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

Rulebook answers deliver certitude and finality, but wisdom embraces mystery. Rulebook answers are distant and passive, but wisdom is intimate and learned through experience. Rulebook answers are immediate, but wisdom takes trial and error over time. Rulebook answers provide comfort and stability, but wisdom asks us to risk letting go of what is familiar for God’s surprises. Rulebook answers are designed to end the journey, but wisdom shapes us so we journey with courage and peace. Rulebook answers are limited to specific moments, but wisdom works in all times and places. Rulebook answers keep us small, but wisdom gives us the space we need to grow.

The Bible isn’t a book that reflects one point of view. It is a collection of books that records a conversation—even a debate—over time. When I began to see that for myself, a lot of things fell into place about the Bible’s purpose and what it means to read it with the eyes of faith. When we accept the Bible as the moving, changing, adaptive organism it is, we will more readily accept our own sacred responsibility to engage the ancient biblical story with wisdom, to converse with the past rather than mimic it—which is to follow the very pattern laid out in the Bible itself. A rulebook view of the Bible misses that dynamic process entirely; indeed, it seems determined to obscure it.

Wisdom, in other words, didn’t stop being a big deal when Jesus came, as if now finally all answers are given and we can start following the rulebook. Wisdom continues to be fundamental to faith. Jesus and the gospel have more to do with wisdom than we might be used to hearing.

Whatever else we do, and especially with issues that generate so much conflict, wisdom must be pursued by all and invited to take a prominent place in these discussions—if only so that they may remain discussions and not an exercise in lobbing back and forth “clear” Bible verses as grenades. Using Bible verses to end discussions on difficult and complex issues serves no one and fundamentally misses the dimension of wisdom that is at work anytime we open the Bible anywhere and read it.