I found out that I have access to The Westminster Theological Journal because my university library has an institutional subscription to it. I’ve just finished reading through a two-part article titled The Inspiration and Interpretation of God’s Word, With Special Reference to Peter Enns, by James W. Scott. The first, in the Spring 2009 edition, is Part I: Inspiration and its Implications which explains the doctrine of inspiration, and the second, in the Fall 2009 edition, is Part II: The Interpretation of Representative Passages which looks at how a number of difficult passages a dealt with in light of the doctrine of Scripture. What follows in this post is a summary of the two papers. My goal is to fairly and accurately summarise the content of the papers, without commenting on the validity of the views expressed or the correctness of the characterisation of other views that are interacted with.

Inspiration and its Implications

This document aims to explain the doctrine of inspiration and its implications for the interpretation of the rest of the Bible. Peter Enns’s ideas, as set out in Inspiration and Incarnation, are to be strongly criticised. Peter Enns was a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary — “traditionally a bastion of uncompromisingly conservative Reformed scholarship” — but was suspended in 2008 due to his views on inspiration and subsequently left the seminary. Enns’s idea (see also this) is that inspiration is analogous to incarnation, so like Christ, Scripture is both fully divine and fully human. Enns focuses on the human side, which means that “God, in order to communicate effectively with ancient peoples, adopted their ways of thinking, their worldviews, and their ways of interpreting Scripture … As a result, Scripture contains mistaken ideas, discordant teachings, and (in the NT) attributions of meaning to the OT that was not originally there.” (p. 130)

Methodology

There are two ways to develop a doctrine of Scripture. You can look at what it says about itself in didactic passages like 2 Timothy 3:16 (“All Scripture is God-breathed…”) and develop a doctrine of Scripture from that — what the Bible claims to be. Alternatively, you can evaluate the entirety of the Bible (the facts or phenomena of Scripture) and develop a doctrine of Scripture from that — what the Bible actually is. The difficulty is that what the Bible claims about itself does not always easily match the apparent facts of Scripture (the apparent errors and contradictions). The best way forward is to look at what the Bible says about itself and develop a doctrine of Scripture, and then examine the rest of the Bible (the facts of Scripture) to 1) prevent the doctrine from being formulated incorrectly, and 2) see if they can be explained in a way consistent with the doctrine of Scripture. “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.” (p. 132)

Enns does not seriously deal with the didactic passages. Most of his attention is focussed on facts of Scripture. It is not that Enns is without a framework to understand the Bible though — this is where the incarnation model comes in. As Christ is fully divine and fully human, so the Bible is a fully divine and fully human text. Basing one’s view of Scripture on this analogy is invalid for a number of reasons, such as that 1) Scripture never uses the analogy, 2) “No argument by anology is ever valid, in the sense of having its conclusion follow from its premises with logical necessity.” (p. 139, italics original) 3) Enns observes that “Christ’s incarnation is itself mysterious”, which makes it difficult to base a doctrine of inspiration on.

Inspiration: The Words of God in the Words of Men

The Bible teaches that the Bible is both the word of God (“God said”, “the Holy Spirit says” etc.) and also the words of man (“Moses says”, “Isaiah is so bold as to say” etc.). The Bible often says that God spoke through people (Acts 3:18 etc.). The Holy Spirit is responsible for inspiration (Acts 4:25; 2 Peter 1:21) — without the Holy Spirit, the Bible would only be a collection of writings by godly men. There are two main views in Reformed theology concerning inspiration.

Firstly, the older theory of “verbal inspiration”, which was the view of the Westminster divines (the people who wrote the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Shorter Catechism — and the Larger Catechism for that matter, but that isn’t used so much these days), but has largely fallen out of favour. In this view, “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.” (p. 143) An extreme version of this view is dictation, where the authors are completely passive, but there was not always such a distinction made between the author’s thoughts and the Holy Spirit’s words in his mind.

The second, more recent view, is “organic inspiration” or “plenary inspiration”. This view teaches that God worked in the life of the author so that he would have the knowledge (gained naturally and supernaturally) and be placed in the circumstances so that he would write. The Holy Spirit then superintended the process of writing, so that the Holy Spirit worked harmoniously with the author so that the writings are fully divine and fully human in every way. It is this superintendence, sometimes called concursus, that makes the Bible the Word of God.

It is not enough to say that the Bible is just as God intended it to be. In the Calvanistic worldview where God is sovereign, every book — and everything for that matter — is as God intended it to be, so a Calvanist can say that any book is as God intended it to be. The Bible must be elevated above that.

Necessary Characteristics of the Word of God

God is omniscient, truthful and unchanging. As the Word of God, Scripture will reflect God’s nature, so it will be consistent (not contradictory), cannot contain error (infallible), and does not contain error (inerrant).

In Inspiration and Incarnation, Enns provides three types of biblical data and argues that the conventional Reformed understanding of Scripture does not work. Enns claims that 1) the OT adopts aspects of the faulty ANE worldview (such as a solid dome above a flat earth), 2) there is “theological diversity” in the OT, which are unreconcilable inconsistencies, which are contradictions, and 3) the NT authors use the OT in invalid ways. Enns claims that Scripture is authoritative and inerrant in “all that it teaches”, but not in everything else (and not everything is a “teaching passage”).

The Conceptual World of Scripture

The Bible is expressing the very thoughts of God. As God is omniscient, truthful and unchanging, the Bible, properly understood, must be perfectly true in every way. But God must communicate in a way that is understandable to humans, so the Bible can be “simple or imprecise.” (p. 156) Contemporary literary styles were likely used, and the Bible was written in human language and often about human things (events, people etc.) but the Bible is still inspired and inerrant.

Divine Accommodation

The idea that God accommodates his words so that man can understand has existed for a long time (Calvin talks about it). Effective communication also involves simplification. The Bible can legitimately use words that have etymologies infused with erroneous ideas (like our word Thursday). The Bible also speaks phenomenologically, so it can legitimately talk about “the rising of the sun”.

Enns goes beyond the orthodox idea of divine accommodation by saying that the Bible can mention erroneous ideas without affirming them. For example, although Jesus said that “Moses wrote of me”, Jesus was not actually teaching this (and may have been wrong), but was accommodating to the belief of the day that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. However, “this view makes God out to be a liar and a deceiver. 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.” (p. 162)

Enns is not alone in his views on divine accommodation. Paul Seeley holds similar views, and although Seeley quotes Calvin, Hodge and Warfield to support his views, none of those earlier theologians actually support him.

The Meaning of Scripture

The Bible was written by men who wrote in the common languages of the day (Hebrew, Greek and a bit of Aramaic), but each had their own unique understanding of the language and unique life experiences. Furthermore, mans’ understanding of concepts is also affected by sin (God’s understanding of “love” is different to any man’s understanding of “love”, and everybody’s understanding will be slightly different). But God is the primary author of the text, so the meaning of the text is the meaning that God intended. It is therefore wrong to ask “what Paul means in a particular text” (unless what is actually asked is “what God speaking through Paul means in a particular text”). That said, Paul (and the other biblical authors) would have meant something when they wrote (unless one subscribes to a mechanical dictational view of inspiration), and although they generally would have had a good understanding of what they wrote, this is not the complete meaning as intended by God.

The biblical authors could have misunderstood what they were writing. For example, the psalmist may have believed that the earth does not move (Psalm 104), but this is not God’s meaning of this text. “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.” (p. 170)

It is also wrong to limit the meaning of a text to what the author could have meant (based on what people living at that time knew), as this usually denies revelation, and “confuses the meaning of the text with the writer’s understanding of it.” Furthermore, the way the original hearers/readers understood the texts is even less relevant. “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) … It may he 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.” (p. 170-171)

The NT is important when it comes to interpreting the OT, and there are a number of difficulties associated with how the NT uses the OT. The real meaning of an OT text may be more than the original meaning (in the OT context), but Enns claims that the NT often uses the OT in ways such that the NT meaning (or real meaning) is not part of the original meaning. For example, Enns claims that Hosea 11:1 was not “predictive of Christ’s coming” (p.172), even though Matthew 2:15 states that it was to fulfill the prophecy.

The Incarnate Christ

Christ was fully God and fully man. He was one person, but the two natures (divine and human) were neither “confused nor separated.” (p. 175) Enns extends what it means for Christ to be human by insisting that he adopted human culture, including their views and ways of thinking. Jesus, according to Enns, believed and taught things that were not true. For example, Jesus did not have any special knowledge concerning Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, but merely accepted what was believed in the day (which may or may not be right). Enns also argues that Jesus’ argument for the resurrection of the dead in Luke 20, based on Exodus 3:6, is not a correct interpretation of Exodus 3:6, but one using faulty Second Temple interpretive techniques, so it would have been seen as correct in Jesus’ day.

Enns’ claim is quite enormous. Jesus, the Son of God, can speak in error. Jesus, who is fully God (and fully man), can misunderstand the Old Testament. Traditionally, it has been believed that Jesus is unable to speak error as that would be in conflict with his divine nature. It must also be recognised that Jesus “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.” (p. 180)

Interestingly, just as Enns has come to the conclusion that the analogy between Christ and the Bible shows that the Bible contains errors, others (such as Warfield) have seen that the Bible must be infallible due to its divinity.

The Interpretation of Representative Passages

This paper looks at a number of passages that Peter Enns focuses on and claims support from. Rather than finding support for Enns’ view that these passages are irreconcilable with an orthodox view of Scripture, this paper finds that there are reasonable ways to understand them.

The Truth of Scripture: The “Firmament” of Genesis 1

The “firmament” has sometimes (Enns, Seeley) been understood as a solid dome that the sun, moon and stars are fixed in. Although people in the ANE often believed in the “firmament” as a solid dome, we now know it is not correct, and since it is not correct, God does not believe it, so Scripture cannot teach or affirm its existence. Moses (the author) and the original hearers/readers may well have understood it to be referring to the solid dome, but this does not make it the true meaning that God intended. It is best to understand the “firmament” as an expanse of “unspecified extent and solidity.” (p. 253)

The Validity of Harmonisation: Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 15

Exodus 21:2-11 and Deuteronomy 15:12-18 describe similar laws about the release of slaves. The problem, according to some, is that Exodus doesn’t allow for the freeing of female slaves, while Deuteronomy does. But there is no problem here: “we see that these laws are quite easy to harmonize. In discussing the usual situation of a person entering servitude to pay a debt, Deuteronomy simply makes explicit what Exodus implies about women entering such servitude and adds a humanitarian provision.” (p. 256)

The New Testament’s Fidelity to the Old Testament: Hebrews 3:7-11 and Psalm 95:7-11

Enns argues that the author of Hebrews made some changes to the Psalm as quoted in Hebrews which change its meaning (God was angry with the people after the forty years, not during it). There are two reasonable solutions: 1) An early copyist made the changes (rather than the author), for this suits the authors use of the Psalm in verse 17; or 2) The author of Hebrews uses the Psalm in a way that is entirely consistent with its original meaning.

Jesus as an Interpreter of the Old Testament: Exodus 3:6 and Luke 20:37-40

It has been argued that Exodus 3:6 contains no such proof of the resurrection. However, even if Moses didn’t understand what he wrote, the idea of resurrection is in fact in the Exodus passage, and Jesus can quite legitimately use it (it is not just a faulty Second Temple hermeneutic).

Jesus Fulfilling the Old Testament: Hosea 11:1 and Matthew 2:15

Matthew’s use of Hosea 11:1 (“out of Egypt I have called my Son”) is difficult and Enns makes much use of it. Making matters more difficult is that Hosea 11:1 is a historical reference to the exodus (rather than a prophecy). Enns argues that Matthew and the other NT authors are applying the OT to their situation (in light of Christ) in ways that are never intended by the original meaning of the OT.

One problem with Matthew’s use of Hosea is that Hosea is quoted when Jesus is brought into Egypt, not when he goes out. However, Matthew says that Jesus goes to Egypt to fulfil Hosea, so it is valid to see that this to be actually fulfilled at the later time when Jesus leaves Egypt (which does happen, as an angel tells Joseph to leave).

It is best to see Hosea 11 as a passage that is not just talking about the Israelites at the time of the exodus, but as God’s people throughout time. “When God calls his people out of Egypt — either literal Egypt or figurative Egypt — and into the Promised Land (again, either literally or figuratively speaking), he is calling them out of an environment of sin and into the sphere of covenant righteousness.” (p. 272) Jesus is part of Israel, and is therefore spoken of in Hosea.

The New Testament’s Use of Extrabiblical Traditions: 1 Corinthians 10:4

The NT affirms some things that are not in the OT but are found in other Jewish writings. It is quite reasonable to expect the extrabiblical Jewish writings to contain some true things, such as Moses’ Egyptian education (Acts 7). If the Bible affirms them, they are true, regardless of the original source of the belief.

In 1 Corinthians 10:4, Paul makes reference to an incorrect Jewish belief that a rock that gave water (also called the “moveable well”) followed the Israelites of old in the wilderness. Paul is not affirming this legend. Rather, he is transforming it to make a point about Christ. Paraphrased, 1 Corinthians 10:4 reads, “For they were drinking from a supernatural ‘rock’ that followed them — not the rock of Jewish legend, but the Rock, Christ himself.” (p. 277)