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

by Brian Zahnd

O God, you have made of one blood all the peoples of the earth, and sent your blessed Son to preach peace to those who are far off and to those who are near: Grant that people everywhere may seek after you and find you; bring the nations into your fold; pour out your Spirit upon all flesh, and hasten the coming of your kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. —The Book of Common Prayer

Though some may contest the point—and I’ve heard them do so for years—there is something profoundly unsettling about watching those who follow Jesus, the Prince of Peace, use weapons of warfare to kill others and still think they are somehow following Jesus. At the simplest level of evangelicalism—and by that I mean anyone who affirms salvation in Christ alone—it impossible for me to comprehend how a Christian can kill a non-Christian who is thereby prevented from turning to Christ, just as it is also beyond me how any Christian can kill another Christian at the orders of state military leaders. In both instances, the Christian renders to Caesar what is due only to Christ.

Our responsibility is not to chaplain the state but to call the state to repentance and to surrender to the King who is Lord.

My claim, which I’m told is audacious by some and naive by others, is simply this: Jesus Christ and his peaceable kingdom are the hope of the world. So let me declare from the very beginning: I believe in Jesus Christ! I believe what the canonical gospels report and what the historic creeds confess concerning the crucified and risen Christ. That’s what makes me an orthodox Christian. But I also believe in Jesus’s ideas—the ideas he preached about the peaceable kingdom of God. And that’s what makes me a radical Christian. Believing in the divinity of Jesus is the heart of Christian orthodoxy. But believing in the viability of Jesus’s ideas makes Christianity truly radical.

Conscripting Jesus to a nationalistic agenda creates a grotesque caricature of Christ that the church must reject—now more than ever! Understanding Jesus as the Prince of Peace who transcends idolatrous nationalism and overcomes the archaic ways of war is an imperative the church must at last begin to take seriously.

Can humanity possess the capacity for self-destruction and not resort to it? The jury is still out. But this much is certain—if we think the ideas of Jesus about peace are irrelevant in the age of genocide and nuclear weapons, we have invented an utterly irrelevant Christianity!

For seventeen centuries Christianity has offered a gospel where we can accept Jesus as our personal Savior while largely ignoring his ideas about peace, violence, and human society. We have embraced a privatized, postmortem gospel that stresses Jesus dying for our sins but at the same time ignores his political ideas. This leaves us free to run the world the way it has always been run: by the power of the sword.

If Jesus of Nazareth had preached the paper-thin version of what passes for the “gospel” today—a shrunken, postmortem promise of going to heaven when you die—Pilate would have shrugged his shoulders and released the Nazarene, warning him not to get mixed up in the affairs of the real world. But that’s not what happened. Why? Because Pilate was smart enough to understand that what Jesus was preaching was a challenge to the philosophy of empire (or as we prefer to call it today, superpower). In making Christ the chaplain-in-chief of Constantinian Christianity, what was unwittingly done was to invent a Manichean Jesus who saves our souls while leaving us free to run the affairs of the world as we see fit.

The resurrection is not only God’s vindication of his Son; it is the vindication of all Jesus taught. Easter Sunday is nothing less than the triumph of the peaceable kingdom of Christ. Easter changes everything. Easter is the hope of the world, the dawn of a new age, the rising of the New Jerusalem on the horizon of humanity’s burned-out landscape. Easter is God saying once again, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him!”

I first started thinking this way while reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s prophetic novel, Demons.

I raise the nation up to God. Has it ever been otherwise? The nation is the body of God. Any nation is a nation only as long as it has its own particular God and rules out all other gods in the world with no conciliation; as long as it believes that through its God it will be victorious and will drive all other gods from the world. … A truly great nation can never be reconciled with a secondary role in mankind, or even with a primary, but inevitably and exclusively with the first. Any that loses this faith is no longer a nation. But the truth is one, and therefore only one among the nations can have the true God.5

What I saw was that great and powerful nations shape God into their own image; great and powerful nations conscript God to do their bidding. Great and powerful nations use the idea and vocabulary of God to legitimize their own agenda. Great and powerful nations project God as a personification of their own national interests. And for the most part, they don’t know they are doing it.

There are no “Christian nations” in the political sense. The risen Christ does have a “nation” (see Matt. 21:43), but it’s not a nationalized body politic, rather it’s the baptized body of Messiah!

does truth shout with a whisper and stand out with subtlety? I think I caught a glimpse of truth out of the corner of my eye. It terrified me as I fell in love with it. I said, This explains everything. This changes everything. This challenges everything. This threatens everything. This transforms everything. Dare I speak it? The truth I caught out of the corner of my eye? Every empire of man is built upon a lie; they come to kill, steal, and destroy. Every empire of man is built upon a lie; all virtue is subject to sacrifice upon the altar of imperial expediency. Every empire of man is built upon a lie; God or gods exist only to serve its cause. Every empire of man is built upon a lie; religion takes off its mask when it says— We have no king but Caesar. The ultimate betrayal, the final apostasy, every empire of man is built upon a lie.

