Peter Enns, The Bible and its Humanity 2
By John Hooper
Inerrancy
Since Peter Enns believes much of the Genesis narrative to be myth, it will not come as a surprise that he has a problem with inerrancy. He once described himself as a ‘progressive inerrantist’ (p. ix). Apparently, that meant he was able to say that the Bible contains factual errors while at the same time claiming it to be inerrant. Now he has moved on to prefer, with greater honesty, the term “non-inerrantist” and represents this view in a book called Five Views in Biblical Inerrancy. Five views! Evangelicalism must be awash with capitulation to 19th century liberalism.
Enns is quite frank in claiming there to be “inherent ambiguities,” “tensions,” and “inconsistencies” in the Bible and he sees these as forming part of the Bible’s “diversity.” They are to be viewed positively, “respected” and “embraced.” They exemplify further what he sees as the humanity of Scripture. He claims, “the Bible is diverse because life is. And God does not shy away from it” (p. 72). “What the diversity of the Bible tells us is that there is no superficial unity to the Bible. Portions of the Bible are in tension with each other….” (p. 96). To give just one example of this, when Enns reads the two records of the Ten Commandments, in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, and finds there are “noticeable differences in the wording” (p. 75), his response is to suggest that “God seems to be perfectly willing to allow his law to be adjusted over time.” He goes on to say, “God Himself understands … that even the law has a situational dimension” (p. 77), and we can see where he is going with that. Enns contends, “To accept the diversity of the Old Testament is not to ‘cave in to liberalism,’ nor is it to seek after novelty,” (p. 95) but it is difficult to know what else it can be.
When asked if there are contradictions in the Bible, Enns replies that there are not, which might surprise us, but once again we find him defining a word to suit himself: “What are referred to as ‘contradictions’ are only so if one assumes that the purpose of inspiration (however it works) is to align or override the down-to-earth diverse voices we actually encounter in the Bible.”1 Again, he says, “The ‘contradictions’ in the Bible aren’t contradictions, for the Bible does not reflect the ‘perfectly consistent mind of God,’ but the diversity of time and place of the writers.”2
Again and again we find in Enns the Bible being stripped of its divinity, reduced to little more than a work of human story-telling. But “the incarnational analogy” requires affirmation that Scripture is fully divine as well as fully human. How, then, is Enns able to affirm the Bible as fully divine if it contains tensions, inconsistencies and contradictions? He affirms strongly his belief that the Bible is the Word of God (e.g., p. 96). He says, “the Bible is God’s word in written form; Christ is God’s Word in human form” (p. 98). But if God’s Word in written form contains myths and inconsistencies, what does that say about God’s Word in human form? And what does it say of the latter’s divinity? I cannot put it better than Guy Prentiss Waters does:
Enns’ formulation of the incarnational analogy is incapable of preventing the legitimate attribution of error to the biblical text. It is equally incapable of preventing the legitimate attribution of error to the man Christ Jesus.3
If this represents “the best in biblical scholarship,” as Enns claims on his website,4 then may we be delivered from it. There is so much more that could be said, but we must draw to a close.
Enns and inspiration
One might be forgiven for having great difficulty in understanding how Enns has arrived at this point, having started with the Saviour’s incarnation. He has taken us far from anywhere that Warfield and Gaussen et al. could have anticipated. But when men use Scripture merely as a starting point or springboard there is no knowing where their landing ground will be. Any connection with the original launchpad can be very tenuous as men go off in the direction they want to take.
So, let’s go back to where Enns began. Remember what he said – “The starting point for our discussion is the following: as Christ is both God and human, so is the Bible” (p. 5). Were we to deny the Bible its humanity, or regard it as something that is “only apparent, to be explained away,” we would, he says, be guilty of “scriptural Docetism,” a reference to an ancient heresy stating that Christ only appeared to be human. But is that the heresy we are facing today? Who are the Scriptural Docetics he is warning us against? It seems to me that the heresy of our day is not a denial of the humanity of Scripture but an effective denial of the divinity of Scripture, reducing it to little more than a story book.
It is difficult to understand how Enns can continue to claim adherence to any kind of doctrine of inspiration, but he makes the attempt. He says, “a firm grounding in ancient myth does not make Genesis less inspired…. [S]uch rootedness in the culture of the time is precisely what it means for God to speak to his people” (p. 44). But this is not divine inspiration as taught by the Bible itself.
The Bible’s doctrine of inspiration
Unlike His creation of the universe, God used secondary means for the producing of Scripture. He did not use angels, nor specially created sinless human beings, but men like ourselves, fallen, sinful and fallible. When Peter writes, “No prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation,” the meaning is that the words of Scripture are not an expression of the opinion or will of man. He goes on to say this expressly in the next verse: “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man” (2 Peter 1:20-21).
