Al Armstrong

“We get something out of them only by wrestling with their “historical particularity” (as some put it) and then doing the hard work of accepting the sacred responsibility of discerning how all of that works out here and now in whatever situation we find ourselves.”
― Peter Enns, How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers—and Why That’s Great News

“The South would gladly have done without the Reverend Maxwell, too, but unlike them he had very little chance of getting out of it, even if he had wanted to. Six million African Americans went north and west during the Great Migration, but many millions more stayed behind. Among them was Maxwell, who lived in one of the many small towns the civil rights movement seemed to have passed by. What Harper Lee knew about Tom Radney’s South instinctively, she could have learned about Willie Maxwell’s South only through patient research and ongoing conversations of the kind that very few white Americans, then as now, ever have.”
― Casey Cep, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

“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, How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers—and Why That’s Great News

“The biblical writers were human like us, and nothing is gained by thinking otherwise. Someone might say, “Well, okay, sure they were human, obviously, but the biblical writers were also inspired, directed by God in what to write, and so not simply ordinary human writers.” I get the point. To see the Bible as inspired by God is certainly the mainstream view in the history of Christianity (and Judaism), but what that means exactly and how it works out in detail have proved to be quite tough nuts to crack. Answers abound (and conflict) and no one has cracked the code, including me. But any explanation of what it means for God to inspire human beings to write things down would need to account for the diverse (not to mention ancient and ambiguous) Bible we have before us. Any explanation that needs to minimize, cover up, or push these self-evident biblical characteristics aside isn’t really an explanation; it’s propaganda.”
― Peter Enns, How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers—and Why That’s Great News