How the Bible Actually Works

by Peter Enns

  Not all Jews fit into one of these groups (just as not every American is either a die-hard Democrat or Republican today), and there were probably as many options out there as there were neighborhoods. But in a way that’s the point—the need to adjust somehow to the past in light of the present was universal, if also broad and diverse. They had no script to follow, but they had to do something.

  * * *

  For the ancient tradition to survive, it had to transform—adapt to changing circumstances. To seek to remain as it always was would simply ensure its isolation, if not its death. The act of transformation is, therefore, a sacred responsibility on the part of people of faith in order to maintain that faith. And how a tradition is transformed is an act of wisdom.

  When we engage that process today, we are simply doing what the Bible itself as well as Jews in the centuries before the time of Jesus had already modeled. Our experiences, what life throws at us, drive us to think about what God is like here and now and consequently what it means to believe in this God. And without making these wise adaptations, however diverse and even conflicting they might have been and regardless of whether some lasted and others didn’t, Judaism would not have survived.

  And neither would have Christianity.

  In fact, it never would have gotten off the ground.

  Chapter 10

  Treasures Old and New

  German Christmases and French Drains

  My parents came to America from Germany in 1956 and brought their German traditions right along with them, a big one being Christmas. We got our stockings on St. Nicholas Day, a full three weeks before the rest of the solar system. I would always find an orange tucked in the bottom. An orange, mind you. I suspect that treasure was a holdover from the old country, when during the war oranges were a special treat. But for me, I never saw the point. I could just walk a few feet into the kitchen and get one myself. What I needed was candy, especially chocolate. Maybe a Matchbox car.

  I remember lighting the Advent wreath on each of the four Sundays before Christmas—oh, and those awesome chocolate Advent calendars my grandmother dutifully sent us from Germany! Each day had a cute little door with a piece of chocolate shaped like Santa or something else Christmassy waiting behind it. We also decorated the tree on Christmas Eve and left it up until Epiphany, January 6, which is way later than everyone else. The biggest thing, though, was we Germans opened our presents Christmas Eve after church. I liked that part. Why suffer another twelve hours?

  Still, despite my parents’ sincere attempts to keep us connected to generations of Germans, those traditions were adjusted in subtle and not so subtle ways in my own family. My wife and I tried, but at the end of the day the only one that made the cut (at least when the kids were young) was lighting the Advent wreath. The first tradition to fall—hard—was presents on Christmas Eve. We decided to be American on that one.

  Such is the way of tradition, including the biblical tradition. Some things remain, some are adjusted, and some are discontinued—that uneasy dance between past and present, tradition and change, of feeling grounded through time and yet accepting the need to innovate. And by “biblical tradition” I mean now to turn to the story of Jesus specifically, the gospel, or “Good News,” as it’s often called.

  Christianity was born from the womb of Judaism, and so the story of Jesus the Messiah is deeply and inextricably bound to the story of Israel. But the gospel is also a profoundly creative act—it brings Israel’s ancient tradition into a new here and now by (drumroll, please) adjusting the ancient faith to meet present circumstances, a process that began within the Old Testament itself.

  Judaism during the Greek period, as we’ve seen, escalated that process. And in the same way Judaism needed to adjust its ancient tradition, the early followers of Jesus needed to continue adjusting that same tradition.

  Well, technically, not really “in the same way.” Christianity adjusted the tradition in its own and striking ways.

  Judaism adapted the past and reimagined God because it had to respond creatively to the unexpected and disastrous crisis of God’s abandonment followed by God’s centuries-long delay in righting the ship. The early followers of Jesus, though they too engaged the tradition creatively, did so for a very different reason—not because of God’s apparent abandonment, but because of God’s unexpected, counterintuitive presence, namely, in Jesus of Nazareth, a crucified Messiah. Such a thing was never part of the playbook of Judaism. To be successful, a Messiah—a chosen, “anointed” leader—should not be executed by Gentiles as a criminal. Messiahs don’t lose.

  And that’s what we are going to be looking at now, how the story of Jesus transforms the ancient tradition and reimagines God. And that reimagining is pretty dramatic, which we will see if we take a moment to step away from the familiarity of it all. The New Testament writers talked about Jesus—paradoxically—as both the true embodiment of Israel’s ancient tradition and at the same time a surprising move by God that the tradition did not anticipate.

  Or to put it another way, the New Testament writers show us how profoundly new the Good News of Jesus Christ is while at the same time insisting that the story of Jesus is deeply connected to the Jewish tradition that bore and nurtured it.

  The New Testament writers faced the challenge of bridging the past tradition and present circumstances, and they did so with a lot of thoughtfulness and creativity.

  Which brings us to another pivotal moment in this book—in fact, the big punch line.

  Christians throughout time, including today, have had to face that very same challenge of bridging the past and their own unique circumstances. The New Testament, in other words, is our Exhibit A for how vital it is to adjust and reimagine the past to meet the challenges of a new day and time.

