Is Human Nature Basically Good or Completely Sinful?
The idea that people are basically good by nature echoes the ancient Pelagian heresy, which affirmed that Adam’s sin affected Adam alone. According to this view, human nature was not affected by Adam’s fall. Scripture teaches otherwise, asserting that Adam’s sin affected all his natural-born posterity (Rom. 5:12–14). By nature, human beings are “children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3). This is the theological point behind the phrase total depravity—the T in TULIP. In other words, sin has corrupted all of us (except Jesus) in heart, mind, body, and soul. This doctrine is found throughout both the Old and New Testaments (e.g., Gen. 6:5; Pss. 14:1–3; 143:2; Eccl. 7:20; Isa. 64:6; Mark 7:18–23; Rom. 1:21–32; 3:10–18, 23; 8:5–8; Gal. 4:3; Eph. 2:1–3; 4:17–19; Titus 3:3).
Christians can become confused because Scripture teaches that human beings were created by God in His image (Gen. 1:26–27), and God calls all that He created good (v. 31). If everything that God created is good, and if God created human nature, then isn’t human nature necessarily good? Yes. As originally created, human nature was good. However, part of human nature is the human will. The first human beings had the responsibility to align their created wills perfectly with God’s will—to obey Him. Instead, they disobeyed God. Like Satan, they turned their will, as it were, perpendicular to God’s will, introducing sin and misery into the world and into their own natures. In other words, they sinned. When they did this, human nature was distorted and corrupted. Like begets like, and all humans are now born with a corrupted and fallen human nature. Human beings are now born slaves to sin.
This is why the claim that “everyone sins a little” is also incorrect. We tend to measure ourselves against other human beings, and we like to pick the absolute worst specimens for comparison. We like to compare ourselves to people like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Mao Zedong. It’s easy to feel good about ourselves if the standard is refraining from killing millions of people. But this is not the standard by which the Word of God measures sin. The standard is God’s will, and the requirement is perfect obedience to that will. “Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it” (James 2:10; see Gal. 3:10). The question is not, Did you refrain from murdering millions today? The question is, Did you perfectly “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” today, and did you perfectly love “your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:37–39)? How often did you fail to do this perfectly? Was it just “a little”? No. We fail to do this a lot, and that means we sin a lot. This is why we need the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ. He is the only One who has ever perfectly fulfilled the law.
