Best-selling author and pastor considers the ’70 times seven’ question

TITLE: Unconditional?

AUTHOR: Brian Zahnd

PUBLISHER: Charisma House (Strang Book Group)

ISBN: 978-1-616-38025-0

PRICE: $19.99

RELEASE DATE: Jan. 4

QUOTABLE: "Forgiveness is not justifying what has happened. It is not necessarily even forgetting...but forgiveness is simply saying I am going to abandon the cycle of revenge." -Zahnd

Starting with the horror of the Holocaust, best-selling author and pastor Brian Zahnd’s·Unconditional? The Call of Jesus to Radical Forgiveness·explores the meaning and scope of forgiveness in a troubled world.

“If Christianity isn’t about forgiveness, it’s about nothing at all,” writes Zahnd, founder and senior pastor of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Mo.

“What Jesus calls us to do is very radical, and I think it’s going to take some profound contemplation for us to come to terms with what it means for us in the 21st century to be practitioners of the Jesus kind of forgiveness,” he told·Christian Retailing.·

Offering many contemporary and historical examples and stories in the new Charisma House work, Zahnd highlights the way the Amish community exercised forgiveness after their children were slaughtered in a Pennsylvania schoolhouse, how Corrie ten Boom forgave a cruel Nazi guard and how Pope John Paul II visited his would-be assassin in prison to extend forgiveness.

In the New Testament, Peter talked of forgiving his brother 70 times seven. Today, with people still asking the question, of how far should we go in forgiving, Zahnd said that the meaning of the word can be “extremely elusive, difficult to get a hold of.”

“The real issue becomes does forgiveness completely subsume justice? Do we live in a binary universe where it’s forgiveness or justice, but you can’t have both? And that’s maybe the most difficult issue that pops up again and again. … Is there a way for forgiveness and justice to be reconciled, or is forgiveness an abandonment of justice? And even in some cases might we ask the question, would forgiveness in a particular situation be a further injustice?”·

Ultimately, Zahnd asserts that those who embrace the Christian faith “must believe in forgiveness, and (that) there is the possibility of reconciling forgiveness and justice, but at some point we may have to come to a new understanding of justice, less punitive and more centered in the realm of reconciliation.”

Zahnd holds that forgiveness is simple, but not easy. “We cannot ask people who have been seriously harmed by the injustice of someone else or some others to simply feel good about them, in other words, to say it doesn’t matter. The fact is, it does matter. Forgiveness begins with a simple choice … doesn’t mean it’s easy to do, but forgiveness doesn’t forget necessarily what has happened. It’s simply is going to abandon the right to revenge.·

“Forgiveness is not justifying what has happened. It is not necessarily even forgetting … but forgiveness is simply saying I am going to abandon the cycle of revenge.”

Zahnd brings the issue down to the basics. “I’ve taken some of the most serious thinking about forgiveness in the 2,000-year history of the Christian church and tried to make it very accessible to the average reader,” he said, adding that·Unconditional?·also “can be very well used to present nonbelievers to the Christian faith.”

For more information, visit www.strangb2b.com. To order, call Strang Book Group at 800-283-8494.

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