Engaging God's World, Chapter 4

In this chapter, I agreed with most of what Plantinga said, but I didn't learn much. I think that Plantinga overanalyzes the redemption story in this chapter. Our redemption involves us falling into sin, Jesus bearing the punishment for us, and then us trying to serve God in gratitude to our salvation. Plantinga writes this chapter with a lot of small theological details and distinctions that in my opinion aren't very important to my life. Rather than learn about the details from the Reformed perspective on exactly how we believe the redemption happened, I want to learn more about how wee should live as a result of it. I realize that some people enjoy learning more about theology, but I really don't find this to be all that fascinating.

One part of the chapter that I didn't agree with was towards the end of the chapter where Plantinga talks specifically about the Reformed perspective. He says that when there is something wrong with the world, we need to reform it. First of all, I think that most denominations would agree that when something is going wrong that we should fix it. I don't think that this is an idea unique to Reformers. Another problem that I had with this was that it is much easier said than done. In our world, we have several problems that don't have easy solutions. Plantinga's example of health care, for instance, is a very tough problem to fix, as we are seeing with Congress right now. Also, our reforms will be tainted with sin just like the things that we are trying to reform. Many times, our attempts to reform things can end up only aggravating the problems or causing new problems. Again sticking with Plantinga's example of health care, improving health care can bring the undesired consequence of sending our country further into debt. While it may seem noble to try to fix the problems of the world, it is actually much harder than what Plantinga makes it appear.