Auf Wiedersehen

Hi everybody, though all I wanted to say is "goodbye" for now. With wedding planning (wedding is May 1!), my soon-to-be wife, working, grad school, and other responsibilities, for now I must dispense with my blog. I would love to resume once I start school full-time, but we'll see. Thanks for reading.

I will update my blog links on the right from time to time. I've spent much time reading blogs, and the ones on the right will reflect what I think are the most important.

Read Calvin's Institutes in '09!

I'm doing it, and you should too (just like if I jumped off a cliff, I'd expect all my closest friends to do the same). Both Reformation 21 and Princeton Theological Seminary are doing the church a great service by celebrating the 500th anniversary of John Calvin's birth in their respective ways. Reformation 21 will blog through Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion every weekday of '09 while PTS has an online text, weekly reflections, and a daily podcast of the day's reading on iTunes; both have reading schedules. Just be sure you use the McNeil/Battles edition and not Beveridge or any other one.

If you're holy like me (just ignore my innumerable faults for a second), you will want to read "the Institutes" at some point in your life, why not now?

Peter Enns and John Frame

So I know I'm way behind the times in checking out all this controversy surrounding Peter Enns' book, "Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament" (henceforth, I&I), but I thought I'd share some quick thoughts on where I'm at in all this.

Enns really brings up many valid questions, topics that I also have been struggling with for about a year. John Frame reviewed Enns' book and makes a couple of good points along the way. But I would like to point out that Frame's review does not appear to be very effective, largely (it seems) because of his Presuppositionalist approach to a doctrine of Scripture.

Frame, as Presuppositionalist, takes a deductive approach to Scripture. That is, in our case, that he starts with the belief that Scripture is inspired by God and is thus inerrant and bases this belief on his presupposition that it is true. Certainly this is circular, but Frame would freely admit that while claiming that all systems of knowledge argue in a circular fashion when it comes to their guiding principles. See his "Apologetics to the Glory of God" and also "Five Views on Apologetics" for his treatment of circularity (and surely in his massive tomes as well). I disagree with him, but that's not the point here.

My point is that because he argues from this perspective, his review does not meaningfully interact with Enns when it comes to the "evidence" presented in I&I. In I&I, Enns, after having already explicitly assumed that God inspired Scripture, proceeds to ask how it is that God did so. So Enns talks about:

(1) the primeval history in Genesis 1-11 and how it is "myth" which he defines as "an ancient, premodern, prescientific way of addressing questions of ultimate origins and meaning in the form of stories: Who are we? Where do we come from?" (40),

(2) the "diversity" (admittedly vague, e.g., does he mean irreconcilable points of view?) of the Old Testament, e.g., the biases of historiography in 1-2 Kings and 1-2 Chronicles,

(3) and how, Enns says, the New Testament authors ripped Old Testament texts "out of context"; nevertheless, this is fine since the apostles were inspired and were working out of their cultural and hermeneutical context of Second Temple Judaism, albeit filtered through the life, death, resurrection and teachings of Jesus.

Enns is working within the doctrine of revelation/inspiration in order to tweak our allegedly modern-tinted glasses that "impose" our definitions of truth, error, and hermeneutical method onto the text. His solution is an "incarnational" model of Scripture in which the Bible is seen as both divine and human like Jesus' incarnation (Greg Beale really hammers this analogy for being vague in his review of I&I). Of course, such a proposal is not novel, as Enns himself states, since it has been historically advocated by some mainstream Reformed scholars as well as some neo-orthodox or liberal theologians (e.g., Karl Barth).

So this is the main thrust of his book. Now, it's very suprising that a typical response of Frame's is the following:

On the flood accounts, Enns says, “The problem raised by these Akkadian texts is whether the biblical stories are historical: how can we say logically that the biblical stories are true and the Akkadian stories are false, when they both look so much alike?” (40) Again, the answer is easy: (1) the Akkadian account is not simply false, but contains some false claims. (2) We know that the biblical stories are true because God inspired them.

This just does not seem to do justice to what Enns is saying. In fact, it seems that the whole force of Enns' argument has been blunted through the lens of Presuppositionalism (and I don't mean that as a compliment).

(1) The scenario Enns describes is this: when we compare the Old Testament texts, rituals, social structure, laws, etc., to its ancient Near East (ANE) neighbors, we practically see no difference. The question that follows from this is how we can justifiably pick out the Old Testament as revelation from God. Based on the appearances of each "package" of worldviews, such a decision would appear to be arbitrary. Enns goes on to say that Israel posited a much different God and that is our marker for identifying true revelation. Its uniqueness is based on the God it proclaims.

Frame's reply? The Akkadian account (Enuma Elish - "The Babylonian Genesis") has errors. OK, but it appears to me that this critique misses the force of Enns' argument and it circumvents Enns' treatment of truth, error, and myth in the ANE world (though Frame does briefly address that later). This is not to say at all that Enns is correct here, but it will do us little good to miss the force of the argument and neglect to respond directly to the charge.

