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