Peter Enns’ Inspiration and Incarnation

Here’s a page collecting links to the controversy surrounding Peter Enns’ book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament.

I don’t think any fair reader of Scripture can deny that the NT’s use of the OT raises some difficult questions (“Out of Egypt I have called my son”?), but I am glad Westminster Theological Seminary views bibliology as an important enough doctrine to suspend a professor over it.

Here are a few comments on the issues at stake in Enns’ book (HT: Brian Collins):

OPC Review

Enns writes beyond the boundaries of the Reformed tradition as exemplified by chapter 1 of the Westminster Confession. When he says the Bible looks human, he means it does not look divine. When he says Genesis is part myth, he means it is not true in historic, narrative particulars. When he says “conflicting theologies,” he means the Bible contradicts itself.

D.A. Carson’s Trinity Journal Review

in the three substantive chapters, most of the space is devoted instead to convincing the reader that the difficulties Enns isolates are real, and must be taken more seriously by evangelicals than is usually the case. In other words, despite his initial claim that he is writing the book to comfort the disturbed, as it were, the actual performance aims to disturb the comfortable. This makes the book rather difficult to evaluate. Moreover, Enns’s ambitions are vaulting: the evidence cast up by biblical scholarship, we are told, is of the sort that requires that an “adjustment” be made in how we think of Scripture, akin to the re-interpretation generated by the Copernican revolution (13). Wow. So are we explaining how evangelical faith accommodates biblical scholarship, or are we asserting that a Copernican revolution must take place within evangelical faith so as to accommodate biblical scholarship?

…when Enns writes (his italics), “It is essential to the very nature of revelation that the Bible is not unique to its environment. The human dimension of Scripture is essential to its being Scripture” (20), the statement is formally true and hopelessly muddled. Using the incarnational analog, the “human dimension” of the God/man not only places him in the human environment, but leaves him unique in that environment since only he is without sin. And even more strikingly, of course, what makes Jesus most strikingly unique to the human environment is that, without gainsaying his thorough, perfect, humanness for an instant, he is also God, and thus the perfect revealer of God, such that what Jesus says and does, God says and does. But when Enns speaks of “the very nature of the revelation of the Bible” as “not unique in its environment,” he looks only at its “human dimension” and integrates nothing of what else must be said if we are to understand what the Bible is in this “human environment.” I hasten to add that I am as rigorously opposed to what he thinks of as a docetic understanding of Scripture as he. But I am no less suspicious of an Arian understanding of Scripture—or, if we may get away from the incarnational analog, I am no less suspicious of assorted non-supernatural and domesticated understandings of the Bible, understandings of the Bible that are far removed from, say, that of the Lord Jesus.

Methodologically, Enns gets himself into these problems because he has spelled out neither what he understands of the doctrine of the incarnation, nor how well analogical arguments work in this case, and what limitations might be applicable.

The failure to get this tension right—by “right,” I mean in line with what Scripture actually says of itself—is what makes Enns sound disturbingly like my Doktorvater on one point. Barnabas Lindars’s first book was New Testament Apologetic. The thesis was very simple, the writing elegant: the New Testament writers came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, and that he had been crucified and raised from the dead. They then ransacked their Bible, what we call the Old Testament, to find proof texts to justify their new-found theology, and ended up yanking things out of context, distorting the original context, and so forth. Enns is more respectful, but it is difficult to see how his position differs substantively from that of Lindars.

Keynote

My boss just defended his Ed.D. dissertation, and he hired me to produce a slick visual presentation to accompany it. (I had to make it real small to fit on the blog; sorry!) We did some real thinking about transitions and when to click. Apple’s Keynote makes that a very smooth, intuitive process.

But working multiple hours on this presentation also raised again a question I’ve had: Is “powerpoint” (used generically like “xerox” or “frisbee” or “kleenex”) really effective and helpful, or is it distracting? Well, I think it’s both, but most frequently the last! I have often thought my good teachers could do just as well or better if they weren’t tied to digital slides. And slides in a classroom encourage kids to write down everything on the slide… and nothing else.

