Peter Enns, The Bible and its Humanity 1
By John Hooper
It has often been said that the process God used to bring the Bible into being has given it two dimensions – divine and human. Hence, good men have not only spoken of the divinity of Scripture but also of its humanity. The Swiss Reformed theologian Louis Gaussen, a staunch defender of verbal, plenary inspiration, felt it necessary to stress this aspect: “In Scripture all the words are man’s; as there, too, all the words are God’s.”1 B.B. Warfield wrote that the Bible is “a divine-human book, in which every word is at once divine and human.”2
Some have gone further to draw a parallel or analogy between Scripture and the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. Not only does Christ possess both divine and human natures in one person, but both Christ and Scripture are the Word of God, further strengthening the case for the analogy. Orthodox men like Warfield, Herman Bavinck and Abraham Kuyper have used it. Moving into the nineteenth century, René Pache (1904-1979) wrote, “by the incarnation Christ is at once perfect God (John 1:1, 14; 20:28; Romans 9:5) and perfect man (Hebrews 2:14,17). The Scriptures also, by the miracle of inspiration, are at the same time a divine word and a human word.”3 He quotes from Adolphe Monod and Louis Gaussen to support his case. Gaussen, for example, wrote the following:
The dogma of inspiration is like that of incarnation … Do not say then, “If Jesus Christ is God, how is it that He is man.” Or “If Jesus Christ is a man, how is He God?” And do not say either: “If the Scriptures are the Word of God, how are they the word of man?” Or “If the Scriptures are the word of man, how are they the Word of God?” No, let us simply read and study, believe, and adore!4
Notice that Gaussen was happy to bring together the doctrines of inspiration and incarnation and stress their resemblance. This is what is sometimes called the incarnational analogy. But Warfield was cautious. He noted:
But the analogy with our Lord’s divine-human personality may easily be pressed beyond reason. There is no hypostatic union between the divine and human in Scripture; we cannot parallel the ‘inscripturation’ of the Holy Spirit and the incarnation of the Son of God.5
Yes, older writers have been prepared to recognise a parallel of sorts, but they were careful, particularly Warfield. According to him, the analogy “amounts to no more than that in both cases divine and human factors are involved, though very differently.”6
But what happens when caution is thrown to the wind? What happens when the incarnational analogy is taken too far and given centre place in one’s understanding of the character of the Bible?
The book Incarnation and Inspiration
Many of us will have some familiarity with Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, USA. It is the seminary established in 1929, largely under the faithful leadership of J. Gresham Machen, in response to the liberal direction pursued by Princeton Theological Seminary. From 1994 to 2008 the Professor of Old Testament at Westminster was a man called Peter Enns. Enns had already been in post for over 10 years when, in 2005, he wrote a book on Scripture and published it under the title Incarnation and Inspiration. Early on he writes, “The starting point for our discussion is the following: as Christ is both God and human, so is the Bible. In other words, we are to think of the Bible analogously to how Christians think about Jesus…. In the same way that Jesus is – must be – both God and human, the Bible is also a divine and human book” (page 5).7 So, while older writers recognised an analogy of sorts and were prepared to leave it there, simply reading, studying, believing, and adoring, Enns uses it as a springboard, or “starting point,” – an approach that ought always to make us wary of what is coming – from which to launch his radical ideas. Notice Enns’ use of the phrase “in the same way….” This already marks a departure from the caution of those older writers. Where does Enns take us from here?
It is often difficult to pin Enns down as he raises questions without directly providing answers. As G.K. Beale has noted, “the reader is left to connect the dots to determine his view.”8 It is as though Enns’ aim is to challenge the old received truths and sow seeds of doubt in the minds of his readers. He covers a lot of ground and I cannot hope to respond to all of it in one article. Guy Prentiss Waters has read much more of Enns than I have done and has written an excellent chapter in response.9 G.K. Beale has written a book.10 At best, all I am able to do is scratch the surface of just some of Enns’ arguments, but hopefully enough to give you a good and fair idea of his views.
