Inspiration and Incarnation by Peter Enns
The Open Volume
Thoughtful Reviews in Theology and Ministry
Inspiration and Incarnation
Peter Enns
Bibliographic Information
Author: Enns, Peter Full Title: Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old TestamentPublisher: Baker Academic Year of Publication: 2005 (Second Edition: 2015) Pages: 197 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8010-2729-8 (First Edition); 978-0-8010-9748-3 (Second Edition) Series: N/A
Author Background
Peter Enns (Ph.D., Harvard University) was Associate Professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia when Inspiration and Incarnation was published in 2005. He taught there from 1994 to 2008, serving at one of American Presbyterianism's most influential Reformed seminaries — Westminster's founding in 1929 represented conservative Presbyterianism's response to Princeton Theological Seminary's perceived theological liberalization, and the institution's confessional commitment to the Westminster Confession of Faith made it the institutional home to figures like J. Gresham Machen, Cornelius Van Til, and John Murray. Enns writes from within the Reformed evangelical tradition, though his Harvard doctoral training under Frank Moore Cross immersed him in the historical-critical methods that have generated significant tension within confessional evangelicalism. This tension between institutional confessionalism and critical scholarship is not merely biographical background but is the animating concern of the book itself.
Using the Theological Traditions Reference Guide's categories, Enns is best categorized as Reformed/Calvinist at the time of publication, writing for an explicitly evangelical audience within that tradition. The book's subtitle — "Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament" — signals both Enns's self-identification with the evangelical world and his recognition that the proposals advanced in the book would be received as challenges to that world's dominant assumptions about Scripture.
The book's publication generated profound controversy at Westminster. Between 2005 and 2008, the faculty engaged in extended debate over whether Enns's proposals violated the Westminster Confession, culminating in a faculty vote of 12–8 in December 2007 affirming that his teaching remained within the bounds of his faculty oath. The Westminster Board of Trustees rejected this conclusion and voted 18–9 in March 2008 to suspend Enns, who resigned in September 2008. This institutional trajectory is essential context: Enns subsequently joined Eastern University and became Senior Fellow at BioLogos, signaling movement toward more progressive evangelical and theistic evolutionary positions. Readers should be aware that the book represents Enns at a transitional moment — writing from within confessional Reformed evangelicalism while advocating positions that would eventually take him beyond its institutional boundaries.
Thesis and Central Argument
Enns's governing thesis is that Scripture is best understood through an incarnational analogy: just as Christ is fully divine and fully human, so Scripture is both God's word and a genuinely human text, deeply embedded in the cultures and intellectual worlds of the ancient Near East. The book responds to what Enns identifies as "the problem of the Old Testament" for evangelicals — the apparent conflict between the high doctrine of Scripture that evangelicalism confesses and three observable features of the Old Testament: its evident participation in ancient Near Eastern mythological and literary conventions, its internal theological diversity that resists harmonization, and the New Testament's interpretive use of Old Testament texts in ways that appear inconsistent with modern grammatical-historical exegesis. Enns argues that these features are not problems requiring apologetic solutions but are the natural and expected results of God's decision to give his word through genuinely human authors writing within genuinely human cultural contexts. The incarnational analogy, he contends, provides the theological framework for affirming both Scripture's full divine authority and its thorough cultural embeddedness without minimizing either.
Overview of Contents
Inspiration and Incarnation consists of five chapters structured around three specific Old Testament "problems," with an opening chapter establishing the incarnational framework and a closing chapter synthesizing the implications. The second edition (2015) adds a substantive postscript reflecting on the book's reception over the intervening decade. The following traces the complete argument across all five chapters and the postscript.
Chapter 1: Getting Our Bearings
The opening chapter establishes both the pastoral problem the book addresses and the theological framework through which Enns proposes to resolve it. The pastoral problem is straightforward: evangelical Christians committed to Scripture's authority are encountering biblical scholarship — particularly scholarship on the Old Testament's relationship to ancient Near Eastern literature — and experiencing crises of faith when the Bible they encounter does not behave as their doctrine of Scripture led them to expect. Enns identifies this as a failure not of Scripture but of evangelical expectations, shaped by a doctrine of inspiration developed in isolation from the actual phenomena of the biblical text.
