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Farewell to Mars: A Few Quotes

What God is opposed to is empire—rich and powerful nations that believe they have a divine right to rule other nations. God is opposed to the agenda of empire for this simple reason: God makes the same claim for his Son!

I am not sure whether I’ll write anything longer about this book, but A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor’s Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace deserves a few quotes:

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.

…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!

…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…

…Nothing unites a nation like war. But what’s so tragic is when Christian leaders pretend that a rally around the war god is compatible with worshipping the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

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