Fuller President Richard Mouw is perhaps the one modern theologian who can make Five Point Calvinism seem not only winsome, but reasonable.
The first “point” of Calvinism is the doctrine of total depravity, the notion that wickedness extends to our deepest self. It doesn’t mean, of course, that each of us is incapable of doing good. Total depravity, the way most Calvinists explain it, is the idea that there is no aspect of our person that is not touched by sin. None of us can, in this life, escape from the influence of wickedness by our own efforts; grace alone is the one thing that keeps us from being totally consumed by depravity.
In a post this month, President Mouw shares how depravity manifested itself in his own childhood:
Recently I went through some old family photos and saw a picture of myself riding a tricycle in the backyard of the first home that I can remember. I know I could not have been older than four years old at the time—probably closer to three—because we moved away from that home (actually an upstairs apartment) not long after my fourth birthday. My mother planted a small garden plot in that yard, and one day she worked with me to plant some seeds. She showed me how to dig holes and do the planting, and she instructed me about regularly watering the ground. She also helped me to block off that area with sticks and string, so that no one would walk on the planted area. And she warned me: “Do not ever step on this ground where you have planted the seeds, or the plants will not grow!”
One day when I was playing in that yard, I looked to make sure my parents were not watching, and then I stepped over the stretched string, and I deliberately stomped on the ground where I had planted the seeds. I can still remember the spirit of rebellion that motivated me. I was stomping on the ground precisely because I knew it was an act of disobedience. I also remember often lying awake in my bed in the weeks after I did that, fearful that the plants would not grow and worried that my rebellion would be revealed. I even prayed some childish prayers for deliverance, although I do not think they included any elements of confession and repentance—just something like, “God, please, please, make those plants grow!” I was greatly relieved when one day the green shoots suddenly appeared in the place where I had stomped my feet.
I tell that story to say that while I did not go from a wicked lifestyle to a pattern of holy living in my youth, I did need to be redeemed from a rebellious spirit that was grounded in my sinful nature. And it was not a rebellion that was motivated by any particular angry feeling I had toward my parents. It was a spirit of rebellion against authority as such, one that was grounded in a very basic desire simply to do something that was wrong.
It’s a similar story to the one St. Augustine, writing 1600 years ago, tells about his famous pears:
There was a pear tree close to our own vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was not tempting either for its color or for its flavor. Late one night–having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was–a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden. Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart–which thou didst pity even in that bottomless pit. Behold, now let my heart confess to thee what it was seeking there, when I was being gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error–not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself.
Bold emphases are mine.
My mother is a retired professor of philosophy, and was a good friend of the Mouws in the early 1960s. Year after year, she taught Augustine to her students — and though she didn’t always do so publicly, she regularly expressed exasperation with the way in which the bishop of Hippo (and now, her old friend the president of Fuller) interpreted childish rebelliousness as so inherently depraved. My mother, an atheist from adolescence on, found Augustine’s self-flagellation wildly unnecessary at best. As she pointed out, if he condemns pear-stealing with such venom and self-loathing, what vocabulary will he have left for greater sins? What words are left for murder, for rape, for acts of genuine cruelty against sentient creatures, when the strongest possible language has already been employed to describe a puerile act of third-rate vandalism?
I have always had mixed feelings about Augustine’s story, and I had those same mixed feelings reading Mouw’s anecdote. On the one hand, I’ve always struggled to accept the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity. I’m prepared to believe that each and every one of us has within us the capacity to be wicked, but am too attached to the notion of free will to believe that we are all suffused by wickedness to the extent that any good we do is not of our own choosing, but instead an automatic response to unmerited grace. I rolled my eyes the first time I read Augustine’s story, and I rolled my eyes a bit reading Rich Mouw’s account of stamping on the seedlings. “Come on, boys”, I thought to myself again, “don’t you think you’re overselling things a bit?”