The incarnational analogy is introduced as the controlling theological metaphor: just as orthodox Christology affirms that Christ is fully divine and fully human without confusion or diminishment of either nature, so a faithful doctrine of Scripture should affirm that the Bible is fully God's word and fully a human text without needing to minimize the human dimension to protect the divine. Enns acknowledges that the analogy has limits — Scripture is not hypostatically united to God as Christ's humanity is united to his divinity, and Scripture does not share Christ's sinlessness — but argues that the analogy is nevertheless theologically productive for reorienting evangelical thinking about Scripture's cultural embeddedness.
The chapter's most significant methodological move is Enns's insistence that the doctrine of inspiration must be built "from the bottom up" rather than "from the top down" — that is, theological claims about Scripture's nature must be grounded in careful observation of what Scripture actually is and does, rather than deduced from prior theological commitments and then imposed on the text. This inductive method shapes everything that follows and represents Enns's most direct challenge to the inerrancy tradition's typical procedure.
Chapter 2: The Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Literature
The first substantive problem Enns addresses is the Old Testament's extensive participation in ancient Near Eastern literary conventions, cosmological assumptions, and mythological motifs. The chapter surveys three categories of evidence: creation accounts (Genesis 1–2 and the Babylonian Enuma Elish), flood narratives (Genesis 6–9 and the Gilgamesh Epic), and law codes (the Mosaic legislation and the Code of Hammurabi). In each case, Enns demonstrates that the parallels extend beyond incidental similarities to include structural patterns, shared cosmological frameworks, and common mythological topoi that cannot be explained away as coincidental.
The traditional evangelical response to these parallels, Enns argues, has been to minimize their significance by emphasizing the Old Testament's theological distinctiveness while avoiding serious engagement with the depth of the literary and conceptual similarities. This approach, he contends, is both exegetically inadequate and theologically unnecessary. The incarnational model suggests an alternative: if God chose to reveal himself within the ancient world rather than above it, then the Old Testament's use of ancient Near Eastern conventions is exactly what we should expect. Genesis 1 employs ancient cosmological categories not because the biblical author was limited by his culture despite God's inspiration, but because God chose to speak through cultural forms his original audience could understand. The theological message of Genesis 1 — that Israel's God, not Marduk, is creator — does not require denying that the text employs the cosmological assumptions of its day.
The chapter's most contested proposal is Enns's willingness to use the term "myth" to describe certain Old Testament material. He defines myth carefully — as ancient, pre-modern ways of addressing questions of ultimate origins and meaning in story form — and insists that myth in this sense is not synonymous with falsehood. But the definitional qualification does not resolve the deeper question: does the Old Testament's participation in mythological conventions compromise its historical reliability? Enns's answer is indirect: he suggests that modern questions about "what really happened" miss the point of what the ancient texts were doing, but he never clearly specifies whether the Genesis accounts narrate historical events, employ mythological conventions to describe historical events, or do something else entirely. This ambiguity is strategic — Enns wants to shift the conversation away from historicity questions — but it leaves readers uncertain about what precisely he is affirming and denying.
Chapter 3: The Old Testament and Theological Diversity
The second problem is the Old Testament's internal theological diversity. Enns examines cases where biblical texts offer competing or apparently contradictory theological perspectives: Proverbs' confident retribution theology (the righteous prosper, the wicked suffer) versus Job and Ecclesiastes' direct challenge to that framework; the Deuteronomistic History's corporate punishment theology versus Ezekiel 18's individual responsibility; Chronicles' selective retelling of Samuel-Kings with different theological emphases. The traditional evangelical approach — harmonizing apparent contradictions by arguing that the texts address different situations or that careful exegesis dissolves the tension — is, Enns argues, often exegetically strained and misses the theological significance of the diversity itself.
