Enns and Carson

Peter Enns, who has recently been promoted to professor of Old Testament and biblical hermeneutics at Westminster Seminary, has written a book titled Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. This book received a strongly negative review by Brenton Ferry in the New Horizons magazine (OPC). The book and the review apparently stirred up a little uneasiness in the readers. I read the review and have now read a good part of the book, and, frankly, I was a little swayed in Enns’s direction and found Ferry’s review to be too much in dogmatism and too little in engaging actual arguments. However, I also sensed some problems with Enns’s approach, but I could not articulate what was bothering me.

Thanks to D. A. Carson’s review on reformation21.org, I now have a better grasp of the issues and can see the weaknesses and gaps in Enns’s presentation. Carson is charitable in his tone, yet engages in real arguments. He points out counterarguments that had already been advanced but which Enns failed to include and address in his book. As a result, Enns seemed often to be hand-waving and would hide behind ambiguities of his incarnational metaphor. I do not doubt Enns commitment to the Westminster Standards and to sound scholarship; however, at many crucial points his presentation seems to be lopsided. Carson’s review was helpful to me in seeing the other side of the problem.