Every empire of man is built upon a lie: Self-promotion and Self-preservation, Greed and Lust, Industry and War, the industry of war. Long live the Empire! Keep the Empire alive, and to keep the Empire alive many will be made to die, because the Empire lives by the sword and dies by the same. Every empire of man is built upon a lie.

Every empire of man is built upon a lie. So when Christ came he did not bring another empire of men built upon a lie as the liar in the desert tempted. Instead he brought the Empire of God, Good News!

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

And you thought it was just Sunday school banality or empty religious sentimentality to pray Thy Empire come Thy Policy be done.

You had no idea it was dissident and subversive, because every empire of men is built upon a lie. The lie that the empire has God on its side. I glimpsed this truth out of the corner of my eye. And if you ask me my politics, I will say, Jesus is Lord! I glimpsed this truth out of the corner of my eye.

In fact, in the 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.

In To Mend the World, Emil Fackenheim famously dares to issue to the Jewish community a “614th Commandment.” It’s an audacious proposition. As far back as the medieval scholar Maimonides, Jewish rabbis have spoken of the Torah containing 613 commandments. But precisely because of the enormity of the Holocaust experience, Fackenheim tells his fellow Jews they must now add one more law to their ancient Torah—a 614th commandment. Commandment 614 is simply this: Thou shalt not give Hitler any posthumous victories. Elaborating on the 614th Commandment, 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.”1

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.

Salvation is a restoration project, not an evacuation project! Or as 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 world.”3

If we believe the lie that they are “not like us,” we are capable of becoming murderers and monsters.

David Bentley Hart speaks to this when he says: Even the most ardent secularists among us generally cling to notions of human rights, economic and social justice, providence for the indigent, legal equality, or basic human dignity that pre-Christian Western culture would have found not so much foolish as unintelligible. It is simply the case that we distant children of the pagans would not be able to believe in any of these things—they would never have occurred to us—had our ancestors not once believed that God is love, that charity is the foundation of all virtues, that all of us are equal before the eyes of God, that to fail to feed the hungry or care for the suffering is to sin against Christ, and that Christ laid down his life for the least of his brethren.4

I know of many St. Jude and St. James hospitals, orphanages, relief agencies, and the like, but I’m still looking for the Nietzsche hospital or the Voltaire children’s home.

What the city of Cain in its Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman expressions excelled at was building an empire by making victims out of those who got in the way. And you can be sure the victims of pagan empires were nameless and faceless victims.

Among the important things my dad taught me was this jewel of counterintuitive wisdom: the majority is almost always wrong. I remember him saying that to me on many occasions. It was a warning to be suspicious of the crowd, to not trust the crowd, to resist going along with the crowd. My father, as a judge and a man of politics, knew that one of the responsibilities of a just democracy is to protect the minority from the majority. And why? Because the majority is not as interested in truth as it is in power—and power in the hands of a crowd is often used for revenge and scapegoating. The disturbing truth is that a crowd can too easily become a lynch mob, whether literally or metaphorically.

Søren Kierkegaard was saying the same thing my father taught me when he made this succinct observation: “The crowd is untruth.” Kierkegaard then goes on to further indict the crowd with this stinging critique, “The crowd is indeed untruth. Christ was crucified because he would have nothing to do with the crowd.”1

As Kierkegaard said, “To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions.”2

Jesus is the sacrificial victim who shows us that sacrifice is not what God wants. God wants mercy, not sacrifice; forgiveness, not scapegoating. Jesus is the Good Shepherd who forgives us and calls us out of the crowd and into his little flock.

three transformational truths: The majority is almost always wrong. The crowd is untruth. Scapegoating is demonic.

Because God loves us, we are free to love others—even our enemies. And after all, once you take fear off the table, how many enemies do you really have? We don’t need to blame. We don’t need to multiply enemies.

Patriarch Bartholomew has said: Unless our actions are founded on love, rather than on fear, they will never be able to overcome fanaticism or fundamentalism. … Only those who know—deep inside the heart—that they are loved can be true peacemakers. Our peacemaking ultimately stems from and relates to love for all of God’s creation, both human and environmental. In this form, peacemaking is a radical response to policies of violence and the politics of power.5

We are mad if we imagine that the God of love revealed in Jesus will bless us in waging war. That is madness! But it’s a pervasive and beloved madness.

