Book Review: Curveball
WCIU Journal: Worldview Topic
March 14, 2023
by Sean Curran, Special Assistant to the WCIU President
CURVEBALL: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming (or How I Stumbled and Tripped My Way to Finding a Bigger God), by Peter Enns. New York: HarperCollins. 2023.
Matthew 9:17 (NIV), which is an epigraph of Enns’ book, reads: “Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”
In a relatively recent meeting I attended, praying for the incoming of WCIU’s President Paul Cornelius, this verse was invoked. When I read it a bit later at the beginning of Enns’ book with the intention to review it for WCIU, I couldn’t help but see the verse’s reoccurrence as something more than a coincidence.
I have been aware of WCIU for over 20 years and worked for WCIU for approximately 11 years. In the last 5 years WCIU has gone through a sea change. For someone like me, primarily a person who was years ago looking for a job in my neighborhood and who has had friendships with coworkers enhance my connection to WCIU, the power of this change is palpable.
For those who have built their lives around WCIU, who placed roots in the north central Pasadena area as an act of faith, this has been a sea change akin to that of Atlantis.
The physical campus that had been as much a part of WCIU as its personnel and scholarly programs, and the neighborhood of houses owned by WCIU around that campus, have been sold in these last few years. This sale was not in any way a hasty or unwise decision, but putting aside the value of that decision, the emotional impact of the loss of the “home” of WCIU has been massive. Literal description seems inadequate to capture the feelings involved with that life change.
One of my favorite songs uses the image of a landslide to signify the impact of a major life change, articulating the trepidation associated with such a change in the song’s chorus with the lines “Well, I’ve been afraid of changing / ‘Cause I’ve built my life around you.”
Fear is only one emotion that can come with the erosion of certainty that major changes in our lives can produce. When what we’ve built our lives around gives way, desperation can take hold of us. God can feel strangely absent, somehow distant from this crisis. What is there to hang on to?
Peter Enns, Abram S. Clemens Professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University and co-host of the podcast “The Bible for Normal People,” articulates in his new book, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming, that major changes are quite normal in the life of those who believe in the God of Christianity and can be a source of new revelation of that God.
“By curveball,” Enns writes, “I don’t mean some bump in the road that could have easily been avoided, nor some annoyingly uncomfortable moment that can be handled by distracting ourselves […] I mean those experiences that are so momentous we simply cannot continue living as if they hadn’t happened – everything changes, and we know we cannot remain as we were.”
In his book, Enns writes that our experiences are a key part of our faith. With each unexpected experience, with each shocking revelation, with each swing and a miss—God reveals who God really is to us. And these curveballs, what we might more often refer to as our “failures” or “crises” in our lives, can be transformative moments bringing us closer to God as God is.
“It would take years for me to accept the idea,” Enns warns us in the book’s introduction before sharing much of his own journey, “that my disruptive experiences are not outside impositions to or an attack on my faith, but are the soil out of which my faith matures and takes shape.”
As a pale male English-speaking second-generation German-American baby boomer who came to faith and initially to be a scholar in conservative Evangelical expressions of Christianity, Enns in Curveball takes readers through the transformative moments he experienced by way of seeing the Bible as sacred yet problematic (Chapter Two), understanding faith communities as adaptive to circumstances (Chapter Four), approaching God’s mysteries mitigated through human knowledge and use of language (Chapters Five and Six), embracing Evolution and Quantum Physics as factually descriptive of rather than ideologically subversive against the work of God (Chapters Seven, Nine, and Ten), and thus embracing panentheism and a form of Christian universalism (Chapters Eleven and Twelve).
Let the reader be advised that Enns is not instructing readers to a particular way of living out the Christian faith. This is not a “pastoral” book. Rather, Enns seems to want to come alongside readers to empathize with them and normalize their experience of a “crisis” of faith as something healthy. This could be good news for anyone whose faith is “deconstructed” from where it once was. Enns writes in his prologue:
I value the experiences of my younger years – they are still part of my story. I am still a Christian but a different sort of Christian than before. I am not one driven by fear of slipping off the tightrope with the next stiff wind. Rather, I am seeking to live into the sacred space of God’s Presence with curiosity, hope, peace, and love of others. I believe this is the type of relationship God seeks to have with us.
