ASM085 Conversation with Peter Enns

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coming to you from the brad street observatory at eastern university it's ask sciencemic conversations

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welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life doing things a little differently this week for the first time ever this show is going to be a conversation between me and my hero dr peter m's we're at eastern university had an event last night tons of fun i do want to let you know i am still on the road on tour so tickets are available for the next couple of events i'll see you in nashville and in columbus in the next two weeks so go to findinggodontheways.com tour we'll be selling tickets at the door if they're available but nashville's going fast so i'd recommend buying ahead of time but with that we've got a show to do so let's get it started so guys this one's totally different this week uh it's kind of like an ass science mic live except there's our audience is just a film crew and my friend john seal uh and but i'm here with pete freaking ends man like it's probably that is my middle name actually if you look at my birth certificate that is my parents yeah they had a number anyway i think it's weird for pete like how excited i get to talk to him literally every time but if you follow my story if you've read the book if you've listened to the podcast you know that for me and for michael and for like almost everyone we know who's kind of found their way back into the faith uh pete's work is uniquely accessible to grounding people who've had trouble with their faith back into some form of christianity that can incorporate the bible which for many of us is uh you know very complicated i mean the bible could be a problem right you know read it every day every morning and then when you do you find a lot of things that you're not prepared for like violence and issues of morality and uh yeah i mean that's that's it the bible can be an obstacle to faith and it doesn't need to be so in your previous books uh you've kind of looked at the frames with which we approached the bible and helped us understand some historical grounding and perspectives but you've got a new book out the sin of certainty right where you don't just talk about the bible although you do some amazing bible scholarship in it but you also talk about how our institutional approach to the bible and the lens we approach the bible with has influenced the entire structure of our churches especially in western protestantism right yeah i mean that's that's sort of the big problem the way the bible is set up for people to read it for their own spiritual nurturing is one that really requires you to be certain you have to know what you believe and that that can be a problem when you get to a point where well frankly you just don't know what you believe anymore life happens right you have questions you watch a movie you read a book and and things get very complicated and the problem is that then people are told you're broken and you need to be fixed you're not you're not a strong christian anymore because you have doubts about your faith and that's really the point of the book you know the sin of certainty isn't that sometimes we feel certain that's fine but the sin of certainty is is thinking that there's something deeply wrong with you and you need to get that certainty back no matter what and quickly and until you do you're sort of a second class citizen for god and that's just utter nonsense in the history of the church and even within the bible itself you have a lot of voices of doubt and struggling and just you know not being able to understand what god is doing so one of my like aha moments in the sin of certainty is when you talk about our framing in church where we kind of come in hear a lecture and then literally go to school and what that says about the purpose of our worship and our time gathered as christians could you kind of talk a little bit about that movement in the book yeah i mean so much of the american christian experience is church is a place where you learn facts or truths and to be sort of protected from the world out there and so you have the right answers and you know where they're wrong and uh that sets you up for a problem later on and um you know from a very young age you go to sunday school and it's to learn things about the bible and ultimately to be able to defend the bible and to know why you're right and other people are wrong and that sets you up for failure i think and for an unnecessary crisis when again you're just not sure for whatever reason you grow up and the world becomes bigger people go to college and all of a sudden you know the faith of their youth becomes um inadequate to explain the reality around them and so they don't know what to do because they've been set up to have the right answers right and so when you don't have those answers anymore faith explodes or dissipates or just fades away that's a shame that's unnecessary but that's part of the american experience coming out of things like the 19th century where you have darwin or archaeology or some other factors that sort of poked holes and things like the book of genesis and science and all that stuff and a lot of the american religious christian experiences made up with defending the faith against those kinds of influences and that's very tiring because at the end of the day we've got some things to deal with with science and history and archaeology and things like that and it's a shame where the faith is set up to keep things like that at a distance it's so sometimes people talk to me and they said where were you you know four years ago or whatever five years ago and i i get so excited about this book because you kind of alluded there to this uh the almost unnecessary journey many of us end up on if you kind of look statistically you know i grew up southern baptist and they have the lowest defection rate of any major christian denomination really that's interesting but people who leave the baptist church are more likely to become atheists than any other denomination so you know if someone leaves a mainline denomination if someone leaves catholicism they might find themselves in a different stream of christianity but when hardline evangelicals leave they leave as far as they possibly can because it is all or nothing it's right all or nothing you have a system of thinking where it is like a jenga tower you take a couple things out the whole thing crumbles so nothing can be taken out which leaves you sometimes defending things that people wind up realizing later on in life is very difficult to defend such as the earth is 6 000 years old because the bible seems to say something like that um or all languages came as a result of a tower that was built and god confuses their languages and i think the bottom line the problem really is not the bible the problem is how the bible is understood and uh not really taking seriously the context of you know who's writing this and when and why and they don't have omniscient knowledge but they're living in a particular point in time and experiencing god in ways that are meaningful and relevant for that point in time our job is to say okay what's our time like how can we be a part of this stream of christian tradition and and embody that faith and embody jesus frankly in the world around us today