Quotes from Peter Enns

It may be hard—sometimes impossible—to see the history in Israel's stories, but we do get a good picture of how these ancient Israelites experienced God.

But at least I didn't do any harm. Along the way I came to see more and more that being right about God and making sure everyone else agreed with what I knew might not be the most important thing I could do in God's eyes.

Like a frail plant that needs careful tending and constant protection from sun and wind, perhaps the real problem wasn't me but the fragile, unsustainable version of Christianity I had been told was my only option.

When we seek and follow wisdom in the precious few years given to us, we are truly accepting a sacred responsibility to live intentionally in the Spirit's presence. And what that looks like will be different for each of us and will likely change through the seasons of our lives.

Grace grows best in winter.

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.

To put it plainly, the life of faith is the pursuit of wisdom.

To live by faith—to live wisely—means living with an ever-increasing awareness of the hidden things, not simply a detached general knowledge that, say, "Money can be harmful," but a deep knowledge of ourselves, a true self-awareness of what money is doing to me . . . right now.

How do biblical writers talk about the past?

The exodus, in fact, is really all about getting to Mount Sinai, and how the events there prepare the Israelites for their ultimate destiny—a kingdom in a land of their own.

What I discovered, and what I want to pass along to you in this book, is that this view of the Bible does not come from the Bible but from an anxiety over protecting the Bible and so regulating the faith of those who read it.

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.