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More than anything, studying the Bible with Jews dislodged my parochial thinking about God, and it's had a lasting impact. Over time, I came to appreciate firsthand the richness and depth of that tradition. I also felt some shame for never really being exposed to it before,
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Peter Enns |
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What is true of the Law is also true of the Bible generally. The Bible (both Old and New Testaments) exhibits this same characteristic of the sacred past being changed, adapted, rethought, and rewritten by people of faith, not because they disrespected the past, but because they respected it so much they had to tie it to their present. I'll go even farther. Without such changes over time, Christianity wouldn't exist. The Christian tradition..
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Peter Enns |
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Thinking of the Bible as shifting and moving may feel spiritually risky, bordering on heretical, but it isn't. Sermons, Bible study materials, prayer books, and the like adapt the ancient words for modern benefit all the time. Biblical psalms that praise the Lord and then ask God to squash the enemy are often edited for church consumption. Generally speaking, Christians think asking God to kill their enemies is wrong (Jesus said so), so adj..
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Peter Enns |
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Without its unwavering commitment to adaptation over time, the Bible would have died a quick death over two thousand years ago. Its existence as a source of spiritual truth that transcends specific times and places is made possible by its flexibility and adaptive nature--one of the many paradoxes we need to embrace when it comes to the Bible.
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Peter Enns |
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that trust means letting go of the need to know, of the need to be certain. And a long and honored Christian practice, diverse as it is, already existed that understood that process.
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Peter Enns |
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The darkness does us a favor by exposing control as an illusion. When everything is removed, "Where can I take back some control here?" eventually ceases being the active question and is replaced with a plea: "Lord, help me let go of control. Help me die. Help me trust."
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Peter Enns |
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84e52f8
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Wisdom, in other words, was not an add-on, but was always central for obeying any law in the Bible. Laws, once we begin thinking about what they mean and how they are to be obeyed, actually push us to seek wisdom, which goes beyond mechanical obedience. It's not surprising, therefore, that ancient Jews came to think of wisdom and Law as inseparable--they need each other to work, like needing a pin number to access your cash.
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Peter Enns |
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Mother Teresa. According to her own journal, she was in her dark night more or less from 1948 until near the time of her death in 1997.
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Peter Enns |
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Belief and faith always have content--a what. But a faith that looks like what the Bible describes is rooted deeply in trust in God (rather than ourselves) and in faithfulness to God by being humbly faithful to others (as the Father and Son have been faithful to us). That's basically it--though it's anything but easy.
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Peter Enns |
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b17dd6b
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Perhaps her long dark night fueled her life, where she kept moving anyway, as an act of trust so deep it cannot be rationally explained--and indeed would look foolish if anyone tried. And the result was about as clear a Jesus movement as you can point to in recent history. Mother Teresa learned
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Peter Enns |
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trust--not clarity, not certainty, but trust in God. And all of that poured out to the people around her.
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Peter Enns |
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One cannot have contentment in the Christian life without the darkness. Dying is the only path to resurrection, and that is the only way of knowing God. There is no shortcut. Jesus himself is our model for this.
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Peter Enns |
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Doubt is God's way of helping us not go there, though the road may be very hard and long.
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Peter Enns |
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I've learned to be fine with not knowing.
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Peter Enns |
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It is now increasingly agreed that the Old Testament in its final form is a product of and response to the Babylonian Exile. This premise needs to be stated more precisely. The Torah (Pentateuch) was likely completed in response to the exile, and the subsequent formation of the prophetic corpus and the "writings" [poetic and wisdom texts] as bodies of religious literature (canon) is to be understood as a product of Second Temple Judaism [po..
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Peter Enns |
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Reimagining the God of the Bible is what Christians do. More than that, they have to, if they wish to speak of the biblical God at all.
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Peter Enns |
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Should we be the least bit surprised when we, along with some biblical writers, find ourselves wandering beyond the words in the Bible as we think about what God is like, sensing that the God we see there made sense for that time but not necessarily for ours, and that the God we were introduced to in the Bible is not in every way the God we believe in here and now? My answer to that rather convoluted question is, "No, we should not be surpr..
