Gospel Cartography

The Counter Strain of Utopian and Dystopian Theology

"Set your minds on things above, not on things that are on earth.” 
— Colossians 3:2

"Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."
— Matthew 6:10

1. The Problem of the Lost Map

John Lennon’s Imagine and Nella fantasia each asked us to imagine a fair world with no heaven, no hell, no countries, no religion, where everyone lives in peace and in honesty. 

These are utopian ideologies. Remove the human structures—nations, religion, property, the sacred—and what remains, they assume, is frictionless human harmony. The assumption is that division is architectural, not anthropological and that ideological identity assures altruism. Tear down the walls and people will naturally cohere to their default state of goodness.

This is, at its root, a Rousseauian claim: the structures are the problem, not the heart. And it is also a theological claim—even when it denies being one. Lennon's "no religion too" is not the absence of a theological position; it is a theological position. Only in an ideological dream can you step outside of the metaphysical by announcing you have stepped outside it.

The other, dystopian, claim is equally compelling. God has destroyed populations before. The flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the multiple destructions of Jerusalem itself. Peter assures us that “the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.” (2 Peter 3:7). 

So which is it? Should we set our minds on heaven, or should we attempt to fix earth?

This has been an ecclesiastical loggerhead for a while now—not for a lack of doctrine, but for lack of cartography. It is, of course, both. We have no trouble listening to the maps app give directions while simultaneously driving down a real road in the real world, each activity enhances the other, each is as necessary as the other. Why then are these two clear mandates positioned as theologically opposed to each other? 

We have systematic theologies that catalogue every truth with precision. We also have hermeneutical rules that specify interpretation. We understand the vehicle well, its mechanisms and its parts. What we do not have, or have largely forgotten, is a map of the territory each specific truths describe. And a people without a map cannot locate themselves. A people who cannot locate themselves will borrow whatever map is available, whether it’s from Lennon or from Orwell.
For a Christian generation shaped by Lennon and social media aesthetics, the borrowed map is utopian. For one shaped by Orwell and a cynical aesthetic, the borrowed map is dystopian. But the Gospel, amongst other things, is a series of maps on which we can trace the trajectory of God’s path if, and only if, we know which map represents the topology we are traversing in the scriptures.

The lostness of the contemporary church is not primarily theological confusion. It is cartographic displacement. They have lost the map that the gospel itself is.

2. What Augustine and More Already Knew

Augustine wrote The City of God not as abstract theology but as an act of cartographic mercy. Rome had fallen. His congregation was reeling, their coordinates gone. Augustine's move was to give them a map: here is where you are, here is where you are going, here is why the burning city is not the point. Two cities coexist in the present age, pressing toward resolution. The City of Man rises and falls. The City of God endures forever. The city of Man which is collapsing will rise again in a different form, like a king with a fatal headwind who, somehow, survives. “The king is dead,” we humans say, “long live the king.” In God’s City the King who survives is the same King who endures, in Man’s City it is a different king with the same old human imperfections.

Thomas More’s Utopia—literally meaning ‘not a place’—is a secular satire of that same cartographic impulse. He too sensed that people needed a map—a destination, a vision of the good place. More's map had no telos and no resurrection. It was a destination without a route (hence the satire). The good place achievable by structural reform, by the right arrangement of persons and property. Huxley’s Brave New World is a modern take on the same theme More was tapping into.

Augustine drew the two cities—a synchronic map, showing the two kingdoms coexisting in the present moment. He didn’t give us a full set of navigational charts. He left us just the two kingdoms pressing toward resolution, not the entire transit from origin to eternal age. That is the map this article attempts to sketch.

Augustine drew the two cities. More satirized the 'good place'. What we need are the various maps of the whole journey.

3. The Six Territories

I claim that the Bible does not present the reader with a single undifferentiated landscape. It presents at least six different territories, each with its own character, its own navigational demands, its own dangers and promises, its own resources and foes. Systematic theology extracts truths from these territories and organizes them thematically—a profoundly useful tool. Traditional hermeneutics organizes the texts by genre, covenant, and historical context—equally necessary. Gospel Cartography adds a third axis: location. Where in the transit is this text situated, and what does that territory require of the reader?

