From the Pastor's Study
From the Pastor’s Study
Utopia
June 8, 2022
“From each according to his ability and to each according to his need.” This quote is attributed to Karl Marx, and it was this idea that gave rise to communism. Communism is founded on the principle that if everything is owned in common, it can be used for the common good rather than for the benefit of a few. In pure communism everyone is expected to contribute according to their abilities and receive according to their needs. In many ways Marx’s principle seems to have parallels in Scripture, although Marx himself said that religion was unhelpful, for it was “the opiate of the people.” Marx believed that people who believed in God and salvation in Jesus Christ were too focused on life after death that they lost any sense of urgency to work on the problems we have here and now. He truly believed that with a great deal of effort, we could eliminate our problems.
Many countries which adopted Marx’s principle (subsequently given the designation, “communist”) came out of a situation where a few powerful people controlled most of the resources leaving the common person to eke out a daily existence. If everyone contributed and everyone received their fair share, then everyone would enjoy a good quality of life, or so it was believed. Things did not work out as intended, and under people like Stalin who sought to impose communism on Russia and its neighbours, more people died than did under the tyranny of Hitler. Marx’s principle, seemingly good in theory, did not work out in practice, mainly because those who imposed communism on their nations were as greedy and cruel as the wealthy bourgeoisie (wealthy and powerful people) before them.
What Karl Marx envisioned was a utopian society. Utopia is achieved when everyone in a community enjoys a nearly equal standard of living and where problems are eliminated. Marxism led to the idea that if everything is held in common, everyone will benefit. Most people in the West who are of a more capitalist persuasion (private ownership of the resources) disagree with Marx. A couple of decades ago I attended a weekend conference led by American capitalists where it was proposed that we could move toward utopia if everything was owned by individuals, an idea which is the complete opposite of Marxism. These capitalists said that the self-interests of the owners would motivate them to pay their workers well and protect the environment for, in the long run, that would be to their own advantage. (It didn’t make much sense to me then, and it still doesn’t now, especially when I see how self-interested we have become in the more capitalist West, often to the detriment of others.) In almost every place in the world where capitalism reigns, we do not see a utopian society. In fact, as we look at any attempt to create a utopia, we see dismal failure.
Yet, in spite of repeated failed attempts to create a utopian society, this continues to be the goal, especially in places like Canada. There is the strongly held belief that if we get rid of the problems that plague society, we will eventually arrive at utopia. Thus, if there is a mass shooting at a school, we hear cries to eliminate guns. If we have more extreme weather than before, we impose a carbon tax. If people riot in the streets following the shooting of a black person by a person of another skin colour, we punish the shooter and introduce racial reconciliation curriculum into the schools. We should not doubt that the problems we have today are real, and they are disturbing. But let’s be clear: it’s not guns that kill people; it’s people with guns that kill people. It is the people who are the problem. Even if we eliminate what we perceive to be the problem (we won’t have mass shootings if there are no guns), we still will have problems, for it is in the hearts of people where the problem lies. Unless humanity is changed, we will not have anything that resembles utopia.
Cardinal Ratzinger (who was Pope Benedict XVI from 2005-2013) wrote about our failed attempts to achieve utopia, and he said that our problem is that we have replaced eternal life with utopia. Though we have eliminated God from our lives, our longing for what God provides has not disappeared. We still long for a place where we live in harmony with each other and with the rest of creation. We long for a peaceful existence of joy and blessing. However, because God is no longer part of our cultural norm, we have no place to turn to but ourselves. We seek to eliminate problems, believing that when we do, we will achieve a kind of salvation. But “This salvation remains perpetually out of reach, yet each failed attempt generates greater urgency and greater fear” (David G. Bonagura, “Eschatology, Not Utopia” in The Catholic Thing). Our attempts at creating utopia have failed and will continue to fail, but God’s provision of eternal life is real. Eternal life, Ratzinger writes, is “a new quality of existence … that is made possible by God’s presence in the universe,” a presence that is made all the more tangible by the incarnation of Jesus Christ. God came to be with us, and he came to forgive us of our sins and change our hearts so that we can live in a new reality that will be fully realized in the new creation.
Our work to achieve utopia will fail, but God’s work to provide eternal life has already been successful. Thus, our efforts should not be to eliminate problems with the goal of making this world a better place but, rather, to follow Jesus Christ faithfully, trusting in him and living faithfully according to his command to love God and neighbour, all the while trusting that he is making things right again.
It is thought-provoking that the word “utopia” literally means “not a place” or “nowhere.” Utopia is imaginary and therefore unachievable. Eternal life is real, and it has been given to us already through Jesus Christ. God has given us what we cannot accomplish.
Pastor Gary
