Brian Zahnd Quotes

#1. At the cross a world of sin is absorbed by the love of God and recycled into grace and mercy. This is what the cross is about! This is what Christianity reveals. Christianity

Brian Zahnd

#2. Ultimately we cannot eliminate enemies through violence - violence only multiplies enemies. The only way to eliminate enemies is to love them, forgive them,

Brian Zahnd

#3. The fall of communism had more to do with prayer meetings in Poland than bombs dropped on Cambodia.

Brian Zahnd

#4. The majority is almost always wrong. The crowd is untruth. Scapegoating is demonic.

Brian Zahnd

#5. the church sacrifices the beauty of Christianity when it chooses the political form over the cruciform. Reaching for the ring of power distorts our beauty.

Brian Zahnd

#6. Believing in the divinity of Jesus is the heart of Christian orthodoxy. But believing in the viability of Jesus's ideas makes Christianity truly radical.

Brian Zahnd

#7. Fundamentalism is to Christianity what paint-by-numbers is to art. With

Brian Zahnd

#8. The beauty of the image of God marred in man through the Fall is what the Incarnation redeems.

Brian Zahnd

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

Brian Zahnd

#10. While Einstein's theory of relativity may one day put Earth on the intergalactic map, it will always run a distant second to the Lord's Prayer, whose harnessing of energies in their proper, life-giving direction surpasses even the discovery of fire.[2]

Brian Zahnd

#11. As Kierkegaard said, "To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions.

Brian Zahnd

#12. it is much easier to unite people around a Jesus who hates our enemies and blesses our wars than it is to unite people around a Jesus who calls us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

Brian Zahnd

#13. Pilate deserves our sympathies, not because he was a good though tragically mistaken man, but because we are not much better. We may believe in Jesus, but we do not believe in his ideas, at least not his ideas about violence, truth, and justice.2

Brian Zahnd

#14. It is through the Incarnation that glory and beauty save the world.

Brian Zahnd

#15. War is, among other things, impatience.

Brian Zahnd

#16. Jesus said his disciples would be known for their love, not for their placards of protest and angry letters to the editor.

Brian Zahnd

#17. Satan never tempted Jesus with evil; Satan tempted Jesus with good. Satan enticed Jesus to go ahead and do good and to bring it about by the most direct way possible.

Brian Zahnd

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

Brian Zahnd

#19. Our task is not to protest the world into a certain moral conformity, but to attract the world to the saving beauty of Christ.

Brian Zahnd

#20. What has happened over the ensuing two millennia is that we who confess Christ have deftly (and mostly unconsciously) crafted a religion that neatly separates the Jesus who died on the cross for the radical ideas he preached - ideas that Jesus foresaw would lead to his crucifixion.

Brian Zahnd

#21. In the politics of Jesus the world will be changed by non-coercive love or not at all. It's not the task of the church to change the world by legislative force. It's the task of the church to be the world changed by Christ. This is revolutionary in a way that conventional politics never can be.

Brian Zahnd

#22. The problem with our "change the world" rhetoric is that it is too often a thinly veiled grasp for power and a quest for dominance - things that are antithetical to the way Jesus calls his disciples to live.

Brian Zahnd

#23. 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

Brian Zahnd