Reasons for Analyzing Romans

After having enough Calvinists quote Romans to support their views, I decided to really get down to analyzing it.

Part of this decision came from a person quoting Romans 3:10-11 to support the position that all are unable to understand (Total Depravity) unless God affects God's grace on a person, thus God is the one who is really doing all the action; our salvation has nothing to do with our choice initially(Unconditional Election)... (though when bringing up the double-election, whatever the technical/theological word for it is, they will turn to the "no one is without excuse; God's made the information plain for everyone" horn).

I asked this person for the context of the Romans 3:10-11 passage, and I was only given a very general statement: that Romans 1-3 is all about giving the history of how humanity fell since the days of Adam. By phrasing it that way, without knowing the context myself having no Bible in hand, it seemed that Romans 1 would be about our initial state (pre-Fall) leading to the culmination (Romans 3:10-11, all have sinned, all are running away from God and cannot turn back to God on their own accord/will). However, when just given that context, I just had a strong feeling that he may have been "stacking the deck" to prove his point. Now that I've analyzed those chapters myself I realize that he was...oooh, yeah he was, though perhaps unintentionally.

Though I can see how, without a thorough analysis of Psalms 14 (all of it, not just verses 1-3), one can interpret Romans 3:10-11 in that manner. But it would have helped if that person who quoted the Romans 3:10-11 passage would have simply said that Paul was quoting verses from the Psalms.

Had I known this during the discussion, I would have at least understood that some of the Psalms were written a bit more in the extreme sense, not meant to be taken quite so literally as we Greek-minded people may be inclined to do. After going home and finding the passage myself, I noticed I could make a good case that Paul seems to have refered the Psalms to make a case about a certain group of people rather than all people who ever lived. Perhaps in another post (if I remember), I'll present how I came to that conclusion about the Psalms passages that Paul quotes.

Note to self: discuss Psalms 14 and 53 eventually.