Enns wrote The Bible Tells Me So for potential Jesus-followers who have been taught to read the Bible as a how-to instruction manual and can’t seem to make it work.  Young people are powerfully attracted to the non-violent kingdom Jesus talked about, but wonder how Jesus fits with the stuff in the rest of the Bible which can be confusing, troubling, horrifying and downright weird.

Peter Enns wants to work with the Bible God gave us instead of the Bible we think God should have given us.  He wants a messy Bible that refuses to behave because that’s the only Bible we have.  The Bible isn’t history–in the modern sense of the word–it’s a book of stories written by ordinary people trying to make sense of God and the world.

And the stories in the Bible kept changing over the one thousand or so years during which the book was being compiled.

Narratives that worked for people during the reign of Old King David didn’t work after that kingdom split in two. Stories that worked during the divided kingdom proved inadequate when the Assyrians “disappeared” the ten northern tribes.  Stories told when the southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin were keeping the dynastic dream of David alive failed to deliver the goods when the Babylonians carried God’s people into exile.

We shouldn’t be surprised that this diverse assemblage of stories produced contradictory portraits of God, dueling theologies and inconsistent moral codes.

Like most biblical scholars, Enns thinks the biblical writers were free to re-craft traditional texts to meet their own needs.  Sometimes these stories give us valuable historical information; sometimes they are pure inventions, usually they are literary inventions rooted in a smattering of historical knowledge.  For the storytellers who gave us the Bible, the issue was never what happened back then; it was always about what’s happening now.

The same pattern holds in the New Testament, Enns believes.  Jesus introduced a radical reinterpretation of his inherited faith.  The infinitely compassionate God of Jesus calls his people to live by the impossibly non-violent rules of the kingdom of God.  There are intriguing foretastes of this God in the Old Testament, but Jesus pushed inherited ideas to their logical extreme while flatly rejecting narratives and notions that conflicted with the God he called “Father”.

Enns says there is no way the kingdom ethic of Jesus can be squared with the portrait of a genocidal tribal deity in the earliest strata of the Old Testament.  The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ could put entire nations under “the ban”, demanding mass slaughter, pillage, and the enslavement of foreign peoples.  The God Jesus proclaimed would have no interest in destroying the entire human race (a single family excepted) in a great flood.

So, what does professor Enns do with the conquest of Canaan as depicted in the bloody book of Joshua?  Simple, it didn’t happen (more on that later).

Jesus sets the standard.  If we insist that Jesus and Joshua must share a common understanding of God’s character we end up signing off on genocide, and that is precisely what millions of would-be disciples are refusing to do.  Tragically, they are heading for the church exits and they aren’t coming back.  Jesus and Joshua disagree, Enns says, and twenty-first century Christians must decide whose side they’re on.

The author isn’t saying that we lop off the bits of the Bible we don’t like.  Everything in the book is 100% Bible; the book we have is the book God wanted us to have.  If God had wanted to give us a self-consistent operators manual he would have done so; but that’s not the kind of book God has given us.  Pretending the Bible is what it obviously ain’t leads us off in the wrong direction.

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