Which did you hear about in Cathechism, Sunday School?

What do you know? God is even better than we ever imagined. More loving. More freeing. More intimate.

What good news!

This was the reaction of a small group of mostly Catholics at being introduced to “Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God.” Brian Zahnd’s book began a years-long discovery of a modern Christian movement, which we have come to know as “The Beautiful Gospel”.

Our exuberance for Zahnd’s book and its message has not waned over the years. In fact, it had been bolstered over-and-over again with the discovery of subsequent books by Zahnd and other writers who carry similar and related messages, including Brad Jersak, C. Baxter Kruger, William Paul Young, and Fr. Richard Rohr.

So what do you do with over-the-top good news that is so good that it begs to be shared? Our immediate thought was to host an online book club to explore the books of the “Beautiful Gospel” writers with others. So, we did.

It seemed natural to start with the book that drew us into this journey and that led us to a God a thousand times more loving than we ever learned in Sunday Mass, weekly catechism classes, and summer school led by black and white-clad nuns.

An open invitation was posted on every available social media outlet to which we had access. We advertised the book club as a “no judgment” discussion around thought-provoking questions.

As we waited for responses, it came to us that Zahnd might have written his book for more of a Protestant/Evangelical audience but that our fellow Catholics would also benefit greatly from meeting a better-than-we-knew Creator. We were hopeful that at least a few potential book club members would be Catholics.

What a surprise when the response resulted in the book club members being 100 percent Catholic! To clarify, the final count was four with all but one being members of the hosting team.

From the very first meeting, our suspicion about Zahnd writing his book primarily for a non-Catholic audience became more certain. All of the members knew nothing growing up of Jonathan Edwards’ famous 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which was the focus of Zahnd’s book. The sermon was preached to Edward’s own congregation in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Also, the idea of God being angry or mean was not something that the book club members recalled as being a part of their religious upbringing. The God in Catholic formation teaching was loving, kind and a wonderful Father, the members reported.

The over-the-top description, in Edwards’ sermon, of a God who “holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire” was not only totally foreign to the Catholic membership growing up but completely rejected as the truth during the club’s discussions. Similarly rejected as truth was Edward’s even more hateful rhetoric that God “abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; His wrath towards you burns like fire, He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire.”

That this sermon was accepted as truth and highly influential among Protestant Christians, was a puzzle to members of the book club. They were dismayed to read that Edward’s “angry” God theme influenced the believers of large segments of the Christian church and was the catalyst for the Great Awakening that ignited a revival movement among Protestants.

Edward’s use of fear, to inspire people to repent and follow Christ, is called into question by Zahnd throughout his book. Book club members were in complete agreement.

According to reports of people in attendance when Edward presented his sermon, incredible fear spread throughout the audience at hearing his words. “Before the sermon was done there was a great moaning and crying out through the whole house — “What shall I do to be saved?” “Oh, I am going to hell!” “Oh what shall I do for a Christ?” and so forth — so that the minister was obliged to desist. The shrieks and cries were piercing and amazing,” wrote Rev. Stephen Williams in his diary entry of what he witnessed during Edward’s sermon in Enfeld, Conn.

It is believed that Edward’s purpose for presenting such a terror-inducing sermon was to “awaken” Christians from a state of complacency about their faith and relationship with God into greater awareness about the consequences of sin. The responding widespread renewal to individual piety and religious devotion among Protestant Christians is seen as evidence that his purpose was fulfilled.

The movement that was born out of the Great Awakening in the United States is evangelicalism. This segment of the Christian church emphasizes individual piety, religious devotion and a belief in the necessity of being “born again.” Evangelicalism also affirms traditional Protestant teachings on the Bible’s infallibility, authority and historicity.

While all of these deeply (and long) held Evangelical beliefs were not seen as problematic to the truth about the unconditional loving nature of God, Zahnd’s book begs the question about the foundation of Evangelicalism if it was formed on the mistaken premise of an angry, retributive God as described by Jonathan Edwards in his famous sermon.

The unanimous conclusion reached by the book club members was that the faulty foundation of Evangelicalism in the United States is exactly why Zahnd wrote the book “Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God.” Having spent most of his life as a member and pastor of Evangelical churches reinforcing the vision of an angry, violent vision of God, Zahnd’s passion to counter the damage done to Christians by Edwards’ “angry God” sermon and almost 300 years of reinforcement by many other Evangelical leaders and major figures is palatable throughout his book.

This all culminates in the last chapter, “Love Alone Is Credible,” in which Zahnd blasts his heart-felt belief in a loving God all over the pages. This was the book club members’ favorite chapter.

“If John 3:16 is to mean anything, it must mean that God gets what God wants through love or not at all,” he writes among his final words. “If I believe that love never fails, it’s because I believe that God is love. To believe in the sufficiency of God’s love to save the world is not naive optimism; it’s Christianity.”