Theology in the Raw - 679: #679 - A Conversation with Brian Zahnd

Episode Date: July 9, 2018

On episode #679 Preston has a conversation with Brian Zahnd. Brian is the founder and lead pastor of Word of Life Church, a non-denominational Christian congregation in Saint Joseph, Missouri. Brian and his wife, Peri, founded the church in 1981. Brian is also the author of several books, including, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, Water to Wine, A Farewell To Mars, Beauty Will Save the World, and Unconditional?: The Call of Jesus to Radical Forgiveness. You can follow Brian on Twitter: @BrianZahnd Keep up to date with Brian on his website: https://brianzahnd.com/

Hello, Theology Niral listeners. I'm Preston Sprinkle, and the following episode is an interview that I did with Brian Zahn. Brian Zahn is a pastor, a writer, a thinker, an intellectual, and in some ways, a Christian provocateur, as you will see. Brian is a wonderful guy. I had a wonderful time with this interview, got to know him quite a bit, actually. I haven't talked to Brian before and really enjoyed this interview. We covered a lot of different things like patriotism, nationalism, pastoral ministry, changing your theological views, spiritual disciplines, violence in the Old Testament, nonviolence in the Bible, and many, many other topics. I hope you enjoy the show.

Hello, friends, and welcome to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I am here with my new friend and, in many ways, fellow minister of the gospel colleague, Brian Zahn. Thank you so much, Brian, for being on Theology in the Raw. Hello, Preston. I've known of you for a good long while, and now we're finally meeting, as it were. Finally. I know. It's like we've, on social media, and just seeing different books come out and seeing a lot of resonance in so many ways. I just feel like I know you already, but this is the first time we've ever talked or seen each other. So, yeah, you look really good for a 45-year-old. There you go.

That's right. Amen. Why don't we start by, I want to hear your theological journey. Because I just know a tiny glimpse that, and here's all I know, is that you were sort of a pastor in a vibrant, if I can say very charismatic kind of background. Yeah. And you have, I don't think ditched that completely, but from what I understand, kind of, yeah, just been on a journey toward a more, I guess, intellectually vibrant, nuanced approach to Christianity.

So if that's at all correct, or if it's not, I'd love to hear you explain your journey. That's correct. But the story is more interesting than just the facts. Okay. The story is, I'm a product of the Jesus movement. I had a dramatic encounter with Jesus when I was 15, 1974. I'll save people trying to do the math I'm 59 oh yeah he's an old guy all right when I was 15 I had this very dramatic encounter with Jesus I don't think every experience with encounter with Jesus or or way of becoming a disciple has to be dramatic mine just simply. And I overnight went from being the high school Zeppelin freak to the high school Jesus freak. Not that I don't still love Zeppelin,

but you know what I'm saying. One of my top favorite bands, by the way. Of course. Yes, absolutely. And this is, you know, this isn't the Jesus movement. This is the seventies. By the time I was 17, I was leading a ministry called the Catacombs here in St. Joseph, which was, it was mostly a music venue for the Jesus music scene. That's, you know, I get to know Keith Green and Larry Norman and Paul Clark and Phil Kagey and all those guys because they were coming into our venue. But it was also taking on aspects of a church because we were just winning young people to Jesus, and this was their place where they got anything approaching discipleship. By the time I was 22, we went ahead and made the move of calling it a church and meeting on Sundays.

We went ahead and made the move of calling it a church and meeting on Sundays. But in one sense, I had been doing the work of a pastor since I was 17. So I tell people I've been a pastor longer than I've been an adult, which I'm not saying is a good idea. I'm not recommending it, but it's what happened. And so we're a church that comes out of the Jesus movement that funnels us into the charismatic movement which I say was good until it wasn't but I found goodness there

until it got weird and celebrity driven and that kind of led us toward at least brushing up against some of the word of faith things I say that with a little bit of maybe embarrassment yeah I get that. But

I don't think we ever embodied the most egregious examples of that. But we were certainly influenced by that, no doubt. Can you quickly give a quick definition? What do you mean by word of faith? And what does that look like? Influenced by kind of the legacy of Kenneth Hagin and all of that sort of flow. Okay. If you wanted to use pejorative language, you would talk about name it, claim it and things like that. But, but that sort of idea,

kind of a success in life through faith, overcoming, you know, that sort of thing. Health and wealth gospel. Is that an offshoot or similar? That would be part of it. You know,

the prosperity message would certainly, I know, I know all of those people. If you're talking about the well-known celebrity word of faith preachers i know them they know me we've generally parted company but i know them um so our church is in now it's in the 90s and it's growing it's big uh so jesus movement goes to charismatic goes to kind of word of faith, goes to aspects of religious right. And then I woke up, well, around 40, I began to have a growing unease. And I didn't

know what to do about it. Preston, I was embarrassingly ignorant of what I would call the good stuff. I just knew that I was done reading the charismatic books. I didn't need to read them. I'd read them all. I'd written a few. I mean, I could tell you what they said, but you tell me who the author is, what the title is. Let me look at the back of the book. I'll tell you what's in it. But I didn't know where to go. That's the part about being embarrassing, the ignorant of the good stuff. what i did and i think it was very prescient on my part i mean i don't know how i knew to do this but i thought okay i'm going to read i'm going to read philosophy church fathers and try to really read the canon of great western literature

you know that's not what your typical charismatic pastor does, but I started doing that. And so I'm reading philosophy, church fathers, and just trying to really read the canon of Western literature, the other great novels, but basically. And of course, that begins to change me a lot. But it's over about a five-year period of time. By the time I'm 45, or as I say, halfway to 90, which I found alarming, I'm halfway to 90, I just had to make a break. And I just knew I couldn't stay where I was anymore. And I began the year with this three-week, a little more than three-week fast. I hope to never do anything like that again.

