Brian Zahnd - Future of the Church

Interesting comments about the future of the church by Brian Zahnd in an interview with Brad Jersak.

The church will eventually have little choice but to be counter-cultural. It will have to be. Christianity is at the heart of the culture wars going on in North America at the moment. It is not a war that the church is going to win. It is not a war that we should fight. I am not fighting for the idea of maintaining Christianity as a cultural hegemony and dominant force. I don't know how long the battle will rage, but I am pretty sure who will win, and it will be secularism.

Christianity should always look a bit odd to people who are not baptised. We make some outlandish claims. We say that the logos of God became assumed human flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth through a virgin. That he was crucified and rose again on the third day. These are outlandish claims.

The church will lose the wrong-headed culture war that many are waging right now. It will not win. The ramifications will be long-lasting.

I do not think there is as much difference between Western Europe and North America as we imagine. The culture wars and the existence of civil religion make Christianity look stronger than it actually is. The political situation is such that people who have never gone to church are calling themselves evangelicals. It is a political brand/identity that is papering over the lack.

Western Europe is secular, but I see deep historic Christian roots. They might be buried or forgotten, but they are there. You don't find that in North America.

The United States is an experiment in secular governance. That is what will be remembered about the United States in 500 years' time. The French Revolution took it further, but the first real attempt at secular governance is the United States. I am not against that. Let the world do what it does, the church is something different. It does not persuade by coercion. We persuade by love, witness, Spirit, reason, rhetoric, and, if need be, by martyrdom; but never by force.

Secularism is a philosophy that is relatively new in the whole human journey. That is the deep roots of the United States, and that is what will win out ultimately. We will get what Thomas Jefferson and his fellow deists actually wanted, and that was a rationalistic, very materialistic philosophy, where Christianity was tolerated, but no longer really prominent. Jefferson hoped for that, and I think he is going to win, in one sense.

The church will have to be content with being underground, a counter-cultural movement that serves the gospel. We are best when we are counter-cultural, not angry. As in the first 300 years of the church, let the world do what the world does, but we are going to be something other.

Let go of the idea that it is our job to change the world. That kind of language has been ubiquitous in evangelical circles, but it is not our task to change the world. Our task is to be the world already changed by Christ. Christ is the saviour of the world. If the world is going to be saved, it has to be Jesus that does it. When we try to do it, we always reach for the ring of power, and it always corrupts us.

Gems from Brian Zahnd

Here are some gems from Brian Zahnd.

The gospel preached by the apostles had no appeal to afterlife issues. The core of their gospel was that the world has a new emperor, a new lord, a new Caesar. Forgiveness of sins is offered in his name. The main message is that you must come under the reign and rule this new kingdom, be baptises, pledge allegiance to him and become part of this new way of arranging society that God has inaugurated through Jesus.

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Until we can see the Kingdom of God, politics trumps everything. If we see the gospel as a ticket to heaven, then between here and heaven, we have to figure out some way to run the world. We end up investing a lot of energy, even putting faith in political parties. Jesus is reduced to being an endorsement of their political agendas.

Jesus is Lord. He has his own politics.

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No political party can embody the kingdom of God. Only the church can do it.

Stanley Hauerwas says, “The church does not have a social policy. The church is a social policy”.

“We need to change the world”, are dangerous words, because we get tempted to reach for the coercive power of Caesar’s sword.

The task of the church is not to change the world directly, the task of the church is to be that part of the world already changed by Jesus. Then we live that out as a colony, a community of believers in the wider world.

The Cross

Brian Zahnd says that before looking at the cross to work out what God has done; we must look at the cross to see who God is.

Where do we find God during the suffering of Christ? Do we find God in the high priest Caiaphas demanding a sacrificial scapegoat? Do we find God in Pontius Pilate requiring a punitive death to satisfy imperial justice? No! On Good Friday we find God in Christ absorbing the sin of the world and responding with forgiveness.

The cross is where God receives the most vicious blow of human sin, and turns the other cheek, and forgives. The apostle Paul tells us that “in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself.” This should not be misunderstood as God reconciling himself to the world. It wasn’t God who was alienated towards the world; it was the world that was alienated towards God. Jesus didn't die on the cross to change God’s minds about us; Jesus dies on the cross to change our minds about God. It was not God who required the death of Jesus, it was humanity that cried, Crucify him! Crucify him! When the world says, “Crucify him”, God says, “forgive them”.

The sacrifice of Jesus was not necessary to convince God to forgive. To forgive sinners is the nature of God. When Jesus prayed on the cross for the forgiveness of his executioners, he was not acting contrary to the nature of God; he was revealing the nature of God as forgiving love. The Cross is not what God does. The cross is who God is.

Cross and Power

Brian Zahnd writes that we need to understand how the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount ends up condemned by the Sanhedrin and executed by the Roman Empire.

