Book Review: The Wood Between the Worlds by Brian Zahnd
Rating: 5 stars of 5
My favorite scene in all of the literary canon is one from The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis, which is the book wherein exists the wood between the worlds that inspired this book’s title. I was, therefore, perhaps predisposed to like this one, but I did end up enjoying it for different reasons.
First, the book is absolutely beautiful, inside and out. You cannot tell in flat images of the cover, but the dust jacket has these beautiful areas of differing texture - the reddish bits are more of a smooth matte and the parts that look like paintings are shiny. When you move the book around, it reflects the light beautifully in those shiny sections, almost as if the paintings are foiled even though I don’t think they are. Under the dust jacket, the book cloth and endpapers are a shimmery gold, and there is a collection of full color images in the center of the book that depict historic artwork.
I think this book makes a lovely follow-up read to another of Brian’s books: Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God (the Kindle eBook version of it is on sale for $1.99 at the time I am writing this), which was one of my favorite reads of 2023 and is a book I plan to revisit again this year. In this one, Zahnd presents a beautifully rendered theology of the cross in a collection of chapters, each exploring a different theme.
I love the way Zahnd works through each of the chapters, presenting ideas that align with a more faithful theology and discussing as he goes why this more thoughtful approach to interpretation is so important. “…To err in depicting the divine is to create an idol - a false and misleading picture of God,” he says in chapter 3, and in chapter fourteen, he states, “Bad theology has real-life consequences.”
I very much appreciated that the interpretations he posits do not depict God as an an angry, abusive tyrant who needs appeasing and afflicts suffering and punishment on the Son. That kind of theology leads to so much cognitive dissonance, bad fruit, and unhealthy farther-down beliefs, and I don’t believe it accurately reflects God at all. I like how Brian discusses those kinds of depictions of God in chapters six, fourteen, and eighteen.
From chapter six: “When we speak of the suffering love on display at the cross, we must be careful not to isolate this suffering in the Son of God alone. There are some theologies of the cross that make the mistake of imagining the Father as entirely aloof and impassible to the suffering of the Son. Or worse, there are atonement theologies that posit the Father as the source of the Son’s suffering. This is paganized soteriology at its worst! The Father is not the one who inflicts pain and suffering upon the Son. To imagine the Father as the one inflicting pain upon the Son is to import an unspeakable violence into the Trinity. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are bound together in eternal love. In the crucifixion of the Son, the Trinity shares the suffering. The Trinity does not consist of separate parts with separate experiences. The Trinity has no “parts.” The Trinity is the divine community in a perichoretic dance of love.”
From chapter fourteen: “Evil was overcome at the cross, not by an imperial execution, but by the triumph of divine love.”
From chapter eighteen: “In speaking of the sacrificial death of Christ, we must always remember that we are ransomed people for God, not from God. In like manner, an orthodox atonement theology understands that Christ does not save us from God, but for God. Thus the redeeming ransom is not paid to God, but on behalf of God. The ransom is paid to the abductor that held humanity captive: death and Hades. Jesus obtained the keys of death and Hades through his ransom. In the logic of ransom, the abductor does not pay himself the ransom.”
He dives into these perspectives much more deeply in the book than I can with just a few brief excerpts here, but suffice it to say that I found the interpretations he offered so refreshing, life-giving, faith-deepening, and affirming.
I highly recommend this book, both to people who feel firm in their faith and want to deepen their perspectives, and to people who have been questioning or deconstructing their faith. If you have found yourself disillusioned with the modern western church and dissatisfied with the same, surface-level, trite answers to hard questions about God (same here, friend), I would encourage you to give this book a try. I think you’ll find it thought-provoking and encouraging at the very least.
I loved this book. It’s one of the most beautiful books I have read in recent years, and it’s one I think I’ll read over and over again. The writing is slow-paced (take your time), thought-provoking, and so beautifully poetic in places, and the theopoetics of the cross section at the end is stunning. I think you’ll enjoy it!
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