Commenting on Eph 2:3, Protestant commentator Marvin Vincent wrote the following against the common Reformed reading of this verse in support of Total Depravity:
By nature children of wrath. See on ver. 2. Children (τέκνα) emphasizes the connection by birth; see on John i.12. Wrath (ὀργῆς) is God’s holy hatred of sin; His essential, necessary antagonism to everything evil Ro. i.18. By nature (φύσει) accords with children, implying what is innate. That man is born with a sinful nature, and that God and sin are essentially antagonistic, are conceded on all hands: but that unconscious human beings come into the world under the blaze of God’s indignation, hardly consists with Christ’s assertion that to little children belongs the kingdom of heaven. It is true that there is a birth-principle of evil, which, if suffered to develop, will bring upon itself the wrath of God. Whether Paul means more than this I do not know. (Marvin Vincent, Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament [4 vols.; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 2009], 3:375)
