Refreshing, yes! But what do you mean by apologetics? I think it’s Enns’ own form of apologetics.. he’s still defending a view of the Bible and promoting a way of handling it, just not a traditional one..
@DoloresLehmann- To address your question as to why there aren't more LIKES for this video, allow me to comment. Even though much of the message is accurate, he does use faulty reasoning with statements like " Bible writers wrote from their own point of view" "Some of the Bible is probably wrong" "When teaching the Bible to children, you must leave out some things" . So, An honest student of the Word would reject such statements since the 40 authors of Scripture did not write their words but rather wrote as God directed them. (See II Tim 3:16-17 & II Pet 1:21-25) This speaker would benefit greatly by heeding the advice given in Prov 4:7 to get WISDOM and UNDERSTANDING before teaching others your views.
@@lonniesatterfield1770 At least he doesn't commit the error of trying to prove the prooftext with the prooftext. Honest students of whatever know that's not going to work, it always leads to circular reasoning.
I love Pete. I don’t agree with everything but he always makes me a better thinker and Christian. He made finally come to grips with what inspiration means. Inspiration means just that to me now. Having experienced something and been affected by it and then sharing it.
Hey all, check out the Bible project videos on RUclips. The problem is we don’t take scripture serious enough. It is an ancient book and there is so much we can’t see without studying it in context.
Many of these issues go away once you fully embrace a supernatural worldview. Many others go away when you fully and carefully read the entirety of the Hebrew Scriptures to get an idea of the narrative being told. Other issues simply require a humble posture of admitting that you were not led by the Spirit to write Scripture, and trust that it is saying something true regardless of how you feel about it.
These issues also go away once you fully embrace a non-supernatural worldview. You can simply appreciate these ancient writings for what they are and the ancient writers for who they were without trying to cypher some present day spiritual truth out of stories of the great flood or the virgin birth.
Honestly, if you listen to bible study academics, the people with PhDs, Christian, Jewish or no faith, issues with the bible do not go away, they become painfully obvious. You can still have faith in God. We do not have to have faith in the Bible as God's word. Personally I now feel that is blasphemous. The bible is not univocal. It is a messy collection by humans, with a mixture of agendas. Sometimes using God in stories to promote political, religious or cultural ideas of human making....
The 'movement' of Scripture is progressive revelation, not contradiction. The 'stronger' brothers of the Old testament understood the 'weightier' matters of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness. Not merely outward obedience of tithing spices and making sure you never eat the wrong foods. The NT teachings are built upon the OT, not 'the opposite' of them.
Never heard that Jesus belonged to the group of Pharisees but he loved to argue scriptures with Jewish religious leaders, as stated in your book I'm currently reading .Great read . "Jesus used creative reading that's what you did in His day"
Over time I have educated myself somewhat about what the peoples local to the Hebrews were like, there is so much more I could learn but I have a fairly good idea now. There were some really AWFUL people near to them. WHY when this is the case have I listened to decades of apologetics which when facing the issue of violence in the Bible where they just say "God decides what it good, God must have had a good enough reason to kill them and questioning isn't allowed". I had to work this stuff out by myself and this fellow is the first apologist I have heard say it and I only found him because to conservative Christians he is apparently some kind of heretic. WHY do these people want to build a fragile faith in people and then give them nothing to understand it with? What is wrong with them??? I'm going to immediately watch every video I can find about this man and listen to his books on audiable :)
Great job on asking when and why books were written and how we know. Almost all Mesopotamian cultures had divine councils. God doesn't destroy the divine council but he claimed to be only God over Canaan. Other 70 nations are ruled by other "gods"
Love Enns. Wish he'd qualify more now by distinguishing/contrasting his view from the classical liberal--for instance-- who doesn't believe in the extraordinary/miraculous (abhor the word supernatural) or the possibility in some of the "dad lifted the car stories" so easily dismissed. Maybe not all classical liberals but some--anyhow.
Daniel fed the dragon a ball of pitch hair and lard. The lizard liked the taste but couldn't burp or digest the hair and pitch. You ever feed a seagull Alka-Seltzer? Don't. Because they literally blow up.
