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cfc2251
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All attempts to put the past into words are interpretations of the past, not "straight history." There is no such thing. Anywhere. Including the Bible."
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Peter Enns |
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I think of Christians who, having been raised to read the Genesis creation story as literal science and history, leave for college, watch the History Channel, or log onto the internet, and find out that fossils and radiometric dating are in fact not hoaxes. That's how nice Christian college freshmen become atheists by Christmas break. If your faith can unravel that quickly, it's enough to make you question whether your faith is worth the ef..
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Peter Enns |
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0e83740
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The Bible isn't a cookbook--deviate from the recipe and the souffle falls flat. It's not an owner's manual--with detailed and complicated step-by-step instructions for using your brand-new all-in-one photocopier/FAX machine/scanner/microwave/DVR/home security system. It's not a legal contract--make sure you read the fine print and follow every word or get ready to be cast into the dungeon. It's not a manual of assembly--leave out a few bolt..
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Peter Enns |
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5d639c9
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In the spiritual life, the opposite of fear is not courage, but trust.
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Peter Enns |
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f3a35b3
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The Bible looks the way it does because "God lets his children tell the story," so to speak."
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Peter Enns |
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cd8346e
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So much can be learned from other traditions. In the long history of the Christian church, so many different, even conflicting, points of view have been embraced as true and valuable.
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Peter Enns |
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cb2fb09
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The need to explain Jesus as both surprise ending and deeply connected to Israel's story drove the Gospel writers to do some creative reading. Sticking to what the Bible says wasn't their goal. Talking about Jesus was.
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Peter Enns |
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0cab8d9
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There's an irony: 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"
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Peter Enns |
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29a785e
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a faith that remains open to the ever-moving Spirit and new possibilities, rather than chaining the Spirit to our past * a faith that welcomes opportunities to think critically and reflectively on how we think about God, the world, and our place in it, rather than resting at all costs on maintaining familiar certainties
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Peter Enns |
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de7999c
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Trust your experiences, your God moments. They don't work as intellectual arguments for God, but that's exactly the point: intellectual arguments aren't enough, and wanting them to be so sooner or later leads to disappointment. God speaks to us through our whole humanity, not just through part of it. God moments can't be proven to anyone else, but that doesn't make them second best. They are proof--of another kind.
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Peter Enns |
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ea09f7a
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Our experiences of God matter--those sacred moments that defy the very rational capabilities we are so keen to rely on.
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Peter Enns |
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3192d93
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Struggling with faith is normal. Journey and pilgrimage have become powerful words for me for describing the life of faith. I have come to expect periods of unsettledness, uncertainty, and fear to remind me that who I am, where I am, and what I think do not define reality. Facing and then truly being present with my experiences along the way help me remember that my experiences at any moment are not the entire journey--including those perio..
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Peter Enns |
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8dcf721
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Doing the best as we can to figure out life, to discern how or if a certain proverb applies right here and now, is not an act of disloyalty toward God, rebellion against God's clear rulebook for life. It is, rather, our sacred responsibility as people of faith.
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Peter Enns |
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bfcf6f4
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And as I write this, Romans 13:1 recently made the rounds on the American political scene to shield the administration from criticism for separating illegal immigrants from their children at the border--which is just one of many reasons why politicians should not be allowed near a Bible without adult supervision.
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Peter Enns |
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4dc607c
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The Bible isn't a book that reflects one point of view. It is a collection of books that records a conversation--even a debate--over time.
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Peter Enns |
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edf6a3b
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The Bible shows us that obedience to God is not about cutting and pasting the Bible over our lives, but seeking the path of wisdom--holding the sacred book in one hand and ourselves, our communities of faith, and our world in the other in order to discern how the God of old is present here and now.
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Peter Enns |
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c4e603a
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The biblical writers were human like us, and nothing is gained by thinking otherwise. Someone might say, "Well, okay, sure they were human, obviously, but the biblical writers were also inspired, directed by God in what to write, and so not simply ordinary human writers." I get the point. To see the Bible as inspired by God is certainly the mainstream view in the history of Christianity (and Judaism), but what that means exactly and how it ..
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Peter Enns |
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26e30b2
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We have practically been conditioned to expect God to be our helicopter parent. And if for some reason we don't run to God to solve every little problem, from finding our car keys to deciding on color schemes for the nursery, we are told there is something deeply wrong with us spiritually. Phooey.
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Peter Enns |
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c17a3c7
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Jesus, who is wisdom incarnate, gives us access to the Creator to reveal hidden things and invites us to seek out our sacred responsibility to perceive God's unscripted presence here and now.
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Peter Enns |
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fcf8487
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I ponder these questions by taking seriously this ancient, ambiguous, and diverse Bible we have as well as honoring my humanity--my experiences, my reasoning, when and where I was born--and I try to get all these factors to talk to each other. That may ring a bell with some of you. I am echoing the so-called Wesleyan Quadrilateral. We are always processing God and faith not from a high place, but from the vantage point of our inescapable hu..
