On the Three Streams United podcast, Jesse sits down with his uncle, Fr. Kenneth Tanner — pastor of Church of the Holy Redeemer in the Detroit area — to talk about his new book, Vulnerable God: How Jesus Upends Our Assumptions About God—and Shows Us How to Be Human (Brazos Press, with a foreword by Brian Zahnd). The book releases Tuesday, September 29, 2026 — the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Jesse: Well, hello, Father Kenneth Tanner. I’m more used to calling you Uncle Ken personally, but I’ll stick with Father Ken for the sake of the podcast audience. How are you doing this morning?
Fr. Ken: Good. It’s good to be with you, Jesse.
Ten years in the making
Jesse: It’s pretty amazing following the trajectory of — what is it, about ten years you’ve been working on this book, The Vulnerable God, that’s coming out this Tuesday?
Fr. Ken: At least ten years. The idea goes back to ’09, ’10, when we were in the hospital a lot with Christian, this young man who was born with underdeveloped lungs at 27 weeks gestation. So he was in the NICU, and the ideas and concepts of the meditation go back to that event. And then I started working on various aspects of it throughout the decade, and a structure finally fell into place in 2018 around the sacred year. I was like, “Well, this is how to tell the story.” And then I signed a contract in ’21, I believe — I’d have to go back and look — but I started really working in earnest on it in the post-pandemic period, through the early fall of ’24, when we turned it in at 82,000 words. Then we went through three pretty intensive editorial processes through the spring of this year. So it’s been a long journey. It’s been a long process.
Writing at the sentence level
Jesse: Having been following your thoughts for many years — and obviously talking with you about various points and seeing you post — it’s really fascinating. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anybody write the way that you write, because it was almost like you wrote in social media posts. I was listening to Bishop Green — Bishop Chris Green — the other day on Speakeasy Theology. Check out that podcast; it’s amazing. And he was talking about how you wrote at the sentence level and then kind of went from the inside out. What was fun was following that progression on social media as you’d have these insights and you’d form them in these really condensed and really meaningful ways and engage with your audience. Did that play a huge part in how the book came about — the fact that you were speaking to real people all the time?
Fr. Ken: I think so. Sometimes — and this still happens — a sentence comes into my head, and I’m like, “Oh, that’s what I want to write about. I want to write about that thought.” So sentence writing — I’ve always really appreciated people who write like Annie Dillard and Frederick Buechner, sentence writers who just have incredible sentences. So these sentences will pop into my head and then I want to flesh them out. Where did that sentence come from? And you find that there are other words that are around that.
And then, yes, the social media dialogue was interesting, because some of it — not all the book, but probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 percent of the book — had a life on social media before it was part of this book. And so to put that up there and then to watch the way people were responding to things — sometimes it’s like, “Oh, I need to say more.” Sometimes, “Oh, this is exactly what needs to be said.”
So, yeah, I’m very interested in dialogue, and that goes back to the really long sabbatical in my priesthood between 1999 and 2005, when I was working in Chicago and taking the train every day, and buses and subways, to get to work and to come back, and just meeting people on public transportation who would learn that I was a priest. You learn there’s a crew on the train, and there are just people that you run into, and they know you’re a priest, and they’re reading the paper and they’re like, “Hey, what do you think about this?” or “This is what’s happening in my life,” or whatever. And I learned I had to have a vocabulary that wasn’t churchy, that didn’t assume that people knew everything or had the same experiences I had of Jesus. And so, how do I articulate this to them?
And so when I got here in ’05, to Detroit, to Holy Redeemer, one of the first things I did was start a Theology on Tap group at a local pub and invite young people that were at the parish to invite their friends. It was risky. You put yourself in an environment that’s not church, with people who don’t automatically assume your authority and who don’t necessarily know the faith, and then to be able to talk to them meaningfully about what we trust about the human God, about Jesus, within the context of what it means to live an ordinary human life — how do those things come together? You learn a language: how do I get this across to someone? So it’s a combination of those things.
And as I’ve told other people, a lot of this was written on my phone. I’m in a parking lot, or I’m in a waiting room, or at the hospital, or wherever I happen to be inspired — a coffee shop, or on the side of the road — because something hits me and I’m like, “I’ve got to write this out.” And then it would go from there into other writing spaces on my computer. And then there was enough of it that I began to say, “Oh, there’s a pattern here. Oh, I need to write something more sustained about this.” And so when 2018 came, the sacred year — it’s like, “Oh, this is a structure.” So I can write about the crucifixion, and I can write about the transfiguration, and I can write about baptism and temptation, all those feasts that we celebrate in the sacred year, the christological feasts. And I’d already written a lot about Christmas and had thoughts about that — but flesh all this out.
