TOTAL DEPRAVITY means man is totally helpless. If God doesn't save man, he can't be saved.  

God creates us in His "shadow image", as Genesis puts it. The essential "person" is the soul, which GOD alone! creates. Free will is thus one of the attributes of the human soul, which God creates at birth. (You thus become human at the moment He creates & imputes your unique soul to your fully-formed body; repeating the pattern of His creation of Adam, who became "a living soul" after God formed all of Adam's body. That is why no human being is evolved, and why, as many Bible verses in OT attest, no human being is "formed" by anyone BUT God.) [1]

The soul is immaterial, not material -- materiality cannot create, add to, or harm immateriality. Any harm, then, which can be done to the soul can ONLY be done BY the soul; however, the soul cannot be killed. By Divine, not human, design, the soul is ruled by free will, aka "volition" or "sovereignty". That is why the Lord warns in Matt10:28 not to worry about those who can kill the body, but not the soul, but to worry about those who can "destroy the soul in the location of hell." [Sidenote: "destroy" is NOT "obliterate/kill", which this verse makes clear in the Greek (in the Greek, He's making a play on words between "kill" and "destroy", which play basically means it would be BETTER to be killed than to go to Hell); "location of" is the meaning of "in", because the Greek uses the locative case, which means "in the location of, located in". In short, this is one of the verses proving Hell exists There are seven kinds of "death" in the Bible; this verse negates the interpretation claiming the soul can die. Since "soul" is often used as a synonym for a human being who's not yet physically died, verses like Ezekiel 18:4, which reference physical death or capital punishment, are often misunderstood.]

Free will is merely an indestructible, nonmeritorious power of choice (more will be said about free will in the "S" section, too).

You can see that free will is without merit pretty quickly. Think about what CHOICE actually is. I go grocery shopping: I may choose tomato can "A" brand, or can "B" brand. Naturally, I'll want to choose what seems like the better brand of the two, based on what I KNOW about both brands. I make a choice. So: where was the merit? In the tomato can (allegedly or really), NOT in my choosing it.

NOTE WELL: free will is DEPENDENT on knowledge. It has no merit of its own. It can choose, but the effect of the choice DEPENDS on the quality of the item chosen; but the choosing depends upon the quality of the KNOWLEDGE of the item. So, a good choice can be made by mistake, from ignorance, or from accurate knowledge. Likewise, a bad choice. All free will is, is the faculty of wanting, choosing. It can be used for good OR bad, so obviously CAN'T have any inherent merit. If you don't have free will, you are not human. God, angels, and humans are persons. Free will is an either/or thing of personhood.

The faculty of thinking, of believing, are functions DEPENDENT on volition. Volition is dependent on things external to it (e.g., knowledge); however, since God made volition an attribute of the soul, man is the product of the quality of what he knows, and what he knows is the product of what he's chosen to know; the quality of the knowledge affects the quality of the person. However, since God made volition an attribute of the soul, one always retains the nonmeritorious faculty of being able to reject or accept previously-obtained knowledge. Again, such a faculty is inherent to personhood. It alone thus has no merit at any time, whatsoever.

Now, we humans mistakenly attribute self with merit because we get mixed up about the value of the thing or person chosen, sorta thinking that, well, I made a good choice (e.g., someone compliments you), so I must be a good person.

The Arminians were mixed up like this: they erroneously believed that since man had the choice of being saved or not, he must have merit, and the act of faith in Christ was some kind of gift(!) to Holy God! But faith is a faculty of the soul, a part of volition, another essential requirement of BEING a person. God made it, so there is no self-merit in its use (one can't take credit for what GOD did, can one). You can't even BE a person without the use of faith; in fact, at all times you are always believing or disbelieving something. Again, merit is in the object of what (or WHO) is believed, not in the FUNCTION of believing.

The Calvinists who wanted to put down the Arminian errors likewise were mixed up; so, instead of saying, "Hey, Arminians, there's no merit in your having an indestructible volition (and faith, which is a subset of volition) created by God?!", they countered that man's corruption meant he had no free will. As if what God created, man could kill! Thus, they erroneously thought man's volition meritorious, too.

Let's put it another way. If all God was, was Will/Faith, would even God be God? No, obviously. What makes God God are His Other Attributes. What makes God a Person are attributes like Self-consciousness, Free Will (including the believing faculty, which is believing IN/ON), etc. In short, God has to be more than "just" a person, to be God. It isn't the mere fact that He is a Person which makes Him meritorious.