The six territories are named here with the Greek ‘-topia’—place—as their common root, because the claim is precisely that each is a genuine somewhere. The Christian is never nowhere. The question is always: which territory am I in, and do I have the right map for it?

1. Abyssotopia — The Unordered Deep

The Greek Septuagint renders the Hebrew tehom—the formless deep of Genesis 1:2—as abyssos. This is not nothing. The abyss is a real something, dark and formless chaos, over which the Spirit of God hovers. Abyssotopia is the pre-ordered territory, the void before the first act of divine speech imposes form and boundary. There are two distinct types of chaos described in Scripture: The unpredictable chaos of the deep, the sea. And the sterile chaos of the void, space.

Biblically Jonah was thrown into it, the beasts were dragged out of it in Daniel 7, Jesus walked on it, and Solomon advised casting one’s bread onto it. The end of all evil will be a lake of fire, and intentional paradox signaling the destruction of chaos.

Critically, Abyssotopia is not outside God's presence. The Spirit is already there, hovering over it. This means the pre-creation state is not pure negation but pregnant disorder: raw material awaiting the Word. Also chaos is not mindless, it is populated by sea beasts, by Isaiah 14 rebel stars, Paul’s Principalities and Powers, wanting to bring their chaotic rule into God’s ordered realms. We have to wrestle with how it is that Jesus has been given “all authority” at the end of Matthew, and yet Paul speaks of rebellious “rulers and authorities” of this present age. We have to understand Jude’s warning that we can “blaspheme” against evil beings.

The Abyssotopia has immediate Bible interpretation consequence. The modern secular imagination looks at outer space—a word whose etymology is emptiness—and sees the default state of reality. Emptiness punctuated by matter. Genesis looks at the same void and sees a block of marble mid-sculpture. Order is not an accident. The Logos is the ground state. John knows exactly what he is doing when he opens his gospel with en arche: before the abyss, before the hovering, the Word already was. God is not, himself, a map in this set of charts.

Abyssotopia also gives the hostile powers their address. The abyss in Revelation is not arbitrary—it is the return address of those who refuse God’s order, those addicted to formlessness. Evil is Abyssotopian in orientation. The Earth was seasoned with the abyss at the fall, but it didn’t fall into the cartography of the abyss—God made a claim of redemption, it has its own chart because it is its own ‘-topia’.

The abyss is not where we came from. It is what we were saved out of.

2. Protopia — The First Ordering

Protopia is the territory of the first ordering: Eden, creation as intended, the world before the fracture. It is not static perfection but dynamic goodness—a jungle given for cultivation into a garden, a mandate to extend the ordering outward. 

The Protopia is all that God calls ‘good’ in Genesis 1, and it’s also juxtaposed in Jesus asking, “why do you call me good?” in Mark 10:18 when a man calls him “good teacher”. He qualifies the distinction with, “no one is good—except God alone.”
Jesus is not claiming to be bad, or corrupt, He is pointing out the category error—more pointedly, the cartography error—we are prone to navigate our current world with the Protopia map. We use absolute terms—truth, justice, goodness, love—for non-absolute and paradoxical realities. We use the wrong map and therefore follow ideological mirages and end up dying of thirst in the desert.

God’s image-bearers are placed here as vice-regents, commissioned and authorized to carry the work of ordering further into the creation. There are two types of order also, jungle order and garden order. Each require a mind originator. But the two types of evil are not comparable with the two types of order, they are fundamentally different things. Good is better at being good than evil is at being evil—they are separate landscapes, requiring different navigational charts for those traversing across them.

Protopia establishes the telos before the fall interrupts it. This is crucial: the direction of creation is not invented after the fracture—it is revealed in the first ordering. What the redemptive story restores is not merely what was lost but what was always intended, now carried forward through the transit.

The ministry of Christ is one of reversal, the ministry of John the Baptizer was to turn hearts of fathers back to children and children back to fathers.

3. Mesotopia — The Battleground Middle

Mesotopia is where we actually live. It is the contested territory of the already and the not-yet—the overlap of the ages—the remaining battlefield of the divine council drama, the two cities Augustine mapped pressing toward the inevitable resolution. The fracture of Protopia has introduced genuine disorder to leak into God’s good creation—it is not an overwhelming Abyssotopian chaos because of God’s plan of redemption, but it is a deep structural dislocation—and the powers that resist the ordering are active and have some residual authority.

Most Christians are functionally living in Mesotopia with a finely tuned vehicle but with the wrong map. They know something about where the story began and something about where it ends, but the middle—the actual territory they inhabit—is navigated by instinct, cultural reflex, or on borrowed maps—like those of the utopian and dystopian worldviews. The result is a church that is spiritually sincere, theologically functional but cartographically lost.

Augustine's two cities are the essential Mesotopian map. They are a synchronic map—showing the two kingdoms coexisting at any given moment. The kingdom of man which dissolves into the kingdom of darkness which is destined for the trash heap. And the Kingdom of God, which comes, has come, and is coming, everlastingly so. They do not, by themselves, show the destination or the character of the territories ahead. They layout historical and prophetic landmarks and highlight the path of faith for us.

We each have to decide, are we building for Babylon or are we building for the New Jerusalem.

4. Telotopia — The Territory of Direction

Telotopia is the missing territory in most contemporary theological cartography, and its absence explains the two errors that dominate the church's imagination.

The telos is the directionality embedded in creation itself—not merely where we will end up, but the grain of the wood, the built-in tangent of history. Telos is not an endless circle of life, it is not a sum total of nothingness, and it is not creation itself becoming god. Telotopia is the territory where the goal of life—corporate or individual—becomes visible, operative, and achievable: the Kingdom advancing, the Spirit working, the already pressing into the not-yet with intentional momentum and the topology changes. This is where the church succeeds, where history has direction, where Paul's teleios language lives. And it needs a new map. If Mesotopia is the brain, then Telotopia is the mind.

In Ephesians 4:3 Paul tells us that we have a unity—the “unity of the Spirit”—which we must maintain, so it’s possible to lose it. But in verse 13 he tells us that we have been given the apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers—all nouns—“until we reach the unity of the faith.” The first unity is Mesotopian, the second is Telotopian, different charts for different regions. Telotopia is precisely “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.”

Telotopia is not the end. It is the approach with real momentum, with such victory as to be a new landscape. It is the victory of Jesus through the Church on earth, the victory of the individual saint, however temporary. This distinction is what gets collapsed when Telotopia is missing. Without it, Christians either conflate Telotopia with Eschatopia—coming up next—producing passivity and escapism. Or they conflate Telotopia with Aeonotopia—the last of our regions—claiming the full extent of God’s Kingdom must come on earth—a utopian ideology. Both errors emerge from the same cartographic failure. And this is precisely where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, in the dichotomy we face in the church. Which is it? Does God’s will and Kingdom come to earth or do we set our hearts and minds not on earthly things? It is, of course, both, different regions.

William Wilberforce, the Quakers and the Clapham Group left us a working model of navigating the Telotopia. Something evil and Biblically beastly has encapsulated our society—slavery and the slave trade—it has popular support and is encoded into law but it’s antithetical to Christ and to Christianity. Should we do something about it or shrug our shoulders knowing the Eschatopia is coming?
Doing something about evil is a collective activity, requiring the power and provision of the Spirit of God, the calling of Christ, and the unity and vision of men and women in pastoral, vocational, and political enterprise.

Telotopia is the answer to U2 who, “still haven’t found what they’re looking for.” And it’s not a purpose driven life. Purpose is the road, the terrain, not the driver!

Telotopia is the growing mountain of Daniel 2 and Isaiah 2 (distinct from the Day of the Lord). It is the assertion that “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14).
Such progress remains incomplete, contested, and subject to reversal where vigilance lapses—yet it demonstrates that Telotopia is no mere theoretical construct. Jesus will build His church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18).

Some may object that Telotopian grants too much victory before the King returns. They will cite increasing apostasy, the warnings of tribulation, or the ‘already/not yet’ tension. But the map of Telotopia does not deny that tension—it locates it. Mesotopia remains genuinely contested. Telotopia does not promise utopia. It promises directional progress, salt and light effects, and real victories that prophecy the coming age. The leaven works. The gates of hell do not prevail. A better question is not why evil is so prevalent, but why progress happens at all. As widely documented in development economics and historical sociology, global trends show marked, sustained improvement across key sociological metrics—extreme poverty, child mortality, literacy, life expectancy, and rates of violence. These gains have frequently correlated with the spread of Christian-influenced institutions, legal norms, and ethical frameworks—visible fruit of Telotopian advance amid ongoing opposition.

Without seeing the Telotopia distinct from the final two regions, the church turns one or the other into an internal conflict.

5. Eschatopia — The Threshold

Eschatopia is the territory of the rupture, and the rapture: the threshold where the tangent arrives, the Kingdoms-become-the-Kingdom declaration of Revelation 11, the moment when the divine interruption that was always coming finally breaks fully into the temporal order. It is the long promised and symbolized “Day of the Lord”. It is not the continuation of Telotopia at greater intensity. It is the new and terrifying territory of the appearance of the unhidden God, of fulfillment by divine act as absolutes are, once again, brought to bear—truth, justice, retribution, redemption.

N.T. Wright's cartographical correction—a genuine recovery of the horizontal dimension of the gospel, does risk something. It risks softening the end. When the telos feels self-completing—when the fullness of the Kingdom arrives as the culmination of the Telotopian advance rather than as the sovereign act of the returning King—Eschatopia loses its extreme and distinct character as threshold and becomes merely the far end of Telotopia. The result is a gospel that is right about direction but not quite right about destination: it knows we are going somewhere but forgets to emphasize that Someone is coming, and He will leave a crater that will change the landscape entirely.

Eschatopia is not the “things above” on which we set our hearts and minds.

6. Aeonotopia — The Eternal Age

The Greek aiōn—the root of aeon—carries in New Testament usage of both duration and character. Ho aiōn mellōn, the age to come, is not merely endless time. It is a regime, an order of reality with a king and a character. The eternal state is not empty endlessness. It is the age of the Messiah and His Bride, permanently open, the age that supersedes all other ages. In this framework it is a whole new region.

Aeonotopia is not a return to Protopia—not nostalgia for Eden’s good old days. It is the arrival at what the Logos always intended before the deep existed. The transit does not end where it began; it ends where it was always going. The new creation is not a restoration of the first ordering but its fulfillment, carried forward through all six territories and finally unveiled. Aeonotopia is also not merely an extension of Eschatopia.

Aeonotopia is that upon which we are to set our hearts and minds, it is the joy which was set before Christ through which He endured the cross, it was not mere Telotopian joy, neither was it Eschatopian wrath and revenge.

The difference between Telotopia, Eschatopia, and Aeonotopia is clearly visible in the transition between Revelation 4 and 5. Revelation 4—the magnificent scene is somewhat out of balance, 24 elders, 4 living beings—it hardly seems appropriate a display of worship for the the One on the Throne. The peals of thunder and flashes of lightning seem to indicate the unbalance. Then chapter 5 opens with the transition between the three. Suddenly we’re in Telotopia, with the slain Lamb, but we’re promised more because He is called the Lion of Judah! And then suddenly again we’re through Telotopia and into Aeonotopia as the walls fall away, and countless angels, men and women, all creation sings his praise. It is the transition from holy to worthy. 

The dystopian evangelical evacuation gospel is right that Aeonotopia is real, is coming, and is the whole point and the exegesis of everything. What it misses is that the route to Aeonotopia runs through Telotopia before arriving at Eschatopia—and that the route matters enormously. 

Aeonotopia is explained, rather beautifully, to Pippin by Gandalf in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, as a white beach, a sunrise, beauty and peace beyond compare. His explanation comes in the heat of a desperate Mesotopian battle full of the grime and exhaustion of war, death is not the end.

We see a very precise definition of the transition from Eschatopia to Aeonotopia in 1 Corinthians 15:24. “Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power.” Paul is not describing the end, but something that will happen after the end. After Christ has destroyed all rebellion—once we’re through Eschatopia—He will hand the Kingdom back to the Father in the Aeonotopia. Christ relinquishes the Kingship after the end. I discuss this further in these two articles:
https://www.firebrandchurch.com/happily-ever-after
https://www.firebrandchurch.com/seriously-its-happily-ever-after

Utopia is nowhere, dystopia is modern myth. Aeonotopia is the place we were always going toward.

Table

4. The Counter Strain

The two verses that frame this essay are not in nearly as much tension as you would think looking at the political divide between 21st century Christians in the Western world. They are in counter strain. Two forces pulling—not in opposite directions, but slightly divergent, like huskies pulling a sled—that together produce structural integrity. Like the tension in a suspension bridge, remove either strain and the whole collapses.

"Set your minds on things above—not on earthly things” (Colossians 3:2) is the vertical orientation. It fixes the reader's compass on Aeonotopia. It guards against the Mesotopian nihilist delusion that the present territory is the final one, against the seduction of any map that treats the contested middle as the destination.

"On earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10) is the horizontal vocation. It plants the reader's vision in Telotopia, even though their feet are in Mesotopia. It highlights the miraculous progress of the past despite the presence of evil. It guards against the evacuation instinct, against treating Mesotopia as mere waiting room, against a piety so heavenward that it does no earthly good.

Paul and Jesus are not contradicting each other. They are together describing the full posture of Mesotopian existence: mind oriented upward toward Aeonotopia so you will recognize where the transit ends and what the end goal looks like, prayer and vocation oriented outward toward Telotopia so you know what to do while you are getting there.

Colossians 3 points to the eternal Aeonotopia, we can peruse the map before we get there. What we have is hardly exhaustive, what we will be has not even yet been revealed. Matthew 6 gives us the Telotopia. We need both to navigate Mesotopia.

The Utopian Error 

Lennon’s imagined world and More’s perfectly arranged island are forms of Protopian nostalgia. They borrow the emotional grammar of arrival without the Eschatopian rupture, the threshold without the King who crosses it, the homecoming without the Father who runs to meet the returning son. It is a mirage of justice which Paul says in 2 Thessalonians kills evil beings and nullifies all evil acts. Our very best human justice systems barely mete out appropriate punishments; they certainly do nothing to undo the acts of evil. Protopian nostalgia wants us to embrace the noble savage in us all. In reality, we are all savage with no latent nobility at all.

This error is not limited to one tradition. Some forms of postmodern, progressive Christianity and over-realized postmillennialism conflate Telotopia with Aeonotopia, downplaying the eschaton and especially the absolutes it brings—judgment, justice, punishment, and reward. They treat the full arrival of the Kingdom as the natural culmination of human progress rather than the sovereign act of the returning King. 

The Church must resist being swept along in cultural pendulum swings between idealism and cynicism. The distinctions of the maps shows us a better way: genuine directional progress in Telotopia, but never apart from the coming rupture of Eschatopia and the finality of Aeonotopia.

The Dystopian Error 

The evacuation gospel of the dispensational error (for which I can find no softer definition) that treats history as a burning building, salvation as the exit, and Mesotopia as white-knuckle survival. It is Abyssotopian angst ignorant of Telotopia’s victory. It sees the deep behind every horizon, treats Mesotopia as essentially enemy territory, and produces a people waiting to leave rather than an army commissioned to navigate and to win.

