I’ve moved to Substack where I hope to revive some of what I used to do here.

You can find me in these fields.

Find me in these fields alone,
Crusted with the salt of my ways,
Rinse me with the motion of sweet water,
The silky rush of Your cleansing stream.

I face the fog in the Autumn,
The midnight moon weaving her chain.
You trace me deep in this valley
Repeating a familiar refrain, forgive me.

~Phil Keaggy

I hope to see you there.

Blessings,

BZ

(The photo is of Peri and me in Ephesus last month.)

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Election Season and Your Soul
Brian Zahnd

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

~Jesus, Sermon on the Mount

Twelve years ago I gave my ironically named “BZ’s Ten Point Christian Voter Guide.”
Now, twelve years later I would like to again share my “voter guide.”

(This comes from my heart — the heart of a pastor. If you choose to comment, please be considerate and kind.)

BZ’s Christian Voter Guide

1. The political process, while necessary, has little to do with how God is saving the world.

2. The fate of the kingdom of God does not depend upon political contests.

3. Don’t be naïve, political parties are more interested in Christian votes than they are in Christian values.

4. The bottom line for political parties is power. The bottom line for a Christian is love. And therein lies the rub.

5. While in pursuit of the Ring of Power, you are not permitted to abandon the Sermon on the Mount.

6. If your political passion makes it hard for you to love your neighbor as yourself, you need to turn it down a notch.

7. Your task is to bring the salt of Christian civility to an ugly and acrimonious political process.

8. To dismember the body of Christ over politics is a grievous sin.

9. Exercise your liberty to vote your conscience and conviction, while accepting that other Christians will do the same and vote differently than you.

10. It’s more important that your soul be filled with love than it is for your political team to win the game.

Love is patient and kind.
Love does not envy or boast.
Love is not arrogant or rude.
Love does not insist on its own way.
Love is not irritable or resentful.
Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing,
Love rejoices with the truth.
Love bears and believes all things.
Love hopes and endures all things.
Love never fails.

~St. Paul (1 Corinthians 13)

We live in a political world
Where peace is not welcome at all
It’s turned away from the door to wander some more
Or put up against the wall

We live in a political world
Everything’s hers and his
Climb into the flame and shout God’s name
But you’re not even sure what it is

~Bob Dylan, “Political World”Lord, make us instruments of Your peace.

O, Divine Master,
grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.

~Prayer of St. Francis

Peace,

BZ

(Artwork is The Sermon On the Mount by Fra Angelico, 1443)

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Weird America
Brian Zahnd

America has always been a weird amalgamation of the disparate — a strange mixture of admirable ambition and appalling hubris, an intoxicating brew of virtue and vice. America can always do things in a big way, but it can’t always make up its mind what it wants to do. It careens between Prohibition and ten thousand craft breweries as just one example of a country always reinventing itself. When you look at America you can see what you want to see because there are so many sides to America — so many contrasting, and often conflicting, personalities.

For multitudes, America has indeed been a New Colossus embracing huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I don’t know the full story of why the Zahnds left Switzerland for America at the end of the nineteenth century, but I know it was to find a better life and, sure enough, we found it — just like millions of other immigrants from the teeming shores of ancient lands. And yet the inspiring story of hopeful immigrants finding a land of opportunity is not the whole story. We must be honest about the fact that this city of refuge is haunted by ghosts of slavery ships and weeping specters on the Trail of Tears. (America is so exceptional that it has twin original sins!)

America the Ambitious set its sights on a continental-sized empire from the outset (from sea to shining sea), and today she’s a behemoth. America is so enormous in every way that it’s not one thing but four things.

America is a nation. In its most basic definition America is a geopolitical nation-state founded in 1776 and now comprised of fifty states.

America is culture. And a global culture it is! I’ve been all over the world, but I’ve never left America. As those Irish blokes sing it: “Outside it’s America.”

America is an empire. My working definition of empire is rich powerful nations that believe they have a divine right to rule other nations and a manifest destiny to shape history according to their agenda. This was, in times past, Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Persia, Spain, England to name a few, and today it’s America’s turn.

America is a religion. This may strike some as provocative, but it’s really just a sober assessment. America is a religion complete with creation myths, founding fathers, canonical texts, sacred sites, hallowed temples, cherished hymns, iconic symbols, liturgical gestures, and holy days. Consider the Apotheosis of Washington painted on the dome of the Capitol rotunda that depicts a deified George Washington ascended to heaven and seated in the place of prominence among the other gods and goddesses. (The risen and ascended Christ is nowhere in sight.) The true object of worship in American religion is America itself — often personified in its presidents and generals.

America the Behemoth is a nation, a culture, an empire, and a religion. As a nation and culture America is a mixed bag, but there is much that is admirable and worth celebrating. There’s an entrepreneurial energy and electric optimism that is distinctly American and this has long been rightly admired by the rest of the world. America has made profound contributions to the arts — especially in the realms of music, literature, and film. America has led the way in scientific advancement and technological development for well over a century. America pioneered the creation of national parks — a concept some have called America’s best idea. (I think they might be right.) And though I do have occasional flights of fancy about living an expat life in Portugal or Spain, there’s really no other place I’d rather live.

I truly do have a sincere and deep appreciation for all that is good in the land of my birth. But I must also insist that America as an empire is dangerous and America as a religion is idolatrous. The current attempt among some to conflate America and Christianity into a common cause is a fool’s errand and a theological heresy that will only end in catastrophe for the church. Christian nationalism is simply nationalism that attempts to co-opt Christ and merge it with the empires of this world. Religious nationalism is syncretism at its most seductive. Of course America is not the first nation to witness a popular push for Christian nationalism. Germany had a particularly bad ending with this dangerous experiment.

