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

The biggest thing, though, was we Germans opened our presents Christmas Eve after church. I liked that part. Why suffer another twelve hours?

The early followers of Jesus, though they too engaged the tradition creatively, did so for a very different reason—not because of God’s apparent abandonment, but because of God’s unexpected, counterintuitive presence, namely, in Jesus of Nazareth, a crucified Messiah.

Christians throughout time, including today, have had to face that very same challenge of bridging the past and their own unique circumstances. The New Testament, in other words, is our Exhibit A for how vital it is to adjust and reimagine the past to meet the challenges of a new day and time.

Christian theology, in other words, is an exercise in wisdom—perhaps far more so than is normally thought. We are not simply maintaining the past; we are transforming it, again and again.

As Jesus himself put it, to be trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old (Matt. 13:52). We are mindful of old treasures, but also anticipate and embrace new ones.

But as Jesus also put it elsewhere, somewhat differently and with a little more punch, old wineskins do not have the strength and flexibility to contain the potency of new wine. As it ferments, it will burst the skins (Matt. 9:17). Translation: the gospel can’t be contained in the old ways.

It has bothered me for some time how little press wisdom gets in the Christian world I inhabit when we see how central it is to the Old Testament. I suppose one reason for this lack is that wisdom gets messy, compared to thinking of the life of faith as a set of rules and clearly defined and never-changing boundaries. We are just people, after all, and we tend to gravitate toward the black and white.

Think of Jesus’s main teaching method: telling parables. If your aim is to get people to comprehend black-and-white information, try a lecture or a press release. If you want to move people to own the moment and take responsibility to work it out for themselves, you tell them a story to stimulate their imagination.

Parables are meant to have an afterlife, to be flexible, adaptable over time to new circumstances. Parables are how wise teachers incite change, not just for the moment, but at all times and in all places. Including ours.

And all of that brings me to this: the incarnation—the “enfleshing” of God that we celebrate each Christmas, and which is such a core mystery of the Christian faith—is a rather striking reimagining of God and wisdom. By claiming that this logos became flesh, John is taking a familiar idea of his culture and infusing it with new meaning—and for the time, a rather absurd meaning at that.

Indeed, the whole purpose of the Word becoming flesh was to make humans children of God (John 1:12), or, as we read later in John’s Gospel, to allow humans to experience the same mystical connection with the Father as the Son does (17:20–26).

But I think the main reason they differ so much is this. Each Gospel writer took it upon himself to shape—not simply report—the story of Jesus the way he saw fit, to present Jesus not as an academic exercise in historical accuracy, but as a way of encouraging and strengthening the community for which he was writing.

But John was written when Jewish–Gentile division was just beginning, and Jewish believers especially might have been ostracized, thrown out of synagogues, and otherwise given a hard time. John’s so-called anti-Jewish rhetoric was a commentary on his day.

By aligning ourselves with John’s rhetoric we would, ironically, not be following what John is actually doing—which is bringing the Jesus story to bear on the circumstances of his community’s here and now.

God is not a helicopter parent, and the Bible isn’t set up to tell us what to do. God is a wise parent and the Bible is an ancient, often ambiguous, and undeniably diverse text, and as such invites us to accept our sacred responsibility of discerning the moment and of perceiving how God is present here and now. That is the life of wisdom, God’s Plan A, which the Bible, by its very nature, points us toward.

You can never rest on past tradition. Success requires adapting tradition to survive. That’s the wise thing to do.

“At what point do we cross the line from adapting a tradition, so it can survive, to compromising the tradition beyond recognition?” That is the big question, I think. And answering that question has been the struggle of Jewish and Christian theology since forever.

Paul is notoriously hard to pin down, but let me try to sum up the gist of his thinking. At times Paul argues that the Law is God’s gift to Israel and even cites Torah as something to be obeyed. Other times—and more often—Paul affirms the Law as fine and good, though only as far as it goes. It really can’t keep anyone on the straight and narrow. The Israelites had centuries to make it so, but their story is shot through with disobedience and ended in exile. The Law was “powerless” because humanity (including Israel) was under the thumb of Sin and Death,* a story that has its roots back in the Garden of Eden with the disobedience of Adam and the punishment of death.

Paul responded that the Torah, which held such a central place in Judaism, has now moved to the side. Now Jesus occupied that central place. Otherwise, Jesus’s self-sacrifice on our behalf—the act of God’s pure grace—means nothing.

Paul even goes so far as to say that the main purpose of the Law was to show just how bad we are at keeping it (the Law multiplied the trespass, as he puts it in Rom. 5:20) and to show, therefore, how great God’s grace is by comparison.

But still, you can’t help but read Paul and walk away with the sense that he’s not fully with the ancient program where Torah is central to knowing God’s purposes.

Paul doesn’t reject the Law of Moses, as some in Christian history have thought, but he does marginalize it, decenter it, by placing at the center of God’s plan for the world not our obedience to Torah, but Christ’s obedience to go through with the crucifixion to defeat Sin and God’s raising of Jesus from the dead to defeat Death.

The whole matter comes to a head with two specific laws that keep coming up in Paul’s letters: circumcision and not eating unclean food.

God commanded that Abraham circumcise himself, his son Isaac, and any other males of his household and that circumcising males on the eighth day from then on would be an everlasting covenant, which sounds serious, because it is (see Gen. 17).

These two laws in particular were central to Jewish identity in Paul’s day.

Paul argued tirelessly that these badges of honor, which he often refers to as works of the law (for example, Gal. 2:16), are not what identify people as children of God. They may have at one time, and they served their purpose. But now faith in Jesus and love of others are the badges of honor.

Paul is reinterpreting the purpose of Torah, because times have changed—Jesus has come. Now Paul has to account for something not accounted for by Israel’s tradition: a crucified and risen Messiah.

Paul didn’t wake up one morning with radical thoughts about the Law out of nowhere. He was awakened to the Spirit of Christ and the conviction that Jesus, because he defeated death, had something for both Gentiles and Jews, with neither being superior to the other. This has proved to be nothing short of an evolutionary innovation in the Jewish tradition, and without it Christianity, which began its life as a Jewish sect, would not have become an essentially Gentile phenomenon already by the second century CE.

Consider Abraham, Paul tells us. He was a friend of God, was he not, long before Moses and the Law? Hence, the Law was never really necessary to God’s plan, only faith was—the faith that Abraham had when he believed (better, trusted) in God (Gen. 15:6). The Law came much later and its role, rather, was (as I mentioned above) to expose the depth of sin, or, as he puts it in Galatians 4:1–7, to act as temporary trustee for God’s people until Jesus came. Then the Law could step aside and we could be released from the Law’s Hagarlike bondage.