Sin Remains: My Response To Rick Phillips

A couple weeks ago I posted a blog asking the question “Are Christians totally depraved?” The point I wanted to make was simple: “Because Christian’s never leave off sinning, they can never leave the Gospel” (Spurgeon).

The reason this is so important is because we will always be suspicious of grace (“yes grace, but…”) until we realize our desperate need for it. Our dire need for God’s grace doesn’t get smaller after God saves us. We never outgrow our need for Christ’s finished work on our behalf-we never graduate beyond our desperate need for Christ’s righteousness and his strong and perfect blood-soaked plea “before the throne of God above.”

But I had to tease out my answer a bit because for centuries theologians have acknowledged that “total depravity” means more than one thing. I wrote:

On the one hand, total depravity means that we are all born “dead in our trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1-3; Colossians 2:13; Romans 3:10-12; Romans 8:7-8), with no spiritual capacity to incline ourselves Godward. We do not come into this world spiritually neutral; we come into this world spiritually dead…In this sense, total depravity means we are “totally unable” to go to God. We will not because we cannot, and we cannot because we’re dead.

I continued:

So, in the sense above, Christians are obviously not totally depraved. We who were dead have been made alive.

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus…(Ephesians 2:4-6)

But once God regenerates us by his Spirit, draws us to himself, unites us to Christ, raises us from the dead, and grants us status as adopted sons and daughters, is there any sense in which we can speak of Christian’s being totally depraved?

Yes.

Theologians speak of total depravity, not only in terms of “total inability” to come to God on our own because we’re spiritually dead, but also in terms of sin’s effect: sin corrupts us in the “totality” of our being. Our minds are affected by sin. Our hearts are affected by sin. Our wills are affected by sin. Our bodies are affected by sin.    Continue at Tullian Tchividjian