How to Read Scripture with Peter Enns (Part 1)

Hunger for Wholeness is back with a brand new season—and we’re beginning with a deep and timely conversation about one the most timeless texts.

In this season-opening episode, Ilia Delio speaks with biblical scholar and bestselling author Peter Enns. Known for his accessible, thoughtful takes on scripture, Pete invites us to rethink how we read the Bible in a world shaped by science, technology, and evolving consciousness.

Together, Ilia and Pete ask:

• Can scripture still speak meaningfully to us in the 21st century?
• Is revelation a fixed moment, or an unfolding process?
• How do we read an ancient text with modern eyes—without losing its transformative power?

This is part one of a two-part interview with Pete Enns, co-host of The Bible for Normal People podcast.

ABOUT PETER ENNS

“I think part of what it means for God to “reveal” himself is to keep us guessing, to come to terms with the idea that knowing God is also a form of not knowing God, of knowing that we cannot fully know, but only catch God in part—which is more than enough to keep us busy.”

Peter Enns (Ph.D. Harvard University) is Abram S. Clemens professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University (St. Davids, PA).  He has written several books including The Bible Tells Me So, The Sin of Certainty, How the Bible Actually Works, and his latest, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming. Pete is also cohost of the popular podcast The Bible for Normal People. The focus of his work centers on understanding the Bible as an ancient text and thinking through what it means to read that ancient text well today.

The Center for Christogenesis' annual conference, Rethinking Religion in an Age of Science: From Institution to Evolution is coming up May 2-4. We're featuring many of our podcast guests including Bayo Akomolafe, our own Ilia Delio and more. Registration is open now, with scholarship discounts available for students. Visit christogenesis.org/conference to learn more and register. We hope to see you there!

Transcript

Robert: Welcome back to Hunger for Wholeness, a podcast from the Center for Christogenesis. I'm your host, Robert Nicastro. In this first episode, Ilia Delio interviews Peter Enns, a Bible scholar whose popular writings have helped many approach such an ancient text through a more contemporary lens. Together, Ilia and Pete explore the question, what role can scripture play in a world driven by science and technology?

Ilia: This afternoon, we are delighted to have with us Dr. Pete Enns, a biblical scholar, an Old Testament scholar who has written quite a number of books in this area and is a well-known speaker and podcaster. I've had the pleasure of being with Pete recently at the Theology Beer Camp, where we interacted on a panel. 

So we want to, in a sense, engage today the question of scripture, especially in an age of science and technology. What role can scripture play? What does it play? What value does it still hold for us? So, Pete, I'd like to begin just by asking you to introduce yourself to our listeners, get a sense of who you are and what you contribute to this conversation.

Peter: Sure. Thank you. And it's a great pleasure to be here with you, Ilia, today. I teach Hebrew Bible and some other things at Eastern University, which is not too far from Ilia's backyard. And I have been doing this for about three, four decades now. I can't remember. I'm getting old. And I just became interested in studying the Bible seriously and academically when I was younger, just out of college, actually. And again, speaking as a Protestant here, so you have this Bible and it is everything. And I just said, “I need to understand this if I say I believe it.” That started the whole trip for me to go to seminary and then graduate school ever since. It's been a long journey and a good one of just reformulating my faith a lot and often. Not just because of the Bible, but also because of quantum physics and the rest of the things you talk about, Ilia. So that's sort of where I'm from.

Ilia: Thank you. Maybe I could just begin by saying I'd love to hear where you are now on your image of God and view of the Old Testament. Because I think, for years, many people have had this idea that God is vengeful or wrathful or, we'll throw a whole host of locusts on our way if we don't obey the law. Is God this kind of harsh lawgiver or is God really kind of mushy God in love with us and really gets upset when we kind of run amok?

Peter: Yeah.

Ilia: Sort of like an Italian God.

Peter: Yeah, you're going right for it, and that's something that I think about a lot. And I try to read people who think more deeply than I do about these things. We're talking about the nature of God here. But I think for me, the biblical side of this is pretty easy. When you're trained to look at context, having a degree in biblical studies for a research university is essentially a history degree. That's what you're doing. You're looking at the origins of the tradition. You're looking at the origins of the text, the origins of the people, whether it's linguistic or archaeological, whatever. 

It becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly that what they're doing, these ancient authors—and that's not a condescending comment it's just an observation that we're essentially in the Iron Age and gods were portrayed in certain ways to reflect their cultural context, which is of kings going to battle. And of course, gods will go to battle with you. And hence, you have this very transactional view of the creator of a very small cosmos. And that's part of the biblical tradition. Walter Brueggemann, who, if your listeners don't know who he is, but he's a very prominent mainline Old Testament Hebrew Bible scholar, but he thinks in terms of the Hebrew Bible and this portrayal of God, he thinks of it as like a courtroom analogy. You have what he calls the core testimony of the Hebrew scriptures, which is from Genesis through 2 Kings, which tells the story from creation to exile, where fundamentally God is portrayed as transactional. 

If you obey, you will stay in the land. If you disobey, you'll be exiled. If you obey, you'll stay in the garden. If you disobey, you'll be exiled from the garden. If you obey, you will have abundant life here in the land. If you don't obey, bad things will happen. and you could just read the lists of curses in the book of Deuteronomy, which are long and not for the faint of heart. It's, “you're going to eat your own children.” That's how bad things are going to be. 

You look at that and you say, “okay, I get it.” I understand why people would portray God in ways they understand. And I think we're still doing that. That's the point. They're doing something in principle no different than people have done ever since, which is trying to understand God in light of reality as they see it. 

There's also a counter testimony in the Hebrew scriptures where there are voices that say, "Nah, I don't think God works that way." And you have books like Job, which I think takes to task directly the theology of the so-called Deuteronomistic historian who wrote Samuel and Kings, and it's very transactional. You have the book of Ecclesiastes, which just calls into question the basic sense of it all. And you have psalms that are lament psalms or complaint psalms that are, some of them, a couple are sort of vicious. 

Psalm 89 essentially calls God a liar because of the promise of this steadfast, loving, and almighty God. The promise was you'll never cease having a king in the line of David sitting on the throne. And he says, so what happened? Why did you go back on your promise? Because the exile happened and we lost everything. 

So I think within the Bible itself, it's a little bit, you see thoughts and trajectories within the Bible itself, which to me says, well, yeah, okay, I think we're supposed to do that. We're supposed to think in terms of trajectories. And these other writers wrote in certain moments in Israel's history where they began questioning some of the conventional wisdom. And so I look at the Bible that way. I don't look at it as everything there is the final word on the nature of God. I think it's a limited view of God. But to say that is not to disrespect the text. I think it's actually to respect these authors and what they're trying to say. I still think it could be a place for communion with God, certainly. But not in a historicistic kind of way.

Ilia: Well, what's so interesting, even as you speak, and just I'm reminded that the Old Testament is a narrative. There are stories, and these stories are conveying different images of God and different relationships with God. And yet, I wonder how these stories fit within the larger narrative of the cosmos that we find. Obviously, they're written within the ancient Hebraic understanding of the cosmos, a very, very different world than we live in today. 

I worry sometimes that we keep transposing these stories in a literal fashion on our own day. And how, so I have two questions, basically. One, how do we read these texts within the light of a Big Bang universe and the universe that is evolutionary and nature. And my second question is, should we keep reading them in a Big Bang universe?

Peter: Right.

Ilia: What value do they still hold for us?

Peter: Well, I would start off by saying, I think the value they can hold for us is in, I mean, I want to use this language of the Bible being a means of grace—

Ilia: Okay.

Peter: —an avenue by which we can commune with God. I do that all the time with stories where I'm not even paying attention to the historical context or how they might have heard it back then, but they speak to me in different ways. And I think I've got precedent for this sort of thing. It's called medieval Christianity. It's a thousand years of multiple meanings and multiple levels of meaning. And I think there's wisdom in that, this tremendous wisdom. 

I think the Orthodox Church has tremendous wisdom as well in all these things. And the bind we're in, I think even the premise for the question, which is a good one, is a modern mindset towards the Bible itself and expecting it to be something that would make modernist kinds of people very happy. It's absolute truth, for example, and if God wrote it, there can be no errors or contradictions. And if you find them, there's a sin in your heart. There's something that's keeping you from seeing how it all fits together beautifully. 

I think we should keep reading the Bible, but I think we should be doing what Christians and Jews, frankly, have done ever since there's been a Bible, which is like, on the surface, it's not helping. It's just not helping. We have to dig deeper, right? 

