|
4c28bf2
|
Whatever we do, let's not imagine that the Israelites were ancient versions of ourselves, maybe less well groomed, who were "nice," read their Bibles daily, the kind you could invite to church and want to marry your daughter, who would vote Republican or drive a hybrid. We respect these biblical stories most when we try to understand what the writers did and why, not when we place false expectations on them, like seeing them as a timeless s..
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
fa4bd25
|
If this Jesus is God's answer, what is the question? Paul eventually came to the conclusion that God was answering a question that gets at the core of not simply the Jewish drama, but the human drama, a question that no one was yet asking in quite the same way.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
37f0ed7
|
For Christians, then, the question is not "Who gets the Bible right?" The question is and has always been, "Who gets Jesus right?" The Gospel writers and Paul couldn't have made that any clearer."
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
06f6497
|
Cramming the stories of Israel into a modern mold of history writing not only makes the Bible look like utter nonsense; it also obscures what the Bible models for us about our own spiritual journey. On that journey, what matters most is not simply where we've been--the triumphs or the tragedies--but where we are with God now in the moment. All great spiritual leaders will tell us that living in the moment is key to vibrant communion with Go..
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
0ce3910
|
What makes the Bible God's Word isn't its uncanny historical accuracy, as some insist, but the sacred experiences these stories point to, beyond the words themselves. Watching these ancient pilgrims work through their faith, even wrestling with how they did that, models for us our own journeys of seeking to know God better and commune with him more deeply.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
6196238
|
When the dust clears and in the quiet of your own heart, what kind of God do you believe in, really? And why?
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
4ab411f
|
the challenges of our day-to-day existence are sustained reminders that our life of faith simply must have its center somewhere other than in our ability to hold it together in our minds. Life is a pounding surf that wears away our rock-solid certainty. The surf always wins. Slowly but surely. Eventually. It may be best to ride the waves rather than resist them. What are your one or two biggest obstacles to staying Christian? What are those..
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
342f783
|
the passionate defense of the Bible as a "history book" among the more conservative wings of Christianity, despite intentions, isn't really an act of submission to God; it is making God submit to us. In its most extreme forms, making God look like us is what the Bible calls idolatry."
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
6599bfa
|
To love as God loves means loving not just others like us, but those who are not.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
1a69c49
|
All this is to say, if your present community sees your spiritual journey as a problem because you are wandering off their beach blanket, it may be time to find another community. One should never do that impulsively. But if after a time you are sensing that you do not belong, that you are a problem to be corrected rather than a valued member of the community, maybe God is calling you elsewhere and to find for yourself that "they" aren't so..
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
84464e2
|
I think part of what it means for God to "reveal" himself is to keep us guessing, to come to terms with the idea that knowing God is also a form of not knowing God, of knowing that we cannot fully know, but only catch God in part--which is more than enough to keep us busy."
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
ecebd91
|
The Bible, just as it is, still works. Don't try to explain it. Just accept it. That won't make you a mindless zombie. It just means you are accepting your own human limitations and acknowledging by faith that something bigger than ourselves is happening, someone bigger is behind it, and we have the privilege to be a part of it.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
9961c32
|
When you read the Bible on its own terms, you discover that it doesn't behave itself like a holy rulebook should.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
3cae58f
|
As Jesus, the Word, is of divine origin as well as a thoroughly human figure of first-century Palestine, so is the Bible of ultimately divine origin yet also thoroughly a product of its time.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
db1e06e
|
was learning to trust God enough (what a concept) to know that, like family (the Bible calls him "Father" after all), he will come through no matter what, that his love and commitment to me is deeper than how my brain happens to be processing information at any given moment, to trust that God will be with me, not despite the journey but precisely because I was trusting God enough to take it."
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
1296125
|
The Bible looks the way it does because "God lets his children tell the story," so to speak. Children see the world from their limited gaze. A second grader might give a class presentation on what mom does all day. She will talk about her mom from her point of view, rooted in love and devotion. She'll filter--unconsciously and in an age-appropriate manner--her mother's day through how she perceives her family and her role in the family. She..
