Thank you Pete
What Greatly Disappointed owes to Peter Enns
A Special Thank You to Pete Enns.
The me that found Pete Enns was the me you will find in chapter ten in Greatly Disappointed; a fully broken me. One who was ready to die from the paralyzing inability to become perfect, and the one who was realizing that the perfect record of the perfect person had imperfections in it.
Pete Enns became a welcome voice for both.
The Bible Tells Me So came first and it did something I didn’t know I needed.
I had been raised to read the Bible as a document outside of time. Inerrant. Consistent. Delivered whole from a God who existed above the mess of human history. The text wasn’t a conversation; it was a judicial order. It was precedent. My job was to receive it and interpret it correctly.
Then I read this:
“God never told the Israelites to kill the Canaanites. The Israelites believed that God told them to kill the Canaanites.”
I had to sit with that for a long time. It was so obvious; so clear, and I’d never seen it.
But it wasn’t even that big uncomfortable question that finally moved me. Christians have been explaining away a God who authorizes genocide for centuries. Theologians and Administrations have constructed entire careers on making that palatable. I’d heard most of the arguments.
The canaanites were wicked.
Israel needed to remain pure so the savior could come through them.
God is God and can do whatever God wants.
If we all deserve to die why can’t God can choose how and when and still be loving?
Enns didn’t reconcile this paradox. What he did was simpler than that. He gave me permission to ask, “What if it’s just how to tell a story?”
Enns wasn’t asking me to abandon the Bible. He was just reading carefully enough to expose a flaw in the way I did.
The ancient Israelites were an ancient tribal people. They saw the world and their God in tribal ways. They told stories of their tribal past, led into battle by a tribal warrior God who valued the same things they did—like killing enemies and taking their land. This is how they connected with God—in their time, in their way.”
Once that opened, I couldn’t close it again.
The Bible isn’t a ceiling. It’s a record of people reaching. And if it’s a record of people reaching, then We can reach too. In our time. In our way. With God the way we’ve come to experience It. We can do this without being in violation of something sacred because this is how it was always used.
That’s not a small thing when you’ve spent your whole life measuring against a fixed standard delivered directly from heaven.
The Bible Tells Me So didn’t ask me to abandon the text. It asked me to stop being afraid of it.
The Sin of Certainty named what I’d been carrying without knowing it had a name.
The problem was never doubt. The problem was the belief that certainty and faith were the same thing. That somewhere along the way, needing to be right had quietly replaced needing to be present. That the armor I’d built to protect my beliefs had become indistinguishable from the beliefs themselves. My constant inner critique of thought and deed made living in the moment dangerous.
There’s a line Enns writes hit me harder than I could have possibly expected:
“When we grab hold of ‘correct’ thinking for dear life, when we refuse to let go because we think that doing so means letting go of God, when we dig in our heels and stay firmly planted even when we sense that we need to let go and move on, at that point we are trusting our thoughts rather than God. We have turned away from God’s invitation to trust in order to cling to an idol.”
I had always been right. I had always been a part of the remnant; one of the few with the Truth. My problem wasn’t ‘leaning on my own understanding’. It was having always leaned on someone else’s and calling it infallible.
That window changed everything about what came next.
The Evolution of Adam was the last of the three and the hardest earned.
I already knew the science. The age of the earth, the fossil record, the provable timeline of life. What I didn’t know was what to do with a faith whose entire structure depended on me ignoring it.
Adventism declares young earth creationism a non-negotiable interpretation.
Because here’s what nobody tells you about creationism and why it’s so hard to release even when the science is undeniable: it’s not really about the age of the earth. It’s about the load-bearing wall.
If Adam and Eve are two specific people then the fall is a specific event. If the fall is a specific event then original sin is a legal transaction. If original sin is a legal transaction then salvation has to be one too. And suddenly you’re back inside the Sanctuary System: the books of record, the investigative judgment, the close of probation, the perfectionism, the fear of never being quite enough. It all depends on that first domino staying upright.
Enns didn’t introduce me to evolutionary biology. He asked me to stop pretending the two things could coexist without consequence. That if Adam wasn’t a specific man, the fall wasn’t a specific event. And if the fall wasn’t a specific event then everything built on top of it was about identity more than truth..
That’s not an exhale. That’s a controlled demolition. (A demolition I had to set and reset three times.)
But on the other side of it I could ask not what the Bible was demanding of me, but what it was actually equipped to say.
That question is the quiet engine underneath everything in Greatly Disappointed. I couldn’t have found it without Pete Enns showing me it was safe to ask.
There’s a kind of thinker who refuses to make you choose between your mind and your faith. Who treats the ancient text as something alive and worthy of honest engagement rather than a verdict requiring your submission.
Pete Enns is one of those thinkers. For those of us whose analytical instincts were trained to feel like a threat to our own beliefs, he is genuinely rare.
If you’re somewhere between what you were told and what you keep observing, start with The Bible Tells Me So. Let it give you permission. Then read The Sin of Certainty when you need someone to name what you’re carrying. And when you’re ready for the controlled demolition, The Evolution of Adam will be waiting.
If you bump into me, I’ll loan you my copies.
