Engaging God's World, Chapter 3: "The Fall"

In this chapter, Plantinga discusses the second movement in the CFR: the Fall. This chapter focused on evil and sin in our world. I think the distinction that Plantinga makes between evil and sin is very interesting. He says that "We might define evil as any spoiling of shalom, any deviation from the way of God wants things to be. Thinking along these lines, we can see that sin is a subset of evil: it's any evil for which somebody is to blame, whether as an individual or as a member of a group. All sin is evil, but not all evil is sin." I have always thought of evil and sin as synonyms. But this description sheds new light on things, not it helps make sense of things, such as his example of a two-year-old who kills someone is evil, but not the two-year-old's sin. This helps me understand between the two, with sin being a part of evil but all of it.
In addition to this differentiation, Plantinga gives several interesting comments about sin. For example, he says: "To sin is to overstep a line or else to fail to reach it; that is, sin is either transgression or shortcoming. These and other images tell us that, in a biblical view of the world, sin is a familiar, even predictable, part of life, but it is not normal. And the fact that 'everybody does it' doesn't make it normal." I just think this is a new angle from which to see sin. I never before thought of each of sins (at least the ones I am aware of) as one of two things: going too far or not going far enough. Also, it is interesting to note that although sin is expected and common, it is not normal. In sin's case, normalcy is not defined by its frequency or popularity. I think these insights help to round out the idea of sin, which is a topic we typically only talk about when we say things like "we're all sinners" or "we live in a sinful world." I thought it was useful to look at it more indepthly and from different perspectives.