Further, there are limits to creative license, and Enns needs to pay more attention to defining these limits. He assumes that Israel’s stories of the deep past cannot be written with both purposes in mind – to record the past, and to help us to cope with the present (p. Enns also falls prey to the either-or fallacy. But, recounting past events cannot provide encouragement to people living in the present if the past events never happened. They are built on “imperfect memories,” and there is a good deal of “creating” and “inventing” going on to accomplish this purpose, with little concern about the original story being true (p.75). But stories of the past are always told for a purpose – “to persuade, motivate, and inspire” (p.76). “God likes stories” – the heading of chapter 3. Note again how human centered all this is. According to Enns, the Israelites only believed that God told them to do so. “God never told the Israelites to kill the Canaanites” (p.54). The chapter concludes with Enns’ solution to the embarrassment we feel about God telling the Israelites to kill the Canaanites: “Canaanite genocide is … not a historical account of something about God” (p.70). He uses this story to drive home a key point for understanding many other parts of the Old Testament: “the ancient Israelites’ tribal mentality about themselves, their world and their God is reflected in what they wrote” (p.67). Or, is Enns mainly concerned about gaining credibility with contemporary atheists?Įnns gives another reason for his preoccupation with Israel’s extermination of the Canaanites. But sincere readers of the bible don’t need an exhaustive description of Israel’s barbarous conquering of Canaan. It is because the Canaanite genocide is a key problem for “sincere readers of the bible” and “contemporary atheists” (p.67). Enns explains why this chapter is “so dreadfully long” (p.66). The first big issue of the book concerns Israel’s invasion of Canaan (ch. Without an equal emphasis on the divine we are simply left with the feeble spiritual gropings of human beings who create their own gods. Where is God in this description? And what about revelation? I want to say that the bible is both human and divinely inspired. My worry here is that this description of the bible is very human centered. In The Bible Tells Me So, Enns maintains that the bible is primarily a record of “ancient journeys of faith,” and these journeys then become “models for us on our own journeys” (pp.24, 77). And yet, I also want to say that the bible is inspired by God. Over the years I have become more willing to admit that the bible was written by fallible human beings. The bible, like Jesus, must be interpreted as having both divine and human origins. The book under review can be seen as a popular summary of Enns’ earlier and controversial book, Incarnation and Inspiration (2005). But unlike Enns, I come out rather differently at the end. Like Enns, I couldn’t simply ignore the questions I was facing (p.19). But increasingly, I found this standard evangelical doctrine dying the death of a thousand qualifications. For a long time I believed in the inerrancy of Scripture. I resonate with Peter Enns’ personal story which he reviews briefly in Chapter 1 of this book. The Bible Tells Me So …: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable To Read It, by Peter Enns
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