Pete Enns: The Bible’s Diversity - Problem or Gift?
In this insightful Theology Lab interview, biblical scholar Pete Enns explores how studying the Bible reshaped his faith and understanding of Scripture. He discusses historical context, biblical diversity, and the challenges of rethinking long-held beliefs. Enns introduces key ideas from his book Inspiration and Incarnation, emphasizing the Bible’s fully human and divine nature. The conversation highlights how Scripture’s complexity can deepen faith, encourage humility, and foster honest dialogue. This discussion is essential for anyone wrestling with doubt, biblical interpretation, and how to engage Scripture in a modern world.
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In this insightful Theology Lab interview, biblical scholar Pete Enns explores how studying the Bible reshaped his faith and understanding of Scripture. He discusses historical context, biblical diversity, and the challenges of rethinking long-held beliefs. Enns introduces key ideas from his book Inspiration and Incarnation, emphasizing the Bible’s fully human and divine nature. The conversation highlights how Scripture’s complexity can deepen faith, encourage humility, and foster honest dialogue. This discussion is essential for anyone wrestling with doubt, biblical interpretation, and how to engage Scripture in a modern world.
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www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com
Generated Transcript
speaker-0 (00:00)
Well, Pete Enns, thanks so much for joining us for Theology Lab.
speaker-1 (00:04)
Thank you, Scott.
speaker-0 (00:06)
Can you tell us a little bit about how you became interested in studying the Bible?
speaker-1 (00:11)
It was after I graduated college, I'd gone to a Christian college and I realized I didn't really understand what I said I believed. And that really drove me just to read the Bible really for the first time. I mean, I had been in Christian circles for a few years, but just cover to cover many times. And then I, it just, one thing led to another. And I said, I actually want to go to school for this. I want to know more. And so I got an M.D.I.V. and that wasn't enough. So I went.
kept on going and ⁓ the doctoral work. ⁓ it was really, it was curiosity and a feeling like I wanted to understand what I said I believed.
And as a result, what I believe changed. that happens a lot too, but.
speaker-0 (00:55)
which is something I think will be a huge part of our conversation tonight. I look forward to getting into. ⁓ So in curveball and elsewhere in your work, but in curveball, you talk a little bit about this period of time during graduate studies where your relationship to the Bible underwent some pretty significant changes. I think this could probably help set the stage for our conversation. ⁓ What kind of questions were you asking and how were they significant for your changing relationship with the Bible?
speaker-1 (01:21)
Yeah, I guess the big question was, it wasn't really a question. It was just an awakening to looking at the Bible in its historical context. And then we throw that around a lot, but when you start really digging, you start seeing how, you know, the Bible, like any text has its own properties, its own behaviors, but you start seeing how very many commonalities there are between
the biblical story and other stories we know from the ancient world. And that was a big one. ⁓ So that raises the question, well, how unique is the Bible? How is it different from anything else if it tells similar kinds of stories, if Israel's God acts the same way that gods of other nations act, and things like that. And then the second thing, ⁓ that's more Hebrew Bible, this is more New Testament, it's ⁓ studying with Jewish scholars who...
dealt with the history of interpretation in Judaism and how creative it was and then seeing the New Testament do that. And for me, it was a huge realization to actually see the way Paul handles, for example, the way Paul handles the Bible or the way Jesus handled the Bible. It's like, these guys are Jewish. They fit in that ancient Jewish world. They're not doing something new that nobody thought of before.
they're actually falling in line. Now they're saying different things about the Bible, but their method, how they read the texts, it was very, very similar. And that to me was probably, that issue was more impactful than anything else. And it really caused me to, I wasn't afraid, but I was disoriented. I was like, I haven't begun to understand what this text is doing. And what I've been taught,
was innocent enough. mean, I'm not angry about anything, but it was at best a partial picture and at worst, probably a little misinformation or distorted, again, not willingly by people, but just, you know, it just happened. start seeing how the sausage is made and you start asking different kinds of questions about the text.
speaker-0 (03:39)
Is there anything that you would say that stands out to you in particular that kind of opened up this text to you that still influences you today?
speaker-1 (03:48)
I, yeah, there has been no bigger influence in my life than my Jewish professors of art because they were, they were spiritual men, John Levinson and James Kugel, just to name the two. But ⁓ they taught me how to read closely, which is what Judaism does. And not to go for the big message and get on with it, but more look at that word.
and how it's used elsewhere. And when you look at it in Hebrew, it obviously changes things because that's the language, right? And you're not dealing with translations. And I think close readings of the Bible and something that this was sort of a theme in some of my courses, but especially with James Kugel, who was my doctoral advisor.
