Review of Peter Enns’ book “How the Bible Actually Works”

In Peter Enns’ insightful and powerful follow up to The Bible Tells Me So and The Sin of Certainty, Enns demonstrates that leading us to wisdom is How the Bible Actually Works. According to Enns, the wisdom the Bible leads us to is unlike popular modern definitions that see wisdom merely as intellectual knowledge gained by rote learning which is then uncritically repeated on automation without any serious scrutiny. Instead, the wisdom the Bible leads us to is the result of a long process rooted in our life experiences, built on and in conversation with the Biblical authors and Christian thinkers throughout church history. This wisdom urges us to courageously reimagine our faith, theology and faith practices in light of new experiences and new information. According to Enns, we simply can’t escape the reality that our experiences and particular life contexts always influence and shape our lives, faith, theology and faith practices. So rather than ignoring our experiences, downplaying them or viewing them as irrelevant to the life of faith, we ought to welcome them as integral and useful components to every arena of our lives, including the life of faith.

For Enns, tapping into this way of framing the Bible’s purpose–to lead us to wisdom–begins by first acknowledging three often overlooked and undervalued characteristics of the Bible. The Bible is ancient, ambiguous and diverse. While the ancient nature of the Bible should go without question (it is very old), most Christians seem to prefer a Bible that’s timeless. Why? Because a timeless book, as opposed to an ancient one, gives us the illusion that not much time has passed from the Biblical authors’ day to our present day, and in doing so, it leads us to assume (naively) that their lived experiences were very similar to ours. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Ancient books demonstrate (if we are paying close enough attention) that all historical events and individuals (including Biblical characters) are located within a particular time in history. Which means they are products of their time, deeply immersed in their historical contexts (including cultural, social, economic, religious and political contexts), much of which is extremely different from ours today. What about Enns’ suggestion that the Bible is ambiguous and diverse? Surely, the Bible gives us unadulterated, universal, unambiguous teaching and that each Biblical author is basically in agreement speaking with one unified voice, right? The reality, however, is that once we begin to allow the Biblical authors to speak for themselves on their own terms in their ancient, often ambiguous and diverse ways, it is glaringly evident that the Biblical authors do not actually give one unified voice about most critical subjects. They had different perspectives and ways of thinking and framing “Biblical” issues than Biblical authors prior to and following them. They didn’t flippantly disregard each other either. Rather, they engaged in healthy dialogue, debates and arguments with each other and often disagreed about how the life of faith should work out in their particular context. Sometimes their disagreements were only slight, and sometimes very dramatic. They even sometimes disagreed with their own contemporaries. Just look at the topic of how to treat one’s enemies. Some Biblical authors willingly support genocide if it’s done under God’s direction and for God’s glory (of course), while others (namely Jesus and the apostles) believed they should love and pray for their enemies and to practice unequivical non-retaliation, or non-violence. And that’s just one of many topics they didn’t see eye to eye on. The very existence of the diversity of the Biblical authors’ opinions, perspectives and way of framing the life of faith is precisely why we can emphatically say that the Bible is, more often than not, ambiguous. The oldest books of the Bible date sometime around 800 BCE (or BC) and the latest books sometime around 100 CE (or AD), so you better believe they are going to have different opinions and perspectives on a whole host of topics.

The holy and perfect rule book way of framing the Bible–that the Bible is clear and unambiguous on every “Biblical” topic and issue–is far more popular because it’s easier to accept, embrace and follow. And many people do. People of faith, like most people, want certainty. In our laziest moments as human beings, we simply want someone or something (God, the Bible, or God through the Bible) to tell us all the answers with complete clarity. No ambiguity. No diversity of opinion. Tell us what to believe and how to live and we’re good. Most people don’t want to hear that life is much more complex and nuanced or that it involves struggle, pain and hardship. They don’t want to hear that life, including the life of faith, involves trying to figure things out with little to go on and wrestling with life’s many mysteries on a perpetual basis in the most arduous circumstances day in and day out. Every generation, including the generations the Biblical authors found themselves in, have had to work out their faith by wrestling with it (with “fear and trembling” to use St. Paul’s language). Why should we think we are beyond this process too?

Our task then as responsible people of faith and Bible readers is to follow their example by letting the Bible lead us to wisdom by listening to others, asking hard questions, engaging healthy debate, wrestling with truth, embracing nuanced answers, paying attention to new experiences, expanding in understanding and courageously reimagining the life of faith today based on all of it. And then starting the process all over again. This is the wisdom the Biblical authors modeled and that is what the Bible leads us to. It will often look messy. But it will be well worth it. Because what we are really after is that endless pursuit of what it means to be truly and fully human living according to our highest potential and good, not merely for our own sake but for the sake of others.

For Enns, this is How the Bible Actually Works.

Pic by Sixteen Miles Out