  That is what Christians do, have always done, and always will do. We are both bound to the past and charged with remaining open to the movement of God’s Spirit, which is free and never bound to tradition or our theologies that try to articulate it.

  Christian theology, in other words, is an exercise in wisdom—perhaps far more so than is normally thought. We are not simply maintaining the past; we are transforming it, again and again.

  And we have a lot to learn about this exercise in wisdom from our own Bible, where we see again and again how its writers accepted their sacred responsibility to perceive God’s presence for their day in ways that respected the past, but were not bound to reproduce it. As Jesus himself put it, to be trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old (Matt. 13:52). We are mindful of old treasures, but also anticipate and embrace new ones.

  I love that image largely because, as I write this, my basement is in utter chaos with a French drain and a new sewer system being expensively installed at the very same ridiculously expensive moment. Before they could start work, my wife and I had to organize the clutter to make room for jackhammers, shovels, and an energetic crew of six. We’d been avoiding the clutter for years, but once we plowed (almost literally) ahead, we came across boxes and boxes of memorabilia from our family’s early years—favorite toys and dolls, a Little League score book, children’s books, report cards, art projects, notes written to us in oh-so-beautiful childhood cadences.

  While working on securing new treasures (a dry basement and the glorious ability to flush our toilets), we found many unexpected old treasures. Both matter. Both are good.

  But as Jesus also put it elsewhere, somewhat differently and with a little more punch, old wineskins do not have the strength and flexibility to contain the potency of new wine. As it ferments, it will burst the skins (Matt. 9:17). Translation: the gospel can’t be contained in the old ways.

  The past is vital, but it’s not enough.

  In order to account for Jesus, God’s surprising move, Israel’s story—and even Israel’s God—had to be reimagined. If anything, that is what the early Jesus movement was, one big wisdom act of reim
agining God in light of Jesus.

  In fact, the ability to build on the past while at the same time exploding it has allowed the Christian faith to survive across time and cultures. Exactly how the two can coexist is not scripted for us, which is why wisdom must be—and is—front and center. We are, as always, expected to embrace the sacred responsibility of figuring out how to be Christian here and now, respecting the past yet open to the present and future.

  Wisdom, in other words, didn’t stop being a big deal when Jesus came, as if now finally all answers are given and we can start following the rulebook. Wisdom continues to be fundamental to faith. Jesus and the gospel have more to do with wisdom than we might be used to hearing.

  Something About Jesus That Doesn’t Get the Attention It Deserves

  Jesus is described in all sorts of ways in the Bible—king, prophet, priest, savior, shepherd, door, gate, vine, healer, rabbi, Lord—all of which are fine and good, of course, though some other words tend to get lost in the shuffle. Jesus was also a wise teacher, a sage, a purveyor of wisdom and the deep mysteries of God, a teller of stories, a confounder of the so-called wise.

  It has bothered me for some time how little press wisdom gets in the Christian world I inhabit when we see how central it is to the Old Testament. I suppose one reason for this lack is that wisdom gets messy, compared to thinking of the life of faith as a set of rules and clearly defined and never-changing boundaries. We are just people, after all, and we tend to gravitate toward the black and white.

  But the Christian faith doesn’t.

  Think of Jesus’s main teaching method: telling parables. If your aim is to get people to comprehend black-and-white information, try a lecture or a press release. If you want to move people to own the moment and take responsibility to work it out for themselves, you tell them a story to stimulate their imagination.

  The Gospels record almost forty distinct parables (who knows how many more Jesus told), and not a single one of them has a clear and obvious meaning. And if you think they do, I suggest you walk into a room of eager Bible readers studying a parable, make your case for its obvious meaning, and then duck for cover; or wander into a theological library and go to section BT373 through 378 and start reading. Parables can be downright obscure, so much so that Jesus’s own disciples sometimes looked like fourteen-year-old gamers trying to grasp theoretical physics.

  And if parables themselves weren’t enough of a challenge, Jesus announces his surprising—even disturbing—purpose for using them:

  To you [the disciples and others close to Jesus] has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that

  “they may indeed look, but not perceive,

  and may indeed listen, but not understand;

  so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.”

  (Mark 4:11–12; Matt. 13:13; Luke 8:10; quoting Isa. 6:9–10)

  If I want to prepare my students for an exam—if I want them to grasp the material—I won’t tell them cryptic, ambiguous stories without explanation with the intention of keeping them befuddled. Some of my students think that’s exactly what I do, but they are wrong, and they deserve the grade they get. If Jesus’s main goal were to be crystal clear, he wouldn’t have introduced thick layers of ambiguities and possible misunderstandings. But that’s what he did. Because he is a sage.

  Jesus tells us that the kingdom of God (or kingdom of heaven*) is like a mustard seed, a fig tree, a sower sowing seeds, hidden treasure, yeast, wheat, a fishing net, a narrow door, a dinner party, sheep, coins, headstrong children, a widow, a tax collector, and so forth. Jesus was clearly more interested in painting portraits, creating a vision, and overturning conventional thinking. You do that by telling a story that leaves people thinking, uncomfortable, moved, motivated—or in some other way invested.