Curveball is in some ways a summary of Enns’ writing on other subjects, his own version of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, a congenially intellectual anthology on Christian faith and mystery.
Unlike Lewis’s book, Enns’ book is not an apologetic. Enns is not attempting to defend the reasonableness of the Christian faith or citing scientific knowledge and discovery as “proof” of how God is described in the Bible or in Christian tradition. At times, Enns doubts the usefulness of apologetics but more so is interested in the role that our human experience and discoveries play as a part of Christian faith.
For example, Enns argues that a literalist understanding of the Bible, not the faith that is nurtured by the Bible, is what is threatened by scientific evolution. Similarly, the attempt to give credence to scientific evolution yet also argue that there is necessarily a “historical Adam” is a false compromise that still prefers a literalist Bible reading. Ultimately, the God depicted in the Bible is super-existent of the Bible, and the depiction is the use of limited language to describe One who is far above such limits. Just as the writers of the Bible used the common knowledge and linguistic expressions of their time to help approximate a depiction of God, so should we allow evolution to shape our understanding of God. Enns writes in Chapter 7:
Creation is shouting to us something of the deep mystery of the character of God and of creation. Pitting evolution against the Bible, or Christianity, or God is a missed opportunity to make God relatable to ourselves and to others. […] The creation as we understand it today is telling us something about God that the Bible doesn’t. But rather than seeing evolution as the enemy of faith that must be squashed, I see it as a curveball that drives me to adjust what I think I know about God. And the God whom I see when I ponder the nature of life on this earth brings me to a humbling awareness that I am part of a big interconnected whole, where God’s creative Presence and energy infuse all living things.
More than empathy for the difficulty of life’s curveballs, more than openness to the ways that God is revealed in creation, Enns wants us as readers to try to see these massive shifts in the norms of our lives as God calling our attention to what God is doing, inviting us to join in that work.
As I am finishing this review, WCIU has recently held an international event to commission Dr. Paul Cornelius in his role as President. He is WCIU’s first President from the Southern Hemisphere of the globe, and many friends and family of Paul’s joined with WCIU to honor Paul and to lift him up to God in prayer for the journey ahead in leading WCIU. That journey is not fully charted. Much remains to plan and to pray upon. But it strikes me that this journey, this path that is unfamiliar to WCIU and to Paul, would not have been possible without turning away from what was familiar.
Enns writes in Chapter 12 about coming into a new awareness of what God’s kingdom coming looks like:
My view on God is not the standard to which others must conform. […] The typical Christian today lives in the Southern Hemisphere, is of dark skin, is poor, charismatic, and female. That person’s faith is not formed by the same identity markers as those in the West. […] Here is something I have learned: God is not only out ahead of me, as I have been saying, but is carrying on with projects without the need to consult my corner of reality. I am being marginalized by the gospel – somewhat like the Jewish and Gentile readers of Paul’s letter to the Romans might have felt marginalized at hearing how both groups, despite their tense history, were nevertheless equal in God’s eyes. The message is now as it was then: “Sorry folks. No wall-building here. You’re all humans and all in this together.” I am aware of these shifts and open to them, because the model of faith I have chosen to embrace gives me the space to do so.
In one sense, WCIU is not doing anything new on its current path. The mission has always been one of willingness to follow where God leads and to be innovative in living out the gospel of God’s love for the world.
Yet WCIU has room to grow and is amid growth. Enns’ book is a good reminder for us to keep a wide perspective of all that is happening—for WCIU to embrace a model of faith that gives space not only for acknowledging the pain of the challenges and changes of the journey so far but also the courage and curiosity to keep looking for what is next.
I am hopeful that we will persevere and that we will be preserved.