Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.
Intro
Welcome back to another episode of the Can I Say This At Church Podcast. I am so happy to present this episode to you today I got to speak with Brian Zahnd, he is founder and the pastor of the Word of Life Church, which is in St. Joseph, Missouri he’s been there his entire career and he's written many books. We discuss today Sinners in the Hand of a Loving God, which I highly recommend you go purchase. But if you want to know a little more about him, I would recommend probably Water to Wine, which is his story of how he came to be where he is now, theologically. This conversation is, I think, needed and a bit challenging. Being that we live in America. I think it's an important conversation. So without any other further, me, Pastor Brian Zahnd.
Seth
Brian, thank you, or I'm sorry, Pastor Zahnd which would you prefer?
Brian
Brian is fine,
Seth
Thank you for being on today. I've been excited about this ever since you said you'd come on. So I'm greatly excited to talk to you today. The topic at hand would be your most recent book: Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God. Before we get into that, though, I'm certainly there will be some people that are unfamiliar with some of the work that you do. So can you kind of give me just a just an overview of yourself and how you came to be, you know, to do the work that you do both at your church now and then kind of what led you to write this book?
Brian
Well, I have pastored one church for 36 years. And I never really set out to be a pastor, I think I'm an accidental pastor. I had a dramatic encounter with Jesus when I was in high school. And I went overnight from being the high school Led Zeppelin freak to the high school Jesus Freak. And then by the time I was 17, I was running a coffeehouse ministry that eventually turned into our church. And I've been doing that for 36 years. And I started writing, at least seriously, I started writing, I think, in 2009. And I've written six books, I'm working on the seventh right now. And so I'm a pastor. I traveled extensively these days, partly because I can, our church is strong and stable, and I've got good staff and I can be gone at times. And I speak at a lot of conferences and seminaries and colleges and churches, and so I travel a lot as well. So I kind of got three gigs going on, Pastor, writer, speaker.
Seth
Yeah, that's a lot of that's a long time to be a pastor, especially at one church. You see so many pastors, they'll bounce around. How now, assuming that's not every Sunday, that's got to be, I don't know, 4000 or 5000. sermons, probably more.
Brian
Well, I have written I can tell you the exact number. I've written 3345 sermons, but I have preached far more than that, because you know, you read them all times. I've preached a lot a few thousand times something like,
Seth
I'm glad you enjoy it. And I've been listening to some of your stuff recently, on your church's podcasts where they reproduce those, and I've enjoyed them. So a brief intro on the book. So I recently finished reading this, I didn't intend to do it in one sitting. But that's what happened. It’s very easy reading good. It's a great good read. So can you kind of give me an intro of what made you want to write your most recent book sinners in the hand of a loving God?
Brian
Well, I would say it is my experience as a pastor, not only as a pastor, but as someone on this journey as well. I picked up some of the pathologies of the angry God theology along the way. I mean, they're just out there. I mean, it's part of the Puritan soul, that is America.
America has a Puritan soul, by which I mean, it shapes the way we think about God and mean even atheists or Puritan atheists. What I mean is in America, the God that atheists don't believe in is the Puritan God, which is too often depicted as an angry, violent retributive God. So I had to work my own way out of that.
And as a pastor, I just see how many people are crippled to a certain extent, in their faith, by inheriting an idea that God is, in fact, angry, violent and retributive. So I think I wrote, I think it's a very pastoral book. I mean, it's theological in nature. But it's not…I didn't write at an academic level, because I wanted it for just, you know, the common person to be able to read it. So it's theological in topic, but it's pastoral in the way that it's written. So that's, that's what I was trying to do there.
Seth
And so you referenced yourself being on journey. When did that journey start for you? I guess, when did you begin to question a, for lack of a better word of vehemently, aggressively abusive God?
Brian
Probably around the turn of the century 2000. But then I really began to really rework a lot of my theology and that's the story, I tell them my memoir, Water to Wine. And that really, I really began to go public with some of the theological spiritual transitions that I was going through in 2004, which, to me seems like yesterday, but of course, it's 14 years ago now. So I've been on this journey for quite a while and honestly Seth, I hear from pastors most days, more days than I don't, I will get some message in some form or another from some pastor who is also on this spiritual transition.
