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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brian Zahnd
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September 19, 2023 - May 20, 2025
Lovely, isn’t it? God depicted as a sadistic juvenile dangling spiders over a fire. We do have to admit the writing is descriptive. I’m sure Edgar Allan Poe would be impressed. We feel the revulsion Edwards intends as he shifts the analogy of how God views sinners from loathsome spiders to venomous snakes. Most of us don’t care much for spiders and snakes. But here’s the question: Is it true? Is it true that God is so dreadfully provoked to wrath by our sin that he looks upon us as abominable snakes and loathsome spiders? Does God abhor sinners and view them as worthy of nothing else than to
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Welcome to God’s torture chamber! The Almighty’s eternal Auschwitz. A divine perfection of pain and misery. Edwards describes hell as he imagines it as “exquisite horrible misery” emanating from “almighty merciless vengeance.” Abandon all hope, ye who enter here! But, again, is it true? Is God actually merciless in vengeance? Is God really an omnipotent Dr. Mengele inflicting eternal torture? I know we can cobble together disparate Bible verses to create this monstrous deity, but is it true? Many preachers and parishioners have been led to think so. For them, believing in a sadistic God who
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The revelation that God’s single disposition toward sinners remains one of unconditional love does not mean we are exempt from the consequences of going against the grain of love. When we live against the grain of love we suffer the shards of self-inflicted suffering. This is the “wrath of God.” But we must not literalize this metaphor so that we end up saying, as Jonathan Edwards said, “God…abhors you.”*23
What I want you to know is that God’s attitude, God’s spirit, toward you is one of unwavering fatherly-motherly love. You have nothing to fear from God. God is not mad at you. God has never been mad at you. God is never going to be mad at you. And what about the fear of God? The fear of God is the wisdom of not acting against love. We fear God in the same way that as a child I feared my father. I had the good fortune to have a wise and loving father, and I had deep respect, reverence, admiration, and, perhaps, a kind of fear for my father, but I never for one moment thought that my dad hated
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Even a casual reader of the Bible notices that between the alleged divine endorsement of genocide in the conquest of Canaan and Jesus’s call for love of enemies in his Sermon on the Mount, something has clearly changed! What has changed is not God but the degree to which humanity has attained an understanding of the true nature of God. The Bible is not the perfect revelation of God; Jesus is. Jesus is the only perfect theology. Perfect theology is not a system of theology; perfect theology is a person. Perfect theology is not found in abstract thought; perfect theology is found in the
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What is an enemy? An enemy is someone whose story you haven’t heard.
Jesus refused to read Isaiah’s vision of vengeance in the synagogue, just as he would refuse to be a violent, vengeful Messiah in the model of King David and Judah Maccabee. And that ignited the rage of the crowd. It’s amazing just how angry some people can become if you try to take away their religion of revenge. As long as Jesus announced that it was the time of God’s favor, the crowd spoke well of him. But as soon as he made it clear that God’s favor is for everyone, as soon as Jubilee was made inclusive and not exclusive, they tried to throw him off a cliff.
Jesus didn’t come to bring vengeance; he came to close the book on vengeance. Jesus announced the Jubilee good news of pardon, amnesty, liberation, and restoration. Jesus doesn’t bless revenge; he blesses mercy and teaches that the mercy we show to our enemies is the mercy that will be shown to us. God does not allow us to hope that the book of divine vengeance will be closed for us but left open and inflicted in full upon others. This is not how it works in God’s economy of grace revealed by Jesus.
To be blunt: If you are going to imagine divinely endorsed genocide, you should not imagine yourself as Joshua but as the unfortunate Canaanite whose entire family and village have just been murdered. Instead of always seeing yourself as the cowboy, try being the Indian sometime. Imagine yourself as a Pequot Indian instead of an English colonist. Try being the Lakota Sioux instead of the American cowboy. Do that and then ask yourself how you feel about justifying genocide in the name of God.
We must constantly resist the temptation to cast ourselves in the role of those who deserve mercy while casting those outside our circle in the role of those who deserve vengeance. Jesus will have no part of that kind of ugly tribalism and triumphalism. Clinging to our lust for vengeance, we lose Jesus.
