Living With Stress

Peter Enns:

"I've had far too many conversations over the last few years with trained, experienced, and practicing biblical scholars, young, middle aged, and near retirement, working in Evangelical institutions, trying to follow Jesus and use their brains and training to help students navigate the challenging world of biblical interpretation. And they are dying inside.

Just two weeks ago I had the latest in my list of long conversations with a well-known, published, respected biblical scholar, who is under inhuman stress trying to negotiate the line between institutional expectations and academic integrity. His gifts are being squandered. He is questioning his vocation. His family is suffering. He does not know where to turn. I wish this were an isolated incident, but it's not."

In the eyes of many evangelicals, Peter Enns is something of a bogeyman. But here, where Enns is not talking about controversial things like evolution or Genesis or ancient near eastern myth or the diversity of the Old Testament or Second Temple Judaism or whatever, there can be little doubt that he is highlighting a real problem.

Any thoughts on this issue?