Some people speak of it as destruction. I don't like that phrase, too aggressive and violent. I like my metaphor, water to wine. I like the idea of, we're restoring a precious artwork that has been kind of spoiled by a patina of grime that we're now trying to recover. So it's been a big part of my own life over the last decade and a half, two decades, of rethinking a lot of what I picked up along the way. Hmm, it's been good. It's been good for my soul. It's been good for churches.
Seth
So I have to imagine, well, I'm here in Central Virginia. And I know if our pastors shift theologically, in a way, it sounds like you had of a traditional, “fundamentalist” God, to what your views are now, how did that go over? What happened in your church?
Brian 7:55
The people that loved it, loved it, and the people that hated it, hated it. I lost 1000 people.
Seth
Oh, my, oh, my.
Brian
So I tell people look, in my estimation, Word of Life Church as the church is today, half the size and twice as good. Or 10 times as good. I, you know, it's, it's a good church. And, and during the real tumultuous period of, let's say, 2005/6/7/8, it was hard. And it was scary. And it was painful. I speak of that now in the past tense, but you know, I made it through there. But I'm in a relatively small city, you know, we're less than 100,000 people. And if you lose 1000 members in a church
Seth
that's big.
Brian
What it means is, if you go to the grocery store, you see them.
If you do it, right, you can see them on aisles, 1 through 10.
And so that was a painful time, but it was, you know, we just had to go through that transition. So how was it received? The people that were able to go on that journey and make that transition, they will tell me regularly, in a very appreciative way, that they're so thankful; it's changed their life. Others, you know, I guess they decided I was Lucifer.
Seth
Right.
Yeah, I've gotten some of that as well, some from close personal friends, at least from college that we went to, I went to Liberty. So I've got friends that at least are thinking about God, and many of them are like, I don't know what you're doing, Seth. But you're, you're slipping, you're doing something wrong. But I've never felt more alive.
Brian
So I know exactly what you're talking about.
Seth
The title of the book is a play on words of the Jonathan Edwards sermon. And so for those that are unfamiliar, and I think a lot of people are unfamiliar, and they didn't know that they weren't, can you kind of go in how you're jumping off from from Jonathan Edwards?
Brian
No doubt about it. Sinners in the hands of an angry God is the most significant sermon in American history. So even if people haven't actually read the sermon, they've been influenced by it, because it just got into the spiritual DNA of America.
A lot of people have read it, though, because it shows up for whatever reason, it's sort of a stock example of creative writing. And a lot of high school students will find it in a high school literature class. And maybe just to give you….I think I'm just going to read part of it.
Seth
Okay.
Brian
So that you get an idea. This is a sermon that was preached in 1741, part of what's called the Great Awakening. And I know it's just continued to have a life almost over. So and I want to say right off, it's not necessarily indicative of everything that Jonathan Edwards preached. He did a lot of beautiful stuff, and the foreword to this book addresses that.
So I'm not really so much contending with Jonathan Edwards as an entire scope of his ministry. But you know, he did preach this sermon, it did have a lasting impact, it continues to influence the American religious imagination. So yeah, that's that's what I used for a, a title. Edwards sinners in the hands of an angry God, it probably the most famous passages is known as the spider passage and it goes like this.
The God that holds you over the pit of hell. Much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over a fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked. His wrath toward you burns like fire. He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire. He is of pure eyes than to have to bear you in His sight. You are 10,000 times so abominable in his eyes, as the most hateful, venomous serpent is in ours.
Lovely stuff, right?
Seth
10,000 times!
Brian
I'm going to read one more passage. Because this is the part that really, and see our hearers don't know that I was very influenced by this. In fact, I made my own…I don't think I have it here. But I made my own little copy of this. I photocopied pages out of a collected work, collected works, Jonathan Edwards and I fashioned my own little homemade, cut and paste and that's when cut and paste was done with scissors and glue. And I made this little pamphlet, where I highlighted I memorized passages of this, I would use this kind of rhetoric, to engage in what I would now describe as evangelism by terrorism.
But here's, here's a passage, Edward says,
It would be dreadful, to suffer this fierceness and wrath of Almighty God one moment, but you must suffer it too. all eternity. There will be no end to this exquisite, horrible misery. When you look forward, you shall see a long forever a boundless duration before you which will swallow up your thoughts and amaze your soul and you will absolutely despair of ever having any deliverance, any end, any mitigation any rest at all. You will know certainly that you must wear out loan ages, millions of millions of ages, in wrestling and conflicting with this Almighty merciless vengeance. And then when you have done so, when so many ages have actually been spent by you in this manner, you will know that all is but a point to what remains.