I mean, he says something very provocative that I still think about. said, what makes the Bible the word of God isn't the words on the page. It's the interpretation given to the words. And what he means is that the Bible has had a very long shelf life.
not just because of what it is, but because communities of faith keep using it and sort of transposing it into their own existence. And that's why the Bible is still here. It's not because it's a magical book or something. It's used by people of faith and it continues to be used and it's not going anywhere. And that really had an impact on me rather than sort of a top down view of things like authority or inspiration is more like a bottom up view saying,
Well, this has been meaningful and people have struggled with it and people have had to.
adapt the text to talk to different time periods in history. And then I start realizing, yeah, my church does that all the time. I mean, we're just adapting this stuff for our own, to make sense of our existence, really. And ⁓ realizing that's as old as the Bible itself.
speaker-0 (05:56)
Hey, Scott here. you're enjoying this video, you can like and subscribe to Theology Lab's channel below and you'll see our latest releases and what's happening at Theology Lab right now. Also, the description and comments have a link to our podcast that features folks like David Brooks, Kristen Kobus-Dumay and others. Enjoy the video. So in 2005, you write this book, Inspiration and Incarnation. This book was
book was very important for me. Uh, and about, I think in about 2010, I was on a bus ride back from a seminary class back to student housing, asking questions to a PhD student about, uh, some, some, some like difficulties I was having reading the Bible. The PhD student explained the concept of divine incarnation that you use in this book so well that I don't think I actually, and it solves so many problems for me. I don't think I put, I picked up the book for another five years.
⁓ it's been a very important book to me. ⁓ I wonder though, can you just kind of give us a sense of, ⁓ what do you, what do mean by the notion of divine incarnation in this book as a way that can help us understand what's going on within the Bible?
speaker-1 (07:12)
Yeah, I'm looking here. You have the older version. This is the newer cover with a little bit extra because the 10th anniversary edition came out in 2015. So. You need to go out and buy that Scott.
speaker-0 (07:26)
Okay, in my defense, I listened to the audio version of it recently and and and then people I was reading it with informed me that I was reading the updated version.
speaker-1 (07:37)
Okay, that's fine. Good. What a concept that has helped me a lot in working through the Bible as a historical phenomenon with all its quirks, its weirdness and all that kind of stuff. I'll even say it's contradictions. It's it's multi valentness. It's it's it's, you know, multi-vocality, as people say nowadays, all that kind of stuff.
the inner dialogue within the Bible, all that sort of stuff. What has helped me make sense of that, and I really jumped on this in graduate school, was the analogy between Jesus, the word, capital W, and the Bible, the word, lowercase w, that the way to think about maybe inspiration of the Bible is analogous to Jesus being the God man.
which is itself a mystery which I'll never understand and neither will anybody else. And if people say they understand it, I think they're lying or they're just ignorant. It's just, this is a profound mystery of the faith. And you know, the same way that Jesus is, okay, he's divine again, whatever that means, but he's also a hundred percent human and you can't lose that. And I think evangelicals especially have trouble holding onto the humanity of Jesus and the serious implications of that.
And if we look at the Bible under that analogy, like, well, it's divinely inspired, but it's thoroughly encultured and thoroughly human at the same time, which doesn't make sense, but that's part of the mystery of the incarnation. so this book, Inspiration and Incarnation, it's looking at the inspiration of the Bible by analogy with the incarnation of
So I'm not saying the Bible is God incarnate or anything like that. I'm just saying it's an analogy to sort of help look at that. So when you look at Jesus and you realize, he spoke Aramaic with maybe little Greek and Hebrew and he wore sandals and he had all of skin and he wore a robe and he probably didn't know calculus or know where Canada was and know there was a candidate, right? He's thoroughly human, but that's not wrong.
Right? That's the way it is. Likewise, the Bible, when it has the marks of humanity, which are in every syllable of the Bible, you know, it's not wrong. if Genesis one is not historical, it's ⁓ Israel's version of a myth that was floating around. Well, that's wrong. It's not wrong. That's human. That's what it looks like to have a human text. you know, Jesus was not ⁓
a ⁓ lavish monarch with chariots and things like that. He didn't look the role, right? But that doesn't mean he's less the Messiah, right? It's just, have to, I think Christians, at least in my circles growing up, in retrospect, I say this, don't grapple enough with the implications of the humanity of it all. And not only that, but
how the humanity of it is irrevocable. It's absolutely essential to our understanding of the nature of humanity, the nature of Christ, the nature of the Bible. And that's, mean, that's been a big thing for me, you know, and that's a big part of the book that stays with me, even though I wrote it, you know, almost 20 years ago now. Hard to believe, gosh, 20 years, what happened? Where'd I go?
speaker-0 (11:27)
back. We're back. I so one of the things that I see in that is there's kind of a almost a requirement to kind of be to be open to how what we think about how God speaks sometimes needs to be like reevaluated. I wonder just for you, this could be whether it was the experiences in graduate school or sometime afterwards. What were the things that made you want to reevaluate them?