And then it was really late in the game — like late 2023, and really in 2024, ahead of that whole year — that a whole section of this book emerged that wasn’t in the original plan, which is section two, “A Human Life.” All those chapters just emerged from a realization that there wasn’t anything about Jesus living his life. And some of the key texts in the book — the last two, “Shepherd” and “Healer,” of that section, really at the center of the book — those emerged very late in the process, again just from a realization that we needed that to round out the book. So some of it’s pretty late.
And then, in the process, we turned in this 82,000-word manuscript in September of ’24. And in the first round of edits, we dropped three whole chapters. There was a chapter on the sacred year at the end of this book. There was a chapter on Ash Wednesday in the book. There was a chapter on the communion of saints in the book. Those are gone. The chapter on the communion of saints ended up in Mockingbird, and I think the other two pieces will find their way. But we cut somewhere around 10,000 additional words besides the three whole chapters that went away. And then we wrote probably in the neighborhood of just as many words again — at least 7,000 new words — in those three waves of process.
So it’s a very different book, in some sense, than the book that I conceived of in the beginning, for sure, and a very different book from the book that was turned in in September of 2024. The final version of the text occurred around October of 2025. And that text, which is the essential text, went through lots of minor revisions between October and May of this year. Right up to May, just before it went to press, we were still — the copy-editing process really ended up being way more rigorous, and the copy editors themselves were like, “I don’t think this is clear enough.” So I really had a whole beautiful team around me at Brazos that made the book what it is in the end.
It’s like if you had pieces of something you’re working on, and then you’re putting them together — it gets woven into this larger thing; it gets altered. Some people do just sit down and write a book from the first word to the last word. That would be one way to do it. I have friends that start with the things that are most inspiring to them, and then they piece it and put it all together and structure it. We moved chapters around in this book. It was very much analogous to what I’ve seen in making a record in a studio. We were remixing, and we were changing the order of the songs, right up to the last minute. But a lot of wisdom, a lot of good people who knew what they were doing, and I think the book is a lot stronger.
I had three people who were reading it really closely: Andrew Arndt — Streams in the Wilderness — Streams in the Wasteland, I can never remember the last word of that book — All Flame — Andrew Arndt from New Life in Colorado. And then Daniel Taylor, who’s the style editor for the New Living Translation, and a novelist, and he has that wonderful book about certainty that was so popular in the late ’80s. And then Chris Green. They read the whole manuscript and offered lots of input, especially Chris. And then the editors at Brazos. And I had maybe a half dozen other friends read portions of the book and give me advice. So it was a process.
A book in conversation
Jesse: I think that comes through in the book, because it feels like a book that’s in conversation. It doesn’t feel like a book that is, “I went on a mountain and I just thought deep thoughts.” It feels like something that really encounters the real world. And I think that’s really the freshness of the book: it really humanizes Jesus and deifies humanity, to borrow from the language of the book.
Fr. Ken: I think that’s Christianity. And so, yes, that’s another aspect. We’re really talking about nuts and bolts, but the aspect that we also want to say is that it emerges from actual pastoral life. These are reflections from someone who’s doing pastoral work — going to prisons, going to hospitals, preaching texts, preaching the Gospels, preaching the Old Testament, living with ordinary human beings trying to do the Jesus thing. It emerges from all that.
And one of the big surprises for me, and blessings for me, is to have people like my sister Mia, and our longtime friend Elizabeth Powell, my sister-in-law, read this book and say, “Wow, we thought it was going to be hard to read, but actually we’re really into it.” And that’s high praise. I’m not an academic writer. I’m not trying to impress anyone — not that that’s what academics are doing with their writing, but you know what I mean. There’s a place for that sort of writing, and you can glean a lot from it, but I’m just trying to tell the story in a way that is edifying for people who are in the academy, or leaders in the church, but also people who live busy lives taking care of their kids and grandchildren, working their jobs, saying their prayers, taking care of the poor. Anybody who’s trying to walk this life — I want them to understand these encounters I’ve had with the person of Jesus, and with the community of faith that has trusted in Jesus, and what I’ve learned about Jesus. I would want anybody to be able to pick it up, regardless of their educational level, regardless of their vocation, regardless of the kinds of places that they find themselves. That was an aim of the book, and I’m hearing, at least anecdotally from my family, that it is doing that. And that’s really gratifying to hear.
Jesse: Yeah. Well, that’s really what impressed me the most — the accessibility. But not just accessibility, because it doesn’t shy away from being profound. Not to blow your head up too much, but there are moments where you engage with the deepest understanding of the reality that we exist in. But it never leaves where we’re at. We still have our feet on the ground.
Fr. Ken: That’s right.
Jesse: And that’s a remarkable work. And I think it was this wrestling. If you wouldn’t mind me framing it this way: there was the social media stuff, which is so vast — anybody can be commenting and talking about it — and then there was your friends and family, and then there was that core group you’re talking about, doing the real work with, and then there’s your pastoral work. These ideas and these phrases were never not being tested. And so I think that’s what kept it grounded, let’s call it. It comes from struggle.
