# Total Depravity



## The Author of my Faith (Mar 10, 2015)

I am having a discussion with a good friend who is greatly influenced by Arminian Theology. He took issue with a text I used to support the doctrine of Total Depravity. Genesis 6:5. He replied by stating:

“God has never removed the seed of righteousness that he put in us at the beginning.” 

“I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” John 12:24

"So, the seed of righteousness lays dormant in the un-regenerated fallen man"

I assume this comes from the Prevenient Grace view? That God gives man the opportunity to make a free-will decision and then if that person does not God says "Sorry Charlie you had your chance". And I for the life of me cannot see how anyone can get "seed of righteousness in unregenerate man" from John 12:24 which is about Jesus?


I briefly read through this article. But I am looking for something that I can give him in smaller chunks that emphatically refutes the concept of “a seed of righteousness lying dormant”. I looked at some articles on the Image of God from Piper and Frame but nothing clearly to show my friend. 

Any suggestions?

Thanks!


The Image of God?
The Image of God in Man: A Reformed Reassessment
“Even among those preachers who desire to be regarded as orthodox, who do not deny the Fall as a historical fact, few among them perceive the dire effects and extent thereof. "Bruised by the fall," as one popular hymn puts it, states the truth far too mildly; yea, entirely misstates it. Through the breach of the first covenant all men have lost the image of God, and now bear the image of the Devil (John 8:44). The whole of their faculties are so depraved that they can neither think (2 Cor. 3:5), speak, nor do anything truly good and acceptable unto God. They are by birth, altogether unholy, unclean, loathsome and abominable in nature, heart, and life; and it is altogether beyond their power to change themselves”. - A. W. Pink, The Doctrine of Sanctification (Choteau, MT: Gospel Missions, n.d.), p. 45.
“The search to locate the image of God somewhere inside man can never become concretely meaningful. It can never give us comfort and encouragement because it is basically on the wrong track. The essence or heart of man cannot be found by looking inside him at some of his faculties. Rather the essence of man comes out in his way of relating to the bond with which God ties man to Himself, the "Love me and keep my commandments." When God’s Word tells us that we are His image-bearers, it wants us to know not that we have certain qualities or abilities which remain vague and difficult to relate to the bread and butter of daily living, but that we, in the very way we are put together, in our whole way of living and acting, must give a reflection of the king whom we serve ... These qualities set Adam as God’s image-bearer. True knowledge, righteousness and holiness; that’s what it is all about”. – Harry Fernhout


Fifth, if unregenerate man is the image of God (in some sense) then there must be some good in him. This follows not merely from God’s delight in His creation, including man who was created after His image (Gen. 1:26-27), as "very good" (v. 31) but also, and principally, from the idea of the imago dei itself. The image of God cannot be bad, nor can it be merely neutral. God is good and, therefore, the image of God is good.86 Man must still have a spark of goodness in him.87 Moreover, God loves that which is good and He surely loves His image. Thus He blesses those in His image (Gen 1:26-28; 5:1-2). If the broader/narrower distinction is to be followed, there is a love or blessing or favour of God for all men.88 This is absolutely intolerable. Moreover, if God loves all men, since His love is a giving love (cf. John 3:16), Christ must have given Himself on the cross for all men (cf. Eph. 5:1-2). Since God’s love is also an active, omnipotent love, they will be saved. After all, God’s love includes not only a favourable and gracious attitude. It necessarily involves His seeking the good of the one beloved and bringing him into covenant fellowship with Himself, the Holy Trinity. This is demanded, for how could God possibly suffer even a tiny part of His image to reside eternally in Hell?89 All these things follow, "by good and necessary consequence" (asWestminster Confession 1:6 puts it), from the teaching that the natural man is still, in the broader sense, the image of God. On the other hand, Scripture declares in the most emphatic terms that Jehovah’s soul "hateth" (Ps. 11:5; 5:5), "abhors" (5:6) and "is angry with the wicked every day" (7:11). His wrath abides on them (John 3:36) and He will "destroy" them (Ps. 5:6) with "the instruments of death" (7:13; cf. 11:6). Yea, the Lord "despise their image [selem]" (73:20). To conclude, the doctrine that all men are in the image of God in the wider sense is both theologically and biblically untenable.


