Ancient Christian Witness

"For those of you who don’t know there has been a
controversy among the Reformed (like, when isn’t there some new dire threat to
“the gospel?” among the Reformed) surrounding OT professor at Westminster
Seminary Peter Enns. It seems the axe is laid at the root in terms of his stay
there unfortunately.

Enn’s bookis in part concerning how to think about
the inspiration of the Bible, particularly the OT using Christology as a grid.
Enns maintains that the proper relationship between the divine and the human in
the OT is not one of a subordinating relationship. This has obvious cross-over
significance to much of what we write about here concerning St. Maximus and his
refutation of Monotheletism and Monoenergism. And for those of you thinking
about the relation of the OT accounts and surrounding cultures and inspiration,
Enns I think is on the right track and worth reading. Even if I don’t agree with
everything he has to say, the progromatic nature of his book and the project
itself is worthwhile and helpful.

I have been contributing to a largely
Reformed discussion of Enns over at Green Baggins. Some of Enns’ responses to
various critics can be seen here, here, hereand here.


Lane G. Lipton
defends what he takes to be the tradtional Reformed view of inspiration where
the humanity of Christ is given via the Spirit “created graces” giving the
relation between divine and human not noly a pnuematological structure but an
extrinsic and subordinating gloss. Note what he writes for example,

The
divine and human in the God-man, therefore, are not equally ultimate, existing
in some sort of parity with one another. The divine is primary; the human, while
real, is subordinate. (Emphasis his)

Uh, I don’t think so. Needless to
say I think Lane’s account of Chalcedon is an exercise in misunderstanding, not
to mention the obvious lack of biblical support for the notion of “created
graces.” (I have to wonder if he is even aware of the history of such a notion
coming out as it does from the medieval Catholicism that Calvinists love to
detest. How ironic.)

Other critics like Paul Helm and John Frame have
chimed in. (At this point after reading all of the reviews, the critics just
seem to be feeding off each other.) Enn’s reply to Helm is here. I think Helm
simply at best picks at the edges and doesn’t really get to the heart of the
matter, specifically because he ignores the obvious Christological import. What
is occuring here is a confrontation between two rival Christologies and to put
it in Van Tillian terms, Helm failed to “press the antithesis.”"