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