So what should a digital slide presentation aim to do? Should it aim to provide an outline of the talk’s content? to add helpful visuals? to make visual jokes? to stress particular quotations?

I watched a talk a few months ago that one powerpoint blog (yes, there are such things!) was touting. It had a lot of visuals that made little puns off of what the presenter was saying. The blog thought it was clever. I thought it was distracting.

Here are a few principles I picked up or extrapolated from a Microsoft book on PowerPoint:

• Use slides to tell a story (if you watch my boss’s presentation, I especially applied this with his hammer throw illustration).
• Use complete sentences.
• Try to make each slide make sense on its own.
• Read directly from your slides (and make slides that can be read from). If you use different wording people will wonder about the discrepancy. Use in front of your audience the same words you carefully crafted for your presentation.

I did a few other things I’ve decided to make principles for myself:

• I limited transitions and eye candy and used mostly understated ones.
• I used one kind of slide transition for each major section of the outline, using a doorway transition for the first slide in the section and a falling transition for the last.
• I established a consistent color scheme and visual style.

How to Get Married

For real marriage advice, click here.

For a silly throwaway post I wrote to get free software, keep reading:

I’m two things, but for years my computer could only be one.

I’m a biblical scholar in training, so I have needed my computer to run the expensive and powerful Windows software (BibleWorks, Logos) that I rely on for my studies and work.

I’m also a graphic designer who never can seem to say no when asked to design a T-shirt or a friend’s wedding invitation… For this work I needed the computer and OS most designers prefer, Mac!

For years I had to content myself with clunkiness because school and work won out over design. Also, I was single. Girls did not like me.

But with Parallels (and Spaces in Leopard!) on my perfect little Macbook, I switch completely seamlessly and with no hiccups between OSX and Windows. I can even drag a file from OSX and drop it on my Windows desktop or in a Windows application! I copy text back and forth between OSes all day. I barely have to think about the transition.

Now my divided psyche is one. And I’m engaged to be married in May!

Thank you, Parallels!

Snafusage

I admit it. Look it up. “Snafu” has a less-than-clean etymology.

The other day, a nice middle-aged man heard me say, “Oops, I made a little snafu!” He later stopped me kindly in private and informed me about the word’s etymology. “I was sure you wouldn’t have used the word had you known where it came from!” he said. I didn’t think it appropriate to reply with anything other than, “Oh! Ok!” And I haven’t used it in his presence since. He really is a good man!

But for the sake of biblical studies, here’s my reply, borrowing from Moisés Silva’s excellent book, Biblical Words and Their Meaning (p. 38):

“We must accept the obvious fact that the speakers of a language simply know next to nothing about its development.”

Silva’s point is that the historical development of Κοινη Greek words is not nearly as important as many interpreters imagine. My point is that people simply don’t use “snafu” as an acronym anymore. If my own internal usage computer, which has been processing English since 1980, isn’t enough proof, check out the title to a PCWorld magazine article from last October:

Newest Windows Update Snafu Puzzles Microsoft

Windows Update again upgrades machines without user permission; Microsoft has no explanation.

PCWorld isn’t exactly a rebellious and profane organ of the far left. “Snafu” simply means “a mess,” no matter what it meant in 1941.

Usage determines meaning.

What in the World!

This is an excerpt from the latest What in the World! newsletter:

What is the Catholic view of salvation? Not all Catholics agree. But Avery Dulles, a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church and a Jesuit professor of religion at a Catholic university, is as authoritative a voice as any but the pope.

Dulles has this to say about how various people can be saved: “Catholics can be saved if they believe the Word of God as taught by the Church and if they obey the commandments. Other Christians can be saved if they submit their lives to Christ and join the community where they think he wills to be found. Jews can be saved if they look forward in hope to the Messiah and try to ascertain whether God’s promise has been fulfilled. Adherents of other religions can be saved if, with the help of grace, they sincerely seek God and strive to do his will. Even atheists can be saved if they worship God under some other name and place their lives at the service of truth and justice. God’s saving grace, channeled through Christ the one Mediator, leaves no one unassisted.”

Dulles is thankful that Catholic teaching on the fate of the unevangelized has “progressed” beyond New Testament limitations. (First Things, 2/08)