Pastor Mark Driscoll: Total Depravity
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/17
This is something that the theologians will call total depravity or pervasive depravity. And what it means is this. It means that all of a person is infected and affected by sin. I’ll start with a simple analogy. So here’s my nice clean water. God made us like this. Clean, pure, holy. He said we were very good. Very good. Sin then enters into the human condition. We all inherited Romans 5 from our first father, Adam. And if I were to drop poison or pollution into this water, how much of it would be infected and affected? All of it. There wouldn’t be a portion that would be preserved. So it is with the human condition. Your mind is infected and affected by sin. Your heart is infected and affected by sin. Your will is infected and affected by sin. And those who don’t believe in the Bible think that a part of them is good. “Well, I just follow the science.” Why do you trust your mind? “Well, because it makes sense to me.” Well, you’ve had some crazy thoughts. I’ve known you a while. And then sometimes we’ll just say, “Follow your heart.” Every hangover started with that assumption. Every hangover started with that assumption. The point is that all of us is infected and affected by sin.
Pastor Mark Driscoll, “Total Depravity” (2021)
Pastor Mark Driscoll looks healthier in this video than at any point in his career, in my opinion. Something before 2021 and after 2021 didn’t do him wonders in the fitness.
What he is referencing here is a common theology based bigotry, it is the idea that individuals who are not Christian can be assumed to have something bad the Christians do not.
Which is to say, something transcendentally impure, as in the bottle of water example. There’s a lot of issues here that don’t make any clear sense. One is the founding of a lot of the preaching to garner truths about the world through merely analogical reasoning.
It has its purposes, but it’s primarily misleading in this context. Leaving that to the side, the use of the traditional Christian concepts of sin and not sin are meant as a call to self-improvement of the Christian in their life.
This, as with a lot of Driscoll’s performances, is merely the use of traditional Christia concepts to supernaturally stigmatize other people, which, as the supernatural does not exist, means the use of Christianity to stigmatize others. The rest of theatrical oratory, he continues:
So I want to break it down and look at all the components of the human being and how it’s infected and affected. He talks about our nature. We’ll unpack these. What then? Are we Jews, those who grew up in church with the Bible, any better off? Not at all. We’ve already charged that all, Jews and Greeks, everybody is under sin. That means ruled, dominated, controlled by, as it is written, he quotes the Old Testament. No one is righteous. No, not one. It’s very negative, very binary, very judgy, very accurate. What about our mind? Well, I went to college. I have more degrees than Fahrenheit. I’m very, very smart. No one understands. They have a lot of knowledge, but not a lot of wisdom. We call that college.
What are individuals to make of this rambling? I can barely see the common thread in the preaching. I am reminded of the preaching of William Branham. It is a torturous path and one washed away as fast as the brambly path is laid down. The short: ‘Sin infects people and makes them bad, examples.’ He continues:
Also motive, no one seeks for God. We’ll talk about that. How about your will? All have turned aside for they have become worthless. Deed. No one does good, not even one. Word. Their throat is an open grave. They use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. What about the body? Their feet are swift to shed blood. Emotion. In their paths are ruin and misery and the soul and the way of peace. They have not known. When you go to the doctor, they literally give you a checkup from head to toe. This is God’s checkup of humanity from head to toe. He literally starts with stick your tongue out. Let me look down your throat. That’s literally where he starts. He starts with nature. This is something that you will only learn in the Bible. You will not hear in any other educational format that you are not just a sinner in your behavior. You are a sinner by nature. It’s not just what you do, it’s who you are. Therefore, you can’t just have behavior modification. God needs to give you nature regeneration. That God needs to fundamentally change you at the level of being. That’s how bad we are. And that’s how great the need is.
Honestly, I do not even know an ordinary context in a proper educational institution in which sin is referenced as something bad in behaviour let alone nature. It’s just not there. It’s only in religious organizations and institutions preaching groundless nonsense. And again, as you all see, the analogical thinking does nothing to support this formulation of ‘reasoning’ because there’s nothing to concretely deal with there. He goes on:
And so how many of you have raised a kid, and you’ve seen that they come, it’s like it’s like a Groupon, you buy one, you get one, you get a kid, and they throw in a free sin nature. Have you noticed that? And if you raised a kid, did you need to teach him to lie or steal? You know what the difference is between an angry, selfish child and a terrorist? Size. That’s it. They all are going to do the same thing. And so even if you’re parenting a kid, you’re like, why do they do this? Because they need a new nature. We need a new nature. And so much of our world is trying to control behavior. And what God wants to do is change nature. Until things change in here, things can’t change out there. There needs to be the change in the want to before there can be the change in the how to.
Once you scrap back all of the layers of gibberish, weird examples, analogies, and the like, you get to something rather ordinary: behaviour. Kids come with selfishness. People can be selfish. Terrorists commit bad acts by definition. What is the point in making an entire cosmology to explain truisms? Does one need to be this cosmically self-centered?
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