Fr. Ken: Yeah, absolutely. And grounding it in the stories, I think, is really helpful as well.
The God who falls with us
Jesse: The stories that you tell of love and loss, and places where you’ve encountered — the only thing that can make this situation redeemed has to be the crucified God. Would you talk a little bit about that? Because I know people really do struggle with the depth of grief that they encounter in their world and the suffering that they encounter in their world. How does the vulnerable God, how does the crucified God, meet us in those places?
Fr. Ken: By not being afraid. Courage. He enters into every experience of what it means to be human in order to share that experience with us — but so that we can experience the situation differently. Not in bondage. Anxious at moments, even angry at moments, but to redeem human emotions and to show us how to be angry without sin, how to be anxious without sin, how to be hungry without sin, and to point the way. But to actually enter the deprivation of hunger, the deprivation of thirst, the deprivation of pain, and alienation, and all the things — with us, and not just in his own life. And this is the mystery of Christ: not just his own life among us, but his share in all of our experiences, and every human being’s experience, right up until death, as only God can do. So there’s that real, particular way in which he, as a human being, suffers, and then there’s that universal taking on of what it means to be human for all of us collectively — all of our collective experiences of grief — and he makes them his own.
So it’s courage, and the actual voluntary participation. In the Son, God suffers. Jenson and others: in the body of the Son, God suffers. So he’s really with us in it and not outside of it. You get that with Dorothy Sayers and others. As she says, in the language of the mid-twentieth-century church — it’s really sort of British — when he comes among us, he plays the man, which means that he’s not a coward. And this would be true of a woman or a man — don’t get weird on me — but whether you’re a man or a woman, actually entering in and experiencing it in its fullness. Not medicated, not checked out, but actually involved.
Jesse: That’s right.
Fr. Ken: And so that’s a decision God makes — to share.
Jesse: Yeah. I wanted to read this quote that really gets into that. It’s one of my favorite quotes of the whole book. It’s actually pretty early on, but I just love it. You say:
Jesus descends into all our hells. The descent of Jesus is not slowed until he is beneath the deepest falling human, descending right to the edges of non-existence to rescue us. Any human who hits rock bottom lands on the body of Christ. There is no other place to land.
I love that. I think that’s just excellent, because it’s the only answer that makes sense. I was at a memorial service recently for a friend of mine that I was really close with in middle school and high school, and it was the first time I’ve preached at a memorial service, and it was just a lot harder than I anticipated. I preach a lot, and I love preaching, and it’s usually very energizing. But in that moment, although I was very moved, it was just so real.
Fr. Ken: Well, you’re feeling all the things that everybody else is feeling.
Jesse: Yeah, that’s it. And in that moment, though — the best moment that happened during the whole day, besides playing with her daughters (it was really beautiful to meet them; they just had so much joy, and I felt so much hope in what God can do, and redemption) — I was talking with her youngest sister, who I had never met, and she said, “What you said made a lot of sense. I’ve never been a religious person.” But basically what she ended up framing, which I thought was so beautiful, was, “The depth of suffering and grief that I feel could only be answered by resurrection and hope.” She’s like, “My worldview didn’t have a frame for this grief.” I’m putting words in her mouth, but that was the conversation.
Fr. Ken: I’m glad that she drew some comfort from the gospel.
Jesse: Yeah. And that’s what I think you elucidate so clearly as you talk through this: doesn’t this make sense of the world? The only thing that really makes sense of a world that could be full of what we might think of as meaningless suffering is a God who’s actually present in every suffering moment, who actually engages with us.
Fr. Ken: Yeah. I tell some stories around this in the book, and we’ll let people read the book. But I think this idea that he falls with us comes from Athanasius in Contra Gentes, the book that precedes On the Incarnation. It’s a two-part work, and Contra Gentes is the opening of the book. Contra Gentes has a lot of stuff that’s not terribly interesting, but there is a passage in it that’s absolutely key for understanding what he’s doing in On the Incarnation. I’m basically paraphrasing what he says in Contra Gentes. He doesn’t use the language of God falling, but he is saying that God extends himself in the incarnation, which is both his being born and his dying as a human being. So we have to hold those together. This descent is in order to lend us permanence. He sees that in death and in the grave we’re descending — the human race is descending towards non-existence, to just not exist anymore. And he says — this is Athanasius — God is not stingy with existence. He wants his creatures to participate in his permanence. And so — he uses this language a lot — it would not be in the character of God to watch his creation descend into non-being without putting himself on the line in order to rescue and lend his permanence to us, so that we don’t slip into non-being.
