Why I think Brian Zahnd’s discussion of Jesus, the Church, the Bible, and Christianity is outdated

In a Substack post, Brian Zahnd looks at four key theological “entities” and warns of the “theological mischief” that happens when the “critical distinction” between them is not properly respected. The Church, the Bible, and the religion of Christianity are all good and important things, but not as good and important as Jesus. “The moment we try to nudge the Church or the Bible or Christianity toward equality with Christ we are headed down a theological path that leads to confusion and real-life trouble.”

My objection to this sort of analysis is two-fold. First, it relies on a flawed understanding of the categories if they are meant to be fundamentally biblical and not the product of later theological rationalisation. Secondly, it is an outdated analysis of “Christianity”: it deals with problems of the past, not of the future.

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The salvation of the Jews by the “Author of life”—not quite in the way you might think
Here’s an interesting question. What are we to understand by the phrase “Author of life” in the ESV translation of Acts 3:15? Since we would normally say that God as creator is the author of life, we might imagine that Peter is saying, in this very early defence of the apostolic witness, that Jesus… ( | 19 comments)
Testing times: a narrative framework for the renewal of the Western church
What I say is: a narrative theology ought to be able to account for the whole experience of the people of God, not just the beginning, middle, and end of it—creation and fall, redemption, final judgment. We may give some sort of priority to the early biblical sections of the narrative, but… ( | 17 comments)
Another reason to think that Isaiah’s suffering servant is the generation of Jews which grew up in Babylon
Whoever finally redacted Isaiah 40-55 saw fit to insert or leave the passage about the suffering servant between a promise concerning the redemption of Jerusalem and the return of the exiles (Is. 52:1-12) and the assurance that the ruined city would be abundantly repopulated: “the children of the… ( | 4 comments)
About whom does the prophet say this?
In the famous “servant song” of Isaiah 52:13-53:12 the prophet describes a person who has suffered punishment because of the sins of Israel, and whose sufferings have had some sort of redemptive effect:But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the… ( | 16 comments)
Who will recline at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven?
The Canaanite woman in Matthew’s story got the leftovers from the table at which the “children” of the household of Israel were being fed. She had no right to sit at the table, nor was any such right promised to her or her daughter; and it is clear that Jesus found her a distraction.The earlier… ( | 16 comments)
What did it mean to “see” the coming of the Son of Man in clouds?
When Jesus says that some people will “see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory” (Mk. 13:26), does he mean this literally—picking up on a recent comment? Does he expect people to look up to the sky and actually see a human figure descending to earth on a cloud, like… ( | 6 comments)
Why was Jesus so polite to the centurion and so rude to the Canaanite woman?
The story of the Canaanite woman (Matt. 15:21-28; cf. Mk. 7:24-30) has been going round in my head the last few days, partly because I have been marking a number of undergraduate essays comparing the two versions of the episode, partly because I happened across quite a good podcast in which Trevin… ( | 17 comments)