71 Quotes by Brian Zahnd

What I see among evangelicals – especially among some of the most prominent evangelical leaders – is an enthusiastic, uncritical, carte blanche support of Donald Trump that has more than a touch of religious aura to it. And this concerns me deeply. I’m profoundly uncomfortable when I see enthusiastic support for Donald Trump impinging upon allegiance to Jesus Christ and what he taught his followers.

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.

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.

Jesus overturned money-changing tables in the temple, but set up banqueting tables in his Father’s house.

Jesus never intended to change the world through battlefields or voting booths. Jesus has always intended to transform the world one life at a time at a shared table.

Violence is the enslavement of a pervasive lie; it imposes upon men a falsified vision not only of God but also of everything else. And that is indeed why it is a closed kingdom. Escaping from violence is escaping from this kingdom into another kingdom, whose existence the majority of people do not even suspect. This is the Kingdom of love, which is also the domain of the true God, the Father of Jesus, of whom the prisoners of violence cannot even conceive.

Fundamentalism is to Christianity what paint-by-numbers is to art.

We pray the Psalms, not to express what we feel, but to learn to feel what they express. In.

Jesus was trying to lead humanity into the deep truth that there is no “them;” there is only us.