Peter Enns Quotes

#1. When we open the Bible and read it, we are eavesdropping on an ancient spiritual journey.

Peter Enns

#2. Church is too often the most risky place to be spiritually honest.

Peter Enns

#3. The Adam story, then, is not simply about the past. It's about Israel's present brought into the past - even as far past as the beginning of the human drama itself.

Peter Enns

#4. If, in full conversation with the biblical and extrabiblical evidence, we can adjust our expectations about how the Bible should behave, we can begin to move beyond the impasse of the liberal/conservative debates of the last several generations.

Peter Enns

#5. Ours is a historical faith, and to uproot the Bible from its historical contexts is self-contradictory.

Peter Enns

#6. Jesus was God's climax to Israel's story, but he was not bound to that story. He pushed at its boundaries, transformed it, and at times left parts of it behind.

Peter Enns

#7. Still, shifting my thinking on the Bible did not mean I was losing my faith in God. In fact, I had the growing sense that God was inviting me down this path, encouraging it even.

Peter Enns

#8. looking for fights - encouraging and even creating controversy thinking that God wills it - is pathological.

Peter Enns

#9. It is wholly incomprehensible to think that thousands of years ago God would have felt constrained to speak in a way that would be meaningful only to Westerners several thousand years later. To do so borders on modern, Western arrogance.

Peter Enns

#10. 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.

Peter Enns

#11. 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 its most extreme forms, making God look like us is what the Bible calls idolatry.

Peter Enns

#12. When you read the Bible on its own terms, you discover that it doesn't behave itself like a holy rulebook should.

Peter Enns

#13. The Bible is not a Christian owner's manual but a story - a diverse story of God and how his people have connected with him over the centuries, in changing circumstances and situations.

Peter Enns

#14. The broader we cast our net, the deeper we wind up owning our own thoughts.

Peter Enns

#15. And for Christians, the gospel has always been the lens through which Israel's stories are read - which means, for Christians, Jesus, not the Bible, has the final word. The story of God's people has moved on, and so must we.

Peter Enns

#16. Protestant church tradition developed over several centuries when Christians were not yet forced, by virtue of the culminating evidence, to see the Bible in its ancient context.

Peter Enns

#17. I think part of what it means for God to "reveal" himself is to keep us guessing, to come to terms with the idea that knowing God is also a form of not knowing God, of knowing that we cannot fully know, but only catch God in part - which is more than enough to keep us busy.

Peter Enns

#18. As Jesus, the Word, is of divine origin as well as a thoroughly human figure of first-century Palestine, so is the Bible of ultimately divine origin yet also thoroughly a product of its time.

Peter Enns

#19. If you are expecting Paul to read the Bible like it was set in stone, you will find yourself getting pretty nervous. For Paul, now that Jesus has come, the Bible was more like clay to be molded.

Peter Enns

#20. To love as God loves means loving not just others like us, but those who are not.

Peter Enns

#21. The first question we should ask about what we are reading is not "How does this apply to me?" Rather, it is "What is this passage saying in the context of the book I am reading, and how would it have been heard in the ancient world?

Peter Enns

#22. If this Jesus is God's answer, what is the question? Paul eventually came to the conclusion that God was answering a question that gets at the core of not simply the Jewish drama, but the human drama, a question that no one was yet asking in quite the same way.

Peter Enns

#23. There is no higher "law" to be obeyed than the law of love. That, at the end of the day, is what it means to follow Jesus.

Peter Enns

#24. Reading the Bible responsibly and respectfully today means learning what it meant for ancient Israelites to talk about God the way they did, and not pushing alien expectations onto texts written long ago and far away.

Peter Enns

#25. Grace grows best in winter.

Peter Enns