Curveball Quotes

“it reflects the inevitable need of us humans to adjust to how we understand God by virtue of when and where we live and what issues we are facing.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“but to find a better God because the circumstances demand it—meaning, to see that God is better than we thought.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“Asking a community to adjust its traditions about God never goes unchallenged.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“God beyond the limiting and inadequate conceptions of God I had.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“couldn’t refuse—to recognize that I had been laboring under a small view of God. I was beginning to find out that God is bigger, completely out of my control, and more mysterious than I had been able to capture in slogans and childish expectations.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“God’s relationship with humans was basically transactional. Humans sin and God punishes sinners—God has to because He hates sin so much. But Jesus stepped in and took the punishment for us. Our side of the transaction, our only obligation, was to accept that Jesus did this—and really mean it—so that when we die, we go to heaven rather than burn in hell for eternity.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“God is not interested in church-performance and the games we play with respect to God. I came to believe, despite the loud contrary voices in my head, that God honors simple honesty more than going along with scripted roles.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“The goal is refinement and redemption, not punishment.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“I believe God expects us to be ready to adjust our beliefs when the curveballs come, to become better hitters, to play the game with greater skill and knowledge. And with that renewed vision of God, we might be able to see the broader role that sacred texts can play in our world. They offer their readers narratives for understanding their place in the world and even the cosmos—sacred texts help us work out the meaning of it all. Our job as readers of these texts and worshipers of God is to transpose those narratives from the ancient world into our own.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“The more flexible we are when it comes to reading the Bible, the more prepared we will be to adjust to the curveballs of life. The more inflexible we are, the less prepared we will be to make those adjustments precisely at the time when they will be needed to keep our faith alive and thriving.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“Whatever the specifics, the simple act of reading the Bible carefully tends to undermine the notion that the Bible is God’s flawless, set-in-stone, authoritative word downloaded to us.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“The role of the church is to be doctor and nurse, not judge and jury.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“reality isn’t what it used to be.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“There is no pure “theology” to be contrasted to “feminist theology” or “Black theology,” because the supposed pure theology is driven by its own encultured concerns and assumptions.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“the central role of experience in the life of faith is widely recognized now in academic circles as a no-brainer.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“We do not comprehend but can only trust that our heavens, as it was for the psalmist, are declaring for us the glory of God. And that glory is as far from our understanding as are the distant galaxies that swirl about in the infinite expanses of the universe.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“I am seeking to live into the sacred space of God’s Presence with curiosity, hope, peace, and love of others. I believe this is the type of relationship God seeks to have with us.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“That model is built on seeing God as a relentless, compassionate inner presence in my life, always beckoning me forward. That model is one of peace, curiosity, and hopefulness and rests on my embrace of the mystery and love of God.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“my disruptive experiences are not outside impositions to or an attack on my faith, but are the soil out of which my faith matures and takes shape.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“The big lesson I learned from wrestling with my own curveballs is how deeply my faith in God had been cemented in fear—which is to say, how I viewed God as very much antagonistic toward me. And so any thought on my part of listening to my experiences and interrogating my inherited faith—to inspect its boundaries let alone climb over its walls—was seen as a crisis that had to be averted or at least resolved immediately.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“Adjusting our understanding of God isn’t a sign of weak faith, nor is it an attack on faith—it is faith.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“I have found that the prompts to adjusting my understanding of God are all around me—literally. The very heavens are shouting them, and the word they are shouting most clearly is “mystery.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“What is at stake is a faith that can actually remain sustainable and meaningful because it listens to the challenges of the present as we follow the God who is always out ahead of us, ready to surprise us.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“God started it. Baked into the name “Israel” is this very idea of a divinely initiated wrestling match. And this name, “you have striven with God,” the ancient biblical storyteller claimed, was not one that the people of Israel chose for themselves but one God bestowed upon them . . . as a blessing. So, here is my late-blooming insight: perhaps wrestling with God is God-initiated and a blessing. Why is it a blessing? Because we never come out of that wrestling match as we entered. Wrestling with God may leave us limping, but it transforms our understanding of who God is. We see God better after the struggle.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“So, too, if we wish to speak of God meaningfully, in ways that engage the people of today, we cannot do so by forcing them to swallow an ancient reality that is demonstrably not real.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“White privilege is not an overt act of racism but the simple observation that people of white skin are historically and culturally dominant, and therefore seen as the standard or norm.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“I have come to think, as have so many others in the course of history, that the goal of Christian faith is the experience of God, not the comprehension of God.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“Placeholder theology is the very nature of theology. By it we acknowledge the human need to say something about ultimate meaning concerning the Creator and the creation while also understanding that what we say will never say it all.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“Does the God of Abraham look lovingly upon ancient cave drawings and temples dedicated to the only gods ancient humans could have known?”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt

“A God who does not connect to the world around us is a God who cannot speak to us. Believing in a God who demands that we continue to adopt only biblically ancient ways of thinking of God, which are themselves rooted in their own cultural moment, is to diminish God’s active presence here and now.”
― Peter Enns, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God) – A Biblical Scholar's Guide to Faith Growing Through Doubt