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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Peter Enns
Read between
February 23 - April 18, 2019
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.
This might be a good time to tell you what these three conspicuous yet often suppressed characteristics of the Bible are: the Bible is ancient, ambiguous, and diverse.
But these 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.
We are as distant from the time of King David (three thousand years ago, about 1000 BCE) as we are from the far distant future time of 5000 CE. Go back another thousand years earlier if you want to start at the time of Israel’s most ancient ancestors, Abraham and Sarah. On one level, when we read the Bible, we need to bridge that distance, which is fine, but we still need to respect that distance. Otherwise the Bible can become too familiar, too much like us—too comfortable.
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.
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.
Rather, 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. This is by design.
And the Bible is diverse—meaning it does not speak with one voice on most subjects, but conflicting and contradictory voices.
Inclusive, if it is exclusive it is not of the Christ.
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.
Wisdom isn’t some secret key available only to an elite few, but the exact opposite. Wisdom is a gift from God, liberally available to all. It is, as we’ll see, a “part” of God that saturates every square inch of the world around us and at the same time invades even the hidden places of our heart, those things we like to keep from others, in order to mold and form us into mature children of God.
To put it in Christian terms, 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.
Wisdom is about the lifelong process of being formed into mature disciples, who wander well along the unscripted pilgrimage of faith, in tune to the all-surrounding thick presence of the Spirit of God in us and in the creation around us.
A life of pursuing wisdom is Plan A.
Although we might not see it, 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.
If God were a helicopter parent, our sacred book would be full of clear, consistent, unambiguous information to take in. In other words, it wouldn’t look anything like it does.
What attitude toward the Bible do we bring to this life of Christian faith, and how do we see God in the process?
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.
This book is for the frustratedly Christian—who have seen that the Bible doesn’t meet the expectations they have been taught to cling to and who are having trouble seeing a better way forward. This book is for the barely Christian—who are hanging on to some semblance of faith because they are worn out from having to defend a rulebook Bible. This book may even be for the formerly Christian—who have had the courage to leave their faith behind when it ceased having any explanatory power for their reality because of what they were taught the Bible had to be.
The path of wisdom isn’t a bigger and better “answer,” another version of the same quest for certainty. It’s a shift in attitude, a new posture for a lifelong journey of letting go of the need for such things.
But this book does point in a direction that is spiritually refreshing if also challenging. Better, it is spiritually refreshing because it is challenging. When we choose to walk the path of wisdom, those two will always be joined hand in hand. And that is also the Bible’s power—not to bend to our expectations, but to help set them.
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.
Reading the book of Proverbs on child rearing is like paying good money for financial advice and being told after ten sessions, “Here’s what I’ve come up with. Invest your money wisely, and you will be set for retirement.” I was hoping for stock tips.
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.
Proverbs actually makes it loud and clear that seeking wisdom rather than grabbing for answers is what this life of faith is about. Proverbs is a book of wisdom, after all.
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.
“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.
These two clearly contradictory proverbs aren’t a problem that needs fixing. The biblical writers weren’t idiots. Placing these two opposite sayings side by side gives us a snapshot of how wisdom works. It seems to me that whoever composed this book and placed these proverbs* next to each other was saying at least this: 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.
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The point is that Proverbs 26:4–5 doesn’t tell me what to do. It wasn’t designed to. It models something better: the permission to think it through, figure it out, and learn from experience for next time. In fact, more than just giving us permission, the contradiction sets up our expectation that we will have to think it through.
That is how Proverbs works, and with that, now is as good a time as any to repeat my really big point in all of this about where we are heading: Proverbs models for us how the Bible as a whole works. The entire Bible, like Proverbs, is ancient, ambiguous, and diverse. The Bible as a whole demands the same wisdom approach as Proverbs.
Having access to the tree of life is symbolic of spiritually being in God’s presence. Death means being alienated from God.
Wisdom as a “tree of life” in Proverbs is the solution to this problem of “death,” of alienation from God. Wisdom opens up the gates of Paradise and gives us back access to life that was lost. Not life literally, but symbolically—a quality of life, a life in harmony with God and creation.