Indeed American is many things and there’s an inherent weirdness in America’s many iterations. And so I learn to live with America’s weirdness. Some of the weirdness is enchanting. America sounds like Johnny Cash and Joey Ramone. It looks like Dorothy Day and Marilyn Monroe. America feels like sultry New Orleans and manic New York. It’s as real as the Rocky Mountains and as contrived as Las Vegas. This is the kind of weirdness that makes America an intriguing culture. It’s the kind of weirdness that gives birth to the blues, jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll. It gives us Flannery O’Conner and William Faulkner. Elvis and Dylan.

But when American weirdness takes up imperial aspirations or religious pretentions, that’s when I resist. I’m a Christian after all, and I’ve pledged my allegiance to Jesus Christ. My idea of empire is the kingdom of heaven, and my notion of religion is the Sermon on the Mount. I seek to be a serious Christian embracing the Great Tradition — the faith and practice of the saints for two thousand years. I’m not interested in some goofball Johnny-come-lately, hyper-patriotic, star-spangled parody of Christianity. Surely we all see the “God, Guns, and Trump” kitsch for the religious silliness that it is. It’s one thing to be a little bit weird; it’s another thing to be downright ridiculous.

So there’s a kind of American weirdness that’s endearing and there’s a kind that falls somewhere between silly and insidious. This is the weird American landscape I must navigate. I’m a stranger in a strange land and I need to keep my bearings. I try to do that by “looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith,” remembering that “here we have no lasting city, but we seek the one to come.” (Hebrews 12:2, 13:14) My earliest predecessors in the faith had to navigate their way through weird Rome, and I have to navigate my way through weird America. And we are fast approaching the weirdest time of all as America enters its quadrennial descent into the political madness of electing a president. (Lord, have mercy.)

So in the predictably weird insanity of Election Season I’ve got to try to keep my wits about me. I want to keep my soul unstained and my heart at peace. I go about this mostly through prayer. And when things get really crazy, as I know they will, I’ll try to keep matters in perspective and my heart at peace, and quietly whisper, America is weird, but Jesus is Lord.

BZ

P.S. If you’re in need of a 4th of July playlist, here you go.

(The artwork is American Gothic by Grant Wood, 1930.)

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LEAP!

In Unfading Light, the highly creative and influential Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov, after a prolonged period as a Marxist atheist, beautifully describes his return to Christian faith as a leap to faith — a description first used by Søren Kierkegaard:

“In my theoretical strivings and doubts a single motif, one secret hope, now sounded in me all the clearer — the question What if? And what began burning in my soul for the first time since the days in the Caucasus became all the more imperious and bright; but the main thing was all the more definite: I did not need a ‘philosophical’ idea of Divinity but a living faith in God, in Christ and the Church. If it is true that there is a God, this means that everything that was given to me in childhood but which I had abandoned is true. Such was the semi-conscious religious syllogism that my soul made: nothing…or everything, everything down to the last little candle, the last little icon. And the work of my soul went on nonstop, invisible to the world and unclear even to me. What happened on a wintery Moscow street, in a crowded square, is memorable — suddenly a miraculous flame of faith began burning in my soul, my heart beat, tears of joy dimmed my eyes. In my soul ‘the will to believe’ ripened, the resolution finally to carry through with the leap to the other shore, so senseless for the wisdom of the world, from Marxism and every ism resulting from it to…Orthodoxy. Oh, yes, of course it is a leap, towards happiness and joy; an abyss lies between both shores. I had to jump.”

Thirteen years before I read Sergius Bulgakov’s account of his leap to faith, I had a similar experience. I had reached the point in midlife where I was either going to yield to spiritual complacency or I had to make some decisive and risky moves to live a life of passionate commitment to Christ. During that time, I wrote a poem I titled “LEAP!” When trying communicate the nature of a spiritual experience, poetry is sometimes a more reliable vehicle than prose.

LEAP!

And shall I go on being casual and numb?
Pretending
Pretending that I know something about this being I so glibly call God
Or shall I dare to encounter Him?
Him
The One with whom I have to do
The One who can never be an object
Forever and always the eternal subject
Is it grammar or a much deeper truth?
The object is acted upon but the subject acts
God is not in my story—I am in His
How is it I can be unaware of this?
Did I think I invented this story called being?
Surely I’m not that crazy
I belong to His story
History
But there is my story
Mystery
God is no object—only and ever a subject
The Subject
You cannot trivialize The Subject to ology or ism
You can only be aware or oblivious
Of the One who alone possesses innate beingness
The most obvious of all truth
But all truth inheres in subjectivity
Oh!
Subjectivity
Where passion is permitted
Where we are in the story
Where we care
Instead of aloof and comfortably numb
Subjectivity is passion
Faith is passion
Life is passion
Sanity is passion
Objectivity is numb
Empiricism is numb
Death is numb
Madness is numb
Passion saves
My soul
From numbness
Prose
Prozac
Prosaic
Ordinary
Medicated
Unimaginative
Passionless being
Passion saves
Poetic prophetic extraordinary imaginative
Passionate being
Passion saves
To believe is to be passionate
Passion is found in the instant of the leap
When you leap beyond the fence
(Objectivity)
Into the Lion’s presence
(Subjectivity)
Will He kill you or let you live?
Either way you are alive in that moment
You are not cool or “cool”
One is dispassionate the other is self-conscious
In that moment you are neither
You are passionate and engaged
LEAP!
The security barrier of objectivity
Into the presence of the Being Himself
It’s the only hope you have of saving your life
Leprosy is not what you think it is
It doesn’t eat you
It’s only numbness
But numbness will destroy you
LEAP!
Before it’s too late
Before the leprosy takes your legs away
Before the creeping numbness takes your soul away
LEAP!
The Leap to faith
That jumps the objective
To encounter the Subject
Where passion lives
Because now there is nothing between you and the Lion
And you know you live because you feel your heartbeat
And you know you live because He lets you live
No more numbness
Passion saves
LEAP!

* * * * * * *

(This is an excerpt from When Everything’s on Fire. The artwork is The Leap by David Brayne.)

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The Wood Between the Worlds releases February 6 — just in time for Lent. This is the Prelude to the book.

PRELUDE

I DARE TO WRITE ABOUT GOD, which is, admittedly, an audacious undertaking. That a bit of sentient soil would venture to say something about the nature of the ineffable Eternal must seem like the most absurd of fool’s errands. And yet I venture. I cannot help myself. The depth of my fascination with the One who is the answer to the question of why there is something instead of nothing makes it impossible for me to remain silent on the subject. I sympathize with King David when he said, “While I mused, the fire burned; then I spoke with my tongue” (Ps 39:3). And when I dare to speak about God, I do so not as the idly curious but as a reverent worshiper. I seek to understand God, not as a cold and dispassionate scientist — a God-ologist, if you will — but as one who prays, worships, and kneels before his maker.

In seeking to understand God, I am not starting from square one — far from it. Theologically, I am not tasked with harnessing fire or inventing the wheel. I am the heir of a venerable theological tradition. I am among the grateful recipients of received revelation that has been passed down for millennia. I am working from the sacred text that is the Jewish and Christian scriptures. In daring to write about God I do so with the language given to us in the Bible. I can truthfully say that my thinking is saturated in Scripture — the Bible is my primary vocabulary. Yet as essential as Scripture is, to say that the Bible clearly reveals the nature of God is to severely oversimplify the matter.

The Bible is a sprawling collection of texts that are often unwieldy and difficult to interpret. While some may speak glibly of the alleged perspicuity of Scripture, nevertheless we must acknowledge the uncomfortable reality of what Christian Smith has called “pervasive interpretive pluralism.” In other words, no matter how ardently we hold to the inspiration of Scripture and insist on its clarity, the text still has to be interpreted, and there is no denying that we are far from universal agreement on biblical interpretation. Thus it behooves us to approach the task of theological interpretation with a good deal of humility.

In seeking to interpret the biblical text with a goal of gaining insight into the nature of God, we need a way of positioning ourselves within Scripture. We need to locate an interpretive center — a focal point from which we can interpret the rest of the Bible. We need to locate the heart of the Bible. As a Christian, I have a ready, and, what seems to me, obvious location for the heart of the Bible: the cross. In the Christian gospel, everything leads to the cross and proceeds from it.

If the Bible is ultimately the grand saga of human redemption through divine intervention, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ is literally the crux of the story. The cross is the axis upon which the Biblical story turns. Who is God? God is the one who was crucified between two criminals on Good Friday. Hints at the nature of God are subsumed into a full unveiling of the divine nature at Golgotha. On Good Friday the true nature of God is on full display in Jesus of Nazareth crucified. God is the crucified one. And yet, nothing is more central to the theological vocation than interpreting the meaning of God as revealed in the crucified Christ. Theologians must gather worshipfully around the cross of Christ and speak from there.  All that can truthfully be said about God is somehow present at the cross.

Yet I suspect that what can be said about God revealed in the crucified Christ is as infinite as God’s own being. Though we can begin talking about the meaning of the cross, we can never conclude the conversation. The four living creatures around the throne of God who day and night sing, “Holy, holy, holy, / the Lord God the Almighty, / who was and is and is to come” (Rev 4:8), are not automatons on infinite repeat, but angels granted an infinite series of glimpses into the ever-unfolding glory of God. Every eruption of their thrice-holy adoration is a reflexive response to a new glimpse of God’s glory. How the seraphim gather around the throne of God is how theologians should gather around the cross of Christ.

The meaning of the cross is not singular, but kaleidoscopic. Each turn of a kaleidoscope reveals a new geometric image. This is how we must approach our interpretation of the cross — through the eyepiece of a theological kaleidoscope. That the word kaleidoscope is a Greek word meaning “beautiful form” makes this all the more apropos. I believe it is safe to assume there are an infinite number of ways of viewing the cross of Christ as the beautiful form that saves the world. In this book I seek to share some of the beautiful forms I see as I gaze upon the cross through my theological kaleidoscope.

Then there is the matter of how to speak of what is seen through the theological kaleidoscope. Not all language is the same. Though in modernity we have a penchant for technical prose when engaging in theological conversation, earlier ages — and the Bible itself — have a fondness for the less precise, but also less limiting language of poetry. Theopoetics is, in part, an attempt to speak of the divine in more poetic language. It is an attempt to rise above the dull and prosaic world of matter-of-fact dogma that tends to shut down further conversation. If in this book I occasionally veer away from prose to employ slightly more poetic language in how I see the cross, this should not be regarded as fanciful, but as the best recourse I could find to describe the truth I believe the Spirit is helping me to see. It’s an invitation to consider something new. With that, let us begin what I hope will be a kaleidoscopic and theopoetic conversation about the wood between the worlds.

Advent 2022.

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Jesus’ Most Scandalous Parable
Brian Zahnd

The parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) may be Jesus’ most scandalous parable — at least for Americans formed in the cowboy myth of rugged individualism. If told this parable came from anyone else, most American Christians would dismiss it as Marxist propaganda. But there it is, right in the middle of the Gospel of Matthew, a parable from Jesus featuring a radical egalitarianism that will no doubt offend the sensibilities of a convinced capitalist. What this parable reveals is how unlike the kingdom of God most of us tend to be in our thinking and especially in our economics. We are never more prone to put a softening varnish on Jesus than when he broaches the subject of money.

