Quotes from Peter Enns

Rather than providing us with information to be downloaded, the Bible holds out for us an invitation to join an ancient, well-traveled, and sacred quest to know God, the world we live in, and our place in it. Not abstractly, but intimately and experientially.

In reading the Bible we are watching the spiritual journeys of people long ago.

When we are taught that the Bible has to meet these unrealistic expectations for our faith to be genuine, the end product is a fragile, nervous faith.

But if the Bible's main purpose is to form us, to grow us to maturity, to teach us the sacred responsibility of communing with the Spirit by walking the path of wisdom, it would leave plenty of room for pondering, debating, thinking, and the freedom to fail. And that is what it does.

Maybe the Bible isn't God's owner's manual for us that answers all our questions about God and lays a script out for us to follow as we walk along the Christian path.

don't want to beat a dead lamb, but let me say again that contradictions between Old Testament laws aren't exactly an industry secret. Jewish tradition has wrestled with them since before Christianity. Biblical scholars write books about it. Who knows, perhaps a future episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel will have Midge's mom stressed out about how exactly to prepare the Passover lamb.

The New Testament story is, in other words, one big act of wisdom—a response to God's surprising presence here and now.

Whether we are aware of it or not, behind our religious deliberations, in one form or another, we are really asking a deeply foundational question, "What kind of God do I believe in, really?" This is not a luxury question for those with idle time on their hands, but exactly the kind of question we should deliberately bring to the front of our consciousness as an expression of responsible faith; it is not evidence that our faith is weakening.

If we think of the gospel as simply rolling right off the Old Testament tongue, we will be wrong. And we will fail to appreciate how creative the New Testament writers were in working out the day-to-day real-time implications of all of this.

And either way, God is with you.

And here's another important dimension of this book. When we accept that biblical invitation, we will see not only how the Bible challenges us to work out what it means to live the life of faith here and now. We will also see—if I may stress the point once again—how the biblical writers themselves were already challenged by the need to move past a rulebook mentality and respond to new circumstances with wisdom.

It seems, then, that the purpose of 3:14—15 is not to introduce a new name, but to underscore the precise identity of the God who is now addressing Moses.