Are Humans basically good or radically sinful?

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Polls taken by George Barna and George Gallup reveal an alarming intrusion of pagan ideas into the beliefs of modern Christians. A majority of professing evangelicals agree with the statement that human beings are basically good, a clear repudiation of the biblical view of human fallenness. The irony here is that while we decry the baleful influence of secular humanism on the culture, we are busy adopting secular humanism’s view of man. It is not so much that the secular culture has negotiated away the doctrine of original sin, as that the evangelical church has done so.
Nowhere do we find more clear evidence of the impact of secularism on Christian thinking than in the sphere of anthropology. Christian anthropology rests not merely on the biblical concept of creation, but on the biblical concept of the fall. Virtually every Christian denomination historically has some doctrine of original sin in its creeds and confessions. These confessional statements do not all agree on the scope or extent
Image via Wikipedia of original sin, but they all repudiate everything that would be compatible with humanism. Yet polls show that rank and file evangelicals espouse a view of man more in harmony with humanism than with the Bible and the historic creeds of Christendom.
After the Reformation began in the sixteenth century, one of the earliest books Martin Luther wrote was his highly controversial The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. In this volume Luther was sharply critical of the development of sacerdotalism in the Roman Catholic church. He believed that a defective view of the sacraments was leading people away from biblical faith into a foreign gospel.
What would Luther think of the modern heirs of the Reformation? My guess is that he would write on the modern church’s captivity to Pelagianism. I think he would see an unholy alliance between Christianity and humanism that reflects more of a Pelagian view of man than the biblical view. This was the germ of his dispute with the Christian humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam.
Though Luther called the doctrine of justification by faith alone (sola fide) the “article upon which the church stands or falls,” he was convinced that a darker problem was lurking beneath the surface of the debate over justifi
Image via Wikipediacation. He considered his book The Bondage of the Will (De servo arbitrio) to be his most important. His debate with Erasmus on the will of fallen people was inseparably related to his understanding of the biblical doctrine of election. Luther called the doctrine of election the cor ecclesiae, the “heart of the church.”
In Luther’s mind the degree of human fallenness is not a trivial matter but strikes at the heart and soul of the Christian life. Luther saw in the work of Erasmus the specter of Pelagius. Despite the historic condemnations of the teaching of Pelagius, it had a strangle hold on the church of Luther’s day.
In their “Historical and Theological Introduction” to one edition of Luther’s The Bondage of the Will, J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston conclude with a question about the contemporary relevance of the debate:


What is the modern reader to make of The Bondage of the Will? That it is a brilliant and exhilarating performance, a masterpiece of the controversialist’s difficult art, he will no doubt readily admit; but now comes the question, is Luther’s case any part of God’s truth? and, if so, has it a message for Christians to-day? No doubt the reader will find the way by which Luther leads him to be a strange new road, an approach which in all probabilit
Image via Wikipediay he has never considered, a line of thought which he would normally label “Calvinistic” and hastily pass by. This is what Lutheran orthodoxy itself has done; and the present-day Evangelical Christian (who has semi-Pelagianism in his blood) will be inclined to do the same. But both history and Scripture, if allowed to speak, counsel otherwise.


Packer and Johnston describe Luther’s treatment of the will as a “strange new road” for the modern reader, an approach never considered by present-day evangelicals who have semi-Pelagianism in their blood. This evaluation echoes Roger Nicole’s observation that “we are by nature Pelagian in our thinking.” Nor does regeneration automatically cure this natural tendency. Even after the Holy Spirit has liberated us from moral bondage, we tend to discount the severity of that bondage.
Packer and Johnston go on to say: “Historically, it is a simple matter of fact that Martin Luther and John Calvin, and, for that matter, Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Bucer, and all the leading Protestant theologians of the first epoch of the Reformation, stood on precisely the same ground here. On other points, they had their differences; but in asserting the helplessness of man in sin, and the sovereignty of God in grace, they were entirely at one. To all of them, these doctrines were the very life-blood of the Christian faith.”
The metaphor of “life-blood” is consistent with Luther’s metapho
Image via Wikipediar of the “heart” in the cor ecclesiae. The Reformers’ view of the sinner’s moral inability to incline himself toward God’s grace was not a secondary or trivial matter to them. In this light they would regard the contemporary evangelical community as suffering from theological hemophilia, in danger of bleeding to death.
We return to Packer and Johnston’s introductory essay:


The doctrine of justification by faith was important to them be cause it safeguarded the principle of sovereign grace; but it actually expressed for them only one aspect of this principle, and that not its deepest aspect. The sovereignty of grace found expression in their thinking at a profounder level still, in the doctrine of monergistic regeneration—the doctrine, that is, that the faith which receives Christ for justification is itself the free gift
Image via Wikipedia of a sovereign God, bestowed by spiritual regeneration in the act of effectual calling. To the Reformers, the crucial question was not simply, whether God justifies believers without works of law. It was the broader question, whether sinners are wholly helpless in their sin, and whether God is to be thought of as saving them by free, unconditional, invincible grace, not only justifying them for Christ’s sake when they come to faith, but also raising them from the death of sin by His quickening Spirit in order to bring them to faith. Here was the crucial issue: whether God is the author, not merely of justification, but also of faith; whether, in the last analysis, Christianity is a religion of utter reliance on God for salvation and all things necessary to it, or of self-reliance and self-effort.


Author: RC Sproul (Ligonier Ministries)
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