Christian utopianism

We're going to keep on praising. I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth.
-Barack Obama, speaking to Redemption World Outreach Center in Greenville, SC, 2007

Apparently, according to our President, we can create a Kingdom on Earth. I suspect if you ask a lot of Christians, they'll give you the same answer. They might not say that we can 'create' a Kingdom, but they will probably say that we can bring about God's Kingdom here on Earth. The problem is that God's Kingdom, the kingdom of heaven, is not attainable through human means.
What is the kingdom of heaven? Jesus certainly mentioned it a lot; the phrase and its equivalents occur around 80 times in the Gospels. "...behold, the kingdom of God is in your midst [within you]" (Luke 17:21). Elsewhere, Jesus says that the kingdom is near (Matthew 4:17). Fantastic. But what exactly is it? One writer interprets it as the "Reign of God, [the] Kingdom of God in the person of Christ." Interpreting the 'kingdom of heaven' in this way is what makes most sense to me, because Jesus said that it is within us; when we accept Him as Savior, He comes into our hearts and dwells within us (John 14:23). The reign of Christ is spiritual; not a physical subjugation or abstract concept of administration such as those seen in earthly nations. Christ Himself said so: "My kingdom is not of [not derived from] this world... My kingdom is not of this realm" (John 18:36). Because there are only two ultimate realms, physical and spiritual, and Jesus said that His kingdom is not physical, then it must be spiritual. Since that is the case, Christ's kingdom can be 'brought about on Earth' in the sense that God can save people's souls and reign in their hearts, thereby extending His spiritual reign on Earth, but the kingdom cannot be brought about through human means.
It seems that many Christians believe otherwise. According to Brian McLaren, the kingdom of heaven is brought about on earth by our good works. As Rob Bell puts it,

For Jesus, the question wasn't how do I get into Heaven? but how do I bring heaven here?... the goal isn't escaping this world but making this world the kind of place God can come to. And God is remaking us into the kind of people who can do this kind of work [emphasis mine].

One person goes so far to say that faith in Christ will topple the "secular salvation" of "political, economic, social, and moral structures" and the Church will become the agent of change in our society. As the writer of the article from which these quotes are gleaned puts it, "It is thought [within these circles] that when the church operates as this type of change agent, the world can't help but get better." This idea is also seen in a 2007 article in Christianity Today, where the author writes,

...Believers should pray for God to bring peace and justice to the world we currently live in... But God's people shouldn't just be praying. They should be working too. In addition to praying that God fixes earth's broken stuff so it's more like heaven, the church is also charged with bringing the kingdom to earth by the way they live.

McLaren, Bell, and the Christianity Today writer have got it wrong. Heaven cannot be brought to Earth by our good works or by any other means. It is not our job to ask that God "fixes the earth's broken stuff so it's more like heaven." This world cannot be made more like heaven; it is full of death due to the presence of sin (Romans 5:12). Christians are never charged by God to save the world; we are commanded to "go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation" (Mark 16:16). God's ultimate goal is to redeem humanity from sin through the sacrifice of Christ.
It is a utopian strand of thought to say, like then-Senator Obama did, that we can create the Kingdom right here on Earth. Utopianism's core belief is that man is inherently perfectible, and given the right environment or leadership, he can overcome his obstacles to perfection and live in peace and harmony with others. Although he was speaking of the goals of fascism, Jonah Goldberg may as well have been describing utopianism as he noted in his book, Liberal Fascism, that some of the commonalities between fascisms are

the quest for community, the urge to 'get beyond' politics, a faith in the perfectibility of man and the authority of experts... most of all, they share the belief--what I call the totalitarian temptation--that with the right amount of tinkering we can realize the utopian dream of 'creating a better world.' (pg. 14)

It seems to me that the Christian sense of community, a desire to 'get beyond' theological differences, and a Christianized concept of man's perfectibility are the ideas that unite the proponents of the earthly kingdom of heaven, which is really Christian utopianism, and not the kingdom that Jesus spoke of. This is puzzling to me because Jesus Himself did not describe His Kingdom as being able to be brought about through human means; I believe that He made it clear that it definitely could not be. Luke 17:20-23:

Now having been questioned by the Pharisees as to when the kingdom of God was coming, He answered them and said, "The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, 'Look, here it is!' or 'There it is!' For behold, the kingdom of God is in your midst." And He said to the disciples, "The days will come when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it. They will say to you, 'Look there! Look here!' Do not go away, and do not run after them."

The Christian utopianists are saying that we need to work to make this world a better place. Now, this is not to say that mere rhetorical excess is on par with the desire to form a better, more functional society; is there anyone among us who hasn't heard a politician or motivational speaker talk about 'making the world a better place'? However, the ideals that the utopianists advance are not just that we can make our society better, or our cities safer, but that we can save the world if we just work hard to do good things, and be nice to our neighbors, and stop arguing over theology. After all, the goal is to better the world, and ourselves, so that Jesus has a nice clean house to return to.
At the heart of the matter is the idea that man is perfectible. The best illustration of this idea that I have seen is the character Adrian Veidt, in the graphic novel-turned-movie Watchmen. When gathering the Watchmen for the first time, he tells them, "We can save this world with the right leadership." Later on in the story, he tells a group of executives that his conquest is "not of men, but of the evils that beset them." His attitude is the same as all utopianists: man can be perfected through the right leadership, the right application of technology, the right environment. For Christian utopia, man can be perfected through the right religion and the right deeds that follow.

However, the Bible teaches that man cannot be perfected. Romans 3:23 tells us that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. In the same book, chapter 7, verses 15-25, Paul writes of the inner struggle between his sinful nature and his desire to to good, saying in verse 18 that "nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh." The only way that man can be redeemed is through faith in Jesus Christ (1 Thessalonians 5:9, John 3:16). Mankind can be sanctified, which is God's desire: not that we perfect ourselves through our own works (an impossibility, since our works are 'filthy rags' before God, according to Isaiah 64:6), but that we are "holy, as [our] Heavenly Father is holy" (Matthew 5:48). If all that God wanted was for us to be perfect and live in a perfect world, He wouldn't have given us the ability to choose between good and evil.
This world will never be perfect, and it is a fool's dream to think that it can be. Humanity cannot bring about the true kingdom of heaven anymore than oxygen can be turned into gold. There are people who are intent on bringing about a counterfeit kingdom of human goodness, which might make us feel better about ourselves in the short term, but in the end, it's just another utopian ideal. Christian utopianism is the same thing as secular utopianism; they are both humanistic ideas that derive their power from the supposed perfectibility of man. The only difference between the two is that the Christian strand seeks to be legitimized by attaching Christ's name to it, and once that's done, the idea can't be argued with because then you argue with God, and if you do that then you're a fool, and obviously don't have as much love and compassion as the people who advance the idea. We are, as Larry Norman put it, "only visiting this planet", and our real treasure lies in Heaven, not here on Earth, "where moth and rust destroy" (Matthew 6:19). Man can be saved, sanctified, and healed through faith in Christ alone. The true kingdom of Heaven is within our hearts, where God dwells and fills us with His Spirit.
Any other kingdom, and any other means of redemption, is lunacy.