Top 80 Brian Zahnd Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Most of us are scripted to think that life is a game and the purpose of life is to win. This is the way that seems right. But the divine truth is that life is a gift and the purpose of life is to learn to love well.”

— Brian Zahnd

2. “The Beatitudes are deliberately designed to shock us. If we’re not shocked by the Beatitudes, it’s only because we have tamed them with a patronizing sentimentality – and being sentimental about Jesus is the religious way of ignoring Jesus! Too often the Beatitudes are set aside into the category of “nice things that Jesus said that I don’t really understand.”

— Brian Zahnd

3. “Love all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire, universal love.”

— Brian Zahnd

4. “I saw the cross as the place where Jesus refounded the world. Instead of being organized around an axis of power enforced by violence, at the cross the world was refounded around an axis of love expressed in forgiveness.”

— Brian Zahnd

5. “The tragedy of growing up is not that we put aside childishness, but that we lose the capacity for childlike wonder.”

— Brian Zahnd

6. “Fundamentalism is to Christianity what paint-by-numbers is to art.”

— Brian Zahnd

7. “The resurrection is not only God’s vindication of his Son; it is the vindication of all Jesus taught. Easter Sunday is nothing less than the triumph of the peaceable kingdom of Christ. Easter changes everything. Easter is the hope of the world, the dawn of a new age, the rising of the New Jerusalem on the horizon of humanity’s burned-out landscape. Easter is God saying once again, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him!”

— Brian Zahnd

8. “The gospel is the beautiful story of how God is bringing the world out of bondage to sin and death through the triumph of Jesus Christ. If you don’t know how to preach the gospel without making appeals to afterlife issues, you don’t know how to preach the gospel!”

— Brian Zahnd

9. “If the crucifixion of Christ can be made beautiful, then there is hope that all the ugliness of the human condition can be redeemed by its beauty.”

— Brian Zahnd

10. “If God can become human, then we must reconsider how we treat our fellow humans.”

— Brian Zahnd

11. “Our task is not to protest the world into a certain moral conformity, but to attract the world to the saving beauty of Christ.”

— Brian Zahnd

13. “It’s not enough to believe in Jesus; we also have to believe in the Jesus way!”

— Brian Zahnd

14. “The truth is that for most of us economic self-interest is the single greatest obstacle to full participation in the kingdom of God. We cannot love our neighbor as our self without being willing to share our wealth.”

— Brian Zahnd

15. “But as Walter Brueggemann says, the problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.”

— Brian Zahnd

16. “The problem with our “change the world” rhetoric is that it is too often a thinly veiled grasp for power and a quest for dominance – things that are antithetical to the way Jesus calls his disciples to live.”

— Brian Zahnd

17. “Jesus never intended to change the world through battlefields or voting booths. Jesus has always intended to transform the world one life at a time at a shared table.”

— Brian Zahnd

18. “Jesus didn’t seem very interested in exposing symptomatic sinners – tax collectors, drunkards, prostitutes, etc. Instead Jesus challenged the guardians of systemic sin – the power brokers of religion and politics.”

— Brian Zahnd

19. “When we pray the Psalms we are continuing a three-thousand-year-old tradition – a tradition practiced by Jesus and the Apostles. We pray the Psalms, not to express what we feel, but to learn to feel what they express. In praying the Psalms we learn to experience the whole range of human emotion in a way that is healthy and healing.”

— Brian Zahnd

20. “It’s not the task of the church to change the world by legislative force. It’s the task of the church to be the world changed by Christ. This is revolutionary in a way that conventional politics never can be.”

— Brian Zahnd

21. “The majority is almost always wrong. The crowd is untruth. Scapegoating is demonic.”

— Brian Zahnd

22. “It is through the Incarnation that glory and beauty save the world.”

— Brian Zahnd

23. “When life is viewed as a competitive game of acquisition, the strain to stay on top can lead to pathological anxiety and a litany of foolish decisions. Life is not a game; life is a gift. The purpose of life is not to win; the purpose of life is to learn to love well.”

— Brian Zahnd

24. “There is no them; there is only us.”

— Brian Zahnd

25. “If what we mean by “Jesus saves the world” gets reduced to “saved people go to heaven when they die,” then Jesus is simply the one who saves us from the world, not the Savior of the world. But this is not what the apostle John.”

— Brian Zahnd

26. “If we console ourselves with the promise of heaven in the afterlife while creating hell in this present life, we have embraced the tawdry religion of the crusader and forsaken the true faith of our Savior.”

— Brian Zahnd

27. “Jesus is not a heavenly conductor handing out tickets to heaven. Jesus is the carpenter who repairs, renovates, and restores God’s good world.”

— Brian Zahnd

28. “The path to paradise is often the path of suffering. If our chief goal is to avoid suffering, we will probably never find paradise. Paradise is not found in the mall, it’s found on the Easter side of Good Friday.”

— Brian Zahnd

29. “Jesus was trying to lead humanity into the deep truth that there is no “them;” there is only us.”

— Brian Zahnd

30. “Jesus does not lead his people as an angry crowd. Jesus does not lead his people to join an angry crowd. Jesus never leads anything other than a gentle and peaceable minority.”

