46. What is the natural state of humanity?
We believe humanity is fallen from righteousness and, apart from the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, is destitute of holiness and inclined to evil.
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Wesley, like most of his Protestant forebears and in keeping with the ancient teachers of the church like Augustine of Hippo, held to a very pessimistic view of human nature and potential apart from God’s intervention. He believed that, while human nature was initially created faultless and sinless, once human beings sinned and experienced the resulting spiritual alienation from God, human nature itself was corrupted. Human beings were not deprived of the faculties with which God had endowed it, such as intellect and ingenuity. But we became curved in on ourselves in self-interest and self-serving. We were cut off from the life of God and, thus, from life itself. Having failed to honor God as the source and goal of their being, human beings have degraded themselves and, no longer seeing the image of God in others, degrade one another through exploitation, oppression, and violence (cf. Rom. 1:18–32).
Wesley did not try to argue that every human being bore the particular guilt of Adam’s sin or that every infant was hiding some sin from birth that would result in its condemnation. It was enough for him that every human being was, from birth, inclined to sin and destined to die. Left to our own devices, we will serve our own interests and desires; we will not serve God, our Maker, as he deserves (see Rom. 1:18–3:20). The corruption of our nature (“original sin”) inevitably leads to actual sins that we ourselves commit—indeed, that come to characterize our lives. The inheritance from our natural birth is alienation from God and a cemetery plot. Nothing less than a second birth and the regeneration of our very nature is required if we hope to regain that life that Adam lost.
This position stands in tension with popular notions that every human being is still created “good.” Wesley would call us to take far more seriously the degree to which human nature itself has been corrupted and, thus, the degree to which we must depend upon God to become something that can be pronounced “good.”
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The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. (Gen. 6:5 NIV)
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned—sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. (Rom. 5:12–13)
You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. (Eph. 2:1–3)
See also Ps. 14:1–3; 51:5; Eccl. 9:3; Jer. 17:9–10; Rom. 3:9–18, 23; 1 John 1:8; CoF VII
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This is an excerpt from Christian Faith and Doctrine: An Annotated Catechism for the Global Methodist Church. Seedbed is pleased to partner with The Global Methodist Church to offer this companion resource to A Catechism of Christian Faith and Doctrine for the Global Methodist Church.
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