Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

What are some features of this flourishing? As Christians see her, a spiritually whole person longs in certain classic ways. She longs for God and the beauty of God, for Christ and Christlikeness, for the dynamite of the Holy Spirit and spiritual maturity. She longs for spiritual hygiene itself—and not just as a consolation prize when she cannot be rich and envied instead. She longs for other human beings: she wants to love them and be loved by them. She hungers for social justice. She longs for nature, for its beauties and graces, for the sheer particularity of the way of a squirrel with a nut. As we might expect, her longings dim from season to season. When they do, she longs to long again. Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, Plantinga Jr., Cornelius

“The United States has a drug problem and a high school sex problem

and a welfare problem and an AIDS problem and a rape problem. None of this will go away until more people in positions of responsibility are willing to come forward and explain, in frankly moral terms, that some of the things people do nowadays are wrong.”

For, unlike some other identifications of human trouble, a diagnosis of sin and guilt allows hope. Something can be done for this malady. Something has been done for it.

My goal, then, is to renew the knowledge of a persistent reality that used to evoke in us fear, hatred, and grief. Many of us have lost this knowledge, and we ought to regret the loss. For slippage in our consciousness of sin, like most fashionable follies, may be pleasant, but it is also devastating. Self-deception about our sin is a narcotic, a tranquilizing and disorienting suppression of our spiritual central nervous system.

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. 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. Introduction Page 1 · Location 168 In pondering the twenty-third psalm, Joseph Sittler once observed that though we walk through the valley of death just once, we spend our whole lives in the valley of the shadow of death. Middle-aged people notice that shadow more often than they used to. Page 2 · Location 178 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. Page 2 · Location 184 The reason is that sin distorts our character, a central feature of our very humanity. Sin corrupts powerful human capacities —thought, emotion, speech, and act —so that they become centers of attack on others or of defection or neglect.

sorrowful, as it normally is when nature catches people in its

Instead, our victims face us indignantly. For they know we have violated them with something powerfully and peculiarly personal. We have willingly hurt them. We have done it on purpose. Sin outstrips other human troubles by perverting special human excellences. When people devise and defend high-minded political fraud, when a musician feels a spasm of happy satisfaction over the sour review of a colleague’s recital, when a drug dealer wants and plans

In fact, sin typically both causes and results from misery.

Accordingly, Christians have always measured sin, in part, by the suffering needed to atone for it. The ripping and writhing of a body on a cross, the bizarre metaphysical maneuver of using death to defeat death, the urgency of the summons to human beings to ally themselves with the events of Christ and with the person of these events, and then to make that person and those events the center of their lives —these things tell us that the main human trouble is desperately difficult to fix, even for God, and that sin is the longest-running of human emergencies.

The Bible presents sin by way of major concepts, principally lawlessness and faithlessness, expressed in an array of images: sin is the missing of a target, a wandering from the path, a straying from the fold. Sin is a hard heart and a stiff neck. Sin is blindness and deafness. It is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it —both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a beast crouching at the door. 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. Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God, and it does all this disrupting and resisting in a number of intertwined ways. Sinful life, as Geoffrey Bromiley observes, is a partly depressing, partly ludicrous caricature of genuine human life. CHAPTER 1 - Vandalism of Shalom

For central in the classic Christian understanding of the world is a concept of the way things are supposed to be. They ought to be as designed and intended by God,

both in creation and in graceful restoration of creation.

But resistance to redemption counts as sin, too, and often displays a special perversity.

The prophets knew how many ways human life can go wrong because they knew how many ways human life can go right. (You need the concept of a wall on plumb to tell when one is off.) These prophets kept dreaming of a time when God would put things right again. 5

The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom.

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.

Criminal and moral misadventures qualify as sin because they offend and betray God.

All sin has first and finally a Godward force. Let us say that a sin is any act —any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed —or its particular absence, that displeases God and deserves blame.

11 Let us add that the disposition to commit sins also displeases God and deserves blame, and let us therefore use the word sin to refer to such instances of both act and disposition. 12 Sin is a culpable and personal affront to a personal God.