In this parable Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is like a person who worked only one hour being paid the same as a person who worked all day. Think about that. In the story a group of people worked all day and received a fair wage for a day’s work. But another group of people worked only one hour and received the same wage. We deride that as welfare. We’re convinced it’s inequitable. We call it unfair. But Jesus calls it the kingdom of heaven! The kingdom of heaven is not a meritocracy; the kingdom of heaven is an economy of grace. The vineyard owner (who obviously represents God) was more interested in giving people what they needed than giving them what they deserved — and he was willing to do so at his own expense. The only person who suffers loss in this parable is the vineyard owner. In this story no one is cheated. The anger of the group paid last was based not in any injustice they had suffered, but in their own envious resentment. The group paid first simply received what they needed based solely on the extravagant generosity of the vineyard owner. The vineyard owner didn’t want any of his workers going hungry, no matter how long they had or had not worked. The parable of the workers in the vineyard is designed by Jesus to provoke the pharisaical ire of those who believe they deserve the love of God more than others. In this regard the parable of the laborers in the vineyard is a cousin to the more palatable parable of the prodigal son.

If we fear that someone we deem as less deserving than us will be made equal to us based on their need and God’s love, we’re still operating according to an economy outside the kingdom of heaven. Or more tellingly, why do we tend to read ourselves into the story as laborers who worked all day? Why are we so convinced of our own deservedness? Isn’t it just as likely that in the sight of God we are those who though only laboring one hour still need — not deserve, but need — a day’s wage? Ask yourself this question: Am I sustained by the law of just deserts or by the grace of God?

BZ

This is an excerpt from The Unvarnished Jesus.

The artwork is The Red Vineyard by Vincent Van Gogh, 1888.

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(This mystical encounter with wonder occurred twenty years ago today. It was life-changing.)

Art is often an attempt to recapture the wonder that is in the world when seen through the eyes of innocence, the eyes of a child. Wonder is so much more than empty amusement or an evening’s entertainment. Wonder is an essential ingredient if life is to be made livable. Wonder is the cure — the cure for life-killing boredom. Wonder is the drug — the natural drug without which people may turn to narcotic drugs. Sure, most people bravely soldier on without wonder, and even do so without drug addictions and self-destructive behavior. But is that the point of life? To soldier on long after the thrill of living is gone? That’s not life — that’s life with all the wonder crushed out of it and compressed to mere existence. Wonder is what we’ve lost. Wonder is what we miss. Wonder is what we want. Wonder is our hidden Narnia into which we long to step and explore.

Years ago I was thinking about these things while on a family vacation in the Rocky Mountains. During our long hikes I would muse on the role of wonder in finding satisfaction in life. One evening I found myself alone at sundown in the high country on a ridge well above tree line. A thunderstorm had passed through a little earlier and was now rumbling off to the east. What was before me as I looked to the west was a masterpiece sunset over the Never Summer Mountains. I wanted to thoroughly absorb the beauty that was on full display before me, so I sat down on the alpine tundra in that numinous world which the naturalist Ann Zwingler describes as “a land of contrast and incredible intensity, where the sky is the size of forever and the flowers are the size of a millisecond.” I remained in solitude until I was joined by seven bull elk who ambled up the ridge to where I was sitting. As the elk grazed they were aware of my presence, but entirely unconcerned. Then, just as the orange orb of the sun was touching the snowcapped peaks of the Never Summer Mountains, the largest of the elk drew closer, looked at me, and then lifted his head in such a way that his massive antlers formed a perfect frame for the majestic sunset in the distance. It was an encounter with such rare beauty that I can only describe it as sacred. Wonder rushed into my soul and I felt the full thrill of being alive. I prayed — “God, I want to live my whole life in a constant state of wonder.” Then God spoke to me.

In saying “God spoke to me,” I realize that such claims can be made in a reckless manner, and I try to avoid labeling my own thoughts and ideas as the voice of God — but this really was one of those rare occasions in life where the Infinite breaks through to the finite and the voice of God is heard by man. It was not a thought from within, it was a Voice from elsewhere. It was a genuine mystical experience. Though not audible, the Voice was as distinct and real as the rolling thunder I could still hear in the distance. The Voice said: “This is the greatest wonder of all — the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

At the risk of sounding cliché, I can only say that that moment at sundown in the Rocky Mountains was a significant turning point in my life. It was as if God had given me a golden key — the key to wonder. That key was the mystery of the Incarnation — the mystery of the Word made flesh, the greatest wonder of all. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. As I traveled for speaking engagements in other churches, I would bypass the regular chit-chat on church affairs with the host pastor and launch into my new favorite topic of discussion with a direct question: “So, what do you think about the Incarnation?” (Sadly, I found that not nearly enough pastors are actually interested in theological conversation.) Over time I have become obsessed with the sacred mystery of the Incarnation, and it is a magnificent obsession indeed. To think deeply about the Incarnation is sacred meditation. I have pondered long over the Apostle John’s poetic prologue to his gospel memoir. Allow me to reproduce John’s introductory poem in poetic form (with the narrative portions omitted).

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came into being through him,
and without him not one thing came into being.
What has come into being in him was life,
and the life was the light of all people.
The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness did not overcome it.
The true light,
which enlightens everyone,
was coming into the world.
He was in the world,
and the world was made through him;
yet the world did not know him.
He came to what was his own,
and his own people did not accept him.
But to all who received him,
who believed in his name,
he gave power to become children of God,
who were born,
not of blood
or of the will of the flesh
or of the will of man,
but of God.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us,
and we have seen his glory,
the glory as of a father’s only son,
full of grace and truth.
From his fullness we have all received,
grace upon grace.
The law indeed was given through Moses;
grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
No one has ever seen God.
It is God the only Son,
who is close to the Father’s heart,
who has made him known.

There are some mysteries so transcendent, so sacred, so otherworldly, that they cannot be adequately communicated in prose, only poetry will do. The Incarnation is one of those mysteries. This is why the Apostle John opens his gospel with a poetic meditation upon the Incarnation. What follows the prologue is John’s unique telling of the Jesus story. John’s gospel (quite different from Matthew, Mark and Luke) is like a vortex, a whirlpool, that, if we fall into it — and the best way to read the gospels is to fall into the story — we find ourselves drawn to a single focal point. That focal point is this: Jesus is the full revelation of God. Jesus is the eternal Word of God made human flesh. Truly this is the greatest wonder of all. The wonder we long for is found in the sacred mysteries of the Faith, and a return to these mysteries can recapture the wonder. And recapturing wonder is part of salvation. We become jaded and bored because we mistakenly think there are no more mysteries to imbue us with wonder, but the Incarnation is an eternal fountain of mystery and wonder. In the mystery and wonder of the Incarnation is found the beauty that saves the world.

(This is an excerpt from my book Beauty Will Save the World.)

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This is my introduction to a new book on Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Confession by Ron Dart and Bradley Jersak.

An Introduction to Tolstoy’s
War and Peace and Confession
Brian Zahnd

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.
WAR AND PEACE

I was listening to an illiterate peasant, a pilgrim, talking about God, faith, life, and salvation, and a knowledge of faith was opened up to me.
CONFESSION

Maybe it’s the long Russian winters. Maybe that’s what explains the length of those ponderous novels produced by the great nineteenth-century Russian writers — among whom Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy are the undisputed champions. But it’s not for their voluminous size that works like Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and The Brothers Karamazov are beloved and still being read. We love them for their genius, their beauty, their insight into the human condition, and their artistic truth-telling. That Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as Russian contemporaries and literary rivals never actually met one another seems as curious as it is tragic. And I refuse to be drawn into the interminable debate over which of these two literary titans was the greater writer. But as a Dostoevsky devotee I will concede that in terms of descriptive prose, Leo Tolstoy is unsurpassed. As someone observed (I’ve forgotten who) in Tolstoy no two horses are the same. To read Tolstoy is not to read a sketch of the world but to encounter the real world in the mirror of the written word. Isaac Babel, a Russian writer executed by Soviet secret police in 1940, said, “If the world could write itself, it would write like Tolstoy.”

Leo Tolstoy’s two literary masterpieces are War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878). If Anna Karenina is the more approachable story, War and Peace is the greater novel. Often regarded as the birth of the modern novel — an artform that will reach its apex with James Joyce’s Ulysses — War and Peace is a sprawling saga set during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) tracing the story of two families of Russian nobility. And it’s a big book. My hardcover edition weighs in at 4.2 pounds! For people in the habit of reading ideas on tiny screens compressed to 280 characters or less, is this 1,200-page behemoth worth the effort? I believe so. I remember reading the end of War and Peace on an airplane in Denver during a snowstorm as we sat on the runway for a two-hour delay. I think I may have been the only person on the plane who was entirely content. It was the famous socialite and Chicago heiress, Mary Landon Baker, who said, “I should like to live my life over again, in order to have once again the pleasure of reading War and Peace for the first time!”

The secret to reading a big book, be it War and Peace, The Lord of the Rings, or the Bible, is to take the first step upon the path and let the book take you where it will. Don’t be in a rush to “check it off your list.” Don’t be in a hurry to “figure it out.” Accept that you don’t have to “understand it all” in order for you to enjoy and benefit from what has already been vetted as worth the effort. Think of reading big books as an act of rebellion against the commercial forces that seek to reduce your attention span to that of a thirty-second advertisement. The large classic novels are for those who care enough about the garden of their soul to tend to it with the finest art.

And this is where Ron Dart enters the picture. Sometimes we need a learned and reliable guide to assist us on our journey through a demanding literary masterpiece. (I would never have made it through Ulysses without assistance from Professor James Heffernan.) Ron Dart is both a careful reader of Tolstoy and a seasoned spiritual guide. In his contribution of Tolstoy’s Soul Probes, Dart helps us to appreciate Tolstoy’s genius insight into the wars that rage within the human soul. With his fine analysis of five principal characters, Dart helps us to perceive in Tolstoy’s novelistic persons “how the inner and outer life, if properly understood, can lead to either wisdom and insight, or to an erratic and dissipated journey, with consequences always the reality of significant, mediocre, or trivial choices made.” Whether Ron Dart’s work with War and Peace provides you with a brilliant analysis of a work you’ve already read or serves as an introduction to Tolstoy’s masterpiece, you will greatly benefit from his valuable contribution. And if you never get any closer to actually reading War and Peace than Ron Dart’s analysis of it here, you will still be the better for it.

If War and Peace is a doorstop of a book, Confession is a booklet you can slip in your back pocket. At less than a hundred pages I read the entire tome in one go on an overseas flight. Inspired by what I had just read I hastily prepared a talk on the wisdom of Solomon, Socrates, Siddhartha, and Schopenhauer as compared to the wisdom of Jesus that I presented to a thousand Indian pastors. I called my talk “A Greater Than Solomon” and gave appropriate credit to Leo Tolstoy. Flipping through my dog-eared paperback edition of Confession I see underlines and margin notations on nearly every page. It’s clearly a book I found worth paying attention to.

Leo Tolstoy was born into a wealthy aristocratic family and never knew a day of poverty. Lev was always able to write at his leisure. (As opposed to Fyodor Dostoevsky who was nearly always writing under financial pressure, trying to keep his creditors at bay, and who only gained a measure of financial security late in life.) Though Tolstoy always had fortune, the enormous success of War and Peace brought him the twin seductress of fame. Having come out on top in the game of life and now on the cusp of middle-age, Tolstoy began to sense the vanity of it all and entered a deep spiritual crisis.

Though, as every non-Jewish Russian of his era, Tolstoy had been baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, his faith didn’t even survive his teen years. At the tender age of eleven, a friend who was a few years older visited young Leo on a Sunday and announced that he had made a great discovery in school. Tolstoy says, “The discovery was that there is no God and that the things they were teaching us were nothing but fairy tales.” By the time he was eighteen Tolstoy reports, “I had lost all belief in what I had been taught.” Thus Tolstoy embarked upon his literary career as an atheist. His childhood faith in God was now replaced with “faith in knowledge, poetry, and the evolution of life.” Tolstoy insists that the pursuit of literary importance was indeed a faith and that he was one of its priests. But if one can come to doubt faith in God, one can also come to doubt faith in writing. And this is precisely what happened. Tolstoy tells us, “I had come to doubt the faith of the writers, I began to observe its priests more closely and became convinced that nearly all the priests of this faith were immoral men. … I realized that this faith was a delusion.” When your replacement faith turns out to be a delusion, that’s when you know you’re in serious trouble. Tolstoy writes, “I did not even want to discover truth anymore because I had guessed what it was. The truth was that life is meaningless.” Today we might describe this as a deconstruction of deconstruction. And once your deconstruction begins to deconstruct, that’s when the yawning abyss of nihilism beckons. That’s when Leo Tolstoy began to remove the ropes from his house, lest he hang himself upon a dark impulse.

This is what Tolstoy’s Confession is about — losing Christian faith in adolescence, facing the abyss of nihilism and the seduction of suicide in midlife, and then finding solace in solidarity with the simple faith of the Russian peasantry. I’ll not try to replicate Tolstoy’s Confession in this introduction, I’ll leave it to you to discover on your own. Or better yet, not on your own, but in the wise company of Bradley Jersak. In his previous book, Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstruction, Jersak helps us recover faith from the scorched-earth ashes of late modernity. But in Anatomy of a Great Deconstruction, we are shown this phenomenon in the life of Leo Tolstoy. Bradley Jersak’s expert analysis of Tolstoy’s Confession makes this piece of nineteenth-century spiritual writing intensely applicable to the spiritual crisis of the twenty-first century. This contribution could not be more timely.

I am eager for you to engage with Leo Tolstoy through the excellent assistance of my gifted friends, Ron Dart and Bradley Jersak, so I will step aside shortly, but first I feel I need to address one final matter. It’s unfortunate that once Leo Tolstoy backed away from the abyss of nihilism and began to rediscover Christian faith through the eyes of the Russian peasant, he was unable to remain within Orthodoxy or orthodoxy. Fyodor Dostoevsky was deeply distressed by Tolstoy’s eventual turn toward a heterodox Christianity. Dostoevsky, less than a month before his death, was told by a relative of Leo Tolstoy that “Lev had announced to her that he no longer accepted the divinity of Christ.” Tolstoy’s cousin then reports that upon hearing this, Dostoevsky “clutched his head and in a despairing voice repeated: ‘Not that! Not that!’” One of the final entries in Dostoevsky’s notebook was a prompt to write a response to Tolstoy. But this was not to be, as Dostoevsky died just a few days later.

I share Dostoevsky’s distress over Tolstoy’s inability to retain an orthodox faith in the divinity of Christ, but my dismay is mitigated when I realize that Tolstoy’s commitment to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously also required him to regard most of the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church as unserious pretenders at actually living the Christian life. Put quite simply, the Russian Orthodox Church failed Leo Tolstoy and Tolstoy’s orthodoxy was a casualty. And if the failed faith of a would-be believer as the collateral damage of a compromised church sounds eerily similar to contemporary events, so be it. Tolle lege. Take and read.

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Bradley Jersak’s tremendous new book, Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstruction, releases November 22, 2022. I had the privilege of writing the foreword for Out of the Embers, and I would like to share it with you in the ardent hope that it will inspire you to read what Steve Bell has described as “a most wise, kind, and timely gift for those of us whose very faith has been traumatized by the tumult of our age.”

BZ

FOREWORD: “SOMETHING IS HAPPENING HERE”

Something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
—Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man”

North America has experienced two episodes of Christian revival known as Great Awakenings — the first in the eighteenth century, the second in the nineteenth century. Both produced a remarkable increase in church membership. (Whether the Jesus movement and the charismatic renewal of the late twentieth century qualify as a third Great Awakening is for others to decide.) But now, in the early twenty-first century, the church in North America is experiencing a precipitous decline — a mass exodus that Bradley Jersak has aptly dubbed “the Great Deconstruction.”

Something is definitely happening here. Mister Jones, the baffled reporter from a bygone age in Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” may not know what is happening, but there are others who do. American Christianity as a colonial extension of European Christendom has run its course and is no longer tenable — at least, not as the default religion and organizing center in an increasingly secular society. The phenomenon of what has been popularly labeled “deconstruction” is not a passing fad but names a genuine crisis of faith that millions of Christians, largely through no conscious decision of their own, are now facing. Once a Christianity corrupted by civil religion, consumerism, and clerical abuse is put on trial, the fate of Christian faith hangs in the balance. And, for many people, the jury is still out. It is certainly possible to deconstruct Christianity down to nothing. This has been the experience of many. But then what? What happens after the Great Deconstruction?

