Aristotle: Poetics — The Chalk Outline and the Cross

Every culture tells stories, and every storyteller is chasing the same ache: a plot that resolves, a hero who deserves his fate, an ending that finally makes sense of the beginning. Around 335 BC, fresh from founding his Lyceum under the shadow of Macedonian power, Aristotle sat down to explain exactly how that ache gets satisfied. His Poetics answers Plato, who had banished the poets from his ideal republic as peddlers of deceptive illusion. Aristotle disagrees. He insists that imitation, or mimesis, is not a corrupting trick but a natural human instinct through which people learn and discover truth about the world. That claim deserves a serious hearing from Christians, because it touches something true: we are storytelling creatures because we are made in the image of a God who authors history. But Aristotle’s brilliant map of the human heart also reveals, at every turn, exactly what the human heart cannot supply for itself.

Literary Backgrounds: A Craft Answering a Master

Aristotle builds his theory as a direct counter to his teacher. Where Plato saw drama as a copy of a copy, dangerously stirring the passions, Aristotle treats a well-made tragedy as an engineered object, closer to biology than to magic. He praises Homer’s Odyssey for its disciplined selection of events, and he returns again and again to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex as the perfect specimen of reversal and recognition landing in the same breath. His famous image says it best: a canvas smeared confusedly with beautiful colors gives less pleasure than a simple chalk outline of a portrait, because plot, not color, is the soul of the work. Scripture, too, is full of reversal and recognition—Job’s restoration, Joseph’s rise from the pit to the palace—yet the biblical writers never treat these turns as products of a closed, self-contained plot. They treat them as the fingerprints of a living Author who is still writing.

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Theological and Ethical Analysis: An Honest Diagnosis with a Missing Piece

The clearest window into Aristotle’s limits is his concept of hamartia. He insists that the ideal tragic hero must fall not through vice, but through an isolated error in judgment, a single tactical misstep committed by an otherwise noble man. This preserves the audience’s pity, because no one wants to grieve for someone who deserved to be destroyed. It is a shrewd observation about how stories work, and it correctly assumes that humanity longs for order rather than chaos—an instinct traceable to a Creator who spoke a coherent universe into being. But Aristotle’s entire system also depends on excluding any outside rescue. He explicitly forbids the deus ex machina, ruling that a plot’s resolution must spring only from internal, human cause and effect. He has, without meaning to, described the tragedy of every fallen life that tries to save itself: an airtight system with no room left for grace.

Old Testament Analysis and Critique: The God Who Breaks the Closed Plot

Genesis 45 supplies the sharpest test case. Joseph stands before the brothers who sold him into slavery and utters the words that shatter Aristotle’s rules before they were even written: “So it was not you who sent me here, but God.” Here is reversal and recognition more complete than anything in Sophocles—the accused becomes the ruler, the guilty stand pardoned—yet the resolution comes from outside the human plot entirely. The famine, the pit, the prison, and the throne are all folded into a purpose Joseph calls lemiechyah, “to preserve life,” securing a sheerit, a remnant, for the covenant family. Aristotle would call this a flaw, a story broken by external intervention. The Old Testament calls it the ordinary way God works: real human choices, real guilt, real consequences, all held inside the sovereign hand of a Author who never stopped writing the story from above the page.

Plato: Protagoras — When Athens Went Looking for Virtue and Found a Dead End

Before the sun has risen over Athens, a young man named Hippocrates pounds on Socrates’ door, breathless with excitement. The most famous Sophist in the Greek world—Protagoras of Abdera—has arrived in the city, and Hippocrates cannot wait to buy his way into moral greatness. Socrates slows him down with a question that still cuts to the heart of every seminar, podcast, and self-help bestseller in our own age: Do you actually know what you are about to put into your soul? Plato’s Protagoras is a fifth-century BC Socratic dialogue built around one of the most urgent questions any human being can ask—Can virtue be taught?—and it answers that question with a brilliance that exposes, almost despite itself, the precise point where human wisdom breaks down and the Gospel must begin. For Christians willing to enter Athens with discerning eyes, this dialogue is not a threat; it is an extraordinary gift, a two-thousand-year-old case study in what happens when the best human mind in history goes looking for moral transformation and comes up empty.

Literary Brilliance: Sophists, Poets, and the Battle Over the Human Soul

Plato stages the Protagoras as a kind of intellectual theater, and every detail of the setting is doing theological work. The debate takes place inside the lavish home of Callias, a wealthy Athenian who spent his fortune collecting Sophists the way other men collected art. Prodicus of Ceos holds court from a bed piled with blankets, parsing synonyms no one asked him to distinguish. Hippias of Elis stands ready to deliver a lecture on any subject in the universe. Into this circus walks Socrates, armed with nothing but short, sharp questions. The literary contrast is stark and intentional: Protagoras speaks in long, rolling epideictic orations—what the ancient Greeks called makrologia—while Socrates presses for brachylogia, rapid-fire question-and-answer that strips rhetorical display down to its logical skeleton. To defend his claim that political virtue can be taught, Protagoras reaches deep into the Greek mythological tradition, retelling the story of Prometheus and Epimetheus. Epimetheus had exhausted all the biological gifts on the animals and left humanity naked and defenseless; Prometheus stole fire and the mechanical arts from the gods; and Zeus, fearing human extinction, sent Hermes to distribute justice (dike) and reverence (aidos) equally to every person, so that cities could survive. Protagoras uses this venerable creation narrative to argue that civic virtue is a divine deposit already present in every human heart, awaiting only proper cultivation. The move is rhetorically magnificent and theologically revealing: by anchoring his educational program in a religious myth, Protagoras claims the same ground that Scripture occupies—the origin of human moral capacity. Later in the dialogue, the debate erupts into a full-scale battle over the interpretation of a lyric poem by Simonides of Ceos, in which Socrates delivers a brilliantly ironical performance that mocks the Sophists’ method of hiding philosophical conclusions behind dead poets. The Protagoras is, in short, a masterpiece of ancient literary craft—and a vivid mirror of every age in which human eloquence competes with divine truth for authority over the human soul.

