Inspiration and Incarnation

Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament

Enns, Peter

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781493400102
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

How can an evangelical view of Scripture be reconciled with modern biblical scholarship? In this book Peter Enns, an expert in biblical interpretation, addresses Old Testament phenomena that challenge traditional evangelical perspectives on Scripture. He then suggests a way forward, proposing an incarnational model of biblical inspiration that takes seriously both the divine and the human aspects of Scripture. This tenth anniversary edition has an updated bibliography and includes a substantive postscript that reflects on the reception of the first edition.

1
Getting Our Bearings

What I Hope to Accomplish in This Book

The purpose of this book is to bring an evangelical doctrine of Scripture into conversation with the implications generated by some important themes in modern biblical scholarship—particularly Old Testament scholarship—over the past 150 years. To put it this way is to suggest that such a conversation has not taken place, at least not to the degree that it could have. It is not to suggest, however, that evangelical biblical scholarship has not engaged many of these issues responsibly on an academic level. There is no question that evangelical scholars have made many excellent contributions, for example, in archeological, historical, and textual studies.

In my view, however, what is needed is not simply for evangelicals to work in these areas but to engage the doctrinal implications that work in these areas raises. Without wanting to overstate the matter, I know or hear of a fair number of Christians who conclude that the contemporary state of biblical scholarship makes an evangelical faith unviable. These are the primary readers I envision for this book, those who desire to maintain a vibrant and reverent doctrine of Scripture but who find it difficult to do so because they find familiar and conventional approaches to newer problems to be unhelpful.

On the one hand, I am very eager to affirm that many evangelical instincts are correct and should be maintained, for example, the conviction that the Bible is ultimately from God and that it is God’s gift to the church. Any theories concerning Scripture that do not arise from these fundamental instincts are unacceptable. On the other hand, how the evangelical church fleshes out its doctrine of Scripture will always have somewhat of a provisional quality to it. This is not to say that each generation must disregard the past and start afresh, formulating ever-new doctrines, bowing to all the latest fads. But it is to say that at such time when new evidence comes to light, or old evidence is seen in a new light, we must be willing to engage that evidence and adjust our doctrine accordingly.

Such adjustments do not simply represent recent developments. One need only think of Copernicus (1473–1543), the Polish astronomer who determined that the earth revolved around the sun, a heretical view at the time. The Catholic Church resisted this evidence for many years. (Galileo was imprisoned for it in 1633.) Eventually, however, the previously held “biblical” geocentric view was abandoned by the church. This is just one of many examples that could be given where evidence outside the Bible, in this case scientific evidence, affected how we view the Bible. Or to put it better, the scientific evidence showed us that the worldview of the biblical authors affected what they thought and wrote, and so the worldviews of the biblical authors must be taken into consideration in matters of biblical interpretation and formulating a doctrine of Scripture.

Reassessment of doctrine on the basis of external evidence, therefore, is nothing new. To state it differently, our topic is the age-old question of the relationship between special revelation (the Bible) and general revelation (creation, i.e., everything else). My concern is that, at least on a popular level, a defensive approach to the evidence tends to dominate the evangelical conversation. For recent generations of evangelicals, this tendency has its roots in certain developments that occurred in biblical scholarship during the nineteenth century and made headlines in the so-called modernist/fundamentalist controversies around the turn of the twentieth century (e.g., the Scopes monkey trial). The effects of these developments can still be felt today. Much of the evangelical theological landscape of the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries was dominated by a “battle for the Bible.” The terms are familiar: liberal vs. conservative, modernist vs. fundamentalist, mainline vs. evangelical, progressive vs. traditionalist. Such labels may serve some purpose, but they more often serve to entrench rather than enlighten.

I want to make it clear here at the outset that this book is not intended to solve “Bible difficulties” here and there, nor is it to perpetuate the debate by defending either side of the debate, nor even to find a middle way between them. My aim is somewhat more foundational while at the same time being far less ambitious. I want 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.1 By focusing on three problems raised by the modern study of the Old Testament, my hope is to suggest ways in which our conversation can be shifted somewhat, so that what are often perceived as problems with the Old Testament are put into a different perspective. To put it another way, my aim is to allow the collective evidence to affect not just how we understand a biblical passage or story here and there within the parameters of earlier doctrinal formulations. Rather, I want to move beyond that by allowing the evidence to affect how we think about what Scripture as a whole is.

The end result, I truly hope, will be to provide a theological paradigm for people who know instinctively that the Bible is God’s word but for whom reading the Bible has already become a serious theological problem—perhaps even a crisis. I have come across many Christians for whom this clash between the biblical world and the modern world is a very real issue. The Bible is central to their lives, but sometimes evangelical defenses of the Bible are exercises in special pleading, attempts to hold on to comfortable ideas 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 Bibles but who also feel the weight of certain kinds of evidence.

