W. Paul Young - Saying Yes or No to God (CWR Video)

The fall issue of CWR VIDEO is available HERE with thoughts by Paul Young, Brad Jersak, Greg Albrecht, Laura Robinson, Steve McVey, Archbishop Lazar Puhalo, Brian Zahnd, Russ Hewett, Ashley Collishaw, Peter Helms, Ed Dunn and Dale Viljoen. For a sample, here's Paul Young.

Who is this 'Monster God' of (Im)Pure Will? - Brad Jersak

A Quick History of the 'Monster God'

The term "Monster God" became 'a thing' in 2014 through a series of sermons, debates and blogs, and while I can't be sure of its earliest use, one will note that its popular usage is typically tagged to Pastor Brian Zahnd (Word of Life Church and a CWR columnist). It came onto my radar through a sermon in early May entitled "Death of the Monster God," a lenten sermon on Luke 23:34, 46 (Jesus' prayers to the Father) asking, "What is God like?"    


The central point of the sermon is summarized by Brian in these words:

When we look at the death of Jesus on the cross in the light of the resurrection, we are looking at our salvation. But, what do we really see when we look at the cross? Are we looking at the appeasement of a monster god through barbaric child sacrifice? Or are we seeing something else? Is the cross vengeance or love? When Jesus says, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," he is not asking God to act contrary to his nature. He is, in fact, revealing the very heart of God! The cross is not about the satisfaction of a vengeful monster god, the cross is the full revelation of a supremely merciful God! In Christ we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies. Once we know that God is revealed in Christ, we know what we are seeing when we look at the cross: The cross is where God in Christ absorbs sin and recycles it into forgiveness. The crucifixion is not what God inflicts upon Christ in order to forgive, but what God endures in Christ as he forgives.

Somehow, the sermon also led to the formal "Monster God Debate" between Brian Zahnd and Michael Brown at the Kansas City IHOP. He contrasted the cruciform God who became incarnate to save us from ourselves with the monster God from whom Jesus needed to save us. Much of this is clarified in his article on "How does 'Dying For Our Sins' Work?" and Rob Grayson's review of the debate.

Zach Hoag's Critique of the Monster God: 

1. God of Absolute Power

Minister and blogger Zach Hoag has picked up on this terminology and begun to apply it to contemporary issues in American Evangelicalism. I'm less interested in how he uses the Monster God motif in his critiques than in how he describes the Monster God's nature. Thus, I've mined two of his articles for clarity and definitions:

The "More Beautiful Gospel" Conference - Register Now

The Beautiful Gospel Conference​ official web page is complete and registration has just gone live. Join Brian Zahnd, Brad Jersak, Brian Doerksen and the Shiyr Poets

Oct. 1-3 in Abbotsford. 

Catch the early-bird price if you can. 

http://thebeautifulgospel.wix.com/thebeautifulgospel.

Gospel in Chairs (2015) - Brad Jersak

Christianity in the Age of Nuclear Weapons - Brian Zahnd

Today is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Saturday we will mourn Nagasaki. As we remember Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the quarter of a million casualties suffered, I would like to share a few words from A Farewell To Mars.

It’s easy to imagine that the world doesn’t really change — that it simply marches around the maypole of violence, trampling the victims into the mud same as it ever has. But as true as that may be, something has changed. We are post-something. If nothing else, we are post-1945 when the enlightenment dream of attainable utopia went up in smoke — literal smoke! — from the chimneys of Auschwitz and a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima.

After 1945 we lost our blind faith in the inevitability of human progress. A threshold was crossed, and something important changed when humanity gained possession of what previously only God possessed: the capacity for complete annihilation. In yielding to the temptation to harness the fundamental physics of the universe for the purpose of building city-destroying bombs, have we again heard the serpent whisper, “You will be like God”?

When Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, witnessed the first atomic detonation at Los Alamos on July 16, 1945, he recalled the words of Vishnu from the Bhagavad Gita…

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

When the monstrous mushroom cloud rose over the New Mexico desert, did the human race indeed become Death, the destroyer of worlds? It’s more than a legitimate question. We’ve now lived for over a generation with the most haunting post-Holocaust/Hiroshima uncertainty: Can humanity possess the capacity for self-destruction and not resort to it? The jury is still out. But this much is certain:If we think the ideas of Jesus about peace are irrelevant in the age of genocide and nuclear weapons, we have invented an utterly irrelevant Christianity!
BZ

(The artwork is Mushroom Cloud by Luciano Civettini.)

The post Christianity In the Age of Nuclear Weapons appeared first on Brian Zahnd.

Beyond “Without the Shedding of Blood …” Brad Jersak

Beyond “Without the Shedding of Blood …”

I must say, I am thoroughly enjoying Christian theology in the budding era of a post-retributive Gospel. With the Western rediscovery of the Beautiful News, I’m feeling—dare I say it—positively born again! I am in awe and worship of the Father of Love, the cruciform God enfleshed in Jesus of Nazareth. The symbol of the ‘old rugged cross’ has once again come to represent, for me, God’s essential nature: namely, his self-giving, radically forgiving, co-suffering love. And that’s good news for everyone! On the cross, in the face of human cruelty and bloodlust, God-in-Christ revealed his bottom line character: a mercy that endures forever—the loving-kindness that is everlasting. We discover that ‘the blood of Jesus’—i.e. a metonym for God’s self-offering, sacrificial love—can wash anything. Anything. Anyone.

Still, there will be holdouts who believe real justice requires retribution, vengeance and satisfaction of wrath. It’s okay. Many of us did … for nearly five hundred years. Happily, I can say it’s a passé ‘thing’ and we are starting to get over it. Hang in there! The shelf-life of the vengeful punisher is coming due and should pass away in not too many generations.

Admittedly, that stubborn old retributive system is also rather dangerous. I write this during a weekend when a famous Christian politician declared to the NRA that if she were “in charge,” she’d let terrorists know that “waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.” Lord, have mercy! Such a departure from the Jesus Way! But don’t hate her for her moment of sacrilege; it is what it is and didn’t come from nowhere. Maybe you’d say it too in the right context for a sufficient honorarium … on the Colbert Report perhaps? We all have our x-amount pieces of silver … this is why Jesus died even for Judas.

Moreover, such betrayals are not merely founded on a secular Constitution; they have rich backstories in Christian theologies of retribution. If, in our theology, God needs to use torture to bring about freedom, why should we be surprised when we become like the One we worship? Just a week or two ago, a radio preacher again made it very clear that if Easter means anything, it “begins with Christ dying to satisfy the wrath of God.”

Some theologians I respect to the point of a borderline man-crush (with apologies to New Testament Wright) repeatedly insist that the Gospel of an angry God who can only be assuaged through a violent sacrifice is just a caricature -- that no one really believes that or preaches it seriously. If only it were true. Sad to say, the caricature defense is an unsubstantiated cliché exposed easily enough by the trick question, “Then how does atonement work?”