Instead, Enns proposes that the diversity is intentional and theologically productive. The Old Testament gives us not a single, unified systematic theology but a collection of voices addressing different pastoral situations across Israel's history. This diversity does not compromise Scripture's inspiration; rather, it reflects God's decision to speak through human authors whose perspectives were shaped by their particular historical moments and pastoral concerns. The incarnational analogy supports this reading: if Scripture is genuinely human, we should expect it to reflect the diversity of human circumstances and the development of theological understanding across time.
The chapter's strength is its demonstration that harmonization often requires reading more into texts than is exegetically warranted. Its weakness is the absence of clear criteria for distinguishing legitimate theological diversity from theological error. If Proverbs and Job offer genuinely competing theologies of suffering, how does the interpreter adjudicate between them? Does the New Testament resolve the diversity, or does diversity persist as an ongoing feature of canonical Scripture? Enns gestures toward these questions but does not provide satisfying answers, leaving readers uncertain about how to move from recognizing diversity to making theological judgments.
Chapter 4: The Old Testament and Its Interpretation in the New Testament
The third and most exegetically contested problem is the New Testament authors' use of the Old Testament. Enns surveys well-known cases where the New Testament appears to violate modern grammatical-historical exegesis: Matthew's use of Hosea 11:1 ("Out of Egypt I called my son") to refer to Jesus when Hosea clearly has Israel in view; Paul's use of Genesis 15:6 in Romans 4 to argue for justification by faith; the writer of Hebrews' extended typological reading of the Old Testament cult. The traditional evangelical explanation — that the apostles discovered deeper meanings hidden in the Old Testament through divine inspiration — is, Enns argues, historically and hermeneutically inadequate. The apostles were not discovering timeless meanings embedded in the Old Testament text; they were reading the Old Testament as first-century Second Temple Jews, employing the interpretive methods common in their cultural context (pesher, midrash, allegorical reading).
Enns's central claim is that the apostles' hermeneutic was "christotelic" rather than strictly "christocentric" — they were reading the Old Testament in light of Christ's coming, not because individual texts predicted Christ in their original contexts but because Christ is the climax and fulfillment of Israel's story as a whole. This means the apostles were "explaining what the Old Testament means in light of Christ's coming" rather than "remaining consistent with the original context and intention of the Old Testament author." The hermeneutical attitude they embodied, Enns argues, should be embraced by the church — not in the sense that contemporary interpreters should imitate Second Temple methods, but in the sense that we should read the Old Testament self-consciously as Christians for whom the resurrection has recontextualized everything.
This chapter generated the most intense scholarly criticism. G.K. Beale, in his extensive JETS review, argued that Enns's account severs the connection between the Old Testament's original meaning and its New Testament fulfillment in ways that undermine the grammatical-historical method and the unity of Scripture. John Frame similarly pressed the question: if the apostles' exegesis is authoritative because it is apostolic rather than because it is exegetically sound, what guidance does this provide for contemporary interpretation? Enns's response — that the christotelic reading is what distinguishes Christian interpretation while the grammatical-historical method remains valid for understanding texts in their original contexts — does not fully answer the concern that he has made apostolic hermeneutics unreplicable and therefore irrelevant as a model for the church.
Chapter 5: The Big Picture
The closing chapter synthesizes the book's argument and draws out its implications for evangelical doctrine and practice. Enns reiterates that the three problems examined are not isolated difficulties but reflect a single underlying issue: evangelical theology has developed a doctrine of Scripture that does not adequately account for Scripture's human dimension. The incarnational analogy, properly understood, allows evangelicals to affirm both Scripture's divine origin and its thorough cultural embeddedness without treating the human dimension as a concession or limitation.
The chapter closes with a call for evangelical humility — humility about our interpretive frameworks, humility about the limits of our theological systems, and trust that God's word accomplishes its purposes even when it does not conform to our expectations. Enns is explicit that this will require rethinking certain formulations of inerrancy, though he does not provide an alternative systematic account of biblical authority. The chapter's pastoral tone is evident: Enns is writing for readers whose faith has been destabilized by the conflict between their doctrine of Scripture and the Bible they actually encounter, and he wants to provide a theological framework that relieves rather than intensifies that tension.
