Brian Zahnd

Word of Life Church was born on All Saints Day 1981. This Sunday we’ll celebrate our 44th anniversary and I’ll preach a sermon called “The Word of Life” (1 John 1:1).

YouTube video by Word of Life Church Dark As Midnight || The Story of Job - Part 3

The third and final sermon in my series on Job—Dark As Midnight.

youtu.be/4mKu_wIh81U?...

Random: My photo of the inkwells, pipes, and tobacco of C.S. Lewis.

YouTube video by The Plunge With Derek Holser Tom Bombadil: Tolkien's Greatest Characters | Brian Zahnd

Wherein I talk about the enigmatic Tom Bombadil.
youtu.be/UGXUGMK16So?...

Resist the tyranny of tiny screens. Read big books. 📚

(It’s true that Marxist atheism is Dostoevsky’s primary target in “Demons,” but the Russian Christian nationalism of Shatov is also exposed as
a kind of “soft atheism.” Shatov only believes in “God” as a personification of Russian nationalism.)

In “Demons,” Fyodor Dostoevsky portrays the adherents of Marxist atheism and the adherents of (Russian) Christian nationalism as both under the sway of demonic isms.

Any attempt to use Jesus Christ to serve some nation, politics, ideology, ism, or cause, other than the divine mission to reconcile all things so that in the end God is all in all, is to reduce Jesus Christ to a false idol.

DEMONS

A 10-week online course through Dostoevsky’s darkest and most prophetic novel.

The course begins in January.
Registration is now open.
Cost: donation of any amount.
The registration link has all the pertinent information.

Join me in January for…DEMONS!

www.eventbrite.com/e/demons-onl...

YouTube video by Word of Life Church Dark As Midnight || The Story of Job - Part 2

DARK AS MIDNIGHT
The Story of Job
Part 2

youtu.be/Yc2Y3G_Tutg?...

When America Went to Hell The Second Great Awakening and the Civil War

Free Substack
open.substack.com/pub/brianzah...

Peri’s photo from the car as we drove to the mountains last month.

DEMONS Dostoevsky's Darkest and Most Prophetic Novel

DEMONS: Dostoevsky's darkest and most prophetic novel.
brianzahnd.substack.com/p/demons

YouTube video by Word of Life Church Dark As Midnight || The Story of Job - Part 1

Today I began a three-part series through the book of Job called “Dark As Midnight.” Here is part 1.
youtu.be/bj5baA4TCPA?...

True Christianity advances without coercion. We persuade by love, witness, reason, rhetoric, Spirit, and, if need be, by martyrdom; but never by force, never by the sword, never by the coercive apparatus of this state.

*I know I’ll be criticized for the lack of diversity and I accept that criticism. I’m not telling you what it should be but what it actually is. I’m still trying to learn.

The ten who have most influenced my theology.* (In alphabetical order.)

Walter Brueggemann
Sergius Bulgakov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Bob Dylan
René Girard
David Bentley Hart
Stanley Hauerwas
C.S. Lewis
N.T. Wright
L. Glen Zahnd

This Sunday I begin a new three-part series on the story of Job: DARK AS MIDNIGHT

* Empires are rich, powerful nations who believe they have a divine right to rule other nations and a manifest destiny to shape history according to their own agenda. As such they are an idolatrous affront to the seminal Christian confession that Jesus is Lord.

A Christianity that promotes the interests of empire* is a Christianity that rides the back of the beast as the whore of Babylon.

(The painting is Rembrandt's "Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem," 1690. I have a print of this painting in my study.)

The prophets and psalmists of lament show us how to find faith and hold on to hope in the time of tears. I'll preach on this tomorrow.

Confessing Jesus Christ is Lord
And pledging allegiance to America
Are incompatible commitments
Choose one
Choose this day
Choose whom you will serve

This Sunday I'm preaching in Denver. Amazing Grace Church, 10AM. My sermon is called, "The Lord Said to Satan..." You're invited. www.agcdenver.net

This photo is upside down. It is also an illustration about the nature of reality and illusion, heaven and earth, the eternal and the temporal. I'll talk about this next week at our Mountain Retreat where the theme is "In Search of Narnia."

Beware of isms. There be devils.

The rapture happened. I’m in heaven. 😎

YouTube video by Word of Life Church A Strange Parable, A Curious Grace || Pastor Brian Zahnd

A sermon in which I attempt an interpretation of what may be Jesus’ most difficult parable—the parable of the Unjust Steward.
youtu.be/bYOLy7OeAjo?...

It grieves me to see people I’ve known for years (some as far back as the Jesus Movement of the 1970s) seduced by a mean-spirited culture-war Christianity that is but a perverse caricature of the authentic faith formed around Jesus of Nazareth. Yes, it grieves me terribly.

Reading.