Not the Way It's Supposed to Be

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be

Metadata

• Author: Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
• Full Title: Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be
• Category: #books

Highlights

• What’s devastating about it 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.
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• The whole range of human miseries, from restlessness and estrangement through shame and guilt to the agonies of daytime television — all of them tell us that things in human life are not as they ought to be.
• The offending driver may simply be a person who has never bothered to curb his wrath and who might be both puzzled and wrathful at the suggestion that he should begin to do so.
• In sin, people attack or evade or neglect their divine calling. These and other images suggest deviance: even when it is familiar, sin is never normal. Sin is disruption of created harmony and then resistance to divine restoration of that harmony.
• Sinful life, as Geoffrey Bromiley observes, is a partly depressing, partly ludicrous caricature of genuine human life.
• So the driver takes the leader of the group aside and attempts a five-sentence introduction to metaphysics: “Man,” he says, “the world ain’t supposed to work like this. Maybe you don’t know that, but this ain’t the way it’s supposed to be. I’m supposed to be able to do my job without askin’ you if I can. And that dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you rippin’ him off. Everything’s supposed to be different than what it is here.”
• The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. We call it peace, but it means far more than mere peace of mind or a cease-fire between enemies. In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight — a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights.7 Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.
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• But once we possess the concept of shalom, we are in position to enlarge and specify this understanding of sin. God is, after all, not arbitrarily offended. God hates sin not just because it violates his law but, more substantively, because it violates shalom, because it breaks the peace, because it interferes with the way things are supposed to be. (Indeed, that is why God has laws against a good deal of sin.) God is for shalom and therefore against sin.
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• In fact, we may safely describe evil as any spoiling of shalom, whether physically (e.g., by disease), morally, spiritually, or otherwise.
• Sin, then, is any agential evil for which some person (or group of persons) is to blame. In short, sin is culpable shalom-breaking.
• Judgments about degrees of culpability, unless they are demanded of people filling such special roles as that of parent, judge, or jury, may therefore wisely be left in the hands of God.
• Though we cannot always measure culpability for it, we do know that sin possesses appalling force. We know that when we sin, we pervert, adulterate, and destroy good things. We create matrices and atmospheres of moral evil and bequeath them to our descendants. By habitual practice, we let loose a great, rolling momentum of moral and spiritual evil across generations. By doing such things, we involve ourselves deeply in what theologians call corruption.
• In the works of Athanasius, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and in classic Protestant confessional literature, corruption — an unhappy cluster of spiritual perversion, pollution, and disintegration — represents one of the two components of original sin (the other being guilt). In these sources, corruption and guilt present the problems that the gifts of sanctification and justification graciously address.
• Mockery takes dead aim at our staunchest natural defense and tries to blow it away. Mockery aims to shred human dignity and therefore to despoil its victim in a specially devastating way.
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• Corruption is thus a dynamic motif in the Christian understanding of sin: it is not so much a particular sin as the multiplying power of all sin to spoil a good creation and to breach its defenses against invaders. Corruption is spiritual AIDS — the mysterious, systemic, infectious, and progressive attack on our spiritual immune system that eventually breaks it down
• all serious Christians subscribe to the generic doctrine of corruption, the centerpiece of which is the claim that even when they are good in important ways, human beings are not sound.
• But what would a spiritually sound person be like? What sort of wholeness does corruption attack? A spiritually sound person fits the universal design. She functions properly: in the range of her relationships to God, others, nature, and self we can spot impressive manifestations of shalom. Or, following one line of New Testament usage, we might call them impressive manifestations of hygiene.
• Although it sounds as if it might have something to do with the brushing and flossing away of small particles of vice, spiritual hygiene is actually wholeness of spirit — that is, wholeness of what animates and characterizes us. Spiritual hygiene is the wholeness of resources, motive, purpose, and character typical of someone who fits snugly into God’s broad design for shalom. A spiritually hygienic person is one who combines strengths and flexibilities, disciplines and freedoms, all working together from a renewable source of vitality. This is a person who flourishes like a fine sapling rooted into the bank of a dependable stream.
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• Spiritual hygiene is the wholeness of resources, motive, purpose, and character typical of someone who fits snugly into God’s broad design for shalom. A spiritually hygienic person is one who combines strengths and flexibilities, disciplines and freedoms, all working together from a renewable source of vitality. This is a person who flourishes like a fine sapling rooted into the bank of a dependable stream.
• Grateful people want to let themselves go; faithful people dare to do it. People tethered to God by faith can let themselves go because they know they will get themselves back.
• Grateful people overflow a little, especially with thanksgiving and passed-on kindnesses. But they do not therefore lack discipline. In fact, self-indulgence tends to suppress gratitude; self-discipline tends to generate it.
• She visits boring persons and tries to take an interest in them, ponders the lives of saints and compares them to her own,
• A person of spiritual hygiene covets the virtues and character strengths that Christians since Paul have always prized — compassion, for example, and patience. She seeks these and other excellences — endurance, hope, humility, forthrightness, hospitality. She then tries to work them into a regular practice routine, always aware that in order to grow in these excellences she needs both to strive for them and to fail in her striving.
• She seeks these and other excellences — endurance, hope, humility, forthrightness, hospitality. She then tries to work them into a regular practice routine, always aware that in order to grow in these excellences she needs both to strive for them and to fail in her striving.47 She needs to persist through striving and failure and growth in order to become a free and joyful contributor to shalom.
• Just as in sports and music, discipline in spiritual hygiene has a point. Anybody can play, but only a disciplined person can play freely.
• what makes them musical is that they bring peace and afford delight, that they please and “glorify” God.
• The point of our lives is not to get smart or to get rich or even to get happy. The point is to discover God’s purposes for us and to make them our own. The point is to learn ways of loving God above all and our neighbor as ourselves and then to use these loves the way a golfer uses certain checkpoints to set up for a drive. The point is to be lined up right, to seek first the kingdom of God (Matt. 6:33), to try above all to increase the net amount of shalom in the world.
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• To glorify God is to do these things and, by doing them, to make God’s intentions in the world more luminous and God’s reputation more lustrous. To enjoy God forever is to cultivate a taste for this project, to become more and more the sort of person for whom eternal life with God would be sheer heaven.49
• According to all traditional Christian wisdom, human flourishing is the same thing as glorifying God and enjoying him forever, and human wisdom is an inevitable, and human happiness a frequent, by-product of such flourishing.
• Perversion is an ends-and-purposes disease. Most broadly understood, perversion is the turning of loyalty, energy, and desire away from God and God’s project in the world: it is the diversion of construction materials for the city of God to side projects of our own, often accompanied by jerry-built ideologies that seek to justify the diversion.
• Traditional presentations of sin, and particularly of corruption, feature a strikingly contrary pair of images. On the one hand, sin tends to despoil things. Unarrested, sin despoils even its own agents, eventually causing “the very death of the soul.”71 On the other hand, sin is remarkably generative: sin yields more and more sin. In a standard scenario, each episode of sin gets triggered by trouble from the last.
• According to Nagy, family systems thrive on basic justice. One of the most important forms of such justice is the give-and-take of the generations: in properly operating families, children take from parents and then give to their own offspring. Children have a right to expect a giving and nurturing posture on the part of their parents, and they have a right to take the nurture and care that parents give. Then, in turn, these children incur an obligation to provide similar attentiveness to their own children — which is not only the reasonable service they owe their children but also the most effective form of gratitude they can offer to their parents.77 To be a healthy human being is therefore to exist “between give and take.”
• We know that nobody is more dangerous than a victim.
• At bottom, says Reinhold Niebuhr, we human beings want security.88 We feel restless and anxious in the world because we are both finite and free, both limited and unlimited.
• But anxiety, as Niebuhr observes, is only the context for sin, not its cause. Our base problem is unbelief. Failing to trust in the infinite God, we live anxiously, restlessly, always trying to secure and extend ourselves with finite goods that can’t take the weight we put on them.
• Unbelief, says Niebuhr, yields anxiety, which yields alternating pride and sensuality.
• But if being selfish brings so much trouble to everybody, including oneself, why be that way? Because, as the filmmaker Woody Allen said in 1993, trying to explain his controversial affair with the young daughter of Mia Farrow, “The heart wants what it wants.”
• Because the heart wants what it wants. That’s as far as we get. That’s the conversation stopper. The imperial self overrules all.
• Like a neurotic and therapeutically shelf-worn little god, the human heart keeps ending discussions by insisting that it wants what it wants.
• “There is something in humility which, strangely enough, exalts the heart, and something in pride which debases it.”
• to identify a motive is to discern only what pushes a person in the direction of some act, not why he actually commits it. We still do not know why a person succumbs to the motive.
• to know the cause of a grievance is not yet to know the cause of all violence done by the aggrieved.
• when society does these things, can it completely wash its hands of crimes motivated by the very resentment, despair, and greed it has engendered?
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• As a working hypothesis, we ought to assume that anybody who has committed them has sinned. Why? The reason is that with this assumption we treat people as grownups. We start them off with a full line of moral credit. We deal with them as people who can accept their debts.
• general, we ought to pay evildoers, including ourselves, the “intolerable compliment” of taking them seriously as moral agents, of holding them accountable for their wrongdoing. This is a mark of our respect for their dignity and weight as human beings.
• until they are moved by evidence to the contrary, respectful people assume that evildoers are responsible citizens like themselves and that they are answerable for their evil.
