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by
Brian Zahnd
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August 19 - August 22, 2017
Getting people to respond to the altar call justified preaching a mean God. Threaten them with an angry God so they would accept a merciful Jesus.
What I did know was that I liked Jesus, but I was really scared of his Dad, the faceless white giant with obvious anger issues who hurled Catholics and others who didn’t believe just right into the fires of Mount Doom. And presumably some of those hapless souls thrown into hell were Baptist kids who tried to believe in Jesus with their hearts but really only believed in Jesus in their heads. That kind of theology is a prescription for religious psychosis!
The real question isn’t “Does it scare kids straight?” but “Is it true?”
God is like Jesus! God is not a sadistic monster who abhors sinners and dangles them over a fiery pit. God is exactly how Jesus depicted him in his most famous parable: a father who runs to receive, embrace, and restore a prodigal son.
we must always remember that any depiction of God, from whatever source, is subordinate to the revelation of God seen in Jesus.
What the Bible does infallibly is point us to Jesus. The Bible itself is not a perfect picture of God, but it does point us to the One who is. This is what orthodox Christianity has always said.
Just started this book and cannot put it down.
“The wrath of God is understood as divine consent to our own self-destructive defiance.”*19
that God’s wrath is a biblical metaphor does not make the consequences of sin any less real or painful.
God does not hate you, and God will never harm you. But your own sin, if you do not turn away from it, will bring you great harm.
The hands of God are not hands of wrath but hands of mercy. To be a sinner in these hands is where the healing begins.
Check out this quote.
But justifying genocide is too high a price to pay for the cause of defending that way
The Old Testament is the inspired telling of the story of Israel coming to know their God. It’s a process.
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 Incarnation. Perfect theology is not a book; perfect theology is the life that Jesus lived. What the Bible does infallibly and inerrantly is point us to Jesus, just like John the Baptist did.
Once we realize that Jesus is the perfect icon of the living God, we are forever prohibited from using the Old Testament to justify the use of violence.
When you’re the top dog you don’t think so earnestly about justice, but if you’re on the bottom you have a different perspective.
It’s amazing just how angry some people can become if you try to take away their religion of revenge.
If we commit to loving our enemies, Jesus will abide with us and help us learn how to do it.
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. But if we can say amen to Jesus closing the book on vengeance, then Jesus will remain with us to teach us the more excellent way of love.
When we speak of the Word of God, Christians should think of Jesus first and the Bible second.
The Bible is not a flat text where every passage carries the same weight. This is why Jesus can say things like, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”*8
in his book A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, Jacob Neusner is uncomfortable with and ultimately rejects the Sermon on the Mount. As he says, “Only God can demand of me what Jesus is asking.”*11 Precisely! Rabbi Neusner clearly understands what is at stake. Is Jesus merely an expositor of Scripture, or is he the Word of God in person? The answer to the question is central to what makes a Christian a Christian.
” I had to explain to him that a Christian can’t cite Moses to silence Jesus.
Biblicists who desire to condemn sinners to death can quote the Bible by citing Moses. But Jesus says something else. That is why I was so appalled when a well-known evangelical leader wrote an opinion piece for CNN defending the death penalty by citing Moses,
yet never once mentioned Jesus.*15 We cannot create Christian ethics while ignoring Christ!
It’s not biblical principles that we seek to live by but the truth of Christ.
It’s not biblical justice that we pursue but Christlike justice.
Jesus didn’t die on the cross to change God’s mind about us; Jesus died on the cross to change our minds about God! It wasn’t God who required the death of Jesus; it was humanity that cried, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” When the world says, “Crucify him,” God says, “Forgive them.”
The cross is not a picture of payment; the cross is a picture of forgiveness.
It was not God who required the violent death of Jesus but human civilization.
The cross is where God in Christ absorbs human sin and recycles it into forgiveness.
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 monster god of religious terror is an angry, abusive, violent deity who must be appeased, whether by throwing a virgin into a volcano or by nailing a son to a tree. It’s this kind of monstrous view of God that is the origin of a lot of atheism.
Punishing the innocent in order to forgive the guilty is monstrous logic, atrocious theology, and a gross distortion of the idea of justice.
The violence part of the cross is entirely human. The forgiveness part of the cross is entirely divine. God’s nature is revealed in love, not in violence. The Roman cross was an instrument of imperial violence that Jesus transformed into a symbol of divine love.
God is not beholden to retributive justice. We are the ones who demand sacrificial victims, not God. We are the ones who insist upon a brutal logic that says God can’t just forgive. We are the ones who mindlessly say, “God can’t forgive; he has to satisfy justice.” But this is ridiculous. It’s a projection of our own pettiness upon the grandeur of God. 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. There is no payment in forgiveness. Forgiveness is grace.
Jesus did not shed his blood to buy God’s forgiveness; Jesus shed his blood to embody God’s forgiveness!
Check out this quote.
This has become a common way of thinking about heaven and hell—“Christians go to heaven; non-Christians go to hell”—but it is not based on anything Jesus ever said!
The question is not whether God loves us but how we respond to God’s love.
If you want to find your way to hell, a good way to go about it would be to assume that everyone unlike you is headed there!
If you don’t know how to preach the gospel without making appeals to afterlife issues, you don’t know how to preach the gospel!
I am sympathetic with the atheist who cannot believe in a god who is so petty and cruel that he defends his so-called honor by torturing billions of souls for eternity. I don’t believe in that god either. But I’m no atheist. I believe in the God who is the Father of Jesus and who relates to sinners in the very same way that Jesus did.
Civil religion is religious patriotism.
If we try to end war by war, we always get another war. World
God’s will is never Armageddon; God’s will is always New Jerusalem.
The change that occurred in my theology came about not by wishing for God to be something other than I assumed God was but from actually discovering God as revealed in Christ.
But 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.
To believe in the sufficiency of God’s love to save the world is not naive optimism; it’s Christianity.