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Theological and Ethical Analysis: Virtue, Knowledge, and the Grand Reversal

The philosophical engine of the dialogue drives toward a conclusion that neither participant fully anticipates. Socrates begins by doubting that virtue can be taught. His evidence is practical: in the Athenian assembly, experts are required for technical tasks like ship-building, but anyone at all may speak on questions of justice and governance, suggesting that Athenians do not actually believe moral excellence is a specialized, teachable skill. More damning still, the greatest statesmen of Athens—men like Pericles—consistently failed to pass their civic virtue to their own children. Protagoras defends himself with the myth and then with a rational argument: punishment, he notes, aims at deterrence rather than revenge, which proves that society believes wrongdoers can learn to do better. The back-and-forth drives Socrates to probe a deeper problem: Are the virtues—justice, temperance, holiness, courage, and wisdom—separate facets of the moral life, or ultimately one thing? Through relentless logical pressure, Socrates forces Protagoras toward the conclusion that they are, in fact, one: knowledge. The dialogue’s famous ironical reversal lands here like a thunderclap. Socrates, who began as the skeptic, ends by proving that virtue is knowledge—precisely the kind of thing that can, in principle, be taught. Protagoras, who opened as the confident teacher of virtue, ends by resisting the identification of virtue with knowledge, and in doing so inadvertently implies that his own profession is groundless. Both men have swapped positions, and neither can define virtue clearly enough to say with confidence whether it can be transmitted at all. The dialogue closes in aporia—an impasse, a friendly stalemate—with the most important question in human life still unanswered. Plato intended this. The deadlock is the argument.

Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus — The Exile Who Became a Blessing

What do you do with a guilt you cannot undo? That question has pursued every human being, and Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus is one of antiquity's most searingly honest attempts to face it. The aged Oedipus—blind, polluted by unwitting patricide and incest, cast out from every city that ever knew his name—stumbles into a sacred grove at Colonus and begs for shelter. He has nothing to offer but his brokenness. You know something of that feeling. The weight of what cannot be undone, the hunger for a welcome you are not sure you deserve, and the fear that your pollution runs too deep for any sanctuary to hold are not ancient Greek problems; they are human problems. Sophocles named them with genius, but only one voice has answered them with authority. That voice did not speak from a sacred grove; it spoke from a cross and an empty tomb. This essay shows the difference—not to disparage a great poet, but to show why greatness is not enough and why the gospel is.

Literary Backgrounds: Greek and ANE Connections

Sophocles wrote for an audience living inside catastrophe. Athens had endured the Peloponnesian War, a brutal coup, and the humiliation of surrender. When the conspirators of 411 BC convened at Colonus—the very precinct of Poseidon where Oedipus seeks refuge—the setting crackled with political memory. Citizens would have recognized Colonus as a place of both civic betrayal and sacred shelter. Theseus' protection of the polluted wanderer amounted to a rebuke of every failure of Athenian ideals the audience had recently endured. Within the Greek tradition, the play draws on Aeschylus' Eumenides and Euripides' Suppliants. Reaching into the ancient Near East, the Egyptian Tale of Sinuhe traces an exile who finds honor in a foreign land, illuminating a universal anxiety about displacement that also surfaces in the Hebrew Bible’s cities of refuge and the protection placed on Cain. These connections are the fingerprints of common grace—the image of God pressing upward through every culture's instinct that the exile deserves a hearing. The Christian reading this is not watching paganism fumble toward biblical ideas but watching every nation groan for the answer only the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has given.

Theological and Ethical Analysis

The play's central claim is that suffering, accepted rightly, becomes a source of blessing. Oedipus offers Theseus not wealth or armies but his own ruined body, insisting the gains from it are better than beauty. A man with nothing remaining presses his brokenness forward as a gift. This image stirs the Christian conscience because we worship a Savior who made the same offer on an infinitely more costly scale. However, the mechanism Sophocles provides is precisely where the gospel's superiority becomes unmistakable. Oedipus' guilt is never atoned for; it is absorbed by oracular decree and converted into civic utility. The pollution is accepted, not cleansed. The suffering earns no forgiveness, only function. The resolution depends on sacred bones quietly decomposing in secret soil—a local, impersonal transaction between a dead man and a city-state. There is no new birth here, no repentance, and no reconciliation. This is the result of every human system that tries to resolve guilt without substitutionary atonement: it arrives at function without forgiveness and a grave that protects a city but cannot raise the man inside it.

The Old Testament's Critique

The Old Testament critiques Sophocles' world at every point where it most needs correction. Where Oedipus seeks refuge in a grove defined by impersonal destiny, Mosaic law established cities of refuge grounded in Yahweh's personal command (Numbers 35; Deuteronomy 19). This is the difference between a universe run by fate and a universe governed by a Father who speaks. In Genesis 4, Yahweh himself places a mark of protection on Cain, rather than a sacred precinct conferring safety via geography. While Oedipus' suffering produces blessing through the power of his tomb, the Old Testament traces a far greater trajectory. God does not heroize guilt in death; He calls broken people to covenant faithfulness in life to bless every family on earth (Genesis 12). The Servant of Isaiah 53, who bears the iniquity of many and carries griefs not his own, is the answer to the question Oedipus raises but cannot resolve. The exile becomes a blessing because the LORD lays on Him the iniquity of us all.

The New Testament's Critique

The New Testament presses this further toward a specific Person. The motif of the outcast welcomed finds its ultimate expression in Jesus Christ, who welcomed the "unclean" not for civic leverage, but because He came to seek and save the lost. When Christ tells His disciples that welcoming the stranger is welcoming Him (Matthew 25:35), He reveals the incarnation—the truth that God became a refugee so that every exile would find a Father’s house. The paradox of physical blindness yielding spiritual insight finds resolution in John 9, where Jesus heals a man born blind and declares Himself the light of the world. Where Oedipus’ insight comes through tragic fate, the healed man’s comes through a personal encounter with Christ. Finally, the image of a polluted body becoming a posthumous blessing is answered at Calvary. The Son of God became a curse for us so that the blessing of Abraham might come to all nations through faith (Galatians 3:13-14), not through secret bones in Attic soil, but through a resurrection that left the tomb empty. Oedipus offers Athens a useful grave; Jesus Christ offers the world an empty one.

Benefits of Reading and Implications for Christian Belief

Why should a Christian read this play? The person who understands what Sophocles was reaching for will preach the gospel with greater urgency and counsel the suffering with greater tenderness. Basil of Caesarea urged young men to glean fruit from Greek poets, and Augustine used the failures of pagan tragedy to illuminate the superiority of divine providence. This play rewards discerning engagement. It deepens your feel for the ancient Mediterranean world that formed the backdrop of the New Testament, helping you understand why the proclamation of grace landed like a thunderclap. It trains you to sit with suffering rather than resolving it too quickly, making you a more faithful presence to those who desperately need someone to stay. It provides concrete imagery—a broken man offering his ruined body as a gift—that can open a door into the gospel for those who would never walk through a church door. You will not be drawn toward paganism but toward the deep gratitude of one who sees clearly what the world groped for in darkness.

Applying Oedipus at Colonus to Christian Life Today

The play ends with a sacred tomb and a fading oracle; Athens is left to manage as best it can with bones in the ground. But you are living on the resurrection side of history. The question this play presses on every Christian reader is: are you living like it? The risen Christ is not a protective spirit tethered to a patch of ground. He is seated at the right hand of the Father, interceding for every soul who has ever brought Him a guilt they could not undo. His invitation remains: come to Me, all you who are weary, and I will give you rest. Read this play the way Paul engaged the Athenian poets in Acts 17—as a bridge into the conversation every human heart is having about guilt, fate, and homecoming. Use it to let the contrast do its work: hope in Christ does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured into our hearts. Oedipus had an oracle, two treacherous sons, and a grave. You have the living God, the atoning cross, and the promise that nothing can separate you from His love. Go tell someone who is still wandering in the dark that the grove they are searching for is a Person. He is already looking for them, and He will never turn them away.

Sophocles and the Tragic Vision of Man: A Biblical Assessment

Sophocles (c. 497–406 BC) stands as one of the supreme literary artists of the ancient world, a figure whose seven surviving plays — Ajax, Antigone, Trachiniae, Oedipus Rex, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus — represent the fullest achievement of Greek tragic drama. Born in Colonus near Athens into a family of comfortable means, he came of age during the height of Athenian power, witnessed the reforms of Cleisthenes and Ephialtes, served alongside Pericles as a general and state treasurer, and survived long enough to see the catastrophic unraveling of Athenian greatness in the Peloponnesian War and the disaster of the Sicilian Expedition. His nearly century-long life gave him an unparalleled vantage on the arc of human ambition and collapse. Of the roughly 120 plays attributed to him in antiquity, only seven survive, preserved through Byzantine selection as a school canon. They were composed for performance at the City Dionysia, the great spring festival of Dionysus in Athens — an event that was simultaneously civic, religious, and communal, attended by thousands as a form of sacred public duty. Drama in this context was not entertainment in the modern sense but a form of civic theology, a public examination of the most urgent questions facing the polis: justice, piety, fate, and the limits of human knowledge.

Sophocles and His Greek Literary World

To read Sophocles well, one must place him within the tradition he both inherited and transformed. His most immediate predecessor was Aeschylus, whose grand trilogies moved toward cosmic theodicy and divine-human reconciliation — the Oresteia being the supreme example, in which the blood-vengeance cycle of the house of Atreus is finally resolved through the institution of civic justice under Athena’s mediation. Sophocles retained Aeschylus’ reverence for divine order while abandoning the trilogic sweep in favor of tight, single-play structures centered on isolated individuals. Where Aeschylus resolved, Sophocles compressed and intensified. Euripides, his younger contemporary, moved in the opposite direction — toward skepticism, rationalism, and a destabilizing of mythic convention — and the contrast between Sophocles’ traditional piety and Euripides’ corrosive questioning is one of the defining tensions of fifth-century drama. Behind both stands Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey provided the mythological raw material for much of tragedy. Sophocles’ Ajax is essentially a meditation on what happens when the Iliadic heroic code — the absolute primacy of personal honor (timê) — is lived out to its logical extreme in a world that no longer supports it. Antigone draws on the same Homeric reverence for proper burial rites that animates Achilles’ eventual return of Hector’s body to Priam. The Philoctetes reworks an episode from the Trojan cycle, contrasting Odysseus’ Homeric cunning — there a celebrated virtue — with the moral ambiguity that pragmatic deception produces in Sophocles’ more ethically probing dramatic world.

