Samenvatting

The modern secular democratic state rests on a new portrayal of man and a new status of religions and other comprehensive doctrines compared to the period before the sixteenth and seventeenth century. In this new view of man, as incarnated in the modern rule of law, other persons and communities are no longer seen as a condition for personal aspirations and development, but rather as a limit. This is expressed in the ‘harm principle’ of the French Revolution and John Stuart Mill. Freedom is at the center of this new constellation, so the homogeneity of the state must be generated from below, by a free civil society and also by religious organizations and traditions. Three problematic developments since the nineteenth century make the Christian view of man as free, responsible and undefinable ‘image of God’ relevant: the zoological, ‘scientific’ description of man that reduces man to a risk factor and an object of security management; the disappearance of ‘innocent’ disasters and calamities that increases human responsibility and the temptation to blame ‘others’ for our faults; and the growing gap between a legal and a moral public response to criminal acts that opens the need for forgiveness.