When we try to embrace Biblicism by placing all authority in a flat reading of Scripture and giving the Old Testament equal authority with Christ, God thunders from heaven, “No! This is my beloved Son! Listen to him!” Though Moses taught that adulterers, rebellious children, and other sinners should be stoned to death, God says to us, “Listen to Jesus!” And Jesus says, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”
The centrality of Christian ethics is found in Christ himself. Though Elijah called down fire from heaven to burn up his enemies, God says to us, “Listen to Jesus!” And what Jesus says is “Love your enemies.”
Does God instruct us to find a healthy balance between Moses, Elijah, and Jesus? No! God says, “Listen to my Son!” If we want to rummage around in the Old Testament and drag out Moses or Joshua or Elijah or David to mitigate what Jesus teaches about peacemaking and loving our enemies, we are trying to build an Old Testament tabernacle on the holy mountain of Christ’s glory, to which God says, “No!”
It’s not biblical justice that we pursue but Christlike justice. Biblical justice may call for the punitive measures of stoning sinners and executing idolaters, but Christ clearly calls us to a higher ethic of mercy.
It’s not biblical manhood that men should aspire to but Christlike manhood. If we only speak of biblical manhood, who is our pattern? Abraham? Moses? David? Elijah? With their propensity for deceit, anger, adultery, and violence? No, Jesus alone is our model of redeemed manhood. It’s not biblical womanhood that should inform women but the light of Christ. Much of the Bible operates from a cultural assumption that women are the property of their fathers and husbands. But Jesus elevates women to a status of absolute and independent equality.
The question isn’t “What does the Bible say?” The Bible says lots of things. The question is “What does the living Word of God to which the Bible points us have to say?” The New Testament gives us a trajectory toward the living Word, who clearly commends the dignity of all human beings and calls for the abolition of slavery.
A Biblicist reading of the Bible can be a clever way of hiding from the rule of Christ. The slavery issue is not settled by citing chapter and verse from the Bible. The slavery issue is settled by listening to the living word from the living Christ.
We need to understand that the Bible is not an end in itself. The Bible is a means to an end but not the end itself. Jesus said it this way: “You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me!”*23 If we see the Bible as an end in itself instead of an inspired witness pointing us to Jesus, it will become an idol.
If we want to make the Bible our final authority, which is an act of idolatry, we are conveniently ignoring the problem that we can make the Bible say just about whatever we want. In doing this we bestow a supposed divine endorsement upon our already established opinion. The historical examples of this are nearly endless; crusaders, slaveholders, and Nazis have all proved themselves adept at bolstering their ideologies with images drawn from the Bible.
The living Word, who is Christ, is the One who informs us theologically, politically, socially, and personally.
What God willed was that Jesus be faithful to truth and love so that through Jesus’s violent and sinful death we would be liberated from violence, sin, and death. The sacrifice of Jesus is the ultimate gift of love offered to a world distorted by hate, where death is wielded as the supreme weapon. The sacrifice of Jesus is not a utilitarian payment to an offended deity bound to an economy of appeasement. The ugliness of the cross is found in human sin. The beauty of the cross is found in divine forgiveness.
The cross is not a picture of payment; the cross is a picture of forgiveness. Good Friday is not about divine wrath; Good Friday is about divine love. Calvary is not where we see how violent God is; Calvary is where we see how violent our civilization is.
Yes, the death of Jesus was indeed a sacrifice. But it was a sacrifice to end sacrificing, not a sacrifice to appease an angry and retributive god.
The cross is as ugly as human sin and as beautiful as divine love—but in the end love and beauty win.
Is the God to whom the Bible points chiefly revealed as infinite anger or as immeasurable love? It’s possible to read the Bible in support of both. What we need is a way to center our reading of Scripture. We do this by reading from the center of salvation history: the cross.
The crucifixion is not what God inflicts upon Jesus in order to forgive; the crucifixion is what God endures in Christ as he forgives.
The monstrous aspects of Good Friday are of entirely human origin. What is divine about Good Friday is the completely unprecedented picture of a crucified God responding to his torturers with love and mercy. Golgotha offers humanity a genuinely new and previously unimagined way of conceiving the nature of God.
Among the many meanings of the cross is this one: in the crucified body of Jesus we see the death of our mistaken image of God. God is not a monster. God does not have a monstrous side. God is whom we find in the Word made flesh. When Jesus dies, he does not evoke revenge; instead he confers forgiveness. Jesus does this for one profound reason: this is what God is like.
The image of a terrifying god is created in the hearts of anxious people.
If we persist in looking at the cross through the distorted lens of fear, anger, and shame, we will imagine that the cross is what God does in order to forgive, instead of perceiving the cross as what God endures as he forgives.
The good news is that the angry and abusive god does not exist! The god that the protest atheist insists should not exist turns out to be merely a figment of a diseased religious imagination. The God whom Jesus called Abba is not a monster god with anger issues, prone to violence. The Father of Jesus is whom we see demonstrated in the life of Jesus. The gospel of John goes to great lengths to make it clear that Jesus is the full revelation of who God is.
God is like Jesus, nailed to a tree, offering forgiveness. God is not a monster. God is like Jesus!
The truth is that there are monsters in this world, but the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is not one of them.
Jesus is perfect theology. And the perfect theology of Jesus saves us from our primeval nightmares about the divine. The hands of God are not hurling thunderbolts. The hands of God have scars; they were nailed to a tree as he forgave monstrous evil.
In what is called the fear of God, what I fear is not God but the suffering my sin can inflict on myself and those around me.
God is not a monster. There are monster-god theologies, but they are mistaken theologies. Accusation and scapegoating, the ravages of war, and the wages of sin are monsters.
God desires lives marked by mercy, not the sacrifice of victims. Jesus’s death was not a ritual sacrifice of appeasement but the supreme demonstration of God’s mercy. Jesus did not shed his blood to buy God’s forgiveness; Jesus shed his blood to embody God’s forgiveness!
One of the problems with a theory of the cross that fractures the Trinity by pitting the Father against the Son in order to vent divine rage is that it fails to take sin seriously enough. The serious problem of sin cannot be solved by the cultic practice of ritual sacrifice. Primitive religion is an entirely inadequate response to the mystery of iniquity. The idea that the cross is a blood payment violently extracted from a sinless victim to somehow balance the cosmic scales trivializes sin. Viewing the cross as payment to God for our personal debt of sin ignores the deep problem of systemic
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We’ve probably all heard preachers say that very thing. What Jesus suffered on the cross is what we all deserve! (I used to say it!) But is that true? Is it true that every person deserves to be tortured to death? Is it true that your grandmother deserves to be tortured to death? Is it theologically accurate to point to a six-year-old girl and say, “That little girl deserves to be tortured to death”? Is it true that God created humanity in such a way that every single man, woman, boy, and girl deserves to be beaten, scourged, and nailed to a tree? Of course it’s not true! You know it’s not
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Life is not an elaborate testing center for afterlife placement based on theological acumen. Life is a gift from God, a gift that is properly appreciated and respected by loving God and neighbor.
We cannot war our way to peace.
A fatalistic eschatology requiring end-time hyperviolence that slaughters hundreds of millions is more befitting of ISIS than the followers of the Prince of Peace.
We escape our addiction to endless Armageddons when we learn to follow the Lamb.
When we literalize the militant images of Revelation we arrive at this conclusion: in the end even Jesus gives up on love and resorts to violence. Tragically, those who refuse to embrace the way of peace taught by Jesus use the symbolic war of Revelation 19 to silence the Sermon on the Mount.
The book of Revelation is not where the good news of the gospel goes to die. The Apocalypse is not where the gospel becomes the antigospel. The book of Revelation is where the good news of the gospel finds its most creative expression.
To mistreat God’s good creation, people and planet, is always the highway to hell.
the notion that God, out of personal offense and infinite spite, inflicts eternal torture upon his wayward children is completely incompatible with the revelation of God in Christ. Being saved includes being saved from belief in malicious libel against God.
For God to resort to violence in order to save the world is not saving the world; it’s condemning the world.
