Eternity disrupted and the search for meaning : negation of imago Dei and identity crisis in Western culture : a Christian apologetic study

PhD (Apologetics), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus ; It is contended that the raison d’être for the turmoil in contemporary Western society, appertaining to certain existential controversies, are the secular humanist ideologies advocated by zealots of Marxist derived dualistic Critical Theory, as expressed through Critical Race and Critical Gender Theories. The articulation of these theories is forced through the guise of an abstruse social justice proposal, connected to Identity politics, and the search for meaning arising from the postlapsarianism that transpired in the primeval Garden of Eden. Conflict is taking place in a context of social confusion and moral anarchism reflecting a ‘battle of ideas’, a Kulturkampf of relativist ideologies against established Judeo-Christian orthodoxy in an attempt to force a reformulation of the core values, tenets, mores, and ethics sustaining extant Western civilization. Society is thus faced with a Zeitgeist of mounting heterodoxy, based on the heretical eritus sicut Deus of Genesis 3:5, envisaging destruction of the uniqueness and identity of the pinnacle of the Creator’s work, the sui generis human beings made in his image. The pivotal Judeo-Christian creeds, particularly the Fatherhood of God concept with the ensuing Imago Dei dogma of humankind, are under threat of elimination from pervasive humanism and a spiritual neopaganism in antithesis of society’s religious, cultural, and liberal democratic political foundations. In this manner, the very Sittlichkeit of established culture itself is under existential onslaught. The conclusion reveals, through application of Rabbinical Jewish hermeneutical strategies, the primordial origins and enduring reiterations of these heretical ideologies plaguing Western society, the finale of which will only be resolved in the eschaton. ; Doctoral