Instead, readers might understand it as a repository of stories from ancient people who wrestled to understand God, ancient people who thus serve as models for us in our own unsure and messy times.Įnns tells his own story of discovering unsettling Bible things that his conservative Christian background hadn’t prepared him for. He wants people to stop expecting the Bible to be a straightforward history of God or a simple rule book about how to live your life in order to go to heaven. “The problem,” Enns says, “is coming to the Bible with expectations it’s not set up to bear” (8), and he hammers on this point repeatedly. ![]() Enns tries to alleviate readerly anxiety by observing that the Bible actually contains several different pictures of God, which is understandable since elements of the Bible were written by different people at different times and places with different concerns and expectations.Įxpectations, in fact, is what this book is really all about. The Bible contains strange accounts and contradictions-and not just in a few Old Testament laws but in the very picture of God it paints in various places. Many people who read the Bible carefully today are left feeling unsettled. I think a lot of Mormons could really benefit from Enns’s experience.Įnns has been around long enough to know that the Bible is not only a source of faith, but can just as easily become a challenge to faith. It’s called The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It. ![]() At least, he seems like that based on this faithful, intelligent, and funny book he just wrote about the Bible. Which really is too bad, because he seems like a pretty faithful, intelligent, funny guy. Peter Enns is an evangelical Christian and a Bible scholar-two identity markers that’ve raised a few conflicts for him.
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