All posts by Brian Zahnd

  • July 4, 2024

    Weird America

    Weird America
    Brian Zahnd

    America has always been a weird amalgamation of the disparate — a strange mixture of admirable ambition and appalling hubris, an intoxicating brew of virtue and vice. America can always do things in a big way, but it can’t always make up its mind what it wants to do. It careens between Prohibition and ten thousand craft breweries as just one example of a country always reinventing itself. When you look at America you can see what you want to see because there are so many sides to America — so many contrasting, and often conflicting, personalities.

    For multitudes, America has indeed been a New Colossus embracing huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I don’t know the full story of why the Zahnds left Switzerland for America at the end of the nineteenth century, but I know it was to find a better life and, sure enough, we found it — just like millions of other immigrants from the teeming shores of ancient lands. And yet the inspiring story of hopeful immigrants finding a land of opportunity is not the whole story. We must be honest about the fact that this city of refuge is haunted by ghosts of slavery ships and weeping specters on the Trail of Tears. (America is so exceptional that it has twin original sins!)

    America the Ambitious set its sights on a continental-sized empire from the outset (from sea to shining sea), and today she’s a behemoth. America is so enormous in every way that it’s not one thing but four things.
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  • February 29, 2024

    LEAP!

    LEAP!

    In Unfading Light, the highly creative and influential Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov, after a prolonged period as a Marxist atheist, beautifully describes his return to Christian faith as a leap to faith — a description first used by Søren Kierkegaard:

    “In my theoretical strivings and doubts a single motif, one secret hope, now sounded in me all the clearer — the question What if? And what began burning in my soul for the first time since the days in the Caucasus became all the more imperious and bright; but the main thing was all the more definite: I did not need a ‘philosophical’ idea of Divinity but a living faith in God, in Christ and the Church. If it is true that there is a God, this means that everything that was given to me in childhood but which I had abandoned is true. Such was the semi-conscious religious syllogism that my soul made: nothing…or everything, everything down to the last little candle, the last little icon. And the work of my soul went on nonstop, invisible to the world and unclear even to me. What happened on a wintery Moscow street, in a crowded square, is memorable — suddenly a miraculous flame of faith began burning in my soul, my heart beat, tears of joy dimmed my eyes. In my soul ‘the will to believe’ ripened, the resolution finally to carry through with the leap to the other shore, so senseless for the wisdom of the world, from Marxism and every ism resulting from it to…Orthodoxy. Oh, yes, of course it is a leap, towards happiness and joy; an abyss lies between both shores. I had to jump.”

    Thirteen years before I read Sergius Bulgakov’s account of his leap to faith, I had a similar experience. I had reached the point in midlife where I was either going to yield to spiritual complacency or I had to make some decisive and risky moves to live a life of passionate commitment to Christ. During that time, I wrote a poem I titled “LEAP!” When trying communicate the nature of a spiritual experience, poetry is sometimes a more reliable vehicle than prose.
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    No Comments / Faith, When Everything's on Fire /

  • January 19, 2024

    The Wood Between the Worlds

    The Wood Between the Worlds releases February 6 — just in time for Lent. This is the Prelude to the book.

    PRELUDE

    I DARE TO WRITE ABOUT GOD, which is, admittedly, an audacious undertaking. That a bit of sentient soil would venture to say something about the nature of the ineffable Eternal must seem like the most absurd of fool’s errands. And yet I venture. I cannot help myself. The depth of my fascination with the One who is the answer to the question of why there is something instead of nothing makes it impossible for me to remain silent on the subject. I sympathize with King David when he said, “While I mused, the fire burned; then I spoke with my tongue” (Ps 39:3). And when I dare to speak about God, I do so not as the idly curious but as a reverent worshiper. I seek to understand God, not as a cold and dispassionate scientist — a God-ologist, if you will — but as one who prays, worships, and kneels before his maker.
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  • September 19, 2023

    Jesus’ Most Scandalous Parable

    Jesus’ Most Scandalous Parable
    Brian Zahnd

    The parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) may be Jesus’ most scandalous parable — at least for Americans formed in the cowboy myth of rugged individualism. If told this parable came from anyone else, most American Christians would dismiss it as Marxist propaganda. But there it is, right in the middle of the Gospel of Matthew, a parable from Jesus featuring a radical egalitarianism that will no doubt offend the sensibilities of a convinced capitalist. What this parable reveals is how unlike the kingdom of God most of us tend to be in our thinking and especially in our economics. We are never more prone to put a softening varnish on Jesus than when he broaches the subject of money.
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    No Comments / Jesus, Unvarnished Jesus /

  • July 24, 2023

    My Mystical Encounter with Wonder


    My Mystical Encounter with Wonder
    Brian Zahnd

    (This mystical encounter with wonder occurred twenty years ago today. It was life-changing.)

    Art is often an attempt to recapture the wonder that is in the world when seen through the eyes of innocence, the eyes of a child. Wonder is so much more than empty amusement or an evening’s entertainment. Wonder is an essential ingredient if life is to be made livable. Wonder is the cure — the cure for life-killing boredom. Wonder is the drug — the natural drug without which people may turn to narcotic drugs. Sure, most people bravely soldier on without wonder, and even do so without drug addictions and self-destructive behavior. But is that the point of life? To soldier on long after the thrill of living is gone? That’s not life — that’s life with all the wonder crushed out of it and compressed to mere existence. Wonder is what we’ve lost. Wonder is what we miss. Wonder is what we want. Wonder is our hidden Narnia into which we long to step and explore.

    Years ago I was thinking about these things while on a family vacation in the Rocky Mountains. During our long hikes I would muse on the role of wonder in finding satisfaction in life. One evening I found myself alone at sundown in the high country on a ridge well above tree line. A thunderstorm had passed through a little earlier and was now rumbling off to the east. What was before me as I looked to the west was a masterpiece sunset over the Never Summer Mountains. I wanted to thoroughly absorb the beauty that was on full display before me, so I sat down on the alpine tundra in that numinous world which the naturalist Ann Zwingler describes as “a land of contrast and incredible intensity, where the sky is the size of forever and the flowers are the size of a millisecond.” I remained in solitude until I was joined by seven bull elk who ambled up the ridge to where I was sitting. As the elk grazed they were aware of my presence, but entirely unconcerned. Then, just as the orange orb of the sun was touching the snowcapped peaks of the Never Summer Mountains, the largest of the elk drew closer, looked at me, and then lifted his head in such a way that his massive antlers formed a perfect frame for the majestic sunset in the distance. It was an encounter with such rare beauty that I can only describe it as sacred. Wonder rushed into my soul and I felt the full thrill of being alive. I prayed — “God, I want to live my whole life in a constant state of wonder.” Then God spoke to me.
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    No Comments / Beauty Will Save the World, Books, Mountains, Uncategorized /

  • July 9, 2023

    An Introduction to Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” and “Confession”

    This is my introduction to a new book on Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Confession by Ron Dart and Bradley Jersak.

    An Introduction to Tolstoy’s
    War and Peace and Confession
    Brian Zahnd

    We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.
    WAR AND PEACE

    I was listening to an illiterate peasant, a pilgrim, talking about God, faith, life, and salvation, and a knowledge of faith was opened up to me.
    CONFESSION

    Maybe it’s the long Russian winters. Maybe that’s what explains the length of those ponderous novels produced by the great nineteenth-century Russian writers — among whom Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy are the undisputed champions. But it’s not for their voluminous size that works like Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and The Brothers Karamazov are beloved and still being read. We love them for their genius, their beauty, their insight into the human condition, and their artistic truth-telling. That Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as Russian contemporaries and literary rivals never actually met one another seems as curious as it is tragic. And I refuse to be drawn into the interminable debate over which of these two literary titans was the greater writer. But as a Dostoevsky devotee I will concede that in terms of descriptive prose, Leo Tolstoy is unsurpassed. As someone observed (I’ve forgotten who) in Tolstoy no two horses are the same. To read Tolstoy is not to read a sketch of the world but to encounter the real world in the mirror of the written word. Isaac Babel, a Russian writer executed by Soviet secret police in 1940, said, “If the world could write itself, it would write like Tolstoy.”
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    No Comments / Books, Uncategorized /

  • October 28, 2022

    “Something Is Happening Here”

    Bradley Jersak’s tremendous new book, Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstruction, releases November 22, 2022. I had the privilege of writing the foreword for Out of the Embers, and I would like to share it with you in the ardent hope that it will inspire you to read what Steve Bell has described as “a most wise, kind, and timely gift for those of us whose very faith has been traumatized by the tumult of our age.”

    BZ

    FOREWORD: “SOMETHING IS HAPPENING HERE”

    Something is happening here
    But you don’t know what it is
    —Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man”

    North America has experienced two episodes of Christian revival known as Great Awakenings — the first in the eighteenth century, the second in the nineteenth century. Both produced a remarkable increase in church membership. (Whether the Jesus movement and the charismatic renewal of the late twentieth century qualify as a third Great Awakening is for others to decide.) But now, in the early twenty-first century, the church in North America is experiencing a precipitous decline — a mass exodus that Bradley Jersak has aptly dubbed “the Great Deconstruction.”

    Something is definitely happening here. Mister Jones, the baffled reporter from a bygone age in Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” may not know what is happening, but there are others who do. American Christianity as a colonial extension of European Christendom has run its course and is no longer tenable — at least, not as the default religion and organizing center in an increasingly secular society. The phenomenon of what has been popularly labeled “deconstruction” is not a passing fad but names a genuine crisis of faith that millions of Christians, largely through no conscious decision of their own, are now facing. Once a Christianity corrupted by civil religion, consumerism, and clerical abuse is put on trial, the fate of Christian faith hangs in the balance. And, for many people, the jury is still out. It is certainly possible to deconstruct Christianity down to nothing. This has been the experience of many. But then what? What happens after the Great Deconstruction?
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    No Comments / Books, Uncategorized /

  • September 26, 2022

    The Anticipated Christ

    Three years ago I wrote a Lenten devotional, The Unvarnished Jesus. Now I’m happy to announce that I’ve written an Advent and Christmas devotional, The Anticipated Christ. These forty-two devotions take the reader on a journey from the first Sunday of Advent through the twelve days of Christmas and to Epiphany on January 6.

    I would like to share with you the introduction and the first devotion to give you a sense of what the book is like. I pray The Anticipated Christ will enrich your experience of Advent and Christmas.

    Blessings,

    BZ

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

    Introduction

    Ours is a secular age. The sacred is pushed to the periphery. To keep the sacred at the center of our lives is a heroic act of defiance. To be a religious person in an irreligious world may be the last act of rebellion. I advocate such rebellion. I reject the trite aphorism, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” Of course, I’m spiritual, we all are, but I’m also religious — or at least I seek to be. Amorphous spirituality too easily becomes little more than a mood with a sprinkling of “wellness” techniques. I need something more rigorous, something more deeply rooted, something that draws upon the deep wells of ancient wisdom and practice. This is what we find in the Great Tradition of the Christian faith.
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    No Comments / Advent, Anticipated Christ /

  • April 15, 2022

    The Singularity of Good Friday


    The Singularity of Good Friday
    Brian Zahnd

    The dripping blood our only drink,
    The bloody flesh our only food:
    In spite of which we like to think
    That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
    Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
    –T.S. Eliot

    Most of us have an instinct to associate Good Friday with the forgiveness of sins and this instinct is correct. Something did happen on Good Friday that makes the forgiveness of any and all sins possible. But how does this forgiveness actually work? St. Paul says, “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.” But what does this mean? Did Christ’s death somehow restore honor to an insulted omnipotent monarch as some have suggested? Is the crucifixion a ghastly appeasement of an offended deity through the torture and execution of an innocent victim? On Good Friday did God vent his anger by brutally killing his Son so he could finally find the wherewithal to forgive? Are we to imagine that John 3:16 actually means that God so hated the world that he killed his only begotten Son? No, imposing the primitive notion of a sacrificial appeasement upon the cross is what N.T. Wright describes as “the paganizing of atonement theology.” The events of Good Friday are not God punishing his Son. Regarding this mistake understanding of the cross, Wright says,

    “If we arrive at that conclusion, we know that we have not just made a trivial mistake that could be easily corrected, but a major blunder. We have portrayed God not as the generous Creator, the loving Father, but as an angry despot. That idea belongs not to the biblical picture of God, but with pagan beliefs.” (The Day the Revolution Began, p. 43)
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    No Comments / Atonement, Cross, Good Friday, Jesus /
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