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 blame. In In short, sin is culpable shalom-breaking.

This is where the definition comes in. “Culpable disturbance of shalom” suggests that sin is unoriginal, that it disrupts something good and harmonious, that (like a housebreaker) it is an intruder, and that those who sin deserve reproach.

To get our bearings, we need to see first that sin is one form of evil (an agential and culpable form) and that evil, in turn, is the disruption or disturbance of what God has designed.

Sin offends God not only because it bereaves or assaults God directly, as in impiety or blasphemy, but also because it bereaves and assaults what God has made. Sexism and racism, for example, show contempt both for various human persons and also for the mind of God.

In sum, shalom is God’s design for creation and redemption; sin is blamable human vandalism of these great realities and therefore an affront to their architect and builder.

Still, the two evils remain distinct because sin is a spiritual and moral evil and disease a physical one. Sin makes us guilty while disease makes us miserable. We thus need grace for our sin but mercy and healing for our diseases. 21

The reason in both cases is that by flouting the deliverances of his own conscience, a person breaks trust with God. For by doing what he thinks is wrong, a person does what he thinks will grieve God, and the willingness to grieve God by one’s acts is itself grievous. 23 Moreover, acting against one’s conscience blunts and desensitizes it; indeed, repeated thwarting of one’s conscience might eventually kill it. The subjective sinner therefore risks moral suicide.

All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad. Acts are either right or wrong, either consonant with God’s will or not.

Involuntary sins are surprisingly common. For example, the traditional seven deadly sins (pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust) are usually involuntary. They are desires, beliefs, and attitudes over which a person may have little or, at best, only variable control. Faithful warriors against these sins thus experience familiar failures, slight improvements, backslidings, painful conquests, Pyrrhic victories, broken treaties, and humiliating compromises.

They are desires, beliefs, and attitudes over which a person may have little or, at best, only variable control. Faithful warriors against these sins thus experience familiar failures, slight improvements, backslidings, painful conquests, Pyrrhic victories, broken treaties, and humiliating compromises. The Scriptures claim that human beings need powerful outside intervention to control and eventually conquer their faults, but all veterans of the sin wars know this by personal experience as well.

What Jim Bob’s racism shows us is that moral evil is social and structural as well as personal: it comprises a vast historical and cultural matrix that includes traditions, old patterns of relationship and behavior, atmospheres of expectation, social habits.

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.

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. CHAPTER 2 - Spiritual Hygiene and Corruption

None of this would have surprised the church father Athanasius. According to him, human beings east of Eden corrupt everything they touch, competing with each other in lawlessness and in “devising all manner of new evils.” 37 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. According to Scripture, God’s original design included patterns of distinction and union and distinction-within-union that would give creation strength and beauty. In Genesis 1 and 2, God —who sometimes speaks there in tantalizing first-person plurals that helped kindle early Christian interest in the distinction-within-unity of the Holy Trinity —sets about to dig out oceans, build hills, plant forests, and stock lakes and streams. But the setting for these endeavors is a “formless void.” 38 Everything in the universe is all jumbled together. So God begins to do some creative separating: he separates light from darkness, day from night, water from land, the sea creatures from the land cruisers. God orders things into place by sorting and separating them. At the same time God binds things together: he binds humans to the rest of creation as stewards and caretakers of it, to himself as bearers of his image, and to each other as perfect complements —a matched pair of male and female persons who fit together and whose fitting harmony itself images God. (Older translations of Gen. 2: 24 present the man as “cleaving” to the woman, a word that nicely suggests both distinction and union.)

According to Scripture, God’s original design included patterns of distinction and union and distinction-within-union that would give creation strength and beauty.

Everything in the universe is all jumbled together. So God begins to do some creative separating: he separates light from darkness, day from night, water from land, the sea creatures from the land cruisers. God orders things into place by sorting and separating them. At the same time God binds things together: he binds humans to the rest of creation as stewards and caretakers of it, to himself as bearers of his image, and to each other as perfect complements —a matched pair of male and female persons who fit together and whose fitting harmony itself images God. (Older

Against this background of original separating and binding, we must see the fall as anti-creation, the blurring of distinctions and the rupturing of bonds, and the one as a result of the other. Thus, human beings who want to be “like God, knowing good and evil,” succeed only in alienating themselves from God and from each other. Even the good and fruitful earth becomes their foe (Gen. 3: 17-18; cf. 4: 12-14).

