Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God

Zahnd (Water to Wine), pastor and founder of the Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Miss., thoughtfully probes the fearful view of God and the idea that fearing God is somehow an expected behavior. He was captured at a young age by Jonathan Edwards’s famous 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and spent years haunted by a vision of a wrathful God. Here he argues that the ultimate expression of God is found in Jesus, and that the angry passages Edwards and others use to inspire fear are handpicked for maximum effect. Rather than wrathful, he says, God is supremely loving. Zahnd states that his view is not a “low view of Scripture but a high view of Christ.” He argues diligently and persuasively that Christians can’t embrace a flat reading of the Bible in which the Old Testament holds equal weight with the person of Jesus Christ, but must instead view the Old Testament as the beginning of a revelation from God that reaches its true culmination in Jesus. (Aug.)