Understanding the Bible: Insights from Peter Enns' "Inspiration
School
Clemson University**We aren't endorsed by this school
Course
AL 3500
Subject
Religion
Date
Dec 10, 2024
Pages
4
Uploaded by ChiefNeutron680
1Reflection on “Inspiration and Incarnation” by Peter EnnsStudents Name Institutional Affiliation Professor’s Name Date
2In Chapter 5, "Big Picture," of Inspiration and Incarnation, Peter Enns considers the nature of the Bible and how believers should approach it. Like the incarnation of Christ, which isfully divine and fully human in one, Scripture had both divine inspiration and a human cultural context. Enns emphasizes that the Bible was produced by people in particular contexts of history and culture, and thus, we ought to be attuned to those contexts when we approach it (Enns, 2015). The Bible is uniquely God's Word, not in isolation from human culture. Enns calls Christians to recognize how other cultures read and use Scripture in our world, which is becoming increasingly connected, where having different cultural views on Scripture increases the ability to grasp the text.Enns also explores the theological diversity in the Old Testament, advocating for readers to welcome such diversity as a necessary, and yes, promising, aspect of Scripture. Instead, he suggests, diversity does not dilute the integrity of the Bible but rather reveals the diverse and variegated ways in which the God of the Bible spoke to humanity. While the Bible does not give self-explanatory diagrams of how these family dynamics work, morality, or community life, it does provide broad trajectories in which these can be applied differentially across cultural contexts. Enns stresses that biblical interpretation, or exegesis (from the Greek word for 'to collect out'), should be ultimately focused on Christ himself, made possible because Christ is the goal, or 'telos,' of the Old Testament story (since Christ is the 'telos of the biblical story, I will refer to the Old Testament as old testament throughout this paper) (Enns, 2015). The reader of the New Testament is directed by its use of the Old Testament toward Christ as Christ and the fulfillment of its promises, and it is admonished that all interpretations of the gospel of God's redeeming work in Jesus be fixed.
3Reflecting on Enns' argument in connection with our semester's discussions, I realize his emphasis on humility and dialogue is significant to me. In class, we explored different hermeneutical approaches to interpreting Scripture and the significance of the high context of biblical texts. This insistence on the need for scholarly conversation with lay Christians is heard in Enns' insistence on a conversation between scholars and lay Christians and is obedient with a more open and humble approach to studying the Bible. His argument disputes the worry that novel findings will denigrate established faiths, which in the past created an unnecessary divisionbetween those who study Scripture as scholarship and those who see it as God's unchanging Word. This chapter encourages me to be a reverent spirit of the divine nature of Scripture while at the same time being open to the meaning of Scripture across cultures and times, always to the gospel of Christ's redemption.
4References Enns, P. (2015). Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament.