What a Mess!
Given that we are in process of being confirmed in the Anglican Church and have been out of the narrowly defined Reformed world for a few years now (which by the way does not mean that we have abandoned our Reformed beliefs–just read the 39 Articles, which of course resound with Reformed teaching; the Anglican world just has more room for diversity–and yes, of course, it has its messes too and big ones), I am hesitant to post anything on more Reformed in-house fighting. Nonetheless, because I know Prof. Enns personally and have sat under his teaching and greatly benefitted from his courses, I’ve decided to post a short piece voicing some of my thoughts regarding the recent events at Westminster. In case you haven’t heard, Prof. Peter Enns, a tenured professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary, was suspended for supposed heterodox teachings espoused in his book Inspiration and Incarnation. Strangely, Enns’ suspension went through even though a majority of the seminary faculty voted in favor of Enns’ orthodoxy. Apparently, the board has the power to override a faculty vote (there were of course those on the board who gave dissenting votes).
From what I can gather at least one of the concerns centers on Enns’ use of an “incarnational analogy” to speak of the nature of Scripture and whether or not this falls within the bounds of the Westminster Confession of faith. (I imagine that there are also concerns as to whether or not Enns’ engagment with higher criticism is “in bounds”; however, I haven’t heard the details on that).
Enns of course is not the first person in the history of Christianity to employ the incarnational analogy. For example, in Mary Healy’s article, “Biblical Inspiration and the Christological Analogy,” Healy discusses what she calls the “Christological analogy” and its hermeneutical implications in order to move us beyond the “false dichotomy between critical exegesis and Christian faith, so that the biblical text will once again be illumined as a means of access into the mystery of the God who revealed himself in time and space” (p. 193). Healy begins by presenting a basic definition of the doctrine of inspiration, viz., “the conviction that God himself is the primary author of the sacred books” (p. 190). In other words, God himself speaks through the biblical authors. Granting this, we must then take into account both the human and the divine authorship of Scripture. As Healy explains, the Christological analogy-comparing Scripture with the hypostatic union of two natures in Christ-was employed by the Second Vatican Council and has roots in patristic sources (e.g., Chrysostom). The SVC version reads, “For the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as of old the Word of the eternal Father, when he took to himself the weak flesh of humanity became like other men.” Here we see the sacramental character of Scripture corresponding to the sacramentality of Christ’s humanity. Moreover, just as Christ was fully human and fully divine, so too we must affirm Scripture as fully human and fully divine-neither elevating one over the other or seeing the two in tension. The human and divine aspects of Scripture form a unity and (contra modern critical practices) given this unity, we cannot presume to discern which passages are “divine” and which are merely “human” (p. 191).
Continuing with the Christological analogy, just as there heretical Christologies, so too are their imbalanced doctrines of Scripture and inspiration. One might, e.g., fall into a kind of “Monophysite” exegesis in which the human dimension of the text is severely downplayed. An extreme version of this would be a “dictation” theory. A second imbalanced approach would move in a direction in which the human aspects are unduly exalted and the divine (if attended to at all) serves as a kind of afterthought. Given our desire to avoid both of these extremes, Healy suggests that we consider a “‘Chalcedonian’ form of exegesis, which does full justice to the human and the divine aspects of Scripture in the integral unity, [...] one which takes seriously the human authorial processes and rigorously investigates the relevant manuscripts, languages, literary genres, historical contexts, cultural settings and so on-but [is] open from the beginning to the interior and vertical dimension. The logical priority of the human dimension is at the service of the teleological priority of the divine: interpretation is for the sake of the knowledge of God in Christ” (p. 192). Clearly, employing the Christological analogy as our hermeneutical key does not mean that we write off completely historical-critical methods. Yet, we do recognize that such “tools” are not neutral and are informed by our own convictions. For example, whether or not we believe that God acts in history will no doubt influence our interpretation. Though we all bring presuppositions to the table and begin with a certain perspective, “[t]he only perspective that is adequate to the realities mediated by Scripture is that which is open to the living God: that is, the perspective of faith. Faith is here understood not merely as assent to confessional doctrines but as a prophetic, that is, divinely bestowed, interpretation of all reality. Its absence-whether real or by artificial abstraction-will close off the most significant dimensions of reality from the perception of the interpreter” (p. 193). To illustrate her point, Healy gives the following excellent analogy taken from Farkasfalvy, “[e]xcluding the experience of faith from the exegetical process … is like subjecting a musical piece to the judgment of a jury whose members must be deaf, so that their aesthetic experience would not interfere with the unbiased objectivity of their judgment” (Farkasfalvy, “In Search of a ‘Post-Critical’ Method of Biblical Interpretation,” p. 303; as cited in Healy, p. 193).
If the current interpretation of the Westminster Confession finds the incarnational analogy heterodox, so much the worse for the Confession. (If there is more to it than this, someone please fill me in).