I got down to 130 pounds. People were worried about me. People thought I was dying. I thought I was dying, and I was. I mean, the whole first half of my life was finally coming to an end. And I was sort of done with that. I told my church, I said, I'm packing my bags from the charismatic movement. Now, by packing my bags, though, that choice of idiom, I'm saying there are some things that are worth taking. I'm not letting go of everything. But as far as being identified with this movement that

is now so celebrity driven, so compromised, I think, by its allegiance to religious right issues i'm just done with that and when i said it wasn't the theology necessarily it was more than the subculture that surrounded it was more the problem or um well i know i knew the theology was paper thin i just didn't have anything i didn't have anything quite yet to replace it with. I just knew it wasn't. It's like from the Lord of the Rings when Bilbo Baggins says, I feel thin, like butter over too much bread. I love that line. I didn't know where the good stuff was. So I'm finding the good stuff through accessing, you know,

the church fathers, great tradition, historical theology, but I still don't know the good stuff through accessing, you know, the church fathers, great tradition, historical theology. But I still don't know the good stuff. Yeah. That's contemporary. And I knew I needed to find it. Now, this is going to show me as a real charismatic, but it's a true story. It's happened just like this. And so one day I prayed.

I just prayed. I said, God, show me what to read. I had this instinct that I, you know, I needed to read something. I said, God, show me what to read. I had this instinct that I needed to read something. I said, God, show me what to read. Five minutes later, my wife walks in the room. She has no idea what I've just prayed. Just walks up to me. Just walks in the room, walks up to me, hands me a book and says, here, I think you should read this.

It was my take and read moment, you know. And what's interesting, Perry had not read that book. And to this day, we're not exactly sure how it got in our house. You know, we have a house full of books, but she doesn't remember buying it. I know I didn't buy it, but somehow it got in our house. I don't know how it got here. She looked at it, thought, I'm not going to read this. Eventually she did, but Brian might want this. And the book was Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy. I was dying to know what book it was. And that was like a door just being, it was like kicked open in my mind. And I read that book. And I mean, I'm five pages into this.

The next day I was flying somewhere. I remember I was on a plane. I remember where I was seated on the plane. I remember being about five pages into this book. And I thought, this is what I've been looking for. And I read it as fast as I could. And then one thing after another. And I went on this binge. I look back upon it. I'll never do anything like this again, either. I can't imagine I will.

I don't think I would be capable of it now. But from about 2004, through let's say, I don't know exactly, I would say maybe seven or eight, about four years or so. The amount of reading I did was kind of a, it was a Herculean task. But I mean, I read all of N.T. Wright. I mean, all of it. I read Brueggemann. I read Hauerwas. I read Barth. I read who were other big influences. Gerard began to influence me. And so I'm... And real quick, you weren't a natural intellectual before this. It's not like you were a ferocious reader before or were you? No, I've always been a reader. But I was just now finding the good stuff. Yeah, okay. I mean, when I say reading philosophy, I was returning to reading philosophy. I'd done it

as a youth and had liked it and then had been kind of convinced that this was unhelpful because it certainly, you know, I mean, people in the charismatic movement, leaders of large churches in the charismatic movement aren't generally sitting around reading Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. But I like that. And then I return to that. So, and this was, but it was, so I would come home at night and say, I'd come home at night and I would read typically. This is not unusual. I would read typically from 6 p.m. till midnight.

You can read a lot if you read six hours a day. And that's just what I did. And it was never, I never thought about it as work. It wasn't like I was being assigned this. It was, I had struck gold, and I couldn't pull it out of the ground fast enough. And so I was in this self-imposed late night seminary for about four years, just reading, reading, reading, reading. And of course you're, you're a preacher. You understand how this works. I mean, you,

you out of the abundance of what you read and see you preach. And so it began to change my preaching a lot, significantly. And it wasn't as popular as I thought it would be. And we ended up losing about a thousand people. How big was your church at this time? I would say 3,000. Oh, wow. It was 2,500, 3,000, and we lost a third or more. And I'm in a town of 70,000. Oh, wow. 2,500, 3,000. And we lost, you know, a third or more. And I'm in a town of 70,000.

Okay. So I'm not in a huge city. So what does that mean? If you lose a thousand people in a town of 70,000, what does that mean? It means you go to the grocery store, you will see them. And if you do it right, you can see them in hours one, two, three, five, six, and it was painful. I mean, I can make jokes about it now and laugh about it. There was nothing funny about going through that. It was the most painful experience of our life. And I need to say, it always needs to be our because Perry and I did this together. Perry and I went on this journey together, and it was hard. But we don't regret it. We would do it again. But in the moment, it's just plain hard.

We're through that now. We're well. We're healed. And our church is good, and it's stable and healthy and growing. But going through that was very difficult. We had this phenomenon, though. We had, because, you know, people leaving, some of them might just be somebody that joined the church a year or two earlier, and, you know, I didn't really know anyway.

But you also had people leaving that we had done our lives with, that we had known as teenagers and in our 20s and had I'd probably baptized them and then baptized their kids and married their kids and all of those things we had this phenomenon that we had people my age maybe older leaving and their adult children saying you can do what you want mom and dad but we're staying. This is what's keeping us in Christianity. If we don't find something like this, we're done. And you have the phenomenon of the done. So I took that as a good sign. I thought that was a good sign. Now, what I've learned is, so we have a lot of second generation in their 20s kids in our church what i've learned is they don't have

any money and if they do they don't like to give it uh so so it's been as it's been as you know tricky there uh but but who i lost since we're just talking and nobody's you know whatever i i can just the best way i can sum up who i I mean, you could say it a lot of different ways, but this is as honest as I can be and accurate as I can be. I lost my Fox News Christians. I don't say that in an ugly way. I say that in a very calm, analytical way. That, for the most part, those people that are having their worldview formed by Fox News, Hannity and all the rest, and they're imbibing that hours a day, perhaps, and then they get to hear me a half an hour a week.

