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

For us, though our ideas of God’s love may include something like that, it tends to be more individualistic, personal, and emotional than how ancient Israelites thought of God. And for Christians, of course, how we imagine God’s love is deeply affected by God’s act of self-sacrifice—Jesus’s death on the cross. It’s unlikely, however, that ancient Israelites would have considered such a shameful death as an act of God’s love.

what is the story of Jesus and the Good News if not a reimagining of the “God of the Bible”?

Jesus’s crucifixion, for example, represents a major reimagining of God. Child sacrifice for Israelites is condemned in no uncertain terms in the Old Testament. It is abhorrent and listed as one of the abominations committed by King Manasseh (whom we met earlier) that led to the exile. And yet central to the story of Jesus is God the Father doing that very thing while at the same time turning the idea of Old Testament sacrifice on its head. Now God is the one offering a sacrifice for humanity rather than humans sacrificing to God, as it always was.

Paul preached that God no longer required of God’s people circumcision or strict dietary observances, even though both are nonnegotiable commands of God in the Old Testament (Gen. 17; Lev. 11; Deut. 14).

Paul reimagines God to account for his here and now, which is that Jesus, the crucified and risen Son of God, has come to save all people, Jews and Gentiles alike. The idea of reimagining God as times and circumstances change should, therefore, not strike us as odd or the least bit troubling—our Bible is full of reimagining.

American Christians have reimagined God as feminist, environmentalist, capitalist, refugee, soldier, Republican, Democrat, socialist, and on and on. Some portraits of God I agree with more than others (and let the debates

begin), but the act of reimagining God in ways that reflect our time and place is self-evident, unavoidable, and necessary.

The questions for us, as they have been for all generations, are: What is our hope? How do we yearn for God to show up here and now? What urgent thing is happening right now to us, our families, and our world? What new thing will the God of old do now?

We find in the Bible ways of anchoring our experience of God—even if that means reading the Bible in fresh and creative ways, which is exactly how we see the New Testament writers engaging their Bible when they talk about Jesus.

The ancient world, after all, gave us warring gods and heavenly board meetings. If that doesn’t fit the definition of “pagan influence,” I don’t know what does. And yet ancient Israelites imagined God within that world—and those images became part of our sacred scripture.

The Creator is being reimagined all the time and can be reimagined through the lens of any culture, of any time and place. No one culture, and certainly not the (largely white male affluent) Western culture I inhabit, can claim superior status for reimagining God once and for all. The Creator doesn’t need any of us to sit atop the mountain and speak down to everyone else. Perhaps this is at least one reason why the Christian faith has had such staying power and spread broad and wide—different people living in different times and places can connect with this God in ways that engage their world and make sense to them.

Blockbuster famously didn’t adapt and now look at it. You can’t. Blockbuster is as dead as pagers and typewriters. Companies that have an eye on market changes survive by reinventing themselves, like every electronics powerhouse that saw the writing on the wall for boom boxes when music went digital.

And so we are back to our paradox: to maintain any tradition, you need to hold on to some aspects of the past while at the same time thinking creatively about how the past and the present can meet—reimagining the faith, as I’ve been putting it. The perennial wisdom question is, “What remains and what gets transformed?”

At what point have we left the tradition by adjusting it to the present, and at what point have we killed the tradition by refusing to change at all? Addressing those questions describes the entire history of Judaism and Christianity, beginning already within the pages of the Bible itself and through to this very moment.

Judaism was faithful to its tradition by adapting that tradition so that it could survive. Not in a willy-nilly, let’s-throw-caution-to-the-wind sort of way, but Judaism adapted nonetheless—or risked letting the tradition die altogether.

The viability of the Christian faith too—as we will see in more detail later—rests on the New Testament writers creatively adapting the story of Israel to account for Jesus. They did nothing less than reimagine God, a pattern that long preceded the Christian faith and that continued to be used by that faith in the millennia that followed.

That biblical portrait of God, as you will recall, reflected the religious culture of the time, where gobs and gobs of gods filled the heavens. Well before the time we get to Jesus and Paul, however, Judaism became monotheistic. Gone were the days of Yahweh doing battle with the gods of Egypt or Moab. Though Paul’s heavens were active with supernatural entities (Eph. 6:4; 1 Cor. 8:5), only one was worthy of the title “God.”

in one section of the book of Isaiah, written in the wake of the exile, we read: I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god (44:6).

Jeremiah, another prophet of the exile, uses similar language about idols (10:1–18). In the entertaining story in 1 Kings 18:20–40, the prophet Elijah* teases and mocks the priests of the Canaanite god Baal when their god does not show up for a divine duel with Yahweh.

The harsh realities of changing times and nothing less than an unraveling social-religious fabric raised new questions that their ancestors never dreamed of—or if they did, those questions would now take on a practical urgency like never before. Modes of thinking from a more sheltered past were not adequate for dealing with this catastrophe.

One big clue that the Bible came along later is how little the stories of the kings and the prophets look back to the time of Moses or quote the Law of Moses, even when the topic calls for it. Though Moses and his story were likely known, in some form, there was no officially sanctioned book to appeal to. There were laws, but there was no Pentateuch, no Torah (Hebrew, meaning “teaching”), that served as a recognized compendium of ancient commands by which kings were judged.

It was created and became part of their life, however, when the need arose—with the effective

removal of God’s presence from the people in the exile and the centuries to follow.

Creating a Bible—compiling and editing older stories and writing some new ones—was an effort to remain connected to the past amid uncertain times.

And not only was the creation of the Bible an innovation, but the Bible itself experienced its own type of innovation early on in its history—namely, the need to be translated into other languages. Probably the earliest translation of the Hebrew Old Testament was into Aramaic—something of a close cousin of Hebrew on the ancient language family tree. This translation arose, as all translations do, out of a need.

So common was Aramaic that even portions of the Old Testament, namely, Daniel and Ezra (two postexilic books), were written partly in Aramaic. Aramaic was also, almost certainly, the main language Jesus spoke.