Influence
During the time that he was at Westminster, Peter Enns had ample opportunity to teach his developing views to students. They will now be preaching from pulpits across the USA and beyond. In his preface to the second edition of Inspiration and Incarnation Enns tells us that the book “has been used as an assigned text in many colleges and seminaries and used in churches” (page x). This gives us some idea of how widely spread his views are being disseminated.
Enns left Westminster in 2008 after three years of internal debate concerning his book. Since then he has written more, notably in The Bible Tells Me So (2014) and How the Bible Actually Works (2019). He is a prolific author having also written commentaries and a series of books for children under the general title of Telling God’s Story. Other titles reveal something of his on-going agenda:
- Telling God’s Story: a parent’s guide to teaching the Bible (2010)
- The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins (2012)
- Genesis for Normal People: A Guide to the Most Controversial, Misunderstood, and Abused Book of the Bible (2019)
- Exodus for Normal People: A Guide to the Story—and History—of the Second Book of the Bible (The Bible for Normal People) (2021)
One only has to look on Enns’ website to see the following he receives. He is at the centre of a wholesale revisionist approach to the doctrine of Scripture.
The battle for the Bible
We are familiar with the battles fought between liberals and conservatives since the mid-nineteenth century, but Enns tries to take a step back from all of that. He wants us “to move beyond the impasse of the liberal/conservative debates of the last few generations” (page 37); to rise above the fray and be guided simply by the “evidence” and the “data” provided by extrabiblical sources, especially by the science of archaeology.
But Scripture teaches us that there will always be a battle, a fight, and it is a good fight (1 Timothy 6:12; 2 Timothy 4:7), as the founders of the Bible League recognised. Enns wants to bring “the battle for the Bible” to an end, but there will always be a battle, because there will always be a very active enemy striving to do mischief and undermine the high status and doctrine of the Word of God. It strikes me that Enns is very much a part of that on-going battle, and that he represents a new flank opened up for us to engage.
And then there is the whole issue of extrabiblical sources, among which are those derived from archaeology. It is fair to say that the great burst of archaeological activity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought to light a huge amount of material of interest to the student of the Bible. But with it came responsibility. When we bring information from external sources to the Bible we are bringing it to a book that is unlike any other book. It is the inspired revelation of God to His people. The Old Testament is not to be approached as a human record of the history of an ancient Near Eastern people, but as God’s own record of the history of redemption. This careful, respectful, spiritual approach has not always been adopted, with the result that archaeology itself has become embroiled in the battle for the Bible.
So, what is Enns saying?
The Bible and culture
To be clear, Peter Enns is not claiming that there is some kind of hypostatic union between the divine and human in Scripture as there is in Christ. Actually, he has very little to say about the incarnation itself or the humanity of Christ incarnate. He takes us down a different route altogether, but it is a strangely familiar one. Concerning the humanity of Christ, Enns says that He completely assumed the cultural trappings of the world in which he lived. In fact, this is what is implied in “God with us.” Perhaps this is part of what the author of Hebrews had in mind when he said that Christ was “made like them, fully human in every way” (Hebrews 2:17). Jesus was a first century Jew. The languages of the time (Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic) were his languages. Their customs were his customs. He fit, he belonged, he was one of them. So too the Bible. It belonged in the ancient worlds that produced it…. It was connected to and therefore spoke to those ancient cultures.” (page 5)11
The implication Enns has drawn from the name Emmanuel, “God with us,” is staggering. But culture, and what Enns sees as its influence on the writers of Scripture, occupies a substantial place in his thinking, and he believes it should in ours too. It is his contention that our interpretation of the Bible should be guided by its cultural setting. The Bible, he claims, is “encultured” (page 5); “The Bible is not unique to its environment” (page 8). “What the Bible is must be understood in light of the cultural context in which it was given” (page 30). Enns recognises, and we will too, that there is nothing new in this (page 44). For the last 150 years liberals have been telling us that the Bible is a culturally conditioned human production. What is new is that Enns and his followers claim to be evangelicals.