And that is where I got this image of the falling human being. And then I discovered later that von Balthasar uses the same — I think it’s in Heart of the World, or it’s in Love Alone Is Credible, one of those — he uses this image of Christ falling. And of course he’s saturated with Nyssa and Athanasius and all these people, but he uses the same image, that Christ is falling. But I use this idea — this idea came to me: what if someone hit rock bottom? What’s the bottom of that fall into non-existence? What would that be? And I was like, well, if what Athanasius is saying is true, we land on the body of Jesus. Balthasar says that he’s, like, below. So then the trick to me was, well, if we landed somewhere, where would that be? Well, it’d be the body of Jesus. And that just was like — boom. That’s it.
And so these influences come in, and then you ponder them on the basis of your real-life experiences, wrestling with people like you were wrestling with the sister of your friend who perished. And they come to, “Oh, that’s our hope. That’s the trust. That’s the reality.” Despite the great sorrow — your friend, and especially these little ones who are going to have to be raised without their mother — in the end, all of us who are falling will land on the body of Jesus, and that will be our rescue.
The structure of all existence
Jesse: That’s right. Well, I wanted to highlight the structure of the book as well, as I was thinking about that being a touch point. In grief you can miss a step, but Jesus is there to catch you. I had that kind of image as I was reading through all of that. But the whole book is framed around our existence. I’m more of a philosophical guy, so you start with the human God — well, that’s the base of everything. The foundation of the world is the human God. That’s not arbitrary. It didn’t just happen 2,000 years ago. It also happened before the foundations of the world — built on this at the throwing down —
Fr. Ken: That’s right. Yeah, the throwing down of the world.
Jesse: I love that. It’s all just bursting out of the love of the human God. Creation just gushes forth from him. And then it’s a human life, a human death, and a human future. And so all of our existence is kind of encapsulated in this structure. I love that your structure is based on the structure of all existence — not that you’re trying to tackle all of that, but if you look at Jesus, that’s what you get. You get the structure of all existence. You get the life, the death, the resurrection, the future hope. And I was thinking about the story of your stepdad, my grandfather — Papu, Archbishop Adler. He used to say, “Don’t get caught in the small story.” We’re called to be consumed, subsumed, in the bigger story — Jesus’s story, the structure of all existence. And I see that that’s what you’re doing in this book: you’re telling the big story and inviting us to be in that.
Fr. Ken: Yeah. We are story-driven creatures. And God tells a story. He’s inviting — that we exist is part of the fact that the Word has spoken us into existence. He spoke all things — human beings are handcrafted, but he spoke all things into being, and he’s constantly speaking, and his word is what sustains us and sustains the world. And so, yes, he is telling a story. And then there are these spiritual forces of darkness that are telling a lie. But the story — the humility of God in writing the story of the world. He is the author and the finisher of the world. So he’s going to tell a story that ends well. And that story that he’s writing of existence is recapitulated in the life of Jesus — from eternity, into the womb of Mary, into silence, then to learn to speak, to learn to crawl, to learn to walk, to exist among human beings as a human being. He comes to die. And it is his death that’s so life-giving. So he takes captivity captive. He converts the use of death. Without his death, death really is — all of us would just be nihilists, and should be. But his death has converted the deprivation of death into a good, as only God can do that.
And so the whole story is vital to understanding who we are. And if we enter into it, and we’re meditating upon his life among us, it not only shows us how to live and be a human, but, as you were saying earlier, how to participate in the way God is human, and to participate in the human God’s own divinity — as Peter says, to be participants in the divine nature.
Jesse: Yeah. And we need almost constant reminders of the story.
Fr. Ken: Yes. And so, to get back to sentences: I was talking with a young man who grew up in charismatic churches. He’s been attending Redeemer for about nine months. He was off on a military thing, and now he’s back. And he’s like, “What goes off in my head all the time is the words from the Eucharist that we repeat several times: ‘Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.’” He said “the sins of the earth,” right? But he’s hearing that over and over again in the liturgy, which is telling a story — telling this story in a different way. And the church year helps us tell all the different aspects of the story. Every Sunday morning, we’re recapitulating the story in the liturgy. These sentences get into us. They become part of the grammar of our lives, part of how subjects and verbs agree. And so we start to realize that we’re in the story of God. And these sentences, like “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” are a reminder. Why do we say it four times? I sat there and offered the Eucharist: why are we saying this four times? Because we forget. Not just week to week, but we forget between the sentences. We have to be reminded all the time. Behold the Lamb of God. The one who offers himself freely, voluntarily, takes away — doesn’t retain — the sins of the world. He takes away the sin: all that is not of love. And it’s of the world — all sin. Not just some sins, but all sin.
