Plantinga Ch. 3

The first thing in this chapter that I felt Plantinga emphasized was that sin has become a habit in all men.  I think it is more than that. Plantinga also mentioned “near-compulsion”, I think, rather it should be just compulsion.  There is nothing near about it, we are drawn right in sin when we are conceived, as Plantinga pointed out, we are  “ ‘concieved and born in sin’ ”.

Plantinga says that sin interferes with “the way God wants things to be.”  I disagree with plantinga on this. I believe in predestination; I believe that everything is as God wants it to be.  Everything now is as it should be according to God’s plan, and there is nothing that can interfere with it, not sin, not even the devil.  All things now work to aid the church, and bring about the glorious return of Christ, which will signal the end of this world, and the creation of the new world.  We all know that the Anti-Christ is to come before our actual Savior.  This means that we will see an increasing wickedness and sin in this world until only a small remnant of God’s children remain.  Persecution will be at its worst, according to the God’s eternal plan, when our Savior will descend from heaven as a thief in the night, to save His children. 

Once again, Plantinga brings up common grace.  I still completely disagree with the doctrine of common grace because there are so many proofs in the Bible that speak against it.  Romans 8:6-8 says, "For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: For it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God." If this verse is not enough go to Psalm 4:3, “ They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: There is none that doeth good no not one.”  Another thing that must be remembered is that we ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and that that day all humanity became totally dead in sin.

The Poison of Subjectivism

Once again C.S. Lewis has managed to deeper than I ever thought possible.  A lot of the things Lewis wrote made little if no sense to me.  It is hard for me to write on something that I only understood bits and pieces of.  To be honest I hardly even knew what subjectivism was at the end of reading the passage.

When Lewis speaks of values, he shows that it impossible to start from scratch with only our own experiences (this is subjectivism).  We always rely on traditional judgment of values.  In this regard C.S. Lewis shows that the questions never end.  When a reformer bases his values on biology, he may say we must act to preserve the species, Lewis can ask why the species must be preserved, then it is answered by falling back on instinct. "We have an instinct to preserve our species." Lewis would answer by saying who told us we had to obey our instincts.  Eventually all questions asked eventually lead to God, who was the beginning of all.  We all know that certain instincts are to be obeyed and others not.  Once again we live according to a preset standard.  We need to remember that the first person to write that standard was God.

I like the way that Lewis presents the problem of attempting to create a subjective value with two points.

“1)The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary colour in the spectrum.

2)Every attempt to do so consists in arbitrarily selecting some one maxim of traditional morality, isolating it from the rest, and erecting it into an unum necessarium.”

It is impossible to create a new value, because all possible values are already there.  When we try to create a new value we usually just end up setting that value up high than others.

I was very confused on a lot of what C.S. Lewis wrote in The Poison of Subjectivism, and I hope that I was not way off the mark, but it is quite possible that I got everything wrong.  I hope that in the discussion things will be clarified for me.

 

Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis says that there are no good or bad impulses, but there are good or bad reactions to an impulse.  You have two impulses when you see a drowning man crying for help: to run to safety, and to help the man.  Which instinct is stronger is usually the one you follow.  The Moral Law helps us to increase the strength of the impulse to save the man, rather than running away.

I do not quite agree with Lewis on this in the sense that there are no good or bad impulses.  If we have an impulse of committing murder it is wrong.  This excludes killing someone in war, because that is not murder.  Most of the sins we commit, occur in our thoughts and impulses.  Lust is a thought and impulse we all have at one point or another, and it is sinful thought.

C.S. Lewis says that all Christians essentially believe the same basic doctrines with many minor differences.  He tells us to look at what we agree on so that we can work together as a unified Church as opposed to a bickering Church.  I agree with C.S. Lewis in a sense.  It is true that the Church should not bicker much among themselves, because the world watches our every move and they glorify in our disunity.  However, we must be careful lest we allow heresy to creep into the Church.  Some of these small things that the denominations bicker about may lead to a bigger problem.  Once you start making certain concessions in the church, you may not be able to see where you draw the line.  As we recall in The Screwtape Letters, the devil works slowly, by gradually causing small changes that can in the end lead to bigger changes that can destroy the purity of the Church. 

