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The Nature of Sin

Author: Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.

In modern society, our tendency is to concentrate on the positive and brush the negative under the rug. We’ve been taught that to “see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil” is the way to banish such evil, but is this rose-tinted view realistic? Cornelius Plantinga argues that our self-deception is a path towards destruction, and that to understand and receive grace, we must first acknowledge sin and the devastation it brings.

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be is a surprisingly refreshing book in that it acknowledges what we all intrinsically know: something is deeply wrong with us and with our world. While too much hellfire and brimstone can cause a depression so deep that we give up, convicted of our own un-savable nature, the reverse is also true. Too much denial of our corruption, too much insistence on “all is well,” is equally damning. We know it, and it’s refreshing to have someone finally state the truth. The world is not the way it is supposed to be. Things are wrong. We are subject to a generational infection. Only once we admit the illness, can there be hope of a cure, after all.

Plantinga starts by describing the nature of sin. These chapters can get a bit heavy, and a bit confusing at times, as he parses words. For example: what is the difference between perversion, pollution, disintegration, corruption, and moral and venial sins? The terms get a bit intermixed, and the differences are ones of subtly and syntax. It’s an interesting examination, but it is not necessary to really “get” the authors admittedly self-made distinctions immediately. What’s important is the gist: this is serious. What’s even more important is Plantinga’s base description of sin and what it disrupts, “shalom.”

Shalom, as Plantinga defines it, is something far greater than peace. Shalom is a stand-in for the way things are supposed to be, how the world, our relationship to one another, and our relationship to God is supposed to be. It is essentially God’s kingdom on Earth, as established in Eden, but uncorrupted and incorruptible. Once this is explained, Plantinga starts talking about sin and its parasitic nature. This is where the narrative takes on strength and goes from the mere realm of intellectual discussion and dissection of terms into the effects of sin. In other words, Plantinga explains just why and how sin is so bad. We know it . . . sort of . . . but we’ve lost the focus on what it does, and what it twists.

Image by Karen .t from Pixabay

The rest of the book is about this twist and about how sin cannot sustain itself. It latches onto us – a parasite. We are the host and we feed and nurture sin in different ways. Some of us run from the acknowledgement of it, leaving it to fester and feed. Some of us leverage it and attack others, a misdirected anger. Some sin is folly or leads to folly, some masquerades as goodness, some causes or is part and portion of addiction. Sin has insidious ways, and the malady has different permutations, but it all comes back to the same infectious disease.

Plantinga’s thoughtfulness leads us to understand sin better and to diagnose it and its impacts more quickly, but he leaves us with hope. With this full acknowledgement of the tumor that grows in us, we gain access to the only physician who can excise it. The cross stops being a story and becomes a remedy, but only one we can accept if we acknowledge the very depths of our illness.

This book is a powerful and very necessary, look at what sin is and why it is so heinous. It does not throw away our “misdeeds” under the guide of “no one is perfect” or ignore sin under the pretense that we live in the joy of our salvation. It tracks the disease, the devastation, and only then, once we have the unvarnished truth of the terminal diagnoses, does the cure truly make sense and the price that was paid to gain it become impactful in a visceral way. Highly recommended.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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