The flood is thus uncreation, “only the final stage in a process of cosmic disintegration which began in Eden.” 39

The story of the fall tells us that sin corrupts: it puts asunder what God had joined together and joins together what God had put asunder. Like some devastating twister, corruption both explodes and implodes creation, pushing it back toward the “formless void” from which it came.

Along the generations, human nature itself, with its vast and mysterious amalgam of capacities to think, feel, supervise, love, create, respond, and act virtuously —that is, with its vast capacities for imaging God —has become the main carrier and exhibit of corruption. Human nature, says the Formula of Concord, has been despoiled of its powers by original sin. The image suggested by this language is that of stripping —stripping a tree of its bark, an animal of its hide, or an enemy army of its arms and provisions. To do these things is to remove the skin that protects against outside invaders and keeps one’s innards from spilling out. In other words, to despoil is to remove that which preserves integrity. 40

Human nature, says the Formula of Concord, has been despoiled of its powers by original sin... To do these things is to remove the skin that protects against outside invaders and keeps one’s innards from spilling out. In other words, to despoil is to remove that which preserves integrity... 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.

To despoil is to wreck integrity or wholeness, to strip away what holds a being together and what joins it to other beings in an atmosphere of hospitality, justice, and delight. As Augustine shows in The City of God, sin despoils persons, groups, and whole societies. Corruption disturbs shalom —twisting, weakening, and snapping the thousands of bonds that give particular beings integrity and that tie them to others.

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 and opens the way for hordes of opportunistic sins. These make life progressively more miserable: conceit, for instance, typically generates envy of rivals, a nasty form of resentment that eats away at the envier. “Sin,” as Augustine says, “becomes the punishment of sin.” 42

“Sin,” as Augustine says, “becomes the punishment of sin.”

Reformation documents offer a number of images for corruption: it is a despoiled nature, a diseased root, a contaminated spring, a foul heart. 43 According to these documents, we are wrong at the core. A bad strain has gotten into the stock so that we now sin with the ease and readiness of people born to the task. After the fall we sin by second nature: we are “born sinners” as some folk are born athletes. This fact, empirical as well as biblical, lies behind a broad consensus on original sin. Although, partly because of the silence of Scripture, Christians of various theological orientations differ on central issues in the doctrine of original sin —for example, how a child acquires the fateful disposition to sin, whether this disposition is itself sin, how to describe and assess the accompanying bondage of the will44 —they agree on the universality, solidarity, stubbornness, and historical momentum of sin. That is to say, 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.

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.

She longs for God and the beauty of God, for Christ and Christlikeness, for the dynamite of the Holy Spirit and spiritual maturity. She longs for spiritual hygiene itself —and not just as a consolation prize when she cannot be rich and envied instead. 46 She longs for other human beings: she wants to love them and to be loved by them. She hungers for social justice. She longs for nature, for its beauties and graces, for the sheer particularity of the way of a squirrel with a nut. As we might expect, her longings dim from season to season. When they do, she longs to long again.

She is a person of character consistency, a person who rings true wherever you tap her. She keeps promises. She weeps with those who weep and, perhaps more impressively, rejoices with those who rejoice. She does all these things in ways that express her own personality and culture but also a general “mind of Christ” that is cross-culturally unmistakable.

Her motives include faith —a quiet confidence in God and in the mercies of God that radiate from the self-giving work of Jesus Christ. She knows God is good; she also feels assured that God is good to her. Her faith secures her against the ceaseless oscillations of pride and despair familiar to every human being who has taken refuge in the cave of her own being and tried there to bury all her insecurities under a mound of achievements. When her faith slips, she retains faith enough to believe that the Spirit of God, whose presence is her renewable resource, will one day secure her faith again.

When her faith slips, she retains faith enough to believe that the Spirit of God, whose presence is her renewable resource, will one day secure her faith again.

In fact, self-indulgence tends to suppress gratitude; self-discipline tends to generate

That is why gluttony is a deadly sin: oddly, it is an appetite suppressant.

The classic longings motivate a sound life; so do faith and gratitude. Of course, all these things fail from time to time. Spiritually healthy people know very well the drag of sloth and doubt. They know about spiritual depression. They know what it is like to feel keenly that the world has been emptied of God. That is why a spiritually sound person disciplines her life by such spiritual exercises as prayer, fasting, confession, worship, and reflective walks through cemeteries. She visits boring persons and tries to take an interest in them, ponders the lives of saints and compares them to her own, spends time and money on just and charitable causes. 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. 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. Discipline is the basis and presupposition of both freedom and power.

A child must learn God’s Word and speak of it tenderly, respect God’s reputation and try to enhance it. She must place her very life in the hands of God and trust what those hands might do to it. She must shun emotional and religious junk food that might spoil her appetite for God and her hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Spiritual hygiene includes ends like these —goals, purposes, primary intended consequences. 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.

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. CHAPTER 3 - Perversion, Pollution, and Disintegration

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.

Sometimes we pervert our own longings, aiming them at the wrong objects (as in sexual perversions) or indulging them disproportionately so that they become dull where God and the things of faith are concerned but acute where various genuine but only proximate goods such as money, knowledge, and power are concerned.

Good spiritual hygiene includes a practiced ability to assess goods (goods seldom come with their weights written on them) plus the power of will to pursue them with appropriate degrees of interest and to enjoy them with a fitting level of pleasure.

involuntary longings lead us around a good deal, and ignorance and self-deception often skew our judgments about what is worth longing for in the first place.

To pollute is to defile (the Latin roots of the word suggest dragging something through mud).

being in the presence of a God who is perfectly holy. In this setting, holiness implies not just otherness or transcendence but also wholeness, oneness, purity.

To pollute is to weaken a particular whole entity, such as a sound relationship, by introducing into it a foreign element.

(In this respect, pollution brings together what God wants kept asunder.) “Fooling around,” for example, pollutes both worship and marriage. Indeed, the biblical paradigm cases of pollution are idolatry and adultery, emblems of each other. In each case, some new commitment insinuates itself into an existing relationship and compromises

In idolatry a third party gets in between God and human persons, adulterating an exclusive loyalty. 58 Idolatry violates both negative and positive law, both the first commandment’s prohibition of idolatry (“ You shall have no other gods before me” [Deut. 5: 7]) and also the summary love command of the Deuteronomic code (“ Love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” [6: 5]).

“ingratitude” or “perversity” or “discontent” or “stubbornness.”

These unhappy attitudes do break the summary law of love to God, but more basically they threaten the vital covenant relation.

Discontent, ingratitude, perversity, stubbornness —these attitudes and dispositions pollute filial loyalty to Israel’s Creator, Deliverer, and Keeper. Ungrateful and refractory people at once foul their own character and their relation to God. They are like a child —willful, resistant, and adroit in self-defense by appeal to various legalisms —to whom an exasperated parent finally says, “Don’t be that way!”

The image of pollution suggests bringing together what ought to be kept apart.

Accordingly, in Scripture and much of the Christian tradition, a “pure” heart is an undivided one.

Scriptural writers fear “double-mindedness” not merely because it shows disloyalty and ingratitude but also because its perpetrator becomes its victim. Divided worship destroys worshipers. Divided love destroys lovers.

split the truly important longings and loyalties is to crack one’s own foundations and to invite the crumbling and, finally, the disintegration of life itself. A divided house cannot stand.

Ideally, by repentance and renewal of mind and heart —that is, by the grace of God working through spiritual disciplines and the support of others.

Disintegration is the main event in corruption —the breakdown of personal and social integrity, the loss of shape, strength, and purpose that make some entity an “entirety” and make it this entirety. 63 As Sylvia Fraser’s story reminds us, sin tends to disintegrate both its victims and its perpetrators. Disintegration is always deterioration, the prelude and postlude to death.

Like some mad charioteer, we now run our lives with more speed than direction. We become off-track racers, amateurs who have lost sight of the finish line. 66 Even in little ways we keep corrupting others and ourselves. Worse, unless arrested by the graces and disciplines of God, we tend to gather momentum in this program: sinners who lose spiritual purpose and control eventually descend into a spiral of increasingly grave assaults on civic and personal integrity.

Of course, sin ordinarily tries to bag a good of some kind: people want power or pleasure or wealth or self-esteem or happiness. Their sin consists in seeking these things in hurtful ways or excessively or preeminently or even exclusively. CHAPTER 4 - The Progress of Corruption

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.

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.

Youngsters eventually discover what the wise have known for millennia: people rarely commit single sins. Thievery and lies and lies about lies, macho pride and mockery and assault, laziness and snappishness and cheating, and alcohol abuse that empties back into laziness —these sins and products of sin keep on replicating and bunching together like clusters of grapes on the vine. The clusters show up in individual persons but also in groups (in family systems, for instance) and in the places where groups and individuals meet. Hence the corruption of persons, of communities, and of whole cultures.

They knew that sin is both fatal and fertile.

Indeed, like cancer, sin kills because it reproduces.

Despite centuries of war, no one has ever done it, he notes: nobody has ever fired a first shot. All strikes are claimed to be counterstrikes. All shots are return fire. “For the Allies, World War II began at the Polish border in 1939; for the Germans, hostilities dated back to Versailles. Your military operation is an attack; mine is a retaliation.“ 84

We know that where grievances are concerned people have long memories and short fuses. We know that injustice enrages people and makes them vengeful. We know that people who hate their lives often abuse those who incarnate what they hate and that the abused are then likely to abuse others. We know that nobody is more dangerous than a victim. We know that sin brings distress and that people often seek to relieve their distress with the same thing that brought it on —a dynamic, as we shall see in Chapter 8, that sin shares with addiction.

We are persons of seemingly endless possibilities and of immense power, but we are also creatures utterly dependent on the good offices of our Creator. So we live on the edge of our finitude and freedom, anxious lest we miss opportunities and anxious anew when we have exploited them.

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.

Our core problem, says St. Augustine, is that the human heart, ignoring God, turns in on itself, tries to lift itself, wants to please itself, and ends up debasing itself. The person who reaches toward God and wants to please God gets, so to speak, stretched by this move, and ennobled by the transcendence of its object. But the person who curves in on himself, who wants God’s gifts without God, who wants to satisfy the desires of a divided heart, ends up sagging and contracting into a little wad. His desires are provincial. “There is something in humility which, strangely enough, exalts the heart, and something in pride which debases it.”

The person who reaches toward God and wants to please God gets, so to speak, stretched by this move, and ennobled by the transcendence of its object. But the person who curves in on himself, who wants God’s gifts without God, who wants to satisfy the desires of a divided heart, ends up sagging and contracting into a little wad. His desires are provincial. “There is something in humility which, strangely enough, exalts the heart, and something in pride which debases it.” 91

We still do not know why a person succumbs to the motive.

Environmental determinism and the no-fault morality that usually accompanies it are pretentious.

But in the meantime, and in 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. After all, what could be more arrogant than treating other persons as if they were no more responsible than tiny children or the mentally maimed?

Of course, the cradle of such pity often turned out to be a mental hospital, and the school for such reeducation a concentration camp —places at least as confining and dehumanizing as any conventional prison. But at least none of the inmates was to blame for being there. Koestler found all this blamelessness progressively disturbing. “Before long it began to become clear that those whom we do not blame we do not regard as responsible. Those whom we do not regard as responsible we do not see as fully human. And those whom we do not see as fully human we are willing to twist and manipulate to suit our own convenience.” 94

Before long it began to become clear that those whom we do not blame we do not regard as responsible. Those whom we do not regard as responsible we do not see as fully human. And those whom we do not see as fully human we are willing to twist and manipulate to suit our own convenience.

We do not finally know why evildoers do evil. At last the origin and explanation of human evil belong to what St. Paul calls “the mystery of iniquity” (2 Thess. 2: 7, KJV).

At bottom, the heart wants what it wants, and the heart has its reasons that reason does not know.

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. 95 The new thoughts then pursue careers of their own, but they, plus their produce, also intersect and cross-fertilize with similar life cycles from hundreds and thousands of other persons. All these persons exist in families and other group systems that they influence and that influence them. Hence the progress of both good and evil is more like a spiral than a shuttle and, more than that, like waves of intertwined and self-replicating spirals.

And here our search runs into trouble, for the heart of even a pretty good person is divided. 99 An evil heart is a maze. In commenting on the overwhelming character pathology that psychiatrists have to struggle with in some patients, M. Scott Peck describes it as a “labyrinthine mass of lies and twisted motives and distorted communications.” 100 That’s just one patient. Let him and his kin, plus ordinary sinners and pretty good persons and everybody else, sow and reap and sow again; let them fertilize and cross-fertilize each other, and the resulting culture will defy rational analysis.

Ultimately, the only human beings we know are people who have been created to please God and build shalom but who, to a greater or lesser degree, mysteriously live against the purpose of their existence.

Nor can Satan detach and harm those who faithfully cling to Christ. Satan can tempt but not coerce. Satan can accuse but not convict. Satan can accost but not destroy —or, at any rate, cannot destroy those who “put on the whole armor of God” (Eph. 6: 11). A central New Testament conviction is that the evil one gains no ground that we do not give him. Satan seduces only those who are in the market for seduction. Satan deceives only the self-deceived.

As Hendrikus Berkhof says, personal goodness cannot lick them. In fact, their force has the feel of inevitability. 110

Chapter 1 we saw that sin qualifies as the worst of our troubles because, among other things, it corrupts what is peculiarly human about us. Sin attaches to intention, memory, thought, speech, intelligent action —to all the special features of personhood —and transforms them into weapons. CHAPTER 5 - Parasite

The sobering fact is that reforms need constant reforming. Rescuers need rescue. 114 Amendments need amendment. Repentant sinners need to repent even of some dimensions of their repentance, such as their pride in the humility that has driven them to their knees. 115 Evil contaminates every scalpel designed to remove it. Even the Montgomery bus boycott —as just a cause as any —had to fight corruption within as well as without.

In general, good and evil grow together, intertwine around each other, and grow out of each other in remarkable and complicated ways.

Our inner lives are not partitioned like day and night, with pure light on one

side of us and total darkness on the other. Mostly, our souls are shadowed places; we live at the border where our dark sides block our light and throw a shadow over our interior places.... We cannot always tell where our light ends and our shadow begins or where our shadow ends and our darkness begins.

The same is true of certain emotions and states of mind. Anger, for example, can take the form of righteous indignation, a virtue of the just. Anger can also take the form of smoldering resentment of competitors, the vice of the envious.

Theology becomes therapy. . . . The biblical interest in righteousness is replaced by a search for happiness, holiness by wholeness, truth by feeling, ethics by feeling good about one’s self. The world shrinks to the range of personal circumstances; the community of faith shrinks to a circle of personal friends. The past recedes. The Church recedes. The world recedes. All that remains is the self. 125

According to traditional Christian wisdom, a main problem with pride is that it recognizes neither sin nor grace; in fact, pride hammers them flat and discards them.

expressing and acquiring them —cross, resurrection, Spirit, justification, baptism into Christ

Sin is deviant and perverse, an injustice or iniquity or ingratitude.

Exodus literature is disorder and disobedience. Sin is faithlessness, lawlessness, godlessness. 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.

