THE MASQUERADE
Romans 16:17-18
I urge
you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in
your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned. Keep away from
them. For such people are not serving our Lord Christ, but their own appetites.
By smooth talk and flattery they deceive the minds of
naive people.
But whether it is older or newer understandings of sin we resist, and
however preachers, teachers, and politicians may assist us in the resistance
movement, each of us possesses one last defense against the knowledge of sin –
a defense so strong, supple, mysterious and private that even veteran sinners
cannot track its ways.
Self-deception is a shadowy phenomenon by which we pull
the wool over some part of our own psyche. We put a move on ourselves. We deny,
suppress, or minimize what we know to be true. We assert, adorn, and elevate
what we know to be false. We prettify ugly realities and sell ourselves the
prettified versions. Thus a liar might transform “I tell a lot of lies to shore
up my pride” to “Occasionally, I finesse the truth in order to spare other
people’s feelings.” We become our own dupes, playing the role of both
perpetrator and victim. We know the truth – and yet we do not know it, because
we persuade ourselves of its opposite. We actually forget that certain things
are wrong and that we have done them. To the extent that we are self-deceived,
we occupy a twilight zone in which we make up reality as we go along, a
twilight zone in which the shortest distance between two points is a labyrinth.
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin. Cornelius
Plantinga, pg. 105
