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Anyway, we don't need to get into all that. My point is simply, no, King David, the heavens are not telling the glory of God (Ps. 19:1)--at least not without a lot of heavy theological lifting and perhaps a double bourbon. The heavens actually freak me out and make me wonder whether there is a God at all
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Peter Enns |
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52c806f
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God seems uncomfortably touchy. It doesn't take much to set him off to kill, plague, or otherwise physically punish these frail human vessels God has created. Swift physical retribution seems to be this God's go-to means of conflict resolution. We only need to get to the sixth chapter of the Bible to see God already so fed up that he drowns all flesh in which is the breath of life--humans together with animals (for good measure, I suppose)-..
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Peter Enns |
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a5d9292
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I hear Aslan's words to Shasta: "'Child,' said the Lion, 'I am telling you your story. . . . I tell no one any story but his own."
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Peter Enns |
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4d7bac3
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Today we don't have a heavenly realm full of gods, but we do have a lot of banks, which means we have loads of banking options. Banks vie for our business by comparing themselves to other banks--"We are more friendly, have more locations, better interest rates, free checking," and so forth. All competing banks claim, "We are the place to trust with your financial lives, not those dozens of other options you pass on the street day after day...
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Peter Enns |
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In Hebrew Exodus 24:10 says rather casually that Moses and a party of more than seventy Israelites saw the God of Israel, which is a problem because no one is actually supposed to be able to see God. The Greek translation shifts the focus (literally): they saw the place where the God of Israel stood. Likewise, after instructions for building the mercy seat atop the ark of the covenant, God says, There I will meet with you (Exod. 25:22). In ..
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Peter Enns |
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fd32191
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Then we have the Gospel of John, the odd man out. John's story of Jesus is so out of step with the others that it is sometimes hard to see how he could be talking about the same person.
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Peter Enns |
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88ca94d
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Rather than defending the Gospels against their (self-evident) diversity, we should be asking ourselves why they are different at all. Why are there four versions of Jesus's life out there? I can think of a few reasons why these differences exist. No one was taking notes as Jesus was talking, and so the stories got jumbled by the time they went from oral to written form. And we humans have faulty memories and "remember" events differently. ..
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Peter Enns |
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b9cfb6f
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Because, more than the other three Gospel writers, John is big on Jesus's divine authority over the religious leaders. That's part of his agenda, and so he shapes the past to make the point.
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Peter Enns |
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The Mystery of Israel's Origins: An Introduction and Proposals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. *Stager, Lawrence E. "Forging and Identity: The Emergence of Ancient Israel," in The Oxford History of the Biblical World, ed. Michael D. Coogan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Stark, Thomas. The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It). Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010...
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Peter Enns |
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Zehr, Paul M. Biblical Criticism in the Life of the Church. Harrisonburg, VA: Herald, 1986.
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Peter Enns |
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I definitely get where these questions are coming from, and remember: I don't think "knowing" or seeking to think "correctly" about God is wrong. Not at all. The problem is preoccupation with correct thinking--mistaking our thoughts about God with the real thing, and then to base our faith on holding on to that certainty."
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Peter Enns |
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0d248fa
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Believing is easy. It gives us wiggle room to think our way out of a tight spot. But trust doesn't have any wiggle room. It explodes it. Trust is about being all in.
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Peter Enns |
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4bf7e0e
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Our level of insight does not determine our level of trust. In fact, seeking insight rather than trust can get in the way of our walk with God.
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Peter Enns |
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bf72b60
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Aligning faith in God and certainty about what we believe and needing to be right in order to maintain a healthy faith--these do not make for a healthy faith in God. In a nutshell, that is the problem. And that is what I mean by the "sin of certainty."
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Peter Enns |
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f6a2163
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A faith that rests on knowing, where you have to "know what you believe" in order to have faith, is disaster upon disaster waiting to happen. It values too highly our mental abilities. All it takes to ruin that kind of faith is a better argument. And there's always a better argument out there somewhere."
