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

by Brian Zahnd

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.

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. This feeds into a nationalized narrative

it too often seems that those who are most committed to the person of Jesus Christ see little need to get Jesus mixed up in the real-world work of peacemaking

If Yeshua had been content to confine himself to the dreamy world of afterlife expectations and had not harbored revolutionary ideas about human social structure, Pilate would have seen little reason to bother with Yeshua, much less crucify him. But Yeshua did have revolutionary ideas. And it was Yeshua’s ideas about an alternative arrangement of the world—an arrangement that might best be called peace—that resulted in his death by state-sponsored execution.

We have embraced a privatized, postmortem gospel that stresses Jesus dying for our sins but at the same time ignores his political ideas.

Because while we believe in Jesus as Savior of the private soul, we remain largely unconvinced about his ideas for saving the world.

the mission of Christ extends far beyond the narrow spectrum of private spirituality and afterlife expectations.