The Bible Tells Me So: Why defending Scripture has made us unable to read it

The controversial Bible scholar and author of The Evolution of Adam recounts his transformative spiritual journey in which he discovered a new, more honest way to love and appreciate God’s Word.
Trained as an evangelical Bible scholar, Peter Enns loved the Scriptures and shared his devotion, teaching at Westminster Theological Seminary. But the further he studied the Bible, the more he found himself confronted by questions that could neither be answered within the rigid framework of his religious instruction or accepted among the conservative evangelical community.
Rejecting the increasingly complicated intellectual games used by conservative Christians to “protect” the Bible, Enns was conflicted. Is this what God really requires? How could God’s plan for divine inspiration mean ignoring what is really written in the Bible? These questions eventually cost Enns his job—but they also opened a new spiritual path for him to follow.
The Bible Tells Me So chronicles Enns’s spiritual odyssey, how he came to see beyond restrictive doctrine and learned to embrace God’s Word as it is actually written. As he explores questions progressive evangelical readers of Scripture commonly face yet fear voicing, Enns reveals that they are the very questions that God wants us to consider—the essence of our spiritual study.

The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It

Religion & Spirituality

Enns, Peter

Christian Books & Bibles

HarperOne

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

The controversial evangelical Bible scholar and author of The Bible Tells Me So explains how Christians mistake “certainty” and “correct belief” for faith when what God really desires is trust and intimacy.
With compelling and often humorous stories from his own life, Bible scholar Peter Enns offers a fresh look at how Christian life truly works, answering questions that cannot be addressed by the idealized traditional doctrine of “once for all delivered to the saints.”
Enns offers a model of vibrant faith that views skepticism not as a loss of belief, but as an opportunity to deepen religious conviction with courage and confidence. This is not just an intellectual conviction, he contends, but a more profound kind of knowing that only true faith can provide.
Combining Enns’ reflections of his own spiritual journey with an examination of Scripture, The Sin of Certainty models an acceptance of mystery and paradox that all believers can follow and why God prefers this path because it is only this way by which we can become mature disciples who truly trust God. It gives Christians who have known only the demand for certainty permission to view faith on their own flawed, uncertain, yet heartfelt, terms.

The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our "Correct" Beliefs

Controversial evangelical Bible scholar, popular blogger and podcast host of The Bible for Normal People, and author of The Bible Tells Me So and The Sin of Certainty explains that the Bible is not an instruction manual or rule book but a powerful learning tool that nurtures our spiritual growth by refusing to provide us with easy answers but instead forces us to acquire wisdom. For many Christians, the Bible is a how-to manual filled with literal truths about belief that must be strictly followed. But the Bible is not static, Peter Enns argues. It does not hold easy answers to the perplexing questions and issues that confront us in our daily lives. Rather, the Bible is a dynamic instrument for study that not only offers an abundance of insights but provokes us to find our own answers to spiritual questions, cultivating God’s wisdom within us. 
“The Bible becomes a confusing mess when we expect it to function as a rulebook for faith. But when we allow the Bible to determine our expectations, we see that Wisdom, not answers, is the Bible’s true subject matter,” writes Enns. This distinction, he points out, is important because when we come to the Bible expecting it to be a textbook intended by God to give us unwavering certainty about our faith, we are actually creating problems for ourselves. The Bible, in other words, really isn’t the problem; having the wrong expectation is what interferes with our reading.
Rather than considering the Bible as an ancient book weighed down with problems, flaws, and contradictions that must be defended by modern readers, Enns offers a vision of the holy scriptures as an inspired and empowering resource to help us better understand how to live as a person of faith today. 
How the Bible Actually Works makes clear that there is no one right way to read the Bible. Moving us beyond the damaging idea that “being right” is the most important measure of faith, Enns’s freeing approach to Bible study helps us to instead focus on pursuing enlightenment and building our relationship with God—which is exactly what the Bible was designed to do.

