Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God

If I were to choose one or two books that sum up a lot of my theology right now, I would put this one at the top of the list. I can't tell you how refreshing and life-giving it was to read this after having wrestled with all of these questions myself, refusing to settle for the surface-level explanations, for the last several years. It's been my favorite read of the year thus far and I highly recommend it. If you have access to Hoopla through your library card, I found the audiobook on there (it's free to listen to through Hoopla) and it's a reasonably short listen. If the book resonates with you, I think you'll also like Love Wins by Rob Bell and Original Blessing by Danielle Shroyer.

I have come to most of the same “conclusions” (I hold that word loosely these days) the author shares in this book on my own over time but had not heard anyone else speak about having similar views / values until very recently. I found this a thoroughly encouraging read.

Short Review: This book is designed to counter the concept of God as primarily wrathful as illustrated by Edwards sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Zahnd charts a course through scripture to counter the idea, briefly looking at Old Testament genocide passages before two long sections on the Crucifixion and the book of Revelation. Broadly Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God is trying to help the reader re-imagine God. This is done very differently, but to similar effect as James Bryan Smith's The Good and Beautiful God.

My favorite insight of the book is Zahnd's phrase literalizing metaphors about God. We all know what a metaphor is and that the bible uses them frequently to talk about God. Zahnd thinks our problem is that we lose the concept of metaphor and literalize those metaphors to make God into a concrete form of the metaphor. We do not do that with some metaphors, God as chicken or God as castle, but we do literalize the metaphors in other places.

This is not fundamentally different from a number of progressive Evangelical books. There are places I have issues, but broadly this is a helpful book. I think part of the importance of books like this is 1) to popularize more academic theology and 2) for me personally to read from a variety of streams of Christianity.

My full review, about 1200 words, is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/sinners/