  Careful readers and writers have pondered these parables for two thousand years, offering fresh interpretations along the way. That’s what’s so great about parables—they just keep giving, because, just like Proverbs, they are open-ended and ambiguous, inviting us to ponder and then bring their wisdom into our own circumstances.

  Parables are meant to have an afterlife, to be flexible, adaptable over time to new circumstances. Parables are how wise teachers incite change, not just for the moment, but at all times and in all places. Including ours.

  Another sagely side of Jesus is how he answers questions when challenged by the guardians of the status quo. He rarely if ever goes for a straightforward answer and often answers the question with another question, like this little number from the Gospel of John. Jesus had just announced to the religious leaders that he and his heavenly Father are unified in their purpose—as he puts it, The Father and I are one (John 10:30). As they were picking up stones to stone him for blasphemy, Jesus responds in a cool and collected manner that in my opinion borders on snarky: I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these are you going to stone me? (verse 32). He then goes on to confound and outwit them with a clever interpretation of Psalm 82. The details don’t need to detain us here, but just know that he puts his opponents in their place.

  Jesus was a clever and crafty debater, as wise master teachers should be. Good teachers can handle any student question, especially if the question is meant merely to catch the teacher off guard and prop up the student’s ego. Jesus shuts that down. And yet with the poor and downtrodden Jesus is open and inviting. His method depends on the audience. He “reads the situation,” a requirement of wisdom already seen in Proverbs.

  Jesus also uses the language of wisdom in his teaching moments, some of which sound as though they could easily have come right out of the book of Proverbs. For example, he speaks of wise builders who build their houses on solid rock and foolish builders who build their houses on the sand (Matt. 7:24–27). The difference between the two is whether they put Jesus’s words into action. Wisdom in Proverbs too is all about listening to wise teaching and acting upon it. Jesus is not about teaching “correct thinking,” but realigning minds, hearts, and motivations to act well, to live in harmony with the kingdom of heaven.

  Wisdom language really pops up frequently. As a boy, Jesus was filled with wisdom and increased in wisdom (Luke 2:40, 52). Not only Jesus’s teachings, but his miracles are chalked up to wisdom as well: What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! (Mark 6:2). Even his simple act of roaming about the countryside and proclaiming the kingdom is like Woman Wisdom in Proverbs crying out in public places:

  Wisdom cries out in the street;

  in the squares she raises her voice.

  At the busiest corner she cries out;

  at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:

  “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?

  How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing

  and fools hate knowledge?

  Give heed to my reproof;

  I will pour out my thoughts to you;

  I will make my words known to you.” (Prov. 1:20–23)

  Following Jesus’s teachings is following the path of wisdom—it is your actions, what you say and do to others, not maintaining a hard-line doctrinal stance or turning faith into an intellectual abstraction. And just like Proverbs, Jesus’s teachings are long on casting a vision, but short on scripted details. We have to figure it out every bit as much as we have to work out whether to answer or not answer a fool (Prov. 26:4–5). Following the Sage of Sages takes wisdom and produces wisdom.

  The life of faith is a journey alongside the wise master teacher.

  Jesus, Wisdom from God

  One of Jesus’s favorite activities seems to be debating the meaning of Torah with his fellow Jews, normally scribes and teachers, often egged on by them. As we saw in chapter 3, the Law is ambiguous. And so, beginning within the Old Testament itself, Judaism has a long history of debate and deliberation over what individual laws actually require.
Those deliberations are examples of a wisdom activity demanded by the ambiguous and ancient nature of biblical laws.

  And so when Jesus joins the debate over the meaning of a law, he is not claiming (as Christians sometimes misunderstand) that the Law is a bad thing. He is, rather, doing what Jews have always needed to do, given the ambiguous nature of these sacred laws.

  Where Jesus adds something new, however, is in setting himself up as the supreme interpreter of Torah and in doing so claiming to reveal the deeper will and mind of God, which go beyond the words on the page. Jesus holds the Law in one hand and wisdom in the other, because the two go together, as we saw earlier.

  True, on Mt. Sinai God had said, “Do not murder,” “Do not commit adultery,” “Divorce only for good reason,” “Fulfill your vows,” “An eye for an eye” (Matt. 5:21–42). Jesus does not dismiss these commands, but he does take them to a deeper place than where those laws go on their own. And so Jesus says: You have heard that it was said, . . . But I say to you . . . Now murder includes hatred, adultery includes adulterous thoughts, the only reason for divorce is adultery, vows of any kind should be avoided, and one should turn the other cheek rather than retaliate.

  According to Jesus, God is after our deep inner transformation, in those dark places of the soul, those little and hidden things we keep secret from everyone else. Jesus isn’t playing a legalistic game, but through the Law pointing people to a God revealed in Israel’s sacred story, but also limited by the “old wineskins.”