A. The fall brought mankind into an estate of sin and misery.

Let’s begin with an early text in the Bible. In Genesis 6:5 we read this,

“The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

Now, following Thomas Boston’s exegesis of this passage, we will take note of its two parts: “Two things are here laid to their charge: I: Corruption of life, wickedness, great wickedness … 2: Corruption of nature: Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”1 In other words, these two dimensions of the charge from God were that man was thoroughly sinful internally, and that there was this thorough wickedness, namely, externally. Everything was polluted from within and therefore everything was destroyed all the way out. Hence the twofold expression, SIN AND MISERY, alerts us to the effect of the first sin, but then also the end effect of that continually causing effect. In fact, the Hebrew word used in Genesis 6:5 for this “intention” of the heart is used elsewhere in Isaiah for the shaping up of the moist clay that the potter uses to form his product. So the word yetser (יֵצֶר) can also mean that which is formed.2 

In discussing this “second state” of man’s nature—that is, the state of sin—we are going to do what this text of Genesis 6:5 does. We are going to move from the inside out, from that new “production line,” now cut off from the life of God, to making and forming its own produce. We will see how that affects both the internal man and the external man. 

Sin and Misery—as a Spiritual Inability

We can begin with a few more Old Testament passages. The prophet asks: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil” (Jer. 13:23). Here we see the most certain and inflexible kind of inability, the inability of a being to become something other than what it is essentially. Now this is an analogy. The point is not to suggest that a totally depraved man is the same as these two beings—the Ethiopian with his skin or the leopard with his spots—in every respect. The focus of the analogy is clearly on the inability of these to change these features of their being. 

This inability makes the sinner unable to seek after God or to desire to know him at all. In a passage that Paul will quote from in Romans, we see the Psalmist affirm the same: “The LORD looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God. They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one” (Ps. 14:2-3). So, Paul borrows from this and another Psalm in saying that,

“None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one” (Rom. 3:10-12).

This inability also makes the sinner unable to obey God. It changes man’s relationship to God’s law. “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom. 8:7-8).

This sinful inability, we must keep in mind, is a nature. So Jesus says, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh” (Jn. 3:3) and “the flesh is no help at all” (Jn. 6:63). In fact Paul is constantly using the expressions “sinful nature” and “flesh” as a synonym for sinful nature. Now for Pelagius this was not the case. The overall thought of Pelagius can be broken down into eighteen premises, as Sproul did (summarizing Harnack), and one of those premises was this: “that evil or sin can never pass into nature … Sin is always an act and never a nature. Otherwise, Pelagius insisted, God would be the author of evil. Sinful acts can never cause a sinful nature, nor can evil be inherited. If they could, then the goodness and righteousness of God are destroyed.”3 Clearly Pelagius was privileging the goodness of God over against the holiness and sovereignty of God, for example. 

It is a nature because it is from birth, an inheriting one form of fallen nature from one parent, as we saw. Turretin put it in this way: “ as man is now, so was Adam after the fall; for whatever he has by nature takes it origin from Adam himself. Now he is born with universal corruption, not only privative of good before received, but also positive of superinduced evil … hence he is called not only blind, but blindness and darkness itself; he is said to be not only corrupt and sick, but ‘dead’ (i.e. in a state of total impotence to good).”4 They are “inventors of evil” (Rom. 1:30).

In reflecting on “Adam’s sudden fall” and “the weakness of human nature,” Watson concluded that, “If our nature was thus weak when it was at the best, what is it now when it is at the worst?”5

Sin and Misery—as a Moral Inability

Moral inability is not an alternative explanation to spiritual inability. Some may have treated it that way, but they ought not have. Edwards especially used the language of “moral inability,” but that was not something he was offering as an alternative. Rather, he was specifically answering the errors of Whitby and Taylor in his generation,6 who supposed that natural man could at least obey God’s law. That is, sinners could still be moral in relation to God. Edwards was also using the language of “moral natures” in correlating man’s affections with God’s attributes, as he spoke of the holiness of God is moral terms, the sum of divine moral excellencies. Bavinck was of the opinion that Edwards’ distinction between natural and moral impotence—the former being retained (something like the essential image)—actually created confusion that contributed to the rise of Pelagianism in the modern English-speaking religious landscape.

The biggest problem with Edwards’ language is that it even suggests a divorce between moral and natural to begin with. A moral nature is a nature; and the real question is not whether this nature is essential or fallen (all of the Reformed agree there), but whether this nature is innate or ingrained. All the Reformed agree that this is innate, but our language must be on guard for those who do not understand this. Now although we cannot reduce total depravity to a moral inability that is less than (or other than) a natural inability, nevertheless, the adjective “moral” is important as part of that nature that is unable. 

To get a better sense of this moral inability, we really have to reach back to that verse in Romans 8:7-8. To say that the person of “the flesh” does not submit itself to God’s law—that there is “hostility” to it—is really to say that the good things and good actions that are to be achieved by obeying that law are in fact despised. In other words, sinful man hates what is good. Sinful man does not simply act immorally in all that he does, but he hates true morality. What he does that is moral is a flailing around of the moral corpse. He still descends from the image of God and thus retains the memory of that essence. Even the unbeliever feels the urge to the rise to the occasion that we call courage. Even the unbeliever senses that a weak person being abused ought to receive his pity. And so these are real moral motions—yet these are not motivated by that glory of God which would direct souls to their proper end through that moral action.  

Man’s sin is so consequential that its curse was over the whole earth. So in Genesis 3 we read,

“And to Adam he said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return’” (vv. 17-20).

The restoration of bodies in 1 Corinthians 15, and of the natural world in Romans 8:20-25, presupposes that the curse has ravaged these to the core. But not only the world with respect to space and matter, but also with respect to time and culture. So Paul calls this world “the present evil age” (Gal. 1:4), and that “the days are evil” (Eph. 5:16). It is a realm which “lies in the power of the evil one” (1 Jn. 5:19).

Bavinck expressed the doctrine in this way: “Human persons are now under the hard necessity of not being able not to sin. Their virtues are vices rather than virtues; they are by nature inclined to all evil, inclined even to hate God and their neighbor.”7

The statement of Philip Schaff is appropriate for closing here. In it we are reminded of the interrelatedness of each main doctrine to all of the others. He says this about the effects of Pelagianism:

“If human nature is uncorrupted, and the natural will competent to all good, we need no Redeemer to create in us a new will and a new life, but merely an improver and ennobler; and salvation is essentially the work of man. The Pelagian system has really no place for the idea of redemption, atonement, regeneration, and new creation. It substitutes for them our own moral effort to perfect our natural powers, and the mere addition of the grace of God as a valuable aid and support. It was only by a happy inconsistency, that Pelagius and his adherents traditionally held to the church doctrines of the Trinity and the person of Christ. Logically their system led to a rationalistic Christology.”8

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1. Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State, 60-61.

2. As the verb  יָצַר  means “to form” or “to fashion.”

3. Sproul, Willing to Believe, 37.

4. Turretin, Institutes, I.9.8.10.

5. Watson, A Body of Divinity, 138.

6. Daniel Whitby (1638–1726) and John Taylor (1694–1761) were two contemporaries of Edwards, the former being from a pervious generation and against whom Edwards also took issue in his Freedom of the Will.

7. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, III:121-22.

8. Philip Schaff, quoted in Sproul, Willing to Believe, 45.