Top 80 Peter Enns Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Wisdom isn’t about finding a quick answer key to life – like turning to the index, finding your problem, and turning to the right page so it all works out. Wisdom is about learning how to work through the unpredictable, uncontrollable messiness of life so you can figure things out on your own in real time. Both.”

— Peter Enns

53. “To feel that our faith is threatened can easily turn to fear. But, judging from the long and varied history of thinking within Christianity, “being right” is elusive, and the Bible is never something we will actually master. The relentless and sinful human habit of creating God to look like ourselves, and thus distorting God, is also a constant problem. The choice we all need to make daily is whether we are willing to hold our narratives with an open hand and let God rewrite them when necessary.”

— Peter Enns

54. “I mean, if we try to explain Jesus’s handling of his Bible in terms of how many Christians today feel the Bible “ought” to be read, Jesus will look like one of my college Bible students, playing free association with the Bible. Or worse, we may try to find some way of taking Jesus out of his ancient Jewish world and making him look more like a suburban Protestant, an urban hipster, a tea party spokesman, and so on.”

— Peter Enns

55. “Doubt is what being cornered by our thinking looks like. Doubt happens when needing to be certain has run its course.”

— Peter Enns

56. “Who we are and when and where we exist affect how we imagine God.”

— Peter Enns

57. “And for Christians, the gospel has always been the lens through which Israel’s stories are read – which means, for Christians, Jesus, not the Bible, has the final word. The story of God’s people has moved on, and so must we.”

— Peter Enns

58. “Still, shifting my thinking on the Bible did not mean I was losing my faith in God. In fact, I had the growing sense that God was inviting me down this path, encouraging it even.”

— Peter Enns

59. “We have practically been conditioned to expect God to be our helicopter parent. And if for some reason we don’t run to God to solve every little problem, from finding our car keys to deciding on color schemes for the nursery, we are told there is something deeply wrong with us spiritually. Phooey.”

— Peter Enns

60. “Being “in” with God is about much more than the thoughts we keep in our heads, the belief systems we hold on to, the doctrines we recite, or the statements of faith we adhere to, no matter how fervently and genuinely we do so, and how important they may be.”

— Peter Enns

61. “There’s an irony: the passionate defense of the Bible as a “history book” among the more conservative wings of Christianity, despite intentions, isn’t really an act of submission to God; it is making God submit to us. In.”

— Peter Enns

62. “We should not be surprised when we find ourselves in a similar spot, experiencing a God who is not beholden to our thinking, a God who doesn’t act according to our sense of certainty, even if we can find a Bible verse or two to back it up. God can’t be proof-texted. God will not be backed into a corner.”

— Peter Enns

63. “When you read the Bible on its own terms, you discover that it doesn’t behave itself like a holy rulebook should.”

— Peter Enns

64. “Paul would agree, to a certain extent. He did not think that Jesus was the founder of a new religion, rather the concluding, surprise chapter to Israel’s story.”

— Peter Enns

65. “God adopted Abraham as the forefather of a new people, and in doing so he also adopted the mythic categories within which Abraham – and everyone else – thought. But God did not simply leave Abraham in his mythic world. Rather, God transformed the ancient myths so that Israel’s story would come to focus on its God, the real one.”

— Peter Enns

66. “If we let the Bible be the Bible, on its own terms – on God’s terms – we will see this in-fleshing God at work, not despite the challenges, the unevenness, and ancient strangeness of the Bible, but precisely because of these things. Perhaps not the way we would have written our sacred book, if we had been consulted, but the one that the good and wise God has allowed his people to have.”

— Peter Enns

67. “Doing the best as we can to figure out life, to discern how or if a certain proverb applies right here and now, is not an act of disloyalty toward God, rebellion against God’s clear rulebook for life. It is, rather, our sacred responsibility as people of faith.”

— Peter Enns

68. “When we grab hold of “correct” thinking for dear life, when we refuse to let go because we think that doing so means letting go of God, when we dig in our heels and stay firmly planted even when we sense that we need to let go and move on, at that point we are trusting our thoughts rather than God. We have turned away from God’s invitation to trust in order to cling to an idol.”