The Architecture of Sophoclean Tragedy

The thematic structure of Sophocles’ plays is governed by several interlocking and recurring concerns. The most pervasive is the relationship between human will and divine necessity. Sophocles’ heroes — Oedipus, Antigone, Ajax, Electra, Philoctetes — are not passive victims of fate but persons of enormous, inflexible will who drive themselves toward destruction through the very qualities that define them. Aristotle, who regarded Oedipus Rex as the paradigmatic tragedy in the Poetics, discussed this under the concept of hamartia, often inadequately rendered as “tragic flaw” but more precisely a fatal miscalculation rooted in the hero’s particular excellence turned to excess. A second governing theme is the problem of knowledge: what human beings can know, when they know it, and at what cost. Oedipus Rex is constructed as an extended and almost unbearable dramatic irony, in which the audience’s foreknowledge of the myth transforms Oedipus’ courageous pursuit of truth into the instrument of his own ruin. A third theme is the tension between written and unwritten law — between civic obligation and a higher moral or divine imperative — most brilliantly dramatized in Antigone, where Creon’s political decree and Antigone’s appeal to the eternal laws of the gods produce mutual destruction without resolution. Sophocles does not simplify this conflict; he gives both parties real arguments and real convictions, and the play ends not in vindication but in wreckage. A fourth and related theme is the nature of heroism and its costs. The Sophoclean hero’s absolute refusal to compromise is both admirable and catastrophic, making these figures simultaneously tremendous and terrible, as often damaging as ennobling to the communities around them.

Sophocles and the Ancient Near East

The thematic concerns of Sophoclean tragedy do not arise in a vacuum but reflect preoccupations shared across the ancient Near Eastern world. Mesopotamian literature provides instructive parallels. The Epic of Gilgamesh traces the arc of a king whose heroic overreach — his refusal to accept human limitation, his quest for immortality after the death of Enkidu — issues in humbling and sorrow rather than triumph. Babylonian lamentations over fallen rulers catalog the consequences of royal hubris in the sight of the gods with a frequency that suggests this was a settled cultural conviction across the ancient world. Hittite and Assyrian plague narratives connect communal calamity with royal impurity in ways that directly parallel the opening of Oedipus Rex, where Thebes is afflicted by plague because the murder of King Laius has gone unatoned. The difference between Sophocles and these ANE parallels lies in individualization: Greek tragedy places the suffering of a single figure at the center and follows its psychological and moral consequences with an intensity that the more corporate and ritualistic ANE texts generally do not. There is also, in both the Mesopotamian and Greek traditions, a conspicuous absence of covenantal theology. The gods of Mesopotamia, like the gods of Sophocles, are powerful, often inscrutable, sometimes capricious, and fundamentally impersonal. They enforce cosmic order, but they do not love.

The Old Testament’s Illumination and Critique

It is here that the Old Testament casts its sharpest light on Sophocles, both as illumination and as critique. The resonances are real and worth dwelling on. Proverbs 16:18 — “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” — reads almost as a précis of Oedipus Rex and Ajax simultaneously. The prophetic confrontations with kings — Elijah before Ahab, Nathan before David, Isaiah before Ahaz — share with Antigone’s defiance of Creon the basic moral structure of divine law overriding human edict, anticipated in the New Testament by the apostles’ declaration in Acts 5:29 that one must obey God rather than men. The book of Job shares with Oedipus a family resemblance in placing a sufferer before a reality larger and more terrible than he anticipated; both texts use the suffering of an individual to probe the limits of human understanding before cosmic order. The motif of blindness as a figure for spiritual ignorance appears in both traditions: Oedipus’ self-blinding after the revelation of his crimes, and the prophetic use of blindness in Isaiah 6:9–10, quoted by all four evangelists as a description of Israel’s failure to receive the Messiah. Yet the difference between the biblical and Sophoclean worlds at precisely these points of similarity is not superficial but constitutive. The God of Israel is not an impersonal enforcer of cosmic order. He speaks, covenants, pursues, and forgives. When David commits adultery and murder — crimes in some respects structurally parallel to Oedipus’ parricide and incest — the outcome is not self-blinding and exile but the fifty-first Psalm: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love.” The possibility of that prayer is the difference between two worlds.

The New Testament’s Redemptive Answer

The New Testament does not merely refine the Old Testament’s critique of Sophoclean tragedy; it answers the human condition that tragedy diagnoses. Paul’s analysis in Romans 1–3 of the universal human plight — pride, self-deception, the suppression of truth, the mind’s inability to deliver what it promises — reads as a theological account of what Sophocles dramatized with such power. The tragic hero’s hamartia is, in Pauline terms, a specific and acute instance of the universal problem of sin: the creature’s overreach, the creature’s refusal of limits, the creature’s insistence on self-sufficiency. Romans 5:3–5 transforms suffering — the instrument of revelation in Sophocles — into the ground of a hope that Sophocles never imagined, because the suffering of Christ absorbs and redeems what the tragic hero’s suffering only diagnoses. Hebrews 5:8 notes that the Son of God himself “learned obedience through what he suffered,” inverting the tragic pattern: where Oedipus’ suffering produces knowledge that destroys him, Christ’s suffering produces an obedience that saves others. The cross is the place where divine justice and divine mercy — the two things Sophoclean theology cannot hold together — are reconciled. Creon’s decree and Antigone’s piety destroy each other; at Calvary, the righteous demand of the law and the mercy of God are simultaneously satisfied. This is not a minor adjustment to the tragic worldview. It is its transfiguration.

