Quotes from Peter Enns

Another dynamic at work here is how friends, family, and church members would handle it if they knew what you were thinking. Feeling judged and banished is a common story among those who take a risk to let people in on their well-guarded secret.

One cannot have contentment in the Christian life without the darkness. Dying is the only path to resurrection, and that is the only way of knowing God. There is no shortcut. Jesus himself is our model for this.

I feel that if we do not engage Scripture with future believers in mind, we will unwittingly erect unnecessary and tragic obstacles to belief. Part of what drives this book is my concern to help prevent that scenario.

Doubt is God's way of helping us not go there, though the road may be very hard and long.

What is at stake is a faith that can actually remain sustainable and meaningful because it listens to the challenges of the present as we follow the God who is always out ahead of us, ready to surprise us.

I've learned to be fine with not knowing.

Then we have the Gospel of John, the odd man out. John's story of Jesus is so out of step with the others that it is sometimes hard to see how he could be talking about the same person.

The idea of reimagining God as times and circumstances change should, therefore, not strike us as odd or the least bit troubling—our Bible is full of reimagining. Without it, there wouldn't be a "New" Testament or a Christian faith tradition. The entire history of the Christian church is defined by moments of reimagining God to speak here and now.

We can't get our minds around God. I don't think the Christian faith is fundamentally rational, by which I mean it cannot be captured fully by our rational faculties—and in fact, more often than not, confounds them. A God who can be comfortably captured in our minds, with little else for us to find out apart from an occasional adjustment, is no God at all. Expecting faith in God to be rational is often more the problem than the solution.

Because, more than the other three Gospel writers, John is big on Jesus's divine authority over the religious leaders. That's part of his agenda, and so he shapes the past to make the point.

The root of the conflict for many Christians is not scientific or even theological, but group identity and fear of losing what it offers.

Think of it this way: the same wisdom that was with God when God "ordered" creation (Gen. 1) is available to us as we seek to "order" the chaos of our lives.