Once again, it's not total inability that I dismiss. An unregenerate man is totally unable to actively participate in believing upon Christ. That's scriptural.
What I dismiss is the foolishness which props up the Protestant notion of inability.
All Protestants believe that a baby is born condemned to hell because of Adam's first sin. Born spiritually dead is how it's usually put. That's mistake #1, because scripture teaches that God places the spirit of man within him; and that upon death, the dust returns to the earth as it were, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
Protestants are woefully ignorant of this spirit/body distinction as it pertains to sin and righteousness. Our body is corrupt on account of Adam. But he did not have any ability to corrupt the breath which had not yet come from God.
Now, if the clean spirit coming from God becomes corrupt upon entering a human body, then Christ would have been corrupt at His incarnation. He was made LIKE US.
Where He succeeded, and where every man fails, is at the point of maturity - when every man goes his own way and determines right and wrong for himself, when we become fools and acknowledge God no longer. That is when we all become dead in sin. Christ only did the Father's will, even obedient to the point of death.
Protestants also get a fail at another point. Falsely thinking that faith is a choice, or a commitment, and understanding that unregenerated mam is unable to please God, they surmise that God must regenerate him first. The fail is reducing regeneration to a mere change of disposition, whereby he can now "choose" Christ.
Faith isn't a by choice, faith comes when the Holy Spirit sideswipes our thinking. When HE draws us to Christ through conviction of sin and convinces us of the truth of the gospel. NOBODY, whether dead in sin or regenerated, has any ability to "choose" to believe the gospel. It's humanly impossible to "decide" to believe upon someone. You either are persuaded, or it doesn't happen.
Read through Acts. Paul went out PERSUADING men. He preached the truth of the gospel , and the Holy Spirit did the work in men.
A third fail is in thinking that righteousness extends no further than "crediting", that our suns are "covered" by the blood of Christ, as if He's no better than a bull or goat.
When regeneration is properly understood as a literal cleansing, a literal removing of sins, a literal recreation, then it should be obvious that it cannot precede faith unto a crediting of righteousness.
What good would it do to "credit" righteousness to someone who's already become the righteousness of God?
In yet another fail, Protestants believe that upon death, a defiled, corrupt, "covered" spirit will be changed to be made fit for heaven. What they're talking about is biblical regeneration, and assigning it to happen at death.
But with biblical regeneration upon conversion, a man's inner being is literally righteous. The only thing he needs, to be fit for heaven, is to shed this BODY of death. Then it, too, will be cleansed of sin at the resurrection. That happens when Christ returns. That is how the whole man will be complete - body, soul, spirit - at His coming.
Protestant doctrine is nothing but one fail piled on top of each previous one, starting with the corrupted notion of Original Sin.