Implications for Christian Belief and Practice

For the Christian reader, Sophocles offers resources of genuine intellectual and spiritual value, provided they are read with discernment. These plays are among the most penetrating explorations of human nature ever written, and their diagnosis of pride, self-deception, the limits of knowledge, and the catastrophic consequences of inflexibility is confirmed at every point by biblical anthropology. Reading Sophocles can sharpen the Christian’s understanding of what Paul means when he speaks of human beings as creatures of “futile thinking” and “darkened hearts” in Romans 1:21. The plays also provide extraordinary training in moral perception, in reading the human heart, and in recognizing the tragic dimensions of choices made without the resources of grace. They illuminate what it looks like to be without God in the world — not in the shallow sense of irreligion, but in the deep sense of confronting the divine order without a mediator, without forgiveness, and without hope of resurrection. They are, in the terms Sophocles himself could not have used, a preparation for the gospel, a documentation of the longing that the gospel answers. The Christian reads them with the same appreciation with which Augustine read Cicero — grateful for the genuine wisdom, alert to the genuine limits, and confident that the truth toward which pagan tragedy gestures from a distance has been spoken, embodied, and enacted in Jesus Christ, in whom the tragic pattern of human overreach and divine judgment is not merely repeated but finally, decisively broken.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Flight

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

10. Flight
“The West has finally achieved the rights of man, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Stanley Milgram
65% continued shocking when the subject pounded on the wall.
62% continued shocking when the subject’s cries could be heard.
40% continued shocking when the subject was in the same room.
30% shocked the subject even when they had to force his hand onto the shock plate, and still shocked the subject up to 450 volts.
Virtually all of hem, when interviewed, stated their opposition, in principle, to hurting innocent people. Yet, what they rejected in principle they did in practice, however distressed they felt about it. They did it because somebody in a laboratory coat told them they had no choice.

Living Tools
Human beings’ tendency to obey helps keep order and stability in society but can also be transformed into a tool of evil.
When a person is in a hierarchical structure he no longer thinks of himself as a responsible moral subject but an agent of others, an instrument or a tool, not a responsible moral agent.
When he finds himself bound to a morally deteriorating situation that he wants to abandon, he cannot find a good, clean place to break off.
Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, trained men to become ruthless by giving officers more difficult assignments, such as the mercy killing of nursing home patients, and when they began to balk he would remind them of what they had already done. Finally, his loyalty to the Nazi party would be questioned and he would be threatened with the same fate of the prisoners if he refused. Obedience got him his position, and cowardice pinned him to it.
A German priest absolved Stangl of all his guilt: “Before God and my conscience, if I had been in Franz’s place I would have done the same. I absolve him of all guilt.”
Rudolf Höss, ordered to carry out mass exterminations at Auschwitz, later stated, “I had been given an order, and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.”

Multiple Evasions

Conforming
Lakewood, CA 1993 and the “Spur Posse” that sexually exploited a large number of girls in a contest for who could have sex with the most girls. Parents didn’t blame the boys at all.

Conniving
To shut one’s eyes to an injustice, to look the other way, to pretend ignorance of evil, is to connive.
Kitty Genovese, March 13, 1964 in Queens was brutally raped and murdered and no one helped.

Leaving Town
Winston Churchill could not convince Europe’s leaders to take action to oppose Hitler.

Specializing
In Stanley Milgram’s experiment, some people dealt with the stress by doing their task with the utmost care in order to avoid the moral dilemma.

Minimizing
Apologize instead of repent, show kindness instead of love, seek happiness instead of joy, talk instead of do.

Going Limp
Making a career of nothing robs the community of our gifts and energies and shapes life into a yawn at the God and savior of the world, and in effect says to God, “You have made nothing of interest and redeemed no one of consequence, including me.”

Cocooning
Some people retreat into the small world of their friends, work, church, and family.

Amusing Ourselves to Death
Our flights of amusement cost us more than time and money. They also may cost us our grasp of the general distinction between reality and illusion.
Neil Postman says, on TV, “everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana.”

The Flight from Shalom
At the heart of all evasions lies two others: He has turned his back on his neighbor and his God, and in some way, on himself. By refusing his calling, he extracts his own core, hollowing himself out to a shell of a human being, without weight or substance. He has made himself an alien to the gospel and a stranger to Jesus Christ. To sell a neighbor short is to sell God short.
The gifts of God—vitality, love, forgiveness, courage, joy, and everything that flows the work of Christ—may be found only in the company of God. And we keep company with God only by adopting God’s purposes for us and following through on them even when it is difficult or initially painful to do so.
Many people have fallen into a “functional godlessness.”
Life with God is not mainly a matter of knuckling under to our superior. Rather, we trust and obey because these responses are fitting.
We must trust and obey to rise to the full stature of sons and daughters, to mature into the image of God, to grow into adult roles in the drama of redeeming the world. God wants not slaves but intelligent children. God wants form us not numb obedience but devoted freedom creativity, and energy. In short, we are to become responsible beings, people to whom God can entrust deep and worthy assignments, expecting us to make something significant of them—expecting us to make something significant of our lives.
God has called us, graced us, to delight in our lives, to feel their irony and angularity, to make something sturdy and even lovely of them. We have to find the emotional and spiritual energy for these tasks from the very God who assigns them, turning our faces to God’s light so that we may be drawn to it, warmed by it, revitalized by it. To be a responsible person is to find one’s own role and then, empowered by the grace of God, to fill this role and to delight in it.


Epilogue
Evil rolls across the ages, but so does good.
Creation is stronger than sin and grace stronger still.
God wants Shalom and will pay any price to get it back.
Human sin is stubborn, but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way.

Attack

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

9. Attack
“He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly.” Iago in Othello.
The complex character of Lyndon Baines Johnson who was both one of our greatest politicians and our greatest liars. He not only had trouble “telling” the truth but in “seeing” it. He was a master of using lies to attack his opponents.

Attack and Flight
Sin alternates between attack and flight. Sinners assault other human beings or else they ignore them. They invade somebody else’s life or they flee their responsibility for it. They transgress God’s prohibitions and avoid God’s requirements. They may even treat themselves with self-abuse or self-neglect.
This approach/avoidance pattern lies deep within Scripture. There are those who attack the light of God, and are consumed by his heat, and there are those who turn their backs on the light of God, and freeze in the cold darkness.
We use lies to avoid our responsibilities and to assault other human beings.

