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Peter Enns - the Problem with Evangelicals and the Bible
September 21, 2007 |
Posted by michaelp · Filed Under Old Testament, Books
Peter Enns has written one of the most provocative, intriguing, and controversial books that is on the theological 
bookshelves today. It is called Inspiration and Incarnation. While I don’t take things as far as Enns does in many areas, the questions he asks are the right questions. He puts his finger on the issues like no one else is able (brave enough?) to do.
I would like to post a few quotes from Enns in the next few blogs to peek your interest.
For those of you who have been in The Theology Program, you will not be surprised by some of them. Others, will make you very uncomfortable. Most of these I will post simply to get thoughts, not so much endorse in their entirety.
The end result [of our studies], I truly hope, will be to provide a theological paradigm for people who know instinctively that the Bible is God’s word, but for whom reading the Bible has already become a serious theological problem—perhaps even a crisis. I have come across many Christians for whom this clash between the biblical world and the modern world is a very real issue. The Bible is central to their lives, but sometimes evangelical defenses of the Bible are exercises in special pleadings, attempts to hold on to comfortable ideas despite evidences that makes such ideas problematic. It is precisely the ineffectiveness of certain way of thinking about the Bible that can sometimes cause significant cognitive dissonance for Christians who love and want to hold on to their Bibles, but who also feel the weight of certain kinds of evidence.
With this in mind, one of the central themes of this book is this:
The problems many of us feel regarding the Bible may have less to do with the Bible itself and more to do with our own preconceptions. (p. 15)
. . .
When God reveals himself, he always does so to people, which means that he must speak and act in ways that they will understand. People are time bound, and so God adopts that characteristic if he wishes to reveal himself. We can put this even a bit more strongly:
It is essential to the very nature of revelation that the Bible is not unique to its environment. The human dimension of Scripture is essential to its being Scripture. (p. 20)
. . .
It is some what ironic, it seems to me, that both liberals and conservatives make the same error. They both assume that something worthy of the title word of God would look different from what we actually have. The one accents the human marks and makes them absolutes. The other wishes the human marks were not as pronounced as they were. They share a similar opinion that nothing worthy of being called God’s word would look so common, so human, so recognizable. But when God speaks, he speaks in ways we would understand. (p. 21)
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*RUSHES out to buy the book*!
Seriously, that does sound like a breath of fresh air. As you know, this type of talk does not make me uncomfortable at all. I will check it out more fully (reviews, etc), but it will definitely be something I will consider buying.
OK, I have ordered the book. Here is a quote that clinched it for me (taken from an Amazon review):
“Therefore, the question is not the degree to which Genesis conforms to what we would think is a proper description of origins. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of Genesis to expect it to answer questions generated by a modern worldview, such as whether the days were literal or figurative, or whether the days of creation can be lined up with modern science, or whether the flood was local or universal…. It is wholly incomprehensible to think that thousands of years ago God would have felt constrained to speak in a way that would be meaningful only to Westerners several thousand years later. To do so borders on modern, Western arrogance….To argue, as I am doing here, that such biblical stories as creation and the flood must be understood first and foremost in the ancient contexts, is nothing new. The point I would like to emphasize, however, is that such a firm grounding in ancient myth does not make Genesis less inspired; it is not a concession that we must put up with or an embarrassment to a sound doctrine of scripture. Quite to the contrary, such rootedness in the culture of the time is precisely what it means for God to speak to his people…. This is surely what it means for God to reveal himself to people - he accommodates, condescends, meets them where they are.”
lol…that is actually a quote from the book itself. I am going to post it soon!
Right, that is what I meant, sorry if I was unclear. And it is why I was so intrigued with the book. Does that not sound like what I have been preaching?
Here is another, even more challenging quote from C.S. Lewis. It is long, but it is a good read (as all his stuff is):
“I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous. Some people find the miraculous so hard to believe that they cannot imagine any reason for my acceptance of it other than a prior belief that every sentence of the Old Testament has historical or scientific truth. But this I do not hold, any more than St. Jerome did when he said that Moses described Creation “after the manner of a popular poet” (as we should say, mythically) or than Calvin did when he doubted whether the story of Job were history or fiction. The real reason why I can accept as historical a story in which a miracle occurs is that I have never found any philosophical grounds for the universal negative proposition that miracles do not happen. I have to decide on quite other grounds (if I decide at all) whether a given narrative is historical or not. The Book of Job appears to me unhistorical because it begins about a man quite unconnected with all history or even legend, with no genealogy, living in a country of which the Bible elsewhere has hardly anything to say; because, in fact, the author quite obviously writes as a story-teller not as a chronicler.
I have therefore no difficulty in accepting, say, the view of those scholars who tell us that the account of Creation in Genesis is derived from earlier Semitic stories which were Pagan and mythical. We must of course be quite clear what “derived from” means. Stories do not reproduce their species like mice. They are told by men. Each re-teller either repeats exactly what his predecessor had told him or else changes it. He may change it unknowingly or deliberately. If he changes it deliberately, his invention, his sense of form, his ethics, his ideas of what is fit, or edifying, or merely interesting, all come in. If unknowingly, then his unconscious (which is so largely responsible for our forgettings) has been at work. Thus at every step in what is called–a little misleadingly–the “evolution” of a story, a man, all he is and all his attitudes, are involved. And no good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights. When a series of such retellings turns a creation story which at first had almost no religious or metaphysical significance into a story which achieves the idea of true Creation and of a transcendent Creator (as Genesis does), then nothing will make me believe that some of the re-tellers, or some one of them, has not been guided by God.
Thus something originally merely natural–the kind of myth that is found amongst most nations–will have been raised by God above itself, qualified by Him and compelled by Him to serve purposes which of itself would not have served. Generalising this, I take it that the whole Old Testament consists of the same sort of material as any other literature–chronicle (some of it obviously pretty accurate), poems, moral and political diatribes, romances, and what not; but all taken into the service of Gods word. Not all, I suppose, in the same way. There are prophets who write with the clearest awareness that Divine compulsion is upon them. There are chroniclers whose intention may have been merely to record. There are poets like those in the Song of Songs who probably never dreamed of any but a secular and natural purpose in what they composed. There is (and it is not less important) the work first of the Jewish and then of the Christian Church in preserving and canonising just these books. There is the work of redactors and editors in modifying them. On all of these I suppose a Divine pressure; of which not by any means all need have been conscious.
The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivet, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not “the Word of God” in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.
To a human mind this working-up (in a sense imperfectly), this sublimation (incomplete) of human material, seems, not doubt, an untidy and leaky vehicle. We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form–something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table. One can respect, and at moments envy, both the Fundamentalists view of the Bible and the Roman Catholics view of the Church. But there is one argument which we should beware of using for either position: God must have done what is best, this is best, therefore God has done this. For we are mortals and do not know what is best for us, and it is dangerous to prescribe what God must have done–especially when we cannot, for the life of us, see that He has after all done it.
We may observe that the teaching of Our Lord Himself, in which there is no imperfection, is not given us in that cut-and-dried, fool-proof, systematic fashion we might have expected or desired. He wrote no book. We have only reported sayings, most of them uttered in answer to questions, shaped in some degree by their context. And when we have collected them all we cannot reduce them to a system. He preaches but He does not lecture. He uses paradox, proverb, exaggeration, parable, irony; even (I mean no irreverence) the “wise-crack”. He utters maxims which, like popular proverbs, if rigorously taken, may seem to contradict one another. His teaching therefore cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, cannot be “got up” as if it were a “subject”. If we try to do that with it, we shall find Him the most elusive of teachers. He hardly ever gave a straight answer to a straight question. He will not be, in the way we want, “pinned down”. The attempt is (again, I mean no irreverence) like trying to bottle a sunbeam.”
C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958), 109.
Right, and Lewis (one of my favourite authors) had a heretical view of Scripture as I do believe Enns does as well. Once portions of Scripture has been labelled as a myth then really what is to stop all of the other fantasical narratives to be considered really as only a myth. The RCC has labeled Joanh and may other portions as mthical even though our Lord quoted from that book as if the events really took place.
The point is that there is no slippery slope since each text can be judged on its own regarding the degree it was intended by God and the original human author to be intended as strictly literal narrative. To our ears, many texts that sound like that were not meant like that.
Calvin thought Job was probably not historical, but was fiction. Do you think he was on a slippery slope.