As the climax of the Hebrew prophetic tradition, Jesus did not merely testify against symptomatic sin—in fact, he spent very little time doing this. Rather, Jesus struck at the heart of the systemic evil that has provided the foundation for human civilization. Jesus didn’t seem very interested in exposing symptomatic sinners—tax collectors, drunkards, prostitutes, etc. Instead Jesus challenged the guardians of systemic sin—the power brokers of religion and politics. Jesus knew that tax collectors were greedy and violent, but he was more interested in focusing his prophetic critique on the foundations of greed and violence that inevitably produce greedy and violent people. Sinful tax collectors were merely a symptom of a sinful but hidden system. The sinful and hidden system of greed and violence is “the world.”

So when Jesus comes along and says to us, “Love your enemy,” we instinctively feel how radical it is. He’s not just giving individuals a personal ethic; he is striking at the very foundation of the world! The world was founded on hating enemies, and now Jesus says, “Don’t do it!” When Jesus said, “Turn the other cheek,” he wasn’t just trying to produce kinder, gentler people; he was trying to refound the world! Instead of retaliatory violence; the world is to be refounded on cosuffering love.

If nations can’t hate and scapegoat their enemies, how can they cohere? If societies can’t project blame onto a hated “other,” how can they keep from turning on themselves? Jesus’s answer is as simple as it is revolutionary: instead of an arrangement around hate and violence, the world is now to be arranged around love and forgiveness. The fear of our enemy and the pain of being wronged is not to be transferred through blame but dispelled through forgiveness. Unity is not to be built around the practice of scapegoating a hated victim but around the practice of loving your neighbor as yourself—even if your neighbor is your enemy. Jesus was trying to lead humanity into the deep truth that there is no “them;” there is only us.

The cross is shock therapy for a world addicted to solving its problems through violence. The cross shocks us into the devastating realization that our system of violence murdered God!

Jesus founded his kingdom in solidarity with brutalized victims. This is the gospel, but it’s hard for us to believe in a Jesus who would rather die than kill his enemies. It’s harder yet to believe in a Jesus who calls us to take up our own cross, follow him, and be willing to die rather than kill our enemies.

To believe in Jesus fully, to believe in Jesus as more than a personal Savior, to believe in Jesus without qualifications, to believe in Jesus as God’s way to run the world, to believe in Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount, to believe in Jesus as the unimagined solution for a world gone wrong and not as merely chaplain or cheerleader for our favorite version of the status quo is very hard to do.

Telling the crowd that God is on our side is never a bad career move.

I learned that it is much easier to unite people around a Jesus who hates our enemies and blesses our wars than it is to unite people around a Jesus who calls us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. It broke my heart to learn that people are not as easily drawn to a gospel of peace as they are to a rally for war.

The crowd said, “We’re talking about freedom,” but Jesus said, “No, you’re talking about killing.” Jesus was unmasking what lay behind the crowd’s euphemistic use of words like freedom. Jesus was telling them a truth about themselves that had long been hidden from them—a truth they really don’t want to know. Jesus also understood that in revealing this truth to the crowd, he would become their enemy and they would seek to kill him. And what happened? By the end of the chapter the crowd was seeking to stone Jesus. Six months later they cried out for his crucifixion.

For the crowd, freedom was just another word for killing. For Jesus, freedom was another word for love.

But one important way of understanding the Akedah is that it is Abraham gaining the revelation that God does not want human sacrifice. This is a new trajectory for worship. At Moriah human sacrifice met its Waterloo—at least as a rite for what will become the Hebrew people. If Abraham is the father of monotheism, Abraham is also the father of the abolition of human sacrifice. When Abraham laid down the knife on Moriah and offered a ram instead of his son, humanity took a huge step in the right direction. (A thousand years later the Hebrew prophet Hosea would announce that God does not desire sacrifice at all—something Jesus twice affirmed. See Hosea 6:6, Matt. 9:13, and Matt. 12:7.) In other words, Abraham abandoned the idea of killing in the name of God. This is what Jesus was talking about! This is what Abraham did! This is why Jesus told the crowd that if they were truly Abraham’s children they would do what Abraham did and not seek to kill in the name of God.

Violence cannot tolerate the presence of one who owes it nothing. It’s why everyone at a stoning needs to throw a rock. If someone at a stoning doesn’t participate, they are in danger of becoming the next victim. For the illusion of innocence to work, everyone must participate in the collective murder. The one who won’t throw a rock becomes a prophet shining light on the evil of stoning. The community must then either repent or stone the prophet.

Jesus was bringing the reign and rule of God where freedom would not be a cover for killing but an expression of self-giving love.

When your city is built upon violence, freedom is just another word for killing your brother. But when your city is built upon love, freedom is just another word for being your brother’s keeper.

Jesus brings us the truth that will set us free. The truth is that God is love and light. The truth is that our enemies are really our alienated brothers. The truth is there is no “them”—there is only us. The truth is that freedom is love, not power. The truth is there is another way to arrange human civilization than what we have known. The tru...