The revelation of the Word of God tells us all of this. This is the gospel—the good news—to which the whole Bible points. It hinges on God’s incarnation in Jesus, the meaning and purpose of which are disclosed in his crucifixion and resurrection. Christ’s resurrection, following on his crucifixion, is the pivot of revelation and hence lies at the heart of truth. Here, in this cross and empty tomb, we understand who God really is. The source and end of all reality—cosmic and historical—is love. This truth, revealed to us fully in Christ, is the essential meaning of Jesus’s assertion in the Gospel of John that he is the truth. He shows us the true nature of reality. All is gift, all is grace, and these are expressions of love. In the person and life of Jesus of Nazareth, as he went about among men doing good, showing kindness and mercy, and dispensing wisdom and justice with great authority, we see what love means in practice: here we glimpse what God is like and how we are meant to be.
When we think of God’s righteousness, we must think of it within the framework of love and grace. His righteousness combines justice and mercy and aims, with respect to mankind, to bring us back into an orderly relationship with himself and with each other. It involves salvation (e.g., Isa 46:13a: “I am bringing my righteousness near, it is not far away; and my salvation will not be delayed.”). This, precisely, is his supreme work of love, carried out effectively and definitively in Jesus. What God the Son suffered on the cross where he was “bruised for our iniquities” (Isa 53:5) expressed both God’s just judgment upon human sin and his merciful forgiveness accomplished and offered to sinners, his beloved creatures made in his image, who had gone astray.
The doctrine of the imago Dei contains implicitly these comprehensive truths, as the genetic code in each cell contains the whole human being in its compass. The God who created us in his own image loves us. Furthermore, he is faithful. He is steadfast and dependable; we may rely on him; he will not lie. This is another part of what we mean when we speak of God as the truth revealed in Christ. We may abandon him—or try to—but he does not abandon us. To the contrary—he remembers us.40 Discipline us he does, for that is part of love; but the ultimate judgment—death—due us for our rebellion against him who is life, he took upon himself in Christ, so as to make it possible for us to choose this life while we are on earth. If it were not so, there could be no possible hope for a race mired in endless war, capable of frightful sexual depravity, exploitation, genocide, and heartless terrorism. These great evils are our work, not God’s. They arise out of man’s refusal of him, not his of us. He remains faithful and available to us even in the midst of our depravity and degradation. We have only to humble ourselves and look to him to see what he offers us through his self-revelation in Christ. But in our human pride we almost invariably demand that he be present to us on our own terms, in the way that we see fit and appropriate and effectual. It is not thus that we will find him, either in our daily lives or at the heart of horrors like genocide and war.
VIII
Hatred of God and the Denial of Sin and Guilt are the Roots of Utopian Pretensions; Ideological Tribalism and the Totalitarian Impulse
On reflection, it is astonishingly foolish to think that such a race as ours, capable of what we have shown ourselves to be capable of, could save itself or change its own duplicitous heart. As something cannot arise out of nothing, so good cannot arise out of perversity. Human pride tries to get around this problem—a problem of moral logic—by denying our sinfulness and guilt, a denial that is achieved by blaming it on God, on society or institutions, on the unconscious, or on some other scapegoat like a different ethnic group or class, in order to shift the onus from humankind, collectively and individually (the phenomenon of negationism, as a corollary of genocide, is a local expression of this basic human deceit). The crowning tactic in this move—which modern human beings have deployed brazenly—is to deny outright the existence of God. Atheism is the ultimate end of human pride and faithlessness, which blinds us from seeing or even wanting to see the faithful Creator God. It is the ultimate negationism, whereby we deny our own creaturehood; and as such, it is the ultimate form of self-destruction.
Underneath the atheistic thrust, what we actually find is hatred of God masquerading as unbelief. The hatred arises from the experience of our own moral turpitude. We are not perfect, and we despise ourselves for it. Such imperfection is intolerable. In response, we accuse others, those who are different from us, and, in the modern period, we proclaim human perfectibility and passionately refuse divine intervention. Concomitantly, we deny original sin. Here indeed we find the root of modern utopian thought and the notion that everything is possible. Rebellion against God moves at this point into a new register, where moral fallibility and, eventually, finitude, are repudiated, in a virtual hijacking of divine omnipotence and perfection.
Everyone knows from personal experience how difficult it is for us to admit we are wrong. If we can point the finger at others and construct utopian systems promising perfection, we can, in appearance, avoid the onus of guilt and weakness. But of course the denial of sin does not lead to the disappearance of guilt. One of the fundamental aspects of man as made in God’s image is conscience, by which an echo of the divine voice is ever present within us. Conscience can be repressed and hardened, but it cannot be destroyed. What the denial of sin does is remove the disposition to admit error and seek atonement and forgiveness. This in turn results in a massive transfer of guilt to the other and a constant inclination to accuse and avoid personal moral responsibility.
Thus the denial of original sin—sin as virtually inherent in human beings in their condition of moral freedom—leads inevitably to scapegoating and a totalitarian attitude, with the political consequences we are only too familiar with.41 For if sin is not ubiquitous in all human beings, mixed with the good likewise to be found in all of us, then a Manichaean mindset begins to operate that has one group, understanding itself as guiltless, pure, and superior, pinning perversity on another group, perceived as wicked, guilty, impure, and inferior. That other group must then be destroyed, in one way or another. This is the distorted moral vision that underpins the totalitarian impulse we have been noting, and of which postmodernism’s absolutist doctrine of tolerance—built, ironically, on ideological relativism—is the latest, soft (in appearance) variation.42
One might call this phenomenon ideological tribalism, and it is the distinguishing negative mark of modernity, as well as of the current Islamist reaction against modernity, which takes the form of terrorism. Terrorism is another expression of the totalitarian impulse, and if it had the political and military means, it would produce another genocide, this time aimed at Western culture as a whole, of which America is perceived to be the current flag-bearer.43 Ideological tribalism thinks in black and white, in absolutes. It is fundamentalistic, and is governed by the quintuplet monsters of pride, fear, envy, jealousy, and resentment—all of which generate hatred. As with Islamist extremism, it often has, along with some legitimate grievances, an overtly religious reference, but its ferocity, heartlessness, and utter unreasonableness reveal its god to be an idol. Idolatry/ideology is always an expression of what is basically a perverted religious impulse.
The origins of ideological tribalism in the West are multiple. We have, first, the crusading and inquisitorial aberrations of the church, manifested occasionally in persecutions during the Constantinian Age and again later in the Middle Ages; and then the absolutist fanaticism of the religious wars of the late Medieval and early Modern periods (fruit of the subversion of the late medieval church by totalitarian pretensions), where, as in the earlier examples cited above, Christendom lurched into ideology and lost touch, to a considerable extent, with the gospel, thus betraying its own principles and bringing itself under God’s judgment. The nationalist impulses that arose in the sixteenth century and governed Europe for the next 500 years also stoked the fires of tribalism, as did, indirectly