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

To say the Bible is ancient might seem mundane and unnecessary to point out, but I find the opposite is true. The Bible, because it is a constant companion of faith, is often thought of as “God’s personal love letter to me” or the like. But that familiarity risks obscuring how old the Bible really is.

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. Now this may seem as if the Bible is locked forever in its ancient moment, but that is most definitely not true. As we will see, the Bible’s antiquity shows us the need to ponder God anew in our here and now. Indeed, it gives us permission to do so.

As we will see later in the book, Jews and Christians throughout history have always known that this ancient Bible cannot simply be “followed” like a recipe. It takes creative imagination to bridge the ancient and modern horizons. And, as we will see in due course, that process is already happening—I can’t stress this enough—within the pages of the Bible itself.

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 thing is, the need to work things out has always been the case, ever since there has been a Bible. So instead of being fed up and frustrated with a Bible that refuses to tell us clearly what to do, maybe we should step back and ask why this is so and what benefit we might derive from it.

So instead of going though painful intellectual contortions pretending this diversity does not exist in the Bible, we should ask why there is so much of it and how this might actually be good news for us.

I believe that God knows best what sort of sacred writing we need. And these three characteristic ways the Bible behaves, rather than posing problems to be overcome, are telling us something about how the Bible actually works and therefore what the Bible’s true purpose is—and the need to align our expectations with it.

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. A quest—meaning this is going to take some time and effort. No “Have a Great Spiritual Life in Five Easy Steps!” pamphlet. The Bible isn’t just going to hand us the goods.

The Bible becomes a confusing mess when we expect it to fulfill some other purpose—like functioning as an owner’s manual for faith. But when we allow the Bible to determine our expectations, we see that intending to gain wisdom is our proper spiritual posture toward it.

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.

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. 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 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.

Play travel soccer?

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.

Or perhaps we readers are meant to insert “generally speaking” and then figure things out on our own as situations come up—in other words, to be wise. That’s what I think.

If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son, . . . his father and his mother . . . shall say to the elders of his town, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death. (Deut. 21:18–21)

If the Bible’s purpose was to provide for us clear and unchanging direction about basic pressing matters like, “How do I raise my kids well?”—it wouldn’t generate so many obvious questions.

Tucked away toward the end of the book of Proverbs, minding their own business, not trying to grab our attention but just waiting to be found, are back-to-back bits of wisdom that completely contradict each other: Do not answer fools according to their folly, or you will be a fool yourself. Answer fools according to their folly, or they will be wise in their own eyes. (26:4–5)

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

We need to use our heads here, people—which is precisely what these contradictory passages in Proverbs are driving us toward. We are left to read the situation to see which bit of wisdom fits here and now.

Proverbs was likely compiled for the purpose of training young upper-class Israelite men for a life of royal service.

When instead of simply reacting to a jerk coworker or an internet troll, we pause and calmly seek wisdom for that moment, even if imperfectly (for surely we are all on the journey of gaining wisdom), we are tapping into something big that created and sustains the cosmos. We are in a sense cocreating with the Creator—not bringing the cosmos into existence (obviously), but creating our own life path by the choices we make.

Building off of Proverbs 8, at least some ancient Jews ascribed to wisdom something approaching divine status to act as a mediator between God and humanity, to make God accessible to us here and now. That’s the key point for us: accessible.

the place held by wisdom would now be held by Jesus, “God with us,” who, as Paul put it, became for us wisdom from God (1 Cor. 1:30).

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. And what that looks like will be different for each of us and will likely change through the seasons of our lives.

Strict legalism is a myth. Laws have a knack for ambiguity, and it only takes a moment of reflection to see that they have to be interpreted, which isn’t exactly breaking news. The entire history of Judaism and Christianity bears witness to people of faith doing just that.

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.

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.

the choice to translate the same Hebrew root word as boil in Exodus and cook in Deuteronomy is aimed at avoiding this contradiction. This isn’t the only place this sort of thing tends to happen in modern translations of the Bible, though the better ones will provide helpful notes.

I don’t want to beat a dead lamb, but let me say again that contradictions between Old Testament laws aren’t exactly an industry secret. Jewish tradition has wrestled with them since before Christianity. Biblical scholars write books about it.

And here is the absolutely vital and life-changing take-home point for us: ancient and ambiguous laws, in order to remain relevant, needed to be adapted—which results in the diversity of the laws we see in the Old Testament. We can’t miss what this is telling us today. Circumstances change, and wisdom is needed to keep the divine–human conversation going. Wisdom always shows up at the door anytime we read the Bible. That is how it has always been—and was meant to be. Within the Bible itself we see writers both respecting the past and transposing it to the present—or better, they respect the past by transposing it, thus allowing the past to continue speaking. Transposing the past is an act of wisdom. It is not scripted. It can’t be predicted. It just has to happen as it happens, in real time, by those seeking God’s presence for their time.

