When Everything's on Fire Quotes

“Christianity has suffered more casualties from faux faith than from honest doubt.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“In my forties, I made the faith-saving discovery that Jesus can turn weak, watered-down Christianity into rich, robust, intoxicating Christianity. I describe my experience as my water-to-wine journey.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“If we intend to purely think our way to God, the more likely result is crippling skepticism. As Kierkegaard pointed out, “When thinking turns toward itself in order to think about itself, there emerges, as we know, a skepticism.” If we privilege the head over the heart in all matters of inquiry, we may very well cut ourselves off from that which is intellectually unknowable. The rational mind is capable of amazing accomplishments, but it is not an organ suitable for experiencing God.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“The theologian who writes about God but never utters Oh, God in prayer is not a theologian I’m interested in.”
― 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

“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

“Sometimes biblical literalism and angry atheism are just two sides of the same fundamentalist coin.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—the work of each builder will become visible, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each has done. (1 Cor 3: 11-13, emphasis added)”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“From this colossal embarrassment, the Catholic Church learned a valuable lesson and now celebrates scientific inquiry. Today, science classes in Catholic high schools in the United States spend more time studying evolution than the science classes in public high schools. It’s time for evangelicals to learn the lesson that Catholics have learned. I regularly tell my church that I don’t know of a single peer-reviewed scientific theory that is a threat to the Christian faith. All truth is God’s truth, and in the end, scientists and theologians are seeking the same thing.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“I dream of a church that is a pioneer in the way of peace and never again a chaplain to the masters of war.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“The reason I cannot be a cynic, the reason I refuse to despair, the reason I hold on to hope despite everything being on fire is that, along with the apostle Paul, I too am “convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8: 38-39). And so I say it without embarrassment: everything is going to be all right.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“When we follow the Jesus way, embrace the Jesus truth, and live the Jesus life, we are on the road to the Father’s house, the house of love. And do I believe that some, drawn by the Holy Spirit, are on this holy way without yet knowing the name of the way? Absolutely. They are what Karl Rahner called “anonymous Christians.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“The incarnation is the intervention that saves the world. When everything is on fire, my greatest comfort is the assurance that the world will be saved. God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world. Yes, the world will be saved by the intervention of God.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“For example, I hold the resurrection of Jesus Christ to be a historical event. Though the precise nature of the resurrection may lie beyond our understanding, I believe it happened. I believe it because the living Christ has been revealed to me and because of the witness and creedal confession of the church. But we can, as we must, read much of the Old Testament as allegorical and still be as solidly orthodox as the church fathers.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“When your biblical foundation requires you to defend the sin of slavery, it’s time to get a new foundation!”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“In the name of biblicism, you can wind up defending sin. I’ve encountered fundamentalists backed into a biblicist corner attempting to defend the Bible by saying, “Sometimes slavery is a good thing” and “There were good masters.” And this was said in reference to American slavery! This is not defending the Bible; this is abusing the Bible! Regarding “good” slavery and “good” masters, James Cone writes, From the black perspective, the phrase “good” master is like speaking of “good” racists and “good” murderers. Who in their right minds could make such nonsensical distinctions, except those who deal in historical abstractions? Certainly not the victims! Indeed, it may be argued that the so-called good masters were in fact the worst, if we consider the dehumanizing effect of mental servitude. At least those who were blatant in their physical abuse did not camouflage their savagery with Christian doctrine, and it may have been easier for black slaves to make the necessary value-distinctions so that they could regulate their lives according to black definitions. But “good” Christian masters could cover up their brutality by rationalizing it with Christian theology, making it difficult for slaves to recognize the demonic. . . . The “good” master convinced them that slavery was their lot ordained by God, and it was his will for blacks to be obedient to white people. After all, Ham was cursed, and St. Paul did admonish slaves to be obedient to their masters. 6 When your biblical foundation requires you to defend the sin of slavery, it’s time to get a new foundation!”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“Very often Protestant Christians (especially evangelicals) are taught that the foundation for Christian faith is the Bible. This is nearly a universal truism in the evangelical world, evidenced by how most evangelical statements of faith begin with the Bible. Subsequently, if the Bible is the foundation for Christian faith, then the Bible must be defended at all costs—and it tends to be an inerrant, literalist reading of the Bible that must be defended. In this system, a flaw in the Bible is a crack in the foundation that can lead to a catastrophic collapse. This is the anxiety that fuels the sham apologetics of the Ken Ham variety. 4”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“Obviously, this is a system that has default atheism built into it from the beginning! When a person says, “I refuse to believe in the existence of invisible realities unless I see them,” they have, by definition, ended the game before it begins. If from the outset you insist that if God doesn’t show up in the telescope like Alpha Centauri or in the microscope like a DNA molecule, then God doesn’t exist, well, guess what, you’re going to “prove” that God doesn’t exist. Arguing that the self-sustaining Creator God doesn’t exist because God doesn’t appear in the category of contingent phenomenon is not a good-faith argument; it’s a trick.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13: 13). Paul’s conversion wasn’t from Judaism to Christianity—Paul wouldn’t have seen it like that. Paul’s conversion was from the zeal of religious violence to the loyalty of cosuffering love. Paul was converted from violence to nonviolence.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“Biblical certainty was the drug of choice for this young Pharisee, but it only made him mean. Certitude can be an incubator for cruelty. Perceived infallibility can lead to brutality.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“During the many decades that I’ve sought to live as a follower of Jesus, I’ve had the experience of losing Jesus several times. It’s usually been something like Mary and Joseph’s experience of suddenly realizing they couldn’t find Jesus in the caravan they assumed he was in. It can be very distressing to realize you can no longer find Jesus in the movement you belong to. I first knew Christ in the Jesus movement and later in the charismatic movement, but there came a day when I could no longer find him there. I could either pretend everything was all right or seek to rediscover Jesus. The seeking may be distressing, but it is the inevitable pattern of spiritual growth. We have Jesus. We lose Jesus. We seek Jesus. We find Jesus. We rethink Jesus. We grow. I don’t think it can be otherwise.”
― 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

