And we’ve already talked about the will, and it shows up, of course, in the conduct. Read Mark 7. You’re familiar with it. What is it that comes out of the inside of man? What does man produce? That which proceeds out of the man is what defiles the man. For from within, out of the heart of man, proceed evil thoughts—fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man. They defile his life because they come from his heart.
And I think you’re very aware of one other text, but just look at it for a moment. I’ve preached it many times, I’m sure. Romans 3, none righteous, not even one, none who understands, none who seeks for God. No potential. No capability. No hope on our own. The sum is that man is evil and selfish, unwilling and unable because he is dead. He loves his sin. He loves the darkness. He thrives on selfish lust. He’s happy to make a god of his own, manufacturing and convinced himself that he is good enough to satisfy that god. He may see his sin in his sin, but he does not see his sin in his goodness, and he does not see his sin in his religion, and it is his sin in his goodness that is most despicable for there is the deception and it is his sin in his religion that is most blasphemous because there it is that he worships a false god.
This doctrine has been called Total Depravity, and some people might be confused about that. It might be a little misleading. Depravity, if you look it up in the dictionary or on your computer, you’re going to find the word “depravity” usually associated with viciousness or vice. One definition said to be depraved is to be villainous, degraded, debased, immoral, and dangerous to a twisted degree like rapists and serial killers. So the word itself has come to connote a level of evil not applicable to all. To say someone is totally depraved would take depraved even further and you would imagine Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin or somebody who kills people and eats them. But to call someone totally depraved doesn’t necessarily set them outside the realm of moral perversion in some other category of consummate corruption that we can barely comprehend. To say you’re totally depraved simply means that you can only sin. You can do nothing that pleases God savingly. And the total part is it affects you totally—mind, heart, will, action, thought, everything. It’s total because it affects absolutely everything. The sinner is utterly unable to raise himself out of his state of death to do anything to see out of his blindness.
The contemporary idea today is that there’s some residual good left in the sinner. As this progression came from Pelagianism to Semipelagianism and then came down to sort of contemporary Arminianism and maybe got defined a little more carefully by Wesley who was a sort of a messed up Calvinist because Wesley wanted to give all the glory to God, as you well know, but he wanted to find in men some place where men could initiate salvation on his own will. That system has literally taken over and been the dominant system in evangelical Christianity. It is behind most revivalism. It is behind most evangelism. That there’s something in the sinner that can respond. And this is sort of like the right in a free country. You have to have this right. This wouldn’t be fair if God didn’t give the sinner the right to make his own decision so that the sinner unaided by the Holy Spirit must make the first move. That’s essentially Arminian theology. The sinner unaided must make the first move. And God then will respond when the sinner makes the first move.
What the Bible teaches is, is that the sinner can’t and won’t. He is unable and he is unwilling. He has no capacity to make the first move. He has no interest in making the first move, the first real move. He will make a false move toward God based upon his own fallen desires. So if you tell him God wants to give you whatever you want, wants to fulfill all your desires, you are feeding him a lie. You are compounding his deception. And on the one hand, you are hiding the true God, and the other hand you are continuing to deceive the sinner. Unless God moves in power over the dead soul and brings true life and understanding and repentance and faith, no one will ever come to the true God in true saving faith. Until God regenerates, gives spiritual life, we have neither the ability nor the inclination to cooperate with him.
If one immediately offers a mutually exclusive proposition as the premise for his ideology, I’m done. There is no point in listening any further. Everything after that MUST be a lie.
Man is both “unwilling and unable” at the level of his nature (read: his root metaphysic)? Impossible. If he is one he simply cannot be the other. The end.
And how much was this TEACHER paid to ignore or to be totally ignorant of remedial logic?
Good grief. Maybe this world is fallen after all. LMAO
You could spend the whole conference on this, John. You could refer people to Paul’s extensive examination of MacAurthur’s doctrinal evolution, and use this as a great example of the practical application of these ancient heresies.
