Ken Schenck has been conducting a series of interviews with Pete Enns, formerly of Westminster Seminary and author of the controversial, Inerrancy and Inspiration.
In the second stage or interactions, Schenck asks Enns what he would say to those who think the Old Testament scholar is not a very good Calvinist. Enns responded:
Just what it means to be Reformed has been a debated issue and the struggle continues to see who will win the right to define it. There are those who think of the Reformed faith—better, a particular articulation of the Reformed faith (19th century Princeton, for example)—as the only true expression not only of the Reformed faith but also of Christianity. Indeed, as some I know have put it, the Reformed faith (narrowly defined) is understood as “Christianity come into its own,†and that the Reformed “hold the truth in trust†for other traditions.
This is tragic, and if this is what it means to be Reformed, then I am not Reformed. If, however, one understands the Reformed faith as a particularly insightful and deep tradition that hits upon numerous biblical and theological issues with clarity and gospel-fidelity—even to the extent that other traditions will be richer for the interaction—BUT that is also, by virtue of its location in particular historical/cultural circumstances, as prone to sin and error as anything else under the sun, and is therefore in need of regular critical evaluation, then, yes, I am Reformed. The Reformed faith is for me, in other words, a means to Christian truth rather than the sum total of Christian truth.
Aside from what this says about Enns’ own understanding of the tradition in which he found himself as a student and professor at Westminster or even what it means to be situated within a theological and ecclesial tradition, it raises an interesting question about the priority of convictions and academics.
It would be impossible to imagine one of Enns’ predecessors at Westminster,  E. J. Young, for instance, rejecting the narrow construction of Reformed Protestantism. Is the difference between Enns and Young that they approach the critical questions of Old Testament studies differently and then reach alternate understandings of being Reformed? Or is it that Enns and Young started out with different views of being Reformed which then lead them to approach Old Testament scholarship with alternate — I believe the word is — “trajectories”?
The right answer is that the theology precedes the exegesis. I know this drives the progressives batty and supposedly flies in the face of biblical authority and sola scriptura (funny how selective – downright miserly —  progressives can be with Reformation solas). But do those who want to put exegesis (not to mention ANE studies) ahead of theology really want to embrace the Enlightenment rationality that lies behind the notion that I can study the Bible free from theological assumptions and reach objectively and detached religious truth? I thought you didn’t even have to be a Van Tillian to reject the Enlightenment. Post-modernity was sufficient.
Old Life 
Delicious and controversial. Wouldn’t have it any other way.
It took me years to see that sola scriptura doesn’t mean solo scriptura. I need the confessions because I’m an idiot and a heretic. I’ve tried the broad-Reformed path, and many there be who walk it to destruction. Give me the narrow path any day.
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“But do those who want to put exegesis (not to mention ANE studies) ahead of theology really want to embrace the Enlightenment rationality that lies behind the notion that I can study the Bible free from theological assumptions and reach objectively and detached religious truth?”
Hmmm…sounds unfair, no?
Does putting exegesis ahead of theology really make one a Modernist? What if my study of scripture brings me into disagreement with the Reformed confessions at a particular point? (e.g., are there really “Ten†Commandants anywhere in the Bible the way it’s organized/articulated in the TFU and WCF/LC/SC?)
Does being Reformed imply that I must embrace ever “jot and tittle†of the Reformed confessions? Were the 18th century American Presbyterians guilty of “Enlightenment rationality†when they made revisions (I assume you have no problem with this) to the WCF when they recognized that what they confessed was in conflict with what they understood in Scripture?
And yes, I’m feeling a bit “batty†which unfortunately must make me a “progressive.†So be it. But to be honest, I still consider myself Reformed, dammit!
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Darryl,
Professor Enns’ attempt to divide up the Reformed Tradition by setting part of the tradition (“a particular articulation of the Reformed faith (19th century Princeton, for example)”) against the rest fails to do justice to the fundamental unity of Reformed belief. It should be obvious to anyone who reads them that the Three Forms of Unity and the Westminster Standards are teaching the same theology. Furthermore, when one considers the great theologians within the Confessionally Reformed Tradition, there is a fundamental unity of thought.
On the other hand, we should be quick to add that while there is a temporal priority to Confessional Theology there is also a logical priority to Scripture as our final authority. This is what allows a Roman Catholic, for example, to realize that the Westminster standards more fully and faithfully reflect Scripture than do the Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent. We are conditioned and restrained by tradition, but thankfully we are not trapped by it.
