Ceaselessly Tossed To and Fro

Seething In Vain

All Christians are utopians insofar as they believe that a day is coming when the Lord of heaven and earth will descend from heaven to dwell here and establish a perfect world, without sin--the unfolded and optimised and glorified Paradise of God's original creation.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more  And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.  And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.  He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.  He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away."  (Revelation 21: 1-4)

Most human beings--whether Christian or not--are utopians of one stripe or other.  But at the same time, there is a strong streak of dystopianism running through the race.  In the Unbelieving frame, evil threatens to destroy us all; were it to succeed, suffering and devastation would be universal.  The causes vary--global warming, asteroid strike, economic inequality, famine, destructive ideologies, disease--but the general theme remains fairly constant.  So, the human race is bedevilled by a contradictory utopian-dystopian antithesis which gives no peace--social, personal or otherwise.  Sound familiar?  Any regular reader of a daily metropolitan newspaper will confirm it so. 


The Christian perspective is that evil is real, but since the incarnation, birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ, evil and its powers have been defeated.  The Church is engaged in a mopping up operation, removing the last vestiges of sinful rebellion--pretty much like the Cleansing of the Shire, following the final defeat of Sauron the Great.  Thus, for the Christian, whilst evil is real, the possibility that the world will become a dystopian horror is a falsehood.  The world now belongs to our Man in heaven, not the Devil and his demons.  He rules, not they.  Thus, whilst creation groans under the weight of sin, awaiting its final redemption (as described in Revelation 21 above), the certainty of the coming utopia is already absolute, final, and inevitable.  Our Lord, our Man at God's right hand, will see it done. 

The mind of Unbelief, however, is tossed back and forth between wild enthusiasm and euphoria, on the one hand, and dyspeptic discouragement and depression, on the other.  Societies and cultures ceaselessly move from one to the other as new generations succeed the former.  Christopher Dawson provides an historical example of utopian euphoria that erupted during the Enlightenment.  Commenting upon the Abbe de St. Pierre, he wrote:

But underlying all this was his fundamental doctrine of the "perpetual and unlimited augmentation of the universal human reason," which will inevitably produce the golden age and the establishment of paradise upon earth.  Nor would this happy consummation be long delayed.  All that was necessary was the conversion of the powers that be to the Abbe's  principles, for St. Pierre shared the beliefs of his age as to the unlimited possibilities of governmental action.

And this doctrine became the ruling conception of the new age, for while the God of the Deists was but a pale abstraction, a mere deus ex machina, the belief in Progress was an ideal capable of stirring men's emotions and arousing a genuine religious enthusiasm. . . . The French Enlightenment was, in fact, the last of the great European heresies, and its appeal to Reason was in itself an act of faith which admitted no criticism.  [Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry (London: Sheed and Ward, 1945),  p. 191f.]

The unquestioning belief in Reason and a belief in an inevitable Progress--technological, scientific and moral--still mark our age.  It is the secularist version of the Gospel.  Yet, despite all the hoopla and triumphalism of Man and His Progress, secular society is, at the same time, gnawed by fears of terrible calamities and fearful catastrophes.  Entire industries have been built upon such fear-mongering.

The prevailing utopian-dystopian antithesis tears modern Unbelief apart.  It is the diabolical pattern of arrogance racked with perpetual fear.  It's father is the Devil.  It is an accurate reflection of his heart.  It is the course of the Demons.  It leaves modern Western culture seething in vain, all its vainglorious hopes marred with dyspeptic fear-ridden discontent.