Why did God create a paradise with temptation built into it?
Isn’t God all-knowing?
Didn’t God know the serpent would trick the woman?
Why didn’t God tell Noah to preach repentance to his generation to give them a chance to live?
And why in the world did God tell Abraham to sacrifice his own son?
Questions about why God does what God does have baffled readers of the Bible since forever, especially when it comes to the book of Genesis. But what if we’ve been asking the wrong questions? What if Genesis isn’t giving us unchanging information about what God is actually doing or thinking, but instead doing something completely different?
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In this class, Pete Enns will guide us through why Genesis was actually written—and how understanding the “why” will help us to ask better questions of the text. Shifting our questioning from “Why did God do this?” to “Why did the writers choose to depict God this way?” will put us in a better position to engage Genesis in our own time, rather than feeling forced to defend God’s odd ways as depicted by the ancient writers of the text.
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This Class Includes:
One-night live class and live Q&A session
Class recording
Downloadable class slides
Topics We'll Cover:
Some common (and wrong) questions often asked of Genesis.
When and why was Genesis written?
What is the real point of those weird stories at the beginning of Genesis?
How do some of the later stories in Genesis help us ask better questions?
Why read Genesis if it’s not telling us what to believe?
YOUR INSTRUCTOR
PETE ENNS
Pete (PhD, Harvard University) is co-founder of The Bible for Normal People and co-host of The Bible for Normal People podcast. He is the Abram S. Clemens professor of biblical studies at Eastern University in St. Davids, PA and author of several books including The Bible Tells Me So and How the Bible Actually Works.
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