The Canons of Dordt take it a step further. After defining the imago dei as uprightness of heart, purity of affections and holiness of the whole man and explaining that it was completely lost ("he forfeited these excellent gifts") and, indeed, turned to its exact opposite by the fall ("blindness of mind, horrible darkness, vanity and perverseness of judgment," "wicked, rebellious and obdurate in heart and will;" III/IV:1), the Canons state, "Man after the fall begat children in his own likeness. A corrupt stock produced a corrupt offspring" (III/IV:2). We may express the argument of the Canons thus: (1) The image of God consists of spiritual virtues (III/IV:1); (2) These were all lost at the fall where man was completely filled with moral corruption (III/IV:2-3); (3) Thus all the seed of Adam do not have the image of God. Moreover (4) Canons III/IV:4 speak of man’s remaining a rational-moral creature after the fall but with no reference to the broader sense of the image of God. Thus the Reformed confessions are fully consistent with the position of Cocceius, Witsius, Perkins, Bayne, Dabney, Homer C. Hoeksema, et al., but present serious difficulties to those wishing to advocate the broader and narrower view of the image of God.


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## Contra_Mundum (Mar 10, 2015)

I don't think the question you hope to address with your friend is best served by that particular article. The reason being, it does not appear to directly address his question; and it raises at least one distracting point of controversy (?) between the author and a sizable segment of the Reformed world.

Namely, that there is both a narrow and broad way of thinking about the image of God in man--including fallen man continuing _in some sense_ to bear the image of God.

Your friend's proposal is that there is some _spiritual relic_ of the divine image in fallen man. The article you've quoted to the effect (properly) that this is untrue scripturally, and unsupported in any Confessional sense. So, it is unquestionably the biblical and Reformed position that meaningful knowledge, righteousness, and holiness are lost to man in the fall. Man as the moral image of God is found once again only through union with the Lord Jesus Christ.

Gen.9:6 "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image." I would not doubt but that the author of the article has some sort of answer to offer to this text (though the excerpt make no mention of it). But on the face of it, the justice of capital punishment lies in part upon the base: that an assault on one's fellow man is an indirect assault on God--how?--by virtue of the fact that man was made in God's image; and we may properly infer that he is, in some genuine sense, still an image-bearer. In other words, it is not merely a retrospective attack, but of the present moment.

The statement applies across the board, to elect and reprobate alike, to the godly and the godless. This is a clear implication of the mark God assigned to the godless Cain, forbidding vigilantee justice upon even him, who so deserved to pay right-soon for his brother's blood. Furthermore, Paul could say in Rom.13:4, concerning every lawful secular governmental ministry (even so self-serving an administration as the Empire), that "he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer." The extreme sentence of death continues to abide under the hand of the magistrate; and there are some crimes in human society for which there is no just recompense by restitution or punishment short of _lex talionis_.

This description of justice cannot rest simply in some version of the theory of human equality. Our Lord did not say that only his believers were harmed by or were guilty of murder (6th commandment) simply on account of hatred. His observation is applicable to every person. Jas.3:9, "With it [the tongue] we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse *people who are made in the likeness of God*." It is not just the Christians, as the subject of curses, who validate James' accusation.

Man as God's creation is the image of God partly by what he is (ontology) and partly by what he does (ethics), as God himself declared both prior to the fall and afterward. But this admission in no way legitimately opens a door to accepting the idea that fallen man retains any inherent goodness. The points in the article that reinforce the reality of total human depravity (mainly by appealing to Scripture) are faithful and accurate.


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