Book Review:
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be

This book review was included in the October 2019 Meadowcroft Monthly. For an archive of all book reviews, click here.

I know that most of my recent reading has been about work and vocation, due to my Adult Sunday school class on this subject. So for this month, rather than giving you yet another book on that subject, I went back into the archives to recommend one of my favorite books on a topic we don’t always enjoy thinking about - sin.

I always appreciate books that have titles that are helpful in and of themselves - and this title certainly fits that bill. I’ve often given “not the way it's supposed to be” as a brief, helpful definition of what sin is. Of course, we can and do say more, but I find this phrase to be helpful.

Plantinga structures his book (written in 1996 but still very relevant, and at times prophetic) in a way that attempts to define sin and then unpacks the various ways that sin pollutes and destroys.

Plantinga starts by characterizing sin as a “vandalism of shalom.” What is “shalom”? He defines it as “the webbing together of God, humans and all creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.” He rightfully says that you could call shalom “the way things ought to be.” Hence, “in short, sin is culpable shalom-breaking.”

Having defined sin, Plantinga moves to detail the different ways that sin works itself out in our fallen creation.

One thing I appreciated about Plantinga’s work is that it avoids “either-or” narratives when the Bible’s narrative is “both-and.” For example, sin is often defined as completely the responsibility of the individual (this being the extreme conservative approach) or as completely the fault of structural issues, leaving the individual as a mere victim (this being the extreme liberal approach.) Plantinga rejects both partial narratives, saying it is “fair-minded... to concede that the forces within social and cultural contexts push, draw, stress, and limit human beings in countless ways... Nonetheless, these forces do not fully explain or justify human evil.” Plantinga is unwilling to throw out human responsibility, but acknowledges that sin embeds itself in institutions and structures.

Still, no matter how much sin gets embedded in our character and in our experience, it is still an intruder into God’s good creation. He says, “The Bible’s big double message is creation and redemption. Sin intervenes, but never as an independent theme...in the biblical worldview, even when sin is depressingly familiar, it is never normal.” He goes on to say that “nothing about sin is its own; all its power, persistence, and plausibility are stolen goods.”

Perhaps the most convicting part of this book comes when Plantinga discusses the deception we partake of (in his chapter called “Masquerade”). He challenges all of us, saying, “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?” He continues:

If we are intellectuals, God is a cosmic Phi Beta Kappa; if we are laborers, God is a union organizer (remember, his Son was a carpenter); if we are entrepreneurs, God is for free enterprise (didn’t His Son say, “I must be about my father's business?); if we are poor, God is a revolutionary; if we are propertied, God is night watchman over our goods. The gods of the Persians always look like Persians.

So helpful. As another author once put it, “You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

Plantinga also helpfully distinguishes between sin and folly (or foolishness). “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.” In doing this, we can admit that some folly is “relatively innocent and some pretty funny,” but also that "a good deal of it is neither.”

The book even ventures into the difficult waters of addiction. Plantinga again rejects a narrow, either-or approach by saying “we must reject both the typically judgmental and typically permissive accounts of the relation between sin and addiction: we must say neither that all addiction is simple sin nor that it is inculpable disease.”

Plantinga finally addresses the idea of flight - running away from difficulty and running away from our responsibility to love God and love neighbor well. This is especially helpful for suburbanites, I believe, since the suburbs are built around individual autonomy and around safety.

Bottom line - I'm glad I took this book down from the shelf again, and highly recommend it to anyone looking to grow in their understanding of sin - because the goal of this understanding will be to see the goodness of God in forgiving us and in promising to one day restore the entire creation to “shalom.”