IIt might be pure to imagine that Brian Zahnd, most just lately the writer of the e-book Wooden Between Worlds: A Poetic Theology of the Cross, is a megachurch pastor. In any case, he has revealed half a dozen in style books and has a great viewership on-line.
However the “gigantic” car parking zone of Zahnd's Missouri church was “abandoned” when journalist Tim Alberta visited seeking his personal current e-book. “There should have been room for 800 autos,” Alberta famous, however maybe a tenth was occupied.
The quick rationalization for the decimation of Zahnd's congregation, Alberta says, is loyalty. After years of his pastoral profession main what was then a megachurch, Zahnd felt that God was calling him to a deeper and more difficult Christian life. He immersed himself in theological examine, particularly of early church fathers similar to Irenaeus and Augustine, and emerged with a modified religion—not “backslidden,” he informed Albert, however “favored,” turning into “extra dedicated to Jesus than [he’d] when he was.”
This included a newfound dedication to Christian nonviolence and a rejection of politicized Christianity, which in Zahnd's context—a crimson state throughout George W. Bush's first time period, with the Iraq Struggle hotly debated and a re-election marketing campaign in full swing—meant near-total integration Republican and American identities of many evangelicals with their religion. “God raised Jesus, not America,” Zahnd recalled telling his congregation. “They acquired it. And so they left.”
Twenty years later Zahnd z A wooden between worlds he’s no much less dogged in his sheer enthusiasm for Jesus. Even his punctuation is smitten by Christ. (“That's the way in which God is!” he trumpets on the head of 1 part.) And the subtitle is apt, as a result of it's probably the most cross-centered e-book I've learn in years—a worthwhile meditation on theodicy, reconciliation, and the form of the cross life. However Zahnd's “poetic” means of theology results in occasional imprecision and, consequently, some doubtful theological strikes.
Followers of the Struggling God
At first of the e-book, Zahnd writes: “Probably the most emotional and convincing argument towards the Judeo-Christian religion isn’t the argument towards the existence of God, however the argument towards God's goodness. He makes his case with testimonies – impressed by true tales – of the torture and homicide of younger kids in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's movie. The Karamaz Brothers.
It's a sickeningly efficient illustration, however maybe pointless at a time when information of evil all over the world is so continuously and quickly broadcast. Footage of catastrophic earthquakes reaches us in actual time; terrorists broadcast their kidnappings and rapes reside; any informal looking of Fb is prone to set off a web-based fundraiser for a toddler with most cancers.
Such horrors lead much less to assured atheism than to a jaded, vaguely non secular preoccupation with injustice and a determined disinterest in any God who condones it. And far of what’s offered as biblical theodicy, Zahnd argues, is nothing of the kind. The Psalms lament the struggling of the harmless, however do probably not clarify it. The e-book of Job fashions belief in God in our most susceptible ignorance, but it surely additionally leaves the central query of evil unanswered.
So the place, asks Zahnd, “is God within the unspeakable human struggling? It’s also there, the e-book concludes, within the solidarity of the cross. “The one theodicy I do know is that God additionally hung and suffered and died,” he writes. “Once we see Christ in agony on the cross, we see a struggling God who refuses to let his beloved creatures undergo alone.” The identical God isn’t useless however alive, not defeated however victorious, and can someday carry justice and restoration to all issues (Acts 3:21).
After all, this isn’t only a theodicy for the twenty first century. It’s also theology itself. It tells us, as that enthusiastic part header places it, “what God is like!” And Zahnd's engagement with theories of atonement has an analogous finish. How we interpret the cross, he rightly notes, is of the utmost significance as a result of the crucifixion is “the top of divine self-revelation” (Col. 1:15-20), and our understanding of God essentially shapes our understanding of what God needs. of us.
Zahnd doesn’t advocate any single principle of the cross, though he favors René Girard's scapegoat principle and an historic household of metaphors (ransom, recapitulation, redemption, and so forth.) that we gather as Christ Victor Mannequin. For Anselm's satisfaction principle and John Calvin's penal substitution mannequin, Zahnd points a scathing critique, arguing that they symbolize a sub-Christian, “pagan soteriology” that “imports[s] unspeakable violence to the Trinity.” (I’ll return to the furthest level Zahnd reaches in rejecting these theories in a second.)
Atonement fashions that emphasize how Christ suffers and dies for his enemies fairly than killing them (Rom. 5:10) are elementary to Zahnd's understanding of what it means to reside as a follower of Christ. Readers who disagree with him on reconciliation might at this level count on Zahnd to be some sort of theological liberal: maybe “smooth on sin,” or inclined to show solely from crimson letters that match comfortably with fashionable sorts of social justice.
An sincere studying doesn’t permit such a conclusion. Quite the opposite, he rebukes “liberal theology [that tries] to separate Jesus' instructing ministry from his struggling and dying, making the cross “nothing however a tragic disaster” and Jesus merely “a hapless sufferer of the machinations of a foul faith and a merciless empire.”