And that’s part of the story we’re walking through. But it doesn’t always seem like the Lamb of God is taking away the sins of the whole world. We live in a world in which there are a lot of counterfactuals to the story that we’re telling. And so we have to constantly be reminded that, in the end, the world is going to function on turning the other cheek. In the end, the world is going to function on going the extra mile. In the end, the world is going to function on love of enemies. Whereas today it all seems totally impractical and totally foolish and totally not the way it works, and we would just be dumb to follow the words of the Sermon on the Mount. But actually, the story God’s telling, and the reality of the world, is now not death but resurrection — not conflagration or war, but peace; not greed and envy, but generosity, in which we were all made.
So the story is so important — entering the story and understanding God’s written you into the story. What is your story? And as Archbishop Adler, our stepfather — your grandfather — would say, “Don’t get lost in the weeds” of the nitty-gritty of what’s happening in any given moment. You’ve got to keep your eyes on the big picture.
Remembering our stories
Jesse: Yeah. And it seems our culture is at that moment where we are remembering our stories. You look at the work of Martin Shaw, Malcolm Guite — or even Paul Anleitner calls this out specifically in his latest book, Based on a True Story. There’s something happening right now where our culture — I mean, we literally just had a blockbuster epic, one of the biggest movies of the year, and it’s The Odyssey. It’s like we’re looking for the stories. And I thought that one fell a little flat for me, The Odyssey, because it didn’t fully inhabit the Jesus story. But it’s definitely not as bad as the worst critics, and it’s definitely not as good as the people who lost their minds over it.
Fr. Ken: Yes. But I think it’s a sign. I think there’s a desire for — what is real, and what story are we in? And stories that interpret — as The Odyssey and The Iliad do, and The Aeneid — were interpretations of the Bronze Age, with their concepts and ideas: “This is the story of the world.” And in some respects, Homer and Virgil are right. But in some aspects, they don’t have the whole story. And that comes through. But there are things you can take away.
Jesse: Yes. Well, I love that this is happening in the realm of story, because, like you said, we’re story people. We’ve lost our way a lot, and I think our interpretation of Jesus — I’m working this around — was lost in the midst of losing our story. Because when you have these flat stories, these reduced stories, these commercialized stories, you cease to be able to engage at the level of meaning that I think Jesus challenges us to. He’s the most transgressive story ever told. It changes everything. And so I’m just excited to see this excitement around the King Arthur story, or the things that Martin Shaw is doing, or even Pageau — Jonathan Pageau — rewriting the fairy tales. There’s just this new animating spirit where we can engage, because Jesus is that big. He can fill all things.
Fr. Ken: A lot of energy around it, and a lot of interest, and a lot of people are drawn to it. And I think that’s because — all these stories that don’t mean anything — people have no appetite for that anymore. For the story that is just despairing. Paul Anleitner talks about the anti-hero, which breeds cynicism. But cynicism is like the water. And to realize that cynicism is deadly. Cynicism doesn’t give life. It doesn’t help anybody wake up in the morning and go about their world and their life with some hope. You can’t raise children on cynicism. They need hope. So it’s a beautiful moment, and I’m glad that we’re in it, and we get to experience some of the storytellers now. Storytellers coming back.
And in a sense, that’s what I am trying to do. In the book, I am telling the story. It’s a personal story. It’s a community story. It’s a story about my own personal journey. It’s a story about my journey with the community called the church — both Holy Redeemer and the people that are in my parish beyond the walls of the church — and with the church through the ages. And it is that central story of the human God. So I’m inviting people into all the nuances of it, because those nuances are a deep critique of the sorts of fallen ways — I don’t like to use the word fallen — the broken ways that our lives are being guided these days.
Allergic to cynicism
Jesse: Well, I think that’s one of the things I was trying to call out in the book: there’s just not an ounce of cynicism in it. It’s all just so genuine. And there’s no denial in the book.
Fr. Ken: That’s right. We’re facing the realities of the world. But I’m really allergic to cynicism, personally. I think it’s a false choice.
Jesse: I think cynicism is antichrist. That’s my quote; I’ll put it on my Twitter. I think Jesus is the one who hopes all things, believes all things — that’s what it says about love — and cynicism is the opposite. It questions all things. Not that questioning is bad.
Fr. Ken: No. I think discernment is important, and some skepticism. You don’t want to be naive, especially in the face of evil. But this kind of posture of cynicism is demonic — to just live in that.
Jesse: Yes. And that posture of cynicism leads to darkness and to evil. And the invitation of Jesus is just, “Come to the cross with me. If you’re feeling that weight, join me on the cross.” That heals cynicism — the self-giving, self-pouring, eyes-wide-open encounter with death that leads to life.
Fr. Ken: So there’s a critical mode, right? As a person, or as an academic, you’re criticizing a movie or a film or a book or whatever it is — an athlete, a sports event. And I think criticism in and of itself isn’t bad if the motive of criticism is love. So if you love something like painting, or you love football, or — and this is profoundly more important — you love your child, you’re going to have to engage critically with whatever it is, whatever you’re working on, whatever relationship you’re in. But it’s life-giving if it’s based in love. If hate is at the bottom of it, or just a kind of opposition, the criticism is not going to do the work that you are intending it to do. Tom Oden was really big on this: the foundation of all true criticism is love. So we want to see the best. We want to experience the best. We want the people that we love to know the good and to experience the good in their own lives. And so we will bring the critical aspects, the things that need to be said, but the foundation is charity.