Although I am happy to entertain scholarly inferences and different views of Bibliology, and further am sympathetic to his contextual exegetical approach, I was stunned by how uninformed Enns view of the Flood story, the deuteronomistic history narrative duet.32:8,9, the reason for the flood, insider outsider is set out in the rebellion of the 70 sons of God. He is not engaging the most compelling of inferences that resolves his dilemma informed by scholarship widely available to him for the last 20+ years. Without it we must paint God or misunderstandings of God by various authors as an enfant terrible of the universe. Why not engage some of the majority scholarly inferences about those texts? This is akin to Erhman's assuming a fundamentalist literalist hermeneutic and attacking that as a true representation of evangelical interpretive practice rather than a crude straw man of Erhman's own making.
@S J Atherton. I understand your reasonable position. But how do you know or decide what is Scripture and what is not? Which Scripture? From which canon? From which religion?
And surely at this point Paul mentions exactly which scripture /books of the Bible are the God breathed ones and which aren't. Would have been nice if he could have been specific and showed up at the Nicean council when the votes where being collected.
@@nikkio.9990, good points all. But we also know the books of the Christian Bible (NT) were not decided until early 5th century. The Council of Nicaea was actually assembled by Constantine for the sole purpose of establishing an agreed-to doctrine so that the Roman Church would finally be unified under one common belief system. Hence, the Council declared doctrine, giving us the Niceness Creed in 325 AD as the unifying doctrine of Christianity. At that point, all other Christians who disagreed with the new doctrine were declared heretical, and their churches and assets were confiscated by the Roman Church. The NT books were not decided for another 150 years by the Bishop of Alexandria. Then later the Roman Church affirmed his book choices. Interestingly, that decision omitted over 50 Gospels not favored by the Alexandria Bishop, but found later. Interesting stuff for sure. And I agree with you that it would have been nice if God had shown up at Nicaea and changed the doctrine before the bishops cast it in stone so it couldn’t be changed. LOL
All.the sound logic put into his lecture but not a clue that no creator has a favorite people because he is fully benevolant and racist creators cannot satisfy that caviat, thus a god referred to as Lord never God in the bible is the demi god our entire bible after Genesis 1 refers to as Lord
Come on. No one knows what the B means...having ideas about it doesn't cut the mustard. It just doesn't. Trying to. nail down God is the most basic hubris.
Sounds like it. To me it's clear from genesis 6... not that God is such a mad evil abusive person... but that we screwed up so bad we somehow ruined the point of the creation experiment. At this point it's just going from bad to worse and God decided enough was enough. But the hope I the story us the even at our worst, God didn't give up on the point of creation, the error wasn't the GOAL of creation, so he gave it another go with willing participants. We're all alive because of an ancient second chance. That's tragic but beautiful. That's not an oppressive abusive God, it's the God of second chances. He stripped down EVERYTHING but someone who loves him and his family... so that's what he wants. That's a big deal.
I think what he is doing is making an educated argument that the Bible can be more than many modern literalists make it. Understanding the Bible in the context of the various authors, and allowing for discussion of the parts that seem to contradict(rather than just insisting there is no contradiction), to me, at least, makes it much more interesting.
@@mikeeasley6670 Peter Enns said at the 10: 28 mark *_"The way God is talked about (in the Bible) is not always the same way. It just depends on where you are reading. It's hard to wrap your head around God and say, ok I got this. I think the Biblical writers were sometimes struggling (with) what is God like? What does God want from us_* I prefer to think of God as the mythologist Joseph Campbell did in that he refers to God as "beyond all categories of thought". So no matter how many ways the human mind conceptualizes God, it can never answer the question WHAT is God like, much less what God wants from us. Of the many interpretations of the Bible, neither one will address that which cannot be described. Of those who I believe are closer to the truth about the nature of God are the mystics from all wisdom traditions but they were persecuted because they described their spiritual awakening in ways that did not fit the rigid interpretations of their day. In his talk, "When Science and Religion Meet", the Jesuit priest, astronomer, and former director of the Vatican Observatory, George Coyne, also tells us that we have this proclivity to anthropomorphize God and I regard this as a serious problem.