Sacra doctrina (Dr. Joel Garver)
A review of Inspiration and Incarnation by Susan Wise Bauer
*Healy’s article was published in Behind the Text: History and Biblical Interpretation. Edited by Craig Bartholomew, C. Stephen Evans, Mary Healy, and Murray Rae (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003), pp. 181-195.
10 Responses so far
6:16 am
At the meeting on campus on Tuesday, President Lillback cited Berkouwer’s observation that no Reformed confession embraces the incarnational analogy with regard to Scripture. Yet, he went on to say that Warfield, Bavinck, and others did employ employ the analogy, so the analogy itself is not necessarily outside the bounds of Reformed orthodoxy (which is good, since confessional silence seems to me a very poor argument against something). So, the problem must be Enns’s particular way of taking up and deploying the analogy.
The vexing thing, of course, is that so far I’ve seen no public statement from anyone involved on precisely how Enns’s use of the analogy in Inspiration & Incarnation falls outside the bounds of the Westminster Standards. The view that it does fall outside such bounds is far from obvious to me and I would like some explanation of what those pursuing his termination are thinking. Those who are part of the wider Westminster community deserve that much, I should think.
7:30 am
I think a big problem with the Christological analogy’s application to the Scriptures (in any strong way) is that there is actually a diversity of types of inspiration in the Bible. Leviticus, for example, is dictated directly. “Here it is. Write it down.”
Other books are different, of course. By the time we get to the New Testament we see the individual writer’s personality and can even discern his particular style and vocabulary over and against another writer. Peter can speak of Paul’s complicated theology. How would that apply to the hypostatic union?
The Christological analogy can help us a bit, I suppose, but as soon as someone actually starts using charges like “Monophysite” or “Nestorian,” I think we’ve got a problem. There are, after all, a multiplicity of persons involved all along. We usually have The Holy Spirit and the human author, but sometimes we may have the Holy Spirit, as well as the second person of the Trinity, in addition to the human author. Clearly this takes us beyond any strict Chalcedonian bounds.
In reality, the reactions are not simply that Enns uses the analogy, but what his use allows him to say. He says that the early parts of Genesis are “myth,” and no matter how you define that term, it is going to set off alarms amongst the right wingers. In my opinion, your description of the Nestorian use is pretty close to the way I see Enns reading Genesis. The creation account becomes heavily dependent on ANE myth, which is always frustrating because it is unprovable. I’m also sure the chronologies become sub-literal (since we are dealing with “the problem of the Old Testament”), and from there a whole host of issues arrives (but I guess I’ve shown my hand now).
I think Enns is probably within the Westminster Seminary tradition, if we keep in mind the work of Kline, Longman, and others, but I’ve always had my problems with their use of the text, so I’m conflicted about the whole thing. I hate to see Enns go this way, but I do agree that his treatment of the text is disconcerting.
8:00 am
[...] Cynthia Nielsen at Per Caritatem notes that “Enns of course is not the first person in the history of [...]
8:23 am
Steven,
Keep in mind that Enns is using an analogy–there are similarities and differences with regard to its application. I sat under Pete’s teaching where he made quite clear that his use of the “incarnational analogy”—the idea that Scripture manifests the dual nature of divinity and humanity—is a starting point for attempting to understand the nature of Scripture. By employing the incarnational analogy, Christians seek neither to elevate the human element, nor to so emphasize the divine such that we lose sight of the fact that the Bible was written in a spatio-temporal context in various languages and cultures. If you happen to venture outside of the small reformed world and actually engage the greater academic world, you have to deal with the claims that believing and non-believing scholars make with regard to Scripture. No doubt Pete has had to deal with that kind of thing at Harvard, and what I take him to be doing is to help prepare others deal with claims that are fairly common in the greater academic world. If one’s faith is lost because of engaging these kinds of issues, then perhaps one should not go into the ministry and certainly one should not pursue an academic career. You mention the ANE stuff and the word “myth,” but why must these be taken in the most negative way, as somehow “proving” that Enns is heterodox is beyond me. In Enns’ class he used the incarnational analogy in the following way to speak into some of the common claims made by those in the larger academic world. For example, the Babylonian creation story, Enuma Elish, which exhibits similarities with the Genesis creation account and is often something that Christians find embarrassing. Employing the incarnational analogy, one might respond by pointing out that the similarities reflect common ancient ways of thinking, i.e., they reflect the typical thought constructs of the times. With the Genesis account, we have both a polemic against as well as a participation in ancient thinking. There are no doubt many similarities, yet there are also important dissimilarities. As Enns points out, the Babylonian creation account depicts the creation of the world as a cosmic battle between the god Marduke and the goddess Tiamat. Marduke created heaven and earth from the slain body of Tiamat. Tiamat represents chaos and Marduke tames the chaos and brings order out of it (Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, p. 26. Reading Genesis 1 against this Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) conceptual context allows for insights not available when read against modern scientific categories. When approached this way, Genesis 1 reads as an ANE polemic, and Genesis itself becomes an exercise in contextual theology. (Sounds to me, whether Enns would say it this way or not, that he is following Augustine’s lead of “pillaging the Egyptians.”)
