For Latter-day Saints who interact with Calvinists, the following definition of "Total Depravity" (the "T" of TULIP) will be useful:
The
doctrine of total depravity states that, with the exception of the Lord Jesus
Christ, all of humanity, from the very moment of conception, share a corrupt
human nature which renders us liable to God’s wrath, incapable of any saving
good, inclined toward evil, and which leaves us both dead in sin and enslaved
to sin. Left to ourselves, we neither want to nor can return to the God who
made us, and, without the regenerating grace of the Holy Spirit, we cannot know
him as our heavenly Father. Our mind has lost the pure knowledge of God so that
we are blind, self-centered, and self-impressed. Our will has squandered its
holiness and surrendered its freedom; we are wicked in our rebellion against a
good God and his ways, and, more than this, we are enslaved to our rebellion.
Our affections are impure and find delight in what is evil. We do not rejoice
constantly in God. It is not that we are as bad as we possibly could be;
rather, total depravity simply describes the fact that there is not one single
aspect of our constitution that is unaffected by sin’s derangements. (David Gibson
and Jonathan Gibson, “’Salvation Belongs to the Lord’: Mapping the doctrine of
the Total Depravity of Human Creatures,” in Ruined Sinners to Reclaim: Sin
and Depravity in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective,
ed. David Gibson and Jonathan Gibson [The Doctrines of Grace Series; Wheaton,
Ill.: Crossway, 2024], 1-2)