Ultimately, I just couldn't compete with that. And they had to decide, and I was often on the losing end of that. So what was it specifically about your shift in preaching that caused them to leave? My assumption is it was sort of challenging a nationalistic narrative, maybe challenging some. Bingo. That was it. There were other things, the other things we could have probably worked through. The other things that we changed and we were far less charismatic. Some people didn't like, but that wasn't a big thing. A huge shift in eschatology because

I had terrible eschatology, to which I just say it wasn't my fault. I just say, in fact, I tend to say, Preston, I tend to say that mostly I didn't change my theology. I grew, I became more mature, more nuanced, more informed, et cetera. When it comes to eschatology, I have to say, no, I changed. Because I'd just been given just terrible dispensational theology, and then I read N.T. Wright. And I'm like, oh, okay, well, I've been wrong all along. And so that upset a few people. But no, by far, it was when I began to critique nationalism and contemporary American Christianity as a capitulation to American civil religion,

and then began to believe Jesus teaches and models an ethic of nonviolence. That was too much for a lot of people. So that was the driving issue. months for a lot of people. So that was the driving issue. Isn't that fascinating that in a world where there's a lot of really important, really crucial, controversial topics, in my experience and in yours and in many others I talked to, once you start poking the bear of patriotism, not even poking it, but just raising the question. Maybe we shouldn't kill our enemies. Maybe, just maybe, because we're Christians, we should explore what loving our enemies looks like. Maybe nationalistic pride could turn into possibly maybe idolatry. I mean, just raising the question.

Yeah. And I've got controversial views just like you do. It's this issue that it just sends people through the roof which tells me that the roots of and i'm gonna say it the roots of the idolatry let me just say potential idolatry are so deep and that might be why the visceral reaction is so strong would you agree with that yeah and i but i need to say this didn't surprise me. I remember, you know, I'm moving in this new direction. I'm reading. I was very influenced by The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder. So good.

Oh, my gosh. And I kind of even knew that one. When that book came, you know, ordered on Amazon, it shows up at my house. And I looked at that book. And I think I even mumbled out loud, this is probably going to my life all right I had like a premonition and it did but I remember being in India and I'd been doing a pastor's conference there I'm getting ready to come home I'm staying at the Imperial Hotel my favorite hotel in the whole world they're in New Delhi and I was getting I was preparing kind of outlining a new sermon series. And I decided that I was going to take about six months

and preach very seriously through the Sermon on the Mount. And I called it the Unvarnished Jesus. And I'm kind of outlining how the, and I began to feel very anxious. Now think about this. I'm not a pastor. I've been a pastor at this point 20-some years. And I mean, physically, I just felt, I eventually had to get up and go kind of just go for a walk. All I was doing was saying, I'm going to really try my best to teach what Jesus taught in his most famous sermon. And I've never had a panic attack, but I think I almost had one that night. And because I just knew that it was

going to be so resisted. And just I'll give you one example. Now, it changed our church in a wonderful way. So that that really became a model for how we were going to be a local church. We're going to at least, you know, I don't want to say we're, I don't want to suggest that we're better than we are. But I will say that we at least take the Sermon on the Mount seriously. We're not going to be dismissive of it. But I'm in the course of preaching this. Yeah. But I'm in the course of preaching this. And towards the end of chapter five, you know, the opening chapterver, a businessman, not unintelligent. And he came and he said, yeah, but the Bible says an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

Despite the fact that Jesus actually uses that as an example in Matthew 5, still he thought, okay, if I can find a Bible verse that seems to justify at least commensurate retaliatory violence, then I can hold on to that. And that's that clever way of hiding from Jesus using the Bible to do so. That's what I mean by Biblicism. And then I realized, oh, this is really going to be hard to move people out of that because Americans are deeply formed by a myth of redemptive violence. It's the myth of the cowboy.

It's the myth of setting the world right with your six shooter. I say a myth, but by a myth, I mean it forms us deeply in our soul. It's a historical narrative. It's a real historical narrative. Right. Yeah. The payoff or the redemptive power of it is the myth, I think. Yeah. Yeah, and the assumption that comes with that, the mythic idea that comes with that is we are the good guys, and when we use violence, it is to make the world a better place.

And it's difficult for Jesus to challenge John Wayne. that is fascinating i mean it my uk friends christian friends who don't have the same addiction to redemptive violence right um you know so funny i did a speaking tour through the uk and it was kind of on controversial topics so i talked about um talked about sexuality talked about hell annihilation and and i also talked where i started at some churches i said okay now let's talk about you know non-violence and and the uk christians would come to me and say no no we want you to talk about controversial things like when you talk about you know i know exactly what you're talking about all over the world oh yeah so i started talking about non-violence and loving your enemy and not

being so enamored with you know a gun culture they're like and they're saying yeah we're already christians we know they're like yawning in the back saying can you talk about something but but it is so that they're the ones that have told me that when they look on from a distance the the gun culture the the very narrative of founding America and the individualism and the cowboy culture and all these things that, you know, they make for a great movie. And I think it's interesting as from a historical perspective. And if I wasn't a Christian, if I wasn't a Christian, if I wasn't a Jesus follower, I'd be like, yeah, that's pretty rad. Like what a great narrative. But how counter that is to the Christian perspective. And yet it's so deeply ingrained deep down into the very fabric of our bones as Americans.

Look, it was ingrained in me. Although I'll tell you a story. When I encountered Jesus as a teenager, by the time I was, I remember, I was 16. I remember being in a high school class and getting in a debate with someone about this. I knew that Jesus taught nonviolence and I knew that waging war was incompatible with following Jesus. I knew that at 16 from reading the Sermon on the Mount. Then I got taught. All right. Then I learned. Then I was, you know, disabused of my naivete and then had to relearn it again when I was 45. But I spent most of my ministry career being completely comfortable with supporting

the myth of redemptive violence and that there is no, you know, that a Christian and waging war are completely compatible. So it isn't that I'm just, that I have a history of being just some, you know, hippie. Right. In fact, I tell people I'm not a pacifist because pacifism is a ethical position regarding violence that one can adopt apart from Jesus. And many have done that. Now, I may admire that, but that's not who I am. I am a person who has an instinct to love violence who's also committed to Jesus.

And as I allow Jesus to inform me concerning violence, I realize that I have to lay down my sword. I have to turn swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hips. So if I do hold to a position of Christian nonviolence today, and I do, I say I attribute that all to how I've been informed in Christ, not because I have a natural inclination for that. Yes, I echo that 100%. Sometimes I use the term pacifist out of expediency. It's a familiar term, but in any sort of robust conversation, you know, I say, look, there's like 20 different brands of pacifism, most of which I don't endorse,

most of which I might find offensive. Like if Jesus doesn't walk out of a grave, I'm not going to love my enemy. Like it's not, that doesn't work. But because he walked out of a grave, you know, well, I mean, nonviolence is not just, it's not just that it works, although many times it does, you know, to our surprise, but it's not what is the most effective, but what's the most faithful,

it embodies and resonates with the rhythm of Jesus. I'll tell you a story. I just, cause I just noticed this. I've got this cup here. You can't tell what that logo is. It says right there, Joint Chiefs of Staff. This is from the Pentagon. Wow.