I'm not trying to name here is that this can also be an unsettling process.
speaker-1 (12:01)
Yeah, I think, I mean, this sounds really idealistic and I don't mean it to sound like that, but I think what made me, frankly, never hesitate to reevaluate is because I only care about what's true. And as I see it, I mean, I don't see truth as it actually is. Nobody does. mean, I'm not, I have to find the truth. It's like, it's more a quest for truth as a quest for understanding. And whatever it is, it is.
whatever's going on in the Bible is going on. that's my, the fact that some things you find out about the Bible can like wreak havoc with your theology.
The problem is not in pointing that out. So people say, you're attacking the Bible or something. hear that occasionally, or you're attacking Christianity or something. And I say some of my tongue in cheek, I said, I'm not attacking the Bible, I'm attacking you. And there's a big difference. And the problem is you don't know the difference between those two. You think what you think is the way it actually has to be. I actually don't think that about myself, but I'm...
truly on a quest for understanding and for truth. And I feel that regardless of what I find, I believe I find God there as well. Just God differently than I had in my own idol factory up in my head ⁓ have conceived of, you And that's a big theme, Scott, of ⁓ the sin of certainty. You know, it's...
When you're freaking out about something and you're shifting in your faith, that could be a big God moment too. Maybe it's time to let go of an inherited faith, not entirely, but at least maybe in segments or something, but to let go of it because what used to serve you is now getting in the way.
because God can't be captured by any system of thought that we have. I'm really committed to that idea for myself. The words I use are just attempts. Calvin said they're lisping, they're baby talk with respect to God. And I believe that.
speaker-0 (14:18)
Yeah. I want to stay with this kind of, same thing that's looking at kind of bigger themes within your work. so this is a key part that, this is a key theme that shows up in a lot of works. I think it's kind of at the heart of how the Bible actually works that book, ⁓ that there is abundant diversity in the Bible. ⁓ there's laws that they don't line up, ⁓ how wisdom is applied, different historical perspective. And then what you say, ⁓ you know, quite straightforwardly is that this diversity can be a gift to us, not a problem.
So how is biblical diversity a gift? ⁓ Can you guess possibly like an example and how that might form how we approach the Bible?
speaker-1 (14:57)
I think, yeah, I mean, succinctly, I'd say I think it's a gift because it models for us that even in our sacred book, there are individuals who don't have the same view of issue X, know, almost whatever it is. And to me, that what's positive about that is the Bible doesn't, it's not a rule book, you just find the verse, you have to actually immerse yourself in
the intra-canonical dialogue, maybe put it that way. There are, I think, clearly examples of later writers engaging earlier ones and coming to a different conclusion about things. And that's part, that to me is a non-negotiable part of the biblical story, that diversity, that again, the buzz term now is multi-vocality. The Bible speaks with multiple voices, even on the same topic.
And I think it's not a matter of which one is right necessarily, although we might gravitate towards one rather than the other, but it's more watching the biblical writers be theologians, frankly. And I would even say practical theologians. So ⁓ I guess, mean, a couple of ⁓ examples would be one. There are laws in Torah about
holding Hebrew slaves. And in Exodus, it's the male can go free after seven years if he wishes, the what I'm just collapsing this very quickly. But the the female slaves can't go free. In Deuteronomy, twice in Chapter 15, it says explicitly male and female Hebrew slaves can go free after seven years. Well, that's interesting. And let's just throw into the mix Leviticus, which says
What are you crazy? Keep me Hebrew slaves. Don't you know that you were slaves in Egypt? Why would you do that to each other? Enslave anybody else if you want to, but just don't enslave each other. Let me put it this way. Ben Summer was on our podcast. He's a Jewish scholar and he has a notion in a book that he wrote ⁓ where he says the revelation of God still has to be interpreted
for different times in different ways. He says that is actually the nature of revelation. It's not just to give you clear information. It's something maybe big and multifaceted. And in the time of the book of Exodus, it was looked at one way. In Deuteronomy, people say there is more of a humanitarian flair. And in Leviticus, it's it's eradicated completely.
All three, see, this is the thing, all three claim to be revelation given by God on Mount Sinai to Moses to the people. And you have three different versions of it. And that's not an isolated example. I mean, there are books written about how the different legal codes in Torah and how they're the same and how they're different. This is well known. And what always strikes me, Scott, is
The scribes that compiled the Bible as we know it, which might've happened sometime after the Babylonian Exile, but probably started before that, ⁓ they could read. They saw the tensions. They didn't take them out.
because this is their story, this is their history, this is their tradition, which is multi-vocalic and that's preserved. favorite of mine is the book of Job where, you know, he's having a rough day, right? And ⁓ he's a super worshiper of God and he's flush with cash. He's like super rich, he's got a great reputation. Then all that gets taken away from him. And the question is, you know, will...
job worship god just because he's got a world he worship god just because he's got stuff and that's the state is argument with god saying he's rate he's obedient because look at him take a stuff away and see what happens right and so the dialogue goes on where jobst friends basically say to him what did you do
because they're working with a ⁓ mentality of sort of like a rewarding God. If you obey, you're blessed. If you disobey, you're cursed. And Job just denies that from beginning to end. He never caves into that. He never says, yeah, I guess you're right. He says, I don't know what's happening, but I didn't do anything to deserve this. And at the end of the book, God appears again in a whirlwind.
with Job and Job's friends. And he looks at Eliphaz, which is like the chief of the three friends. And he says, my anger is kindled against you, for you have not spoken rightly of me as my servant Job has. So Job wins the argument. But here's the point. Job's friends are not heretics who just don't get God. They're voicing what's usually called a retributional theology.
which is all over the Hebrew Bible. It's not everywhere, but it's certainly in Deuteronomy and in the literature inspired by Deuteronomy, especially read first and second Kings, right? I mean, it's all the retribution of theology you'll ever need. ⁓ Some Psalms are retributional, some Proverbs are retributional. It's like, know, there are consequences of actions, but it's not a flat thing that works everywhere. And so,
The book of Job, I think is in dialogue or even in debate with that dominant way of thinking about God in the Hebrew Bible. And I find that fascinating. The whole Bible is saying, yeah, this way. And Job goes, hold on a second. The author of Job, who has created a story to get his point across, it's a vehicle for theology. I don't think it's historical. ⁓ But he's created a vehicle to
to get you thinking about the nature of God. And I love that about the Bible. People claim we know God and what God does and what God is like. And the biblical story itself has differences of opinion on that. And to think that we can sort of squash that stuff together, that's not respectful of the Bible, I think. It's we're ignoring a ⁓ key property of this text, which is...
diverse expressions on the very same topic, and a topic no less important than what is God like? It's amazing to me. And that stuff doesn't stop in the New Testament. You've got four Gospels that don't agree. You've got Paul and James and Peter that don't get along because they see the whole Gentile thing very differently. We're seeing debates in the Bible.
speaker-0 (22:09)
If this is what's happening in our sacred text, what would you like to see it mean for how we live faith today, for how we use the Bible in our common life?
speaker-1 (22:22)
⁓ I think it would be to approach it, and this is one of the themes in the book you mentioned, how the Bible actually works. It's to approach it as, I use this kind of language as a wisdom text for discernment and to give us language and to wrestle with the text, which is something that is humbling and I think brings about humility and how we think about God and how we approach other people who might think differently.
⁓ I also think of the Bible then as, know, like Bill Maher says, it's not God's big book that drops out of the sky, right? It's a book that in ⁓ its messiness, in its untidiness, in its imperfection,
even though I think the Bible is great the way it is, but it doesn't act like you think a Bible should act, you know, when it's got all this diversity in it. But I think the Bible then acts as a means of grace. It's an access, it's a way of accessing communion with God and with each other. And, you know, just a quick story, Rachel Hould Evans, which is a name I all of you know, and... ⁓
died five years ago this month, which I still can't believe that happened. But ⁓ when she was writing ⁓ a year of biblical womanhood, she spent a lot of time with an older Jewish woman to sort of understand Jewish laws and things like that. And she was over her house one day and the woman's husband was there with his friends. I think they were all rabbis and they were sitting around the table, loudly debating the Bible.
loudly and disagreeing strongly and rachel s the woman she said does that bother you at all to this but you kidding me look what they're there there see the thing is i mean i learned this my jewish ⁓ professors to especially john levenson he says that
debating and struggling with the Bible is an act of worship.
And Trip Fuller, who's a friend of mine, some of you may know him as a theologian, he says all that working it out stuff that is doing theology, an evangelical point of view. I don't mean this in a cheap shot way, but just my own experience historically, in evangelicalism, it's you have to work it all out so that you can do theology.
