NOTE: If you are reading this series, it would be most helpful to read them in order, beginning with Part 1.
Whatever your theology is, even if you are an atheist, there are two cornerstones that will drive your entire worldview. Those two cornerstones are your doctrine of God (Theology Proper) and your doctrine of man (Anthropology). What you believe about those two things determines practically everything else. All other doctrines are based on the foundation of your view of who God is/isn’t and who man is/isn’t.
The “T” in the TULIP acrostic is for Total Depravity and is a particular anthropology, a doctrine of man. It describes what man is like, his condition before God, the state in which we are born and find ourselves.
A decade or more before I came to wrestle with the doctrines of grace, I knew about the universal sinfulness of mankind since the Fall in Genesis 3, so total depravity wasn’t a stretch for me. Reading any news site for any length of time will tell you something is wrong with mankind in general. I think terminology again interferes a bit as we speak of criminals doing unspeakably dark things as “depraved” and for this to then speak of our nice neighbor as “totally depraved” needs clarification. It doesn’t mean everyone is a serial ax-killer and is as evil as they possibly could be. “Depravity” means we are unable to come to or please God in our natural-born fallen sinful state, and the “total” means that sin affects every part of our being (mind, emotions, will). So, Jim our non-Christian neighbor may hold down a nice job, love his family, be great to have over for a BBQ, volunteer at the local soup kitchen, and give to all sorts of charities and the question is in what sense is he “totally depraved”? The answer to that involves this verse:
The heart is deceitful above all things,
Jeremiah 17:9 ESV
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
Though Jim isn’t out to hurt or harm his fellow creatures and he’s a really nice, responsible fellow, God tells us all our hearts are desperately sick (as the KJV translates it “desperately wicked“) and is at the apex of deceitfulness. I’d venture it’s safe to say 99 people out of 100 do not believe that, which is evidence of the absolute effectiveness of the heart’s deception. We think we’re pretty decent folk and God is telling us we’re not. This is all about your frame of reference. All we know apart from Scripture is this world and our life in it, so we look around and think we’re doing OK. However, if your reference point is the absolutely perfect, blazing, “consuming fire” holiness of God, you’ll arrive at a different conclusion that you could label total depravity. Do a study sometime on when “good people” in the Bible came into contact and saw the Holy God. They can’t fall down and confess their utter sinfulness fast enough. It really is all about your frame of reference. Add this verse to this concept:
for whatsoever is not of faith is sin.
Romans 14:23b ESV
That verse teaches us that even the best works of Jim and all the rest of us, all the good ‘whatsoever’ you can think of, if it is not of faith in Christ then it is sin. It is rebellion against the Creator; performed for the glory of the creature, not God’s glory. Performed as a form of worship of the creature, not the Creator. The nicest, kindest, most generous person you know, if their acts aren’t for the glory of Jesus Christ, then everything they do is an offense to God. Again, it is all about your frame of reference. From a purely human perspective this is all absolutely ridiculous. But if you align with God’s perspective revealed in his word, it makes total sense.
But we are all as an unclean thing,
Isaiah 64:6 KJV
and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags;
That tells me our best deed on our best day is a “filthy rag” to a perfectly Holy God whose minimum standard is being holy as He is holy; perfect as He is perfect. God isn’t grading on a curve and none of us can meet the standard – as Paul states in Romans 3:23 we all “fall short of the glory of God”. So yes, we are totally depraved and can do nothing but sin on our best day apart from Christ. He is grading us on one thing alone: have we seen our sin, repented, and are we depending on His Son’s life of perfect righteousness to be counted as ours and for His death to pay the penalty for our falling short, our sin, our rebellion, our glory stealing?
God’s Spirit, using His word, has to get anyone to the point where they understand the total depravity of all people of all time in all parts of their being apart from Christ.
As to the history of the “T” in TULIP, there’s an interesting point. If I go to the Articles of Remonstrance that defined the Arminians’ 5 areas of disagreement with the Dutch Reformed Church and Protestant Reformers like Calvin, this issue in Article 3 is peculiar in that they do not disagree but instead affirm total depravity; affirming that man is unable to do the will of God or save himself apart from the grace of God. To get to the actual difference, I have to mix in Article 4 that describes the type of grace they mean, known as prevenient grace. This concept from the Arminians became part of Roman Catholicism and Methodism as well. ‘Prevenient’ simply means ‘preceding’. According to Arminianism, this is a grace that God universally dispenses upon all that enables them to choose salvation in Christ. Thus, you have a universal total depravity but matched to that is God’s universal prevenient grace that enables men to overcome it and freely choose Christ. Arminius taught that prevenient grace will inevitably lead to salvation unless finally resisted by the individual. The issue I have with that is Romans 1:18-3:20. I simply can’t read that section of Scripture and come to a conclusion that the Scriptures teach this. The Apostle Paul, before he launches into several chapters of the glory of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and salvation – the “good news” – teaches on what we all must deal with that makes the good news so good; namely the bad news of the universal condemnation of all mankind. Paul spends basically two chapters hammering home the fact that all men are without excuse before God and under his wrath – totally depraved. Paul tells us in Ephesians:
among whom we all once lived 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.
Ephesians 2:3 ESV
This is the bad news that makes the good news so good. If you are saved today, ask yourself this one question – “saved from what?” That is a very probing question. The Bible’s answer is we are saved from the wrath of God. If you are saved, God is saving you from himself. Spend a few minutes contemplating this verse about Jesus, the Lamb of God:
calling to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?”
