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

And all that stress about needing the Bible to provide certainty about God, life, and the universe is rich soil for cultivating a defensive attitude about our beliefs and therefore an angry and combative posture toward those who see things differently—just another thing to argue about on Facebook, like politics, sports, or who should have won the Oscar.

And maybe that’s why a faith that celebrates someone known for his radical agenda of loving one’s enemies and turning the other cheek has a public image, according to a number of opinion polls, for being judgmental, condescending, and nasty.

the Bible is ancient, ambiguous, and diverse.

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.

Rather than providing us with information to be downloaded, the Bible holds out for us an invitation to join an ancient, well-traveled, and sacred quest to know God, the world we live in, and our place in it. Not abstractly, but intimately and experientially.

Both sides of these (and many other) 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.” But if polar opposite positions can keep claiming the Bible’s support, then perhaps providing “clear teaching” might not be what scripture is prepared to do. Just throwing that out there.

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

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.

Seeing the Bible as a wisdom book allows us to see God as a good parent, full of grace, love, and patience—the very character traits we value in earthly parents and that the people of God are to exemplify.

Indeed, we will see that very process as a prompting of God, not an attempt to get out of doing what the Bible says. Adopting a wisdom mentality rather than a rulebook mentality gives us a Bible with fresh possibilities.

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 walk this path of wisdom.

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.

The Bible is not the problem. The Bible is great—not because it is an answer book, but precisely because it isn’t; not because it protectively hovers over us, but because it most definitely doesn’t.

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

The lesson here is that wealth can be positive or negative, depending on our attitude. A razor-thin line exists between genuine thankfulness to God for the protection wealth can provide and arrogance about one’s wealth. The book of Proverbs challenges us to get used to patrolling that line, so we can learn when we cross it.

Once we come to see the entire Bible as a book of wisdom, we will come to know a Bible that opens up for us a deeper, more life-affirming, and frankly more captivating journey of faith than one that is preoccupied with coloring inside the lines.

Wisdom, like a good parent, is patient and supportive, gives us freedom, and encourages and empowers us to work things out as best as we can.

One of wisdom’s great rewards is the true, raw, unfiltered, unchecked, honest knowledge of oneself.

Laws, once we begin thinking about what they mean and how they are to be obeyed, actually push us to seek wisdom, which goes beyond mechanical obedience.

Changing times require adjustments to thinking about God and faith.

Jewish tradition has always understood that keeping the sabbath law—and any law—means working out how. And that insight still holds for today as we too seek to know God in the pages of scripture.

The point is that laws don’t stay still. They can’t. They’re fidgety little buggers. Debating, amending, and even moving beyond some laws are part of the deal—and that includes the laws in the Bible.

Some laws were already outdated for later biblical writers. The Old Testament covers centuries of time, and as times and circumstances changed for the ancient Israelites, older laws sometimes had to be adjusted to speak God’s word to new generations.

Creative thinking about past laws is already happening during the biblical period.

rethinking older laws for new situations, bringing together the ancient and revered tradition with the ever-changing, real-life circumstances of God’s people over time.

I got to know a lot of people—students and professors—who had religious outlooks very different from mine. It sobered me to see how differently they conceived of God, if at all, and that they were products of their worlds as much as I was a product of mine.

And so rather than think of them as pitiful outsiders to God’s great plan, I began to do some serious soul searching about whether God might be more merciful and more inclusive than I had always been taught.

Travel broadens, as they say. Coming into contact with different people and cultures cannot help but affect our view of ourselves, the world we live in—and God.

The sacred responsibility I’ve been talking about is really a call to follow this biblical lead by reimagining God in our time and place.

We are all culturally embedded creatures—we can never untangle ourselves from our here and now. We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.

Whether we are aware of it or not, behind our religious deliberations, in one form or another, we are really asking a deeply foundational question, “What kind of God do I believe in, really?” This is not a luxury question for those with idle time on their hands, but exactly the kind of question we should deliberately bring to the front of our consciousness as an expression of responsible faith; it is not evidence that our faith is weakening.

In a way, when the biblical writers look at God, they all reflect back something of their own experience as humans living in a particular time in a particular culture. They use familiar metaphors when speaking of God. They don’t—“poof”—magically take off their cultural lenses.

Maybe (if I may venture beyond my horizon) that is precisely how God intended us to think and talk about God, as people in our time and place, because God is fine with our being human. After all, this God, as Christians claim, walked among us.

Recognizing how our thinking of God is bound to our own time and place is freeing in that it helps us make sense of some of the rather uncomfortable things we read about God in the Bible, like Psalm 68—or the following that has caused more than its share of quiet panic among alert Bible readers.

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.

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.

To honor tradition means adapting that tradition in order to keep it vibrant. It may seem totally counterintuitive, but you can’t really honor a tradition unless you a...

once you put the sacred tradition in writing, it is less a living tradition and more locked into a time gone by.

“How can we stay connected today to the tradition of the past? How does there and then speak to us here and now?”

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.

The sacred story of their people and the God they worshiped were becoming something of a problem. God had to be defended, and that meant God had to be reimagined.

I think of Christians who, having been raised to read the Genesis creation story as literal science and history, leave for college, watch the History Channel, or log onto the internet, and find out that fossils and radiometric dating are in fact not hoaxes. That’s how nice Christian

college freshmen become atheists by Christmas break. If your faith can unravel that quickly, it’s enough to make you question whether your faith is worth the effort at all.

Translations are great places for religious groups (ancient and modern) to introduce course correctives to some things that might cause embarrassment.

We expect certain things of God and are bothered when we don’t see them in the Bible.

Actually, to take a commercial break, one great thing about the Apocrypha is that it was written almost entirely during the Greek period—it’s a window onto that period of Jewish history.

But Jews also had an internal challenge. God’s delay in coming to their aid and setting things right for them raised questions of God’s justice and goodness. Answering those questions meant reimagining God even more.

What is God like? Is God good and just? Is God faithful? Yes. God must be. And here’s how.

If God is all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing and yet bad things happen, might it be that God is none of those things? Blaming human misery on a very powerful divine archenemy keeps God from having to take the blame—though you’d still need to ask why God allows that dark figure to exist, but let’s not get sidetracked.