Utopia and its Power Mongers
Looking back over my experience as a Jehovah's Witness and later as a Christian, I can say that the single most important thing that I have learned is grace. The grace as shown by Jesus Christ, some of the writings of Paul and others enlighten me to the fact that in the Bible's worldview, paradise will come, not by man's effort, but by God's effort. In other words, it's not going to happen in our lifetime.
This was such a contrast to what I saw at Bethel where you have a group of old men who want to bring about or cajole or somehow provoke the return of Christ in such a way as to destroy all their opponents in bringing a Utopia. And of course, the idea is that they want to not only be part of that Utopia, but they want to be running it. And in 1979-1980 when I left Watchtower headquarters in New York, this was the single most obvious fact to me that these men in Brooklyn were power mongers.
Often when I talk to Christians or people that comment on [the book of] Revelation in the Bible or the end times or something, I run into the same pattern of people who are trying to do God's work to bring about a Utopia through either political means or through somehow their preaching efforts that they find all these [manmade] techniques to bring people to Christ or to change the world. Oftentimes it's humanistic or people go out on projects to change the world.
The idea to me is not bad, but the problem is that if they are Christians, they get this confused with God's way through the Holy Spirit. I learned this particularly after leaving the Witnesses and getting involved in exit-counseling where I could see that it was unethical for me to try and bring a person out of one religion, crazy or not, and try to introduce them into another as if that was the work of God that I should be doing. But not only through all the experiences of exit-counseling I had, but in helping people to come to know the Bible, to come to know Christ and so forth - the future hope for the dead - I always knew that the work of conversion was assigned to the Holy Spirit, not me. And this is one reason I believe that my ministry was quite successful, is that certain things you don't put your hands on, you don't muddy the waters with your own efforts. And that if a person is being drawn by God to them, then it will happen, as long as you are performing as a good conduit for that sort of thing; and a good conduit generally means a friendliness, a joy, a peace, conveying a better hope - spending time with the person, and so forth. To me it did not mean trying to get them to pray the Lord's prayer or do silent conversions in church when I was a pastor or any such thing. To me that was a cheap trick, and it was not the work of the Holy Spirit.
Many Christians in the United States especially, are given over to the idea that the it's up to us to rally round the cause of morality, to change the world, to get rid of the homosexuals, to get rid of the Muslims and seek to get rid of all these elements and help usher in the kingdom of God. But people been doing this for 2000 years - actually longer if you look beyond the Christian framework. This is a tendency of man to take matters into his own hands that you really ultimately cannot control. The alpha male has a tendency to seek power, and often power can be achieved through using religion as a tool or the concept of utopia as a tool to convince people that you're working with God, and that because God is working with you, you actually have the power to bring about this change in our lifetime or shortly thereafter.
I'd like to quote from John Gray in his book, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. He says on page 3,
"Utopian projects reproduce religious myths that had inflamed mass movements of believers in the Middle Ages, and they kindled a similar violence. The secular terror of modern times is a mutant version of the violence that has accompanied Christianity throughout its history. For over 200 years, the early Christian faith in an End-Time initiated by God was turned into a belief that utopia could be achieved by human action. Clothed in science, early Christian myths of Apocalypse gave rise to a new kind of faith-based violence."
John Gray continues,
"When the project of universal democracy ended in the blood-soaked streets of Iraq, this pattern began to be reversed. Utopianism suffered a heavy blow, but politics and war have not ceased to be vehicles for myth. Instead, primitive versions of religion are replacing secular faith that has been lost. Apocalyptic religion shapes the policies of [former] American President George W. Bush and his antagonist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran. Wherever it is happening, the revival of religion is mixed up with political conflicts, including an intensifying struggle over the Earth's shrinking reserves of natural resources; but there can be no doubt that religion is once again a power in its own right. With the death of Utopia, apocalyptic religion has re-emerged, naked and unadorned, as a force in world politics."
Now my point in quoting John Gray in this is not to blame utopianism and the misuse of power on the Bible, but really, power-hungry men who read the Bible and use it for their own ends. The apostle John, or whoever it was that wrote the book of Revelation wrote something that is akin to a vision - almost a psychedelic vision that every sort of religious ideologue throughout the centuries has used for their own ends, to interpret how society will become Utopia. I don't think it was meant to do that. I don't think that it was meant to give man the power to use tools like that to control other men. I do believe that power-hungry people in the Church throughout the last 2000 years have used these things to force the hand of the Holy Spirit to try and bring about this New World, this Utopia, this Paradise. And that this continues to happen. A lot of religious leaders around the world have a great deal of power, and they're using it to try and foment wars and to create circumstances that are harmful to billions of people.
The greatest joy of all came to me in 1979, while I was still at Bethel, and I finally got the point of what grace meant in the New Testament, in the writings of Paul, especially Romans and Galatians, and the thought that we are not the ones to change the world - that this will happen in God's due time, and that was a comforting message to me. As I continued to leave the Watchtower and get involved in the church and become a pastor, I became very annoyed by certain practices of people really just trying to control others and to force them into this utopian way of thinking and to follow their political agenda. Anything from the idea of "Let's all pray together, let's give our life to Jesus Christ, and someone will pray with you," as if that event is necessarily going to do anything for you. Instead, today we see the same thing happen in a larger scale in many churches are efforts to get people involved in certain causes to help Jesus along in his coming Kingdom. This, too, is a power struggle.
In our efforts to help people out of cults, we should remember one thing that if you are a Christian, [then] you believe in God, and you expect the Holy Spirit to work with you. It's a good idea to stay away from your own efforts to make that happen, but to rather make the person comfortable, help them to understand the message of grace in the Bible, and that we are powerless to bring forth these utopian worlds. But yet we can have a great deal of peace and joy in our lives. And that peace and joy comes from surrendering to this concept of the drive for power - the need for utopia - and will aid us. It will get the bugs out of our heads to speak. Preaching Utopia is one of the most common ways of bypassing work of the Holy Spirit. For instead of having a heart conversion, a really true recognition of your helplessness as man and the need for something greater to bring about paradise, is not fostered in the individual.
Perhaps we should add the drive for utopia as one of the marks of a cult.
_____________
By the way, Grace called and asked if I was okay this morning, since I did not post on my birthday thread. I replied,
Wow, I'm so sorry I missed this!
Thank you all so much!
I've been so busy on my website projects that I only get over here once every 2-3 days, and the likelihood of seeing this post on any given moment (these posts come in so fast that they go on to page two of new posts very quickly) is not good.
But I had a wonderful day at the beach, after I quit working at 3 PM, and had a few friends over. I DID get all the Facebook comments on my birthday and replied to them, but no one told me about this post, Grace, sorry!
Love you all,
Randy