Peter Enns is an enigma to me. I know the name and have longed wished for a conversation between him and someone.like Craig Keener. Yet, I really haven’t spent anytime with him.
However, his book the Sin of Certainty, the title alone, has been a source of fascination, as one of my big verses is Acts 2:36 “therefore know for certain.” The verse is based on 3 types of evidence in the preceding passage.
Keener recognized this apologetic argument in his commentary on Acts. The conversation I’d like to see between him and Enns would be about what the history of spiritual awakenings can tell us about God’s initial call to humanity.
I know that you are a great follower of Keener - and so presumably know extensively of him. I don’t - but I do fancy from having read two of Enns’ works to know him well enough that I will presume to speculate here (even only guessing at Keener through your admiring eyes) that you probably wouldn’t find any such conversation (in the unlikely event that it would happen at all) as satisfying as you might imagine.
Here’s why I suggest this: I think Enns is the type who, with so many these days (I include myself among them) has stepped away from apologetics of the post-enlightenment variety, and have looked back with a critical (and in Enns’ case, humorous) eye at what they probably now view as a game they are no longer interested in. One that he’s decided not to play. It may seem disingenuous of him (if indeed he would own these words I’m putting into his mouth), since - from the harried apologists’ view, he is taking potshots at things they hold near and dear. So they might understandably conclude that not only is he “still very much in the game” - but has even joined the wrong side of it! Maybe they have a point. But I just don’t think somebody like Enns would give somebody like Keener much satisfaction of indulging him at the level he would wish to be indulged. People who have some very fundamental differences of theological hermeneutics tend to talk past each other and discover that they aren’t finding the same things to be important. It’s quite possible I’m not giving Keener his due here, and perhaps he would be more of an engaged and willing bridge traveler / listener than I’m imagining. But my gut tells me that if they were both at the same party and the conversation steered toward any deeper stuff, they would both end up with different crowds and in different parts of the room. And these days - I would even be prepared to be quite impressed if they were even at the same social event at all!
It’s hard to say. You never really can predict these sorts of things. He might be lead by the Spirit in such a way that he surprises both you and himself.
I am trying to say this without being offensive (to evangelicals) but Keener is extremely reasonable for an evangelical.
This is his view on Genesis 1. In the end I still think he is going to tote the inerrancy line but he has no problem pointing out, for example, that parts of the Gospel of John are non-historical interpretations (see his Baker Academic 2 volume Commentary). I don’t usually find many evangelicals who delve into Biblical criticism reasonable but his scholarship is very much in touch with reality.
You can also see some articles on his blog to get the gist of his thinking. Canaanite Genocide:
In part 2 he writes:
Reading through Joshua in Hebrew several years ago I had to keep putting it down. As a follower of Jesus, the prince of peace, I could not stomach the slaughter I was again encountering afresh. Revulsion is an appropriate response for those who understand God’s loving heart for people; as God said later, “Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?” (Ezek 18:23, NIV).
But that Asbury statement of faith he must operate under is going to be restrictive…
Although I appreciate Enns’ efforts, I’m not particularly impressed with them. In particular, I find the claims that a more open theology approach is a better match with science highly problematic. In reality, scientific data are compatible both with open theology and with belief in God’s complete foreknowledge of events.
When will you abandon this childish notion that either someone agrees with you or they are throwing away the scriptures?
Kings and Chronicles could be complete fiction and it wouldn’t impact the Gospel at all, but you can’t see that because you’re stuck in a system of thought that turns the scriptures upside down and makes the Sabbath more important than the Savior.
Right there is why so many, many college kids raise YEC leave the faith: they are doing exactly what they were taught.
Have you ever bothered to actually look to see what kinds of literature they really are? The thing is, if you don’t have at least some idea what the original writers had in mind, then you’re not reading the scriptures at all, you’re reading some mix of what you want to see and the result of forcing the scriptures to fit your own worldview.
What you just said is that you have a big problem if God didn’t do things in a way that makes you happy. Dr. Ennes is quite correct because God teaches as much by action as by word, and the way that the scriptures came to us is God in action. So why do you insist on ignoring something God is teaching?
Which has absolutely nothing to do with what preceded. This isn’t about obedience or sacrifice, it’s about listening to God. You can’t obey if you don’t understand what God has said, and if you ignore how the scriptures came to us you can’t understand: ignoring how the scriptures came to us leaves you stuck demanding that the Holy Spirit had to inspire the ancient writers to write to make you happy by using your worldview and to leave the people of Israel in the lurch.
But you haven’t given a “serious biblical challenge”, all you’ve written is just you saying that everything has to fit your worldview and you don’t have to learn anything because God plainly write it all for you.
If he is correct that the Old Testament writings as we have them were compiled during the Babylonian Exile, that is part of the message! just as the fact that the Genesis Creation story follow the order of events as found in the Egyptian creation story is part of the message – in fact if you aren’t aware of that you miss most of the actual message!
I thought there had been a find of Hebrew curse scrolls from the time of Joshua. No?
Anyway, we had to be able to read cuneiform, proto-Hebrew, and classical Hebrew, and it strikes me as I sit here that I can’t remember ever asking whether the Pentateuch (or Hexateuch; some of my grad school professors treated Joshua as part of the initial corpus) exhibited any signs that it might have been first set down in Egyptian. That seems an obvious question!