See? The merit was in the tomato can, not in my choosing it. In fact, its merit was the reason for choosing it. My choosing it was ITS VALUE, not mine. But, to total depravity, because "I" chose it, I must have merit. 'Baloney. I chose it based on what I knew about it, and the faculty of being able to learn is ALSO something God authored -- not me. So where is the merit? As always, in GOD!

But Total Depravity is always about "me, me, me". So, it appropriates to self, gets mixed up, whenever there is perceived merit in anything. It's a constant subroutine of the brain, which is physical. (T.D. is genetic..read on.)

This irrationality about the self and merit is a classic sign of TOTAL DEPRAVITY. You can get a good picture of how irrational thinking works by reading the Bible's book of Romans, Chapters 1-9. There, the apostle Paul shows the ludicrous twists and turns in our depraved minds, to illustrate the need of salvation and how God accomplished it. (You may have to read the book over 20 times while using 1Jn1:9 for the material to sink in: don't feel discouraged.)

So, the volition, which itself is neither good nor bad, dependent as it is on the quality of known information, has only BAD information from the sin-ruled body/brain. So it naturally yet freely chooses based upon that bad information...until and unless it gets good information, which it can only get from God.

T.D. is a genetic condition (per Romans 5:12 and 1Cor15:21-22's Greek constantive aorist tense). We are totally helpless, totally ugly to God's Righteousness, and TOTALLY UNABLE to comprehend God. Obviously, we can't do a thing to earn salvation. Bible uses words like the '"old man", aka "the old sin nature", "flesh" and derivatives, to describe this hapless condition. Sin rules the body, which includes the brain. We are soooo bad that even our "righteousnesses are menstrual rags" ("filthy" in English is a euphemism). And, we "come short of the Glory of God" and, "no one is righteous..no, not one." You can probably think of a dozen other famous verses the Bible uses to condemn our hapless state.

See the conundrum, here? God must condemn such a state, or He is not Righteous. Yet, the state is not our fault: we are born in it. How, then, does God solve this problem? Does He recreate us? Yes! But, not like the first Adam, for that story would just repeat itself. Rather, He recreates us in the 2nd Adam (Christ), due to salvation. ('Which is why Romans 6 explains that we died in Christ; Rom5:15-21, 1Cor15:22, 1Cor15:55-56, 2Cor5:17 are some related verses). In short, we get to CHOOSE how we want to be recreated. We couldn't choose to be created the first time, because we didn't exist. We CAN choose how to be recreated the 2nd time, because we do exist!

In short, you can choose to have God recreate you, or you can choose to recreate yourself, your own way. That's the heart of the matter: "what think ye of Christ?" Because you have this choice, it doesn't matter that you are born in a state of Total Depravity. God preserves your free will.

You are not "contributing" squat to God if you believe in Christ; and you are responsible to God for NOT believing in Christ. He did all the work. You can believe in Christ or reject Him, but your acceptance benefits Him not at ALL; your rejection hurts you and you alone totally. He offers you an option. You accept it or you reject it, your nonmeritorious choice. God is just to cause you to be saved if you accept it (your acceptance doesn't cause your salvation, God does); God is also just to send you to the Lake of Fire if you NEVER believe in Christ. Every decision has its Divinely-ordained consequences, and as always, the OBJECT of the faith has the merit/demerit, never the faith itself. So: be CAREFUL what you believe...

Hopefully it's now clear that the choices you make "program" you, because learning means your choices will be affected by what you know, and to learn anything you must CHOOSE to do so.

Knowledge, not free will, is what is corrupted by Total Depravity. Eating "knowledge", Adam lost his ability to know God (lost his human spirit), and also passed down the genetic corruption of "good and evil" knowledge urges, to all progeny, which results in: inchoate ("fuzzy") thinking, non-sequitur (disjunctive) thinking, emotion-driven thinking. T.D. is thus in the thought pattern of the brain, which is part of the T.D. body. The brain has been programmed by total depravity to constantly tempt the soul. Temptation is NOT sin; because you have free will, you can reject the temptation. Unbelievers and believers do so often. However, we all give in to the temptation, too; and the FIRST time we give in, we have repeated Adam's sin. So it doesn't matter that we inherited his corruption; we are still responsible for our own sins. And when we sin, we corrupt ourselves by means of that same always-free volition. As it stands written, "the heart of man is deceitful and desperately wicked: who can know it?"

