Welcome back to another episode of Five Minutes in Church History.

We are still in the month of August, so we are talking about good reads to finish off this summer.

And this week we are talking about a good book on a bad subject.

It is the bad subject. It is the subject of sin. And the good

book was published in 1995, right at the end of the 20th century. It was written by Cornelius

Plantinca Jr. and titled, Not the Way It's Supposed to Be, subtitled, a Breviary of Sin. And the preface to the book, Dr. Plantanga writes,

in this book, I'm trying to retrieve an old awareness that has slipped and changed in recent

decades. The awareness of sin used to be our shadow. Christians hated sin, feared it, fled from

it, grieved over it. Some of our grandparents agonized over their sins.

But the shadow has dimmed.

He goes on to define sin as the violation, or the vandalization, or even the scandalization of Shalom.

Now that word Shalom is from the Hebrew. It means peace. But Dr.

Plantaga helps us see that this is more than just a truce during a time of war or some

sort of momentary sense of being at rest. It is how things were supposed to be. It is that original adenic condition where Adam and Eve had perfect relationship with

God, perfect relationship with each other, and even a perfect relationship to creation.

And what happened?

Well, sin entered into that and fractured all of it.

Fractured our relationship to God, to each other, and to this world.

It violated Shalom.

In fact, Dr. Plantanga reminds us that sin has its first and final, he says, Godward force. He goes on to write, let us say that a sin is any act, any thought, desire, emotion,

word, or deed, in particular absence that displeases God and deserves blame.

He adds that even our disposition to commit sin is itself sin.

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