Sin: Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be

by Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

“Everything’s s’pposed to be different than what it is here.”
—Simon (Danny Glover) in Grand Canyon

In the 1991 film Grand Canyon, an immigration attorney breaks out of a traffic jam and tries to drive around it. He doesn’t know where he’s going and he’s alarmed to note that each street seems darker and more deserted than the last. Then, a nightmare. His fancy sports car stalls. He manages to call for a tow truck, but before it arrives, five local toughs surround his car and threaten him. Just in time, the tow truck shows up and its driver—an earnest, genial man—begins to hook up to the sports car. The toughs protest: the driver is interrupting their meal. So the driver takes the group leader aside and gives him a five-sentence introduction to sin:

Man, the world ain’t s’pposed to work like this. Maybe you don’t know that, but this ain’t the way it’s s’pposed to be. I’m s’pposed to be able to do my job without askin’ you if I can. And that dude is s’pposed to be able to wait with his car without you rippin’ him off. Everything’s s’pposed to be different than what it is here.

The driver’s summary of the human predicament is just about perfect. He understands the way things are supposed to be. They are supposed to include friendly streets that are safe for strangers. They are supposed to include justice that fosters peace, mutual respect and goodwill, deliberate and widespread attention to the public good.

Of course, things are not that way at all. Human wrongdoing or the threat of it mars every adult’s workday, every child’s school day, every vacationer’s holiday. The news online, the news from our friends, and our own experience give us all the examples we need. A college man plays the field and leaves behind him a string of hookups; the women can’t afterwards get him even to answer their texts. A fourth grader in a class of twenty-five distributes fifteen party invitations in a way that lets the omitted classmates clearly see that they have been excluded; her teacher notes but never ponders the social dynamics of this distribution scheme. A mother steps outside her marriage, wrecks it, and leaves her children to grieve over the end of their family story. From 1989 to 2006, the British pianist Joyce Hatto put out a dazzling set of recordings of some of the most beautiful and difficult music in the classical literature. She had become a prodigy at age 60. Music critics marveled that she seemed to have a different approach for each kind of music she recorded. No wonder. All of her output during this period had been stolen from the CDs of other pianists and sold as her own.

1. Shalom

Lots of North Americans use the word sin only on dessert menus and when telling an inside joke. If they hear the word used seriously, they might conclude that they are in the presence of a Puritan. There are few contexts left in which the word is said and heard straight. A certain number of churches do have a part of the service in which there is confession of sin and assurance of pardon, but in many churches, even preachers mumble when it comes to sin. Such a downer, they think. How can you keep the customers happy if you talk about depressing topics?

So what to do? My purpose in this essay is to describe sin and to do so (mostly) seriously. Once we get into the topic, I think you’ll accept that there is such a thing as sin. After all, it’s hard to deny that bad things happen in the world and that people are sometimes to blame for causing them. If the word “sin” puts you off as a way of naming these bad things, I invite you to find another word (“wrongdoing,” say, or “offense” or “what Wormtail and Voldemort do”) and make the mental substitution as I write about sin.

In any case, the great writing prophets of the Bible were unafraid to diagnose sin as the oldest and deepest human problem. They talked about it all the time, often in contexts in which they protested injustice in the land. The prophets knew that sin has a thousand faces. They 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 straight line to tell when one is crooked.) These prophets kept dreaming of a time when God would put things right again.¹

They dreamed of a new age in which human crookedness would straighten out. The foolish would be made wise, and the wise made humble. They dreamed of a time when the deserts would bloom, the mountains would run with wine, people would stop weeping and be able to sleep without a weapon under their pillow. People would work in peace and work to fruitful effect. A lamb could lie down with a wolf because the wolf had lost its appetite. All nature would be fruitful, benign, and filled with wonder upon wonder. All humans would be knit together in brotherhood and sisterhood; and all nature and all humans would look to God, lean toward God, and delight in God. Shouts of joy and recognition would well up from women in streets and from men at sea.

The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. In English we call it peace, but it means far more than just peace of mind or ceasefire 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 the creator and savior opens doors and speaks welcome to the creatures in whom he delights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things are supposed to be.

In a shalomic state, each entity has its own integrity, and each also possesses many edifying relations to other entities. The All Terrain Vehicle Sports Club, for example, might be related to the ecological health of forest streams by protecting them, by placing the streams off limits to members. “The way things ought to be” would also include in individual persons a whole range of healthy responses to other creatures—a spread of appropriate thoughts, desires, emotions, words, deeds, and dispositions. Gratitude, for example, is as fitting an emotional response to unexpected kindness as delight is to the velvety coat of a puppy or the honking of geese in a November fly-by.

Of course, the dreams of the Hebrew prophets are visionary: the regular bursting of high- altitude winery casks so that the mountains may stream with Chardonnay is not necessarily a feature of every ideal world. Nor is John Milton’s portrait of Eden or Thomas More’s of Utopia. Not everyone wants Milton’s “happy rural seat of various view,” for example, or More’s communist uniformitarianism. Still, every one of us does possess the idea of a world in which things are as they ought to be. Moreover, though we would wonder about some of its features (Would other people’s annoying music play any part in a perfect world? Would it, at least, be audible only to its own fans?), we would probably still agree on many of the broad outlines of a transformed world.

It would include, for instance, strong marriages and secure children. Nations and people groups in this brave new world would treasure differences in other nations and people groups. In the process of making decisions, men would defer to women and women to men till a crisis arose. Then, with good humor all around, the person more naturally competent in the area of the crisis would resolve it to the satisfaction of both.

Government officials would still take office (somebody has to decide which streets are cleaned on Tuesday and which on Wednesday), but to nobody’s surprise they would tell the truth and freely praise the virtues of other public officials. Broadband networks would be strong enough to enable quick downloads. Highway overpasses would be graffiti free. Professors would know students’ names while also leading such lively classes that students no longer felt like Facebooking their way through them. Nobody would un-friend anybody. Teachers of third graders would no longer make them sing “I am special; I am special; look at me; look at me” to the tune of Frẻre Jacques. Tow truck drivers and lost motorists would be serene on city streets, secure in the knowledge that, under the provisions of government and private foundation grants, former gang members are now all in law school.

Business associates would rejoice in each other’s promotions. Middling Harvard students would respect the Phi Beta Kappas from the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople and would try to learn from them. Intercontinental ballistic missile silos would be converted into training tanks for scuba divers. All around the world, people would stimulate each other’s virtues. Blogs would be filled with well-written accounts of acts of great moral beauty and, at the end of the day, people on their porches would read these accounts and call to each other about them and savor them with their single martini.