*_“Religious people, we pray to God so that he will do what I want God to do. Take the extremely difficult case of a mother who has a young child with leukemia. The typical reaction from a mother who has religious belief is that, “God why did you do this to me -of all the children in the world I suffer with a child with leukemia”. We have to sympathize with that response. Nonetheless, it’s a failure in a sense to open ourselves to the mystery of God, except all that we have in human life, all the experiences, and not try to bring God down into my individual experience and make God fit what I think God should be doing. That’s a constant temptation to me, it’s my temptation every day in trying to reduce God into what I think God should be doing”_*
No, he's educating people on the context around the bible...why is that bad. It's not easy to comprehend for some people without that background knowledge...and really I doubt anyone CAN actually properly understand it without some historical knowledge.
@dinahn6955 where are you getting that? The actual name, YHWH, does not appear in any pre-monotheistic text. You're thinking of Baal. Or perhaps you're trying to conflate baal and El. But El was a creator deity, not the storm deity in that canannite pantheon. YHWH wasn't found in canannite religion, and the name literally is "I will be what I will be" but translated into Greek, became known as the famous "I am that I am". In Hebrew this implies absolute power of self definition... a deity that transcends pantheon roles, the ultimate will and standard or authority and identity. In Greek it's come to inspire the entire western philosophical development of classical theism beyond what Plato or Aristotle envisioned... from "The One" to "The Unmoved Mover" to "Being itself". To be sure, we do see biblical development of God taking on different canannite titles, like an ensure series of "el" prefix titles, using "el" as a semantic generic label for deity, similar to how English borrowed "god" from the pagan germanics and let it be general deity label that can be narrowed by role for lower case "god" or left generic it signifies the Supreme being when given a capital G, God. But Israel's usage of el plus suffixes signifying roles wasn't to signify pantheon members, but the conquest of YHWH over the signified roles he's subsuming. It's conquest in the unseen realm. Hence the appropriation of Baals images of "riding on the clouds", why? Because YHWH defeated Baal and subsumed his storm god role. The imagery is self aware of the reference to BAAL, that's the point.
There is absolutely nothing here of substance. He poses questions. Casts doubt. More questions, more doubt. No answers, nothing definitive... what is his point?
Stephanie Usrey - he’s providing 2 things: 1) he is demonstrating intellectual inquiry and deconstruction of a text. The Talmudic style of inquiry (not to mention Socratic style) involves asking questions, comparing text, analysis, demonstrating “letting God’s children tell the story” instead of merely defending the Bible for all he’s worth, as the average Biblical speaker does. This is adult Bible reading. 2) Enns is explaining a way to approach the Bible’s contradictions and inconsistencies with faith, instead of throwing it out when it doesn’t conform to post-Enlightenment rationality and modern historical storytelling.
@@Huddie400 Thanks for helping me understand. Adult Bible reading? Approaching with faith in what? Enns here and in his book "The Sin of Certainty" wants us, as you say, to have trust and faith in God without knowing the answers, but after shredding the very book that tells us who God is and why He's trustworthy and faithful, what God, exactly, does he believe in? He never says what God he believes in (belief is a word Enns has great disdain for according to his book), he merely sits high up in his lofty chair of doubt, asking high-minded questions and casting a 6 thousand year-old question, "Did God really say...?" It's serpentine. It's humanist arrogance parading as strong faith. If we can't trust God's Word as inerrant and infallible (2 Tim 3:16), then the God presented in the holy scriptures is not the one true God. Listening to Enns won't draw you strong faith, but rather, a weak faith full of holes. Contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints, for certain people have crept in unnoticed, who long ago were designated for this condemnation, who pervert the grace of our God.
