Yes, God has changed our hearts, given us the Spirit, made us new creatures in Christ, accepted in the beloved, and the myriad other things that are newly ours because of Christ. Amen!

That said, careful, brother, that the tone doesn’t come across that being declared righteous is synonymous with sinless perfection.

Being effects action…how we react to the world comes out of who we are…

since none of us -act- truly totally depraved, in the most literal representation of the word I can think of. Then perhaps people are misinterpreting what the Bible is trying to say, or perhaps it’s saying exactly what we think, and more, the more part being what changes everything.

God is spirit. We are matter, material.
God is light. We are darkness.
God is eternal. We had a beginning.
God is infinite. We are finite.
God is self-existent. We are created, dependent.
God is love. We are selfish.
God is immutable truth. We tell lies.
God is transcendant, holy, righteousness. We are sinners.

An act of sin did not make us sinners, but is proof of what we are by nature, depraved sinners, without a chance of doing anything God-like.

So total depdravity is not so much an issue of outward evil action, but our state of being, and there is nothing we or any religious organization can do to make up the difference.

That’s why Jesus became a man and died in our place so that by simple child-like faith we can believe in His perfect work and become God-like in Christ.

“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved”.
Acts 16:31

One, I’ve never heard a satisfying explanation of Total Depravity. Until I watch Zombie or Vampire movies. But according to your thoughts, that would be an inaccurate representation. Yet how else does one depict the word Total in accompaniment with the word Depravity? The most depraved beings we might see in reality would be those like Jeffrey Dahmer, but even he said he always knew what he was doing was wrong, and that he was guilty of a sin. He later accepts Christ and by all accounts I believe him to be standing in God’s presence in worship and hope even now.

The truth is I agree that a vampire or a zombie is an inaccurate representation of a truth of humanity, because humanity is not like that. In other words total depravity, in it’s most literal sense, seems an inaccurate representation of humanity. One would have to believe that every choice is made out of selfish desires, and one would have to believe that God is completely unintelligable to the human mind. Sometimes I am not even sure humanity needs prevenient grace to get to saving grace, but then I think the miracle and beauty of an intelligible God is itself grace.

Not sure where my question was, sorry about that.

Second, and this is probably a lot easier of a trail to follow, would it be unbiblical, or perhaps just illogical to compliment a nonchristian on their work? Perhaps we would only say “Well done God for using that depraved being to somehow get out your truth without their knowing it or really even being part of the process” because if they were, there would have to be smatterings of identity clogging up the truth. Well, okay, so there usually is. But where and how does the truth or beauty even come into existence, all creative process, and I am writing this as an artist, comes from within, from the very being of me. Whatever comes out of me, be it ugliness or beauty, truth or lie, is as much a part of me as it is a part of that Imago Dei. That is because the human process is a complicated sticky process where identity itself grows organically out of environment, Imago Dei, sin nature, etc. to create an individual, and all parts are sums of the whole in a way that cannot be divided. Any truth or beauty has to have come out of something perhaps truthfilled and beautiful, something that is itself as much as Image of God. The process of identity of becoming a someone is hard even for me to describe,and probably i’d say now that trail is even harder to follow than the first one.

But it’s what I believe.

But perhaps you’d rather focus on the questions than the reasons behind them, and that is okay with me.