Sin and Folly

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

7. Sin and Folly
When we say an act was senseless, stupid, tragic, shortsighted, mistaken, unfortunate, miscalculated, erring, regrettable, or out of line, we are agreeing with the Bible that it was “foolish.”

Fitting into the World
Wisdom is the knowledge of God’s world and the knack of fitting oneself into it.
The Bible is a book about the way the world really is, not merely the way it should be.
To be wise is to discern reality, to love it, and then to live according to it.
To discern realities at their deeper levels we have to become engaged with them.
The wise accommodate themselves to reality.

Against the Grain
Borneo: government used DDT to kill houseflies, geckos got sick from eating poisoned flies, cats died from eating poisoned geckos, rats infested the houses and brought the plague.
Folly is the lack of understanding of the world and living contrary to reality.
Intelligence and education are only the raw materials for good judgment.
Folly includes poor judgment, lack of discernment, inattentiveness.

The Main Event
Not all that is folly is sin, but all sin is folly. Sin is both wrong and dumb. Sin is finally futile.
Pride is futile because self-fascination is so often unrequited. The more self-absorbed we are the less there is to find absorbing.
Idolatry is not only treacherous but also futile.
People hungry for love, people who want to “connect,” will often open up a sequence of shallow, self-seeking relationships with other shallow self-seeking persons and find that at the end of the day they are emptier than when they began.
Folly is swimming against the stream of the universe.
It is not only wrong but foolish to offend God because God is our final good, our maker and savior, the one in whom alone our restless heats come to rest.
Those who turn their back on God can find only “black-market substitutes”: instead of joy, they only get excitement; instead of self-giving love they get sex with strangers; instead of unconditional acceptance they get a professional therapist.
Rebellion against God and flight from God only remove us from the sphere of blessing, cutting us off from our only invisible means of support.
Sin is a form of self-abuse. It disqualifies us from the true good: promiscuity keeps us from enjoying intimacy, lack of trust means we condemn ourselves to social superficiality, cheating brings distrust, enmity and suspicion, envy traps us in torment, pride aborts the very possibility of real friendship and communion.
Pride renders fools unteachable. Folly causes a great deal of misery and also prevents the fool from escaping from it.
A proud person tries to reinvent reality.
A fool is essentially out of touch with reality.
Only a fool would describe a meeting with God as “fun.”