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The world, and those who inhabit it, are both characterized by possibility—by potential. In fact, it is perhaps most correct to postulate that the world that we all encounter daily is not so much the world that is as the world that could be. We certainly act as if this is the case. We conceptualize ourselves and our world in this manner. We perceive in front of us an array of things that could be, and work—when we are in fact working, instead of merely letting things degenerate—to make the things we choose from that array manifest themselves in reality. We confront the possibility inherent in Being with the possibility that inheres in our souls. We act out our formulation in the image of God, using our communicative, creative capability—our Logos, our divine souls—to extract from the chaotic possibilities of present and future the reality we choose to make manifest. If we do that ethically—with the desire to improve Being itself with our actions and to speak the truth—then we can grant ourselves a certain respect and can extend that to others whom we seeing undertaking the same mission.
That’s the message of Genesis: our making in the image of God is the ability to transform chaos into reality and to do that in a manner that is good, if we orient ourselves in accordance with our conscience and act courageously, with genuine care for the world (despite its shortcomings and horrors), and in truth. And the message, say, of the Passion of Christ: there is no excuse to fail to undertake this responsibility. Not the sentence of death. Not the infliction of torture. Not the betrayal of friends. Not the enmity of the state. Not even, in the final agony, doubt about the relationship between God in the Highest and the suffering man. This is a responsibility that is too much to bear, in some real sense, and its existence is to me the most fundamental reason for the criticism of our religious heritage. Perhaps even randomness, nothingness, meaningless—perhaps even of sufficient intensity to produce a nihilistic hopelessness or a desperate turning to authoritarianism—is to be deemed preferable in our understandably cowardly moments to the terrible burden that we are apparently required to adopt to live as truly ethical men and women. Are we so sure that it is only the discoveries of our rational science (something, by the way, deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian idea of a comprehensible world capable of being understood by a willing spirit) that has led us down the garden path to our current state of confusion and faithlessness? All that intellect-fostered hopelessness is the courage of facing the truth, and none of the cowardice of avoiding our responsibility? I don’t think we’re good enough to make such a claim.
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