The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum I hoped that it will never happen but it did.

Brad,

Your first premise is rather "fractured", i.e., the fact that all men need regeneration of the Spirit in order to repent and believe since they are spiritually dead; openly in rebellion against God and all that is holy has little bearing upon the universal call of the Gospel. Man's natural state does not except him nor include him from the outward calling to repent and believe. Put another way, the extent of the Gospel call isn't dependent upon man's spiritual condition. However, man's spiritual state is directly dependent upon the Gospel; better, the sovereign working of the Holy Spirit through the right preaching of the Gospel.

My main concern here is actually that which I have highlighted above; the necessity of making known a sinner's "state" or "condition" before calling one to repentance and faith. I'll have to take your word that MacArthur nor Boice never did/does so, but I do know that the overwhelming majority of the Reformers and Puritans did preach on Original Sin and its dreadful affects, i.e., the doctrine of total depravity/inability. This was the Gospel preached for centuries until Finney came along (of course there were others as well), but he made popular the "dumbed-down gospel" methodology for he adamantly rejected the doctrines of grace and embraced Pelagianism. Today, we don't have so much Arminianism as was the case during the time of Wesley, et al, (an improvement of sorts over Finneyism) but rather the churches and most professing Christians have sunk even lower and have embraced semi-Pelagianism.

Rather than go into a long excursus on the necessity of preaching the total depravity/inability of man as being foundational to the Gospel of Scripture with many examples cited, I am simply going to point you to a excerpt taken from J.I. Packer's Introductory Essay to John Owen's 'Death of Death in the Death of Christ'. In this short excerpt he deals specifically with this issue and contrasts the "Old Gospel" with the "New Gospel", its application and affects.

Go here: The Old Gospel and the New.

For the full essay, go here: Introductory Essay to [i]The Death of Death[/i]

Arthur Pink agrees and says thus from his article: Present Day Evangelism

In twentieth-century evangelism there has been a woeful ignoring of the solemn truth of the total depravity of man. There has been a complete underrating of the desperate case and condition of the sinner. Very few indeed have faced the unpalatable fact that every man is thoroughly corrupt by nature, that he is completely unaware of his own wretchedness, blind and helpless, dead in trespasses and sins. Because such in his case, because his heart is filled with enmity against God, it follows that no man can be saved without the special and immediate intervention of God. According to our view here, so will it be else-where: to qualify and modify the truth of man’s total depravity will inevitably lead to the diluting of collateral truths. The teaching of Holy Writ on this point is unmistakable: man’s plight is such that his salvation is impossible unless God puts forth His mighty power. No stirring of the emotions by anecdotes, no regaling of the senses by music, no oratory of the preacher, no persuasive appeals, are of the slightest avail.

In His grace,