Total Depravity

He spoke for one hour and sixteen minutes. I listened and watched all of it, and that is the first sign of depravity. Not total depravity, as Calvin and his clan have taught, but surely partial depravity.

          I don’t have a problem with partial depravity. Mostly because I myself have generated enough evidence to convince, well, just about anybody. Partial depravity I can go with, the idea and experience that all of us and each of us is morally flawed, corrupt, even wicked. Sinner is the old Bible term and its worth keeping because it acknowledges what we all know.

          But some go further. Total Depravity. It’s the idea that we can’t do anything right. That nothing we do counts for anything in the moral realm and everything we do or say or think or desire is a failure. Every aspect of our being is corrupt.

          The old theologians and these days not a few young ones embrace this idea not because it covered with their experience or even helps make sense of the Bible or the world or the Lord Jesus Christ. It does, however, complete their theological jigsaw puzzle, the one they call TULIP.

          Total depravity is the first one, the T, and it’s probably the worst, but it has a lot of competition in that category. U stands for unmerited favor or unconditional election, which means those selected for eternal salvation and a palace in heaven are chosen by God for no reason within themselves. That is a convoluted sentence, in both senses of that word, and it doesn’t get better or clearer when we come to the L. Limited atonement. Jesus died only for the elect. Not necessarily for you or me or the bum on the street or the thief in the corner office but only for those destined for heaven.

          I is for irresistible grace. If God selected you, and Jesus died for you, then you cannot avoid the eternal destiny of bliss laid out for you. The rest of us? Not so much.

        One last piece, that P. Perseverance. If you qualify for the first four letters and get your salvation, you will hold on to it forever, and also it will hold on to you. You will never give up or fall away. You’re in for keeps.

It’s a complete system, a wickedly compact equation for explaining, well, everything. Like “E = MC squared.” And it came into play yesterday as I spent one hour and 16 minutes listening and watching The Donald ramble and wreck the National Prayer Breakfast.

          The fact that I did that is evidence sufficient of my depravity. I could have prepared breakfast for my wife, or read the entire book of Genesis or gathered all the documents my accountant will need to file my taxes. Or I could have listened to two entire albums of John Prine or both sides of Van Cliburn’s album of concertos #1 and #2. But instead, I listened to 76 minutes of deceit and distortion from the mouth of Donald J Trump.

          That provided overwhelming evidence of the doctrine of Total Depravity. Not Partial Depravity or Significant Depravity, or even Overwhelmingly All-Over-the-Place Depravity. Total. It was the Grand Slam Homer Dr. John Calvin longed for when first he cobbled together his Grand Theory of Universal Everything. That was way back in the 17th century, before electric razors and cosmic consciousness. He saw it dimly, this Total Depravity. But we see it clearly. In the flesh. On the screen. The Big Screen. The Really Big Screen. Depravity so Total that it consumes everything, everywhere, in all directions.

          It came in my direction and, frankly, I was, well, too depraved to get out of the way, run for cover, and hide while it passed by. I stood there and watched and listened. And in this way provided all the evidence anyone ever needed for Depravity. Total Depravity. His and Mine.

          And shortly, in a few months or more, you also will get converted to Total Depravity. When The Donald and his peeps drag out of storage that larger-than-life statue of himself and display it in some public place and all his minions go wild with praise and glory. I don’t know how much gold has been plastered to that calf, I mean statue, but it is a lot. And that is also a lot of depravity. Probably Total.