The Screwtape Letters: Lukewarm Behavior

I liked this exert from the Screwtape Letters because it takes a perspective that I have never thought of before.  It is Sr. demon called Screwtape writing to his nephew.  He instructs his nephew on how to corrupt a certain Christian.  He tells his nephew to do it gradually, and slowly draw him away from God, because if he tried to do it to fast his patient would realize the trouble he was in and repent.  Screwtape encourages his nephew to make the patient sin little by little.  At the beginning he must just distract him from God, and eventually the patient will not even need a distraction to avoid Godly activity. 

The perspective that Lewis takes makes us aware of the danger we all face.  The devil will lure us away from God little by little so that we hardly even aware of the slippery slope that we are sliding down.  The example of Lot and Abraham was a good example of how this can happen.  Little by little Lot pitched his tent closer to Sodom, and closer to sin.  Little by little his children fell into the worldliness and sin of Sodom until they refused to leave when the angels came and warned them of the impending destruction.

We must be cautious, because these subtle changes that the devil causes us to make can lead to the utter destruction of our soul.  We must rely on the Lord, for without Him we cannot stand alone.

Engaging God’s World: Ch 2

I have a few disagreements with Plantinga over a few issues.  At one point Plantinga claims that we humans have certain unalienable rights. He says “ Sixth, the declaration, ‘Let us create man in our image’ implies a range of human responsibilities, including those associated with earthkeeping and creativity.  But it also secures rights, including the right to respect, the right to life, and the right to certain freedoms.  These are unalienable rights.”  I disagree with Plantinga about this.  I do not think that we have a right to anything.  If we ever had any rights they were lost in the fall.  We deserve nothing but hell.  We cannot claim any rights because no one can give us rights but God, and the rights Plantinga claims that we have are not biblically founded at all.

Another issue that I have has been a large theological issue for years; this issue is common grace. Plantinga speaks of how everything that God created in this earth retains some of its goodness after the fall.  I disagree with this statement.  As follows Calvin’s TULIP we are all totally depraved, which means there is no good left in us.  When Adam ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil he died spiritually and thus all his descendants inherited this spiritual death, “The day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”  The elect are only able to do good by the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  This grace fills us with the Holy Spirit which allows us to do God glorifying works.  If the work is not done to the glory of God, then it is not a good work.  This is why the bandit loving his mother was not a good work.  I do not presume to say whether this bandit is saved or not, but Plantinga implied that he was a reprobate.  We must remember that our purpose on this earth is to glorify God in all that we do.  A wicked man could love his mother, yes, but he would not be glorifying the Lord in doing it.  We must remember that even our best works are shrouded in sin, and it is only through the grace of our Father in heaven that He sent His Son to the cross that He might purify the souls of the elect and thus allow our works to be pure.  The wicked do not have that gracious sacrifice, and thus they have black hearts that corrupt every work they do.  I do not see any evidence that the Lord has a common grace that he has given to all men.

The Weight of Glory

One of the things that I liked most about The Weight of Glory was the drastic difference that CS Lewis explains between those that are acknowledged by God, and those that are denied by God; the former gets eternal glory in heaven, and the latter gets eternal death in hell.

Lewis describes the promises that Scripture gives of heaven in five heads.  He then goes on to explain that the first head is the only one that really matters, because being with Christ is all the glory we could ever have.  All the other heads were symbols.  Being with Christ leads to the rest of all these glories.

I have also come to realize that Lewis ties many of his writings together.  Our English Syllabus talks about how some of things that we do not want to learn are the building blocks that lead to what we want to learn.  The Weight of Glory relates to this when Lewis explains that there are many things that we do in this life that does not seem at all related to the glory that we will receive in heaven, but in reality they put us on the path to that glory.

Our English Syllabus

I found that CS Lewis emphasized learning for the sake of learning, because you want to.  Learning something you don’t want to, just because you are forced to is not the way that we should work.  If you are learning something that you want to, you can get so much more out of it. 

This is where Calvin College comes in.  Calvin tries to teach you a little bit of everything, and often times this extra knowledge leads a person to change their major, because they found something that interests them more.  Find what you like and then go deeper into it.

These Core classes may not always be fun, but they are the building blocks that we must set up in order to advance our learning enough to study what we want to.  You cannot easily study Greek mythology without first learning Greek.

We must take a different perspective on things in order to get more out of the studies that we do not like.  If you hate your English class you will not get near as much out of it as you would if you liked it.  If you do just enough to get by, you will unlikely enjoy the class.  You will only get as much out of a class as what you put into it.