Politically-apolitical Jesus: Reflections on the evangelical churches response to crises in Ukraine

Politically-apolitical Jesus: Reflections on the evangelical churches’ response to crises in Ukraine
Fyodor Raychynets and Parush Parushev

   This essay is intended as a minute tribute to the life-work of Glen Stassen – a scholar, a mentor and, most importantly, a friend. One of us, Parush, walked alongside him as a student and a colleague in the last twenty years of his life. The other, Fyodor, got to know him through Glen’s association with the International Baptist Theological Seminary in Prague and through Glen’s work, along with David Gushee, on recovering the ways of Jesus in contemporary contexts.The one temptation the man Jesus faced – and faced again and again – as constitutive element of his public ministry, was the temptation to exercise social responsibility, in the interest of justified revolution, thorough the use of available violent methods. Social withdrawal was no temptation to him; that option (which most Christians take part of the time) was excluded at the outset. Any alliance with the Sadducean establishment in the exercise of conservative social responsibility (which most Christians choose the rest of the time) was likewise excluded at the outset. We understand Jesus only if we can empathize with this threefold rejection: the self-evident, axiomatic, sweeping rejection of both quietism and establishment responsibility, and the difficult, constantly reopened, genuinely attractive option of the crusade.

CET