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 The full message of the beauty of the gospel has been replaced by our desires to satisfy our material needs, to empirically prove out faith, and to establish political power in our world - the exact same things that Christ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!

The Benefit of Doubt

Last week Greg Boyd posted a piece on his blog from another blog that is a great introduction to his newest book, Benefit of the Doubt (to be released next month - see here). This article was written by a young mother whose 4 year old son died last year with a brain tumor. She says in her piece, 

"Over the years I've had a lot of misconceptions about faith and doubt. I've equated faith with certainty. I've considered doubt to be a sign of spiritual immaturity or even an absence of salvation.  So for most of my life, I've stuffed my reservations, fears, and downright oppositions toward God. I thought He was seeking certainty, my stoic profession of absolute confidence in His plans, He word, and His heart. I was afraid to wrestle.

But Jacob wasn't. Jacob wrestled with God all night long on the riverbank (Gen. 32:22-31). He refused to let go until God blessed him. God renamed Jacob 'Israel' after that, and his descendants became the Israelites, "The Wrestlers." They were people unafraid to wrestle with God, and unafraid to be honest..."

To read the whole story and also to hear Boyd's short video commentary on the place of doubt in our growth, go here.

Arrival Has Never Been the Point

In his wonderful book, Naked Spirituality (see here), Brian McLaren writes about the repeated pattern of four seasons of life in God. Simply put, the four seasons are the following:

1. Simplicity - the spring season of spiritual awakening, the season of our "first love" when all is alive and prayers seem to be answered "beyond the statistical norm." "Our relationships in this stage tend to be dependent or even codependent; we need our in-group and its confident, charismatic leaders to know who we are and what we're about...This simple, dualistic faith gives us great confidence."

2. Complexity - the summer season of spiritual strengthening, a time of "hard work and getting things done during long sunny days". In this season we build on stage one with new skills in which we learn increasing independence. We move our focus from right-versus-wrong to effective-versus-ineffective. "To our core of dualism we now add a new layer of pragmatism" in which "good" people are identified less as the "correct" ones and more as the "effective" ones. We are not content to simply be with the right in-group; we want to be part of a winning team. The skills/practices we develop in this stage are 1) the ability to self-examine, 2) the habit of acknowledging our weaknesses and limitations and seeking wisdom and strength beyond our own, and 3) the ability to empathize with others in their pain.

3. Perplexity - the autumn season of spiritual surviving in which more important than being right or than being effective is being honest and authentic (brutally so). In this season we move from dualism and pragmatism to a relativistic and critical mindset. We are suspicious of the motives of leaders we used to admire. "If we acquired our faith in Simplicity or Complexity, we will probably doubt it now and may even abandon it for awhile. At the very least, we will need to add a margin for mystery and unbolt some of the structural elements of our faith that have been until now tightly fitted together..."

4. Harmony - the winter season of the nakedness/bareness of nature leading to new birth; in this stage all of the aspects of the previous stages come into harmony. "...the right-versus-wrong dualism of Simplicity, the effective-versus-ineffective pragmatism of Complexity, and the honest-versus-dishonest relativism of Perplexity are taken up and expanded into something bigger in the Harmony of stage four...If in Stage One we knew that everything was knowable, in Stage Two we knew that everything was doable, and in Stage Three we knew that everything was relative, now we in some way come to know with the old sage that 'everything is suitable for its time.' We can finally accept that all our knowing, past and present, is partial. Harmony requires this posture of humility, which allows us to finally see authority figures neither as godlike...nor as demonic..., but rather as human beings like us, often doing the best they can and even then making plenty of mistakes along the way..."

McLaren goes on to say that "Stage One orthodoxy now morphs into what some have called paradoxy - the realization that every true statement about God cannot fully contain the true majesty and wonder of God. This humility before God helps create harmony among all of us who believe in God, making it harder for us to maintain the old us-versus-them dualisms that have so often animated religious conservatives and liberals alike."

So does this mean we have now arrived? No...the season of Harmony opens into a new season of Simplicity and so on "in an ascending spiral of growth and discovery that continues as long as life itself. Far from feeling we have finally arrived, in Stage Four we finally begin to understand that arrival has never been the point."

"Death to Self" and Becoming Who You Are

Having been raised and trained in the holiness stream of Christianity, I know the language of "death to self" well. There is truth to this, of course, but my own experience and the experience of many who I have listened to over the years who have come out of that world has taught me that, as is true of any slice of truth in God that becomes all of the truth, this language has become fraught with confusion and distortion.

The following is a short quote from an article from Peter Enns' blog that is helpful along these lines. He is quoting from a book by James Martin, Becoming Who You Are (here).

"Martin explains by citing Merton...:

For me to be a saint means to be myself,…Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and discovering my true self” (p. ix).

These might be off-putting, even scary, words for those raised in a Christian faith where “we” are the problem that needs fixing. I mean, Jesus even said you have to lose your life if you want to find it.

But Merton is in fact saying just that. Note Merton speaks of “discovering my true self.” The true self is “the person we are before God and the person we are meant to be” (p. 18). The false self, by contrast, is “the person that we wish to present to the world, and the person we want the whole world to revolve around” (p. 19)"

To read the whole review of this book by Peter Enns, see here.

The Greatest Mistake...

I was away from home last week enjoying a few days of quiet and relaxation with a friend, and one day we visited a small town and looked around in a few little stores. I came across a greeting card with the following statement on the front of it:


"THE GREATEST MISTAKE YOU CAN MAKE IN LIFE IS TO BE CONTINUALLY FEARING YOU WILL MAKE ONE." - Elbert Hubbard


May we find the love of God so real that we begin to not fear making mistakes!