How Scripture Can Still Evolve with Peter Enns (Part 2)

In Part 2 of Ilia Delio’s conversation with author and biblical scholar Peter Enns, we explore deeper dimensions of scripture—and how our understanding of it must evolve alongside us.

Together, Ilia and Pete examine how the Bible is often misused as a political and cultural tool, and they ask: Can scripture still offer wisdom in a world facing ecological collapse, moral polarization, and spiritual disconnection?

This episode approaches:

• The New Testament through the lens of change and complexity
  Why fundamentalist readings distort the transformative power of scripture
• The psychological and planetary costs of static belief systems
• Whether scripture itself is part of a larger religious and cosmic evolution

Pete also shares where he looks for hope—and how embracing uncertainty may actually deepen our spiritual lives.

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. Today, we dive back into Ilya's conversation with Pete Enns, scripture scholar and co-host of the Bible for Normal People podcast. asks Pete how he reads the New Testament, why the Bible's become an unfortunate political tool, and whether scripture itself is part of a much larger cosmic and religious evolutionary process.

Ilia: I think scripture, as we open up from Genesis through the Torah, and it's very organic. I find the Old Testament very creation-centered, very organic, a living God who's in a living relationship with us. And then, we've got the New Testament, and then the kind of this constructions from the New Testament have a philosophical God. We have an abstract God. We have this distinction of nature and person, and we get into things that really start moving away from the organicity or the livingness of the divine mystery. I think, as we begin to, and flush that abstract God, and then develop all sorts of theologies out of that, we move further and further away from a deep, deep interconnectivity with nature itself. All of this is the spiraling of the ecological environmental crisis traced back right into that demonstrating of Jesus into the Christ.

Peter: Well, and I think, David Bentley Hart says that the New Testament is basically Jewish apocalypticism.

Ilia: Yeah.

Peter: Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. That is my reading of the New Testament as well. And very, very much centered on here and now.

Ilia: Yeah.

Peter: And Jesus is raised, he ascended, but he's coming back, by the way, really soon. Not in thousands of years. Don't get married, just watch yourself. He's coming. The parable of the virgins and the oil and all that sort of stuff, right? It's going to happen. Very soon, the book of Revelation begins. These things are soon coming to pass. Yeah. So the notion, I mean, this is sort of my quick take on what you're saying—

The notion of salvation in the New Testament is a very Jewish notion of salvation. And I just get that for reading Luke's Gospel. It's about redemption, deliverance from Rome. It's about being saved as a people. And Jesus is the Messiah, means not floating up in the air someplace, but the King. The King has come, and now he's gone for a while, but he's coming back, and he will take his rightful place in the throne in Jerusalem and fulfill all the things in the Old Testament of Gentiles screaming to Jerusalem and everything's fine. Well that didn't happen. You're going to have this, what do you say, this interpolation. You're going to have people take this story and shift it to have it make more sense to match what happened, but also to match certain philosophical sensibilities, right? 

Now salvation becomes more an after-life thing, which there's very little in the New Testament about that. I mean, Tom Wright says there really isn't anything in the New Testament about that. And so it shifts, right? Now, on the one level, I get it. I understand that this gospel has to be almost reinvented throughout time. And that's exactly what the early church did, right? And I think that I'd say that to people when they're not happy with how some people are reinventing it now in light of some of those realities we've been talking about, right? And how do you know when it's too far? I don't know. I'm just trying to figure it all out. What I do know is we have thinking to do. That's, that's what I do know.

Ilia: That whole New Testament period, is the emergence of Jesus onto the scene, this young Jewish man, he's faithful in every way to Judaism. He reads the Torah, I mean, he teaches in the temple, but yeah, he's an upstart, as Donna Haraway called, he's a trickster, he destabilizes, he wants to challenge things. So he lives right on the border. So Jesus is something of a border person, he's between something is and something that is yet to come. 

I have a very interesting article that I signed for next week on how Jesus—”when did Jesus become God?”—which I find that question, time very, very interesting because we have a very simple idea that Jesus was God, and that's it, and this is what God is. And the truth is, that was not a given question.

It was a question that was not certainly not clear in the New Testament period, and the disciples were not sure. I mean, “who do people say that I am?” Peter's like, “well, you're the Christ, and like, okay, you're number one.” And others are like, “I don't know, maybe John the Baptist, who knows?” And then of course, probably in that time, there were many messiahs, there were probably many people thinking “yeah, they're the Christ.” 

