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I

Genocide and Racism

If we peer behind the unspeakable wars and genocides of the last century, we invariably find ideological forces at work. These break down into terms of race or class, with, in every case, one group claiming inherent superiority over another group. The tragedies of the twentieth century, rooted in the convulsions of the Industrial Revolution and their ideological consequences, in the decimation of native peoples in Africa and Asia by the European powers in the nineteenth century coupled with the competitive mercantilism of the occupying colonial administrations, and in racist thinking linked with chauvinistic nationalism and social Darwinism, combined to deal a terrible blow to three convictions central to the modern Western tradition: the unity of the human race, the spiritual/moral equality and dignity of all human beings, and the inherent value of the individual person as created in the image of God.8 These convictions had been shaped over time, painstakingly, through the interwoven, competing, often competing influences of the ancient Hebraic biblical texts, Greek philosophy, Roman jurisprudence and political acumen, and Christian theology. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European philosophers, under the sway of the new scientific/rationalistic paradigm, succeeded (by entirely secularizing these several influences) in giving the convictions a political focus that found its concrete fulfillment in the founding of the American Republic and in the ringing declarations of the French Revolution; but the gradual extrusion of supernatural features from the new paradigm and from its political application, and the relegation to the status of irrelevancy of belief in the transcendent and immanent God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, sowed the seeds of the horrors that were to bloom malevolently in the next centuries, by leaving modern man stranded in what he perceived to be an empty universe, with no compass but his easily corrupted reason to guide the orientations of his will.

These foundational convictions of the Western tradition were then tested in the first half of the nineteenth century by the great question of chattel slavery and the African slave trade, and by the chronologically parallel question of the relation of North American natives to the white immigrants from Europe. If the ruthless treatment by the whites of the indigenous Americans and Canadians was a moral and political catastrophe, the success of the European nations and the United States in finally defeating the hideous institution of chattel black slavery after 300 years—a success spearheaded in England, France, and America by passionately committed Christians—was a moral triumph, though the existence of this institution in the first place, and its maintenance at the heart of a civilization calling itself Christian, was an unspeakable abomination for which the fact that the practice had originally been taken over in the sixteenth century from Muslim slave traders in Africa could offer no tenable moral justification.

Tragically, the racist snake still lay coiled in the European soul, and its poison infected the colonial experience in Africa and Asia for the next century, giving rise, in conjunction with economic exploitation, to barbarous actions that made a mockery of the Christian gospel and the enlightened civilization the European nations thought they represented.9 Indigenous populations in the Congo, the Sudan, the Ivory Coast, Mozambique, German East Africa, and Oceania, to take just a few examples, were reduced by more than half in the course of the nineteenth century from the shock of military invasion and economic exploitation. Tens of millions of lives were lost. It has been estimated that the colonial famines of 1870–1890, directly connected with the integration of local economies into European economic structures and the ruthless aggrandizement accompanying it, occasioned the death of at least 30 million people in Southeast Asia, India, and Africa.10 And as a more recent example, the Rwandan genocide, which claimed nearly 1 million victims in 1994, was not, as it has sometimes been alleged, merely a matter of African tribal warfare, but the direct fruit of European racist theory and in particular Belgian colonial and postcolonial policies confirmed by the French. While this certainly does not exonerate the Hutu Power government of responsibility for that great crime, it does place the tragedy in the larger historical context where it belongs. Such terrible realities as these constituted a travesty and subversion of the fundamental convictions on which the greatness of European and American civilization was based.

And the coiled snake also struck closer to home, at the very heart of Europe, with the planned decimation of the Jewish people, and along with them of the Gypsies, by the Nazis. Here a virulent pagan racism, allied to a militant nationalism, exploited the deepest and most shameful enmity in the Western tradition: that between Jew and Christian.11 With the tragedy of the Shoah, Western civilization amputated itself. It sliced off its two legs that together had enabled it to arise: the Hebraic (revelation) and the Greek (reason). The principles of the unity of mankind and the equality and dignity of all human beings were denied and trampled violently underfoot. This betrayal was a symptom of civilizational suicide.

These frightful crimes of the last century, along with others produced by the even more widely destructive communist form of totalitarianism, provide the appropriate backdrop for our consideration of the biblical doctrine of the imago Dei, based on the text in Genesis 1:27, which declares that God created humankind in his own image. But before moving on to this subject, we need to make a few additional observations about these catastrophes. Along with the flouting and undermining of the two basic moral principles of Western civilization already mentioned, it is noteworthy that four of the seven major twentieth-century cataclysms that we have come to label genocides involved attacks on people who, as Jews or confessing Christians, were identified with what the Bible calls “the people of God”: the Armenians, whom the Young Turk government sought to destroy utterly in 1915 and 1916, are the oldest Christian nation in the world, constituted as such in AD 301; the Jews are God’s historic people, chosen by him to be the vehicle for bringing salvation, through the Messiah, to the whole world; the large majority of the tribes in Southern Sudan that have been methodically wiped out by the Islamist government in Khartoum in the last two decades are Christian (this genocidal project, to which the African Union, the European Union, and the UN have tried, with some success, to put a stop to, is not to be confused with its more widely reported and no less horrendous genocidal corollary in Darfour, in western Sudan, where the victims are Muslim and are made up mainly of black, non-Arab ethnic groups); and in Rwanda, almost all of both the Tutsis and the extremist Hutus who made a systematic effort to exterminate them in 1994 were baptized and bore the name “Christian,” a deplorable fact that redounds to the shame of the Catholic Church on the one hand, which, notwithstanding noble exceptions in its ranks, had been largely seduced or silenced by racist propaganda over the decades, and of the Protestant churches on the other hand, which had failed for the most part to denounce the murderous racism that was taking over the country.12 This terrible evidence of the irresponsibility of the church leadership and of the superficiality of the faith and commitment to Christ among the baptized members of the several churches brings to mind the words of Jesus in the parable of the sower: “As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is he who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet he has no root in himself, but endures for a while, and when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away” (Matt 13:20–21).

To this observation must be added two reminders: first, that the central principle of the Marxist-Leninist agenda, based on a historical analysis that presented itself effectively as a new gospel, was hatred of religion, especially the Christian religion with its Jewish roots—the very religion that had produced the culture of which Marx was a product—and that this dogma has inspired relentless persecution of Christians around the world for the last 100 years, most notoriously, of course, in the Soviet Union, China, and Southeast Asia (such persecution is now also increasingly to be found in Muslim states where extremist Islamism is on the rise); and second, that World Wars I and II, which brought to a head the national antagonisms and racist phobias noted earlier, were both fought primarily, if not exclusively, among European nations rooted in a 3,800-year-old Judeo-Christian tradition, the very tradition that, combined with its Greco-Roman counterpart, had given rise to the moral principles we have highlighted, principles that in turn have contributed to the emergence of political freedom and democracy, surely one of the great achievements of mankind.

II

The Wars of Religion in Europe; Divine Judgment; the Human Project of the New Man

Any visitor from another planet witnessing all this would be obliged to conclude that Western civilization as a whole, in Europe and beyond, is tearing out its own guts and committing suicide by implosion, cutting itself from and crushing its Hebraic taproot and utterly rejecting, in practice and in theory, the Christian gospel that has shaped and nourished it. To the persecution of Jews and Christians perpetrated by adversaries coming from outside the Christian sphere, such as is represented by many communist assaults across the world and by the murder at the hands of the Ottoman Turks of millions of Christian Armenians, Greeks, Arameans, and Assyrians between 1895 and 1923, has been added subversion, corruption, and persecution coming from within. While the twentieth-century genocides, totalitarian ideologies, and two World Wars involved many peoples from traditions other than Christian ones, it is clear that for the most part the protagonists were cultural brothers who had lost any sense of sharing the vital religious heritage whose center is Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, Reconciler of man to God and of man to man. The ever-growing rejection of the church and of the Christian gospel in Europe since the seventeenth century, entailing the loss among the European peoples of a common transcendental and moral vision, led finally to the most horrendous conflicts the world has ever known. The ironies here are sickening.

Undoubtedly the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which arose in response to the Reformation and its intention to reform the decadent late medieval church, were responsible for the first major breach in the basic cultural unity of Europe in the Middle Ages. The church, if not the gospel itself, has much to answer for in making Europe a battleground in these centuries and beyond. It is undeniable that the subsequent gradual disaffection from Christian faith of a large portion of the European population, especially among the intellectual elite, coupled with internal strife centered on questions of religious belief, of the nature and place of the now-divided church, and of the kind of political institutions needed to replace the church-throne alliance, profoundly destabilized European identity. This state of affairs quite naturally gave rise to a contentious, revolutionary spirit which, in the context of the industrial, scientific, and technological developments from the eighteenth century on, nurtured the hostilities and resentments that finally exploded two centuries later.

