The Inspiration And Interpretation Of God’s Word, With Special Reference To Peter Enns (Part I): Inspiration And Its Implications

By James W. Scott

[James W. Scott is Managing Editor of New Horizons in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and Publications Coordinator for the Committee on Christian Education of the OPC.]

This article sets forth the biblical doctrine of inspiration and some important implications of that doctrine for the interpretation of Scripture, and (in Part II) illustrates how these insights help us to understand some difficult passages of Scripture. Along the way, views advanced by Peter Enns (and others), most notably in his book Inspiration and Incarnation, will be criticized for being at variance with the biblical doctrine.[1] However, while his views deserve this attention, coming as they do from a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary, traditionally a bastion of uncompromisingly conservative Reformed scholarship,[2] it should be noted that there are many other more or less conservative scholars whose approach to Scripture could also be criticized for being inconsistent with the doctrine of inspiration.[3] Others have offered extensive and useful criticism of Enns’s arguments, but they have generally failed to get to the heart of the theological problem, perhaps because it is endemic in modern biblical studies.[4]

Enns’s basic contention is that inspiration is analogous to incarnation, from which he infers that Scripture, like Christ, must be both fully divine and fully human. Focusing on the human element in Scripture, Enns explains that God, in order to communicate effectively with ancient peoples, adopted their ways of thinking, their worldviews, and their ways of interpreting Scripture (as we find these things expressed in the literature of the ancient Near East and Second Temple Judaism). As a result, Scripture contains mistaken ideas, discordant teachings, and (in the NT) attributions of meaning to the OT that was not originally there. But I will argue that, based on what God reveals in Scripture about himself and about his word, we can be sure that he would not have so spoken and thus did not so speak; furthermore, the arguments that he did so speak are mistaken, and the evidence for such speaking can be reasonably interpreted otherwise. We will also see that Enns’s doctrine of Christ is as deeply flawed as his analogous doctrine of Scripture.[5]

I. Methodology

There are two ways to develop a doctrine of Scripture. First, we can study what Scripture says about itself. That is, we can examine the relevant didactic passages of Scripture and from them build a comprehensive doctrine. Second, we can examine the characteristics of the Bible—that is, what are often called the phenomena, data, evidence, or facts of Scripture—and construct a doctrine out of our findings. The first approach aims to tell us what Scripture claims to be; the second approach aims to tell us what Scripture actually is. If what Scripture claims to be turns out to be what it actually is, well and good.

However, the doctrine of Scripture produced by the first approach generally fails to receive full confirmation from those who follow the second approach. Indeed, many would say that the second approach has shown that the Bible is not what it claims to be. That is, the Bible rather clearly teaches that Scripture is the inspired word of God, infallible, inerrant, and authoritative. But Bible scholars have uncovered a considerable amount of biblical and extrabiblical evidence that seems to be inconsistent with that doctrine, indicating that there are many errors and contradictions in the Bible. This dichotomy between the biblical doctrine of Scripture and the apparent facts of Scripture has been the fundamental tension in biblical and theological scholarship since the Enlightenment.

Given this situation, how are we to proceed? On the one hand, we can steadfastly maintain the biblical doctrine on the grounds that it has come from the highest authority, God himself, and do our best to interpret the evidence in accordance with it. On the other hand, we can accept the evidence marshaled by critical scholarship (at least in principle, if not in detail) and concede that the biblical doctrine has been refuted. But is there a middle way? Is it possible to accept the brunt of the evidence and still maintain a viable doctrine of Scripture as the inspired word of God?

Over a century ago, J. Paterson Smyth said yes. In How God Inspired the Bible, he argued that “we must give up the old method of assuming that certain things must be true about the Bible, and arguing then from these ungrounded assumptions,” for that approach will be “in constant danger of being shattered by the logic of facts.” While the Bible does reveal itself to have been inspired, he maintained, it does not tell us what effect inspiration had. Thus, “our theory of inspiration must be learned from the facts presented by the Bible.” We might reasonably make the assumption that “this direction by the Holy Spirit involves absolute immunity from the slightest error” in any matter, but we must be ready “to test, and, if necessary, correct, it by the facts.” If I become convinced that there are inaccuracies and discrepancies in the Bible, I must then modify and perhaps even reject “my idea of inspiration.” Since “God did not declare” that the Bible was free from error, I must humbly accept that “I was wrong” and “correct my theory.” It is best “to examine the phenomena presented by the Bible in order to find out what God has done in inspiration, rather than confidently to assume that because, in men’s opinion, God must have done so-and-so, therefore He has certainly done so.”[6]

B. B. Warfield criticized the approach advocated by Smyth: “This method amounts simply to discarding the guidance of the doctrine of Scripture in favor of our own doctrine founded on our examination of the nature of Scripture.”[7] However, Smyth is not, at least ostensibly, claiming the right to modify the scriptural doctrine of inspiration, but only one’s own assumptions about inspiration. Smyth’s fundamental error is his assertion that the Bible has no doctrine of inspiration other than the fact of it.[8] If one grants that, then the rest of his argument follows reasonably well. Warfield gets at this later in his critique of Smyth, expressing surprise that one “can frame a theory of inspiration after only such shallow investigation of the Scriptural doctrine of inspiration.”[9] There is in fact a wealth of biblical teaching on inspiration and its effects, not to mention centuries of reflection on it by theologians, some of which will be explored in this article. Only by ignoring all this can one travel down Smyth’s path.

We cannot believe that Smyth, a learned churchman, was ignorant of the biblical teaching regarding its inspiration, infallibility, and inerrancy. Nor, do we believe, was he concerned merely about one’s personal views regarding inspiration. What he wanted to see modified was nothing less than the church’s received doctrine of Scripture, which was firmly rooted in Scripture’s self-attestation. Smyth’s whole argument falls to the ground at the beginning, when he denies that Scripture has a doctrine of inspiration, that the church has a doctrine of inspiration, and that the former is the basis for the latter.

If we begin with some preconceived theory of inspiration and then make a thorough study of the biblical data, it makes sense, in true inductive fashion, to modify that theory in accordance with our interpretation of the data. However, it is illogical to suppose that the Bible’s own doctrine of Scripture can be modified by any study of the data. Our understanding of what Scripture says about itself can be corrected only if the meticulous exegesis of its relevant didactic statements yields a superior understanding of them. “The so-called phenomena of Scripture,” observes Herman Bavinck, “cannot undo this self-testimony of Scripture and may not be summoned against it as a party in the discussion.”[10] If the biblical phenomena undeniably contradict what Scripture teaches about itself, then that doctrine (and the whole idea of Scripture being an authoritative teacher of doctrine) must be rejected as false, but it still remains the biblical doctrine. It is not sufficient, says Warfield, to refuse to make a careful exegetical study of 2 Tim 3:16,[11] and simply “say that Paul must have meant to affirm the Bible to be what we find it to be. Surely no way could be invented which would more easily enable us to substitute our thought for the apostles’ thought, and to proclaim our crudities under the sanction of their great names.”[12] Warfield continues: “The effort to modify the teaching of Scripture as to its own inspiration by an appeal to the observed characteristics of Scripture, is an attempt not to obtain a clearer knowledge of what the Scriptures teach, but to correct that teaching,” which “is to proclaim Scripture untrustworthy as a witness to doctrine.”[13] To ascertain the Scriptures’ doctrine of inspiration, we must make an inductive study of all their statements concerning, and references to, the subject, “but the characteristics of their own writings are not facts relevant to the determination of their doctrine.”[14] We must either accept or reject the biblical doctrine of inspiration; the notion that that doctrine can be modified to fit the data of Scripture is not only improper but nonsensical. There is no middle way. “If the teaching and the facts of Scripture . . . are in disharmony,” concludes Warfield, “we cannot follow both—we must choose one and reject the other.”[15]

When we move ahead to our own day, we find Peter Enns following Smyth’s flawed methodology, applauding his “incarnational approach to Scripture” as the proper way “to address the problems introduced by the modern study of the Bible.”[16] Like Smyth, Enns argues that when our study of the data of Scripture leads to results that conflict with our doctrine of Scripture, we must “engage that evidence and adjust our doctrine accordingly.”[17] Like Smyth, Enns speaks of “our doctrine” of Scripture, as if there were no biblical doctrine of Scripture involved. Similarly, he concludes an article by insisting that “our doctrine of Scripture must make every effort to reflect how the Bible behaves,” that “our doctrine of Scripture must be flexible enough,” and that “our own paradigms” must not serve as “litmus tests of orthodoxy”—all without a word about the doctrine of Scripture stated in Scripture itself.[18] Throughout his book on inspiration, Enns makes it clear that by “our doctrine” he has in view the evangelical doctrine of the inspiration, infallibility, and inerrancy of Scripture, although he never spells out the details of that doctrine. He never acknowledges any connection between evangelical doctrine and what Scripture says about itself.[19] Moreover, he ignores what Scripture says about itself. One looks in vain in his writings for careful exegesis of 2 Tim 3:16 or any similar passage of Scripture. He virtually ignores the didactic statements of Scripture about itself and plunges into the seemingly unsettling evidence (though not without a theoretical framework, as will be discussed shortly). Like Smyth, he proceeds on the assumption that we should learn about inspiration from the data of Scripture, while giving scant attention to its actual statements on the subject. Such an approach is hopelessly flawed, for all the reasons given above in our critique of Smyth.

One has to ask why Enns would ignore what Scripture has to say about itself. Is he uncomfortable with the biblical doctrine of Scripture? Warfield comments on those who adopt the methodology of Smyth and Enns: “Who does not see that underlying this whole method of procedure . . . there is apparent an unwillingness to commit ourselves without reserve to the teaching of the Bible, either because that teaching is distrusted or already disbelieved.”[20] In War-field’s judgment, “the attempt to make the facts of Scripture co-factors of equal rank with the teaching of Scripture in ascertaining the true doctrine of inspiration, is really an attempt to modify the doctrine taught by Scripture by an appeal to the facts, while concealing from ourselves the fact that we have modified it, and in modifying corrected it, and, of course, in correcting it, discredited Scripture as a teacher of doctrine.”[21] Bavinck echoes that sentiment: “Those who make their doctrine of Scripture dependent on historical research into its origination and structure have already begun to reject Scripture’s self-testimony and therefore no longer believe that Scripture.”[22] Is that a fair assessment of the direction in which Enns is going? Is he among those who “think it is better to build up the doctrine of Scripture on the foundation of their own research than by believingly deriving it from Scripture itself “?[23]

Enns pleads in his own defense that the “rhetorical strategy” of his book, aimed principally at “a lay evangelical audience,” was to assume with them the divine element in Scripture and show that the human element, far from threatening the divine element, actually supports it.[24] But how can one show that the divine element is safe, without discussing what it is? Furthermore, Enns’s avoidance of the didactic passages of Scripture about itself characterizes not only Inspiration and Incarnation, but also his more overtly scholarly writings that pertain to the doctrine of Scripture and do not have the same agenda as his book. For example, in one article aimed at scholars, he declares: “Our doctrine of Scripture must be driven by the data of Scripture itself; Scripture must set the agenda, and not preconceived notions of what Scripture ought to be.”[25] He here insists that “the data of Scripture” (as explicated by his exegetical and comparative studies) must “drive” the doctrine of Scripture. He has no time for “preconceived notions,” which can only be the doctrines that theologians have derived from the careful study of the didactic statements of Scripture. Enns continues this rhetoric in Inspiration and Incarnation, where he commends “listening to how the Bible itself behaves and suspending preconceived notions (as much as possible) about how we think the Bible ought to behave.”[26] And in another scholarly article on the doctrine of Scripture, Enns barely mentions “texts such as 2 Tim 3:14-17” (i.e., the didactic passages), telling us that they must not be “taken in isolation”(i.e., carefully interpreted and treated as definitive). It is “just as important,” he says, “to observe how NT authors behave toward the OT.”[27] Judging by Enns’s own behavior (i.e., what he devotes his attention to), “just as important” is an understatement for “much more important.” Indeed, earlier in this article he states that it is upon “the facts” of how the NT interprets the OT “that doctrine must ultimately be based, particularly if what one is after is the articulation of a doctrine of Scripture.”[28] As we shall see in detail below, his modus operandi has generally been to use traditional theological terms, such as inspired, inerrant, and God’s Word, sidestep the biblical texts that elucidate these terms as traditionally understood, and then give them contrary content derived from his studies of scriptural data. He puts it more elegantly, if vaguely, of course: “Any notion of what Scripture is must in the end be in intimate, Spirit-led conversation with what Scripture does.”[29]

Enns seeks to validate his approach by appealing to Charles Hodge, who wrote: “The nature of inspiration is to be learnt from the Scriptures; from their didactic statements, and from their phenomena.”[30] However, what Enns does with the didactic statements and the biblical phenomena is quite different from what Hodge does with them. Enns basically ignores the didactic statements, whereas Hodge looks exclusively and extensively at them when formulating the doctrine of inspiration.[31] As we shall see, Enns simply propounds a theory of divine involvement in the origin of Scripture without referring to any didactic statement of Scripture, and then interprets various phenomena of the Bible in such a way as to substantiate that theory. Hodge, on the other hand, looks at the phenomena in order to prevent the biblical doctrine from being developed in a mistaken way. For example, he observes that if the various sacred writers manifest differences in “style and mode of thought,” then we must reject any theory (going beyond what Scripture requires) that allows no room for any “individual peculiarities.”[32] Similarly, one might suppose that inspiration renders the biblical writers omniscient, but the fact that Paul could not remember something as he wrote 1 Cor 1:16 shows this to be a mistaken inference.[33] In other words, careful study of the phenomena of the Bible can serve as a check on the tendency of theological imagination to go beyond what the didactic passages of Scripture actually teach.[34]

At this point, Hodge unfortunately adds a confusing statement: “If the Scriptures abound in contradictions and errors, then it is vain to contend that they were written under an influence which precludes all error.”[35] While this is a true statement, it really has to do with the veracity of the biblical doctrine of inspiration, not its formulation. As Hodge recognizes, the biblical teaching that Scripture is the inspired word of God implies that it is infallible.[36] So if Scripture is found to abound in contradictions and errors, then we must reject the biblical doctrine of inspiration. Only if Scripture did not clearly teach its own inerrancy would the fact of biblical error be a warrant for understanding the scriptural doctrine of inspiration to allow for error. Of course, we could devise our own theory of “inspiration” so as to allow for error in the Bible, but we should not imagine that that theory is the biblical doctrine. Furthermore, although Hodge speaks of the hypothetical possibility of errors in the Bible, he dismisses all the claims of biblical discrepancies, even in cases where no satisfactory explanation is known, because he is committed to biblical infallibility as a Christian, that is, as one who accepts that teaching, not only from the pages of Scripture generally, but specifically from the lips of Christ himself ( John 10:35).[37]

The proper way to proceed, contrary to Smyth and Enns, is first to determine what doctrine of inspiration is taught in Scripture about itself, and see what implications that doctrine has for our handling of Scripture.38 Then we should examine troublesome passages (the so-called “data”) in that light and see if they can be reasonably explained in a manner that is consistent with that doctrine.[39] It is proper to begin with the witness of Scripture to itself for several reasons. First, one should approach any literature in that way, because it is of prime importance to know what an author thinks about what he has written. His testimony should be accepted unless there is good reason to doubt his knowledge or veracity. Any study of the “strange” (i.e., unique) phenomenon of inspiration should “of course” begin by examining what the biblical writers say about it, before trying to observe “where in the Scripture the track of inspiration becomes visible,” observes Abraham Kuyper, because they “were themselves its organs.”[40] Second, there is a wealth of biblical teaching on the doctrine of Scripture. To ignore it would be foolish, if not perverse. Third, this teaching is quite clear in its main outline, whereas interpreting the data of Scripture is often problematic, especially when one tries to discern a doctrine of inspiration in it. The data can be interpreted in different ways; an interpretation of it that one person finds persuasive, an equally capable person may not.

Finally, it is the believer’s “intuitive” sense, from the internal testimony of the Spirit, that his Bible is the word of God and thus true. This demands that believers, including Christian scholars, start with the teachings of Scripture about itself and endeavor to interpret the phenomena of Scripture in that light. If this leads to results that are unsatisfactory, then we have to reevaluate our basic religious views and commitments. But first let us see what Scripture says about itself and where that takes us.

Our approach, then, will be to search the Scriptures carefully, to see what they teach about inspiration that can help us to interpret Scripture properly. Then (in Part II) we will examine some of the supposedly contrary evidence and see that it does make sense in the light of that doctrine. That was the approach taken by E. J. Young, a predecessor of Enns as professor of Old Testament at Westminster Seminary, and it is the only one that is consistent with a commitment to Scripture as the authoritative word of God.[41]

It would be unfair to accuse Enns of simply looking at the data of Scripture in Inspiration and Incarnation without any theological framework. He does have a framework for his analysis of the biblical evidence, and he lets the reader know that up front. That framework is the incarnational analogy between inspiration and the incarnation. However, he makes no attempt to derive that analogy from Scripture. He simply asserts that it is true and will guide his discussion. He quotes no passage of Scripture that sets forth the incarnational analogy, for there is no such passage. One could perhaps build some sort of analogy from a combination of passages, much as the doctrine of the Trinity is constructed, but Enns has not attempted to do so in print. Furthermore, he presents no evidence that Scripture itself ever argues on the basis of the analogy. That is, no biblical writer ever explains some aspect of Scripture (or of any passage of Scripture) by comparing it with Christ. Enns’s approach is essentially pragmatic: the analogy works, by answering difficult questions; therefore, we should accept and use it.

Enns does make some effort to justify his use of the incarnational analogy by saying that other theologians have drawn attention to it.[42] He is right: other theologians have noted similarities between the union of divine and human factors in the person of Christ and in the inspired Scriptures, although those theologians have differed as to how much they want to make of it.

