So the baby is not totally depraved then. Depravity is in varying degrees, and there is something redeeming and worthwhile in man that God values.
The belief of total depravity requires babies to be damned to hell.
The main reason why baptizing them is so important. Otherwise, we depend on mercy and grace.
This all depends on what you mean by ‘total depravity.’ I have heard some claim that it only means that without God we are incapable of being saved (that we cannot save ourselves). That is pretty much the Lutheran position, but it is in fact a distortion of the Calvinist position, and it reveals that some might not know the difference between being
depraved (i.e. being evil or wicked) and being
deprived (i.e. lacking something essential).
It seems to me that the main difference between Lutheranism (and I would add Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Anglicanism) and Calvinism is that the former believes in ‘total deprivation,’ while the latter believes in ‘total depravity.’ And we see this difference clearly when we see that for Calvinism, ‘total depravity’ is due to sin.
In
I.15.8Institutes, Calvin writes (emphasis added):
To this he has joined will, to which choice belongs.
Man excelled in these noble endowments in his primitive condition, when reason, intelligence, prudence, and Judgment, not only sufficed for the government of his earthly life, but also enabled him to rise up to God and eternal happiness. Thereafter choice was added to direct the appetites, and temper all the organic motions; the will being thus perfectly submissive to the authority of reason.
In this upright state, man possessed freedom of will, by which, if he chose, he was able to obtain eternal life. It were here unseasonable to introduce the question concerning the secret predestination of God, because we are not considering what might or might not happen, but what the nature of man truly was. Adam, therefore, might have stood if he chose, since it was only by his own will that he fell.
And in his
commentary on Gen 3:19, Calvin writes, “Truly the first man would have passed to a better life, had he remained upright; but there would have been no separation of the soul from the body, no corruption, no kind of destruction, and, in short, no violent change.”
If we read the context of these quotations, and especially the emphasised parts of the first one, we see that Calvin held that Adam was created in a natural state whereby he could have earned his salvation, and that consequently total depravity came through the fall, due to sin.
According to Lutheranism (and Luther), however, man cannot do anything except by the grace of God, and that goes for his prelapsarian state as well. Lutheranism maintains that in the relationship between God and man (including the eternal happiness to which Calvin points), God always gives and man always receives. And furthermore, that even when man gives something to, or does something for, God, it is a gift of God. Even though this is about our postlapsarian, post-Regeneration lives, I think this principle is clear in
Phil. 2:12-13: “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence,
work out your own salvation with fear and trembling;
for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”
Salvation from sin, then, doesn’t change this fact. In heaven we well be equally dependent on grace to do al that we do (at least as regards the relationship between God and man). For Calvinism, it seems, grace is only applicable to the fallen man, while for Lutheranism man cannot do anything by his own nature (at least as regards the relationship between God and man) without the aid of God, even before the fall.
