Voices In My Head Podcast Episode #224: Brian Zahnd - Sinners In The Hands of a Loving God

Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer-songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is your source for discussions on music, literature, movies, pop culture, theology, and more. Now sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of the Voices in My Head podcast. And don't forget to let the voices in your head be heard by following me on Twitter @RickLeeJames and sharing your thoughts about today's show. Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I am your host, Rick Lee James. I'm so glad you could join us today. Just so you know, today's episode is sponsored by audible.com, and for those of you who listen to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of Rick Lee James, Audible is offering a free audiobook download with a free 30-day trial to give you the opportunity to check out their service. All you have to do to download your first free audiobook audiobook today is go to audibletrial.com/voicesinmyhead. Now the guest today is Brian Zahnd, and I would recommend why not check out one of Brian Zahnd's books through Audible. You can listen to it while you're going down the road, or when you're running on the treadmill, or when you're being chased by the police, or whatever you do in your free time. You know, you can be listening to it. Hopefully none of you are actually chased by the police. That was a joke, if not a bad one. So audible.com or actually audibletrial.com/voicesinmyhead. That'll get you a free download. So who doesn't like free? I love free. Now speaking of things that are not free, the internet. I'm a little mad at the internet today. I'm not really mad at the internet, I'm more mad at the internet service provider we have here locally. You can better believe that I'm going to be calling them as soon as possible because my service here at home has not been great lately. Today I thought we had a wonderful connection set up. The first about, I don't know, 10-15 minutes of my conversation with Brian Brian's on just seemed to be flawless, clear as a bell. And then suddenly we started losing the connection and it was on my end. And so there are parts of this conversation that you are going to hear, uh, the, the, the audio go in and out when Brian is talking. And I am so sorry about that. He had wonderful things to say and was saying it very well. And at one point I even had to start and stop and have him start over again. So it always flusters me when that happens, and I hate it for our guests. But Brian was so gracious to just kind of deal with it keep going on. I tried to edit it, some of it out, but the glitches kept happening again and again. There was about 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, about 10 times that this happened throughout the podcast today. So when you can hear Brian, it's very clear, and I'm so grateful for that. When you can't, it's like he just completely drops out. Usually it's only for a few seconds and it will pop back in. You'll probably hear my pencil being pushed across a piece of paper because I'm trying to write down the different points where, where the disconnect happened. It happened a couple weeks ago when we had one of our guests on, Ben Passmore, and I apologize to him as well. Hopefully by the next time I podcast, we will have this fixed. I am really sorry. I hate when this happens. Uh, our guests deserve better than that. Brian Zahnd certainly deserves better than that. But I do want to recommend his books to all of you. Really, any book that he has written, they all are worth your time. It seems like he keeps getting better and better. And this one in particular, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, I think it's going to be such a wonderful tool to help bring a lot of help and a lot of hope to many people who have grown up with a view of God that is a monster and a God that really wants to not do us good but cause us harm. And I think oftentimes, because of baggage we carry to scripture, maybe from our own past, maybe from congregations that have not been so gracious to us at times, um, we carry those things with us when we come to God. But thankfully, in Jesus, we see a God who is not like that. And so I have really enjoyed getting to know Brian over the last few years and having him on the podcast. Again, just one more time, I want to apologize, uh, but if you want crystal clear clarity when you're listening, you ought to try audibletrial.com/voicesinmyhead. See what I did there? You can go get a free audiobook. All right, without any further hesitation, here is my conversation on Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God with my guest Brian Zahn. Thank you so much for listening to Voices in My Head. Brian Zahnd founded Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri more than 35 years ago, and he still serves as lead pastor to a congregation committed to authentic expression of Jesus Christ in the 21st century. He's also the author of Water to Wine, A Farewell to Mars, Beauty Will Save the World, Unconditional, and What to Do on the Worst Day of Your Life. Today he's here because he has a new book out called Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News. So Brian Zahnn, welcome back to the Voices in My Head podcast.

Thank you, Rick. Good to be with you again.

I have to say at the beginning of the show, I have to give you greetings from our mutual friend Walter Brueggemann. Just last week he was on the program and we had a great time came together in Cincinnati, Ohio, and he speaks of you with the highest regard and said please tell you hello.

Well, you know, that just makes my day right there because my admiration for the great Walter Brueggemann has no bounds. I, I, I, I have been as influenced by Walter Brueggemann in, in regard to how I read the Bible as anyone. Just powerful. Yeah.

Yeah, he, he, and really, I hope that when I'm 84 years old, I'm even half as sharp as he is too, because, man, he really, yeah, and, and such a gracious guy too. I mean, I think a lot of times theologians get sort of a reputation for being a little stodgy, especially in their old years, but my goodness, he's such a warm human being too.

And he's fun, he's fun to hang out with, he laughs easy. And yeah, indeed.

And I think, let's see, he, he's been on the podcast 3 times, but unless I'm mistaken, I think this is your 5th time on this show because I was trying to go over the books that you had out.

You'll have a score.

So, well, I'm really glad to have you back again either way. I'm excited to talk about your new book. I've been anticipating it for a while, and it did not disappoint. So in case people that are listening don't know, and I think what I'll do is give just a little excerpt from the back of the book today just so people can kind of have a synopsis and the point where we can jump off and discuss it. But the The book is based off, uh, it's sort of a rebuttal to the famous Jonathan Edwards sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. And straight from the back of the book it says, in his famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Puritan revivalist Jonathan Edwards shaped predominating American theology with a vision of God as angry, violent, and retributive. Three centuries later, Brian Zahnn was both mesmerized and terrified by Edwards' wrathful God. Haunted by fear that crippled his relationship with God, Zahn spent years praying for a divine experience of hell. What Zahn experienced instead was the Father's love revealed perfectly through Jesus Christ for all prodigal sons and daughters. So that can be sort of a jumping-off point for us today as we talk about this new book. Your book starts with the story of two Christians who seem to represent the view of God that you are arguing against in this book: Jonathan Edwards and J.T. Chick, who many people will know made Chick Tracts for many years. I think he just died fairly recently, if I'm not mistaken. I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about those men and some of what you found problematic in their view of who God is.

Well, let's see. You know, you said in the introduction that Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God might be viewed as a kind of rebuttal of Jonathan Edwards. I would say it's more a rebuttal of my younger self, but my younger self was formed by a lot of different influences. As a young man, as a young preacher, I had my own kind of handcrafted copy of Sinners in the Hands of a Loving— or Angry God from Jonathan Edwards' famous 1741 sermon. I memorized parts of it, put it in my arsenal, used it in my strategy of evangelism by terrorism, because really I did see God as violent, angry, retributive, and so that was the gospel I was working from. I encountered Chick tracts earlier when a well-meaning but I think misguided Sunday school teacher had given me one of these. You know, I don't know how many of our listeners know about them. I think it's pretty difficult to have lived in America the last half century and not have encountered them because they're almost ubiquitous. But these are these cartoon-like pamphlets that kind of have these kind of corny plots that always seem to end with all of the people that aren't fundamentalist Christians standing before a white faceless monster that is to represent God who ultimately orders them to be flung into the fires of doom and hell. And, you know, it's, it's, that's lowbrow Puritan sermons that are designed to terrify. And so those got lodged in me. And whereas on the one hand I wouldn't say I just walked around all day in dread terror of God, I would say that that seed was present within me. And so I was, you know, having to deal with those sorts of things. And there just came a time in my life when there was a breakthrough, and I just didn't think that way anymore. I didn't look at God that way, and I began to preach in a new kind of way, and it brought hope and health and help and healing to people. And so that's, you know, why I sat down and wrote the book. And I really, I kind of anticipated, I kind of thought that it would be well received. But I have to admit, I'm really surprised at how enthusiastically people have embraced this at a very personal level because it's helped them. It's helped them recover from some of the spiritual trauma that has come upon their soul in one way or another. Now of course, you know, a book like this will have its critics, those that are deeply committed to a Calvinist view of theology and Christ. Are almost obligated to push back on some of it, but they've been in the— really in the very small minority. And I didn't write it to engage with people who are committed to defending a particular systematic theology. I wrote it for people that had an instinct, an intuition, that God really is good and God really is love, but felt like a certain way of reading the Bible prevented them them from fully embracing that. So I thought, well, maybe I can help these people understand what I think is absolutely the best news of all, and that is that God is like Jesus.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