— Peter Enns

69. “If this Jesus is God’s answer, what is the question? Paul eventually came to the conclusion that God was answering a question that gets at the core of not simply the Jewish drama, but the human drama, a question that no one was yet asking in quite the same way.”

— Peter Enns

70. “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

71. “Paul is “our guy,” and we Protestants continue to expect from him clear direction about what to believe and what to do. And Paul certainly seems to oblige. He has that alluring black-and-white, decisive, uncompromising “just do what I say” quality that some of us just can’t get enough of. It’s almost as if Paul’s letters have become the Protestant version of the Law.”

— Peter Enns

72. “A story like the exodus story is what happens when, as I said previously, God lets his children tell the story – in ways they understand and that is packed with meaning for them.”

— Peter Enns

73. “We can well imagine Jews feeling a bit out of their element – maybe intimidated and shamed by their own story, which began in slavery, ended in exile, and with absolutely zero contributions to philosophy or science. “Some ‘chosen people’! What kind of God did you say you follow? Apparently one who lets bad things happen to you.”

— Peter Enns

74. “I think of Christians who, having been raised to read the Genesis creation story as literal science and history, leave for college, watch the History Channel, or log onto the internet, and find out that fossils and radiometric dating are in fact not hoaxes. That’s how nice Christian college freshmen become atheists by Christmas break. If your faith can unravel that quickly, it’s enough to make you question whether your faith is worth the effort at all.”

— Peter Enns

75. “As Luke’s story unfolds, Jesus continues to undermine expectations involving political power and Jewish identity. In his first public appearance, in a synagogue service, he claims to be the messiah, which creates quite a buzz of support – until he tells them that he will bless Gentiles and be rejected by his own kinsmen. The crowd responds by trying to throw Jesus off a cliff. Israel’s messiah isn’t supposed to say things like this.”

— Peter Enns

76. “Readers who come to the Bible expecting something more like an accurate textbook, a more-or-less objective recalling of the past – because, surely, God wouldn’t have it any other way – are in for an uncomfortable read. But if they take seriously the words in front of them, they will quickly find that the Bible doesn’t deliver on that expectation. Not remotely.”

— Peter Enns

77. “Whatever we do, let’s not imagine that the Israelites were ancient versions of ourselves, maybe less well groomed, who were “nice,” read their Bibles daily, the kind you could invite to church and want to marry your daughter, who would vote Republican or drive a hybrid. We respect these biblical stories most when we try to understand what the writers did and why, not when we place false expectations on them, like seeing them as a timeless script or a permanent fixture for how to think about God.”

— Peter Enns

78. “The Adam story, then, is not simply about the past. It’s about Israel’s present brought into the past – even as far past as the beginning of the human drama itself.”

— Peter Enns

79. “Ours is a historical faith, and to uproot the Bible from its historical contexts is self-contradictory.”

— Peter Enns

80. “Paul doesn’t call followers of Jesus “Christians.” He calls them “in Christ.” That isn’t the easiest thing to understand, let alone explain, but it suggests an intimacy with Jesus that defies words. That intimacy also includes – somehow – suffering.”

— Peter Enns

81. “I didn’t know how to “do” faith without making sure my thoughts about God were lined up, and so, once those thoughts failed to be compelling, my faith sank.”

— Peter Enns

82. “Jesus was God’s climax to Israel’s story, but he was not bound to that story. He pushed at its boundaries, transformed it, and at times left parts of it behind.”

— Peter Enns

83. “That’s Jesus for you. Making people across time upset with him.”

— Peter Enns

84. “I feel it is part of the mystery of faith that things normally do not line up entirely, and so when they don’t, it is not a signal to me that the journey is at an end but that I am still on it. As I reflect on my own experience and that of many others far wiser than I, God seems willing to help that process along.”

— Peter Enns

85. “I believe that God is more interested in the who. And that means walking the walk, not just talking the talk. Better: it means walking the walk when no words are left. That is trust.”

— Peter Enns

86. “Seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote: “The eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrifies me.”

— Peter Enns

87. “I need a place to let go and fall back from my familiar patterns and trust God to catch me.”

— Peter Enns