Enns asserts that Herman Bavinck’s statement of the analogy, which he quotes in its entirety in defense of his own use of it, “represents my own deep Reformed commitment.”[43] But his view is not that of Bavinck. Bavinck says only that the word of God entered the creaturely world of humanity “in all the human forms of dream and vision, of investigation and reflection,” that is, in the processes of revelation and human preparation for writing Scripture— which is a far cry from Enns’s notion that God entered into and adopted the pagan worldviews and non-Christian views and methodologies of the ancient world, as vehicles to convey his message. (In the paragraph preceding the one quoted by Enns, Bavinck states that the Holy Spirit, when inspiring human writers, “entered into their style and language, their character and unique personality, which he himself had already prepared,” choosing Hebrew and Hellenistic Greek “as the vehicle of divine thoughts.”) Bavinck adds that just as the incarnation led to death on the cross, so God’s revelation in human language ended up as “that which is humanly weak and despised and ignoble,” namely, the human writings of Scripture, subjecting itself to “the fate of all Scripture.” This apparently refers to the limitations of human language and the vicissitudes of ancient documents as they are often miscopied, mislaid and ignored, and misinterpreted. But again, this is quite different from Enns’s notion of the word of God embedding itself in the erroneous ideas and thought-patterns of non-Christian cultures.[44]

It is one thing to develop a doctrine of Christ and a doctrine of Scripture, both from the didactic passages of Scripture, and then to observe an analogy between them and consider how far it extends. It is something quite different to observe that certain characteristics of Scripture are analogous to certain characteristics of the incarnate Christ and then to argue that Scripture has certain other characteristics because analogous ones can be discerned in the incarnate Christ. Yet that is what Enns sets out to do in Inspiration and Incarnation: to “build a doctrine of Scripture” by making “an attempt to flesh out (as it were) the Incarnational Analogy.”[45] There are two related problems with this approach. First, as Irving M. Copi observes, “No argument by analogy is ever valid, in the sense of having its conclusion follow from its premises with logical necessity.”[46] Such arguments can only be suggestive: the more points there are of established similarity, the greater the probability is that there will be similarities at other points—but it is still only a probability, never a demonstration. Hence, an analogy is inherently a precarious foundation upon which to build a doctrine of Scripture. Christ and Scripture may well correspond at points A and B, but it does not necessarily follow that they correspond at point C. Second, as Enns himself admits, the analogy does not always work.[47] Indeed, Warfield comments that “between such diverse things there can exist only a remote analogy; and, in point of fact, the analogy . . . amounts to no more than that in both cases Divine and human factors are involved, though very differently.”[48] Since there are points of dissimilarity as well as points of similarity, the probability that similarity will obtain at other points is not great. So how do we know when this analogy can be extended and when it cannot? Do we simply use it when it yields the desired result?

II. Inspiration: The Word Of God In The Words Of Men

Central to the Christian doctrine of Scripture and well articulated in traditional Reformed theology is the teaching that the Scriptures are the written word of God. This is repeatedly taught by Scripture itself, most commonly whenever the NT introduces an OT quotation with such words as “God said” (e.g., 2 Cor 6:16) or “the Holy Spirit says” (e.g., Heb 3:7), especially when God is not the speaker in the OT passage (e.g., Acts 13:37, quoting Ps 16:10).[49] “The word of God,” to which Heb 4:12 refers, includes the Scriptures (along with God’s spoken words), as is clear from the repeated statements in the previous verses that God has spoken the words of Scripture. Also, the NT’s characterization of the OT as “the oracles of God” (e.g., Rom 3:2) “fairly shouts to us,” concludes Warfield after a thorough study of this expression, “that to its writers the Scriptures of the Old Testament were the very Word of God in the highest and strictest sense that term can bear—the express utterance, in all their parts and each and every of their words, of the Most High.”[50] The consistent witness of Scripture to itself is that it consists of verbal communication from God to man. That is, God is the originator, or author, of Scripture. What Scripture says, God says.

At the same time, the Scriptures were written by human beings, expressing thoughts that had formed in their minds, in their language. Scripture affirms its human authorship whenever the NT introduces OT quotations with such words as “Moses says” and “Isaiah is so bold as to say”(Rom 10:19-20). Sometimes the human authors recorded utterances that they attributed directly to God (e.g., “Thus says the Lord . . .”), but often they wrote in their own capacity, as leaders of God’s people (e.g., “Paul, an apostle, to...”).

So how can Scripture be both the word of God and the writings of men? There was of course no divine-human collaboration, as when two or more people jointly write a book today. Rather, in Scripture divine and human authorship come together in a unique way. Through the divine activity called inspiration, God was involved in the process of writing Scripture in such a way that his message came to expression as the writings of its human authors. The fact of his determinative involvement is taught in numerous passages of Scripture (2 Tim 3:16 being the classic text). We may speak of Scripture having human authors because its human writers wrote freely (i.e., without coercion) what was in their minds. But we may also speak of Scripture having God as its author because he caused his message to be expressed by what they wrote. Because of inspiration, the text of Scripture is the word of God in the words of men.[51]

The Bible frequently mentions together both the divine author and the human author(s) of Scripture or of a particular passage. When it relates these two aspects of its origin to each other, it characteristically states that God spoke through (i.e., through the instrumentality of ) the human writer(s). In Rom 1:2, for example, Paul declares that the gospel of God was “promised beforehand through (διά) his prophets in the holy Scriptures.” Similarly, we find a quotation from the OT introduced with these words in Acts 28:25: “The Holy Spirit was right in saying to your fathers through (διά) Isaiah the prophet.” There are even statements that the word of God has come to us through the mouth of the writer of Scripture. For example, Acts 3:18, referring to the messianic prophecies of the OT, states that “God foretold by the mouth (διὰ στόματος) of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer.” This expression may have literally in view the prophet dictating his text to an amanuensis, with God’s words coming out of his mouth, or it may refer metaphorically to God’s word being expressed as the prophet’s utterance (whether spoken or written). In any case, this manner of expression graphically portrays the human writers of Scripture as the instruments through which God spoke his word.[52]

This human instrumentality implies that God is the originating and controlling author of Scripture. That is, he determined what men would write in the Bible, not only as their message, but more importantly as his message. God used the writing efforts of inspired men to speak his word to us. He did not merely approve or endorse what they wrote, or have enough influence on what they wrote that he could claim it as his own; rather, he caused them, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, to write what they wrote. God did not concur with what the human writers wanted to write; they concurred with what he wanted to write. And they did not merely write what God intended them to write, as the providential outworking of his sovereign will, for that would have been no less true of uninspired writings.[53] Rather, the text that came “through their mouth” was God’s teaching for his people.

Inspiration was a work of the Holy Spirit within (i.e., in the mind of ) the human author as he wrote. This is shown by the many passages that attribute the words of Scripture to the empowering Holy Spirit. For example, Acts 4:25 explicitly says that the Lord God “through the mouth of our father David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit” the words of Ps 2:1-2. Inspiration (specifically for the purpose of writing Scripture) is not listed among the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the NT, perhaps because it is implicit in (though not essential to) the functioning of apostles and perhaps also prophets. Nonetheless, inspiration was a direct, supernatural work of the Spirit upon the writer, over and above whatever preparatory work of ordinary providence (and extraordinary grace and revelation) may have contributed to the writing of Scripture. God’s work of providence alone, Warfield reminds us, would have produced a biblical text that was “merely the word of godly men,” not “the immediate word of God Himself, speaking directly as such to the minds and hearts of every reader.”[54] Scripture, he explains, can claim to be the word of God only because it “has been written under the direct and immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit.”[55] This is what 2 Pet 1:21 has in view when it states that the men who wrote Scripture “spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”[56]

It is beyond the scope of this article to determine the precise mode (or modes) of inspiration. However, a brief look at the two theories of inspiration that have been most influential in orthodox Reformed theology will show how God may have been active in the writing of Scripture to ensure that his word was written. The older theory of inspiration is what used to be called simply “inspiration,” then came to be known as “verbal inspiration,” and came to be characterized (usually pejoratively) in more modern times as “dictation” or “mechanical inspiration.” According to this theory, which dominated Reformed theology in the seventeenth century and was the view of the Westminster divines (and thus informed the Presbyterian confessional standards),[57] the Holy Spirit directly put into the mind of the biblical writer the words that he was to write and motivated him to write them in a fashion that was appropriate in his circumstances. John Owen puts it this way: the statements of the biblical writers “were not their own, not conceived in their minds, not formed by their reasonings, not retained in their memories from what they heard, not by any means beforehand comprehended by them, (1 Pet. i. 10, 11,) but were all of them immediately from God—there being only a passive concurrence of their rational faculties in their reception, without any such active obedience as by any law they might be obliged unto.”[58] If the writer distinguished the Spirit’s words in his mind from his own thoughts (as Owen perceives the mental state of the inspired writer to have been), then “dictation” is an appropriate label. However, one could also suppose that the writer’s mind was opened to receive thoughts and words from the Spirit and make them his own thinking and words (whether or not he was conscious of their divine origin), in which case “dictation” would be a misleading label. In the extreme form of this view (which was rarely held), the writer’s mental capacities were suspended, so that the Spirit essentially possessed the writer’s body and used it to write Scripture; this would indeed be “mechanical” inspiration. But regardless of the extent to which the writer distinguished God’s thoughts from his own thoughts as he wrote the former, God is clearly the author of Scripture on this theory of inspiration.

The second theory, which developed in response to the modern study of the Bible and the growing perception that the “human element” in Scripture could not be adequately explained by the verbal, or dictation, theory, is generally called the theory of “organic inspiration” (or “concursus”), although some speak of it as “verbal inspiration” or “plenary inspiration” because it extends to the very words, the full text, of Scripture.[59] According to this view, as classically formulated by A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, God worked providentially in the life of the human author, shaping him as a person and bringing him into such knowledge, both naturally and supernaturally, and into such circumstances that he would be prepared and motivated to write what God wanted him to write. Then, when the writer proceeded to write, the Holy Spirit superintended the process of writing, “causing his energies to flow into the spontaneous exercises of the writer’s faculties, elevating and directing where need be, and everywhere securing the errorless expression in language of the thought designed by God.”[60] Writing later on his own, Warfield stated similarly that “the Bible is the Word of God” because of “the Spirit’s superintendence,” extending even to “the choice of the words by the human authors,” making their text “the adequate expression of His mind and will.”[61] Hodge and War-field emphasized that only this final superintendence was the actual “inspiration” of Scripture.[62] Without it, we would have the writings of godly men, but no word of God. One might say that providence provided the “raw materials” for Scripture, and that the Holy Spirit, in his work of inspiration, used them to produce the “finished product” of Scripture. God is the author of Scripture, on this view, because he controlled the process of its formation, both in his providential, gracious, and miraculous (revelational) shaping of the author, his thoughts, and his circumstances prior to writing, and especially in his superintendence of the actual process of writing.[63]

Hodge and Warfield did not call their view of inspiration “organic,” but the Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck embraced the term. Inspiration, he said, must be understood “organically,” that is, “historically and psychologically.”[64] “The Spirit of the Lord,” he explains, “entered into the prophets and apostles themselves and so employed and led them that they themselves examined and reflected, spoke and wrote as they did.” “As they themselves had been already shaped by the Holy Spirit in advance, so they are now summoned into service and used by that same Spirit.”[65] “The activity of the Holy Spirit in the writing process, after all, consisted in the fact that, having prepared the human consciousness of the authors in various ways (by birth, upbringing, natural gifts, research, memory, reflection, experience of life, revelation, etc.), he now, in and through the writing process itself, made those thoughts and words, that language and style, rise to the surface of that consciousness, which could best interpret the divine ideas for persons of all sorts of rank and class, from every nation and age.”[66] Because on this view he shapes the writer before he writes and leads him as he writes, God is the primary author of Scripture, though the human writers remain real authors of the same text as well.

One must be careful not to confuse the providential preparation of the writer with his actual writing under inspiration. For example, John Murray has in view the material obtained during providential preparation when he says that the Bible “contains much that was not derived from supernatural communications,” such as their own eyewitness testimony and material “derived in the use of their natural faculties from extant sources of information,” in addition to what they learned by supernatural revelation.[67] Once all this material was accumulated, the Spirit worked in the writer’s mind—selecting, shaping, and elevating—so that out of the writer’s knowledge and thoughts a text was produced that could, by virtue of the Spirit’s immediate and controlling influence, be legitimately called the word of God. Intervening between the writer’s sources of information (both supernatural and nonsupernatural) and the text of Scripture was the divine act of inspiration, which Murray defines as “that influence of the Spirit of God brought to bear upon the writers of Holy Scripture whereby Scripture itself in its whole extent and every part is divine in origin, character and authority.” Whether they were writing things learned by special revelation or by ordinary means, “a supernatural divine influence superintended, directed and controlled the writers of Scripture when they were writing.”[68] The human aspect of inspiration, then, is not the writer’s prior nonrevelational learning, but his active, thoughtful concurrence during the inspiring work of the Spirit and willful writing in accordance with the impetus of the Spirit.

In seeking to explain “the act of inspiration,”[69] Warfield described “the mode of inspiration” as “concursus,” explaining: “The whole of Scripture is the product of divine activities which enter it, however, not by superseding the activities of the human authors, but confluently with them; so that the Scriptures are the joint product of divine and human activities, both of which penetrate them at every point, working harmoniously together to the production of a writing which is not divine here and human there, but at once divine and human in every part, every word and every particular.”[70] This concursus during the act of inspired writing, which involved “the direct and immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit,”[71] Warfield carefully distinguished from the analogous concursus “in providence” and “in grace.”[72] Thus, Warfield’s position remained the same as that previously laid out with Hodge: there is a providential preparation for writing, and then an act of writing involving inspiration—the latter making the finished product the word of God. Later, Warfield insisted that “in revelation by ‘concursive operation,”‘ the Spirit should be viewed as working in the writers of Scripture by “elevating them, directing them, controlling them, energizing them, so that, as His instruments, they rise above themselves and under His inspiration” achieve a “result above what could by any possibility be achieved by mere human powers,” making what they wrote “expressly a supernatural product.”[73]

When we turn to Enns, we find that, although “inspiration” is the first word in the title of his book, he offers no explanation of the divine act of inspiration (as opposed to what it supposedly means for the Bible to be inspired). In his opening remarks, Enns does aver that “the Bible is ultimately from God” and that “it is God’s gift to the church.”[74] But such declarations fall far short of the specificity required of one who wants the church to “adjust” its doctrine of inspiration. Enns emphasizes that the Bible is fully human and fully divine, but without explaining how it got to be that way.[75] He does recommend Warfield’s article on concursus for further reading,[76] and he cites it regularly elsewhere.[77] However, his focusing on the basic concept of concursus, and his ignoring of Warfield’s more important scholarly treatises on the subject of inspiration, make one wonder whether he really agrees with Warfield’s view of inspiration or just wants to employ the term concursus in his own way, but with Warfieldian cover.[78]

It appears that Enns has in mind the concursus of providence and perhaps also of grace, but not the concursus of inspiration of which Warfield spoke. Enns nowhere speaks clearly of the Spirit’s superintending or controlling the biblical writers as they wrote, which for Hodge and Warfield constituted inspiration and was necessary for scriptural infallibility. On one occasion, Enns speaks of the Pentateuch possibly being modified by an editor “under the leading of the Spirit,”[79] but he may have in view there merely the concursus of providence and/or grace (such as the “leading” of Rom 8:14 and Gal 5:18). Enns also speaks of “words that the Spirit inspired biblical writers to write” and of the Bible as “what the Spirit has left us,”[80] but this may well be limited to the Spirit’s providential and gracious workings, for, on one occasion when he discusses the divine element in Scripture, all he can say is that the Bible “is what the Spirit of God wanted it to be,”[81] which suggests no more than divine sovereignty at work through providence. In his clearest statement, he says that biblical texts are “inspired,” explaining that “they are there because God wants them there,” adding: “They are under God’s providence.”[82] If indeed Enns limits inspiration to God’s working in and through providence (and grace), then in his view there was not a final work of the Spirit controlling the writer—the work necessary not only to produce an infallible product, but also to give us the word of God. If this analysis is correct, there is no act of inspiration in Enns’s view of “inspiration,” and thus his view is insufficient for the Bible to be truly the word of God. If the biblical writers simply recorded what they had learned from a variety of sources, including direct revelation from God, and were “left to the infirmities and imperfections characteristic of human nature” while they wrote, then the Bible is simply a human witness to that revelation (and other things)— an essentially Barthian view.[83] However, Enns is so vague on this point—the very point of inspiration itself—that it is difficult to know what his view actually is.

The basic theory underlying Enns’s book, as we have noted, is the incarnational analogy. He argues that one can gain insight into the results of inspiration (the Bible) from the results of incarnation (the dual-natured person of Jesus). However, it is not clear (despite the title of the book) how the incarnation itself is supposed to shed light on inspiration itself.[84] That is, how does the act by which the Holy Spirit produced an embryonic Jesus in the womb of Mary and brought him to birth explain how the Holy Spirit put the word of God in the mouth of the biblical writers and brought it to written form? Were the writers wholly passive (though receptive), as was Mary? Certainly, in the absence of a human father, there was no concursus of divine work and male reproductive activity in the conception of Jesus. The incarnation was therefore quite “mechanical”; was inspiration also? No doubt Enns would say that this is one of the “places where the analogy does not quite fit.”[85] At this point, at least, he would be in agreement with Warfield.[86] But by what criteria do we determine that the analogy does not work here, but does work where Enns wants to use it? He never tells us.

In this section, we have seen that only a direct, immediate work of the Spirit in the mind of a human writer as he writes, which is the work of inspiration, can make the resulting text the word of God. Anything less than that makes the text of Scripture merely the words of godly men, at best a witness to God’s word. According to the verbal (dictation) theory of inspiration, God directly supplies the thoughts and words that are written (perhaps often similar to the writer’s own thinking and expression), while according to the organic theory he causes thoughts and words that are providentially already in the mind of the writer to be written (with direction, correction, and improvement, as needed). These two theories are somewhat different, but the results are the same: the words of the written text are the word of God.[87] But regardless of how God’s words came to be the ones that the biblical writers wrote, the Holy Spirit caused the word of God to be formulated in the minds of men and then to come to expression in the words written by them.

III. Necessary Characteristics Of The Word Of God

If Scripture is indeed the very word of God, an expression of the divine mind, will, and character, then the characteristics of Scripture must be completely consistent with the characteristics, or attributes, of God. Our knowledge of God, of course, comes largely from Scripture. What Scripture reveals about God should tell us a lot about the word of God.

Scripture reveals that God is omniscient, truthful, and immutable. Since these attributes are well understood and well elaborated in Reformed theology, I will comment on each one only briefly. Nonetheless, they have important implications for the doctrine of Scripture that are not always fully appreciated.

First, God is omniscient: he “knows everything” (1 John 3:20); “his understanding is beyond measure” (Ps 147:5). From this we can infer that God cannot say or cause to be written in his word anything that he thinks is true, but in fact is false. The statements of Scripture cannot and therefore do not manifest any ignorance on God’s part. Inspiration does not render the human writer omniscient (see, e.g., 1 Cor 1:16) or make the biblical text exhaustive of divine knowledge at any point (cf. 1 Cor 13:8-12), but the Author of Scripture nonetheless speaks out of his omniscience.