@@stephanieusrey I'm glad it's all so easy for you. For some of us, there's just too much intellectual dissonance in the Bible to believe it is inerrant and infallible. The Bible's many inconsistencies and obstacles present a problem for many of us who left the church and faith at some point. (And if you don't see genocide, infanticide, rape, incest, and slavery - all supported or enacted by God in the OT - as an obstacle to faith, I don't know what to say to you.) Thanks to people like Peter Enns, few of his ilk though there may be, who make it possible for people like me to come to Jesus and have faith. (That verse in 2 Tim by the way is written about the OT. The writers of the NT had no idea their letters and works were going to become Scripture. They were just writing letters and historical accounts! They didn't become "scripture" until the 4th cty.)
@@Huddie400 Yes, you're right about 2 Tim 3:16 being a reference to the OT being breathed out by God. No argument here. But that doesn't mean the whole Bible, including the NT, isn't breathed out by God.. Beautifully, we see that this is also how the early church regarded the Gospels and the Epistles. In 1 Timothy 5:18 Paul uses the same word for Scripture (graphe) that he uses here in 3:16 to refer to quotations from both the Old Testament and New Testament: “For Scripture says, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain’ (Deut. 25:4) and ‘The laborer deserves his wages’ (Luke 10:7).” Similarly, the Apostle Peter includes Paul’s writings in the category of Scripture (graphe): “There are some things in [Paul’s letters] that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures” (2 Pet. 3:16). It is clear that Peter regarded Paul’s writing to be Scripture! (I copied all that from a Crossway article... my explanation was too long). The words were holy Scripture the moment God breathed them through men to write them down, regardless of when they were acknowledged as such. God gave them to the early church and to us. Where were infanticide, rape and incest "supported or enacted" by God? The God of the OT and the NT and today are One and the same. If you've come to Jesus and have faith in Him, but don't believe He's the Son-part of the triune God of the OT, then you may very well have faith in a different God - a different Jesus - one that's more palatable to you. I write all of the above in earnest. My questions are real and honest. You say you're glad this is all so "easy" for me. It's not easy, but I do believe firmly in inerrancy and infallibility, though I will never understand it all. My trust in God grows deeper and stronger as I age because I have complete confidence and faith in who God is... which I learn from the Scriptures.
@@stephanieusrey "Where were infanticide, rape and incest "supported or enacted" by God?" Well, throughout the OT. Every time God (sending Israel against the Canaaninites or Assyrians for instance), or his representative (Moses, Lot, Noah ) wiped out a civilization (genocide and infanticide); Lot offering his daughters and story of Dinah (rape). These are troublesome incidents seldom explained in traditional Christian circles. People like Pete Enns, Richard Rohr, and Brian McLaren attempt to deal with these while at the same time maintaining faith in Jesus.
Apparently you didn't watch the video. Speaker talked about sharing his view, and discussing the reasons. Flippant would be to not engage his points and launch an ad hominem attack against his character. Several times he say, "I could be wrong." You may need to look up the definition of flippant, and then look up "ad hominem fallacy," or lying about someone's character so someone won't listen and consider their view. Jesus railed against religious leaders who used ad hominems and misrepresented his teaching as not informative. Hmm...
Yes! We have had fundamentalist misrepresent the nature of scripture for over 100 years. Isn't it marvelous that the speaker helps us understand and identify false beliefs given by well-meaning ignorant, untrained pastors.
Refreshingly interesting, contextually honest and without the apologetic baggage I have been feed for the last 62 years. Thank you!
Refreshing, yes! But what do you mean by apologetics? I think it’s Enns’ own form of apologetics.. he’s still defending a view of the Bible and promoting a way of handling it, just not a traditional one..
How can this have so little likes? I'm not even halfway in and I'm absolutely thrilled!
@DoloresLehmann- To address your question as to why there aren't more LIKES for this video, allow me to comment. Even though much of the message is accurate, he does use faulty reasoning with statements like " Bible writers wrote from their own point of view" "Some of the Bible is probably wrong" "When teaching the Bible to children, you must leave out some things" . So, An honest student of the Word would reject such statements since the 40 authors of Scripture did not write their words but rather wrote as God directed them. (See II Tim 3:16-17 & II Pet 1:21-25) This speaker would benefit greatly by heeding the advice given in Prov 4:7 to get WISDOM and UNDERSTANDING before teaching others your views.
