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!â€
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.