A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor's Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace

by Brian Zahnd

Taken seriously this is a bold claim (and among skeptics a debatable one): Jesus is the Savior of the world. But this is what our Christian Scriptures tell us. (Explicitly in John 4:42 and 1 John 4:14, and in other ways throughout the entire New Testament.) Yet for that thought to make us happy enough to soar above the dismal status quo, it has to be liberated from the emaciated world of trite religious cliché. If what we mean by “Jesus saves the world” gets reduced to “saved people go to heaven when they die,” then Jesus is simply the one who saves us from the world, not the Savior of the world. But this is not what the apostle John meant when he spoke of Jesus as the Savior of the world. John was talking about something much bigger and much more expansive than individuals “accepting Jesus as their personal Savior.” John (and the rest of the apostolic writers of the New Testament) presented Christ as the Savior of God’s good creation and the restorer of God’s original intention for human society. This is the gospel! This is the apostolic gospel, and it’s a gospel that gives us an eschatology of hope. By eschatology of hope, I mean a Christian vision for the future that is redemptive and not destructive—more anticipating the New Jerusalem and less obsessed with Armageddon.