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
5a473d6
|
We understand today that the physical universe is bigger and older and operates very differently than how the biblical writers, and all other ancient people, thought. Many Christians stumble over this, thinking they are showing respect for the Bible and obeying God by making the biblical story mesh with modern science, or rejecting modern science entirely in favor of God's Word. But there is no need to feel embarrassed or unfaithful by ackn..
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
6da1ea9
|
Readers who come to the Bible expecting something more like an accurate textbook, a more-or-less objective recalling of the past--because, surely, God wouldn't have it any other way--are in for an uncomfortable read. But if they take seriously the words in front of them, they will quickly find that the Bible doesn't deliver on that expectation. Not remotely.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
946cf41
|
When we open the Bible and read it, we are eavesdropping on an ancient spiritual journey. That journey was recorded over a thousand-year span of time, by different writers, with different personalities, at different times, under different circumstances, and for different reasons. In
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
ae5cb4c
|
The Lord's Supper teaches that] Rituals are good, and they are instituted and used by God to 'connect' his people with him. We learn through ritual that the church is not just made up of individuals, but is a corporate body. It is not just about personal salvation, but a group of people, the people of God, who are bound to one another and to the faithful through the generations. (page 263)
|
|
communion
lord-s-supper
ritual
|
Peter Enns |
|
3f53f2e
|
Lord, help me let go of control. Help me die. Help me trust.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
750854b
|
If we let the Bible be the Bible, on its own terms--on God's terms--we will see this in-fleshing God at work, not despite the challenges, the unevenness, and ancient strangeness of the Bible, but precisely because of these things. Perhaps not the way we would have written our sacred book, if we had been consulted, but the one that the good and wise God has allowed his people to have.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
fa4b30a
|
Repetition and familiarity work. What is repeated becomes familiar, and this becomes a part of us. Our own culture understands this, but alas, not always the church. Far too many equate ritual with spiritual dryness. True, ritual and liturgy can be dead--even using the terms can raise hackles--but only when the significance and power of those rituals are forgotten. Spiritual death is not a property of ritual itself. To the contrary, ritual ..
|
|
religion
ritual
|
Peter Enns |
|
35a3d00
|
Doubt is God's instrument, will arrive in God's time, and will come from unexpected places--places out of your control. And when it does, resist the fight-or-flight impulse. Pass through it--patiently, honestly, and courageously for however long it takes. True transformation takes time.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
d2209f6
|
It is wholly incomprehensible to think that thousands of years ago God would have felt constrained to speak in a way that would be meaningful only to Westerners several thousand years later. To do so borders on modern, Western arrogance.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
21145ee
|
I've learned to accept this paradox: a holy book that more often than not doesn't act very much like you'd expect it, but more like a book written two thousand to three thousand years ago would act. I expect the Bible to reflect fully the ancient settings in which it was written, and therefore not act as a script that can simply be dropped into our lives without a lot of thought and wisdom. The Bible must be thought through, pondered, tried..
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
a246c7b
|
The spiritual disconnection many feel today stems precisely from expecting (or being told to expect) the Bible to be holy, perfect, and clear, when in fact after reading it they find it to be morally suspect, out of touch, confusing, and just plain weird.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
99595cc
|
getting the Bible right and getting Jesus right are not the same thing.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
58f5a7e
|
In the New Testament, God's steadfast love and faithfulness are seen, not in an act of deliverance from foreign enemies, but in sending the Son and raising Him from the dead to enact a global rescue mission (Romans 8:3.) Jesus is God's supreme, grand, climactic act of faithfulness. Not only that, but "faithful" also describes Jesus. Paul writes, "We know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but in faith in Jesus Christ" (G..
