Biblical Authority and the Peter Enns Controversy

I have again returned to reading about the suspension of Westminster Theological Seminary professor Peter Enns. The suspension, for those ignorant of the situation, is a result of his book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (amazon link) in which Enns advocates his so-called incarnational view of biblical authority. This view has been criticized because those who hold the view are willing to update their theological understanding of biblical inspiration and authorship in light of historical and textual data.

As I have read responses to this situation I have been paying close attention to the ways that Enns’s opponents attack his view, especially their theological grounding. One such response is written by the dean of Reformed Baptist Seminary, Dr. Robert Gonzales Jr. and is posted here. I would like to take issue with Dr. Gonzales’s post, especially this portion which he excerpts from his course notes:

Let’s suppose that the Bible is proved to be in error in some of its teachings that can be verified empirically, such as scientific or historical facts. We could no longer believe those doctrines just because the Bible teaches them. And if we can no longer believe those teachings of the Bible that can be “checked out,” how can we affirm those teachings that cannot be “checked out”? In other words, once we reject the inerrancy of the Bible, we may still choose to believe in the incarnation, the atonement, and the resurrection. But we no longer believe these doctrines because the Bible teaches them. We ultimately believe them because we choose to do so. Our own personal preference, therefore, becomes the ultimate basis for our faith.

I think that Dr. Gonzales has fallen prey to a vicious epistemic circularity. I assume he would argue that the reason that the Bible is authoritative is its divine authorship. But what reasons do we have to believe that the Bible is authored by God? Is it because the Bible makes this claim (2 Timothy 3:16)? If a stranger walked up to me and informed me that she was the president of the USA, I would have to have some evidential basis for her claim before she could be reasonably believed. Perhaps there is a reliable witness who can attest to this woman’s claim, or perhaps she can produce some document or token unique to the presidential office, but without this corroboration we have no basis for believing her.  The problem Dr. Gonzales runs into is that if the Bible could be disproved on some external, rational grounds then “we could no longer believe those doctrines just because the Bible teaches them.”  Hopefully, we never believed those doctrines ‘just’ because the Bible teaches them.

Now that criticism might be a bit unfair considering his paragraph was an excerpt from a larger piece. I am sure Dr. Gonzales probably grounds his belief in the reliability of the Scripture in some historical research, likely combined with the testimony of those he would judge to be reliable witnesses and even perhaps including his own religious experience. However, this is not the only issue here. I am speaking now of the latter portion of his paragraph:

…if we can no longer believe those teachings of the Bible that can be “checked out,” how can we affirm those teachings that cannot be “checked out”? In other words, once we reject the inerrancy of the Bible, we may still choose to believe in the incarnation, the atonement, and the resurrection. But we no longer believe these doctrines because the Bible teaches them. We ultimately believe them because we choose to do so. Our own personal preference, therefore, becomes the ultimate basis for our faith.

Gonzales’s perspective of the scriptures here seems to me to be quite flat. First of all, the biblical data which is verifiable can be more or less central to the Christian thesis, as well as more or less applicable for the purpose of the text. In the first case, if a passage from one of the Pauline epistles where Paul is greeting the believers in the recipient city is disproved through historical evidence, say by some manuscript that proves that the people Paul was greeting did not in fact live in the recipient city,  this would not be adequate grounds for launching an attack on the whole scriptural corpus. Now if there was some verifiable proof, say, that Jesus did not exist and thus did not die or rise from the dead, then we would have adequate grounds for contradicting the Christian thesis.

In the second case, where a datum might be more or less applicable for the purpose of the passage, I am mainly referring to the genre of a given passage. For instance, one cannot expect the content of poetry to match historical data. The poet never intended the passage to be historically descriptive and thus any historical allusions need not be technically accurate.  I think this is where Gonzales and I might take issue. In my view, there is no reason why the Bible cannot be littered with errors so long as those errors do not infringe upon the central content of the text. (I know that the phrase ‘central content of the text’ is almost inexcusably vague, but for now I will leave it thus. Perhaps a future post will address this issue.) I think that this view would be problematic for someone who is desiring to hold onto the doctrine of inerrancy, but I find this term unhelpful and misleading. The point of any doctrine of scripture is that the scripture is a reliable witness to the events and content of the faith.

Lastly, at the close of the paragraph Gonzales makes the implication that if our beliefs are not founded upon the biblical text, that we are simply choosing to believe something. However I think it is clear by now that there is no reason to think that the Bible is the sole evidential source for doctrinal beliefs. 

Thus, I think I am siding with Enns on this one, at least insofar as Enns is on the other side of the debate as Dr. Gonzales.

For more on the controversy at WTS and Peter Enns, as well as a delightful selection of excellent articles via links, check out this website.