No, it's the working it out. That's actually part of the theological process. That's part of the journey that we're on. And well, how do know if you're right or not? I have no earthly idea. I think I'm right about some things. I'm probably wrong about a lot of things. I just don't know which is which. And I think God understands that. I mean, I'm sort of counting on that. That, you know, I don't wake up in the morning and say, how can I be a jerk and undermine people? It's I wake up thinking, how can I understand and how can I seek truth?
And I come up with theories like everybody does, it makes sense to them, but it's always only a partial story. It's not the whole thing. I think if the Bible were a simple, short rule book, it would be hard to live that way. But the Bible is a diverse book that probably was written over, including the Christian Bible.
I probably a 1300 year period, roughly. mean, the earliest biblical texts are probably around 1200 BCE and the later ones probably around a hundred, maybe early second century, depending on who you talk to and written at different times, different places under different circumstances, different personalities, different topics are addressing different things happening in the world politically. There there's bound to be diversity in a text like that. And sure as heck you find it there and
That is if you believe in revelation, if you believe in inspiration.
I encourage you to tie those notions with how the Bible is actually behaving and not how it should behave based on our assumptions of what it means to be a revealed text or an inspired text.
speaker-0 (26:33)
I thought that you might speak to the way that this kind of diversity within the text might then be almost like a model for us and that this is okay for us to live today in this way of interacting in our interpretations of the text and with one another. This notion of that, the way you describe it as a means of grace is I think really powerful as well. ⁓ I think it speaks to me and says, give it a go in your best understanding of this text in all of its complexity.
Do this with other people who are also giving it a go. ⁓ No one's going to hit a home run, but that's okay. Like this kind of diversity and ongoing discussion is happening in the text itself. There's a grace to that kind of, ⁓ to that way of approaching the Bible.
speaker-1 (27:17)
And it helps me have a little peace that I don't have to figure it all out. And when it's a means of grace, it's sort of like, I'm sort of Episcopalian. I haven't become a member, but I've been hanging out with them about the past 12 years. I think I have psychological barriers with church membership still. it's, my team of therapists are working on that, don't worry. ⁓ But. ⁓
I forgot where we were.
speaker-0 (27:47)
A means of grace and being okay not figuring it all out.
speaker-1 (27:51)
not figuring it out and just realizing that just like the Eucharist, know, is something that can't, what can happen there emotionally and spiritually is ⁓ trans-rational. It's beyond our rational attempts to control it, right? And that happens sometimes when I...
something's going on and a passage or something comes to mind. And, you know, there's for me a very powerful passage in the middle of Ephesians chapter three that I think about a lot. ⁓ And, you know, I read it, you know, this has been going on for years, this passage. I even have it on a note card that I keep ⁓ as a bookmark. And, ⁓ you know, it's in Ephesians. So I said to myself, Paul probably didn't even write this, but none of that mattered.
It's just, it's like there's something there that connects me. Not everything connects me, but different things connect me at different times in different ways. Right. And so I, I, it's sort of like you're minding your own business and a song comes up that is deeply meaningful to you. And you're just sort of lost in that. Right. I think music and Eucharist and Bible, they,
I think that to me that's a helpful expression of the life of faith, that it's not figuring it out so that you can go forward.
As we're figuring it out, God's with us and we have these moments occasionally where they can ground us so they can remind us, you know, and to me that's a means of grace.
speaker-0 (29:33)
I also think it's important to point out that if Pete Enns has a Bible verse on a notecard used as a bookmark, there's still some evangelical inside Pete Enns. just want to know that for the record. Okay, so another key idea, this is very prominent in Curveball, ⁓ is that right? As our circumstances change, we have to rethink what faith means, how we understand God and kind of the
⁓ going back, right, I think to especially the Bible, how the Bible actually works, you are, and you've just said this, you've just showed it to us is right. This is happening within the Bible itself. So that's kind of moving from, from the Bible kind of to, what's going on in the Bible to, the present. And what I want to do is almost kind of think about a question here that moves in the other direction. in curve ball, say, there's this line I'm gonna read. says that tensions arise because we also sense that some parts of our faith need to stay the same.
So, okay, as we look back on this text, as we look back on the Bible, I wonder if there are things that are very important to you, kind of like a core that informs, a core within scripture itself, very important things that inform how you connect the Bible to life today.
speaker-1 (30:50)
Yeah, I think for me, a lot of that answer to that question comes out of the diversity itself, where I think God was mystery, including to the biblical writers. And that's why they're all trying to work it out, but no one's quite getting it right. I don't mean it quite that way, but no one is giving the full story.
