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.