A CIA operative who was directing drone strikes in Afghanistan started listening to my sermons and reading A Farewell to Mars while in Afghanistan, went to his commanding officer and said, I can't do this anymore. Resigned his position in the CIA. He, as part of his resignation, though, he needed to go to Washington at the Pentagon, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and give a final report. And he did that. And then on his way out, I guess he stole one of these coffee cups and came all the way to St. Joe, brought it to me as a gift, and told me his story. No way.

What a beautiful story. I get quite a few emails from people in the military, aspiring to be in the military, a few like deep, like your friend, deep in the military machine who have really changed their view. They change their view for three reasons. Number one, I mean, a lot of the ones, the emails I get, they read my book and it caused them to kind of like, Oh my gosh, then they go to scripture and then it's really ultimately scripture that

compels them. And then number three, it's, it's also seeing that the narrative that sounded so compelling on marine commercials isn't all it's cracked up to be. That they start seeing just natural incongruences and wait a minute, collateral damage is this dead child that I just shot. What an Orwellian term, collateral damage.

And you're telling me, oh, you know, it happens. It's just collateral. And I'm looking at this dead baby or I'm looking at this or I'm starting to ask questions about who are the good guys again? And they start seeing just the natural incongruence and messiness of it from being over there. A good friend of mine who he went over in Desert Storm. You remember Desert Storm? And he was one of the top

like navy seal snipers and he apart from any even sort of christian thing going on he did become a christian while he was over there um but it was really just coming face to face with the incongruence of the the narrative that he was fed before going over and then going over and seeing just the complexity and evil. And there is no good guy here. We're all bad guys fighting fellow bad guys. And he now is like, you know, he still wears a Navy SEAL trident or whatever. And he would say he's a pacifist. And he says it is partly because of Christianity of Jesus, but really just being over there forced me.

My most serious interlocutors when I was writing a farewell to Mars, which is my critique of war, were career military officers. Some who ended up agreeing with me, even to the extent of resigning their commission. Others maybe not agreeing with me, but taking me quite seriously. And I think the reason is they do not hold to any romantic notions about war. Right. They're not, and I can tell you most of these people do not take seriously the thank you for your service crowd. crowd who who look if you're going to believe in in the waging of war as legitimate legitimate means compatible with Christ of shaping the world then you need to support a draft you shouldn't just say we're gonna let the

poor people do it, and then we'll let them get on the plane first and say, thank you for your service in the airport. Now, I think in some ways there should be a draft as one who is opposed to war, and then the Christians either have to pay the price or they're given some sort of alternative that would be an alternative form of service. But I think just having a completely privatized military while at the same time being a militarist is, I find that very ethically problematic. So when I was doing a lot of research in preparation for fight i i somebody made that argument i forgot who it was maybe it was andrew bosovich andrew bosovich or harwals makes that argument at least maybe it's that yeah i've seen that because he said once

you don't have a draft now you can have a a wide disconnect from what's actually going on it isn't that the case whereas if you're so enamored with war if you're like thank you for my sir thank you for your service if you're so pro-war would you be so when it's your child that's going over right when you're actually personally invested and i was like oh that's a that's an interesting argument as much as well and it would force christians to say you know um yeah are you going to uh say that i don't believe in war are you going to reconsider the very ethical question because you just got drafted and now you need to make a decision i think it would put pressure on culture as a whole to kind of rethink you know their enamorment with

with war but yeah i don't know if it'll ever happen though you think it will i don't know yeah oh you think that they'll bring back a draft yeah uh i don't know i don't think not as long as they can uh as long as they can do it like it's done now it won't come back but who knows yeah yeah but now war is just so it's so uh technologically driven right right you could sit in some basement in nevada and bomb people through a drone and you're so far removed from it, which I think adds so much, so many problems to it. Brian, I've got a bunch of questions

that my Twitter followers submitted. Why don't we jump into some of those? Let me pull some of these up. And you were on this thread, so I don't know if you had a chance to look at some of these. Let me, there's a couple stupid ones here that are, I think they're fun. It fun it might you know warm us up a bit but uh the first

guy says uh would you ever consider teaching with a giant blackberry at your side like Bruxy Cavey and this guy really wanted me to ask that I have no clue what he's asking I didn't know that I told him I told him what he's asking and the answer is no i love brooksy by the way brooksy is a friend i love brooksy and my follow-up question would be they still make blackberries i mean really that was my question i didn't think these things still existed what is the latest band that you're listening to and this questioner says that you turned him on to whistles and the bells and future islands i've never heard of those bands first of all you can't listen you can't just start off by listening to future islands you must youtube them and watch them you have to see them uh well i don't

know i mean i'm a music neurotic uh what have i listened to today today i've been giving a new listen to arcade fires everything now a lot of critics've been giving a new listen to Arcade Fires, Everything Now. A lot of critics pan that album. Don't listen to them. It's really good. It's brilliant. It's insightful. And if you don't get it, then maybe you don't get it,

but there's something there to get. I listened to Arcade Fire. I listened to a Portuguese Fado singer by the name of Anamora. Spotify, her song, it's her cover of Joni Mitchell's song A Case of You who else I always listen to Radke R-A-D-K-E-Y hard rock band yeah you're making this up hard rock band I mean they're just rock hard they're kids three black kids rocking hard from right here from St. Joseph Missouri and they're opening right now for Jack White on his tour wow but you don't like to rock if you just like you know

sometimes you just got to have some heavy rock rad key I'm gonna write that down that sounds right up my alley r-a-d-k-e-y I'm gonna that out. They have connections with our church. Yeah. But they're just a rock band. They're just a heavy rock band. Do you listen to a lot of genres? It sounds like you're pretty eclectic then. I'm eclectic, but I'm a rock guy. Okay. Dylan's my, you know, Dylan's my Northern star, my shining mentor or whatever.