Jesse: Yeah. It reminds me of T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, which is my favorite poem. He has that great line where he says, “Who wove that intolerable shirt of flame? Love. Love is the unfamiliar name.” And his whole point that he draws to is that we only live, we only suspire, consumed by either fire or fire. We’re all consumed by the fire of God’s love. What it burns away is everything that is not who we are, who we are called to be — that is not who we’re intended from the foundation of the world to be, where we’re false to ourselves, or we’re false to the story, or we’re false to the community, or we’re false before God. The promise — not the threat, the promise — is that it will be burned away.
Fr. Ken: That’s right. And so good storytelling, I think, instills hope, and also discernment. And it instills courage, and not fear.
Idol or icon?
Jesse: That’s right. Well, and I think in this book, what I wanted to get at too is that as you’re telling this story, it’s reintegrating who Jesus is, in the form of the way that you unpack what he did on earth and the stories you tell of your pastoral encounters. And I think you’re going to like this comparison. I was thinking about Talladega Nights, which is cinema — absolute cinema, as they say. In Talladega Nights — it’s the Will Ferrell movie —
Fr. Ken: It took me a minute. Okay.
Jesse: Yeah. John C. Reilly.
Fr. Ken: I’m with you.
Jesse: They’re around the dinner table and they say, “I like to see my Jesus as —” you know, the sweet baby Jesus. He likes to pray to the baby Jesus with wings at a Van Halen concert. All of those things. But it’s such a great critique, because, like many funny things, it absolutely gets at the heart of some of what we do with Jesus: we like to see our Jesus as these things. They use absurdity to draw it out into humor. But don’t we all like to see our Jesus as whatever our imagination can come up with? But when you really gaze upon Jesus — like you said that phrase, “Behold the Lamb of God.” What does that word “behold” mean? It’s more than just “look.” It’s “open yourself to attend to the person of Jesus.” And that’s what you’re doing in the whole book. As Brian Zahnd said in the foreword, you’re like an iconographer with words. You’re painting the picture of who Jesus is. You’re writing the picture of who Jesus is. And when you read it, it’s not quaint. It’s not dogmatic. It’s a picture. You’re painting a picture with the story. And hopefully, in the reflection of this, you’ll behold Jesus. You’ll see him. And that will allow us, instead of saying, “I like to see my Jesus this way,” to just say, “Oh, there he is. There’s Jesus.”
Fr. Ken: Brian — that foreword is a blessing. It has its own value as a kind of summary of what Brian has been trying to say about Jesus for a couple decades. Well worth it — don’t skip it. If you’re reading the book, make sure to read that. But I think he got it right. And I think there’s two things we can do. What you were addressing with Talladega Nights is, you’re taking aspects or bits of the story of Jesus, and you’ve really made an idol, not an icon. And so I’ve been thinking about this, especially in light of Philippians 2, which is — talk about story — verses 5 through 11. I mean, it could be a creed. You could say that every morning: “Have this mind in you which is also in Christ Jesus, who did not grasp for equality with God but lowered himself.” It’s the whole story in 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 — seven verses. It’s the whole story.
But thinking about it, it’s like when Moses ascends Sinai to receive the tablets of the law, the children of Israel down below, in their despair and in their cynicism, decide to make a golden calf and worship the golden calf. And I think some people in their imagination think, “Oh, that’s an Egyptian god, or maybe an Assyrian god, or maybe one of the gods of the Canaanites or something.” And it’s not. They were making an image of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — a bull. So they’re making an idol of the God who has addressed them and is their God. They’re making an idol of Yahweh — even though we’re not supposed to pronounce that name — of Adonai, of Elohim. The God, the Lord.
So I think there’s a real danger. I mean, it’s comic. Of course we laugh at Talladega Nights, and that’s beautiful and fun — bring all the humor on. But it’s a very serious matter to take Jesus, and take bits and pieces of the story, and start investing energy in creating something that’s not Jesus and worshiping it. So it was very much at the heart of what I’m trying to do in this book — to dispel false, idol aspects. People are making Jesus an idol. Usually we do that in order to underwrite or give excuses to attitudes, dispositions, actions, and words that don’t line up with the holiness, the beauty, the goodness of God. So we create a false Jesus who is blessing — and we could point the finger at ourselves, but, to be cartoonish, you’ve got Vladimir Putin lining up these Orthodox priests, in the mausoleum that they’ve made for the military, blessing missiles and planes and helicopters and all these kinds of things — which is an antichrist thing to do, to bless these weapons of war as if Jesus is in the middle of all that. And so it’s a false god, but not an Egyptian or Syrian or Palestinian or Canaanite god. We’re talking about the God. And I think it’s far worse. To make an idol of Jesus is worse than worshiping Isis, you know what I’m saying?