With this in mind, one of the central themes of this book is this:

The problems many of us feel regarding the Bible may have less to do with the Bible itself and more to do with our own preconceptions.

I have found again and again that listening to how the Bible itself behaves and suspending preconceived notions (as much as that is possible) about how we think the Bible ought to behave is refreshing, creative, exciting, and spiritually rewarding.

To work through this process, I want to focus on three issues that have not been handled well within evangelicalism (at least in America). These three issues are not based on fanciful, trendy theories but on evidence that comes from within the Bible itself as well as from the world surrounding the Bible.

1. The Old Testament and other literature from the ancient world: Why does the Bible in places look a lot like the literature of Israel’s ancient neighbors? Is the Old Testament really that unique? Does it not just reflect the ancient world in which it was produced? If the Bible is the word of God, why does it fit so nicely in the ancient world?
2. Theological diversity in the Old Testament: Why do different parts of the Old Testament say different things about the same thing? It really seems as if there are contradictions, or at least large differences of opinion, in the Old Testament.
3. The way in which the New Testament authors handle the Old Testament: Why do the New Testament authors handle the Old Testament in such odd ways? It looks like they just take the Old Testament passages out of context.

Each of these three points has its own chapter in this book. To those perhaps more familiar with biblical studies, the importance of these three issues will be immediately recognizable. The latter two problems are generated directly by the Bible itself. And for at least the first and last items, older approaches to the Bible do not always take the extrabiblical evidence into account. This is partly the case because these extrabiblical evidences have made their presence felt only over the past 150 years or so; older approaches to understanding the Bible were already well established before this evidence came to light.

Why these three issues? I could have brought others into the discussion or arranged the evidence in different ways, but I choose these three for what I think is a very good reason. Each of these issues, in its own way, presents challenges to traditional, evangelical views about Scripture.

The first issue deals with the Bible’s uniqueness. It is a common expectation, often implicit, that for the Bible to be God’s word, it should be unique, that is, it should not bear striking similarities to the literature of other ancient peoples.

The second concerns the Bible’s integrity, its trustworthiness. It is a common expectation that the Bible be unified in its outlook, be free of diverse views, if we are being asked to trust it as God’s word (does not God have just one opinion on things?).

The third deals with the Bible’s interpretation. To modern readers, the New Testament authors sometimes seem to interpret the Old Testament in fanciful ways, seemingly unconcerned about the meaning of the Old Testament in its original context. This seems to make the whole issue of Old Testament interpretation highly subjective. Should this have an effect on how Christians today handle the Old Testament?

Regardless of how we organize the data, the issue before us is not how we handle this verse or this issue, one at a time. Rather, what needs to happen is that we take a step back from the details and allow these issues to challenge us on a more fundamental level. What is needed is a way of thinking about Scripture where these kinds of issues are addressed from a very different perspective—where these kinds of problems cease being problems and become windows that open up new ways of understanding. It is not enough simply to say that the Bible is the word of God or that it is inspired or to apply some other label. The issue is how these descriptions of the Bible bear fruit when we touch down in one part of the Bible or another. How does the study of Scripture in the contemporary world affect how we flesh out descriptions such as “word of God” or “inspired”?

A Way toward Addressing the Problem: The Incarnational Analogy

I do not want to suggest that difficult problems have simple solutions. What I want to offer, instead, is a proper starting point for discussing these problems, one that, if allowed to run its course, will reorient us to see these problems in a better light. This starting point can be traced back to the early centuries of the church and can be applied to modern issues with considerable profit. 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. Christians confess that Jesus is both God and human at the same time. He is not half God and half human. He is not sometimes one and other times the other. He is not essentially one and only apparently the other. Rather, one of the central doctrines of the Christian faith, worked out as far back as the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, is that Jesus is 100 percent God and 100 percent human—at the same time.

This way of thinking of Christ is analogous to thinking about the Bible. In the same way that Jesus is—must be—both God and human, the Bible is also a divine and human book. Although Jesus was “God with us,” he still 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” (Heb. 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 not an abstract, otherworldly book dropped out of heaven. It was connected to and therefore spoke to those ancient cultures. The encultured qualities of the Bible, therefore, are not extra elements that we can discard to get to the real point, the timeless truths. Rather, precisely because Christianity is a historical religion, God’s word reflects the various historical moments in which Scripture was written. God acted and spoke in history. As we learn more and more about that history, we must gladly address the implications of that history for how we view the Bible, that is, what we should expect from it.

This way of thinking about the Bible is referred to differently by different theologians. The term I prefer is incarnational analogy: Christ’s incarnation is analogous to Scripture’s “incarnation.” As with any analogy, one could highlight places where the analogy does not quite fit. Moreover, we must reckon with the incarnation of Christ itself being mysterious; one could rightly question the merit of using an ultimately unexplainable entity to explain something else! That being said, my starting point is the orthodox Christian confession, however mysterious it is, that Jesus of Nazareth is the God-man. The long-standing identification be...