All posts in Theology

  • Six or Eight? On Reading the Gospels

    Six or Eight? On Reading the Gospels
    Brian Zahnd

    Let’s think about the Transfiguration for a few minutes. The mystery of Tabor is a theological diamond mine that has yielded treasures for two thousand years. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all give an account of the Transfiguration. With a tight focus on the Transfiguration story, we read that Jesus took three disciples (Peter, James, and John) up a high mountain where his divine glory was revealed in dazzling light, and where Moses and Elijah made their anachronistic appearance. When Peter suggested a construction of three tabernacles on the holy mountain — one each for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah — the idea was rebuked by the voice of God saying, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him!” After these heavenly words, the three disciples no longer saw Moses and Elijah, but only Jesus. From this rich passage we see that the Law and the Prophets are fulfilled in Christ and that only Jesus is the perfect Word of God. The disciples are told to listen to the beloved Son because Jesus is what God has to say. This is the story of the Transfiguration in tight focus.
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  • Christ and Nothing

    Today I stumbled upon a 2003 essay in First Things by David Bentley Hart. It’s 8,400 words on the inevitable nihilism of modernity. This is a topic I find myself thinking about a lot these days. What follows is my severe edit of the essay down to a thousand words that gets at the heart of the matter.

    BZ

    ___________________________________________________________________________________

    What is the consequence when Christianity, as a living historical force, recedes? We have no need to speculate, as it happens; modernity speaks for itself: with the withdrawal of Christian culture, all the glories of the ancient world that it baptized and redeemed have perished with it in the general cataclysm. Christianity is the midwife of nihilism, not because it is itself nihilistic, but because it is too powerful in its embrace of the world and all of the world’s mystery and beauty; and so to reject Christianity now is, of necessity, to reject everything except the barren anonymity of spontaneous subjectivity. As Ivan Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor tells Christ, the freedom that the gospel brings is too terrible to be borne indefinitely. Our sin makes us feeble and craven, and we long to flee from the liberty of the sons of God; but where now can we go? Everything is Christ’s. Read more

  • “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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  • Why Did God Create the World?


    Why Did God Create the World?
    Brian Zahnd

    I’m currently reading The Lamb of God by Sergius Bulgakov. Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944) is widely regarded as the leading Orthodox theologian of the twentieth century. Regarding The Lamb of God, David Bentley Hart says, “This book is quite simply the most remarkable and impressive work of Christology produced in the twentieth century.”

    Today I read something so beautiful I felt I had to share it. This is the first three paragraphs of the chapter entitled “The Creaturely Sophia.” This is technical academic theology that some may find a bit daunting, so at the end I’ve added a few paragraphs from my book Water To Wine in which I attempted to say something similar. My take on why God created the world is less technical and less thorough, but perhaps it’s more poetic and more accessible.

    Here’s Sergius Bulgakov on why God created the world:
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  • God’s Love In Granite

    Mills

    God’s Love In Granite
    Brian Zahnd

    The Bible opens with a creation narrative and the constant refrain is the goodness of it all. In the first chapter of Genesis God declares every day as good. The third day (the day life begins) is declared good twice. On the sixth day of creation we are told, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).

    The ancient Hebrew account of the entire goodness of creation stands in stark contrast to the pagan creation stories where the world comes into existence amidst the chaos of a great struggle between good and evil. In the rival myths of the ancient world, evil plays a role in creation. The first great revelation of the Hebrew scriptures is that the universe flows entirely from the goodness of God; evil played no part in God’s good creation.
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  • Christianity vs. Biblicism

    Christ_Pantocrator_Deesis_mosaic_Hagia_Sophia

    Christianity vs. Biblicism
    Brian Zahnd

    (This is my foreword to Keith Giles’ excellent new book, Jesus Unbound.)

    As modern Christians we are children of a broken home. Five centuries ago the Western church went through a bitter divorce that divided European Christians and their heirs into estranged Catholic and Protestant families. The reality that the Renaissance church was in desperate need of reformation doesn’t change the fact that along with a reformation there also came an ugly split that divided the church’s children between a Catholic mother and a Protestant father. In the divorce settlement (to push the metaphor a bit further) Catholic Mom got a long history, a rich tradition, and a unified church, but all Protestant Dad got was the Bible. Without history, tradition, or a magisterium, the Bible had to be everything for Protestant Dad — and Protestants have made the most of it. For five hundred years Protestant scholars and theologians have led the way in biblical translation, scholarship, and interpretation, giving the Christian world such notables as Martin Luther, John Calvin, Jacob Arminius, John Wesley, Karl Barth, C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, T.F. Torrance, Walter Brueggemann, Stanley Hauerwas, Fleming Rutledge, Richard Hays, N.T. Wright, to name a few.

    But with Sola Scriptura as a defiant battle cry there always lurked the temptation to place more weight on the Bible than it could bear, or worse yet, a temptation to deify the Bible and make an idol out of it. This has become increasingly true among the more fundamentalist clergy and congregations who are suspicious of higher education and unwilling to read their Bibles with the help of biblical scholars the caliber of Brueggemann, Hays, and Wright. So while pretending to “take the Bible as it is,” the fundamentalist reads the Bible through thick lenses of cultural, linguistic, political, and theological assumptions — interpretive lenses they are unaware of wearing.
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  • Christ and the Vilified Other (My Address to Christ at the Checkpoint)

    CATC

    Last week Peri and I attended Christ at the Checkpoint in Bethlehem — a biennial evangelical conference sponsored by Bethlehem Bible College. Peri has posted some of her musings regarding the conference, which I encourage you to read. I would also encourage you to read the Christ at the Checkpoint Manifesto.

    I’m sharing the address I presented at the conference on Christ and the Vilified Other. This is not a transcript; neither is it a manuscript (I don’t speak from a manuscript). But this is very close in substance to what I said at the conference. I can only hope it will be as well-received here as it was in Bethlehem.

    BZ

    Christ and the Vilified Other
    Brian Zahnd

    Let me begin by talking about the land, the Holy Land, the land of the Bible. Geography played a significant role in shaping ancient Hebrew ethics and theology. Situated between the northern and southern superpowers of the ancient Near East, Israel lived under constant threat of invasion and occupation from these economic and military empires.

    (In my writing and preaching I frequently reference empire. Allow me to give a definition. Empires are rich, powerful nations that believe they have a divine right to rule other nations and a manifest destiny to shape history. The Bible gives a sustained critique of empire from Genesis to Revelation — particularly in Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, the Gospels, Acts, and especially Revelation. Empires are an enemy of God’s purposes because what they claim for themselves — a manifest destiny to shape history and a divine right to rule other nations — is the very thing God has promised to his Son.)
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  • The Sign That Saves The World

    FraAngelico

    The Sign That Saves The World
    Brian Zahnd

    Look to me and be saved,
    All you ends of the earth!
    –Isaiah 45:22

    Peri and I are on our way to speak at the Christ at the Checkpoint conference in Bethlehem and we’re spending a few days in Florence, Italy exploring the cradle of the Renaissance. Visiting the museums and art galleries, I’ve seen hundreds of crucifixion paintings, and I’ve tried to view each one with a reverent eye. I never look at depictions of Christ crucified with a jaundiced eye. Their religious nature and ubiquitous presence may illicit a yawn from the secular cynic, but not from me — I’m an incorrigible Christian. I believe the cross is where Christ saves the world. Looking at the cross with the right eye, the reverent eye of humble faith, is the locus of salvation. The cross is the sign that saves the world.

    Ten years ago when I first began to connect Fyodor Dostoevsky’s enigmatic phrase “beauty will save the world” with the cross — it is at Golgotha that the ugliness of human sin is overcome by the beauty of divine love — the image of the cross as saving beauty that I most often referred to was Fra Angelico’s fresco. Today when we visited the San Marco Monastery I was able to see this fresco painted by the monk-artist Beato Angelico in 1441. As I lingered in contemplation of Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion, it prompted me to once again ask — what does this mean? Take a moment and ponder this question with me.
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