71 Quotes by Brian Zahnd

The crusades are perhaps the most egregious example of how distorted Christianity can become when we separate Christ from his ideas.

The death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord has given the world a new ultimate reality – love for God expressed as love for neighbor and enemy.

When we pray the Psalms we are continuing a three-thousand-year-old tradition – a tradition practiced by Jesus and the Apostles. We pray the Psalms, not to express what we feel, but to learn to feel what they express. In praying the Psalms we learn to experience the whole range of human emotion in a way that is healthy and healing.

As long as we look at the world through the eyes of self-interest and self-defense we will never see the world as God sees it. Contemplation.

What Jesus did to embody the will of the Father on the cross was not just done on our behalf; it was also done as the way we are to follow. Jesus did not renounce the way of violence for the way of peace so that we could renounce the way of peace for the way of violence. The long dark night of mankind’s addiction to violence has come to an end. The new day of Messiah’s peace has dawned, and we are called to be children of the day. Do we dare?

Jesus founded his kingdom in solidarity with brutalized victims. This is the gospel, but it’s hard for us to believe in a Jesus who would rather die than kill his enemies. It’s harder yet to believe in a Jesus who calls us to take up our own cross, follow him, and be willing to die rather than kill our enemies.

This is not to suggest that Christ isn’t the source of salvation of the human soul, but I am suggesting that the mission of Christ extends far beyond the narrow spectrum of private spirituality and afterlife expectations. Jesus actually intends to save the world! And by world, I mean God’s good creation and God’s original intent for human society.

Christian faith is more about connecting our lives with Christ than it is about gaining spiritual information.

Jesus is not a heavenly conductor handing out tickets to heaven. Jesus is the carpenter who repairs, renovates, and restores God’s good world.