What is harder, perhaps, for secularized modern people in the West to see or assess adequately is the evidence that the tragic events of the twentieth century, and the unraveling of much that we hold valuable and noble in the Western tradition, are refractions—in some sense, reflections—of the cracks and splits in the Western church and the weakening and distortion of Christian faith over the last centuries. That is to say, they are intimately tied up with the condition of the church in Western society. As suggested above, the fractures of the late medieval church have causal links with what followed. The church’s hunger for worldly power and its frequent substitution, in the course of its history, of political agendas or religious trappings for vital Christian life and witness, and its no less frequent disobedience to its Lord’s commands to love and honor all men and women and to play the role of humble servant, explain, it seems to me, some if not all of the rejection and opposition it has experienced since the seventeenth century and continues to experience in our day. Current liberal efforts to sanitize Christ’s call to repentance and spiritual rebirth, for example, or, in some cases of interreligious dialogue, to play down the uniqueness of Christ and to flatten out, in obedience to the foolish and dangerous doctrine of political correctness, the fundamental differences between, for instance, Islam and Christianity, are misguided enterprises and will not alter the unbelief and frequent contempt that accompany the almost total ignorance, shared by a large percentage of Western men and women in our day, of the real content of the Christian faith.13 I believe that this patent repudiation of Christianity—uninformed though it often is about the true nature of the gospel—is, in part, a manifestation of God’s judgment on his own people within the frame of world history, in the sense that it has arisen to some extent as a consequence of aberrant attitudes and behaviors among those representing Christ’s church.

But there is more to be said here. The church and any society it may be part of are inter-dependent. Its faithfulness or unfaithfulness to the true gospel of Jesus Christ will, under God’s providence, determine to a large extent the course and direction of a given society, whether the leaders of that society are conscious of this or not. Likewise, the society’s treatment of the church and the gospel to which it bears witness will bring blessing or judgment on that society in the short or long term. Both the church and the societies that participated in those terrible events of the last century mentioned here must bear their share of blame.

This is obviously also true with respect to the period of the religious wars in Europe. At this point a caveat needs to be introduced, however, to balance what has been said about the church’s share of responsibility for these wars. In a recent publication, William T. Cavanaugh presents a strong argument that the religious wars were not, as is commonly suggested, “the events that necessitated the birth of the modern state; they were in fact themselves the birth-pangs of the state.”14 That is to say, they were inseparable from the power politics of the age, at a time when the centralized monarchical state was coming into its own and seeking to gain control over the appointments, revenues, and remaining temporal power of the church. In France, the absolutist, bureaucratic state was already fairly well defined when the religious conflicts erupted in the middle of the sixteenth century. All across Europe, the distribution of power was in a state of flux. The royal houses, the nobility, and the bourgeoisie were all struggling for advantage, and used religion shamelessly to extend their influence. “For the main instigators of the carnage,” writes Cavanaugh, “doctrinal loyalties were at best secondary to their stake in the rise or defeat of the centralized state.”15 The strife in France in the sixteenth century and the catastrophic violence of the Thirty Years’ War in the Habsburg Empire in the seventeenth century were not primarily due to religious conviction as such but to rivalries between classes and states all using Christian doctrine and allegiance as a pretext and tool to gain power.

It is not fair to allege, therefore, that the subsequent recourse to the secular state as the source of civil order in Europe, replacing the church, was brought about and rendered necessary simply by the collapse of religious unity and the violence engendered by religious passions. The posture of the modern state as savior of civil society and generator of the peace that the late Medieval Church failed to maintain is a self-serving myth according to Cavanaugh. Far from being the messianic peacekeeper that finally brought order out of confessional strife with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the state was in fact at the root of the religious wars and the source of their atrocious ferocity. Moreover, the idolatry of the state in modern times, coupled with the doctrine of the state’s absolute sovereignty within a defined territory, has massively increased, not lessened, the use of war over the last centuries to expand and consolidate boundaries.16 The decline of the church as a temporal power and its domestication by and subordination to the secular state, leading to what we call today the privatization of religion and its effectual removal from the political sphere, is by no means the unmixed blessing it is often presented as being, even if the doctrine of the separation of church and state that ultimately emerged from this development in the West has undoubtedly brought great benefits within the territorial confines of individual nation-states.

And now a last observation in this connection, before focusing more narrowly on the question of the imago Dei. It seems to me that the blatant assaults on Christian faith common in the West since the late nineteenth century, and the massacres and persecution of Christians and Jews that were a major factor in twentieth-century conflicts throughout the world, take us way beyond the matter of what may be construed, in some instances, as God’s judgment on his own unfaithful people, Jewish and Christian alike, to a deeper level of reality concerning mankind as a whole and the basic thrust of modernity and postmodernity. Modern man appears to be aiming, with ever greater boldness and often with full awareness of just what he is doing, at the deliberate rejection of the divine moral and material order as revealed in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures and the replacement of it with a human order authored by man himself.

The twentieth-century cataclysms, and then the final failure of both national socialism and communism, may be interpreted as the first major evidence that this project, whatever form it take, will exact a terrible toll and must fall under God’s judgment and be doomed ultimately to failure; yet with the technology developed in the course of that same century, which now is being extended into the uncharted territories of biochemistry, biogenetics, global electronic circuitry, and so-called artificial “intelligence” (algorithms are not intelligent; they are the fruit of intelligence, not expressions of it), a new phase of the project is clearly underway. Western society today, as it repudiates its Christian heritage and, increasingly, the best of its Enlightenment heritage as well, which rejected traditional Christian faith but still retained belief in the concept of truth and of universal moral principles, is riddled more than ever with doubts and uncertainties about human identity and the meaning of life; yet at the same time its revolutionary mindset and technological power are pushing it to sit down again at the gaming table and try once more to produce a new man. If, it is surmised, the political utopian visions of the last few centuries have not ushered in a new Eden, perhaps the technological/economic version—essentially materialistic—will. This attempt, too, is bound to lead to unimaginable catastrophes, both social and ecological, and is also doomed to failure, because the ontological understanding of man that underlies and motivates it is false. God’s created order is malleable and open to enormous development as its structures and constituent elements are discovered by the divinely designated caretaker of this order, mankind; but its malleability is not infinite and its indefeasible reality—its being as God’s order—must in the end always reassert itself against human usurpation and manipulation. Man can, in his power and freedom, warp the creation order, though only at great cost; but he cannot destroy or replace it without destroying himself.

III

The Ideology of Individualism; Absolute Relativism; the Undermining of the Grounds for Affirming the Dignity of Man

I want to argue in this essay—in a summary manner, necessarily—that a central cause of the twentieth-century cataclysms of the World Trade Center calamity on September 11, 2001, and of any catastrophes still to come arising out of similar utopian visions rooted in human hubris and racism, is a progressive weakening through the centuries of a proper understanding of and adherence to the foundational biblical doctrine of the imago Dei. This doctrine, I shall maintain, is the chief ground for the Western conviction concerning the unity of the human race and the moral equality and dignity of all human beings. As, over time, it has been partially misconstrued within the church itself, then secularized, and then, as in the case of the racism alluded to earlier, subverted and contested from outside the church, the great creative energies it has unleashed into human self-consciousness and action, productive of all that is best in Christian civilization, both Western and Eastern, have become increasingly detached from their divine ground and order, to the point of curving dangerously in upon themselves and generating the suicidal explosions of the last century. This has produced a loss of perspective and intelligibility in Western self-understanding, which in turn, in our period of late modernity, has led to a crisis of identity accompanied by nihilism, crippling relativism, self-hatred, rage, destruction, and death.

The contemporary French philosopher Chantal Delsol observes that the West today, seeking to get beyond the traumas of its recent past, methodically denounces terror and totalitarianism, yet refuses to question the ideological foundations that made them possible.17 She argues that our civilization is caught in a bind: it clings in principle to its one remaining moral certitude—its belief in human dignity—and at the same time subverts that dignity by its subservience to an ideology of individualism sustained by a willful materialism and a vision of technological utopia. Human dignity is the basis of what in the West is the only shared moral conviction left to us—human rights (which itself, of course, is the basis for any genuine democracy)—but Delsol insightfully asks the question of whether, or for how long, the postulate of human dignity can be maintained when the religious grounds for it, and the cultural context that produced it, have been repudiated and worn away. She writes:

The dignity of man as an incomparable and irreplaceable being is a postulate of faith and not a given of science. The course of history demonstrates its fragility. The collapse of just one portion of the immense architecture of which it is the heart is enough for its defence to be severely weakened. Personal dignity requires the existence of the person; it requires a conscious and responsible subject, witness of its own acts; it presupposes the moral unity of mankind and an awareness of the specificity of the human as over against the animal. It rests on an inherited cultural world, and it was in annihilating that heritage that Nazism and Communism pulverized it.18

As a philosopher without any explicit Jewish or Christian faith, Delsol is able to affirm the vital importance of the creation texts in the book of Genesis for the upholding of the postulates of human unity and dignity.19 For all its reasonableness and demonstrability, such an affirmation by a philosopher in the West is unusual today, since the refusal and hatred among the majority of the intellectual classes of anything biblical has reached such irrational proportions that thoughtful reflection on a scriptural theme—on the supposition that this ancient fount of Western wisdom and civilization might have some truth to teach us—is ruled out as a matter of course without even a look-in. Peter Sloterdijk, for example, an important contemporary German thinker, assumes, with Nietzsche, that God is dead and with him the entire edifice of Judeo-Christian culture, so that we live henceforth in a world without limits, where anything is possible, and where the only constant is endless experimentation and self-creation.20 He admits, whether ruefully or not it is hard to tell, that this “experimental” mode of living, involving what he calls a “self-intensification,”21 is driven at least as much by a thrust toward self-annihilation as by a hopeful quest for new personal and social structures. But any recourse to biblical paradigms as a way of exploring this thesis or of orienting creative thought at a time of social crisis, appears to be unthinkable to him.

