Peter Enns Quotes

[The Lord's Supper teaches that] Rituals are good, and they are instituted and used by God to 'connect' his people with him. We learn through ritual that the church is not just made up of individuals,...

Grace grows best in winter.

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No attempt should be made to reconcile Yahweh's hardening of Pharaoh's heart (plagues 6,8,9,10) with statements in the other plagues that Pharaoh hardened his own heart.The tension cannot be resolved...

If there is any cure for thinking of the Bible as a once-told-forever-binding source of information about God and his people, Paul is it. For

If this Jesus is God’s answer, what is the question? Paul eventually came to the conclusion that God was answering a question that gets at the core of not simply the Jewish drama, but the human drama,...

A relationship based on trust means not walking on eggshells, but talking openly, honestly, with no hint of passive-aggressiveness or any of the other dysfunctional manipulative tactics we tend to imp...

•​a faith that remains open to the ever-moving Spirit and new possibilities, rather than chaining the Spirit to our past •​a faith that welcomes opportunities to think critically and reflectively on h...

I still think and talk about what I think God is like, but I’ve hopefully learned (feel free to keep me honest here, people) that being right and winning isn’t the endgame here. Loving as God loves is...

I can choose to trust God with childlike trust regardless of how certain I might feel.

Seeing the similarities between these two stories should discourage us from expecting the Adam story to contribute to contemporary scientific debates about human origins (let alone guide those debates...

None of these modern adaptations is in the Bible, and yet even the most committed rulebook Bible readers out there wind up adapting what the Bible says, because we have to—if we want that ancient text...

When we grab hold of correct thinking for dear life, when we refuse to let go because we think that doing so means letting go of God, when we dig in our heels and stay firmly planted even when we sens...

When knowing what you believe is the nonnegotiable center of true faith, questions and critical self-examination pose a threat.

Being saved by God is an ongoing process of growth and transformation, of dying and rising, of being conformed to the image of his [God’s] Son, as Paul puts it (Romans 8:29). Following Jesus means exp...

The reputation Christianity has in the public arena has varied causes, to be sure, including our post-Christian culture, which has little use for religions of any sort. But ultimately some blame must...

Lord, help me let go of control. Help me die. Help me trust.

God doesn’t change, but God—being God—is never fully captured by our perceptions. As people continue to live and breathe and experience life, how they see God changes too.

These two laws in particular were central to Jewish identity in Paul’s day. They had become social badges of honor to distinguish Jews from Gentiles, something concrete to hang on to amid the persiste...

The bottom line is that for Wellhausen and many other biblical scholars before and since, the Pentateuch as we know it (an important qualification) was not completed until the postexilic period (after...

Repetition and familiarity work. What is repeated becomes familiar, and this becomes a part of us. Our own culture understands this, but alas, not always the church. Far too many equate ritual with sp...