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Peter Enns |
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51b1679
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What could be more normal than for different people, living at different times, in different places, who wrote about the past for different reasons and to different audiences, to produce different versions on the past? Nothing. And that's what we see in the Bible.
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Peter Enns |
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Our home planet, as Carl Sagan put it, is a "pale blue dot" . . . The "Pale Blue Dot" is a moving soliloquy by Carl Sagan in his 1980 television series Cosmos. The remake of this series, which aired in 2014 and was hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, replayed Sagan's soliloquy toward the end of the final episode (episode 13, "Unafraid of the Dark") with stunning graphics to illustrate that the Earth is a "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
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Peter Enns |
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6e4850a
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What drove the Bible's storytellers to recall the past the way they did was the quest to experience God in the present, a sometimes volatile and catastrophic present. 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..
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Peter Enns |
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These diverse stories of the past that we find in the Bible are not a problem to be solved. They model for us the spiritual immediacy of the present.
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Peter Enns |
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Wherever biblical writers talk about the past, we should expect them to be shaping the past as well.
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Peter Enns |
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These first seven books are Israel's stories of their deep past, or "origins stories" as they are sometimes called. They don't exist for entertainment or for idle curiosities about the past (and definitely not as fodder for children's Bible lessons). They explain how things came to be, why things are the way they are, and most important, how Israel got to be Israel--a kingdom with a land of its own."
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Peter Enns |
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f8792e0
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That kind of Bible works, because that is our story, too. The Bible "partners" with us (so to speak), modeling for us our walk with God in discovering greater depth and maturity on our journey of faith, not by telling us what to do at each step, but by showing us a journey of hills and valleys, straight lanes and difficult curves, of new discoveries and insights, of movement and change--with God by our side every step of the way."
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Peter Enns |
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a0a6190
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Revering the Bible and handling it creatively might sound like a contradiction to us, but it wasn't to ancient Jews. To understand why, and therefore to understand Jesus, we need to back up for just a second. As we saw in chapter 3, the Old Testament (more or less as we know it today) was produced by the Israelites in the generations after they returned from the exile in Babylon (539 BCE). These writings--some of which were being produced a..
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Peter Enns |
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c29f1ce
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The Gospels are also anonymous, and the names attached to them come to us from early church tradition. Likely none was an eyewitness. The writers relied on stories of Jesus that were circulating orally, perhaps (or probably) going back to what eyewitnesses had seen.
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Peter Enns |
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Baker, Sharon L. Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You've Been Taught About God's Wrath and Judgment. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010. *Batto, Bernard. Slaying the Dragon: Mythmaking in the Biblical Tradition. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1992. Bell, Rob. Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011. Brettler, Marc Zvi, Peter Enns, and Daniel Harring..
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Peter Enns |
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The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say About Human Origins. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2012. *Goldingay, John. Theological Diversity and the Authority of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987. Gorman, Michael. Reading Paul. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2008. Hawk, L. Daniel. Joshua in 3-D: A Commentary on Biblical Conquest and Manifest Destiny. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011. *Japhet, Sara. The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles ..
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Peter Enns |
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Testament Can Teach Us. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011. Kugel, James L. How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. New York: Free Press, 2008. *------. Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Levenson, Jon D. Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 199..
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Peter Enns |
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Walter Brueggemann calls these parts of the Bible Israel's "countertestimony" . . . This spot-on term to name the dark side of the Bible, and which calls into question Israel's main storyline, comes from Walter Brueggemann's Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy."
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Peter Enns |
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In 1975 the Jesuit philosopher John Kavanaugh . . . For the dialogue between Kavanaugh and Mother Teresa, see Brennan Manning's Ruthless Trust. An account of Mother Teresa's journey in a collection of her letters is Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk). The name of the home has since been changed to "Home of the Pure Heart" as has the name of the city to Kolkata."
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Peter Enns |
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d1d06e8
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Paradoxically, 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.
