What does "dead in sin" mean? Does it mean unable to respond?
"Dead in trespasses and sins" (Eph 2:1) means spiritually separated from God and under sentence, not a corpse unable to hear. The same word describes the prodigal, "dead, and is alive again" after he came to himself and walked home (Luke 15:24).
What the text states
Paul's dead men in Ephesians 2 "walked" and fulfilled desires (2:2-3), so "dead" cannot mean insensate. It means estranged, cut off, under the sentence of death, the prodigal's state while alive and far off (Luke 15:24, 32). Calvinism builds total inability on a corpse reading; Scripture's "dead" is relational and legal, and Paul commands the very people he called dead, which no one does to corpses.
Calvinism reads "dead" as total inability requiring regeneration before faith. We answer that the biblical "dead" means estranged and condemned, since the gospel is "the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth" (Rom 1:16).
Go deeper
Checked 2026-09-29 by Darren. 50 Scripture citations verified against the KJV rows. Wave 4. 50 quoted fragments table-passed against the verses table, splitting every quotation at its ellipsis. 49 pass. ONE CORRECTION: the file quoted "Dead in sins" (Eph 2:1); the KJV reads "dead in trespasses and sins", and the quotation was corrected to the table. One exhibit does not resolve and ships omitted rather than guessed: what-does-dead-in-sin-mean listed 'is-faith-a-work', which is not a slug on this site (the nearest is is-believing-a-work); flagged for Darren.
Further reading (allied sources)
Written by others, hosted by them, on the same text.
- What can the spiritually dead do? · Cheryl Schatz, The Giving
This answer is the short form. The argument is made at length in the other day on x.