Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Wesley

Wesley on human depravity

Sometimes people think that it is only Calvinists that hold to "total depravity".  Yet this is a biblical doctrine, held also by classic Arminians, too.  It is only in Pelagius (in the 4th century) and later in the Enlightenment and some branches of modern evangelicalism that believe there is some good spark in humanity that is able to respond to the knowledge and goodness of God.   Case in point is this excerpt from John Wesley's sermon on "Original Sin." "...we can have no love of God: We cannot love him we know not. Most men talk indeed of loving God, and  perhaps imagine they do; at least, few will acknowledge they do not love him: But the fact is too plain to be denied. No man  loves God by nature, any more than he does a stone, or the earth he treads upon. What we love we delight in: But no man has  naturally any delight in God. In our natural state we cannot conceive how any one should delight in him. We take no pleasure  in him at all; he...