Chapter four is about redemption, and how it can be achieved. Plantinga interestingly compares the Heidelberg Catechism to the ten commandments. The Catechism is an expansion of the commandments, showing "not only where we have gotten off the road, but also how to get back on it." Instead of merely not killing, we should refrain from hatred, envy, lust, all the things that might lead a person to kill. In the end, it all comes down to a much more positive statement about how we should live our lives: love your neighbor as yourself. If we seek shalom, we inevitably must love, the two go hand in hand.
With these commands we go about our daily lives seeking shalom. I know in my life I have a tendency to think of various parts of my life as separate. My high school friends are a separate thing than my college friends, my church life is a separate thing from my personal life, and my school life is separate from my home life. I often have to make a conscious shift in my mind in order to think of all my life as connected. I know also I sometimes act differently around different people, so much so that sometimes it seems like I am living multiple lives, and am trying to make them all fit together. While I like the fact that I can adapt to a variety of different situations, often my desire for shalom gets lost in the shuffle. If I am around a group of people who are obviously not Christian or not taking their faith seriously, I find it hard to speak of my faith.
But, as Plantinga and other theologians have been pointing out for hundreds of years, all of our lives belong to God, not just part. As Lewis also suggests in his essay "Learning in Wartime", this doesn't necessarily mean that we have to change all of our actions. For the most part, we still do the same things after we become Christians, but the spirit in which we do them is changed. We can still enjoy life, we can still live the kind of life we want to live, provided that life doesn't go against God's commands, but we must do it all to the glory of God and never for a moment cease to love each other.
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