Quotes from Peter Enns

Humility, love, and kindness are our grand acts of faithfulness and how we show that we are all in. "No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us" (1 John 4:12). Loving each other is the closest we get to seeing God.

If I were king of Christianity, after limiting church services to forty-five minutes and sermons to ten, as well as outlawing church "share time" altogether, I would proclaim a kingdom-wide decree that, at least for a while until we get it, "believe" should be stricken from all of our Bibles and replaced with trust.

Mother Teresa. According to her own journal, she was in her dark night more or less from 1948 until near the time of her death in 1997.

Perhaps her long dark night fueled her life, where she kept moving anyway, as an act of trust so deep it cannot be rationally explained—and indeed would look foolish if anyone tried. And the result was about as clear a Jesus movement as you can point to in recent history. Mother Teresa learned

But a faith that requires us to hold on to what we "know" becomes, we eventually discover, inadequate for handling the peaks and valleys of our humanity. It's also exhausting to try to hold it all together as it once was.

Wisdom teaches us to embrace both the adequacy and the limitations of our God-talk, to keep the two in tension. Perhaps accepting that paradox is true faith.

We have every reason today to think differently about the universe and our place in it. This doesn't disprove God, but it does challenge our thinking. For people of faith, bringing the ancient Bible and our lives together can be stressful and unnerving—which is a problem if faith and correct thinking are deemed inseparable. "What does it mean to be human?" does not have as clear a biblical answer as it once had.

trust—not clarity, not certainty, but trust in God. And all of that poured out to the people around her.

As quite distinct from Jewish interpretation, the history of modern evangelical interpretation exhibits a strong degree of discomfort with the tensions and ambiguities of Scripture.

I am amazed and encouraged by those who have lived through these moments of hell on earth and have continued on in the life of faith anyway. They have something to teach people like me: no matter what we think we know, no matter how sure we happen to think we are, suffering is the place where our sense of certainty about God's ways fades like a dream and forces us to consider that what we know may not be as central to our faith as we might think.

Adjusting our understanding of God isn't a sign of weak faith, nor is it an attack on faith—it is faith.

The Gospels are also anonymous, and the names attached to them come to us from early church tradition. Likely none was an eyewitness. The writers relied on stories of Jesus that were circulating orally, perhaps (or probably) going back to what eyewitnesses had seen.