Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News (Waterbrook, 2017)
There has been a decided turn in the last decade by many from within this historic conservative evangelical tribe to a more nuanced read of the Bible, the Church Tradition and a serious questioning of Calvin and NeoCalvinism—Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God stands within such a line and lineage.
The title for this fast moving but reflective manifesto of sorts emerges from contra Jonathan Edwards “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. Obviously, the Puritanism of Edwards has done much to shape American Christianity and Brian Zahnd took in such a homily (and the broader exegetical and theological perspective for many years). Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, wisely and discerningly so, clarifies in ten packed and incisive chapters, the dilemmas raised by a flat and questionable read of the Bible. The core question comes to this: how can a thoughtful reader and exegete of the Bible (and much of this compact beauty lingers in the Bible) make some coherent sense of, on the one hand, a God of Love and, on the other hand, the warrior God of the Old Testament, the penal theory of the atonement and eternal punishment for those who do not accept Christ in their short journey through time?
Zahnd, in a judicious manner, cuts to the quick in offering an alternate and Christocentric hermeneutic as a way of reading the Old Testament and problematic portions of the New Testament, particularly the ever contentious book of Revelation. Many of the more sophisticated Christian thinkers such Lewis, MacDonald, Girard, Wright, Peterson, Noll, Volf, Balthasar, Dostoevsky, Chrysostom, Kalomiros and Moltmann are called forth as witnesses as viable and substantive exegetes of the Bible than that of Edwards, Hal Lindsay or Bunyan’s The Groans of a Lost Soul. Sinner in the Hands of a Loving is, in many ways, a hand in glove companion to Brad Jersak’s A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel (2015).
There can be no doubt that Zahnd takes the Bible with utmost seriousness, but he is troubled (as he should be) by an exegetical Sanhedrin of sorts that has reduced and restricted a way of reading the Bible that legitimates a warrior god, penal theory of the atonement and eternal punishment (plus a rather horrendous reading of Revelation) to those who do not explicitly accept Christ in this life. The burden of Zahnd (and many of the former conservative evangelical revisionist readers of the Bible) is, indeed, to proclaim from the Bible, the “very good news” and “more beautiful gospel”. Zahnd has done this in a symphonic manner of sorts, and the orchestral sound of each chapter, unfolding each into the next, works its eternal compelling music into the longing soul. Do read and inwardly digest Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God—your approach to reading and applying the Bible will never be the same again.
Ron Dart
Comments