What we have here, it seems to me, is evidence that the memory of the biblical God among opinion-formers and indeed among the masses of Western society under forty years old, is, on the whole, totally lost today, and the traces of it willfully despised, especially by a substantial proportion of the elite in Western universities and media. The resultant existential angst and moral confusion, and the huge burden of guilt, cynicism, and self-hatred underlying them and covered over by constant hammering on the theme of human rights and by ever-new technological gadgetry (offering constantly new forms of distraction) and an ever-growing GNP, are themselves being turned into a new ideology. This ideology is basically self-destructive in content but masquerades under the banner of the absolute freedom of the individual to create/invent (read destroy) his or her self. Destruction is creation, and vice versa. Suicide is experience and being truly alive. Negation is positive. Commitment to any kind of transcendental value or belief that would originate from outside the self is mocked as naïve folly, while skepticism at every level is lauded.

Absolute relativism has become, for the majority of people in Europe and North America, an uncriticized cultural presupposition, postmodernism’s seminal idolatry. Logically, we may say, denial of God as the Source of life requires that whatever is truly vital be equally suppressed and opposed, in favor of those counterfeits of true vitality, the meretricious, the ephemeral, and the flashy. This, of course, will comprise most of what we call the “Western tradition,” and will include not only the bathwater of that tradition, its many failures and perversions, but also the baby, consisting in the conjunction of human dignity, reason, freedom, and order. Death, then, on such a reading, is actually the operative principle behind the ever more vertiginous straining toward new “frontiers of experience,” new “extremes” of every kind, new “paroxysms” and “orgasms.”22

Technological innovation, with its appearance of unlimited power, potential, and possibility, is the fuel for this boundless propulsion. But underneath the propulsion, which gives people the feeling of being authentic and passionate because they are living in a pastless and futureless instant, there is boredom and a blasé sentiment that everything, at bottom, is pointless. In the place of meaning, there is either exhaustive scientific or pseudoscientific description—an infinite piling up of words and signs and numbers (data) in a quest for total control—or what might be called irrational self-detonation of one kind or another. Outside of the self’s will to experiment (which, at another level, is being coopted increasingly by unbridled commercialism—the word “totalitarian” would not be out of place here—and becoming simply the self’s will to make money), the propulsion does not seem to have any ultimate aim whatsoever, either in the sense of an objective and determining reality or reference over against the “self-subject,” or in the sense of a finality/end.

I hear in all this an ironic echo, in the new guise of individualism in the context of technological utopianism, of earlier totalitarian proclamations of the new man, proclamations that the actual new men in the West today, those “neutronized autonomous individuals,”23 would, at least in principle, most heatedly oppose. And what is striking is that, just like its communist and nationalist-racist predecessors, this new ideology is a counterfeit of biblical revelation. (We shall look at this matter more specifically in our later discussion of the doctrine of the imago Dei.) Ideologies are modern names for cultural idolatries, for human—and therefore finite and fallible—conceptions that become invested with ultimacy.

It is no accident, therefore, that, wearing the lineaments of divinity in the sense of ultimacy, they should invariably turn out to be secular imitations of divinely revealed truth. Revolution, progress, science, such and such racist myth, communist man, the classless society, capitalist man, history, the new man/creation (whether he/she/it be the product of political, economic, or genetic manipulation), the autonomous individual, self-reinvention, sexual liberation, technology-as-salvation, transhumanist man—all these and others, as ideologies or as varieties of utopia aiming at human freedom, are, in the final analysis, biblical counterfeits or distortions, arising in the framework of a Judeo-Christian civilization that has willed and continues to will, for a host of reasons, to destroy its own foundations and then finds itself left with the impossible and dispiriting task of shoring up the tottering edifice while striving to build new foundations using the wreckage of the old. Obviously, despair, cynicism, consumerist materialism, and the thousand escapes through sensory intoxication must tempt many today, and the more so now as it begins to dawn on thoughtful people that technology is, as a matter of fact, no magic wand or panacea, and cannot possibly, masquerading as a man-made version of God’s creative Word in the book of Genesis, produce a new Eden to replace the old.

IV

The Ultimate Danger that the Skeptical Doctrine of Perspectival Relativism Poses for Human Rights

The priestly account in Genesis of the creation of man reads as follows: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man [humankind] in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female, he created them. God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’”24

Counterfeits are full of pretense. They are proud. They pretend to be something they are not. Like evil of any sort, they can only arise in correlation with a prior reality, a prior good, of which they are a perverse imitation and distortion. The world that has been emerging in the West in the last centuries, with analytical science as its root and technological innovation as its trunk, branches, and foliage, is at once a logical and proper development from the creation story and man’s place in it as set forth in Genesis 1 and 2, and a counterfeit of that story. Its excellences and accomplishments, its political, scientific, and economic achievements, its productive transformations of the matter of the world, its medical wizardry, its improvement of the quality of life for millions of people around the world, are in keeping with what a close examination of the creation story might lead one to expect. Man (man and woman) is fashioned in the image of God, and so is gifted with reason, moral freedom, and, as a corollary to that freedom, conscience; consequently, and as the practical dimension of the imago Dei, humankind is given a mandate to care for and develop the creation and to represent in its midst the generous and loving lordship of God; and both authority and power are bestowed on man and woman to carry out that mandate. Surely much in the modern age is a fulfillment of this biblical revelation, presented under the form of myth.

Indeed it is. Western civilization has a great deal to be justly proud of. Its achievement of democracy and political freedom and representation, along with a widely generalized concern with and possibility of economic advancement and social well-being, is, though incomplete and flawed to a considerable extent in practice, unique in human history and rightly the wonder and envy of the world. But simultaneously, alongside this modern growth, a counterfeit has grown up, a lookalike weed whose seed may be found by inverting my last formulation (“. . . a fulfillment of this biblical revelation, presented under the form of myth.”) to read: “. . . a fulfillment of this biblical myth, presented under the form of revelation.” The modern mind considers divine revelation to be a mythical category, using the word “mythical” in a nontechnical sense as meaning simply “untrue.” But the grounds for ruling out the possibility and reality of divine revelation are rationalistic, not rational. It is not the brief or competence of science to evaluate what Christian theology calls revelation, but science’s own counterfeit, scientism, has presumed to do just this and has judged revelation to be a specious and outdated religious category.

Western philosophy since Hume and Kant has had the same presumption.25 It works from within a subject-object schema that gives absolute priority to the subject; while disallowing or at least severely limiting the possibility of objective knowledge, it sees the subject as able nevertheless, from within its own finitude, to posit the nature of reality—including that ultimate reality which, we are told, it is actually impossible for him to know. The fountain of Cartesian thought, which characterizes the thinking subject as the epistemological starting point and sets it over against and basically disconnected from the physical world, became, with Kant’s a priori categories, a powerful river that romanticism and the relativizing forces of historicism subsequently extended across a wide valley floor, ending in the submersion of the whole land under modern subjectivism.

But Kant’s disproof, through his antinomies, of the possibility of obtaining metaphysical knowledge by theoretical reason—a disproof that ever since has cast a shadow on Christian faith and made it seem unlikely that the personal God Christians believe in is anything more than a speculative projection—has in fact nothing whatsoever to say about the possibility of divine revelation being given to man, if a personal God exists who wishes to reveal himself. Ironically, Kant’s arguments are actually a philosophical equivalent to theological arguments against natural theology and the pretension that finite and unholy man, by himself, can rise up to a knowledge of the true, infinite, and holy God without that God having first to come down to him in revelation.

