Monday, January 19, 2009

Monday Enns: Old Testament Diversity

Today our reading group discusses chapter 3 of Peter Enns' Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. We read chapters 1 and 2 last Monday. Today we discuss chapter 3, "The Old Testament and Theological Diversity."

I had a few overarching thoughts as I read this chapter. Here are a few:

1. He is conservative! At least he talks conservative. What I mean is he treats Exodus as written by Moses at the time of the Exodus and Deuteronomy as written by Moses some 40 years later before Israel entered Canaan.

I'm not sure how you count Old Testament scholars, but I bet the vast majority of card carrying PhD's in OT don't think Moses wrote either Exodus or Deuteronomy, at least not in their current forms. Good grief, there are a lot of "biblical minimalists" out there who would doubt whether Moses even existed! There is no doubt in this chapter that Enns is conservative and evangelical.

2. Why did this guy get fired? Surely not over the content of this chapter. Either he rubbed it in someone's face or the people he was dealing with are psycho. The kind of person who would have a problem to the fairly well agreed things he talks about in the chapter are not worthy of the name evangelical--they would be fundamentalists.

I did notice one hint where he may do therapy. He mentions a story where he came into conflict with someone over the "Train up a child" verse because he showed his son Saving Private Ryan when he was 12. He comes out the hero, of course. I'm not saying he was wrong, but it's what I call doing your therapy as a scholar.

I'm sure I've done my share, and I apologize to anyone who's had to listen.

3. Why did he write this book? I found myself wondering why a person would write a book like this one other than to try to fix the people around you or to do therapy over your past. I really don't know whether that is truly the case. Like I said, I could understand his frustration if the people around him actually have a problem with some of the things he mentions.

But, as a scholar talking to laypeople, the most effective tactic is not a frontal assault (not that I think this book is anything like an assault--I find it relatively mild in tone). It is important to realize that when it comes to areas like religion and politics, despite the rhetoric of truth, we are not dealing with a situation where reason and evidence predominate. Great care has to be taken to convince others that you are truly speaking from a standpoint of faith, not simply as someone who thinks they know the truth. Positions that seem ridiculous from the standpoint of a scholar have to be taken seriously because others take them seriously and have a good deal of their identity invested in those ideas.

I will say that I didn't pick up on any "in your face" tone except a very small one in the example I mentioned above about showing his son a movie. Even there he says "in my opinion" (75). I only thought that I might tread just a little more softly to bring everyone along with me. Lead my audience to my conclusion by asking questions I hope they will answer my way, rather than state baldly as a claim, "to respect the diversity of the Old Testament is to respect it the way God has given it to us" (80), where the way God has given it to us is the way Enns is arguing. Similarly, "Qoheleth clearly has no notion of the afterlife such as Christians take for granted" (79) might come off as a little distasteful to some readers.

Again, to scholars, comments like these may not seem to have any attitude or edge attached. This may be business as usual stuff. But these comments may sound arrogant to a layperson who has never thought of these issues and thus for whom Enns may seem to be a little too sure of himself about something I've always heard the opposite for the last 50 years.

Come to think of it, I had a family member say something like this to me some twenty years ago. I don't remember the issue, but it was something that wasn't really that controversial in evangelical circles. But the response was, "If that's true, why haven't I ever heard of it growing up in the church for 60 years." This is, I think, Enns' audience in part, and this audience requires great care in how and whether you approach certain issues.

The Content
Let me just list the kinds of diversity he mentions (put in my own words):

1. Proverbs are not exceptionless absolutes. There is not, for example, a single view of wealth but several different angles. You have to decide when to apply which one because they all don't apply every time.

2. Ecclesiastes doesn't seem to think wisdom and knowledge are always beneficial. Proverbs is much more consistently favorable toward wisdom.

3. Job's comforters tell him things we might easily read in Deuteronomy or Psalms, but they were wrong to apply those ideas in the case of Job, again showing that the statements of these books are to be applied with thought for the situation involved.

