Six Questions: Question 2

Today I am publishing the second in my series of six questions. These questions and their commensurate answers will help us better understand how Worldviews shape our lives. In answering, I will be comparing the response from two Worldview perspectives:

1. The Judeo-Christian Worldview

2. The Statist Worldview

If you missed the first question, “How Did We Get Here?” you can find it here.

The second question is “What Went Wrong?”

The Judeo-Christian Worldview. The Christian understands that mankind’s troubles began long, long ago in the Garden of Eden, when our first two parents decided that they could do life better without their Creator as their Lord. All that is broken in the world can be traced—according to those who espouse and hold to the Judeo-Christian Worldview—back to that fateful day when Adam and Eve chose to pursue knowledge and wisdom outside of God.

Those first two souls rejected their transcendent Designer and Maker and stepped out on their own, in hopes of finding their own way absent of His principles and laws. They also expected to be made into gods themselves.

How crushed they must have been to discover that their Maker did not approve of, or excuse their foolish choice. They quickly realized that their act was an act of rebellion against a just God, and that there would be consequences—serious consequences—for their choice. They were not just slapped on the wrist and sent to sit in the corner for a while. No! Everything they had, except their breath, was stripped from them. They were cast out of their beautiful garden-home, sent packing basically, with virtually nothing in their bags, and thrust out of their garden as the gate was locked behind them.

And that was the good news. The bad news presented itself in the reality of their now broken, severed relationship with their Maker. What’s more, they came to understand that their God’s promise of an unending life of bliss was now lost, and one day death would take them.

The first hard evidence of human dysfunctionality arrived when their son Cain murdered their son Abel. Oh what grief must have been theirs! And so it has been, down through the millennia, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, right into the present, when foolish men still believe that they can reject their Maker, live under their own rules, and create their own utopias outside of God. It has never worked. And it never will.

For more detail read Genesis two through four and Romans one and two.

The Statist Worldview. State worshipers, having rejected the creation story and the idea that man is made in the image of God, for a purpose, and with a plan, must, by default then also reject the story of man’s fall as told in Genesis chapter three. After all, if there is no God, how can there be rebellion against Him?

The statist then, must turn to other explanations for the general dysfunctionality of the human race. And it would seem he has settled on one that really works for him. It does not take long to understand that men have, almost since time began, been seeking to build the perfect society. Because you see, in the statist’s Worldview, it isn’t the people that are broken, it is the systems under which people organize themselves that need fixing.

We begin with the Tower of Babel, the first recorded quest for the human utopia.

“Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”” (Genesis 11:4 ESV)

God had told both Adam and Noah to disperse, to spread out across the globe. But the wisdom of men directed the opposite. Let us gather ourselves together and get organized in a single place, they said, under a singular government and for a singular purpose—to make a name for ourselves.

Whether merely imagined places, like Plato’s Republic and Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, or one of the hundreds of actual attempts to flesh out the perfectly-ordered society, man’s quest for happiness in the flawlessly-structured community has been pursued pretty much since the beginning of time. Even here within our own country we find such failed utopias as New Harmony Indiana (1814-1824), Oneida, NY (1848-1878), Amana, Iowa (1855-1932), Ephrata, Pennsylvania (1732-1813), and the more recent debacle known as Jonestown (1956-1978), which began within our American borders but ended tragically in the South American Republic of Guyana. Most of these utopian communities have, at their core, an overt religious component.

The above, small-scale, American examples all failed. Except for Jonestown, these experiments in the pursuit of the perfectly ordered society, left minimal damage in their wake compared to other, more deadly, national-scale, utopian quests. The most deadly utopian experiments exist at the national level and involve some form of socialism. Among them we find the failed, socialist, utopian experiments known as The French Revolution (1789-1799), the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) (1922-1991), and Nazi Germany’s National Socialist Worker’s Party Movement (1933-1945). All produced large, tyrannical, centralized governments, and left millions dead in their wake.

This is the legacy of the statist, the one who would pursue the perfect society at the national level, outside of God’s plan and clear instructions.