Not the Way It's Supposed to Be

Preface

Précis

Plantinga explicitly pointed out in the first sentence that his project was an attempt to recreate a consciousness of an age old theme: that of sin. He began by sketching out the flippancy with which we address the issue, in contrast to the seriousness in which it was once dealt with, not without fault in its inappropriate tone or hypocritical self-righteous air, yet taken seriously nonetheless. The author wrote that people possessed both an understanding and shared communal outlook in regards to it. Plantinga noted its contemporary loss of poignancy, to which he raised the question of the purpose of a more serious treatment. He outlined two major themes of informing and reminding people as its very nature he saw requiring continual diligence. The author then notes the difficulties of such an endeavor (informing), laying it in part on the shift in our cultural backdrop. Despite this, Cornelius explained its cultural relevancy, that being the hope offered through a diagnosis of sin in the ails which engrossing us. He explained though the need for our rearticulation of this traditional theme to be responsive to contemporary problems unique to our situation. He wrote that moreover, this rearticulating was not merely for Christian audiences, but rather for society as a whole, who would then share in the value of a common understanding and awareness of a Christian outlook, even while rejecting particular features. After Plantinga mapped out a gap in our treatment, due to the inaccessibility of some tomes, fragmentary and specialized coverage, and the increasing infrequency of exposure in church institutions, he reasserted his purpose of providing an avenue of revitalizing this doctrine so that it would once again be capable of profound personal confrontation/engagement. Written slightly melodramatically and with an air of nostalgia, the preface was regardless rhetorically well-written, introducing some thematic elements of the book.

Commentary

We are in really fucked up times. Seriously. This post is coming this late cause a friend called me up, drunk, wanting to know if I would come out and talk. We talked for two hours until two at night. And what was the one word which never ushered out of either of our mouths? Sin. It wasn't from me being scared of what he might think if I brought it up or its inappropriateness to the conversation. We just had no common basis on this point for which to bring it up. This is despite amongst other things us talking a great length on the topic of sexual infatuation, a general loss of consideration for him by others, loneliness and anxiety about a lack of intimacy, and the stresses of life at age 21. Anger at religion and the bs he experienced growing up and how he had been brainwashed negatively was also a theme. I mainly listened and tried to be there for him (with frozen barefeet). Amongst other things, tried taking the time to explain to him, that when some women say they're raped, they aren't kidding. That what he's telling me is "women know what's going on and should expect", I had to gently explain leaves one of my friends crying hours everyday. We talked about a lot of things that I'm not going to share, but it left me filling empathetically frustrated. He would say things like, "I fully trust you man," to which I would respond, "No, you don't, and I don't full trust you. You trust me a lot, more than most, but at some level you're afraid I'm gonna reject you." He would agree. He would frequently say, "Freud is a genius!" to which I eventually suggested, "Freud is full of shit, but I once thought that too." Still, he knows the reality of disillusioned ideals and expectations of others and life. He knows it all too well and is heading for cynicism. He's drunk too often. People seem to oscillate between burying their heads in the sand of wishful thinking with false dogmatism and coping by conforming themselves with "straight-thinking", emulating debase practices, and accepting as the way-things-are this decadent social order we've constructed, this below-the-bar standard for what it means to be human. People should have certain expectations of others, and have not only a right but a duty to demand it of others.

What the hell? We know a lot of our ideas are bankrupt, reality shouts that at us! Our incredulity to the hope of promise is overwhelming.

Meanwhile I'm on another site, where an interlocutor is arguing against an "understand-first" culture, to which I agree is bs, but not the desire to listen and understand. I agree in other words that we suck at it. This concern with compromising "speaking the truth" to the point where we neglect a theology of suffering, and people are suffering even if it's partially self-inflicted, to which the truth can actually effectively break us out of, is a religious abuse of the gospel. The two are not necessarily opposed to one another. But how to wisely go about them being intertwined?

Ah, I'm ranting not commenting.

The book is full of examples that I'm glossing over but which really help in illustrating what he's talking about. My favorite though was:

[S]chool teachers no longer say anything as pointed as "Stop it, please! You're disturbing the class!" For these are judgmental words. Instead, to a strong-armed youth who is rattling classroom windows with his tennis ball, educationally correct teachers put a sequence of caring questions: "What are you doing? Why are you doing it? How does this make you feel?"

Do we honestly believe people are going to take that crap seriously? Wake up to the real world! Making people feel immensely "cared for" in some segmented window of their existence doesn't seriously impact people's lives, it makes the "caring" people tools.

I heard a phrase in a lecture on relativism that is relevant, we've in our attempts to be loving "cut the vocal cords" of what a Biblical message has to say to ourselves and society. We forfeited our calling to be culturally subversive on both conservative and liberal fronts, participating in God's redemptive work of righting the wrongs of this world. We rather willingly participate in muddling things further, focusing on a shallow self-fulfilling of our mediocre lives. Through our bankrupt doctrines of sin, we've undercut our abilities to address social and individual injustices, settling for the pretense of concern or smugly complacent in self-absorption or both.

He's also in this part explaining the need for the books focus, commenting:

Books on sin today must meet concerns and untie knots that did not worry Augustine and Calvin. They were not worried about the flattening of human majesty in modern naturalism or of human corruption in Enlightenment humanism. They did not wonder at the Californian tendency to conflate salvation and self-esteem. Nor did they meet a widespread cultural assumption that the proper place to inquire about the root causes of human evil is a department of psychology or sociology....

Modernity has shaped the human, and even the Christian, understanding of sin in important ways, some of them welcome and some not, and any restatement of the Christian understanding of sin must pay attention to these shapings.

Modernity briefly generally refers to in most context (this included) the 19th and 20th centuries, with the advent of industrialization. There are also certain political allusions entailed, as well as a trust in science. The term though is frequently employed with a focus on huge totalizing narratives or ideologies with themes of human progress or emancipation. Modernity is typically viewed paradoxically as providing both benefits and losses, for instance technology, medicine, and human rights but a weakening of community, a loss of meaning and narcissism, and a preoccupation with instrumentality. I'll explain more later.

Again, the topic needs understanding, not just a check-list of things we know about. This understanding entails its application in reality, a reality that has shifted over time. This lack of understanding I would suggest is why impoverished Evangelicals who repeat well-rehearsed lines, seem out-of-touch with God's work.

What's devastating about [our loss of consciousness of sin and self-deception] is that when we lack an ear for wrong notes in our lives, we cannot play right ones or even recognize them in the performances of others. Eventually we make ourselves religiously so unmusical that we miss both the exposition and the recapitulation of the main themes God plays in human life. The music of creation and the still greater music of grace whistle right through our skulls, causing no catch of breath and leaving no residue. Moral beauty begins to bore us. The idea that the human race needs a Savior sounds quaint.

So the broader goal of this study is to renew our memory of the integrity of creation and to sharpen our eye for the beauty of grace.

A great blog post, on this subject.

I for one look forward with anticipation to the predicted collapse of Evangelicalism, a post-God church bastardizing religious faithfulness.