How Dead is Dead?

In this, the first of a number of pieces, we will unpack the Five Points of Calvinism, or what more accurately could be called the Five Responses of the Orthodox Church to the errors of Jacobus Arminius, and his followers.

In The Netherlands, early in the 17th Century, Arminius introduced significant innovations into the historic doctrine of Salvation, as taught by the Protestant Reformers. These innovations can be summarized in five essential points.

First, while the Fall has radically affected human beings, rendering us all depraved and just recipients of the wrath and curse of God, it has not so affected us as to leave us helpless before the claims of Christ in the Gospel. Arminius taught that fallen man, aided by the grace of God, was able to respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ by trusting and receiving the salvation offered by Christ.

Second, without denying the Bible’s teaching of the electing grace of God found throughout Scripture, Arminius taught that God’s choosing one sinner instead of another rested on the basis of foreseen faith. In other words, God chose those He knew would believe in the gospel. This election, therefore, was not the cause of such saving faith, but rather a response to it. The ultimate case of insider trading, you might say!

Third, Arminius taught that Jesus Christ really did die in the place of every human being who ever lived on this earth. And, when He died, he claimed Jesus paid the ransom price for all the sins of all humanity. What distinguishes between the saved and the lost, therefore, do you see, is not something Christ has done (He died in the place of every sinner), but rests instead on the things we do—faith, repentance, and perseverance in the grace of God.

Fourth, while the Holy Spirit does indeed incline people towards faith, and, at times, even drags human beings towards Christ in faith, His efforts can be successfully resisted by sinners if they so desire. No one’s salvation is guaranteed. We must cooperate with the Spirit if we are to come in a saving relationship with the Holy Spirit. But in the final analysis, such drawing by the Spirit can be resisted by human beings. He will not violate or tinker with our free will. If a human being, therefore, is to be saved, this offer of salvation must be freely accepted by us. In the Arminian scheme, God will not do more for one sinner than for another. We must make the choice, god will not make that choice for us.

Fifth, because, when it comes to the salvation of a human soul, the deciding contribution is made by us believing into Jesus Christ. Such a salvation, by its very nature, cannot be secure. Think about it for a moment: If we fail to persevere in the faith, from the Arminian perspecgive, we can be saved and then lost again. When Jesus said nobody could snatch one of His sheep from the Father’s hand (John 10:25-27), He did not mean to suggest we could not snatch ourselves out of the Father’s hand. From this perspective, salvation is not secure. Our hatred and distrust of God keeps us back from trusting in Jesus. We must lay down our deadly doings, our rebellion, our godless plans to make somethin of ourselves in the Church, and we need to give ourselve completely to Uesus Chirst.

In 1618-1619, the Dutch Church called a Synod in a city called Dordrecht to juddge the matter. After almost two years deliberations, they produced the Canons of Dordt, condemning the teaching of Arminius and His followers, and propounding the traditional protestant soteriology we call today the Five Points of Calvinism.

Over the next few weeks, I want to take a lesirely walk through each of these points, while we examine the Biblical basis of this teaching.

Today we will consdier the first point, which i s Total Depravity…

In Paul’s letter to the Christians at Ephesus, he describes the condition of fallen human beings without grace as “dead in trespasses and in sins” (Eph. 2:1). That is to say, we are spiritually dead: dead souls in dying bodies. This is clearly a radical diagnosis. What does the apostle mean?

First of all, Paul affirms that as dead sinners, we are cut off from God’s life-giving presence. Fish live through their connection to the ocean. Electrical appliances live through their connection to electricity. Green plants live through their connection to sunlight. Remove any of these things from their essential source of energy, and they immediately begin to die. Exactly the same thing can be said about a soul and the presence of God.

Paul makes this clear when he says, “Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated (cut off) from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart” (Eph. 4:17–18).