So it was kind of a murky period in my view. All of this to say, and because this plays out in how we interpret scripture today, in light of an evolving universe, in light of a universe that is still coming into being, and then what is our role? Since we now know, we know so much more about ourselves in this universe today than they didn't know in the first century. So we know that we're part of and coming out of a very long evolutionary process, that what we are is the waking up of a universe now on a self-reflective level. So we are the universe on the level of self-reflection. 

I think certainly what scripture scholars left out and continue to leave out sometimes is the role of consciousness, that there's a role here. And it's hard to read back into the first century, what was the role of consciousness, the disciples or even in the life of Jesus. And yet, say if we just bracket the New Testament from our scripture for a moment and we just look at the evolution of religion itself, religion is a natural phenomenon. It's not something that God just began in Genesis, just decided to appear and say, let there be light, that you can actually trace the emergence of religion as an awakening, of the human person as we move from lower primate levels to more advanced primate levels with a larger brain, more complex brain, et cetera. 

So I mean, the earliest form of religion, as Robert Bellah tells us, is in the form of play, like primates play. They came together and he calls this a proto-justice. And so this idea that a playfulness and a communal gathering was in a sense a leveling of hierarchies and tribal warring and a creation of a new awareness together. So I find those very basic elements of reason important to begin to even interpret what scripture is about because our scriptures, even if they come in 10,000 BCE or whenever the early Genesis, I mean, Yahwist and those writers wrote, I mean, that's a very relatively recent period.

Peter: Oh yeah.

Ilia: So I worry about the way we have ontologized scripture, the way we read into it, very fixed notions of what God is and what we're about. And then we've used these scriptures, even as we see into our own day, as political tools to justify who's going to be saved, who's on the righteous side, who's on the condemned side, whether it's in terms of gender, whether in terms of politics. And I'm thinking, we are so off the mark in the way scripture is contextualized within the broader mainstream of an evolving culture and the world that we no longer, I think, are reading it to what it can really be for us.

Peter: Right, and it's easy to, I think, manipulate a text that's left in the past for purposes of power. That's my opinion. It's this deeply past authoritative thing and you just do what it says.

Ilia: Yeah.

Peter: Which of course is in a sense, nonsense, because what does it say? And people disagree on how to use text. And of course, now in our beloved nation, we have all sorts of issues going on with Christian nationalism and the use of scripture for power. And you have an Episcopal bishop who gives a sermon that Jesus could have given or any one of the prophets, and all of a sudden she has demons inside of her, right? 

See, the problem here is in a way scripture, but I think in a way it's America's relationship to scripture because of its founding. And Mark Noll, the historian, he has a book about this, he's very eloquent, but how America doesn't have a state church, it never did. It just had a bunch of Christians coming over wanting freedom and they just created the same problems everybody else had. But people go west, right? And they have their wagons and they make farms in Wisconsin and things like that. And so when the itinerant preachers went out on horseback, their authority became the Bible.

Ilia: Yes.

Peter: In a way that it had never quite been an authority before. And I think that's baked into the DNA of the American experience. And people, they exploit that. They exploit it. I think the Bible and that mentality is being exploited today, and they're saying the silent stuff out loud.

Ilia: In that kind of thinking, that level of thinking, what really concerns me is the way that even live in a scientific, technological, cultural milieu, we are immersed in a technological milieu, we can bracket that when it comes to this relationship with God, which becomes, it's encased in something that's absolute. And then we use that absoluteness of this word of God to draw barriers, as to who's acceptable to God, who's not acceptable to God, who's going to be saved, who won't be saved. 

This has led me to just, in my own way of saying that artificial intelligence is not a problem. That's what nature is. It's information. But we have become artificially intelligent. We have become artificial humans. There's something about us and the way we parcel out, we parse out these things, we parse scripture, we ontologize it, we create, this is what God is about. This is who God likes and who God doesn't like. And I'm thinking this is really made up. This is completely constructed. This has nothing to do with reality. And we're creating virtual realities for ourselves and we're calling it the real. then we are creating, we're using those realities to divvy up our human community. And it's becoming extremely problematic to the point where it's going to probably wind up in some kind of out and out conflict at some point, you know. And how do we get scripture—

Peter: Yeah, I don't want to think about it.

Ilia: No, I don't either. How do we get Scripture is really at the heart of a lot of what's going on.

Peter: It is. See, that's just the point. Scripture in some way or form is the heart of it, because that's what people appeal to for all sorts of reasons. And what do you do? I mean, the thing is that you can't sit down and say, “Listen, Donald, it doesn't work this way.” The Bible is really interesting. I can't use it. We're not a Christian nation that's actually anti-biblical to think that way. But people aren't ready for that conversation until they're ready. The problem is that it's used for power though, and in the meantime.

Ilia: It is. The scriptures have become a primary source of power, political power. And then from political power, all other powers, including economic wealth and status and everything else. Racism is really, in my view, a result of the way scripture is misread. But all of this to say, Thomas Berry, I remember years ago, I was at a lecture with him and he said, he was about 90 something years old at the time, and he said, "We need to put scriptures to the side." He thought scripture had become the problem and we need to put it to the side and turn to reading the book of nature. He said, "We've lost sight of how to read the book of nature." And I wonder that myself, like, have we just placed too much power into the scriptures where we have literally extracted it from its wider context within evolution, and therefore we have lost sight of what we are by nature?

Peter: Yeah.

Ilia: I think once we lose sight of what we are by nature, we have a very, very ambiguous future because we really have no sense of what we are and where we're going.

Peter: And when you equate scripture with God speaking to you, then in removing scripture from that larger context, you're also removing God from that larger context. And in my opinion, Ilya, I think that's more of an issue, I may be totally off base on this, this is really conservative American Protestantism. Whether you call it evangelical or fundamentalist, this is where we are. And I really don't know, I don't know if it can be fixed. It might have to blow up.

Ilia: Well, Pete, funny that you should say that. That's where I think we're headed. We're headed for a great catastrophe because I think we cannot turn our backs on, we can't even treat nature. It's not a stage. It's not a background. It's not such something that we're acting the human drama on. That's why we call it Mother Earth, because it's from where we're born.

Robert: Unhelpful views of Scripture may have a detrimental effect on our own mental health. But what if it's having a disastrous effect on our entire world? How must our relationship to Scripture evolve along with us? Next, Ilia reflects on the roots of our ecological crisis, and Pete considers whether a healthy view of Scripture can still play a central role in our religious life, a view quite different from the dominant fundamentalist readings. And later, we hear about how and where Pete looks for hope.

Ilia: If we don't get back to the true roots of our lives within evolution, we are headed for a great cataclysmic event up ahead, because the truth is you can only denature, dissociate yourself from nature long enough before nature will react. And it's reacting already, it's responding already with global warming and we keep marginalizing that because we're pretty sure it'll affect us. And we're just not prepared for the conditions of disaster that we have actually created for ourselves, precisely because we placed this unhealthy emphasis on scripture to the exclusion of nature, to the exclusion of evolution itself. Even that word evolution for many, for many fundamentalist, Protestant, even Catholics, quite honestly, it's an errant word, it's a no-no word, right? Because we're not to send our monkeys, like God has special dignity for us. And I'm like, 
“No, absolutely, your next relative really is a whale.”

Peter: Yeah, right.

Ilia: People don't want to feel like they're animals, but look at how we act. We act between animal and angel. We do things to one another that are worse than the animals.

Peter: We're a menace.

Ilia: To not acknowledge our animalistic side is really then to leave ourselves vulnerable to what we can become. I think we have to just, we've lost sight of what we are, I mean, as people. And I think, unfortunately, and I have nothing against it, I love scripture. And I do think it has an important role in our lives. The question is, does it have an important role or a fundamental role? Can we live without scripture? Or is our life necessarily contingent on the scriptures? I guess that's a question.

Peter: Or can it have—I agree with the way you put it, but just to play with that a little bit—can it have a fundamental role that's not fundamentalist biblicism?

Ilia: Okay.

Peter: Right? I know you would agree with that in principle, but the Bible is not the problem. It's the expectations people put onto the Bible, which is baked into our DNA. And it's also very useful for some people. I mean, there's some, I think, very cynical people, but there are others who actually do believe that, well, we're a Christian nation. We've always thought that. 

That's why, living as we do in Northeastern United States, you got Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, you got New Canaan, all these places, right? It's like, that's what they thought. And that's nuts actually. But that's again, part of our culture breathes it. But it's not the Bible, it's what people have understood the Bible to be and coming to America and it's okay to kill people 'cause that's what the Israelites did with the Canaanites and all that kind of stuff. And that's our guiding principle, right?

Ilia: Right, and so that really, really worries me, that kind of thinking, especially because it does have a supersessionist kind of mentality to it. Like we're the real deal. Like we're the ones God really loves, you know? And it can create an anti-Jewish sentiment and anti-blasphemy, not us, like white Anglo-Saxon, cross-Christian, this can be eliminated because it's not part of God's plan. 