@@lonniesatterfield1770 At least he doesn't commit the error of trying to prove the prooftext with the prooftext. Honest students of whatever know that's not going to work, it always leads to circular reasoning.
I love Pete. I don’t agree with everything but he always makes me a better thinker and Christian. He made finally come to grips with what inspiration means. Inspiration means just that to me now. Having experienced something and been affected by it and then sharing it.
Pete is open and honest enough to say that it is great you don't agree with everything he says.
He wants critique, not a captive audience.
Such a great lecture, thank you for giving us the opportunity to listen, reflect and learn!
Amazing stuff Pete
Hey all, check out the Bible project videos on RUclips. The problem is we don’t take scripture serious enough. It is an ancient book and there is so much we can’t see without studying it in context.
Many of these issues go away once you fully embrace a supernatural worldview. Many others go away when you fully and carefully read the entirety of the Hebrew Scriptures to get an idea of the narrative being told. Other issues simply require a humble posture of admitting that you were not led by the Spirit to write Scripture, and trust that it is saying something true regardless of how you feel about it.
🤗 great analysis
These issues also go away once you fully embrace a non-supernatural worldview. You can simply appreciate these ancient writings for what they are and the ancient writers for who they were without trying to cypher some present day spiritual truth out of stories of the great flood or the virgin birth.
Many of these issues go away when you abandon rationality
Honestly, if you listen to bible study academics, the people with PhDs, Christian, Jewish or no faith, issues with the bible do not go away, they become painfully obvious. You can still have faith in God. We do not have to have faith in the Bible as God's word. Personally I now feel that is blasphemous. The bible is not univocal. It is a messy collection by humans, with a mixture of agendas. Sometimes using God in stories to promote political, religious or cultural ideas of human making....
But what if tbr truth tells you that God is evil?
The 'movement' of Scripture is progressive revelation, not contradiction. The 'stronger' brothers of the Old testament understood the 'weightier' matters of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness. Not merely outward obedience of tithing spices and making sure you never eat the wrong foods. The NT teachings are built upon the OT, not 'the opposite' of them.
this is great!
this is very good
Love this! Thank you. Question: could a false god "disguise" its voice and claim to be the one true God? How did they know?
Where can I find this PowerPoint? I’m teaching Bible class and would love to use this.
"Well the history doesn't really match but that's cool."
Never heard that Jesus belonged to the group of Pharisees but he loved to argue scriptures with Jewish religious leaders, as stated in your book I'm currently reading .Great read . "Jesus used creative reading that's what you did in His day"
I did. Means that is not from saducees nor esene. More likely theologicaly I would say. Pharisees school wasn t so unified scholarly I think
Over time I have educated myself somewhat about what the peoples local to the Hebrews were like, there is so much more I could learn but I have a fairly good idea now. There were some really AWFUL people near to them. WHY when this is the case have I listened to decades of apologetics which when facing the issue of violence in the Bible where they just say "God decides what it good, God must have had a good enough reason to kill them and questioning isn't allowed". I had to work this stuff out by myself and this fellow is the first apologist I have heard say it and I only found him because to conservative Christians he is apparently some kind of heretic. WHY do these people want to build a fragile faith in people and then give them nothing to understand it with? What is wrong with them??? I'm going to immediately watch every video I can find about this man and listen to his books on audiable :)
@johnhammons679 blind leading the blind? Peter Enns knows way more about the Bible than you and I will ever know in our lifetime.
@johnhammons679 doesn't answer how he's a blind guide leading the blind.
Read more Nicolas Berdyaev on this subject to go deeper...
Great job on asking when and why books were written and how we know.
Almost all Mesopotamian cultures had divine councils. God doesn't destroy the divine council but he claimed to be only God over Canaan. Other 70 nations are ruled by other "gods"
That we should "continue the conversation" in the church sounds very much like Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy.
The two most legitimate forms of Christian tradition, wending all the way back to the apostles. Yes.
