Beauty Will Save the World Quotes

“Ultimately we cannot eliminate enemies through violence—violence only multiplies enemies. The only way to eliminate enemies is to love them, forgive them,”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“Our task is not to protest the world into a certain moral conformity, but to attract the world to the saving beauty of Christ.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“Here in the second beatitude, Jesus is making an important announcement to those who, instead of finding a means of avoiding personal pain and shared sorrow, have allowed themselves to be sculpted by pain and sorrow. Jesus seems to be saying that it is those who have given up being comfortably numb through shallow contentment and have instead engaged in the real work of grief—for there is much in this world to grieve over—who are the ones who will encounter the deep comfort of the kingdom of God.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“Because we are uncomfortable with sorrow, we passively enforce a kind of mandated happiness in our churches. Instead of weeping with those who weep, we want everybody to just cheer up. And we want them to cheer up for our sake. . . because we are so terribly uncomfortable with their sorrow. What we should do instead is join them in their sorrow and assist them in the work of grief. When human beings suffer tragedy and profound loss, there is a certain amount of grieving that is required. But in the deep mystery of human inner-connectivity, the work of grieving does not have to be done alone.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“If the crucifixion of Christ can be made beautiful, then there is hope that all the ugliness of the human condition can be redeemed by its beauty.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“Jesus is not so much telling us to mourn as he is making an announcement to those who do mourn. Sorrow is a necessary consequence of loving others and being fully engaged with humanity. If our plan is to go through life minimizing pain and avoiding as much sorrow as possible, we will do so as a shallow people, and Jesus has nothing to announce to us in the second beatitude—he simply leaves us in our prosaic self-contentment. It is through the work of grief that we carve depth into our souls and create space to be filled with comfort from another.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“The problem with our “change the world” rhetoric is that it is too often a thinly veiled grasp for power and a quest for dominance—things that are antithetical to the way Jesus calls his disciples to live.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“The lost beauty of God’s good creation is what is recovered in the Incarnation.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“Satan never tempted Jesus with evil; Satan tempted Jesus with good. Satan enticed Jesus to go ahead and do good and to bring it about by the most direct way possible.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“The Beatitudes are deliberately designed to shock us. If we’re not shocked by the Beatitudes, it’s only because we have tamed them with a patronizing sentimentality—and being sentimental about Jesus is the religious way of ignoring Jesus! Too often the Beatitudes are set aside into the category of “nice things that Jesus said that I don’t really understand.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“The cross is the beauty of Christianity because it is at the cross that we encounter cosuffering love and costly forgiveness in its most beautiful form.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“For people who are poor at being spiritual (which is most people), this announcement really is good news. But do you see how counterintuitive this is? The kingdom of God is coming on earth, and who would we think would be the first ones invited in? The religious. The devout. The observant. The ones rich in spirituality. The ones good at being spiritual. But that’s not how Jesus issued the invitation, and it’s not what happened. It was the spiritual elites, the Pharisees, Sadducees, priests, scribes, and Torah lawyers who had the most trouble with Jesus. The company of Jesus’s followers was largely comprised of people for whom being spiritual was not their primary identity—fishermen, tradesmen, tax collectors, and a wide variety of sinners.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“In going to the cross, Jesus was not being practical; he was being faithful. Jesus didn’t take a pragmatic approach to the problem of evil; Jesus took an aesthetic approach to the problem of evil. Jesus chose to absorb the ugliness of evil and turn it into something beautiful—the beauty of forgiveness.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World

“the church sacrifices the beauty of Christianity when it chooses the political form over the cruciform. Reaching for the ring of power distorts our beauty.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“It is through the Incarnation that glory and beauty save the world.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“The tragedy of growing up is not that we put aside childishness, but that we lose the capacity for childlike wonder.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“Christianity as the ongoing expression of the Jesus story lived out in the lives of individuals and in the heart of society is a beauty that can redeem the world.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“It’s true that the gospel of Luke records Jesus as saying, “Blessed are you who are poor”—period. (Luke 6:20) In Luke’s Beatitudes, Jesus simply blesses the poor, and the further categorization of “in spirit” is omitted. In Luke, Jesus blesses the poor without reference to what kind of poverty it is. The truth is this: Jesus meets us at our point of poverty, not our place of strength. If we want to position ourselves to receive Christ’s blessing, we must identify an area of need and cry out for grace from there. If we think we have no area of weakness, need, or poverty, we essentially have no need for Jesus.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“We are from the future. In a world devoid of imagination and dominated by the "way it's always been", we are to be a prophetic witness to otherness and holy imagination.”
― Brian zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World

“Beauty, mystery, wonder. They all three go together.

The primary human response to an encounter with overwhelming beauty is wonder. Wonder is the transcendent sensation we experience when we find ourselves in the presence of an awe-inspiring sunset, artistic masterpiece, or newborn baby. Wonder is the uniquely human reaction to the sublime. Wonder is a large part of what it means to be human.

Wonder defined is, "a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration caused by something beautiful, unexpected, or inexplicable."

We wonder at two things - the beautiful and the mysterious.

A life stripped of beauty and mystery is a life barren of wonder, and a life without wonder is a kind of deep poverty.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World

“As Christians we will do the world a great service and lead the way in peacemaking if we will boldly and unequivocally state that violence can never be justified in the name of God. Never. If the state feels that violence is unavoidable in achieving their ends, so be it, but the church must speak with a unified voice and tell the state they employ violence without the blessing of God.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“The beauty of the image of God marred in man through the Fall is what the Incarnation redeems.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“evangelical Christianity needs to recover the form and beauty that are intrinsic to Christianity.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“Jesus meets us at our point of poverty, not our place of strength.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“In our reckless attempt to make Christianity popular by making it “practical,” we invariably vandalize it by stripping it of its inherent beauty and mystery.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“In our own day it will be other empires, other institutions, other power structures that will resist our witness. Because of this we must accept that from time to time persecution may be our lot and that martyrdom remains a possibility. We may be called upon to bear the ultimate witness of the way of the Lamb to the children of Cain who are still building their violent cities east of Eden.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“Instead of crying out for vengeance, the blood of Jesus cries, “Father, forgive them!”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“Being a faithful witness to the gospel should be a hallmark of evangelical Christianity. But something has gone very wrong. Think about it—that the primary public witness of the American evangelical church for the past thirty years has been political is an absolute tragedy! Evangelicals are no longer known within the wider culture for their devotion to Scripture and their belief in a personal conversion experience.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“The hill of the Beatitudes and the hill of Calvary are not unrelated. The moment Jesus proclaimed the Beatitudes on that Galilean hillside—and began to live them—he was launched on a course that would ultimately lead to Good Friday and his crucifixion on the hill of Calvary.”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity

“We live in the tension of longing for justice but always extending mercy. This cruel world needs more mercy, and where is this cruel world to find more mercy if not from the followers of Jesus?”
― Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity