So where have we come from to get to this, the seventh installment on Inspiration and Incarnation? We began with setting the scene. Enns's book comes on the back of the 20th century "Battle for the Bible". Certain pieces of ancient evidence were discovered in the library of King Ashurbanipal in the latter half of the 19th century and were subsequently used by some scholars to dismantle the evangelical doctrine of Scripture. The fundamentalists fought back (which seems to be an important aspect of what constitutes "fundamentalism"), but not in any meaningful way that engaged with the evidence. More of a "la la la I can't hear you la la la" kind of way. Enns, by challenging the assumptions made on both sides of the war, has put himself in No Mans Land as a voice of reason. There is one mediator between conservatives and liberals, the man Peter Enns.
His proposal is a model for thinking about the nature of Scripture that takes it's divine and human aspects seriously, thus the Incarnational Analogy is born. As we must hold the divine and human nature's of Jesus in tension and not diminish either, so it should be with Scripture. Like any analogy, it is not irrefutable or complete, or in mathematical language, it does not represent a 1:1 correspondence. But it is helpful, given the obvious human dimension of Scripture (the dimension Enns is chiefly concerned with in his book).
We glanced over a couple of the pieces of evidence put forward by Enns, and noted the resulting issues that place large question marks over an evangelical doctrine of Scripture. Which brings us to where we are now - looking at how these issues have been handled in the past, and how Enns suggests they should be handled in the present and future. In case you missed the previous six parts, I'll link them here for your convenience:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
"How have these issues been handled in the past?" is the penultimate step before getting to grips with the issues in the present and future. Enns asserts that the aforementioned evidence "caught the church off guard". Pre-evidence, the predominant issues in the exciting world of biblical scholarship were textual - uncovering the original form of these much-copied biblical texts. Post-evidence, there was a shift from text to context, with the dominant question being, "What did these documents mean in their original context?" (As the saying goes, a text without a context is a pretext.)
Scholarly response to the issues raised by this evidence was divided. In one camp were those who insisted that the Bible was basically a purely human book. As Enns notes,
His proposal is a model for thinking about the nature of Scripture that takes it's divine and human aspects seriously, thus the Incarnational Analogy is born. As we must hold the divine and human nature's of Jesus in tension and not diminish either, so it should be with Scripture. Like any analogy, it is not irrefutable or complete, or in mathematical language, it does not represent a 1:1 correspondence. But it is helpful, given the obvious human dimension of Scripture (the dimension Enns is chiefly concerned with in his book).
We glanced over a couple of the pieces of evidence put forward by Enns, and noted the resulting issues that place large question marks over an evangelical doctrine of Scripture. Which brings us to where we are now - looking at how these issues have been handled in the past, and how Enns suggests they should be handled in the present and future. In case you missed the previous six parts, I'll link them here for your convenience:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
"How have these issues been handled in the past?" is the penultimate step before getting to grips with the issues in the present and future. Enns asserts that the aforementioned evidence "caught the church off guard". Pre-evidence, the predominant issues in the exciting world of biblical scholarship were textual - uncovering the original form of these much-copied biblical texts. Post-evidence, there was a shift from text to context, with the dominant question being, "What did these documents mean in their original context?" (As the saying goes, a text without a context is a pretext.)
Scholarly response to the issues raised by this evidence was divided. In one camp were those who insisted that the Bible was basically a purely human book. As Enns notes,
What modern biblical scholarship demonstrated was that the Bible shared many of the standards, concepts and worldviews of its ancient Near Eastern neighbours. When they got down to it, there really wasn't anything about the Bible itself that made it all that special, and this seemed very inconsistent with conventional notions of inspiration and God speaking to us in the Bible today.
In the other camp was the "conservatives", who held fast to their highly-valued doctrines and thus were only prepared to engage with any evidence that supported them, while retreating from any evidence which was seen as threatening. As noted in an earlier post, ironically enough both camps made the same questionable assumption:
The Bible, being the word of God, ought to be historically accurate in all its details (since God would not lie or make errors) and unique in all its own setting (since God's word is revealed, which implies a specific type of uniqueness).
Enns goes on to paint something of a caricature by saying that,
if historical context was everything for liberal scholars, regardless of its implications for Christian doctrine, for conservative scholars doctrine was everything, regardless of the historical evidence that challenged doctrine.
Which leads us back to Enns's original intention for writing this book: to engage with ancient evidence in such a way that it is allowed to shape what we mean by saying the Bible is the word of God. Christians may affirm that the Bible is God's word, but what does that mean? Whether you identify yourself as a Christian or not, what do you think it means to call a text God's word? What should something with this title look like, keeping in mind especially the creation and flood narratives?
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