Love Enns. Wish he'd qualify more now by distinguishing/contrasting his view from the classical liberal--for instance-- who doesn't believe in the extraordinary/miraculous (abhor the word supernatural) or the possibility in some of the "dad lifted the car stories" so easily dismissed. Maybe not all classical liberals but some--anyhow.
Daniel fed the dragon a ball of pitch hair and lard. The lizard liked the taste but couldn't burp or digest the hair and pitch.
You ever feed a seagull Alka-Seltzer? Don't. Because they literally blow up.
Although I am happy to entertain scholarly inferences and different views of Bibliology, and further am sympathetic to his contextual exegetical approach, I was stunned by how uninformed Enns view of the Flood story, the deuteronomistic history narrative duet.32:8,9, the reason for the flood, insider outsider is set out in the rebellion of the 70 sons of God. He is not engaging the most compelling of inferences that resolves his dilemma informed by scholarship widely available to him for the last 20+ years. Without it we must paint God or misunderstandings of God by various authors as an enfant terrible of the universe. Why not engage some of the majority scholarly inferences about those texts? This is akin to Erhman's assuming a fundamentalist literalist hermeneutic and attacking that as a true representation of evangelical interpretive practice rather than a crude straw man of Erhman's own making.
citation required
"ALL Scripture is inspired and God-Breathed..." 2Timothy 3:16. Thats good enough for me.
S J Atherton he talks ab this in his books
@S J Atherton. I understand your reasonable position.
But how do you know or decide what is Scripture and what is not? Which Scripture? From which canon? From which religion?
And surely at this point Paul mentions exactly which scripture /books of the Bible are the God breathed ones and which aren't. Would have been nice if he could have been specific and showed up at the Nicean council when the votes where being collected.
Inspired, not written by God.
@@nikkio.9990, good points all. But we also know the books of the Christian Bible (NT) were not decided until early 5th century. The Council of Nicaea was actually assembled by Constantine for the sole purpose of establishing an agreed-to doctrine so that the Roman Church would finally be unified under one common belief system. Hence, the Council declared doctrine, giving us the Niceness Creed in 325 AD as the unifying doctrine of Christianity. At that point, all other Christians who disagreed with the new doctrine were declared heretical, and their churches and assets were confiscated by the Roman Church. The NT books were not decided for another 150 years by the Bishop of Alexandria. Then later the Roman Church affirmed his book choices. Interestingly, that decision omitted over 50 Gospels not favored by the Alexandria Bishop, but found later. Interesting stuff for sure. And I agree with you that it would have been nice if God had shown up at Nicaea and changed the doctrine before the bishops cast it in stone so it couldn’t be changed. LOL
All.the sound logic put into his lecture but not a clue that no creator has a favorite people because he is fully benevolant and racist creators cannot satisfy that caviat, thus a god referred to as Lord never God in the bible is the demi god our entire bible after Genesis 1 refers to as Lord
Come on. No one knows what the B means...having ideas about it doesn't cut the mustard. It just doesn't. Trying to. nail down God is the most basic hubris.
So he's explaining away the Bible....is that it? Surely, there must be more than this.
Sounds like it.
To me it's clear from genesis 6... not that God is such a mad evil abusive person... but that we screwed up so bad we somehow ruined the point of the creation experiment. At this point it's just going from bad to worse and God decided enough was enough.
But the hope I the story us the even at our worst, God didn't give up on the point of creation, the error wasn't the GOAL of creation, so he gave it another go with willing participants. We're all alive because of an ancient second chance.
That's tragic but beautiful.
That's not an oppressive abusive God, it's the God of second chances. He stripped down EVERYTHING but someone who loves him and his family... so that's what he wants. That's a big deal.
I think what he is doing is making an educated argument that the Bible can be more than many modern literalists make it. Understanding the Bible in the context of the various authors, and allowing for discussion of the parts that seem to contradict(rather than just insisting there is no contradiction), to me, at least, makes it much more interesting.
@@mikeeasley6670 Peter Enns said at the 10: 28 mark *_"The way God is talked about (in the Bible) is not always the same way. It just depends on where you are reading. It's hard to wrap your head around God and say, ok I got this. I think the Biblical writers were sometimes struggling (with) what is God like? What does God want from us_*
I prefer to think of God as the mythologist Joseph Campbell did in that he refers to God as "beyond all categories of thought". So no matter how many ways the human mind conceptualizes God, it can never answer the question WHAT is God like, much less what God wants from us. Of the many interpretations of the Bible, neither one will address that which cannot be described. Of those who I believe are closer to the truth about the nature of God are the mystics from all wisdom traditions but they were persecuted because they described their spiritual awakening in ways that did not fit the rigid interpretations of their day.
In his talk, "When Science and Religion Meet", the Jesuit priest, astronomer, and former director of the Vatican Observatory, George Coyne, also tells us that we have this proclivity to anthropomorphize God and I regard this as a serious problem.
*_“Religious people, we pray to God so that he will do what I want God to do. Take the extremely difficult case of a mother who has a young child with leukemia. The typical reaction from a mother who has religious belief is that, “God why did you do this to me -of all the children in the world I suffer with a child with leukemia”. We have to sympathize with that response. Nonetheless, it’s a failure in a sense to open ourselves to the mystery of God, except all that we have in human life, all the experiences, and not try to bring God down into my individual experience and make God fit what I think God should be doing. That’s a constant temptation to me, it’s my temptation every day in trying to reduce God into what I think God should be doing”_*
No, he's educating people on the context around the bible...why is that bad. It's not easy to comprehend for some people without that background knowledge...and really I doubt anyone CAN actually properly understand it without some historical knowledge.
@dinahn6955 where are you getting that? The actual name, YHWH, does not appear in any pre-monotheistic text.
You're thinking of Baal.
Or perhaps you're trying to conflate baal and El. But El was a creator deity, not the storm deity in that canannite pantheon.
YHWH wasn't found in canannite religion, and the name literally is "I will be what I will be" but translated into Greek, became known as the famous "I am that I am".
In Hebrew this implies absolute power of self definition... a deity that transcends pantheon roles, the ultimate will and standard or authority and identity.
In Greek it's come to inspire the entire western philosophical development of classical theism beyond what Plato or Aristotle envisioned... from "The One" to "The Unmoved Mover" to "Being itself".
To be sure, we do see biblical development of God taking on different canannite titles, like an ensure series of "el" prefix titles, using "el" as a semantic generic label for deity, similar to how English borrowed "god" from the pagan germanics and let it be general deity label that can be narrowed by role for lower case "god" or left generic it signifies the Supreme being when given a capital G, God. But Israel's usage of el plus suffixes signifying roles wasn't to signify pantheon members, but the conquest of YHWH over the signified roles he's subsuming.
It's conquest in the unseen realm. Hence the appropriation of Baals images of "riding on the clouds", why? Because YHWH defeated Baal and subsumed his storm god role. The imagery is self aware of the reference to BAAL, that's the point.
I like this scholar, but his chronic lip-smacking is obnoxious.
There is absolutely nothing here of substance. He poses questions. Casts doubt. More questions, more doubt. No answers, nothing definitive... what is his point?
Stephanie Usrey - he’s providing 2 things: 1) he is demonstrating intellectual inquiry and deconstruction of a text. The Talmudic style of inquiry (not to mention Socratic style) involves asking questions, comparing text, analysis, demonstrating “letting God’s children tell the story” instead of merely defending the Bible for all he’s worth, as the average Biblical speaker does. This is adult Bible reading. 2) Enns is explaining a way to approach the Bible’s contradictions and inconsistencies with faith, instead of throwing it out when it doesn’t conform to post-Enlightenment rationality and modern historical storytelling.
@@Huddie400 Thanks for helping me understand. Adult Bible reading? Approaching with faith in what? Enns here and in his book "The Sin of Certainty" wants us, as you say, to have trust and faith in God without knowing the answers, but after shredding the very book that tells us who God is and why He's trustworthy and faithful, what God, exactly, does he believe in? He never says what God he believes in (belief is a word Enns has great disdain for according to his book), he merely sits high up in his lofty chair of doubt, asking high-minded questions and casting a 6 thousand year-old question, "Did God really say...?" It's serpentine. It's humanist arrogance parading as strong faith.
