A Cathedral of Astonishment

"If we reduce the Christian faith to only that which we can explain, we end up with a paper-thin, watered down, cheap knock-off of Christianity that no longer has the capacity to astonish...""

"..What we need in our faith, theology, and witness is to build a cathedral of astonishment. Or more accurately, we need to rediscover and preserve the cathedral of astonishment that is authentic Christianity when it is imbued with mystery and beauty."

   - Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity, pages 163, 165 (italics in the original)

I Am From the Future

"Jesus was telling the Pharisees 'You keep asking when the kingdom of God is going to come, but it's already here. You just haven't seen it.' Jesus was telling the Pharisees that the future had arrived with what he was doing and with what was happening among his disciples. But you have to be born again to see it. It takes new eyes. Those who have been born again and have new eyes have sen the kingdom of God - they have, in fact, seen the future.. .."

"...as a baptized believer, this is my confession: I am from the future. I have seen and tasted the powers of the age to come."

       -Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World, page 132-1333

Ugliness Abosorbed

"Jesus didn't take a pragmatic approach to the problem of evil; Jesus took an aesthetic approach to the problem of evil. Jesus chose to absorb the ugliness of evil and turn it into something beautiful - the beauty of forgiveness."

               -Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World, Page 21

Beautiful Truth, Beautiful Goodness

"Truth and goodness need beauty. Truth claims divorced from beauty can become condescending.  Goodness minus beauty can become moralistic. to embrace truth and goodness in the Christian sense, we must also embrace beauty...." - Pages 28-29

"...But when the beautiful is severed from the absolute (God), what passes for beautiful can be anything and everything - which is to say nothing.  There really is a profound connection between the loss of beauty and the loss of meaning..." - Page 30

""The cross is a beautiful mystery - a mystery where an unexpected beauty is in the process of rescuing the world from its ugliness. Beauty will save the world."  Page 31

From Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Beauty and Allure of Christianity, by Brian Zahnd

Prime Examples

"...nearly everyone admires St. Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa of Calcutta whether or not they are Christians. St. Francis and Mother Teresa are preeminent examples of lives shaped by the cruciform to a degree that their lives of co-suffering love have come to be universally recognized as lives of beauty."

 - Brian Zahnd, Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Beauty and Allure of Christianity, Page 27

The Beauty of the Crucifom

More quotes from Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity, by Brian Zahnd, on what is means to live according to the pattern of the Cruciform:

"..the cruciform (the shape of a cross) is the eternal form that endows Christianity with its mysterious beauty. Simply put, the cross is the form that makes Christianity beautiful! The cross is the beauty of Christianity because it is at the cross that we encounter co-suffering love and costly forgiveness in its most beautiful form." - Page 6

The cruciform is the aesthetic of our gospel. It is the form that gives Christianity its unique beauty. ....,,,to those who have eyes to see, the cruciform shows for a transcendent beauty - the beauty of love and forgiveness. It is the beauty of Christ's love and forgiveness most clearly seen in the cruciform that is able to save us from our vicious pride and avaricious greed." -Page 7

"The beauty of the cruciform by which Jesus saves the world through an act of co-suffering love and costly forgiveness is the same beauty that must characterize the church if we are to show forth the glory of the Lord in our world." - Page 10

"The cruciform as a pattern gives us a means of evaluating our own form and how we present ourselves to the wider culture. With an eye on the cruciform, we can ask ourselves 'Does this attitude, this approach, this action, look like Jesus on the cross?' If our attitude, approach, or action cannot be reasonably compared to the image of the cruciform, we need to abandon it." -Pages 18-10

Beauty Will Save the World

I've been reading a unique, inspiring and fascinating book by Brian Zahnd entitled Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure &  Mystery of Christianity. Wonderful book!

I've never before read a book about an apologetic of beauty. He believes that the church needs to recover the form and beauty that are intrinsic to Christianity. He finds that beauty in the story of the Cross, expressed through believers living "cruciform" lives, that is, lives marked by grace, sacrificial service and forgiveness. Zahnd begins with this thesis on page 2:

"Christianity as the ongoing expression of the Jesus story lived out in the lives of individuals and in society is a beauty that can save the world." 

Or, as C.S. Lewis put it:

"We do not merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words - to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to  bathe in it, to become part of it."
          -C.S. Lewis, The Weight & The Glory

Expect a lot of quotes from this book in the next few days.