Argo
Exactly right… the mutually exclusive is directly tied to Aristotle’s Laws:Identity, Non Contradiction and Excluded Middle. Macarthur is grounding his doctrine in Augustine’s idealism which is of course why he can have a contradiction at the center of his presentation. It is metaphysically permissible under the Platonist/Augustinian construct.
(That was another hint for those of you working through the questions)
And you are right … I could use him as the object lesson through out the conference. And I am very tempted to do that very thing.
Remember Children, whatever the Powerful Majority decide is heresy must be heresy, because, you see, it is the powerful who define truth. And it is the majority that ratifies it. Didn’t Jesus Himself say, “You Priests and Scribes, Lawyers and Pharisees: you are those who understand truth. We all should learn at your feet.”
When Macarthur argues that man is unwilling to do good, he means this as a root function of man’s very existential essence. Meaning that man is INFINITELY unwilling. Which means that man has absolutely no choice but to choose non-compliance.
Think about that for a moment, and then ask yourself why going to church these days is such a colossal mind f**k. And why it so blatantly shows.
Without the individual FIRST, there can be no such thing as community. The lie is that a collection of people can provide for the individual what the individual cannot provide for himself. However, when we realize that the collective is a direct function of the individual we can see how this must be impossible. Individuals may organize in the interest of their own individual needs, but this is not “collective” provision–this is not “community” coming to life (unless you are thinking Frankenstein, perhaps); at the root of it is individuals taking individual action on their own individual behalf. The idea that since man is a member of a group he is absolved of his individual metaphysic (and therefore his responsibility for the sum and substance of his own life) is the lie that has killed and/or psychologically (and literally) castrated millions.
And though I appreciate what Tom is trying to say, the pendulum metaphor is off target. There is no compromise–no neutral middle position–between individual identity and collective identity. No common ground to be found between a collectivist metaphysic and the individual metaphysic. It MUST either be one or the other. Just like left is not also right, so the Self is not also Other.
Yes… this is a common conceptual mis-identification: mistaking the group as the primary while ignoring the constituent parts of the group–i.e. the individual. The group can never make a claim to any achievement, virtue, or purpose because in all instances the individuals are the source of those things.
As a brief aside it was John Locke who first successfully identified the individual as the primary social (and as a result) political unit. If you dear readers have not done so yet, I would highly recommend reading Locke’s Second Treaties of Government.
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John,
Not sure where to put this comment so just chose this post. I have been listening to your TANC podcast sessions. WOW! You did a ton of work on that and frankly, I am not sure where else this focus has been addressed. The history of deterministic thought.
Most don’t even realize they are determinists! One thing that has me perplexed and I will admit up front that I kept having interruptions so not sure if I missed it…..was the enlightenment part and how deterninistic thought from the ancients crept back in. So besides Hobbes how on earth did we come to have Founders who put it on the line for individual rights? From what I am understanding there was a constant mix of determinism and free will thinking during that time. Was it a sort of cognitive dissonance that played out on one side?
(never mind that we are now hurtling toward determinism/collectivism)
Lydia, actually this is a great question . . . one that i didn’t address in the conference.
The driving power of the enlightenment was really Bacon and Newton. Their work stood as an undisputed example of the power of man’s reason. So practically every day men took their work seriously . . . put into practice the process of “commanding nature” Every example of reasons success produced an increased confidence in reason and undermined the mysticism of the church which in turn inspired increases in political freedom which opened up more opportunities for man to act in accord with his independent judgment which increased mans grasp of the world.
The Enlightenment is a cultural evolution that happens within about 100 years. This cultural evolution was so dramatic and so potent that the traditional powers were in a panic. They knew they were about to be laughed out of existence because within living memory of two generations Man could see the contrast between the culture created by Augustinian doctrine and the profound success of human reason.
By contrast the intellectuals of that era started modern philosophy by accepting the historic philosophical presumptions and started their inquiry accepting the root Pythagorean soul/body split.
