Now for it. Here is my review of Gary Johnson’s article.
Gary Johnson starts off his article with a discussion of the purpose of polemics, using the Wesley/Toplady debates, as well as the example of John Calvin, as a starting point. His conclusion about this issue is that “the purpose of polemics is not argument for argument’s sake, but the critical evaluation of truth claims” (pg. 197). A second, vitally important concern is brought out shortly thereafter: “Polemical theology serves a noble and important role only when doctrine is highly valued” (ibid.). The reason this is important is that oftentimes in our current theological climate, the heat of polemics tends to be downplayed in its importance by the cold-blooded theological majority. All this is to set up a defense of Warfield’s polemics against Briggs, which Johnson views as necessary to the defense of the truth at that time. As Warfield points out (quoted by Johnson), “There are, regrettably, those in our midst who fear controversy more than error” (pg. 198, quoted from Warfield’s Shorter Writings, 2:216).
The next section of the article deals with Warfield’s polemics against C.A. Briggs. Briggs held to a “limited inerrancy” view, which refused biblical inerrancy to fields such as history, geography, and other subjects (!), but maintained that the Bible was authoritative for faith and practice (pg. 199, quoting James T. Dennison, Jr., The Letters of Geerhardus Vos, pp. 33-34). I am not going to relate all the details of the Briggs trial that Johnson so carefully documents. However, I will quote rather extensively from the Briggs quotation on pg. 205, which I deem of crucial importance today:
No one who has studied through the literature of Christology can do other than say that the researches of recent scholars have put the whole subject in such new lights that the writings of the older scholars have become for the most part antiquated. There are doubtless many still living who are unwilling to accept any theological opinions which have not been stamped with the approval of the antiquarians. For such the author does not write. The readers he desires are the open-minded and truth-loving, who would see the Christ as the apostles saw him, and who will not be restrained from the heavenly vision by the pretended perils of the Higher Criticism and of Biblical Theology, or by the supposed safer paths of traditional and ecclesiastical theology…The author has done his best to turn away from the Christ of the theologians and of the creeds and of the church, and to see the Messiah as he is set forth in the writings of the apostles. (from The Messiah of the Apostles, pg. ii).
As Johnson notes (ibid.), Briggs here completely rejects systematic theology in favor of biblical theology. I wonder how many of Briggs’s disciples today would react to this quotation from the great Geerhardus Vos:
The fact is that Biblical Theology just as much as Systematic Theology makes the material undergo a transformation. The sole difference is in the principle on which the transformation is conducted. In the case of Biblical Theology this is historical, in the case of Systematic Theology it is of a logical nature. Each of these two in necessary, and there is no occasion for a sense of superiority in either. (Biblical Theology, pg. 14, emphasis mine).
A close look at Vos’s incredibly helpful article on the covenant in Reformed theology (see Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation, pp. 234-267) will reveal that Vos was quite conversant in all of the scholastic Reformed theologians, and indeed viewed them as bread and butter for theological reflection. More importantly, he viewed their contribution to systematic theology as exercising an incredibly important impact on his conduction of biblical theology. This attitude towards systematic theology is almost completely lacking in most biblical theology done today. Instead, we see a complete bifurcation between the wrongly so-called “scholastic rationalization” of the 17th century Reformed authors (in particular) and a more “biblical” theology that is exegetical. Briggs would certainly have approved of this development in “Reformed” theology.
After briefly noting Warfield’s contempt for dispensationalism and the wild-eyed, but hermeneutically naïve systematics of various authors from that tradition, Johnson proceeds to draw some relevant applications of Warfield’s polemic for various contemporary issues. He takes aim at Sandlin, Franke, and Armstrong. However, I want to focus the rest of this review on Johnson’s critique of Peter Enns, a professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary, who has written a book entitled Inspiration and Incarnation. This is an extremely difficult thing for me to write about, since I had Enns as a professor, learned a lot from him, and consider him a friend. Nevertheless, the concerns which Johnson has of the book are concerns that entered my mind as I was reading Enns’ book. Especially important are the qualifications that Warfield puts on the incarnational analogy itself (see pp. 229-230), the problems inherent in making the dependability of the Bible dependent on other ancient sources outside the Bible (which is not something Van Til would have approved of: see pg. 226), and the problem of using the term “myth” to describe the Bible. On the latter point, it might have been nice to see a more explicit address of the question of historicity, especially given Enns’ definition of myth as “an ancient, premodern, prescientific way of addressing questions of ultimate origins and meaning in the form of stories: Who are we? Where do we come from?” (pg. 40 of Inspiration and Incarnation). In the context of this definition, Enns rejects the idea that myth, if it is to be used at all in the description of Genesis, is to be equated with “’untrue,’ ‘made-up,’ ’storybook’” (ibid). However, Enns did not help himself by including the word “simply” in the sentence mentioned, as it would seem to imply that it is possible legitimately to include those three pejorative words, and yet still get at something deeper. Enns also shot himself in the foot on the next page, where he has this off-hand comment that would seem to contradict his earlier statement: “So, stories were made up that aimed at answering questions of ultimate meaning” (pg. 41). He rejected “made-up,” apparently, on pg. 40, and yet embraces the word on page 41. Then, in the next paragraph, he shifts back to the definition of myth as a prescientific story (definition of story would be nice here!) of origin. This is not pure nit-picking here. The question is this: are there errors or not in the Bible? Is Genesis, for instance, a made-up story of origin, or did it actually happen? This question is not assuming a modern scientific mindset in and of itself, since ancient people did in fact concern themselves with what actually happened. The continual recitation of the Exodus events ought to be proof enough of this. I am not asking the question of whether Genesis tells a scientific story, but whether Genesis tells a factual story.
Another important question is this: is Enns’ idea of “limitation” equivalent to Briggs’ idea that the Bible is fallible? What does Enns mean by “limitation?” He seems to advocate that the Bible readers were culturally limited in the sense that God made sure that His words spoke to the culture of that time. Is this equivalent to saying that the Bible is wrong in places? Since this would be a good discussion point, I will not answer the question.
Posted by Lane Keister
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jeffhutchinson said,
November 19, 2007 at 3:50 pm
I have not yet been able to read either Johnson’s Warfield article, or Enns’ book. So, thanks for your helpful summarizing work.
reformedmusings said,
November 19, 2007 at 4:16 pm
I love the Reader’s Digest versions. Thanks for taking time to write this nice summary.
greenbaggins said,
November 19, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Okay, but the point is to get you to buy the book! ;-)
Mark Traphagen said,
November 19, 2007 at 6:50 pm
…and buy Enns’s book and read it also, to be fair, and to make sure that the criticisms are just and not out of proportion. Please don’t read that last sentence as a judgment one way or another on Lane’s piece above; by it I mean the criticisms leveled at Enns in general.
One nit to pick with you, though, Lane, in reference to your pulling a quote from p. 41 of I & I. The sentence “So, stories were made up that aimed at answering questions of ultimate meaning,” in context of the paragraph in which it appears, is not referring to the Bible but to ancient peoples in general striving to make sense of their world. Enns speculates that the “imprint of God is so strong on his creation that, even apart from any knowledge of the true God, ancient peoples just knew that how and why they were here can be explained only by looking outside themselves.” In other words, a very Reformed doctrine of general revelation.
There may indeed be “weaknesses” in the way Enns expressed himself in his book.–and I would remind again that to some extent those “weaknesses” are intentional since Enns was writing for a popular, not a scholarly, audience–but lets make sure we don’t pull quotes out of their context to create weaknesses that aren’t there.
Nowhere in the book does Enns say, explicitly or implicitly, that the Bible writers “made up” their stories out of whole cloth.
GLW Johnson said,
November 20, 2007 at 8:04 am
Mark
Greetings . We once spoke over the phone when you were running the WTS bookstore. My main point in dealing with Enns in that chapter was to demonstrate how far from the Old Princeton tradition he had strayed. I am aware that this assessment is shared by others on the Faculty of WTS.
greenbaggins said,
November 20, 2007 at 10:31 am
Okay, Mark, I see your point. However, that is not the end of the story, given the next two paragraphs, where Enns seems to follow up the discussion of myth with the question of whether we can use that category with reference to the Bible. It is not entirely clear where he nets out on this, but it seems to me that his answer is yes. He says that ancient people made up stories (myths). In this sentence, as you say, he does not immediately say that the Bible is such. However, he then goes on to say that “this leads to a big problem for Christians today and their Bible.” Then he talks about ancient versus modern standards of historical inquiry, and nets out that the Bible follows ancient history-writing practices. It would help if Enns would clarify here.
jeffhutchinson said,
November 20, 2007 at 10:41 am
You guys are colluding so that now we HAVE to buy the book to read it for ourselves….
greenbaggins said,
November 20, 2007 at 4:10 pm
Well, duh! ;-)
jeffhutchinson said,
November 20, 2007 at 4:16 pm
A vast right-left-center wing conspiracy! WHO PUT YOU UP TO THIS? WHO?
mtraphagen said,
December 1, 2007 at 10:59 am
Sorry so long in replying. My profs at WTS insist that I create papers and take exams before they will give me a grade, the ogres! ;-)
Dr. Johnson:
I do remember talking with you, of course. You probably realize now that I must have been biting my tongue through much of the conversation! For reasons that I would hope would be obvious, I try to stay out of controversies when dealing with customers in my bookstore capacity. But I am grateful for the opportunity to converse with you here simply as Mark Traphagen, mere Christian, via Lane’s blog.
