Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God Quotes

“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. The justice of God is not retributive; the justice of God is restorative. Justice that is purely retributive changes nothing. The cross is not where God finds a whipping boy to vent his rage upon; the cross is where God saves the world through self-sacrificing love. The only thing God will call justice is setting the world right, not punishing an innocent substitute for the petty sake of appeasement.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“In the parable of the prodigal son, the father doesn’t rush to the servants’ quarters to beat a whipping boy and vent his anger before he can forgive his son. Yet Calvin’s theory of the cross would require this ugly insertion into Jesus’s most beautiful parable. No, in the story of the prodigal son, the father bears the loss and forgives his son from his treasury of inexhaustible love. He just forgives. There is no payment. Justice as punishment is what the older brother called justice. The only wrath we find in the parable belongs to the Pharisee-like older brother, not the God-like father. Justice as the restoration of relationship is what the father called justice.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“The gospel is the beautiful story of how God is bringing the world out of bondage to sin and death through the triumph of Jesus Christ. 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!”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“God is not wrath. Though we may rightly understand and describe the consequences of divine consent to our own self-destructive will as the wrath of God, the truth remains that God is not wrath; God is love. God is not a bloodthirsty deity requiring ritual killing. Though this may have been the only way we could understand God four millennia ago on the lower flanks of the holy mountain, the truth remains that God is not bloodthirsty; God is love. God is not violence. Despite the fact that religion has a long history of sacralizing violence by projecting it on God, the truth remains that God is love. God does not operate an eternal torture chamber. However we understand the state of a postmortem soul incapable of love, the truth remains that God is not a sadistic torturer inflicting eternal pain; God is love. God is not a killer. Though many have misread the book of Revelation to such an extent that they think God’s final solution for sin is the “Final Solution,” the truth remains that God is not a genocidal killer; God is love.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“I remember preaching on Jesus’s call to the practice of radical forgiveness and being challenged by a church member who said, “Yeah, but the Bible says, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ ” I had to explain to him that a Christian can’t cite Moses to silence 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!”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“Perhaps the best way to understand the book of Revelation is that it is a prophetic critique of civil religion. By civil religion I mean the religion of state where the state is the actual object of worship. Civil religion is religious patriotism. Christians are called to practice responsible citizenship but to renounce religious patriotism. In the practice of civil religion, the truth that the state is what is actually being deified and worshiped is usually carefully concealed. Instead of directly worshiping the state as God, worship of the state is expressed through sacred symbols, myths, and personifications of the state treated with religious reverence. The tendency to deify the state is particularly pronounced in empires—rich and powerful nations that believe they have a divine right to rule other nations and a manifest destiny to shape history according to their agenda. God’s contention with empire is one of the major themes of the Bible. From Egypt and Assyria to Babylonia and Rome, the prophets constantly critique empire as a direct challenge to the sovereignty of God. This prophetic tradition of empire critique reaches its apex in the book of Revelation. John the Revelator tells us that Rome’s claim of a divine right to rule the nations and of a manifest destiny to shape history is the very thing that God has given to his Son, Jesus Christ. Thus the drama of Revelation is cast as an epic conflict between the Lamb (Jesus) and the Beast (Rome).”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“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.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“One of the problems with understanding what is meant by hell is that this tiny word has been forced to carry so much freight. Over the centuries it has picked up meanings often far removed from what was originally intended in the Bible. Hell has become a catchall word for however we imagine eternal punishment in the afterlife. But the Bible doesn’t talk near as much about the afterlife as we have imagined. A surprising thing about the Old Testament is its almost total disinterest in the afterlife. We think of heaven and hell as being the stock-in-trade of religion, but this was not the case with the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures. While the pagan religions of the Gentiles made elaborate speculations about the nature of the afterlife (this was a specialty with the Egyptians and Babylonians), the Hebrews were conspicuous in having almost no afterlife theology. For the Hebrews, death was Sheol, the grave, the underworld, the abode of the dead. The Hebrew Scriptures are fundamentally concerned with this life.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“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!”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“The role of the Old Testament is to give an inspired telling of how we get to Jesus. But once we get to Jesus we don’t build multiple tabernacles and grant an equivalency to Jesus and the Old Testament. This was Peter’s mistake on Tabor. Jesus is greater than Moses. Jesus is greater than Elijah. Jesus is greater than the Bible. Jesus is the Savior of all that is to be saved… including the Bible. Jesus saves the Bible from itself! Jesus shows us how to read the Bible and not be harmed by it. Jesus delivers the Bible from its addiction to violent retaliation. Moses may stone sinners and Elijah may kill idolaters. And so violent holiness can be justified as biblical. But for a Christian that doesn’t matter. We follow Jesus!”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“Hell in its popular and pagan misconceptions has been a blight upon the beauty of the Christian gospel.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“Jesus can save whomever he wants. Jesus is Lord.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“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!”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“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.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“But to literalize a metaphor is to create an idol and formulate an error.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“One of the main challenges in talking about God is the problem of metaphor. We cannot talk about God without using metaphor; it’s the only option we have when speaking of the supremely transcendent.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“Perhaps the best way to understand the book of Revelation is that it is a prophetic critique of civil religion. By civil religion I mean the religion of state where the state is the actual object of worship. Civil religion is religious patriotism. Christians are called to practice responsible citizenship but to renounce religious patriotism. In the practice of civil religion, the truth that the state is what is actually being deified and worshiped is usually carefully concealed. Instead of directly worshiping the state as God, worship of the state is expressed through sacred symbols, myths, and personifications of the state treated with religious reverence. The tendency to deify the state is particularly pronounced in empires - rich and powerful nations that believe they have a divine right to rule other nations and a manifest destiny to shape history according to their agenda. God's contention with empire is one of the major themes of the Bible.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“Hell is the love of God refused...