In 1888, one year before his mental collapse, Friedrich Nietzsche published three books: Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo, and The Anti-Christ. All three launch a withering assault upon Christianity, but none more so than The Anti-Christ. However, even in the midst of his scorched-earth attack upon Christianity, you can sense the alarm bells going off in Nietzsche’s mind as he laments, “Two thousand years have come and gone — and not a single new god.” Nietzsche’s grand project was to eradicate Christianity but avoid the abyss of nihilism. He correctly understood that only a god can accomplish this. Nietzsche’s hope was for the Übermensch (humanity manifest as the Will to Power) to arise as the new god, yet he complained of this god’s failure to appear. When the Übermensch finally did goosestep onto the world stage, it turned out to be not a god but a demon. In 1966, following the devastation wrought by the Nazi attempt to install the Übermensch, personified in Adolf Hitler as Europe’s new god, Martin Heidegger gave an interview to the German news magazine Der Spiegel, trying to explain his failure to denounce Hitler and Nazism. In this now famous interview, Heidegger, reflecting on the current state of affairs following the two world wars, said, “Only a god can save us.” These two renowned German philosophers knew that in the world of late modernity, only a god can stand between us and the abyss of nihilism.

But I have news for Nietzsche and Heidegger: no new god is coming. Why? Because the one God who has already come has triumphed so decisively over all other gods that there is no possibility of their rising from the dead. Once upon a time, the Western world was awash in gods and goddesses — from Apollo to Zeus, from Venus to Cupid, from Odin to Thor. But no more. It took a few centuries, but Jesus Christ eventually vanquished all rivals. Jesus Christ is the last god standing because he is, as declared by resurrection, the true Son of God.

The implication of Christ’s definitive triumph over the gods is enormous. Nietzsche and Heidegger both understood that only a god can save us from the meaningless existence of god-less nihilism. But since no new god is coming, we have reached the point in history where the only question that really matters is this: Jesus or what? If we are not going to believe in Christ, then what are we going to believe in? An ism as our savior? Conservatism? Progressivism? Capitalism? Marxism? Nationalism? Globalism? Dear reader, I have enough respect for you to assume that you will not foolishly put your faith for salvation in an ism. Heidegger is right: “Only a god can save us.” We are now so stuck in a morass of meaninglessness that we can only worship our way out of it. But what are we going to worship if not the one declared to be the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead? Money? Pleasure? Politics? Self? We already know that such things, worshipped as gods, destroy our soul. And even noble things like knowledge and science, or even family and friendship, when worshipped as gods, are exposed to be feeble idols that cannot save. We really have arrived at the end of any possibility of an innocent idolatry. It’s now God or atheism. God or nihilism. God or nothing. And the God who alone can save us has been definitively revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

In the Gospels, Jesus Christ is revealed as the light of the world, and how we respond to this light is our judgment. We either love the light and move toward it, or we hate the light and seek to escape from it. But there is no escape from the light other than to willingly choose to inhabit the outer darkness. This is like the elder brother in the parable of the prodigal son gnashing his teeth in the darkness outside the father’s house, refusing to join the party because he continues to nourish his resentment toward his sinful brother. The apokatastasis hope that Christ will ultimately reconcile and restore all things does not eliminate an indeterminate time of self-exile in the outer darkness for those who refuse the light of Christ. The question always remains: Christ or what? When a great many erstwhile disciples walked away from Jesus because of his scandalous talk of “eating his flesh and drinking his blood,” Jesus posed a very poignant question to the Twelve: “Do you also wish to go away?” (John 6:67). Simon Peter was at his very best when he replied, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God” (vv. 68–69). Peter knew: it’s Jesus or nothing.

Bradley Jersak knows this too, and his book has arrived on the scene at a time when everything’s on fire. The book you hold in your hands is filled with priceless treasures that have been pulled out of the embers and that offer you the possibility of a renovated faith after the Great Deconstruction. John Wesley often borrowed the language of the prophet Zechariah when he described his own life and faith as “a brand plucked from the fire” (Zech 3:2). My prayer is that many a brand will be plucked from the fire in the reading of Out of the Embers.

Bradley is a scholar who graciously consents to write not as a scholar but as a friend — a wise and trusted guide. In his engagement with Simone Weil, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, he skillfully unpacks the insights of these important seers to help us understand the unique epoch we are passing through and how best to navigate it. There is never a hint of scolding in Bradley’s writing; he is a humble and compassionate comrade who has experienced his own disorientation from a messy unraveling. He has glimpsed into the abyss and found his way back to feel the breath of God in his lungs and the love of God in his heart. When our Christendom-constructed houses of wood, hay, and stubble are consumed in the flames of deconstruction, there still remain the gold, silver, and precious stones of a faith worth saving. Bradley Jersak has done the painstaking work of sifting through the embers and ashes to retrieve these treasures. Tolle lege. “Take up and read.” Recover and rediscover the imperishable treasure that fire can never destroy but only refine.

—Brian Zahnd
Easter Week 2022

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Three years ago I wrote a Lenten devotional, The Unvarnished Jesus. Now I’m happy to announce that I’ve written an Advent and Christmas devotional, The Anticipated Christ. These forty-two devotions take the reader on a journey from the first Sunday of Advent through the twelve days of Christmas and to Epiphany on January 6.

I would like to share with you the introduction and the first devotion to give you a sense of what the book is like. I pray The Anticipated Christ will enrich your experience of Advent and Christmas.

Blessings,

BZ

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Introduction

Ours is a secular age. The sacred is pushed to the periphery. To keep the sacred at the center of our lives is a heroic act of defiance. To be a religious person in an irreligious world may be the last act of rebellion. I advocate such rebellion. I reject the trite aphorism, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” Of course, I’m spiritual, we all are, but I’m also religious — or at least I seek to be. Amorphous spirituality too easily becomes little more than a mood with a sprinkling of “wellness” techniques. I need something more rigorous, something more deeply rooted, something that draws upon the deep wells of ancient wisdom and practice. This is what we find in the Great Tradition of the Christian faith.