“But I say if Jesus Christ did not exist, we would never have imagined him. Who would have imagined that billions of people would eventually come to worship God as a crucified Jew? The gospel exists not because it was invented but because it happened. The most astounding thing I know about the gospel is that being disguised under the disfigurement of an ugly crucifixion and death, Christ on the cross is paradoxically the clearest revelation of who God is. And I can’t imagine any news that is better than the good news that God is like Jesus. Some things in the universe are too good not to be true.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“I would much rather ground Christian faith on the beauty of Christ than on biblical literalism. Biblical literalism can be debunked by a college freshman, but the beauty of Christ can withstand the most formidable attack Nietzsche can muster.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“Marx says our motives are mostly about money; Freud says our motives are mostly about sex; Nietzsche says our motives are mostly about power.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“suppose if I did get to have my fantasy lunch with Nietzsche, I’d have to tell him the bad news that his dreamed-of Übermensch turned out to be a monster and that his dreaded last man seems to be the inevitable end of his philosophical trajectory. It would probably be an awkward lunch. Maybe I don’t want to have that lunch with Nietzsche after all—it would be just too sad.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“Being angry with modern people for losing their faith is like being angry with medieval people for dying of the plague.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“Unlike the zealous new atheists, Nietzsche didn’t say “Hooray! We’ve got rid of God! Now everything will get better!” Nietzsche was much more sober and feared that life in a world that had abandoned God would become petty and pointless. Nevertheless, Nietzsche was ready for the world to take the bold step and move on without God.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“It’s considered incontrovertible that Europe is thoroughly secular while America clings to Christianity. But that has not been my experience. When I’m in Europe, I sense deep, though often buried and forgotten, Christian roots; while in America, I encounter a thin veneer of civil religion disguising a deeply secular core. Contrary to what some may think, the soil of Americanized Christianity is not well-suited to nourishing or sustaining Christian faith.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes

“Certitude can be an incubator for cruelty. Perceived infallibility can lead to brutality.”
― Brian Zahnd, When Everything's on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes