Bible In Context: The Continuing Vitality of Reformed Biblical Scholarship -- By: Peter E. Enns

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 68:2 (Fall 2006)
Article: Bible In Context: The Continuing Vitality of Reformed Biblical Scholarship
Author: Peter E. Enns


Bible In Context:
The Continuing Vitality of Reformed Biblical Scholarship

Peter Enns

Peter Enns is Professor of Old Testament and Biblical Hermeneutics at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia. This article is a revised version of his inaugural lecture given 15 March 2006.

I. Introduction

As I thought about this inaugural ceremony, my personal theme quickly became “my teachers.” Four of them are participating today, Professors Waltke, Longman, Groves, and McCartney. If time allowed, I would like nothing better then to list all of my teachers, like the author of Hebrews, one by one, and talk at length about how much they have meant to me, how they have influenced me, how they have changed me. Indeed, how—whether they like it or not—they are responsible for who I am.

My Westminster teachers deepened and broadened my understanding of Scripture and the gospel. And they did so through the six familiar areas of our curriculum: Old Testament, New Testament, Systematic Theology, Practical Theology, Church History, and Apologetics—all interrelated, yet also different, diverse disciplines, but all adding, from their own perspectives, a piece of the puzzle. At Harvard I became part of another academic community, and one for which, like Westminster, I will always be thankful. There my teachers deepened and broadened me in another way, by studying Scripture with a more detailed historical focus—linguistics, archaeology, ancient Near Eastern studies, history of interpretation. Of course, there were challenges, but it was a deeply satisfying, engaging, content time.

These two phases in my academic life have both been, in their own way, powerful and influential, demanding serious reflection. In fact, over the years, a fair bit of my thinking has been fueled by an internal dialog between these diverse influences. And more than once I have pondered how it all comes together. One of the ways I have come to bring some focus to that internal dialog is to ask myself a concrete question: “What is distinctive about a Reformed approach to the study of Scripture?” There are a number of legitimate and worthwhile answers one could give to this question. But today I want to focus on only one of those distinctives, one that reflects closely my own intellectual and academic journey as a biblical scholar.

The distinctive, as indicated by the title of the lecture, is “Bible in Context.” God gave us the Bible, as we all know, not as an abstract treatise, hurled down to earth from an Olympian height, nor as a Platonic ideal kept at a safe distance from the human drama.1 Rather, Scripture is God...

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