That is a powerful distinction, and that's something that I want to talk about more as we go along, because that's even something that even listening to your sermons over the year, that's been a real help to me in explaining different ways of how I see God, because we do see him shaped as— yeah, I mean, we see him revealed in Jesus. I mean, that's what we believe as Christians very fundamentally, is that we see him as that. But I thought for the sake— it might be a little fun today, and I'm so glad to hear that the book is being so well received by so many people. And I've read so many of your books, and I agree with you so much that often I think, well, I could just sit here and agree with you the whole time. But I thought it, I thought it might be fun today. I found a few different sort of reviews that had a little bit different take on it with like some questions that people said, you know, in book reviews. Well, I wish Brian could explain this, or things like that today. So I thought it might be fun just for, for a few questions anyway, to just sort of take the other side of things and sort of ask some of those questions about it.

We can do that.

That's right. No, no, but I thought it would be interesting just to hear your take on some of the things. And some of this is, is not so much taken from reviews of— because I didn't find that many really, but just sort of the, the question that often when you're talking with Calvinists specifically, things that come up. And I just love to sort of hear your answer in response through, through the book that you have. Um, and so my, my first question that I have sort of on that end of things, um, some have said that just as fundamentalists swing too far in the direction of God's wrath, so too you have swung far in the opposite direction, erring too much on the side of grace. Do you ever think that you have erred too much on the side of grace where others have erred on the side of wrath?

I suppose it is possible to do that. I won't deny that that is a possibility. Of course, I wouldn't sit here and say, "Yeah, I think I've done that." I would correct myself. So, um, but if you're going to make a mistake, if you are going to err, I would want to err on the side of grace and mercy. I don't think that's what I've done, but look, think of it this way, Rick. If I go to the judgment seat of Christ and Jesus says, well, here's my primary judgment against you, Brian Zahn: you preached my love, my grace, my mercy, uh, too extreme. I'm just thinking I'm gonna be okay. Well, in all seriousness, no, I don't think I've done that. I think, uh, I, I come from— I mean, I'm not in a reactive stage of my life. I'm 58 years old. Uh, these are processes I've been working through for at least— well, really since I was about 40. So it's coming up on 20 years that I have been rethinking these things, and I've done so as a pastor. And there's some There's something about the day-to-day responsibilities of being a pastor that really do keep you grounded. I think it's a lot easier to swing from one extreme to another if all you're doing is blogging or operating in the very specific confines of academic theology. That's not where I'm at. I'm dealing with real people, day by day, not in theory but in practice. And so if you ask me, for example, do I believe in the wrath of God? Of course I believe in the wrath of God. Of course I do. But then we can talk about what that is. And I think there is a nuanced way that is consistent with the church fathers of talking about the wrath of God that doesn't end up placing you in a position where essentially evangelism becomes a good cop, bad cop routine. Where God's primary disposition towards sinners is that of anger, violence, and retribution, but Jesus steps in as the good cop to save us from the bad cop. I think there's just a lot better way of dealing with that, and I think that's the move that I've made in my own life and ministry, and it's what's reflected in Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God.

Well, and your statement a few moments ago about, you know, if that's the worst that can be said of me, 'At the end when I stand before God that I was too gracious.' I was thinking of when you said that, something that Pope Francis said one time. I was reading a book and I don't think it was even his quote. He was quoting someone else. I just don't remember who it was. But the thing that he said in a similar scenario was, 'Forgive me, Lord, if I have erred too much on the side of grace, but it is you, O God, who set the bad example.' I hadn't heard it. That's great. Yeah, it was really beautiful.

I'll have to remember that.

Yeah, I think it's in the book. Book, uh, the title has left me. I think it might be The Kingdom of God is Joy, uh, it's something similar to that. But, um, yeah, it was a beautiful way of phrasing it, I thought, and I thought it would be a good companion to what you had just said to us. Um, and, and of course, a lot when we have this conversation, and, and you mentioned the wrath of God, which is something that would be really interesting to talk about too. Um, and of course, it, it's just, it's full in the Old Testament. If you read the Old Testament, you just see there's lots of violence there, and much of it is attributed to God in in those times. So a lot of trouble that we have when we come to Scripture, and that many people have when they come to Scripture, is how do we justify this God that we see? And, and, and so if God never condoned violence— because in Jesus we see a God that appears quite different than that— so if God never, never condoned violence, and the Old Testament attributes the violence as coming from God, How is the Old Testament not the antithesis of divine revelation? I wonder if you can kind of deal with that because I kind of see questions about that sometimes, about even in the way we read Scripture.

Ah, yeah, let's establish this first of all, that I confess the Bible has been appended en masse to the beginning of Christian Scriptures, the New Testament. So I read the Scriptures The Old Testament scriptures every day. I prayed them every day in praying the Psalms. Um, I believe that they are a divinely inspired telling of Israel's story to come as they come to know the living God. But there are obvious problems with the Old Testament when we try to have a nice easy fit with what we see in the Old Testament with Jesus. Now people have always been aware of this. I'm not the first by any means. Jesus himself in the Sermon on the Mount says things like, "You've heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," quoting from the Torah. "But I say to you, do not resist the one who is evil, turn the other cheek," etc. And so Jesus is making a daring move to challenge some things that are part of the Hebrew Bible. It's why at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew adds the comment, "And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught as one having authority, not as the scribes and Pharisees." And he's appealing to his own authority, which is pretty radical. They knew it was radical then. Rabbi Jacob Neusner, who I have high regard for, says this. He says, "I admire Jesus, but in the end I have to reject what he asserts in the Sermon on the Mount because only God has the authority to ask of me what Jesus commands." To which, of course, believing Christians would say, "Exactly!" And that's what we are confessing, that Jesus is the Word made flesh. He is the perfect embodiment of the word and will of God. Now, as I said earlier, people have noticed that there seems to be some kind of change as we go through the text from Old toward New Testament, although we should make very clear that there are discrepancies, or I would rather say it this way, that the Old Testament is not univocal. It doesn't always speak with one voice. There are dissenting opinions throughout.. For example, if you ask, does God require ritual blood sacrifice? Early on, the priests are going to say, yes, of course, obviously. But then the psalmists begin to say things like, you haven't required blood sacrifice, this isn't what you want. And the prophets say the same thing. And so you do see movement. But I would say it's like this: it isn't that God is changing. Rather, think of it this way, Rick. What is the most obvious fact What is it that happens in the natural world? Well, I suppose it's that the sun rises in the east, travels across the sky, sets in the west, and it happens every day. Except that none of that's true. That's how we experience it. That's what we are perceiving. But in fact, we are the ones who are in movement, not the sun. So, and to this day, I'm just amazed that anybody ever figured that out, you know. I mean, imagine the first guy going, You know, I've been thinking, and I think it's not the sun that's moving, it's we're the ones who are moving. I'm sure they, you know, called him a heretic and burned him at the stake, probably. Um, what the Bible is doing— the Bible is a divinely inspired diary, as it were, of the chosen people Israel on their journey of revelation toward the full knowledge of the living God. And so that movement is documented within the text. So in recognizing the problem, we don't make the move that Marcion made, second-century heretic who said several things. He said first of all that the God of the Old Testament was a demonic deity, and that his solution was we just get rid of the Old Testament. Well, I confess that Yahweh is the Abba of Jesus, that Yahweh, or the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is the true and living God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I also say that of course the Old Testament is part of our canonical text because it tells the story of how we get to Jesus, and I believe it's inspired, but I can't treat it as a flat text where every single verse contains perfect revelation of who God is. That is a move that, as Christian Smith said in his brilliant book, makes the Bible impossible. And I would recommend that book, The Bible Made Impossible, by Christian Smith. And, uh, he talks about the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism, that it really doesn't matter even if you want to say, okay, I believe in the infallible, inerrant word of God The problem is that doesn't do us any good if we don't have a unified interpretation. So the scriptures, the text still has to be interpreted. What I want to say, and I think it's a very, very high Christological move to do this, I believe in the inspired, infallible, inerrant Word of God, and his name is Jesus. What we find with the scriptures is the most reliable and inspired witness to— There are difficulties in dealing with the Scripture. I think one of the fundamental moves though that can be made is to make a distinction between the Bible and Christian faith. The Bible is the soil from which the tree of Christian faith is rooted and grows. You cannot separate the tree from the soil, but still they are not the same thing. A tree is distinct from the soil in which it is rooted. So our Christian faith is indeed rooted in the soil of Scripture, as we must be. But Christian faith is not precisely the same thing as the Bible. So if I, if I hold up a Bible and say this is Christianity, no, it's not. This is our text. This is scripture, but out of scripture grows the Christian faith. Jesus is the object of our worship. Jesus is the perfect revelation of God. Jesus is the icon of God. God is fully revealed in Jesus Christ. As I like to say, and people have heard me say it, and I put it in the book, God is like Jesus. God has always been like Jesus. There's never been a time God wasn't like Jesus. Now, we haven't always known this. But now we do, and isn't that good news? Isn't it good news if we decide that God is like Jesus?

Right. Very good news. And I think it's interesting too because a lot of times it does matter— let's see how I want to say this— the way that we approach Scripture. If we're not approaching it like a holistic holistic book that we can see where it's taking us on this journey together. We have a lot of problems with it because we're just sort of people who pick and choose and grab a verse here and say this. And as you've already noted today, many of the authors of the Bible are sort of in conversation and even in argument with each other at times. And so they're, they're sort of, um, they're sort of having these discussions that I think we often have together many times where we're still trying to figure out what it means to follow the God that is and to follow the God who is living and true that we see revealed in Jesus. And if we start from different places with that, then we might as well just make the Bible say whatever we want to because you certainly can do that.

You can do that, yeah.

Yeah, and so I really like how you bring that about in this book. But, you know, we're, we're in a place, I guess, in our nation right now where there's a lot of that going around, where people are— I guess there always has been, you know, picking and choosing scriptures to justify this, that, and the other, and, and not seeing the Bible as holistic as, as we should see. But seeing God as this, as this monster God, or seeing him as this very wrathful God, or even seeing ways of justifying things like like when our president a few weeks ago said, "We will rain down fire and fury upon you," and then for Christians to go, "Yeah, thus says the Lord," you know?

Look, I could do it as well as anybody. If I wanted to put together a sermon that would have plenty of Bible verses and justify dealing with our enemies with fire and fury heck, I could write that sermon in 45 minutes. It's not hard to do. The question is, is it true? Is it actually consistent with the revelation of God that we find in Jesus Christ? The Bible is this enormous book covering so much territory that, I mean, you tell me what ideology, what policy, what position that you could not adopt and support by clever use of the Bible. I mean, look, the Bible will— nor New— gives anything approaching a clear denunciation of slavery. The Bible— now, if I'm going to defend the Bible, I will say that for the most part, when the Bible talks about slavery, it's trying to mitigate the suffering But the Bible itself does not possess a vision of the abolition of slavery. It simply kind of accepts it as just a given, that it's just part of the human condition. Yet if we allow Christ to not be imprisoned by the Bible, but we allow the scriptures to be a witness to the living Christ who is Lord of the church and Lord of all, then by a trajectory drawn from the scriptures toward Christ, we find a way where we, where we are able to say in the name of Christ, the only acceptable position regarding regarding the institution of slavery is that it is a repugnant moral evil and we must work towards its abolition. If you're just going to chapter and verse it, you're going to end up painting yourself into the corner where, you know, "Well, I guess sometimes slavery is okay because the Bible seems to think so." And yet, every one of our listeners knows that's not true, and so we have to find a way beyond just staying within the rigid confines of the text and finding a chapter and a verse. I mean, after all, if we're Christians, we believe in fact that Jesus Christ has been raised, exalted to the right hand of the Father, is the head of the church and Lord of the nations. And so it's not— Jesus doesn't say all authority in heaven and earth has been given to a book that I'm going to give you guys. He said it's given unto me. Now I understand that it is tricky how the church, especially in its fragmented nature, discerns what the living Christ is saying, but still that's the task that's given to us. Otherwise, every Tom, Dick, and Harry can just run around with a Bible and say, "Okay, you know, I found a verse, you know, for fury and fire," or, "I found a verse for racism," or, "I found a verse for slavery," or, "I found a verse for genocide." I mean, you see how that works, and that's what I think we have to avoid.