A Select History of Envy
In Iowa, Miss Harvest Queen strangled Miss Homecoming Queen with a leather belt.
High school yearbook editor in Indiana draws facial hair, underarm hair, blackens teeth of girls she envies just before sending it to the printer.
An African-American girl in Oakland works hard to get into medical school but is ridiculed and scorned by her peers.
In Chicago, subordinates spread lies about a publishing executive that cause him to be fired.
In Texas a mother of a thirteen-year-old cheerleader hired a hit man to kill the mother of a rival cheerleader to disrupt her ability to do well at tryouts.
An envier doesn’t care whether you have earned part of your success or whether some golden parachute from heaven has dropped into your lap; to an envier, your advantage is totally unfair either way.
Envy is nastier than covetousness in that what envy wants is not what another has; what an envier wants is for another not to have it.
To covet is to want somebody else’s good so strongly that one is tempted to steal it while envy is to resent somebody else’s good so much that one is tempted to destroy it.

Resentment, Pride, and Destruction
The advantages of others makes the envious angry. Envy is a corrupted form of anger. Resentment is a protracted form of anger.
The envier resents another’s good because it scuffs his pride.
The envier usually resents someone that is slightly superior to him or equal to him.
The proud envier keeps running for the office of God.
Enviers also rejoice in the misfortunes of others (Schadenfreude).
Envy poisons the envier and introduces gangrene into his own soul.
Enviers want to be envied.

The Tragedy of Addiction

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

8. The Tragedy of Addiction
Goethe: “Master, I am in great distress! The spirits that I conjured up I cannot now get rid of.”

The Wide World of Addiction
There is undoubtedly a spiritual dimension to addiction that all recovering addicts readily admit.
What drives addiction is longing—a longing not just of the brain, belly or loins, but of the heart.
Addictions eventually center in distress and in the self-defeating choice of an agent to relive the distress. In fact, trying to cure distress with the same thing that caused it is typically the mechanism that closes the trap on an addict. Then every time you meet a demand, it escalates and any good is sapped away by this parasite.

The Deadly Spiral
What converts a delinquent to an addict is when he tries to relieve the despair by indulging his obsession all over again, thereby initiating a new round of addiction.
The same culture that that encourages self-indulgences also punishes the indulgent with scorn fit for a failed god.
Addictions flourish by feeding on human attempts to master them.
An addict stands a chance of recovery only if he is finally willing to tell himself the truth. He must admit that he is helpless.

Sin or Symptom?
Not all addictions are sin.
Perhaps the addict is responsible for his addiction since he made choices before he became addicted that ultimately led to his addiction. We are also responsible for our addictions once we get them in that we must choose to seek help.
Perhaps a better category to use would be “tragedy” since it implies the fall of someone who is responsible and significant, someone who is naturally great but whose greatness has been compromised and finally crushed by a mix of forces, including personal agency, that work together for evil in a way that seems simultaneously surprising and predictable, preventable and inevitable.
Addicts are sinners like everyone else but also tragic figures whose fall is often owed to a combination of factors so numerous, complex and elusive that we cannot fully understand them.

Overlapping Circles

Dynamics of Addiction
Addiction is about our hungers and thirsts, about our ultimate concern, about the clinging and longing of our hearts, and about giving ourselves over to these things.
When it is in full cry, addiction is finally about idolatry, where the addict will do anything for his idol, including dying for it.
The addict needs to turn to God because the “hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and hIs compulsion is our liberation.”

Masquerade

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

6. Masquerade
La Rochenfoucauld: “Hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue.”

The Mask of Sanity
Psychopaths are often intelligent, attractive, and charismatic. They wear the mask of a genial and trustworthy human being, but underneath it everything is self-protective chaos.
The lack of a sense of guilt is both dangerous and deviant.
To do its worse evil must look its best. Vices have to masquerade as virtues. Satan must appear as an angel of light.
Most people seek at least the form of godliness while denying its power. They do not want to be good but merely appear to be good.
Evil people are simultaneously aware of their evil and desperately trying to resist that awareness.

A Public Resistance Movement
For the educational elite, moral tolerance is the only good, and moral intolerance the only evil.
Self-Swindling
Self-deception is a shadowy phenomenon by which we pull the wool over some part of our own psyche.
Self-deception is “corrupted consciousness. First we deceive ourselves and then we convince ourselves that we are not deceiving ourselves.”
When we are most religious we my be most at risk of losing touch with God.
There is a vast difference between the truth of religion and the use of religion.
Many believers do not really believe in God but merely some deified image of themselves.
Even when we are at worship the wolves may be howling in our souls.

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.”

Parasite

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

5. Parasite
Bernard Shaw: “You cannot have the power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.”
During the civil rights movement, some blacks figured out ways to defraud their own movement.

Ironies and Hybrids
Saints bring dirty weapons to holy wars.
Reform needs constant reform; rescuers need to be rescued.
Evil contaminates every scalpel designed to remove it.
Human beings are extremely complex creatures where great good and great evil often cohabit, sometimes in separate, well-insulated compartments, but sometimes in an intimacy so deep and twisted that we never get to see the one moral quality without the other.
Until the Enlightenment, sinful human pride was widely regarded as the first of the seven deadly sins. Now it is no longer viewed with alarm.
Theology has become therapy, holiness is replaced by happiness, truth by feeling, ethics by self-esteem.
The main problem with pride is that it recognizes neither sin nor grace.
Hubris is a hybrid that can be either titanic or pathetic and it can afflict the great and the would-be great.
Often humility has been used as a club to beat other races, women, children, etc. into submission.
The proud love humility in others.
The humbled sometimes reply by usurping the very pride they had hated.