Jesse: Well, yeah. I mean, we both grew up in Sunday school cultures where taking the Lord’s name in vain meant you couldn’t say, “Oh my God,” right? But as you grow up, you realize taking the Lord’s name in vain is so much deeper than that. It’s to ascribe to the character of God something that’s not true of God.
Fr. Ken: That’s right. So to take the name of the Lord God in vain is to say that God is in something God would never be in. And so, yes — very positive motivation. It’s not driven by — and it would be okay if it were — a more polemical work, which would be to say, “We are absolutely going to avoid these idols.” But this book is more ironic, in the sense that it’s trying to draw the picture so beautifully that false pictures of Jesus just aren’t attractive. To inoculate the reader against accepting these false stories and images of Jesus that are used to underwrite our greed, or our fear, or our grasping for power, or whatever it is that’s not of love — to have it our way. And so that is a very positive motivation in the book. And it starts with the conversations on buses and subways and trains, and then it continues in conversation with parishioners and neighbors and on social media — and really to subvert a lot of what’s happening in social media into actual love and engagement around what matters. And so, shaping the wisdom that comes to us from the church over the centuries — in different cultures and different times and different languages, men and women who had these experiences with Jesus and wrote about them, that are such tremendous gifts to us as we traverse the real world of 2026 — so that we have companions on the journey that are helping us to see the fullness of Jesus. You’ve got a little piece of it, Jesse. And you mentioned Malcolm Guite — he certainly has a bit of that. And all the men and women — Julian of Norwich, and Irenaeus, and contemporary figures we might look to, like somebody like Beth Moore, or maybe Ann Voskamp — people who are voices today. And in the recent past, somebody like Alexander Schmemann. These voices that give us — and Shawn Copeland is a major influence on me, the Black female writer, when it comes to the cross. Fleming Rutledge, who I think I had in the back of my mind. All of these witnesses that help us to see Jesus well, and to remove false concepts — as cute or comical as they sometimes might be, also dangerous.
The master restorationist
Jesse: Well, and I think too, underneath a lot of this is fear, right? Most people who have a bad image of God, or a poor representation of God in their mind, in their spirit — and they’re responding to that — if your God is wrong, then there is a lot of fear. And what I love about your book, and what I constantly am thinking about, is that he’s just so much better than we know. We limit his goodness more than I think anything else we limit in him. And if you understood the goodness of God and the beauty of that — like Dostoevsky says, right, beauty will save the world. The beauty of the goodness of God is so much more drawing than the anger and fear that can be generated by any false idol.
Fr. Ken: Yes. And when we start with that — Athanasius says in On the Incarnation that part of what it means that God becomes human and dies — an aspect, an angle; these are infinite, this is just one angle — is that he comes as a master restorationist. Each of us is a painting, and the history — the harm we’ve done to ourselves, and the harm that others have done to us, and the experience of the broken world — has damaged the painting. There’s grime and smoke and all these things. And he comes not just to take away the buildup of sin but to restore the vibrant color of our being made in the image of God. So it’s always in reciprocity: we behold the face of Jesus, and then we are conformed to the image. And when we don’t limit the goodness of God, we begin to experience our created goodness, because of the Creator. It’s something that is inherent in us because we’re made in the image of God. And we begin to see our own capacity — despite the fact that we are fallen from love — our own capacity for goodness is far greater than we sometimes allow. And to the extent that we have said yes to the restoration that God wants to do on us, the greater and greater our capacity to participate in our created goodness.
And I think we sometimes put limits on how transformed our neighbor can be, or how transformed our child can be, or how transformed our friend can be, or how transformed our enemy — the potential that our enemy can be transformed by the grace of God to their original goodness, to a memory of who they actually are, so that they begin to understand that violence is not who they are, but healing. Like a great surgeon, you only wound to heal. You don’t wound to destroy. Or the essence, for the person who’s just self-seeking, greedy: greed is not the core of you. Generosity is. And so you’ve been given all of this in order to be a giver. Whatever it is. It is the core struggle for any human, and most of us have several of them. I say in the book that, within creation, human beings have done the most evil. I don’t think cows have — controversial. I don’t think trees have done the most evil. Oceans have not done the most evil. Human beings have. So we’ve made a mess of things. But our capacity for redemption and restoration, and to become in this life — to receive the likeness of the Creator — we limit the goodness of God, but we also limit the capacity, I think, of ourselves to be transformed by grace.