I mean, I love Dylan. Dylan, Zeppelin, Neil Young, U2, of course the Stones, The Beatles, all those but I really love Queens of the Stone Age. That's kind of like my favorite contemporary rock band. I've never heard of Queens of the Stone Age. Oh no, they're awesome. I know hardly any bands. How do you even find these like the obscure ones? Well, I mean, it's just such a huge part of my life. Music's a really big deal with me.

Nietzsche said, without music, life wouldn't be worth living. And I think I agree with that. And now I have a son. I have three sons. My oldest son is 36. So he's, you know, maybe he's going to be losing it. I don't know, but he's been my, my, I always told Caleb, that's my son. I would tell him, I said, I'm going to get you a t-shirt that says, I listened to bands that are so obscure. They don't even exist yet. So he, he helps me out he knows that because i could just slip into my classic rock you know yeah yeah and i don't want to do that so i want to stay

fairly contemporary i love the national i love arcade fire mentioned them earlier yeah you know whatever all right uh jesus said to welcome the refugee and care for the least of these how do we balance christian care with the secular political need or desire to secure the borders is this possible um i'm gonna have to have a nuanced response to this. I'm trying not to be a Christian anarchist. Okay. My friend Greg Boyd would be a Christian anarchist. Really?

Yeah. Would he identify that way? Yeah. No, he will say that. Jacques Ellul and people like that. That's actually a serious position. That's not just sort of, by anarchist, we don't mean, you know, going around spray painting A's with circles around them and, you know, pricing a Starbucks. We mean just a complete disengagement from the state altogether. Yes. Yeah. I understand that in dysfunctional societies that can break down and, you know, what is war, what is policing, and you can't tell the difference. But in most societies, and certainly in healthy societies, there is a world of difference between what I consider the necessary function of policing in a civilized state and the waging of war. So I'm trying not to be an, I'm trying to be a responsible citizen.

Um, so I'm trying not to be an, I'm trying to be a responsible citizen. On the other hand, my allegiance to the kingdom of Christ is so thorough and so all consuming that there's times when I don't know that I have a lot of advice to give to the state. I understand the state is going to have borders and they're going to regard, uh, immigration enforcement as a priority, so be it. But I'm still always going to try to be more the prophetic witness that we have to love our neighbor as ourself. And so if my only stance is to constantly push against what I see to be some form of xenophobia and abuse and vilifying the other, scapegoating, then that's what I'm going to do. Is there a way to do it in a way that is, you know, whatever, morally and ethically acceptable and compatible with Christian ethics? I think so, but I'm not a

acceptable and compatible with Christian ethics? I think so, but I'm not a policy man. I mean, that's not my role. We need serious people to do that, but for me to sit here and say, okay, this is the policy, and I'm going to make it up as I sit here and talk to you, I don't want to pretend that I can do that. I'm a pastor. I'm not a policymaker. I'm not a politician. I'm a pastor. And my deep concern is when I see Christians siding with a clear example of scapegoating, vilifying the other, viewing a Honduran mother and her child fleeing violence in Honduras, where I've been four times and I know about that, as really a clear and present danger to the United States. I think that's nonsense. And if I go to the judgment seat of Christ and Jesus critique of me as,

Brian, you were too merciful. You were naive politically. You stressed love too merciful. You were naive politically. You stressed love too much. I'm just going to like, okay. So what are you going to do to me? I'm going to be merciful. So would you break a federal law to reach out and care for an undocumented immigrant? Here is what I actually fear about at the judgment seat of Christ, is that Jesus is going to go over the records and he's looking at me and he'll say,

so Zond, you lived all those years in the American empire and you never once got arrested? Come on. Oh, no, I would totally do. Yeah, I mean, yeah yeah of course i would yeah i would too i mean yeah of course i would and i would i would be in favor of and i don't want to say too because this is actually some real life stuff here but yeah i would i would make my church a sanctuary, which, you know, it's not something, it's not a legal status for undocumented immigrants, but there's been a kind of unwritten code that ICE officials don't go into churches

to extract undocumented. I wouldn't do that. There's a lot I could say on that, but I can't because I can't say it publicly. That's fine. That's fine. But yeah, the idea of breaking the law on something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, King said, MLK said, we have a moral obligation to break unjust laws. So if there's

something that we would say morally is in competition to or incongruent with Christian virtue or Christian rhythm of life, then we have the obvious priority to follow the Christian value system, the Christian rhythm of life, even if it forces us to break an unjust law. Yeah, I fear being judged to law abiding. Yeah, yeah. All right. Theologically, this person says, can you ask Brian if the atonement is multifaceted and if so, is penal substitution one of those facets or if penal substitution is outside the scope of scripture? Oh, I talk about this till I get tired of hearing myself talk about it. I have not read you, I have not read hardly anything about, I kind of know from a distance your view on penal substitution. It's something I speak on a lot. In fact, I spoke on it for about, I don't know,

five or six hours last week at Northeastern Seminary. Even the way the question is framed, the atonement, as if there's some package sitting somewhere, here's the atonement. I think we confess that Christ died for our sins. We clearly see the cross as the very center of God's saving act within history through Jesus Christ. The gospel is a story, not a formula. We tell the story that reaches a crescendo with the crucifixion, and then the apparent utter utter failure and then the surprise ending of resurrection. That's the gospel, I mean, in its shortest form, but the gospel is the story of Jesus. I'm suspicious of these tidy little explanations that we call atonement theories. I don't really like to subscribe to them, but there are some that I find abhorrent. I don't mind substitution. I do object to the penal aspect by which you suppose that God is punishing Jesus in order to forgive, or as they

will say, to satisfy either wrath or satisfy justice. Then I want to say, okay, so you're telling me God can't just forgive, that he has to satisfy just yes. Well, then who's in charge here? I mean, do we have a God who is saying, look, I'd love to forgive you guys, but I've got to satisfy justice. And justice is going to want, you know, blood. How does this work? I don't know.

I can speak for hours on this. I do reject penal substitutionary atonement theory. I've debated it publicly. Just look up monster God debate. I debated Dr. Michael Brown on it. It's on YouTube. You can see it. monster god debate i debated dr michael brown on it it's on youtube you can see it um yeah i can't i can't say about that debate is that it was sponsored by people who

really wanted to establish penal substitutionary atonement theory as the gospel that's why the debate was put on and it has now become a primary source for introducing people to other ways of thinking about the cross. So I think it backfired on them in that sense. But no, I don't mind substitution, but the idea that God, I say things like this, the cross is not where Jesus saves us from God. The cross is where God, where Jesus reveals God as Savior. The cross is not what God inflicts upon his son in order to forgive. The cross is what God in Christ endures as he forgives. And then there's a lot of ways we can talk about it.