And how about that blue line in their Almighty merciless vengeance. Okay. You can preach God like that. You can ransack the Bible and cobble together disparate Bible verses and paint that picture fear of God, that is a deity of almighty merciless vengeance. But the question remains, is it true? And I challenge that, and that's what the book is about?
Seth
Yeah, I mean, people have done that for millennia. I mean, Hitler found proof text and I mean, what's the name of the Baptist Church now that goes around protesting?
Brian
Westboro, they've come to our place twice. Lovely people.
Seth
You get a trophy after more than one I guess?
Brian
It's kind of like a badge of honor, isn't it?
Seth
But people have done that for forever. So I guess the question is, then, how do you reconcile the God of, I guess, the God of the Old Testament that does read more angry, at least to me, and at least in the children's Bibles that every with my kids. So how do you reconcile that?
Brian
So many stories that we think of as children's stories from the Bible are not children's stories? Noah and the flood is not a children's story.
Seth
Right.
Brian
But that’s what we do with it because you know its got animals?
Seth
No, I mean, and most of the copies of my Bibles are upstairs, they are children's Bibles, the copies on the bookshelf to my right they are regular Bible. So how do you reconcile then, that angry God of the Old Testament with the well with Jesus?
Brian
Well, okay, to begin with, I want to establish my orthodoxy. I confess that the living God, who is the God that Jesus called Abba, or Father, is also the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So I don't think it's there are different gods, there are different views of God.
So I'm not a Marcionite, sometimes tag with that, I want to make that very clear. Marcion was a second century Christian heretic, who saw the problem, but his solution was far too radical outside the bounds of Orthodoxy. And he said, he saw that there seemed to be a difference between the Abba that Jesus speaks of and certain aspects of the violence and vengeance that you'd be pulled in the Old Testament deity. And Marcion’s solution was to say that the God of the Old Testament was a demiurge; kind of a malevolent deity. And his solution was to completely remove the Old Testament from the Christian canon of Scripture, but I don't do any of that.
I confess that Yahweh of the Old Testament is the Abba of Jesus and the God that Christians confess as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But we do have to wrestle with some of the problems, we can't pretend there's not a problem there. And so my approach is to simply say, look, the Bible doesn't stand above the story it tells, but it's fully immersed in it.
The Bible itself is on the journey to discover the true Word of God, who is Jesus Christ. You can say it another way, the Old Testament is the inspired telling of Israel’s story of coming to know the living God. But along the way, inevitable assumptions are made because it is a journey. You don't get to Jesus in Genesis or Exodus, or Joshua, you have to get all the way to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John before you meet Jesus.
And so you have this kind of inspired don't mind using that word, diary of a people who are chosen by God, and God is revealing himself to them, but they also make their own assumptions about God. I think if you don't like that, if someone doesn't like that, then I can say, well, then what do you want to say? Do you want to say, “look, you know, we can we can talk about, we can talk about Canaanite genocide.”
Okay, so I can the Scriptures, I think most people know they're there, where the command is kill everybody, including the babies. So you have a Bible verse where God is depicted as commanding what today we would call genocide. Today, what we would call war crimes. So what do you do with that?
You can't pretend that it's not there and hope that you know, your teenagers don't find it.
It's there. So what do you want to say? Do you want to say, Well, God used to do that, but he doesn't do that anymore. Well, now you are saying, okay, what's happened is God changes. You're going to question the immutability of God. And that's, that's a far more radical solution than what I offer. I mean, there are people that embrace that. But you are really striking at the heart of what Christian theologians have always said about God. And one of the things that Christian theologians have consistently asserted is the immutability, that is the unchangeableness of God. God doesn't mutate.
So if you can say, “Well, no, God doesn't change”, then you can say, okay, so you're not…you don't want to question the immutability of God's some will then question the morality of God, by simply saying: “When God commands that it's not immoral”. But that that's asking me to violate my own conscience. I know killing babies is wrong. You know killing babies is wrong. Everybody listening to this podcast knows that killing babies is wrong.
And then the problem becomes, well, if God used to tell people to kill babies, you've left the door ajar for people who want to justify their own violence, by projecting it upon God. And that's not a theoretical problem that can arise, that kind of thing has happened throughout history. So if you're not going to, if you don't question, the morality of God, if you don't want to question the immutability of God, the only thing that remains is for us to question how we understand the inspiration of Scripture.