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 That's Great News

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

“Peter Enns is brilliant at taking the big topics, those Christian ideas that usually scare us or intimidate us or worry us, and then make those very places a meeting place with a God who is bigger and wilder and more wonderful and trustworthy than we ever could have guessed.”—Sarah Bessey, author of Out of Sorts and Jesus Feminist 
The author of How the Bible Actually Works and The Bible Tells Me So explains how our model of God and faith must evolve as our understanding of the world deepens—just as the Bible describes it should. 
Life throws us “curve balls”—from devastating personal losses to world tragedies. These events often leave us doubting God, the Bible, and our faith. But instead of pushing away our reservations, we should embrace them, Peter Enns argues. A leading biblical scholar and Christian mentor, Enns has never been afraid to question the Bible or Christian beliefs. Such thoughtful inquisitiveness, he argues, is part of God’s plan. He wants us to question, because doing so actually leads to a stronger, lasting faith. 
By reframing how we see these events, we allow ourselves to see how the Bible itself showcases this very process and that “treating curve balls as the enemy” is not only counterproductive but thwarts God’s goal of helping us become mature and wise. Enns shares a number of curve balls he’s encountered in his own life and the questions he has pondered. Does God care about the millions of people who never heard the gospel? Could I relate to a God who has created a universe this big? If God is so relatable, constant, and caring, how do we explain quantum physics? He reveals how particular biblical passages have helped him find wisdom, and how they can do the same for us. 
As Curveball persuasively shows, God is bigger and more mysterious than anyone’s expectations. We need a faith that can grow just as deeply.

Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Can the Bible be approached both as sacred scripture and as a historical and literary text? For many people, it must be one or the other. How can we read the Bible both ways? The Bible and the Believer brings together three distinguished biblical scholars--one Jewish, one Catholic, and one Protestant--to illustrate how to read the Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament critically and religiously. Marc Zvi Brettler, Peter Enns, and Daniel J. Harrington tackle a dilemma that not only haunts biblical scholarship today, but also disturbs students and others exposed to biblical criticism for the first time, either in university courses or through their own reading. Failure to resolve these conflicting interpretive strategies often results in rejection of either the critical approach or the religious approach--or both. But the authors demonstrate how biblical criticism--the process of establishing the original contextual meaning of biblical texts with the tools of literary and historical analysis--need not undermine religious interpretations of the Bible, but can in fact enhance them. They show how awareness of new archeological evidence, cultural context, literary form, and other tools of historical criticism can provide the necessary preparation for a sound religious reading. And they argue that the challenges such study raises for religious belief should be brought into conversation with religious tradition rather than deemed grounds for dismissing either that tradition or biblical criticism. Guiding readers through the history of biblical exegesis within the Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant faith traditions, The Bible and the Believer bridges an age-old gap between critical and religious approaches to the Old Testament.

The Bible and the Believer: How to Read the Bible Critically and Religiously

Reference

Brettler, Marc Zvi

Harrington, Daniel J.

Encyclopedias & Subject Guides

Oxford University Press

The Leader Guide provides process guidance for weekly group sessions. The Leader Guide understands the role of leader as facilitator of small-group sessions. Procedures for guiding sessions include: directions for using related video segments, and questions for discussion. This study takes groups into the rich tapestry of Genesis exploring the interaction between God and very human people - pride, family relationships, conflict and journey all showcase the best known stories of Creation, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Rebekah and Joseph. The video reflects the drama of the Genesis stories, first with selected text dramatized by an actor, and then study writer, Peter Enns interviews a scholar to help unpack the meaning and the mystery in the stories. Participants for this Invitation to Genesis do not have to have an in-depth knowledge of the Bible to enjoy and benefit from participation. Reading just two chapters of Genesis a week, they will discover the life altering stories that will invite them to follow Christ as true disciples. This eleven-week study includes a participant book outlining daily reading assignments for group preparations, a leader guide suggesting discussion activities for use in the 60–90-minute weekly meeting, and a video component providing interpretation and context for the biblical texts. Sessions: <ol>
<li>The Beginning...and What Went Wrong</li> <li>Another Beginning: The Flood...and What Went Wrong</li> <li>Another Beginning: Abraham and the Patriarchs</li> <li>Abraham and a Glimpse to the Future</li> <li>The Promise Fulfilled: Isaac</li> <li>Another Beginning: Jacob and the Uneasy Birth of a People</li> <li>Jacob: The Struggle Continues</li> <li>Another New Beginning: Joseph and the Family of Israel</li> <li>The Trek Into Egypt</li> <li>An End and Another Beginning: Israel's Story</li> </ol>

Invitation to Genesis: Leader Guide: A Short-Term DISCIPLE Bible Study (Disciple Bible Studies)

ABINGDON PRESS *

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