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

by Brian Zahnd

But while contemporary writers and filmmakers explore the dark possibility of a postapocalyptic world, it is entirely feasible that a world without Christmas and Easter would have already crossed the threshold into a postapocalyptic reality. And what has saved us? Jesus! Yes, I believe this. Jesus’s achievement in giving humanity an ethic of mercy through the incarnation of love has already done much to save the world from the fate of a self-inflicted Gehenna. How? It works like this: once the world came to see Christ’s death upon the cross as an act of cosuffering love and an alternative to violent revenge, it introduced a saving grace that helped mitigate man’s inhumanity to man. Nothing has done more to confer dignity upon the individual person than the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. If God can become human, then we must reconsider how we treat our fellow humans. The incarnation has, without question, made the world a more humane place by raising the dignity of every individual.