Just Around the Corner
Just Around the Corner
Utopia is the name of the paradise city that men both individually and collectively considered are forever seeking to build as an alternative to God's Kingdom. Because Utopia is pursued in defiance of King Jesus and His Kingdom what begins with the best of intentions results in death multiplied. In recent history this piling up of death is the result of the Leviathan State believing that it has the ability to legislate, manipulate and inaugurate the coming of the Kingdom of man.
The architecture of Utopia is intended to be a monument to the genius of man's social engineering since it is built with the brick of man's inherent goodness and perfectibility and the mortar of anthropological notions of the inevitability of progress and the belief in man's malleable nature. Whereas for the Christian, God and His Kingdom, is the destination (goal) of History for the Utopian Statist, man and his kingdom is where History is headed.
The fact that the State's well-intentioned Utopia building always comes at the cost of spilled blood, war and death is chronicled well in the era of Big State history. At the end of the 18th century we hear Frenchmen crying out the utopian slogan of 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.' Indeed, the French Revolution was unleashed to rebuild France from scratch according to the use of right reason and to create a society that would establish Liberty, Fraternity and Equality. The result instead was 300,000 dead Vend'ee Frenchmen who wanted to opt out of the Revolution and a French government that produced the quaint but effective le guillotine, the Reign of terror, and ended in the rise of the dictator Napoleon. No doubt it is true that dead people are free, equal and brothers all.
In America this Utopian distemper rises time and again as Statist Death merchants and elitist bureaucrats, always with the best of intentions, concoct one more utopian scheme after another thus revealing their conviction that Statist Government can bring in the Kingdom of man. These visions gain traction since the powers of the State here, as a result of the war between the States, are now no longer delegated, enumerated or restricted in any meaningful way. As such the State has seemingly infinite power through legislation or executive or judicial fiat to play at social engineering in the attempt to recreate the virtues of Eden. The only problem is that whenever Pandora opens her utopian box what issues forth is death and destruction.
At the beginning of the last century the imperialist President Woodrow Wilson set about to create Utopia. Wilson, referring to WWI gave notice that "this war is a war to end all wars." Further he added that the "World must be made safe for democracy." Wilson's utopian vision of a war to end all wars, ended in the death of 115,000 Americans and the blood spilled 'over there' was only the seed of what would turn out to be the bloodiest century in World history. Because of Wilson's Statist Utopian plans for war and then for peace at Versailles the war that was to make "the world safe for democracy" was a recipe for the usual dystopian counter reality as Europe was flooded with socialism, fascism, and communism, all ideologies of death that likewise each promised their own utopian vision and ended in the dystopian death of multitudes.
Twenty years later WWII starts as a confrontation between two competing systems. Hitler's National Socialist (Fascism) Aryan Super-state (Third Reich) vision is pitted against the International Socialist (Communism) vision of Stalin. Both visions are thoroughly imbued with the notion of perfecting man and ushering in the Kingdom of man. Each has no problem with breaking eggs in order to make omelets (Lenin's cute euphemism regarding how killing people must be expected if utopia is to be reached). In the end we see tens of millions of people killed in war, political famine, Soviet gulags, German concentration camps, crematoriums, experimental medical facilities and exactly no evidence that utopia is just around the corner.
After a century of Statist Utopian bloodbath if one listens closely one can still hear the current Leviathan Statists in Washington still dishing out this same type of tired utopian tripe. Leviathan utopianism is avant garde in America's current foreign policy as the State today pursues the latest version of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny promising that planting "democracy" and nation building in the Middle East will provide for peace, and security in the Middle East as we become God's instruments to 'Eradicate Evil'. No doubt we will bring the same type of bloody peace and security that the 20th century experienced due to the utopian success of America's making the world safe for democracy. Thus far 800 Americans and 10,000 Iraqi civilians are dead in the attempt of utopian Secular Humanism to do for Iraq all that it has done for 'democratic' America.
Time and again in the 20th century we have heard politicos speak dreamily in utopian code language. From Churchill to Roosevelt to Nixon, to Rockefeller, to George H. W. Bush we have heard expressed the need for a 'New World Order.' For at least 100 years now the State has been pursuing some ethereal New World Order. A great deal of blood has been spilled in order to achieve a New World Order that doesn't look particularly new or orderly.
In light of all this, when do Christians begin to seriously ask whether or not the State is the institution that is responsible for bringing in New World Orders? When do Christians start looking at the bloody historical evidence and begin to conclude that it may not always be the case that whoever the State says is their enemy is indeed their enemy? When do Christians start asking if it is a Centralized, all encompassing State that is the enemy? When do Christians thus begin to pursue a Christian policy of limiting and restricting what the State is responsible to do?
It is because Sovereignty resides in God alone that man must seek to make sure that sovereignty on earth resides in a plurality of spheres. The Christian can not support any institution that seeks to usurp and aggregate all power to itself, for such power always kills those to whom it is forever promising Utopia.
Bret McAtee is a friend, and a pastor in Charlotte, Mich.