The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism

Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority

Gregory K. Beale

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781433502033
• eBook ISBN: 9781433522093
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Examines recent postmodern efforts to redefine the traditional evangelical view of scriptural authority and counters with sound logic that supports inerrancy.

Due to recent popular challenges to evangelical doctrine, biblical inerrancy is a topic receiving an increasing amount of attention among theologians and other scholars. Here G. K. Beale attempts vigorously and even-handedly to examine the writings of one leading postmodernist, Peter Enns, whose writings challenge biblical authority. In support of inerrancy, Beale presents his own set of challenges to the postmodern suppositions of Enns and others.

How can the Bible be historically inaccurate while still serving as the authoritative word on morality and salvation? Beale concludes that it cannot, and his work will aid all who support biblical inerrancy in defending their position against postmodern attacks. This is an issue that affects the entire body of Christ.

CHAPTER ONE

Is a Traditional Evangelical View of Scripture’s
Authority Compatible with Recent Developments
in Old Testament Studies? Part 1

Below, with minor revisions, is my initial review, “Myth, History, and Inspiration: A Review Article of Inspiration and Incarnation by Peter Enns,”¹ which appeared in JETS 49 (2006): 287–312.

Introduction²

Peter Enns has written a stimulating and yet controversial book on the doctrine of Scripture. Scholars and students alike should be grateful that Enns has boldly ventured to set before his evangelical peers a view of inspiration and hermeneutics that has not traditionally been held by evangelical scholarship.

After his introduction, in chapter 2 Enns discusses the parallels between ancient Near Eastern myths and accounts in the Old Testament. He says that the Old Testament contains what he defines as “myth” (see his definition later below), but, he affirms, this should not have a negative bearing on the Old Testament’s divine inspiration. God accommodates himself to communicate his truth through such mythological biblical accounts.

In chapter 3 Enns discusses what he calls “diversity” in the Old Testament. He believes that the kinds of diversity that he attempts to analyze have posed problems in the past for the doctrine of inerrancy. He asserts that this diversity must be acknowledged, even though it poses tensions for the inspiration of Scripture. This diversity is part of God’s inspired Word.

In chapter 4 Enns shifts to the topic of how the Old Testament is interpreted by New Testament writers. He contends that Second Temple Judaism was not concerned to interpret the Old Testament according to an author’s intention or to interpret it contextually or according to modern standards of “grammatical-historical exegesis.” This hermeneutical context of Judaism must be seen as the socially constructed framework of the New Testament writers’ approach to interpreting the Old Testament, so that they also were not concerned to interpret the Old Testament contextually. Accordingly, they interpreted the Old Testament by a “christotelic hermeneutic,” which means generally that they had a Christ-oriented perspective in understanding the purpose of the Old Testament, including the meaning of specific Old Testament passages. This also means that “the literal (first) reading [of an Old Testament text] will not lead the reader to the christotelic (second) reading.”³

The final chapter attempts to draw out further implications from the earlier chapters for Enns’s understanding of an “incarnational” doctrine of Scripture.

At various points throughout the book, Enns appeals to this incar-national notion, contending that since Christ was fully divine and fully human, then so is Scripture. Accordingly, we need to accept the “diversity” or “messiness” of Scripture, just as we accept all of the aspects of Jesus’ humanity. Also at various points in the book is the warning that modern interpreters should not impose their modern views of history and scientific precision on the ancient text of the Bible. Such a foreign imposition results in seeing problems in the Bible that are really not there.

The origin of Enns’s book and its strength derive from the author’s attempt to wrestle with problems that evangelicals must reflect upon in formulating their view of a doctrine of Scripture.

Enns has attempted to draw out the implications of postmodernism for an evangelical doctrine of Scripture further than most other evangelical scholars to date. He argues that liberal and evangelical approaches to Scripture both have held the same basic presupposition: that one can discern the difference between truth and error by using modern standards of reasoning and modern scientific analysis. He is proposing a paradigm for understanding scriptural inspiration that goes beyond the “liberal vs. conservative” impasse (pp. 14–15). He wants to “contribute to a growing opinion that what is needed is to move beyond both sides by thinking of better ways to account for some of the data, while at the same time having a vibrant, positive view of Scripture as God’s word” (p. 15). This, of course, is a monumental task that Enns has set for himself. Enns says we must go beyond this impasse, and he presents himself as one of the few having the balance or the new synthesis that solves these age-old debates.

The book is designed more for the layperson than the scholar but is apparently written with the latter secondarily in mind. He says his thesis is not novel, but, in reality, the main proposal for which he contends throughout is “novel”: he is trying to produce a synthesis of the findings of mainline liberal scholarship and an evangelical view of Scripture. Many who will judge his attempt a failure would probably wish that he had written a book that goes into much more depth, and even those who agree with him would probably wish for the same thing.

There is much to comment on in his short book. At some points, especially in the first three chapters, Enns is ambiguous, and the reader is left to connect the dots to determine his view. What follows here is an attempt not only to summarize and evaluate his explicit views but also to connect the dots in the way I think Enns does in areas where he is not as explicit. Thus, I quote Enns sometimes at length in order to let readers better assess his views and to try to cut through the ambiguity.

This chapter will focus primarily on the first part of Enns’s book, which deals with Old Testament issues.

Enns’s Incarnational Model for Understanding Biblical Inspiration

In Relation to History and Myth

Perhaps the overarching theme of Enns’s book is his conception of divine accommodation in the process of scriptural inspiration. For Enns, Scripture is very human, which means that God meets his people in a very human way in his Word. Enns repeatedly compares this to Christ’s incarnation: “As Christ is both God and human, so is the Bible” (p. 17; likewise pp. 18, 67, 111, 167–68). It is out of the incarnational analogy that Enns develops his view that “for God to reveal himself means that he accommodates himself” (p. 109; cf. p. 110). Enns is certainly right to underscore that the divine word in Scripture is also a human word. What this means for Enns is that much more “diversity” in the Bible should be recognized by evangelicals than has been typically the case in the past.

