David > David's Quotes

“When I speak with former Christians who have become atheists, I often ask them to describe the God they don’t believe in, and almost always I’m able to say, “I don’t believe in that God either.” If they say, “I can’t believe in a God who would eternally torture the vast majority of humanity just because they didn’t believe the right things,” I say, “I can’t believe in that God either, and I don’t believe that God exists.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“Losing Jesus. Finding Jesus. Rethinking Jesus. This is the only way we make spiritual progress. Just about the time we think we’ve got Jesus figured out, he goes missing. We may fear that we’ve lost Jesus, nevertheless if we seek him, we will find him. But in the rediscovery we will be required to rethink some things. And that’s what repentance means—to rethink things in the light of Christ.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“Mystical experiences are not foreign to scriptural tradition but are the norm within scriptural tradition. These mystics found in Scripture—and I only mentioned ten, there are many more—are witnesses to the possibility of mystical experiences in our own lives. If all we do is read about father Abraham and King David, the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene and never open our hearts to our own experiences, we have become history readers instead of God-seekers.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes