Cornelius Plantinga Jr. > Quotes

“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 its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“On Thanksgiving Day, 2011, my pastor Peter Jonker preached a marvelous sermon on Psalm 65 with an introduction from the life of Seth MacFarlane, who had been on NPR’s Fresh Air program with Terry Gross. MacFarlane is a cartoonist and comedian. He’s the creator of the animated comedy show “The Family Guy,” which my pastor called “arguably the most cynical show on television.” Terry Gross asked MacFarlane about 9/11. It seems that on that day of national tragedy MacFarlane had been booked on American Airlines Flight 11, Boston to LA, but he had arrived late at Logan airport and missed it. As we know, hijackers flew Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. My preacher said, “MacFarlane should have been on that plane. He should have been dead at 29 years of age. But somehow, at the end of that terrible day, he found himself healthy and alive, still able to turn his face toward the sun.” Terry Gross asked the inevitable question: “After that narrow escape, do you think of the rest of your life as a gift?” “No,” said MacFarlane. “That experience didn’t change me at all. It made no difference in the way I live my life. It made no difference in the way I look at things. It was just a coincidence.” And my preacher commented that MacFarlane had created “a missile defense system” against the threat of incoming gratitude — which might have lodged in his soul and changed him forever. MacFarlane, “the Grinch who stole gratitude,” perfectly set up what Peter Jonker had to say to us about how it is right and proper for us to give thanks to God at all times and in all places, and especially when our life has been spared.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Reading for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists

“All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“Recalling and confessing our sin is like taking out the garbage: once is not enough.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“A third complication is that the same tradition that held pride to be a sin and humility a virtue has often been dominated by whites who have preached humility to blacks, by men who have preached submissiveness to women, by rigid and unimaginative persons who have regarded every creative impulse, every struggle for personal dignity, as a shameful show of arrogance. In the eyes of such persons, anyone who wanted mere self-respect was cheeky. What is troubling is that the advocates of humility and submissiveness have often had a personal stake in the popularity of these virtues and have therefore made adopting them look like the project of a special-interest group. In”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“The written word Should be clean as bone, Clear as light, Firm as stone. Two words are not As good as one.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Reading for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists

“The point of our lives is not to get smart or to get rich or even to get happy. The point is to discover God’s purposes for us and to make them our own.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“Perversion is an ends-and-purposes disease. Most broadly understood, perversion is the turning of loyalty, energy, and desire away from God and God’s project in the world: it is the diversion of construction materials for the city of God to side projects of our own, often accompanied by jerry-built ideologies that seek to justify the diversion.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“To be a Christian is to participate in this very common human enterprise of diagnosis, prescription, and prognosis, but to do so from inside a Christian view of the world, a view that has been constructed from Scripture and that centers on Jesus Christ the Savior, "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). Christian hope centers on Jesus Christ, the Lord of the whole cosmos, the one "through [whom] God was pleased to reconcile to
himself all things" (Col. 1:20). Moreover, classical Christian hope centers on Jesus Christ alone, rejecting his rivals as pseudo-Saviors. Christians trust "no other name under heaven" (Acts 4:12).”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living

“God hates sin not just because it violates his law but, more substantively, because it violates shalom, because it breaks the peace, because it interferes with the way things are supposed to be.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“We blunt our own conscience, darken our own judgment by self-interest, and rebuke in others the very vices for which we are famous. Each of us carries around a “deep and calm source of delusion, which undermines the whole principle of good.”173”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“The story of the fall tells us that sin corrupts: it puts asunder what God had joined together and joins together what God had put asunder. Like some devastating twister, corruption both explodes and implodes creation, pushing it back toward the “formless void” from which it came.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“Satan goes to church more than anybody else because he knows that, at a particular time and place, a corrupt church can devastate the cause of the gospel.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living

“When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality.... Christianity is a system, a consistently thought out and complete view of things. If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one's hands.... Christian morality is a command: its origin is transcendental ... it possesses truth only if God is truth - it stands or falls with the belief in God. "
Friedrich Nietzsche5”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living

“Sin hurts other people and grieves God, but it also corrodes us. Sin is a form of self-abuse.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“People tethered to God by faith can let themselves go because they know they will get themselves back.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“The image of pollution suggests bringing together what ought to be kept apart. To pollute soil, air, or water is to blend into them foreign materials — machine oil, for example — so that these natural resources no longer nourish or delight very well. Similarly, the introduction of a third lover into a marriage or an idol into the natural human relation to God adds a foreign agent to them; it corrupts these entities by addition.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“Sin is disruption of created harmony and then resistance to divine restoration of that harmony. Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God,”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“We may think we are praising and encouraging the young by predicting great things for them, but the burden of our expectations may shame and crush them.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Reading for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists

“Vices have to masquerade as virtues — lust as love, thinly veiled sadism as military discipline, envy as righteous indignation, domestic tyranny as parental concern.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“Unbelief is not the only way of suppressing the truth about God,” says Westphal. “It is only the most honest.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“Perhaps the preacher is hoping to acquire from her reading what I call “middle wisdom.” Let’s say that middle wisdom consists of insights into life that are more profound than commonplaces, but less so than great proverbs.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Reading for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists

“To recall an image of John Calvin, the preacher is someone the church sends to the Bible week by week to dig up part of its treasure and bring it to us in the Sunday sermon. The”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Reading for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists

“God is great and God is good, but God is also elusive and unpredictable,”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Reading for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists

“To try deliberately for self-actualization is like trying very hard to fall asleep or to have a good time.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“Sticks and stones can break our bones, but lies can break our hearts and our careers.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“human society,” as C. S. Lewis puts it, “inside which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“An envier doesn’t care whether you have earned part of your success or whether some golden parachute from heaven has dropped straight into your lap. To an envier, your advantage is totally unfair either way. In this respect, enviers are theological switch-hitters: sometimes they are Pelagians and sometimes they are Augustinians. But always they are potential killers.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

“To speak of sin without grace is to minimize the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the fruit of the Spirit, and the hope of shalom.”
― Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin