Top 80 Brian Zahnd Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “The lost beauty of God’s good creation is what is recovered in the Incarnation.”

— Brian Zahnd

52. “The fall of communism had more to do with prayer meetings in Poland than bombs dropped on Cambodia. War is, among other things, impatience.”

— Brian Zahnd

53. “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

54. “I remember preaching on Jesus’s call to the practice of radical forgiveness and being challenged by a church member who said, “Yeah, but the Bible says, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ ” I had to explain to him that a Christian can’t cite Moses to silence Jesus. When we try to embrace Biblicism by placing all authority in a flat reading of Scripture and giving the Old Testament equal authority with Christ, God thunders from heaven, “No! This is my beloved Son! Listen to him!”

— Brian Zahnd

55. “What I see among evangelicals – especially among some of the most prominent evangelical leaders – is an enthusiastic, uncritical, carte blanche support of Donald Trump that has more than a touch of religious aura to it. And this concerns me deeply. I’m profoundly uncomfortable when I see enthusiastic support for Donald Trump impinging upon allegiance to Jesus Christ and what he taught his followers.”

— Brian Zahnd

56. “Christianity as the ongoing expression of the Jesus story lived out in the lives of individuals and in the heart of society is a beauty that can redeem the world.”

— Brian Zahnd

57. “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

58. “Christian faith is more about connecting our lives with Christ than it is about gaining spiritual information.”

— Brian Zahnd

59. “Jesus said his disciples would be known for their love, not for their placards of protest and angry letters to the editor.”

— Brian Zahnd

60. “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

61. “Believing in the divinity of Jesus is the heart of Christian orthodoxy. But believing in the viability of Jesus’s ideas makes Christianity truly radical.”

— Brian Zahnd

62. “The cross is the beauty of Christianity because it is at the cross that we encounter cosuffering love and costly forgiveness in its most beautiful form.”

— Brian Zahnd

63. “Violence is the enslavement of a pervasive lie; it imposes upon men a falsified vision not only of God but also of everything else. And that is indeed why it is a closed kingdom. Escaping from violence is escaping from this kingdom into another kingdom, whose existence the majority of people do not even suspect. This is the Kingdom of love, which is also the domain of the true God, the Father of Jesus, of whom the prisoners of violence cannot even conceive.”

— Brian Zahnd

64. “We pray the Psalms, not to express what we feel, but to learn to feel what they express. In.”

— Brian Zahnd

65. “Lord Jesus, help us to see the beauty in the gospel of forgiveness as you have proclaimed it, and liberate us from our wrong ideas about an angry, violent, and retributive God. Amen.”

— Brian Zahnd

66. “In going to the cross, Jesus was not being practical; he was being faithful. Jesus didn’t take a pragmatic approach to the problem of evil; Jesus took an aesthetic approach to the problem of evil. Jesus chose to absorb the ugliness of evil and turn it into something beautiful – the beauty of forgiveness.”

— Brian Zahnd

67. “It’s so hard for us to let go of the sword and take the hand of the crucified one.”

— Brian Zahnd

68. “Feed on a lot more Philippians and a lot less Fox News. Feed on a lot more Luke and a lot less Rush. If like Daniel and his friends we refuse the fare of the empire’s propaganda, it will be evident that we are far healthier than those feeding on the fear-inducing menu of Mammon and Mars. Those who feed on faith, hope, and love stand out in a culture characterized by fear; they are distinguished by the healthy glow of a robust peace.”

— Brian Zahnd

69. “You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb the world to peace.”

— Brian Zahnd

70. “Politics is the art of compromise, but there are some areas where Christians must not compromise. You can’t absolve the sin of being pro-torture by claiming to be pro-life. If making America great again involves waterboarding, nuclear weapons, child detention camps, and ridiculing environmental concerns, it’s a project Christians cannot participate in.”

— Brian Zahnd

71. “Hell in its popular and pagan misconceptions has been a blight upon the beauty of the Christian gospel.”

— Brian Zahnd

72. “Christians can and should be productive citizens within the particular nation they happen to have residence; they should pray for political leaders and pay their taxes; they can vote and participate in public service and contribute to the public good. But they should not labor under the delusion that the nation itself can be Christian. Only that which is baptized can be Christian, and you cannot baptize a nation-state.”

— Brian Zahnd

73. “The sacrifice of Jesus is not a utilitarian payment to an offended deity bound to an economy of appeasement. The ugliness of the cross is found in human sin. The beauty of the cross is found in divine forgiveness.”

— Brian Zahnd

74. “Trust the holy instincts within you – the instincts of compassion aroused by the Holy Spirit. Yes, politics are always complicated, but what does Jesus want your attitude to be toward Syrian refugees, Honduran asylum seekers, and undocumented day laborers? You already know. You’ve always known. Some will say power trumps everything, but you’ve always known that mercy triumphs over judgment.”

— Brian Zahnd

75. “Daniel is about how to live responsibly but faithfully in an idolatrous culture. Thus Daniel is a book that’s always relevant for the people of God – whether ancient Jews living in Babylon or early Christians living in Rome or modern Christians living in America.”

— Brian Zahnd

76. “One of the main challenges in talking about God is the problem of metaphor. We cannot talk about God without using metaphor; it’s the only option we have when speaking of the supremely transcendent.”

— Brian Zahnd

77. “While Einstein’s theory of relativity may one day put Earth on the intergalactic map, it will always run a distant second to the Lord’s Prayer, whose harnessing of energies in their proper, life-giving direction surpasses even the discovery of fire.”

— Brian Zahnd

78. “But to literalize a metaphor is to create an idol and formulate an error.”

— Brian Zahnd

79. “In a culture that venerates materialism and militarism, the only way to truly follow Jesus is to be countercultural. Sure, the prosperity gospel extols materialism and the religious right celebrates militarism, but these are nothing but attempts to smuggle the idols of Mammon and Mars into Christianity. A synchronistic religion that attempts to amalgamate Jesus and American values may be popular, but it’s unfaithful to the Spirit who calls the people of God out of Babylon.”

— Brian Zahnd

80. “The failure to see the clear difference between Jesus sacrificing his life while forgiving his enemies on the cross and the sacrifice of a soldier slain while waging war on a battlefield is an indication of the degree to which a commitment to militarism has obscured the implications of the gospel. But when waging war is regarded as a religious sacrifice, such confusions abound.”

— Brian Zahnd

81. “I’m a Christian and ultimately my political theology can be summed up in three words: Jesus is Lord.”

— Brian Zahnd

82. “When we see faith leaders fawning over proximity to political power, don’t we feel the falseness of their faith? Don’t we know that they too have secretly confessed, “We have no king but Caesar”? “Woe to them! For they go the way of Cain, and abandon themselves to Balaam’s error for the sake of gain.”

— Brian Zahnd

83. “The original Jesus movement was not a pietistic religion of private belief about how to go to heaven when you die. The original Jesus movement was a countercultural way of public life.”

— Brian Zahnd

84. “Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing.”

— Brian Zahnd

85. “I write it so my grandchildren will know that during the Trump era I wasn’t duped, I wasn’t silent, and I didn’t go along for the ride. I want them to know that I saw what was happening, I knew it for what it was, and I spoke out.”

— Brian Zahnd

86. “Jesus can save whomever he wants. Jesus is Lord.”

— Brian Zahnd