Second, Paul asserts that as dead souls, we are committed to and trapped in a life of a rebellion. In Romans 8, for example, we read, “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom. 8:7–8). Notice what Paul is saying here: it’s not just that men and women, fallen in sin, are rebels by accident (like someone breaking a speed limit of which they were ignorant). No, unregenerate human beings deliberately defy God’s law from a spirit of implacable hostility. Indeed, so vehement is this hostility that it traps them. Vested in such anatagonism with all of their soul, they cannot free themselves from such antagonism. Such is their hatred that they are not able to submit to God. We have said this before: they can’t submit to God’s law because they won’t, and it is precisely because they won’t that they can’t.

Third, Paul declares that our minds cannot grasp the light and wisdom of God’s perspective. This is why people do not listen to the Bible. As Calvin says, “Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color, or sweet and bitter things do of their taste.” When men arise from their reading of Scripture unimpressed and unmoved by its authority, beauty, and power, the problem lies not in the Scriptures. These individuals are dead to it and blind, much like a blind man cannot see the light of the sun. His faculty of perception is broken. Isn’t this what Paul means when he said to the Corinthians, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14)? In a similar vein in his letter to Titus, Paul says, “To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled” (Tit. 1:15). Sin has touched every fibre of their being. All their facultieds have been corrupted by and given over to the devil and the darkness.

Theologians call this the noetic effect of sin; that is, it affects our ability to think straight, to know as we ought to know, to feel as we ought to feel, and to choose as we ought to choose.

Fourth, he states that we are slaves of sin and selfishness. As Jesus said to the Pharisees, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34, ESV). As such, we live “in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Eph. 2:3, ESV). The driving force of such a life never rises above what looks good to the eye, what feels good to the body, and what seems good to the mind. They never do anything purely soli deo gloria. They might not truly love their friends, but they haven’t even begun to love their enemies, and they won’t love God (at least not as He reveals Himself to them in nature and in Scripture). These are all the marks of an earthbound soul, dead in sin.

If these four contentions are true, and they are, how can any person be saved? Is it really hard to answer that question? God must do something. In fact, God must do everything. He must give life where there was before only death (Eph. 2:4-5). He must resurrect the dead soul, an action the Bible describes as a new birth (John 3:3, 5) or regeneration (Tit. 3:5). He must, quite literally, drag us to Jesus, or we will never come at all (John 6:44).

The applications of this truth are legion and well beyond the scope of this article. But churches that fail to grasp this truth tend to fall into the trap of seeking to please men rather than God. It’s almost inevitable, is it not? If men are not really spiritually dead but only sick, and if men are able to decide for Christ on their own, well then our efforts have to revolve around persuading men, pleasing men, impressing men, and attracting men to the claims of Christ.

But that’s a fool’s errand with fallen sinners whose basic problem is that they hate God and refuse to come to Him. Such people need much more than just to be impressed by an atmosphere, or entertained by a certain type of music, or brought to tears by a powerfully emotive message. They need to be saved. They need new life, and God’s ordinary means for accomplishing that end is the pure, unvarnished gospel (Romans 1:16-18).

However, if we focus on drawing people, do you see, we will almost inevitably tend to file off the rough edges of a gospel that men by nature find repulsive, unattractive, and profoundly offensive. Compromise that message, and we remove the sinner's only hope of life from the dead, which is the very thing that he so desperately needs. As Paul said, “Faith comes again by hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ.” Or, '"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus who, according to his abundant mercy, has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ the dead.”

Here is a firm place on which to stand amidst a drying world, shifting in unbelief, darkened in sin, and bound for a lost eternity. What we cannot do, dead as we are through sin, however, God can do if we wait for Him in the gospel. As Luther says, ‘"Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of Christ.” The God who formed the world out darkness using bare, spoken words is also able to call us out of darkness, and assure us of salvation through the Gospel, and by the same means!

After all, who is this God? He is the One who calls the things that are not into existence, who speaks and it is done, from whom no purpose of His heart can be withheld. This God is well able to take his Truth and call sinners out of dead-darkness into His marvelous light, releasing them from the burden of sin, and keeping them in Christ forever.