Yet the Volkswagen scandal is a reminder of how our human sinfulness, in ways both individually and corporately, holds us back from shalom. It’s a story of greed, pride, self-deception and outright lies, mostly by engineers and corporate officials. And even if I didn’t know about it, on some level, no matter how clean my fossil-fueled vehicle seemed to be, I remained complicit in a world economy that is damaging creation.

My bro-in-law has one of these VW Diesel's that were included in the scandal. He purchased it because, quite frankly, it's a sweet car and got great gas mileage with low emissions. Two out of three of those things remain true. Unfortunately, it's just polluting a lot more than anyone thought.

The first response to something like this is typically anger. Angry at the system, at Volkswagen, corporate greed, and just generally feeling lied to and cheated. The second response, though, is frustration. Frustration at all the things we were angry about, and how it feels like we can't change them, but then the general frustration of realizing that, no matter how much we wish we weren't, we're part of the problem.

VW had some motive (largely financial) to lie about the emissions of these vehicles. They knew that with the right combination of performance and the perception of being green, these things would sell like crazy. And that's what happened. The problem was, it wasn't actually possible to put those two things together. It couldn't perform as well as it does and still be as green as they had hoped. So they cheated.

The pessimist in me says that VW knew that there was a whole crop of people who would love to drive a green vehicle, but had no intention of sacrificing performance to do it. That's not necessarily wrong, but it's also not necessarily green. Lots of people would be "green" if it didn't cost them much...