“Since [Kant’s] time Christians have been pushing back against what became, and in Kant’s train remains today, methodological atheism in biblical studies. Enns simply embraces the thesis that the Bible’s God-talk is necessarily no more than futile ancient efforts (heavily redacted and embellished) to articulate the ineffable.” - TGC
In this excerpt from the book Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy, Peter Enns shares his initial thoughts about inerrancy from his essay, entitled, “Inerrancy, However Defined, Does Not Describe What the Bible Does.”1
The Bible is the book of God for the people of God. It reveals and conceals, is clear yet complex, open to all but impossible to master. Its message clearly reflects the cultural settings of the authors, yet it still comforts and convicts across cultures and across time.
Denny Burk - Some reflections on the 65th annual meeting of ETS
In a panel discussion with Albert Mohler, Mike Bird, and John Franke, Enns denied the inerrancy of scripture, called into question the exodus of Israel, and compared the Bible to a “theological compost pile.”
“For a long time now BioLogos has ignored its initial mission of trying to convert evangelical Christians to evolution. It didn’t work—as I predicted—because those Christians know that if you buy Darwinian evolution, then you have to see much of the Bible as either fictional or at best metaphorical.
Evangelicals look to the Bible to settle important questions of faith. So, faced with a potentially faith-crushing idea like evolution, evangelicals naturally ask right off the bat, “What does the Bible say about that?” And then informed by “what the Bible says,” they are ready to make a “biblical” judgment. This is fine in principle, but in the evolution debate this mindset is a problem: It assumes that the Adam and Eve story is about “human origins.” It isn’t.