I think there's something neurologically that's gone on in us as well. I think the brain can splinter. It can splinter into different realities. And we have something of a neurological condition, I mean, in this country, and probably it's, I don't know if it's even global, but we're split brained. We have a God brain and then a cultural brain, but our God brain has become locked in. And I think the brain can lock in ideas and it plays these ideas over and over like a broken record. And if anything tries to disrupt that circuit, it becomes then as something of an opponent, like an attack. And we have the need to defend ourselves.

Peter: Yeah, and that's the direct result, in my opinion, of the battles for the Bible from the 19th century were Darwin and biblical archeology and German higher criticism, and it became the enemy, and we're still fighting those battles. And right now, the fundamentalists are winning. Well, they've won in a sense. They've won for the moment, I hope not forever, but my concern is always how to effect change with that, how to encourage a, I want to say, a healthy view of scripture, a healthy view of what it means to be human in light of what we understand of physical reality, right? And that's not a conversation many people are willing to have because it's so baked in that it can't be that complicated. God just talks. 

I see this all the time online with people who don't like me very much. “God says it and that's all there is to it, and it's not complicated.” I said, “there's, wait a minute, there's 2,000 years of Christian theology debating this stuff.” “No, it's not complicated. It's right there. God wouldn't lie to us.” And that's, I don't blame them because that's how they're taught. Because that's how their pastor was taught and their grandparents were taught and their great-grandparents were taught. This is a deeply embedded thing that's actually, I mean, people who know more than I do will say, this has been with the American experience since the beginning. It's not new. It's been amped up the past couple hundred years, but it's always been there.

Ilia: You're absolutely right. We've locked ourselves into this. Literally, it's like a box and we can't get out of it. We're kind of suffocating in fundamentalism. But on the other hand, guess what?

Peter: What?

Ilia: We've not always been human beings and we won't. And I think our fastest game, so while the fundamentalists are killing themselves to maintain this absolute God control thing, we're reinventing ourselves. Artificial intelligence is our fastest game changer today. And if we want to shift our attention onto what we're becoming, we might be startled to realize that we are quickly exiting our homo sapien species that in the next, could be, I mean, Ray Kurzweil says by 2045, we'll have exited in the singularity. We'll be so merged with technology. 

Peter: Wow. 

Ilia: Yes, exactly. Life is what happens when you're looking in a different direction.

Peter: I know, yeah.

Ilia: So if fundamentalists want to lock themselves into these ontologies of black and white, thinking, in other words, literally, it's God, no God, save, not saved. Fine, please do so. But you're going to become extinct. I mean, that's the whole thing. That you want to know what's going to live on, what lives on in an evolutionary universe. It's what's most creative, what's novel, and what is future oriented. That's biblical, quite honestly. If you want to get back to the Bible, the whole of scripture is about promise, a future. It's about God doing new things. And those principles are very much consonant with artificial intelligence. 

So that's exactly what we're doing. We're creating and we're using our capacity to think, to imagine, to create. By creating, we're creating a new future for ourselves. I mean, look at what we're doing here in terms of having a podcast through Zoom. I mean, we have devices that we can log around the world, et cetera. Soon, this stuff will be embedded in us. We'll be communicating almost seamlessly across the globe. We're on the verge of flying taxis, robotic cars. Robots will change a lot of everything for us. 

So do I worry about a God who's locked into some kind of very, very neuralgic understanding of scripture? No, not at all. I think we have to be on the side of life. I think what it calls us to is to be on the side of life. I think the whole thing is about life, life unto more life, even right through the resurrection. However we interpret that resurrection, that's one thing, but it's a belief that Jesus did not die, that Christ is raised from the dead and now lives with God. And so I think God is the last word. And I think it's a belief in life itself. And I find a very static, closed, reactionary thinking of scripture is not life-giving. It's deadly. And it creates division, opposition. And where there's conflict and opposition, there's no God there. That is in my view.

Peter: And the singularity, that's interesting—2045, things are going to change. And my immediate thought goes to, “Yeah, but people who don't want that, they run the economic war machine.” They want control over education. Right. And I just wonder how much conflict that might breed.

Ilia: As they say, the future belongs to those who can see. So you have to be able to see into the future. You have to be able to see and imagine what we can become as a human community, as a God-centered community, as a planet of life. And I think one thing about Jesus, he was about imagination. Imagine, the small mustard seed, imagine what it can become. That imagination, I think we have allowed our imagination almost to die at some point, really. It's just flattened out sometimes. 

And we're so fearful. This is what I find. Fear just kills imagination, right? So we have to reclaim a center of freedom with us, a center of trust and faith that God is here and God is doing new things because God just loves life and just wants more life. And so a God who's on the move towards more life. And that's where AI is not to be feared by any means. It's fearful because we're not on board with it. And we think, "Oh my God, Elon Musk is gonna take over the world and go to Mars and then Mark Zuckerberg." And these guys are worth billions and billions of dollars now. We're just peons here on this earth and probably expendable commodities of some sort. 