that won't necessarily look the same as what they might have done say 4 000 years ago so one thing that happens to me a lot is uh someone says okay i i listened to you and i i've been longing to explore the bible again um and so i went and i read all of pete's books that happens like yeah relatively often they said but now what i've read i've read incarnation i've read the bible tells me so i've read this uncertainty what other resources out there that offer i'm hesitant to say better but more open more uh dynamic um scholarship and study for popular audiences around the bible well i mean in those books i do give some hints about where people can go so i don't leave them alone but it can be hard to find people of faith who work for living in let's say ecclesiastical institutions who understand the problems but who still write about it openly because it can be sometimes difficult for them professionally to do that but i would just encourage people to um to read anything i mean where do i go to for the next step just read broadly even if it's just reading the bible with really good footnotes you know things like the harpercollins study bible or the new interpreter study bible or the jewish study bible which is an amazing resource for a whole different world of looking at these texts that's not effective but let's say fundamentalists or evangelical protestantism and just living with us it's not it's not a quick path to like okay now i two or three more books now i'm going to be there if if my books have helped people to sort of break the ice and move forward just go just sail and just just read whatever and and years to come things seep in and they change how you think and just to throw props at that the jewish study bible for me amazing i love those notes like well this here in leviticus contradicts what moses says in exodus next point you know it's like they don't like that's just the way it is it doesn't like well they seem to be contradictory but they're really not you see they're saying exactly the same now i mean that sort of violates common sense sensibilities when people read i mean the the the the gymnastics that we have to go through sometimes to make the bible speak exactly with one voice all the way through that's that's one of the things that set people up for failure because they actually read the bible and they you get to genesis 2 and they say why is this creation story different than genesis 1 right it begins at the beginning that that tension to try to make sense of those things and there are um smart people who've been reading the bible since before christianity um who have thought about this and i think to sort of mine that wealth of information like the jewish study bible can do and other good study bibles i think that that's a valuable resource reading the bible along with decent aids that don't overlook what are considered difficulties in the more conservative world so one question i get over and over and over on this show and i answer as an uneducated fool so we're going to take advantage of that that's my turn someone's opinion who matters on the show answer this uh if the bible contains these points of tension or or somewhat even say contradictions how can we believe that the bible embodies divinity at all well that's the offense of the christian faith where divinity is incarnated and some people say god risks things by allowing humanity to sort of have a hand in how god is perceived and we have them in the bible so i think it's actually it's a strength of the christian faith to have a bible that is as messy as it is that actually reflects the spiritual experiences of people in times and places and having a bible that sort of records that diverse journey of faith where different things are happening and different personalities are recording it and they say different things about god and you find yourself in your own journey actually seeing yourself in different parts of the bible depending on where you are right so um the whole question is i think off-center it's it's not getting at the beauty and the brilliance of the christian faith which is god with us and i think the bible sort of it illustrates that on every page and we want to get it out of the earthly realm right and put it way up high someplace in the sky and that's just not the way god does things not the christian god anyway do you have any advice for people who read your book and find it compelling um but feel some sense of fear uh that if if they're wrong now uh they're gonna go to hell or because the stakes have been placed so high for people from evangelical backgrounds that there's beyond the mental layer an emotional layer that has to follow and i think that emotional layer is not talked about enough and that's that that is the issue i think my advice for people is to find others that you can be honest with and talk to and i don't say this lightly at times it might mean for some people that to find another church home and again i don't say that lightly because people have social connections there too but to feel supported to realize i mean it's a beautiful thing for people to realize i'm not the first person to think these things in fact there are 30 people in my church who are actually struggling with these things too and you feel more of a camaraderie and you don't feel so alone and you don't feel like you're broke into something wrong with you you need to be fixed you're actually on a normal part of the journey of faith and i think finding community is probably the key to doing that even if it's just one person that's a start but not thinking that you're alone and isolated and and you have less fear i think when you talk to other people who are like-minded and who understand enough compassion for you so uh dr peter ends the smartest guy in the room everywhere he goes in my opinion that's why i had it everywhere he goes if you're not following his work you need to uh just cut out the middleman whenever you ask me bible questions all i do is open one of his books so you need to go check out his books especially the son of certainty where's the best place for people to keep up with you online uh on my blog petens.com also the bible for normal people both get you to the same place and i try to blog on a regular basis and uh my books are up there too so you can order them if you want from the from the website and i try to have as many guests come in and speak to so it's not just my voice but that's the place thanks so much pete you bet thanks well you've done it you've listened to another episode of ask science mike uh we need your questions on the show so you can do that by going to asksciencemike.com where you can fill out a text question or record a voicemail for consideration on the show you can also use the hashtag asksciencemike on twitter youtube soundcloud pretty much anywhere we'll find it and put it in the queue now my patrons on patreon pick the questions on the show so a i want to thank them for not just free labor but negative labor will they pay to work uh you guys are amazing but if you'd like to help make this show financially possible you can go to ask sciencemike.com click on the patreon tab i want to thank greg nordin for his work producing the show and making it sound so great andrew golucky for pre-production work and of course the theme song was written by the great jeb bodifor thanks for listening everyone and i'll talk to you next week