Proverbs also ties wisdom farther back to the dawn of time: The LORD by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he* established the heavens (3:19). What it means for God to have founded the earth by wisdom is hardly obvious, but we don’t need to try to work it all out. It’s enough to observe that wisdom and creation are inseparable—without wisdom, there is no creation.
That’s why I think of living a life of wisdom as a “sacred responsibility.” It is a responsibility because God is not a helicopter parent. And it is sacred because all of our efforts, big and small, to live wisely are sacred acts of bowing to and seeking alignment with the Wise Creator.
Times had changed for this author. The days of old, when prophets and inspired writers walked among them, was over. But wisdom was still there as she always was, even from the very beginning of creation. And the Wisdom of Solomon goes on to say that wisdom enters human souls and makes them friends of God, . . . for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom (7:27–28).
So, once again, wisdom is God’s Plan A. Anything else, which includes thinking of the life of faith as primarily a script to follow verbatim, is settling for something “less than.”
Think of it this way: the same wisdom that was with God when God “ordered” creation (Gen. 1) is available to us as we seek to “order” the chaos of our lives. When we seek and follow wisdom in the precious few years given to us, we are truly accepting a sacred responsibility to live intentionally in the Spirit’s presence.
To put it plainly, the life of faith is the pursuit of wisdom.
To live by faith—to live wisely—means living with an ever-increasing awareness of the hidden things, not simply a detached general knowledge that, say, “Money can be harmful,” but a deep knowledge of ourselves, a true self-awareness of what money is doing to me . . . right now.
“Know thyself” might have been coined by Socrates and may sound like “secular” or “humanistic” advice, but it isn’t. To gain honest knowledge of oneself is to see wisdom at work. In fact, one way of stating the goal of the life of faith is entering deeper and deeper into that kind of wisdom.
And to sum up this entire chapter, wisdom is a really big deal in the Bible and if we miss it, we’ll miss how the Bible actually works.
But readers from ancient times have always understood that keeping a law means more than “doing what it says”; it means deliberating over what the command actually requires here and now.
The law as written leaves its readers to ponder what it means and how to obey it here and now—in other words, to practice wisdom. Like it’s on purpose.
For me, though, a far more interesting question is lurking just below the surface. What are we to make of this ambiguity in, of all places, the Law beyond simply pointing out, “Hey, weird. That’s really ambiguous”? Biblical laws shout to us something about the Bible’s purpose.
Even biblical laws, where one can’t be faulted for expecting absolute crystal clarity, invite—even instigate—a lively discussion. When handled with a humble rather than anxious heart, laws drive us toward healthy community—not a tribalism geared toward insider-outsider thinking, but a community of faith where we can call upon wisdom as we deliberate and even debate how to live faithfully.
It’s not surprising, therefore, that ancient Jews came to think of wisdom and Law as inseparable—they need each other to work, like needing a pin number to access your cash.
Ben Sira’s point is that Law, not just wisdom, was there all along, flowing out from Paradise. We don’t see this way of thinking in the Old Testament itself (at least not put so clearly), but now a few centuries later Ben Sira brings the Law back to the dawn of time, like wisdom, even though the Law does not actually appear until it is revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai.
Ben Sira’s placing of the Law at the very beginning of the biblical story signals for us a central point of this book: Changing times require adjustments to thinking about God and faith.
Tying Law and wisdom together reflects what we’ve already seen: Law—however divine its origin and serious its requirements—is nevertheless ambiguous, and so “following the Law” and “seeking wisdom” are bound together for all time. Ancient Jews understood that following the commands necessarily took them beyond doing what the words said. Wisdom was needed to discern how to obey.
Amendments are called amendments for a reason. Times change, and laws that made sense at one point in time don’t necessarily make sense in another, and so they need to be amended. Some amendments themselves go out of date—the Third Amendment, concerning the quartering of soldiers in private homes, for example. And one amendment, the Eighteenth (prohibition), was famously repealed by another (the Twenty-First).
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.
