Tuesday, October 17, 2017

500, Part 2: Depravity

This doubtless means man's mind can become spiritually wise only in so far as God illumines it.

Christ also confirmed this most clearly in his own words when he said: "No one can come to me unless it be granted by my Father" [John 6:44 p.]...But nothing is accomplished by preaching him if the Spirit, as our inner teacher, does not show our minds the way. Only those men, therefore, who have heard and have been taught by the Father come to him.


John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

The Reformed doctrine of salvation begins in humility! Human reasoning itself is deeply impacted by human sinfulness. You will not reason your way to God! In fact, you will not reason your way to yourself! I have known so many people, and read others, who truly believe that their drift into secular compromise was ultimately authored by their own dispassionate and superior intellects. It is a lie! It is not the mind that exposes the alleged want of Christianity and then lives accordingly; it is the sinful heart that moves the mind to rationalize its choices. We love to arrogate control over our lives to our own reasoning minds, but surely it is possible that the self-assured master is a slave.

It is an interesting question to probe how well our reasoning works as fallen creatures. In the quote above, John Calvin obviously had a low view of human reason, especially in its capacity to provide a clear moral assessment of its own state, much less a clear understanding of God and His ways. Human reason, left to itself, invents such measurements as utilitarianism, pragmatism, relativism, and general secularism, and we always come out smelling like roses. In other words, we measure ourselves by ourselves. It is attractive to do so because as long as you measure yourself by another human being you will never feel anything like condemnation, and you will never see a problem greater than human reason can repair. This is the "darkened understanding" to which Paul refers.

We have many moral teachers in our day, but perhaps they all have in common the singular belief that human reason is, or can be, our savior. Aristotle was the father of all of this. Secular thinkers may grant the need for a congress of the intelligentsia to fix more complicated problems like poverty, but nothing is beyond the reach of human reason.

Calvin and the other Reformers were less enthusiastic of the idea. For them, our condition is beyond desperate. It is not as if we are merely incapable of repairing the ruin of the world; we don't even have a clear knowledge of what is really wrong or right. Consider the moral disunity of our nation at this time in history as ample evidence of the point. Who is our moral authority when the moral epistemology of the age is that there is no higher authority than man? We are left with a gaggle of voices all shouting at or past each other. Students in schools today are encouraged to "find their own moral voice," which is a perfect recipe for the tyranny of moral confusion.

God did not leave us in this condition. He revealed His glory, His truth, His law and His Son clearly to us in the pages of His infallible Word, without which there is no true north for the internal compass of human reason or human conscience. More than that, He has graciously provided His Spirit in His people, who repairs and calibrates the internal compass itself. He has provided the standard and He has provided an internal witness to the standard.

The point here is that the first effect of our depravity, of our fallenness, is that we can no longer reason clearly about our fallenness. We are deceived as to who we are, our native powers, our understanding of God. And if that is the case, how can we be saved? Even if God comes to mankind in all of His glory and entreats them to receive Him and His healing grace, what is going to happen to them in their blinded and corrupted condition? No, as Calvin suggested so long ago, depraved people need the internal teacher of the Spirit, and the external teacher of the law and the Son just to understand their own fallen condition, much less flee to the savior because of it. The true gospel teaches that every resource for salvation comes from a source external to the individual. He is not helped or supported in his own well-reasoned efforts to fix himself. No! He is given utterly foreign knowledge of himself, God, sin, the hope of the gospel, and all!

The Reformers indeed cherished no high view of man or his powers, but that made all the more room for a high view of the Savior!