Also new is Enns’ use of the so-called “incarnational analogy” to give legitimacy to his argument. He is saying that the human writers of the Bible were so influenced by their cultural context as to produce works that were not unique but shared a great deal in common with other writings of their day. Many of these writings, largely in the ancient Akkadian language of Babylon and Assyria, came to light in the archaeological finds of the nineteenth century. Enns notes, “They told stories that had not been read for over two thousand years…. It is not an overstatement to say that how people viewed the Bible would never be the same again” (page 13). This last comment is undoubtedly true, but the shift in attitude, even among professing evangelical Christians, has been toward a view of the Bible as a less divine and more human, more fallible, less authoritative book.
That is not, of course, what Peter Enns means by his comment. He sees the discovery of ancient extrabiblical evidence as a great advance by which “the Spirit leads the church to truth,” prior to which her understanding of Scripture was “provisional and incomplete” (page 38; Enns’ emphasis). The Akkadian texts are to be seen as “shedding light on the Old Testament” (page 16), as though for the two thousand or so years those texts lay undiscovered, the Old Testament was shrouded in incomprehensible darkness, or at least liable to misunderstanding. In contrast, with 150 years of accumulated extrabiblical material available to us, no generation has been so blessed with opportunity to gain a better grasp of God’s Word than our own. However, if the fruit of that accumulation is a grasp of Scripture such as we find in Inspiration and Incarnation, it is little wonder that the church is at a low ebb. Future discoveries may reveal that our understanding too is woefully deficient. It is never possible for the church to be sure that she comprehends the Bible correctly because the truth may always lie buried in the sand.
Old Testament “stories”
We are being asked to “acknowledge that the Genesis story is firmly rooted in the worldview of its time” (page. 16). So let’s take a look at that worldview and a few examples of the kind of extrabiblical evidence Enns uses. First, there is the Enuma Elish Babylonian creation myth which, while in many ways is very different from Genesis 1, shares some similarities. Enns concludes, “Whether or not the author of Genesis was familiar with … Enuma Elish, he was certainly working within a similar conceptual world … The Genesis account must be understood in its ancient context….” (page 16).
Secondly, Enns refers to two ancient Babylonian “flood stories,” the Atrahasis text and the better known Gilgamesh story, and notes that these “parallel Genesis” (page 17). His concern is that we should consider “how the Akkadian evidence influences our understanding of the historical nature of the biblical story” (page 19). Do you see what Enns is suggesting? By pointing out similarities between Genesis and older non-biblical Near Eastern flood stories, he is questioning the historicity of the Biblical record. Are they not all “stories”? He says, “The problem raised by these Akkadian texts is whether the biblical stories are historical” (page 29).
Thirdly, there is the Code of Hammurabi, the legal systemof a Babylonian king who ruled in the eighteenth-century BC. In this, Enns finds parallels with the laws of Old Testament Israel, even making those laws “look somewhat commonplace” in comparison. He tells us, “the biblical story” of God revealing His laws to Moses on Mount Sinai “occurred centuries after Hammurabi” (page 20-22). He goes on to ask, “What can we say about the uniqueness of the Bible when, in so many areas, it bears striking similarities to the beliefs and practices of the other nations?” (page 22). Enns also uses the Hittite suzerainty treaties and several other ancient texts to the same ends.
And so we come to the crucial question, “how can we say logically that the biblical stories are true and the Akkadian stories are false when they both look so very much alike?” (page 29). Of course, Enns is not the first to notice these similarities, but he says very little about the differences. Again, he is not the first to do this. Writing about resemblances between the biblical and Babylonian creation accounts, Merrill Unger wrote in 1954, “Although these similarities are genuine, they are commonly exaggerated and erroneous conclusions are frequently drawn from them”.12 He went on, “The Genesis account is not only the purest, but everywhere bears the unmistakable impress of divine inspiration when compared with the extravagances and corruptions of other accounts. The biblical narrative, we may conclude, represents the original form these traditions must have assumed.”13
Unger also noted “numerous similarities” between the Babylonian flood story and Genesis, but the differences are “much more significant and fundamental … Even where the parallels are most striking, the radical underlying differences of theology, morality, and philosophy of religion remain the salient features beside which the resemblances … are quite superficial.”14 It was Unger’s assessment that the theology, morality and philosophy of the two accounts are “in diametrical contrast.”15 Again, it is the biblical narrative, revealed and written by divine inspiration, that provides the original record.