The locus of philosophical activity today is no longer the question of whether it is possible to have knowledge of objects outside the self, but rather the position of absolute perspectivalism, according to which all perceptions and assertions (apart from mathematical, logical, and scientifically demonstrable statements), being made by a subject and being therefore necessarily subjective and under the constraint of arbitrary signs/words (which cannot correspond in any objective sense to the objects they stand for), are unable to make contact with truth external to the perceiving, asserting subject. The conclusion is not far behind, of course, that no such truth exists. Hermeneutics has taken over epistemology. Relativistic perspectivalism is the latest form of skepticism. It is my conviction that a renewed appreciation of the biblical teaching about the imago Dei can be a powerful response to the dangers facing Western society today, and provide an underpinning to the doctrine of human rights we seek rightly to apply more widely, while at the same time keeping this doctrine from becoming itself an exploited and exploiting ideology.

V

Imago Dei: Man is a Creature Ontologically Related to God; M. Behe: Irreducibly Complex Systems; C. Tresmontant: Human Beings as Substances/Psychic Entities/Persons; the Irrational Human Project of Self-creation

“So God created man [humankind] in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female, he created them” (Gen 1:27). In the short space of this essay, we cannot possibly deal with all the complexities and implications of this foundational biblical affirmation. We shall merely touch on a number of key aspects that seem especially pertinent in light of the foregoing reflections about the critical situation of humanity at the start of the twenty-first century.

This statement, without equivalent in any other culture, is understood within the Judeo-Christian context as the basic revelation from God of the truth about human beings. What is given as revelation must, of course, be considered and evaluated by reason, but reason must not overstep its limits by arbitrarily positing its superiority to revelation. Such a move will only lead reason into contradiction with itself when it rules out the possibility of revelation simply because it repudiates the possibility of certain knowledge being gained through metaphysical speculation. The two modes of knowing, or of knowing about, unmeasurable reality—divine revelation and human metaphysical speculation—are in no way equivalent. The exclusion by reason of the possibility of revelation is unreasonable and cannot be defended on rational grounds.

The core of the truth about man revealed here is that he (male and female) is a creature ontologically related to God. To say that a man or woman is, is to say that he or she is in relation to God. This is primary, ontological; qualitative descriptions of men and women made in the effort to articulate an adequate anthropology and that describe human beings as creatures having ontic qualities like rationality and freedom are secondary and properly follow this primordial affirmation. It is these qualities that make possible the expression of the relation of men to God, but the relation itself is prior.

Man is a creature. He is created. This is the first aspect of the doctrine of the imago Dei that we must examine. However the mystery of his evolution is to be understood, humankind, according to the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, owes its existence to a Creator, a personal God, and not to chance, chance being understood here as the negation of an organizing intelligence. To posit chance as the ultimate source of all reality is to assert that the constituent elements necessary to the existence of beings have appeared randomly and come together over time and then produced living beings that have subsequently evolved through the mechanism of natural selection. The efficacy of natural selection as the operative force of evolution can, logically, have only two possible sources: a primordial organizing intelligence that has willed this to be the case, or chance. The assertion that chance must be the source of all form, order, and life in the universe, including the very process of natural selection operative in the evolution of living forms, begs the question of how natural selection itself came to be. Merely to assert that natural selection is the result of chance cannot even begin to address the obvious fact that natural selection has a teleological orientation that logically points to intentionality, not to chance.

The recent work of the biochemist Michael Behe seeks to show that irreducibly complex systems at the biochemical level—and, by extension, at higher levels—cannot have evolved gradually, by incremental mutations.26 The complexity of just one cell, without even mentioning biological structures involving more than one cell, involves webs of different, identifiable, immensely complex systems. An irreducibly complex system, Behe writes, is “a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”27

Behe argues that traditional Darwinian theory which, to use a commercial image, deals in wholesale and not in retail goods, cannot account adequately for such systems, where every single protein has a definable role to play that is adapted to that of every other protein, all the roles being necessary to the operation of the system. A system must have a “minimal function” to be a candidate for natural selection, and in the case of an irreducibly complex system, this requires that all the parts be present at once and able to perform at a level suitable to their purpose.28

Behe concludes, logically, that irreducibly complex systems point to intelligent design as their cause. I say “logically” because ultimately there is no other logical conclusion possible, though materialists will continue to make appeal to some causal third force, neither a Creator/Designer nor Chance-plus-Time but some unthinkable Other Process. Such prevarication shows well how subjectivist ideology, with its materialist presupposition, has taken captive sections of the scientific establishment. Behe himself, discreetly, does not go on to plead for a Creator as the Intelligent Designer behind the intelligent design, but his scientific work opens the way for metaphysicians and theologians to do so.

Behe’s thesis has been challenged scientifically, however. Michael Ruse, in his book entitled Darwin and Design, takes issue with Behe by citing a number of examples of complex processes that appear to have come about over time, incrementally, through the process of natural selection. Instancing the case of the Krebs cycle, whereby energy from food is converted into a form that can be used by cells, he makes the important point that intermediate stages, or subprocesses, of the cycle, which initially had no fitness functionality with respect to the complex final product, started off their existence doing something quite different and were subsequently coopted by the cells and put to a new use. Ruse insists that this re-deployment by natural selection of material that already exists is the answer to the problem of irreducibly complex systems and explains how it is possible for such systems to emerge progressively. No intelligent design, he affirms, is necessary to explain their existence; natural selection performs the operation.29

While Ruse’s argument is cogent and may indeed point to the evolutionary process that normally may make possible the emergence of irreducibly complex systems (though of course this is unproven), it still leaves unanswered the fundamental question of how the mechanism of natural selection itself emerged in the first place. Undoubtedly natural selection is evolution’s principle if not exclusive method, but to imagine that such an efficacious method simply happened and is itself the result of . . . natural selection (!), is metaphysically jejune.

Equally odd, even disingenuous, is the argument of the traditional Darwinian that what he is expecting to find by virtue of natural selection—and does find—is not design but the appearance of design. “The question,” writes Ruse, “is not whether design demands design. All can grant that. The question is whether design-like demands design, or if selection can do the job instead.”30 The same question is begged. Whether we are speaking of design or of the appearance of design, we are confronted by order that appears to arise, as far as we can determine at present, through the remarkably efficient mechanism of natural selection. But how did such an order-producing mechanism arise?

One thinker who has given much thought to the metaphysics involved in these issues is the Frenchman Claude Tresmontant, who observes that there are two kinds of metaphysics: a woolly, speculative type, arbitrary and imaginary, constructing castles in the air, which is what most scientists think metaphysics is and what most scientists who engage in speculation outside their field—usually on origins, cosmological and biological—do; and a responsible type, founded on the experimental sciences, which pushes the rational analysis of reality to its utmost limits.31

Tresmontant finds scandalous the contemporary divorce of science and metaphysics, unknown before Kant, which has major philosophers being untrained in the sciences and oblivious to their findings, so caught up in their existentialism or their linguistic analysis or their pragmatism that the metaphysical and cosmological implications of paradigm-shattering recent discoveries such as that the cosmos is evolving and so had a beginning and will have an end, go virtually unnoticed, as if philosophical reflection need not concern itself with experimental science. (Ironically, the same philosophers, untrained in hard science or in traditional metaphysics, are usually materialists who, while presuming that science provides the only kind of knowledge we can have, yet unaccountably refuse to probe the implications of its discoveries.)32

Tresmontant, in discussing Chance-plus-Time as the possible source of the emergence of life and its astonishing orderly complexity, reminds us that modern materialists, as distinct from the Greek pre-Socratic philosophers such as Parmenides, no longer have available to them the categories of infinite time and space and an infinite quantity of matter, when they consider cosmic and biological existence.33 Most thinkers (such as the eminent American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, the biologist Pierre Lecomte du Noüy, and the astronomer Arthur Eddington) who have given any attention to the issue are aware that the statistical probability that life as we know it has emerged by undirected chance, through incremental mutations and natural selection, is effectively nil.34 The fact that the implications of this observation are rarely faced up to by materialistic evolutionists35 is another disturbing commentary on the level of thinking in this discipline.

Michael Ruse maintains, however, that Richard Dawkins has “scotched” this argument according to which random mutation cannot of itself ever produce adaptation or design-like effects.36 There is a big difference, Ruse points out, citing Dawkins, between a computer program operating by cumulative selection, where the program is jigged so that a successful move toward adaptation is remembered and built upon, and a program using single-step selection of the sort referred to above, where every new attempt to work toward a target is a fresh one. The obvious objection, acknowledged by Dawkins, is that in nature there is no ascertainable prior goal, as there is with the computer program. To this point Dawkins replies simply that if selection is factored into an evolutionary process, one has an entirely different trajectory—a very effective one, in fact—from that of the infinite randomness that, he admits, cannot possibly produce a design-like effect. This is certainly true, but it solves nothing, since the question remains as to how selection could ever come to be factored into the process in the first place.

Tresmontant, by metaphysical analysis, takes the discussion much further. Observing that living beings are not just more or less complex combinations of atoms, he draws on the concept of substance in the Aristotelian sense of a form, or identity (to be distinguished from a physical body), that subsists through the constant change of atomic matter (atoms in a living organism are continuously flowing in and out and being renewed) and that integrates, by its own proper activity, a huge number of elements and functions in a synthetic unity. He writes:

Living beings are substances, beings that subsist even while their integrated matter is being constantly renewed; they are substances capable of action and reaction; they are psychic entities; and finally, with the last animal that has appeared [man] they are psychic entities capable of conscious reflection—what we call persons. . . . It is because they have not perceived the philosophical, metaphysical dimension of the problem that so many thinkers remain focused on the mathematical analysis of probabilities in connection with the composition of genetic messages. But again, a genetic message in itself is not enough to explain the existence of a substance that is a psychic entity and, finally, a person. This is of another order.37

An aggregate of elements, no matter how complex, does not make a living creature with its own proper activity capable of self-repair, assimilation, elimination, and reproduction. Along with the questions of the very existence of matter and of the nature—energy—of the matter that exists, there is the question of the information of matter, constantly increasing all the way up to the emergence of living beings and on to man. The passage from an aggregate of elements to a substance/subject is a mystery. A living being is constituted from its conception by a form, an idea, an organizing genetic message that is the principle of its activity and operations and that endures over time until the organism’s death, whereupon it turns into the mere aggregate it never was while living, with the inevitable result that it disintegrates.38 Where does this integrating principle of life come from? There can be no recourse here to random mutations as an explanation of such a radical novelty; and to give the cause as natural selection simply begs the question, as we have seen.

A correlative mystery involves the passage from a generic type, normatively coded—cat, say—to a particular individual cat. From an essence (cat) to an existent (this cat) is a move quite beyond our ken. This cat—and how much more so this man or this woman!—will be distinct, with unique peculiarities within its species-normative genetic code. The move from a fertilized human cell to the particular human individual it will become—from the virtual being, through the becoming, to the actual being—involves an inconceivably complex process of embryonic information of which the dynamic—the vital principle—remains utterly mysterious.

All this, then, and much more is involved when we say, with the inspired writer of the Genesis text, that “God created humankind, male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). It is clear that if men and women are created beings, they are essentially dependent on their Creator, both for their existence and for their maintenance in being. God does not impose on us a conscious awareness of this reality, because he wills that our relation with him be one of freedom, with no trace of a master-slave dynamic. The human being-as-creature is changeable, vulnerable, mortal: as created, he/she is an absolutely different order of being from the eternal, omnipotent being who is the Creator of all that is. What is important to see is that both the biological life of human beings, and the eternal life that they are offered (by virtue of Christ’s redemptive work) to share with their Creator, are gifts.

Man (man and woman) is not his own author; he is not and cannot be autonomous. Any creating he does, impressive and splendid though it may be, is derivative and secondary, using materials already at hand. Human beings cannot be original creators, since they themselves, and the world they inhabit, are already there as givens. Everything we have, we have received, as the apostle Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 4:7 in an effort to show the members of the church he is writing to that pride has no place among Christians (and should have none among men and women in general), since our very existence, and our existence as individuals with particular qualities, talents, and vocations, are gifts and come from God in the first place.

At bottom, what theologians call original sin is a refusal of this truth and of the God behind it. As Creator, God is responsible for our existence; as creatures, we are responsible to him for our existence. And this sets moral and material limits to our being and our doing. It is these limits that we refuse, and it is this refusal that generates all our human counterfeits of the creation and the re-creation that God accomplishes through his word. These counterfeits are simply attempts at self-creation and self-salvation.

There is no reason for human rebellion; it is irrational. The pretension behind it, with the infinite suffering it has entailed in the course of human existence, is bewilderingly stupid, given the enormous intelligence human beings are equipped with and deploy in other areas of their existence. But precisely that fact points up sin’s irrationality. Our will, much of the time, is not synchronized with our reason. By political and technological means (now including the possibilities offered by biogenetics, organ replacement, designer babies, reproductive cloning, and cryogenics), human beings, with mounting intensity and purpose (finding here, perhaps, the sense of purpose we have lost in losing sight of the providential God), seem determined to recreate their kind, to start, as it were, from scratch (obviously an impossibility), to do over God’s original blueprint, deemed faulty (because we perceive it through the distorting lens of the refusal of our createdness and the catastrophic consequences of our rebellion). The ultimate aim of this enterprise, of course, must be to overcome death itself.

It is important to see that this determination is not, at bottom, properly therapeutic, though an exaggerated therapeutic concern can lead in the same direction. It is of quite another order. We are talking about a remake, a re-creation. Modern man, to the extent that he is captive to a triumphalist ideology patterned on an engineering model, proposes to save mankind by engendering a new man, invulnerable to the corruption of the first man, and by placing him in a new Eden environmentally controlled to the last degree and not subject to the dangers and unpredictabilities of the first Eden.

It is this monstrous pretension—rationalistic to an extreme, yet completely irrational—that I call a counterfeit of the mandate given to humankind by God to tend and develop the world, including his own human society. A correlative counterfeit, invariably operative in genocidal enterprises and, basically, an essential component of all ideologies, is the racist drive to create, in a given territory, one homogenized people, to the exclusion of all alien others (an exclusion that logically entails the destruction of these others, or at the very least their subservience). This is the counterfeit of the biblical revelation of the unity and ontological equality of the human race, a revelation that the counterfeit denies and seeks to replace. Like the vision of the new man, it subverts the truth of the imago Dei and opens the way for boundless manipulation and oppression.

As technological power has increased, so have such utopian projections; and ruthless human beings, incarnating humanity’s drive to play God, have wreaked havoc as a consequence. The sequence of human cataclysms in the last century is evidence of this, each resulting from the perverse will to make man over in part by eliminating elements of humanity considered by the ideologues, according to self-serving criteria, to be subhuman. By claiming to be intrinsically superior, or by aspiring to be superhuman in the sense of greater than the Adamic prototype, the perpetrators of such abuses and atrocities become inhuman. The attempt by man to make himself in his own image is a misbegotten enterprise, a perverse use of the rationality with which he is gifted and in which he has put so much ideological stock since the Enlightenment; it is an enterprise fundamentally flawed because of the theological/ontological lie at its root that posits man as his own master; as such, it cannot but fall under God’s judgment and be doomed inevitably to disaster.

VI

Imago Dei: Who is the God Who Created Man in His Own Image? Divine Revelation through the History of the Jews and Supremely in the Messiah

It is God who created humankind in his own image. Who is this God? This is the second aspect of the imago Dei doctrine that we shall examine. The question is entirely legitimate, and the misguided answers men give to it in the wake of our inner refusal to accept our status as creatures (that is, as created and designed by an Intelligence infinitely higher than ourselves) account for the atheological animus of modern society and the ever-increasing hubris accompanying our impressive technological achievements. It may perhaps be said that the yawning gap between these achievements, where we manifest such formidable control, and our shameful and flagrant incapacity to master our ethical behavior and social relations, serves as the chief driving engine of the totalitarian will to reinvent ourselves by political and technological domination and manipulation.

Through the egocentricity of sin, we are a fractured species, yet we hold in our heart, by virtue of our being created in God’s image, a yearning for integrity, wholeness, and unity, in relation to our Creator and to the rest of his creation. But sin, in addition to causing our brokenness, also determines our response to it, which is to strive by ourselves to make things whole, unified, and harmonious. It is this striving that leads to totalitarianism at whatever social level it may manifest itself—to the assertion made by (self-) chosen elites of total control over others, using extreme force if necessary, to the point of turning men and women into objects, dehumanizing them, actually destroying them, in order to achieve the absolute domination and ersatz unity/wholeness/purity required by redemption. For, of course, the totalitarian/utopian enterprise (which always has a religious tenor because of its idolatrous belief in its own ultimacy) is invariably presented as a kind of redemption requiring purification and unification—and this, once again, as I have suggested, is an imitation of God’s work, a diabolical counterfeit of God’s saving plan for humankind through his chosen people, the Jews, and their (and the world’s) Messiah, Jesus Christ.39

It is here, precisely, in God’s providential saving plan for humankind, revealed to successive generations through the scriptural narratives, that we discover who God is.

Unless God reveals himself to us, we cannot know him as he is. This is because we are finite and fallen (in rebellion against the true God and blind to his goodness), while he is infinite and holy. Through beholding the glory and order of the world—his creation—with wonder-filled eyes, we may intuit, even sense, his reality and presence, for he dwells here and the world is filled with his dynamic being; but nature itself is impersonal, so we cannot know the personal God, its Creator, simply by observing it. But providence is an implication of creation, and redemption is an implication of providence. Christians believe, with the historical witness of the New Testament narratives and apostolic letters as the ground for their faith, that Jesus Christ was the Word of God made flesh, the very utterance of God himself—one with him in being—become incarnate. God is personal and communicates; he speaks, whereas idols, as the prophets never tire of pointing out, are dumb (e.g., Jer 10:5); he speaks, and in Jesus that communication is made physically manifest to us. He is God’s self-revelation—his Word—God who comes down to us (Isa 64:1; cf., John 1:11). “No one has ever seen God,” writes John, “but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (John 1:18). And Jesus himself says later in this gospel: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well . . . Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father . . . ” (John 14:6–7a, 9b).

