Top 80 Peter Enns Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The Bible – from back to front – is the story of God told from the limited point of view of real people living at a certain place and time.”

— Peter Enns

2. “When we think of “strong” faith as something that should be free of uncertainty or crises, I believe we have gotten wrong an important part of who God is and how the Christian life really works.”

— Peter Enns

3. “To love as God loves means loving not just others like us, but those who are not.”

— Peter Enns

4. “Doubt is God’s instrument, will arrive in God’s time, and will come from unexpected places – places out of your control. And when it does, resist the fight-or-flight impulse. Pass through it – patiently, honestly, and courageously for however long it takes. True transformation takes time.”

— Peter Enns

5. “For any one group today to think it has the best grasp on the creator of the universe is a form of insanity. Run away – far and quickly – when you see this.”

— Peter Enns

6. “A relationship based on trust means not walking on eggshells, but talking openly, honestly, with no hint of passive-aggressiveness or any of the other dysfunctional manipulative tactics we tend to impose on family and friends.”

— Peter Enns

7. “Church is too often the most risky place to be spiritually honest.”

— Peter Enns

8. “I believe that the Bible does not model a faith that depends on certainty for the simple fact that the Bible does not provide that kind of certainty. Rather, in all its messy diversity, the Bible models trust in God that does not rest on whether we are able to be clear and certain about what to believe.”

— Peter Enns

9. “If God were a helicopter parent, our sacred book would be full of clear, consistent, unambiguous information to take in. In other words, it wouldn’t look anything like it does. But if the Bible’s main purpose is to form us, to grow us to maturity, to teach us the sacred responsibility of communing with the Spirit by walking the path of wisdom, it would leave plenty of room for pondering, debating, thinking, and the freedom to fail. And that is what it does.”

— Peter Enns

10. “Trust your experiences, your God moments. They don’t work as intellectual arguments for God, but that’s exactly the point: intellectual arguments aren’t enough, and wanting them to be so sooner or later leads to disappointment. God speaks to us through our whole humanity, not just through part of it. God moments can’t be proven to anyone else, but that doesn’t make them second best. They are proof – of another kind.”

— Peter Enns

11. “The Bible shows us that obedience to God is not about cutting and pasting the Bible over our lives, but seeking the path of wisdom – holding the sacred book in one hand and ourselves, our communities of faith, and our world in the other in order to discern how the God of old is present here and now.”

— Peter Enns

12. “The Bible looks the way it does because “God lets his children tell the story,” so to speak.”

— Peter Enns

13. “When we open the Bible and read it, we are eavesdropping on an ancient spiritual journey.”

— Peter Enns

14. “Reading the Bible responsibly and respectfully today means learning what it meant for ancient Israelites to talk about God the way they did, and not pushing alien expectations onto texts written long ago and far away.”

— Peter Enns

15. “What makes the Bible God’s Word isn’t its uncanny historical accuracy, as some insist, but the sacred experiences these stories point to, beyond the words themselves. Watching these ancient pilgrims work through their faith, even wrestling with how they did that, models for us our own journeys of seeking to know God better and commune with him more deeply.”

— Peter Enns

16. “Trusting God even when we can’t or don’t want to because nothing makes sense – especially then – is freedom, freedom from the pressure of needing to be certain when certainty has left us. Choosing to trust the Creator then and there isn’t irrational, but a humble admission that our rational faculties are limited for grasping the eternal and infinite. To call such trust irrational has already put on a pedestal the rationalistic pattern of faith that deeper faith calls us to transcend.”

— Peter Enns

17. “In the spiritual life, the opposite of fear is not courage, but trust.”

— Peter Enns

18. “Our experiences of God matter – those sacred moments that defy the very rational capabilities we are so keen to rely on.”

— Peter Enns

19. “So much can be learned from other traditions. In the long history of the Christian church, so many different, even conflicting, points of view have been embraced as true and valuable.”

— Peter Enns

20. “Rather than being quick to settle on final answers to puzzling questions, a trust-centered faith will find time to formulate wise questions that respect the mystery of God and call upon God for the courage to sit in those questions for as long as necessary before seeking a way forward.”

— Peter Enns

21. “Lord, help me let go of control. Help me die. Help me trust.”

— Peter Enns

22. “Christianity is a setup for letting go of certainty. The two pillars of the Christian faith express the mystery of faith: incarnation and resurrection. Of course, there’s more to the Christian faith, but two elements make Christianity what it is, and both dodge our powers of thought and speech.”

— Peter Enns

23. “Our level of insight does not determine our level of trust. In fact, seeking insight rather than trust can get in the way of our walk with God.”

— Peter Enns

24. “BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGISTS are about as certain as you can be about these things that the conquest of Canaan as the Bible describes did not happen: no mass invasion from the outside by an Israelite army, and no extermination of Canaanites as God commanded.”

— Peter Enns

25. “The Bible isn’t a book that reflects one point of view. It is a collection of books that records a conversation – even a debate – over time.”

— Peter Enns

26. “The first question we should ask about what we are reading is not “How does this apply to me?” Rather, it is “What is this passage saying in the context of the book I am reading, and how would it have been heard in the ancient world?”

— Peter Enns

27. “We should linger here for a moment, for it summarizes a main theme of Paul’s letters: God’s unexpected move – Jesus’s death and resurrection – places Jews and Gentiles on equal footing with God.”

— Peter Enns

28. “For Christians, then, the question is not “Who gets the Bible right?” The question is and has always been, “Who gets Jesus right?” The Gospel writers and Paul couldn’t have made that any clearer.”

— Peter Enns

29. “When knowing what you believe is the nonnegotiable center of true faith, questions and critical self-examination pose a threat.”

— Peter Enns

30. “If you are expecting Paul to read the Bible like it was set in stone, you will find yourself getting pretty nervous. For Paul, now that Jesus has come, the Bible was more like clay to be molded.”

— Peter Enns

31. “When we reach the point where things simply make no sense, when our thinking about God and life no longer line up, when any sense of certainty is gone, and when we can find no reason to trust God but we still do, well that is what trust looks like at its brightest – when all else is dark.”

— Peter Enns

32. “Sticking to the Bible at every turn, like it’s an owner’s manual or book of instruction, as the way to know God misses what Paul and the rest of the New Testament writers show us again and again: the words on the page of the Bible don’t drive the story, Jesus does. Jesus is bigger than the Bible. For.”

— Peter Enns

33. “The life of Christian faith is more than agreeing with a set of beliefs about Christ, morality, or how to read the Bible. It means being so intimately connected to Christ that his crucifixion is ours, his death is our death, and his life is our life – which is hardly something we can grasp with our minds. It has to be experienced. It is an experience.”

— Peter Enns

34. “The need to explain Jesus as both surprise ending and deeply connected to Israel’s story drove the Gospel writers to do some creative reading. Sticking to what the Bible says wasn’t their goal. Talking about Jesus was.”

— Peter Enns

35. “The Bible, just as it is, still works. Don’t try to explain it. Just accept it. That won’t make you a mindless zombie. It just means you are accepting your own human limitations and acknowledging by faith that something bigger than ourselves is happening, someone bigger is behind it, and we have the privilege to be a part of it.”

— Peter Enns

36. “When the dust clears and in the quiet of your own heart, what kind of God do you believe in, really? And why?”

— Peter Enns

37. “God doesn’t change, but God – being God – is never fully captured by our perceptions. As people continue to live and breathe and experience life, how they see God changes too.”

— Peter Enns

38. “There is no higher “law” to be obeyed than the law of love. That, at the end of the day, is what it means to follow Jesus.”

— Peter Enns

39. “Reimagining the God of the Bible is what Christians do. More than that, they have to, if they wish to speak of the biblical God at all.”

— Peter Enns

40. “Here is another strategy for the sentence completion exercise: Sure, Jesus talks about loving your enemies, but Jesus also talks about throwing sinners into hell to burn forever. Since eternal damnation is far worse than exterminating merely one ancient people for their land, the argument goes, don’t get all worked up about the Canaanites. Crisis averted. No, it’s not.”

— Peter Enns

41. “It is wholly incomprehensible to think that thousands of years ago God would have felt constrained to speak in a way that would be meaningful only to Westerners several thousand years later. To do so borders on modern, Western arrogance.”

— Peter Enns

42. “None of these modern adaptations is “in the Bible,” and yet even the most committed “rulebook Bible” readers out there wind up adapting what the Bible says, because we have to – if we want that ancient text to continue to speak to us today.”

— Peter Enns

43. “All attempts to put the past into words are interpretations of the past, not “straight history.” There is no such thing. Anywhere. Including the Bible.”

— Peter Enns

44. “If there is any cure for thinking of the Bible as a once-told-forever-binding source of information about God and his people, Paul is it. For.”

— Peter Enns

45. “Walking the path of faith means trusting God enough to let our uh-oh moments expose how we create God to fit in our thinking.”

— Peter Enns

46. “When we open the Bible and read it, we are eavesdropping on an ancient spiritual journey. That journey was recorded over a thousand-year span of time, by different writers, with different personalities, at different times, under different circumstances, and for different reasons. In.”

— Peter Enns

47. “The broader we cast our net, the deeper we wind up owning our own thoughts.”

— Peter Enns

48. “Jesus, who is wisdom incarnate, gives us access to the Creator to reveal hidden things and invites us to seek out our sacred responsibility to perceive God’s unscripted presence here and now.”

— Peter Enns

49. “My commitment to follow through on my choice came with a cost. I tried very hard, for years, with complete transparency, to blend together old and new – the particular Christian tradition that birthed me and for which I had deep respect, and the bigger Bible I had come to know, was excited about, and could not deny without deceiving myself and others.”

— Peter Enns

50. “The Bible is not a Christian owner’s manual but a story – a diverse story of God and how his people have connected with him over the centuries, in changing circumstances and situations.”

— Peter Enns