Postscript (Second Edition, 2015)
The 2015 second edition includes a substantive postscript in which Enns reflects on the book's reception, the Westminster controversy, and the trajectory of his own thinking over the intervening decade. The tone is more candid than conciliatory — Enns acknowledges that the book was deliberately provocative and expresses no regret for the controversy it generated. He notes that the most intense criticism came from those committed to a particular formulation of inerrancy, and he suggests that the controversy revealed the extent to which that formulation had become functionally authoritative in some evangelical circles in ways that constrained honest engagement with Scripture.
The postscript also clarifies that the book was never intended as a comprehensive doctrine of Scripture but as an invitation to conversation about how evangelicals might rethink inspiration in light of the Bible's actual characteristics. Enns is more explicit here than in the original edition about his own movement away from traditional inerrancy formulations, and he frames the book as a transitional work in his own theological development rather than as a settled position.
Theological Evaluation and Critique
Exegetical and Hermeneutical Method
Enns's exegetical method is competent and his engagement with ancient Near Eastern primary sources is well-informed. The treatment of the Gilgamesh Epic and Enuma Elish in Chapter 2 demonstrates genuine familiarity with the texts and the secondary literature, and his presentation of the parallels is fair — he neither overstates the similarities (as maximalist comparativists sometimes do) nor minimizes them (as evangelical apologetics has often done). The argument that the Old Testament participates in ancient Near Eastern cosmology and literary conventions is historically sound and has become increasingly accepted even in conservative evangelical scholarship since the book's publication.
The hermeneutical framework, however, raises significant questions that Enns does not fully address. The insistence on building the doctrine of inspiration "from the bottom up" sounds methodologically modest, but it presupposes that empirical observation of Scripture's characteristics can yield theological conclusions about its nature without prior doctrinal commitments shaping what counts as relevant data. This is less methodologically neutral than Enns suggests. John Frame's review identified this tension with precision: Enns consistently appeals to "evidence" for historical events as though evidence is purely inductive, but he never appeals to divine inspiration itself as evidence for historicity. Frame argues this reflects a prior methodological decision about what kinds of evidence count, not a simple inductive observation of what Scripture is.
The most significant hermeneutical weakness is the underspecified criteria for identifying what in Scripture is cultural accommodation versus what is theologically normative. If the Old Testament employs ancient cosmology as cultural accommodation, why not also its moral norms? If theological diversity in the Old Testament is a feature rather than a problem, how does the interpreter distinguish diversity from contradiction? Enns provides no clear principles for making these distinctions, which leaves the incarnational model generative as a metaphor but insufficiently precise as a hermeneutical method.
Doctrinal Analysis
Measured against the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and the Chalcedonian Definition, Inspiration and Incarnationraises no concerns at the ecumenical level. The book's Christology is orthodox, and the incarnational analogy is deployed to honor rather than diminish Scripture. The doctrinal questions emerge at the confessional and hermeneutical level.
From a Reformed perspective, the most relevant benchmarks are the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) and the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978). The Westminster Confession affirms in Chapter I that Scripture is "immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages" and that "the Old Testament in Hebrew...and the New Testament in Greek...being immediately inspired by God...are therefore authentical." The Confession's account of inspiration emphasizes both divine origin and textual preservation in a form that makes Scripture accessible as "the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of faith and practice."
Enns's proposals do not deny inspiration, but they qualify significantly what inspiration entails. If Scripture participates in ancient myth, reflects genuine theological diversity that resists harmonization, and authorizes interpretive methods that violate grammatical-historical standards, then the Confession's confidence that Scripture provides a "certain and infallible rule" becomes more ambiguous than the Reformed tradition has historically allowed. The Westminster board's conclusion that Enns's views violated the Confession is theologically defensible even if one disagrees with the institutional decision to suspend him.