But I don't want to think that way. I think we need to help shape, we shape the future. And I think, how do we get out of these wars that we've, political, cultural wars that scripture has built on its own, locked us in. We can't find a way out. And I'm saying there is a way out, and that is by, really not living from the outside, but living from the inside, as Jesus did, returning to the Jesus of the New Testament, and the way he lived, a deep center from within him, seems to me.

Peter: This is hope, right? This is joy. This is hope. There is a future that God is not disinterested in. And whatever happens, I mean, I don't think God controls the evolutionary process. I don't think God controls the use of AI or not. This is us. We're creating these things, but we're part of it all. And I'd like to think God is interested, again, however we want to explain or define what we mean when we say God, but I think it's the universal, that which is the ground of being, that which is not a thing, but by which all things exist. That's the best I can do when I try to define God.

Ilia: No, I love that. Yeah, for sure.

Peter: That's our hope. Our hope is in, I think, ultimately the beauty and the goodness of this unfathomable cosmos that we live in. And that, I think, when you say, this is what it means to me, when you say things like being connected, it's that. It's also being connected to the trees right outside my window and the squirrels and all of that and taking walks in the woods every once in a while instead of maybe always being on my phone, even though phones are fine, they're here to stay and will be embedded in my brain in 10 years, whatever. But I like to, I look for hope that I look for it because it's sometimes very hard to see it when we're in the middle of a process, we don't quite understand, we just see bad things happening. I believe the Christian faith can be part of a dialogue there if understood well and not manipulated by cynical people.

Ilia: Hope. That's a great four-letter word. And it's what I think the scripture really ultimately is about. Faith is always just, it's believing in that which can be seen, but we believe, right? It's in a sense, it's something that has grasped us. And I think when we're so caught up in our little diatribes and arguments and defend ourselves, we can't be grasped from within. God can't get in. It's like, I'm standing at the door knocking, but no one's home. No one's answering.

Peter: Well, the ego gets in the way, right? So that's part of the problem.

Ilia: Right, it locks the door and defends itself. So I've never thought that science or technology is the problem. In fact, I find them wondrous and I find them part of scripture itself. I think if I were to extend scripture into a fifth gospel, That might be something like, it might be an AI or a God who is really becoming something new in us, you know. And I just don't think we have the last word on God, quite honestly. And I think this is God, I like what you say, a grounded being, but deeply faithful. And this is why I love the Psalms, the Old Testament. A God of unconditional love, a God who accompanies us, who is with us through all things.

What books would you recommend to our readers, for those who are interested in a living God, where scripture can be really helpful, to maybe some of your own books, of recent time that you want to direct people to? 

Peter: I mean, a couple of books I've written, How the Bible Actually Works, where I make the point that the Bible is a book of wisdom. It promotes wisdom because it's so diverse and so ancient and so weird and so conflicting. It's clearly not a rule book, a very good rule book. It's more something to bring us to a point of exploring reality and in that sense, a book of wisdom. There are, I mean, a lot of people I've gotten a lot out of with respect to not just scripture, but I think the larger question too of Christianity and science or just religion and science. 

I like this book by Peter Todd, The Individuation of God, who introduced me to the term, “we need a third millennium theology.” And when I read that, I said, yeah, okay, because we've been doing that. You've said this too. We've been doing it every—we're not second millennium, we're not first millennium, we're not BCE, we're now, and how do we think about things? That's a beautiful book. 

I also like Dale Allison, who is a New Testament scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary, but he's written... Actually, I need to remind myself of the title of these books, but one is Embracing Mystery: Religious Experience in the Secular Age. He also has a book called The Luminous Dusk, where he deals with some issues of modern life and how that helps us. 

And also Barbara Brown Taylor has a book by a similar title that means a lot to me, and it means so much I forgot the title of it. Oh, Luminous Web, which is a different book, but she engages science there very, very directly, quantum physics especially. And her take on the nature of religion in light of those realities to me, I just find very inspiring. So those might be places to start for people if they're interested.

Ilia: Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Pete. What a great conversation. I really enjoyed speaking with you.

Peter: I had a wonderful time, Ilia. Thank you so much.

Robert: A huge thanks to Pete Enns for joining us. Be sure to find his book, How the Bible Actually Works, and listen to his insightful podcast, “The Bible for Normal People.” Next up, Ilia is joined by biophysicist Gregory Stock to talk more about technology and the future of Humanity. As always, I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.