But Enns views the biblical narrative as something much less than inspired revelation:-
God reveals. The biblical writers interpret God’s revelation. Those interpretations eventually become the Bible. The fact that different writers are interpreting God’s revelation at different times, for different reasons, and for different circumstances accounts for why the Bible contains diverse and contradictory points of view.16
In this one paragraph the entire evangelical doctrine of Scripture is dismantled.
Myth?
Enns regards the myth-history distinction as “a modern invention.” He says, “Taking the extrabiblical evidence into account, I question how much value there is in posing the choice of Genesis as either myth or history” (page 38). He sees no reason why God would not use what we call “myth” to convey truth to the Israelites of the Old Testament, though he does admit to a problem. The term “myth” carries baggage that prejudices from the outset any discussion. His response is to draw up his own definition:
Myth is 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? (page 29)
This avoids using what is surely a key word in the definition of myth, the word fictitious. My dictionary tells me that myth is “a purely fictitious narrative….”17 It strikes me that Enns has given us an example of postmodernism, in which words only mean what we want them to mean.18
In the absence of modern science, ancient peoples made up stories to address fundamental questions such as how life began, and Enns thinks that “this leads to a big problem for Christians today and their Bible.” The sub-title of his book is Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, but it may be that many of us did not realise there was a problem! The problem, as Enns’ sees it, is this:
If the ancient Near Eastern stories are myth (defined … as prescientific stories of origins), and since the biblical stories are similar enough to these stories to invite comparison, does this indicate that myth is the proper category for understanding Genesis? Before the discovery of the Akkadian stories, one could quite safely steer clear of such a question, but this is no longer the case. (page 30)
Enns’ viewpoint is that the Bible was written in a culture of storytelling and it is only by looking through this lens that the narratives of the Old Testament can be properly understood, i.e., as stories suited to the culture of their times. He asks, “Is it not likely that God would have allowed his word to come to the ancient Israelites according to standards they understood” rather than the modern standards of our own culture? (page 30 – original emphasis). This is what Enns means by the human dimension of Scripture. Its humanity gives it the marks and characteristics of the culture to which it was connected, by way of its human writers. Therefore, we should not be judging “the early stories in the Old Testament … on the basis of standards of modern historical enquiry and scientific precision” (ibid.). We should not impose upon the Bible our modern, scientific worldview by, for example, asking questions about the nature of the creation days, or the extent of the flood, but understand it “in light of the cultural context in which it was given” (ibid.). Take careful note: cultural context allegedly provides light for our understanding of sacred Scripture.
In summary, then, Enns sees the norm for the heathen nations of the ancient Near East as also being the norm for Israel, the people of God. They all lived at a time when everything was to be explained by myth.
To be concluded
1 Louis Gaussen, The Plenary Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures;(London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1888), p. 31.
2 Quoted by Guy Prentiss Waters, For the Mouth of the Lord has Spoken; (Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus Publications, 2020), p. 77.
3 René Pache, The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture; (Salem, Wisconsin: Sheffield Publishing Company, reissued 1992), p. 40.
4 Quoted in René Pache, p. 41-42.
5 Quoted by Guy Prentiss Waters, p. 276.
6 Ibid.
7 Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation; (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015, 2nd ed.), p. 5. Further quotations from this book will be identified simply as page numbers in the text.
8 G. K. Beale, The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism; (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2008), p. 27.
9 Guy Prentiss Waters, For the Mouth of the Lord has Spoken; (Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus, 2020), p. 271-305.
10 See note 8.
11 Enns’ emphasis. His Biblical quotations are taken from the NIV.
12 Merrill Unger, Archaeology and the Old Testament; (London: Pickering & Inglis, 1954), p. 31.
13 Ibid. p. 37 (emphasis Unger’s).
14 Ibid. p. 65-66.
15 Ibid. p. 66-68.
16 https://thebiblefornormalpeople.com/contradictions-biblical-writers-interpreted/
17 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 2; (London: Book Club Associates, 1983), p. 1381.
18 It was Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass who said, “When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”