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

by Peter Enns

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, because—as I’ve come to see—the Bible wasn’t 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.

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 don’t for one minute claim to know what God actually “intends” about anything.

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.)

three characteristics—ancient, ambiguous, and diverse—are 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.

The Bible, because it is a constant companion of faith, is often thought of as “God’s personal love letter to me” or the like. But that familiarity risks obscuring how old the Bible really is.

The writers of the Bible lived long ago and far away, intent on asking their questions and seeking their answers, oblivious to our own questions and concerns.

the Bible’s antiquity shows us the need to ponder God anew in our here and now. Indeed, it gives us permission to do so.

By ambiguous I mean that the Bible, perhaps surprisingly, doesn’t actually lay out for anyone what to do or think—or it does so far less often than we have been led to believe.

when reading the Bible for spiritual guidance, we find we are usually left to work things out for ourselves at the end of the day. This isn’t a drawback or a problem.

And the Bible is diverse—meaning it does not speak with one voice on most subjects, but conflicting and contradictory voices.

I believe that God knows best what sort of sacred writing we need. And these three characteristic ways the Bible behaves, rather than posing problems to be overcome, are telling us something about how the Bible actually works and therefore what the Bible’s true purpose is—and the need to align our expectations with it.

What, then, is the Bible’s true purpose when we take seriously its antiquity, ambiguity, and diversity?

if the Bible’s true purpose were to provide us with rulebook information about what God is like and what God wants from us, then why can the Bible be so easily used to: Justify both slavery and its abolition? Justify both keeping women subordinate to men and fully emancipating them? Justify violence against one’s enemies and condemn it? Justify political power and denounce it?

issues have been embraced with uncompromising passion throughout the course of history by real people, convinced they were simply following the Bible’s “clear teaching.”

wisdom is what forms us to be more like Jesus, who, as the apostle Paul put it, became for us wisdom from God (1 Cor. 1:30).

Shepherding us toward wisdom, kicking and screaming if need be: that is the Bible’s purpose.

Rulebook answers are distant and passive, but wisdom is intimate and learned through experience.

Rulebook answers are designed to end the journey, but wisdom shapes us so we journey with courage and peace.

Wise parents know that their job is to equip their children to be independent, to acquire skill sets for navigating on their own the ups and downs of life, to experience failure and triumph, pain and joy, and everything in between, and handle it all well—in other words, to be in training to become mature, well-functioning adults.

many of us have been taught, in one way or another, that the Bible is our instructional manual and that God is helicoptering over us to make sure we stick to it.

We have practically been conditioned to expect God to be our helicopter parent. And if for some reason we don’t run to God to solve every little problem, from finding our car keys to deciding on color schemes for the nursery, we are told there is something deeply wrong with us spiritually. Phooey. Judging by the fact that our ancient, ambiguous, and diverse Bible is nothing at all like a Christian owner’s manual and that, likewise, the life of faith, from the minute we get out of bed in the morning until we hit the pillow at night, is rarely clear and straightforward, I have come to the conclusion that (drumroll) God is not a helicopter parent—which is good because, as I said, helicopter parents are objectively annoying.

But if

the Bible’s main purpose is to form us, to grow us to maturity, to teach us the sacred responsibility of communing with the Spirit by walking the path of wisdom, it would leave plenty of room for pondering, debating, thinking, and the freedom to fail. And that is what it does.

God is not a stressed-out helicopter parent, living through his or her children, nervously and fretfully hovering over us in the form of the Bible to make sure we stick to the script, so it all works out. God is a wise parent, prodding us toward spiritual maturity in a secure atmosphere of unconditional love and acceptance, so we can learn to navigate life well. That’s what good parents do. The Bible holds out for us an invitation to accept this timeless and sacred responsibility of working out for ourselves what faith in God looks like here and now, of owning the process, with no accompanying checklist of on...

The fact that we have a Bible does not free us from this sacred responsibility, but, as we shall see, demands that we accept that responsibility—and do so as an expression of faith, not a rejection of it.

Seeing the Bible as a source of godly wisdom to be explored, pondered, deliberated, and put into action will free us of a common burden so many Christians have unwittingly carried, namely, that watching over us is God, an unstable

parent, who is right off the bat harsh, vindictive, at best begrudgingly merciful, and mainly interested in whether we’ve read and understood the fine print; if not, God has no recourse but to punish us.

Wisdom heals us to see God as God is.

I

have no problem saying to anyone who will listen that I live daily with the very difficult tensions of being an unavoidably modern-day human while embracing an ancient faith, rooted in an

ancient, ambiguous, and diverse book—which is to say, I continue to have to w...

By focusing on some portions of the Bible—the wisdom literature, laws, stories, letters, and more—we will see that the Bible’s invitation to wisdom is gently persistent and mercifully hounding.

We will also see—if I may stress the point once again—how the biblical writers themselves were already challenged by the need to move past a rulebook mentality and respond to new circumstances with wisdom.

Biblical writers already accepted the sacred challenge of pursuing a life of wisdom rather than thinking of God as a helicopter parent.

Its purpose is to invite us to explore, ponder, reflect, muse, discuss, debate, and in doing so work out a life of faith—not to keep that hard work from happening.

Here’s another passage from the book of Proverbs, a go-to, slam-dunk favorite of Christian child-rearing experts everywhere: Train children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray (22:6). Again, more fear that parents might not do enough “training.” And what does that “training” look like, exactly, and what is “the right way”?

And what does it mean, practically speaking, to

“stray”? Where is the line between healthy youthful boundary exploration and actual straying? What do I do?! That’s all I want to know.

Are we really meant to conclude that children should always obey their parents no matter what—like, every single time, without fail? What if the parents are neo-Nazis—or Calvinists? What if they are drunk or abusive? Should those kinds of parents be obeyed in everything as an acceptable duty in the Lord?

(Deut. 21:18–21) Okay, I’m not doing that. Not that I haven’t been tempted, but no.

Getting the townsfolk together to stone your son to death for stubbornness seems like the kind of thing civilized societies were created to prevent. And it probably doesn’t send a message of unconditional love to the remaining siblings. Probably doesn’t make a good evangelistic conversation starter either.

I suppose it would have been nice if God had handed us a Bible with a chapter in it called “FAQs on Godly Rules for Parenting”

I’m just saying that what the Bible says about raising children is ambiguous once we pay attention to the details. It’s even morally suspect in places, in need of being questioned—even interrogated.

How the Bible addresses this one topic of child rearing is a window onto how inadequate (and truly unbiblical) a rulebook view of the Bible as a whole is.

(26:4–5) Let me say right here and now that the lesson we learn from these two little verses sums up not only how Proverbs works, but how the Bible as a whole works as a book of wisdom. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

“Fool” in Proverbs is the catchall term for someone you definitely do not want to be: a hater of knowledge, a slanderer, one who leads others down the path to destruction, someone who lacks discernment and is complacent, stubborn, ignorant, prideful, greedy, and a whole slew of other despicable character traits.

Fools lead you away from God, and so we might expect here of all places, where the topic under consideration is “fools,” to get some clear direction about what to do when we come face-to-face with such a disruptive, ungodly person. But no. Instead we are told (1) not to engage a fool because by doing so you will come down to his level and (2) to engage the fool to shut him up.

The biblical writers weren’t idiots. Placing these two opposite sayings side by side gives us a snapshot of how wisdom works.

If we are looking to the Bible to be a rulebook, not only will we be frustrated, but we will miss the wisdom this pairing contains. Both of these sayings are wise, and the one we act upon here and now, at this unscripted moment, depends on which fits the current situation best.

Reading the situation—not simply the Bible—is what wisdom is all about.