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Peter Enns |
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The Creator is being reimagined all the time and can be reimagined through the lens of any culture, of any time and place. No one culture, and certainly not the (largely white male affluent) Western culture I inhabit, can claim superior status for reimagining God once and for all. The Creator doesn't need any of us to sit atop the mountain and speak down to everyone else.
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Peter Enns |
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whatever it means to speak of the Bible as inspired by God clearly doesn't mean the Bible is scrubbed clean of the human experience of the writers.
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Peter Enns |
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A Bible that does things like this is not a disappointing problem that has to be explained away or made excuses for, but something to be embraced with thanksgiving as a divine gift of love, as we, in return, accept our sacred and biblical responsibility to walk daily the path of wisdom rather than looking to hitch an easy ride.
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Peter Enns |
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The diversity we see in the Bible reflects the inevitably changing circumstances of the biblical writers across the centuries as they grappled with their sacred yet ancient and ambiguous tradition.
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Peter Enns |
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And taking seriously the historically shaped biblical portrayal of a violent God drives us to ask for ourselves, "Is this what God is like?"
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Peter Enns |
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Doesn't God realize that we don't share the common understanding that, say, Paul shares with the people in Corinth or Thessalonica? Doesn't God realize that making twenty-one of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament letters means that we will have to think--really think--about what these letters were meant to do and then be really thoughtful and intentional, maybe even humble, about how to engage them for ourselves? Doesn't God know t..
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Peter Enns |
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We get something out of them only by wrestling with their "historical particularity" (as some put it) and then doing the hard work of accepting the sacred responsibility of discerning how all of that works out here and now in whatever situation we find ourselves."
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Peter Enns |
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Paul is "our guy," and we Protestants continue to expect from him clear direction about what to believe and what to do. And Paul certainly seems to oblige. He has that alluring black-and-white, decisive, uncompromising "just do what I say" quality that some of us just can't get enough of. It's almost as if Paul's letters have become the Protestant version of the Law."
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Peter Enns |
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I am not trying to offer a cheap apologetic for the resurrection of Christ; accepting the resurrection of Christ is truly a matter of faith.
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Peter Enns |
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Rounding out our list of early Christian writers is Augustine (354-430), especially his work The Literal Meaning of Genesis, where he shows, among other things, how much intellectual effort is required to handle Genesis well, and how ill-advised it is to read the creation stories literally. It is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these [..
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Peter Enns |
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If we toss about the idea of "God in the flesh" as if it were just that thing we believe, we are not tuned in to the shock and even offense that John's opening lines would have generated. Christianity is a weird religion, folks."
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Peter Enns |
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Whether we are aware of it or not, behind our religious deliberations, in one form or another, we are really asking a deeply foundational question, "What kind of God do I believe in, really?" This is not a luxury question for those with idle time on their hands, but exactly the kind of question we should deliberately bring to the front of our consciousness as an expression of responsible faith; it is not evidence that our faith is weakening..
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Peter Enns |
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We are all culturally embedded creatures--we can never untangle ourselves from our here and now. We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.
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Peter Enns |
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Wisdom teaches us to embrace both the adequacy and the limitations of our God-talk, to keep the two in tension. Perhaps accepting that paradox is true faith.
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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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Burridge, Richard A. Four Gospels, One Jesus? A Symbolic Reading. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005. *Campbell, Anthony F., and Mark A. O'Brien. Unfolding the Deuteronomistic History: Origins, Upgrades, Present Text. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000. *Clifford, Richard J. Creation Accounts in the Ancient Near East and in the Bible. Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1994. Dever, William G. Who Were the Israelites and Wher..
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Peter Enns |
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To mention just a few: Brian McLaren, The Last Word and After That; Valerie Tarico, Trusting Doubt; Greg Boyd, Benefit of the Doubt; Rachel Held Evans, Faith Unravelled (formerly, Evolving in Monkeytown); Philip Yancey, Disappointment with God; Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith.
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Peter Enns |