Quotes from Peter Enns

You might find yourself wondering whether all this detail is really necessary, that God could really have stopped after the Ten Commandments and not gotten into leprosy, eating pork, or how to dress and ordain a priest.

These ancient writers had an adequate understanding of God for them in their time, but not for all time—and if we take that to heart, we will actually be in a better position to respect these ancient voices and see what they have to say rather than whitewashing the details and making up "explanations" to ease our stress.

Here's a simpler explanation: there were other people living outside of the Garden of Eden all along, even if the story doesn't explain it. Which leads to this: maybe the story of Adam and Eve isn't about the first human beings. Maybe it's about something else. And that something else is this: The Adam story is a story of Israel in miniature, a preview of coming attractions.

What could be more normal than for different people, living at different times, in different places, who wrote about the past for different reasons and to different audiences, to produce different versions on the past? Nothing. And that's what we see in the Bible.

Rulebook Bible reading" shortchanges the depth and raw reality of Israel's own journey of faith in God.

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.

I'VE BEEN ON A JOURNEY of rediscovering the Bible and the God behind it for over thirty years and I don't see that journey ending any time soon.

Another angle, one often taken by Christians in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, is to read the Adam story as being not about a fall down from perfection, but a failure to grow up to godly wisdom and maturity.

Wisdom leads us to dialogues with the past. It doesn't lead us back to the past.

Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job all agree: the Bible doesn't capture a freeze-frame of God and bind him to it. If we get on board with this idea, some other things the Bible says about God will make more sense.

Think of the resurrection as God unexpectedly going off script and bringing into the present time a bit of the future.

These diverse stories of the past that we find in the Bible are not a problem to be solved. They model for us the spiritual immediacy of the present.