Peter Enns - How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers―and Why Thats Great News

To clear the air, let me just put this out there. I am a left-brained academic of German heritage with control issues and marginal social skills. Im leaving out a few steps, including hours of therapy and self-help seminars, but since I fear you might be losing interest already, let me get to my point.

Ive been studying, teaching, and writing about the Bible since the Reagan administration, andfunny thingIve noticed the same questions keep coming up, not only for me but for plenty others, like:

What is the Bible, exactly?

Who cares?

What do I do with it?

and especially:

How does this ancient, distant, and odd book work for people who look to it today for spiritual guidance?

These questions keep coming up because they are not easy to answer. They mean a lot to me, though. They drive what I do.

My last two books lay out common beliefs many Christians have about the Bible that are actually wrong, are not at all biblical, and cause all sorts of spiritual problems. In The Bible Tells Me So, I look specifically at the mistaken belief that the Bible is something like a divine instructional manual, a rulebook, so to speakjust follow the instructions as printed and youre good to go. In the follow-up book, The Sin of Certainty, I look at a related mistaken notion, namely, the idea that having strong faith is the same thing as feeling certain that the beliefs we hold are correct, and thus periods of doubt or spiritual struggle reveal a weak faith.

When we come to the Bible expecting it to be an instructional manual intended by God to give us unwavering, cement-hard certainty about our faith, we are actually creating problems for ourselves, becauseas Ive come to seethe Bible wasnt designed to meet that expectation. In other words, the problems we encounter when reading the Bible are really problems we create for ourselves when we harbor the misguided expectation that the Bible is designed primarily to provide clear answers.

Starting with these mistaken notions causes the whole Christian enterprise to go off course. It causes anxiety and stress about following the Bibles fine print as if it were the Terms and Conditions for your latest Apple download, whereas Jesus promises rest to weary pilgrims. And all that stress about needing the Bible to provide certainty about God, life, and the universe is rich soil for cultivating a defensive attitude about our beliefs and therefore an angry and combative posture toward those who see things differentlyjust another thing to argue about on Facebook, like politics, sports, or who should have won the Oscar.

And maybe thats why a faith that celebrates someone known for his radical agenda of loving ones enemies and turning the other cheek has a public image, according to a number of opinion polls, for being judgmental, condescending, and nasty.

So thats what the other two books are about, and I cant recommend them highly enough. In this book, however, I want to focus not on mistaken beliefs about the Bible and the problems those beliefs cause. Instead, I want to look more closely at the how the Bible actually works. I want to explore how I think God intended the Bible to be used and so to find deeper spiritual benefit in its pages.

Of course, I dont for one minute claim to know what God actually intends about anything. Im not a televangelist or cult leader, claiming special access to the Creator that the rest need to pay for. All Im going on is what I see the Bible doing, how it behaves when I pay attention to the words in front of me. And when I do that, I see some pretty conspicuous characteristicsthree, to be exactthat are not tucked away in a few corners of the Bible, but that are baked into its pages, though they dont always get the airtime they deserve, since they wreak havoc with the aforementioned view that the Bible is a source book for certainty in matters of faith.

This might be a good time to tell you what these three conspicuous yet often suppressed characteristics of the Bible are: the Bible is ancient, ambiguous, and diverse.

That might sound a bit obscure. I dont blame anyone for expecting me to have used words like holy, perfect, and clearterms more worthy of the Bible. And those words are fine, I suppose, but not if they paper over how the Bible actually works.

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. And they are further told that anything they come across while reading the Bible that threatens this lofty view is either actually no big deal or unfortunate evidence of their own poor reading skills, and neither should get in the way of said lofty view. (Denying the obvious is a great way to create a stressful life for yourself.)

But these three characteristicsancient, ambiguous, and diverseare not rough patches along the way that we need to deal with, so we can get on with the important matter of reading the Bible properly. They are, rather, what make the Bible worth reading at all.

They are not hiding but on full display. They are not obstacles to faith, but characteristics that, if we allow them to chart our course, will let us come to know the Bible in new and spiritually refreshing ways. By embracing these characteristics, we will find a Bible that:

Challenges and cheers us on as we walk our own difficult path of faith;

Doesnt close windows and lock doors to keep us in, but invites us to risk, to venture forth beyond what is familiar to us, and to seek God directly;

Gently urges us to see through and past the words on the page to what God is up to right here and now;

Encourages and helps us to step out and find God for ourselves.

So what of these three conspicuous yet often suppressed characteristics of the Bible? To say the Bible is ancient might seem mundane and unnecessary to point out, but I find the opposite is true. The Bible, because it is a constant companion of faith, is often thought of as Gods personal love letter to me or the like. But that familiarity risks obscuring how old the Bible really is.

We are as distant from the time of King David (three thousand years ago, about 1000 BCE) as we are from the far distant future time of 5000 CE. Go back another thousand years earlier if you want to start at the time of Israels most ancient ancestors, Abraham and Sarah. On one level, when we read the Bible, we need to bridge that distance, which is fine, but we still need to respect that distance. Otherwise the Bible can become too familiar, too much like ustoo comfortable.

We can open the Bible almost at random and begin reading, and it wont take long before we see how deeply embedded the Bible is in this distant and utterly foreign world. In fact, any decent study Bible (a Bible that comes with explanatory footnotes) will point that out by the time we get through the first two sentences of the Bible (Gen. 1:12). The ancient writer describes the beginning not as a nothing or a singularity, as cosmologists call the prebig bang state, but as a dark primordial chaos, called the deep, which is something like a threatening vast cosmic ocean that God has to tame.

And that sounds weirdwhich is my point.

If were paying attention, turning a blind eye to the Bibles ancientness cannot be sustained for long; the distance between now and then needs to be respected as a key character trait of the Bible we have. The writers of the Bible lived long ago and far away, intent on asking