Kelley Nikondeha has started a fabulous virtual book club called by the tagline #transitlounge. Together #transitlounge will read a different Christian text each month with the intention of tweeting and blogging the content together. This month Peter Enns’ controversial work Inspiration and Incarnation is our subject.
For those unfamiliar with Enns’ Inspiration and Incarnation, the work has been met with much criticism. I find myself in a difficult position with this work, on the one hand applauding Enns’ attempt at reconciling the evangelical perspective with modern day biblical scholarship yet dissatisfied with his ultimate conclusions.
Rather than offer a summarative narrative review, I’d like to offer a few staccato thoughts.
First, Enns’ primary audience is to evangelical Christians who struggle to coexist in the stream of modern day biblical scholarship and their personal doctrinal ties. Imagine Enns in your living room, taking you by the hand and leading you through a Intro to Old Testament class, and you’ll have a good feel for this read.
Fundamentally, Enns wants to shift evangelical conversations away from “what are often perceived as problems” within the Old Testament, expanding the evangelical mind to the merits of ancient near eastern textual and linguistic comparisons and insisting these modern methods of historical criticism can actually enhance religious and spiritual commitment (15).
However, as far as Enns goes, in my opinion, he does not go far enough.
In attempting to write toward an audience outside of biblical scholarship, Enns offers a simplistic view of many critical issues. While I know his intent is not to address these issues but to encourage the evangelical person to encounter them for themselves, watering down the very elements he wants evangelicals to discover does little in helping them attain his goal. For example, Enns follows the now dated dual model of Judaism versus Christianity, rather than acknowledging the variety of Judaism(s) and Christianity(s) that existed at the time of the New Testament’s formation. Enns insists upon the New Testament’s “Second Temple status,” yet fails to address the significant developments in theology following the destruction of the Second Temple that would have affected in the very least the authors of Matthew, Luke, John and the pseudepigraphical epistles. A better comparison would be made to similarly situated Jewish texts, such as the Mishnah.
Further, anyone who writes in his/her opening pages, “Any theories concerning Scripture that do not arise from these fundamental instincts [that the Bible is God's gift to the church, etc.] are unacceptable” (14), immediate alienates myself as a reader. Enns wants to insist that “a Protestant confessional commitment cannot allow that confessional commitment to have the final word—ever,” yet his writing contradicts that sentiment (Enns, “Criticism 1“). As hard as Enns tries, he can’t seem to escape his confessional commitment; instead, he offers a weird hybrid of fundamentalism, evangelicalism, and biblical criticism.
That being said, I think Enns has a lot to offer his primary audience, an audience that is probably not familiar with much of modern day scholarship. For those committed to their confessional beliefs, Enns can serve as the first step toward evaluating the biblical tradition. Confessionally, I appreciate Enn’s sentiments when he writes “our expectations of the Bible must be in conversation with the data, otherwise we run the very real risk of trying to understand the Bible in fundamental isolation from the cultures in which it is written” (168).
However, Enns will never truly achieve what he is attempting, to help the evangelical resolve theological problems that clash with his/her commitment to God’s word. It appears Enns is lovingly attempting to pick up the fundamentalist/evangelical boundaries and take a few steps forward; simply renegotiating the boundaries to accommodate for some modern criticism. Yet, I feel deeply that one should not simply pick and choose where the boundary of their faith will lie. At the end of the day much of the typical evangelical agenda remains in Enns’ writing—that the Bible is God’s divine gift and therefore still an authoritative text for our lives. This is the fundamental problem I have with Enns’ work and why I would only recommend the book for those in his primary audience.
