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

by Brian Zahnd

Particularly in the church in the USA. Why? Because after a century or more of rather simple confusion of the church and state due to the vast majority of Americans calling themselves Christians, or at least being comfortable with a Christian kind of country, Americans woke up to choice in the twentieth century. That century saw the gradual diminution of the church’s voice in the public sector and forced some Christians to a kind of activism of taking back what it thought it previously had. But it never had the state. Many thought the church’s voice was shaping the state or at least calling it back to its roots, but we have learned that the state had the church by the throat.

America is always right in war—I’d known that all of my life. Like many Americans, I had grown up believing that war was both inevitable in life and compatible with Christianity. So while America’s pastor prayed with America’s president in the White House and Wolf Blitzer gave the play-by-play, I ate pizza and watched a war on TV in my living room. It was better than Seinfeld!

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.

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.

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.

We do this mostly unconsciously, but we do it. I’ve done it. And the result is that we reduce Jesus to being the Savior who guarantees our reservation in heaven while using him to endorse our own ideas about how to run the world.

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.

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!

Two thousand years have not made the ideas taught by Jesus of Nazareth any less radical than those that so threatened Pontius Pilate and the imperial ideology he was aligned with. What has happened over the ensuing two millennia is that we who confess Christ have deftly (and mostly unconsciously) crafted a religion that neatly separates the Jesus who died on the cross for the radical ideas he preached—ideas that Jesus foresaw would lead to his crucifixion.

It seems we Christians have had a habitual tendency to separate Jesus from his ideas. This bifurcation between Jesus and his political ideas has a history—it can be traced back to the early fourth century when Christianity first attained favored status in the Roman Empire.

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.

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.

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. Which is what we want—especially if the present arrangement of the world has our own particular nation situated near the top. Because while we believe in Jesus as Savior of the private soul, we remain largely unconvinced about his ideas for saving the world.

Jesus actually intends to save the world! And by world, I mean God’s good creation and God’s original intent for human society.

In short the problem is this: far too few who believe in the risen Christ actually believe in his revolutionary ideas. 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.

As Walter Brueggemann describes our situation, “Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing.”4

And where are we? 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. All in an outright betrayal of Jesus Christ and his revolutionary ideas.

The resurrection is not only God’s vindication of his Son; it is the vindication of all Jesus taught.

Once you extricate Jesus from subservience to a nationalistic agenda, you can rethink everything in the light of Christ. And isn’t that required of a Christian?

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!

It’s not that God is opposed to nations—he’s not. God has appointed the nations with their rich diversity and unique cultures. Nations are essential for how a person becomes a person with a particular language, identity, and culture. 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 is opposed to the agenda of empire for this simple reason: God makes the same claim for his Son!

The thought that makes me so happy is that Jesus is the Savior of the world! This world that you and I inhabit—where we go to work, do our living, raise our children, and try to find meaning and happiness—Jesus is the Savior of that! 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!

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 heaven) for the low one-time cost of a sinner’s prayer. How hard is that? And since it mostly applies to the next life, why wouldn’t you pray the prayer? If for no other reason than as a kind of afterlife insurance.

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.

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 (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.

Why do you go to church? Why are you a Christian?

Christian happiness is based in the conviction that because of the accomplishments of Christ, the future is a friend.

With this in mind let me introduce you to a Jewish scholar and rabbi who insisted that an eschatology of hope is required of those who confess faith in God. His name is Emil Fackenheim, and he came to embrace an eschatology of hope in direct response to the Holocaust.

In 1982 Fackenheim wrote To Mend the World, an influential book on post-Holocaust Jewish thought. The title comes from the Jewish theological concept of tikkun olam—“repairing the world.” 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 humanity in order to repair his creation.

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

A Christian understanding of tikkun olam is that God is restoring all things through Jesus Christ.2 And while it may be true that the Jewish community in general has not recognized that God is repairing the world through Jesus, Christians often fail to recognize that God is repairing the world at all!

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!

This teaching also claims that this all depends on our belief, and that without converting the world to that belief his kingdom will not come. As if it all depends on us!

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 appropriate response to this gospel proclamation is to rethink everything in the light of the risen and ascended Christ and live accordingly. 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 to redeem the human person and renovate human society in Christ.

The Bible tells the story of humanity going wrong from the first.

Interestingly, anthropology tells a similar story (at least in part). 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.

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.

Blood and soil.

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.

In 1991 two hikers in the Italian Alps stumbled upon a 5,300-year-old corpse that would later be dubbed “Ötzi the Iceman.” Preserved for more than five millennia in the ice and dry mountain air, Ötzi is the oldest intact corpse ever found. Forensic investigation revealed that Ötzi was most likely a shepherd. Ötzi was also a murder victim.

I find it poignant and sadly apropos that the oldest human corpse was not found resting in a peaceful grave with attendant signs of reverence,

Yet it is the very claim that Jesus is the Savior of the world (in ways beyond the interiorized realm of private religion) that invites incredulity. The skeptic (or maybe even the Christian) will say, “But just look at the world! How has Jesus made the world any different than it’s always been?” It’s a fair question and one we should tackle head-on. So let’s take the question at face value and ponder just how Jesus has made the world different from what it’s always been.

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.

But what skeptics often fail to realize is that it is precisely because of Calvary that we call these things atrocities and not normalcy.

Jesus has taught us to see the sick, the poor, the prisoner, and the stranger as his brothers … as our brothers … as Jesus himself! This is something entirely new. It was not something bequeathed to us by the pagan world. It was not something the pagan world was capable of producing.

But in reconfiguring the world around love instead of competition, Jesus answered Cain’s question with a resounding yes … and then said to us, “And here are your brothers; take care of them.”

As I point out to secular critics, 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.

So the next time you drive past a children’s hospital or a free medical clinic or see a relief agency going about its work of compassion, you should see it as an expression of how Jesus saves the world from its uncaring pagan past—a pagan past we need to remember.

Today the victims of all systems of greed, injustice, and exploitation are given a face—and it is the face of Christ. That Jesus won his kingdom in a way that gives him solidarity with victims everywhere is something that would have been utterly inconceivable to Ramesses the Great, Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar.

Because Jesus suffered as a victim of ambitious power hiding behind a facade of legitimacy, all victims of ambitious power are now brought into the light.