Jesus is presented in Scripture as the image—the eikon (eīikōn) and very representation—of God (Heb 1:3; 2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15). Now we are considering a few aspects of the doctrine of human beings as created in God’s image. It is proper and necessary, in doing this, to glance at the sweep of the scriptural revelation and not simply to remain in the book of Genesis, for the full meaning of the text in Genesis 1 and 2 is only revealed in Christ. If Christ is God’s image and we are made in that image, then we are created in Christ’s image, and to find out who human beings are essentially, and to what they are called, we must look at Jesus. And similarly, we must look at this same Jesus—the One who is both God and Man—to see who God is.

Jesus Christ is unique. Yet the union in him of the divine and the human points to our human vocation, which is to be united with the Godhead, gathered up into eternal, dynamic communion with the Father through the Son in the Spirit. It is to this that human beings are called, for this that they were created. To refuse this vision after having first received it, as Western civilization is now doing, is to move inevitably, on the wings of technology-as-ideology and the infinite manipulations it makes possible, toward the sophisticated dehumanization of mankind. It is not that those who have faith in Christ, or those others who truly long for God (whatever their religious perspective), will be made divine, but rather that they will be taken up into the divine life, of which already here below faithful Christians have the vital deposit, the indwelling Holy Spirit, not because of any intrinsic merit of their own, but because they have been fortunate to hear the call and have been willing to open themselves to receive the gift and to bear witness in this life to the Giver.

But the call goes out to all men and women and is constitutive of true human identity; if we fail to heed it in our inner conscience, we alienate ourselves not only from our Creator but from each other. The result is the violence of human history, growing ever more intense as technology extends human means. The rejection by modern culture of Jesus Christ, the God-man who reveals in himself the glorious destiny to which all human beings are summoned, is the ultimate source of the alienation afflicting the West and wreaking such havoc across the world. We do not want to be what we are called to be by our Creator—the modern mind sees that call, falsely, as heteronomy and rejects it; we want to be what we will make ourselves to be, gods of our own manufacture. And this slavery to our own will we blindly call freedom.

VII

The God Revealed in Jesus Christ is Love; He is Righteous and Faithful

The God who destines us to union with himself is love. He creates in love (what greater love than the act of creation, when God goes out from himself to fashion an other, then calls that other to fellowship with himself?); he redeems in love (God in Christ humbles himself to become man, to pass unrecognized amongst his own, to bear opprobrium for our sake, to carry our sin, to suffer and die on a cross, all of this so that humanity-in-him—in him who is our representative and, for each of us, our substitute—might die with him on the cross to the egocentric nature and, forgiven, be raised with him, as a new creation, to newness of life, which means to a life of love); and he glorifies in love (by faith we are resurrected with Christ already, and abide already with him in the Father; and by hope we live in expectation of the fulfillment of this spiritual reality when, at his coming again, we shall be resurrected and clothed with spiritual bodies, and shall see him as he is and be like him (Eph 2:6; John 14:20; 1 John 3:2).

The revelation of the Word of God tells us all of this. This is the gospel—the good news—to which the whole Bible points. It hinges on God’s incarnation in Jesus, the meaning and purpose of which are disclosed in his crucifixion and resurrection. Christ’s resurrection, following on his crucifixion, is the pivot of revelation and hence lies at the heart of truth. Here, in this cross and empty tomb, we understand who God really is. The source and end of all reality—cosmic and historical—is love. This truth, revealed to us fully in Christ, is the essential meaning of Jesus’s assertion in the Gospel of John that he is the truth. He shows us the true nature of reality. All is gift, all is grace, and these are expressions of love. In the person and life of Jesus of Nazareth, as he went about among men doing good, showing kindness and mercy, and dispensing wisdom and justice with great authority, we see what love means in practice: here we glimpse what God is like and how we are meant to be.

When we think of God’s righteousness, we must think of it within the framework of love and grace. His righteousness combines justice and mercy and aims, with respect to mankind, to bring us back into an orderly relationship with himself and with each other. It involves salvation (e.g., Isa 46:13a: “I am bringing my righteousness near, it is not far away; and my salvation will not be delayed.”). This, precisely, is his supreme work of love, carried out effectively and definitively in Jesus. What God the Son suffered on the cross where he was “bruised for our iniquities” (Isa 53:5) expressed both God’s just judgment upon human sin and his merciful forgiveness accomplished and offered to sinners, his beloved creatures made in his image, who had gone astray.

The doctrine of the imago Dei contains implicitly these comprehensive truths, as the genetic code in each cell contains the whole human being in its compass. The God who created us in his own image loves us. Furthermore, he is faithful. He is steadfast and dependable; we may rely on him; he will not lie. This is another part of what we mean when we speak of God as the truth revealed in Christ. We may abandon him—or try to—but he does not abandon us. To the contrary—he remembers us.40 Discipline us he does, for that is part of love; but the ultimate judgment—death—due us for our rebellion against him who is life, he took upon himself in Christ, so as to make it possible for us to choose this life while we are on earth. If it were not so, there could be no possible hope for a race mired in endless war, capable of frightful sexual depravity, exploitation, genocide, and heartless terrorism. These great evils are our work, not God’s. They arise out of man’s refusal of him, not his of us. He remains faithful and available to us even in the midst of our depravity and degradation. We have only to humble ourselves and look to him to see what he offers us through his self-revelation in Christ. But in our human pride we almost invariably demand that he be present to us on our own terms, in the way that we see fit and appropriate and effectual. It is not thus that we will find him, either in our daily lives or at the heart of horrors like genocide and war.

VIII

Hatred of God and the Denial of Sin and Guilt are the Roots of Utopian Pretensions; Ideological Tribalism and the Totalitarian Impulse

On reflection, it is astonishingly foolish to think that such a race as ours, capable of what we have shown ourselves to be capable of, could save itself or change its own duplicitous heart. As something cannot arise out of nothing, so good cannot arise out of perversity. Human pride tries to get around this problem—a problem of moral logic—by denying our sinfulness and guilt, a denial that is achieved by blaming it on God, on society or institutions, on the unconscious, or on some other scapegoat like a different ethnic group or class, in order to shift the onus from humankind, collectively and individually (the phenomenon of negationism, as a corollary of genocide, is a local expression of this basic human deceit). The crowning tactic in this move—which modern human beings have deployed brazenly—is to deny outright the existence of God. Atheism is the ultimate end of human pride and faithlessness, which blinds us from seeing or even wanting to see the faithful Creator God. It is the ultimate negationism, whereby we deny our own creaturehood; and as such, it is the ultimate form of self-destruction.

Underneath the atheistic thrust, what we actually find is hatred of God masquerading as unbelief. The hatred arises from the experience of our own moral turpitude. We are not perfect, and we despise ourselves for it. Such imperfection is intolerable. In response, we accuse others, those who are different from us, and, in the modern period, we proclaim human perfectibility and passionately refuse divine intervention. Concomitantly, we deny original sin. Here indeed we find the root of modern utopian thought and the notion that everything is possible. Rebellion against God moves at this point into a new register, where moral fallibility and, eventually, finitude, are repudiated, in a virtual hijacking of divine omnipotence and perfection.

Everyone knows from personal experience how difficult it is for us to admit we are wrong. If we can point the finger at others and construct utopian systems promising perfection, we can, in appearance, avoid the onus of guilt and weakness. But of course the denial of sin does not lead to the disappearance of guilt. One of the fundamental aspects of man as made in God’s image is conscience, by which an echo of the divine voice is ever present within us. Conscience can be repressed and hardened, but it cannot be destroyed. What the denial of sin does is remove the disposition to admit error and seek atonement and forgiveness. This in turn results in a massive transfer of guilt to the other and a constant inclination to accuse and avoid personal moral responsibility.