I say it's inspired. But one of the reasons the Bible reads the way it does, especially in the earlier parts of the Bible, is God is allowing his children to tell the story, and certain assumptions are made along the way.
Seth 20:15
Yeah, they're gonna have their own biases cook in a little bit. Here's my fear. My fear is my, my children are somehow indoctrinated with the same fear based version of the gospel that I was. And then like many my age, now, they just leave the church in 20 years, they just check out. And so that gospel or that salvation by terrorism, as you said earlier, how does a pastor or a parent someone in my position, talk to their children and read through the Bible in such a way that you don't filter it? And you're honest, but you're also not implying that, that God has to beat somebody for there to be salvation?
Brian
Well, you don't read, as a Christian, you don't read the Bible, the way you read other books. You know, I got books all around me pick up a book, what did you start page one, and you read the thing? That is not the way Christians approach the Bible? Let's think about it. What are the first 39 books of the Bible? What we call the Old Testament, but really what it is, it's the Jewish Bible.
And so you have to ask the question, why is the Jewish holy text, the Jewish canonical text, appended as this giant prequel to our Christian canonical text? Well, the answer is, Jesus is Jewish. And it tells the story of how we get to Jewish but it's Jesus that attracts us to begin with. So we don't start with Genesis, we start with Jesus. And that's who we're going to first introduce everybody to children, everybody, we're pumped by Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, he becomes, the filter through which we read everything.
And then the rest of it can read as a story that gets us to Jesus. But when push comes to shove, and you see apparent contradictions, you work them out the best you can. But if something has to give, it's not Jesus, it's everything else or anything else. So I say, I think part of what you do with children, is make sure that you have given them a very strong, vibrant, living picture of Jesus, who is endlessly winsome. Everybody's attracted to Jesus. I mean, think about it, that Christianity has, you know, innumerable critics, and some of them very sophisticated and very, let's say sophisticated right word in their arguments.
But even the most virulent critic of Christianity virtually never tries to sustain a criticism of Jesus Himself. Most critics of Christianity still admire Jesus. So just keep playing the Jesus card, just keep talking about Jesus. And then you know, when you run into some of these troubling passages, then you do something like, you know, well, what do you think Jesus would say about that?
You see the problem is, and this is a particularly Protestant problem, we have elevated the Bible, to an extent that we somehow think it's equal to Jesus, the Bible is not equal to Jesus. Jesus said this about the scriptures.
You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them, you have eternal life, but they are that which bear witness to me, but you won't come to me.
So when we say Word of God, as Christians, the first thing we should think is Jesus. And then in secondary and a pen, ultimate sense, we think scripture. Scripture is the word of God that bears witness to the true Word of God, who is Jesus. In other words, the Trinity is not Father, Son, and Holy Bible. And I say this is a Protestant problem. Well, it is because we're all products of a divorce, a 500 year old divorce, and in the divorce, and I'm not saying that the Reformation wasn't necessary. I mean, something had to give. But I mean, the Renaissance church was intolerably corrupt and something had to happen. But what we got was not just a reformation, we did get some reformation, but we definitely got a divorce. And we're the children of that divorce. And in the divorce settlement, we who are Protestants ended up with Protestant dad, make him the dad, and all Protestant dad got into divorce was the Bible in the Bible had to be everything. But the Bible can't live up to me and everything.
Mom got church and got tradition. When we don't want to have to hire at church theology, we don't want to have a very high ecclesiolology, we don't want to have any emphasis on tradition. The problem is, when you do that, you have no ability to really account for what the Bible isn't how it came to be. And it tends them to take on almost this life of its own becoming, essentially deified, which is a form of idolatry. The Bible is not divine in and of itself. It's a gift. It's inspired, but it's not a member of the Trinity.
Seth
Why do so many, I guess why do so many churches and ministers of many denominations, why do they still cling to this angry God mentality?
Brian
Why? I…let me think, why? I don't think there's any one answer. You know why they do this is not really something I raised in the book. I think some of it comes from an inability to have a sophisticated reading of Scripture. And they're afraid that if they don't place equal emphasis and give equal authority to every verse in the Bible, that somehow people are going to just end up pitching the whole Bible and walking away from the faith. To which I say, teaching people to read the Bible in a terrible way is a good way to ensure that when they get a little older and a little more sophisticated themselves, they may in fact, walk away from the faith. So I think part of it is how they have come to view the Bible that forces them to do that. I think other people, I think they just it is a way to control people, isn't it?
Seth
Yeah,
Brian
I mean, threat is, and threat of violence, and because of this is what this is, a threat of violence has always been a good way to control people.
Seth
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, that's, yeah, that's how you control animals. And anything else for that matter?
Brian
But it’s not the way of love.
Seth
No, definitely not. I think my kids sometimes when they're being punished would agree with that. That you're not being very loving. You're punishing me.
So you speak…there's a chapter in your book called Hell, and I believe it's got it next to me. It's called How to get there. How do I get there?
Brian
Well, Jesus tells you he doesn't he, he says things like,
if you don't care for the poor, the stranger, the imprison the sick, to the extent that you disregard them, you disregarded me.
And now there's some sort of consequence that comes from that. And he speaks of a fiery Gehena? That's Matthew 25. Now I'm not you know, I'm not ignorant, Seth, I know that that isn't what people want to think about hell, what they want to do is they want to, they want to, they want to have some sort of what they call literal hell, which they don't really don't mean literally mean figurative, but they think they mean literal, hell, and then and then then they want to, but and so they use Jesus because Jesus talks about hell.
He's the one that talks about hell all them talk about. But then they take a certain reading of Paul, which I think is a misreading of Paul, to find a way to escape held, Jesus talks about, so they don't let Jesus actually be a theologian himself. They don't take Jesus seriously. As a theologian Paul is the serious theologian, Jesus is a factor in a salvation equation, but they don't really pay attention to what Jesus Himself teaches about hell.
Seth
Which is what?
Brian
Well, okay, we got slow down here.
Seth
(laughter)
Brian
Here's the, we have this word hell, HELL. Well, of course, that's, you know, the word hell, HELL is not found in the Hebrew text or the Greek text. It's this dramatic word that we use. And it's sometimes it's how we, some translations have translated Sheol and Hades and Gehena that way. But the problem is, that word has picked up accumulated meaning down through the ages, from things like Dante's Inferno to a “chick track”. And then we read that back into the text. And we assume somehow, that what we've picked up later, along the journey through, you know, some fundamental Baptist hell-house at Halloween.
So then we read that back into the text, most of the time when Jesus is talking about what we would call help, not all of the time. Most of the time, though, he is talking in very descriptive language, about the impending doom awaiting Jerusalem, because they will not follow him in the way of peace. And it's quite specific. He says, they're going to march on you, the Romans, they're going to put up ramparts, they are going to lay siege to the city, and it's going to meet a fiery do the, the maggots not going to die, that is, you know, rotting corpses and the fires won't be quenched.
Another example, remember when Jesus said “unless you repent”, which means to rethink, you're all going to perish in the same way. And it was in the context of hearing about pilot executing, some apparently, would be revolutionaries, or protesters in the temple, and a building collapse, in which 18 people were killed. And Jesus says, Look, this is this is Luke, what 13..16?
Jesus says, unless you rethink everything, you're all going to perish in the same way. And somehow we think he's talking about a postmortem hell, when what he's actually saying, unless you rethink this hell bent for destruction, revolution against Rome, you're all going to die by Roman swords and collapsing buildings. Which a generation later they did. And so most of the time, Jesus is warning us about the doom and the fate of self inflicted Gehena(s) that we bring upon ourselves, because we are determined to go contrary to the grain of love.
There is a there is a grain to the universe, because it comes from God who is love. And if we can move with the grain of love, it tends toward human flourishing. But when we go against the grain, we suffer the shards of self inflicted suffering, we can call that the wrath of God, if we like. It's fine. It's biblical language. But at a more sophisticated level, we see that it's really the consequences of going against the way God has ordained and designed the universe to work. And that's love. I'll give you an example. Here. Let me grab a Bible. I'll give you a good example right out of Psalm 7.
In the 7th Psalm, you're going along for the psalm, and you come to this, you come to this passage,
God is a righteous judge, God sits in judgment every day. If they will not repent. God will wet his sword, he will bend his bow and make it ready. He has prepared his weapons of death. He makes his arrow shafts of fire.
