engineering model, proposes to save mankind by engendering a new man, invulnerable to the corruption of the first man, and by placing him in a new Eden environmentally controlled to the last degree and not subject to the dangers and unpredictabilities of the first Eden.
It is this monstrous pretension—rationalistic to an extreme, yet completely irrational—that I call a counterfeit of the mandate given to humankind by God to tend and develop the world, including his own human society. A correlative counterfeit, invariably operative in genocidal enterprises and, basically, an essential component of all ideologies, is the racist drive to create, in a given territory, one homogenized people, to the exclusion of all alien others (an exclusion that logically entails the destruction of these others, or at the very least their subservience). This is the counterfeit of the biblical revelation of the unity and ontological equality of the human race, a revelation that the counterfeit denies and seeks to replace. Like the vision of the new man, it subverts the truth of the imago Dei and opens the way for boundless manipulation and oppression.
As technological power has increased, so have such utopian projections; and ruthless human beings, incarnating humanity’s drive to play God, have wreaked havoc as a consequence. The sequence of human cataclysms in the last century is evidence of this, each resulting from the perverse will to make man over in part by eliminating elements of humanity considered by the ideologues, according to self-serving criteria, to be subhuman. By claiming to be intrinsically superior, or by aspiring to be superhuman in the sense of greater than the Adamic prototype, the perpetrators of such abuses and atrocities become inhuman. The attempt by man to make himself in his own image is a misbegotten enterprise, a perverse use of the rationality with which he is gifted and in which he has put so much ideological stock since the Enlightenment; it is an enterprise fundamentally flawed because of the theological/ontological lie at its root that posits man as his own master; as such, it cannot but fall under God’s judgment and be doomed inevitably to disaster.
VI
Imago Dei: Who is the God Who Created Man in His Own Image? Divine Revelation through the History of the Jews and Supremely in the Messiah
It is God who created humankind in his own image. Who is this God? This is the second aspect of the imago Dei doctrine that we shall examine. The question is entirely legitimate, and the misguided answers men give to it in the wake of our inner refusal to accept our status as creatures (that is, as created and designed by an Intelligence infinitely higher than ourselves) account for the atheological animus of modern society and the ever-increasing hubris accompanying our impressive technological achievements. It may perhaps be said that the yawning gap between these achievements, where we manifest such formidable control, and our shameful and flagrant incapacity to master our ethical behavior and social relations, serves as the chief driving engine of the totalitarian will to reinvent ourselves by political and technological domination and manipulation.
Through the egocentricity of sin, we are a fractured species, yet we hold in our heart, by virtue of our being created in God’s image, a yearning for integrity, wholeness, and unity, in relation to our Creator and to the rest of his creation. But sin, in addition to causing our brokenness, also determines our response to it, which is to strive by ourselves to make things whole, unified, and harmonious. It is this striving that leads to totalitarianism at whatever social level it may manifest itself—to the assertion made by (self-) chosen elites of total control over others, using extreme force if necessary, to the point of turning men and women into objects, dehumanizing them, actually destroying them, in order to achieve the absolute domination and ersatz unity/wholeness/purity required by redemption. For, of course, the totalitarian/utopian enterprise (which always has a religious tenor because of its idolatrous belief in its own ultimacy) is invariably presented as a kind of redemption requiring purification and unification—and this, once again, as I have suggested, is an imitation of God’s work, a diabolical counterfeit of God’s saving plan for humankind through his chosen people, the Jews, and their (and the world’s) Messiah, Jesus Christ.39
It is here, precisely, in God’s providential saving plan for humankind, revealed to successive generations through the scriptural narratives, that we discover who God is.
Unless God reveals himself to us, we cannot know him as he is. This is because we are finite and fallen (in rebellion against the true God and blind to his goodness), while he is infinite and holy. Through beholding the glory and order of the world—his creation—with wonder-filled eyes, we may intuit, even sense, his reality and presence, for he dwells here and the world is filled with his dynamic being; but nature itself is impersonal, so we cannot know the personal God, its Creator, simply by observing it. But providence is an implication of creation, and redemption is an implication of providence. Christians believe, with the historical witness of the New Testament narratives and apostolic letters as the ground for their faith, that Jesus Christ was the Word of God made flesh, the very utterance of God himself—one with him in being—become incarnate. God is personal and communicates; he speaks, whereas idols, as the prophets never tire of pointing out, are dumb (e.g., Jer 10:5); he speaks, and in Jesus that communication is made physically manifest to us. He is God’s self-revelation—his Word—God who comes down to us (Isa 64:1; cf., John 1:11). “No one has ever seen God,” writes John, “but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (John 1:18). And Jesus himself says later in this gospel: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well . . . Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father . . . ” (John 14:6–7a, 9b).
Jesus is presented in Scripture as the image—the eikon (eīikōn) and very representation—of God (Heb 1:3; 2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15). Now we are considering a few aspects of the doctrine of human beings as created in God’s image. It is proper and necessary, in doing this, to glance at the sweep of the scriptural revelation and not simply to remain in the book of Genesis, for the full meaning of the text in Genesis 1 and 2 is only revealed in Christ. If Christ is God’s image and we are made in that image, then we are created in Christ’s image, and to find out who human beings are essentially, and to what they are called, we must look at Jesus. And similarly, we must look at this same Jesus—the One who is both God and Man—to see who God is.
Jesus Christ is unique. Yet the union in him of the divine and the human points to our human vocation, which is to be united with the Godhead, gathered up into eternal, dynamic communion with the Father through the Son in the Spirit. It is to this that human beings are called, for this that they were created. To refuse this vision after having first received it, as Western civilization is now doing, is to move inevitably, on the wings of technology-as-ideology and the infinite manipulations it makes possible, toward the sophisticated dehumanization of mankind. It is not that those who have faith in Christ, or those others who truly long for God (whatever their religious perspective), will be made divine, but rather that they will be taken up into the divine life, of which already here below faithful Christians have the vital deposit, the indwelling Holy Spirit, not because of any intrinsic merit of their own, but because they have been fortunate to hear the call and have been willing to open themselves to receive the gift and to bear witness in this life to the Giver.
But the call goes out to all men and women and is constitutive of true human identity; if we fail to heed it in our inner conscience, we alienate ourselves not only from our Creator but from each other. The result is the violence of human history, growing ever more intense as technology extends human means. The rejection by modern culture of Jesus Christ, the God-man who reveals in himself the glorious destiny to which all human beings are summoned, is the ultimate source of the alienation afflicting the West and wreaking such havoc across the world. We do not want to be what we are called to be by our Creator—the modern mind sees that call, falsely, as heteronomy and rejects it; we want to be what we will make ourselves to be, gods of our own manufacture. And this slavery to our own will we blindly call freedom.
VII
The God Revealed in Jesus Christ is Love; He is Righteous and Faithful
The God who destines us to union with himself is love. He creates in love (what greater love than the act of creation, when God goes out from himself to fashion an other, then calls that other to fellowship with himself?); he redeems in love (God in Christ humbles himself