Book Recommendation: ‘How the Bible Actually Works’ by Pete Enns

If you’ve been to one of our gatherings, you know that we engage with the thoughts of many scholars, faith leaders, activists, and artists. These voices cover quite a gamut of times, places, and cultures, so that there’s very little that ties them together—except that they’re not straight white men. The reasons for this are pretty straightforward. Not only are we already hearing my straight white man voice, but theology in the West has been dominated by this cluster of perspectives forever. It’s time for new voices to ring out.

All that is a sort of apology for the fact that the Harbor Blog’s first book rec is for a book about the Bible from some white guy (Peter Enns).

But dang, this book is good.

I’m just going to present to you the main point and overall flow of the book. My hope is that, (1) if you love to read, this post might inspire you to pick up the book, and (2) if you’re allergic to books, this piece can give you some of the benefits you would have gotten from reading the real thing.

How the Bible Actually Works

The main point of this book stems from a simple claim Enns makes about God: God is not a helicopter parent. Yeah. That really is the theological basis for pretty much the entire book, so maybe sit with that for a minute.

If God were, in fact, a helicopter parent, we could expect a certain kind of Bible from God: a clear, precise, black-and-white guide, chock-full of rules, principles, revelations, and decrees to give us everything we need to say, believe, think, and do exactly what will please God at all times.

But because God is not a helicopter parent, that’s not the Bible we have.

God is instead like a good human parent who does express love, support, and insight, but who ultimately trusts the children with independence and lets them figure things out on their own. With this kind of heavenly parent, we get a very different Bible—one that is not designed to give us certainty, perfection, or rules, but to help us develop wisdom.

What kind of book can help people develop wisdom? According to Enns, one that is ambiguous and diverse. And those words (along with ancient) are exactly how he describes the Bible.

To Enns, the fact that the Bible is ambiguous and diverse is not a bug, it’s a feature. So instead of trying to explain away or harmonize every point of confusion, offensive passage, or inconsistency, we should celebrate these features of the Bible—because they actually help us develop wisdom. They force us to engage in the very process of the biblical authors and the Bible itself: reimagining God for the time and place in which we live. As Enns describes it:

The Bible holds out for us an invitation to accept this timeless and sacred responsibility of working out for ourselves what faith in God looks like here and now, of owning the process, with no accompanying checklist of one-size-fits all solutions, no safety net of prescribed responses, and no fear that God will bring down the hammer on us for accepting the challenge of faith.

The Bible Models Wisdom

How exactly does the Bible hold out this invitation for us? Not only by explicitly inviting us to seek out wisdom, but by showing us how the wisdom process occurs! In the crucible of real life, each new generation of biblical authors was forced to discern again what God is like and how God is present. Back to Enns:

We see already throughout the Bible how its various writers, living in different times and places and under different circumstances, found themselves needing to think of God differently—to reimagine God when older perceptions (which made sense earlier) could no longer account for their experience.

That quote is near the end of the book, because by this point Enns has already shown us how the process of wisdom—of reimagining God, faith, love, and community—has already shaped the Bible’s contents. He points mainly to the crisis of Babylonian exile as a new circumstance that demands a new understanding of God and faith. This experience shaped large sections of the Old Testament, resisting or revising previously written biblical material. Yet another wisdom-building context was the later return to the land—and the disappointing lack of a new dynasty to sit on David’s throne, the lack of God raising up new prophets. This, too, brought on new theological reflection.

The process of reflecting and reimagining did not end in the Old Testament. By Jesus’ day, the people were living under Roman rule, with little hope of freedom or independence. What did this mean for their experience of God? Then there were the teachings of Jesus, which explicitly reimagined and redefined crucial concepts like Temple, Sabbath, and Messiah. We know of these teachings from four different Gospels, each of which was “adapting and reshaping the relatively recent history of Jesus of Nazareth, even freely editing the work of others, in order to present Jesus meaningfully to their communities of faith.” Paul, too (along with James, Peter, and the rest), was adjusting and reconfiguring his theology to meet the needs of his moment.

Accepting the Path of Wisdom

What does it mean to step into this process, to say yes to the Bible’s invitation to wisdom?

For some of us, it probably starts with embracing God as a God of wisdom, who is both present and absent, but always loving, rather than a stern parent hovering over our shoulders at all times. But more to the point of the book, wisdom will also ask many of us to completely reevaluate the ways we approach and use the Bible.

Not a rulebook. Not a source of timeless, unchanging truths that translate easily into all times, places, languages, and cultures. It does not paint a concrete picture of society for us to return to—not Eden, not Sinai, not David’s Israel, not the early church. We cannot and should not simply replicate the beliefs, practices, or norms of the peoples in the Bible.

These phases in the history of God’s people (like the phases that came after them: the creeds, the Holy Roman Empire, the Protestant Reformation) are important sources of wisdom, precisely because we can engage them in order to perceive God and shape our faith here and now. On this, I’ll give Pete the last word:

If the notion of reimagining God is still a bit unnerving for some, as I can well understand, look on the bright side. We are all already doing that very thing whenever we talk about God—and the biblical writers were doing that very same thing long before any of us came on the scene.

Whatever fear there might be, grace and peace are also to be found by taking the Bible seriously enough to accept the challenge of wisdom and truly own our faith here and now. That, as I’ve been saying, is our sacred responsibility, and by accepting that responsibility we will learn to let go of the youthful fear of the unfamiliar and move toward wisdom and maturity.

If you’re up for wisdom and all its risk and uncertainty, let us know here on our Get Involved page that you’d like to check out one of our gatherings.