"Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament" by Peter Enns, part 1

I follow a few theology blogs, and ran across reviews of this book through those blogs.  Because the blogs I follow often tend toward the more liberal side of theology, I was expecting this book to have much the same tone as those blogs.  That is, I was expecting a good deal of irritation with "those crazy evangelical Christians" and plenty of doubt cast here and there through which I'd have to wade.

I was pleasantly surprised.

That's putting it lightly, actually.  This book changed my life, or at least changed the way I think about the nature of terms like "inspiration."  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Let me start at the beginning...

The problem that Enns is addressing is the perception that the Bible needs to be historically accurate in every last detail as well as perfectly internally consistent in order to be the inspired Word of God.  With the advancement of historical knowledge about ancient societies over the past century, this belief has come under serious attack.  Christians often find themselves having to choose between clinging to a high view of Scripture (scripture as the inspired, inerrant word of God) and a low view of Scripture where the Bible is nothing but a flawed human document that talks about God.  Enns offers a middle road.

Enns' thesis:
Enns argues for an "incarnational analogy."  That is, just as Christ was both fully human and fully divine, so too is Scripture both fully inspired and fully a part of the historical contexts from which and to which it came. Although he does reference John 1:1 ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"), Enns does not attempt to scripturally (I may have just made that word up) prove his thesis.  Rather he simply uses the incarnation of Jesus himself as an analogy for what he sees as the incarnation of the Word.  He writes that just as "Christ is both God and human, so is the Bible." (Enns, 17)  The Bible is connected to and spoke to the cultures from which it came.  For Enns, "the human dimension of Scripture is essential to its being Scripture." (20)

And so, Enns covers three separate but broadly related topics falling under the umbrella of Old Testament (OT) studies.

Topic #1: "The OT and Ancient Near Eastern Literature"

One thing that Enns really likes to do is point out incorrect assumptions that we evangelical Christians (or sometimes even liberal theologians) tend to bring to our reading of the OT.  In this chapter, Enns addresses the fact that the first 11 chapters of Genesis are very similar to other ancient Near Eastern myths, and in fact the Genesis stories are most likely much younger than other accounts of the prehistoric past.  I won't go into the nitty gritty here, but if you find yourself reading this and saying, "Oh my, Marilee, you crazy liberal," please read the book.  He goes through in pretty great detail his reasons for coming to the conclusions he does, and if you still disagree or agree or whatever I would love to have that conversation with you (and I'm not even kidding - you may have information that he's omitting of which I am entirely unaware - this is pretty much my first foray into this subject matter).  In any case, back to that first assumption he points out:

Since OT literature looks like other ancient sources, it must be less inspired.

First, Enns makes a careful definition of the term "myth."  He defines it as "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?" (40)  When the word "myth" is thrown around, it usually carries connotations of being made-up or from a storybook.  To think of myths in this way, though, is to impose modern sensibilities on the past.  In regard to that assumption, he replies:

Is it not likely that God would have allowed his word to come to the ancient Israelites according to standards they understood, or are modern standards of truth and error so universal that we should expect premodern cultures to have understood them?" (41)

He also points out a second assumption:

Revelation is "thoroughly distinct from the surrounding culture." (42)

Ironically enough, as Enns argues, both sides of the debate hold the above assumption.  In the case of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, conservatives remove the scripture and thus revelation from its historical context, arguing that each story must be entirely accurate in all of its historical detail. Meanwhile, liberals take away the inspired nature of Scripture, arguing that the Bible is just like every other culture's founding myths.  Enns writes that "what needs to be called into question is the assumption that both sides of the argument are making, namely, that the situated/enculturated nature of the Bible poses a problem to the definition of divine revelation." (43)

Enns thus proposes two assumptions of his own to replace the above:

1) extrabiblical evidence is important in order to understand Scripture.  

2) the Spirit leads us toward the truth - we don't simply get plopped down right in the middle of it. 

 Genesis, according to Enns, is set apart from other sources by its claims about God: "What makes Genesis different from its ancient Near Eastern counterparts is that it begins to make the point to Abraham and his seed that the God they are bound to, the God who called them into existence, is different from the gods around them." (53)  In other words, God met the Israelites where they were, using their cultural beliefs and assumptions.  "And if God was willing and ready to adopt an ancient way of thinking, we truly hold a very low view of Scripture indeed if we make that into a point of embarrassment." (56)

Enns closes the chapter by making the argument that the Bible is historiography, and as such is not objective.  He argues there is no such thing as objective history; even God has an "agenda."  On a personal note, this portion of the chapter made me uneasy as a historian - although I am well aware of the human impossibility of objectivity when writing history, objectivity is what I strive toward.  I suppose I always assumed God had objectivity mastered, since He's perfect and all that.  So, I need to think through this portion of Enns' argument a bit more.

At this point I am going to break - I will talk about the second and third topics in another post (or maybe two).  I had hoped to cover it all in one, but I quickly realized there is way too much material to gloss over.  Sorry about that...