I digress, but it was a good digression. I hope you hear (or rather "read") my caution.
It is a digression (not sure how good, or not) and I do understand the caution.
The salient point is that verses about the saved shouldn't be applied to the unsaved and
that practice is one of the most frequently occurring problems in any Arm v Cal discussion. It's very dysfunctional both scripturally and logically. It's bad exegesis. It creates red herrings, straw men, false comparisons/equivalences, ambiguities, false causes, categorical errors and errors of construction, and more. After the "
Yep," read the first paragraph in this post
HERE (Post 51). I listed four big problems:
- Getting our own doctrine wrong.
- Getting the other party's doctrine wrong.
- The failure to correctly identify and discriminate the audience affiliation of scripture.
- Thinking Calvinism or Arminianism (or any other ~ism) is singular or monolithic, lacking any diversity within a core orthodoxy.
One or more of those four problems can be seen in every single thread in the Arm v Cal board. It is, imo, a sad state because we're all intelligent enough to use a computer so we're all intelligent enough to learn sound exegesis and sound reasoning. We are all also, presumably, capable of acknowledging any of those mistakes and self-correcting them
for the sake of a functional conversation and goodwill among our siblings. Neither do any of the four ever solve any of the differences (which implies those willfully ignoring or willfully resisting correcting these problems want the division).
ALL of the epistles were written to Christians. We
know this because the letters usually identify the intended audience very early on. That does not mean every single word or sentence is
about Christians. The authors do sometimes talk about non-Christians or the attributes or practices of non-Christians. On all such occasions the author indicates the group about which he's writing so we, the 21st century reader, can and should make that distinction. It's just as dysfunctional to apply attributes of the non-Christian onto Christians as it is to attempt applying the conditions of the regenerate believer onto the unregenerate non-believer. We saw this happen with the assumption Total Depravity applies to the already-saved regenerate believer when it does not.
Paul can address them as saved, and Paul can also remind them of their past, which was an example of total depravity (prior to being made alive).
Exactly. Sorta.
Total depravity is a condition
prior to being saved. Since TD is specifically about
the inability to become saved in one's own might it has, by definition, nothing to do with the already-saved and
that is the problem incorrectly injected by our brother into these recent threads. The doctrine (TD) does not apply to the saved. WCF 6.4 does not apply to the saved.
Some scriptures apply to both saved and unsaved. Scriptures
specifically about the unsaved don't apply to the saved. Scriptures specifically about the saved do not apply to the unsaved. Scripture usually identifies its applicable audience, and no one should ignore what scripture states when it does. Various forms of depravity, or corruption, can occur before or after salvation but the effects of sin in their general form have nothing to do with TD.
None of this is an Arm thing or a Cal thing (Arminius was a subscriber of TD). Only the other, more volitional soteriologies dissent (which is why our brother thought he had a valid point of dispute). This is an example of the #2 problem (see list above).
@praise_yeshua now understands he's made a mistake incorrectly applying total depravity to the already saved and not limiting it to the unsaved but has yet to acknowledge the mistake here in the boards. The matter of the saved being TD was inserted into a small number of threads around the same time and addressed uniformly by showing the verses and WCF Article employed to justify the practice were misused. The irony, of course, is the fallacious questions, persistent misunderstanding in the face of uniform correction, and absence of repentance are the kinds of things that evidence depravity (corruption), just not the kind covered by the doctrine of total depravity.