4. Chronicles may represent a later author already working at reconciling tensions within earlier material. For example, is the Passover to be eaten with the family (Exod. 12:2-4) or only in Jerusalem (Deut. 16:5-6). Page 84 gives a number of tendencies in the way Chronicles edits previous material in Samuel and Kings.

5. Even the 10 commandments have a slightly different material between Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5.

6. He mentions tensions between the Levitical material of the OT and the prophetic material on the importance of sacrifice. "There is no flat teaching of sacrifice in the Old Testament" (94).

7. He mentions tensions on the inclusion of foreigners within Israel. In some places, for example, Moabites are forbidden (Deut. 23:3) and then there is Ruth, the Moabitess.

8. He mentions tension on the existence of other gods. Some parts of the OT speak of God as the only God (Isaiah 45) while other passages treat the other gods as real but illegitimate.

9. He discusses the fact that the Old Testament at least portrays God as being affected by us and of learning new information. I can see that this would be a sore spot for some. He does not take an open theism position. Actually I thought this section was very carefully worded as to his position, although I can see it angering those for whom open theism is the Devil.

Open theism is a conservative "heresy," a "heresy light," I would say. Open theists believe that God does not access His omniscience in His interaction with humanity because, if He did, we could not have free will. I don't buy it, but I respect those who hold this view, and they are often Old Testament scholars or evangelical philosophers.

What is so ironic to me is that, as Enns indicates, God is indeed portrayed in the OT as changing His mind and truly being impacted by human interaction. I take this language metaphorically as far as God is concerned, God doing a dance with us although He knows where it is all headed.

Enns does not espouse open theism, but he thinks it is important to recognize that this is in fact how God presents Himself in the OT: "for the Old Testament to speak of God changing his mind means that this is his choice for how he wants us to know him" (106). Do our words really affect God, Enns asks, "That is for God to know, not us" (107).

This would seem a reasonable consideration, although I understand how it might really irk some fundamentalist Calvinists for whom free will is anathema and absolute predestination and irresistable grace are the name of the game. Enns has chosen to listen to the Old Testament and leave open the question of the Westiminster Confession as unknowable. His detractors are sure of the Westminister Confession and willing to reinterpret the OT accordingly while saying that they are only following the Bible alone. :-)

He concludes that "there is no superficial unity to the Bible" (108) and "for God to reveal himself means that he accommodates himself" (109). And on page 110 is a statement that must really have irked some at Westminster, "As Christians we must remember that we believe not only that the Bible is the word of God, but that Christ himself is the word." Those words, so obvious to most Christians today who have no therapy to do on this subject, were fighting words in the middle twentieth century, when they would have immediately won you the label of "neo-orthodox" or "Barthian."

I wonder still if he jumps a gap here to his conclusion. It is not that his conclusion is bad. It's just that I'm not sure he has made it clear exactly what "unity" means to him, given what he has been arguing.

11 comments:

Unknown said...

Enns makes clear in numerous places that the intended audience of his book is educated evangelicals who ARE aware of issues that he brings up. He is not trying to create controversy but rather help those whose faith has been challenged when they find out that things they were taught about the Bible just don't match up with the Bible as it is.

BTW, where did you get that Enns thinks Moses "wrote" the Pentateuch? Not my impression.

Ken Schenck said...

OK, maybe "write" is the wrong word. Here was the sentence that triggered the thought: "Deuteronomy presents Moses as someone who, forty years after the fact, recounts God's words differently than they were given in Exodus" (87). I recognize this can be taken differently, but my first impression was that Enns was implying that Deuteronomy is in dialog with Exodus. Maybe he was not meaning to imply this or was leaving it up to his audience to take it whichever way they chose.

Ken Schenck said...

The question of "who you are writing to" is a tricky one, unfortunately. In a very real sense, a book that is published and available on Amazon is written to anyone who buys it. In a confessional setting, that means you are writing to whoever has power over your contract. Any scholar at any university who thinks that such matters are purely a matter of the search for truth may be in for a rude awakening. I'm no more happy about these realities than anyone else, but repeatedly we find that those who are naive enough to think it works differently are crushed by the politics of truth.

