Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Jesus v. Peter Enns


Andrew Wilson reviews The Bible Tells Me So.
Yet the book is also fundamentally imbalanced. Enns is so eager to show how “messy” and “weird” the Bible is that he frequently exaggerates difficulties, presents a one-sided picture, or neglects obvious resolutions to the "contradictions" he puts forward. So, for instance, he shows us differences between sacrificial laws in Exodus and Deuteronomy and calls them contradictions, without acknowledging that the former are given for life in the wilderness, and the latter for life in the Promised Land. He finds confusion about how many “gods” there were in the Old Testament, without pointing out that biblical writers are able both to affirm many “gods” and only one God in the same text, because of their theology of idols and demons (e.g. Isa. 44:6-20; 1 Cor. 8:4-6). His paraphrases sometimes create discrepancies out of thin air. Nobody but Enns, surely, could read Leviticus 17:15-16 as saying “sure, you can eat mauled animal carcasses,” and hence conflicting with instructions elsewhere. Many more examples could be given.
Or take his portrait of Jesus. Enns is keen to show that Jesus was not a “modern” reader of the Bible, so he draws attention to various stories in which Jesus handles texts in surprising ways (like, famously, Psalm 110 in Matthew 22). But he largely ignores the dozens of texts in which Jesus speaks about Scripture as authoritative, unbreakable, true, unchangeable: Think of sayings like it is written, the Scriptures must be fulfilled, the word of God cannot be broken, not a dot will disappear from the law, and so on. This creates a substantial imbalance, especially since most evangelicals would appeal to Jesus to support their high view of biblical truthfulness. Enns never reconciles his inaccuracy-strewn view of the Old Testament (his most striking example being the implication that the plagues on Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea never actually happened) with the reverent way Jesus spoke about it.
Even more problematic, Enns describes stories where God kills people, like the Flood, as “hard to defend as the Word of God in civil adult conversation.” He spends many pages stressing what a problem divine violence is. Yet he never mentions that Jesus himself not only quoted events like this—all-destroying floods, fire and sulphur from heaven, pillars of salt, the whole caboodle—but used them to explain what his own coming would be like (Luke 17:22-37). Jesus even tells stories about people being handed over to torturers (Matt. 18:34) and eternal punishment (Matt. 25:41-46).
But [the picture of Jesus painted in the Gospels] should also unsettle progressives, peaceniks, and professors—especially those who think that Jesus would join them in rejecting the accuracy of the Bible's violent narratives.
Overriding all of these problems, however, is a larger one. Enns begins with a description of the “stress” that sometimes comes from struggling to believe the Bible, with its talking serpents, peculiar food laws, bloody wars, vindictive floods, and other anachronistic oddities. He takes swipes at all sorts of biblical stories (“magical trees” being an especially unfair example), typically the ones which most puzzle self-consciously “modern” readers. Like Rob Bell, Enns concludes that the Bible is ultimately about “mystery” and a “spiritual journey” and “the thoughts and meditations of ancient pilgrims.”
But aside from vague phrases like these, it is never clear what it actually means for the Bible to be the Word of God. How might the Scriptures call us to repent, to die to ourselves, to change, or to do anything other than listen to a spiritual conversation? Enns doesn’t say. There is no account of how doctrine should be formed, no discussion of what biblical authority really looks like, no real engagement with the teachings of the church (which has often read the Bible rather differently than Enns), and no examples of biblical ethics beyond what The New York Times would freely endorse. In short, if I were trying to write a book about the Bible that allowed progressive moderns to ditch all the bits they don’t like, this is exactly how I would have done it.

1 comment:

  1. I wonder at what point Enns abandoned the faith he once professed? Was it a single crisis, an unfortunate series of events?

    His next book should be a an autobiography entitled "Anatomy of Apostasy".

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