Descartes of course starts with what is called the prior certainty of consciousness which effectively subordinates all of existence to consciousness and man is effectively a lump of determined material . . . so from the outset of modern thought philosophy is tied to the ancient thinkers.
Hobbes doesn’t get any real traction with his contemporaries. It would take almost 200 years before he gains real acceptance. Really he was a philosopher ahead of his time . . . a thinker that got a lot of reading in the early 19th century.
So the contrast is . . . culturally reason is winning across the board in man’s “practical” every day life but the intellectuals are already undermining the integration of the consciousness and existence. Or in other words we already see the breach between the practical and the intellectual. Over the next 75 years or so thinkers dance back and forth across this dilemma with varying success. The biggest reason the British empiricists emerged is because the continental rationalist had taken philosophy so far into the realm of the abstract (mathematics) that it was divorced from reality all together.
John Locke was of course the first British Empiricists and how he managed to get his political formulations correct in light of the fact that his metaphysics and epistemology are a hodge podge of of previous thinkers . . . honestly i don’t know how he managed it. But his Second Treaty of Government and his Letters Concerning Toleration were seminal in shifting the worlds political structures.
But like i said in the lectures, he opens a door that ultimately leads to David Hume who effectively destroys the whole of modern science and he (Hume) is the reason that Kant sets out to destroy reason as such. Locke’s political thought suffered an almost immediate attack in Brittan . . . (Freedom and capitalism only lasts about 50 years in Britain and political liberty really never makes it to into Europe)
So there actual was a very narrow window of opportunity for the United States to emerge. The Atlantic ocean probably did as much to insulate Kant’s expansion into the Americas as anything and by the time Kant actually gets into the intelligentsia, America was already a shining light of the success of reason So it took another what . . . (off the top of my head) 120 years before Yale and Harvard and Cambridge et. al could indoctrinate two generation of thinkers to abandon reason, embrace human inability and inculcate collectivism into the American mind. The first sign of this massive intellectual shift shows up in America in about 1920.
So the cognitive dissonance is really the contrast between the intellectuals and the people who actually have to work in the real world. As i explain in lecture 4 … free will is axiomatic in volition so when you have to figure out how to feed yourself, and you have the political freedom to solve your own problems, Hobbes mechanistic determinism carries no intellectual force because the average individual can make the ostensive case that ideas. . . . BETTER IDEAS are the central means of man’s ability to do what Francis Bacon said: “nature to be commanded is to be obeyed.”
Thanks John. I just got done with session 5. And through the whole time I am wondering how on earth the US ever came into being. I realize there was always a tension going on but this makes total sense:
“So the contrast is . . . culturally reason is winning across the board in man’s “practical” every day life but the intellectuals are already undermining the integration of the consciousness and existence. Or in other words we already see the breach between the practical and the intellectual”
Not only a huge ocean but the fact that living in the Colonies was about practical every day life without the caste system of Europe which was so stifling. I have another theory that might fit here. The Puritans just about wore out their descendents who pretty much eschewed the whole system. There is anecdotal evidence many became Unitarians and another reason I am partial to Tom Paine who said “Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man”. And we see hints of the disgust of state religion in many of the Founders writings yet at the same time, an appeal to “Providence”. They were rethinking that whole relationship of God to man.
So I can see the short time frame you mention for a declaration of independence which makes it all totally amazing. Incredible what people can do when they believe themselves capable.
What I also see is a constant idea war that must be waged with determinism vs human agency. And I totally agree with you that we need to not go past the foundational premise of determinism. Once you accept the premise there is nothing more to discuss except a blackhole of circular arguments that are a waste of time. I am amazed at how many Neo Cals are quick to insist they are responsibility for their actions. They have clever fancy words like compatablism and such because if you engage the premise they are basically admitting they are not the philosopher kings they claim to be and that is embarassing. They must admit they are wicked worms. After all, if someone is a worm and not responsible for their predetermined actions, then they are not safe to be around. :o)
I watched your presentation amazed that America existed at all.