Okay, then you stop right. There you go. Okay. So clearly, we see that God is a God of vengeance, employing violence, he wets his sword, he bends his bow, he has weapons of death. But just keep reading. Okay, I keep reading from where I just stopped. The Psalmist goes on.
Look at those who are in labor with wickedness who can see evil and give birth to a lie. They dig a pit and make it deep and fall into the hole that they have made. Their malice turns back upon their own head, their violence falls on their own scalp.
And so first, there's this metaphorical picture of God as a warrior with weapons of death. But as you continue the psalmist switches, and so it's more like this. It's more like people digging a pit for their enemies, but they fall into it themselves. It's more like, it's more like violence has a boomerang effect, and it comes back upon our own lives. And so I understand the wrath of God primarily as divine consent to our own self destructive rebellion.
Seth
And that makes sense. I mean, I know as you, as everyone gets angry, or hateful, or vengeful, and in your personal life, be at work or be in your marriage, whatever things do tend to escalate quickly, and they quickly spiral to a point that you can't repair them.
Brian
Yeah.
Seth
You speak in your book. And there's…I forget where it is. But I didn't know this before I read the book. So Jesus is quoting Isaiah. Yeah, and I don't remember which part of Isaiah, but he only quotes it up to a specific time. And then after that, he just stops,
Brian
right.
Seth
Can you go into that a bit?
Brian
I'm gonna grab another Bible.
I've got them all over the place here, okay. It's Isaiah 61, where it goes like this,
the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he's anointed me to preach good news to the poor, he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor in the day of vengeance of our God to comfort all who mourn to grant though.
So so it ends with this big, and the day of the vengeance of our God, because Isaiah sees, I mean, this is written during the exile, and he sees a day coming, when there's gonna be a Jubilee for these exiles, that the things are going to turn around and there's going to be good news for the poor. And there's going to be the captives, because they literally the captives, are going to return and they're going to be set free, and their wounds are going to be bound up. And it's going to be the year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance of our God, because Isaiah has this idea that the crowning achievement of God's work is to not only deliver us from our enemies, but then to visit violent retribution upon those enemies. Well, very famously, Jesus, after he began his ministry, in Luke 4 returns to his hometown, Nazareth, and we’re told that they heard him gladly.
The Messiah was going to launch this revolution to deliver them from their enemies. That is the the hated Romans who ruled over them and occupy their land. And they like the idea that maybe Messiah could be one of the hometown boys. But when Jesus stands up and reads in the synagogue, he reads it like this,
the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he's anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty, all who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor,
and he closes the book. I mean, they all know this passage is supposed to be and the day of vengeance of our God, but he just read it. It's like singing the national anthem and singing, or the land of the free and in the end, you stop and everybody's waiting for the home of the brave, you gotta…Jesus doesn't finish it. And they say, well, maybe you know, you're reading too much into that. But Jesus do that on purpose very clearly. Because what then Jesus does in his sermon is draw these two subversive subtexts from the Old Testament, that show God having mercy on Israel's enemies.
And he first tells the story of the Sarah Phoenician woman, the, the widow of Zarephath, in the line of sight. And, and Jesus says in a very provocative way, he says, There were many widows in Israel, but the only one that God provided for in the days of Elijah was this Gentile woman of Sidon. And then he tells another story, that's even more provocative. He said, there were many lepers in Israel in the days of Elisha, but the only one that got healed was not only a Gentile, a Syrian, but he was the general of their most dreaded enemy at the time.
And so Jesus tells the story of the God of Israel having mercy on those that they had been brought up to view as enemies. And did they get the point? Oh, they got the point. And they were furious, and they tried to throw Jesus off of a cliff. Because it's amazing how angry people can be if you try to take away from them their religion of vengeance.
A lot of people cherish the idea that God is going to hate who they hate, and that God's ultimately going to visit violent retribution on those that they deem their enemies. Jesus challenged that and he got driven out of the city and they almost threw him off a cliff for it.
Seth
Well, ultimately got crucified. So I've got I want to be respectful time. So I have a couple smaller questions. Well, one of them probably won't be smaller. But as I've read critiques of yours, the people that seem to absolutely hate this book, are the “five-point hyper Calvinists”,
Brian
and I knew that before I wrote this,
Seth
my question is why? I don't understand what they're losing, by gaining love or Grace?
