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Almost 100 years ago, the American poet Edwin Markham wrote these whimsical words:

"There's so much good in the worst of us

And so much bad in the best of us,

That it hardly behooves any of us

To talk about the rest of us."

Now, that poem actually has profound implications for all of us living in this twilight year of the 20^th century, and it raises a question which is fundamentally important for each of us as Christians: "Are we human beings basically good or basically bad?"

Last spring, our entire nation was shocked to the core by the tragic school shootings in Colorado and Georgia. Late in July, we were stunned again by the senseless, violent deaths and injuries of a family, innocent bystanders and the suicide of the gunman right here in Atlanta. And just this past week, out in Los Angeles, children and a teacher were shot in a Jewish community center and a Filipino postal worker was murdered by a man who belongs to a white supremacist group called the Aryan Nation.

In each and every horrible situation, I listened to the television and radio commentators describe the perpetrators as "berserk" or "psychotic" or "deranged." But not once did any of those reporters assert that these people were "bad" or "evil."

Well, are they? Or are they basically good individuals who have gone off the deep end? Or might it be that some of them were possessed by a dark and demonic spirit?

We may never know. But we do know that when traumatic events like these occur, the question rises up from deep down in our souls about human nature: are we basically good or basically bad? And how we seek to answer that question may determine the way that we Christians see ourselves, live our lives and relate to others in this world.

Beginning with the Book of Genesis, the Bible tilts us in one direction. After each act of creation, when God said Let there be light, Let there be a firmament, Let there be waters and heavens, Let there be sun...and moon...and living creatures of every kind - scripture tells us that God called it all Good.

And when God created human beings, male and female in His own image, saying to them Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, behold, God declared that it was very good!

You see, from the dawn of creation, the blueprints of all that God had made were stamped with the Divine seal of approval. That's the way it was In the beginning - God saw and said that it was all Good.

Turn the pages with me now across the aeons of time from Genesis 1 to Romans, chapter 7, and listen again to what the Apostle Paul had to say:

I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do...O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me?... (Romans 7:18-20, 24)

Obviously, something has changed. What God called good at the beginning of our human journey, Paul, writing in the first century A.D., now calls bad. And ever since then, we Christians have been trying to make some sense out of what has happened.

In 1536, a Frenchman named John Calvin wrote a book that became the Magna Carta of the Protestant Reformation. Calvin, a lawyer and a layman, was only 29 years old, but The Institutes of the Christian Religion reflects a wisdom far beyond his age.

This book, which helped to galvanize the Reformation in protest against the church in Rome, this book was also written in resistance to the prevailing attitude of the Renaissance which asserted that humanity no longer needed God.

Roland Bainton, the theologian and historian, once described it this way: "The Renaissance shifted human interest from heaven to earth." And the evidence of that was pervasive. Humanism pushed aside a sense of the holy, the Bible was seen for the first time as a book like any other book and economic, political and ecclesiastical systems usurped the power which once belonged only to God.

And that is where John Calvin began his book, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Listen to what he wrote in the first chapter, on the first page:

"From the feeling of our own ignorance, vanity, poverty, infirmity and what is more - depravity and corruption - we recognize that the true light of wisdom, virtue and the full abundance of every good and all righteousness rests in the Lord God alone."

From that sentence about sin and salvation, a phrase was born which became one of the watchwords of the Reformation: "The total depravity of man."

If those words are unfamiliar to you, then this is the way Webster's Dictionary explains it:

"Depravity - In theology, a vitiated state of the heart; wickedness: corruption of moral principles...total depravity is the doctrine that man's nature is innately bad and perverse, the original sin of Calvinism."

So you see, even Noah Webster ascribed to John Calvin this idea of total depravity, and that concept was prominent in the Protestant Reformation. Calvin and his colleagues in Geneva, Switzerland, called the people of that day to repent of their self-centered sin and total depravity, and to seek the salvation of God through the forgiveness of Jesus Christ. Many responded to that message 460 years ago, and we Presbyterians are the inheritors of that message and that movement still today.

But, there are Christians in the Reformed Tradition who believe that we need a different message for this modern era. And nearly twenty years ago, a Dutch Reformed pastor and preacher out in California wrote a book to try to re-define our approach to the gospel. His name is Robert Schuller and the book is entitled Self-Esteem: The New Reformation.

Some of you may have seen his Sunday morning television program, "The Hour of Power," and perhaps a few of you have read this book. When it was published, a number of critics said that Schuller had gone soft on sin. But in the introduction, this Dutch Reformed pastor offers the following explanation:

"A young man in his thirties lamented to me recently that for 'the first nine years of my life, I was a Roman Catholic. Then I became a Methodist. Next I joined a Baptist Church. And from there I moved into charismatic circles...In every one of those scenes, I was made to feel that I was a sinner unless and until I started condemning myself. I started to hate myself and lost all sense of self-esteem. Then I had an encounter with Christ. I was born again! And He didn't tell me how bad I was...He told me how great I was going to become as we walked on through life together.'" (Page 20)

From that story, Schuller launches into his theory and theology, saying that "self-esteem is the human hunger for the divine dignity that God intended to be our emotional birth-right as children created in His image."

So instead of saying that we are basically bad and totally depraved, Robert Schuller out in southern California is saying that we are basically good, created in the image of God.

Where did he get that idea from? From the Bible and from Jesus, says Schuller. Genesis 1 tells us that God made everything and called it good, including human beings. Moreover, from John 3:16, He reminds us that God so loved the world that He gave us His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but has eternal life. What we forget, says Schuller, is the next verse which says For Christ came into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.

And therein lies the distinction. The Protestant Reformation of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, focused on sin and total depravity and the need for salvation through Christ...compared with what Schuller called "the New Reformation," based on the original goodness that God poured into us and which Christ calls forth from us when we fall prey to sin and temptation.

Now, this may be a heavier sermon than you were expecting on a Sunday in August. But having heard these words from the Bible, from John Calvin and from Robert Schuller, what do you think? Are we human beings basically good or basically bad?

Let me tell you in closing what I think. I think that if we as Christians ever forget that Jesus Christ hung on the cross to forgive us from sin, we're dead. Because His death and resurrection are the core essentials of our faith and salvation. And even though I have never been comfortable with the phrase - "total depravity" - I know the reality of sin because it is within me. But, if we fail to recognize and remember that Jesus also calls forth the good that God put into each of us and that He loves us, even as Paul said, While we are still sinners (Romans 5:8), then we might as well close the doors of this church and go home and not come back again.

In fact, I think that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who is a Christian and who survived the dark era of Communism, was right when he wrote these words about our human nature:

"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?"

(From "The Gulag Archipelago")

If that is true, then I think what God has called us to do is to repent of the sin that is in each of us, to recover the good that He has put into all of us and to receive the love which God has showered upon us through the life-giving, life-changing Power of His Son, our Savior, Jesus. And that brings us back full circle to Edwin Markham: "There's so much good in the worst of us

And so much bad in the best of us,

That it hardly behooves any of us

To talk about the rest of us..."

Except for this: we Christians have been given a message - not to talk about each other but to share with each other. It is called "the good news of the gospel," and if we don't share that good news with the world, who else will?

In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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