And sometimes they give conflicting stories, right? So for me, it's to me that models something out like the respect for God as mystery, ⁓ where our words are ⁓ adequate, but not unchanging, you know? And that's why our circumstances come into play is like, gosh, know, something happened to me that I just hadn't.
This changes everything. I mean, we've all had experiences, I think, in our lives where something just happens. I do mention ⁓ Scott and Kerbal, Robert Portman, the Ohio senator who's ⁓ Republican and very adamant about, ⁓ again, same-sex marriage. And then his son came out to him and took him a couple of years, but then he had a press release where he said, I used to be against this.
But then something happened. And the thing that happened was something in his own family. then he says something like, I've come to see. Something happened. I've come to see that if two people committed to it, blah, blah. And it struck me when I read that, and I was so taken by it, I made sure I put it in the book. But ⁓ I was so taken by the fact that it's not just that Robert Portman changed his views on human sexuality.
He actually changed his views on God. What he felt God was dead set against a couple of years earlier, he now believes God is not dead set against. Some people can debate that all that. I'm just saying, he was surprised and his circumstances changed what he thought. And the biblical writers are the very same thing. Is their circumstances affect how they talk about God?
So to me, that's very meaningful about the Bible. would also, you know, even though we have a lot of violence passages in the Bible and stuff, you you get to the Jesus story and I think, I'm gonna say the unconditional love of God is not absent in the Hebrew Bible. It's in the book of Jonah, you know, it's in Psalm, it's there.
I just think it's highlighted more in the gospel and what comes after. And I think the love and graciousness and mercy of God, if we don't have that, we're all screwed. We're all gonna be like Job's friends saying, ⁓ you better watch your step or else you're gonna get zapped. And many people have said, ⁓
know, will probably be surprised at exactly the extent of God's grace. Hopefully, pleasantly surprised.
speaker-0 (34:08)
Really really appreciate that. ⁓ Okay. Let me let me go on to a word. That's a bit loaded right now All right as biblical authority and let me let me just say like preface this by saying I'm not asking this question Coming from a place that like somehow I think this is like the God's Word and the words on the page Align it some immediately straightforward literal way like I'm trying to preface and say I'm not asking you this as a fundamentalist ⁓ But I'm still interested in this this question, know as you as you as you get into this kind of
you let this kind of historical data change the way you understand the text and it's rich, it's rewarding, it's very meaningful, but there's a lot of change. I'm still interested in this question of why we turn to this text. And I just kind of curious what that has been like for you, how you'd answer that question.
speaker-1 (34:52)
⁓ Yeah, and I appreciate the question because, you know, the notion of authority, I think, is well worth rethinking what we mean by that. You because it usually means a top-down thing. God says that you believe it, right? But if God says I still see these debates in the Bible and differences of opinion and multivocality and all that sort of stuff. So the way I think of authority and, you know, why I will use the word
the Bible's authority, but I'll mean something different than what maybe my fundamentalist friends me by. I think it's authoritative because of how it can be employed to affect your life and change your life. And it's not because I'm allowing the Bible to do this because I've examined it and it's perfectly logical and historically accurate and doesn't contradict science and things like that. It's it's that's not that kind of authority. It's more
You know, ⁓ Jared and my co-host of the podcast, in our book Genesis for Normal People, I think that's where we have like a little analogy with something like The Lord of the Rings or pick your favorite novel where you read it and you're moved to like valor, right? Or courage or.
One of the most, if you've seen the movies, but one of the most beautiful scenes to me is at the end after all that Frodo and Sam and the other hobbits went through and the king is crowned and everybody's bowing down with the king tells them to stand up. says, you bow to no one. Right. And they were just little, they had no idea what was going on. They're just trying to like not die, you know, and just do the right thing. That to me is, I say like, I want to be like Frodo.
You know, so there's a sense in which that story exerts an influence on me. And if we want to call that authoritative, that's fine. And that's just an analogy. I'm not equating the Lord of the Rings or anything like that. But ⁓ that is ⁓ an analogy for me for how the Bible can be effective and effective, both.
right? think hit her emotions and also encourages to move and change and think differently without even looking for it necessarily. So that's authority of a different kind than say, I mean, you all know this, but maybe a more fundamentalist notion, which is Genesis one says six days, that's it. That's the authority of the Bible. You have to believe it. If you don't, you're contradicting, you're calling God a liar.
and all this kind of stuff. to me, that's not a helpful view of authority because in part because of the multivocalic nature of the Bible. Like which of those stories are you gonna put your authoritative thing? Well, yeah, and all of it, because they only look different, but they're actually all saying the same thing. And at that point, it's like, you would never say that about any other book if you saw it doing this kind of stuff. You would notice the differences.
