The burden of proof is upon BR to establish that “sinners are born as sinners in birth.” Take Romans 3, which BR refers to often as proof of inherited moral depravity. What verse in that chapter or any other states anything about being born in sin, born with a sinful moral nature, born morally depraved, born in original sin, or any other such Augustinian notion. It simply does not.
Due to the fact that ‘all have sinned’ or that there is not one righteous prior to salvation, does not in any way equate to being born with original sin or constitutional moral depravity. It simply establishes the fact that “all we like sheep have gone astray, and have turned everyone to his own way” and that in Scriptural terms have ‘become’ unprofitable.
Morality is impossible to conceive of without moral accountability. Moral accountability demands that certain conditions are present. There must be a law, abilities to understand and comprehend and comply with that law, knowledge of that law, and a free will to either obey or disobey the know commands, i.e., the power of contrary choice of intents. Morality takes place in the will of man, antecedent to the doing, and cannot under any circumstances be seen as attached to the physical or the sensibilities or the nature that we are born with. Morality cannot be predicated without contrary choice to choose not just to follow the necessitated impulses of the sensibilities, but the choice to actually determine the intents of the heart, formed in the will of man, that are antecedent to any and all outward acts.
The so-called constitutional moral depravity foisted upon the church by Augustine is at best an oxymoron. By claiming sin can be predicated prior to the formation of intents within the will, that serve as the cause of ones actions and therefore blameworthy or praiseworthy, choices which of necessity must take place for morality to exist, all morality is annihilated. Constitutional depravity destroys accountability and makes God unjust in blaming man for being born into a state in which he did not ask to be birthed into nor have anything whatsoever to do with the outcome of his moral nature and subsequent moral choices. Such a notion is simply not supported by Scripture or reason.