Second, God is truthful. That is, he always communicates the truth. “God is true” ( John 3:33); hence, his words are “trustworthy and true” (Rev 22:6). He “will not lie” (1 Sam 15:29); he “never lies” (Titus 1:2). Because God is omniscient, he will not unintentionally say something that is untrue; because he is truthful, he will not intentionally say something that is untrue. God not only intends to speak the truth, but, because he is omniscient, always succeeds in stating what is true. Because inspiration gives us “the immediate word of God Himself,” Warfield states, it gives to Scripture “a trustworthiness . . . which is altogether Divine.”[88]

Third, God is immutable, or unchangeable. “I the LORD do not change” (Mal 3:6). He remains “the same” forever (Ps 102:27). Thus, his word is “unchangeable” (Heb 6:17-18). He “cannot deny himself “(2 Tim 2:13), and thus he is always self-consistent and noncontradictory. If he is immutable, his truth, as expressed in Scripture, never changes. If he is self-consistent and noncontradictory, his written word must be free of inconsistencies and contradictions.

But what is the truth that God knows fully and always speaks consistently? That which is true is that which is, that which is real. God, as the ultimate reality and the creator of all other reality, then, defines truth. That is, his being, will, knowledge, and acts—and, by extension, everything that he has created and everything that happens in his creation—are by definition real and true. A statement of truth, then, corresponds to the reality of God and of his creation. In that sense, everything affirmed by Scripture is true. Everything stated in Scripture corresponds to the reality of God and his creation.

Furthermore, since God is an objective Being, it follows that his truth is also objective. There is one standard of objective truth, and that is the knowledge held by God. The word of God expresses that knowledge, and thus is objectively true, conforming to what really is. There is no human standard, ancient or modern, that determines what truth is. There is only the eternal and perfect standard of divine knowledge. Whenever God speaks, he necessarily speaks in accordance with that standard. Thus, everything that he says in his written word, the Scriptures, expresses and is perfectly consistent with the objective truth of divine knowledge.

Because the God of all truth is the author of Scripture, we say that Scripture cannot contain any error (i.e., is infallible) and therefore does not contain any error (i.e., is inerrant). It is without error in the sense that it is consistent with what God knows to be true and what is objectively true in God’s Being and in his creation (including what has happened in history). Furthermore, since God is immutable and his word is therefore self-consistent, it follows that no passage of Scripture contradicts or is inconsistent with any other passage of Scripture.

We can say all of this without examining the text of Scripture for errors or contradictions. It all follows from the position that Scripture is the written word of God. If one feels constrained to believe that there are errors or contradictions in Scripture, then one ought to conclude that Scripture is not the word of God or that God is not as Scripture portrays him to be, not that the God of Scripture is speaking out of character.

It is futile to try to undermine the connection between inspiration and inerrancy by appealing to the freedom of God. Herman Ridderbos declares that “it is not up to us, it is up to the free pleasure of God to decide what kind of effect divine inspiration should have in the mind, knowledge, memory, [and] accuracy of those whom he has used in his service, in order that their word really can be accepted and trusted as the inspired word of God.”[89] But the freedom of God allows him to speak in perfect accord with his character; it does not allow him to speak at all contrary to his character. We cannot, indeed, predetermine how God will speak in character—but we can be confident that he will speak in character. For example, we might imagine that God would have inspired all four evangelists to write their gospels in chronological order. But when we discover that he has not done so, but rather has inspired them to use thematic organization to some extent, we can still be sure that he has not inspired any two evangelists to make conflicting claims about chronology. Similarly, we discover that the evangelists often narrate the same events differently (i.e., with different details), yet we can be sure that these differences do not involve contradictions. So when Ridderbos appeals to God’s freedom to allow one evangelist to “correct” another one,[90] he has pushed it too far, in effect making God deny himself. Such contradiction would be possible if inspiration were merely a divine influence on human writers, but not if inspiration makes their words the very word of God. Thus, Enns shares Ridderbos’s misunderstanding of divine freedom when he comments on Ridderbos’s remark: “A belief that God inspired Scripture does not commit us to any particular understanding of how he did it.”[91]

Enns might appear to agree with our basic argument in this section, that the word of God is necessarily inerrant, for he says: “The Bible does not err because it is God’s Word and God does not err.”[92] Enns affirms that the Bible is “inerrant.”[93] Or does he—in substance, not just in words? If, as we have argued, there is an objective standard of truth (God’s standard) to which the word of God must, and therefore does, adhere, namely, that which actually is, was, or shall be (what God is and has created), then it is clear that Enns denies that Scripture is true, trustworthy, and inerrant. The bulk of his book, Inspiration and Incarnation, is a litany of three types of biblical data which, if his interpretations of them are correct, can in most cases only be considered errors and contradictions (though he prefers not to use such terms), when measured against God’s objective standard. Enns does mix in some things that are not errors or contradictions, but most of his examples are of this nature.[94] In his first category are instances in which the OT allegedly adopts the erroneous views of the ancient Near East. For example, Enns asserts that Genesis “portrays the world as a flat disk with a [solid] dome above.”[95] This is an objectively false portrait of the world, for it is a fact that the world is not a flat disk and does not have a dome above it. In the second category, “theological diversity” in the OT—a term that brings differences of emphasis or situation (which can harmonize) under the same roof with inconsistencies and contradictions (which cannot harmonize)—Enns asserts, for example, that the laws regulating slavery in Exod 21 and Deut 15 do not say “the same thing,” and that it is “counterproductive to attempt to reconcile” them.[96] He recognizes that “some such discrepancies” can be reasonably harmonized, but he insists that “in many cases, as with the slave law,” that will not work.[97] In Enns’s third category, NT interpretations of the OT, he asserts that “there is no persuasive connection” between Exod 3:6 and “how Jesus uses it” in Luke 20:37-38.[98] The author of Hebrews, Enns claims, deliberately inserts a word at 3:10 to give Ps 95 a meaning contrary to its original meaning.[99] As our final example, Enns claims that in 1 Cor 10:4 Paul accepts as true a historically false Jewish legend that a “moveable well” followed the Israelites in their wilderness wanderings.[100] In short, the Bible contains errors and contradictions, whether or not Enns finds it expedient to call them that. Indeed, as we shall see in the next section, Scripture, in Enns’s view, manifests an ancient mentality that is characterized by what, according to God’s objective standard (i.e., correspondence with himself and his created reality), can only be called error and contradiction.[101] (In Part II we will deal with all of these examples in detail, showing that they are not errors or contradictions.)

If Enns were to reply to this, he would no doubt say that I am trying to impose an artificial, unbiblical, modern notion of abstract truth on the Scriptures, rather than letting Scripture demonstrate its own standard of truth. However, that is not true. I have argued at length that, according to the Scriptures themselves: (1) Scripture is the word of God; (2) God is omniscient, truthful, and immutable; (3) God speaks in accordance with his nature; (4) God has an objective standard of truth, namely, his perfect knowledge of himself and his creation; (5) God speaks in accordance with that standard of truth; and therefore (6) every affirmation of Scripture is an expression of what God knows to be true—accurately, consistently, and objectively representing what actually is. Enns clearly does not believe that Scripture is true in this sense.

As indicated in my initial summary of Enns’s argument, his key point is that God has deliberately chosen to adopt the ways of thinking of the ancient world in order to communicate his word through them. The three main chapters of his book argue this point in regard to three matters. First, Enns tries to show that the OT adopts the worldview of the ancient Near East, including many of its erroneous views. The second main chapter argues that since there were many “diverse” views in that ancient world, the OT naturally expresses such diversity, including some contradictory views. The third main chapter argues that the NT writers often adopted contemporary interpretive methods (including the use of nonhistorical legendary material) to give a Christian interpretation to OT texts that often is not inherent in the texts themselves. These three lines of argumentation are questionable in a number of respects, but the key point here is that Enns presents God as speaking untruth.

God cannot use false ideas, contradictory ideas, and faulty methods of argumentation to express his truth. God knows that the world is not a flat disk, and so he is not going to say that it is as part of his effort to get across his message. God is not going to say one thing on one occasion and something contradictory on another occasion. God is not going to say that an OT text has a certain meaning if it does not have that meaning. God would be a liar if he used false information to “prove” his points. He would be a liar if he used objectively faulty interpretive methods to “prove” his points. God would be despicable if he tried to convince people of certain things on the basis of their assumptions that he knows to be false. And yet that, I regret to have to say, is precisely what Enns (unintentionally, no doubt) makes God out to be: a despicable liar.

If Enns is correct about what is going on in the Bible—the erroneous world-views, the discrepancies, the faulty interpretations—then he should stop calling the Bible the word of God. His real view of Scripture is that it is the word of godly men, but not the word of God in any real sense. He should be telling us that these men shared many of the faulty ideas and methods of the ancient world, but also had many God-given insights into spiritual truth. Enns may want to believe that the Bible is the word of God, but the Bible as he describes it cannot be considered the word of the God.

In the second section of this article, we pointed out that God speaks his word “through the mouth” of the human authors of Scripture. This means that the writers’ words are themselves God’s words. But Enns has subtly changed this into the notion that God speaks through the words of the human authors, thus through their ancient worldviews and methods. For example, he says that the Holy Spirit has spoken the gospel “through pedestrian and uninspired Jewish legends.”[102] But the Holy Spirit speaks, not through the words of the inspired writer, but through the inspired writer himself, so that what he says is what God says. God’s message is the text of Scripture, not truths conveyed by, or distilled from, the text.

To take one striking example, Enns believes that certain OT texts presuppose that Yahweh is just one among many real deities, and that God adopts a polytheistic viewpoint in order to argue to the Israelites that he is greater than the other gods. Enns maintains that since the ancient Near East was polytheistic, we should not be surprised to find OT texts that “describe God as greater than the gods of the surrounding nations”—passages in which the other gods “must be presumed to be real.”[103] But if God is making statements that are based on the assumption that other gods are real deities, he is deceitfully confirming the Israelites in their polytheism, not just contending for his own greatness. God, we should hardly have to insist, would not make such arguments. These texts will not be examined in Part II, so I will simply observe here that they portray God as greater than the supposed gods of the nations (see 1 Cor 8:5). This is made clear in the first passage cited by Enns (Ps 86), for after supposedly granting polytheism in v. 8, the psalmist goes on to say that “you alone are God” (v. 10).[104]

Thus we see that when Enns claims to believe that the Scriptures do not err, he is at best confusing the issue. He likes to say that the question is not “whether” the Bible is the word of God, true, trustworthy, or inerrant, but “how” it is these things.[105] But his “how” turns out to answer the “whether” in the negative. The only “way” that a statement can be true and not err is for it to accurately represent reality, as God objectively sees it. The suggestion that “the very way in which God ‘does not err’ is by participating in the cultural conventions of the time”[106] is an absurdity. Contemporary cultural conventions do not determine what is true; changes in such conventions do not mean that the truth changes. God and his reality determine what is true, and the truth does not change; he expresses that truth when he speaks in Scripture. For Enns to insist that the data he presents of “the human situatedness and diverse nature of Scripture . . . are not to be understood as errors”[107] is to speak nonsense. How is it that an expression of “human situatedness” (whatever that means) or “diversity” is automatically true, whether it corresponds to reality or not? The mind of God defines truth; his created reality defines truth; the worldview of the ancient Near East most decidedly does not define truth.

If inerrancy means correspondence with the reality of God and his created world, then a crucial aspect of inerrancy is God’s self-consistency or noncontradiction. But Enns goes so far as to find fault with using the law of noncontradiction to help define inerrancy.[108] Such an extreme position is perhaps to be expected, for how else is one to maintain that error is not error? How else can he claim that the “theological diversity” he finds in the OT does not mean it “lacks integrity or trustworthiness”? All we have to do, Enns says, is “to conceive differently of how Scripture has integrity or is worthy of trust.”[109] Enough of this double-talk; error and contradiction cannot be redefined as integrity and trustworthiness to suit Enns’s view of an error-and contradiction-laden “word of God.” Without an objective standard of truth, including the law of noncontradiction, Enns’s whole position reduces to irrationality. Because he does not start with the immutable God of absolute truth, who speaks only in accordance with that truth—doctrine revealed in Scripture, not dreamed up by theologians and imposed on it—Enns’s position is self-destructive in the end. He insists that we define inerrancy, not by “some outside standard, . . . perhaps the law of non-contradiction,” but by “Scripture’s own attestation of its character.” This reference to Scripture’s self-attestation sounds very traditional and pious, but once again he means something quite different by it. Such words should refer to Scripture’s teaching (didactic statements) about itself, not to Enns’s interpretations of certain scriptural phenomena—what he goes on to call “that attestation . . . that comes to us fully clothed in the humility of its human element and diverse theologies.”[110] The scriptural doctrine of God and of the word of God should constitute an “outside standard”—not for Scripture itself, but for our interpretation of the data of Scripture. If Scripture is the word of God, we are obligated to treat it as such.

Recently, Enns has moved to a different way of expressing the truth/untruth of Scripture. Instead of saying that all of Scripture is inerrant, and including error in that inerrancy, he is now saying that part of the Bible—its teaching—is inerrant, and part of it—everything else—is not. He acknowledges that with his incarnational view of Scripture, the extent of inspiration is difficult to determine. But he takes the position that Scripture is “inspired through and through”—the “nonteaching texts” as well as the teaching texts. At the same time, “Scripture is infallible only in what it teaches.” Determining what it teaches is also a problem for Enns, for it is less than what the whole text of Scripture affirms.[111] Most recently ( January 2008) he has written that the Bible is “without error and absolutely authoritative”—not in its every affirmation and implication thereof—but only “in all that it teaches.”[112] He does revert to his earlier, misleading terminology, saying that “the Bible as it is [i.e., as we have it today] is without error,” and referring to “in what way Scripture is without error,”[113] before declaring his commitment to “receiving all that Scripture is found... actually to teach.”[114]

According to Enns, the “nonteaching” elements of Scripture are those cultural forms into which God’s teachings have been incarnated. For example, Gen 1 narrates that God created the world as we know it in a certain progression of “days,” but Enns denies that Scripture actually teaches that those things happened as narrated, for this ancient Near Eastern myth teaches only that “Israel’s God, not a pantheon,” created everything.[115] Similarly, as we shall see (in Part II, section 4), Enns insists that the affirmation of Jesus in Luke 20:37-39, that Exod 3:6 implies a resurrection of the dead, expresses Jesus’ (objectively faulty) cultural way of thinking, contrary to the original meaning of Exodus. Apparently Enns would now classify Luke 20:37-39 as a “nonteaching text”; the teaching of the larger passage would presumably be that there is in fact a resurrection.

We appreciate the fact that Enns is now speaking with more candor and clarity. His position is now much like the usual “limited inerrancy” position. However, if the entire Scripture is truly the word of God, and God speaks only that which he knows to be true, then it cannot be that it contains “nonteaching texts” that are often erroneous. If Enns is correct about the Bible containing erroneous statements, then either it is not the word of God or God does not always tell the truth.

IV. The Conceptual World Of Scripture

If Scripture is truly the word of God, then it originated in, and expresses the thoughts of, the mind of God. The storehouse of knowledge, the world of ideas, from which the statements and teachings of Scripture come, is nothing less than the all-knowing and all-wise mind of God. This means that every statement of Scripture, if it is to be understood correctly and fully, must be understood within the context of the totality of divine knowledge and as an expression of that knowledge. The conceptual world of Scripture, then, is nothing less than the mind of God. Through Scripture, we have access, in some measure, to the mind of God.[116]

Of course, in Scripture God does not express himself in his own terms, in his own language. Such expression would be beyond human comprehension (cf. 2 Cor 12:1-4). Instead, God is communicating a message to human beings. To make such communication possible, he limits or accommodates himself to what can be expressed in human language. He provides only a partial communication of divine truth, even on the topics he addresses, in recognition of what we can comprehend in our present state of existence (cf. 1 Cor 13:8-12). Scripture reveals the mind of God, but only on a simple, human level—taking us into the depths of divine wisdom only as far as God wants to take us in the present age.

Nonetheless, as we have seen, God speaks in accordance with his all-knowing, truthful, and immutable character, and so everything actually stated in his word must be entirely true and self-consistent. The statements in the Bible may be simple or imprecise for the sake of effective communication, but they are always true within the degree of precision implied by the language used. God could speak no other way without denying himself and compromising his integrity.

But since the word of God comes to us in the words of men, written indeed by men, though inspired men, the question is raised whether and to what extent the thoughts of God have taken the shape of the thoughts and concepts of the human authors. Certainly the word of God has been “translated” into the terms and categories of human language. The use of written human language makes it likely that, to some extent at least, contemporary literary forms or styles were used. Certainly also the word of God refers to things in this world— people, events, nature, and so forth. These “human elements” of form and context, as we have indicated, provide some limitations on what God can effectively communicate, and thus involve simplification and approximation, but cannot involve error and still be the word of God.

If we try to expand the human element beyond linguistic and literary form and historical and natural context, we can easily get into trouble. That is, if we suppose that the assertions made in these forms and contexts are of human origin, coming out of the conceptual contexts of the human writers, then we are in danger of denying that Scripture is the word of God. William Henry Green, in a statement described by Enns as “penetrating and instructive,” was careful to define “those distinctive qualities and characteristics which link men to their own age” only as “language,” “subject,” “style of thought,” and “local and personal allusions” (relating to the “circumstances of the period”), which are what we have called the linguistic form and historical context of Scripture.[117] We can go a little further, with the model proposed by organic inspiration, and say that the ideas in the mind of the inspired writers came in part from their culture and thus were fallible, but we have to insist, as did Hodge and Warfield, that the Holy Spirit so selected, directed, elevated, and corrected these ideas (which divine providence had intentionally brought into their minds with this communication in view), as they were put together in the mind of the writers, along with content from revelation, illumination, and spiritual reflection, that they became a formulation of God’s thought, with the result that the writers proceeded to write out the word of God as their message.[118]

For example, there are certain similarities of form and content (but no striking verbal correspondences) between a section of Proverbs (22:17-24:22) and the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope. The nature of, and reason for, these similarities have been much discussed since E. A. Wallis Budge published this Egyptian text in 1923,[119] and Enns’s one-sided discussion leaves the unsuspecting reader thinking that Proverbs is directly dependent on that pagan source of wisdom.[120] This conclusion has been rejected by evangelical scholars who have studied the matter carefully,[121] but it seems likely that the book of Proverbs, while adapting certain forms and motifs of the “wisdom tradition” of the ancient Near East, was intended to surpass and supplant that tradition for the people of God. There were many Semitic and Egyptian instruction manuals offering practical advice on the art of living, and Proverbs supplied a divine one. The fact that Proverbs deals with some of the same situations as the Instruction of Amenemope and sometimes gives similar advice or uses similar motifs, shows that they are addressing similar subjects and that there is some genuine insight (common grace) in the ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature. But the verbal parallels are far too tenuous to establish literary borrowing. And even if we conclude that Solomon or the compiler of Proverbs did draw upon that wisdom tradition, we must also say, if Scripture is the inspired word of God, that the Holy Spirit guided the use of that tradition in such a way that not only what was taken from it was true, but also what was written in Proverbs expressed God’s message to his people. Because “God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure,” it “surpassed” (i.e., was similar to, but superior to) the wisdom of the ancient Near East (1 Kgs 4:29-30), and it was perfected in the inspired book of Proverbs.

