Chpt 1 Plantinga

Plantinga addresses the topics of hope and longing in the first chapter of his book Engaging in God’s World. He states that all humans have an inner longing for “something we have been separated from.” We are hoping to be reunited to something that we are missing—a happy memory, friends, and etc… However, Plantinga states, we will never truly fulfill this longing with the unions we create on this earth. Plantinga writes that all humans are born with a longing and want for God. This is where our feeling of separation comes from. It is the reason for our “stabs of joy and longing.”
Plantinga’s next and final point is to say show that longing is just an ingredient of hope. Hope comes from a want for something, and an intense want of something can be described as a “longing” for it. This hope is coupled with imagination. It is the imagination that allows us to hope and the hope that keeps us going. To hope and not to act on this hope, however, is useless. “Without costly action, hope can soften into sentimentality. With costly action, hope may harden into reality.” With this statement, we are told that we cannot rely on hope only, but rather, we must act in accordance with this hope. Finally, we must base our hope and center it on Jesus Christ alone. I do appreciate Plantinga’s idea that we cannot rely on our hopes and just expect them to turn into reality. We cannot simply be idle, waiting for our hopes to “harden into reality,” but neither can we ourselves make that hope harden. We need to work towards it, but it is up to God whether or not this hope will become reality.
I did find myself questioning Plantinga especially on the idea that all men “want God.” This does not make sense to me. If all men want God, and yet God rejects them, does that not make God unjust? I think instead that all creation points towards God, showing every human being that He exists, therefore leaving no man with the excuse that they did not know that God existed. However, man in his fallen, depraved nature wants to do everything to reject God. So instead, they worship nature itself. Consider Pantheism, Hinduism, and various other religions—either their central goal or some significant part of their religion is focused on the worship of nature itself.