A Farewell to Mars

An Evangelical Pastor's Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace

Brian Zahnd

• Publisher: David C Cook
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780781411189
• eBook ISBN: 9781434707925
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

We know Jesus the Savior, but have we met Jesus, Prince of Peace? When did we accept vengeance as an acceptable part of the Christian life? How did violence and power seep into our understanding of faith and grace? For those troubled by this trend toward the sword, perhaps there is a better way. What if the message of Jesus differs radically from the drumbeats of war we hear all around us? Using his own journey from war crier to peacemaker and his in-depth study of peace in the scriptures, author and pastor Brian Zahnd reintroduces us to the gospel of Peace.

“That Preacher of Peace”

It was my worst sin.

That’s what I believe about it. And I deeply believe it. And I’m ashamed of it. But I’m going to tell you about it anyway. This confession is not because I have a penchant for sensational self-deprecation (I don’t) but because I want to write honestly. I hope that by telling the truth, what I have to say—especially about my own journey as it pertains to things like war and peace—will carry more weight. Anyway, here’s the story.

It was January 16, 1991. I was busy and excited. As the pastor of a rapidly growing nondenominational church, I was busy with all the sorts of things pastors do. But that day, I kept a radio on in my study to stay abreast of the big news: America was going to war! That was what I was excited about. The real fighting of the Gulf War was about to begin—Operation Desert Storm. The bombing of Baghdad. A real shooting war. And it was going to be on TV! That evening I hurried home, so terribly excited. This was going to be a first—a war was on, and CNN would be there to bring it live into my living room! Like the Super Bowl! And that’s how I treated it. Friends were invited to the viewing party. We ordered pizza. We watched a war. On TV. America won. CNN had huge ratings. Wolf Blitzer became famous. I was entertained.

I certainly had no qualms about America going to war. That is what America did. America went to war to keep the world “safe for democracy.” Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. The UN had passed a resolution. “America’s pastor” had prayed with America’s president. And anyway, wasn’t Iraq the nefarious Babylon of biblical prophecy? Dropping bombs on Babylon had such a powerful apocalyptic appeal that it just felt right.

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!

And I didn’t think about it again for fifteen years. I promise you, my pizza-eating, war-watching evening of entertainment didn’t cross my mind for fifteen years. Then, one day in 2006, while I was in prayer, for no apparent reason this whole scene from a decade and half earlier played back in my mind. I had forgotten all about it. But there it was, played back in my memory like an incriminating surveillance video. Then I heard God whisper, “That was your worst sin.” That whisper was a devastating blow. I wept and repented and wept. Had I been so shallow, so desensitized, so lacking in Christ-likeness that I could think of war and violent death as a kind of entertainment? 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.

On the few occasions I have shared this story, there are always those who want to assure me that this could not possibly be my worst sin. All I can say is I know the whisper I heard in prayer. But I do find solace in the fact that January 1991 was a long time ago, and I’m no longer that person. How I reached the point where I could weep over war and repent of any fascination with it is part of what this book is about—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.

But this book is mostly about Jesus of Nazareth and the revolutionary ideas he preached—especially his ideas about peace. This first-century Jew from whose birth we date our common era, this One who became the heir of Isaiah’s ancient moniker Prince of Peace preached a new way of being human and an alternative arrangement of society that he called the reign or kingdom of God. It was (and is!) a peaceable kingdom.

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.

Divorcing Jesus from his ideas—especially divorcing Jesus from his political ideas—has been a huge problem that’s plagued the church from the fourth century onward. 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. With little awareness of what we are doing, we find ourselves in collusion with the principalities and powers to keep the world in lockstep with the ancient choreography of violence, war, and death. 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. This feeds into a nationalized narrative of the gospel and leads to a state-owned Jesus. Thus, our understanding of Christ has mutated from Roman Jesus to Byzantine Jesus to German Jesus to American Jesus, etc. 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.

Okay, let’s step back and think for a moment about where we stand as a people and a planet. It’s easy to imagine that the world doesn’t really change—that it simply marches around the maypole of violence, trampling the victims into the mud same as it ever has. But as true as that may be, something has changed. We are post­something. If nothing else, we are post-1945 when the enlighten­ment dream of attainable utopia went up in smoke—literal smoke!—from the chimneys of Auschwitz and a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. After 1945 we lost our blind faith in the inevitability of human progress. A threshold was crossed, and something important changed when humanity gained possession of what previously only God possessed: the capacity for complete annihilation. In yielding to the temptation to harness the fundamental physics of the universe for the purpose of building city-destroying bombs, have we again heard the serpent whisper, “You will be like God”? When J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, witnessed the first atomic detonation at Los Alamos on July 16, 1945, he recalled the words of Vishnu from the Bhagavad Gita—“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” When the monstrous mushroom cloud rose over the New Mexico desert, did the human r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Prelude
• Foreword: Following the Prince of Peace
• Chapter 1: “That Preacher of Peace”
• Chapter 2: Repairing the World
• Chapter 3: Christ Against the Crowd
• Chapter 4: It’s Hard to Believe in Jesus
• Chapter 5: Freedom’s Just Another Word For …
• Chapter 6: The Things that Make for Peace
• Chapter 7: Clouds, Christ, and Kingdom Come
• Chapter 8: A Farewell to Mars
• Chapter 9: Us and Them
• Extras