How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers―and Why That's Great News

As I get started, please note that I am already a bit of an Enns-fan and a reader of three of his other books: “The Bible Tells Me So”, “The Sin of Certainty”, and “Ecclesiastes (The Two Horizons Commentary)”. I have “Inspiration and Incarnation” queued up on the shelf as well. I should disclose that I also listen regularly to Pete’s podcast, “The Bible for Normal People”.So then, who is this book for?* Are you a frustrated Christian who doesn’t understand why there is a difference between what you are reading and what you are being taught? This book is probably for you.* Are you barely hanging on to your faith and worn out due to the inability to defend the Bible in its strict evangelical or fundamentalist context? Or, have you seen the Bible weaponized as a tool to fight a cultural or political battle? Perhaps this book is for you.* Have you given up on your faith because the Bible as you were taught, no longer makes sense or it seems contradictory or it doesn’t feel relevant to your life? This book is definitely for you!I am a bit of all three. I’ve deconstructed views and doctrines, reconstructed them, and started over again. That’s not a bad thing.Why am I a fan of Pete and why am I giving this book five stars and a hearty endorsement?I think the main thing is that Pete is both a PHD scholar and a guy who is trying to live a Christian life just like me. He is not only an academic, but he has developed concepts in this book that just plain make a lot of sense. The book is not dry and academic. It’s full of humility, grace, and humour. Lots of humour! Here’s an excerpt from page 18:“I live daily with the very difficult tensions of being an unavoidably modern-day human while embracing an ancient faith, rooted in an ancient, ambiguous, and diverse book—which is to say I have to continue to walk this path of wisdom. I’m not at the beach planted in an Adirondack chair cradling a Corona waiting for the rest of you to show up.”The book is also chock full of Pete’s personal anecdotes. Seriously, you will be laughing out loud in Starbucks and people WILL look at you weird. Don’t skip the footnotes. There’s gold there. You will have a fun time reading, and it will go fast. I went quite slow stopping to read so much to my wife that she banished me from the house just to finish before release day.Now for the more serious bit. The GOAL of the book is to demonstrate Pete’s method for really reading, understanding, and applying the Bible. Pete being an academic, I am always surprised how he presents his knowledge in such a conversational manner. Humour (yes again) and a dose of repetition. Spoonful of sugar and all that… The repetition serves the purpose of getting the ideas into you head. It didn’t bug me, I don’t think it will bother you.In my time as a Christian, I’ve been asked the two following—now cliched—questions about the Bible:* Do you read it figuratively or just literally?* Do you read it literally or just figuratively?The answers are No and No.Pete identifies three key concepts that address those two questions and others but avoiding the liberal/fundamental traps. There is a better way:**The books of the Bible are Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse, and those books if understood properly lead to Wisdom.**Brian Zahnd recently said, “Jesus Seminar liberalism and Young Earth Creation fundamentalism are two sides of the same empiricist coin. An obsessively historical-critical approach to the Bible ends up having to either defend everything (Ken Ham literalism) or deny everything (Schleiermacher liberalism). A far healthier approach is the pre-Enlightenment patristic approach to biblical interpretation where the sacred text is never an end in itself, but a repository of wisdom guiding us toward the perfect revelation of God in Jesus Christ.” I think Brian got an advance copy of this book too!Pete develops this idea early and spends most of the book refining and applying the concept to topics and issues we all might have questions on. Read the Table of Contents to see what I mean. I reread chapter 11 -13 a few times. They stood out as something I needed just now.Pete really sets out to demonstrate that the Bible is not an instruction manual that you can go to for DIYing your life. It isn’t a Popular Mechanics library. The Bible has too many difficult passages and seemingly contradictory sections for that. He stresses the timeliness or occasionality of Biblical instruction. One instruction might be appropriate for one circumstance, but not for another. Wisdom is understanding when and how to apply those instructions. Here is another short excerpt regarding Proverbs 26:4-5 which contain contradictory statements if read in flat literalism:“It models something better: the permission to think it through, figure it out, and learn from experience for the next time. In fact, more than giving us permission, the contradiction sets up our expectation that we *will have* to think it through. And I bet some of you might have thought ‘Contradictions’ in the Bible were ‘Bad’. They’re not. They’re revealing.”Fundamentalists have a really hard time with this. To them it’s scary stuff—all passages must be true at all times and places. To me, the fundamentalist rigidity is scarier and doesn’t mesh with what I actually read in the Bible. That its ancient, ambiguous, and diverse really stands out to me, and I am glad Pete was able to articulate it in this way. The book has released me from some old indoctrinated ideas. I don’t think though that Pete’s concept of wisdom frees you to the point of extreme libertarianism; it’s just a refreshed foundation—old come new. I’ll repeat myself here, it makes A LOT more sense.So that’s about it. Serious bits. Seriously funny bits. Wisdom about the Bible. The Bible’s wisdom pointed at difficult topics and issues. Wisdom not answers. Read this book. Read it again in a group setting open to discussion like I hope to. Peace be with you!ps. I fully expect to come back and add to this review after that second read. I am sure I missed important points or didn’t really get what was happening here and there. My issue not Pete’s.

