An objection to Total Depravity from a psychological point of view

As I previously mentioned in my post about my theological journey, there was a time where I had believed in the doctrine of Total Depravity. As such, I had plenty of time to reflect upon the meaning of it. However, what I believed at the time was a more theoretical view of it since I believed also in prevenient grace and so I had a Wesleyan view of it. I however found the theoretical untenable due to my belief that the Bible speaks in practical terms. This forced a revaluation of the interpretation of the passages that it came from and in the end I came to believe that Total Depravity was a interpretation that failed to take into consideration the context. From that point since, I have reflected a lot on its faults and how it is essentially untenable in my opinion, which is what I am about to present.

Total Depravity states that every part of man has been corrupted. Its not that they are as bad as possible, but that they are bad in all ways. In other words, every ability of a person is affected.

Jesus preaching about the Kingdom gave two requirements to get into it: repentance and faith. A Calvinist would say that a person is incapable of repenting and believing in God unless God bestowed grace upon them first, from which the man will irresistibly repent and believe. In the natural state though, either it is impossible for the man or the man can never be willing to.

Lets look at the regular world so to speak that isn't explicitly religious. There are many examples of people who repent of something they have done or even of their whole life style, and they are sincere as they do change in some regards. There are many, many, many examples of people who have faith in someone or something. Outside of the religious realm, it is clear that repentance and faith are very possible and do happen.

Because of this, a person who holds to total depravity would probably have to separate non-religious repentance and faith with religious repentance and faith. However this becomes very untenable as it requires a different "mechanism" for repentance and faith of a religious nature (or more precisely, a Christian religious nature) when repentance and faith of both the religious and non-religious nature are very similar in what is happening on the person's side. Cognitively speaking, repentance and faith of a religious nature would be essentially something totally different from that of a non-religious and that there is in fact no similarity between the two whatsoever. Despite the great amount of similarity of repentance and faith of the religious and non-religious nature, there is nothing similar between the two. This is an objection to the idea that an unbeliever has not ability to repent and believe.

However, many persons would state that in total depravity that man is not incapable but totally unwilling to repent and believe. In this form of argumentation, total depravity is primarily a matter of the irrational aspect of man (not in the sense of being counter to reason, but including the realm of the emotion and affect that isn't itself based on rationale) and not a matter of cognitive ability. But then this forgets the basic meaning of repentance, to cognitively decide to change that which we are otherwise drawn to. Granted, our feelings affect whether we are willing to repent but the irrational sense does not in itself dictate us cognitively decided to go against what we otherwise feel and want. In the non-religious realm, there have been examples of people who have been passionately for a certain idea or behavior, but then somehow they decide to change (repent). Once again then, a Calvinist would have to differentiate that form of self-rejection from a self-rejection before God when the only visible difference is the direction in which the repentance is directed.

Either way, there becomes a seemingly artificial difference between repentance (and faith) in the religious and non-religious realms. The result then might be to try to attribute it to the spiritual realm which would explain how repentance might happen without God's grace in the non-religious realm but spiritual "blindness" prevents a religious repentance without God's grace. At this point however, we are getting away from what is observable in the senses and going to what must be accepted on the basis of faith (and therefore comes from Scripture), but that goes beyond the purpose of this objection.

My point is to say that in order to hold to a form of total depravity, a person must relegate the reason behind it to the realm in which we can not observe (hence the spiritual realm). Total depravity lacks any basis upon that which is observable and does not explain that which can be observed any better than other ideas of the nature of humanity. To be very polemical, often times a belief that can not be backed in observation is said to be founded in the realm of the unobservable, and this is essentially a form of retreat to a "fortress of safety" since no one can essentially be proven wrong in that which is unobservable (with the exception of the exegesis of Scripture for the Christian). This is not to say that relegating something to the unobservable disproves it. There are many things that are unobservable and come primarily through revelation and faith, especially God and His nature.

So, the argumentation would move to Scripture then, which by our faith is the basis of the revelation of the unobservable. I will probably proceed to that point in future posts (although my posting topics are a big unpredictable and enigmatic at times). However, a few remarks before I conclude.

I can see how some might draw the idea of total depravity from Scripture. There are passages that can at first blush seem to teach that. However, I would say that these interpretations fail to take all the context into consideration (which is what I will probably address in future posts). And even the greatest exegete can occasionally fail to recognize certain important facts about the context.

The first person that I know of in Christian theology that developed the concept we would call Total Depravity was Augustine of Hippo. He came from a Manichean background, and Manicheanism to my knowledge had a form of predestination, a very dualistic world view, and a teaching about certain individuals that they can not possibly advance similar to that of total depravity (this was characteristic of some gnosticism like Manicheanism). While Augustine did reject the teachings of Mani, people do not just get rid of everything they believed when they reject a system of thinking but instead much of the way of thinking is changed gradually. And even then, it is easier for a person to revert back to a way of thinking they held previously. So, it is very supposable that Augustine, when he saw the passages that might be read so as to teach the concept of Total Depravity, he reverted back to his Manichean theology in that area.

I say all that not to disparage Augustine at all, but rather to show that it is probably no coincidence that the idea of Total Depravity first came from a person who held to a similar view before his Christian conversion. But then this becomes an argument about tradition, especially before Augustine, which is not something I am going to tackle in the near future. It is something that I might pick up later, but any future posts on Total Depravity will stay within the observable realm or within the realm of Scripture and revelation of the unobservable.