Among Evangelical penitents, Peter Enns is lately among the most popular. What is an Evangelical penitent? I have coined this term for an Evangelical who has gone emergent on us because they can't stomach the Bible as it stands, so they come up with all manner of outlandish re-readings to make the text more palatable. In tbis article, we'll be doing some "reader response" commentary on Enns' flagship text in this regard, The Bible Tells Me So (TBTS).
In one respect at least, Enns is on target. He immediately distances himself from the concept of the Bible as "downloaded from heaven" (perhaps an allusion to Geisler's "fax from heaven" statement). [3] He also stands against any idea of the Bible as a "spiritual owner's manual." (8) Although, from there it all goes downhill, and Enns flips into the emergent chaos of the Bible as an "invitation", [9] which turns God into a conversation partner [21]-a genre and situation unknown before the modern age. Indeed, Enns commits the classic error of over personalizing references to God as "Father."
Enns lists a few "turning points" in his career, and one of these is particularly sorrowful. He was taught by a Jewish professor about a Jewish tale of Israel being followed around in the wilderness by a rock. What got Enns in a snit over this? A realization, he supposes, that Paul literally believed that this historically happened, based on 1 Cor. 10:4. This realization, he said, made his view of the Bible "collapse like a house of cards" [17]… and little wonder, since that's not a particularly robust view. Paul makes it quite clear that the "rock" that followed Israel was Christ-not a literal rock. In other words, he does use that literalist tale in a new way, to say, "Here's what the real deal is, not that literalist account of a walking rock." Yet Enns is apparently unable to distance himself from an ingrained fundamentalism to see this reality. He is also unable to rightly divide between the extremes of the Bible as a fundamentalist "instruction manual" versus an emergent "wrestling match." It is neither, and neither view can be justified contextually.
When we finally get to hard Biblical content…Enns' first beef of grief is over the extermination of Canaanites. He only has a few of the needed answers; he does know the one about them being evil, but waves that off on the grounds that lots of evil people in the OT weren't killed for being evil. That's true, but irrelevant: Aside from the fact that many of Enns' selections for Evil Creep of the Week don't deserve it (Jephthah, for example), God's show of mercy in Example 1 doesn't mean the reaction was any less warranted in Example 2. He's partly right that it was their address in Palestine that spared them mercies, but he doesn't get why…and it's very important: The main argument he needs and misses is that the Canaanites who were left for Israel to tackle were those who hadn't left of their own accord after having learned what happened in Egypt, because they decided to stay behind and kinda double-dog-dare Yahweh to take on their gods in a wrestling match.
Enns offers not much else in terms of argument on this subject. There's a great deal of boo hoo, "Boy am I shocked!" repartee, of the sort which Enns probably thinks will make non-believers go, "Hey, that's OK. Pass the Jesus." But it won't. Nor will his answer, that Israel only thought God told them to kill the Canaanites, make much of an impression on anyone whose intelligence exceeds that of a stewed beet. His only other points have to do with archaeology allegedly not backing up the accounts, but at a mere page, his analysis on this point is mainly something about which to be ashamed.
Enns begins his third section with a typically emergent theme about "stories" being told from different points of view by different persons. While this is essentially a truism, it avoids a very pertinent fact; namely, that inevitably either one point of view is right and all the others are wrong; or none are right. Enns professes that there is "no such thing" as straight history, but in the process of so doing he self-contradicts: "In order to know that this assertion is true, one must be able to recognize "straight history" for what it is, and then be able to say that all other versions of the relevant accounts are not straight history." The effect is that Enns must effectively deny that he can have the knowledge that he must have in order to make the claim he is making in the first place. And, typically of emergent commentators, Enns is unable or unwilling to see his own self-contradiction.