At the same time, I share with them a sense that wanton destruction, smashing for the sake of smashing, is inherently sinful. Mouw and Augustine describe the impetus to do as they did as a desire to rebel (against God and authority), and they locate the real wickedness of their act in that rebellion. My view is a bit different. In both instances, the boys involved are destroying for the sake of destroying — their only pleasure lies in damaging something growing, something alive. And it is that conscious choice to destroy what is living that I find so troubling, not the rebellion against God. The real sin lies, in other words, in the misuse of creation — not in an act of defiance to the Creator. God, as I (a liberal evangelical) see Him is not in the business of demanding our obedience for the sake of His glory. Sin lies less in disobedience than it does in a reckless disregard for the value and goodness of what He has created. Obedience is not an a priori good; reverence for all that He has created is.
As my own theology has grown and changed over the years, I’ve never lost respect for my many conservative friends. But I’ve grown increasingly exasperated by the way in which they confuse service to God with obeisance. We are, as Paul writes, co-laborers with Him in the vineyard. And what He wants from us is not obedience for the sake of obedience but justice and mercy towards the rest of His glorious Creation. God declared Creation good, and the sinfulness of our actions lies not in our rebelliousness towards that Creator but in our cavalier attitude towards our earth and its living creatures.
In other words, when little Rich Mouw stomped on the ground, the locus of his wrongdoing was not rebellion against God or rebellion against his mother, but his contempt for the new life that lay beneath the soil. And the extent to which each and every one of us is touched by depravity is the extent to which we are unwilling to value what is alive, what is growing, and what is inherently good.
“God declared Creation good, and the sinfulness of our actions lies not in our rebelliousness towards that Creator but in our cavalier attitude towards our earth and its living creatures.”
God declared Creation good before mankind’s fall, due to rebelliousness.
Gen. 1:31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
But after the fall, the earth was cursed.
Genesis 3:17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
Genesis 5:29 And he called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the LORD hath cursed.
We do have a duty to be good stewards of this first earth until the time of the new earth.
The real sin lies, in other words, in the misuse of creation — not in an act of defiance to the Creator.
I am not sure if I agree with this. Are you saying that the act itself isn’t sinful, but the attitude behind it is? You can’t have the act without the attitude, after all. I see both as sinful, but perhaps I misunderstood you.
Fred, as a vegan I read Genesis 3 as an explanation of how the earth suffered for human failings, and how we are called to restore the natural order of things.
Merm, you misunderstand me. The act is sinful, but the sinful nature of the act is not rebelliousness but destructiveness. Those aren’t the same things.
I don’t think the two analyses (Mouw/Augustine vs Schwyzer) are mutually exclusive — what makes an act wrong, and what motivates it, can be two different things. So the reason there is a rule against seed-stomping is to protect the plants, but the reason Mouw broke that rule was for the joy of rulebreaking, not because he felt any animus toward the plants.
I think that’s fair, Stentor. But what matters is where we locate the sinfulness of an act. For me, it’s not animus towards the plants, it’s the reckless willingness to place a private desire to rebel or smash (for whatever reason) over the well-being of creation. The rebellion itself isn’t good, but the smashing is the wrong part. And of course, it can be a both/and not an either/or, and I ought to have made that clearer.
Ah, but whence comes the rebelliousness? Augustine’s point, and Mouw’s, is that the desire-to-rebel is part of the consequence of the Fall. That’s the inherent depravity aspect of it.
No doubt, but that still doesn’t elevate rebelliousness to the status of supreme sin. Destructiveness and rebelliousness are distinct; the harm to the creation is the real offense to the creator.
I don’t think the point is that rebelliousness is a *worse* sin than destructiveness. I think the point is that rebelliousness is a *purer* sin — most sins we try to rationalize as being somehow justified or outweighed by some other gain (even if we have a nagging voice telling us our rationalization is BS), but the kind of thing Augustine and Mouw are describing is sinning for the sake of sinning, doing something *because* it’s wrong rather than *despite* its wrongness. So it makes you confront your sinfulness more clearly than a sin that causes more harm but is somehow rationalizable.
I think that’s fair, Stentor. What I object to is the reasoning, so common among my Calvinist friends, that when we sin all of our sins are primarily against God — that it He whom we have offended, and only He from whom we need forgiveness. It allows us to see the concerns of creation as secondary, even unimportant — and allows us to focus on accepting God’s forgiveness rather than on earning it from those whom we have more directly offended.
Then we’re in agreement — I object to your Calvinist friends’ reasoning as well (and not just because I’m a borderline atheist).
I agree with you Hugo what is most striking about each of these stories is man’s relationship with nature. I find it difficult to understand how or why it is that we not only sepperate our selves from that which we to are a part of (nature), but why at times we so knowingly destroy what we are apart of.
I don’t belong to any particular faith and am genrally not conserned with the question of God or what will happen after this life, however I am deeply concerned with the actions of humans in this life and how all of our actions effect all life on this earth. That being said I have a great deal of difficulty understanding and accepting man’s abilty to partake in such distructive and awful behavior. Nonethatless, I can not deny that it seems to me that I have seen a great deal of such behavior, and perhaps taken part in such behavior. I know two things from my own disobedient behavior: one had some sort of rational in my own mind for taking part in the behavior; and two I latter learned from behavior. Offten what learned was that I was cappable of hurting other.
As I said I’m not religious, but I can also understand these stories in the context of Paradise Lost. Spesifically it seems that our own ability to cause harm is a part of our human state (not a fallen state.) I say spesfically human state because Eve’s dession to eat the apple came while she was stil in eden. Similarlly, Satan’s own actions while he is still in heven cause him to fall. Thus, even in states where we are protected we still have free will and are vulenrable to temptation. While Miltion it seems would suggest that such free will is essential to proving one’s faith in God, I belive that it is important so that we may grow and learn as a spesies. I believe Free will is one of the most challening and importnat parts of the human experience.
One thing to keep in mind is that Augustine’s more careful and complete ethical theory in City of God is that virtue is well-ordered love, meaning that virtue is constituted by whether you love the right things according to how good they are. Vice, correspondingly, is constituted by loving things with distorted priorities. Loving the apples more than loving and respecting the principle of private property and belonging to someone else is thus a bad state to be in and a falling away from the ideal state God created us to be in. It’s easy to see how this childish rebelliousness is a kind of depravity on that ethical view. It’s a distortion of desiring properly.
Now it follows that the most important virtue is going to be love for the highest goods, with love for lower goods (there is nothing that’s not good on Augustine’s view, since evils are privations of good) coming lower in the priority list. So the failure to put God’s perfect goodness on the top is the highest of all sins, and putting all the other goods in the proper order is a necessary result of putting God at the top, so any sin is indeed a rebellion against God. He’s got a well-worked-out theory to explain why this is so, and it’s not so strange a view to my mind.
I don’t think it’s fair to set Augustine against the idea of sinning vs. creation. He certainly thinks you can sin against a person, and he doesn’t think it just reduces to sin against God. He does think the violation against God is more serious than the violation against the human, but that’s because God is infinite and perfect. He has a strong sense of intrinsic value increasing with higher levels of creation. A plant is more intrinsically valuable than a rock, a horse more than a plant, a human more than a horse, and God more than a human. He strongly criticizes those who value their horse more than their slave or who value a gemstone more than a horse. He really does think it goes against the thing itself to value it lower than it’s worth.
Once that’s clear, I think we can look at the original case again. What Augustine sees as the root of his sin is that he loved the rebelliousness of it. He had just wanted to be rebellious. That was what motivated him to do it. But one of the things that made it a bad act was not its rebelliousness but its wastefulness. In his fuller view, that’s clear, but I think it’s part of why he emphasizes that this wasn’t stealing to eat the food but just to steal it. So I don’t think he’s necessarily saying what you think he’s saying. I think what you see as the basis of the evil is compatible with what he sees as the motivation for why he did it, and I think he’d insist that both are wrong. The motivation is more seriously wrong, but what makes the act itself wrong is indeed wrong and wrong enough that he mentions it in the process of telling the story.