Ed Bleynat Review of How The Bible Actually Works by Peter Enns(or, A Review of A Play In Three Acts About Helping Normal People Find a Better Way to Read the Bible) With publication of How The Bible Actually Works, Peter Enns completes Act Three of Helping Normal People (of which I am only arguably a member) Find a Better Way to Read the Bible. Why is it a third act instead of a single book? Because it is particularly helpful to read The Bible Tells Me So, The Sin of Certainty and How The Bible Actually Works as a three part play (sorry, Pete, no way to turn this into a nine inning baseball analogy). So here we go: Act One: The Bible Tells Me So, names the elephant in the room. We Christians spend so much time justifying our own views of what Scripture is that we fail to read and understand what it means. What are your own favorite words to describe Scripture? Inspired? Authoritative? Inerrant? Infallible? Instructive? Name Your Adjective; it is a real challenge to find common ground on some of these words, much less to build consensus around them. When we read Scripture defensively in support of our favorite adjective, we experience barriers to understanding, interpreting, and applying it. The Bible Tells Me So, Act One of our play, helps us wade in the waters of history, religious tradition, and the like so we can better understand how the Bible arises from ancient context yet still gives modern content and meaning to our faith. Act Two: The Sin of Certainty overlaps with and proceeds from Act One. It helps us extend beyond the ways in which we now understand our Christian faith to the essential next step of knowing deeply that our trust in God is more important than intellectual assent to various religious propositions. Act Three: How The Bible Actually Works takes us further still. Here, we apply the ancient, ambiguous and diverse thirty-nine books of the Old Testament and twenty-seven books of the New Testament to pursue wisdom. Now, we are ready to see not only that there are such things as proverbs or laws in tension (or even in conflict) with each other, but also to see what confronting this Biblical diversity calls us to do. We are not to render some distorted notion of Solomonic justice as we arbitrarily split our Biblical understanding between divergent passages and so kill wisdom in the process. Rather, we are to consider how to apply tension within the Biblical witness to our life decisions and larger Christian commitment. Sometimes, we must live into the meaning of the Good Book rather than woodenly read its words. In the abolition of slavery, Enns offers a prime historical example. The Bible as “Rule Book” assumed, and did not overtly condemn, the institution of slavery. But its principles of love of God and one’s neighbor would not allow slavery to exist indefinitely with its evils exposed to the light of the Holy Spirit. More recently, we have seen Christian denominations grow into acknowledging -- and in the case of my own mainline Protestant tribe, fully institutionalizing -- the leadership roles women rightly hold as equals before God and within the Church. Enns supports his proposal that we enter into a living engagement with Scripture by showing the reader how the Biblical witness has itself adapted, even internally, during its 1,000+ years of composition. Old Testament examples of change might include the Israelites modifying the Judaic law as they transformed from an enslaved to a nomadic to a settled to an exiled to an occupied culture. The evolution of the Passover celebration offers a case study. By showing how the Bible works through change, Enns presents the seemingly odd notion that we, too, might work through change. Instead of treating the Bible as a rule book given by a helicopter parent to keep us out of harm’s way or, worse yet, as a criminal code to inflict punishment on us for even the most elusive transgressions, we should seek wisdom as the heart of our interpretive work. Enns drives major Biblical themes known to ancient Israel toward a radical reinterpretation by the people of the Way. The ancient Israelites saw as central to their faith a commitment the Judaic law, the practices of worship and sacrifice in the Jerusalem Temple, and the settlement in the Promised Land of Canaan. Christian thinkers transformed this world view. The Gospel writers and the Apostle Paul experienced the entirely unexpected manner in which the Messiah appeared, lived, scandalously died, and then rose again. His life required a radical reinterpretation of the Law and the Prophets. When Jesus opened wide the gates of the Kingdom of God for all, an expectations-shattering response flowed forth. As Christians, we proclaim that we are under grace, not law; that we worship in spirit and in truth, and are not bound to sacrificial rites practiced long ago in the ancient temple cult; and that we can experience our lives in the Kingdom of God from wherever we are, rather than contesting over a bloody strip of holy dirt along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Should we, too, not boldly engage Scripture to respond to God’s call? If I were to ask more of the book, it would be for the author to elaborate on tools of discernment as we seek the wisdom toward which the Bible points us. How do we take Biblical wisdom principles, and the power of the holy story, and live into them? How do we experience the ambiguity and paradox of being part of the Kingdom of God among us, even though we are not (yet) witnesses to its fullest power? How do we follow what Jesus would have us do, and share the knowledge and experience of God’s blessing with a hurting -- even broken -- world? But to ask all that of this author right now and in this book might bring us full circle back to The Bible As Rule Book, the very deficiency in our interpretive practices from which Peter Enns seeks to liberate us. Such a demand would join us with those of the hypothetical “overzealous doctoral student” who might second guess what is left out of How The Bible Actually Works “because,” as Pete says, “apparently anytime I say anything I have to say everything.” Lord save us from that unholy alliance! Therefore, I recommend this book, without reservation; and whether read as Act 3 of a play, or on its own, the witty, informative and challenging How The Bible Actually Works promises a rich reward to the reader. If it turns out that Peter Enns wants to tackle further the discernment of wisdom one of these days, more power to him. I will look forward to that book, too!Ed Bleynat is an Asheville, North Carolina attorney who sometimes teaches and writes about things biblical, especially the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, which are considered in his book series, The Synoptic Gospels: A Journey Into the KingdomEd thanks Harper Collins for an advance copy of the book and for being included in the book’sLaunch Team#harperonepartner +#wisebible#howthebibleactuallyworks