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
ab85dfa
|
BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGISTS are about as certain as you can be about these things that the conquest of Canaan as the Bible describes did not happen: no mass invasion from the outside by an Israelite army, and no extermination of Canaanites as God commanded.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
833d962
|
We should linger here for a moment, for it summarizes a main theme of Paul's letters: God's unexpected move--Jesus's death and resurrection--places Jews and Gentiles on equal footing with God.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
a561f60
|
The Bible--from back to front--is the story of God told from the limited point of view of real people living at a certain place and time.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
4a5210c
|
I mean, if we try to explain Jesus's handling of his Bible in terms of how many Christians today feel the Bible "ought" to be read, Jesus will look like one of my college Bible students, playing free association with the Bible. Or worse, we may try to find some way of taking Jesus out of his ancient Jewish world and making him look more like a suburban Protestant, an urban hipster, a tea party spokesman, and so on."
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
f8fe10f
|
Here is another strategy for the sentence completion exercise: Sure, Jesus talks about loving your enemies, but Jesus also talks about throwing sinners into hell to burn forever. Since eternal damnation is far worse than exterminating merely one ancient people for their land, the argument goes, don't get all worked up about the Canaanites. Crisis averted. No, it's not.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
5cbdcbf
|
judging by how the Bible actually behaves--God did not design scripture to be a hushed afternoon in an oak-paneled library. Instead, God has invited us to participate in a wrestling match, a forum for us to be stretched and to grow.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
f63d66f
|
I will use the conventional Christian term "Old Testament" when talking about the sacred writings of the ancient Israelites--a. k.a. the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, an acronym for the three sections of the Jewish Bible, Torah (five books of Moses), Nevi'im (prophets), and Kethuvim (writings)." --
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
5544628
|
a common burden so many Christians have unwittingly carried, namely, that watching over us is God, an unstable parent, who is right off the bat harsh, vindictive, at best begrudgingly merciful, and mainly interested in whether we've read and understood the fine print; if not, God has no recourse but to punish us.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
959113e
|
If God were a helicopter parent, our sacred book would be full of clear, consistent, unambiguous information to take in. In other words, it wouldn't look anything like it does. But if the Bible's main purpose is to form us, to grow us to maturity, to teach us the sacred responsibility of communing with the Spirit by walking the path of wisdom, it would leave plenty of room for pondering, debating, thinking, and the freedom to fail. And that..
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
a08e674
|
Sticking to the Bible at every turn, like it's an owner's manual or book of instruction, as the way to know God misses what Paul and the rest of the New Testament writers show us again and again: the words on the page of the Bible don't drive the story, Jesus does. Jesus is bigger than the Bible. For
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
167c703
|
The Adam story, then, is not simply about the past. It's about Israel's present brought into the past--even as far past as the beginning of the human drama itself.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
05a3ae7
|
To feel that our faith is threatened can easily turn to fear. But, judging from the long and varied history of thinking within Christianity, "being right" is elusive, and the Bible is never something we will actually master. The relentless and sinful human habit of creating God to look like ourselves, and thus distorting God, is also a constant problem. The choice we all need to make daily is whether we are willing to hold our narratives wi..
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
cec8969
|
The broader we cast our net, the deeper we wind up owning our own thoughts.
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
f88ec62
|
You get the feeling from the Bible that being unsettled is almost a normal part of the process. Not that we should go looking for it-- it will find us soon enough-- but struggling in some way seems like something we should expect on our own spiritual journeys. True struggling in faith is a stretching experience, and without it, you don't mature in your faith. You either remain an infant or get cocky. Feeling dis-ease and challenged in faith..
|
|
|
Peter Enns |
|
51623c8
|
We can well imagine Jews feeling a bit out of their element--maybe intimidated and shamed by their own story, which began in slavery, ended in exile, and with absolutely zero contributions to philosophy or science. "Some 'chosen people'! What kind of God did you say you follow? Apparently one who lets bad things happen to you."
|
|
|
Peter Enns |