Next, coming to the positive aspect of inspiration, Peter tells us, “Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (v. 21). When he says they were “holy” men, this is not to suggest that those men were without sin, but that they were especially set apart by God and prepared by Him for the work He had ordained for them to do. They were chosen and called men, such as Moses, David, Matthew and Paul, and they wrote “as they were moved [i.e., carried, driven along, just as a sailing ship is carried along by the wind] by the Holy Ghost.” Thus, they wrote not according to “the will of man” – their own will, that is – but of God, for it is the Holy Ghost alone who is the author of Scripture.
Thus, a distinction can and must be made between the divine author and the human writer. Cornelis Van Dam has expressed it perfectly when he writes, “There is one divine author working through the human writer.”5 Thus, Scripture is the Word of God. “All scripture is given by inspiration of God….” (2 Timothy 3:16). We are very familiar with this verse, so much so that we can become careless in the way we think of it and speak of it. Sometimes, in our rather casual way of expression, we might suggest that it was the writers who were inspired, or that the general idea of their message was inspired, but that that is not what the text is saying. It is the Scripture itself that is inspired. The very words the human writers spoke and wrote were breathed out by God Himself. This is the Bible’s own testimony concerning itself, not only here but elsewhere too. We could look at many passages to demonstrate this but here is just one example. God said to Isaiah, as also to Moses and Jeremiah, “I have put my words in thy mouth” (Isaiah 51:16; Deuteronomy 18:18; Jeremiah 1:9).
Inspiration is not an arrangement of cooperation between God and man whereby some words of Scripture are divine and some are human, leaving us to sort out which is which. Neither can we attribute individual words partially to God and partially to men. The Bible is not partly divine and partly human. The miracle of Scripture is that it is God’s Word and for that reason we bow before its authority, treasure it and take care never to adopt a terminology that might detract from this exalted view.
A right view of the Bible’s “humanity”
Out of a concern to maintain a high view of Scripture, the process of inspiration has sometimes been caricatured as one of dictation, the human writers being little more than stenographers but, as Gordon H. Clark has pointed out, we need to consider the involvement of the omnipotence and wisdom of God. Then, he says, “a very different picture emerges.”6 Taking Moses as an example of a Biblical writer, Clark notes that God “so controlled events that Moses was born at a given date, placed in the water to save him from an early death, found by Pharaoh’s daughter, given the best Egyptian education possible, driven into the wilderness to learn patience, and in every detail so prepared by heredity and environment that when the time came, Moses’ mentality and literary style were instruments precisely fitted to speak God’s words”.7
How is it that the Scriptures were written by men, each with their own distinctive personalities, writing styles and cultural backgrounds so perfectly suited to God’s purpose? Is it the case that God looked around in search of men best qualified to write Scripture for Him? No, that is to diminish God. We are rather to think in terms of God being active in His sovereign predestination to eternally ordain, raise up and providentially prepare each human instrument to pen the part or parts of the Bible that He had assigned for him. It is not the case that God looked for a poet to write the psalms and found David, or for a herdsman to write a book of prophecy and found Amos, or for a converted Pharisee to write New Testament letters and found Paul. Each one was ordained by God in His eternal counsel to be born just at the right time in history and just in the right place and circumstances, to be raised, educated, fashioned and perfectly equipped with the gifts, personality and spiritual heart to write what He had eternally decreed him to write. Those gifts, personalities and, yes, cultural characteristics too, shine through in their writing.
It might be quite legitimate to speak of this as the “human dimension” of inspiration, but it is probably unwise to go so far as to speak of the “humanity of Scripture.” We need to hold in our minds that this “human dimension” too is God’s work because the writers were “God’s men, shaped and formed by the hands of the Almighty.”8 Remember God’s rebuke to Moses: “Who hath made man’s mouth? … have not I the LORD?” (Exodus 4:11).
(Concluded)
1. https://thebiblefornormalpeople.com/there-are-no-contradictions-in-the-bible/
2. Ibid.
3. Waters, p. 295.
4. https://thebiblefornormalpeople.com/about-b4np/
5. Cornelis Van Dam, In the Beginning: Listening to Genesis 1 and 2; (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Reformation Heritage Books, 2021), p. 20.
6. Gordon H. Clark, God’s Hammer: The Bible and Its Critics; (Jefferson, Maryland: The Trinity Foundation, 1982), p. 10.
7. Ibid.
8. Herman C. Hanko, The Battle for the Bible; (Lansing Illinois: Peace Protestant Reformed Church, 1993), p. 6.