My wife and I saw the movie Luther a few days ago. It is a good movie--quite moving, without my quite knowing why, and with superlative acting by Peter Ustinov as Duke Frederick the Wise. It seemed historically and theologically accurate, too, which is remarkable. (I do wonder about the treatment of Carlstadt, and I did find the Peasants' War section completely confusing, but then, it was a confusing war.) The movie stimulated me to think about Purity and that gave me a new angle on the perplexing doctrine of Total Depravity-- the orthodox doctrine of Luther and Calvin (and perhaps Augustine?) that all men, even the apparently virtuous and or saintly, are sinful and do not deserve eternity with God. The proximate cause of my seeing this angle was a passage from Luther's Table Talk that I read after seeing the movie:

For he that is not an open and a public murderer, an adulterer, or a thief, holds himself to be an upright and godly man; as did the Pharisee, so blinded and possessed spiritually of the devil, that he could neither see nor feel his sins, nor his miserable case, but exalted himself touching his good works and deserts.

The new angle is to think not in terms of sin, but of impurity. If you ask the average man whether he is sinful, he is likely to say no. If you ask him if his soul is filled with impurity, he is likely to say yes. The average man is not a murderer, adulterer, or thief (and even if he is, excuses those things as occasional lapses). But if you ask him whether someone looking into his soul would find impurity, he would have to admit that every day he has thoughts that would not bear looking into, thoughts he would be embarassed and ashamed to have made public, or that at the least, like angry thoughts, are unpleasant and ugly. With much work, a person can reduce the number of such thoughts, and can reduce the impurity in his soul, but I do not believe he can eliminate it entirely. Or perhaps he can, but only in the Buddhist style, by emptying his soul of everything, good and bad, in which case he is still not left with a pure and good soul-- just a blank one. This, I suppose, is on Buddhist motivation: impurity is bad enough that it ought to be destroyed even if the rest of the soul must disappear too.

Ask then, whether it is proper for a human soul to join God. Yechh! That would be like putting dirty water into milk. It is not a matter of injustice, but of aesthetics and physics. The dirty water may not be happy being separated off by itself, stinking and festering, but ought the milk to be blamed for that? Is it unjust for the milk to reject the company of the cesspool? Rather, God must make some special effort to deal with my impurity if I am to join Him.

It is another issue whether God affirmatively punishes unsaved souls. Jonathan Edwards, said of sinners in his most famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,"

3. Another thing implied is, that they are liable to fall of themselves, without being thrown down by the hand of another; as he that stands or walks on slippery ground needs nothing but his own weight to throw him down.

4. That the reason why they are not fallen already and do not fall now is only that God's appointed time is not come. For it is said, that when that due time, or appointed time comes, their foot shall slide. Then they shall be left to fall, as they are inclined by their own weight. God will not hold them up in these slippery places any longer, but will let them go; and then, at that very instant, they shall fall into destruction; as he that stands on such slippery declining ground, on the edge of a pit, he cannot stand alone, when he is let go he immediately falls and is lost.

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