Brian Zahnd – Scribbling Theology

A warmly lit study with a wooden desk and chair, an antique table lamp glowing on the desk, stacks of old books, and tall bookshelves filled with leather-bound volumes lining the walls.

When Faith Stops Feeling Life-Giving

I once managed belief like a fragile museum piece, feeling the weight of maintaining it rather than living it. Before deconstruction, my faith felt exhausting. Not because I didn’t believe, but because the answers I had adopted stopped helping me live freely or flourish. Over time, they settled into a shallow kind of idea-ism, a way of thinking about faith that meant my spirituality, my questions, and even my own human experience had to be constantly filtered through categories that needed defending, maintaining, and keeping in order. Faith became something to manage rather than inhabit. Something to defend instead of embody.

Unresolved Theological Tension

Faith started to feel like something that needed constant attention instead of bringing rest. I carried a lot of unresolved tensions. The sharpest was the contradiction of a loving God who was also described as perpetually angry. It was difficult to reconcile the message of the cross as good news with explanations that felt wrong to me. I was told to trust Scripture, but only within rigid boundaries, which impacted how I viewed science and historical contexts. These tensions weren’t just ideas. They manifested in politics and in divided groups. Faith increasingly felt like an exercise in picking sides to stay ‘biblical.’ Underneath, I was sorting people: who was orthodox or heretical, faithful or compromised, who belonged and who didn’t. None of it felt life-giving. All of it carried weight, and over time, that weight became unbearable. Eventually, I didn’t just feel strained. I stopped altogether. I stopped engaging. I stopped trying to hold everything together, not out of rebellious spirit or a hard heart, but out of exhaustion.

Why I Stepped Away

It wasn’t some hidden sin I wanted to justify that led me to deconstruct. Rather, it was the heavy burden of traditional evangelism, a way of holding faith that was slowly hollowing me out rather than giving life. I needed distance. Not dramatically or all at once, but carefully. Slowly and surely, I removed myself from it. Stepping back didn’t feel brave. It felt disorienting. I wasn’t replacing one system with another. I was letting go of the constant explanations and seeing what was left.
At first, stepping back felt uncomfortable, but also freeing. Without my old ways of thinking, I didn’t know what to do next. My prayers changed. I stopped trying to say the right words and just sat with my feelings, embracing these moments as a form of silent prayer or centering. This contemplative posture allowed me to talk less at God and be more present. Faith didn’t come with easy answers anymore. There were no safe categories or certain words. The mystery I used to fear started to feel interesting instead of scary.

Deconstrucion Research

As I went through this, I noticed I wasn’t alone. Increasingly, I realized that deconstruction was happening everywhere. Research shows that about 42 percent of adults have questioned the faith they grew up with, and many still call themselves Christian. Barna’s research says about a third of practising Christians have seriously re-examined their inherited beliefs without leaving their faith. This shows that deconstruction isn’t simply about leaving Christianity. For many, it’s a personal reckoning inside the Church. Commentators such as Scot McKnight helped me understand this further. In Invisible Jesus, McKnight says that much of modern Christianity has replaced the real Jesus with other versions: a political Jesus, a nationalist Jesus, a moral enforcer, or a doctrinal gatekeeper. When people deconstruct, they’re often not rejecting Christ, but these distorted versions, hoping to find the real one.

Deconstruction as Reformation

Seen this way, deconstruction begins to look less like collapse and more like correction. Building on this, it almost ironically carries the marks of reform and renewal. Historically, movements that return people to the centre of faith are rarely neat or reassuring in the moment. They disrupt settled systems and force hard questions. Consider Martin Luther’s 95 Theses in 1517, which challenged the practices of the Church and sparked the Protestant Reformation, a period of profound religious renewal born out of significant disruption. Today, deconstruction feels like that kind of moment. As Brian Zahnd has often said, the future Christian will likely be a mystic, not someone chasing spiritual novelty, but someone formed by presence rather than control, encounter rather than certainty, love in place of fear. Taken together, the data and lived experience tell the same story. Deconstruction is not about killing Christianity. For many, it is about clearing away what is brittle and broken, so that something more ancient, deeper, and more Christ-centred can emerge.