But Enns makes no allowance for inspiration as Old Princeton and Early Westminster (as he calls it) would have understood it. He argues that what the authors of Scripture learned from their cultures, both true and false (by God’s objective standard), entered into the Bible without the Spirit’s requisite selection, direction, elevation, and correction to keep it free from error.[122] Indeed, he even asserts that God embraced the error of antiquity as the “incarnate” vehicle to convey his truth. He says, for example, that the Bible shares “many of the standards, concepts, and worldviews of its ancient Near Eastern neighbors.”[123] God “was willing and ready to adopt an ancient way of thinking” on such matters as the configuration of heaven and earth.[124] God adopted “the conventions and conditions” of ancient people, leaving us with a “messy”[125] “The historical contexts [that is, the cultural ideas and methods] of the biblical authors played a determining role in the shape that God’s revelation took.”[126] By denying an error-preventing inspiration, as Old Princeton and Early Westminster understood it, Enns breaks in principle with his theological heritage. Although he continues to call Scripture the inerrant word of God, he denies that it is such in reality (i.e., as those words have been understood in Reformed and evangelical theology), as we argued in the previous section. God can no more “incarnate” his truth as erroneous human statements than he can incarnate his Son as a sinful human being.

Enns’s idea that the word of God has been incarnated in the cultural milieu of its time involves another moral impossibility for God. Enns argues, in effect, that God uses dishonest (evil) means to achieve his good ends—what Paul calls a slanderous charge worthy of condemnation (see Rom 3:8). That is, God supposedly uses statements that he knows to be false and interpretive methods that he knows to be fallacious in order to persuade people of certain things, knowing that they think that those statements are true and think that those methods are legitimate. For example, “Genesis makes its case” that “Yahweh, the God of Israel, is worthy of worship,” in “a way that ancient men and women would have readily understood,” with a flat earth and a geocentric universe.[127] And, as noted above, God supposedly “communicate[d] the supreme Good News through pedestrian and uninspired [and unhistorical] Jewish legends.”[128] The apostolic “exegetical methods,” Enns says, “were not objective tools, . . . but a means of realizing a grander purpose.”[129] Finally, God, as Enns portrays him, is not only seriously lacking in intellectual and moral integrity, but strangely incapable, for this was supposedly “the only way” he could make his points.[130] Enns’s pushing of the incarnational analogy has led him horribly astray.

V. Divine Accommodation

Enns seeks to position his line of interpretation within the bounds of Reformed orthodoxy by appealing to the idea of divine accommodation. He says that God, in order to reveal himself to people, “accommodates, condescends, meets them where they are,” by speaking and acting “in ways that make sense to them.”[131] So far, so good. As we have indicated above, God’s desire to communicate to his people requires that he speak in their language and on their level. God accommodates, or adapts, his word by limiting, shaping, and fitting his language to the possibilities of human speech and the mental capacities of his people (both of which he created for the purpose of such communication).

Effective communication often requires simplification. A good teacher, for example, simplifies his subject matter when explaining it to students who know very little about it. Similarly, when God appears to people in the Bible, he does not show himself as he actually is in himself (for no one could see that and live), but he takes a physical form that reveals in a simplified way something about himself. Likewise, when he speaks about himself in Scripture, he uses anthropomorphisms and other figures of speech. In general, we may say, the more sublime and transcendent the truth being expressed in Scripture, the more simplified and “brought down to earth” it has to be. Consequently, we look forward to the resurrection state, in which we will “know fully,” compared with the partial revelation of even the NT era (1 Cor 13:8-12). But, as we have argued above, simplicity of expression and similar accommodation does not necessarily entail the statement of error. Coming from God, such communication may involve approximation and ambiguity, but not error.

The use of human language means that words and phrases may sometimes be used whose etymological origin involved erroneous conceptions.[132] But those conceptions need not still attach to the words, as used by later speakers, and certainly as used by God. For example, when we use the word Thursday, we are not honoring Thor, as our linguistic forebears did, nor are we giving any credence to Norse mythology. And even if we did, it would still be true that if God were to speak to us in English and use that word, he would be doing nothing more than using familiar language to refer to the fifth day of the week. Similarly, when Matthew uses the verb σεληνιάζομαι in 4:24 and 17:15 with reference to epileptics, we should not assume that Scripture is endorsing the view that people are actually “moonstruck.”

Furthermore, when God speaks in human language, he must be understood as referring to things without necessarily adopting the assumptions or beliefs about those things that his hearers hold. Let us suppose that God were speaking to some animists; he could use such words as tree and wind without endorsing their view that those objects are animated by spirits. No doubt many Greeks believed that the deities Helios and Selene were behind the sun and the moon, yet the Bible uses the words ἥλιος and σελήνη to designate those bodies without accepting Greek polytheism. Similarly, we must assume that God uses the phrase “the end of the earth” in Acts 1:8 (cf. Isa 49:6; Acts 13:47) simply to refer to the most distant place on earth (from Jerusalem), implying nothing about the shape of the planet, even if it could be established that the expression originally presupposed, and even if Luke believed, that the world was flat and came to a literal end. One speaker’s use of language does not necessarily entail the acceptance of the conceptual baggage that other users may bring with it, and that is especially true of God’s use of language. God uses the words of human language only with proper and true connotations.

In addition to speaking simply and using contemporary language without endorsing the etymological meaning of words or adopting erroneous contemporary ideas about the referents of words, God accommodates his word to his human audience by speaking phenomenologically. That is, he speaks of phenomena as they appear to people, not as modern scientists have determined they are from another vantage point. Thus, for example, he speaks in Ps 113:3 of “the rising of the sun” and “its setting.” This is not a statement about which body revolves around which other body as viewed from outside the solar system. Rather, it refers to the sun as people daily observe its movement across the sky. When people ordinarily speak of the sun, they mean the ball of light and heat in the sky, and that object does indeed rise and set on the horizon; so to refer to that observed phenomenon as such is by no means erroneous.

These kinds of accommodation do not compromise the truth; they simply assert the truth less precisely or less fully than it might have been asserted (albeit with less comprehension). But there remains one category of accommodation that must be ruled out when we speak of the word of our truth-telling God. That is the category that William Lee in the nineteenth century said was already being attributed to biblical writers by “over-ingenious and perverse minds,” namely, accommodation “in which the teacher adopts as true, principles which he knows to be erroneous; and employs them so as to confirm his pupils in their errors.”[133] In the words of Warfield, “It is one thing to adapt the teaching of truth to the stage of receptivity of the learner; it is another thing to adopt the errors of the time as the very matter to be taught.”[134]

Regrettably, that is the kind of accommodation that Enns finds in Scripture. As he clarifies his concept of biblical accommodation, he says that God was “willing and ready to adopt an ancient way of thinking,” such as the categories of “ancient myth” (pertaining to creation, the flood, etc.).[135] God “accommodates himself,” that is, he “condescends to the conventions and conditions of those to whom he is revealing himself.”[136] Enns generally glosses over this crucial point, but he means that God adopts certain of the erroneous views of those to whom he speaks. For example, when Jesus said that “Moses . . . wrote of me” ( John 5:46), his statement does not establish that Moses wrote a portion of the OT, Enns argues, because Jesus was accommodating his argument to what the Jews believed. His statement should be understood as “a device to convict these Jews on the grounds of what they hold most dear: their authoritative Scripture.” One should not be surprised at this, for “we would fully expect Jesus, precisely because he is God incarnate, to exhibit such marks of accommodation.”[137]

What does Enns mean when he speaks of Jesus “exhibit[ing] such marks of accommodation”? Is he suggesting that Jesus was taking rhetorical advantage of the Jews’ belief in Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, while knowing such authorship to be false? Milton S. Terry observed that some “rationalists of Germany” (then the most perverse lot in Christendom) had “gone so far as to teach that our Lord accommodated himself to the prejudices of his age and people,” and he properly insisted that such a view “should be utterly repudiated by the sober and thoughtful exegete,” for “it virtually teaches that Jesus Christ was a propagator of falsehood.”[138] Kuyper is no less emphatic: “Will you accept such a sinful accommodation of what is unworthy of God and in conflict with the character of spiritual life, in Him whom you worship as the incarnate Word?” To apply such a notion of accommodation to what Jesus said about the origin of the Scriptures (or any other matter) “attacks . . . the Deity of Jesus and even His moral character,” making him a liar and a sinner.[139]

On another occasion, Enns insists that there is “absolutely no indication” that Jesus “does not mean what he says.”[140] Thus, Enns’s rather cryptic statement that Jesus exhibits “marks of accommodation” must mean that God was accommodating himself to Jewish culture by allowing Jesus to believe and even argue on the basis of the erroneous ideas of his day. This interpretation is supported by his subsequent comment that “much of Jesus’ words were conditioned by his culture,” and that “Jesus’ first-century contours” are “evidence of the lengths to which God will condescend to redeem his people.”[141] Stripped of the rhetoric, Enns is saying that Christ believed and taught some things that were false. The grave implications of such a position will be explored in section 7. At this point, we will merely note that the Spirit’s empowerment of Jesus for ministry (Luke 3:22) included a unique inspiration that enabled him to speak, not only from God (as a prophet), but as the Son of God (Luke 4:1, 18; 9:35; John 3:34; 8:26; Heb 1:2). This inspiration characterized his entire teaching ministry. Thus, it is contrary to the whole tenor of the gospel record to suppose that certain of his utterances express erroneous notions that he picked up from his culture. Everything he spoke came from God. Enns’s view of divine accommodation, then, implies that God was telling falsehoods through his Son. On such a view, the Son may be spared the moral condemnation expressed in the previous paragraph, but the Father may not. Such a horrendous conclusion surely refutes the idea of God accommodating himself in the erroneous statements of his Son.

This problem is compounded by the fact that these supposedly erroneous statements of Jesus are recorded in the Gospels as authoritative teaching to be accepted by Christians. So on Enns’s view of divine accommodation, God employs in his inspired word various ideas, premises, and methodologies that he knows to be objectively false. So once more this view makes God out to be a liar and a deceiver.[142] Surely he is not. The accommodation that is necessarily involved in God speaking to men cannot be extended to stating falsehoods and using arguments known to be erroneous.

Paul H. Seeley, who in a number of articles has argued that the early chapters of Genesis are historically unreliable and reproduce the erroneous views held in antiquity, holds to a view of accommodation much like that of Enns, and he objects to the thought that he in effect makes God out to be a liar: “Temporarily allowing a prescientific people to hold onto their ingrained beliefs about the natural world is not at all the same thing as lying to them. Rather, it is following the principle of becoming ‘all things to all men.”‘[143] However, the only way that God can “allow” people to hold onto their erroneous views is not to speak on the subjects involved. But when he speaks on a subject, he is stating his view, not their view, and inculcating that view among his hearers.[144] By saying nothing about the composition of the moon, for example, God allows people to think it is made out of cheese, but if he says it is a big chunk of rock, then he is denying that it is anything else. And if he says it is made out of cheese, then either he is a liar (or ignorant) or he knows something that modern scientists do not know. But to interpret such a statement as “allowing” people to “hold onto their ingrained belief “about the moon is preposterous. Let’s see where Seely’s notion takes us: if God says the moon is made out of cheese, he is not lying because his hearers already believe that, but if he says it is made out of mustard, then he is lying because they do not already believe that. Enough of this! Stating a known falsehood, either in a narrative of what ostensibly happened or as the premise of an argument, is lying, pure and simple. What one’s hearers happen to believe is irrelevant. If Genesis is the word of God, then Seely and Enns portray him as a teller of falsehoods. Their position is even worse than the standard liberal view, which is that Scripture is not (truly) the word of God. The liberals give up a high view of Scripture to preserve the integrity of God; Seely and Enns sacrifice the integrity of God in order to preserve, at least in their verbiage, a high view of Scripture. Over against both of those views stands Reformed orthodoxy, which preserves both the integrity of God and a high view of Scripture by insisting on the objective truth of Scripture.[145]

Enns and others who have an unjustifiably expansive view of divine accommodation often appeal to orthodox theologians, from Calvin onward, in support of their position. However, Calvin and the others to whom appeal is made hold to accommodation as we have outlined it above, not as Enns and those like him use the word.[146] Enns describes Calvin’s idea of accommodation with careful ambiguity, in a way that could be read as we have explained it above, but could also be interpreted to include an unacceptable extension of the concept: “Calvin understood how, in inspiring Scripture, God accommodated himself to the historical context to which he spoke, and this has remained a Reformed trajectory.”[147] His example of this, Calvin’s commentary on Gen 1:6, will be shown in Part II to lend no support to what Enns has in mind.

Similarly, Seely claims that his understanding of the supposed geographical and anthropological inadequacies of Gen 11:1-9 are “in accord with Calvin’s understanding of accommodation for he showed in his expositions of Ps 72:8-10 and Gen 2:8-14 that he believed God accommodated his revelation to the limited knowledge available at the time.”[148] But when Calvin comments on Ps 72:8 that “David obviously accommodates his language to his own time,” all he means is that David “has . . . begun his description” of the extent of the messianic kingdom by referring to the land of Canaan “in phraseology well known, and in familiar use,” before in the next few verses proceeding “to speak of the enlarged extent of the empire of this king” throughout the world.[149] And commenting on the geographical uncertainties in the description of the garden of Eden in Gen 2:10-14, Calvin rejects the suggestion that Moses provides a description that was accurate before the deluge, but not after it, because “Moses (in my judgment) accommodated his topography to the capacity of his age,” that is, described the location in terms that people of his day would readily recognize (which Calvin then tries to explain).[150] So neither passage has anything to do with adopting false views as a rhetorical tactic.

Seely then correctly notes that Scripture, in Calvin’s view, was at times accommodated to phenomenal appearances (as we discuss above). “But he also showed in his expositions of Jer 10:2 and John 17:12 that he believed Scripture could be accommodated to false conclusions which might be drawn from mere phenomenal appearances.”[151] But when Calvin says, in commenting on Jer 10:2, that Jeremiah “accommodates himself to the notions which then prevailed,” he means nothing more than that Jeremiah does not use the word signs “in its proper meaning” (as in Gen 1:14), but in the profane astrological sense— and all this would have been clear if Seely had bothered to quote Calvin’s entire sentence.[152] This “accommodation” has to do merely with using a word with reference to astrology (the practice of which Jeremiah rejects). In John 17:12, Calvin expresses the view that the exceptive phrase “but the son of perdition,” if analyzed by “the rules of grammar,” suggests incorrectly that Jesus lost one of the disciples whom the Father had given him, but he explains that Jesus was speaking “in accommodation to the ordinary opinion of men,” that is, in accordance with the appearance that Jesus had lost one of his originally true followers. But Jesus was not adopting that view, and indeed denied it by describing Judas as “the son of perdition”—someone “devoted to destruction” by God all along.[153] Neither of these passages remotely supports Seely’s contention that, in Calvin’s view, “Scripture could be accommodated to false conclusions which might be drawn from mere phenomenal appearances.” Finally, Seely comments that “Calvin saw Jesus as the ultimate source of the idea that inspired Scripture can be accommodated to the notions of the times (Matt 19:8; Mark 10:5).”[154] In his commentary on Matt 19:7-8, Calvin merely observes that Moses permitted divorce as a matter of civil law (not moral law) in order to deal with the depravity of men (not “the notions of the times”) and regulated divorce for the protection of women.[155] Thus we see that Seely’s appeals to Calvin consist of one distortion after another.

It is no secret that a common ploy of those holding unorthodox views on the doctrine of Scripture, not to mention other subjects, is to claim the support of Calvin.[156] We cannot get into all of that here, of course, but it will be instructive to see how Kent Sparks, in an article recommended by Enns,[157] twists the language of Calvin, even ignoring his statements in the same paragraph that directly contradict him. When Calvin observes that Gen 1:6-8 speaks of “waters above the heaven,” Sparks represents Calvin as arguing that “Genesis merely accommodates itself to the ancient view that such waters existed,” when in fact “one knows good and well” that there are no such waters. Sparks summarizes Calvin’s “ready-made hermeneutical tool” as follows: “Whenever the Bible appears to speak ‘falsely,’ this reflects an accommodation to the false views of humanity.”[158] However, Calvin’s “principle” of accommodation is not that at all, but simply (in his own words) that “nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world.” Thus, “the waters here meant are such as the rude and unlearned may perceive,” that is, “the clouds suspended in the air.”[159] Sparks also notes Calvin’s comment on Ps 136:7 speaking of the sun and the moon as “the two great lights,” that, even though the planets can be shown by astronomers to be larger than the moon, “the Holy Spirit would rather speak childishly than unintelligibly to the humble and unlearned.” Sparks asserts that “from this” Calvin inferred that God is “adopting the errant viewpoints of his human audience.”[160] But Calvin does no such thing. Rather, he says that the Holy Spirit speaks of the relative sizes of the heavenly bodies as they appear “to the eye.” Once again, God’s accommodation consists of describing things as they ordinarily appear, not adopting the erroneous ideas of antiquity. But on the basis of these distortions of Calvin, a principle is propounded that supposedly excuses the allegedly false statements of Scripture. If Calvin had actually supported such a position, we would not hesitate to reject it as unscriptural, but the fact is that he did not support it; indeed, there should be little doubt but that he would have considered it reprehensible.[161]

Returning to Seely, we find next that his appeal to Charles Hodge is as mistaken as his appeal to Calvin. He asserts that Hodge “appealed to Calvin’s concept of accommodation” to explain why Genesis supposedly contains statements of scientific error.[162] However, in the discussion cited by Seely, Hodge argues for the “historical veracity” of the Mosaic account of creation, and does not concede the presence of any errors. To explain the use of terms that seem to embody erroneous concepts, Hodge explains that Scripture uses “the language of common life,” in which phenomena are often described as they appear. “Men instinctively form their language according to apparent, and not absolute or scientific truth.” They use such expressions as the “rising” and “setting” of the sun, “although they know that this is only apparently and not really true.” Accordingly, when Scripture employs “familiar” terms like this, it should not be charged with error. Hodge concludes by citing a passage in the Institutes where Calvin notes that Moses accommodates himself to the “rudeness” of ordinary people—in that case, by mentioning in Gen 1 the creation of the things that are part of common human experience, but not other things that were created, including angels.[163] None of this has anything to do with adopting the erroneous views of the times as if they were true; it involves only the categories of accommodation that we described above as being consistent with Scripture being the word of a truth-telling God.

Seely also appeals to Warfield in support of his notion of accommodation, frequently quoting a passage in which he says that a biblical writer may be presumed to have “shared the ordinary opinions of his day in certain matters lying outside the scope of his teachings,” such as the relation of the earth to the sun, and that “the form of his language, when incidentally adverting to such matters, might occasionally play into the hands of such a presumption.”[164] But in the context of these remarks it is clear that Warfield is referring to the biblical writer’s private, unexpressed views, not to what he writes in Scripture under inspiration. And when Warfield allows that “the form of his language” may “incidentally advert” to those ordinary opinions, he is referring to accommodation as Calvin and Hodge describe it. A merely careless scholar might have missed these points, however crucial, but the extraordinary aspect of this repeated attempt to use Warfield for orthodox theological cover is the fact that Warfield’s quoted words are actually part of an extended argument against the contention, which Seely is promoting in a similar context, that these mistaken opinions of the day “underlie, are so assumed in, are so implied by, are so interwoven with Paul’s official teaching.”[165] That is, Warfield denies that Scripture contains statements that teach the mistaken opinions of the day, yet Seely extracts part of Warfield’s denial and distorts it into support for the view that Scripture does contain such statements.[166] And in another article Warfield asked rhetorically, “Shall we then take refuge in the idea of accommodation, and explain that, in so speaking of the Scriptures, Christ and his apostles did not intend to teach the doctrine of inspiration implicated, but merely adopted, as a matter of convenience, the current language, as to Scripture, of the time?”[167] Some today may answer with a resounding “Yes!” but they should not attempt to enlist the support of Warfield or imagine that their argument is at all orthodox.

Finally, we should note that in his latest writings, Enns has begun to distinguish openly between the inerrant “teachings” of Scripture and its errant “nonteaching texts” (see Part I, section 3). This sort of thinking would be a logical development of the accommodationist analysis of Inspiration and Incarnation, although, as we have seen, in that book he tries instead to subsume such error under inerrancy. But when, for example, Enns tells us that “God transformed the ancient myths so that Israel’s story would come to focus on its God, the real one,”[168] he could have proceeded to say that the myth is simply the vehicle by which the teaching is conveyed that God, not some other deity or deities, did the creating. Similarly, one might argue that when Jesus says, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me” ( John 5:46), the teaching of the passage, as distinguished from the accommodationist argumentation about Moses, is merely that one ought to believe Jesus because he fulfills OT messianic expectation. We would reply, however, that the conclusion or the lesson of a passage cannot be separated from the narrative or the argument that leads to it. A narrative relating things that God did not really do hardly establishes that God did something. The conclusion of a logical argument is not valid if one of its premises is invalid. Furthermore, the teaching of Scripture consists of all that it asserts, not just the conclusions reached by those assertions. John 5:46, for example, teaches that Moses wrote about Jesus and that his writings were available to be read (in the OT, obviously), just as much as it teaches that those who believe the OT will recognize that it speaks of Jesus. Extended notions of accommodation cannot be used to separate the teaching of Scripture from any supposedly nonteaching elements. Such an approach would undermine the unity and integrity of Scripture as the infallible word of God.

VI. The Meaning Of Scripture

Throughout this article, we have emphasized that the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, at the time of the writing of the biblical text (presumably including any rewriting or editing for a later age), was the decisive act that made the biblical text the word of God. Whether God put into the mind of the writer the words he was to write or guided him in formulating the appropriate statements using knowledge and ideas already in his mind as the result of providence, the key point is that God directly caused the text to be written as it was written, thus making it his word. In this fashion, Scripture gives expression to the mind of God in the words of men.

When we say that God has spoken in the words of men, we mean, of course, the words of ancient Hebrew (and a little Aramaic), as understood by the ancient Israelites from the time of Moses onward, and Hellenistic Greek, as understood in the Mediterranean world of the first century after Christ. But “Hebrew” and “Greek,” like all linguistic phenomena that we call languages, are abstractions. There is a considerable amount of variation within each language as it is actually spoken and written. Indeed, we may say that each person has his own language, and even that that is variable, depending on his audience, subject matter, state of mind, and other circumstances. Since the meanings that we attach to words are shaped by all of our life experiences, and no two people have exactly the same experiences, it follows that no two people express themselves exactly alike. Fortunately, people tend to use words in similar ways within a given linguistic group, thus making meaningful communication possible. The language of such a group consists of a set of verbal forms that have meanings that are generally agreed upon by its users. But the agreement is only general, and the more diverse the group is, the more variation there is in the group’s language. Thus, it would be more accurate to say that God speaks to us, not simply in Hebrew and Greek, but in the Hebrew of various writers and the Greek of various writers—and even the Hebrew or Greek spoken through one biblical writer will be somewhat different in different circumstances.[169]

Furthermore, we must reckon with the fact that the Author of the word of God has had “life experiences” that are markedly different from those of men. Thus, it can be only approximately correct to say that he has spoken to us in the Hebrew and Greek spoken by people at the time of writing, or even by the actual writers of Scripture. For example, when Scripture says, “Love your neighbor,” does God mean the same thing as the writer? Would God and the writer consider the same persons to be one’s “neighbor”? Would they have the same understanding of “love”? Clearly, God would have a more profound understanding of the statement than the writer.

How can we know what God means when he employs human language? Real communication between God and man is possible, we know, because God created man in his image and gave him language, not only to enable people to communicate with one another, but also to enable them to communicate with God. But we also know that the fall of man into sin affected every aspect of his life—including his language. Our concepts have been warped by sin. What does “good” mean to a sinner in comparison to what it means to God? For that matter, what does “God” mean to a sinner in comparison to what it means to the Almighty?

So how do we know what God’s communications in human language mean? A knowledge of the biblical languages as used by people at the time of writing (aided by ancient translations) can give us a general sense of what God meant. But to refine that sense we must study God’s use of human language. We have that only in Scripture. An intensive study of the Scriptures in general will help to explain the meaning of any verse in particular. Furthermore, since God’s statements are true, corresponding to the reality of God and his creation, anything we can learn about God and his creation from studying theology and the world around us can help us understand his word. Also, especially where the more spiritual statements of Scripture are involved, the illumination of the Holy Spirit is necessary to give the reader a deeper understanding of what the word of God is talking about.

This discussion has assumed that the meaning of the text of Scripture is the meaning that God intended to convey by it. The meaning of any text is the meaning intended by its author, and God is the author of Scripture by virtue of inspiration. We discern the author’s intended meaning by studying the text and learning about the author. As we get to know God better and study Scripture more, we gain greater insight into the meaning of the word of God at any point.

But what do we make, then, of the meaning intended by the human authors of Scripture? It is commonplace in our day to say that “Paul here means such-and-such,” and the like. Such statements are all right if they are shorthand for “God, speaking through Paul, here means such-and-such.”[170] Unfortunately, most people who speak of what Paul meant are focusing on what Paul understood as he wrote, as if he was not inspired, and in that they err. The meaning of the biblical text, strictly speaking, is the meaning of its author, God. We really don’t know how much of that meaning was intended or understood by the human writer. Under the various theories of inspiration (except the strictly mechanical view, which is more of a straw man than anything), however, the thinking of the human writer was drawn by the Spirit into the thinking of God, so that he could write God’s word intentionally and knowingly as his word as well. We may be reasonably confident, then, that the writer ordinarily had a good grasp of the divine meaning, though not always fully understanding the revelations that he was passing on (as indicated by 1 Pet 1:10-12). Thus, if we could ask Paul what, say, “being baptized on behalf of the dead” means in 1 Cor 15:29, we would no doubt take his answer as definitive.

Nonetheless, we must always bear in mind that the human writer’s understanding of what he was writing under inspiration was never the complete meaning, in all of its depth and implications, as understood by God. The human writers held many views, some of them quite erroneous, but the significance of inspiration is that out of the mix of ideas in their minds, only true statements were written down.[171] And because of their limited knowledge, misunderstandings, and sin, what they understood of those true statements may not always have been correct. For example, it may be that when the psalmist wrote about the earth not moving (e.g., Pss 93:1; 104:5), he thought he was expressing a geocentric view of the universe (as Calvin took it). However, we know today that that view is wrong and therefore could not have been God’s intended meaning, and so we should understand the text to mean that the earth is solid and unmoving as people experience it (or perhaps in a figurative sense, as some commentators suggest). Thus we see that we would not have an infallible and inerrant Scripture if we equated it with the meaning understood by its human writers. Only as it is the word of God is Scripture infallible and inerrant. Only as we search out God’s meaning of the text do we find the infallible word of God.

We go further astray from the divine meaning of the text if we insist that the meaning of the text cannot go beyond what the human author could have meant by what he wrote. The assumption behind that view is that the human author could not have known much more about anything than anyone else in his day. Apart from the fact that such thinking usually denies the possibility of revelation, it also confuses the meaning of the text with the writer’s understanding of it. Perhaps Moses, at his stage in the history of redemption, could not have known that the seed of the woman (Gen 3:15) was Jesus Christ, but God inspired those words to be written with the Savior in mind, and so Jesus is part of the genuine meaning of the passage. Of course, in the context of Gen 3 alone, the identity of the seed cannot be determined, but from the rest of Scripture, which gives us a fuller insight into the mind of the Author, we know that he was referring to Jesus when it was written.

Even less relevant to the meaning of Scripture than what the human authors may have understood their text to mean is what the first hearers or readers of the text would have understood it to mean. Ordinarily we may assume that God wanted the initial audience to understand what was written, but that was not always the case (see 1 Pet 1:10-12, again). The divine meaning of Scripture was not necessarily fully grasped by the initial audience. And no doubt the first hearers understood less of it than the writers. It may be interesting to speculate what they may have or could have understood, but that has little to do with determining the full meaning as intended by God.

The true meaning of Scripture, then, is the meaning intended and understood by God. Since the teaching of the entire word of God is necessarily unified and consistent, the meaning of one passage will usually be clarified by the rest of Scripture. This is not because esoteric meanings are lurking here and there, defying the ordinary meanings of words, but because individual passages are sometimes vague or lacking in clear referents. They sometimes come into focus, or show unexpected depth of meaning, in the light of the rest of Scripture. At such times, it is irrelevant that the human writer (or the initial audience) may not, and perhaps could not, have understood the text in that manner. His understanding of what he wrote may well have been incomplete, or even erroneous.

Now since the word of God has come to expression in the language of men, it is important to understand the biblical languages. Contemporary extrabiblical literature can be of use here, to explain the meanings of words and to help understand literary forms. But Scripture may also use words with new meanings and new connotations. Ordinary grammatical-historical exegesis will always provide at least a good first approximation of the meaning of the text. But words in Scripture may have nuances that they do not have elsewhere. There may be references that are unclear until they are revealed later in redemptive history. There may be principles embedded in the text, the full significance of which appears only in the fullness of time. This meaning was there from the beginning, whether the human writer understood it or not, and whether or not it is discernible from the immediate context of the passage.

The NT’s handling of the OT is particularly important in providing guidance for the proper interpretation of the OT. The fact that so many interpreters often see a disconnect between the original meaning of OT texts and what the NT derives from them, shows how mistaken those interpreters are. Much work still needs to be done to elucidate the divine meaning of the OT, but genuine progress will be made only when the NT, as God’s later word, is permitted to explain the OT, as his earlier word. Enns starts out on the right track when he recognizes that “there must be more to Christian biblical interpretation” than standard grammatical-historical exegesis of the OT (determining the meaning of the text in accordance with, but also within the limitations of, its immediate literary and historical context), but such exegesis should not be equated with “uncovering the original meaning” of the passage.[172] The “more” that is often in Christian interpretation must be understood as part of the original meaning—the meaning understood by the divine author—but that may only become clear as redemptive history unfolds. But for Enns, the “more” is not in the text as written, but as read back into it in the light of the coming of Christ.

In the introduction to his commentary on Exodus, Enns explains his position more fully. First, he defines the “original meaning” of an OT text as what “was intended by the writer to be understood by his audience”—that which grammatical-historical exegesis attempts to uncover. But since Scripture “ultimately comes from God,” there is also “God’s intention” to be considered, which we discern by looking at “the sweep of Scripture as a whole” (especially the coming of Christ). “To look at God’s intention is ultimately to look to the end of the story and work backward.” For a Christian, the “meaning” of the OT text must be “more” than the original meaning. To discern that meaning, one must find “the connection between the meaning of a text in its original setting and the effect the resurrection of Christ has on our understanding of that meaning.”[173] If God’s intention (the Christian meaning) were at least part of the original meaning of the text, we would agree with Enns. But what Enns calls the original meaning does not include the Christian meaning intended by God. This becomes clear when he discusses the handling of Isa 49:8 in 2 Cor 6:2. Enns declares that nothing in the Isaiah passage “objectively” refers to Christ, as it refers simply to Israel’s release from Babylon. But after the coming of Christ, “we know what God was ultimately saying through Isaiah.”[174]

Enns calls his hermeneutic “christotelic,” because it sees Christ as “the end [Greek, telos] to which the Old Testament story is heading.”[175] The problem with this approach, however, is that it denies that the NT interpretation is actually at least part of the original meaning of the OT text. The confusion begins when Enns equates the “original meaning” of the OT text with the meaning intended by the writer, whereas in fact it is the meaning intended by the primary author, God. The meaning revealed by God in the NT is at least part of God’s original meaning, whether the writer knew that or not. The confusion of meanings really escalates when we attempt to apply the christotelic hermeneutic to OT passages upon which the NT does not comment, for if the Christian meaning is not present in the OT text, finding it there seems to be basically an exercise in free association.[176] It would have been interesting if Enns had provided an example of applying his hermeneutic to such a passage.

But the most serious problem with Enns’s approach is its assumption that the NT’s interpretation of the OT is often objectively false. For example, Matt 2:15 clearly says that the flight to Egypt “was to fulfill” the Lord’s prophecy in Hos 11:1. In Part II, we will explain how this was so, but the important point here is that Enns denies what Matthew declares to be true: “This passage is not predictive of Christ’s coming.”[177] Again, Enns tells us that Rahab was not converted and thus did not exercise saving faith in Josh 2, and so Heb 11:31 and Jas 2:24-26 are wrong to say that she was a believer.[178] Similarly, Gal 3:16 states that the word “seed” in God’s promises to Abraham refers specifically to Christ, but Enns insists that this statement is objectively wrong: “Paul is using the Old Testament in a way that has nothing to do with how the Old Testament is to be understood in its original context.”[179] In other words, “seed” does not refer specifically to Christ, despite what the word of the omniscient God states. So once again we find Enns, however unintentionally, making God out to be a liar.

Enns sinks deeper into error when he argues that the apostolic church interpreted the OT using sometimes arbitrary methods learned from contemporary non-Christian interpreters.[180] This cannot be true, since the interpretive methods of the Author of Scripture must be those that truly elucidate the actual meaning of the text that he inspired the writer to write. Methods of interpretation are objectively valid or invalid in accordance with God’s immutable standard, not relatively valid, depending on what various people consider valid.

Nonetheless, Enns claims that in order to understand apostolic hermeneutics, we must first understand “the interpretive world in which the New Testament was written,” which was “the Second Temple interpretive world.”[181] It may be true that the NT was written during the time when the so-called Second Temple was standing, but that does not make the NT “a Second Temple interpretive text,”[182] any more than the date of this article makes it a postmodern interpretive text. The interpretive methods of the NT are God’s methods, and they would have been the same whether there had been any other interpretation of the OT going on during that time or not. If other writers interpreted the OT in the same manner as the apostles did, that was simply because those writers also had some understanding of the OT.

So what is Enns’s evidence to support his claims? He makes much of the fact that the Qumran community presupposed itself to be “the focus of prophetic fulfillment” and interpreted the OT accordingly, just as the church presupposed that Christ and the church served as that focus.[183] But many diverse groups down through the centuries have believed that the OT was being specially fulfilled in their generation. But that does not make every such group (e.g., adventists, dispensationalists) part of the Second Temple “interpretive world.” The real question is how this general approach is carried out. It would make more sense to say that the Qumranian method was to apply the OT to the Qumran community, and that the apostolic method was to apply it to Christ and the church.

Enns goes on to argue that just as Qumran read into the OT references to itself that were not in the original text, so the church read into the OT references to itself that were not there. “This involved manipulating the text to suit their purposes.”[184] For example, Matthew found meaning in the OT that “is difficult indeed” to regard “as an objective reading” of the text.[185] The NT authors take OT passages “out of one context, that of the original human author,” and put them “into another context,” that of Christ and the church.[186] Enns expresses his view more bluntly in these words: “NT writers attribute meaning to OT texts that clearly differ[s] from the intention of the OT author.”[187] As we have argued, this implicates God in deception and falsehood, and therefore is an unacceptable explanation. In Part II, we will show how some of Enns’s examples of this supposed phenomenon can be properly interpreted. If the NT asserts that a certain meaning is in an OT text, then it must be there, or else the word of God is inconsistent and its Author is making false statements.

Enns also contends that the apostolic hermeneutic involved adopting as true certain Second Temple interpretive traditions (i.e., Jewish legends) that were in fact false. For example, he argues that when Paul says that the Israelites in the desert under Moses drank from a rock “that followed them” (1 Cor 10:4), he was assuming to be true a Jewish legend that a “moveable well” miraculously accompanied the Israelites during their wanderings to supply them with water.[188] We can state categorically, however, that if the Bible is the inspired word of God, it does not adopt as true any legends or other interpretive traditions that are not true. Again, to assert that this occurs in the word of God is, in effect, to accuse him of being a liar. Some of the extrabiblical traditions handed down by the Jews were no doubt true, and if such traditions are presented in the NT as true, then they are true. That is not the proper explanation of 1 Cor 10:4, but we will leave the interpretation of the passage to Part II. When a passage like this one is interpreted in a way that contradicts the biblical doctrine of Scripture, we may be sure that that interpretation is incorrect—or else we must give up the idea that Scripture is the written word of God. And when someone advances such an interpretation, we have clear evidence that he does not hold to the biblical doctrine of Scripture.

VII. The Incarnate Christ

In the latter part of section 1, on “Methodology,” we observed that Enns interprets the data of Scripture in accordance with what he calls the incarnational analogy between Christ and Scripture. His use of the incarnational analogy can be conveniently expressed as a syllogism:

Premise 1: There is an analogy between the incarnate Christ and the inspired Scriptures. 

Premise 2: The incarnate Christ was thoroughly enculturated. 

Conclusion: Therefore, Scripture is thoroughly enculturated—as we in fact observe in many passages.[189]

In this article, we primarily address Enns’s first premise and his conclusion, and in opposition to his position we develop the biblical view of inspiration and its implications for interpretation. But in this section we will examine his second premise. Enns has written little about it, perhaps assuming it to be noncontroversial. However, when we look at it closely, we see that what he says about the incarnate Christ is as seriously flawed as what he says about Scripture.

“The starting point for our discussion,” says Enns, “is the following: as Christ is both God and human, so is the Bible.” Referring to the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451), he explains that Jesus is “100 percent God and 100 percent human—at the same time,” not “half-God and half-human.”[190] This unconventional description of the person of Christ is not unambiguous, but since he mentions Chalcedon we will take it to mean that Christ had both a fully divine nature (being “perfect in Godhead”) and a fully human nature (being “perfect in manhood”), united in one person, but neither confused nor separated. That humanity, according to Chalcedon, consisted of a normal human body and a normal (i.e., “reasonable,” or rational) human soul (without sin, of course).

According to Enns, however, the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity involved more than the partaking of a human body and a human soul: it also involved the adopting of human culture. When Matt 1:23 tells us that Jesus was “God with us,” the words “with us” imply, Enns asserts, that Jesus “completely assumed the cultural trappings of the world in which he lived.” He suggests that this is part of what Heb 2:17 means when it declares that Jesus was “made like his brothers in every respect.” In other words, Jesus was “a first-century Jew,” speaking their languages and adopting their customs.[191] Although these appeals to Matthew and Hebrews are forced,[192] we would agree that Jesus spoke, dressed, ate, and generally lived much like his contemporaries. However, nothing in Scripture, or in the formulations of Chalcedon, indicates that cultural conformity was an essential part of his humanity. Rather, we should say that he found it appropriate to his humanity to “fit in” in various outward ways, so long as his sinlessness and his ministry were not compromised. Whatever he adopted from his culture, he adopted intentionally and critically, and thus rejected many Jewish customs. We must not forget, as Warfield says, that “despite the completeness of His identification with men, He remained, therefore, even in the days of His flesh different from them and above them.”[193]

But Enns pushes on, entering dangerous waters. Jesus, he tell us, adopted not only the outward trappings of his contemporaries, but also their views and ways of thinking.[194] Jesus, he says, “participated fully in their language, customs, worldview, etc.,” becoming “in every sense one of them.”[195] Once again, if Enns means that Jesus did this critically, accepting only what was appropriate, then we could accept his position. The Gospels portray Jesus as an independent thinker and as a thoroughgoing critic of his culture, seemingly impervious to influence, yet not all of the thinking of his contemporaries was unacceptable. However, it seems clear that this is not what Enns means. Rather, he seems to be saying that because Jesus was raised among, was taught by, and lived his entire life with Palestinian Jews of the late Second Temple period, he grew up thinking like them, for his “cultural acquaintance” was “the same” as that of Moses. We should not be embarrassed, Enns tells us, by “how much of Jesus’ words were conditioned by his cultural milieu.” “Jesus’ first-century contours,” then, extended to his thinking and teaching.[196] In other words, Jesus was to a significant extent the product of his culture.

The attitudes, views, worldview, knowledge, and understanding of the OT that Jesus absorbed from his contemporaries, according to Enns, included some of their erroneous thinking. Jesus not only believed things that were not true, like any other first-century Jew, but also taught things that were not true. For example, as we saw in our discussion of John 5:46 in section 5 on “Divine Accommodation,” it is Enns’s view that Jesus mistakenly believed and stated that Moses wrote a portion of the OT that he had not written. Jesus had no authoritative knowledge of Pentateuchal authorship, according to Enns, but simply accepted what all the Jews then believed. Enns excuses this erroneous statement by Jesus on the grounds that it was part of the divine condescension, or accommodation, involved in the incarnation.[197] However, in section 5 we refuted this notion of divine accommodation to error.

In another instance, Enns argues that Jesus, in Luke 20:37-40 (and parallel passages), uses the interpretive techniques of his day, thinking that they are legitimate, to infer from Exod 3:6 that there will be a resurrection of the dead, although Exod 3:6 actually implies no such thing. “To understand Exod 3:6 as demonstrating that ‘the dead rise’ (Luke 20:37), as Jesus does, violates our hermeneutical sensibilities,” declares Enns, “and we should not pretend other-wise.”[198] “The teachers of the law” were “highly impressed” by “Jesus’ exegesis of Exodus 3:6,” Enns claims, “precisely because Jesus employed Second Temple techniques.”[199] Evidently, Jesus was “quite at home in the Second Temple world.”[200]

Some would argue that we have in the Gospels merely early Christian interpretation of the OT, which has been placed on the lips of Jesus. But Enns attributes this interpretation of Exod 3:6 to Jesus himself, as well one should. He states that “the interpretive methods of Christ,” no less than those of “the NT writers,” were Second Temple phenomena.[201] One might suppose that Jesus (with a loose sense of truthfulness) was intentionally accommodating his arguments to the erroneous thinking of his audience, but Enns properly rejects the notion that “Jesus here does not mean what he says but is only adopting the illegitimate hermeneutical practices of his opponents.”[202] The implication of this is that those “illegitimate hermeneutical practices” are Jesus’ own ways of interpreting the OT, which he mistakenly thought were legitimate. Enns challenges the assumption “that Jesus would not have handled Scripture in this way.”[203]

And why is Jesus’ use of Exod 3:6 “illegitimate”? Enns explains that “it is hard to see” how Exod 3:6, as originally written, “could have been intended to be used as a proof-text for the resurrection.” In that verse, the Lord simply identifies himself to Moses at the burning bush as the God of his ancestors. No one coming to this verse, Enns says, “would think that resurrection was suddenly the topic of conversation.” Clearly, “there is no persuasive connection between that passage and how Jesus uses it.” But Jesus, by using “the hermeneutical (i.e., interpretive) conventions” that he and his hearers considered appropriate, was able to derive the doctrine of resurrection from the passage.[204]

In Part II, section 4, we will demonstrate that the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead is implied by Exod 3:6, just as Jesus said. Here we simply want to refute Enns’s argument that Jesus’ use of (objectively invalid) Second Temple interpretive techniques is shown by the fact that “the teachers of the law” were “highly impressed” by his argument. First of all, Enns does not explain what those interpretive techniques were, let alone how Jesus used them on Exod 3:6. Secondly, only “some of the scribes” were impressed by Jesus’ argument (Luke 20:39). Mark specifically mentions “one of the scribes” being impressed (Mark 12:28), although there were presumably others. Thus, Enns’s scenario of an audience of teachers being delighted by Jesus’ brilliant use of their own favorite interpretive techniques is quite an exaggeration. Thirdly, the real reason why some of the scribes overcame their general hostility to Jesus and thought he had “spoken well” (Luke 20:39) was simply that those scribes were Pharisees, who believed in the resurrection and thus welcomed his siding with them in their dispute (see Mark 12:28) with the Sadducees who had started the whole discussion with Jesus (Luke 20:27). Similarly, Luke relates that “some of the scribes of the Pharisees’ party” spoke well of Paul because he supported the doctrine of the resurrection (Acts 23:6-9). None of this had anything to do with employing so-called Second Temple hermeneutical practices. And as for “the crowd” of more ordinary people who were listening to Jesus, they were “astonished at his teaching” (Matt 22:33) because he spoke impressively, with authority (cf. Matt 7:28-29), not because they were hermeneutical sophisticates who were impressed by his use of Second Temple interpretive techniques.

At this point, we must step back from the details of Enns’s argument and reflect on the enormity of what he is saying about Jesus. Jesus, we are told, misunderstood the OT and drew information and doctrine from it that were not really there. It would be one thing to say that the biblical writers made mistakes, for they were, after all, fallible men, and perhaps they were not as inspired as we have thought. But Jesus was the Son of God—with a divine nature, in intimate communion with the Father, and empowered and inspired by the Holy Spirit for his prophetic ministry. Therefore, Christians have always acknowledged him as their unquestioned teacher. If Jesus says something in the Gospels, Kuyper reminds us, “then the matter is settled for every one who worships Him as his Lord and his God and confesses that He can not err.”[205] Christians have sometimes disagreed as to what Jesus taught, or how his teachings should be applied, but they have always accepted his words as true. Yet Peter Enns audaciously declares that Jesus sometimes spoke in error. Jesus thought that he understood the doctrinal implications of Exod 3:6, but Enns informs us that the Son of God did not know what he was talking about. This critical attitude toward Jesus, although utterly inconsistent with Christian discipleship, is of course nothing new in modern scholarship. Bavinck opposed it a century ago, insisting that “one may not infer” from the humanity of Christ “that in various domains Jesus could err, . . . especially in relation to the Old Testament.” He continues: “One who in this respect charges Jesus with error comes into conflict not only with his divine nature but also with his prophetic office and with all the testimonies in which he ascribes his teaching to the Father.”[206] In short, Enns has challenged the authority of Jesus—with all that that implies.

Ironically, although Enns uses the incarnational analogy to arrive at a thoroughly enculturated and therefore error-prone Bible, other scholars have derived from the analogy a Bible that, while having a human form, nevertheless is without error because of its divinity. For example, Warfield derives from the analogy (“distant” though it may be) the insight that just as the human nature of Jesus “can never fall into sin or error because it can never act out of relation with the Divine nature into conjunction with which it has been brought,” so likewise “the human factors” in the production of Scripture “cannot have fallen into that error which we say it is human to fall into, because they have not acted apart from the Divine factors, by themselves, but only under their unerring guidance.”[207] Because Enns wants to justify his separation of the humanity of Scripture from unerring divine control (i.e., inspiration proper), he begins by separating the analogous humanity of Jesus from unerring divine control (i.e., his divine nature). This is a perverse use of the analogy between Christ and Scripture.

Enns’s separation of the humanity of Christ from divine control is also inconsistent with the orthodox doctrine of the two natures of Christ. That is why Bavinck states (as quoted above) that one who charges Jesus with error “comes into conflict . . . with his divine nature.” It is also why Warfield states (above) that Jesus could not have spoken in error because his human nature could not act “out of relation with the Divine nature into conjunction with which it has been brought.” In the person of Jesus, according to the biblical and orthodox doctrine of the hypostatic union, his divine nature coinhered with his human nature, so that he continued “to have at His disposal the attributes which belonged to Him as God.”[208] Therefore, he could not act or speak contrary to his divine nature. Since God speaks only that which is true (as we argued in section 3), Jesus could not have spoken in error. His divine nature would simply not have allowed that to happen. But Enns separates the human nature of Christ from his divine nature, treating the former as the functional Jesus (in his knowledge and thinking). That is, he supposes that Jesus spoke out of a thoroughly enculturated human nature that operated, at least to a significant extent (enough to believe and teach error), apart from his divine nature. Whether that separation be understood in a Nestorian or a kenotic fashion,[209] it draws into question the divinity of Christ, for if he was a truly divine person, he would not have spoken that which is not true. The doctrine of Christ implicit in Enns’s idea of a thoroughly enculturated and error-prone Jesus, then, is contrary to the orthodox doctrine of the person of Christ.

In accordance with his incarnate state of self-abasement and humiliation (Phil 2:5-8), the Son of God, it is true, voluntarily limited his knowledge at the conscious human level. That is, while he was omniscient by virtue of his divine nature, he limited his access to that knowledge as befitting his human condition. Accordingly, he grew in knowledge as his human mental capacities developed (Luke 2:52), and never knew all that his Father knew (Mark 13:32). Bavinck, citing many of the leading Reformed theologians, explains: “Just as behind our limited consciousness there also lies within us a world of being, so behind the human consciousness of Christ there lay the depths of God, which could only very gradually and to a limited degree shine through that human consciousness.”[210] Nonetheless, there are many hints in the Gospels that Jesus regularly drew upon a special source of knowledge that was inaccessible to ordinary men (notably his intimate knowledge of God, his knowledge of the thoughts of other men, and his knowledge of coming events), which was certainly divine, and which is best understood to be the omniscience of his own divine nature. Furthermore, Jesus was always (until forsaken at the cross) in intimate communion with his Father. As a result, he spoke only what he heard from his Father ( John 7:16; 8:26-29, 38; 12:49-50; 14:10; 15:15; cf. 1:18). Moreover, he was uniquely indwelt by the Holy Spirit (Matt 3:16-17 and parr.), who empowered and inspired him to speak for God (Luke 4:1, 18; 9:35 and parr.; John 3:34; Acts 10:38; Heb 1:2). Thus we see that the three persons of the Trinity worked together in the person of Jesus to ensure that he spoke and acted as the Word of God, and especially that everything he said was properly the word of God—and thus true. Jesus’ understanding of the OT and of truth more generally was far greater than what Enns has been willing to grant, and without the defects that he finds in it. Both as the Son of God and as God’s prophet par excellence, Jesus always spoke what was true.

Finally, Enns’s deficient Christology has huge implications for the Christian faith more generally. Consider the fact that every human culture in our fallen world is laden with sinful attitudes and ideas. Sometimes the sin is subtle and sometimes it is blatant, but sin is pervasive. Anyone who grows up in a particular culture inevitably absorbs, at least to some extent, sinful attitudes and ideas. So if Jesus’ attitudes and ideas were thoroughly enculturated, as Enns claims, then it is hard to see how he could have avoided absorbing sinful attitudes and ideas. The only way that that could have been completely avoided was if his thinking was at all times controlled by God—whether through his own divine nature, through his communion with the Father, through the influence of the Spirit, or indeed all three. But in that case his thinking would not have been thoroughly enculturated. Furthermore, the sinful thinking that would have been unavoidable in Enns’s Jesus, separated from divine control, would inevitably have given rise to sinful words and deeds. Warfield comments that Jesus “never fell into sin” because his human nature could “never act out of relation with the Divine nature.”[211] But because Enns removes the thinking of his thoroughly enculturated Jesus from divine control, we must conclude that he did fall into sin, just as Enns insists that he fell into error. Enns’s view of a thoroughly enculturated Jesus makes the sinlessness of our Savior impossible, and thus undermines the whole doctrine of redemption. It is no exaggeration to say that Enns’s view of Christ, if carried through consistently, destroys the entire Christian faith. No doubt, he does not mean for it to do so, but it does so all the same. There is only one solution: the notion of a thoroughly enculturated Christ must be repudiated, and the notion of a thoroughly enculturated Scripture must be repudiated with it.

VIII. Conclusion

The pertinent didactic passages of Scripture, as correctly understood by orthodox Reformed theology, teach that the Bible is the word of God, written in the words of men under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Inspiration involved the direct work of the Spirit in the mind of the writer, so guiding his thoughts that what he wrote expressed the communication of God to his people. Hence, God is the primary author of Scripture.

If Scripture is truly the word of God, then it reflects the attributes of God, such as his omniscience, truthfulness, and immutability. Consequently, Scripture is infallible, inerrant, and noncontradictory, measured not by some ancient or modern standard, but by God’s own standard of truth, which is his perfect knowledge of what actually is, was, and shall be in himself and in his creation.

If Scripture is truly the word of God, then it originated in the mind of God. The conceptual world of Scripture, accordingly, is the mind of God. His word is tailored to, but does not originate in, the culture of the biblical writers. To communicate his word effectively, God simplified his message, expressed it in human language, and engaged the historical and natural circumstances of his people. This involved accommodation to the human condition, such as describing phenomena according to appearance and speaking of himself anthropomorphically. It even involved using words that had erroneous etymological meanings and that had referents about which erroneous ideas were commonly held, yet such use did not entail the endorsing of those concomitant errors.

If Scripture is truly the word of God, then the meaning of the text is God’s intended meaning, his full understanding of the text as originally inspired. The writer’s understanding of the text was ordinarily approximately the same, but it could never have been exactly the same. In the effort to understand the text, it is misguided to ask either what the writer could have known in his circumstances or what the first hearers would have understood. Grammatical-historical exegesis yields a good first approximation of God’s intended meaning, but the full meaning may only become evident in the context of the rest of Scripture.

With regard to all these matters, the views on inspiration propounded by Peter Enns are mistaken. His focusing on the “data” of Scripture, without being guided by the teachings of Scripture about itself, leads him astray, as he develops an understanding of the origin and character of Scripture contrary to the declarations of Scripture itself. His use of the so-called incarnational analogy leads him into serious error. His idea of concursus (unlike Warfield’s) ignores the crucial work of inspiration at the time of writing. When he supposes that God can express himself with false ideas, contradictions, and faulty methods of interpretation, Enns undermines the inerrancy of Scripture and even denies the moral and intellectual integrity of God. His notion that God accommodates himself to (i.e., adopts) the faulty ideas of antiquity denies that God always tells the truth. In attempted defense of this view, he and others misinterpret Calvin, Hodge, and Warfield. While Enns correctly recognizes that the meaning of the OT sometimes goes beyond what ordinary grammatical-historical exegesis reveals, he errs in thinking that that meaning is not in the text itself. He is wrong to think that apostolic exegesis of the OT follows the fallacious methods of other first-century interpreters and adopts the erroneous traditions of contemporary culture. He is especially wrong to argue that the teachings of a thoroughly enculturated Jesus included errors. This brings Enns into conflict with the orthodox doctrine of the person of Christ, undermines Christ’s sinlessness, and imperils the doctrine of redemption. All of these errors arise from a failure to understand what it means that Scripture is the inspired word of God.

Enns claims that his doctrine of the inspired Scriptures derives by analogy from the doctrine of the incarnate Christ. However, he begins with a defective doctrine of Christ, and thus ends up with a similarly defective doctrine of Scripture. Specifically, he begins with a thoroughly enculturated Christ, whose teaching contains errors, and ends up with a thoroughly enculturated Scripture that similarly contains errors. We now see what Enns’s incarnational analogy really boils down to: a doctrine of Scripture that undermines its character as the word of God, derived by analogy from a doctrine of Christ that undermines his character as the Word of God. The former error damages the authority of Scripture, but the latter one endangers the whole Christian faith.

In Part II, we will look at a variety of biblical passages and show how they should be interpreted in accordance with the principles laid down in this article, over against the interpretations advanced by Enns in support of his unbiblical view of Scripture.

I want to thank Prof. Richard B. Gaffin Jr. for taking a special interest in this article, suggesting improvements, and offering encouragement as it was being developed. Of course, I alone take responsibility for the views expressed herein.

