Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 71:1 (Spring 2009)
Article: The Inspiration And Interpretation Of God’s Word, With Special Reference To Peter Enns
Author: James W. Scott

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WTJ 71:1 (Spring 2009) p. 129

The Inspiration And Interpretation Of God’s Word, With Special Reference To Peter Enns

Part I: Inspiration And Its Implications

James W. Scott

James W. Scott is Managing Editor of New Horizons in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and Publications Coordinator for the Committee on Christian Education of the OPC.

This article sets forth the biblical doctrine of inspiration and some important implications of that doctrine for the interpretation of Scripture, and (in Part II) illustrates how these insights help us to understand some difficult passages of Scripture. Along the way, views advanced by Peter Enns (and others), most notably in his book Inspiration and Incarnation, will be criticized for being at variance with the biblical doctrine.1 However, while his views deserve this attention, coming as they do from a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary, traditionally a bastion of uncompromisingly conservative Reformed scholarship,2 it should be noted that there are many other more or less conservative scholars

WTJ 71:1 (Spring 2009) p. 130

whose approach to Scripture could also be criticized for being inconsistent with the doctrine of inspiration.3 Others have offered extensive and useful criticism of Enns’s arguments, but they have generally failed to get to the heart of the theological problem, perhaps because it is endemic in modern biblical studies.4

Enns’s basic contention is that inspiration is analogous to incarnation, from which he infers that Scripture, like Christ, must be both fully divine and fully human. Focusing on the human element in Scripture, Enns explains that God, in order to communicate effectively with ancient peoples, adopted their ways of thinking, their worldviews, and their ways of interpreting Scripture (as we find these things expressed in the literature of the ancient Near East and Second Temple Judaism). As a result, Scripture contains mistaken ideas, discordant teachings, and (in the NT) attributions of meaning to the OT that was not originally there. But I will argue that, based on what God reveals in Scripture about himself and about his word, we can be sure that he would not have so spoken and thus did not so speak; furthermore, the arguments that he did so speak are mistaken, and the evidence for such speaking can be reasonably interpreted otherwise. We will also see that Enns’s doctrine of Christ is as deeply flawed as his analogous doctrine of Scripture.

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