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Peter Enns, Inerrancy, and the “Two Natures” of the Bible

Peter Enns, Inerrancy, and the “Two Natures” of the Bible

Last updated on: September 27, 2015 at 12:04 pm by Kyle Roberts

Peter Enns, Inerrancy, and the “Two Natures” of the Bible 2015-09-27T12:04:39-05:00 Kyle Roberts

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This post is a contribution to the Patheos Book Club discussion on Peter Enns’ Inspiration and Incarnation (10th Anniversary Edition).

What is the best way to understand the Bible’s inspiration?

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Evangelicals have another good chance to pay attention to Peter Enns book, Inspiration and Incarnation. Baker Books has released a 10th Anniversary edition of the book, which includes slight modifications, an expanded bibliography, a new preface, and a reflective postscript.

Enns uses an analogy, or a model, to suggest how the Bible can be both divinely inspired and a thoroughly human book that reflects the history, culture, of its times: the incarnation and the two-natures of Christ. Just as Jesus was considered (by the early Christian creeds) to be both fully divine and fully human (without contradiction or conflation), so the Bible has a divine nature, if you will.

The Bible is obviously written by finite humans through the lens of human experience, but it is also providentially and uniquely inspired by God to communicate important, essential even, truth and meaning. The Bible as the inspired, inscribed words meant to present God’s will and to communicate the Word of Christ should be deemed authoritative and irreplaceable by Christians.

On the other hand, the implications of the Bible’s human authorship/editorship are numerous: It is written by fallible human beings who–like us–are limited by their times, places, and cultures. Furthermore, the text of the Bible is itself compiled, arranged, redacted, and so on, by human beings over time and in conversation with other texts, whether other intra-biblical texts or other extra-biblical texts (e.g. Enuma Elish and Epic of Gilgamesh).

Oh yes…and the Bible has to be translated, again and again, in new languages and contexts in order to be disseminated and read. All this means that every act of translation, every act of reading, and every act of preaching, involves yet more fallible human interaction with the text.

In the epilogue at the end of this edition, Enns reflects on the reception of his book over the years. He rehearses some of the most common critiques of his book over the years. I won’t give them all away here; instead I’ll focus on one: the critique of the use of the incarnational model itself.

Enns suggests there are three sub-critiques under this larger heading; three reasons why the chosen analogy was deemed problematic. He summarizes them as:

(1) The incarnational analogy is invalid because the Bible is not a hypostatic union; (2) my use of the incarnational analogy does not offer sufficient protection against liberal views of Scripture; and (3) Christ’s sinlessness invalidates my use of the incarnational analogy. (170)

Enns takes these critiques point by point, first noting (re. the “hypostatic union”) that readers need to keep in mind that analogies are always by necessity imperfect and incomplete. Furthermore, he notes that in the book he suggested that model might be a better term than analogy, since what he is really offering is a cognitive approach, or a “mental construction,” that makes the most sense of the available data.

But then Enns takes on the second criticism, suggesting that perhaps the “underlying difficulty” of many readers of his book is that they did not sense Enns’ incarnational model sufficiently defended against liberal interpretations of the Bible, or sufficiently affirmed its divine quality. Enns acknowledges that his model “does not safeguard any inerrantist perspective,” and it was never his intention for it to do so. Instead, it was simply a “descriptive” way to “account for the biblical phenomena and give readers theological permission to explore those phenomena with more confidence” (174).

The third critique, that an incarnational model should apply a traditonal affirmation of the sinlessness of Christ to the Bible, therefore any appropriate use of an incarnational model would entail the defense of absolute inerrancy. But since Enns’ approach does not do that, his use of the incarnational model is thought to be faulty. But as Enns’ rightly points out, this critique assumes a singular–and modern propositionalist–definition of “error” and does not adequately account for the historical contexts and worldview limitations reflected in the ancient texts. For Enns, in other words, ascribing “error” (from a contemporary perspective) to an ancient myth is hardly comparable to ascribing sin to Jesus.