And to me, that's the challenge of—and I haven't worked this out completely—but this is the challenge of reading the Bible in the Big Bang universe in the same way that it was a challenge for the ancient Jews to read the Bible in an exilic universe, or the New Testament to read Bible in a Christ event universe or the early church to read the Bible in a Greco-Roman philosophical universe. This has been going on since the beginning. We're no different, only in the sense we're different, I think, that the explosion of knowledge and where it's going has made some of these shifts undeniably necessary in thinking in terms of the nature of God and how Scripture fits with all this and how Christianity, just as a whole, whatever variety you have, How does this work? Who cares?

Ilia: That actually is the sentiment, for many, many people. But I do think you're absolutely right. There is a tremendous value here, but it's how we're reading and interpreting these texts. One of the great Old Testament scholars—I don't know him as well as Robert does—but Abraham Heschel. And his idea of God as the most moved mover.  And that I get that God is not static or a fixed being, but God is deeply relational. Leading then into a kind of an openness of open and relational theology, reading the Old Testament through the lens of relationship itself. I think’s really helpful to bringing the Old Testament and the lessons and the wisdom there into a greater synchrony, so to speak, with a world that's deeply connected and where relationship is a fundamental lens of interpretation here. Because I think there's a value to scripture. 

I've always held the two books theory. There's the book of nature and the book of Revelation—the book of scripture as two sources of revelation. I don't think these two books are to be in any way in conflict, but they are indeed two aspects of the same reality, that God is feeling God's self in nature and God reveals God's self in Scripture. In that respect, I think, do you think, too, that an open and relational view of the perspective of Old Testament theology is one that is needed more today, to be emphasized more today?

Peter: Yeah, the more we understand about the interrelatedness of everything, and then it's a very short but necessary step to think of God in the same way, it can't help but affect how we read this text. I mean, there may be moments in Scripture where I think they get out of their heads a little bit. And I call them mystery passages where in John's gospel, “oh, Father, let me be in you and they in me and us and all together.” It's one of these very relational things. Or Colossians where Paul, the anonymous author, he says something like, “I'm fulfilling what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ by my own suffering.” That's mystery to me. That's deep mystery.

Ilia: Yes.

Peter: I think they see it within the, I'll say this gently, within the limitations of the parameters of the old cultural moment. And I wonder, what are my limitations? We all have limitations. So our job, I think, as theologians is to transpose, I think, the energy of Scripture and be clear about some of the stuff we just don't want to carry forward.

Ilia: Right.

Peter: Both Testaments, we just don't want to carry it forward because, but we still want this tradition to speak in us and through us and to us. And that is a highly creative hermeneutical and theological endeavor. And it's one that I like waking up into in the morning instead of thinking I have all the answers.

Robert: If the whole story of the universe is still unfolding, how can we relate to the story of Scripture? Is Scripture the last and final word? Next, Ilia asks Pete whether revelation is static or an ongoing process.

Ilia: First of all, I like your term, “the energy of scriptures.” I've never heard that before. That's very, very interesting. What I hear here is that Scripture gives a form to our understanding of a God-world relationship. There's a particular, it's a narrative, but that narrative shapes how we conceive of this divine power or, whatever we conceive God to be in our lives and the way we relate to that power. I think Scripture is meant to be. And, one of the things I've really questioned in more recent days, because I'm teaching a course on the future of Christology, and we've spent the last weeks on the question of Jesus as Jewish. And the question that the revelation itself was closed, the canon of scripture has been closed. In other words, all that can be said about God now has been said. I find that really kind of problematic in a universe that's still coming to be, that's an unfinished universe. How do you reconcile these things?

Peter: Well, yeah, I'm not a very good Protestant. That's why I reconcile it, because I think it's hard within some iterations of Protestant Christianity to actually reconcile those things. But this is, for me, the thing I will always be thankful to God for is sitting under Jewish professors in graduate school who had a very different perspective on things than what I was used to. And they opened me up to, well, for example, you ask, I mean, a very blanket statement. 

You ask a Jew, “what should you do about a certain situation? How should you act?” They're not necessarily going to say, “well, let's find the Bible verse.” They're going to say, “what do the rabbis say? What's the tradition?” So they have the Talmudic tradition, which is a rich extension of this normative tradition that's always norming, but also needs to be adapted to different settings at different times and places. 