I speculate that hell is as eternal as the human capacity to resist the love of God, and thus hell is potentially eternal. But this is only speculation. I can't make the claims of certainty made by either the universalists or infernalists. What I'm convinced of is this: no one who calls upon the mercy of God is ever refused.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“The good news is that the God revealed in Christ does not belong to the category of Mars and Molech, of Ares and Zeus. These are the false gods of our frightened and shame-laden imaginations. The Creator God, the One True God, is not vengeful and retributive like those gods of the primitive pantheon. In his triumph Jesus put these petty and vindictive gods out of business. It's only their fading ghosts that haunt us today...
With the dayspring of Christ the terrors of night fade away. 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 forgives monstrous evil.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“A forgiveness-centered view of the cross saves us from a pathological anxiety about God, which is so detrimental to the soul. We can now understand that the monster god is our own creation - a monster born of our projected issues of anxiety, anger, and shame.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“When we view the cross in the light of resurrection, we are looking at salvation, but what do we see? Are we looking at the appeasement of a monster God through the barbarism of child sacrifice? No, we are seeing the very opposite. 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.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“The Bible recognizes the tragedy that civilization is founded upon human violence. The Bible is wrestling with the miserable reality. But the Bible is not univocal about violence. It says, "There is... a time to kill." And, "Thou shalt not kill." The Bible says, "Show no mercy to them." And, "Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful." Are these contradictions? Of course they are! And it's a fool's errand to try to reconcile all the disparate things the Bible says about violence. But there is a trajectory in the Bible, a movement away from violence as a normative and toward God's peaceable society where swords become plowshares and spears become pruning hooks. It's not by plucking isolated Bible verses here and there that we arrive at the truth of God but by identifying and following the Bible's trajectory.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“This is the problem of Biblicism untethered from the revelation given us in Christ. Unscrupulous readers of Scripture can always find a loophole or rogue verse to make the Bible seem to do their bidding. The most egregious abuse of the unscrupulous is when the Bible is pressed into service as a sponsor of violence.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“One of the reasons the Old Testament talks so much about justice is because the Hebrew people so often suffered injustice. 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.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“What the Bible does infallibly and inerrantly is point us to Jesus, just like John the Baptist did.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“The Incarnation is the ultimate act of divine self-disclosure. It's Jesus, not the Bible that is the perfect revelation of God.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“Christians are to believe in the perfect, infallible, inerrant Word of God - and his name is Jesus.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’ Jesus didn’t reply, ‘Well, you’ve got a Bible verse. If the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it. Where are the rocks? Let’s get this stoning started!’ No, Jesus says something new: ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’ That wasn’t what the Law said, but Jesus was revealing the heart of God, not giving a conservative reading of the Torah. Jesus gives us a new ethic of life-affirming mercy, which sets aside the old ethic that supported death penalties. Biblicists who desire to condemn sinners to death can quote the Bible by citing Moses. But Jesus says something else. [...] We cannot create Christian ethics while ignoring Christ!”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“The Incarnation is the ultimate act of divine self-disclosure.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“Sometimes the Bible is like a Rorschach test: our interpretation of the text reveals more about ourselves than about God.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News