The Chicago Statement's Article XIII provides a more nuanced benchmark: "We affirm that it is proper to interpret Scripture according to its literary forms...We further affirm that inerrancy is not negated by Biblical phenomena such as...the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations." Enns explicitly appeals to this article, arguing that recognizing ancient Near Eastern conventions and theological diversity is precisely what Article XIII requires. This is a defensible reading, but it is contested. Critics like Wayne Grudem and R.C. Sproul have argued that Enns stretches Article XIII beyond what its framers intended, particularly in his account of theological diversity and his treatment of myth. The disagreement is not merely about Enns's conclusions but about whether those conclusions are compatible with any meaningful affirmation of inerrancy.
From a broader evangelical perspective, Enns's proposals are more compatible with traditions less invested in inerrancy formulations. Wesleyan-Arminian readers who work within the Quadrilateral (Scripture, tradition, reason, experience) will find more theological space for Enns's proposals than strictly sola scriptura Reformed readers. Anglican readers familiar with the tradition's engagement with higher criticism will recognize the methodological principles at work, even if they question specific applications. Roman Catholic readers whose tradition has engaged historical criticism through the lens of Dei Verbum's teaching that Scripture teaches "that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation" will find Enns's incarnational model broadly compatible, though they may find his account of theological diversity less carefully developed than Catholic biblical theology typically requires.
From a Baptist perspective, particularly within the Southern Baptist Convention where the Baptist Faith and Message (2000) affirms Scripture as "truth, without any mixture of error," Enns's proposals will generate significant resistance. The tension is not merely about specific conclusions but about methodological assumptions: Enns's inductive approach treats Scripture's observable characteristics as hermeneutical data to which doctrine must conform, while the Baptist inerrancy tradition treats Scripture's self-testimony as the starting point from which hermeneutical principles are derived. These are incompatible starting points that lead to different conclusions even when engaging the same exegetical evidence.
Engagement with Secondary Literature
The book's engagement with secondary literature is selective rather than comprehensive, reflecting its intended audience (lay evangelicals and seminary students) rather than professional biblical scholars. Enns cites standard critical scholarship on ancient Near Eastern literature (John Walton, Tremper Longman, William Dever) appropriately and engages evangelical biblical theology (Brevard Childs, N.T. Wright) substantively. The treatment of Second Temple hermeneutics draws on Richard Longenecker's work but does not engage more recent scholarship by G.K. Beale and D.A. Carson that offers alternative accounts of apostolic exegesis.
The most significant gap is the book's limited engagement with critics. Enns acknowledges that evangelical scholars have addressed the ancient Near Eastern parallels for decades and that his proposals are not entirely novel, but he dismisses previous treatments as inadequate without sustained engagement. John Frame's review rightly notes that Enns gives the impression that problems like the Gilgamesh parallels or theological diversity are newly discovered when in fact Reformed and evangelical scholars have been addressing them for generations. The book would have been strengthened by more direct engagement with the best conservative evangelical responses before advancing its revisionary proposals.
The most important critical dialogue occurred after publication. G.K. Beale's JETS review (2006) and the subsequent exchange between Beale and Enns across multiple journal articles represent the most detailed scholarly engagement. Beale's criticisms — that Enns's incarnational analogy is underspecified, that his account of myth is ambiguous about historicity, and that his treatment of apostolic hermeneutics severs the Old Testament from its New Testament fulfillment — are substantive and have not been adequately answered. John Frame's review similarly pressed questions about Enns's unwillingness to appeal to inspiration as evidence for historicity and about the practical implications of the incarnational model for contemporary interpretation. These reviews should be engaged alongside the book itself for readers seeking a full picture of the debate.
Strengths
Honest engagement with the evidence. The book's most significant contribution is its forthright presentation of difficulties that evangelical scholarship has often minimized or avoided. Enns does not pretend that the ancient Near Eastern parallels are superficial, that theological diversity dissolves under careful exegesis, or that the New Testament's use of the Old Testament conforms to grammatical-historical standards. This intellectual honesty is pastorally significant — readers who have encountered these difficulties elsewhere and felt that evangelical treatments were evasive will find Enns's direct engagement credible and refreshing. The book models the kind of transparency about textual difficulties that builds rather than erodes trust in evangelical scholarship.