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Peter Enns |
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e0e8890
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None of these modern adaptations is "in the Bible," and yet even the most committed "rulebook Bible" readers out there wind up adapting what the Bible says, because we have to--if we want that ancient text to continue to speak to us today."
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Peter Enns |
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2baae14
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God doesn't change, but God--being God--is never fully captured by our perceptions. As people continue to live and breathe and experience life, how they see God changes too.
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Peter Enns |
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5050314
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God adopted Abraham as the forefather of a new people, and in doing so he also adopted the mythic categories within which Abraham--and everyone else--thought. But God did not simply leave Abraham in his mythic world. Rather, God transformed the ancient myths so that Israel's story would come to focus on its God, the real one.
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Peter Enns |
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46512ee
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A story like the exodus story is what happens when, as I said previously, God lets his children tell the story--in ways they understand and that is packed with meaning for them.
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Peter Enns |
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If there is any cure for thinking of the Bible as a once-told-forever-binding source of information about God and his people, Paul is it. For
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Peter Enns |
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My commitment to follow through on my choice came with a cost. I tried very hard, for years, with complete transparency, to blend together old and new--the particular Christian tradition that birthed me and for which I had deep respect, and the bigger Bible I had come to know, was excited about, and could not deny without deceiving myself and others.
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Peter Enns |
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44b9054
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A noncontextual reading of Scripture is not only methodologically arbitrary but also theologically problematic. It fails to grasp in its entirety a foundational principle of theology that informs not only our understanding of the Bible but of all of God's dealing with humanity recorded there, particularly in Jesus himself: God condescends to where people are, speaks their language, and employs their ways of thinking. Without God's condescen..
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Peter Enns |
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Paul would agree, to a certain extent. He did not think that Jesus was the founder of a new religion, rather the concluding, surprise chapter to Israel's story.
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Peter Enns |
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Christ is the ultimate example of how God enters the messiness of history to save his people.
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Peter Enns |
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diversity in no way implies chaos or error.
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Peter Enns |
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bb67fdb
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The deeper problem here is the unspoken need for our thinking about God to be right in order to have a joyful, freeing, healing, and meaningful faith. The problem is trusting our beliefs rather than trusting God.
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Peter Enns |
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2748ab4
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Doubt is what being cornered by our thinking looks like. Doubt happens when needing to be certain has run its course.
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Peter Enns |
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bd10553
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I feel it is part of the mystery of faith that things normally do not line up entirely, and so when they don't, it is not a signal to me that the journey is at an end but that I am still on it. As I reflect on my own experience and that of many others far wiser than I, God seems willing to help that process along.
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Peter Enns |
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56073b3
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Trust does not cancel our mind but circumscribes it and tames it--and so we do not succumb to fretting or anxious thoughts of being unsure.
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Peter Enns |
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Trust like this is an affront to reason, the control our egos crave. Which is precisely the point. Trust does not work because we have captured God in our minds. It works regardless of the fact that, at the end of the day, we finally learn that we can't.
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Peter Enns |
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90d2ea9
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Two great critiques of modernity by biblical scholars are Walter Brueggemann's Texts Under Negotiation and Walter Wink's The Bible in Human Transformation.
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Peter Enns |
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d487c45
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Seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote: "The eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrifies me."
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Peter Enns |
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0f9a2ba
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Who we are and when and where we exist affect how we imagine God.
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Peter Enns |
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ce88bb5
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I'VE BEEN ON A JOURNEY of rediscovering the Bible and the God behind it for over thirty years and I don't see that journey ending any time soon.
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Peter Enns |
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67168ac
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No attempt should be made to "reconcile" Yahweh's hardening of Pharaoh's heart (plagues 6,8,9,10) with statements in the other plagues that Pharaoh hardened his own heart. The tension cannot be resolved in a facile manner by suggesting, for example, that Pharaoh has already demonstrated his recalcitrance, so Yahweh merely helps the process along, or that he is doing what Pharaoh would have done on his own anyway. Rather, 9:12 is a striking ..
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free-will
god
pharaoh
yahweh
predestination
sovereignty
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Peter Enns |
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9e6d041
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Grace grows best in winter.
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grace
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Peter Enns |
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94e4fd2
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The Pentateuch was not authored out of whole cloth by a second-millennium Moses but is the end product of a complex literary process--written, oral, or both--that did not come to a close until the postexilic period.
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Peter Enns |
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0eee826
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It is only to admit that what we have cannot be explained as an early (second-millennium-BC) document written essentially by one person (Moses). Rather, the Pentateuch has a diverse compositional history spanning many centuries and was brought to completion after the return from exile.
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Peter Enns |
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f99f603
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Seeing the similarities between these two stories should discourage us from expecting the Adam story to contribute to contemporary scientific debates about human origins (let alone guide those debates). Likewise, the similarities between Genesis and Atrahasis suggest that the biblical account cannot be labeled "historical," at least not in any conventional sense of the word."
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Peter Enns |