90 Quotes by Peter Enns

I feel it is part of the mystery of faith that things normally do not line up entirely, and so when they don’t, it is not a signal to me that the journey is at an end but that I am still on it. As I reflect on my own experience and that of many others far wiser than I, God seems willing to help that process along.

Trust your experiences, your God moments. They don’t work as intellectual arguments for God, but that’s exactly the point: intellectual arguments aren’t enough, and wanting them to be so sooner or later leads to disappointment. God speaks to us through our whole humanity, not just through part of it. God moments can’t be proven to anyone else, but that doesn’t make them second best. They are proof – of another kind.

There is no higher “law” to be obeyed than the law of love. That, at the end of the day, is what it means to follow Jesus.

I believe that God is more interested in the who. And that means walking the walk, not just talking the talk. Better: it means walking the walk when no words are left. That is trust.

As Luke’s story unfolds, Jesus continues to undermine expectations involving political power and Jewish identity. In his first public appearance, in a synagogue service, he claims to be the messiah, which creates quite a buzz of support – until he tells them that he will bless Gentiles and be rejected by his own kinsmen. The crowd responds by trying to throw Jesus off a cliff. Israel’s messiah isn’t supposed to say things like this.

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 question that no one was yet asking in quite the same way.

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

So much can be learned from other traditions. In the long history of the Christian church, so many different, even conflicting, points of view have been embraced as true and valuable.

BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGISTS are about as certain as you can be about these things that the conquest of Canaan as the Bible describes did not happen: no mass invasion from the outside by an Israelite army, and no extermination of Canaanites as God commanded.