but they understand to the point where now they're angry, and so they just want to make sure they've got the right guy.

They want to peg the right guy. John 10, 24, so the Jews gathered around him and said to him, how long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly. Jesus answered them, I told you, and you do not believe the works that I do in my Father's name, bear witness about me, but you do not believe, here's the key, because you are not among my sheep.

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. Well, some will say, well, yeah, okay, they're the sheep of God, because he's speaking of those who finally chose to be his followers, and once they finally chose to be his followers, now they're his sheep, and now they hear his voice.

Well, he clarifies that in five chapters later, John 15, 16, speaking directly to his disciples. He says, you did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask in the Father's name, he may give it to you.

It's very obvious as you work through John's words of Jesus that he was trying to get the point across that God sovereignly has to save, because men are dead and incapable of saving themselves.

Just to continue to pile this on and still using those red letters, those words that Jesus spoke again in John's gospel. Yeah, I mean, yeah, obviously they're all inspired. You know, the red letters are no more inspired than the black ones.

But here we go. John 6, again, just to be crystal clear that the point we're driving at here is our inability to do something about our natural spiritual condition. Jesus, in talking to his disciples, says this to them in John 6, 63.

He tells them, it is the spirit who gives life. The flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life, but there are some of you who do not believe, and he's just reiterating this reality that it is the Holy Spirit of God, the sovereign working of God alone, that would bring someone to faith in him.

Human beings naturally do not have that ability. And to be really clear, like lest we be misunderstood, not only do we not have the ability, we don't have the desire either. It's not as though there are people who are wanting, you know, in some way to come to Jesus, but are being somehow hindered by this mechanical robotic limitation that God has put on us.

Naturally, we do not want to come to Christ. So we're unable, but we're also unwilling. It's not what we desire. We do not naturally desire the things of God. We desire other things in accord with our fallen nature.

Paul speaks to that too, Justin, in 1 Corinthians 1. He says in verse 21, for since in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe, for the Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly or stupidity to the Gentiles.

But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. So it's very clear Paul understands that the gospel, when being presented, is not something someone logically can say, oh yes, I accept that.

As a matter of fact, Paul says, unless they are called, they cannot come out of their depravity. They can't come from death to life. They are stuck here. And this is why it is a power that is outside of themselves.

Let's think about this practically. So you're a believer. That wouldn't be helpful. That wouldn't be helpful. Right. Why would we ever want to be helpful? Practical, Jimmy. Practical. Practical.

Practical. Practical. Practical. We're talking about practical. We're talking about the Bible. Not a game. Not the Bible. Not the Bible. Practical. Here's the thing. Here's the thing. Think about the unbeliever in your life.

Let's say you are listening. You're half an hour into this conversation with us. You're sitting at the table with us. Think about the unbeliever in your life. How do you pray for their salvation? What do you ask God to do?

Here's what you're probably not praying. And if you are, maybe we need to continue this conversation elsewhere. But here is most likely what you are not praying. Dear Lord, I pray that my friend, co-worker, father, brother, sister, whoever, naturally within themselves comes to a saving decision in Christ.

You're probably not praying that. In fact, you are actually probably praying as a Calvinist that you are asking God to do a supernatural work in their heart to bring them to Christ. And again, just to keep piling on the scriptures that attest to this, Romans 3, where Paul is quoting various Old Testament passages.

Romans 3 .10, as it is written, None is righteous, no, not one. No one understands. No one seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they have become worthless. No one does good, not even one. And this is where, and it's probably coming to the end of its time, Lord willing, but this is why the seeker-sensitive movement is just so silly.

Because not only is it a world of problems in terms of its strategy and how they reach people, but rather it's just anti-scriptural. You can't be seeker-sensitive and be jiving with Romans 3 at the same time.

Because Romans 3 says what? Well, no one seeks God. Apart from the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit upon the hard and obstinate human heart, no one is seeking after God. We're told in Scripture that our hearts naturally are like stone and that the Lord has to do a work in replacing those.

He describes that most poignantly in Ezekiel 36 through the prophet there. Jeremiah 17 .9, another one of the prophets in the Old Testament, in these words, describes our heart. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick.

Who can understand it? Answer, nobody. Because that's how deep the depravity is. We don't even understand our own hearts and their own wickedness. I mean, picking up, Jimmy, you referenced Romans 3. Romans 1, at the end of that chapter, Paul describes the fact that God has not only given us over to our own lusts and passions and desires, he's also given us over to a debased mind to do what ought not be done.

And then he names all of these things that describe the human race and the things that we do naturally, that we are full of envy and murder and strife, deceit, maliciousness, all of these things, he goes on and on and on.

And one way I would illustrate this, guys, and you can pick up on this maybe and chew this up a little bit, if you want a practical apologetic for total depravity, look at young children. All three of us on the mic are dads, and maybe you don't have kids of your own, but you're at least around children on a semi-regular basis, maybe in your local church or whatever, if you're listening to this.

Well, just observe kids. None of us as dads have ever had to teach our children to do wrong. Doing wrong is as natural as breathing for us as children of Adam. It's the things that are righteous, upright, good, and virtuous that we have to train our children in.

So we've never had to look at our kids and tell them to covet what their sibling has. We've never once had to look to our children and tell them to be selfish or tell them to just blow up in anger when things don't go their way.