Furthermore, I hope that it would be understood that anything I say here represents only my own ‘take’ on Dr. Enns’s work, and should not in any way be construed to represent what Enns may or may not think on any matter. My opinions are based on the text of his book as we have it, my classes with Enns at WTS, and a few other opportunities to hear or read Enns interacting about the book. But they remain my opinions only.
Having read your chapter, Dr. Johnson, I fully understand that your aim was to compare Enns’s proposals to the Old Princeton Tradition. Certainly that tradition looms large in the history and culture of WTS, and no one who is serious about pursuing theology or biblical studies at WTS should be ignorant of nor willfully ignore that tradition.
On the other hand, it is a tradition, and as such is informative and even formative to us in many ways, but as a tradition it is not normative in any absolutist kind of way. I’m sure that you would agree as a Reformed Christian that only Scripture can hold that place. That should not be read as a careless casting aside of tradition, whether it be that of a confession (the WCF) or a school of scholarship (Old Princeton). But I think what Enns is about, as much as I understand him, is trying to work in the trajectory of that tradition while engaging honestly and without fear with ongoing scholarship in the area of biblical studies. Basically, his message as I perceive it is “an honest engagement with the ongoing developments in biblical studies scholarship is not only not something we need to run away from in order to preserve our tradition, but used the right way, it can actually ‘improve’ that tradition while remaining within its most important foundations.”
As Enns pointed out in his inaugural address at WTS, the Old Princeton to WTS tradition has always been evolving, even back in Warfield’s days. If a tradition is to remain living, it has to be a trajectory, a path to walk in, not a frozen ice block in which to preserve a lovely corpse.
I’m sensitive to the fact that any time anyone proposes ideas that are meant to move a traditional trajectory further along its path, it will make people within the tradition nervous. A certain amount of that nervousness is a good thing; it keeps us from making rash turns from the path that become false trails leading to dangerous cliffs. However, a knee jerk rejection of any proposal to move down the path is equally counter-productive, and at its worst can verge on being idolatrous (of the tradition). (NOT saying that anyone being engaged in this thread is necessarily in that latter place!).
I realize none of the above ‘proves’ that what Enns is doing is right or wrong, that it is moving us down the path in progress or leading us over a cliff. But I think it is important prolegomena to any discussion that involves assessment according to a tradition. I hope, Dr. Johnson, that you would agree.
greenbaggins said,
December 1, 2007 at 11:05 am
Mark, I can agree that what you say is most probably what Enns thinks he is doing. After all, I did take three classes from him. I believe he even said as much in his paper on the Yankees and Westminster tradition. However, that is a different question from what Enns is actually doing. Enns is an exegetical scholar, not a systematics scholar. As a result of this difference, Enns is not always aware of theological problems with certain exegeses. I fear that the over-specialization in certain fields that undercuts the creation of generalist theologians is at work in this case as well. Ultimately, the question is this: is Enns furthering the “trajectory,” or is he undercutting it?
mtraphagen said,
December 1, 2007 at 11:10 am
Lane:
Thanks for your response. I don’t have my copy of I&I with me right now (yes, it’s true, I don’t actually carry it with my Bible!), and I want to be looking at ‘chapter and verse’ when I respond. I’ll look to get back to you on this sometime this week.
Great questions you raise, the ones that seem to be at the heart of the matter of some people’s apprehensions about and (I believe) misunderstandings of what Enns is after.
Mark T.
mtraphagen said,
December 1, 2007 at 1:50 pm
To be clear, my #12 comment was in response to your first comment to me, Lane. Looks like #11 got posted while I was still writing #12.
While it is certainly true that Enns’s area of academic speciality is not systematics, I certainly think he is “aware” of the categories of Reformed systematics. And forgive me if this is an overly naive approach, but I thought I leaned at WTS that our systematic theology is supposed to come out of exegesis. So it seems to me that if good Scriptural exegesis (which to me does the full task of taking into account the historical situatedness of the text) leads us to have to take another look at one of our ST formulations, that would be a good thing, and a very Reformed thing to do.
Of course, I suspect that you may want to challenge that Enns is doing ‘good exegesis,’ and that would be another discussion.