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Peter Enns |
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33a6498
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I was also facing a simultaneous and very serious stressor at work . . . In this section I recall briefly my departure from Westminster Theological Seminary in 2008. The focus of the "controversy" was the publication of Inspiration and Incarnation. The matter became quite public, landing me on the cover of the Philadelphia Inquirer ("Embattled Professor to Leave Seminary") and attracting the attention of the local NPR station (resulting in ..
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Peter Enns |
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I was drawn to authors and others who were explicitly outside of the Christian tradition . . . Such as Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth), Robert Bly (Iron John), Don Miguel Ruiz (The Four Agreements), and Sam Keen (Fire in the Belly). I also re-read Viktor Frankl's classic Man's Search for Meaning (which my daughter Lizz and my wife Sue also read while Lizz was away).
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Peter Enns |
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76af56a
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they introduced me to extended communities of faith through writers I had never heard of before . . . Along with the writings of Gerald May and Thomas Keating, whom I had not known before, I was encouraged to explore or revisit a few other writers, including Richard Rohr (Adam's Return and The Naked Now), Thomas Merton (Thoughts
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Peter Enns |
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in Solitude; also James Martin's introduction to Merton and others, Becoming Who You Are), Henri Nouwen (The Inner Voice of Love), Gregory Mayers (Listen to the Desert), Rowan Williams (Tokens of Trust), J. Keith Miller (Compelled to Control) and David Benner (Spirituality and the Awakening Self). Let me also include here Frederica Matthews-Green (The Jesus Prayer and At the Corner of East and Now) for gentle and compelling introductions to..
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Peter Enns |
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Andrew Perriman at "P.OST" (postnost.net)."
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Peter Enns |
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You might find yourself wondering whether all this detail is really necessary, that God could really have stopped after the Ten Commandments and not gotten into leprosy, eating pork, or how to dress and ordain a priest.
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Peter Enns |
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e93c82d
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don't want to beat a dead lamb, but let me say again that contradictions between Old Testament laws aren't exactly an industry secret. Jewish tradition has wrestled with them since before Christianity. Biblical scholars write books about it. Who knows, perhaps a future episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel will have Midge's mom stressed out about how exactly to prepare the Passover lamb.
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Peter Enns |
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865eec7
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The Bible is an ancient book and we shouldn't be surprised to see it act like one. So seeing God portrayed as a violent, tribal warrior is not how God is but how he was understood to be by the ancient Israelites communing with God in their time and place. The biblical writers were storytellers. Writing about the past was never simply about understanding the past for its own sake, but about shaping, molding, and creating the past to speak to..
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Peter Enns |
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That is the lesson we learn from the Old Testament, Israel's story. God meets the ancient Israelites as they are able to understand him--as a warrior who slays his enemies, human and divine; a deity who is appeased by the blood of animals; a God who commands that eating lobster and bodily discharges make one "unclean," and considers virgin daughters spoils of war and the property of their fathers. And just when it seems this is all there is..
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Peter Enns |
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Think of it this way: the same wisdom that was with God when God "ordered" creation (Gen. 1) is available to us as we seek to "order" the chaos of our lives."
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Peter Enns |
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The Bible is not, never has been, and never will be the center of the Christian faith. Even though the Bible (at least in some form) has been ever present since the beginning of Christianity, it's not the central focus of the Christian faith. That position belongs to God, specifically, what God has done in and through Jesus. The Bible is the church's nonnegotiable partner, but it is not God's final word: Jesus is.
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Peter Enns |
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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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The way forward is to let go of that need to find the answers we crave and decide to continue along a path of faith anyway (as Qohelet would say). That kind of faith is not a crutch, but radical trust.
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Peter Enns |
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59ed125
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I still think and talk about what I think God is like, but I've hopefully learned (feel free to keep me honest here, people) that being right and winning isn't the endgame here. Loving as God loves is.
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Peter Enns |