In the next chapter, Enns applies this self-contradictory conclusion to a misguided analysis of the Gospels. Enns not unexpectedly fails to account for normal ancient narrative practices that suitably explain divergences in the Gospel records without accusing the Gospel authors of biases (see Link #1 below). Then the next chapters repeat many of the standard canards about contradictions between the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke, and the Resurrection accounts (see Links #1 & #2 below). Then chapters follow in which the same erroneous anachronistic machinations are committed upon the Old Testament. We would ordinarily summarize Enns' analysis of the Old Testament with a close look at just one of the chapters: His take on the "political map" portrayed in the Bible. But we cannot even do that much. All of it boils down to simply the standard charge and routine that…"past history was invented to explain what was happening in the present"…a tactic that conspicuously fails not only in that it devolves to an ultimate begged question, but is also conveniently non-disprovable, relying as it does on applied disrespect to accounts of private, small-scale events. The idea that Israel's neighbors, like Moab, are described as "bad" because, historically, they actually were bad, is immediately shuffled off of Enns' table before the hand can be dealt. So likewise Abraham's travels to Egypt are regarded as a fictitious back write of Israel's own journey; that both stories follow characters along a prominent trade route of the day is apparently beyond Enns' consideration, such that he makes any possibility of a historic Abraham actually travelling to Egypt an unqualified impossibility. Perhaps Abraham should have gone to Hoboken instead, to prevent Enns the chance of theorizing his functionality. Such amounts to the bulk of Enns' nonsensical treatment of the Old Testament.
It speaks for itself that when Enns does confront such practical realities, he shoves them into a corner as quickly as possible. For example, it is a rather obvious argument that Egypt's records do not mention the Exodus because it was embarrassing. Enns manages to weakly acknowledge this, but fails to answer it; his only retort is that "political spin was always an option." No doubt it was, but that it was is not a refuting argument. Just because Egypt could have done A instead of B does not mean they did not do B. At the same time, the same could be said of oppression of records of Akhenatan; but if we in fact did not know, as we now do, that such records were oppressed, Peter Enns, Egyptologist, would think it sufficient refutation to say that Egypt could have used political spin on the story instead.
Enns' only other options are as follows. One is the usual "no physical evidence" gig, but Enns is no better at explaining why this is a problem than my critics have been, over the past decade, at explaining why we also lack records of millions of nomadic Scythians who wandered the steppes for centuries (see Link #3). His other option is to complain that other nations don't tell of Egypt being whipped up on at the time, but he conspicuously fails to explain what remaining records, from places like Midian or Moab, in which he expects this to be found...clearly for Enns, it's better to not do that and to instead raise questions about the sufficiency of one's non-explanation.
Enns' one useful point is this section is the usual emergent observation that the Bible is not meant to be an instruction book. That is true, as far as it goes in Toto; it is a good point against those who profess that the Bible is a "fax from heaven." But Enns' counterpoint is equally oblivious, and equally ignorant of the considerations of genre. It does no good to say the Bible is not a "fax" from heaven, and say instead it is a "story" from heaven.
Our next section on Peter Enns' The Bible Tells Me So, begins with a conspicuous misuse of Proverbs 26:4-5, which stands ironically contrary to Enns own stated purpose. As we have remarked (see link 1 below), these two verses are proverbial, not absolute, and so cannot be said to contradict. On the other hand, Enns manages to scramble it into an advertisement for his view that the Bible is not a "road map." True that it is not, but while Enns does correctly identify Proverbs as non-absolutes that does not extend the application in the same way to every other one of the 65 books of the Bible. Some books are "like" road maps than Proverbs, and some sections in some books are even more like road maps than that i.e., Deuteronomy is likely the "road mappiest" of all of the Bible's books, though Leviticus is a near even competitor. What this means is that while Enns may feel like he can entertain himself guffawing over a woman who used Proverbs 22:6 like an absolute, in so doing he's no more respectable than the fundamentalists he is so justly mocking. Proverbs is not, as Enns says, a "snapshot of how the Bible as a whole works", for the simple reason that not all 66 books are proverbial literature. (Tellingly, Enns cherry picks from the wisdom literature to illustrate his claims, like Ecclesiastes and Job, but fails to provide a chapter explaining how Deuteronomy works the way Proverbs does.)
The next chapter of interest has Enns sowing his own brand of confusion asking how many gods there are, according to the Bible. Enns falls for the standard atheist canard, which makes a semantic equation between the modern English proper name of "God" and the more generic Biblical words like Elohim (see link 2 below). We then have a chapter in which Enns remarks upon how "human" God seems in his actions; in this Enns falls for the usual error of failing to measure the accounts as one would see them in an honor-shame society.
