Al Armstrong

“The Bible isn’t a book that reflects one point of view. It is a collection of books that records a conversation—even a debate—over time.”
― 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

“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

“Doesn’t God realize that we don’t share the common understanding that, say, Paul shares with the people in Corinth or Thessalonica? Doesn’t God realize that making twenty-one of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament letters means that we will have to think—really think—about what these letters were meant to do and then be really thoughtful and intentional, maybe even humble, about how to engage them for ourselves? Doesn’t God know that we will have to exercise tremendous—what’s that word again? Oh, yes—wisdom in order to know how or even if these words will apply to”
― 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