This chapter opens with the familiar Christian hymn "This is my Father's World," a perfect picture of shalom. Plantinga then reminds us that although this is how God intended the earth to be in the beginning, sin did enter the earth; and now, Creation sings and rings AND groans. In his book "Our Father's World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation," Edward Brown describes the Fall as a "shattering of relationships...like dominoes, they fall one after another." He says that not only was our relationship with God broken, but so was our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the rest of all creation. As an aspiring biologist/ecologist, this makes sense because everything on this earth is interconnected; it's the whole concept of interconnected-ness. Much the same, since everything is infected with this sin, it is very hard to get rid of-like pulling out a plant whose roots are interconnected with another plant's-because "the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."
This chapter also challenged me to think about what evil is exactly. According to Urban Dictionary, evil is (besides girls) "the essential ingredient for the making of humans." Plantinga says that "evil is what's wrong with the world, and it includes trouble in nature as well as in human nature" or "a spoiling of shalom." He also says that "sin is a subset of evil: it's an evil for which someone is to blame...all sin is evil, but not all evil is sin."
I found it especially interesting when he talked about evil being a parasite on good. Evil has no life on its own; after all, we can't have evil unless we have good. Plantinga says, "Badness can't be very bad without tapping deeply into goodness. Badness is twisted goodness." This evilness, as we've read in some of our C.S. Lewis papers, is something we are born into and cannot avoid. This evilness "shadows" us from God's glory and the only way we can get back in the full light is through the one who created it all, because "such fixes are tainted with the same corruption that needs fixing." Therefore, our only hope is "that God has addressed human corruption from outside the system." We ourselves cannot save humanity, we can only plant the seeds and maybe water them. Only through God can the shadow of sin be removed in order to allow the light to shine upon them.
This is a bit off topic, but I laughed out loud that you looked up "evil" on Urban Dictionary - haha. I can't think of a better place to get an accurate view of a word (exaggeration). However, it did do a pretty good job in describing evil (after shifting through the bizarre ones I'm sure). Good use of your resources!
ReplyDeleteI liked your quote from Browns book. The dominoes illustration is a great visual to have because we all know what that looks like. That illustration makes me think of another way to put it. We are the one's setting up the dominoes (which are all the good things in our lives) and there is a little kid watching over our shoulder who, as soon as we are done setting up the dominoes that little kid comes and knocks it all down and we have to start all over with what we were doing in building a long path of dominoes.
ReplyDeleteWhile the Urban Dictionary definition is very funny, I think that it shows the broken world that we live in. There is no hope in the definition. In order to be human, you must be evil. This is not the way that God intended. Some people have gotten so accustomed to seeing humans do evil that they refuse to believe that there is any redemption for us at the end.
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