The incarnational analogy as a theological resource. The incarnational model, while not original to Enns, is deployed with greater consistency and pastoral sensitivity than in most previous evangelical treatments. The analogy helps readers see that Scripture's cultural embeddedness is not a theological liability but reflects God's decision to reveal himself within history rather than above it — just as the incarnation required God to enter fully into human flesh and culture, so biblical revelation required God's word to enter fully into the cultural and intellectual world of the ancient Near East. This is a genuinely illuminating theological insight that has proven pastorally helpful for evangelicals struggling to reconcile their commitment to Scripture's authority with the findings of biblical scholarship. The analogy is theologically generative even for readers who contest specific applications Enns makes.
Accessibility without condescension. Enns writes for non-specialists — pastors, seminary students, thoughtful laypeople — without oversimplifying the argument or patronizing readers. The prose is clear, the structure is logical, and the examples are well-chosen. The book does not require technical competence in Hebrew or familiarity with the scholarly literature, but it also does not insult readers' intelligence by pretending the issues are simple or the solutions obvious. This balance of accessibility and seriousness is difficult to achieve, and Enns sustains it throughout. The book serves its intended pastoral audience effectively, even when its proposals are contested.
Weaknesses and Limitations
The incarnational analogy is theologically underdeveloped. While the analogy is heuristically useful, Enns does not develop it with sufficient precision to answer the questions it raises. The Chalcedonian Definition specifies that Christ's natures are united "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation" — a formulation developed through centuries of careful theological reflection. Enns invokes the incarnation but provides no comparable precision about how Scripture's divine and human dimensions relate. What does it mean for Scripture to be "fully divine and fully human" in a way analogous to but not identical with the hypostatic union? How do we distinguish the human dimension that is part of Scripture's God-given character from human elements that involve limitation or error? John Frame's critique is incisive: Enns acknowledges the analogy has limits but never specifies what those limits are, which makes the incarnational model more a suggestive metaphor than a developed theological framework.
The treatment of myth is strategically ambiguous. Enns defines myth carefully as ancient, pre-modern ways of addressing ultimate questions through story, and he insists myth is not synonymous with falsehood. But this definitional precision does not resolve the substantive question: does the Old Testament's participation in mythological conventions compromise its historical reliability? Enns's answer is indirect — he suggests that modern historicity questions miss the point of what ancient texts were doing — but this rhetorical move avoids rather than answers the question. G.K. Beale's review pressed this point relentlessly: if Genesis employs myth to address theological questions, does the Genesis flood describe a historical event? Did a historical Adam exist? Enns wants to shift the conversation away from these questions, but his refusal to answer them directly makes his position appear evasive to readers for whom historical reliability is a non-negotiable component of biblical authority.
The account of apostolic hermeneutics undermines grammatical-historical exegesis. Chapter 4's argument that the apostles employed Second Temple interpretive methods is historically accurate, but the theological implications Enns draws are problematic. If the apostles' use of the Old Testament is authoritative because it is apostolic rather than because it conforms to grammatical-historical standards, and if their methods are culturally specific to the Second Temple period, then contemporary interpreters cannot replicate apostolic exegesis without special revelation. This creates a methodological crisis: the grammatical-historical method assumes that faithful interpretation tracks the text's original meaning, but if the apostles did not concern themselves with original authorial intent, why should we? Enns's suggestion that we can adopt the apostles' christotelic "attitude" while not imitating their specific methods does not resolve this tension — it leaves the contemporary interpreter with no clear guidance for how christotelic reading relates to grammatical-historical exegesis. This is the book's most serious hermeneutical weakness, and Beale, Frame, and Carson have all identified it as the point where Enns's proposals most clearly threaten the evangelical interpretive tradition.
The criteria for theological adjudication are absent. If the Old Testament contains genuine theological diversity — not merely complementary perspectives but competing claims that resist harmonization — how does the interpreter decide between them? Does the New Testament resolve all Old Testament diversity, or does diversity persist as a permanent feature of canonical Scripture? Are some Old Testament theologies simply wrong, or is diversity itself the point? Enns gestures toward these questions but provides no satisfying answers. Without clear criteria, the diversity claim becomes an invitation to relativism in theological interpretation: readers can choose which Old Testament voices to prioritize based on personal preference rather than on theological principle. A more developed account of how diversity functions canonically and how the church discerns theological truth within diversity would significantly strengthen the book's constructive contribution.