Enns then raises a related critique to the third (just mentioned) one, which is that some people warn that an incarnational two-natures analogy (or model) might lead to the undermining of the divine aspect of Scripture and to an emphasis on the human. Thus, they should take care to “keep the divine side more prominent, elevated above the human side so as not to accord humanity equal status” (177).

In my view, this critique highlights the greatest weakness in the incarnational model; not because I agree with the concern of the critique (that the human might overpower the divine), but because the tendency in evangelical circles is the opposite. The two-natures doctrine of Christ typically (in my experience and observation) lends itself to an over-emphasis on the divine nature of Jesus and to a consequent overshadowing of his humanity. This has also been the case in the way evangelicals approach the Bible: emphasizing its divine aspect, its divine origin, and its sacredness, to an extent that historical examination, moral criticism, and scientific updating has been mostly discouraged and even punishe

The flaw is not so much in the actual model itself, but in the way the two-natures doctrine has been understood by the audience that Enns wants to convince. In many cases, when push comes to shove, the divinity of Jesus outweighs the humanity of Jesus. And it is simply too difficult (probably impossible0 to conceive the divinity and humanity together in any sort of seamless way. This has been true of the Bible.

That said, if you can get evangelicals to take more seriously the humanity of Jesus and the humanity of the Bible by winning them over with the analogy, then maybe you can kill two birds with the proverbial stone.

In the preface, Enns notes that, a decade ago when he first wrote the book , he identified as a “progressive inerrantist” (or “genre inerrantist”). He understood inerrancy as the acceptance by faith that the Bible we have is the “the Bible that God has in fact seen fit to provide us…” (x). This view of inerrancy affirms the divine inspiration of Scripture and God’s providential involvement in canonical revelation, but it also makes genuine room for the historical context of its writers and for the cultures mirrored in the texts.

The “progressive inerrantist” allows for the Bible’s description of the world to reveal the situation, limitations in knowledge, and so on, of the original authors and editors. The phenomena of Scripture reflect the times, places, and literary methods of finite human beings. In other words, God gave us, as Enns puts it, a “thoroughly inculturated Bible.”

Enns notes in the preface that he no longer uses the term “inerrancy” to describe his own position on Scripture because of the cultural baggage that has accrued to it. And if you know a bit of Enns’ story, you know that some evangelicals have determined that his view of inerrancy–and his interpretations of Scripture–were not sufficiently “evangelical” to keep him in their tribe.

I was one of those evangelicals who found Enns book to be a welcome drink of water in an evangelical desert. A number of my professors and colleagues (though not all) held to a view of inerrancy which meant reading the Bible as if mining it for propositional revelation. The Bible contained “perfect, flawless truth”; this perfection covered not just theology and morality but history and science as well.

I came to embrace the term intentional inerrancy. Like Enns’ genre inerrancy, it signifies that the communicative intentions of the text (and the limits of our expectations of it) must always be constrained by the literary form, historical situation, and communicative intention (insofar as that might be determined or approximated) represented in the text. As a former literature major in college, it made sense to me that a good story, even a good myth, could be just as truthful–if not more truthful–than an “objective” historical account or scientific explanation. The key was to figure out what sort of truth it was conveying.

Much of the conflict within evangelical institutions continues to be variations of a “battle for the Bible.” These conflicts revolve in part around definitions of inerrancy–though they are most intense when they are battles of the implications of those definitions. In other words, when they are conflicts over biblical, theological, and ethical interpretation.

But it’s clear that the most conservative and more rigid adherents to inerrancy–those who are wary of approaches like that of Enns, which take the historical and literary situation of the Bible’s content more seriously (and–let’s be frank–more honestly) will not stand for the concept of inerrancy to be framed in ways that, in their perception of it, diminish its “perfections.” Their role seems to involve a protection of the Bible’s fundamental sacredness.

But progressives ask the question: What, exactly, are they protecting as sacred? The Bible itself or their received and cherished interpretations of it? Or is it something else entirely?

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Inspiration and Incarnation

Peter Enns

Scripture

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