Also, I don’t think Enns is asserting that anything is merely myth in the sense of fairy tale and without historical grounding. For me (even if not for Lewis), the question is not just whether the text was attempting to tell about an historical past, but in those places where it WAS (really most all of it, although I will concede Calvin his Job), exactly what literary style and genre was that history being told in. What METHOD of telling about these real past events is the author using.
To modern minds, there is only one valuable way to tell about the past, and that is by strict literal historical narrative. In the past this was not the case. In fact, that method was simply never used at the time we believe the Genesis texts were first inspired and told and written down.
So, while I would not be shocked when I get to heaven to find out that what Lewis said was true, I don’t even think you have to go as far as him to get to where Enns seems to be.
You have to let the author, and God, tell the story in the manner and style and genre God allowed, not the manner in which we are most comfortable. Why should we be so presumptuous as that?
Our job is as follows:
1. Realize it is God speaking, and thus, HOWEVER He wants to tell us about the story, it is inerrant.
2. Determine what God is attempting to tell us, regardless of what genre it is.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here but I think one of the biggest hurdles to overcome is realizing that the bible was not written to us. It is God’s word, it is divinely inspired, it provides instruction but it was written by men at a particular time in context of a particular culture. The more we can disarm our modern, western thinking lenses that I think is our natural bent toward a view, I believe the better we can understand what the author intended and how God has revealed himself within that particular framework.
Lisa, I agree. There are truths that come out loud and clear no matter how poorly you understand the context, but NOT getting the intent can lead to a lot of difficulties and wrong thinking.
What I think is wonderful about the way God allowed it to be written is how the basic message God wanted to convey, the essential truths, DO come through to everyone of every age.
While in any proper hermeneutic approach to interpreting the Bible, we always start with what did it mean then but we have to then find the timeless principal and bring it to the here and now. God wrote a timeless book that was meant for every generation for all time. He is not thwarted by historical events or things like accomodation or anachronistic meanings. It is His revelation to us and it is our job (sorry Job pun) to apply to us now as a generation living under the full revelation of God at least through the Scriptures. We can’t be stuck in history or we develop liberal theology or reader response theology (see B & H course at TTP)
I agree that timeless principles are to be extracted and applied. Otherwise, the bible is reduced to just being a good old history book, as those of the liberal persuasion would see it. But, I still think those timeless principles for the here and now can get clouded by the here and now, when not viewed under the clear lens of historical and cultural context and a literary genre that was applicable then.
BTW: I took the B&H TTP course last semester.
Exactly, tnahas, the truths contained in texts like the Genesis creation accounts are indeed timeless and equally applicable and, if properly read, understandable to both an iron age group of nomads and a modern, scientifically sophisticated society, and every age in between. What Genesis is telling us is the same thing it was telling them, and in language that everyone throughout time can understand.
That is what is so amazing about the text. Whether you read it as literal historical narrative (what we use as our default today) or how the ancient Israelites would have read it (figurative accounts of real events), there is common denominator of beliefs that still come out of it.
And, it is not surprising that those truths happen to be the ones that are essential to the Christian faith! God created everything, he did so with a purpose, God created Mankind in His image and desired full communion with Mankind, Mankind fell due to rebellion, pride and selfishness, Mankind is out of communion with God and in need of redemption, all of this just for starters, and it all comes in loud and clear anyway you look at it, even Lewis’ way, really.
The danger of anachronistic reading (reading it as a history book or a scientific treatise) is that in addition to the truths that are there for all to read, you end up reading in a lot of extra stuff that may not be there (like the concept of exact timing, exact science, etc). Then the focus becomes on those factors rather than the truths.
BTW, I also got the full benefit of the TTP B&H class, which I found very solid.
To tnahas: I would never find that Lewis had a heretical view of scripture. I think he is great. I’ve read a number of his books and the one on miracles was the hardest one to get through. I would sometimes have to read each paragraph twice to get the full meaning.
Joanie D.
The difficulty with allowing that a text should be read as a figurative retelling of an historical event is that in doing so, you risk losing common ground.
I am not sure that the original hearers of the Genesis story would not have viewed it as literal. For me, getting to what the text has to say to us is first getting to what those original hearers would have made of it (as close as we can). Then, perhaps, other information is allowed to “wash out” some cultural perspectives; that helps me identify less pertinent parts of the text (like the fact that this is not, no matter what they may have thought at the time, a literal history). I think this actually points us in the right direction.