Jesus was not preaching his sermons and working his miracles as “random acts of kindness” but as announcements and enactments of the arrival of the kingdom of God. By the kingdom of God we mean the government of God, the politics of God, the alternative arrangement of the world that comes from God. In his practice of radical hospitality Jesus was announcing the arrival of a new way of arranging human society. Jesus was proclaiming to the principalities and powers (the very rich, the very powerful, the very religious, the institutions they represent, and the malevolent spirits that energize it all) that their time was up because the alternative from heaven was now within reach.

Jesus called upon all who heard him to rethink everything (repent) and believe that a radical rearrangement of the world was good news. But...
The empire always strikes back.

The principalities and powers had a vested interest in keeping the world as it had always been arranged — an arrangement that benefits the elite. So Caiaphas (the very religious), Herod (the very rich), and Pilate (the very powerful) colluded together to execute this Galilean disrupter who threatened their preferred social order. A mere five days after arriving in Jerusalem, Jesus is betrayed, arrested, tried, condemned, spit upon, beaten, scourged, and crucified.

Zahnd on Politics

This statement by Brian Zahnd hits the nail on the head.

America is experiencing an alarming exponential increase in acrimony and vitriol in its political discourse. This is why Christians need to become serious about embodying the politics of Jesus—a politics that has as its ultimate goal, not power, but love. Christians are free to vote according to their conscience, but if their political engagement makes it harder for them to love other people, then as followers of Jesus they need to disengage from politics.

The kingdom of Christ is not furthered through the apparatus of power politics. The politics of Jesus are the politics of love and are to be lived out by the church. The church is not called to covet Caesar’s sword; the coercion of Caesar’s sword is incompatible with the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is without coercion; we persuade by love, witness, spirit, reason, rhetoric, and, if need be, martyrdom…but never by force.

Farewell to Mars (3)

Brian Zahnd gets stirred up about warmongering eschatology.

Isaiah, in his prophetic poems, frames the Messianic hope like this: A Prince of Peace will establish a new kind of government, a government characterized by ever-increasing peace. Weapons of war will be transformed into instruments of agriculture. At last the nations will find their way out of the darkness of endless war into the light of God’s enduring peace. This is Isaiah’s hope. Christians take Isaiah’s hope and make a daring claim: Jesus is that Prince of Peace. Jesus is the one who makes Isaiah’s dreams come true.

From the day of Pentecost to the present, this is what Christians have claimed. But then a doom-obsessed dispensationalist performs an eschatological sleight of hand and takes the hope away from us. On one hand, they admit that Jesus is the Prince of Peace who has come, but on the other hand, they say his peace is not for now … it’s only for when Jesus comes back again. Bait and switch. Yes, swords are to become plowshares … but not today. For now plowshares become swords; in our day, it’s war, war, war!

They abuse Jesus’s prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem in the first century by always applying it to the latest contemporary geopolitical events. They replace the hope of peace with an anticipation of war! They find a way to make war a hopeful sign. Think about that for a moment! And here is the worst irony: It was precisely because Jerusalem failed to recognize Jesus as Isaiah’s Prince of Peace right there and then that they rushed headlong into the war that ended with their own destruction!

End-time prophecy experts keep trying to force the same mistake on us in our day. We should refuse. I am a conscientious objector to the doom-obsessed, hyperviolent, war-must-come, pillage-the-Bible-for-the-worst-we-can-find eschatology of Hal Lindsey and his tribe. We must reject that kind of warmongering misinterpretation of Scripture.Zahnd, Brian (2014-06-01). A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor's Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace (Kindle Locations 1895-1908). David C. Cook. Kindle Edition.

I present an eschatology that is more consistent with the gospel of peace in Times and Seasons. I may not have got it totally right, but do not know of anyone else who has even attempted to do this.

Farewell to Mars (2)

Another good quote from Brian Zahnd.

Do we believe that Jesus really is reigning over the nations? Or have we reduced Jesus’s role to that of a personal Savior who presides only in the hearts of believers? If Jesus is relegated to the hyperspiritualized role of personal Savior, then we are free to pledge our political allegiance to the latest incarnation of empire. This is why Christians from the days of Constantine onward have been so pliable in the hands of beasts.Zahnd, Brian (2014-06-01). A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor's Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace (Kindle Locations 1634-1637).

Farewell to Mars (1)

Great quote from A Farewell to Mars by Brian Zahnd

Salvation is the kingdom of God. Our personal experience with the kingdom of God (including forgiveness) is our personal experience of salvation, but the kingdom of God is much bigger than our personal experience of it. The problem we have today is that the term “kingdom of God” is archaic and obscured under layers of religious veneer. “Kingdoms” went out with the Middle Ages and we tend to think of the “kingdom of God/ heaven ” as privatized Christianity experienced in our personal spiritual lives. But Jesus was [doing something far more radical when He proclaimed the kingdom of God— he was announcing] that the government of God was at long last being established in the world through what He was doing … in light of this , we need to rethink our lives and begin to live under the administration of Christ.

Perceiving the kingdom of God as an actual political reality is a game changer. Once you see that Jesus has his own political agenda, his own vision for arranging human society, his own criteria for judging nations, then it’s impossible to give your heart and soul to the power-based, win-at-all-costs partisan politics that call for our allegiance . Unfortunately, what I’ve learned through bitter experience is that a lot of people don’t want the game changed. They want to win the game— not change the game.

They simply cannot imagine how God’s will is going to be done if “our side ” doesn’t win the political game. This is the game most of the church has played for seventeen centuries— use Christianity to endorse or buttress a particular political agenda. Christian then becomes a mere adjective to the dominant political noun. What is dominant is a particular political agenda. Politics trumps everything. The political tail wags the Christian dog. Christianity’s role is to serve a political agenda. So viewed through the American lens, Christianity is seen to endorse democracy and capitalism, just as it was once seen in Europe to endorse monarchy and feudalism.

The problem with the chaplaincy view of Christianity is the assumption that the kingdom (government) of God has yet to come. If we think the kingdom of God is still waiting in the wings, then our political allegiance is given to one of the players currently on stage. Christianity becomes subservient to conventional political power, a chaplain to offer innocuous invocations, a lackey to hand out “Christian voter guides.”

But what if the whole assumption is wrong? What if the reign of Christ over the nations has already begun? What if the politics of God are already present? What if the age to come has already been inaugurated (even if far from fully established)? What if Jesus has no interest in endorsing some other political agenda because he has his own?!

That would change everything. And it’s clearly what Jesus believed about what he was doing! If we learn to read the Gospels free from the Constantinian assumption that the kingdom of God has not yet dawned, we will find a fresh, new story. If we let the Gospels speak for themselves instead of hammering them into a sword for our favorite empire, we would see a radical alternative. Once we stop trying to use Jesus to endorse monarchy or democracy, feudalism or capitalism, it becomes quite clear that Jesus was announcing the arrival of the reign and rule of God through what he was doing. (Zahnd, Brian (2014-06-01). A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor's Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace (Kindle Locations 1543-1574)).

Gospel Hope

I really liked these words from chapter 2 of Brian Zahnd's book called A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor's Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace.

Jesus is the Savior of the world! This world that you and I inhabit—where we go to work, do our living, raise our children, and try to find meaning and happiness— Jesus is the Savior of that! Jesus is not a heavenly conductor handing out tickets to heaven. Jesus is the carpenter who repairs, renovates, and restores God’s good world. The divine vision and original intention for human society is not to be abandoned, but saved. That’s a big deal! It’s the gospel!

In fact, in the eight gospel sermons found in the book of Acts, not one of them is based on afterlife issues! Instead they proclaimed that the world now had a new emperor and his name was Jesus! Their witness was this: the Galilean Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, had been executed by Roman crucifixion, but God had vindicated him by raising him from the dead. The world now had a new boss: Jesus the Christ. What the world’s new Lord (think emperor) is doing is saving the world. This includes the personal forgiveness of sins and the promise of being with the Lord in the interim between death and resurrection as well as after the resurrection, but the whole project is much, much bigger than that— the world is to be repaired!

If what we mean by “Jesus saves the world” gets reduced to “saved people go to heaven when they die ,” then Jesus is simply the one who saves us from the world, not the Savior of the world. But this is not what the apostle John meant when he spoke of Jesus as the Savior of the world. John was talking about something much bigger and much more expansive than individuals “accepting Jesus as their personal Savior.” John (and the rest of the apostolic writers of the New Testament) presented Christ as the Savior of God’s good creation and the restorer of God’s original intention for human society. This is the gospel! This is the apostolic gospel, and it’s a gospel that gives us an eschatology of hope. By eschatology of hope, I mean a Christian vision for the future that is redemptive and not destructive— more anticipating the New Jerusalem and less obsessed with Armageddon. In our anxiety-ridden world, who can doubt that we desperately need an eschatology of hope?

Far too many American Christians embrace a faulty, half-baked, doom-oriented, hyperviolent eschatology, popularized in Christian fiction (of all things!), that envisions God as saving parts of people for a nonspatial , nontemporal existence in a Platonic “heaven” while kicking his own good creation into the garbage can! Framed by this kind of world-despairing eschatology, evangelism comes to resemble something like trying to push people onto the last chopper out of Saigon. But this is an evangelism that bears no resemblance to the apostolic gospel proclaimed in the book of Acts. Christianity’s first apostles evangelized, not by trying to sign people up for an apocalyptic evacuation, but by announcing the arrival of a new world order. The apostles understood the kingdom of God as a new arrangement of human society where Jesus is the world’s true King. Put simply: because Jesus is Lord, the world is to be redeemed and not left in ruin.

Brian has hit the nail on the head. In these times, we desperately need an eschatology of hope. Unfortunately, from reading the rest of the book, I am not sure if he has found one yet.

I have always believed that God wants us to have and an eschatology of hope. That is why I wrote my book Times and Seasons.