Where Have All the Augustinians Gone?

 Gone to Total Depravity, every one? When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn...

There is a tension in the best evangelical theology between the fallenness of the world and the goodness of creation. How we elaborate on that tension says and does a lot for how we engage with the world and ourselves.

This is one of the many places where I feel as though I do not fit in some of the circles in which I have spent a great deal of time. At my Wesleyan college, I learned to emphasize the original goodness of Creation in a way that tends to resist much reformed white evangelical emphasis on total depravity. But this is an Augustinian emphasis. The world was created good, and all evil in it is a falling short of the good. Things, in the Augustinian imagination, exist only by participating in the good in some sense and to some degree.

Total depravity can only be a healthy doctrine in the context of the goodness of creation on which all evil is parasitic. The very evils which the deconstructing Christians critique are themselves a failure to live up to Christian doctrine. This is part of why the notion of "deconstruction" is eminently fitting for Christians to take up: in our conviction that things were created good, and that everything which abides does so through the loving-kindness of God, we are confident that the falsest of ideologies carries in itself the seeds of its own de(con)struction and reform, nay redemption, into that holy articulation of truth which it would have been apart from the fall.

Total depravity, at its root, is not, as I understand it, so much the claim that we sin in all we do, but that the curse has been found everywhere, and so the blessing which is made known in Christ must be hoped for in every realm of human endeavor. It legitimizes our agony in the face of the fall as we encounter it across our lives, as we struggle against the flesh at every turn in our sanctification, and are thereby given hope that the salvation and renewal of Christ shall enter even here.

Total depravity, even as it says that we can do no good apart from Christ, also assures us that we are not alone in finding our moral capacities to be utterly frail, and we are not alone in desiring to be better than we are, and that we are, just as we believe ourselves in our most honest moments, in dire need of salvation.

The goodness of creation is a point of departure, but it also assures us that we are not so evil as to be incapable of being restored. We were good, and we will be good. Every human activity is marred by total depravity, but it is good human activity that is so marred. Every pop song is a gloriously good song--yet marred. And in heaven, every song ever sung, every story ever told, every bumper sticker ever written, and every doctrine ever professed will be redeemed in the great diversity of the kingdom of God. And we, the people of that kingdom, ought to seek out these goods even now. Hear the songs which are marred with the ears of a hopeful people who own them as redeemed songs.