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