Yeah, yeah. And it's really, it's hard to have that conversation at times, often because we are, you know, as we've already referred to, we're not necessarily using scripture the correct way. I love what you said about, you know, all power and authority is not given to a book, it's given to the person of Jesus. And in the book, you spell out some helpful things, and you give us 4 options when dealing with these difficult things and the wrathful parts of Scripture if we're stuck on those things. And so I'm just going to read those 4 things real quick because I think they're great. The first option you say is we can question the morality of God, that somehow perhaps God is monstrous, and just accept that and think God's a monster. The second option is we can question the immutability of God, that is, that God changes over time, that God used to be angry but he's happy now. Or we can ignore the Old Testament text altogether, which is option 3. Or the 4th way, which, which you very well talk about in this book, is we can question how we read Scripture. Perhaps it could be that we should learn to read the Bible in a different way. And it's wonderful to hear you talk about that and to read more about that in the book, because the way you describe it is the Bible is taking us on a certain trajectory, and the slavery issue is a beautiful example of that that you talked about. That the church has to fight for the freedom of people from slavery and bondage. It should be, at this point in our life, the trajectory that the Holy Spirit has moved us on. It's just common sense. It should be to anybody.

Well, every modern person with even a modicum of a sense of morality knows that slavery as an institution is an abhorrent evil. But in making that statement, Rick, you are saying something that the Bible does not apparently know, right? And, and I don't know how you get around— and people then that, that just, you know, double down on a biblicist position, I've seen them do it. What they end up doing is saying, well, uh, the kind of slavery you found in the Bible, it was kind of— it was different. It was— oh, they had the good kind of slavery, huh? You know, you end up defending things that are indefensible, right?

And yeah, definitely. And, and it's, and it's an interesting time to live in because I think there's other issues that we also find ourselves facing socially as the church right now. And the church doesn't always know exactly what to do. Things like immigration and Muslim bans and homosexual equality and things like that, which I think the world is looking to the church and asking, what are we to do here? And the church, if all we have is, is just simply, well, the Bible tells me so, we don't necessarily have answers for those things. And, and we really need a, a Christ trajectory to help us in those matters. I think that the Holy Spirit would guide us in those matters, certainly using Scripture, but just knowing that we may not be able to have a verse for every single thing we come to, but we do have Jesus.. And it really, that's, the living Word of God has to come over and above the written Word of God.

We need to come to the point where as Christians when we hear the phrase "Word of God" we think Jesus first, Bible second. I don't mind calling the Bible the Word of God, that kind of language is used itself in Scripture, but the Bible is the Word of God in a penultimate sense. It is the inspired witness to the true and perfect Word of God, who is Christ. Now when I say that, I'm not saying anything other than what Jesus himself said when he told Pharisees in John 5, "You search the scriptures because you think in them you will have eternal life, but they are that which bear witness to me, yet you won't come to me that you might have eternal life." So if we want to really participate in the life of the age to come, we can't just stay um, with our noses buried in the Bible, at some point we have to allow that to lead us to the living Christ who alone possesses eternal life.

Hmm.

Yeah, as one who has a deep, deep commitment to the scriptures, that at the desk I'm sitting at, I'm surrounded by Bibles. I've been reading the Bible every day of my life since I was 15. I have written 3,327 sermons based on Bible texts. I am not one who I'm not one who has a low view of Scripture, but I am one who has a very high view of Christ.