Brian
You're asking me this question? I don't know. They'll have to answer that themselves. But I will say that I knew, when I wrote this book, I kind of I had a suspicion that it would be well received. And really, it has been, it's been very well received. And I found that very gratifying, on a personal level, but on a more significant level. I am just so happy that the book seems to have gone forth and is doing what I sent it to do. It's helping people it's, it's preserving the capacity for faith in a God that looks like Jesus. But I told the publisher, I told my literary agent, I said, the hardcore five point Calvinists are going to hate this book.
I think because they would have to change their system to some extent. And they're deeply committed to that system. You know, I mean, a five point Calvinist a hardcore I mean, they have a picture of God, that God not only from eternity, the past has appointed, whom you will save. Many people talk about double predestination. Now, there's no such thing as not double I mean, if you're gonna have predestination, and you have a system where you view, you know, Heaven and Hell and, yeah, so they have a system where they believe that the God that Jesus called Allah created the vast majority of human beings so that they can be tortured forever in God's own torture chamber. And as the Calvinist would say it to the glory of God.
Seth
and he'll enjoy it.
Brian
Yeah. But have you ever met a Calvinist that didn't believe they were one of the elect?
Seth
Well, no.
Seth
So it, you know, with that, though, I just don't know how to live with it. You know, I did a debate Austin Fischer and I debated a couple of Calvinists was sponsored by Christianity today. I think it's available online, and they can see it online. It was called. I think it's just called. I don't know, just Google. I will debate the first debate you'll find is my debate on atonement theory. That one's really popular, but I'm not referring to that one. I'm referring to the one in Chicago…just, I can't remember.
Seth
I will. It's you against Austin Fischer or you and Austin Fischer?
Brian
There were four of us and Austin was my debate partner, he was with me and the guys, the guys were good guys. I mean, I liked it. We hung out afterwards and got along fine. I hate their theology, and they know I do.
Seth
I'm sure it's I'm sure that's reciprocal. Um, so to bring it too…I have two questions.
I want to end with Jesus so I'll ask the other first. The world that we live in now and not to put politicize things where you have people that read the Bible in such a way that they're encouraging violence and encouraging Jerusalem being having a capital and whatnot
I mean, I was raised that's called I didn't know it was called dispensationalism until I was older and learned that there were…
Brian
You just thought that it was the Bible
Seth
Yeah, that's just…this is the way that it is
Brian
It’s almost wearing lenses. It's okay to, to read the Bible through a lens, as long as you know you're doing that. The minimalist is someone who is reading the Bible through coke bottle thick glasses and thinks they have perfect vision.
Seth
I think I understand, but I'm sure there are many that would like a different viewpoint, there seems to just be an inherent danger in reading the Bible. That way it seems to encourage things that I don't know are generative for society?
Brian
Well, don't you think there's something a little bit suspicious about asserting that the book of Revelation is plain and clear and simple. And you can read the book of Revelation and understand exactly how it pertains to modern, contemporary, geopolitical events. But when you go to the Sermon on the Mount, you say, “Oh, you know, that's that's, that's difficult to understand”.
Ah, shouldn't be the other way around. Shouldn't be the Sermon on the Mount. It's pretty clear. I see what Jesus is saying here. He says, “Blessed are the peacemakers”, not suspicious are the peacemakers. And Blessed are the peacemakers they'll be called the children of God. And I think, you know, you should interpret the book of Revelation, in the light of the Sermon on the Mount, not the other way around. And, and just you know, so our listeners will know, I have three chapters on the book of Revelation in Sinners in the Hands of Loving God, so I don't skirt that, in fact, is one of my favorite books. If you if you read it, right, I think it's the probably the most timely book we have right now in the Bible, but you have to learn to read it right, you have to read it for what it is. And that is a prophetic critique of the Roman Empire, and us of all Empire.
And if you learn to read it from that vantage point, it's very relevant for today. But if you use it to justify your own, you know, vision of how the world should play out, and justify it to the extent that you believe that God Himself is violent, and therefore there's nothing wrong with assisting God by endorsing violence. Well, you've completely ignored the Jesus of the Gospels to get to that point.
Seth 45:36
Yeah, timely for America or timely for the world?
Brian
Especially America. No, I think the book of Revelation is always extremely relevant for a church that is living in a military economic superpower. So it was relevant for the Christians living in Rome and the first century, or Byzantium in the fourth century or Spain the 15th century or England in the 19th century or American the 20th.
