It is prudent to remember that the French Revolution’s slogans of liberty, fraternity, and equality were only applicable at first to the pure and the good, that is, to those who espoused the cause of the revolutionaries; but hatred and terror were reserved for opponents, i.e., the retrograde and the bad (Catholics and royalists), as demonstrated by the murderous fury visited by revolutionary troops on the royalist Catholic inhabitants of the Vendée region of France, a case of violence even more appalling than that of Robespierre’s Terror in Paris. It should be evident that those massacres were an early form of ethnic cleansing, a harbinger of things to come and a precursor of the State-orchestrated genocidal phenomena of the twentieth century.
IX
The Perfection and Holiness of the God Revealed in Jesus Christ; Modernity’s Hatred of God Entails Hatred of Man
The hatred of God so current in the modern world, especially among those who think of themselves as avant-garde, liberal, even revolutionary, has another cause similar to the perception—and repudiation—of human moral turpitude mentioned above. This is the traditional belief in the perfection of God, as understood in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Along with his perfection we may speak of his holiness, the utter awesomeness and purity of his being, resplendent and immaculate beyond our conceiving, God uncreated, everlasting, essentially Other than his mortal creation. Obviously, by comparison, humanity comes off as inferior on every count.
For modern men and women, such a state of affairs, like the admission of original sin, is intolerable. Our response in the last two and a half centuries has taken two forms: we accuse God of evil, or we deny his existence. Both these solutions to the dilemma effectively remove the problem raised by the comparison of God’s perfection and holiness with our own lack of them, thus clearing the way for the assertion of human perfectibility; motivated by a hatred that is rooted in pride, they amount in effect to the same thing. (Many people, for example, believe in God only to the extent that they can blame him for evil and pain—their own and that of others; clearly, this is not really very different from denying his existence.) In the West today, the innate call of human beings to know and love their Creator—who is eminently worthy of this devotion—is actually being inverted and turned into its opposite.
This is evident, once again, in the totalitarian impulse (both hard and soft): modernity refuses to believe in (to know) the biblical God or to love him, choosing instead, by denial of his existence or by indifference to his reality and commandments, to hate him. Since human beings are made in God’s image, this can only result in similar attitudes toward their own kind—hence the gradual intensification in the last two centuries, alongside the remarkable achievements and manifestations of greatness during this period, of cynicism, hardheartedness, cruelty, and a kind of moral dullness and shallowness of character that shows itself in modern man’s frenetic self-preoccupation, in his limitless deceit, dishonesty, and weak-minded fear of truth and difference, and in the superficiality of so many of his relationships.
This flatness and moral anemia is expressed in our day in the dogma of political correctness, which is the exact opposite of what one might expect and wish in a genuinely pluralistic society, and which inevitably, in reaction, gives rise to adversarial postures, the polarization of attitudes on issues, and the decline of rational debate. Rather than enabling harmony within a pluralistic society as is its supposed intention, this relativizing and sentimental dogma actually undercuts the self-expression and integrity of the different human groupings that make up the society and so creates frustrations that inevitably find other outlets and end 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.
X
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,