Sin: Read All About It

Why would anyone read, much less recommend, a book on sin? Perhaps the following, from the introduction to Cornelius Plantinga’s accessible and enthralling book, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be : A Breviary of Sin,
will sufficiently intrigue you that you will put this one on your reading list for 2011.

“Slippage in our consciousness of sin, like most fashionable follies, may be pleasant, but it is also devastating. Self-deception about our sin is a narcotic, a tranquilizing and disorienting suppression of our spiritual central nervous system. What’s devastating about it is that when we lack an ear for wrong notes in our lives, we cannot play right ones or even recognize them in the performances of others. Eventually we make ourselves religiously so unmusical that we miss both the exposition and the recapitulation of the main themes God plays in human life. The music of creation and the still greater music of grace whistle right through our skulls, causing no catch of breath and leaving no residue. Moral beauty begins to bore us. The idea that the human race needs a Savior sounds quaint.

“So the broader goal of this study is to renew our memory of the integrity of creation and to sharpen our eye for the beauty of grace.” (xiii)