Quotes from Peter Enns

There's an irony: the passionate defense of the Bible as a "history book" among the more conservative wings of Christianity, despite intentions, isn't really an act of submission to God; it is making God submit to us.

And again, the genius of the laws is their ambiguity, not their clarity, for their ambiguity is the very thing that allows them to gain new life with each passing year, ensuring that past and present forever remain connected and in dialogue.

The Pentateuch was not authored out of whole cloth by a second-millennium Moses but is the end product of a complex literary process—written, oral, or both—that did not come to a close until the postexilic period.

Trust does not cancel our mind but circumscribes it and tames it—and so we do not succumb to fretting or anxious thoughts of being unsure.

Doubt tears down the castle walls we have built, with the false security and permanence they give, and forces us outside to walk a lonely, trying, yet cleansing road. In those times, it definitely feels like God is against us, far away, or absent altogether. But what if the darkness is actually a moment of God's presence that seems like absence, a gift of God

To mention just a few: Brian McLaren, The Last Word and After That; Valerie Tarico, Trusting Doubt; Greg Boyd, Benefit of the Doubt; Rachel Held Evans, Faith Unravelled (formerly, Evolving in Monkeytown); Philip Yancey, Disappointment with God; Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith.

It is only to admit that what we have cannot be explained as an early (second-millennium-BC) document written essentially by one person (Moses). Rather, the Pentateuch has a diverse compositional history spanning many centuries and was brought to completion after the return from exile.

A Bible that does things like this is not a disappointing problem that has to be explained away or made excuses for, but something to be embraced with thanksgiving as a divine gift of love, as we, in return, accept our sacred and biblical responsibility to walk daily the path of wisdom rather than looking to hitch an easy ride.

reality isn't what it used to be.

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.

Paradoxically, the challenges of our day-to-day existence are sustained reminders that our life of faith simply must have its center somewhere other than in our ability to hold it together in our minds.

Doubting God is painful and frightening because we think we are leaving God behind, when in fact we are only leaving behind ideas about God that we are used to surrounding ourselves with—the small God, the God within our control, the God who moves in our circles, the God who agrees with us.