I think it's in some ways almost infinite mystery. But even if penal substitutionary atonement theory were an accurate model i don't think it is but even if it were here's a couple of problems i have with it one it has become for people the gospel right and if penal substitute penal substitutionary atonement theory is the gospel then the apostles never preach the gospel in the book of Acts. Right. They'll never go there. And with PSA, it's too easy for people to go, there it is. That's what the cross is.

All done. All done. And I contend that it doesn't take sin seriously enough in the realm of the systemic sin. That is the structures, the principalities and powers. It lets them go scot-free. One of the things that the cross should do is, and the apostle says this, is to heap shame upon the principalities and powers who claim to be wise and just, but in their alleged wisdom and justice, they crucified the Lord of glory. But if, when PSA becomes the only explanation for the cross, you conspire to continue to exonerate the

principalities and powers that are supposed to be shamed by the cross. That's some of the problems I have with this. That's a great summary, man, of something that could take you six hours to unpack. That's a great summary, man, of something that could take you six hours to unpack. I have not done a lot of research into it. I would still, I totally agree that some people have made penal substitution the gospel, the central component, and I would completely disregard that. As you said, I mean, the book of Ephesians doesn't mention it. Colossians might barely mention it in Colossians 2, but it very much elevates a Christus Victor model. The book of Acts is all about the resurrection, never mentions penal substitution. So to say it's the center of the gospel, I think, is just to go against the

grain of the... Well, and then you have, I mean, I don't, again, I'm sort of exhausted on this subject, but you have, I mean, I'm not saying this is a clenching argument, but it's worth consideration that the entire Eastern side of Christianity, the Orthodox world has never talked about it like that. And if you say, oh, no, no, the early church fathers did, and I promise you, every Orthodox theologianian priest alive today will say you are reading into that that which is not there we have never held that yeah yeah yeah that may not be that may not be a definitive argument but i think it's something to factor in that you have a whole side of christianity that has just never thought that way about yeah here's where i mean and you

and i we may disagree on this, but I still see penal substitute, especially substitution, but I would still include some type of penal substitution as one of many sort of metaphors of the cross. And the way I talk about it is within a covenantal framework so that it's not this sort of medieval you know legal transaction but it's it's it's within an old covenant blessings and curses framework to where you know galatians 3 13 where christ you know um he bore the curse of the cross within a covenant framework the covenant curses that hung over israel the cross part of the mission of the cross is to bear and as nt right says exhaust those curses but that that's

a very different way and i would agree with that but then provided then we continue to have the conversation about what we mean by the wrath of god is the wrath of god punitive or consequential yeah yeah yeah yeah just raising that question this is another discussion yeah yeah well let's move on a lot more to say about that uh uh brian's this person says brian zahn seems to believe and he's it's a genuine question so if it sounds more accusatory i don't think he intends it that way he seems to believe that script that's the old testament in the old testament the ancient near eastern peoples understanding it wait hold on let me let me back up.

It seems that Brian believes that scripture, the Old Testament in particular, are an ancient Near Eastern people's understanding of God and do not accurately reflect who God is. He would say, Brian would say, that the retributive justice passages are how the authors wanted to understand Yahweh. And so Jesus had to come along and correct their misunderstanding. Does that make, it's a little convoluted to me. I understand the question exactly. I think it's putting maybe too fine a point on it. But we have this phenomenon within conservative Protestantism, and it's entirely confined to conservative Protestantism of certain varieties, where we have to pretend that the Old Testament is univocal. That it says one thing in perfect agreement.

And I'd say that's clearly not the case. For example, if you ask the Old Testament, as if the Old Testament isn't a single entity. So let's gather representatives of the Old Testament. Let's have some priests and Levites, a prophet or two, a psalm writer, whoever, over a period of, you know, a thousand years or so. We gather them in a room. There's about 10 of them. And we say, hey, guys, I've got a question, simple question. Does God require ritual blood sacrifice? I'm going to get a couple of calls to come back in a little bit, find out what your answer is. I'm gone 15 minutes. I walk back in. They're in a fist fight.

They don't agree. So you will have the priest. You'll have the Levites saying, of course. And they will have their text. And they'll say, God requires sacrifice, burnt offerings for sin day by day. I mean, that's there. You'll have the author of Psalm 40 going, hold on, I'll just, you know, prove that I'm a kind of a Bible guy here.

So, I mean, so you're just, you're cruising along here. You've gone through Leviticus and Deuteronomy and all that. And then you get to this passage here, which ends up quoting the New Testament. In sacrifice and offering, you take no pleasure. You have given me ears to hear you. Burnt offering and sin offering, you have not required. Well, which is it? Is it required day by day? I can show you that verse. Or is it not required? And then you have Hosea boldly speaking in the name of Yahweh saying, I desire mercy and not sacrifice, by which he means ritual blood sacrifice. I don't want that. I want mercy.

And it's unresolved. Jesus, though, ends up siding with Hosea. So if you're asking, what is the Old Testament? The Old Testament is the inspired, which I'll use that word, but what do we mean by that? I don't mean dictated. The Old Testament is the inspired telling of Israel's story on their journey to discover the living God. But it is a journey, and you track their progress. The Bible doesn't stand above the story it tells. It's fully immersed in the story itself.

The Bible itself is on its way, on the journey, on the quest to discover the true Word of God, who is Jesus. I would that when, and this should be the case, although unfortunately it's not, when we say Word of God, the first thing that a Christian would think is, yes, Jesus, the word of God, the word of the Father. Yes, Jesus. And then secondarily, the Bible. I don't mind calling the Bible the word of God. I do. I'm fine with that.

The Bible itself uses that kind of language referring to Scripture. But it's the word of God in a penultimate sense. It's lowercase w. But it's the word of God in a penultimate sense. It's lowercase w. Yeah, what the Bible does perfectly, inerrantly, infallibly is point us to Jesus. Yeah, yeah. So, and then I'll push back a little bit.

I'll use some emotive arguments, but there are emotive arguments that come from real life experience, you have texts where, and they're famous, where God is depicted in the Old Testament as commanding what today we would call war crimes and genocide. That is ethnic cleansing. That is eradicate people, including women and children, babies. Now, that's a problematic text. You can pretend it's not a problem. It's a problem. That's one. It's just a closing. So there's no problem there. There's a problem there. People are going to ask you about it. So what do you do? Well, your options are limited. You can say, you can question the morality of God or confer upon God something that transcends our concept of morality, and you say, well, when God commands the killing of babies, it's moral. It's okay. I don't know. I can't go there. My conscience doesn't allow me to do that, and I'm afraid you leave that door open. The problem is modern people will run through it. And they have. I mean, this isn't

a theory. I mean, during the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous inhabitants of North America, the English colonists and later the Americans frequently would cite these passages in the illusion that America is a kind of new Israel and the, uh, the indigenous peoples were a kind of Canaanite. And so they justified the wanton slaughter. So that's, that's a problem, but that's an option. You say, okay, I say, when, when God says to kill babies, um, it's not immoral to which I, my followup question is though, if God told you to kill babies, would you do it? And if you're going to be consistent, you have to say, yeah, yeah. If God told me to kill babies, I would do it.

And then I'm afraid of you. It's like, I don't want to be in the same room with you. You're making me quite nervous if you say that. Okay, well, the other option is you can say, all right, I'm going to question the immutability of God. God used to do that, and now God doesn't do that. Well, that to me sounds like a far more radical solution than what I'm suggesting. I think, I mean, I'm a traditionalist. I'm a

conservative in the sense that I hold what the church fathers always have held, and that is that God is immutable. God doesn't mutate. God isn't subject to change. If God is in the process of change, well then, you know, the very ground beneath our feet is moving. And how can we have any faith? So the only other option, and I don't know of another option. Maybe you can tell me one. But the only option I have is how we read Scripture. Not that we don't call it Scripture.

Not that we don't treat it as Scripture. But how we read Scripture may have to be questioned. What about, I mean, the immutability thing, that's always kind of thrown me for a loop. I mean, does God change? And of course we want to say no, but God's ways of working in the world does change. I mean, in his laws do. You might say that God is coming as far as he can to meet people. Yeah. Where they are.

He meets them where they're at to... But even then, there is, you are making a gesture that there are assumptions that people are making that are false, and God is accommodating himself to it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see what you're saying. So even then, you you would say yeah they they were making a some god god was accommodating himself to it because that's the only option he had without violating their authenticity as free beings yeah um so then we can be subtle there but even that is an

acknowledgement that there are assumptions within the text i think the the cleansing of canaan though it is kind of a unique situation and not not to uh not to diminish the the horror of of that event it's not like i mean you could say that god did command the conquest in on some level now i would question the comprehensiveness of it i think that um oh this is gonna take us off on a huge rabbit trail, but, you know. Well, if nothing else, our hearers will get the idea that this is not a simple issue. No, no, no, no. If you're saying the Bible says that I believe that that settles it, you're not being serious.

Here's where I want to go with it. Okay, I do want to pursue this because I don't want to just leave people hanging. In Deuteronomy 20, 16, he says, don't save alive anything that breathes. It sounds like a comprehensive killing, right? Don't leave anything that breathes. Then in Joshua, I'm going on memory here, Joshua 10, verse, I think it's 40.

It says, the Israelites destroyed the highlands, the lowlands, this side, the countryside, the cities that are comprehensive killing. They didn't save alive anything that breathed just as the Lord commanded. Now you're like, Oh, well that's fulfilling. Deuteronomy 2016. The one big elephant in the room is they didn't. Right now there's, there's exactly there's tons of people still remaining so which tells me that if or no since joshua 10 40 is hyperbole there's nothing there's no way around that it's hyperbole and since joshua 10 40 is also referencing the

command we fulfilled the command then logically maybe the command itself was hyperbole. Maybe, and I think this has actual textual biblical justification, that God's command was not to annihilate everything that breathes, but simply to disarm, confront, and I would say kill the opposing Canaanite forces and drive the Canaanites out of the land, not necessarily killing babies and stuff, but disarming and breaking the back of the Canaanites. And I guess one, you see, it's not just the commands to kill everybody. It's in the book of,

the whole book of Joshua is built on the premise of they didn't actually fulfill the command and therefore they were being. The problem with Joshua is we read it this way i mean here we are american citizens superpower and we always have this bad habit of imagining in some way that we're israel yeah well that's a problem categorically you should read it like this we might be canaan read it like this. We might be Canaan. Read it like this. Oh, no, we are. That God chose a people out of Mexico, and they marched north, and the Rio Grande rolled back, and they went in, and Jehovah fought on their behalf, and yea, they had not. Abram, M1 tanks. Or yea, they had not. B-2 bombers. But the Lord did fight on their behalf. That's the story. And remember that part of the command is

they had to hamstring the horses. Now, that's not an act of animal cruelty. I mean, it may be cruel, but that's not the point. The point is that horses were exclusively military. They were the tanks of the ancient world. And so the story is saying this, that not by military power, but by the faithfulness of Jehovah to his covenant, a weak people overpowered stronger empires, but they were not allowed to imitate their militarism. They had to disable the tanks, get rid of them. And there is a prohibition in the Torah against multiplying horses, a prohibition that Solomon excelled in violating, right? So even just this conversation we're having right now, I think at least for our listeners, makes it clear that these are more complex issues. As I said earlier, the Bible says that I believe that that settles it. It doesn't

settle much. No, you know, I used to teach Old Testament survey for years. And when you come to the book of Joshua, and I would, you know, teach the text, book of Joshua and I would you know teach the text whatever and then I would sometimes raise the question okay what kind of ethical maybe questions do you have from this book and when when the class wouldn't say anything it's like no let's go ahead and move on the judges I would say what are you thinking like did you did you were you caught were you awake when you read what you just read like if you are not disturbed by the text, then something's wrong with you. So, again, I'm not saying there's not valid solutions to this, and it's a very complex issue, but I completely agree that we first must be profoundly disturbed by the text before we can

even think of, you know, constructing some kind of solution that makes sense of everything else. Well, what we call the Old Testament didn't float down out of the heavens and magically appear. It is produced through a people of that time. And I think some of those assumptions are to be found within the text. Yeah, yeah. I got a couple more questions. I'm running an hour mark, so I don't want to keep you much longer. What practice do you use for your daily spiritual disciplines?