Then we have a chapter on the law books, and it begins with a quantity of alleged "contradictions" whose quality is barely above that of the Skeptics' Annotated Bible. The very first is exemplary: Enns finds a contradiction between Exodus 21:2-11 & Deuteronomy 15:12-18, which allows Israelites to be kept as slaves for 6 years, and Leviticus 25:39-43, which says they may never be kept as slaves. Enns' rendering is corrupt from the start because what we call "slavery" was effectively non-existent in the Biblical world. Enns further decides that inter-law contradictions should be traced to Israel having multiple "legal traditions", which mirrors the strained attempt by some scholars to create wholly otherwise unattested "communities" for each Gospel. Not considered are more prosaic and more practical answers, such as that Exodus was for a nomadic society, while Deuteronomy was for a society more settled in a fixed place; hence, some laws are changed to suit the surroundings. Solutions with such a practical nature, though, are apparently of little use to Enns' Biblical interpretations.
Thereafter Enns turns his attention to Jesus, and initially he does well to explain that Jesus interpreted the Old Testament according to certain Jewish methods, not modern methods. He calls these methods "creative" though in so doing he is using a description that itself assumes modern values; it is doubtful Jesus would say his readings were "creative." He also correctly designates Jesus as a "Moses 2.0" and rightly supposes that the Beatitudes are also not in "rulebook" format, but fails to credit that they presuppose a following of rules intended to fulfill them (much as codes fulfill statutes).
A chapter on Jesus "picking fights" begins with an error in which Jesus is said to be using the Old Testament text "creatively." As we noted last time, this description itself approaches the matter from a modern perspective; it is doubtful Jesus (or even the Pharisees) would use such a description. Contrarily, Enns says in the next chapter that we do need to explain Jesus' handling of the Bible in a contextual way, but his descriptor indicates that he has not shed all such permutations of thought himself.
Somewhat more peculiar and telling is that though this chapter is about Jesus "picking fights" it does not take care of what would seem to be an obvious problem for Enns; namely, that Jesus actually ever "picks fights." Enns refers to Jesus "getting in people's faces" [186] and to Jesus' use of "inflated rhetoric"; however, given that Enns has so far been effectively apologizing for God being confrontational in the Old Testament, the lack of explanation is rather telling. One, to be sure, can argue as well that it is a matter of scale, but once the barn door is open then any number of cows might ramble on through unless a finer defense is offered.
The chapter following is of generally better quality, as Enns argues for a contextualizing of Jesus in both his culture and in terms of his humanity. He illustrates the problem fairly well in the chapter following that one, with an illustration of how difficult it would be for even Alexander Graham Bell to understand the workings of an iPhone.
The next chapter is a bit of a surprise, even for me: Enns presents a "lite" version of my "impossible faith" argument (link 1) in which he argues that critical elements of Christianity, like a crucified savior, were contrary to values held in that cultural setting. Then we are back to several chapters on how the New Testament used the Old Testament, with a few interludes about how Jesus violated cultural ideas of the time (such as a military messiah), as well as a discussion of the disposition of the Torah in the New Testament period. These chapters are substantially the best in the book; they are simplified, and not entirely agreeable to me…but had they been typical of the book, this article would never have been written.
The last chapter (at least in terms of substantial content) is one in which Enns tells us what he thinks the Bible is, and is not-in broad terms what advice he believes the reader needs. The one bit in this that stands out is the heading, "An unsettled faith is a maturing faith." I don't say this is wrong by itself but what is wrong is extending "unsettled faith" in perpetuity, or insisting that there is no such thing as a "mature" faith and if you aren't unsettled, there's something wrong with you. This was illustrated in comments I once made in reply to Rachel Held Evans:
[Evans said], "...I can only regard with suspicion those who claim the Bible never troubles them. I can only assume this means they haven't actually read it." [51]
Better yet: Some of us aren't troubled by it precisely because we have read it, especially when it is read in a serious, scholarly, and contextual manner. Not that Evans would care, as this even more oblivious statement indicates, regarding those who deal in the texts with scholarship and apologetics: "These are useful insights, I suppose, but sometimes I wish these apologists wouldn't be in such a hurry to explain these troubling texts away, that they would allow themselves to be bothered by them now and then." [53]
No thanks, though. Instead of following Evans into a round of the Hand Wring Polka, which leads into zero solutions and does nothing but waste valuable time, I'll go for explanations…and I'll do it just as fast as is needed to get that explanation done properly, not slowing down just so whiners like Evans can feel better about their own insecurities.