Zahnd: Believing in an interventionist God

Brian Zahnd has a post today that I needed to hear: I Believe In An Interventionist God.

In my journey out of evangelicalism and into some broader, more historic practice of Christianity, I have struggled with prayer. As I wrestle with questions about what even is God, really—thanks Teillhard and Ilia Delio!—and whether God’s nature is to compel anyone or anything—thanks Thomas J. Oord!—I vacillate between wanting to fall back on a sort of naive presumption of the evangelical god and wondering what even the use of prayer is. And yet, at some part of my core deeper than the intellect, I know there’s some real value, use, and need for prayer. It means something.

Zahnd observes:

Prayer is the oxygen of faith. When we can’t pray, we can at least say our prayers. When the tide of faith has receded far out to sea, liturgical prayers—prayers that we did not compose—can sustain us until the tide comes back in. It’s the vetted prayers passed down through the ages that best sustain faith in a dark night of the soul. The soul that can hold on to the prayers during the dark night will eventually arrive at a new dawn.

He’s right.

In this time the liturgical prayers from the Book of Common Prayer have been so valuable for me. For a closing prayer at the end of last week’s diocesan convention a priest broke out this beautiful familiar prayer from the Compline, and I was unexpectedly immediately in tears:

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night,
and give your angels charge over those who sleep.
Tend the sick, Lord Christ;
give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering,
pity the afflicted, shield the joyous;
and all for your love’s sake. Amen.

Zahnd understands the temptation to look around at the world and just ask “what’s the use?”. But that way lies a dead, shriveled faith.

[P]rayers go unanswered, children die of cancer, and even the most faith-filled suffer “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” God intervenes, but from our vantage point not nearly as often as we would like. It does create the temptation to fling our hands up in despair and say, “I no longer believe in an interventionist God.” I understand this impulse, but I think it is mostly an attempt to seal ourselves off from potential disappointment. We give up praying lest we be disappointed, or we pray such safe prayers that we no longer run the risk of being disappointed. But if we are to have any hope for a life of vibrant faith, we have to run the risk of disappointment. Faith by its very nature is a risky venture. So I choose the risk of disappointment. I do this because it is my experience that God can help me bear disappointment, but if I quit engaging with God by ceasing to implore divine intervention in our world and in my life for fear of disappointment, my soul begins to waste away. I don’t want to live in a world where God seems absent just because I don’t want to risk disappointment.

And I love that when Zahnd gets down to what he does believe about prayer and God’s engagement in the world, he ends at a conclusion that fits in just fine with Teillhard, Delio, and Oord:

I actually believe—though I cannot prove it—that God is in a constant state of intervention in the world. I hold to the seemingly outrageous idea that God is never not intervening in the world! God is love, and God is always loving the world. God’s intervention is God’s love. God’s intervening love may rarely (if ever) be coercive and controlling, but the intervention of love is there nevertheless. What God’s loving, though noncoercive, intervention looks like exactly is hard to tell, but I suspect that has more to do with our own spiritual blindness than with any imagined absence or ambivalence on God’s part.

I am slowly feeling my own reactionary, deconstructing pendulum reach the apex of its swing and head back toward a better resting place. Slowly finding my voice in prayer again. But I am supremely thankful for the written prayers—I like Zahnd’s word here, vetted prayers—that have sustained my faith in the interim.

The Beatitudes (Brian Zahnd Version)

I’m not sure what social media Brian Zahnd is on these days, but he shared his own retelling of Jesus’ Beatitudes on Facebook yesterday and they’re beautiful enough that I’d like to capture them here.

The Beatitudes (BZV)

Blessed are those who are poor at being spiritual,
For the kingdom of heaven is well-suited for ordinary people.

Blessed are the depressed who mourn and grieve,
For they create space to encounter comfort from another.

Blessed are the gentle and trusting, who are not grasping and clutching,
For God will personally guarantee their share as heaven comes to earth.

Blessed are those who ache for the world to be made right,
For them the government of God is a dream come true.

Blessed are those who give mercy,
For they will get it back when they need it most.

Blessed are those who have a clean window in their soul,
For they will perceive God when and where others don’t.

Blessed are the bridge-builders in a war-torn world,
For they are God’s children working in the family business.

Blessed are those who are mocked and misunderstood for the right reasons,
For the kingdom of heaven comes to earth amidst such persecution.

Zahnd: Christianity vs. Biblicism

I attended the Water to Wine Gathering at Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, MO a couple weekends ago. WOLC’s pastor Brian Zahnd included in one of his talks some discussion of the dangers of biblicism. I had hoped to summarize that talk in a blog post, but happily Zahnd has published a post of his own doing just that. (It’s actually the preface to an upcoming book, but he shared it on his blog.) I find his thinking very helpful in how we approach and interpret the Bible.

I particularly enjoy his opening metaphor:

As modern Christians we are children of a broken home. Five centuries ago the Western church went through a bitter divorce that divided European Christians and their heirs into estranged Catholic and Protestant families. The reality that the Renaissance church was in desperate need of reformation doesn’t change the fact that along with a reformation there also came an ugly split that divided the church’s children between a Catholic mother and a Protestant father. In the divorce settlement (to push the metaphor a bit further) Catholic Mom got a long history, a rich tradition, and a unified church, but all Protestant Dad got was the Bible. Without history, tradition, or a magisterium, the Bible had to be everything for Protestant Dad — and Protestants have made the most of it.

He goes on to liken the Bible to rich soil out of which grows the tree that is the Christian faith. The Christian faith is rooted in and draws nourishment from the Bible, but Christianity and the Bible are not synonymous. To approach it this way, says Zahnd,

…is both conservative and progressive. Conservative in that it recognizes the inviolability of Scripture. Progressive in that it makes a vital distinction between the living faith and the historic text.

I probably have some readers getting very nervous at this point, but if so I would really recommend reading the whole thing. Zahnd and others like him are pointing the way to embrace Scripture while at the same time moving past reading it in a flat, biblicistic way.