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

by Brian Zahnd

Because this is what empires do. Silence the prophets who will not prostitute the truth. Religion is tolerated.

Imperial religion is ...

But the prophetic hope of another way must be censored even by the sword. This is the way of empire. Because every e...

Constantine can become a Christian, but Constantine cannot baptize the Empire. The E...

hearts of men one a...

every empire of men is built upon a lie. The lie that the empire has God on its side.

happy thought

My happy thought is this confession: Jesus is the Savior of the world.

Jesus is not a heavenly conductor handing out tickets to heaven. Jesus is the carpenter who repairs, renovates, and restores God’s good world. The divine vision and original intention for human society is not to be abandoned, but saved.

That’s a big deal! It’s the gospel! And it makes me happy!

As a zealous American evangelical, I spent plenty of time peddling “the bus ride to heaven” reduced version of the gospel. I can tell you it’s a pretty easy sell. You promise the moon (actually he...

the important thing was to fill up the bus for the postmortem ride to heaven. That’s largely how I understood and preached the gospel. And, yes, at times it did seem a little cheap. But plenty of people made decisions and prayed the prayer.

Eventually I reached a crisis point concerning what the gospel is and how it should be preached. To a large extent, this came about when I began to seriously

read the apostolic sermons found in the book of Acts.

eight gospel sermons found in the book of Acts,

not one of them is based on afterlife issues! Instead they proclaimed that the world now had a new emperor and his name was Jesus!

Their witness was this: the Galilean Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, had been executed by Roman crucifixion, but God had vindicated him by raising him from the dead. The world now had a new boss: Jesus the Christ. What the world’s new Lord (think emperor) is doing is saving the world. This includes the personal forgiveness of sins and the promise of being with the Lord in the interim between death and resurrection as well as after the resurrection, but the w...

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.

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.

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.

in order to claim that our Christian message is “good news,” we must honestly believe that we are headed for something that is ultimately hopeful.

Without an anticipated end that justifies God’s act of creation itself, happiness is mostly a form of escapist fantasy. And faith should never be confused with fantasy.

Emil Fackenheim, and he came to embrace an eschatology of hope in direct response to the Holocaust.

Kristallnacht—the

To Mend the World,

influential book on post-Holocaust Jewish thought.

tikkun olam—“repairing t...

Tikkun olam is the idea that although the world is broken, it is not beyond repair—that it’s God’s intention to work through huma...

Fackenheim says, “We are forbidden to despair of the world as the place which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted.”

Fackenheim was saying to his own Jewish community that even in the face of the Holocaust, they are not permitted to give up on the world; despite all the atrocities, they must continue to believe that a horribly broken world can be repaired.

course tikkun olam is properly a Jewish concept, but it is a Jewish concept that Christians can and should embrace. A Christian understanding of tikkun olam is that God is restoring all things through Jesus Christ.

Christians often fail to recognize that God is repairing the world at all! The Jewish failure to embrace Jesus as the restorer of the world is explainable, at least in part, due to the long, sad history of Christian anti-Semitism, pogroms, and persecutions. But the Christian failure to embrace Jesus as the restorer of the world lacks any justification.

Somewhere along the way, we picked up the inexcusable idea that God has given up on the world. This is especially true in certain forms of world-denying fundamentalism.

Far too many American Christians embrace a faulty, half-baked, doom-oriented, hyperviolent eschatology, popularized in Christian fiction (of all things!), that envisions God as saving parts of people for a nonspatial, nontemporal existence in a Platonic “heaven” while kicking his own good creation into the garbage can!

evangelism comes to resemble something like trying to push people onto the las...

Christianity’s first apostles evangelized, not by trying to sign people up for an apocalyptic evacuation, but by announcing the arrival of a new world order.

The apostles understood the kingdom of God as a new arrangement of human society where Jesus is the world’s true King. Put simply: because Jesus is Lord, the world is to be redeemed and not left in ruin.

The appropriate response to this gospel proclamation is to rethink everything in the light of the risen and ascen...

We rethink our lives (which is what it means to repent) not so we can escape a doomed planet, but in order to participate in God’s design ...

Salvat...

a restoration project, not an evacuati...

Thomas Merton put it, “Eschatology is not an invitation to escape into a private heaven: it is a call to transfigure the evil and stricken...

The Bible tells the story of humanity going wrong from the first. A transgression in the garden led to an expulsion from paradise, culminating in brother killing brother and a world addicted to violence.

envisioned alternative of a kingdom of peace and justice set forth by the Hebrew prophets.

Anthropologists tell us that the rise of human civilization was made possible largely through the harnessing of agriculture. But this also resulted in the unleashing of violence and the birth of the organized violence we call war. Agriculture-based civilization was a double-edged sword. Cultivating crops allowed for settled and larger communities that gave rise to greater technology and richer culture. Written language originally developed as a means of recording grain stores. But then, it could also be used to record everything from science to sonnets,

enriching the whole spectrum of human culture. Unfortunately there is also a dark side. An agriculture-based economy introduced the new concept of land ownership, and once land could be owned, it could be coveted and fought over. This propelled civilization down the road to tribalistic social structure. Civilization advanced by treading upon the corpses of those who were “not us” and “not on our side.” This was especially true as conflict arose between the settled agriculture communities and the nomadic shepherding communities who had differing understandings of land (which is one way of understanding the Cain and Abel story).

human civilization founded in murder. And the rest is history. Literally.

Humanity’s worst sins and most heinous crimes occur when we follow the way of Cain as the founder of human civilization and refuse to recognize the shared humanity of our brothers and fail to acknowledge our responsibility to be our brother’s keeper.

When vicious competition and blind commitment to tribalism become more valued than the brotherhood of shared humanity, we let Satan loose in our midst. When we denigrate those of differing nationalities, ethnicities, religions, politics, and classes to a dehumanized “them,” we open the door to deep hostility and the potential for unimaginable atrocities. If we believe the lie that they are “not li...

find it poignant and sadly apropos that the oldest human corpse was not found resting in a peaceful grave with attendant signs of reverence, but sprawled upon a bleak mountainside with an arrow in his back.