Westminster Seminary has announced the supension of Peter Enns due to the controversy over his book Inspiration and Incarnation. What a shame.
Pete’s book was and is very important to me personally, and I believe the questions he raised are vital to the future of evangelical faith. We cannot ignore the humanity of the Bible. People need meat, not just milk. We have learned to integrate the emotional aspects of spirituality into our practice through praise music and small support groups, and that is a good thing. But educated, urban people also need food for the mind.
The shamanistic recitation of magical dogmatic phrases such as “inerrancy” is not meat. Meat is actually digging in to the Bible God gave us, in all of its maddening situatedness, strangeness, and diversity. Meat is recognizing that what it means for God not to “err” in communicating to human beings might not be exactly what we would expect. Meat is working to understand the authority of scripture in the context of the whole of God’s revelation, including what He reveals to us through the natural and social sciences, literature, the arts, and philosophy.
If we evangelicals can’t move on to the meat, we’ll starve. If we can’t learn to eat the meat, how will we be different than the thousands of other fundamalist sects of the world’s religions that lack contact with reality? If we can’t learn to eat the meat, how can we expect our young people to hold onto their faith? If we can’t develop a more robust and well-rounded consensus on the nature, authority, and interpretation of scripture, a consensus that isn’t just rigidly formulaic, evangelicalism will become an irrelevant emotionalist backwater. At least that’s my two cents as a moderately educated lay person.
5 replies on “Peter Enns Suspended”
I haven’t read Enns’s book so I can’t comment on it or the action of the WTS Board Committee. But I think there will always (need to) be a tension between biblical theology and dogmatic theology. the latter is necessary t to set boundaries for the Church. The former is necessary to prod the latter. As Richard Pratt put it, Dogmatic theology is the horse and biblical theology is the gadfly. You can’t hitch up the gadfly if you want to get anywhere but without it the horse doesn’t want to move.
WTS is not the Church or even an organ of a church. It is independent. But while it has more freedom to tolerate views outside the limits of, say, the Westminster Standards, it can also choose not to permit such freedom.
On a personal level, I hope that Enns can find some way to say something to the effect that “I know what I believe but I am willing to suspend (teaching) that belief for the good of the Church.” In turn, I hope that WTS can tolerate at least some “slippage” in the gears of the system of Westminsterian doctrine.
Hey Scott, thanks for the comment. I understand what you’re saying about this tension between biblical and dogmatic theology. However, at some point the horse does have to move a little, doesn’t it? When we insist on dogmatic formulations that require intellectual dishonesty, don’t we have a problem?
I agree with you about WTS as an institution, in a sense. I don’t have any personal institutional tie to WTS, so there’s a sense in which I also can’t comment on and can’t be concerned with what they do as an institution qua institution. And of course, as lawyers, we know there’s always more to every story than one side tells. But I do care about the evangelical movement as a whole. My concern is that this action by WTS reflects a broader unwillingness within some evangelical circles to deal with the actual phenomena of scripture.
I don’t agree with your hope that Enns agree to censor himself. His book is important and his views represent applications and extensions of hermeneutical principles that can be found in the Church fathers, Aquinas, and the reformers, particularly Calvin. I don’t think it would do the Church any good for Enns to keep quiet. In fact, I think that would represent a major step backwards. Personally, I hope he has the resources to be able to say “here I stand.”
I should add this too — you really have to read Pete’s book and his writing following the book. It is not a matter of suggesting that God errs. It’s rather a matter of trying to understand exactly what that looks like when God speaks to and through human beings. So, I’m not even sure there’s a fundamental tension between the incarnational analogy for scripture and the dogmatic assertion that God does not err. Instead, it’s a corrective to the imbalanced, docetic view of scripture that defines “inerrant” to mean something that can’t possibly apply to documents mediated through situated human beings. At least, IMHO.
[…] Theology, Suspension, Westminster, Westminster Theological Seminary trackback There has been a veritable explosion of epic proportions in the blogosphere over the issue of Peter Enns’ suspension […]
One good thing has come out of his suspension. Before the suspension I had never heard of Enns or Inspiration and Incarnation. Because of the suspension I now know of them and have started reading the book. And that has been a very good thing.
I hope this publicity gets more to read this book and more of his work.