Engagement with the Broader Scholarly Conversation
Inspiration and Incarnation enters the long-running evangelical conversation about biblical authority that intensified with the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early twentieth century. The book's closest theological predecessor is Bernard Ramm's The Christian View of Science and Scripture (1954), which advocated for progressive creationism and argued that evangelicals needed greater hermeneutical sophistication in engaging modern science. More recently, Kenton Sparks's Sacred Word, Broken Word (2012) and Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible(2011) have advanced more radical critiques of inerrancy from within evangelicalism, though both move beyond where Enns is willing to go in Inspiration and Incarnation.
Within Old Testament studies, the book engages the same ancient Near Eastern material that John Walton addresses in the Lost World series, but with different conclusions. Walton's The Lost World of Genesis One (2009) and The Lost World of Adam and Eve (2015) argue that recognizing ancient Near Eastern conventions does not require abandoning historicity or inerrancy, while Enns is more willing to leave historicity questions open. Readers comparing these approaches will find that Walton represents a more conservative application of ancient Near Eastern contextual reading than Enns does.
The most important critical engagements came from within the Reformed evangelical tradition. G.K. Beale's The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism (2008) devotes four chapters to Enns's proposals and represents the most sustained scholarly critique. The collection Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith? (2012), edited by James Hoffmeier and Dennis Magary, includes several essays engaging Enns directly on ancient Near Eastern parallels and historicity questions. These works represent serious, substantive engagement from scholars who share Enns's evangelical commitments but contest his conclusions, and they should be read alongside Inspiration and Incarnation for a balanced perspective on the debate.
Conclusion and Recommendation
Inspiration and Incarnation is a significant and genuinely illuminating contribution to evangelical theology's engagement with biblical criticism — a carefully argued, pastorally motivated, and intellectually honest attempt to provide evangelicals with a theological framework for affirming Scripture's authority while acknowledging its cultural embeddedness, internal diversity, and the New Testament's interpretive freedom. The incarnational analogy is theologically generative and has proven pastorally helpful. The book's honest presentation of difficulties is a model of intellectual integrity. At the same time, the proposal's most significant moves — the claim that the Old Testament participates in myth, that theological diversity is a feature rather than a problem, and that apostolic hermeneutics is culturally specific rather than exegetically replicable — are insufficiently developed and raise questions Enns does not fully answer. The book's reception history — including Enns's suspension from Westminster and the extended scholarly debate with Beale and Frame — demonstrates that the proposals challenge Reformed evangelical commitments more directly than Enns initially acknowledged. The book is best read as an invitation to conversation rather than as a settled position, and readers should engage it alongside the tradition's most careful responses before drawing conclusions.
Recommended for: M.Div. students in Old Testament, hermeneutics, or doctrine of Scripture courses; pastors whose congregants are wrestling with the relationship between biblical authority and biblical criticism; evangelicals trained in historical-critical scholarship who are seeking a constructive evangelical theology of Scripture; readers who have found traditional inerrancy formulations unhelpful or inadequate and are looking for alternative frameworks; those interested in the contemporary evangelical debate about Scripture's nature and authority.
Not recommended for: Readers seeking a defense of traditional inerrancy; those from strongly confessional Reformed or Baptist traditions who require more detailed engagement with the Westminster Confession or the Chicago Statement before considering revisionary proposals; readers who have not yet engaged the grammatical-historical tradition's best work and therefore lack the foundation needed to assess Enns's departures from it; those looking for a comprehensive systematic treatment of the doctrine of Scripture rather than a focused engagement with specific exegetical problems; readers unwilling to engage the book's critics alongside the book itself.
Overall Assessment: ☐ Highly Recommended | ☑ Recommended | ☐ Recommended with Reservations | ☐ Not Recommended
Comments
Post a Comment