How the Bible Actually Works

 

 

How the Bible Actually Works – Peter Enns

This was one of the most annoying books that I’ve ever read.  It’s not that it was bad.  No, it wasn’t bad,  but it certainly wasn’t good either.  It was….well….annoying.  This is one of the books where the author tries to be funny as he writes.  Think about the statement “tries to be funny”.  That’s never good.  Either you’re funny or you’re not, and if you’re “trying” to be funny, it means you’re not funny.  In other words, this book was too “Dad Joke-ish”.  After a while you get so sick of the dad jokes, you simply don’t want to read another word; and if you do read anymore, it’s hard to take anything the author says seriously.

That’s a shame too because a book such as this warrants serious discussion.  It’s about the Bible after all. And if there is one book that deserves serious attention, it’s our Bible.  This is a book that is meant to challenge how Protestant Christians should read their Bible.  I’ve read a lot of books like this lately. Many Protestant Evangelical Christians are taught to essentially believe the Bible IS God, and they think that if they somehow misrepresent it, vengeful angels will appear out of it as they did in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and melt everyone’s skin to ashes.

And if you read closely, the author is on to some good things. He’s certainly done his homework.  He dives into some deep mostly uncharted waters of our Old Testament, and he shows us that, yes, this thing DOES have plenty of contradictions, but that is actually ok, and not a bad thing.   The Bible, he ascertains, wasn’t written as a rule book to every generation of Christians, but rather specific stories that were directed towards specific people at very specific times. Yes, the Bible is God’s word.  And, yes, the Bible needs to be read and studied.  Somewhere over the last 2,000 years, though, we’ve gotten a bit lost.

The problem though is that this author and book are too unfocused.  If Peter Enns were to read this review, he would disagree.  I should clarify that by “unfocused” I don’t mean that he doesn’t connect the dots or transition well from chapter to chapter.  No, the problem, again, is his snippets of humor and comical personal stories that are supposed to illustrate his points don’t actually do so. They diverge too far from the topic at hand.  This is a book that if I were the editor, I would wear out a few red pens with corrections, yet encourage the author to keep his main points.

And, yes, for those who do revere the Bible as God himself, you will have a lot of problems with many of the illustrations he gives.  Why is it that we now (mostly) conclude that chattel slavery is wrong, yet we continue to subjugate women and practice complementarianism?   Beliefs that are set in stone die hard, and if this author serious wants to change how we look at scripture, he should have been a lot less flippant.  No, he doesn’t have to come down as a wicked English Boarding School teacher, but he really should have worked harder to find a middle ground with his overall attitude.  I really can’t recommend this author nor this book.