Engaging and interesting read about the most influential book in Western history. It's a lightweight yet scholarly blend of textual criticism, theology, and exegesis, written in an accessible and conversational tone with enough humanity and just enough humor to keep things moving along.

I conclude from reading this book that too often we read the Bible like a Manufacturers Manual when we should be viewing it as wisdom. This doesn't mean we lower the level of importance of the Bible but that we apply our wisdom to our understanding of what it means today.

I am thankful to Pete Enns for creating space to allow and even encourage me to see things different.. to question and even doubt without shame. To recognize the evolution of humanity and how that contributes to understanding, embracing and applying a book as ancient, ambiguous and diverse as the Bible to my life here and now.Big takeaways for me that can be applied whenever we are attempting to grasp the concept of God and how we can 'know' Him:"God doesn't change but God - being God -can never be fully captured by our perceptions.""The Bible shows us that obedience to God is not about cutting and pasting the Bible over our lives, but seeking the path of wisdom - putting the sacred book in one hand and ourselves, our communities of faith, and our world in the other in order to discern how the God of old is present here and now.""Thinking of the Bible as shifting and moving may feel spiritually risky, bordering on heretical, but it isn't. Sermons, Bible study materials, prayer books, and the like adapt the ancient words for modern benefit all the time.""God is one step ahead of us, it seems - always another surprise around the corner that forces us to stand back and wonder what God is up to and how to respond."" Whatever else we do, and especially with issues that generate so much conflict, wisdom must be pursued by all and invited to take a prominent place in these discussions. If only so that they may remain discussions and not an exercise in lobbing back and forth "clear" Bible verses as grenades. Using Bible verses to end discussions on difficult and complex issues serves no one and fundamentally misses the dimension of wisdom that is at work anytime we open the Bible anywhere and read it."" Whatever any of us think about the Bible as God's inspired word, it should make us take a step back and reflect for a moment that scripture itself portrays the boundless God in culturally bound ways of thinking."Pete's witty, clever, sarcastic writing is intermingled with his intelligent, serious and well thought out explanation of scriptural, historical and cultural context making this an extremely readable and enjoyable book about The Book.The footnotes are indescribable. I've tried but I have no words!Also if understanding the heart of the writer will help you hear the message of the writing more clearly, I suggest you read the Acknowledgements before you read the book.

Another good book by Peter Enns. Big idea is: the Bible is not contemporary, clear, nor unified; rather it is ancient (we’re as far away from David’s past reign as the year 5019 lies ahead of us), ambiguous (do I answer the fool or no? cf. Proverbs 26:4-5), and diverse (for two takes on Nineveh see Nahum and Jonah; King Manessah cf. 2 Kings 21-23 and 2 Chronicles 33).He draws from this that the Bible is not an instructional manual for your life. Consider this: has anyone misunderstood manuals? No, they’re clear and the pictures help to boot. So if not that then what? The least worst option is that the Bible may lead us to wisdom-a present activity fusing, creating, as well as critiquing the past and possible futures.The good book, so to speak, holds a formative place in my life, as I know it does for many friends on here, and our cultures (🇺🇸🇩🇪). For those frustrated with it, curious about it, or who have courageously given up on it, I highly recommend Enns’ good book.

Enns writes another essential book for Christians today, especially those that view the Bible as static. He points out how it has changed over thousands of years. He reminds us that it is not a recipe book, but rather a living encounter with God that we need to wrestle with. Excellent stuff.

We can approach the Bible knowing what it says and what God is like, or we can approach it with the attitude that we might have something to learn about what it says and what God is like. This book helps us to engage with it as the writers and characters of the Bible did.