In short, why couldn’t an orthodox answer to the issue of ANE parallels be an appeal to the incarnational analogy? In other words, instead of being embarrassed by the similarities, we ought to expect the biblical writers (because they were inspired by God) to communicate in such a way that will be understandable within the thought structures of their time. Reading Genesis this way enables us to see the polemical nature of Genesis. By understanding the literary context of Genesis, we can avoid insisting that the Genesis account must match up to modern science—all the while holding a view high view of Scripture. In essence, Genesis is saying, “YHWH is God and the others are not; only YHWH is worthy of worship.” In fact, in class, Enns stated emphatically that taking the conversation in this direction is not to say that God’s creation of the world is a myth in the sense that it is untrue, rather it is an entirely different point. God in Genesis 1 describes his actual, historical, in-time creation in mythic language, i.e., the language of the time, the pre-scientific language of the ANE. God enters into the conceptual categories of the times and teaches the people by contrast what he is like.
Moreover, given my concerns for being in harmony with a greater catholicity, Pete’s use of the analogy seems very congenial with what is expressed in the Vatican II document, Dei Verbum, where we read that in sacred scripture “the marvelous ‘condescension’ of eternal wisdom is plain to be seen, ‘that we may come to know the ineffable loving-kindness of God and see for ourselves the thought and care he has given to accommodating his language to our nature’ [St. John Chrysostom, In Gen 3, 8 (homily 17, 1)]. Indeed the words of God, expressed in human language, are in every way like human speech, just as the Word of the eternal Father, when he took on himself the weak flesh of human beings became like them” (section 13, chapter III, DV).
Best wishes,
Cynthia
9:28 am
Ok, so let’s think about segments of Scripture that are presumably, in some sense, dictated. Does the incarnational analogy apply any less there? Whenever I hear the “Oh? So what about dictation?” objection, I suspect we’re not really thinking through what it would mean for dictation to occur.
It seems to me that even in a case of divine dictation to a human scribe, the incarnational analogy would still fully apply. After all, inscripuration is a human process. How does God speak to his scribe? Does he place audible vibrations into the air? Does he take up existing forms within the scribe’s mind from his past experience of language and culture? Does God make use of the scribe’s own imagination or dreaming?
The means by which God dictates would still be thoroughly human, created means – even before the words get onto the parchment – particular sounds, in a particular language, at a particular time and place, with all the ordinary sorts of ambient distractions, possibilities for mis-hearing, mis-copying, and so forth.
Moreover, they would be embedded within a particular sequence of events by which the scribe would be able to recognize and understand these words to be those of God and not of his own mere imagination or a hallucination or the voice of an evil spirit. Thus there is still an ineliminable interpretive element for the scribe in his assessment that his situation is in fact one of God speaking to him for the purpose of his writing it down.
Beyond that, there is the role of the Spirit in shaping the scribe’s experience and activity in such a way that he not only accurately transcribes all that he writes down, but also that he leaves nothing out and adds nothing of his own where he might be inclined to “fill out” what God is saying.
At any rate, it seems to me that there is still a fully and richly human element even in the event of divine dictation of Scripture and that the incarnational analogy would apply there as well as anywhere. So the objection from the possibility of dictation fails.
9:44 am
Really good points, Joel. Having just read Hobbes’ Leviathan, what you say hits home. Hobbes points out several things that you note about the various ways in which God condescends to us (speaking in an audible voice, for that matter, speaking at all given the time-laden aspect of human speech), and it leads him (Hobbes) to conclude some pretty disturbing things about the Triune God’s nature.
9:47 am
And my distaste for playing along with the “myth” vs. “science” language is that I never see folks say, “Yes it’s using mythical language, and so will I.” They typically use the “mythic language” as a way to explain why the assertions of Genesis 1 are no longer believable as fact. In all of the rest of day-to-day living they concede the authority of the scientific.
I think that this approach also makes the mistake of presuming natural phenomena were roughly the same in the Old World as they are in the New. I tend to believe that dragons really did exist. Giants and monsters probably appeared. Things were probably bigger on the whole. Evil spirits were present in the world. Shaolin monks probably really did stretch and fly.
But things changed. If Jesus put down all of the elements of the world and the powers of the air, then it seems like the science of the ancients would come up with different findings than the science of today.
10:50 am
I hadn’t thought of Hobbes on that point, though he does make some interesting observations. I was more riffing off of Augustine, Bonaventure, and Aquinas on the phenomenon of prophecy as revelation.
11:14 am
Not sure how to respond to that one, Steven. Signing out.
11:17 am
Joel,
And your riffs are well-taken : ) (Augustine’s commentary on Genesis comes to mind).
Best wishes,
Cynthia