Revelation 6:16-17
God’s offer of salvation is open to all and if you bow the knee now in repentance and faith, you are saved from the “wrath of the Lamb”. This typically isn’t a part of the gospel presented today and as a result people can have a “take him or leave him” attitude about Jesus – they seem to be doing just fine without adding the constraints of Christianity to their life. They have no concept of what they need to be saved from. To many, a gospel is presented and it’s implied if not stated that you are saved basically from “missing out” on an even better earthly life so folks are willing to make that trade-off because their life is currently pretty good. Others say, “Oh! Jesus will make my life even better? Less problems? OK, I’m in!” The wrath of the Lamb is a totally foreign concept that just does not compute. In the verse above from the book more fully titled “The Revelation (revealing) of Jesus Christ”, large percentages of the population are crying out to for stones to crush them rather than face the wrath of the Lamb. Does that fit in your concept of Jesus? He IS love and loving and gracious and merciful and desires to save us … from his second coming with his completely just wrath against our sin that has us depraved totally. We have to wrestle with heaven is God’s heaven AND hell is God’s hell. But the prevailing anthropology today is man is pretty decent and as long as our good outweighs our “mistakes”, we’ll be fine. We simply do not understand what God says about our total depravity, from His frame of reference, so we basically see no real, desperate need for salvation and thus a savior is not something we really need; he’s not a priceless, precious provision to us worth everything.
I’m convinced the hardest part of “getting saved” is “getting lost” first. Seeing our depravity and our culpability before a perfectly holy and righteous God who is extending grace and mercy in this current age to those who can see it from His word – and run to that grace and mercy by taking His Son’s sacrifice in their place as their only hope.
A large part of our natural depravity is, as Romans 3:11 plainly tells us, “no one seeks for God” yet prevenient grace says everyone can and does – due to this universal prevenient grace and will come to him unless they stubbornly refuse with their free wills. I simply do not find that taught in the Bible, in fact I find it in opposition to what Jesus taught in John 6 (see part 1 of this series).
Right after this section of Romans, as Paul switches from the bad news to the good news, he launches into “faith alone” and that “faith is a gift” and that the reason is so that our boasting is excluded. If God dispenses a universal prevenient grace, and I freely chose Christ and Jimmy resisted and did not, then I can boast that I’m “better” in some way and to some degree than Jimmy. Jimmy wasn’t smart, moral, good enough to choose Christ, but I did! Maybe I just loved my sin a little less than Jimmy loved his. No matter how you say it, the difference is something in ME. Such boasting, even if we don’t verbalize it, steals God’s glory in our salvation – reserving just a wee bit for ourselves. God goes to great lengths in Scripture to squash the idea that any flesh can boast in his sight.
So what this boils down to is “monergism” vs. “synergism” in salvation. Are you a “monergist” or a “synergist”? Synergism means you believe salvation is a synthesis; God does a part and you do a part. God initiates with a prevenient grace, then it’s up to you to respond or not. In the final analysis, it depends on you; if you do not do your part in the synthesis, it does not proceed. You are the determining factor. I’ve heard many a synergistic Southern Baptist sermon concerning life preservers. You are drowning in the ocean and God throws you a life preserver in Jesus. All you have to do (presumably through prevenient grace) is just simply grab hold and God does all the rest of the saving. You do 1% and God does the other 99%. However, that 99% is dependent on your 1%. Without your 1%, God can accomplish 0%.
Monergism says that illustration has an errant starting point. You are DEAD, dead in trespasses and sins, and are lifeless and decomposing on the ocean floor. Dead men cannot reach for life preservers. God is the determining factor alone because he resurrects a dead man, and he doesn’t somehow “halfway” resurrect them so they can float to the top and grab the preserver. In the hearing or reading of the gospel of Jesus Christ (faith comes by hearing), the Holy Spirit does the resurrecting work – takes out your heart of stone, puts in a new living heart of flesh and you are born again, raised from the spiritually dead. The very first thing your new alive heart does is cry out in repentance for your sins and throws all of its newfound faith (a gift to you) in Jesus Christ alone.
But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit
Titus 3:4-5 ESV
How does God save us? By the regeneration and renewal of dead men. The Holy Spirit does it all, making effective in time what the Father, Son, and Spirit planned in eternity past. You didn’t get prevenient grace and then God sat back waiting and wondering for your decision. No, He regenerated your dead soul. Born again as Christ told Nicodemus. It is a monergistic work of the Holy Spirit. I think this is what Jesus said in the 15 verses before John 3:16 as he talks with Nicodemus. He tells him unless you are born again, you cannot even see the kingdom of God, much less choose it. He then says:
Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
John 3:5-6
Then He says to Nicodemus in vs. 10, which I find fascinating, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?” He fully expects Nicodemus to understand this being “born again of water and the Spirit” from the OT scriptures! Where? Here is one of many and notice the sole actor in this monergistic work:
I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
Ezekiel 36:24-32 ESV
As I came to understand all this, I found the “T” to be foundational. Because of our fallen state, our utter slavery to sin as our natural condition, all the rest of the “ULIP” follow. We must have the “U” of unconditional election, as Christ said we do not choose him, He chose us. He must. We cannot come to Him unless the Father drags us as he said in John 6. We on our own would never choose him. We need a completely effectual atonement, limited in scope but unlimited in efficacy, one that actually, really, truly saves us – the “L”. We need the “I” of irresistible grace as in John 6 where all he draws will come. Finally I know, as “prone to wander, Lord, I feel it”, that left to ourselves we’d throw it all away without the “P” – the perseverance of the saints as the hand of God keeps us in Him, preserving us until our glorification. It is a package deal of unimaginable grace and mercy and it is all to God’s glory – alone. No boasting allowed nor desired.