The full six-territory map recognizes utopia and dystopia for what they are, illusions, mirages to be ignored. Mesotopia is genuinely contested—the powers are real, the fracture is deep, no human device resolves it, neither government nor revolution. Telotopia is genuinely achievable—history is not decay, it is progress. Creation has a grain, the kingdom is actually advancing the Powers and Principalities are being dislodged. Both utopians and dystopians are working with fewer maps than they need, and fewer than are actually given in the Bible.

5. Hermeneutical Consequence

Systematic theology is the vehicle manual. It tells you every part of the car with precision: the engine of substitutionary atonement, the fuel system of the Holy Spirit's work, the chassis of covenant. It is extraordinarily useful. But the manual tells you nothing about where the vehicle is going. Even the finest mechanic sitting in a perfectly tuned car needs to know where he’s going.

Traditional hermeneutics adds important tools: genre recognition, covenantal context, historical-grammatical method, textual criticism. These tell you what kind of road you are on and how it was built. But it doesn’t tell you where you are on the map.

Gospel Cartography adds the road atlas in six distinct charts. It asks: in which of the six territories is this text situated, and what does that territory demand of the reader? A Mesotopian text read with Aeonotopian coordinates will produce a certain level of disorientation. An Eschatopian text read with Telotopian expectations will produce false triumphalism. The wrong map for the territory is not merely academically imprecise. It is also pastorally dangerous.

The proof-texting problem that plagues popular Christianity is—at root—a cartographic problem. People are not necessarily reading the wrong Bible. They are reading the wrong territory into the text. Every passage exists in a territory. The territory shapes the text's navigational function. Gospel Cartography is the discipline of reading with that awareness.

Gospel Cartography does not oppose systematic theology. It does not replace traditional hermeneutics. It works in conjunction with both—adding a third axis to the reading of scripture, the axis of location. Where are we in the transit? What map does this territory require? These are not new questions. They are the questions that have always lurked beneath the surface of faithful biblical interpretation, waiting to be named.

Although most of our theological conflict arises when we conflate Telotopia with either Eschatopia or Aeonotopia, there is a subtler error worth mentioning, that of conflating Eschatopia with Aeonotopia.
The finest Biblical example of the vast differences between these two hermeneutical terrains is in the eight movements of Revelation. Revelation is not seven sets of sevens, is is actually eight (from Revelation 21:9 to its conclusion). The final scene is not the end, it is the beginning that is beyond the end; a new week, so to speak. Jesus is the bringer of a new heaven & earth, a new city whose provision is God Himself.

6. Reading the Map

CS Lewis said it best in Mere Christianity: "If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the NEXT."  The church's cartographic disorientation is not permanent. The map has not been lost—it has been buried under centuries of Western systematization and, more recently, under the borrowed maps of a culture fluent in utopian longing and dystopian anxiety. The six territories were always there in the text.

The six-stage transit—Abyssotopia, Protopia, Mesotopia, Telotopia, Eschatopia, Aeonotopia—is not a new theology. It is an attempt to recover the full narrative grammar of the gospel and render it cartographically legible. To give the congregation, the individual believer, and the Christian scholar a map that is large enough to contain the whole story: void, first ordering, contested middle, incremental advance, divine rupture, eternal age.

With this map, the counter strain of Colossians 3 and Matthew 6 resolves not into compromise but into posture. Eyes up, feet down, one step at a time. Compass fixed towards Aeonotopia, vocation rooted in Telotopia, feet planted in Mesotopia, the Abyssotopian powers named and located, the Protopian telos remembered, the Eschatopian judgement awaited.

This is not Lennon's imagined world. It is also not Orwell’s burning building. It is the whole voyage—accurately charted, faithfully navigated, and ending exactly where the Logos always intended.

The gospel is not an evacuation plan. It is a map of the whole transit—from the abyss over which the Spirit hovered, to the eternal age the Logos always intended. Learn to read it.

© Alan R. Jones