Deconstruction as Formation

When I stepped back, not everything disappeared. In fact, some things stayed, not because I fought to keep them, but because they were never tied to the frameworks I had let go of. Christ stayed. Not as a system to defend or a set of conclusions to maintain, but as the person I kept returning to. Even when I wasn’t sure what I believed, Jesus himself remained compelling. His way of being in the world. His closeness to those on the margins. His refusal to grasp for power. Whatever else shifted, I couldn’t shake him. Sometimes, in silent prayer, it felt like Jesus whispered, ‘I’m here with you.’ It was as if he was telling me, ‘It’s okay to ask questions, to seek understanding. I am with you in your doubts and your discoveries.’ Scripture stayed too. And in many ways, it became more profound. I never stopped loving the Bible. I’ve always been a Bible nerd. What changed wasn’t my affection for the text, but the way I read it. As I let go of the lenses I had adopted, Scripture stopped being something I approached primarily to extract answers or defend positions. It became sacramental. Life-giving. Formative.

Deconstruction and Orthodox

I came to recognise the Bible not as a puzzle to solve, but as a place to meet God. Reading it this way made me slow down. It shaped how I think and what I care about. It worked deep inside me, not just in arguments. The text didn’t always answer my questions, but it kept bringing me back to Christ and to living more like him. That didn’t weaken my faith. It made it stronger. Orthodoxy came back, but it felt different.

What I eventually realised was that orthodoxy really is about healthy boundaries. In its earliest expressions, orthodoxy existed to confront heresy and guard the heart of the Christian confession. The creeds and confessions were shaped in conflict because what was at stake was not abstract correctness, but the truth about God, Christ, and what it means to be human. That work mattered. It still does. What surprised me was discovering that those boundaries were never meant to suffocate faith. They were meant to protect life.

Reading the early Church Fathers made this clear. Figures like Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa were deeply orthodox and fiercely committed to doctrinal clarity, yet their theology was never anxious or thin. For Athanasius, orthodoxy mattered because if Christ is not truly God, then humanity is not truly healed. Doctrine was inseparable from salvation. Gregory of Nyssa, equally committed to the creedal faith, insisted that God always exceeds our concepts. Orthodoxy did not eliminate mystery. It required it. Doctrine named the centre, but it also opened the soul toward continual growth, desire, and transformation.

From there, the tradition opened rather than closed. I found this same orthodoxy expressed across several streams of the Church, in the earthy devotion of Celtic Christianity, in the depth and union spoken of by Catholic and Eastern mystics, and even in modern voices who continue to live this faith attentively and sincerely. Each tradition nurtures humility and compassion, drawing from the same well of Christ’s love and teachings. What united all of it was Christ, not as an idea to defend, but as a life to enter.

Deconstruction didn’t take me away from orthodoxy. It led me into a deeper kind of orthodoxy.

To Those Watching Other’s Deconstruct

That’s why I want to offer a word of caution to those watching others deconstruct: how we respond matters. Treating deconstruction as betrayal, danger, or moral failure does not protect faith. It reinforces the very wounds that made faith unlivable in the first place. If the goal is depth, maturity, and Christlikeness, then fear-driven responses are counter-formative. What deconstructing people need is love, not suspicion. Curiosity, not control. Space to ask honest questions without punishment. Orthodoxy was never meant to be enforced through fear. It was meant to form people into the likeness of Christ.

I didn’t lose my faith. I lost a version of it that could not carry life.
What remains now is not certainty, but commitment. Not answers I can deploy, but a way of living I am learning to inhabit. Christ abides at the centre again. Scripture is sacramental. Orthodoxy is formative. Mystery is no longer something I rush to resolve. For the first time in a long while, faith doesn’t require vigilance. It asks for faithfulness. Faith now feels like breathing, not balancing plates. It sustains me quietly, like a gentle rhythm that I can finally rest in. And that feels like something I can truly live with.

