All posts in Violence

  • May 30, 2014

    A Farewell To Mars

    2014-05-30 13.22.04

    A Farewell To Mars releases June 1. Here is a taste from chapter eight.
    ____________________________________________

    A Farewell To Mars
    Brian Zahnd

    Isaiah, in his prophetic poems, frames the Messianic hope like this: A Prince of Peace will establish a new kind of government, a government characterized by ever-increasing peace. Weapons of war will be transformed into instruments of agriculture. Swords turned into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks. Tanks turned into tractors, missile silos into grain silos. The study of war abandoned for learning the ways of the Lord. The cynic will laugh (for lack of imagination), but this is Isaiah’s vision. At last the nations will find their way out of the darkness of endless war into the light of God’s enduring peace. This is Isaiah’s hope. (see Isaiah 2:1-4; 9:1-7)

    Christians take Isaiah’s hope and make a daring claim: Jesus is that Prince of Peace. Jesus is the one who makes Isaiah’s dreams come true. From the day of Pentecost to the present, this is what Christians have claimed. We claim it every Christmas. But then a doom-obsessed dispensationalist performs an eschatological sleight of hand and takes the hope away from us. On one hand, they admit that Jesus is the Prince of Peace who has come, but on the other hand, they say his peace is not for now … it’s only for when Jesus comes back again. Bait and switch. Yes, swords are to become plowshares … but not today. For now plowshares become swords; in our day, it’s war, war, war! They abuse Jesus’s prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem in the first century by always applying it to the latest contemporary geopolitical events. They replace the hope of peace with an anticipation of war! They find a way to make war a hopeful sign. Think about that for a moment! And here is the worst irony: It was precisely because Jerusalem failed to recognize Jesus as Isaiah’s Prince of Peace right there and then that Jerusalem rushed headlong into the war that ended with its own destruction!
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    53 Comments / Christianity, Nonviolence, Violence, War /

  • May 21, 2014

    It’s Hard to Believe in Jesus

    3298 Sermon on Mount 10.5x13.75 cas d(v) Dec. 23, 1949 signed (v)

    It’s Hard to Believe in Jesus
    Brian Zahnd

    The cross is shock therapy for a world addicted to solving its problems through violence. The cross shocks us into the devastating realization that our system of violence murdered God! The things hidden from the foundation of the world have now been revealed. The cross shames our ancient foundation of violence. The cross strips naked the principalities and powers. The cross tears down the façade of glory that we use to hide the bodies of slain victims.

    In the light of the cross, we are to realize that if what we have built on Cain’s foundation is capable of murdering the Son of God, then whole edifice needs to come down. In the light of the cross, our war anthems lose their luster. But this throws us into a crisis. What other alternatives are there? How else are we to arrange the world? The alternative is what Jesus is offering us when he told us that the kingdom of God is at hand. God’s way of arranging the world around love and forgiveness is within reach. If we only dare to reach out for it, we can have it. But we are so afraid. We’re not sure we can risk it. It’s so hard for us to let go of the sword and take the hand of the Crucified One. It’s so hard for us to really believe in Jesus.

    The crowd never believes in Jesus. Only the little flock that accepts its vulnerability can believe in Jesus. If you tell those rushing to war that their hatred of enemies and their plan for the organized killing of enemies is evil, the crowd will hate you. War is sacred. It lies beyond critique. To critique it is blasphemy. The crowd hates blasphemy. The crowd wants to kill blasphemers. The crowd knows that the criticism of their violence is blasphemy because they know their cause is just. They believe it. And from their perspective their cause is just. They can prove it. Both sides can prove it. Always.

    Achilles knew his cause was just and that it was perfectly legitimate to drag Hector’s body from his chariot in front of the gates of Troy in a show of grotesque triumphalism. It’s the same grotesque impulse that causes modern soldiers to pose for gruesome photos with the bodies of dead enemies. It’s literally the way of the world. But it’s not the way of the new world founded by Jesus. Jesus is not the warrior king the world is accustomed to. Jesus is not the Jewish Achilles. Jesus refused to be the violent Messiah Israel longed for. Jesus did not kill Pilate and drag the governor’s body behind his chariot. Jesus did not pose triumphantly over the dead bodies of slain Roman soldiers. Instead it was Jesus who hung naked on a tree after being put to death through a state-sponsored execution. Jesus founded his kingdom in solidarity with brutalized victims. This is the gospel, but it’s hard for us to believe in a Jesus who would rather die than kill his enemies. It’s harder yet to believe in a Jesus who calls us to take up our own cross, follow him, and be willing to die rather than kill our enemies.
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    3 Comments / America, Cross, Jesus, Peace, Violence /

  • May 6, 2014

    Jesus Trumps Biblicism: A Tale of Sticks and Stones

    Abstract-Artist-Lucie-Beardwood-Art-Painting

    Jesus Trumps Biblicism: A Tale of Sticks and Stones
    Brian Zahnd

    This morning I was reading Scripture. From the Old Testament I was reading Numbers and in the New Testament I was reading John. In Numbers chapter 15 we find this story…

    An Israelite guy was gathering sticks on the Sabbath. This was forbidden. The guy got caught and was taken into custody. Moses inquired of Yahweh what should be done. Yahweh told Moses that the guy had to be killed. So the stick-gathering Sabbath-breaker was taken outside the camp and stoned to death by the congregation of Israel. Sticks and stones. (Number 15:32–36)

    Next I read from the Gospel of John chapter 5. This is what happens…

    Jesus meets a guy who has been paralyzed for 38 years. Jesus tells the guy to take up his bed and walk. The man is healed, takes up his bed, and heads for home. But this was the Sabbath. And the guy gets busted for breaking the Sabbath. When the Judean Torah enthusiasts find out that it was Jesus who was behind all this Sabbath breaking, they are prepared to kill Jesus. (Like Moses did in the Bible.) John concludes the story like this…

    “This is why the Judeans were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, ‘My Father is working until now, and I am working.’ This is why the Judeans were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.” (John 5:16–18)

    Look at what we have here. In Numbers a guy gets caught picking up sticks on a Saturday and is stoned to death. The text tells us that Yahweh instructed Moses to do this. This is the Moses who spoke to God face to face. (Exodus 33:11)

    But in the prologue to his gospel John says this…

    “The Torah was given by Moses. Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. The only begotten God who is near the Father’s heart, he has made him known.” (John 1:17–18)
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    6 Comments / Bible, Christianity, Jesus, Violence /

  • April 7, 2014

    Sympathy for the Devil…or Pilate

    Ecce Homo by Antonio Ciseri c. 1880

    Sympathy for the Devil…or Pilate
    Brian Zahnd

    Please allow me to introduce myself
    I’m a man of wealth and taste
    I’ve been around for a long, long year
    Stole many a man’s soul and faith
    And I was ‘round when Jesus Christ
    Had his moment of doubt and pain
    Made damn sure that Pilate
    Washed his hands and sealed his fate
    Pleased to meet you
    Hope you guess my name
    But what’s puzzling you
    Is the nature of my game

    –The Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil

    In his fascinating novel, The Master and Margarita, Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov creates an imaginary conversation between the Roman governor Pontius Pilate and the Galilean prophet Yeshua. When asked about his views on government, Bulgakov’s Yeshua says, “All power is a form of violence over people.” The peasant preacher of Bulgakov’s novel goes on to contrast the governments of power and violence with the peaceable kingdom of truth and justice. In response Pontius Pilate rages, “There never has been, nor yet shall be a greater or more perfect government in this world than the rule of the emperor Tiberius!” When Pilate asks Yeshua if he believes this kingdom of truth will come, Yeshua answers with conviction, “It will.” Pilate cannot stand for this. In a memorable passage Bulgakov’s Pilate rails against the possibility of the kingdom of God ever coming and supplanting Caesar’s empire.

    “It will never come!” Pilate suddenly shouted. Many years ago in the Valley of the Virgins Pilate had shouted in that same voice to his horsemen: “Cut them down! Cut them down!” And again he raised his parade-ground voice, “Criminal! Criminal! Criminal! Do you imagine, you miserable creature, that a Roman Procurator could release a man who has said what you have said to me? I don’t believe in your ideas!”

    In The Master and Margarita, Pontius Pilate seems to have little personal animosity toward the wandering Galilean preacher, but Pilate hates his ideas. In the end what forces the Procurator to condemn Yeshua to crucifixion is the preacher’s revolutionary ideas about power, truth, and violence. Like Pilate we too wrestle with the conflict we have between Jesus and his unsettling ideas. We often want 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. In October of 312 the Roman general Constantine came to power after winning a decisive battle in which he used Christian symbols as a fetish, placing them as talismans upon the weapons of war. (The incongruence is absolutely stunning!) Having emerged victorious in a Roman civil war and securing his position as emperor, Constantine attributed his military victory to the Christian god. In short order the wheels were set in motion for Christianity to become the state religion of the Roman Empire. The kingdom of God had been eclipsed by Christian empire.

    Almost overnight the church found itself in a chaplaincy role to the empire and on a trajectory that would lead to the catastrophe of a deeply compromised Christianity. The catastrophe of church as vassal to the state would find its most grotesque expression in the medieval crusades when under the banner of the cross Christians killed in the name of Christ. The crusades are perhaps the most egregious example of how distorted Christianity can become when we separate Christ from his ideas. Read more

    1 Comment / Jesus, Kingdom, Violence /

  • March 10, 2014

    Bread, Circuses, and Violence

    DSC00566

    Bread, Circuses, and Violence
    Brian Zahnd

    On Sunday the Gospel reading was the temptation of Jesus (Matthew 4:1–11). After church someone asked me if I thought the temptation of Jesus was literal. The questioner was struggling with what seemed to be a cartoonish contest between Jesus and the devil. This person was particularly perplexed by the idea that Jesus would actually be tempted to worship Satan.

    So when asked if I thought the temptation account was “literal,” what did I say? I said, yes and no. I certainly believe Jesus encountered Satan in the wilderness and was tempted. But I don’t think the devil showed up in a red suit sporting a tail and a pitchfork saying, “Hello, I’m Lucifer, and I’m here to put you through your paces. Alright, shall we get started? First off, how about turning that rock into lunch? No? Okay. What about showing off with a leap from the temple? No again? Well, how about you just fall down and worship me and I make you king of the world and we’ll call it a day?”

    No, I don’t think it was quite like that. It wasn’t cartoonish. It was far more subtle and insidious than that. I suspect the satan came to Jesus the same way he comes to you and me: disguised as our own thoughts. Just like the temptation of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. I’ve never met a talking snake, but I’ve sure had some serpentine thoughts crawl through my head! So let’s treat the temptation of Jesus seriously.

    What was Jesus doing in the wilderness? Fasting, praying, preparing to begin his ministry. What was on his mind? We might assume he was contemplating how to go about his work. That’s when subtle and satanic thoughts entered the mind of the Son of God.
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    1 Comment / Church, Cross, Jesus, Violence /

  • February 3, 2014

    Scot McKnight’s Foreword to “A Farewell To Mars”

    Mars

    I have a new book coming out in June. A Farewell To Mars (David C. Cook). I’m pretty excited about it. I plunged my pen into my heart and wrote from deep within. It will probably stir a bit of controversy. So be it. What matters is that I’ve told my own story honestly.

    Scot McKnight, New Testament scholar, professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary, and author of several important books such as The Jesus Creed, The Blue Parakeet, and The King Jesus Gospel has written the foreword to A Farewell To Mars. Perhaps you would not think too uncharitably of me if I shared it with you.

    BZ
    _______________________________________________________________

    Though some may contest the point, and I’ve heard them for years, there is something profoundly unsettling to watch those who follow Jesus, who is the Prince of Peace, use weapons of warfare to kill others and think they are somehow following Jesus. At the simplest level of evangelicalism, and by that I mean anyone who affirms salvation in Christ alone, it impossible for me to comprehend how a Christian can kill a non-Christian who is thereby prevented from turning to Christ just as it is also beyond me how any Christian can kill another Christian at the orders of State military leaders. In both instance the Christian renders to Caesar what is due only to Christ.

    As Brian Zahnd says in this aesthetic and courageous book, too often the church – and individual Christians are therefore complicit – has become chaplain to the State. It’s divinely-ordained and Christ-shaped role is thereby denied, it has become idolatrous and has betrayed the Prince of Peace. Our responsibility is not to chaplain the State but to call the State to repentance and to surrender to the King who is Lord. Our responsibility is to be an alternative to the State. Christians would do far more good for our country by learning not to look to DC for solutions but to the glorious Son of God, who loved us and who gave himself for us and in so giving himself gave us a whole new way of life, one not shaped by the power of force but the force of the gospel.

    Leaders like Brian Zahnd are quietly becoming more numerous, not because they’ve turned Euro on us but because they’ve turned once again to the Gospels and to the New Testament to find an alternative political vision for our world. They’ve eschewed pragmatics and compromise for a full-throated commitment to the kingdom vision of Jesus, which by the way is necessarily political, but an alternative politic. This alternative political world, what Stanley Hauerwas calls a “peaceable kingdom,” refuses to flash the sword of Caesar or Constantine, Germany or the USA, and it instead flashes the cross as the way to live. The cross is the symbol of the politics of Jesus, and it is beginning to burn its way into the heart of so many in the church in the USA. We need it.
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    No Comments / Books, Christianity, Jesus, Violence /

  • January 1, 2014

    Scripture as Witness to the Word of God

    christsinai
    Scripture as Witness to the Word of God
    Brian Zahnd

    To begin with a few axiomatic thoughts on Christ and the Bible…

    The Bible is the word of God that bears witness to the Word of God — Jesus Christ.

    The Logos-Word became flesh — not a book.

    Jesus is God. The Bible is not.

    The Bible did not create the Heavens and Earth — the Word (Christ) did.

    We worship Jesus; we do not worship the Bible.

    The Bible is not a member of the Trinity.

    The Bible is not God. Jesus is God.

    The Bible is not perfect. (There are parts of it we now regard as obsolete; e.g. Levitical codes.)

    Christ is the perfection of God as a human being.

    What the Bible does infallibly is point us to Jesus Christ.

    There is one mediator between God and man…and it’s not the Bible.

    The Bible is the inspired witness to the true Word of God who is Jesus Christ.

    Now consider this…

    The first Sunday after Christmas the Gospel reading was John 1:1-18. As I heard the Gospel read it occurred to me that the role John the Baptist played as the divinely sent witness to the Light is precisely how we should view Scripture in relation to Christ. Allow me to reproduce the reading, but I will substitute John the Baptist with Holy Scripture.
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    3 Comments / Bible, Christianity, Violence /

  • December 17, 2013

    West of Shinar

    NewJerusalem

    West of Shinar
    by Blindman at the Gate

    God said, “Let there be.”
    Existence. Life. Awareness.
    Good, very good.
    A man called Mankind.
    A woman called Mother-of-All.
    They bore and wore the Imago Deo.
    Walked in the Garden with God.

    Then something went wrong.
    Paradise lost.
    Moved to an apartment east of Eden.
    They had babies.
    Called them Cain and Abel.
    Farmer and Shepherd.
    But the landed gentry murdered the nomadic herdsman.
    The killer lied to God (and himself) about what he had done.
    “I didn’t murder my brother — I just killed an enemy. It had to be done.”
    Read more

    1 Comment / Hell, Kingdom, Poetry, Violence /

  • December 11, 2013

    Merry Christmas! War is Abolished!

    photo(63)_2

    Merry Christmas! War is Abolished!
    by Brian Zahnd

    Isaiah had a dream, a God-inspired dream.
    Isaiah was a poet, a God-intoxicated poet.
    He had a Messianic dream that he turned into a prophetic poem.
    It goes like this—

    In days to come
    the mountain of the LORD’s house
    shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
    and shall be raised above the hills;
    all the nations shall stream to it.
    Many peoples shall come and say,
    “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
    to the house of the God of Jacob;
    that he may teach us his ways
    and that we may walk in his paths.”
    For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
    and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
    He shall judge between the nations,
    and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
    they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
    and their spears into pruning hooks;
    nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
    neither shall they learn war anymore.
    -Isaiah 2:2–4

    Swords turned into plowshares.
    Spears into pruning hooks.
    Tanks turned into tractors.
    Missile silos into grain silos.
    The study of war abandoned for learning the ways of the Lord.
    Instead of academies where we learn to make war,
    there will be universities where we learn to wage peace.
    The cynic will laugh (for lack of imagination), but this is Isaiah’s vision.

    And every Christmas we borrow another of Isaiah’s poems to celebrate the birth of the child who makes these dreams come true—

    The people who walked in darkness
    have seen a great light;
    those who live in a land of deep darkness—
    on them light has shined…
    For all the boots of the tramping solidiers
    and all the uniforms stained in blood
    shall be burned as fuel for fire.
    For unto us a child is born,
    unto us a son given;
    the government shall be upon his shoulders;
    and he is named
    Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
    His government shall grow continually,
    and there shall be endless peace
    for the throne of David and his kingdom.
    He will establish and uphold it
    with justice and with righteousness
    from this time onward and forevermore.
    -Isaiah 9:2, 5–7

    Isaiah in his prophetic poems frames the Messianic hope like this:

    A Prince of Peace will establish a new kind of government, a government characterized by ever-increasing peace. Weapons of war will be transformed into instruments of agriculture. At last the nations will find their way out of the darkness of endless war into the light of God’s enduring peace.

    This is Isaiah’s hope. Christians take Isaiah’s hope and make a daring claim: Jesus is that Prince of Peace! Jesus is the one who makes Isaiah’s dreams come true. From the day of Pentecost to the present this is what Christians have claimed.
    Read more

    4 Comments / Jesus, Kingdom, Peace, Theology, Violence /
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