And it came to me many years ago thinking of like, I think that's what the New Testament is for Christians and the history of Christian thought. The New Testament is almost like the beginnings of a Christian Talmud to have conversations with the Hebrew Bible in light of this Christ event. And then the history of the church, I'm telling you, Ilia, they are adding to the canon. They just don't say it. Our tradition's right. Well, our tradition, so we fight. We have religious wars, right? But there's something beautiful about an evolving church tradition, which is exactly what's happened over 2,000 years. That seems normal and good and very much in sync with the varieties of Judaism that exist today.

Ilia: If I understand you correctly would you then agree that revelation is ongoing that God continues to reveal God's self in new ways or do you think that all that God is has been revealed and we just haven't discovered it we just haven't you know our limited minds haven't become fully awakened?

Peter: I mean, that's a very good question. I probably lean towards God is active continually. I think creation continues. Creation hasn't stopped. Things are moving. And I mean, the other choice, I think, is deism of some sort, where it's just like God kicks it all going and then just takes a backseat and it's up to us the rest of the time. And I'd like to think that God is involved in everything from the smallest quantum reality to the largest galaxies. I mean, I really believe that. I don't understand it, but I really do believe that's the case if we're going to talk about God today in any meaningful way.

Ilia: Yeah. Jack Haught in his book, God After Einstein, says that time itself is still coming into existence. And so, the unfolding universe or the Big Bang universe is, in a sense, the space-time mattering of the universe itself. So if that's true, then there's no there or up ahead for God to be in if the whole thing itself is just coming into being.

Peter: Right.

Ilia: So, as he states, God is still coming to be. There's that theogenesis that's taking place.

Peter: Right.

Ilia: And I think for Scripture, honestly, what I find, you can correct me, but there's certain types of fundamental Protestants that would find that absolutely horrific to think about that God has this plan and that it's all done. And I think sometimes the way people think about scripture and the way they think about God, this is kind of fixed, it's a fixed creation and God has it up and we just have to pay, pray and obey and just, pray, go to heaven or the rapture or whatever is going to happen for us. When in fact, the reality is, I mean, even God doesn't exist yet. That's the whole point. Like God is becoming God in this unfinished universe. I think that really challenges what Scripture is. It seems to challenge certainly what Scripture is about.

Peter: Yeah, I mean, at least it challenges the notion that Scripture gives a fixed view of God, which it doesn't. There are debates within the Hebrew Bible, within the New Testament, like they're all trying to figure out what God is like. And even, I would say to my more conservative friends, even with any sort of a doctrine of revelation or inspiration that you might have concerning Scripture, regardless, this is what you see there. So you have to say that God then revealed this indeterminate witness concerning the nature of God. And that can easily come into conversation with the understanding of an evolving universe and God's role. And what do we mean when we say God? And if God is relational, is God becoming? All those kinds of deep questions, which I think are, I love thinking about. I just wind up scratching my head too and say, “I'm really sure what to do with this.” But here's the good news. It's okay. It's okay that I don't wrap my head around the nature of reality and God. I'm just trying.

Ilia: Well, I agree. I mean, I don't think this is a problem to be worked out. Like, it's not an algebraic problem that we're going to, like, eventually have a solution. And that's the thing. I think these questions are really invitational questions into a deeper mystery, a reality that is ever elusive. I think God is, even in the Old Testament, I find God to be an elusive God.

Peter: Oh, yeah.

Ilia: You seem to think this chapter in this book and the next one, it's a whole different type of God showing up. So you go, well, will the real face of God please reveal God's self.

Peter: Right.

Ilia: And that's it. I think this question of God is always beyond certainly the human grasp and the human ability to even intellectualize what scripture is about. So for me, I think scripture is always the lived experience. And it's the experience of God, more than kind of the rationalization of God, which I think really is important. This came up recently. It's actually going to be a topic of discussion or department on supersessionism. 

Where are you on the question of supersessionism? Namely, that Christianity has surpassed Judaism and is now the true God's revelation or something of this nature.

Peter: Yeah. Well, one thing I wonder about is whether Paul was supersessionist. I tend to think he wasn't, but he says things occasionally that make you think that he doesn't think much of the law. But then he goes and quotes it again, and he says this is, you know. Anyway, but that's a different issue entirely. No, I'm not a supersessionist. I think that the gospel brings something unique to the conversation of humanity and meaning and destiny and all those sorts of things. And we have that gospel given to us in scripture within the context of a first century Greco woman entity, which shapes very much how things are said.

Ilia: Right.

Peter: And even what is said. So I think the early Christians, by the way, we know this from early church history and second, third century and on, where Jesus followers were hanging out in synagogues. They liked it. They were getting stuff out of it. I talked to my Jewish friends. I'm like, I never thought of that before. That's so helpful, right? And I think the notion that Christianity has supplanted Judaism is, I'm going to say it's contrary to what I believe Jesus taught.

Ilia: Yep.

Peter: And it's at the end of the day, contrary to Paul, because Paul sees this Jesus as the unifying element between Gentiles and Jews. Of course, he felt that Jews and Gentiles would all agree on Jesus, but that didn't happen. And that's why we really do have what Paul did not envision. We have two religions, probably as early as the second century.

Ilia: I think that's absolutely right, Pete. So I've thought about this for a while myself. I actually think there was never meant to be two. First of all, Jesus did not come to start a new religion.

Peter: Right.

Ilia: There's absolutely no evidence for that in the New Testament, certainly not in the Old Testament. And so he was Jewish, and, I would say, Jesus was not Catholic. He was not even Protestant. He was Jewish. So he was born Jewish, lived Jewish and died Jewish. And, as many scholars differentiate whether or not he was an eschatological prophet, did he come to fulfill those promises made to Israel or, what was he about? Well, there are various interpretations here, but clearly whatever he was doing was within the context of Judaism. He wasn't about starting something new. 

And yet the New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado speaks about a mutation of consciousness. He was Jewish, but he had a mutation of consciousness. He had a different way of seeing things. He was acting and speaking from a different center, which I find interesting. So that role of our awareness, so his awareness of God in his life, his experience of God was just slightly different from what many other Jews were living and practicing. But I don't think that there was ever any signs or pointers that a new church was breaking in here. It was really that what Judaism was about would be brought to its fulfillment or that it would be brought to a new level. And certainly it would overcome some of the violent, more ultra-Orthodox or whatever those tendencies, those radical tendencies to fight against the Romans in that very violent period that they were living in. Which has led me to wonder about, so as a Catholic, is the Catholic Church just a construct, basically? I don't know. I mean, so I find Protestantism very, very interesting because they actually kind of rebelled against this construction called the church, with all its many layers of patriarchy and hierarchy and, and the way authority became lodged, not in God or scripture, but within the church itself. And so it makes a lot of sense. And I thought to myself, I am probably a Protestant at heart, I mean, because you can begin to see how the church begins to cover over and create a narrative. It's a whole new narrative that's created. Even the God of Jesus Christ becomes a creation, a construction out of something out of Scripture and then mixed with Greek metaphysics and Hellenic philosophy. And there's something else going on here, but it's not really true or faithfully true to what Jesus of Nazareth and that experience of Jesus was about. Am I off course here?

Peter: No, I mean, what you're saying reminds me of John Caputo in "What Would Jesus Deconstruct?" Jesus's purpose is the bringing in the kingdom of God, the breaking into the kingdom of God. And that's plan A. Plan B is the church. And the church, I mean, I'm paraphrasing my understanding of what Caputo says, but the church's job is not to see itself as the end product of what the gospel is about, but it's to be those who help bring in plan A.

Ilia: Yes.

Peter: And too much, we're focused on plan B and we have thousands of plan B's, right?

Ilia: Yes.

Peter: So yeah, that makes sense to me.

Ilia: Yeah. No, I completely agree. I think the church is like a mediator, a plan A, an announcer, but certainly not something that would, in other words, supplant it, which we can. So maybe this is another way to say it. We can distort the scriptures. That's what I want to say. like we can take what was originally there and then we start editing it and then we start, like we do today, it's like cut and paste.we cut and paste pictures with our own interpretations or own interpolations. And then we have something else going on here.

Robert: Thank you for tuning in to launch another season of Hunger for Wholeness. You might notice a small change in our format this season. Instead of a few months of weekly podcasts, we're going to release episodes every other Monday. Coming up, we're excited to host conversations with biophysicist Gregory Stock, neuroscientist Ian McGilchrist, neuroanthropologist Terence Deacon, and more. A special thanks to our partners at the Fetzer Institute. I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.