All posts in Books

  • 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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  • 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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  • “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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  • Escaping the Cave

    Two weeks from today (November 9) When Everything’s on Fire will be released. To possibly pique your interest, I’m sharing Bradley Jersak’s foreword to the book. (It contains an excellent analysis of Plato’s famous cave allegory that is definitely worth reading.)

    BZ

    _____________________________________

    Foreword

    Frankenstein and Faust are yet the rage
    Unspeakable, the severing damage done
    Yet on the wind, the distant sound of drum
    And the sweetness of the sage
    Still might come a kinder age . . .

    –Steve Bell, Wouldn’t You Love to Know

    Friends of the truth, the book you are about to read brought me tears of both grief and joy. I moaned over the darkness revealed as darkness and laughed with hope as Easter dawn was unveiled afresh. This book is the word of the Lord. (Thanks be to God). I know this because “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy,” and that Spirit reverberates throughout these pages.
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  • Ash Wednesday and the Lenten Journey


    The shadow of a cross on a cemetery wall in northern Spain.

    ASH WEDNESDAY AND THE LENTEN JOURNEY
    (Ash Wednesday 2021 is February 17.)

    THE UNVARNISHED JESUS
    LENT Day 1 (Ash Wednesday)
    Mark 8:31–38 | Jesus Foretells His Death

    We begin our Lenten journey with Jesus by hearing him tell us that he’s not headed to greatness as the world esteems greatness, but to the cross and to death. Peter and the rest of the disciples understand that Jesus is on his way to the capital city of Jerusalem to lay claim to the throne — to become the King of the Jews. But without any ambiguity Jesus tells his disciples that he will suffer many things, be rejected by the chief priests, and finally be killed. Yes, Jesus also says that his apparent defeat will be turned to victory when he is raised on the third day, but his disciples probably hear this as an idiom referring to the resurrection of the righteous at some point in the future — as when Hosea says, “After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up.” That Jesus could become King of the Jews through suffering and death is inconceivable to Peter. For Peter, a messiah who is killed is a messiah who fails, and Peter didn’t sign up for failure. Jesus alone seems to understand that a breakthrough into new life is only attained through the experience of loss. Martin Luther was right, Christianity is not a theology of glory, but a theology of the cross. But to choose the way of the cross over the way of glory is a hard lesson to learn.
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  • O Little Town of Bethlehem

    I’m currently writing an Advent devotional entitled The Anticipated Christ. It’s the companion to my Lenten devotional The Unvarnished Jesus. Today I wrote three meditations and I’m now about halfway done with the book. I thought I would share the most recent meditation with you.

    O Little Town of Bethlehem

    But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah,
    who are one of the little clans of Judah,
    from you shall come forth from me
    one who is to rule in Israel,
    whose origin is from of old,
    from ancient of days…
    He shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord,
    in the majesty of the name of the Lord our God.
    And they will abide undisturbed,
    for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth;
    and this one shall be our peace
    (Micah 5:2-5)

    The prophet Micah was a contemporary of Isaiah of Jerusalem, prophesying seven hundred years before Christ. Micah is best known to us as the one who prophesied the birth of Messiah in Bethlehem. Of course, Bethlehem was the birthplace of King David, so it makes sense that the messianic Son of David would also be born there. Nevertheless, Bethlehem was only a small and seemingly insignificant village, but this is in keeping with the ways of God — the work of God often emerges from quiet obscurity.
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  • “Above All — Don’t Lie”

    “Above All — Don’t Lie”
    Brian Zahnd

    Lately I’ve been thinking about the seductive nature and ruinous consequence of embracing lies. I’m alarmed by what seems to be a deliberate move toward a post-truth society. Euphemistic language is eroding veracity. Lies are sold as “alternative facts” while uncomfortable truth is dismissed as “fake news.” Political tribalism requires adherence to an approved “version of the truth.” Propaganda and conspiracy theories have become the mind-addling narcotics of groupthink. The Information Age is swiftly devolving into the Disinformation Age. So I need to say something: With all my heart I urge you to resist being swept away in a current of lies. There are few things, if any, as destructive to the soul as embracing untruth. As the Proverb says, “Buy the truth, and sell it not.” Above all — don’t lie.
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  • “Only the Suffering God Can Help”

    “Only the Suffering God Can Help”
    Brian Zahnd

    Very early in the development of Christian theology the doctrine of divine impassibility ascended to an unquestioned status. Commonly understood, divine impassibility asserts that God is not a subject of any passion, including pain and suffering. Throughout long centuries the doctrine of divine impassibility rested undisturbed and rarely visited in the library of Christian thought. But then came the twentieth century when advancements in technology tragically increased the capacity for human suffering. At the same time that our species was making significant advancements in medical science that lessened the suffering of disease, we also learned how to mechanize war and how to subject large portions of human beings to totalitarian control. From the Gatling gun to the hydrogen bomb, from the Third Reich to Pol Pot, the capacity to inflict suffering became exponential. The crematoriums of Auschwitz and the killing fields of Cambodia haunt our memories and torture our imaginations. In the ghastly light of the Holocaust the language of divine impassibility became untenable. From his cell in the Flossenbürg concentration camp shortly before his execution at the hands of the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer penned these words: “Only the suffering God can help.”
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  • The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: A Summary by Peri Zahnd

    The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: A Summary by Peri Zahnd

    I finished a book I’ve been promising myself I’d read for three years — when Covid lockdown hit I decided I had time. And it still took me three months of sporadic reading. I had to read it slowly so that it could seep into me — I took weeks-long breaks. The Patient Ferment of the Early Church by Alan Kreider, an academic book by a Harvard trained PhD, professor emeritus of church history and mission at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. It was an academic book, so it was exhaustingly comprehensive and tedious at times and certainly not for everyone. Brian first read it three years ago and loved it. There are lots of books he reads and loves I know I’ll never touch, and visa versa. But the title so intrigued me and I mused on it often. A patient ferment. A little leaven that slowly makes the bread rise, expand, grow, mature. Water turned to wine. How did the early church end up changing the world?
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