Sin, though, is not the root problem of Total Depravity, but rather an evidence of it. The root problem: the soul cannot know God so cannot choose God, EVEN THOUGH man has free will, because there is no knowledge of God upon which to MAKE a choice. It's the worst possible situation: to be responsible, thus liable to Hell, and yet unable to have the knowledge free will needs, to choose! [The human spirit is the interface needed to get knowledge of God -- but even then, God has to transmit knowledge, as illustrated by the daily Bible classes to Adam and the woman, in the Genesis quotes of things God said to them, and Gen3:8. (Gen 3:8 in the Hebrew says that He habitually visited them at that time of evening.) So, when they both ate that fruit, they lost their human spirits, and could no longer process what they had learned. So, when a believer sins, he enters a carnal state, is off-line from the Holy Spirit and his human spirit, and can't "eat" even the doctrine he's learned.]

What, then, happens to free will? It looks at what it "knows", which is "good and evil". Look at Adam and Isha: right after the Fall, even though they HAD known God, they "know" only that they must adjust to the "evil" of being naked. Their memory of God was disconnected, off-line, unusable, a partition on a hard drive which can no longer be accessed. Well, actually WORSE: the SAME data in their memory now shows up in Genesis 3 as guilt (the figleaves), fear (the hiding), and REJECTION (accusing God before admitting sin). SAME DATA, but now 'depraved', hateful: every attitude is REVERSED. So now, volition takes the OPPOSITE choice, despite the memory of their former fellowship with Him. How much more we, who are born with no prior knowledge at all..! So no wonder we are predisposed to guilt, fear, accusation when "God" is anywhere near even the background of any topic in life. It's always popular to make "God" the bad guy, to say He doesn't exist, to be DISINTERESTED in Him (you know, nod to God on Sunday, and have the colossal GALL to think that works for people should 'count' with God, thus REPLACING GOD with people as the First Commandment). Socrates was right: we are all Glaucons, preferring, with our indestructible free will, the dank caverns of our fractalic arrogance.

So how does the will become depraved? By means of successive ACTS of free will freely ACCEPTING depraved information. Temptation is not depravity, ACCEPTING temptation is depravity (remember James' description on how one "gives birth" to sin). Even the Lord was tempted, so we know that to be tempted itself is not depravity.

"Depraved" is NOT "deprived", either. The central fatal flaw in TULIP is that it equates "depraved" and "deprived". The two are very different, and will was NOT deprived in man due to the Fall. Let's go through the mechanics, to see what really happens.

We saw that Adam suddenly got goofy due to the Fall, and grabbed onto the insane idea that his and his wife's nakedness was evil. Clearly, his former knowledge of God became unusable, because he lost his 'spiritual processor', his human spirit. His old knowledgebase was in a 'language' he could no longer properly read. Adam's nonetheless trying to RESTORE the relationship with God by means of an act he considers "good". It is not an act of sin, here. So, what's really happening?

Adam is using his volition; it is still free, because he's CHOOSING something; no one's coercing him. But what is the object he chooses? A "good" thing! So, the desire to choose "good" remains. However, his "good and evil" knowledge base, is depraved, not merely "deprived" of knowledge of God. It is sending up options from the brain; the soul is choosing based on corrupted information, instead of asking the question, "is this information valid?" It is still choosing and believing: here, among all the other choices Adam could have made, he chooses to cover his and his wife's loins.

In making that choice from his soul, he has just depraved his soul slightly, for he has assigned a "truth" value to a lie (the idea that covering nakedness "buys" something with God). So YES! he has caused his own depravity, analogous to stomping down grass. The next time, it will be easier to travel that same path, for he has programmed himself to want that choice; so, when next something analogous to it occurs, he will be more tempted to accede to it. HOWEVER he still retains the ability to say "no". It will be harder, that's all.

Thus, an unbeliever may have some sin habit (say, alcoholism) and can transcend it, a fact which occurs often in such folks. It's difficult, but doable. Does the person who does this have merit? NO -- he has done something which God enabled him to do, and he has done something due to the POWER of the object: the inherent benefit of abstention. Not the man's merit, but the God-given nature of benefit in abstention. God set up how life would be; God created morality for man's benefit. For man to use it, what merit is there in man? None at all. He didn't invent morality. God did. Man didn't invent the advantage; God did.

