Book Review: The Bible Tells Me So, by Peter Enns

Cross-posted at By Common Consent
By BHodges
Peter Enns is an evangelical Christian and a Bible scholar—two identity markers that’ve raised a few conflicts for him. Which really is too bad, because he seems like a pretty faithful, intelligent, funny guy. At least, he seems like that based on this faithful, intelligent, and funny book he just wrote about the Bible. It’s called The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It.
I think a lot of Mormons could really benefit from Enns’s experience.
Enns 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. Many people who read the Bible carefully today are left feeling unsettled. 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. 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.
Expectations, in fact, is what this book is really all about. “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. 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. Instead, readers might understand it as a repository of stories from ancient people who wrestled to understand God, ancient people who thus serve as models for us in our own unsure and messy times.
Enns tells his own story of discovering unsettling Bible things that his conservative Christian background hadn’t prepared him for. These problems left him with a few options: Ignore the problems; deny the problems; or engage directly with them, risking changes to his faith and understanding. (What kind of problems? Like God commanding horrific genocides in the Old Testament, or like the Gospel authors contradicting each other or using Old Testament scripture out of context.) Out of three choices, Enns chose “door number three” (as he jokingly frames it; again, the overall tone of this book is humorous). He says “I gained a Bible—and a God—I was free to converse with, complain to, talk back to, interrogate, and disagree with, not as an act of rebellion, but as an act of faith and trust” (21).
So Enns wants the Bible to be interpreted for what it actually seems to be (a collection of ancient texts with a variety of perspectives about how God relates to us and how we might relate to God) rather than what people might hope it is (a uni-vocal, step-by-step rulebook that unerringly teaches particular facts about God). Why does Enns read the Bible this way? Because the Bible “tells him so,” to quote a popular Christian ditty. He turns Evangelical devotion to the Bible against those who allow their devotion to obscure basic understanding of the biblical text. You say you love the Bible? You can show that love by letting the Bible be itself.
Latter-day Saints have even more flexibility than many Evangelicals do when it comes to reinterpreting the Bible or viewing it as an imperfect but still divine text. But it seems like we as a community have yet to avail ourselves of some of the most interesting advances of biblical scholarship over the past century. Enns breezily (very breezily—he’s cracking jokes half the time, so if that’s not your thing you may need to skip this book and try something else. I’m not really a fan of ham-it-up style humor for the sake of quirkiness, but I did laugh out loud at a few of his cornier one-liners) introduces readers to a number of strange things about the Bible, but insists these strange things are not so much obstacles we should ignore or deny. They are actually invitations for us to dig deeper, to develop a more mature faith, and to give devotion to God beyond the Bible rather than restricting God to its pages, poorly interpreted.
The Bible Tells Me So is for non-academics. Enns puts footnotes and most scripture references and a timeline at the rear of the book, the print is large, and the tone is straight-forward, chatty, and humorous. (Enns blogged about the book here, by the way, if you want to get a feel for the book’s tone straight from him.) I think Mormons could really use this kind of basic introduction to some of the problems raised by biblical scholarship because (a) most of us are unfamiliar with the problems; (b) not many Mormons working academically in ancient scripture are trying to make the methods and discoveries of modern scholarship accessible and relevant to LDS views of the Bible; and (c) too many of us don’t see that scholarship can actually alleviate some of the tensions caused by reading scriptures written hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
It can be invigorating to discover that, for all the things we know about God, there is still so much more—further light and knowledge—to learn. As Enns puts it:
“A well-behaved Bible is one that rises above the messy and inconvenient ups and downs of life. A Bible like that is an alien among its surroundings, a brittle scroll kept under glass, safe and sound from the rough handling of the outside world…If we let the Bible be the Bible, on its own terms—on God’s terms—we will see this in-fleshing God at work, not despite the challenges, the unevenness, and ancient strangeness of the bible, but precisely because of these things. Perhaps not the way we would have written our sacred book, if we had been consulted, but the one that the good and wise God has allowed his people to have. If we come to the Bible and read it this way, in true humility, rather than defending our version of it, we will find God as he wants to be found. The Bible tells us so” (244).
Peter Enns, The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It (San Francisco: HarperOne, September 2014), pp. 267.