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.

As he explores questions progressive evangelical readers of Scripture commonly face yet fear voicing, Enns reveals that they are the very questions that God wants us to consider - the essence of our spiritual study.Peter Enns is an evangelical Christian and a Bible scholar-two identity markers that’ve raised a few conflicts for him. The Bible Tells Me So chronicles Enns' spiritual odyssey, how he came to see beyond restrictive doctrine and learned to embrace God's Word as it is actually written. Is this what God really requires? How could God's plan for divine inspiration mean ignoring what is really written in the Bible? These questions eventually cost Enns his job - but they also opened a new spiritual path for him to follow. Rejecting the increasingly complicated intellectual games used by conservative Christians to 'protect' the Bible, Enns was conflicted. But the further he studied the Bible, the more he found himself confronted by questions that could neither be answered within the rigid framework of his religious instruction or accepted among the conservative evangelical community.

Trained as an evangelical Bible scholar, Peter Enns loved the Scriptures and shared his devotion, teaching at Westminster Theological Seminary. Peter Enns recounts his transformative spiritual journey in which he discovered a new, more honest way to love and appreciate God's Word.

The Bible Tells Me So by Peter Enns