Thus the denial of original sin—sin as virtually inherent in human beings in their condition of moral freedom—leads inevitably to scapegoating and a totalitarian attitude, with the political consequences we are only too familiar with.41 For if sin is not ubiquitous in all human beings, mixed with the good likewise to be found in all of us, then a Manichaean mindset begins to operate that has one group, understanding itself as guiltless, pure, and superior, pinning perversity on another group, perceived as wicked, guilty, impure, and inferior. That other group must then be destroyed, in one way or another. This is the distorted moral vision that underpins the totalitarian impulse we have been noting, and of which postmodernism’s absolutist doctrine of tolerance—built, ironically, on ideological relativism—is the latest, soft (in appearance) variation.42

One might call this phenomenon ideological tribalism, and it is the distinguishing negative mark of modernity, as well as of the current Islamist reaction against modernity, which takes the form of terrorism. Terrorism is another expression of the totalitarian impulse, and if it had the political and military means, it would produce another genocide, this time aimed at Western culture as a whole, of which America is perceived to be the current flag-bearer.43 Ideological tribalism thinks in black and white, in absolutes. It is fundamentalistic, and is governed by the quintuplet monsters of pride, fear, envy, jealousy, and resentment—all of which generate hatred. As with Islamist extremism, it often has, along with some legitimate grievances, an overtly religious reference, but its ferocity, heartlessness, and utter unreasonableness reveal its god to be an idol. Idolatry/ideology is always an expression of what is basically a perverted religious impulse.

The origins of ideological tribalism in the West are multiple. We have, first, the crusading and inquisitorial aberrations of the church, manifested occasionally in persecutions during the Constantinian Age and again later in the Middle Ages; and then the absolutist fanaticism of the religious wars of the late Medieval and early Modern periods (fruit of the subversion of the late medieval church by totalitarian pretensions), where, as in the earlier examples cited above, Christendom lurched into ideology and lost touch, to a considerable extent, with the gospel, thus betraying its own principles and bringing itself under God’s judgment. The nationalist impulses that arose in the sixteenth century and governed Europe for the next 500 years also stoked the fires of tribalism, as did, indirectly and unintentionally, the philosophical conjectures of Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant, who, in understandable reaction against the religious conflicts of the seventeenth century, were seeking a revised anthropology and a new (nonreligious) basis for social unity and stability, but who unwittingly laid the groundwork for the closed universe and narcissistic metaphysics that underpin the massive social engineering of the modern age, of which the utopian revolutionary vision of the French Revolution was the first major political and social expression.

It is prudent to remember that the French Revolution’s slogans of liberty, fraternity, and equality were only applicable at first to the pure and the good, that is, to those who espoused the cause of the revolutionaries; but hatred and terror were reserved for opponents, i.e., the retrograde and the bad (Catholics and royalists), as demonstrated by the murderous fury visited by revolutionary troops on the royalist Catholic inhabitants of the Vendée region of France, a case of violence even more appalling than that of Robespierre’s Terror in Paris. It should be evident that those massacres were an early form of ethnic cleansing, a harbinger of things to come and a precursor of the State-orchestrated genocidal phenomena of the twentieth century.

IX

The Perfection and Holiness of the God Revealed in Jesus Christ; Modernity’s Hatred of God Entails Hatred of Man

The hatred of God so current in the modern world, especially among those who think of themselves as avant-garde, liberal, even revolutionary, has another cause similar to the perception—and repudiation—of human moral turpitude mentioned above. This is the traditional belief in the perfection of God, as understood in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Along with his perfection we may speak of his holiness, the utter awesomeness and purity of his being, resplendent and immaculate beyond our conceiving, God uncreated, everlasting, essentially Other than his mortal creation. Obviously, by comparison, humanity comes off as inferior on every count.

For modern men and women, such a state of affairs, like the admission of original sin, is intolerable. Our response in the last two and a half centuries has taken two forms: we accuse God of evil, or we deny his existence. Both these solutions to the dilemma effectively remove the problem raised by the comparison of God’s perfection and holiness with our own lack of them, thus clearing the way for the assertion of human perfectibility; motivated by a hatred that is rooted in pride, they amount in effect to the same thing. (Many people, for example, believe in God only to the extent that they can blame him for evil and pain—their own and that of others; clearly, this is not really very different from denying his existence.) In the West today, the innate call of human beings to know and love their Creator—who is eminently worthy of this devotion—is actually being inverted and turned into its opposite.

This is evident, once again, in the totalitarian impulse (both hard and soft): modernity refuses to believe in (to know) the biblical God or to love him, choosing instead, by denial of his existence or by indifference to his reality and commandments, to hate him. Since human beings are made in God’s image, this can only result in similar attitudes toward their own kind—hence the gradual intensification in the last two centuries, alongside the remarkable achievements and manifestations of greatness during this period, of cynicism, hardheartedness, cruelty, and a kind of moral dullness and shallowness of character that shows itself in modern man’s frenetic self-preoccupation, in his limitless deceit, dishonesty, and weak-minded fear of truth and difference, and in the superficiality of so many of his relationships.

This flatness and moral anemia is expressed in our day in the dogma of political correctness, which is the exact opposite of what one might expect and wish in a genuinely pluralistic society, and which inevitably, in reaction, gives rise to adversarial postures, the polarization of attitudes on issues, and the decline of rational debate. Rather than enabling harmony within a pluralistic society as is its supposed intention, this relativizing and sentimental dogma actually undercuts the self-expression and integrity of the different human groupings that make up the society and so creates frustrations that inevitably find other outlets and end up abetting tensions and confrontational positions. By regarding as of equal value all traditions and opinions, and by discouraging even cogent criticism of “the other” through a fatuous desire not to offend any party, political correctness and its academic twin, historicism, actually deplete the particular value and contribution of each grouping, shrinking its self-awareness and sense of its tradition and identity. The result is not the rainbow of vital diversity that characterizes a genuinely pluralistic society, where real dialogue and mutual give-and-take bring out the varied bands of color and encourage toleration, but a kind of indifferent gray wash across the social canvas, accompanied by heightened suspicion, fear, and ignorance. Historical depth and differentiation are sacrificed in favor of a bland and humorless homogeneity that conceals tension, ignorance, and mistrust under outward conformity. People who practice political correctness take themselves terribly seriously. Self-righteousness is their distinguishing trait. In certain religious circles that pride themselves on their tolerance, the equivalent of political correctness may take the form of a vapid inclusivism that passes for love. Jesus’s call to repentance and a changed life for those who call him Lord will then be buried under a rhetoric of openness that turns the gospel into just another form of men-pleasing humanism.

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Further Aspects of the God Revealed in Jesus Christ: He is Personal and Rational; Mysteriously Plural in His Unity; Transcendent and Omnipotent; Free, Immanent, Good; the Judge of Evil as Well as the Savior of Mankind

Returning to the Genesis narrative, we note that the God portrayed here is personal. It is clear that only a personal being can create, as only a personal being can love. Creation is an act of will and intelligence, not the result of random, impersonal forces. The category of the personal, of course, necessarily includes the category of the rational, of which it is the presupposition and substratum (a rational god that is impersonal cannot possibly be anything more than a human concept). The personal Creator God is essentially rational. Moreover, God speaks, and his creative speech is in the form of commands, e.g. “Let there be . . .” Rational speech—the power and will to communicate—is intrinsic to personal beings. The Creator God and his Word are identified here, as they are again later in the Gospel of John in relation to the Word of God incarnate in Jesus Christ (John 1:1–2). The incarnation is the supreme manifestation of the personalness of the living God, of which the essence is the will-to-communicate. Man and woman are personal beings—persons—precisely because they are made in the image of the personal God. Wherever the doctrine of the imago Dei is unknown, neglected, or subverted, different human tribes will see the other as an enemy and be inclined to treat each other as less than personal and, at the limit, as subhuman.

The God who speaks is, furthermore, mysteriously plural without being multiple. This is revealed in the self-address, “Let us,” of Genesis 1:26, when God decides to make humankind in “our” image. Only personal beings have this self-reflexive capacity. The capacity to love—which always involves an exhalation and inhalation, a going out from the self to another distinct from the self as well as a welcoming reception of this other—depends on this prior ontological reality. God is not a lonely, opaque, remote Monad: he is a personal being-in-communion, in whom purpose and word and breath are distinctive yet one, not separate yet plural. In him who is the origin of all reality, each of these several divine expressions subsists as a particular absolute hypostasis, or personal mode of divinity, within the one divine being.

Moreover, throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, the one God, Yahweh, is constantly referred to in relation to his Spirit, his Word, his wisdom, and his shekinah glory, which are all ways of speaking about Israel’s experience of the transcendent God who goes out from himself toward them to create and to save, who is also and always in their midst, immanent, with them. The Word reveals/expresses the primordial purpose/design, and the breath enables the Word to be manifest in effective power: a personal plurality-in-unity, without which neither creation by God nor incarnation of God nor divine self-revelation of any sort is actually conceivable. We have here, Christians believe, the adumbration in revelation of the mystery of God-as-Trinity, as Tri-Unity—the mystery that Jesus Christ, in his relation as Son to the Father in the one Spirit, and as God’s Word and wisdom and presence come to be among men physically as a man, revealed in its fullness, and that the Holy Spirit was to make known subsequently to the church.44

And, evidently, the creation narrative reveals God as omnipotent and sovereign. To say that God creates is to say that he is all-powerful. It is to say that he is transcendent, and thus of a different order from his creation. He is free, not dependent on or conditioned by what he has made, whereas creatures are necessarily and essentially dependent. This is precisely what galls people since, made in God’s image, they are morally free, and yet as creatures they are ontologically dependent. They are both of these; and it is only as they live in communion with the free and good God, as they were made to do, that this paradox is resolved and the tension removed. Only then can persons become and be themselves, in fullness of life. For fallen humanity, existing in opposition to God, freedom is distorted to mean license and the pretension to autonomy. This is a caricature of freedom. The human creature can be truly free only when living in harmony with the Creator, who is life. Where death reigns, there can be no freedom. Only where God is, is death absent, overcome eternally by the divine power of being, and historically by the passion and resurrection of Christ.