This person says, I've heard bits and pieces that you've said before that sound intriguing. And then another person said something similar. Can you talk about anything on prayer, contemplation, and how it shapes us spiritually in our culture today? The best thing I do as a pastor, the most helpful thing I do, is I teach people how to pray. I've learned how to pray well. I say that just very objectively. I've known how to pray well for about 12, 13 years. I've been a pastor 36 years. It should be the other way around, but that's the way it goes. I have a morning liturgy of prayer that I practice every morning of my life. It takes about a half an hour,

and then there's prayers throughout the day, noon, evening, nighttime. There's shorter liturgies of prayer. It's what I teach in prayer school. I can't, but prayer school is a, it's, it's five hours and I can't teach it in less than five hours. It's the one thing I don't do online. It's the one thing I don't, I think it has to be done intimately. I think it needs to be done face to face. It's like sharing secrets, but it's, yeah, it's what's, it's what's enabled me to progress and stay on the journey of following Jesus is the practices and disciplines of prayer. I have a robust reading program of the Bible. I've always been a reader of scripture. You know, people that want to just immediately dismiss me as a Marcionite,

you know, Marcion was the second century heretic who said, here's what he said. He said that he solved the problem that all the church fathers solved. There is a problem, but his solution was untenable. He said the God of the Old Testament was a demiurge, which is a kind of lesser deity, maybe a demon, who led astray the Jews. It's kind of a very anti-Semitic position. The God of the Old Testament is a demiurge that has no relationship with the God that Jesus called Father, and his solution was to completely get rid of the Old Testament, and he actually wanted to get rid of parts of the New Testament, too. I'm nothing like that. I call the Old Testament Scripture a giant prequel that we understand how we get to Jesus.

I read the Old Testament every day, both in study and in devotion. I pray from the Old Testament. I pray through the Psalms constantly. That's part of my regimen of spiritual formation is praying the Psalms. So I'm immersed in the text. I mean, the Bible is the world that I live in. So scripture and prayer, along with some other things, and then I teach a form of contemplative prayer that I call sitting with Jesus. I sort of intuitively developed this over a period of years, and then later realized that what I call sitting with Jesus is what the church has more or less throughout its history referred to as contemplative prayer. So those

are things I can just allude to them, but I can't teach. It takes hours to teach it. Wow, that's so good. I might hit you up later on some of that, some specifics on that. That sounds really fascinating. Why is Brian Zahn so freaking cool? Or a serious question, how should Christians really respond to the immigration crisis and how he thinks we should get involved? and how he thinks we should get involved. This kind of, I guess, goes along with some stuff we've talked about before,

but do you have anything to add to how practically Christians can respond? I think on a practical level, I think just if we can be a voice of mercy, if we could say, well, no matter what, when the day is done, we must love our neighbor as ourself, what does that look like? Look, we have undocumented immigrants in our church. And these are people that are not theory to me. They are, I know their names. I know the names of their kids, the people that I love. the people that I love.

I'm kind of an introvert, so when I get done preaching on Sunday, I go and I shake hands, but that's always a little uncomfortable for me, but I do the best I can. But I'm always looking around for these, especially of late, these undocumented immigrants among us. Some are dreamers have dreamer status some don't I'm always looking for

them and I just go up to them and I call them by name I talk with them because I know the pressure they're under and I want I want them to know that there are people in America that love them and view them as not a problem, not as an issue, but as a human being worthy of dignity. And, you know, borders are arbitrary. I mean, when we talk about an immigration crisis, it's kind of like, you know, well, when do we want to start keeping score? You know, I believe in legal immigration. Well, since when, when do you want to start keeping score? Cause you know, the native Americans are going, yeah, right. Tell me about it.

So it's a bigger way of looking at this. Yeah. Oh yeah. Brian, that's so good. I think that really shows your pastoral heart and I'm sure again, I don't, I don't really follow too much and you know, like social media debates, whatever, but I can, I have seen a little bit, I'm sure really follow too much in social media debates, whatever. But I have seen a little bit. You get a lot of flack. And I'm sure you probably get a lot more criticism than I'm even aware of. And so I really appreciate you centralizing your pastoral heart, your commitment to Christ,

your teachability, your commitment to go with the text lead. So thank you so much for your ministry and your example. I mean, I really am so thankful that you exist and that you are continuing to speak out in the ways you do. That's very kind of you, Preston. Thank you. Thanks so much for being on Theology in the Raw. Real quick, where can people find you? And your latest book for my YouTube watchers is, this is your latest one, right? Right. Yeah. this is the latest book. I'm almost done with a book called Postcards from Babylon, but it's not out yet. Ooh, that one sounds great. This one is Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God. So check that one out.

And you've got many more books. If you can spell my name, you can find me pretty easy. Okay, cool. Ryan, Z-A-H-N-D. It's such a weird name that if google it you know you'll find my website you'll find what you know it's i'm not hard to find just google me i'm the only one you're active on social media at least twitter are you idea instagram facebook twitter i try to be somewhat i'm pretty involved there and i treat it rather seriously. Instagram is more fun and the devil lives on

Facebook. So I actually do have a public figure Facebook account, but I don't do much with it because it scares me. You know, it's funny as I'm sure you do. I get probably equal attacks from, I hate these terms, but the left and the right, whatever. Yeah. Right. I get it from both sides. Yeah. Facebook, I get more attacks from the right, Twitter from the left and Instagram right, whatever. Yeah, right. I get it from both sides. Yeah. Facebook, I get more attacks from the right. Twitter from the left. And Instagram is where me and my friends hang out. Instagram is where we have pictures of cats and things like that. Where we go to decompress.

Well, thanks so much for being on the show. Yeah, I really appreciate you. And thanks for listening to Theology in the Raw. If anybody wants to support the show, you can go to patreon.com forward slash Theology in the Raw and look up ways you can support the show. So thanks so much, Brian, for being on the show. We'll see you again. All right.

Thank you.