Ronnie W. Rogers, “Taking every thought captive…”

With regard to man’s depravity, we mean the corruption, distortion, and death that followed Adam’s choice to sin in the Garden of Eden. This now means that every person is born sinful, with a depraved or corrupted nature, which reality is painfully obvious to anyone but the most blinded materialist—I even suspect that it is overwhelmingly obvious to him if he contemplates life in light of God’s design.

I believe that this corruption is total in extent; thereby, affecting every aspect of the human being. Humans still retain the Image of God (Genesis 1:26-28, 9:6). It is corrupted but not destroyed; therefore, while man does retain the image of God, and with that the ability to choose, that ability to choose is limited to temporal and civil good. Man can only be brought to a place of truly seeking, desiring to know God or being saved by faith in Christ by the gracious mercy of God.

The following is a summary of what I affirm and disaffirm regarding depravity in relationship to salvation and Calvinism.

I affirm that man is dead in his sins (Ephesians 2:1), and that the fall of man corrupted every aspect of man, making him utterly incapable of turning to or relating to God in any way without God’s initiating and enabling him to do so; further, God sufficiently supplies man with the necessary grace in order for him to be able to exercise faith in Christ unto salvation and eternal life or to resist the genuine offer of salvation unto eternal damnation.

The means of this enablement include but are not limited to: conviction of the Holy Spirit (John 16:7-11), working of the Holy Spirit (Hebrews 6:1-6),¹ good soil (Matthew 13:1-23), and the power of the gospel (Romans 1:16). Further, that man, because of these gracious workings of God, can choose to seek God such as the Bereans who were noble, and it says because they studied the Scripture, “therefore many of them believed” (Acts 17:11); moreover, no one can come to God without God drawing (John 6:44), and that God is drawing all men (John 12:32).² Lastly, God’s kind actions toward man are because of the nature of God rather than the nature of man. In other words, God affords man salvation, love, grace, and mercy because of what is in God rather than because of what is in man; therefore, although man, on his own, cannot exercise faith and repent and therefore be saved from eternal damnation, he is enabled to do so by the gracious provision of God. And this enablement is not causation such as Calvinism’s unsolicited and irresistible regeneration.

I disaffirm that the technical meaning of being spiritually dead is adequately illustrated by using Lazarus or dead people in a cemetery…in order to show that like them, the lost who are dead in sin cannot believe until they have been given life.³ Or that this divine enablement is by limited and selective regeneration, which precedes faith and necessarily results in faith in Christ (Acts 16:31-32; Romans 1:16). Further, that only some are drawn to the real offer of salvation (see affirmation); finally, that the truth of Calvinism, which is that God withholds regeneration from some who would otherwise be saved if He chose not to withhold regeneration from them, sufficiently or satisfactorily demonstrates the glorious character of God as portrayed in the Scripture as well as sufficiently and accurately represents the quality of His love, grace, mercy, provision, desire, and plan as represented in Scripture.

Next Topic: Atonement for Sin

1. Over sixty times in the New Testament God says faith, belief, and trust in God is to be the basis of receiving God’s forgiveness and grace [↩]
2. The same Greek word for “draw”, ἑλκύω, is used in both verses [↩]
3. Romans 10:9, “if you will confess….” which no physically dead graveyard man can do, but a spiritually dead man, by the grace of God, can do. In Romans 6:11, it says that “in the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” (see also Romans 6:2; Ephesians 2:5-6; Colossians 2:12-13) If being dead in sin means one can’t respond to God, then does being dead to sin mean that the Christian cannot respond to sin? A dead body cannot respond, e.g., bodies in graveyards or Lazarus, but the person who in death is separated from his body is very much aware, e.g. Jesus, Acts 3:15; the dead, Matthew 22:32, Luke 16:30ff; therefore, the graveyard with its appropriate implications—they cannot speak, think, make moral evaluations…is not a metaphor and an suitable replica of spiritual death. [↩]