As omnipotent and free, God has power over evil and all that opposes him. Evil, which arises out of self-will and issues in destruction, is derivative, not primary; it is a negation of being, hence dependent on the being it denies. It is a lie, and that which comes into its orbit is sucked into untruth and bondage. Sin, being a distortion of freedom, enslaves; it also deludes, so that the sinner is blinded and actually thinks himself free.

Only God, truly free and holy, can liberate and redeem those in the thrall of evil. This liberation involves judgment. God judges evil in his own time and way, with sovereign power, not only by condemning it—in individuals and in nations—but also by drawing good out of it, as with the crucifixion of Christ which, by divine determination, became the source of mankind’s salvation. He does not always prevent evil as we might wish him to do, for that would require him to impose himself on us coercively, and coercion, which is different from judgment, is against his nature. Those who trust in him are not thereby systematically spared evil’s painful whiplash, for they live in a world enmeshed in sin, their own and that of others, and sin’s concrete effects cannot easily be undone; but, penitent as they will be if they are in a relationship of obedience and trust with him, they stand under God’s forgiveness and are saved from divine condemnation and undoubtedly protected from many of sin’s effects as well, though this may not be readily discernible. The Holy Spirit deepens them as persons through their trials and keeps them from nihilism and despair, even while correcting them and changing patterns of behavior seen by God to be egocentric and destructive of love.

So the God revealed in Jesus Christ is Judge as well as Savior. These two dimensions of the divine being go together, and together they demonstrate God’s omnipotence. Human sin is a failure of love and entails its own pernicious consequences. These consequences are stitched into the fabric of the world by its Creator, no less than the physical laws of the universe. However they may work themselves out, they constitute the inevitable judgment that falls upon any deviation from the norm of love.

Only the Creator of reality has the power and authority to intervene and amend that reality if, as has happened, one of its features—human freedom—has been distorted by sin, with deadly consequences for the whole of creation. Humanity’s ambition to perform this salvage operation itself through utopian constructs of a political or technological nature is an extreme manifestation of the very evil it is intended to redress. God alone can alter what we call fate and undo the inevitable consequences of a bad attitude or action. He alone can forgive us our sins, deliver his human creatures from guilt and the judgment of slavery to sin and death, and create in us new hearts inclined to love him and love our fellow human beings. As Creator, he judges the sinner according to the moral logic he has built into the world; as Redeemer, he intervenes to pardon, save, and renew, according to his gracious mercy and his understanding of every individual human heart.

While in both these cases, as Creator and as Redeemer, God’s omnipotence is operative, the ultimate expression of this power is present, paradoxically, in the complete abnegation of power in the worldly and temporal sense by Jesus, the Son of God incarnate, before his human judges, and in his acceptance to be crucified by them in absolute weakness. The power of sin and death, which in this world expresses itself in the power to dominate others by coercive force of one kind or another, is overcome by the greater power of love (John 14:30–31, 16:33): Jesus freely and humbly lays down his life for the world (John 10:17–18; Phil 2:5–8), gives himself up to God to be made sin for our sake (2 Cor 5:21), absorbs in his person the worst that man can do to man, and then is raised up by God through the power of the Spirit of holiness (Rom 1:4; Phil 2:9). Life, which is greater than death, works by the holiness of love, which is greater than material power. Life/Love/Holiness conquers death/power/corruption and redeems, just as, in the beginning, life/love overcame chaos and the formless void and created. This is the supreme manifestation of divine omnipotence and the definitive judgment of sin under the form of perverted human power.

If God did not judge sinners in this life and in the final judgment in the fullness of time of which the Scriptures speak, justice would be absent from the world and evil would triumph; and if he were not gracious, if he did not show mercy to the penitent—to those who hunger for mercy and who show mercy to others—love would be absent and evil would triumph. Both justice and mercy are present in the world, of course, woven into its structures; and they are present, ironically, in some of the actions of the same human beings who desecrate them.45

Made in God’s image, we are not bereft of these qualities, though we regularly pervert both. But because of this moral doublemindedness we cannot redeem ourselves or fundamentally reform our behavior. In Christ, God’s very image incarnate, who was like us in every way except that he was without sin and loved God and all his human neighbors with an undivided heart, the Lord God has undertaken to do this on our behalf. That is the meaning of the cross. The Messiah took upon himself freely the judgment and penalty for the sins of mankind, condemning condemnation itself to the grave and so manifesting supremely God’s omnipotence and his essential nature of love and opening the way to resurrection and the triumph of life.

Two other aspects of omnipotence remain to be pointed out. We spoke above of God’s immanence in connection with his mysterious plurality. Here I want to suggest that his immanence is an aspect of his omnipotence. He is omnipotent as he is immanent in his creatures since in some way every one of them, from the smallest particle upward, will reflect him, its Creator, and be sustained in being by him. Surprisingly to us, perhaps, God’s omnipotence, in implying immanence, may thus be said to involve intimacy and intrinsic involvement with his world. This truth underlies the possibility of incarnation, where God in Christ comes amongst us as one of us and then sends the Holy Spirit actually to live within us, in what the Bible calls our hearts, in a real and not just symbolic sense.

Secondly, omnipotence must never be dissociated from goodness, inherent in God’s love. God is limited by his character: as good, he cannot do or endure evil; as love, he cannot act unjustly or cruelly; as rational, he cannot act irrationally or arbitrarily; as faithful, he cannot break his word or alter his purpose; as merciful, he always seeks to give us grace. But these limitations in no way detract from divine omnipotence; rather, they qualify it and disclose its inner moral dynamic.

The concept of omnipotence is in itself impossible for finite mortals to grasp. The idea of the sheer act of creating ex nihilo or of raising another from the dead may give us a hint of what we designate by this concept, but even that idea is quite beyond our intellectual reach. All we can say about such an act is that the power to do it must be unlimited (except as suggested above), altogether beyond any analogy with power as we experience it within the creation. What we may be sure of, on the basis of revelation and of the structures of the natural world, is that the fruit of divine omnipotence is, as goodness, the opposite of chaos, and becomes manifest in order, beauty, and redemptive love.46

It is, finally, as noted above, God’s redemption of mankind through the cross and resurrection of Jesus that provides the ultimate manifestation of omnipotence within the confines of history. The power to overcome death and bring forth a new creation within history—first Jesus the Christ, then those who long for him in their hearts (whether they know it or not) and so will be raised with him in the life to come—is equivalent to the power that brought forth light and matter out of nothingness “in the beginning.” Creation and new creation—manifestations of sovereign love—are the work of the omnipotent God.

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The God Revealed in Jesus Christ—the Creator—is Purposeful; the Purposefulness of Organic Entities and Systems; Teleology in the Universe, as Focused in Humanity; Human Self-transcendence and its Perversion

God the Creator is also revealed to be purposeful. Obviously, purposefulness is implicit in the concept of creation, as its opposite is implicit in the concept of chance.47 As, starting with the rise of deism in the seventeenth century, the concept of autonomous nature gradually displaced that of God-dependent creation, and as the Creator God, disconnected from his handiwork, receded from the human mind and finally disappeared over the horizon of unbelief, teleology was extruded from science and replaced entirely by the schema of cause and effect. Most unreasonably, yet wearing the mask of reason, impersonal chance (plus time) was called in to assume the mantle of the personal Creator God; as surrogate divinity, chance became the causal agent of the universe. The absurdity of this, in the light of the wondrous complexity and order of this universe, is only now beginning to be recognized by honest thinkers.

The biological and biochemical discoveries of the last century, combined with the astrophysical discovery of an evolving universe, should lead to a reconsideration of the place of teleology in the physical universe. Purpose is inherent in order and beauty. This affirmation which, empirically speaking, we may make initially on the basis of the phenomenon of life and, supremely, of human life, may be projected backward retrospectively and made with reference to the inorganic universe as a whole, in view of the fact that life has emerged out of this universe and cannot therefore be altogether in discontinuity with its principles. If purpose is to be found in living beings, we are entitled to infer that it is inherent in nonliving beings insofar as they are part of a larger, coherent context and are characterized respectively by their own forms of order.