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by
Brian Zahnd
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July 17, 2019 - December 15, 2020
the cross as what God endures as he forgives.
God is like Jesus, nailed to a tree, offering forgiveness. God is not a monster. God is like Jesus!
Yes, I understand the Bible commends the fear of God, and I do too, but only as a preliminary beginning. God desires us to grow beyond the rudimentary beginning of fear.
But I’m not afraid of God. I used to be, but I am no longer. I am no longer afraid of God because I have come to know God as he is revealed in Christ.
Jesus was killed by the principalities and powers, a term used by the apostle Paul*1 to describe the very powerful, the very rich, the very religious, the institutions they represent, and the spirits that operate within these institutions.
God did not kill Jesus; human culture and civilization did. God did not demand the death of Jesus; we did.
The violence part of the cross is entirely human. The forgiveness part of the cross is entirely divine.
Of course God can just forgive! That’s what forgiveness is! Forgiveness is not receiving payment for a debt; forgiveness is the gracious cancellation of debt.
Ritual sacrifice does not originate in the heart of God; it originates in the violent heart of humanity.
“See, I have come to do your will.” He abolishes the first in order to establish the second.
As Jesus told the sacrifice-obsessed Pharisees, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ ”*7 God desires lives marked by mercy, not the sacrifice of victims.
Jesus did not shed his blood to buy God’s forgiveness; Jesus shed his blood to embody God’s forgiveness!
What sinners need (shall we say deserve?) is love and healing, not torture and death. We are worthy of God’s love and healing not on the basis of personal merit but because of the image we bear: the very image of God. Original blessing is more original than original sin!
The spirit of God is not heard in the blood-lusting cries of “Crucify him” but in the merciful plea “Father, forgive them.”
On Good Friday Jesus refounds the world as an Abel-like victim and not a Cain-like conqueror.
God’s action on Good Friday was to surrender his beloved Son to our system.
The cross is not the place where God vents his wrath on Jesus. The cross is the place where human fear and anger are absorbed into God’s eternal love and recycled into the saving mercy of Christ.
The cross of Christ is the end of sacrifice. It’s not the appeasement of a vengeful deity but the supreme demonstration of God’s everlasting love.
In other words, many concepts of hell are not derived from the text but read into the text.
It’s very eye opening to realize that in all the evangelistic sermons found in the book of Acts, none of them makes an appeal to afterlife issues. Not one.
Their invitation was to believe this joyful announcement, turn from the destructive ways of sin, and be baptized into the new world where Jesus is Lord.
Jesus uses the word wicked in a conventional sense: the wicked are those who live wicked lives, inflicting evil upon others.
Life is a gift from God, a gift that is properly appreciated and respected by loving God and neighbor.
What Jesus certainly does not say is that the sheep and goats are divided on the basis of who has and who has not said a sinner’s prayer! Unfortunately, a cobbled-together misreading of Paul
Jesus taught that the Golden Rule is the narrow gate that leads to life.
Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.*18
The kingdom of God is the government of God.
Jesus confers dignity upon the indigent and infirm beggar by giving him a name while leaving the prominent tycoon nameless, thus hinting at the impending reversal of fortunes.
The original point of this rabbinic story was that a day would come when there would be a great reversal. Jesus’s point is that the day of great reversal has arrived with the coming of the kingdom of God!
According to Jesus, when the Law and the Prophets are read correctly, without being screened out through the lens of self-interest, the message adds up to love—love of God demonstrated by love of neighbor.
In the final scene, the older brother is outside the father’s house, gnashing his teeth in resentment and rage. The father has not exiled his elder son to the outer darkness; rather, in his refusal to forgive, the embittered brother has exiled himself.
Jesus’s teaching on hell is basically this: if you refuse to love, you cannot enter the kingdom of God and will end up a lonely, tormented soul.
Elder Zosima says, “I ask myself: ‘What is hell?’ And I answer thus: ‘The suffering of being no longer able to love.’
But love’s power acts in two ways: it torments sinners, while at the same time it delights those who have lived in accord with it.*27
God is love. As sinners we are sinners in the hands of a loving God.
the wrath of God is the love of God wrongly received.
Hell is the love of God refused.
I agree with everything that Jesus believed and taught about hell. But that doesn’t mean I have to agree with everything that smug, mean-spirited, self-righteous, Bible-thumping know-it-alls believe about hell. They don’t get to dictate what Jesus taught about hell.
This is a monstrous theology that is utterly contrary to the spirit of the gospel!
Using hell as a means of scaring people into Christianity may also drive them out of Christianity when they become a little more thoughtful.
The only way to consistently interpret the book of Revelation is to acknowledge that everything is communicated by symbol.
Today if we see a cartoon of a donkey and an elephant glaring at each other and wearing boxing gloves, we instantly recognize it as a kind of comic commentary on American partisan politics. But someone seeing the cartoon two thousand years from now would be very unlikely to understand its original meaning.
There is no lion in Revelation, only a Lamb…a little slaughtered Lamb.
he reigns not as predatory lion but as a sacrificial lamb.
What John is doing is giving us a highly symbolic and very powerful contrast between the Roman Empire and the kingdom of Christ.
For the essence of prophecy is to give a clear witness for Jesus.
For John’s original readers, a reference to Armageddon would evoke the image of a battlefield. If I make a reference to Omaha Beach, you probably don’t imagine a seaside picnic but a bloody battlefield. This is Armageddon; it’s an icon of war.
In Revelation the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet are a kind of unholy trinity symbolizing satan, Rome, and imperial propaganda.
If we try to end war by war, we always get another war. World War I was billed as “the war to end all wars.” So seventeen million people were sacrificed on the altar of war in order to end war. And what did we get? Sixty million people killed in World War II! What caused World War II? World War I. And what caused World War I? World leaders seduced by accusation, empire, and propaganda.
It’s the wrath of God as divine consent to our own deadly trajectory.
