Answer
The World Transformation Movement (WTM) is a global organization that addresses humanity’s fundamental problems through biopsychology. Biologist and author Jeremy Griffith founded the movement in Sydney, Australia, in 1983. Griffith believed humans were inherently good but corrupted by external factors. While Griffith’s teachings have appealed to many people, his ideas stand in stark contrast to those of biblical Christianity.
The World Transformation Movement teaches that “all our species’ psychologically upset angry, egocentric and alienated behaviour can now, immediately, be put aside, and eventually, over a few generations, completely disappear, thus bringing about the complete rehabilitation and transformation of the human race and thus of our planet” (from their official website, accessed 12/5/24). Griffith’s primary idea is that humans do not understand their real nature. According to Griffith, we experience guilt, shame, and alienation because of a war between our instincts (which still follow natural selection) and our intellect. Griffith believes the solution is to understand ourselves as fundamentally good, not bad. The key to humanity’s salvation is self-knowledge.
According to the World Transformation Movement, once we reach an understanding of our true condition and the reasons for our corrupted condition, we can “transition from a competitive and selfishly behaved person to a cooperative and selflessly behaved one, a truly integrative part of humanity” (ibid.). The resulting transformation will allow humanity to “mature” into “adulthood.”
Scripture teaches something quite different about human nature. According to the Bible, humans are not inherently good. Adam and Eve, the first humans, were created in God’s image and had perfect fellowship with Him, but they transgressed God’s command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 3). Adam’s disobedience introduced sin into the world, leading to our alienation from God and from each other.
In Romans 3:23, the apostle Paul writes, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (ESV). Our most significant problem is not a conflict between instinct and intellect, as the World Transformation Movement teaches, but a heart corrupted by sin, which we inherit at birth: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did not my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5, ESV; see also Romans 5:12). Thus, we cannot achieve God’s standard of goodness and righteousness on our own: “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away” (Isaiah 64:6, ESV). Griffith denies original sin and in fact denies a personal God. According to the World Transformation Movement, God is simply “our personification of Integrative Meaning” (op cit.).
The World Transformation Movement’s teachings claim to be “carefully argued and evidenced, and fully accountable, first-principle-based science” (op cit.), but they can more accurately be described as a false gospel. Intellectualism and self-knowledge cannot save us. We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone in Christ alone (Ephesians 2:8–9). Freedom from guilt and shame comes only through the finished work of Christ: “For freedom, Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1, ESV).
Griffith and the World Transformation Movement encourage us to look inward for salvation rather than outward and upward to God. Self-centeredness leads to ruin and destruction. Jeremiah 17:9 warns that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (ESV). God is the only one who understands our sick hearts and can heal us.
The World Transformation Movement represents the danger of human-centered philosophies. Colossians 2:8 says, “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ” (ESV). WTM might appear intellectual and scientific, but it is sophistry, plain and simple.
Believers must be careful not to exalt human reason above divine revelation. Rejecting biblical teachings on sin and redemption by embracing “a different gospel” (2 Corinthians 11:4) will lead us away from the only truth that can set us free (John 8:32). Human insight cannot reconcile us with God or resolve the separation caused by sin—only Christ can bridge the gap (1 Timothy 2:5).
Believers must reject theories such as put forward by the World Transformation Movement. Let us cling to the gospel, which proclaims that salvation is found not in ourselves but in Christ: “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23, ESV).
