Recollections

Susan Wise Bauer has an interesting review of Inspiration and Incarnation, by Peter Enns, posted at Books and Culture.

Bauer begins the review with a striking example of Sumerian poetry that anticipates a famous line from the biblical book of Isaiah. Such echoes of Scripture in other ancient texts can be troubling to evangelicals, she says, because they seem to suggest that certain stories and forms in the Old Testament did not originate with God. Equally discomforting to evangelicals, says Bauer, are the hermeneutical practices of the apostle Paul, who often seems to rip Old Testament verses out of their contexts in order to establish a theological point about Christ.

But Enns’ book apparently argues that both of these kinds of discomfort are produced by a misguided approach to the inspiration of Scripture. He argues that Scriptural inspiration can be usefully compared to Christ’s incarnation: in both cases, God’s revelation did not take place in a vacuum, but wrapped itself in human form:

In other words, the God who spoke to man through Christ also speaks to man through Scripture, and in much the same way: he enters into our world and uses our own cultural patterns to reveal himself. We cannot insist that there is a separate, ahistorical, all-divine message in any part of the Bible that somehow triumphs over all contemporary thought and custom. This, Enns writes, is a modern version of the ancient Docetic heresy, which held that Christ only seemed human. “What some ancient Christians were saying about Christ,” he writes, “… is similar to the mistake that other Christians have made (and continue to make) about Scripture: it comes from God, and the marks of its humanity are only apparent, to be explained away.”

I find that allusion to Docetism thought-provoking, and I wonder if Enns follows up on it in the book.