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by
Brian Zahnd
Of course that was part of the problem: televised war carried out by cruise missiles and smart bombs launched from a safe distance seemed like a video game … except that the points scored were human beings killed.
it’s the story of how I left the paradigms of nationalism, militarism, and violence as a legitimate means of shaping the world to embrace the radical alternative of the gospel of peace.
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.
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The problem is this: when we separate Jesus from his ideas for an alternative social structure, we inevitably succumb to the temptation to harness Jesus to our ideas—thus conferring upon our human political ideas an assumed divine endorsement.
Conscripting Jesus to a nationalistic agenda creates a grotesque caricature of Christ that the church must reject—now more than ever!
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!
Jesus called these revolutionary ideas “the kingdom of God.” Jesus also believed that ultimately the kingdom of God would triumph … but not through violence.
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.
Freedom becomes a euphemism for vanquishing (instead of loving) enemies; truth finds its ultimate form in the will to power (expressed in the willingness to kill).
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.
Pilate deserves our sympathies, not because he was a good though tragically mistaken man, but because we are not much better. We may believe in Jesus, but we do not believe in his ideas, at least not his ideas about violence, truth, and justice.2
There is a sense in which we create religion as a category to keep Jesus from meddling with our cherished ideas about nationalism, freedom, and war.
Wars continue to define us. Freedom remains a euphemism for the power to kill. Violence is still viewed as a legitimate way of shaping our world.
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!”
Shatov explains to Stavrogin how all great nations believe that God is expressly their God—that somehow great nations deify and personify their nation as God.
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 neither can they claim that the God revealed in the crucified and risen Christ is their God, committed to their interests! No! 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!
What God is opposed to, and has always been opposed to, is empire—rich and powerful nations that believe they have a divine right to rule other nations and a manifest destiny to shape the world according to their agenda.
God has made his Son the true, present, and eternal emperor of the world. With their nationalistic agendas the empires of this age make themselves a rival to Christ. This is never more clear than in the area of violence.
Out of the Corner of My Eye I think I caught a glimpse of truth out of the corner of my eye. A ghost, a whisper, a suspicion, a subtle and subversive rumor. So dangerous that every army would be commanded to march against it; so beautiful that it would drive those who see it to madness or sanity. Does the whole of my kind suffer from mental and moral vertigo? As Melville said of cabin boy Pip, he saw the foot of God upon the treadle of the loom and dared to speak it. Henceforth his shipmates called him mad. As Vladimir said when they came to bury Fyodor, the spiritual leader must feel the
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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. 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
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“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
Salvation is a restoration project, not an evacuation project!
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 like us,” we are capable of becoming murderers and monsters. And it’s been going on for a long, long time.
After all it was the followers of Jesus who pioneered such radical innovations as hospitals, orphanages, leprosariums, almshouses, relief for the poor, and public education. The idea that the world somehow or other
