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"T"
Stands for Total Depravity Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 20,2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 1:26-31 T.U.L.I.P. We embark, this morning, on a little summer series of sermons, a series actually requested by a few members of the congregation. The title of the series is "T.U.L.I.P." Now lest you think we are headed to the garden for a sampling of the summer flora and fauna, be forewarned! We are headed to a garden, but it is the garden of our origin where we will consider the five so-called "disputed points of Calvinism." T.U.L.I.P. is an acrostic for: Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace and the Perseverance of the Saints. They are doctrines we have considered before, so some of these reflections will be a kind of review for those who have been in these pews over the past few years. Yet I hope the exercise of considering them together will find us, at the end of the season, with a better understanding of these old doctrines and the help they may offer to our complicated, post-modern lives. "T," then, stands for total depravity. "They have all fallen away, they are all alike depraved; there is none that does good, no, not one." The Heidelberg Catechism asks in the sixth place what we seem to be asking, these days, in the first: Did God create man evil and perverse like this? The catechism's answer would surprise those who expect to hear from Calvinists, as regards human nature, the dour doctrine of total depravity or the belief that sin was original and passed on from generation to generation. Did God create human beings evil and perverse like this? "No," the catechism says. "On the contrary, God created man good and in his image, that is in true righteousness and holiness, so that he might rightly know God his Creator, love him with his whole heart, and live with him in eternal blessedness, praising and glorifying him." Evidence for this created goodness is hard to come by. Evidence rather would be that we come by our evil and perversity naturally, while any goodness is achieved through the strength of a will or the ordering of society clear contrary to our nature. There is no need for a litany of such evidence this morning or any morning, given the headlines of murder and mayhem near and far. Yet the Christian faith does not draw its conclusions about being human from evidence suited for statistics or sensational front-page stories. In fact, when asked about what constitutes our true humanity, Christians have cited two unique events as cause to confess at the beginning that God created the human creature good, and as cause to conclude in the end that the good work God began in us will be brought to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. The first of these two events is the event of creation itself: "So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." What does our creation in God's image mean and matter given the headlines? Some have said our ability to reason and act accordingly is what originally marks us as made in God's image and so good. Others have said that when God breathed the spirit of life into this creature formed from dust, the resulting soul, rather than the carnal body, constituted God's image in us and so what was good eternally. Still others believe we are human because we were given, in the garden, the capacity to make moral decisions. God gave us the ability to be good, in other words. Finally there are those who hold that the command to have dominion over the earth signals the coincidence of God's power and the power arrangements of those made in God's image. Power, because it is from God, is good and gives us reason to claim God's imprimatur for the imposition of our better will. Now, all of these supposedly biblical understandings of what makes a human being human obviously have far ranging social consequences. Take, for example, the assertion that what makes us human is our moral goodness or is the idea, as Marilynne Robinson puts it, "that society can and should produce good people, that is, people suited to life in whatever imagined optimum society, who then stabilize the society in its goodness so that it produces more good people, and so on. First the bad ideas must be weeded out and socially useful ones put in their place. Then the bad people must be identified, especially those that are carriers of bad ideas." You may take this reasoning to the right or to the left. Either way, it is the case that when our humanity is recognized or denied by a particular trait, be that trait our reason, our religious sensibility, our moral code, our power, then what we see and seek in one another is seen through a very selective screen. But if, instead of all these, the sixth answer of the Heidelberg Catechism tells us the truth about what it means, biblically, to be created in the image of God and so, from the beginning, good, then we begin to see and to stake our lives on precisely what is not evident in one another and in this poor, broken world. Listen again: God created human beings good...so that we might rightly know God as our Creator, love God with our whole heart, and live with God...praising and glorifying God. In other words, what makes human beings human and human existence good is the unique relationship we are given to have with the One who created us: children of God we are--we all are! Therefore to say that we are good is to say that we are God's, that we were made for God, that our lives find their meaning and purpose in God, that our days are a gift of God to be received with gratitude and thankfulness. Or, to be more specific, God made human beings to correspond to God in such a way that we may speak to God and listen to God, speaking and listening so that "something can happen between creator and creature." By implication, the word "good" must be pronounced, as well, over the head of every human creature born into this world, no matter how old and infirm, how disturbed or malformed, no matter the sex or sexual orientation, the skin color or social origin, the brokenness or the perversity. "This holds despite all differences among people," writes Claus Westermann, "it goes beyond all differences of religion, beyond belief and unbelief. Every human being of every religion and in every place, even when religions are no longer recognized, has been created in the image of God." Now, if this is the answer we hold to be true, we can only confess that not a one of us, nor a one of God's children, has managed to live in relation to God or to the rest of humanity as though this were true. We judge, we hurt, we deny, we destroy: we are judged, are hurt, are denied, are destroyed. And so mutually, we mar the image in us even as we miss the image in another, missing it in part, we say by way of excuse, because the other has so marred it...all of which lands us squarely in the Calvinist camp of those who must consider the truth of humanity's total depravity alongside the truth that we were created good. The good I would do, I do not, wrote Paul, and the very thing I hate, I do. Now we are in more familiar territory. I think of the last, late adolescent entry made by Anne Frank in her diary: "A voice sobs within me: 'There you are, that's what's become of you: you're uncharitable, you look supercilious and peevish, people dislike you....' I start by getting snappy, then unhappy, and finally I twist my heart round again so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and what I could be, if...there weren't any other people in the world." No doubt, the bad on Anne's outside, when placed against the evil of those about to find her out, does not compare. And yet, says Robinson, "The Calvinist doctrine of total depravity--'depravity' means 'warping or distortion'--was directed against [what are called] casuistical enumerations of sins, against the attempt to assign [sins] different degrees of seriousness [based on general principles of ethics]. For Calvinists, we are all absolutely, that is equally, unworthy of, and dependent upon, the free intervention of grace." So we are made in God's image, but we are equally prone to warp that image, that relationship, beyond recognition. Further, proclaims Ben Lacy Rose, "the doctrine declares that this depravity is total, meaning that it affects every department of our nature: intellect, emotions, will…rendering us totally incapable of achieving salvation or peace without God's grace." Or to be more specific, we will know no peace without Him who was born to redeem the image of God, the relationship for which we were made, within the confines of human flesh...without Him who, in the end, will bring to completion the good thing God began in us. Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God and has stamped that image anew upon every one of God's children who appear, in the meantime, to be totally depraved! Neither reason nor soul nor morality nor power revealed him as human being in the image of God. Rather our true humanity was revealed in this: that in every moment of his life, and especially in his death, he had to do with the Living God. God's purpose for human life--that it be lived so that something might happen between Creator and creature--was fully realized in this One whom we call the Christ. Then it follows directly that something radically new also happened in him between creature and creature. In his living and his dying, God revealed what it means and matters to see every other human being as a child of God. From the lepers to the blind man begging, from the soldier under orders to the woman hemorrhaging and unclean for twelve years, from the rich young man who went away sorrowful to the woman caught in adultery, from the paralytic whose sins were forgiven to a demoniac exorcised of evil spirits. Even in the Pharisees and scribes, whom he recalled to themselves though they heard it not, in all of these, Jesus met the warping of God's image with the woof of grace incarnate, met the reality of a relationship denied with news of sin forgiven, met the evil and perversity evident with the promise of humanity restored. Jesus' life, death and resurrection are God's new creation revealed. In him we see and now have reason to hope, in the end, that the good work God began in us, and in all of God's children, will be brought to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. What could such an old doctrine possibly mean and what could it matter for such a time as this, and for these days of ours purposed by God within the brackets of our origins and our destiny? The doctrine of total depravity reminds us that we live, you and I, at most, now and again, remembering that originally we were made in the image of God. "Original righteousness" this is called: the memory we have of our original creation, which is given according to Reinhold Niebuhr, "in the moment when the self transcends itself and history and remembers its origin and its destiny." We remember that we were made for God, that we were made to live in relation to God, that we were made to love God and glorify God and enjoy God forever. Disturbed sinners, he calls us. Because we remember that we were created good, we live in our present world as those who are given enough wisdom to be disturbed by the silence we keep as creature to Creator. And we are given enough grace, now and again, to do something about it, preferably on our knees or in the halls of congress or behind the closed doors of our domesticated lives. For these actions, we may claim very little, because our memory being jogged only by God's grace, the rest of the time we live forgetting our origins and the origins of everyone else we encounter. Therefore, in the meantime, we may only live as forgiven children of God who also must forgive; and as redeemed children of God who may have hope, the conviction of things not seen. It is a radically different way of life, I tell you, from the ways which divide and destroy. So it was on July 15, 1944, three weeks before the Gestapo discovered the Franks' hiding place, Anne could bear witness to the memory and hope within her, writing not from sentiment but from evidence not seen: "In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will be given again. Yours, Anne." Thanks be to God. |