Seth
Okay, so whoever Well, yeah, because I guess the Bible is written for and to have people that were the was the least of these the oppressed, the slaves the people was they're being pressed down upon.
Brian
Yeah. So if you want me just say something really provocative, here's what we have to do. We have to learn to view America, not as a kind of Biblical Israel, but as a kind of Biblical Babylon.
Seth
That's okay. Yeah. That is provocative. So we spoke a bit on hell earlier. And so I wanted to end on what then is the inverse of that, what is salvation?
Brian
Jesus virtually never used the word salvation that noun, he uses it twice, that's all. Paul uses it all the time. What Jesus used all the time when Jesus talked about incessantly, not even incessantly, exclusively, the only thing Jesus ever talked about, in his entire ministry was the Kingdom of God. Everything Jesus did was either an announcement, or an enactment of the Kingdom of God, that was his whole ministry. So Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God, Paul talks about salvation. But here's the thing. They're not talking about two different things. They're talking about the same thing. So what is salvation? Salvation is the Kingdom of God. What is our experience of salvation? It's our own personal experience of beginning to live under the reign and rule of Christ, which involves the forgiveness of sins and the hope of resurrection and things like that.
But what is salvation? It is participating in God's saving action to redeem and set right a world gone wrong through Jesus Christ. The problem is we have made salvation almost exclusively. private, and postmortem. It's just an individual private transaction between me and God. I mean, my relationship with other people has nothing to do with my salvation is just me and God. And it's mostly postmortem, so that I go to heaven and not hell when I die.
Interestingly, as you read the book of Acts, there's about eight sermons in there, depending on which account as a sermon. And the Apostles never make appeals to afterlife issues in their proclamation of the gospel.
So if you can't preach the gospel, without making appeals to afterlife issues, well, then you can't preach the Apostolic gospel. I'm sure they had ideas about it, about the afterlife, but they don't refer to it. It's not at all central to their proclamation, the gospel, their gospel is the world has a new Emperor, a new Lord, and he's the true Savior of the world. And his name is Jesus. And the evidence is that God raised Him from the dead. That's their gospel. So we need to pull away from a privatized, postmortem understanding of the gospel, and return to understanding salvation as a kind of belonging. And that it's, it's very much right now. That we participate in how God is saving the world through Jesus Christ.
Seth
Yeah, that's good. So the book for those listening, go buy the book, it’s not very expensive, it's just just very good book. How else would would would you encourage people to interact with you? And then and then just for a final thought, what would be for pastors, for lay leaders, for deacons, for people questioning what would be one thing that you would say that, that we as a church can, can do to embrace a better, well a better 2018; for lack of a better word, but a better overall Christianity for America?
Brian
You can find me I'm easy to find you just Google me, Brian Zahnd. I’m the only one.
You can find my blog. It's BrianZahnd.com, and I'm active on certain forms of social media. Well, what would I say? I would say, Let's become more Jesus-centric. Let's, let's talk about Jesus. Let's look to Jesus. Let's let our reading of the whole Bible be centered in the Gospels. I embrace the entire scriptures. I read Old Testament, New Testament every day. But I'm rooted in the gospels, because that's where we find Jesus being Jesus, doing what he does. And so I would never have the idea that I should run into the old, see if I hear Jesus say, love your enemies. What I would never do is say, Oh, yeah, but he can’t really mean that because in the Old Testament, God told Joshua to kill all those people. So we see what you're doing that you're using Joshua, to save you from Jesus. Yeah.
And so my plea would be let us be more radically centered on Jesus, let Jesus speak for himself, treat Jesus seriously as a theologian, because it's amazing how many people don't and now, you know, I'm looking at you, Calvinists, who want to use Jesus as a factor in an equation. He's the one you know, that dies on the cross, and they have a certain way of explaining what that means and how their salvation is found in that, but they don't take Jesus seriously as a theologian in his own right. And I would say, let's focus intentionally and intensely on Jesus, and play the Jesus card every chance you get because Jesus is the best thing going. I mean, Christianity's got all kinds of problems, but I stick with it because it has Jesus.
Seth
Good. I think that's as good a spot as any to end it. So thank you, Pastor Zahnd, for your time. I've enjoyed it greatly. I'd love to do it again in the future. Be blessed today. I hope you have a great day.
Brian
Thank you, Seth.
Outro
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