Notes

1. Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005). The views expressed in this book gradually came to expression in his earlier writings:”Creation and Re-Creation: Psalm 95 and Its Interpretation in Hebrews 3:1-4:13,” WTJ 55 (1993): 255-80;”The’Moveable Well’in 1 Cor 10:4: An Extrabiblical Tradition in an Apostolic Text,” BBR 6 (1996): 23-38; “Biblical Interpretation, Jewish,” in Dictionary of New Testament Background (ed. Craig A. Evans and Stanley E. Porter; Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2000), 159-65; “Matthew and Hosea: A Response to John Sailhamer,” WTJ 63 (2001): 97-105 (coauthored with Dan McCartney); “William Henry Green and the Authorship of the Pentateuch: Some Historical Considerations,” JETS 45 (2002): 385-403; “Apostolic Hermeneutics and an Evangelical Doctrine of Scripture: Moving beyond a Modernist Impasse,” WTJ 65 (2003): 263-87; “Faith,” in Dictionary of the Old Testament: Historical Books (ed. Bill T. Arnold and H. G. H. Williamson; Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2005), 296-300. Enns endeavors to clarify and defend his position in “Response to G. K. Beale’s Review Article of Inspiration and Incarnation,” JETS 49 (2006): 313-26; and “Response to Professor Greg Beale,” Them 32.3 (May 2007): 5-13. See also Peter Enns, “Bible in Context: The Continuing Vitality of Reformed Biblical Scholarship,” WTJ 68 (2006): 203-18; “Preliminary Observations on an Incarnational Model of Scripture: Its Viability and Usefulness,” CTJ (2007): 219-36. His website, www.peterennsonline.com, contains additional interaction with critics and other relevant material. Reference will be made in this article to all these sources and also to Enns’s unpublished paper, “Reflections on Inspiration and Incarnation,” dated January 3, 2008 (adapted portions of which began appearing on his website in June 2008).
2. If Enns had been a professor at, say, Fuller Theological Seminary—where Daniel P. Fuller was leading his school down a similar path in the 1960s (see his “Benjamin B. Warfield’s View of Faith and History,” Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society 11 [1968]: 75-83, esp. pp. 81-83; cf. George M. Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987]), never to return—his book would not have attracted so much attention, since not much is original in it (as he himself acknowledges at the beginning of his preface); but the surprise of such ideas being so boldly propounded by a professor at Westminster Seminary has focused a lot of attention on it.
3. For general critiques of such scholarship, see Richard Pratt Jr., “Westminster and Contemporary Reformed Hermeneutics,” Reformed Perspectives Magazine 8 (November 5-11, 2006), at http:// thirdmill.org; Vern Sheridan Poythress, “The Presence of God Qualifying Our Notions of Grammatical-Historical Interpretation: Genesis 3:15 as a Test Case,” JETS 50 (2007): 87-103.
4. I have chiefly in view the critiques of G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson. See Carson, “Three More Books on the Bible: A Critical Review,” TJ, n.s., 27 (2006): 1-62 (pp. 18-45 on Enns); and the following works by Beale: “Myth, History, and Inspiration: A Review Article of Inspiration and Incarnation by Peter Enns,” JETS 49 (2006): 287-312; “Did Jesus and the Apostles Preach the Right Doctrine from the Wrong Texts? Revisiting the Debate Seventeen Years Later in the Light of Peter Enns’ Book, Inspiration and Incarnation,” Them 32.1 (October 2006): 18-43; “A Surrejoinder to Peter Enns,” Them 32.3 (May 2007): 14-25; “A Surrejoinder to Peter Enns’s Response to G. K. Beale’s JETS Review Article of His Book, Inspiration and Incarnation,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 11 (2007): 16-36; The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008) (reprinting Beale’s four articles listed above, with revisions, and adding discussion of related issues). For other criticism of Enns, see Ben Witherington III, The Living Word of God: Rethinking the Theology of the Bible (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2007), 35-49; Peter A. Lillback, “‘The Infallible Rule of Interpretation of Scripture’: The Hermeneutical Crisis and the Westminster Standards,” in Resurrection and Eschatology: Theology in Service of the Church: Essays in Honor of Richard B. Gaffin Jr. (ed. Lane G. Tipton and Jeffrey C. Waddington; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2008), 283-339. Various critiques are also available on the Internet.
5. An earlier version of this article was distributed to all voting members of the Westminster Theological Seminary faculty in early February 2008 and to all members of the board of trustees in early March. The board decided on March 26 to suspend Prof. Enns as of the close of the academic year (May 23). He reached an agreement with the seminary administration to “discontinue his service” to the school as of August 1, 2008. I invited him to interact with this article (and especially to correct any misunderstanding of his views) as it was being developed as early as September 2007, but he offered only a cursory dismissal of Part I and did not respond to Part II.
6. J. Paterson Smyth, How God Inspired the Bible (2d ed.; Dublin: Eason & Son, 1893), 69-73.
7. Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, “The Real Problem of Inspiration” (1893), in The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1948), 202 n. 47. (Warfield cites the first edition of Smyth’s book.)
8. Smyth, How God Inspired, 60: “We are only bound to believe in the fact of inspiration; we are free to differ widely as to what it may involve,” since “neither the Bible nor the Church has pronounced on the matter.”
9. Warfield, “The Real Problem,” 203 n. 47.
10. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics (ed. John Bolt; trans. John Vriend; 4 vols.; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003-2008), 1:424.
11. Smyth, How God Inspired, 101, offers only a cursory glance at 2 Tim 3:16 and 2 Pet 1:21, concluding that “neither will help us further than this, that ‘inspiration’ means Divine influence.” Smyth also surveys fairly well what the biblical writers thought of their own (and other writers’) inspiration, again with a nod toward 2 Tim 3:16 and 2 Pet 1:21 (110-13), but all he is willing to see in these many passages is that “the writers of Holy Scripture were themselves at any rate believers in a special inspiration, a miraculous endowment given by God” (113)—again refusing to find in them more than the mere fact of inspiration (i.e., a divine influence of uncertain effect).
12. Warfield, “The Real Problem,” 203-4. See also Warfield’s whole discussion of “Facts versus Doctrine” on pp. 201-8. Bavinck agrees that those who follow this approach “substitute their own thoughts for, or elevate them above, those of Scripture” (Reformed Dogmatics, 1:424).
13. Warfield, “The Real Problem,” 204.
14. Ibid., 206. Warfield adds that the data of Scripture can be used “as an aid in, and a check upon, our exegesis of Scripture” (206). The “careful student of the Bible doctrine of inspiration” will “try his conclusions as to the teachings of Scripture by the observed characteristics and ‘structure’ of Scripture.” That may require us to “correct our exegetical processes and so modify our exegetical conclusions,” butitis “quite another” thing to use the data of Scripture “to modify . . . the Scriptural teaching itself “(206-7).
15. Ibid., 207.
16. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 22. Smyth sets forth the incarnational analogy in How God Inspired, 132-35, finding in Scripture “the Divine Spirit revealing itself through imperfect human minds in imperfect human language,” just as in the person of Christ “is the Divine nature shrouded in weak humanity” (132-33). However, Smyth does not make the incarnational analogy his hermeneutical paradigm, as does Enns.
17. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 14 (emphasis added).
18. Enns, “William Henry Green,” 403 (emphasis added).
19. Cf. Enns, “Apostolic Hermeneutics,” 274: This doctrine is what “modern evangelicalism has constructed for itself.”
20. Warfield, “The Real Problem,” 205.
21. Ibid., 207 (emphasis added). The logical outcome of Enns’s position, whether or not he is ready to acknowledge it, is that the NT doctrine of inspiration, as we find it in such passages as 2 Tim 3:16 and 2 Pet 1:21, does not in fact describe the origin of Scripture accurately (as modern studies of the data of Scripture show), but rather is, ironically, part of the “human situatedness” of the Bible, a divine “accommodation” to the typical Jewish view of the first century.
22. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 1:424.
23. Ibid.
24. Enns, “Response to Beale,” 313-16. (This was also the professed strategy of Smyth, How God Inspired, 18.) However, this “lay” audience includes “graduate students” (314), and in any case he admits to having “a secondary purpose as well: to foster further theological discussion among evangelical scholars” (315).
25. Enns, “The ‘Moveable Well,”‘ 38.
26. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 38. In “Matthew and Hosea,” 105, McCartney and Enns conclude with a similar deriding of those who have “preconceptions about how Scripture ought to behave.” And in “William Henry Green,” 403, Enns says that “our doctrine of Scripture must make every effort to reflect how the Bible behaves.” Again, the didactic statements of Scripture about itself are ignored. Since we evidently cannot rely on them, let alone on theology built upon them, “we should not presume to know what the Bible can or cannot do.”
27. Enns, “Apostolic Hermeneutics,” 280.
28. Ibid., 268.
29. Ibid., 280.
30. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (3 vols.; 1872; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 1:153, quoted by Enns, “Preliminary Observations,” 225.
31. See Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:153-68.
32. Ibid., 1:169.
33. Charles Hodge, An Exposition of the First Epistle to the Corinthians (New York: R. Carter, 1857), 16. Here Hodge remarks, “The nature of inspiration is to be learnt from the declarations of the Scriptures and from the facts therein recorded.” These “facts” are simply the various statements in the Bible about actual instances of inspiration, not phenomena that could be interpreted as discrepancies and errors.
34. Raymond B. Dillard, in “Harmonization: A Help and a Hindrance,” in Inerrancy and Hermeneutics: A Tradition, A Challenge, A Debate (ed. Harvie M. Conn; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1988), would appear to have no more than this in mind when he states, “The nature of Scripture is not established alone from the proof texts so often cited in reference to that doctrine, but also from the phenomena we observe there” (163), for, after defending the traditional view of biblical origin, inerrancy, and authority (156-57), he calls for exegetical sophistication in dealing with apparent discrepancies in Scripture (157-64). Similarly, he describes “harmonistic exegesis . . . to defend a doctrine of Scripture” as “immeasurably important” (162), thus placing such study of the biblical phenomena at the service of the doctrine of Scripture, with which such study begins. Whether Dillard’s own biblical studies always remained within the bounds of the Bible’s teaching about itself, however, is another question.
35. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:169.
36. Ibid., 1:153.
37. Ibid., 1:169-70.
38. For the purposes of this article, we shall presuppose that the Scriptures have a unified doctrine of inspiration. If the Scriptures are the word of God and God is immutable, then that assumption is appropriate. There are those who have argued that there is not in fact a unified biblical teaching on inspiration, especially that certain writers’ (weak) self-consciousness of inspiration is inconsistent with later writers’ (strong) ideas of the former writers’ inspiration, but we are not persuaded of this. If that is true, then the basic argument of this article, not to mention orthodox Reformed theology in general, collapses.
39. Warfield, “The Real Problem,” 174: If there is solid reason to believe that the biblical doctrine of inspiration is true, then “all so-called objections brought against it” are really just “difficulties to be adjusted to it.”
40. Abraham Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology (trans. J. Hendrik de Vries; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954 [first published as Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology in 1898]), 429.
41. Edward J. Young, Thy Word Is Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957). See also Young, The God-Breathed Scripture (1966; repr., Willow Grove, Pa.: Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 2007).
42. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 17-18; Enns “Preliminary Observations,” 227-28; see also Enns, “The ‘Moveable Well,”‘ 35 n. 25.
43. Enns, “Response to Beale,” 324, quoting Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 1:434-35. He quotes the same long passage in “Preliminary Observations,” 227, as showing “enthusiasm for an incarnational model” of Scripture. Bavinck may indeed be enthusiastic for “an” incarnational model, but he is highly critical of Enns’s model, as we shall see (see esp. Part I, sec. 7).
44. Enns then cites William Henry Green in connection with this analogy (“Response to Beale,” 325), but when Green explains what he means by the biblical books bearing “the stamp of that age,” he refers only to its “language,” “subject,” “style of thought,” and “local and personal allusions,” not to what Enns means by the Bible being a product of its time. Enns often recycles the same misinterpreted passages of inerrantist writers; this one reappears in “Preliminary Observations,” 227, where it is described as a “bold, even blunt, affirmation of the human dimension of Scripture”—which it is, but not in Enns’s sense.
45. Enns, “Response to Beale,” 322. This would seem to be a much more ambitious program than that stated ten years earlier in “The ‘Moveable Well,”‘ 35 n. 26, to be appropriate for analogies: “The purpose of an analogy is to clarify a difficult concept by means of a known and familiar one.” Enns observes that “Christ’s incarnation is itself mysterious,” which would make its use to “clarify” the doctrine of inspiration quite problematic.
46. Irving M. Copi, Introduction to Logic (3d ed.; New York: Macmillan, 1968), 310 (emphasis added).
47. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 18. In “The ‘Moveable Well,”‘ 35, he comments that this analogy “is not without its drawbacks.”
48. Benjamin B. Warfield, “Inspiration,” in The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia (ed. James Orr; 1915; rev. ed.; Chicago: Howard-Severance, 1929), 1482.
49. Unless otherwise indicated, Bible quotations in this article are taken from the ESV.
50. Warfield, “‘The Oracles of God’” (1900), in The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, 351-407, at p. 407.
51. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:153: The Scriptures “are the word of God because they were given by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost.” Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 1:429: “Divine inspiration is above all God speaking to us by the mouth of prophets and apostles, so that their word is the word of God.”
52. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 1:428: “God, or the Holy Spirit, is the actual speaker, the informant, the primary author, and the writers are the instruments by whom God speaks, the secondary authors, the scribes.”
53. This point is often missed. If God has foreordained whatsoever comes to pass, then everything ever written is precisely what God designed it to be. When Enns states that Scripture is “precisely what God wanted us to have” and is “perfectly formed to do what God has designed it to do,” he thinks he is explicating “the divine element” in Scripture (“Response to Beale,” 317), but in fact he is saying nothing about Scripture that a Calvinist could not equally say about any book. In “William Henry Green,” 397, Enns similarly speaks of God inspiring a writer to record events “in the manner in which he wants those events recorded,” which is fine as far as it goes, but fails to distinguish inspired from uninspired writing (unless one presupposes a non-Calvinist world, as biblical scholarship generally does).
54. Warfield, “Inspiration,” 1481.
55. Benjamin B. Warfield, “The Divine and Human in the Bible” (1894), in Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield (ed. John E. Meeter; 2 vols.; Nutley, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1973), 2:548.
56. While 2 Pet 1:21 speaks specifically of “prophecy,” i.e., “prophecy of Scripture” (v. 20), in view would appear to be the entire content of Scripture. These verses refer to what v. 19 calls “the prophetic word, to which you will do well to pay attention,” which can hardly refer only to selected portions of Scripture, as that would suggest that the other portions can be ignored. Even the NT is arguably included (see 1:16-18; 3:2, 15-16).
57. See Benjamin B. Warfield, “The Doctrine of Inspiration of the Westminster Divines” (1894), in The Westminster Assembly and Its Work (vol. 6 of The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield; New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), 261-333; Richard A. Muller, Holy Scripture: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology (vol. 2 of Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725; 2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 230-55. For similar developments in Lutheran theology, see Robert Preus, The Inspiration of Scripture: A Study of the Theology of the 17thCentury Lutheran Dogmaticians (2d ed.; St. Louis: Concordia, 1957), 26-75. This view also characterized sixteenth-century theology, both Catholic and Protestant, though with much less conscious reflection and consideration of details. For example, Calvin’s commentary on 2 Tim 3:16 clearly assumes a (nonmechanical) dictation viewpoint. This view was also widely held into the eighteenth and even early nineteen century, but gradually gave way to new ways of thinking. Warfield could complain (with some exaggeration) as late as 1888, in a review of The Inspired Word, edited by A. T. Pierson, that among the eighteen essays were “bold avowals of belief in mechanical dictation” (Presbyterian Review 9 [1888]: 512).
58. John Owen, “Of the Divine Original, Authority, Self-evidencing Light, and Power of the Scriptures,” in The Works of John Owen (ed. William H. Goold; 24 vols.; London: Johnstone & Hunter, 1850-1855; repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1968), 16:298. These words pertain specifically to the content of the OT, but on p. 305 Owen extends them equally to the content of the NT.
59. So, e.g., Warfield, “The Real Problem,” 173.
60. Archibald A. Hodge and Benjamin B. Warfield, Inspiration (1881; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), 11-18 (quote from p. 16).
61. Warfield, “The Real Problem,” 173.
62. Hodge and Warfield, Inspiration, 16, 17.
63. The word providential is used in two different senses in this paragraph, reflecting its use in the literature. When Hodge and Warfield refer to the preparation of the writer as providential, gracious, and miraculous, they have in view “ordinary providence” (WCF 5.3), in which God uses natural means (second causes) to achieve his ends. But there are also God’s gracious operations in the soul of the writer (illumination, sanctification, etc.) and the special (miraculous) revelations that the writer may receive. These three categories of God’s work constitute his providential preparation of the writer in a general sense.
64. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 1:438.
65. Ibid., 1:432.
66. Ibid., 1:438.
67. John Murray, “The Inspiration of the Scripture,” in Collected Writings of John Murray (4 vols.; Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1976-1982), 4:38.
68. Ibid.
69. Warfield, “The Divine and Human in the Bible,” 542, 543.
70. Ibid., 547.
71. Ibid., 548.
72. Ibid., 546. The idea of concursus in providence, which is common in theology and goes back to Augustine, is that God governs the world by working concurrently in and with the operation of second causes. See, e.g., Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:598-605. The concursus in grace is the teaching of Phil 2:12-13 (which Warfield paraphrases): we work out our salvation as God works the willing and doing in us.
73. Benjamin B. Warfield, “Revelation,” in The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia (ed. Orr), 2580.
74. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 14 (see also pp. 72, 108).
75. Ibid., 17-18.
76. Ibid., 22.
77. See Enns, “Apostolic Hermeneutics,” 287; Enns, “Response to Beale,” 313, 317, 325; Enns, “Bible in Context,” 211, 218.
78. Warfield’s article, “The Divine and Human in the Bible,” was written for a magazine aimed at a more popular audience. He used the word concursus once in that article, and only rarely elsewhere in his extensive writings on the doctrine of Scripture.
79. Enns, “William Henry Green,” 396.
80. Enns, “Reflections on Inspiration and Incarnation,” 9, 12.
81. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 108.
82. Enns, “Preliminary Observations,” 233. Enns is speaking specifically of “nonteaching texts,” but what he says would apply no less to “teaching texts.”
83. So Murray, “The Inspiration of the Scripture,” 39 (drawing the connection to Karl Barth).
84. When Enns introduces the incarnational analogy in “The ‘Moveable Well,”‘ 34-36, he compares “the very nature of revelation” or “the nature of Scripture” with “the person of Christ” or “the being of Christ,” not inspiration with the incarnation.
85. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 18.
86. Warfield, “Inspiration,” 1482: “There is no hypostatic union between the Divine and the human in Scripture; we cannot parallel the ‘inscripturation’ of the Holy Spirit and the incarnation of the Son of God.”
