Peter Enns’ book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, is a vital contribution to the discussion about how Evangelicals should understand the Bible, one reviewer says of the book, which I am reading.

The book says: “It is a fundamental misunderstanding of Genesis to expect it to answer questions generated by a modern worldview, such as whether the days were literal or figurative, or whether the days of creation can be lined up with modern science, or whether the flood was local or universal…. It is wholly incomprehensible to think that thousands of years ago God would have felt constrained to speak in a way that would be meaningful only to Westerners several thousand years later. To do so borders on modern, Western arrogance.”

In terms of postmodern epistemology, I do not believe Enns could strictly be described as a postmodern thinker. However, the Westminster tradition of presuppositionalism seems to underlie some of Enns’ argument. It seems to me that there could be some potentially fruitful cross-polinization between presuppositionalism, Reformed Epistemology, and some postmodern epistemologies. Indeed, Enns provided a back-cover blurb for John Franke’s The Character of Theology (another excellent book that I will review in a subsequent post), which suggests to me that Enns’ is sympathetic to the “postconservative” Evangelical commitment to move away from a modernist, “scientific” approach to the Biblical narratives,” he says.  (also apparently called ‘foundationalism.’)

There was something about this in the book on the fathers and theology —   ‘Reading Theology with the church fathers’ – our tendency to view the Bible in sort of a ‘scientific’ way, where the author of that book cited one of the founders of DTS, Chafer it might have been, with that view.

Reading Enns’ book makes me think that Spadfil’s treatment of Eccl was superficial – he said that the final statement negated everything (though as he went through the book he couldn’t really stick to that view).  Instead Enns view would be more that the diversity points to the complexities of life, which is the whole point of the book.

Both here and in Galatians, he seems to take a boring and safe line.