The Depravity of Humanity

At UMYS, the gathering of United Methodist high school students in Minnesota, I was bombarded at several points by songs and speakers that stressed our total dependence on God. While I would agree that each of us needs God, what I struggled with was the accompanying belief that without God, we are nothing, or really that left to our own devices, humans will tend towards evil and failure. This low view of humanity has been around for a long time. Luther certainly believed in the total depravity of humanity and our great need for grace. Several different branches of the Christian faith today also stress this same depravity and dependency.

Now I should make it clear that I know from my own numerous failings in life that I am far from perfect and certainly in need of God's grace. I guess I want us to have a better sense of God's prevenient grace. I think if we have too low of an opinion of humanity, we are in fact insulting God. I am not big on the whole idea of original sin and its completely destructive effects on our lives. What I struggle with is that God's creation, namely us, could have been so fragile that we could screw it up so bad in one go. When we talk about the depravity of humanity we are talking about the depravity of God's creation. While I believe in need for grace in our lives, I believe that God is already at work in our lives. While we ultimately need God's grace to be saved, we also need to remember that God gave us some gifts already to help in our salvation. To my knowledge Gandhi never really claimed the need for God's grace in his life. I am certain he never accepted Christ as his Lord and Savior. At the same time, can we say that he lived a life of total depravity. While I question some of the choices he made, I think he is a great example of what humanity can do. I do not want to undermine the need for grace in our lives, I just think we need to recognize that part of the grace that God gives us is simply innate in who we are. We as humans are capable of making good choices. We are not perfect, but I think like Wesley we need to aspire to perfection, and when we fall short in this life, we can trust in God's grace to help us along.

I think this is more ranting than I wanted it to be. I think that at the moment I am simply struggling for a more positive view of humanity than I often find in Christianity. I feel that we ultimately undermine ourselves by saying we are not capable of anything without God. The sort of negative language we use in our theology would be scorned in regular conversation as being overly negative, and damaging to our sense of self worth. I guess I think it is possible to believe in the greatness of God and yet to see some of that in the ways that God created humanity, to see God's grace already at work in our lives, not something we have to claim before we can be anything at all. The irony in this is that I want to talk tonight about how each of us betrays Christ in our own ways ... maybe I am not so sure what I think after all.