87. So I. Howard Marshall, Biblical Inspiration (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1982), 52: “B. B. Warfield and his followers . . . interpret the effect of the concursive action of the Spirit to mean that, although God did not use the method of dictating his words to the biblical writers, the effect of inspiration was to produce the same result.”
88. Warfield, “Inspiration,” 1481.
89. Herman Ridderbos, Studies in Scripture and Its Authority (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 26.
90. Ibid., 28.
91. Enns, “Preliminary Observations,” 228.
92. Enns, “Response to Beale,” 323 n. 20.
93. Enns, “Apostolic Hermeneutics,” 279-80; Enns, “Response to Beale,” 323.
94. By using categories in a way that blurs the concepts of truth and error (e.g., “diversity”), by asking unsettling questions and not quite answering them, by caricaturing traditional ways of thinking (e.g., “preconceived notions”), and by using evasive and misleading terminology (e.g., “human situatedness”), Enns seeks to lead the unsuspecting reader into accepting that there are errors and contradictions in the Bible without thinking of them as such; however, sometimes his language is less guarded than at other times.
95. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 54.
96. Ibid., 91. Enns is more forthcoming in his discussion of these passages in “William Henry Green,” 394-95, saying that they contain a “discrepancy,” and chiding Green for thinking that “an actual discrepancy” would impugn the credibility of the Pentateuch.
97. Enns, “William Henry Green,” 394.
98. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 114.
99. Ibid., 140-42. See also Enns, “Creation and Re-Creation,” 273-75.
100. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 150. See also Enns, “The ‘Moveable Well.”‘
101. By his own admission, Enns presents in his book only “a few examples of things that are universally accepted as demonstrations of the human situatedness of Scripture” (“Response to Beale,” 314). Beale, in “Myth, History, and Inspiration,” 288, asserts that Enns seeks to “produce a synthesis of the findings of mainline liberal scholarship and an evangelical view of Scripture.” Interestingly, in responding to this claim, Enns does not deny it (“Response to Beale,” 317 n. 10), responding only that “my effort to produce a synthesis does not make me a liberal.” That would be true if he did not undermine the evangelical doctrine of Scripture, a crucial point of which is that inspiration prevents the human authors of Scripture from writing errors and contradictions.
102. Enns, “The ‘Moveable Well,”‘ 34.
103. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 98-102. Enns even finds polytheism implied by the reference to “other gods” in the first commandment (101). See also Enns, “Response to Beale,” 318.
104. So, e.g., Joseph Addison Alexander, The Psalms Translated and Explained (1873; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1975), 362. Of course, some pagan deities, while not real gods (1 Cor 8:4; 10:19), are nonetheless real beings, i.e., demons (Deut 32:17; 1 Cor 10:20).
105. See Enns, “Apostolic Hermeneutics,” 279-80; Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 17, 21, 108, 168-69; Enns, “Response to Beale,” 321, 323.
106. Enns, “Apostolic Hermeneutics,” 279.
107. Enns, “Response to Beale,” 323.
108. Ibid., 321.
109. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 169.
110. Ibid.
111. Enns, “Preliminary Observations,” 232-33.
112. Enns, “Reflections on Inspiration and Incarnation,” 2.
113. Ibid., 12, 13.
114. Ibid., 13.
115. See Enns’s “Conversation” with Richard Pratt’s “Westminster and Contemporary Reformed Hermeneutics,” at www.peterennsonline.com.
116. But cf. Enns, “Reflections on Inspiration and Incarnation,” 28: “We do not have access to God’s mind, only Scripture.”
117. Enns, “Response to Beale,” 324-25. He quotes the same passage from Green in “William Henry Green,” 399, and in “Preliminary Observations,” 231.
118. So Hodge and Warfield, Inspiration, 28: The biblical writers “were in large measure dependent for their knowledge upon sources and methods in themselves fallible,” yet (because of inspiration) “all the affirmations of Scripture of all kinds...are without error.”
119. See E. A. Wallis Budge, Facsimiles of Egyptian Hieratic Papyri in the British Museum (2d series; London: British Museum, 1923), 5-6, 9-18, 41-51, plates 1-14. See also Budge, The Teaching of Amen-em-apt, Son of Kanekht (London: Hopkinson, 1924). For a summary of the Instruction of Amenemope, see William McKane, Proverbs: A New Approach (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970), 102-17.
120. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 37-38. Enns does hint that the evidence is far more complex than he presents it, but his presentation is nonetheless one-sided. Andrew K. Helmbold surveys the difficult issues (including authorship and date) in “The Relationship of Proverbs and Amenemope,” in The Law and the Prophets: Old Testament Studies Prepared in Honor of Oswald Thompson Allis (ed. John H. Skilton; Nutley, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1974), 348-59. There may even be borrowing in the opposite direction, as argued by E. J. Young, An Introduction to the Old Testament (rev. ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), 313-15. Raymond B. Dillard and Tremper Longman III object that “a dominant culture (like the Egyptian) is less likely to be influenced by a subdominant culture (like that of Israel)” (An Introduction to the Old Testament [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994], 241), but that ignores the biblical claim that “Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt,” and that “his fame was in all the surrounding nations” (1 Kgs 4:30-31).
121. See John Ruffle, “The Teaching of Amenemope and Its Connection with the Book of Proverbs,” TynBul 28 (1977): 29-68, reprinted in Learning from the Sages: Selected Studies on the Book of Proverbs (ed. Roy B. Zuck; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995), 293-331. The noted Egyptologist K. A. Kitchen comments in Ancient Orient and Old Testament (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1966), 88 n. 3: “Careful study of both books in their full Near Eastern context (instead of in isolation, as is commonly done) has shown how inadequate are the grounds for relationship offered hitherto.” For the opposite view, see J. A. Emerton, “The Teaching of Amenemope and Proverbs xxii 17–xxiv 22: Further Reflections on a Long-standing Problem,” VT 51 (2001): 431-65.
122. In “William Henry Green,” 400, Enns recognizes that Green would not go very far in seeing the Bible as “a product of its culture,” and then in “Response to Beale,” 325, he says that we must go beyond Green in accepting an “increased understanding” of how the Bible incorporates what Green called “the life of the period.”
123. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 46.
124. Ibid., 56 (in the context of pp. 53-56).
125. Ibid., 109.
126. Ibid., 161.
127. Ibid., 55.
128. Enns, “The ‘Moveable Well,”‘ 34.
129. Enns, “Biblical Interpretation, Jewish,” 165.
130. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 55.
131. Ibid., 56.
132. Hodge and Warfield, Inspiration, 28, refer to this phenomenon, and perhaps also to the ones discussed in the next two paragraphs, as follows: The Scriptures “are written in human languages, whose words, inflections, constructions and idioms bear everywhere indelible traces of human error.” It is quite inappropriate for Enns, in “Preliminary Observations,” 223, to cite this passage in support of his theory of the cultural conditioning of biblical ideas and worldviews.
133. William Lee, The Inspiration of Holy Scripture (4th ed.; Dublin: Hodges, Smith, 1865), 69.
134. Warfield, “The Real Problem,” 195.
135. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 56.
136. Ibid., 109.
137. Enns, “William Henry Green,” 401. The statements of Enns quoted here are expressed as questions or proposals in the original context, not as assertions, but as he develops his argument (on pp. 402-3) it becomes quite clear that what he is posing to the reader is in fact what he believes.
138. Milton S. Terry, Biblical Hermeneutics: A Treatise on the Interpretation of the Old and New Testaments (1883; repr., Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974), 511.
139. Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology, 431.
140. Enns, “Apostolic Hermeneutics,” 270 n. 17.
141. Enns, “William Henry Green,” 402.
142. So Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 97.
143. Paul H. Seely, “The Date of the Tower of Babel and Some Theological Implications,” WTJ 63 (2001): 15-38, at p. 38.
144. So Warfield, “The Real Problem,”195: “It is one thing to refrain from unnecessarily arousing the prejudices of the learner, that more ready entrance may be found for the truth; it is another thing to adopt those prejudices as our own, and to inculcate them as the very truths of God.”
145. We will let Warfield (ibid.) reply to Seely’s misuse of 1 Cor 9:22: “It was one thing for Paul to become ‘all things to all men’ that he might gain them to the truth; it was another for Peter to dissemble at Antioch, and so confirm men in their error.” And what does Seely mean by “temporarily”? What God supposedly tells us through modern science does not do much for the “prescientific people” to whom he gave the Bible and who, for generation after generation, century after century, have been taught by it.
146. See the important work by Ford Lewis Battles, “God Was Accommodating Himself to Human Capacity,” Int 31 (1977): 19-38. Battles shows how, in Calvin’s view, God accommodated his communication to the capacities of men to receive it, especially the rude and ignorant Israelites, but he never suggests that Calvin understood this as involving the adopting of the erroneous views of antiquity. He comments: “In the divine rhetoric accommodation as practiced by the Holy Spirit so empowers the physical, verbal vehicle that it leads us to, not away from, the very truth” (37). There is no suggestion that, in Calvin’s view, divine accommodation involved adopting mistaken ideas, according to the thorough study of Clinton M. Ashley, “John Calvin’s Utilization of the Principle of Accommodation and Its Continuing Significance for an Understanding of Biblical Language” (Ph.D. diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1972), 64-121.
147. Enns, “Bible in Context,” 204 n. 2. The word “trajectory” is a hint that the idea has been carried well beyond what Calvin had in mind.
148. Seely, “The Date of the Tower of Babel,” 38.
149. John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms (trans. James Anderson; 5 vols.; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), 2:109 (emphasis added).
150. John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis (trans. John King; 2 vols.; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), 1:118-24.
151. Seely, “The Date of the Tower of Babel,” 38.
152. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah and the Lamentations (trans. John Owen; 4 vols.; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), 2:7-8.
153. John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel according to John (trans. William Pringle; 2 vols.; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), 2:176.
154. Paul H. Seely, “Noah’s Flood: Its Date, Extent, and Divine Accommodation,” WTJ 66 (2004): 291-311, at p. 311 n. 100.
155. John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke (trans. William Pringle; 3 vols.; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), 2:381-82.
156. E.g., Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 89-115, refuted by John D. Woodbridge, Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), 49-67.
157. Enns, “Bible in Context,” 204 n. 2.
158. Kent Sparks, “The Sun Also Rises: Accommodation in Inscripturation and Interpretation,” in Evangelicals and Scripture: Tradition, Authority and Hermeneutics (ed. Vincent Bacote, Laura C. Migue´-lez, and Dennis L. Okholm; Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2004), 112-32, at pp. 117-18.
159. Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses, 1:79-81.
160. Sparks, “The Sun Also Rises,” 128.
161. See John Murray’s excellent study of Calvin’s doctrine of Scripture in general, and his most problematic statements in particular, in Calvin on Scripture and Divine Sovereignty (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1960), 11-31.
162. Seely, “Noah’s Flood,” 310.
163. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:568-70, citing Calvin, Institutes, 1.14.3.
164. Seely, “The Firmament and the Water Above,” WTJ 53 (1991): 227-40 and 54 (1992): 31-46, at 53:240; Seely, “The Geographical Meaning of ‘Earth’ and ‘Seas’ in Genesis 1:10,” WTJ 59 (1997): 231-55, at p. 255; Seely, “Noah’s Flood,” 310; Seely, “The Date of the Tower of Babel,” 32, 33—all quoting Warfield, “The Real Problem,” 197. The passage is attributed to the same incorrect page numbers (166-67) and is quoted with the same copying errors in the first three articles; in the fourth, a paraphrase is put in quotation marks.
165. Warfield, “The Real Problem,” 197-98. By “Paul’s official teaching,” Warfield means the contents of “the body of official teaching which Paul has left to us,” i.e., the Pauline epistles (197).
166. Seely’s distortions of Calvin, Hodge, and Warfield (and there is more of this to come in Part II) are outrageous, to be sure, but perhaps they should also evoke sympathy, for they suggest how desperately he wants to hold on to the infallibility of Scripture, even though his many years of research have led him to conclusions that undermine it. The idea of an infallible word of God is an immensely powerful one, even for many who have a difficult time believing that Scripture is not full of errors. That power, which Reformed theology attributes to the internal witness of the Spirit, suggests that perhaps those errors are not really errors after all.
167. Benjamin B. Warfield, “The Inspiration of the Bible” (1894), in Revelation and Inspiration (vol. 1 of The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield; New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), 63.
168. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 54.
169. Cf. Murray, Calvin on Scripture, 30: “The Bible is literature and the Holy Spirit was pleased to employ the literary forms of the original human writers in the milieu in which they wrote.”
170. In the same way, for example, “what was spoken by the prophet” (Matt 2:17) is shorthand for “what the Lord had spoken by the prophet” (Matt 1:22). Similarly, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you” (Mark 7:6) must be understood more fully as “The Holy Spirit was right in saying to your fathers through Isaiah the prophet” (Acts 28:25).
171. Enns does not understand this, probably because he has a faulty understanding of inspiration (see sec. 2), for he quotes the following statement of Hodge and Warfield as if it supports his theory: “Their personal knowledge and judgments were in many matters hesitating and defective, or even wrong” (Inspiration, 28, quoted in Enns, “Preliminary Observations,” 223).
172. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 160.
173. Peter Enns, Exodus (NIV Application Commentary; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 19-22; cf. McCartney and Enns, “Matthew and Hosea,” 101, 104.
174. Enns, Exodus, 28.
175. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 154.
176. Enns admits that his approach is inescapably “subjective” (ibid., 161). His solution is for Christians to get together and have a conversation, expecting the Spirit to help them come up with something (162)—something that is not in the text, but sounds Christian. To me, this is fantasy.
177. Ibid., 133. Enns adds the bizarre comment that “what ‘the Lord had said through the prophet’” is to be distinguished from the prophetic text (134). Of course, Matthew’s introduction to the OT quotation simply acknowledges God as the primary author of the text, in the usual fashion; it hardly hints at a “christotelic” interpretation.
178. Enns, “Faith,” 296. Enns explains that the use of the Rahab story in the NT books “is a function of their specific rhetorical-theological contexts.” In other words, the NT writers attribute to the OT whatever suits their purposes, regardless of whether it is really there or not.
179. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 137.
180. Since Enns does not expect modern Christians to endorse all the apostolic methods, yet considers the apostolic conclusions normative, Dennis E. Johnson asks: “Is it intellectually consistent to stand with the apostles at their hermeneutical ‘destination,’ when we cannot in good conscience walk with them on the path that led them there?” (Him We Proclaim: Preaching Christ from All the Scriptures [Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2007], 150).
181. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 116, 143.
182. Ibid., 123.
183. Ibid., 128-32.
184. Ibid., 131. Although Enns applies these words specifically to Qumran, he says that the church used the same “interpretive methods” and “exegetical techniques” as Qumran (131).
185. Ibid., 153.
186. Ibid.
187. Enns, “Apostolic Hermeneutics,” 267 (emphasis original). Although Enns has in view the human OT author, he is referring to the original meaning of the OT text, which we attribute to the divine author. Authors aside, Enns’s point is that the meaning attributed to the OT by the NT is often not really in the OT as originally written.
188. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 149-51; Enns, “The ‘Moveable Well.”‘
189. From now on, we will use the phrase “thoroughly enculturated” to represent Enns’s view of the humanity of Christ and of Scripture that we have been examining. He himself describes Scripture as “thoroughly encultured” (“Reflections on Inspiration and Incarnation,” 8), which we take to mean “thoroughly enculturated.”
190. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 17 (emphasis original).
191. Ibid.
192. “With us” in Matt 1:23 refers to God’s having become part of the human race. It implies nothing about assuming particular “cultural trappings” or being subject to cultural conditioning. In Heb 2:17, “in every respect” cannot be pressed absolutely (for sin is obviously excluded [4:15]), but must be understood in its context as referring to whatever was integral to being a human being— i.e., “the same things” that ordinary people (“the children,” v. 14, of which he was one of the “brothers,” v. 17) share, namely, “flesh and blood,” presumably including whatever circumstances and experiences such existence entails (2:14). Again, there is nothing here about adopting the views of a particular culture.
193. Benjamin B. Warfield, “Person of Christ,” in The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia (ed. Orr), 2342.
194. Interestingly, when Enns discusses the humanity of Jesus as part of his introduction to the incarnational analogy (Inspiration and Incarnation, 17-21), he does not mention that he intends to extend the scope of Jesus’ cultural conformity from his outward trappings to his inward thoughts. He only hints vaguely at what is to come: “Both Christ and his word are human through and through” (21). It would seem that Enns is trying to get the reader to accept his conception of Jesus’ cultural conformity without knowing what all is involved in it. I say this because it is the cultural conditioning of Jesus’ thinking, not of his outward trappings, that is essential to what Enns wants to say is analogously true about Scripture.
195. Pete Enns, “Food for Thought: Should Christians Be ‘Contemporary’ and ‘Culturally Relevant’?” Gwynedd News [the newsletter of Gwynedd Valley Presbyterian Church in Gwynedd, Pa.], November 2002, 6 (emphasis added).
196. Enns, “William Henry Green,” 402.
197. See ibid., 400-402.
198. Enns, “Apostolic Hermeneutics,” 269-70.
199. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 132.
200. Enns, “Apostolic Hermeneutics,” 270.
201. Ibid.
202. Ibid., 270 n. 17.
203. Ibid.
204. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 114-15.
205. Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology, 429. On the other hand, this matter is not automatically settled for “him who does not thus believe in his Saviour” (ibid.).
206. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:312-13.
207. Warfield, “Inspiration,” 1482. So also J. I. Packer, “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958), 83. In the Dutch Reformed tradition, Kuyper and Bavinck similarly derived the errorlessness of Scripture from the incarnational analogy, according to Richard B. Gaffin Jr., God’s Word in Servant-Form: Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck on the Doctrine of Scripture ( Jackson, Miss.: Reformed Academic Press, 2008), 46, 101.
208. Warfield, “Person of Christ,” 2342.
209. Packer sees such a separation as Nestorian (“Fundamentalism” and the Word of God, 83-84); but while some follow a more Nestorian line (tending to make the divine Logos a separate person from the man Jesus), Enns seems to have more of a kenotic view, according to which the Son of God laid aside his divine attributes in the incarnation, or at least did not make much use of them (especially his divine knowledge). A kenotic Christology enables one, as Enns does, to accept certain findings of modern higher criticism of the OT, despite Jesus’ statements to the contrary, for it suggests “that as a result of the incarnation Christ’s knowledge on such matters was no different from that of his contemporaries” (Donald Macleod, The Person of Christ [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1998], 206).
210. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:312. Jesus’ divine nature was probably more active than this one quote makes it sound. However, the classic Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Lutheran views go too far in making Jesus omniscient on earth. For a thorough study of this matter, see H. C. Powell, The Principle of the Incarnation with Especial Reference to the Relation between Our Lord’s Divine Omniscience and His Human Consciousness (London: Longmans, Green, 1896).
211. Warfield, “Inspiration,” 1482.