The reason I reject Total Depravity, is not because I believe that people can “save themselves” or earn their way into heaven, or do anything good to merit eternal life. I don't believe any thing like that. Instead I reject Total Depravity because I understood what most Calvinists meant when they talked about Total Depravity.
For Calvinists, Total Depravity means way more than just sinfulness.
Here are some quotes on Total Depravity from Calvinists:
Total depravity does not mean that each man is the epitome of the devil. For, as a matter of fact, man does not commit all the sins possible; and those he does commit are not always as bad as possible. Furthermore, we see that he can even perform a certain amount of relative good. … Total depravity means that natural man is never able to do any good that is fundamentally pleasing to God, and, in fact, does evil all the time (Palmer, The Five Points of Calvinism, 12-13).
Human nature has been and is utterly corrupted by sin so that man is totally incapable of doing anything to accomplish his salvation (Rose, TULIP, 2).
When Calvinists speak of man as begin totally depraved, they mean that man’s nature is corrupt, perverse, and sinful throughout (Steele & Thomas, Five Points of Calvinism, 18).
Total Depravity means that unregenerate man is hopelessly enmeshed in sin, bound by Satan with the chords of spiritual death, and wholly disinterested in the things of the Creator (Spencer, TULIP, 36).
To be totally depraved, however, does not mean that a person is as intensively evil as possible, but as extensively evil as possible. It is not that he cannot commit a worse crime; rather, it is that nothing that he does is good. Evil pervades every faculty of his soul and every sphere of his life. He is unable to do a single thing that is good (Palmer, The Five Points of Calvinism, 9).
What total depravity is meant to convey is the idea that sin has affected the whole person down to the very core or root of his or her being (Boice & Ryken, Doctrines of Grace, 71).
By nature we are slaves to sin. This does not mean that the fall has destroyed or eradicated the human will. Fallen man still has all the faculties to make choices. WE still have a mind and a will. The problem is not that we cannot make choices. Natural men make choices all the time. The problem is that, in our fallen condition, we make sinful choices. We make these choices freely. We sin precisely because we want to sin, and we are capable of choosing exactly what we want to choose (Sproul, Grace Unknown, 130).
What of Abraham? Did he not choose God being depraved? And what of Moses and David and so many others in the Old Testament that chose God? Man’s will does function to choose God and that is the way God set it up. There is no one born-again on the earth today that did not use his or her free-will to become that way.
Without free-will, man cannot love God. And we know that God says for us to love Him with all our heart (Matt 22:37). For a man to love God, he must have the freedom to choose or reject Him. Love involves an acceptance of the person being loved, in this case God.