Privation and Parasite
Even when sin is depressingly familiar, it is never normal; it is unknown, irrational, alien; it is a departure from the norm.
Sin is deviant and perverse, an in-justice, in-iquity, in-gratitude, dis-order, dis-obedience, faith-lessness, law-lessness, god-lessness.
Sin is both the overstepping of a line and the missing of a mark.
Sin is an intruder, a gate-crasher, that has gotten into God’s world uninvited.
Sin is a parasite; nothing about sin is its own: all its power, persistence, and plausibility are stolen goods.
Sin is a spoiler of entities—there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.
C.S. Lewis: “Goodness, so to speak, is itself; badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.’
Good is original, independent, and constructive; evil is derivative, dependent, and destructive.
Evil wants good; it needs good to be evil. It merely wants the good without God.
Sin is fruitful because, like a virus, it attaches to the life force and dynamics of its host. It attaches and converts them to a new use.
We are often drawn to men who commit bold evil, not because we love the evil but because we love the boldness and audacity and freedom. Sin is only attractive when it is vital. But these very qualities are borrowed and not original, because the very boldness, imagination, and creativity come from the very God it attacks.
Often we focus on the “good” aspects of evil while choosing not to notice the negative fallout it creates. We only see the vitality of the parasite, glowing with stolen life.

The Progress of Corruption

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

4. The Progress of Corruption
Mesillat Yesharim: “If a man is allured by the things of this world and is estranged from his Creator, it is not he alone who is corrupted, but the whole world is corrupted with him.”
One moral misstep leads to another.
Sin yields more and more sin; each episode of sin gets triggered by trouble from the last.
Sin is a plague that spreads its contagion.
People rarely commit single sins.
Unarrested, sin despoils even its own agents, eventually causing the very death of the soul.

History Echoes
Sin is both fatal and fertile.
Like cancer, sin kills because it reproduces.
Victims of crime are dangerous because they are unlikely to exercise self-control in their attempt to get even.
Most people believe they are a victims and are merely returning fire, never firing the first shot.

Motives, Contexts, and Causes
People have long memories and short fuses when it comes to grievances.
Injustice enrages people and makes them vengeful.
Those who have been abused are more likely to abuse others.
It is easier to chose the short-term stress reliever, that puts long-term stress on our hearts and bodies.
Human beings want security, and our main problem is that we seek security in the wrong places and in the wrong ways because we fail to trust God to take care of us.
Unbelief produces anxiety which produces pride and sensuality.
“The heart wants what it wants.”
The human heart, when it ignores God, turns in on itself, trying to lift itself, please itself, and ends up debasing itself. When we want God’s gifts without God, we end up sagging and contracting into a little wad.
Motives may be mixed, making it difficult to discern them.
There are also social contexts to consider. Society must take some of the blame for sins committed because of injustice and abuse.
Even if we could understand all the motives, contexts, and forces, we would still not be able to fully understand why a certain sin was committed.
Failure to blame people for their sins is dehumanizing. In the Soviet Union the concept of blame disappeared and people were no longer treated as fully human.

The Great Law of Returns
Paul called this “the mystery of iniquity” (2 Thess. 2:7)
At the bottom, the heart wants what it wants, and it has its reasons that even reason does not know.
“The heart is sinful and desperately wicked; who can know it?”
People not only reap what they sow, they also sow what they reap.
George F. Will: “America’s slide into the sewer is greased by praise.”

Other Causes?
Secrecy fertilizes evil.
God created us to live Shalom and to please Him, but we mysteriously live against the purpose of our existence.
Satan does not take any ground that we do not give him.
Satan seduces only those who want to be seduced.
Sin is not only personal but also interpersonal and suprapersonal.
Sin becomes a living, powerful force with a life all its own.

Perversion, Pollution, and Disintegration

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

3. Perversion, Pollution, and Disintegration
Seneca: “Devotion to what is wrong is complex and admits of infinite variations.”
Anatole France: “It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.”

Perversion
Perversion is an ends-and-purposes disease. It is the turning of loyalty, energy, and desire away from God and God’s purpose in the world so that energy and resources are wasted on unworthy ends or wrong ends.
Spiritual hygiene requires us to be able to recognize and assess goods, to pursue them with appropriate degrees of interest, and to enjoy them with the appropriate level of pleasure. Ignorance and self-deception often skew our judgments about what is worth longing for in the first place.
Any return to greatness requires a reappraisal of what the primary purpose of man is, his spiritual nature, and his responsibility to God and others.

Pollution
When a church uses hymns or praise songs primarily for entertainment, it simultaneously perverts the hymns and pollutes worship.
To pollute is to defile, to weaken a whole entity by introducing a foreign element.
Idolatry is pollution in that a third party gets in between God and the worshipper, adulterating an exclusive loyalty.
Ingratitude fouls our character and our relation to God.
Dividedness and Disintegration
Idolatry both contaminates and divides proper loyalty to God.
A pure heart is an undivided heart.
When the foundation is cracked the building will crumble.
Sin tends to disintegrate both its victims and its perpetrators.

Amor Mortis
Sin has caused deterioration to spread through our soul and our psychic governing center, making it internally lawless.
Sinners who lose spiritual purpose and control eventually descend into a spiral of increasingly grave assaults on civic and personal integrity.
Sin both numbs us and hollows us out.
Sin eventually creates an upside down morality, showing that evil has crossed some wire within them so that their moral polarity has switched.
“Wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every form of sensual excess, to be in love with death.”

Spiritual Hygiene and Corruption

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

2. Spiritual Hygiene and Corruption
Oliver Stone: “I don’t want integrity to block my creative growth.”
Sin corrupts: it puts asunder what God has joined together.
Sin despoils: it removes that which preserves integrity. (The Nazis not only tried to kill the body but also the spirit, and not only to slay the spirit but to corrupt it so that it would recriminate and slay itself. They tried to strip away everything that holds a being together and what joins other beings in an atmosphere of hospitality, justice and delight.)
Spiritual Hygiene
A spiritually whole person longs for God and the beauty of God, for Christ, for Christ-likeness, for the Holy Spirit, for spiritual maturity, for other human beings, for love, for justice, for nature, for beauty.
Spiritually whole people long for character, virtue and goodness.
Most of what we long for cannot be had by trying to get it. The more we pursue these things the more elusive they become. We will find what we long for only when we seek for God.

