he Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It

Or, more accurately, he wants us to see that the Bible destroys it for us. Peter Enns would like to destroy that foundation. Often the foundation of this architecture is some strong version of the doctrine of inerrancy: the idea that the Bible is the perfectly accurate, contradiction-free, manual for all life’s ills written word-for-word by God himself (as dictated to his chosen authors). Then their first history or philosophy or biology class blows through them like a hurricane and it all comes crashing down. Many students come into college with a received faith, built like a house of cards that has yet to encounter a breeze. And we talked about the Bible – about its power to bring things out in us, about it being a place where God meets us and teaches us and changes us – and how none of that depends on whether or not the Bible is a perfect document, free from historical error or internal contradiction.Īs a professor at a large public university not far below the Bible belt, I encounter this fairly often. We talked about genre and author intention and how the truths conveyed by a story don’t always depend upon the story’s historical accuracy. His big question: given all of these contradictions, how could he trust the Bible? My response question: trust the Bible for what? We talked for an hour about what the Bible is for – how its not meant to be a history or science textbook and how holding it to that modernist standard involves bringing expectations to it that it was never meant to meet.

I’ve had this conversation a few times before. We sat down and he immediately produced a printed paper containing a list of ‘contradictions’ in the Bible as well as a copy of Evidence that Demands a Verdict.

He told me he’d been in a bit of a crisis of faith and had some questions about the Bible. A few weeks ago, I met a young man at Pascal’s Coffee for a chat.

He Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It