V
Let me finish by asking: What does one’s soul, resting in heaven after death, separated temporarily from the old body (“temporarily” is an inapt word, since the nature of time in this state is unclear to us), actually do during this period of waiting? Reflection on that will have to await another occasion, but let me drop this thought in your minds: Might this be a sanctifying time, not for sin to be punished—Christians are fully justified in this life by grace through faith in Jesus, so there is no punishment for them to undergo after death—but rather for our lives to be considered and examined, including the sin—but examined as from outside those lives, with a detachment impossible on this earth, to achieve a kind of rereading of our lives and so a really full understanding of ourselves, both the good and the bad, bringing a kind of completion and, with it, a kind of in-depth washing of our minds and an even greater appreciation of Christ’s redemptive work? The notion of purgatory, rightly conceived, might correspond to something like this. Perhaps this sanctifying work, involving the assessment and judgment of our acts and the final burning up of all that was sinful, is accomplished altogether at the final judgment, as Paul suggests in the texts I’ve quoted. But perhaps some kind of sanctifying and edifying work is accomplished by the Spirit in the soul as it waits restfully in paradise for the Lord Jesus Christ to return to earth triumphantly, when he will resurrect and judge the living and the dead and transfigure believers into the fullness of his image. On this point, it seems, the Bible gives us no conclusive illumination.
Part II
Reflections on the Imago Dei in a Modern Context
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