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Man's Depravity According To Calvinism

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Man’s Depravity
According to Calvinism, man is completely depraved and dead in his sin; man is unable to save himself and so God must initiate salvation. Arminianism partially agrees in that we are depraved and dead in our sin and have inherited this nature as a result of the Fall, but the work of the Holy Spirit allows you to respond to the call of salvation. Our depravity is unquestionable from the perspective of scripture as “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. ” We know intuitively that the heart includes things such as emotions and desires (it is not referring to the literal, biological organ), so we can reason that our emotions and desires, without the interaction of the Holy Spirit, is deceitful and wicked. This is not a difficult proposition to believe when you look at the state of humanity from as far back as we can look. …show more content…
” Being a Christian, he may well have got this view from the Bible which as we see in Jeremiah has a very negative view of man when deprived of God’s involvement. Even Jesus observes the depraved ways of the hearts of men: “For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man. ” So there is little doubt that man requires God to break away from the chains of evil. This is not even something that has developed over time but this depravity was seen not too long after creation: “Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

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