Zahnd firmly rejects dangerous faith and merciless empire. (He has ties to the Neo-Anabaptist motion.) However he does so, quoting theologian Søren Kierkegaard, “that the lifetime of Christ is a requirement.” He thus calls Christians to a crucified life that renounces battle, idolatry, and fornication—a lifetime of following Jesus, even when it kills us or empties our gigantic church parking tons.
Poetry or precision?
“Not all theological languages are the identical,” Zahnd writes in a short preface:
Though in fashionable occasions we have now a penchant for technical prose in theological dialog, earlier occasions—and the Bible itself—have a penchant for the much less exact but in addition much less restrictive language of poetry. Theopoetics is partly an try to talk of the divine in a extra poetic language. It’s an try to rise above the boring and prosaic world of factual dogma, which tends to close down additional dialog. If at occasions on this e-book I deviate from the prose and use a bit of extra poetic language in how I see the cross, it shouldn’t be thought-about fanciful, however as the perfect means I may discover to explain the reality, I consider that the Spirit helps me. see.
Two notes are essential right here. To begin with, I’m very fashionable in that sense. I like the easy arguments of the Epistle. I respect the precision of the prose. However I don't wish to make a theological verdict on what could also be principally a persona distinction, so let me expose that bias.
Second, the bulk A wooden between worlds is prose. Zahnd talks about theopoetics and quotes some hymns and poems, however it’s only within the final, unnumbered chapter that he himself strikes totally into theopoetic mode. Within the prose that makes up the majority of the e-book, Zahnd is extraordinarily exact when he needs to be (on factors just like the divinity of Christ, the need of the cross, and the fact of the resurrection). And there are locations the place it’s deliberately looser, hoping to impress thought, elevate questions, and go away the reader with a spiritually productive lack of decision.
However there are additionally factors the place Zahnd's chosen type raises questions that appear much less productive – fairly in want of a concrete reply. Two particularly stood out.
First was his repeated description of the story of Cain and Abel as a “founding” second. Pilate couldn’t perceive the dominion of Christ, says Zahnd, as a result of he isn’t of this world, which “is the one based by Cain by killing a brother referred to as one other and an enemy” (emphasis mine). Related constructions seem a number of occasions. As a result of Cain was “the founding father of the primary metropolis,” Zahnd argues, his “founding homicide” of Abel was “the cornerstone of human civilization.”
As somebody who basically shares Zahnd's beliefs about nonviolence (which he graciously defined in an interview for my first e-book in 2018), I sympathize with what he's attempting to do right here. However the New Testomony doesn’t use the story of Cain on this means; it suffices to quote the Fall as a enough narrative rationalization of evil in our world, together with violence.
There could also be a compelling motive for decoding Cain's story this manner. Zahnd is nearly definitely drawing on Augustine, who describes Cain because the assassin as “the founding father of the earthly metropolis”. The thought of Cain's homicide as “unique violence” is echoed by Thomas Hobbes, Girard, and fashionable students, and Zanhd might be influenced at the very least by Girard. However he shares none of this background with the reader and has given up explaining why violence is a “particular” sin with its personal “fall”.
The second case the place Augustin can't be slotted into the protection is extra prone to land Zahnd in scorching water. In his criticism of the atonement and penal substitution theories of atonement, his essential objection is the position these views attribute to God the Father. Christ Victor he makes the satan an impediment to reconciliation between God and males; to decide on one metaphor, it’s the satan who calls for a ransom for human freedom (Heb. 2:14-15, 9:15). However these later theories confuse the matter and painting the Father as demanding satisfaction or punishment earlier than reconciliation can happen. In accordance with Zahnd, this means God “who inflicts ache and struggling on the Son”.
Zahnd rejects this concept, quoting Russian Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov, who wrote that in “the human crucifixion of the Son and the divine widespread crucifixion of the Father, love itself is co-crucified.” Zahnd himself acknowledges two pages later that “to talk of the entire Holy Trinity as co-crucified with the Son is definitely presumptuous language, however it’s much more theologically sound than doing violence to the Trinity by relating to the Son as the article of the Father's wrath.”
As soon as once more, I agree with Zahnd's intentions. I want it too Christ Victor mannequin and on an analogous foundation. However the idea of the co-crucifixion of all the Trinity isn’t solely “courageous”. It approximates at the very least the traditional Trinitarian heresy of Patripassianism (which says that God the Father suffered on the cross) and associated heresies like Modalism (which describes the three members of the Trinity as completely different appearances or modes of a single particular person).
To be clear: I don't suppose Zahnd is a modalist, and I doubt he may pretty be labeled a patripassian. However barely extra exact and, sure, prosaic language may make the identical factors in regards to the loving unity of the Trinity's function within the redemptive undertaking with out introducing the identical uncertainty in regards to the nature of the Trinity.
This inaccuracy is a matter of a number of pages and a big half A wooden between worlds stands on safer floor. Zahnd writes as a Christian who has lengthy been “decided to know nothing…besides Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2), and deftly challenged his readers to do the identical.
Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director for concepts and books at Christianity Right this moment.