The following is in part responding to Chapter 3 of Cornelius Plantinga Jr.'s Engaging God's World. If you are a random passerby, stop for a minute. Feel free to comment, question, discuss, and/or debate.
Falling is a terrible sensation. I wonder if our bodies haven't even been hardwired to know that for the irony of it. It is our reality that we have fallen from what God intended for us to be. While God wills our reality to be wholly good, it is tainted by evil. Word choice is very important here, as we will also see from Plantinga's writing. Tainted is used specifically for its definition, which is to contaminate or pollute something. This is when something that is neutral, or good, and make it bad. Evil twists in order to twist. There is no method to madness, for it is simply the corruption of order and structure.
Purity is a powerful word that is impossible. As sinful creatures, no matter the aspect of our life, there is no opportunity to be completely clean of it. It can be passed down through generations even in the form of prejudices and abuse. "Human character forms culture, but culture also forms human character."(Plantinga 57) This Dangerous concept leads way for evil to manifest in different societies as deceiving sins. Our consumer culture is one perfect example of this. When capitalism came into existence, it was widely accepted. What it does is let a third party create more stable and speedy ways of buying and selling products. The issue became the corruption of something that otherwise could have been good.
Because there are few restrictions on how a third party, or middle man, does its business, they are able to manipulate and gain more than they should from interactions. Look at Nike, a popular shoe brand for instance. Everyone by now is likely familiar with their issues with worker rights and poor overseas treatment. What they do, is spend hardly anything on workers who have no other choice but to work for them, and then sell the products to people who are willing to pay for far more than they are worth. This circle is an unfortunate example of evil's hold on a simple modern day commodity.
While there is nothing bad about shoes, as they are a useful tool, and there is nothing bad about companies producing them, there is pollution of good in the buying and selling of them. This is something Christians have to come to terms to. Evil is present, and although purity is impossible to achieve in this broken world, we must still turn to God in an attempts to get as close to it as we can.
7 comments:
Ben, I really enjoyed reading what you had to share. I don't think I have read something by you and I was impressed. I liked what you had to say about evil - "Evil twists in order to twist. There is no method to madness, for it it simply the corruption of order and structure." How well worded that is and also how sadly true. Everything bad soon becomes a evil twisted up pretzel that never had a defined starting point. When I think about the evil things I have done in my own life, I can not help but look and ask myself where it all started from. How much we are in need of Christ Jesus our Lord and how little we know it.
Agreed. I also found your comment on the fall insightful. We use that terminology all the time, but I rarely think of why. It just seems like we were at a higher station and fell to a lower one of evil and sin. But it is true, falling is such a terrible sensation that can cause a lot of pain during the process.
I enjoyed your last few sentences.. "This is something Christians have to come to terms to. Evil is present, and although purity is impossible to achieve in this broken world, we must still turn to God in an attempt to get as close to it as we can". I feel like it's so easy for Christians to get discouraged about sin but we have to remember the God is (and always will be) with us.
@Kendra, Thank you for your kind words! You're right, it's hard to say where evil come from or go to, we just know that it is in our world. Sometimes the best way to just relax in the knowledge that God is good is just to listen to the right piece of music and mentally decide to be in the mindset. God gives us outlets, through him, we can bear it all.
@Gina, discouragement is easy indeed. Take the example of many movies though and apply logic to them, and things don't seem so bad. In most movies the evil is the super power, and groups of rebels magically prevail. But because God is all powerful, hopelessness is futile.
Thanks for pointing out Plantinga's careful use of the word "tainted," because this got me thinking about why he would use that word.
If you'll pardon the nerdiness, "tainted" reminded me of chemistry lab, where we work as hard as possible to gain "pure" products. Evil is like the impurities we try to get out of our products: it doesn't change WHAT the products are, but they interfere with our abilities to use them properly. Water with impurities in it is still water, but it won't behave properly and we can't use it how its supposed to be used until it is pure.
And if O-chem has taught me anything, it is that we can never get 100% yields: something always gets left behind. Thankfully, God is not an organic chemist: he intends to get a 100% yield of goodness once his plan for salvation for the world is complete.
Plantinga's choice of the word "tainted" is also important for the reason that it implies an incomplete corruption. As a result of the Fall, sin has pervaded the entire world; however, it has not completely corrupted it in the sense that it isn't as bad as we could be.
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