The Kingdom of God and the Open Society: Hope Without Utopia

 

                                                                                Karl Popper (1902-1994) 

Introduction

Kerk & Leven (“Church & Life”) is the leading weekly Catholic magazine in the Flemish region of Belgium. Since October 2025, on the invitation of the chief editor of the local edition of the parish of Olen, Cis Marinus, I have been writing a reflective article every two weeks from a philosophical and theological perspective, exploring Christianity in a scientific age.

6 May 2026

The Kingdom of God and the Open Society: Hope Without Utopia 

On Sunday, April 12, 2026, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán lost the elections after having remained in power for 16 years in a row. Despite the fact that the rule of law in Hungary had been systematically undermined during those years, it nevertheless proved possible for democracy to bring about a political turnaround without any violence. Even though democracy is slow and sometimes hopelessly complex and frustrating, with seemingly little decisiveness, its strength lies precisely in the fact that a democratic society can correct its own mistakes.

Nevertheless, we see that the efficiency and decisiveness of authoritarian regimes, especially those grounded in a clear and rigid ideology, are exerting an increasing appeal, particularly among young people. The younger generation is growing up with an uncertain outlook on the future. Every day we are reminded of the “brokenness” of this world: exploitation, war, terrorism, the growing gap between rich and poor, climate change, and so on. Confrontation with these realities fuels a deep longing for a different and better world. It is an attractive idea to want to “wipe the slate clean” and imagine an ideal, straightforward society capable of efficiently addressing all these pressing global problems.

However attractive it may be, this also entails great dangers. Throughout history, many have attempted to design a blueprint of what an ideal society should look like. The philosopher Karl Popper showed in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies (1947) that attempts to actually realize such an ideal society based on a pre-designed blueprint have invariably led to totalitarian societies in which all criticism was violently suppressed. The most well-known example is the communist dictatorship in the former Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, where political opponents were deported on a large scale to labor camps (gulags), often in harsh Siberia, resulting in the deaths of more than sixty million (!) people.

According to Popper, anyone who believes they know what an ideal society should look like also believes they are justified in “shaping” society by force. This leads to large-scale plans that tolerate no dissent. Criticism is seen as sabotage of the historical mission and is therefore suppressed. In this way, a “closed society” emerges, one in which power is concentrated, individual freedom disappears, and violence and repression are legitimized in the name of a supposed higher historical goal.

As an alternative, Popper advocates the concept of an “open society.” In an open society, laws, customs, and institutions are open to correction. People are free to express criticism without fear of reprisals. This allows an open society to evolve naturally, without being constrained by top-down state control. Crucially, an open society works through “piecemeal engineering” (the step-by-step improvement of what goes wrong). It is impossible to determine what makes people happy (“happiness” is a difficult concept to define), but we do know what makes people unhappy. It is better to address concretely what causes unhappiness than to chase a vague ideal such as “happiness.” Moreover, because policy decisions are corrigible, an open society is ultimately much better able to adapt when unexpected developments or problems arise.

In the Christian tradition, this need for a hopeful perspective takes shape in the image of the 'Kingdom of God'. When you ask Christians what they imagine by the term 'Kingdom of God', their answers often point toward an afterlife, heaven, a place “at the end of time,” a distant future expectation of salvation, love, justice, and peace. For many people and young people today, such ideas sound like a blueprint of an unattainable ideal. But is this really the case? If the Kingdom of God were indeed a blueprint of an ideal society, then Popper’s analysis of the danger of utopia as a closed society would also apply here.

Strangely enough, in the Bible we find no description of this “kingdom,” no blueprint, no “Utopia.” The term “Kingdom of God” is remarkably vague, and it is precisely this vagueness that points us toward its meaning. In the Bible, the term is used to describe a state that is both not yet here and already present. Jesus healing the sick, casting out demons, and teaching a new ethic of life, all these are experienced as signs that the Kingdom of God is manifesting itself here and now. The Kingdom of God is not about the afterlife but about human well-being here and now, in this life, realized modestly and step by step. It is about “good news,” the Gospel.

At the same time, there is the fulfillment of a greater, future reality. How can this be reconciled? In the biblical framework of thought, transcendence is not expressed in spatial terms as with the Greeks, but in terms of time. Consider, for example, the opening of the Book of Jeremiah, where God says, “Before you were born, I set you apart for myself.” The reference to the future is not a reference to an event in time, but an indication of the transcendent character of the present moment. The Kingdom of God is not a place or a future event, but a concrete call to humanity and compassion here and now.

From this perspective, the Kingdom of God shows striking similarities with the “little goodness” (la petite bonté) of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Not grand deeds, but small, almost unnoticeable, ordinary acts that help others. Jesus, too, does not suddenly heal all the sick in the world with a wave of a magic wand. He walks from place to place and heals individuals he encounters along the way. The Kingdom of God is an active impulse to roll up one’s sleeves here and now, a call to compassion. 

The way Jesus interacted with people (with attention to the weakest and most marginalized) offers a powerful perspective on what such compassion can look like in practice. The Christian vision of the future in the Kingdom of God, the orientation toward a horizon of hope projected onto “the end of time”, is not about an event or a place, but about an ethical appeal here and now. It is a perspective that can protect us from a society that closes in on itself and stagnates, with all the consequences that entails. It is a perspective that fits very well with Popper’s idea of an open society with gradual improvement, without a blueprint. We do not know what we must do to turn the earth into heaven, but we do know what we must do to ensure it does not become a hell.