Part of what we find in the Great Tradition is a sacred calendar — a way of marking time through the course of the year by telling the gospel story of Jesus Christ. We have a secular calendar to coordinate our lives within a secular age, and we have a sacred calendar to form our lives through the gospel story. And, yes, a couple of holy days from the sacred calendar are firmly entrenched in the secular calendar — Christmas and Easter. But the way the sacred calendar and the secular calendar approach these holy days is quite different. In the Christian calendar Christmas is anticipated by four weeks of waiting. This is Advent — a word derived from a Latin word meaning “arrival.” During Advent we await the arrival of the Messiah of whom the Hebrew prophets spoke. During Advent we allow the messianic poems of the Hebrew prophets to seep deeply into our soul. With Isaiah and the great company of Hebrew prophets we wait for the one who will bruise the serpent’s head. We wait for Immanuel — the one who is God with us. We wait for the ruler to arise in Bethlehem who will shepherd God’s people. We wait for the child born unto us upon whose shoulders the government will rest; we wait for the Prince of Peace in whose kingdom the lion lays down with the lamb. Advent is about waiting — a practice most of us in our secular age struggle with, but a holy practice we would be wise to cultivate.

During Advent we also visit the New Testament stories that precede the birth in Bethlehem. Stories like Zechariah and Gabriel in the Temple, the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth, the Annunciation, the Magnificat, and the birth of John the Baptist. All these prophecies and stories set the stage for Christmas to arrive with full force. And when Christmas does arrive, it’s not a one-day celebration — the birth of Messiah is far too big an event to celebrate for a mere day. No, Christmas is a twelve-day feast during which we meditate on all the marvelous stories surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ that help us explore the meaning of the Incarnation. And after the twelve days of Christmas have run their course, we arrive at Epiphany where we celebrate and contemplate the revelation of Christ to the Gentiles, as the Magi come with their gifts to pay homage to the child born King of the Jews. This is what the six-week journey from the first Sunday in Advent to Epiphany is about. It’s a journey out of secular banality and into the sacred mystery of the Incarnation.

I encourage you to read The Anticipated Christ as it is intended — don’t fly through it in a day or two. Instead, read each meditation on the indicated day and read it slowly. The demand of the secular “Christmas Season” is to be in a great hurry, but the aim of Advent is to instill a quiet slowness into our soul. Each day’s meditation begins with a brief reading from Scripture, followed by a three-page reflection, and concludes with a one or two sentence prayer. It doesn’t take much time to read each day’s selection, the challenge is to read it slowly. You can probably speed through it in three minutes but see if you can find a way to spend ten minutes with it. The richness will be revealed in the slowness. During Advent try to feel Israel’s centuries-long wait for the promised Messiah. Let the anticipation build. And when we reach Christmas, don’t take down the tree and pack away the decorations on December 26 — the party has just begun! Join with the angels and the shepherds and the wisemen and Simeon and Anna and all the rest in the unbounded joy that comes with the birth of Christ.

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 15:13)

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First Week of Advent
SUNDAY

The Proto Gospel
Genesis 3:15

The Bible tells a big story. Holy Scripture is a sacred saga of more than a thousand pages that takes us from creation to new creation, from paradise lost to paradise regained, from the Garden of Eden to the garden city of New Jerusalem. In every epic drama there are antagonists who threaten goodness and menace justice. In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Sauron, Saruman, Gollum, Wormtongue, and a host of other villains imperil Middle Earth. In the Bible we find the likes of Pharaoh, Goliath, Nebuchadnezzar, King Herod, and Pontius Pilate among the villains who are in league with the very embodiment of evil itself — the devil. It’s with these enemies that the heroes of the Bible — Moses, David, Daniel, John the Baptist, and most of all Jesus — must struggle and prevail. The Bible is not really an encyclopedia of God-facts or a journal of divine jurisprudence, it is primarily the epic story of God’s ultimate triumph over evil. Admittedly there are moments in, say, Leviticus or Numbers, where the plot seems lost, but it’s always found again and the Great Struggle continues.

The main antagonist in the Bible story first appears in the third chapter of Genesis. After two creation accounts where everything is declared “very good,” a cunning serpent enters the story. We’re not told who the serpent is or where it came from — it just appears. (The Bible offers almost no account of the origin of evil.) The serpent gives humanity deceitful advice that leads to a catastrophic exile from paradise and ultimately from life itself. Only much later, toward the end of the New Testament, is the deceitful serpent in Eden identified as the devil. The point of the story is that evil has arrived and now must be contended with. The drama of the biblical story has begun.

The story tells us that the Creator enters Eden to pronounce judgment. From now on, human life will endure painful labor and fruitless toil and will end with an inevitable return to the dust. Every human story will come to an end at a grave. The chapter concludes with Adam and Eve exiled from paradise. Only three chapters into the Great Story tragedy has arrived. But in the judgment the Creator pronounces upon the serpent, there is a faint glimmer of hope. Someday the Seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. We don’t know who the Seed is or when he will arrive or how he will prevail, but the story does foreshadow a hero who, though wounded in the process, will bring to its demise the origin of evil. Christian theology calls this foreshadowing the protoevangelium — the proto gospel or the first good news. As Adam and Eve are subjected to death and exiled from Eden, there is the foreshadowed hope that someday a man born of woman will triumph over sin and death. This is the messianic hope. This is the anticipated Christ.

Creator God, as we enter the season of Advent, may our hearts cultivate the blessed hope that your goodness, O God, is infinite and eternal, while evil and death are but finite and temporal. May we hold to the gospel hope that in the triumph of the Seed of the Woman, evil and death meet their demise. Amen.

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