Not the Way It's Supposed To Be

Introduction

Précis

Plantinga began by illustrating the way annoyances, regrets, and miseries have impacted our lives, before he hit upon what he saw as the primary cause of suffering: sin. The author justified this insight with two reasons; the first reason was that sin corrupts the core of our being and character, and the second was that it underlined many of the other misseries, e.g. loneliness, restlessness, estrangement, shame and meaninglessness. Cornelius understood the relationship between sin and misery as one of give and take, or mutually affecting each other in a cyclical fashion. This was seen regardless of whether the sin was intentional or involuntarily. Even with metaphysical evils, while not morally evil, the actual event of suffering is also in part compounded by our past choices or responsive ones. Plantinga argues that the gospel narratives go to great lengths to explaining the efforts God took to defeat sin and addressing the urgency with which humanity too needs to address the issue. He explained that sin was structurally presented though the ideas of lawlessness or faithlessness and a plethora of metaphors. Before the author ended on a note about how the book could explore the issue, Cornelius stated that sin was a negative not positive force, and that it should be discussed against the backdrop of creation and redemption. The tone was more concrete than the preface, and the writing more heuristic.

Commentary

We're still in the intro, so there's obviously not that much to comment on. I do appreciate how he's going at lengths not to collapse some phenomenological distinctions, as well not oversimplify the issues that he's addressing. He's still introducing themes and concepts here that he's going to unpack later on in a multifaceted manner; however, he does state some noteworthy things which should cause us to pay attention and ruminate on rather than allow to slide by.

One was when he was addressing natural disasters, he made the statement, "Many accidents are, in retrospect, both accidental and predictable" (Plantinga 4). He then gives some examples, some of which I agree with and some I'm taking pause to ask if we agree? Yes, when climbing in nature, one should respect it and not party above the tree-line during the afternoon, and doing otherwise is not only at one's own risk, but is tantamount to stupidity. So he's implicitly laying out a relationship to the natural order that includes moral virtues like respect. He mentions shortcuts that constructors and inspectors take in the functioning of their jobs which can afterwards have "unexpected" repercussions during natural events. He also mentions though "greedy condominium development in known hurricane alleys or flood plains" (Plantinga 4). Are they merely thoughtlessly endangering humans in order to quickly turn a profit? I'm sure Plantinga would agree, but what of the complicit consumers driving the demand? Are they actually driving the demand with advertisements and brochures proliferating like bunnies, or are the developers also manipulating our desires? What struck me as odd though is not these questions, but the disregard for questions pertaining to nature attributed to the developers (which was obviously a caricature), without really questioning the assumption of whether these questions were legit. In other words, how much should our consideration for possible natural events prudently factor in, and do they deserve the characterization of sinful? Yes, he's right here that human control does factor in, but might not attributing it to human evil be a categorical mistake?

He made the comment briefly that "the main human trouble is desperately difficult to fix, even for God, and that sin is the longest-running of human emergences" (Plantinga 5). This also caught my attention, sin is hard to remedy "even for God." I'm not sure how well that gels with my conceptions of Him, so it challenges me to rethink both the severity of sin and ask if my conceptions in this regard of God might not be trite?

One quote though I loved was that "People also suffer boredom, what Walker Percy called 'the self being stuffed with itself.'" (Plantinga 2). I see it all around me, and is a common plight with those whom I love. I wanna share two of my favorite paragraphs of all time from the intro to Theology of Hope:

Thus despair, too, presupposes hope. 'What we do not long for, can be the object neither of our hope nor of our despair' (Augustine). The pain of despair surely lies in the fact that a hope is there, but no way opens up towards its fulfillment. Thus the kindled hope turns against the one who hopes and consumes him. 'Living means burying hopes', says Fontane in one of his novels, and it is these 'dead hopes' that he portrays in it. Our hopes are bereft of faith and confidence. Hence despair would seek to preserve the soul from disappointments. 'Hope as a rule makes many a fool.' Hence we try to remain on the solid ground of reality, 'to think clearly and not hope any more' (Camus), and yet in adopting this so-called realism dictated by the facts we fall victim to the worst of all utopias - the utopia of the status quo, as R. Musil has called this kind of realism.

The despairing surrender of hope does not even need to have a desperate appearance. it can also be the mere tacit absence of meaning, prospects, future and purpose. It can wear the face of smiling resignation: bonjour tristesse!All that remains is a certain smile on the part of those who have tried out the full range of their possibilities and found nothing in them that could give cause for hope. All that remains is a taedium vitae a life that has little further interest in itself. Of all the attitudes produced by the decay of a non-eschatological, bourgeois Christianity, and then consequently found in a no longer Christian world, there is hardly any which is so general as acedia, tristesse, the cultivation and dandling manipulation of faded hopes. But where hope does not find its way to the source of new, unknown possibilities, there the trifling, ironical play with the existing possibilities ends in boredom, or in outbreaks of absurdity. (Moltmann 1993, 23-24)

Obviously, this is a place where someone like Plantinga and Wright can be brought into conversation with one another. Although Plantinga is not here treating boredom as sin, it's directly related to the notion of hope and seems to spawn on a lot of Christian's obsessive behavior with insignificant time-occupying activities due to their impoverished understanding and self-absorption. Like sin, despair is a leaching drive. The tie to being self-absorbed though, beyond the outward difficulties of boredom, is a negligence on the part of contemporaries to be sincerely committed to and interested in the other, whether God, people, or the created order. It's counter-intuitive, especially to a society that has reached a degree of decadence which is unnatural historically, and to explain that we would need to look at the modern social development since the Renaissance and Enlightenment. It gets back to some of the comments pertaining to modernity noted in the earlier post.

Beyond the boredom hinting to the possibility that we weren't created in such a way, it raises questions as to why we aren't more vulnerable to others. One such reason is pain and fear of others; another is a rejection of meaningful givens which either aren't recognized by autonomously free individuals or are only very partially grasped. This includes a concept of sin. It also God's redemptive work in the world and the role God's people play. The focus in Christian circles can often instead by on either what God has done for them personally, and vain attempts to convince themselves and others of this idolatrous focus and false reality either through legalism and a concentration on doing or not doing certain things or through attempting to grapple with the hollowness and emptiness that they experience and to which the American church answers sound meaningless. It can also result in other Christian circles in abandoning even hope of resolution and a coming to terms with just "living life" no matter what it "throws their way".

Although my treatment of the text is a little pretentious, in that what interests me is of both a personal and intellectual flavor, I relate predominately publicly via the scholastic. And the text does lend itself easily to other perspectives, but not to the degree I'm portraying it. Let me allow the author to use his own words to describe what he's trying to do:

My project in this book is to show these things, to discuss them, to look at them from several angles, and to sharpen the profile of sin by comparing it with a couple of its conceptual neighbors. In short the project is to present the nature and dynamics of sin...

The plan may look pretty academic, but the treatment will be only partly so. Or let me put it a little differently: this study has a traditional theological table setting, but the food comes not only from the Bible and St. Augustine but also from books on crime and addictions, from books by Garry Wills and William Manchester and Daniel Akst, from Newsweek, the movies, and NBC's Today show. The book is about sin, but a lot of the paragraphs are about sins. (Plantinga 5,6)

On this note, Plantinga does a brilliant job in my opinion.