The diversity we see in the Bible reflects the inevitably changing circumstances of the biblical writers across the centuries as they grappled with their sacred yet ancient and ambiguous tradition. And again, the same could be said of people of faith today.

The Bible (both Old and New Testaments) exhibits this same characteristic of the sacred past being changed, adapted, rethought, and rewritten by people of faith, not because they disrespected the past, but because they respected it so much they had to tie it to their present. I’ll go even farther. Without such changes over time, Christianity wouldn’t exist. The Christian tradition depends on these changes over time—and some rather big ones at that.

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.

Thinking of the Bible as shifting and moving may feel spiritually risky, bordering on heretical, but it isn’t. Sermons, Bible study materials, prayer books, and the like adapt the ancient words for modern benefit all the time. Biblical psalms that praise the Lord and then ask God to squash the enemy are often edited for church consumption. Generally speaking, Christians think asking God to kill their enemies is wrong (Jesus said so), so adjustments are made to those parts of the Bible that say exactly that. Laws that assume the legitimacy of slavery or virgins as their fathers’ property are omitted or given a more spiritual spin. The list goes on.

Adaptation over time is baked thoroughly into the pages of the Bible as a whole and as such demonstrates that the Bible is a book of wisdom, demanding to be adapted again and again by people of faith living in vastly distant cultures and eras—including our own, removed by as much as two millennia from the time of its completion.

The moments of time, place, and location we occupy cannot help but play a major role in shaping how we understand God and the life of faith.

In that sense, one can speak of the Bible as “timeless”—not because its commands and teachings remain fixed and impervious to change, but because they are clearly not. Without its unwavering commitment to adaptation over time, the Bible would have died a quick death over two thousand years ago. Its existence as a source of spiritual truth that transcends specific times and places is made possible by its flexibility and adaptive nature—one of the many paradoxes we need to embrace when it comes to the Bible.

To see the Bible as inspired by God is certainly the mainstream view in the history of Christianity (and Judaism), but what that means exactly and how it works out in detail have proved to be quite tough nuts to crack.

any explanation of what it means for God to inspire human beings to write things down would need to account for the diverse (not to mention ancient and ambiguous) Bible we have before us. Any explanation that needs to minimize, cover up, or push these self-evident biblical characteristics aside isn’t really an explanation; it’s propaganda.

The writer of Deuteronomy sees his updating of the older laws as God’s words for his time and place. And so God isn’t just a voice out of the past. God still speaks.

The author accepted the sacred responsibility to rethink the past because the changing circumstances demanded it: “What does God require today? How do we embody God here and now, in our time?”

thus the Bible, rather than closing down the future, sets us on a journey of relying on God’s presence to discover it.

It is much maligned in some Christian circles to suggest that different times require different responses, since “The Bible is God’s word. People may change, but God never changes.” I understand the logic, but the author of Deuteronomy doesn’t agree. Neither does the prophet Ezekiel.

Like the author of Deuteronomy, the prophet Ezekiel lived around the time of the Babylonian exile. A prophet’s job in the Bible was to interpret for the people the events of the day from God’s point of view—in Ezekiel’s case, to proclaim that the sack of Jerusalem and the (for all intents and purposes) end of the nation of Judah was no accident of history, but God’s punishment for generations of corruption, namely, worshiping false gods.

Does this mean God changes? I don’t think so (though some do). It means, rather, as I see it, that different times and different circumstances call for people of faith to perceive God and God’s ways differently. God doesn’t change, but God—being God—is never fully captured by our perceptions. As people continue to live and breathe and experience life, how they see God changes too.

Yes, the Judahites were in a full-blown, centuries-long crisis that would come to lodge itself deeply in the Jewish consciousness. And that crisis would have to be processed, so the Judahites did what anyone would have done under the circumstances—they told their story: This is who we are. This is where we came from. This is what we believe of God. This is where things went wrong. This is our hope for a renewed future. Christians call that story the Old Testament.

That’s how the Bible was born. Out of crisis. And the question that drove these ancient writers and editors was the wisdom question we have been looking at all along: “What is God up to today, right here and now?”

Jonah and Nahum clearly see the matter of God’s attitude toward the Ninevites differently, and the reason is . . . wait for it . . . they were written at different times and under different circumstances for different purposes.

Jonah, however, was written in the postexilic period, after (perhaps generations after) the return from Babylonian exile in 538 BCE. And this author doesn’t seem to be in the least bit interested in recording history.

Jonah remains there for three days as the fish descends down, down, even entering the abode of the dead, which the Bible calls Sheol. These strike me as the kinds of details a writer, including an ancient one, would put into a story to ensure that his readers knew they were dealing with something other than history. The book of Jonah isn’t a history lesson. It’s a parable to challenge its readers to reimagine a God bigger than the one they were familiar with.