Again, these sort of politics are often much worse at secular institutions than at Christian ones. Walk softly until you have tenure because if you tick off the wrong person in your department, you might be toast, no matter how worthy you truly are! But these dynamics are also a regular feature in the history of Christian institutions as well. All it takes is someone who knows someone who knows someone with power and you can be in for a heap of trouble. You can be lucky if anyone even asks you to explain yourself.

Unknown said...

The key word there is "presents." Enns's point isn't over whether or not Moses wrote any or all of the Pentateuch, but over the way the Pentateuch presents itself. He is pointing out that it's a little strange for a document that tradition says was written by one man to have significant internal inconsistencies.

I'm speaking as a former student of Enns, BTW. My take is that he sees arguments over things like Mosaic authorship of the Pent. as irrelevant to the question of inspiration and biblical authority.

Ken Schenck said...

Many thanks for the clarification!

Angie Van De Merwe said...

Of course one can choose to "affirm" a confessional statement, and understand that inspiration is understood within that confessional frame, which is good if it is a generalized understanding, as in orthodoxy.

But, where I would question, is one can "use" Scripture if one understands Scripture in a certain way, for only the ends that one "sees" or understands is the goal that is to be pursued, which is where theology comes into the mix.... This, I believe, would not concur with a "freedom of conscience" about one's life, if it happened that those whose understanding were limited to a certain framework, thus limiting one's options in choosing one's practical ministry and practical lifestyle. It becomes a Christian culture that makes judgments based on those theological understandings..

Is there any work that has been done in reference to following the themes or differences between the prophetic and priestly writers in teh OT, that you would recommend?

Ken Schenck said...

I might add, though, FS, that to say that Deuteronomy presents Moses recounting things a little differently forty years later than Exodus presupposes the placement of Exodus and Deuteronomy as books into the same narrative in some way. It either implies that Deuteronomy presupposes Exodus in its recounting or it implies that Enns as a canonical reader is reading Deuteronomy in the context of Exodus.

Keith Drury said...

The chapter we read for today is misnamed I believe… while there is “theological diversity” in a few of the examples Enns cites the view of wealth, the value of wisdom, the slightly different wording of the 10 commandments between Exodus and Deuteronomy, the various directions for sacrifices, and the treatment of foreigners are not matters of theology to me. While I see the various writers of the Old Testament presenting various “slants” (just like the four gospels do) I see a fairly unified view of God, man, sin, salvation and the future the “stuff” of theology… problems with the term “roasting” of a sacrifice does not rate as “theology” for me. Various "books" in tension with each other at times may raise theological issues (e.g. what kind of God 'allows' such tensions to exist) but many of his examples sure don't rate as "diversity of theologies" to me.

Unknown said...

Ken:

It presupposes it within the narrative frame, not necessarily as "historical fact" (as we conceive of that in the modern West). In other words, both Exodus and Deuteronomy essentially tell the same story (are in the same narrative frame) but there are enough differences between them to posit that they came from different sources, later assembled together.

Again, this can be argued endlessly (was there one Isaiah? Two? Three?), but Enns's point in bringing such problems up is not to debate the points themselves but rather to say that proving Mosaic authorship or complete harmony and unity (as if you could) doesn't really have any bearing on the questions of inspiration or authority.

David Baruch said...

I think you are making some sweeping claims here. I am very glad Enns has taken the time to clarify what you have muddled up. You are making many assumptions in these posts, you claim that he got fired?!? You claim he thinks Moses wrote the Pentateuch? Where are you getting your information from? Certainly not I and I!

Ken Schenck said...

Thanks for those kind words :-)

You'll note, though, that Pete acknowledges he was adopting a somewhat conservative rhetorical stance toward Mosaic authorship. In other words, he did word things in such a way so that the issue of Pentateuchal authorship did not get in the way of his argument. And my motivation in pointing that wording out was similarly to create a good ethos between his book and my readers--in other words, to give him a boost with his potential detractors among my readers.