Quotes from Peter Enns

But doubt is not the enemy of faith, a solely destructive force that rips us away from God, a dark cloud that blocks the bright warm sun of faith. Doubt is only the enemy of faith when we equate faith with certainty in our thinking.

Walter Brueggemann calls these parts of the Bible Israel's "countertestimony" . . . This spot-on term to name the dark side of the Bible, and which calls into question Israel's main storyline, comes from Walter Brueggemann's Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy.

The Creator is being reimagined all the time and can be reimagined through the lens of any culture, of any time and place. No one culture, and certainly not the (largely white male affluent) Western culture I inhabit, can claim superior status for reimagining God once and for all. The Creator doesn't need any of us to sit atop the mountain and speak down to everyone else.

Rather than focusing on the badges that define our tribal identity (our church, denomination, subdenomination, doctrinal convictions, side of the aisle, whatever), a trust-centered faith will see the world with humble, open, and vulnerable eyes—and ourselves as members and participants rather than masters and conquerors. We will see our unfathomable cosmos and the people in our cosmic neighborhood as God's creation, not as objects for our own manipulation or unholy mischief.

N. T. Wright's Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision or What Paul Really Said.

Doubt can certainly leave us empty and frightened, but that is precisely the benefit of doubt: it exposes the folly that strong faith means you need to "know what you believe," that the more faith you "have," the more certain you are.

Thomas Merton's Thoughts in Solitude.

Rather than counting on the acquisition of knowledge to support and defend the faith, a trust-centered faith values and honors the wise—those who through experience and mature spiritual habits have earned the right to lead and are given a central role in nurturing faith in others.

whatever it means to speak of the Bible as inspired by God clearly doesn't mean the Bible is scrubbed clean of the human experience of the writers.

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.

Doubt means spiritual relocation is happening. It's God's way of saying, "Time to move on.

Rather than defining faithfulness as absolute conformity to authority and tribal identity, a trust-centered faith will value in others the search for true human authenticity that may take them away from the familiar borders of their faith, while trusting God to be part of that process in ourselves and others, even those closest to us. The choice of how we want to live is entirely ours.