Self-Deception about Sin

Writing 20 years ago about sin in his book Not the Way It's Supposed to Be, Cornelius Plantinga noted that its become harder and harder to speak about what is wrong with us:

“The newer language of Zion fudges: “Let us confess our problem with human relational adjustment dynamics, and especially our feebleness in networking.”  Or, “I’d just like to share that we just need to target holiness as a growth area.”  Where sin is concerned, people mumble now.” (Plantinga x)

This mumbling comes from a lack of confidence as to how sin functions in this day and age:

“Books on sin today must meet concerns and untie knots that did not worry Augustine and Calvin.  They were not worried about the flattening of human majesty in modern naturalism or of human corruption in Enlightenment humanism.  they did not wonder at the Californian tendency to conflate salvation and self-esteem.  Nor did they meet a widespread cultural assumption that the proper place to inquire about the root causes of human evil is a department of psychology or sociology.” (xii)

Still, Plantinga holds out hope that understanding sin and grappling with it can free us from crippling anxiety and thus be deeply therapeutic:

“Indeed, for most of us a healthy reminder of our sin and guilt is clarifying and even assuring.  For, unlike some other identifications of human trouble, a diagnosis of sin and guilt allows hope.  Something can be done for this malady.  Something has been done for it.” (xii)

In other words, a diagnosis of sin, under the circumstances that a Savior did deal with sin 2000 years ago, would not yield despair, but would yield hope.  After all, there’s a cure.  But we’re not sure we believe sin is real.  Plantinga explores the consequences of this with a metaphor of the human nervous system:

“For 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 performance 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.” (xiii)

Note how Plantinga does not actually leave the metaphor of the nervous system.  The human soul who is suppressing and tranquilizing any sense of sin also misses the “music of creation and the still greater music of grace” which would otherwise cause a “catch of the breath.”  In other words, we would be moved, not only by the sin we are trying to ignore, but also by the beauty which we also lose as a side effect.  Insensitivity to sin inside of us and outside of us causes a similar insensitivity to glory inside of us and outside of us.  Plantinga’s point about narcotics is not that narcotics are moral or immoral - it simply depends on what is being subdued.  His point is that we have been participating in a culture that subdues, subverts, downplays a sense of sinfulness and diverts us from any sense of the reality of sin.