September 22, 2020

The Omnipotence of the Utopian Godhead

In the previous article I discussed how a necessary tenet of the doctrine of God – or any God-substitute – is unity. God cannot be divided against Himself, and anything trying to take the place of God must counterfeit this unity. A second necessary aspect to any doctrine of God is omnipotence. Clearly, if God is not sovereign and all-powerful, he cannot be God. Consequently, if sinful man’s humanistic project is ‘to be as God,’ then as the new source of power, certainty and meaning, he must be omnipotent. What is then required is that man as the new god must ape and acquire the characteristics of the living God in order to realize his divinity. In order to be all-powerful, the new god, of necessity, must eliminate chance, impotence (powerlessness) and uncertainty from human affairs and this requires total control and omni-competence.

We have already seen that utopians believe this will require a world-state with universal jurisdiction. It is only in terms of this theology of state that we can understand the aspirations of groups like the United Nations with its goal of a one-world order, manifest in the proliferation of a litany of international bodies, treaties and institutions, from banks, to courts, to armies, lawmakers and cultural organizations for planning humanity’s future when we will all be one. The aim is not simply power, but control.

The irony of this coercive pursuit of freedom through unity should not go unnoticed. Utopian power and control require the political use of coercion, with the state functioning as ‘man enlarged,’ the sole source of law and sovereign authority. It further requires the manipulation of nature in terms of organizational ‘science’ to eliminate uncertainty and demonstrate this omni-competence. This is not simply a technique for domination, it is a religious principle. Molnar observes:

It is a doctrinal necessity inscribed in Marxist theory. Totalitarianism prescribes total domination over man – over all his mental spiritual, creative and technical endeavors, and its organization of these activities is the sine qua non of restoring man to a direct relationship with nature.[1]

Total power is then an essential requirement to bring about the new utopia which mankind is said to both need and be destined for. Even if most people don’t understand this destiny, the new philosopher kings, the elite social planners believe they understand, and more importantly, know what is best for the rest of us.

To understand the reason for this we must note again an aspect of Marxist theory. In this worldview, the ideal world (from which man is alienated), is the material world (nature) reflected in the human mind and translated into thought forms. Human thought is then reduced to rank materialism. As a consequence, true philosophy is not the love of wisdom, man reflecting carefully on human experience, both internal and external, it is rather ‘work’ or ‘practice’ of the human sciences (total praxis). In other words, the concern of utopian thought is not with describing or explaining the inner and outer world, but with changing and controlling them. Since the human person is merely a part of the material of nature (since matter is all there is) and the progress of cosmic evolution, man is equally the legitimate object of scientific and social experiment. A totalitarian world of total control, of the science of organization and experimentation, thus replaces Christian theology and philosophy.

Whether the utopian delusion is expressed as a form of Marxism, National Socialism (fascism) or some other political permutation, power is the central theme. Both Marxism and fascism are totalitarian ideologies; one centred in class warfare where people are divided up into oppressor and oppressed groups, the other in elitism in which the superior must crush the inferior and weak. One calls for the dictatorship of the proletariat or the common people, the other for the dictatorship of the supermen. Both are instruments of naked power for the creation of a utopian society where, one way or another, man is becoming a god. In the twentieth century, both resulted in the expression of naked power involving brutal and horrific slaughter on an unprecedented scale. Both engaged in repression, torture, mass murder and ‘scientific’ experimentation on human individuals, families, communities and whole nations. Whether through the SS and Gestapo, or by officials of ‘the party,’ both sought total control of all aspects of the social order to create their brave new worlds. In both contexts, dissent could not be tolerated. Likewise both regimes claimed to act on behalf of nature (materialistic evolution), advancing mankind toward its destiny in godhood.

Now, as ever, the true and living God remains the main obstacle to man’s lust for total power and the creation of his dystopian nightmare. Once the idea of the God of the Bible is eliminated, the stage of freedom from God or the stage of ‘necessity’ has been reached. In this stage of necessity, nature and history dictate all human decisions and actions with a total authority surpassing that of God himself. These dictates of nature cannot be refused. Molnar explains why: “First, because these dictates are proclaimed in the name of nature; secondly, because man is himself part of nature and of history, nothing remains in reference to which he might say ‘no.’â€[2]

If nature and impersonal processes of history dictate human actions, then there is no transcendent appeal possible for man, no higher authority which he may petition against tyranny and slavery. The new order of unity and salvation is then the scientific, socialist state. The ‘One’ (nature/ god) is totally immanent and so there is no escape from the incarnate truth. It becomes logical then that to resist this truth is evil. Man is thus absorbed into a process that is both necessary and irresistible. Accordingly, total predestinating power is demanded and sought by the state in the name of man’s freedom – freedom to be part of nature and its determinative historical progress. In a profound irony, true freedom becomes the renunciation of freedom. The desire for individual freedom is seen as a kind of childhood of mankind, whereas collectivist freedom is to grow up into the maturity of mankind’s freedom to fulfill his destiny. In such a view only the immanent god (nature manifest in statist man), not the transcendent God, can be allowed in human politics, since a God who is different from nature and claims power for Himself, would always attract loyalty away from the immanent god. With man as the only god, complete cohesion and unification is thought to be within reach.

Whenever man usurps the attributes of divinity and seeks omnipotence, he creates a hell on earth, and those he claims to be liberating become victims of the vindictive wrath of a counterfeit god. Man is not omniscient, omnipotent, nor is he at the wheel of history; he is a creature and by his attempts to be other than he is by manipulation, experimentation, drugs and social engineering, he only reveals his enslavement to the machinations of dark spiritual powers beyond his control.


[1] Thomas Molnar, Utopia: The Perennial Heresy (New York: ISI, University Press of America, 1990), 99.

[2] Molnar, Utopia, 113. Note that in both Marxism and Hitler’s National Socialism, the doctrine of evolution in nature played a key role. For Marx, Darwinism justified the class struggle and verified his materialism, for Hitler, evolution justified the elimination of the weak in the creation of the man-god.

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