In particular, he is concerned that conservatives have not sufficiently recognized ancient Near Eastern (ANE) parallels with the Bible, particularly the parallels with the Babylonian myth of creation and the Sumerian myth of the cataclysmic flood (pp. 26–27). Enns says that “the doctrinal implications of these discoveries have not yet been fully worked out in evangelical theology” (p. 25). For example, he says that if the Old Testament has so much in common with the ancient world and its customs and practices, “in what sense can we speak of it as revelation?” (p. 31). But, as he acknowledges, these discoveries were made in the nineteenth century, and evangelical scholars have been reflecting on their doctrinal implications ever since the early nineteen hundreds.

It is important to remark at this point that (1) some evangelical scholars have seen the presence of similarities to supposed ANE myth due to polemical intentions,⁴ as have some non-evangelical scholars, or to direct repudiation of pagan religious beliefs and practices. (2) Others see the presence of similarities as rising from a reflection of general revelation by both pagan and biblical writers, and only rightly interpreted by the latter.⁵ (3) Still others have attributed purported ANE mythical parallels in the Old Testament to a common reflection of ancient tradition, the sources of which precede both the pagan and biblical writers, and the historicity of which has no independent human verification (like the creation in Genesis 1) but is based ultimately on an earlier, ancient, divinely pristine revelation that became garbled in the pagan context and reliably witnessed to by the scriptural writer.⁶ (4) Yet another view is that revelation did not always counter ANE concepts but often used them in productive ways, though still revised in significant manner by special revelation. For example, ANE concepts may have helped give shape to the theology of sacred space in the building of Israel’s tabernacle and temple, e.g., the eastward orientation, the placement of important cultic objects, the designation of areas of increasing holiness, the rules for access to the Holy Place and the Most Holy Place, etc.⁷

Of course, another option, in contrast to the preceding four views, is that the biblical writers absorbed mythical worldviews unconsciously, reproduced them in their writings, and believed them to be reliable descriptions of the real world and events occurring in the past real world (creation account, flood narrative, etc.) because they were part of their socially constructed reality.⁸ Divine inspiration did not limit such cultural, mythical influence.

Does Enns agree with this latter view, still nevertheless contending that God used myths to convey truth? Does Enns believe that these Old Testament “mythical accounts” do not contain essential historicity, so that he uses the word myth with its normal meaning? The following analysis of Enns will contend that his view, while sometimes consistent with some of the four above views, does not primarily align itself with any of them. He appears to give an affirmative answer to the preceding two questions, though one must work hard at interpreting Enns to come to these conclusions, since, at crucial points in his discussion, he is unclear. It would have been helpful to readers if Enns had acknowledged the above variety of ways that the Old Testament interacts with ANE myth and where precisely he positioned himself with respect to various Old Testament passages.

According to Enns, the ancient peoples around Israel asked questions about their ultimate being and meaning, “so, stories were made up,” especially about the creation (p. 41). The Genesis account of creation “is firmly rooted in the [mythological] worldview of the time” (p. 27); in other words the Genesis passage presupposes and utilizes the mythological creation stories circulating in the ANE (including, presumably, the background of the account about “Adam’s” creation?). The main point, according to Enns, is to show that Yahweh is the true God and not the Babylonian gods (p. 27). The same conclusion is reached with respect to the flood account (pp. 27–29).

Enns likes the use of the word myth to describe these biblical accounts, but how does he define myth precisely? Enns says that not all historians of the ancient Near East use the word myth simply as “shorthand for ‘untrue,’ ‘made-up,’ ‘storybook,’” a position with which he appears to align himself (p. 40). Yet, enigmatically, he goes on to define myth in the ANE as something apparently very close to this. His formal definition of “myth” is as follows: “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?” (p. 50; so likewise p. 40).

Note well that there is no reference to history or actual events in this definition. But then Enns proceeds to affirm, despite his earlier apparent qualification about “made-up” stories, that ANE myths were “stories [that] were made up” (p. 41, my italics) and were composed by a process of “telling stories” (p. 41), and that “the biblical stories” of the “creation and flood must be understood first and foremost in the ancient contexts.” This means, interpreting Enns by Enns, that the biblical stories had “a firm grounding in ancient myth” (p. 56, my italics); to reiterate, with specific reference to the Genesis creation account, he says it “is firmly rooted in the [mythological] worldview of the time” (previous page). So, what is Enns’s view of myth in relation to real events of the past?

In this respect and in connection with some of Enns’s directly preceding statements, he poses a difficult question:

If the ancient Near Eastern stories are myth (defined in this way 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? (p. 41)

He answers this by asking another question:

Are the early stories in the Old Testament to be judged on the basis of standards of modern historical inquiry and scientific precision, things that ancient peoples were not at all aware of? (p. 41)

He answers by saying that it is unlikely that God would have allowed his Word to come to the Israelites according to “modern standards of truth and error so universal that we should expect premodern cultures to have understood them.” Rather, more probably, God’s Word came to them “according to standards they understood” (p. 41), which included mythological standards of the time. Recall once more that part of Enns’s definition of myth includes stories that were made up. He concludes that the latter position is “better suited for solving the problem” of how God accommodated his revelation to his ancient people (p. 41).

Enns ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• DEDICATION
• COPYRIGHT
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CHAPTER FIVE
• CHAPTER SIX
• CHAPTER SEVEN
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX 1
• ADDENDUM TO APPENDIX 1
• APPENDIX 2
• APPENDIX 3
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY