Beauty Will Save the World - Rethinking Power and Violence

Part of the description on the back of this book (here), reads, "In Beauty Will Save the World, Brian Zahnd presents the argument that the loss of beauty as a principal value has been disastrous for the Western culture - and especially for the church. The full message of the beauty of the gospel has been replaced by our desires to satisfy our material needs, to empirically prove out faith, and to establish political power in our world - the exact same things that Christ was tempted with - and rejected - in the wilderness."

The ancient Greek philosophers and the early church fathers understood truth, goodness, and beauty to be the three prime virtues. Early church theologians taught that these proceeded from God Himself because God is true, good, and beautiful. Zahnd says that "the unique form of Christianity is the cruciform - Christ upon the cross, arms stretched in offered embrace, forgiving the world its sins. This is the beauty that saves the world, and the symbol of this saving grace is the cross...One way of viewing the cross through the lens of beauty is to see how at Golgotha the world was given a new axis - an axis of love...an axis can be understood as a centering principle that provides a fundamental organization to a social structure..."

In his chapter on "Axis of Love", the author (using the encounter between Pilate and Jesus) shows how "the truth of power enforced by violence is the axis around which the world ruled by the principalities and powers revolves. Power - especially the power of violent force - is the ultimate truth, the bottom line, the organizing principle for those who are under the spell of Satan as the ruler of this fallen world...Jesus and Pilate represent two different truths, two different gospels, two different axes, two different ways of organizing the world..."

By the manner in which Jesus lived and died non-violently, He presented an entirely different axis by which to organize the world - that of forgiving love. "Ultimate truth is not power enforced through violence, but love expressed through forgiveness...Jesus was going to re-center the world around an axis of love...

"As long as Jesus lay dead in the grave, the principalities and powers could congratulate themselves on maintaining a world ordered around the axis of power and propose a toast 'to the way things have always been.' But on the third day the Father acted and issued his overturning verdict! He overturned the verdicts of Caiaphas and Pilate. He overturned the verdicts of political power and colluding religion. God vindicated his Son and validated the revolutionary truth Christ proclaimed. With the events of Good Friday and Easter Sunday the world was given a new axis - the axis of love. This is beautiful!...It really is the beauty that saves the world..."

In his book, Brian Zahnd issues a challenge to all who follow Jesus to rethink how we live in this world if we call ourselves His followers. The church's propensity in both the past and present to make following Jesus more about personal piety and her propensity to attempt to establish God's kingdom through collusion with religious and political systems (i.e., via the axis of power) have obscured the beauty of the unconditional non-violent forgiving love of Jesus' life and death. As we His followers grasp and walk more fully in Jesus' axis of forgiving love, the world will be saved by this greatest beauty of all!