Our part to play
Jesse: Yes. And I’m just wanting to step towards receiving more and more of the fullness of his goodness, and to be made more and more in the image of his goodness. Well, I was thinking we could, heading towards exactly what you’re saying, maybe make our last idea this thought I’ve been thinking about in reading this book, and thinking about just how we image Christ. Because this book is an image of Christ. That’s the whole point of the book. But we are really the true image. And it’s like God is so big and so good and so multifaceted and infinite that the only way he could be displayed and made known on earth is through his people who he’s transformed, restored. And so the whole journey of the entire world — if, however many, eight billion people imaged Christ in their own way, then we might get a little bit of a picture of the goodness and the infinity of God. And we are adding to this day by day.
Fr. Ken: We would still have the problem of death. But other than death, both in the creation and in ourselves, we would be living in Eden again. We would be living in a world made well, if we were all participating in that fullness. And the animals and the creation would participate in all of that. The universe itself would participate in it. We’d still have the problem of death. And so in the end, no matter how converted even the totality of human beings are, it’s the act of God that has to happen. So I don’t think we say, “Well, we’ve just got to leave it to God.” Martin Luther King says that’s superstition: “Well, we’re just going to let God fix this.” We get to participate. Well, how does God show up right now? He shows up in and through us. So when the prisoners are visited, when the sick are taken care of — this happened in the history of the world, with the first Christians in the Roman Empire. There was a conversion of the empire away from its fatalism and its worship of false gods and its running from anybody in misfortune. And the church ran to people, not accepting this superstition that they would be infected with death, or infected with poverty, or whatever, by drawing close to the poor, or infected with criminality by drawing close to the prisoner, and so forth. It converted their whole mindset. And they built hospitals and orphanages. Rodney Stark and all the people — his name is not coming to me right now — the guy who wrote Dominion —
Jesse: Tom Holland.
Fr. Ken: Yeah. A lot of really fine people have studied this and shown that real transformation happened in the Roman Empire because of the church. And it would be the same thing now. And it has been the same thing, in waves.
Jesse: Yes, it has been. We’ve seen this occur in cultures.
Fr. Ken: And it doesn’t take anything away from any of those things. That’s the kind of church we want to be, the kind of human beings we want to be in the world — still knowing that, for all of our efforts, we all die, and then God brings us and the world back. And so we have to fall into death knowing, as we’ve said already, that when we land, we land on the body of Christ, and that the end is not non-being but resurrection, which is us and the world being made well again. And that is ultimately an act of God. So we don’t end up putting too much confidence in our concerted human effort, and we ultimately put our trust in God, who alone can disinfect the world from the scourge of death — and will, and has. At the death of Jesus, resurrection started breaking forth as the reality of this world, and there will be a day when the only thing that there will be is resurrection. We won’t have cemeteries anymore. The world will just be resurrection. In the meantime, we need to be reminded, and so that’s what we’re trying to do here, in our little part. And this is a show for people who are a part of the Charismatic Episcopal Church, and we have our part to play in this renewal. And I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful for this church. It’s not perfect, but it’s where I’m called and where you’re called — and if you’re listening to this, where you’re doing the work for God. And I think we can take joy in that participation. This is the place we get to do that work.
Jesse: Yeah. It’s such a beautiful picture. Nothing you do in kindness and love is too small to be a part of that great picture of hope and resurrection. It’s not wasted. It’s all part of what God’s doing.
Get the book
Fr. Ken: That’s right. And so one thing you can do is you can read this book — to do the marketing pitch at the end. It comes out on Tuesday. You can order it wherever you get your books.
Jesse: It comes out on Tuesday. It’s crazy.
Fr. Ken: It’s already showing up everywhere. Some of the early orders are already arriving — people are getting them. I think Amazon is the one that’s the most behind. Barnes & Noble, straight from Brazos Press, Bookshop, Thrift Books, and even independent stores have it. So it’s a lot of fun, and it’s been a long, long time coming, but here it is.
Jesse: On the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, which is just such a cool thing.
Fr. Ken: I did not put those two things together.
Jesse: I did put the 50th anniversary of you two together.
Fr. Ken: Yeah, there you go. But I did not think about Saint Michael. Debbie, my wife, will be excited about hearing that it’s the same day. So do you guys have the feast on Tuesday, or usually Sunday?
Jesse: This Sunday. We’re going to have a burger truck come. And we’re at Saint Michael’s, which is the origin story for the CEC — the CEC came out of Saint Michael’s, and your participation in that — and so it seems really fitting, really providential. So yeah, we’ll have a big party here on Sunday.
Fr. Ken: Well, get the book, guys. Wherever you like to buy books, it’s there. It’s available. Just walk in and grab it. And shoot me a note. Send me a note. Tell me what you think.
Jesse: Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you for your time. It’s going to be awesome.
Vulnerable God (Brazos Press) is available from Brazos Press, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Thrift Books, Amazon, and independent bookstores.