Vandalism of Shalom

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

Introduction
Walker Percy: Boredom is “the self being stuffed with itself.”
The main human trouble is desperately difficult to fix; sin is the longest-running of human emergencies.

1. Vandalism of Shalom
Jonathan Dimbleby filmed a documentary about the hunger in Ethiopia and found that the government required the aid workers to pay a tariff on the emergency food relief they were bringing in for the starving people.
Shalom
The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight.
A universal flourishing, wholeness and delight.
Sin: A Definition
Sin is both a religious and a moral concept.
It is a breaking of the Law as well as the breaking of the Covenant
Sin is first and foremost a Godward force; any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed that displeases God and deserves blame.
Includes both acts and dispositions.
Sin is a culpable and personal affront to God.
Sin violates Shalom and interferes with the way things are supposed to be.
Sin is unoriginal in that it disrupts the good and harmonious like an intruder.
Sin offends God because it bereaves or assaults God directly or what God has made.
If there is no God, then there is no violation of God’s Law or an affront to Him.
Interscholastic and Intramural Distinctions
Crime is statute-relative while sin is not.
The relationship between sin and immorality is knotty and complex.
We need grace for our sin but mercy and healing for our diseases.
Do not confuse sin with mere error.
Sin is both objective and subjective; objective sin breaks the peace while subjective sin is when we feel we have broken the peace, whether we have or not.
All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad. The badness of a sin depends partly on what kind and how much damage it has done.
There may be mitigating circumstances that need to be taken into account, but involuntariness may mitigate but it doesn’t necessarily excuse. If the sin was acquired in some way through some fault of our own, then we are culpable.
Evil social structures and habits may contribute to a sin, making it more difficult to assess the culpability of a sin.

Bacchantes

In his last days, Euripides wrote the tragedy Bacchantes, which was performed after his death in 405 B.C.. While living with King Archelaus of Macedon, Euripides became disillusioned with the corruption in Athens and the excesses of the fanatical Dionysian festivals.

The story takes place outside the palace of Thebes near the shrine of Semele, who gave birth to Dionysus after copulating with Zeus. Semele’s sisters have been driven mad by Dionysus because they claim that he is merely a mortal and not the son of Zeus. The women are all reveling in a drunken stupor caused by Dionysus. Among the women is Agave, the king’s mother, daughter of Cadmus, the prior king, and sister of Semele.

Pentheus, king of Thebes, is outraged at this display of excess and tries to stop the madness by arresting the women. The women miraculously escape from prison and Pentheus then has Dionysus arrested since he is causing the problem. Dionysus escapes and then leads Pentheus to the women, who are engaging in a wild sexual orgy in a secret spot in the forest. When Pentheus finds the women, Dionysus calls to them and tells them to attack Pentheus who is spying on them. The women attack him and tear him limb from limb, scattering the parts of his body all around.

Agave returns to the palace proudly holding the head of Pentheus, her son, thinking it is the head of a lion. When her father Cadmus sees what has happened, he has all the parts of Pentheus gathered and brought back to Thebes. He then convinces Agave that the head belongs to her son and not a lion. When she finally realizes what she has done, she is struck with horror and regret. The play ends with her being exiled from Thebes for her vicious crime. Dionysus has gotten his revenge on the two most outspoken critics of his deity.

A New Kind of Calvinism

In her review of the recently released The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Books & Culture, January/February 2007, pages 12-13, Sarah Hinlicky Wilson makes some interesting observations about the decade-long comic strip that had a profound influence on our culture. I have always loved Calvin & Hobbes and felt that Bill Watterson had a keen sense of American culture and critiqued it in a humorous, yet profound way.

Here are a few of her observations that I enjoyed:

“Hobbes…is neither Calvin’s better half nor his psychopomp. He is evry bit the rascal that Calvin is, though considerably more disguised in his misdeeds, especially in a rousing game of Calvinball or the at the sight of Susi Derkins. If Calvin is the unrepentant sinner, the ethicists will observe, then Hobbes is the Pharisee, smug of his virtuous living and immensely proud of not being human.”

“Is it right to charge ten billion dollars for a dinosaur skeleton constructed from backyard trash? Is it wrong to steal a truck from a bully if he stole it from you first? How about the quandaries raised by recent advances in corrugated cardboard technology? One must consider what benefits could be gained for science by transmogrifying oneself into a 500-story tall gastropd, a slug the size of the Chrysler building. One must decide whether the duplicator is better used as a counterfeit money machine or as a clone generator to supply oneself with a baseball team. What if the duplicator has an ethicator tacked on—and what if one’s good side is prone to badness?”

“The lure of a slushball square in Susie’s face confronts his limitless greed in an epic struggle. Calvin therefore tries to rationalize. It should count for more if a bad kid tries to be good than if a naturally good kid is good. Ten spontaneous, if reluctant, acts of good will a day should compensate for a year’s sordid sin. Relinquishing retaliation rights on Susie should produce [Christmas] presents by the truckload (never mind that Calvin provoked her in the first place and lied to Mom about it). Still, every Christmas without fail, Calvin is acquitted of his crimes and showered with gifts, even when he learns the wrong lesson from it. A parable of God’s love for the sinner and justification by faith, no works, the theologians infer—good Calvinism, indeed.”



Sorry, but I couldn’t find the article on the website. It must be only available in the print version.