• the wise person knows the laws, rhythms, and dynamics of reality.
• the great law of returns is true not only for the person who on a September afternoon walks out into her garden with a bushel basket in her hands; it’s also true of respectful persons who are much respected, and of hostile persons who find hostility coming right back at them.
• generally speaking, you reap what you sow. This is simply how things are in the universe. There is no explaining it, no use railing against it, usually no way to get around it. We might as well try to get around the law of gravity. We might as well argue with our body’s need for sleep.
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• people not only reap what they sow but also sow what they reap.
• Inside a given human life, the dynamics of sowing, reaping, and resowing lie behind the process of character formation.
• A fuller statement of the great law of returns would therefore go something like this: sow a thought, and reap a deed; sow a deed, and reap another deed; sow some deeds, and reap a habit; sow some habits, and reap a character; sow a character, and reap two thoughts.
• Sin is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it — both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a missing of the mark, a spoiling of goods, a staining of garments, a hitch in one’s gait, a wandering from the path, a fragmenting of the whole. Sin is what culpably disturbs shalom. Sinful human life is a caricature of proper human life.
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• The heart of sin is rather the persistent refusal to tolerate a sense of sin, to take responsibility for one’s sin, to live with the sorrowful knowledge of it and to pursue the painful way of repentance. Evil people are simultaneously aware of their evil and desperately trying to resist that awareness.149
• “First we deceive ourselves, and then we convince ourselves that we are not deceiving ourselves.”
• Nothing, said Martin Buber, hides the face of our fellowman more than morality, and nothing hides the face of God more than religion.
• We ought to consider the possibility that in our own religion, “what presents itself as an altruistic virtue may be, in terms of motive and function, only an egoistic vice dressed up in its Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes.”
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• Remarkably, the phenomenon of self-deception testifies that we human beings, even when we do evil, are incorrigibly sold on goodness. At some level of our being we know that goodness is as plausible and original as God, and that, in the history of the human race, goodness is older than sin.
• a murder does not belong in the world, no matter what its author thinks of it. The murder of a human being is not the way it’s supposed to be. This act is out of order. It is a senseless act because it saws against the grain of the universe, because, as Christian believers would say, it doesn’t fit the design for shalom.
• In the literature of Scripture, wisdom is, broadly speaking, the knowledge of God’s world and the knack of fitting oneself into it. The wise person knows creation. She knows its boundaries and limits, understands its laws and rhythms, discerns its times and seasons, respects its great dynamics.
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  • Note: “Knows” here can’t (?) be head knowledge, must be heart knowledge. Wisdom comes from living into all these things, experiencing and getting comfortable/aligned with them.
• The wise person gives in to creation and to God — and she does the first because she does the second.
• The book of Proverbs usually doesn’t even bother to distinguish between righteousness and wisdom: it pairs up righteousness with wisdom and wickedness with folly in such a way that the distinction between a moral judgment and a prudential judgment fades.
• As Frederick Buechner once pointed out, the Bible is not first of all a book of moral truth. I would call it instead a book of truth about the way life is. Those strange old scriptures present life as having been ordered in a certain way, with certain laws as inextricably built into it as the law of gravity is built into the physical universe. When Jesus says that whoever would save his life will lose it and whoever loses his life will save it, surely he is not making a statement about how, morally speaking, life ought to be. Rather, he is making a statement about how life is.179
• To be wise is to know reality, to discern it. A discerning person notices things, attends to things, picks up on things.
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• Discernment is a mark of wisdom: it shows a kind of attentive respect for reality. The discerning person notices the differences between things but also the connections between them.
• The really discerning person, the one whose discernment marks genuine wisdom, does not merely inspect reality or analyze it: the one who discerns also loves. She possesses what Jonathan Edwards called “benevolence to being in general.”182 At some level, she affirms the reality she knows and even commits herself to it.
• To discern realities at their deeper levels, we have to become engaged to them. The deeply discerning person brings empathy and care to what she knows. Discernment of the hopes and fears of other persons, for example, depends on compassion for them; knowledge of these persons comes into us only if our hearts go out to them.
• To be wise is to know and affirm reality, to discern it, and then to speak and act accordingly. The wise accommodate themselves to reality. They go with the flow. They tear along the perforated line.
• The more you talk, the less people listen. • If your word is no good, people will not trust you, and it is then useless to protest this fact. • Trying to cure distress with the same thing that caused it only makes matters worse. • If you refuse to work hard and take pains, you are unlikely to do much of any consequence. • Boasting of your accomplishments does not make people admire them. Boasting is vain in both senses of the word. • Envy of fat cats does not make them slimmer and in the end will rot your bones. • If you scratch certain itches, they just itch more. • Many valuable things, including happiness and deep sleep, come to us only if we do not try hard for them.
• intelligence and education are only raw materials for good judgment. The same is true of knowledge, attentiveness, and discernment. Using them, a person must also estimate, appraise, and infer. She must conclude, choose, and act — all in a way that is firmly based in reality and relatively undistorted by personal whim and bias.
• The shortest and clearest way to state the relation between sin and folly is to say that not all folly is sin, but all sin is folly. Sin is both wrong and dumb. Indeed, wherever the follies are playing, sin is the main event. Sin is the world’s most impressive example of folly. What is it about sin that makes it so foolish? Sin is the wrong recipe for good health; sin is the wrong gasoline to put in the tank; sin is the wrong road to take in order to get home. In other words, sin is finally futile.
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• Sin is a form of self-abuse. Promiscuous persons, for example, coarsen themselves. They disqualify themselves for the deepest forms of intimacy, the ones bonded by trust, and “condemn themselves to social superficiality,” as one of my friends once put it. Something similar is true of liars and cheats. As Christopher Lasch remarks, “Whoever cheats his neighbor forfeits his neighbor’s trust, imprisons himself behind a wall of enmity and suspicion, and thus cuts himself off from his fellows.”195 Envy — the displeasure at another’s good and the urge to deprive her of it — traps and torments the envier, turning her life into a hell of resentment. Proud persons isolate themselves. Pride aborts the very possibility of real friendship or communion — namely, “benevolence toward being in general.”
• these and other standouts from the ranks of the foolish display one of human life’s most wondrous combinations: a stubborn combination of ignorance and arrogance. The foolish, as the saying goes, are often in error but never in doubt. Moreover, when their dogmatism is challenged, they increase it. Some of them give you a piece of their mind they can hardly afford to lose.
• But what moves an addict to the bait? At every stage, addiction is driven by one of the most powerful, mysterious, and vital forces of human existence. What drives addiction is longing — a longing not just of brain, belly, or loins but finally of the heart.208
• Healthy people keep a rein on their longings. Healthy people enjoy the freedom that is born of contentment (a “freedom from want”), which is, in turn, owed to a sturdy and persistent discipline of desire. Healthy people deliberately note, for instance, how many material goods they can do without and then take extra pleasure in the simple and enduring ones they possess. They make it their goal, most of the time, to eat and drink only enough to relieve hunger and thirst, not to sate themselves. They integrate their sexual desire into a committed relationship, bonded by vows and trust.
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• By servitude to passion, habit is formed, and habit to which there is no resistance becomes necessity. By these links … connected one to another … a harsh bondage held me under restraint.
• envy is a nastier sin than mere covetousness. What an envier wants is not, first of all, what another has; what an envier wants is for another not to have it.
• To covet is to want somebody else’s good so strongly (“inordinately,” as the Christian tradition says) that one is tempted to steal it. To envy is to resent somebody else’s good so much that one is tempted to destroy it.
• anger always sets itself against what causes its displeasure. Anger is passionate againstness.
• Resentment is a special, and usually protracted, form of anger: resentment is anger aimed at what the angry person regards as unjust, insulting, or demeaning, especially to her personally.
• To a truly envious human being, the success or blessing of another — particularly a rival, and most particularly a close rival — is an affront, a kind of insult.
• But why think of someone else’s good as an injury to oneself? Again, what’s the point? The point is pride. The point is personal preeminence. The envier resents another’s good because it scuffs his pride.
• W. H. Auden once said that he could not understand the point of writing poetry if one did not obey at least the basic rules of prosody. It was like doing a crossword puzzle and, on being unable to find the correct word of seven letters, writing in one of nine letters that spills over the margin. Where is the point and satisfaction in that?
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• Cinderella is helpless before her sisters’ envy. She can do nothing to turn it. They reduce her life to ashes, and, in return, she treats them with natural beauty and grace — an excellence they find galling.
• We must trust and obey because these responses are fitting.
• We could describe our situation like this: we must trust and obey in order to rise to the full stature of sons and daughters, to mature into the image of God, to grow into adult roles in the drama of redeeming the world. God has in mind not just what we should be but also what, one day, we could be.
  • Note: A parent’s charge is to choose and provide what is trusted and obeyed so that the child grows steadily and reliably into being as much as possible the adult they could be.
• In short, we are to become responsible beings: people to whom God can entrust deep and worthy assignments, expecting us to make something significant of them — expecting us to make something significant of our lives.
• To be a responsible person is to find one’s role in the building of shalom, the re-webbing of God, humanity, and all creation in justice, harmony, fulfillment, and delight. To be a responsible person is to find one’s own role and then, funded by the grace of God, to fill this role and to delight in it.
• to speak of sin by itself is to misunderstand its nature: sin is only a parasite, a vandal, a spoiler. Sinful life is a partly depressing, partly ludicrous caricature of genuine human life.