Brian zahnd Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: Brian Zahnd
Quotes of Author: Brian Zahnd

Brian Zahnd _ Beauty Will Save the World:
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.
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Brian Zahnd _ A Farewell to Mars: An
I pledge no allegiance to elephants or donkeys, only to the Lamb.
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Brian Zahnd _ A Farewell to Mars: An
The fall of communism had more to do with prayer meetings in Poland than bombs dropped on Cambodia.
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Brian Zahnd _ Water To Wine: Some of My
Feeling intimidated by the Scientific Revolution, fundamentalism takes a "scientific" approach to the Bible-which is perhaps the worst of all ways to approach Scripture. The Bible is not interested in giving {or even competing with} scientific explanations. The Bible is working on a different project than scientific inquiry.
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Brian Zahnd _ Beauty Will Save the World:
The beauty of the image of God marred in man through the Fall is what the Incarnation redeems.
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Brian Zahnd _ A Farewell to Mars: An
Not long ago I was in Istanbul, Turkey. While there I toured the Topkapi Palace-the former royal palace of the Ottoman sultans and center of the Ottoman Empire. Among the many artifacts collected throughout the centuries and on display was an item I found quite remarkable-the sword of the prophet Muhammad. There, under protective glass and illuminated by high-tech lighting, was the fourteen-hundred-year-old sword of the founder of Islam. As I looked at the sword with its curved handle and jeweled scabbard, I thought how significant it is that no one will ever visit a museum and be shown a weapon that belonged to Jesus. Jesus brings freedom to the world in a way different from Pharaoh, Alexander, Caesar, Muhammad, Napoleon, and Patton. Jesus sets us free not by killing enemies but by being killed by enemies and forgiving them … by whom I mean us. Forgiveness and cosuffering love is the truth that sets us free-free from the false freedom inflicted by swords ancient and modern. Muhammad could fight a war in the name of freedom to liberate his followers from Meccan oppression, but Jesus had a radically different understanding of freedom. And lest this sound like crass Christian triumphalism, my real question is this: Do we Christians secretly wish that Jesus were more like Muhammad? It's not an idle question. The moment the church took to the Crusades in order to fight Muslims, it had already surrendered its vision of Jesus to the model of Muhammad. Muhammad may have thought freedom could be found at the end of a sword, but Jesus never did. So are Christians who most enthusiastically support US-led wars against Muslim nations actually trying to turn Jesus into some version of Muhammad? It's a serious question.
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Brian Zahnd _ A Farewell to Mars: An
The spiritual experience of expressing a shared hostility can even be confused for the Holy Spirit … because of how it feels.
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Brian Zahnd _ A Farewell to Mars: An
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed
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Brian Zahnd _ Beauty Will Save the World:
Christianity as the ongoing expression of the Jesus story lived out in the lives of individuals and in the heart of society is a beauty that can redeem the world.
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Brian Zahnd _ A Farewell to Mars: An
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
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Brian Zahnd _ Beauty Will Save the World:
It's true that the gospel of Luke records Jesus as saying, "Blessed are you who are poor"-period. {Luke 6:20} In Luke's Beatitudes, Jesus simply blesses the poor, and the further categorization of "in spirit" is omitted. In Luke, Jesus blesses the poor without reference to what kind of poverty it is. The truth is this: Jesus meets us at our point of poverty, not our place of strength. If we want to position ourselves to receive Christ's blessing, we must identify an area of need and cry out for grace from there. If we think we have no area of weakness, need, or poverty, we essentially have no need for Jesus.
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Brian Zahnd _ Beauty Will Save the World:
The Beatitudes are deliberately designed to shock us. If we're not shocked by the Beatitudes, it's only because we have tamed them with a patronizing sentimentality-and being sentimental about Jesus is the religious way of ignoring Jesus! Too often the Beatitudes are set aside into the category of "nice things that Jesus said that I don't really understand.
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