And historically, one of my hobby horses again from having Jewish professors is that ⁓ Judaism has never really had a problem seeing that. And honestly, Christians for the most part in history haven't had trouble seeing it either. It's more the past two, 300 years, especially in the West and are importing this to other parts of the world where we're just hung up on it. We're hung up on
the Bible can't have any tensions. If it has any tensions, it's not the word of God. And I think the history of Judaism and Christianity would say that's nonsense. Read it.
speaker-0 (38:50)
So something I appreciate in that response is the way that it brings in. kind of has this natural way of tying together reading the Bible with experience in that, like, if you're saying, I hear you saying that part of the authority of the Bible has to do with the way that it is used, the ends for which it is used. So like, it has authority when our use of it is bringing out a message of good news that really feels like good news.
to us. And if it doesn't, then maybe that should be like a sign of returning to the text and asking like if the interpretation doesn't feel like good news, we should at least possibly be asking questions.
speaker-1 (39:28)
Yeah, I think Augustine said something similar, like if what you're bringing out of the text isn't love, then you need to work on your interpretation. Of course, the problem there is that there's a lot of not love stuff going on in the Bible, too. It's like God says a little bit touchy at times in the Hebrew Bible. I Moses has to calm him down after the golden calf episode and
I'm going to kill everybody and start over most of this. Don't do that. That's a bad idea. You know, what will the Egyptians say? You brought us out into the desert just to kill us. Just, just don't do it. And God says, you're right. I still want to kill a few of them though. And I'm to kill like 3000 and have the Levites go through the camp with swords. Right? So you have these stories and you still have to grapple with those. Right. And I don't, I don't, I don't know if I want to take that story and interpret it as I'll find a love story in there someplace.
or like finding a love story in the flood story. example, I just, to me that you can do that if you want to, that doesn't really, that makes me like think I'm just playing a game with it. ⁓ I'd rather say, and this is the controversial part for some people, I'd rather just say there are things in the Bible that I don't think accurately describe what God is like. And I think, you know, the spirit of God is moving still. And I think as Christians, you know, ⁓
If you want to, Tom Wright, if you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus, right? Which is somewhat helpful. I don't think it takes care of all the problems, but it's at least something to think about. And, you know, what if we're still having God revealed to us in the world today? That's that arc is moving towards, I think, a greater sense of love and ⁓
And then people say, you have a war about all the unloving stuff in the Bible. We can look at that, we can take care of that, but we believe that God is doing something different. It's like, you know, the 19th century, the wars in America over is God for or against slavery, you know, in the 19th century. And the South argued literalistically. And if you want Bible passages, they win that argument.
But the North said, maybe not exactly this way, but yeah, but the trajectory of scripture is towards freedom and away from slavery. That trajectory argument means maybe we're seeing things about God today.
I say this better, more fully than maybe even some of the biblical writers do? You know, and I know that's, that's, I'm not expecting you to stand up and cheer when I say that, but that's, that's how I make sense of this stuff, you know, and it's, it's having a realistic view of the Bible that the data of the Bible can actually handle.
rather than making up a way of thinking about the Bible, then you go to the Bible and see it doesn't work, and then you become an apologist because you have to now defend your view against things in the Bible that just won't ever fit with that.
speaker-0 (42:43)
You know, you know, the Golden Calf incident, which is this entry has this two sided feature to it, which is on the one hand, it's one of these passages that makes us wonder about the kind of character of God coming down the mountain ready to take away all the people. And yet, you know, thinking about something, Gary Anderson at Notre Dame said this and he's drawing on a rabbinic tradition where he says, like, the full picture of God only comes between God and Moses.
when Moses reminds God of the covenant in that instant. And it's funny, like a passage that isn't the one sense so strange is also a passage that is basically saying, if you want to get God here, you need to enter into the discussion and contribute and somehow God will speak. I hear that it's complicated, I do think that I, but there's also, think something that's pretty kind of inviting and maybe freeing for like how we come to the text and bring ourselves in it.
speaker-1 (43:34)
Yeah, and put yourself in it. And how many times have we pleaded and argued with God, you know, to try to get God to change God's about things. But that's the nature of the relationship, I think. that's, I like how, again, getting back to authority, the Bible models an alarming honesty with God, that Moses is, you know, he wasn't the best leader.
