The Bible Represents Men as Spiritually Dead

Charles Hodge

Another way in which the Scriptures clearly teach the doctrine of original sin is to be found in the passages in which they describe the natural state of man since the fall. Men, all men, men of every nation, of every age, and of every condition, are represented as spiritually dead. The natural man, man as he is by nature, is destitute of the life of God, i.e., of spiritual life. His understanding is darkness, so that he does not know or receive the things of God. He is not susceptible of impression from the realities of the spiritual world. He is as insensible to them as a dead man to the things of this world. He is alienated from God, and utterly unable to deliver himself from this state of corruption and misery. Those, and those only, are represented as delivered from this state in which men are born, who are renewed by the Holy Ghost; who are quickened, or made alive by the power of God, and who are therefore called spiritual as governed and actuated by a higher principle than any which belongs to our fallen nature. “The natural man,” says the Apostle (that is, man as he is by nature), “receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them; because they are spiritually discerned.” (1 Cor. 2:14.) “You hath he quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins;” and not only you Gentiles, but “even us,” when dead in sins, hath God “quickened together with Christ.” (Eph. 2:1, 5.) The state of all men, Jews and Gentiles, prior to regeneration, is declared to be a state of spiritual death. In Eph. 4:17, 18, this natural state of man is described by saying of the heathen that they “walk in the vanity of their mind (i.e., in sin), having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.” Man’s natural state is one of darkness, of which the proximate effect is ignorance and obduracy, and consequent alienation from God. It is true this is said of the heathen, but the Apostle constantly teaches that what is true of the heathen is no less true of the Jews; for there is no difference, since all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. With these few passages the whole tenour of the word of God agrees. Human nature in its present state is always and everywhere described as thus darkened and corrupted.

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Hodge, Charles. 1997. Systematic Theology. Vol. 2. Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.