Yes, that's a wonderful way to put that. That's very good. And, you know, while we're on the subject of the Eternal Word, I want to talk about something that I'm sure everybody who has interviewed you has probably talked about, and that's hell.

The hell chapter has been by far the most popular chapter. It's the one that people tell me they love the most, and then I have people say, "I read the hell chapter first." illegal procedure penalty right there. But I have had— I get pushback on when I deal with the violence of the cross from people that are committed to certain atonement theories. I get pushback on how I read the Old Testament, which I also deal with in the book. I have not— I'm not saying it's not out there, and I don't want to jinx myself, but I have had zero pushback on the LDS chapter, which I find very interesting and encouraging.

Well, that is encouraging, as I was actually going to ask you what kind of pushback you had received from that, and I was going to preface this by saying none. That's great. Well, see, it's interesting.

It's early. It's only been out 10 days or so.

Yeah, give it time. There's always somebody. It's the, you know, the internet's kind of the Wild West. You can always find somebody out there. But, you know, it's interesting when we have this conversation. I've become friends with our local Jewish rabbi here in town. I had put a scripture or something up on Facebook or something one day, and he sent me a message and he said, "Hey, next time you're with me, I'll show you a picture of hell." I said, "Okay." Of course, from one of his trips to Jerusalem, he had a picture of what Jesus refers to there as Gehenna. It's a park. Right, right. It's a very nice park now. It's not even the fiery junkyard it once was anymore. So it's interesting to have conversations like these, and, and we do forget that, that the Bible uses metaphors to talk about things that we just sometimes don't have words to describe. And one thing that I love, having just finished my third Dostoevsky novel this week, actually, I had just finished. But my first, my first novel read by Dostoevsky was The Brothers Karamazov. So I was pretty filled with joy to see you quoting it here, where Dostoevsky introduces really, it's Eastern Orthodox theology and wisdom through the saintly character Elder Zozima, who says, 'I asked myself, what is hell?' And I answered thus: 'The suffering of being no longer able to love.' And in your book, that hell is not God's hatred of sinners, it's God's love wrongly— I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about Yeah, you dropped out.

I mean, yeah.

Oh, I am so sorry. What was the last thing you heard? Do you remember? Oh, this connection. All right, are you able to hear me again?

It's, yeah, it's inconsistent, but—

Oh, uh, I'm so sorry.

I don't know, maybe it's on my end. I don't know.

It— I wouldn't bet on it. I've got a new computer and I've been having a little problem lately with this, and I apologize for that. But I don't know how much of that you heard, but what I had said was I was thrilled that you quoted Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov in this, and the saintly character Elder Zozima really introduces us to Eastern Orthodox theology, and he says, "I ask myself, what is hell?" and I answer thus: the suffering of being no longer able to love. And you say in your book that hell is not God's hatred of sinners, it is God's love wrongly received. And I wonder if you could just talk to us a bit more about—

