Inspiration and Incarnation Quotes

“Ours is a historical faith, and to uproot the Bible from its historical contexts is self-contradictory.”
― Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament

“It is wholly incomprehensible to think that thousands of years ago God would have felt constrained to speak in a way that would be meaningful only to Westerners several thousand years later. To do so borders on modern, Western arrogance.”
― Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament

“God adopted Abraham as the forefather of a new people, and in doing so he also adopted the mythic categories within which Abraham—and everyone else—thought. But God did not simply leave Abraham in his mythic world. Rather, God transformed the ancient myths so that Israel’s story would come to focus on its God, the real one.”
― Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament

“Christ is the ultimate example of how God enters the messiness of history to save his people.”
― Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament

“as Christ is both God and human, so is the Bible.”
― Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament

“diversity in no way implies chaos or error.”
― Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament

“As quite distinct from Jewish interpretation, the history of modern evangelical interpretation exhibits a strong degree of discomfort with the tensions and ambiguities of Scripture.”
― Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament

“It is a fundamental misunderstanding of Genesis to expect it to answer questions generated by a modern worldview, such as whether the days were literal or figurative, or whether the days of creation can be lined up with modern science, or whether the flood was local or universal. The question that Genesis is prepared to answer is whether Yahweh, the God of Israel, is worthy of worship.”
― Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament

“The findings of the past 150 years have made extrabiblical evidence an unavoidable conversation partner. The result is that, as perhaps never before in the history of the church, we can see how truly provisional and incomplete certain dimensions of our understanding of Scripture can be. On the other hand, we are encouraged to encounter the depth and riches of God’s revelation and to rely more and more on God’s Spirit, who speaks to the church in Scripture.”
― Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament

“If, in full conversation with the biblical and extrabiblical evidence, we can adjust our expectations about how the Bible should behave, we can begin to move beyond the impasse of the liberal/conservative debates of the last several generations.”
― Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament

“Protestant church tradition developed over several centuries when Christians were not yet forced, by virtue of the culminating evidence, to see the Bible in its ancient context.”
― Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament

“it is worth asking what standards we can reasonably expect of the Bible, seeing that it is an ancient Near Eastern document and not a modern one. Are the early stories in the Old Testament to be judged on the basis of standards of modern historical inquiry and scientific precision, things that ancient peoples were not at all aware of? Is it not likely that God would have allowed his word to come to the ancient Israelites according to standards they understood, or are modern standards of truth and error so universal that we should expect premodern cultures to have made use of them?”
― Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament

“We do not honor the Lord nor do we uphold the gospel by playing make-believe. Neither are those who engage the kinds of issues discussed in this book necessarily on the slippery slope to unbelief. Our God is much bigger than we sometimes give him credit for. It is we who sometimes wish to keep him small by controlling what can or cannot come into the conversation.”
― Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament