Tremper Longman's soap opera

A third part of this public relations campaign is the “retirement party” being giving by the seminary for Bruce Waltke who only taught at Westminster for five years and left in 1990 and, ironically, at least he told me at the time, at least in part because the conservative constituency was constantly harassing him for being too “liberal.” After all, Bruce does affirm evolution, has no problems with multiple Isaiahs, and doesn't think that Moses wrote every word of the Pentateuch. 

Anticipated future Posts:
A Retirement Party for Bruce Waltke, Really? I love Bruce, but this is pure political theatre and Bruce knows it… 

https://www.facebook.com/tremper.longman/posts/827196623966300?fref=nf

Several issues:

i) How does Longman know the retirement party from Waltke is part of a PR campaign?

ii) He accuses Waltke of colluding in the PR campaign. 

iii) He misrepresents Waltke's position, which is more qualified:

In my book An Old Testament Theology [hereafter AOTT] I resolve the tensions between biblical cosmology and science partly by the theory of theistic evolution; I remain open to multiple authors of Isaiah; I accept an exilic date for the final edition of Deuteronomy; and other matters.  WTJ 71 (2009), 116.

iv) Who schedules events like this at WTS? The board? The office of the president? Of is it lower down the pecking order?

v) It's deeply misleading to say he only taught there for 5 years. To my knowledge, he's been a visiting prof. at WTS for many years. 

vi) Given that there are some traces of liberalism in Waltke's theology, it may be inconsistent for WTS to host a retirement party for him on the heels of dismissing Enns, Green, and Fantuzzo. Suppose that's the case. What then? It's better to be inconsistently right than consistently wrong. The important issue is not the retirement party, which is ephemeral, but what prospective ministers of the gospel will be taught in the class room.

vii) I agree that there are some significant weaknesses in Waltke's theology. At the same time, Waltke has compensatory virtues that Enns, Green, and Fantuzzo do not. Waltke has produced a tremendous body of scholarship over the years, most of which is very useful to the church. The same cannot be said for the other three. Most of what Enns has published is destructive to the Christian faith. Green and Fantuzzo haven't made anything like the contributions to evangelical scholarship that Waltke has. In fairness, Fantuzzo's a young scholar. But that's why there's very little basis on which to compare Waltke with Green or Fantuzzo. 

Does Green publish so little because he has nothing original to contribute, or because he has something to hide? It's a bit suspicious. 

viii) Keep in mind that Waltke is clearly to the right of Enns. He's a sharp critic of Enns:

Moreover, Enns’s interpretation opens the door both to a liberal definition of progressive revelation and to open theism. According to the liberal definition, ‘‘progressive revelation’’ refers to an evolutionary development of religion wherein earlier revelation is primitive and rudimentary and its teachings about divine reality and morals must be assessed and corrected by later revelation. 

Enns earlier informs his readers that authors in Second Temple literature anchored their interpretations in what they knew to be right. This involved manipulating the text to suit their purposes. He suggests this is the interpretative method used in Matt 2:15. But I find that that interpretation depreciates a high regard for Scripture’s inspiration. 

Enns believes his theory of incarnation is consistent with Warfield’s concursive theory of inspiration. I do not. A theory that entails notions that holy Scripture contains flat out contradictions, ludicrous harmonization, earlier revelations that are misleading and/or less than truthful, and doctrines that are represented as based on historical fact, but in fact are based on fabricated history, in my judgment, is inconsistent with the doctrine that God inspired every word of holy Scripture. To be sure, the Scripture is fully human, but it is just as fully the Word of God, with whom there is no shadow of turning and who will not lie to or mislead his elect. WTJ 71 (2009): 89n7, 90, 94.

Apparently I put more weight on logic than does Enns. True, it remains an a priori of mine that doctrine is based on the conviction that God does not contradict himself; speak nonsense; represent as ostensive fact on the plot level (i.e., the human author’s representation of the event) what in fact is fiction on the story (i.e., ‘‘the event’’) level; and other human ‘‘mistakes.’’ Admittedly, I am not a professional systematic theologian nor a scholar of the Westminster Standards in particular, but if the Westminster divines thought that Scripture contains what is commonly understood as human error, why would they and how could they have defined God with respect to his revelation in Holy Scripture as ‘‘truth itself ’’ (WCF 1.4)? 

‘‘Tensions,’’ the balancing of opposing truths that prompt one to extend understanding to embrace both, do not trouble me. Paradoxes mirror the messiness of life and are the grist for profitable theological reflection. The Semites have a saying, with which I tend to agree: ‘‘You do not have truth until you have paradox.’’ Like most people, I seek to resolve tensions with the same unflinching honesty as Enns, while admitting that the finite mind can never come to infinite truth. But Enns’s approach generates tensions between the inspiration of the Bible by an inerrant Source and human foibles such as contradictions, mistaken teachings, semantic impertinence, and doctrines based on Qumran pesher and on sharp but inappropriate and unaccredited exegesis that is called pilpul in Talmudic hermeneutics. In Enns’s response he does not correct my statements that his book implies these foibles. 

Likewise, I do not accept Enn’s resolution of the tension by conceding the necessity of accepting what most regard as human error. When I encounter contradiction in a good writer, not just in the Bible, I retrace my steps to see where I went wrong in my interpretation. I do not go on feeling comfortable with nonsense. 

Typology assumes that redemptive history was in the mind of God from the beginning and that he designed the type to show that he is writing Israel’s redemptive history. The Antitype event fulfillment of the event type is just as much‘‘fulfillment’’as an intentional verbal prediction of an event that finds fulfillment in a later event. Typology assumes a high view of inspiration in that its fusion of the event horizons assumes God has a design for sacred history, and that that revealed history points to him as the Author of that story. 

It would be helpful if Enns would define more clearly what he means by ‘‘midrashically generated’’ stories. If he intends to blur the distinction between ‘‘history’’ and ‘‘fiction’’—as James Mitchner did in his historical novels—he needs to state clearly what is historical, as Mitchner did in some of his novels. In the case of The Da Vinci Code, it made a big difference to people whether Dan Brown accurately represented his alleged historical data in his foreword. For most, Brown’s ‘‘doctrine’’ of Christ stands or falls on that issue. Note that the apostles argue at numerous points that they are writing real history, not myths in the sense of fictions, so evidently the distinction was important to them, not just to moderns. Elsewhere, Enns uses the word ‘‘Midrash’’ to refer to what moderns think of as specious argumentation; is that what he means by ‘‘midrashically generated’’? 

Enns takes us beyond diversity. His alleged entailments of his interpretation of the model of incarnational inspiration include—at least so it seems to me—such human foibles as contradictions, mis- taken teachings in earlier revelation, and building doctrines on pesher, arbitrary interpretations, and he does not correct me. These assertions go beyond mere tensions and call into question the cogency of the biblical writers, the inerrancy of the Bible’s Source, and the infallibility of the divine/human texts. WTJ 71 (2009), 115-116,125-127.