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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2e810ac | In the entertaining story in 1 Kings 18: 20-40, the prophet Elijah* teases and mocks the priests of the Canaanite god Baal when their god does not show up for a divine duel with Yahweh. At one point Elijah even suggests that perhaps Baal needed to use the restroom, which is to say he isn't a god at all. I'm not kidding. He has wandered away in verse 27 is a euphemism for going potty. | Peter Enns | ||
| a0cea8a | These ancient writers had an adequate understanding of God for them in their time, but not for all time--and if we take that to heart, we will actually be in a better position to respect these ancient voices and see what they have to say rather than whitewashing the details and making up "explanations" to ease our stress." | Peter Enns | ||
| 54a2660 | Biblical writers living in different times and places who wrote for different reasons and under different circumstances have modeled for us the centrality of wisdom for the life of faith. To rethink the past in light of the present moment, as the ancient writers did, is--again--not an act of faithlessness, but the very thing faith demands. To do what is necessary to bring the past to meet the present is the highest sign of respect. A wooden.. | Peter Enns | ||
| 4187dd3 | Think of the resurrection as God unexpectedly going off script and bringing into the present time a bit of the future. | Peter Enns | ||
| 8327198 | These two laws in particular were central to Jewish identity in Paul's day. They had become social badges of honor to distinguish Jews from Gentiles, something concrete to hang on to amid the persistent religious chaos introduced by centuries of Greek and Roman ways. That's why I wear my Yankees jersey in Phillies country. I do it, at great risk to myself, to let the world--the world, mind you--know that I am different. I belong to another .. | Peter Enns | ||
| 24d4634 | The period of the monarchy is not only the meat of the Old Testament narrative of Israel. It's also the period when Israel's grand narrative was written. | Peter Enns | ||
| 017d71d | One more ball to juggle, but let's sum up the first two: (1) Israel's dismal story of the monarchy is the meat of the Old Testament, and the origins stories are an introduction to that main story. (2) Israel's origins stories, like the stories of the monarchy, were written during the period of the monarchy and the exile when the Israelites were ready to write it. Now, the third ball to keep in the air: (3) Israel's stories of kings and exil.. | Peter Enns | ||
| 17795c6 | With all due respect to Israel's primo king, David and I are not on the same page here. I'm more with the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, who lived when modern science was coming into its own, and who had public nervous breakdowns in his Pensees such as: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me." | Peter Enns | ||
| 3d54c6b | 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 | Peter Enns | ||
| 52c806f | 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)-.. | Peter Enns | ||
| a5d9292 | 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." | Peter Enns | ||
| 4d7bac3 | 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... | Peter Enns | ||
| 10b1be4 | 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 .. | Peter Enns | ||
| fd32191 | 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. | Peter Enns | ||
| 88ca94d | 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. .. | Peter Enns | ||
| b9cfb6f | 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. | Peter Enns | ||
| 74a7804 | 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... | Peter Enns | ||
| 9bbc16c | Zehr, Paul M. Biblical Criticism in the Life of the Church. Harrisonburg, VA: Herald, 1986. | Peter Enns | ||
| 49c408f | 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." | Peter Enns | ||
| 0d248fa | 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. | Peter Enns | ||
| 4bf7e0e | 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. | Peter Enns | ||
| bf72b60 | 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." | Peter Enns | ||
| f6a2163 | 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." | Peter Enns | ||
| 51b1679 | 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. | Peter Enns | ||
| d44e602 | 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." | Peter Enns | ||
| 6e4850a | 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.. | Peter Enns | ||
| 3206e9e | 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. | Peter Enns | ||
| e67fc84 | Wherever biblical writers talk about the past, we should expect them to be shaping the past as well. | Peter Enns | ||
| 9c2fdc1 | 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." | Peter Enns | ||
| f8792e0 | 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." | Peter Enns | ||
| a0a6190 | 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.. | Peter Enns | ||
| c29f1ce | 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. | Peter Enns | ||
| da0ab0d | 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.. | Peter Enns | ||
| 94a0d39 | 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 .. | Peter Enns | ||
| a353ea7 | 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.. | Peter Enns | ||
| 9a3039f | It is a fundamental misunderstanding of Genesis," wrote Peter Enns, "to expect it to answer questions generated by a modern worldview, such as whether the days were literal or figurative, or whether the days of creation can be lined up with modern science, or whether the flood was local or universal. The question that Genesis is prepared to answer is whether Yahweh, the God of Israel, is worthy of worship."2" -- | Rachel Held Evans | ||
| c78e255 | 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." | Peter Enns | ||
| 8d6e8c5 | I rot on the wall, my ownDorian Gray. | Anne Sexton | ||
| 2e3455e | 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." | Peter Enns | ||
| d1d06e8 | 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. | Peter Enns | ||
| 33a6498 | 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 .. | Peter Enns | ||
| ef92907 | 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). | Peter Enns | ||
| 76af56a | 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 | Peter Enns | ||
| 1c74d79 | 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.. | Peter Enns |