Peter Enns - Inspiration and Incarnation

Inspiration and Incarnation

Enns garnered significant attention for his 2005 book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. His stated purpose for writing the book is “to bring an evangelical doctrine of Scripture into conversation with the implications generated by some important themes in modern biblical scholarship—particularly the Old Testament—over the past 150 years”. Enns’s primary audience is those readers who find it difficult to maintain their faith in God because “familiar and conventional” evangelical approaches often mishandle the challenges raised by modern biblical scholarship. Enns writes that evangelicals commonly take a defensive posture to new ideas, and that such defenses are “exercises in special pleading, attempts to hold on to comfortable idea despite evidence that makes such ideas problematic. It is precisely the ineffectiveness of certain ways of thinking about the Bible that can sometimes cause significant cognitive dissonance for Christians who love and want to hold on to their Bible, but who also feel the weight of certain kinds of evidence”

Enns looks at three issues raised in modern biblical scholarship that he feels are mishandled by Evangelicals: (1) the strong similarities between the Old Testament and the literature of other ancient societies; (2), theological diversity among the Old Testament authors; (3) how New Testament writers interpreted the Old Testament in inventive ways that reflect Jewish practices of the time.

In all three cases, the Bible behaves in ways that don’t seem very “inspired,” but rather very “human.” Enns argues for an “incarnational” understanding of the Bible as a way to take seriously these types of challenges. This model draws an analogy between Jesus and the Bible: “In the same way that Jesus is—must be—both God and human, the Bible is also a divine and human book”. The Bible is not “an abstract, otherworldly book, dropped out of heaven. It was connected to and therefore spoke to those ancient cultures….precisely because Christianity is a historical religion, God’s word reflects the various historical moments in which Scripture was written”. Enns feels that the problems raised by the “human dimension” of the Bible for many evangelicals “has less to do with the Bible itself and more to do with our own preconceptions” of how the Bible “ought” to be). Enns advocates an incarnational model to help evangelicals reorient their expectations of Scripture and so come to peace with new developments in their understanding of the Bible.

Inspiration and Incarnation has been endorsed by such notable scholars as H.G.M Williamson, Bill T. Arnold, Bruce Waltke, David W. Baker, Tremper Longman III, Joel Green and others for its creative approach to solving the modern problem of the Bible. Among scholars, it has also met with criticism by D. A. Carson, Paul Helm, and G. K. Beale, who claim it abandons the traditional evangelical doctrine of biblical inerrancy. For links to these reviews and Peter Enns's responses to them, as well as his general defense of the books' thesis, see iandibook.com, the official web site of the book. Other reviewers include John Frame.

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