Back to human nature...

This is going back a bit to a previous discussion, but I was recently in dialog with my friend John Hay, a former Free Methodist pastor and committed Wesleyan-Arminian.  He had recommended to me a book called "Let Your Life Speak" by Parker Palmer, a Quaker.  I had asked him about to what extent we have an "inner light" within us that we can follow in our path to God.  I thought his reply was very appropriate for this blog:


"Here's how I see the distinction: Wesleyan theology begins with humans created in the image of God.  This is prior to the fall and it always has the power to trump the behaviors associated with the fall.  So, "self," though self-seeking in its fallenness, also has capacity to see through this shallowness, this emptiness, and see and seek what is deeper, higher, most original, i.e., "wholeness" beyond pathology.  Calvinistic theology, on the other hand, begins with the fall.  So, it would not and cannot appreciate this nuance (this reality). Calvinism can't see "self" as anything but completely depraved and unable to see or seek anything but "pathology."  To me, this is one of the most important and powerful distinctions between Wesleyan (and Wesleyan-related theological orientations, which Quakerism is) and Calvinistic understandings of the human condition.  Wesleyans see the human salvation project as a recovery of something good that has been badly sabotaged but that still, by its very creation and imago dei, has capacity to seek even apart from Christ's salvific work.  Christ's salvific work moves us from reckless seeking (groping about in darkness, self-inflicting and inflicting others in an effort to desperately survive, etc.) to seeing as light shines into our darkness.

The confidence that the self seeks not pathology but wholeness is based on a presumption that being created by God and in the image of God has "hard-wired" us for seeking wholeness in spite of everything that's been done (by others, historically and presently) or that we've done.  Even though we may engage in pathological behaviors and initially "seek" them, our we also "know" that these are just that: pathologies.  The self, even in its depravity and out of the experience of pathologies, seeks wholeness. Christ's work shines the light and opens the way to wholeness."

Do you think, Oscar and readers from the Reformed tradition, that John gives an adequate description of the difference between our traditions?  Is it fair to say that Calvinist anthropology "begins with the fall"?  Was the fall a total corruption of all human faculties or are there parts of human nature that have been preserved "through" the fall?