If we can't trust God's Word as inerrant and infallible (2 Tim 3:16), then the God presented in the holy scriptures is not the one true God. Listening to Enns won't draw you strong faith, but rather, a weak faith full of holes. Contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints, for certain people have crept in unnoticed, who long ago were designated for this condemnation, who pervert the grace of our God.
@@stephanieusrey I'm glad it's all so easy for you. For some of us, there's just too much intellectual dissonance in the Bible to believe it is inerrant and infallible. The Bible's many inconsistencies and obstacles present a problem for many of us who left the church and faith at some point. (And if you don't see genocide, infanticide, rape, incest, and slavery - all supported or enacted by God in the OT - as an obstacle to faith, I don't know what to say to you.) Thanks to people like Peter Enns, few of his ilk though there may be, who make it possible for people like me to come to Jesus and have faith.
(That verse in 2 Tim by the way is written about the OT. The writers of the NT had no idea their letters and works were going to become Scripture. They were just writing letters and historical accounts! They didn't become "scripture" until the 4th cty.)
@@Huddie400 Yes, you're right about 2 Tim 3:16 being a reference to the OT being breathed out by God. No argument here. But that doesn't mean the whole Bible, including the NT, isn't breathed out by God.. Beautifully, we see that this is also how the early church regarded the Gospels and the Epistles. In 1 Timothy 5:18 Paul uses the same word for Scripture (graphe) that he uses here in 3:16 to refer to quotations from both the Old Testament and New Testament: “For Scripture says, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain’ (Deut. 25:4) and ‘The laborer deserves his wages’ (Luke 10:7).”
Similarly, the Apostle Peter includes Paul’s writings in the category of Scripture (graphe): “There are some things in [Paul’s letters] that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures” (2 Pet. 3:16). It is clear that Peter regarded Paul’s writing to be Scripture! (I copied all that from a Crossway article... my explanation was too long). The words were holy Scripture the moment God breathed them through men to write them down, regardless of when they were acknowledged as such. God gave them to the early church and to us.
Where were infanticide, rape and incest "supported or enacted" by God?
The God of the OT and the NT and today are One and the same. If you've come to Jesus and have faith in Him, but don't believe He's the Son-part of the triune God of the OT, then you may very well have faith in a different God - a different Jesus - one that's more palatable to you.
I write all of the above in earnest. My questions are real and honest. You say you're glad this is all so "easy" for me. It's not easy, but I do believe firmly in inerrancy and infallibility, though I will never understand it all. My trust in God grows deeper and stronger as I age because I have complete confidence and faith in who God is... which I learn from the Scriptures.
@@stephanieusrey "Where were infanticide, rape and incest "supported or enacted" by God?" Well, throughout the OT. Every time God (sending Israel against the Canaaninites or Assyrians for instance), or his representative (Moses, Lot, Noah ) wiped out a civilization (genocide and infanticide); Lot offering his daughters and story of Dinah (rape). These are troublesome incidents seldom explained in traditional Christian circles. People like Pete Enns, Richard Rohr, and Brian McLaren attempt to deal with these while at the same time maintaining faith in Jesus.
Flippantly uninformative.
Apparently you didn't watch the video. Speaker talked about sharing his view, and discussing the reasons. Flippant would be to not engage his points and launch an ad hominem attack against his character. Several times he say, "I could be wrong." You may need to look up the definition of flippant, and then look up "ad hominem fallacy," or lying about someone's character so someone won't listen and consider their view.
Jesus railed against religious leaders who used ad hominems and misrepresented his teaching as not informative. Hmm...
A perfect description of your comment. Well done.
Preying on people's ignorance.
Yes! We have had fundamentalist misrepresent the nature of scripture for over 100 years. Isn't it marvelous that the speaker helps us understand and identify false beliefs given by well-meaning ignorant, untrained pastors.
@@ubergenie6041 exposing people's closed-mindedness
Can someone please explain to me why explaining the context of the Bible is offensive???