Oneism tells us that the answers are within. We need the honesty to say that the problem is within, and that the Creator alone can redeem the beyond-self-repair brokenness of his creatures. Sugarcoating the bitter reality of sin causes the good news of Christ’s saving work to ring hollow and meaningless.

How do we help our utopian neighbors, those around us who reject a biblical worldview, yet seek a better world? One common answer to this question is what we may call the chameleon strategy, which says that the church must take on the colors of the surrounding culture. We must alter basic hues of the Christian faith to blend in with dominant shades of our post-Christian context. We absorb the pigmentation of mainstream spirituality, emphasizing the mystical against the intellectual, the spiritual against the material, human power against divine power, an impersonal energy over a tripersonal God.

Although such adaptive tactics may seem like a promising method for helping our utopian neighbors, they often succeed only in rendering Christianity more irrelevant. I will briefly sketch a case for a better way to help our neighbors. In short, Christians are far more helpful to our utopian neighbors if we do not take on their colors. Believers who refuse to abandon what is utterly unique to the Christian worldview and who maintain distinctive biblical colors will be tremendously helpful to those beyond our worldview borders. We must show our neighbors, with a heavy dose of humility and love, the antithesis between the gospel and human-powered utopian systems. We must articulate the antithesis, and do so without arrogance or compromise.

In what follows I pinpoint five areas in which it is remarkably easy (and seriously unhelpful) to lose sight of the antithesis between the worldview of Twoism—in which the transcendent Creator exists over creation—and the worldview of Oneism—in which the creation is all there is.

1. Is Humanity Basically Good?

1.1 Anthropological Optimism

Christians are of no help to our utopian neighbors when we absorb the Oneist notion of “anthropological optimism.” Utopian systems tend to rest on a radical overestimation of human power, a view of man that says we are essentially good and/or God at our core. You are not a sinner who needs the grace of the God that comes from outside of yourself; rather, you are a super being who needs to recognize the greatness of the God who is your Self.

Let us briefly observe the tinges of anthropological optimism in secular thought. In the 18^th century we meet the Genevan philosopher and composer Jean Jacques Rousseau. Jettisoning the Calvinism of his youth, Rousseau thought that, “there is no original perversity in the human heart… Man is naturally good… It is by our institutions alone that men become wicked.”^[1] Your problems are not internal, but external. Evil is less an individual problem than an institutional problem. If we could only escape the corrupting influences of society’s institutions, then our innate goodness would shine through.

A similar anthropological optimism can be seen in the tragic tale of Marquis de Condorcet, one of Rousseau’s fellow architects of Enlightenment thought. Condorcet believed that, “There is no limit set to the perfecting of the powers of man; human perfectibility is in reality indefinite.”^[2] In this explicitly utopian manifesto, Condorcet argues that there is no corrupt human nature thwarting our attempts to create heaven on earth. Rather our biggest obstacle is ignorance, which can be eliminated through education in the natural and social sciences In this modern echo of the ancient Greek doctrine of salvation from ignorance by education (rather than salvation from sin by grace), Condorcet anticipated that our knowledge-driven virtue would propel us beyond all divisions of class, religion, culture, and gender into an ever-expanding heaven-on-earth.^[3] There is a sad irony to Condorcet’s optimistic appraisal of man’s intrinsic goodness. Writing during the French Revolution, Condorcet fell into disrepute with some of his fellow revolutionaries. He found himself in a Paris prison cell awaiting his turn at the guillotine. What was supposed to be a utopia dream—the age of reason and “the limitless perfectibility” of our species—became for Condorcet (and the tens of thousands who fell victim to the falling blade) a dystopian nightmare. Shortly after penning the words about our innate goodness and moral perfectability, Condorcet was killed in prison. Scholars disagree on whether the French optimist committed suicide or was murdered. In either case, Condorcet’s sad fate became a grim refutation of his own view of human nature.

The hard lessons learned from the guillotines of the French Enlightenment were also learned in the gulags of Russian Communism (another secular system that believed “man is basically good and capable of being master of his own destiny.”^[4]). Tens of millions have perished over the last two centuries on the altar of systems built on man’s intrinsic goodness. Human evil runs deeper than any purely external diagnosis.^[5]

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