Yesterday, my dear friend and writing partner Tom Chantry had a great post about the flaws in a lesser catechism, and I enjoyed it immensely until I ran into this part:

Scripturally, no man is morally blank: each soul has been covered in writing, either that of wickedness or that of righteousness.

The fallen soul is clogged with wickedness. It does not need erasure - subjection to some sort of moral degaussing - rather it must be overwritten with righteousness.

I agree with what comes before the colon.  I really am crazy about the theological metaphor he creates after the colon.  I agree without any qualification with the next sentence.  I am not sure what to do with that last sentence.

According to Romans 1, every person ever knows all the moral decrees of God.  According to Romans 2, what's worse is that our very consciences tell us about these things -- so when we do the wrong thing, it's not for lack of information or even a lack of understanding.  It's from a profusion of disobedience.  Indeed, Rom 3 goes on to say that just because the Jews have the actual written moral law, it doesn't do them one bit of good.

So, first things first: on the one hand, I like Tom's gold-star effort to make a theological metaphor, and in that I gave a lot of grace for his attempt to seal the deal by transposing the act of justification into his metaphor.  In that grace, what I think he means here is that root cause of sin doesn't need to be merely corrected: it needs to be utterly changed out because, frankly, it's the kind of thing that can't be left blank.

Sticking to my Romans riff here, it says at the end of Romans 3 that what happens is "[we] are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus."  So if I was to re-write what Tom wrote, here's how I would say it:

Scripturally, no man is morally blank: each soul has been covered in writing, either that of wickedness or that of righteousness.

The fallen soul is defaced with wickedness, graffiti'ed with all manner of vulgar mottos. It does not need erasure: it needs to be utterly reissued, reprinted by the publisher Himself, printed and bound on stuff purchased by the blood of Christ Himself.

Still, Tom's post has so much independent verve, I ran it as-is. Consider this my meditation on what he said so well.

Labels: human nature, justification, Romans

The question in the Catechism for Young Children which I insisted on rewriting for use in our church was # 50:


Sorry, epic fail. It’s almost as bad as the old “just if I had never sinned” pneumonic.

Let’s think about that for a moment. What would it mean for God to treat me merely as one who had never sinned? Does God accept men into His eternal kingdom based upon the mere absence of sin? Or does He reward according to the measure of our righteousness? (Psalm 18:24) Having my sins taken away is a great truth, but it leaves me unfit for heaven, needing yet to supply my own righteousness in order to enter in.

I suppose such a justification might make me a new Adam - capable of moral action, but also capable of sin. Am I so confident that I will succeed where Adam failed? That I will manage to supply sufficient righteousness to stand before God’s holy gaze? Moral neutrality is a horrible specter - a frightfully dangerous condition - and not the goal of Christ’s justifying love.

Perhaps the greatest point of departure for the Enlightenment philosophers was their elevation of the Aristotelian concept of tabula rasa. To Locke and others the infant was a moral blank slate with the freedom to determine his own moral destiny. Scripturally, no man is morally blank: each soul has been covered in writing, either that of wickedness or that of righteousness.

The fallen soul is clogged with wickedness. It does not need erasure - subjection to some sort of moral degaussing - rather it must be overwritten with righteousness. Moreover, a fallible human righteousness such as Adam’s will not suffice. No, what is needed is both the forgiveness of sins and an accounting of the soul as infallibly righteous.

And this, Christian, is the act of God’s free grace unto you: pardoning all your sins, yes, but also accepting and accounting you as righteous in His sight, according to the perfect obedience and full satisfaction of Christ, imputed to you by God and received through faith alone.

Labels: human nature, justification, total depravity