On the sin of perversion

I've been reading Cornelius Plantinga's excellent book, Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Eerdmans, 1995). He begins by describing life as God designed it to be, namely a life of shalom, lived in right relationship with God, with each other, and with nature, resulting in peace, joy, and goodness, experienced in the presence of God. Sin, in its various forms, brings disruption to that life. It breaks, disrupts, alters, pollutes, twists, distorts, or perverts the way things ought to be. 

A popular notion of perversion is that it is something that is strange or creepy or cringey when compared with what is normal to the rest of the human race, or at least, to the rest of the human race at a particular time in history. In certain cultures, practices like child prostitution and cannibalism have been accepted as normal behavior rather than perversion. 

But we must realize that what makes an action (or thought or intent) perverted is how it is evaluated from God's point of view. Here is an explanation that Plantinga gives for the meaning of perversion:

"Perversion is an ends-and-purposes disease. Most broadly understood, perversion is the turning of loyalty, energy, and desire away from God and God's project in the world: it is the diversion of construction materials for the city of God to side projects of our own, often accompanied by jerry-built ideologies that seek to justify the diversion.

"Specifically, to pervert something (such as the office of prosecutor) is to twist it so that it serves an unworthy end (such as merely gaining convictions) instead of a worthy one (such as achieving criminal justice) or so that it serves an entirely wrong end (such as humiliating one's political enemies). Examples abound: a journalist distorts an event in order to render it more controversial and thus more newsworthy; a clergyman uses his office and authority to bend children to his sexual wishes; a juror casts her vote to express her lifestyle preferences; a teenager uses a friendship to move up in the social pack; a head of state launches a short but lethal war against a tiny nation in order to boost the economy, raise his standings in the polls, and bury criticism of his domestic performance. 

"Sometimes we pervert our own longings, aiming them at the wrong objects (as in sexual perversions) or indulging them disproportionately so that they become dull where God and the things of faith are concerned but acute where various genuine but only proximate goods such as money, knowledge, and power are concerned. Many of our longings rise in us like a force of nature. Some of them seem to be a force of nature, as little under our control as a cramp. Still, as every successful dieter knows, the discipline of desire is often merely difficult, not impossible. Whether or not we succeed depends in part on how much we are encouraged by others, including society as a whole. And, of course, contemporary society picks and chooses the desires it would like to see us discipline. In many settings, society seems far readier by various programs and prohibitions to help us discipline our desire for, say, cigarettes than our desire for our neighbor's spouse."

--From Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, by Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. (Eerdmans, 1995)