I think up to this point, he all these problems and didn't quite do it right. And he's got second thoughts and all. And now he's up and telling God what to do, right? It's a little bit interesting, you know, that story is one that can model for us something of the, well, again, forgive me, this is the sin of certainty. know, it's arguing with God is part of the biblical tradition.
you know, and Job and Ecclesiastes and Lamentations and some prophetic literature, but also the Golden Calf episode. It's part of what it is. There's got to be something of value in that for us, like you just said, Scott, you know, just something that, you know, we can, it's almost we have permission to be real.
That's part of the beauty of this collection of diverse texts. It's not just a pamphlet. It's not 10 commandments. It's narrative.
speaker-0 (45:01)
Be we about 10 minutes left here. If it's okay, I'm gonna kind of go to some questions from the audience. One to two final questions here and kind of see if I can get a one minute response out of you from these questions. Is that okay? Yep. All right. So we read the Bible very often within church communities as people of faith. ⁓ But when your relationship to the Bible changes, like so can questions come up about your relationship to the community. A friend of mine recently shared a quote.
from ⁓ Rachel Hill Evans with me. I'll read it here. ⁓ The hardest part about doubt is feeling isolated from your community. ⁓ I just wonder, are there kind of, do you have any kind of guidance for people in experiencing say their doubts and their faith, their changing relationship to the Bible, ⁓ helpful ways to navigate that, especially if you're feeling disconnected from community?
speaker-1 (45:57)
Yeah, this is not a commercial, one reason why we started the Bible for normal people is to create community for people who can't talk about things at church, you know, but need a place just to be honest. And so I think it's very important to find a community. And I don't say this lightly, that might mean leaving the church where you are and seeking out a church that is not
the issue is that if most of us are familiar with churches that have reacted to issues in the modern world like archaeology or science or whatever, even if it's down the road, it's part of the DNA and it's Bible church or this sort of thing. That's why I...
sort of became Episcopalian about 14 years ago because I knew that I couldn't continue in those spaces. I just knew that I couldn't. And I encouraged people to think about making use of communities that are already there and maybe joining. I mean, the Episcopalians, we cite scripture all the time. We have readings, Bible readings, three of them every Sunday. It's not ignored.
They're not fundamentalists. I that's easiest way to put it. And they understand the ⁓ process of faith where you have seasons of very serious doubt. Who doesn't? And that's nothing to be embarrassed about. I mean, that's a good community to be a part of.
speaker-0 (47:39)
Let me close with this question here. think it's also helpful. Always helpful to think about kind of the next generation. Right. And Kerbal, you, you write about some of your personal experiences with raising kids within, within church context. ⁓ Has this prompted you to think at all about introducing kids, children, the next generation to faith? Can children or next generation be taught a more complex version of God and reading the Bible and still develop an authentic faith?
speaker-1 (48:07)
hope so. Yeah. And I think something like that probably needs to happen. You know, I have three children. My daughter has two children, six and four, and she's really working very intentionally to not give them a religious faith that will lead them into therapy by the time they're 20. And she's serious about that. And ⁓ again, some of you may know we have a children's Bible that's going to come out around Easter time next year, which is intending to do that very thing. It's
It's to ⁓ encourage curiosity in children and in families and not a Bible that gives all the answers, but more something that elicits conversations and lets children be honest about things. I think that's very valuable. It's a nut that I haven't cracked personally, but I think how do you move the faith forward
while still being connected to a tradition, but moving it forward and adapting it for different times, which is again, part of the biblical story itself. And that's not for the faint of heart. That's the most serious kind of theology as far as I'm concerned. Are there lines? Yeah, I think there are lines, but I think in order to figure out what those lines are, you might have to cross them for a while.
speaker-0 (49:30)
Finally, at what age can you introduce children to historical criticism? I just want to get to the heart of that last question. What grade? ⁓
speaker-1 (49:35)
I actually
think that it's probably not appropriate until they start realizing things about the story themselves and then you can use historical criticism to actually explain a real thing that they're seeing rather than sort of imposing it on them, you know. And that can happen as soon as they're able to read and say, you know, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, they seem like two very different stories.
It's not one creation, so it seems to be more than one. Okay, let's talk about that. ⁓ And that sense, criticism becomes a tool to help understand things that the Bible is actually doing rather than a foreign element imposed on it. The questions have to arise, and once they arise, that's when it happens, I think.
speaker-0 (50:23)
Pete, thank you so much for being on Theology Lab. You've been a terrific guest.
speaker-1 (50:28)
And normally too. She's very, she hears you. She's jealous. She's very upset with you right now. Anyway. Yeah. No, was great to be here.