Yeah, let me back up a second. First of all, part of the problem with the word hell is it's picked up all kinds of accumulated meanings over the centuries, from Dante's Inferno to J.T. Chick tracts. And so we see that word hell and we read back into the text assumptions that aren't present in the text at all. When you see the word— any word translated hell in the Old Testament, which modern translations don't have— don't translate Sheol as that— it's just talking about the afterlife. It's just talking about the the realm of the dead. The Old Testament simply does not bother with hardly any speculation about the afterlife. New Testament, yes, there are aspects of afterlife theology, but not as quite as much as people think, because so often Jesus is talking about impending disaster that's about to fall upon Jerusalem that will turn the city into a living hell where the fire wasn't quenched and the worms dieth not. But I— very helpful corrective for both Catholics and Protestants in the Christian West. So let's say it this way: God has a single disposition toward all sinners, all human beings, and that is one of unconditional, unchanging love. The Orthodox would say it like this: there flows from the heart of God a river of fire that is his pure eternal love. For those that respond to God's love with love, this river of fire is experienced as warmth and light. For those who resist the love of God by resisting God and resisting loving their neighbor, resisting the great command to love God with all of our heart, our neighbor as ourself, then that same fire is experienced as a kind of torment. The Apostle Paul talks about this at the end of Romans 12 when he is borrowing from the Sermon on the Mount, saying, "If your enemy's hungry, feed him. If he's thirsty, give him drink." But the result will be, it'll be like burning coals upon his head. Paul isn't telling Roman Christians how to torture their enemies, he's simply acknowledging that which is the case, that if people people stay in a disposition of hatred towards us when we love them, when we love our enemy, still they receive that as a kind of torment, even if we're feeding them and giving them drink. But if they will repent, rethink, repense, if they'll reevaluate and say, wait a minute, why am I hating this person? They are loving me, then all of a sudden that which was One way we might understand hell is that it is the love of God wrongly received. Now, I think I do a whole lot better job in the book. It's hard for me just to pluck up, you know, 2 or 3 minutes, 4 or 5 minutes of conversation, really nail it, uh, really well. But that's the chapter that I gave the most thought to. My wife, Perry, who is always my first editor editor, and she's always maybe a little bit cautious. She will try to restrain me from being too, I don't know, you know, too daring, too out there. I don't delve into a whole lot of speculation, and I just say, look, you know, a lot of this is speculation, and so I don't know. We don't I do challenge people that claim they know exactly how afterlife judgment works and who goes to hell and who goes to heaven and exactly who they are and their names and— I think fairly conclusively in the book that that's based upon all kinds of assumptions and they don't know what they're talking about. But we do need to do work on this hell business because we have inherited a a glitch in the matrix through our theological systems that force people into the corner of saying all people who are not Christians and have not prayed a sinner's prayer to Jesus end up tortured forever in an eternal Auschwitz. Now that is the result of a theological system, uh, gone off the rails. It is not something that is taught from Jesus. And I think I show that pretty conclusively in the book. Yeah.

Yeah, talk about— I mean, talking about something that, I mean, we don't have spelled out in the Bible. We really don't have the sinner's prayer as we use it. Oh, we don't? You know, so we almost have to take liberties with that and how we say it. Well, as you say, you really do say it so well in the book. And so I want to take a moment as we're starting to wrap up our conversation here to encourage as many people as possible to check it out. Check out for yourself. Uh, the first thing when I read this, I thought, uh, this is great. I hope that people don't, um, don't do it like they did with Rob Bell and just go, oh, he's, he's dismissed hell entirely, or whatever. You, you make it very clear in the book that you're not saying hell isn't, isn't anything at all.

Very real. And just in case people are wondering, no, I'm not a universalist. I think that is to claim to know too much.

So, um, yeah, and, and I, I really do encourage people to read it because I feel like it probably explains a more biblical and, and Jesus-oriented view of hell than maybe I've ever read before. And so I appreciate that as your contribution. Um, man, I would love to talk more, but I— my internet connection just seems to, to keep going in and out, and it's, it's unfortunate because I'm really enjoying our conversation. So I probably ought to start wrapping up the show today. But Brian, it has been as always just a huge honor to have you here talking about you.

Thank you, Rick Lee James.

For everyone listening, I highly recommend going to Brian Zahnd's blog at brianzahnd.com, and you can find out more about him through his webpage. And he has so many wonderful books, and he has such a great voice for the church. And you can listen to him weekly on the Word of Life podcast where his sermons are found online, and I strongly encourage you to listen to Brian. So Brian, thank you so much for being one of the Voices in My Head this week.

Thank you, Rick.

Thank you for joining me here this week on the Voices in My Head podcast. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, follow me on Twitter @RickLeeJames, like my artist page on Facebook at facebook.com/rickleejames, and keep up to date on what I'm writing at my author author page on Amazon.com. Make sure to follow my calendar on the website, and if you would like to have me come to your town to do a concert, a speaking engagement, or a book event, you can book me through my website by clicking on the link for Pare Booking Agency. That's P-A-R-E Booking. And finally, it would mean the world to me if you were to leave me a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast is on the internet. And now the benediction: May the God of peace, who raised Christ from the dead, strengthen your inner being for every good work. And may the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, rest upon you and dwell within you this day and forevermore. Amen.