(2) So we pick out the Old Testament out of all these ANE texts/worldviews based on the belief that God inspired them? Maybe Frame would want a strict description and reply that it's not based on our belief but on the reality that God did inspire the OT. But my point is epistemological, and so is Enns'.

On the other hand, Frame's most serious critique of Enns' method, I think, is the following:

But in this section he shows an unwillingness, curious for an evangelical, to say anything about the relation of inspiration to historical factuality. When he speaks about “evidence” for this or that event, the evidence is always inductive, never an appeal to divine inspiration as evidence. Perhaps Enns thinks that inspiration is such an event that we may never appeal to it as evidence. I think that position is inconsistent with Scripture’s own view of itself.

I do think this may be a genuine flaw in I&I, though one must again point out that Enns starts with the assumption that the Bible is inspired.

Merry Christmas!!! Or Happy Jesusmas...

Hey, what would you have thought if I went the PC way and said "HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!"? Let's just reflect on Jesus and reconsider our lives in light of him.

So for the few of you who come here, you may notice that I haven't posted for a while. There's a lot of reasons - it's been a crazy month - but let me just give a general update of myself in quick bullet form for your speed-reading convenience.

- I finished up Metaphysics I with J. P. Moreland and wow do I feel dumb. Like, I learned a ton, but there's just so much to take in. I'm still awaiting my grade and I think I have a shot to get that A (why is it 96% for an A now!?). We'll see.

- I'm only taking 3 units next semester, just like this past semester, which is Symbolic Logic with Tom Crisp (smaaaaaart dude). Logic isn't my favorite topic but it's foundational and I'm willing to put in the time for it. I already bought the book ("Deductive Logic" by Warren Goldfarb) and the plan is to read it all before school starts up again Jan. 26. That way I can devote more time to wedding planning next semester and already have a good idea of where the class is going.

- How's the wedding planning? All's I gotta say is that Kels and I are behind right now and we have to get a lot done before I go back to school in 4 weeks. Yup, really busy next semester.

- I'm 20 pages away from finishing Peter Enns' "Inspiration and Incarnation" which is amazing and I highly recommend it (with certain reservations). He's pretty much outlining a ton of things that I've been thinking about, but just more from a strongly OT perspective whereas I think of it more theologically (he does apply it to theology many times though). I'll most likely be posting on this too.

- I got "The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism" by Greg Beale for Christmas so I can't wait to read that next. It is a book-length response to Peter Enns' aforementioned book and it will be pretty enlightening I'm sure.

- My former prof Dr. Lunde is getting me his new book "The New Testament Use of the Old Testament: Three Views" for $8. SWEET! I'll probably try to read that too soon. Note: the contributors to this book are Walter Kaiser, Darrell Bock, and Peter Enns as well as Jon Lunde and Kenneth Berding (both at Biola :D) as editors.

- Did you know Christopher Hitchens is coming to Biola to debate Craig sometime soon? So excited!

- I got a WiiFit for Christmas ( :D )and it says I'm inhumanly out of shape. I also got one of those pistol adapter thingies and so now I'm probably going to be "forced" to go buy a first-person shooter like "Call of Duty: World at War". Woe is me!

- The new JETS issue (Vol. 51, No. 4) is great - go check it out. I'll probably try to read it all because all the articles are so dang interesting.

- I recently found out that I LOVE Radiohead and have been listening to them non-stop for like the past 3 weeks. I do wanna go get the other two CD's of theirs that I don't have: "The Bends" and "In Rainbows" (salivating at the thought of driving to Best Buy to pick up "The Bends" and "In Rainbows" or, alternatively, buying them on iTunes as I stuff my face with good homemade food...mmmm...homemade food...).


'Til next time.

Study Prayer

There's a certain point you reach after reading so much, that you forget why you're doing it. It happens to me a lot. I've been wanting to write a prayer out that I would try to slowly pray and meditate on before any prolonged study session (or even a semi-short one). This is what I came up with, and I think I'm sticking with it. It sums up everything that's important to me when it comes to studying.

---------------------------------------------------------------

STUDY PRAYER

My loving Father, Daddy,
Cultivate in me a habit of thankfulness.
Thank you for the privilege of studying your Word and your creation.

Holy Spirit, my Comforter,
Give me the wisdom to understand,
the patience to persevere,
the determination to ignore distraction,
and the strength to endure.
Guard me from envying others,
and keep pride far from my heart.
Imbue me with a burning passion to descend from abstract clouds into daily life,
to those who are physically and emotionally abused,
to those who are dying, even without You.

My savior Jesus,
Prepare me to serve your church,
for the equipping of the saints,
for the defense of the faith.
Remind me, that I once was also in darkness.
Help me empathize with the skeptic, as I also was one.

Most beautiful, holy Triunity,
may this all be for your glory above all
- not my fame but yours alone -
and lead me into a more profound personal and experiential knowledge of who you are.

----------------------------------------------------------------

I feel like I should add "So let it be written, so let it be done" at the end or something. haha, j/k. Now, only to try and memorize it...