I do not usually read with lists in mind. I read slowly, often distractedly, sometimes devotionally, sometimes just to survive a season. But looking back over this year, a handful of books stand out not because they impressed me intellectually, but because they helped to form me. They changed the way I noticed the world. They softened me. They reoriented my imagination toward God.

These are my top five books of 2025, not ranked by importance, but gathered because each met me where I was and quietly moved me somewhere better.

1. Haiku: Japanese Poems for the Four Seasons edited by Ornella Civardi

This book did something simple. It forced me to slow down.

Haiku does not allow for rushing. There is no room for verbosity or explanation. You must attend. You must notice. A falling leaf. The sound of rain. A moment that would otherwise pass unnoticed. Reading these poems is helping me to train my attention outward again, away from constant abstraction and into the texture of the world around me.

Spiritually, this mattered more than I expected. It reminded me that presence is not a technique but a posture. That the sacred often hides in what is small and fleeting. That God does not always speak in paragraphs but sometimes in a single image, held long enough to be received.

I found myself more deliberate after reading this book. More aware of light, sound, and stillness. In a culture obsessed with speed and productivity, haiku felt quietly resistant. Almost monastic.

2. The Wood Between the Worlds by Brian Zahnd

Zahnd has a gift for naming the thin places between heaven and earth, and this book lives entirely in that space. Drawing its imagery from C S Lewis, The Wood Between the Worlds explores liminality, transformation, and the places where God meets us between certainty and chaos.

What I appreciated most was its refusal to rush toward answers. This is not a book trying to win arguments. It is a book inviting readers into mystery, into surrender, into the slow work of unlearning false images of God.

It resonated deeply with my own growing sense that faith is less about holding tight to certainty and more about learning how to dwell faithfully in the in between. Zahnd writes with pastoral warmth, theological depth, and poetic imagination, making this a book I returned to more than once.

3. Ancient Wisdom for the Care of Souls: Learning the Art of Pastoral Ministry from the Church Fathers By Coleman M. Ford and Shawn J. Wilhite

In an age where pastoral ministry is often shaped by metrics, branding, and performance, this book gently but firmly pulls us back to a much older vision of soul care. One rooted in patience, humility, discernment, and deep attention to the inner life.

The section on Gregory of Nyssa stood out to me in particular. His vision of the soul as endlessly journeying into God, always growing, always becoming, reframed formation not as fixing people but as accompanying them. Gregory does not see humanity as a problem to be solved, but as a mystery to be loved into wholeness.

That perspective has stayed with me. It has shaped the way I think about spiritual direction, formation, and even my own inner life. It reminded me that good pastoral care is slow, relational, and deeply human.

4. The Shack by William Paul Young

I know this book divides opinion. But this year, God used it powerfully in my life.

The Shack met me at a time when I needed healing more than explanation. It did not answer all my theological questions, nor did it try to. Instead, it reintroduced me to a God who is present in suffering, gentle with wounds, and more loving than my fear had allowed me to imagine.

Reading it felt less like consuming a book and more like being accompanied through a difficult conversation. It helped clarify my path toward God this year, not by removing doubt, but by reshaping trust.

For all its simplicity, The Shack carries a deeply pastoral theology. One that prioritises relationship over control, love over fear, and presence over performance. I am grateful for it.

5. Kitchen Hymns by Pádraig Ó Tuama

Reading Pádraig always feels like home.

Ó Tuama has a remarkable ability to write about God without forcing God into the room. Kitchen Hymns is intimate, domestic, and deeply human. It finds the sacred in ordinary spaces, conversations, and moments that rarely feel religious enough to matter.

What I loved most is how gently theological it is. The poems and reflections do not preach. They listen. They honour complexity. They allow grief, joy, doubt, and love to sit at the same table.

This book reinforced something I keep returning to in my own writing and faith. That God is not waiting for us in abstraction or spiritual achievement, but already present in kitchens, friendships, silence, and shared meals.

Tag: Brian Zahnd

Deconstruction Led Me to a Deeper Orthodoxy and Faith