I recall when I first decided that historical-critical was a game I wasn’t interested in playing any more when I had a professor who blithely called the book of Joshua a tourist guide to piles of stones. It was much later that I came to view what passes for apologetics these days in the same way.
Though the two decisions sprouted from different causes: the first was the recognition that depending on what assumptions you made the Old Testament texts could be turned into all sorts of things and there was no way to judge between them; the second was from reading some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Lutheran apologetics and recognizing the modern version that YEC and much ID engage in as cheap stunts and tricks compared to the deep scholarship of those earlier generations.
What a shameful dig. You really think evangelicals are incapable of a principled belief in inerrancy. Like at a fundamental level you think everyone who is theologically conservative has some ulterior axe to grind or pet project.
It’s not a dig. It is a fact. When you work at a conservative seminary all your views, research and publications have to abide by the statement of faith you agree to most often of which assumes the inerrancy of scripture. It restricts a person’s ability to do genuine research and obvious clouds judgment as there are hundreds of not thousands of obvious errors in the Bible.
Imagine a scientist who is doing research that all must conform to a 6,000 year old earth. Do you get good science? Nope. You can’t go into a research project knowing the answers before you do the actual research. What ends up happening is you mix theology with historical criticism. There is nothing wrong with that per se, but one should not pretend to be doing historical research when it fact they are guided by theology. Don’t sell me theology in the history section of the bookstore.
Yeah, it’s so easy to just up and and leave your job, your community, your house, financial commitments etc and relocate. But I never said Keener disagrees with inerrancy and is being forced to comply with it against his will. I don’t know his inner mind. I only said inerrancy constrains legitimate historical research.
Most statements of inerrancy are worded with enough wiggle room that you can affirm them with a lot of latitude depending on your definition. Don’t know about Ashbury’s.
[We believe] In the divine inspiration, truthfulness and authority of both the Old and New Testaments, the only written Word of God, without error in all it affirms. The Scriptures are the only infallible rule of faith and practice. The Holy Spirit preserves God’s Word in the church today and by it speaks God’s truth to peoples of every age;
They also believe:
“That human beings were created in the image of God. This image was marred in every part through the disobedience of our first parents, and fellowship with God was broken. God, in His prevenient grace, restores moral sensibility to all humankind and enables all to respond to His love and to accept His saving grace, if they will;”
So looks like some sort of fall due to the first human couple. Wiggle room there but still constricting. And yes, the “in all it affirms” adds a bit of wiggle room but not enough. Conservative scholars from these seminaries always seem to reach conservative judgments on all questions of authorship, historicity and dating.
Keener and a few others certainly represent the best of the conservative crowd but when you work in a theologial seminary where everyone shares the same conservative beliefs about the Bible as you, where is the challenge? Where is the research? Where are the peers that disagree with you?
This is what Janet Kellogg Ray (recent podcast here) says in her 2023 book “The God of Monkey Science”
I get the feeling this is a pretty widespread thought of researchers in public institutions towards those in seminaries on historical issues as well. I’ve seen AJ Levine say as much (I think about Darrell Bock) in a scholarly historical Jesus journal (JSHJ) when an entire issue was devoted to the question of whether or not conservative scholars have anything to contribute to the field. Overall the response was positive (they can contribute constructively to the field) but the question of credibility was raised by her when a conservative always reaches a conservative verdict. As an example, if a scholar looks at 100 questions of say, authorship, dating, historical reliability and so on inside the Bible and almost always or INEVITABLY sides with historicity or tradition in all those cases—clearly the deck is rigged. There is a big gulf between seminary scholarship and critical scholarship outside of them.
The bastion of YECism is a stretch… I love this recent quote/tweet from Keener
Some conservative evangelicals expend enormous effort to defend the idea of a ‘young’ earth. Yet most evangelical biblical commentators don’t think the Bible itself actually teaches that.
It actually helps my faith knowing that stories like Noah are likely somewhat mythological or adopted from other religions. I have a hard time worshipping a God who gets frustrated and just drowns everyone and everything. Not to mention that Noah did not end up being very righteous after all. Poor draft choice.
You don’t believe a 600 year old man built a structurally stable boat out of wood a third the size of the titanic that housed two of every animal? Me either.
Yes, God looks morally troubling even though the account tries to claim everyone was completely evil. I tend to disregard such sweeping generalizations as hyperbole and that makes me evaluate the story again in light of Genesis 18.
But the kicker is God vows to never drown all humans again, as if He regrets His choice to do so. Did He make a bad decision? As God His choice was not optimal? Done in a fit of rage? The text is not flattering. If it was a good and proper decision, why the vow to never do it again?
The reality was that major floods happened in the region and there was a really big one that probably influenced peoples memories. Lots of stories about it were extant, stories much older than the Biblical version. What they did was take a story everyone knew and tried to spin it with a different theology. The gods were’t mad humans were too noisy…. The flood happened because humans were evil. In the end, it looks like an attempted explanation for the existence of evil to me in the world and it serves as a story of liberation… God will save his righteous and faithful people.
