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