— Brian Zahnd

31. “Seen in the light of the Easter dawn, the cross is revealed to be the lost Tree of Life. In the middle of a world dominated by death, the Tree of Life is rediscovered in the form of a Roman cross. The cross is the act of radical forgiveness that gives sin, violence, and retribution a place to die in the body of Jesus.”

— Brian Zahnd

32. “American Christians especially should keep in mind that we as the modern Romans – the privileged citizens of the world’s lone superpower – have more in common with Pontius Pilate than we do with Galilean peasants.”

— Brian Zahnd

33. “As long as we look at the world through the eyes of self-interest and self-defense we will never see the world as God sees it. Contemplation.”

— Brian Zahnd

34. “Failing to recognize the worth of beauty independent from utilitarian function is symptomatic of an abject poverty of the soul. It’s like saying that if we turned St. Peter’s Basilica into a parking garage, we would improve it by making it practical. There’s a word for this, and it is vandalism. We must not vandalize the faith in the name of pragmatism!”

— Brian Zahnd

35. “I pledge no allegiance to elephants or donkeys, only to the Lamb.”

— Brian Zahnd

36. “We are scripted to believe that reality is zero-based and that we live in a closed system. This paradigm of scarcity and insufficiency is the philosophy that undergirds our structures of systemic sin. We fear there won’t be enough land, water, food, oil, money, labor to go around, so we build evil structures of sinful force to guarantee that those we call ‘us’ will have what we call ‘ours.’ We call it security. We call it defense. We call it freedom. What we don’t call it is what it is – fear.”

— Brian Zahnd

37. “The death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord has given the world a new ultimate reality – love for God expressed as love for neighbor and enemy.”

— Brian Zahnd

38. “After 1945 we lost our blind faith in the inevitability of human progress. A threshold was crossed, and something important changed when humanity gained possession of what previously only God possessed: the capacity for complete annihilation. In yielding to the temptation to harness the fundamental physics of the universe for the purpose of building city-destroying bombs, have we again heard the serpent whisper, “You will be like God”?”

— Brian Zahnd

39. “Christianity is a confession, not an explanation. We will attempt to explain what we legitimately can, but we will always confess more than we can explain.”

— Brian Zahnd

40. “Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

— Brian Zahnd

41. “What Jesus did to embody the will of the Father on the cross was not just done on our behalf; it was also done as the way we are to follow. Jesus did not renounce the way of violence for the way of peace so that we could renounce the way of peace for the way of violence. The long dark night of mankind’s addiction to violence has come to an end. The new day of Messiah’s peace has dawned, and we are called to be children of the day. Do we dare?”

— Brian Zahnd

42. “Can you feel the falseness that prevails in Babylon? Babylon is always religious and knows how to keep up appearances, but that only serves to conceal the idols Babylon really worships. Money and Power. Economy and Military. The falseness is the phony assumption that the pursuit of money and power is sustainable and leads to a life worth living.”

— Brian Zahnd

43. “Our responsibility is not to chaplain the state but to call the state to repentance and to surrender to the King who is Lord. Our responsibility is to be an alternative to the state. Christians would do far more good for our country by learning not to look to DC for solutions but to the glorious Son of God, who loves us and gave himself for us and, in doing so, gave us a whole new way of life – one not shaped by the power of force but the force of the gospel.”

— Brian Zahnd

44. “I find it poignant and sadly apropos that the oldest human corpse was not found resting in a peaceful grave with attendant signs of reverence, but sprawled upon a bleak mountainside with an arrow in his back. It’s a distressing commentary on the origins of human civilization. It seems that human civilization is incapable of advancing without shooting brothers in the back.”

— Brian Zahnd

45. “The first precondition of being called a spiritual leader is to perceive and feel the falsehood that is prevailing in society, and then to dedicate one’s life to a struggle against that falsehood. If one tolerates the falsehood and resigns oneself to it, one can never become a prophet. If one cannot rise above material life, one cannot even become a citizen in the Kingdom of the Spirit, far less a leader of others. – Vladimir Solovyov in his eulogy of Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1881.”

— Brian Zahnd

46. “The cross is shock therapy for a world addicted to solving its problems through violence. The cross shocks us into the devastating realization that our system of violence murdered God!”

— Brian Zahnd

47. “This is not to suggest that Christ isn’t the source of salvation of the human soul, but I am suggesting that the mission of Christ extends far beyond the narrow spectrum of private spirituality and afterlife expectations. Jesus actually intends to save the world! And by world, I mean God’s good creation and God’s original intent for human society.”

— Brian Zahnd

48. “The beauty of the image of God marred in man through the Fall is what the Incarnation redeems.”

— Brian Zahnd

49. “Jesus founded his kingdom in solidarity with brutalized victims. This is the gospel, but it’s hard for us to believe in a Jesus who would rather die than kill his enemies. It’s harder yet to believe in a Jesus who calls us to take up our own cross, follow him, and be willing to die rather than kill our enemies.”

— Brian Zahnd

50. “At the cross a world of sin is absorbed by the love of God and recycled into grace and mercy. This is what the cross is about! This is what Christianity reveals. Christianity.”

— Brian Zahnd