So "depravity" is sourced in body/brain knowledge, but is ONLY programmed into the soul BY FREE WILL as the soul accedes to the depraved temptations. That and that alone is the mechanism whereby man becomes depraved in his soul. GOD IS NOT THE AUTHOR of a soul so weak the body can superimpose its urges on the soul. To say otherwise is to give God too little credit, especially since He foreknew the results.

By contrast, the free will choice to believe in Christ, or to get Bible doctrine, doesn't have this programming power, because knowledge of God can only be provided BY God. It's a supernatural power, so must be run by a supernatural God. So that same God must GIVE a supernatural power to cause the inherently-good knowledge of Him to program the soul into Quality. That is why Christ learned Bible Doctrine. That is why we need it.

We are born spiritually-brain-dead. Our souls, of course, remain alive; We have free will, in our souls, and physical life in our bodies. But until God saves us, we have no human spirit, which we would need to be able to GET information about God. So, we are interested in the things of the soul and the body, but have no basis for being interested in the things of God, so we are NOT naturally interested in God. So, even our morality is totally-depraved: God is not our motive; being "good" (merit-me, merit-me, merit-me) is the motive. No wonder even our "good" is so ugly to God! (1 Corinthians 2 is a sample passage which explains this situation in some detail. The "who keep on thinking about earthly things" verse, and Romans 7&8 elaborate on the 1Cor2 passage.)

God, being omniscient, knew this problem would happen in advance, before He made the universe. God is SO SCRUPULOUS in His Justice, that, in eternity past, He took responsibility for ordaining His allowance of this terrible condition. He chose to become the Unique Human Mediator. ("God" here is the Lord, who in His Diety is Creator of all things, per Hebrews Chaps 1,2, and Col 1, etc.) 1Tim 2:5 dramatically records His eternity-past decision to add Humanity to Himself (Phili2:5-10) and thus pay for all sins and be Mediator (do a bot search on "Mediator" to see those verses). Since He took the responsibility for solving the problem, and DID solve it, we have nothing to do but to believe in Christ, just once, during this lifetime. Further, NO ONE ELSE solves the problem: "there is no other name given among men whereby we MUST be saved." No religion, no works, no other Savior can substitute for Christ.

As the "I" subpage on this website will explain, the Holy Spirit, acting both as a human spirit and the Teacher, is the One who enables EVERYONE without exception to get knowledge of God sufficient to nonmeritoriously change his mind about Christ, and nonmeritoriously believe in Him. Even so, that nonmeritorious faith, a faculty of the soul, is spiritually dead! So, when someone believes in Christ, God the Holy Spirit causes him to be saved, because of Christ (NEVER because of man): He picks up that spiritually-dead faith and makes it efficacious for salvation, and creates your unique human spirit: you are THEN regenerated "born again", NOT before. (More on how He causes you to be saved is or will be explained in "I".)

Our being-born-in-sin causes a knowledge-and-body/brain depravity due to spiritual-brain-death. Salvation is the permanent acquisition of a human spirit, created by the Holy Spirit (1Pet1:23,Tit3:5), to which God the Father imputes His Own Righteousness, and His Own Eternal Life (well, also the Son's, but I'll find the verses and put them in these parentheses later). God, after all, is a spiritual being, so you have to be of compatible Life to be able to live with Him. You thus, at salvation, are enabled to be fed information from Him (see V), so you can know Him, and thus have a fantastic relationship with Him -- forever.

Your body, however, remains totally depraved, so you still sin. 1Jn1:9 handles that condition to put you back into a spiritual "on-line" status. Learning Bible Doctrine gradually reduces (restricts, really) the effects of total depravity. At death, you lose the corrupted body, and get a new heavenly one. So, no more sinning is possible after death. Your soul's personhood attributes (free will, memory, etc) of course remain intact; best of all, you take your accumulated believed-Bible-Doctrine "with you", because believed Doctrine is accumulated in your soul, not (thank God!) in your brain. (Look up the "epignosis"(Greek), "wisdom", "grow" and "enlarged..soul" verses to help see this fact, if it is news to you.)

The mechanics of the post-salvation life are or will be covered in V. If Total Depravity is still unclear to you, Click here for a MUCH more detailled explanation. Else, hit the "End" key, if you want to bypass the footnotes and go to the link for the next page.