So the biggest biblical idea about sin, expressed in a riot of images and terms, is that sin is an anomaly, an intruder, a notorious gate-crasher. Sin does not belong in God’s world, but somehow it has gotten in. In fact, sin has dug in, and, like a tick, burrows deeper when we try to remove it. 133 This stubborn and persistent feature of human sin can make it look as if it has a life of its own, as if it were an independent power or even a kind of person. Indeed, St. Paul uses language that suggests as much, as when he says that sin “exercised dominion in death” (Rom. 5: 21), that “sin deceived me and ... killed me” (7: 11), that “if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me” (7:

The reason is that sin is a parasite, an uninvited guest that keeps tapping its host for sustenance. Nothing about sin is its own; all its power, persistence, and plausibility are stolen goods. Sin is not really an entity but a spoiler of entities, not an organism but a leech on organisms. Sin does not build shalom; it vandalizes it. In metaphysical perspective, evil offers no true alternative to good, as if the two were equal and opposite qualities. “Goodness,” says C. S. Lewis, “is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.” 135 Here Lewis reproduces the old Augustinian idea that evil “has no existence except as a privation of good.” 136 Good is original, independent, and constructive; evil is derivative, dependent, and destructive. To be successful, evil needs what it hijacks from goodness.

Evil wants good; in fact, evil needs good to be evil. Satan himself, as C. S. Lewis explains, is God’s Satan —a creature of God who can be really wicked only because he comes from the shop of a master and is made from his best stuff.

The better stuff a creature is made of —the cleverer and stronger and freer it is —then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong.

How peculiar, then, that sin multiplies right along with goodness. Faithful parents tend to reproduce themselves, but so do faithless ones. Generous acts congeal into character traits, but so do selfish ones. People who long for God want to satisfy their appetite and also to sharpen it, but the same is true of sex addicts.

Sin is fruitful just because, like a virus, it attaches the life force and dynamics of its host. 139 Sowing and reaping, human longing, children’s natural trust of their parents —such things belong among the springs and roots of a good creation. Sin does not remove these things; it attaches them and converts them to new uses. A faithful father, for instance, accepts his small daughter’s trust and love, strengthens them, and tries to extend them toward God and out toward the world. A sexually abusive father also accepts his daughter’s trust and love, but he uses them to bind his daughter to his lust. Sooner or later, he converts trust to fear and love to resentment. He strengthens these emotions with each episode of abuse, and, whether he wants to or not, may extend them toward God and out toward the world. The parasitic nature of sin accounts for the fruitfulness

But in a romantic, revolutionary frame of mind, we choose not to notice such fallout. When we thrill to demonic rebellion or cheer for fleeing bank robbers, we do not focus on any of the damage, disturbance, or offense. We notice only those features that sin has pirated from goodness —energy, imagination, persistence, and creativity. Everything sin touches begins to die, but we do not focus on that. We see only the vitality of the parasite, glowing with stolen life. CHAPTER 6 - Masquerade

Vices have to masquerade as virtues —lust as love, thinly veiled sadism as military discipline, envy as righteous indignation, domestic tyranny as parental concern.

This infernal embarrassment (Satan must appeal to our God-given appetite for goodness in order to win his way) suggests a significant feature of evil: to prevail, evil must leech not only power and intelligence from goodness but also its credibility.

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.

Likely she would add some comments on moral relativism and subjectivism: if no moral borders are objectively fixed, either culturally or personally, then the biblical concepts of transgression and shortcoming fade away. If moral lines keep moving, how will people know when they have overstepped a line or fallen short of one?

We prettify ugly realities and sell ourselves the prettified versions. Thus a liar might transform “I tell a lot of lies to shore up my pride” to “Occasionally, I finesse the truth in order to spare other people’s feelings.” We become our own dupes, playing the role of both perpetrator and victim. We know the truth —and yet we do not know it, because we persuade ourselves of its opposite. 158 We actually forget that certain things are wrong and that we have done them. To the extent that we are self-deceived, we occupy a twilight zone in which we make up reality as we go along, a twilight zone in which the shortest distance between two points is a labyrinth.

After all, how many believers really believe in God, as opposed to some deified image of themselves? How many, for example, really do attend to the countercultural images of God in Scripture —the ones that judge and condemn as well as the ones that affirm and comfort? How many of us would rather fashion God in our own image so that God’s pleasures and peeves will merge conveniently with our own? Believers, not just secularists, exchange “the glory of the CHAPTER 7 - Sin and Folly CHAPTER 8 - The Tragedy of Addiction CHAPTER 9 - Attack CHAPTER 10 - Flight Epilogue