David
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Michael,
It seems to me that you make a pretty big leap in implying that “my study of Scripture” (understood as an individual task) is in some way analogous to revisions to a Confession made by an entire confessional communion. As a matter of fact, this kind of proves the point. To be Reformed in the historic sense means to belong to a particular group of churches which confess a particular doctrine. Revisions to a Confession are valid when undertaken by the churches of that confession (so long as they maintain the substance of the tradition), but not valid when made by individuals who for some reason think it is okay to deviate substantially from the faith of their church. Believing something to be out of line with confessional Reformed dogma based on your own personal study of Scripture is all well and good in the “land of the free” (and I wouldn’t expect you to go against your conscience), but to do this and then still claim to be “Reformed” in any meaningful sense of the word is either uninformed or dishonest.
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John,
Fair enough. So how many revisions can you make before you lose the “Reformed” label?
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Thankfully, I’m not the one to answer that question. This is something to be decided by the confessional churches, not by the private opinion of individuals. This is basic Protestant conciliarism. We don’t believe that individuals can make decisions for the whole church, whether a big pope in Rome, or a little pope anywhere else.
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MT: who used the word modernist? Who was even talking about creeds? I made a point about a narrow and a broad understanding of Reformed, and whether one leads to a certain kind of exegesis or not.
Out of curiosity, instead of simply tilting at windmills, what is your shorthand understanding of Reformed Protestantism? If you’re Reformed, what does that mean? If you’re not, if you’re a charismatic, then won’t we be talking past each other — which already seems to have happend — ?
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I don’t like big popes, little popes, and (IMO, just as bad) paper popes.
On a more serious note, however, I understand what you are trying to say (ie, one person does not speak for the church). That’s not my point. I just get “batty” when reformed folk give the impression that the confessions are unchangeable or “unimprovable” (I know this isn’t a word) and that the ONLY way to interpret Scripture correctly is to do so through the lenses of the reformed confessions.
As a caveat, I am indebted to the Westminster Confession of Faith/LC/SC and see it as a great summary of what the Bible teaches. I just don’t see it as perfect one. And all I’m saying is that we should be open to the possibilty of revisions when convinced by Scripture to do so.
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I don’t think anyone is arguing for perfection or infallibility. Protestantism, by definition, believes that church doctrine is “Reformable”. However, those of us who are “confessional” would insist that only church councils and synods (operating under the authority of Scripture) can determine matters of doctrine/confessional revision for the church.
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Michael,
You sound an awful lot like my fellow CRCers as they contemplate the revision to the Form of Subscription. What I notice there is a confusion of high opinion, high views and infallible views. You might be mistaking a high view for an infallible one (“I just don’t see it as perfect one”). High views do not mean that the forms are invulnerable to change. As well, seeing the forms as “a great summary” is more of a high opinion than a high view. High opinions tend to speak of “guidance” and “(being) helpful.” High views, of course, agree that the forms are these things, but, more importantly, they are also “binding” and “authoritative.” Infallible is reserved for scripture alone.
I know you were kidding, but, just to round it out a bit, low opinions/low views tend to talk about “paper popes,” as in that Presbyterian humiliation name of Finney.
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DGH: My bad. I didn’t intend on “tilting at windmills” but was a bit hasty in my response. I guess that’s what happens when you’re typing on a blog when you should be crunching numbers at work; silly me. Beats me why I brought up the term “Modernist” and well, I brought up “creeds” because isn’t that what you’re really getting at?
But to your question: To be reformed is to subscribe to the reformed confessions. But as I’m sure you can already tell, I don’t believe in strict subscription.
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Can you believe in “system” subscription and be a “high-viewer.” My gut is telling me you’re gonna say no.
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Michael,
System subscription + high views (tends to) = strict subscription.
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MT: what do you make of the idea that the Reformed faith is “a particularly insightful and deep tradition that hits upon numerous biblical and theological issues with clarity and gospel-fidelity—even to the extent that other traditions will be richer for the interaction—BUT that is also, by virtue of its location in particular historical/cultural circumstances, as prone to sin and error as anything else under the sun, and is therefore in need of regular critical evaluation”? That was the quotation that led to this discussion and you took it right toward the creeds. Odd.
This understanding of Reformed Protestantism is not different from any other academic intellectual or theological position.
I tend to think that Reformed is narrow, in that it is distinct from a number of other Christian traditions, and I think it is better than the others. Oh man, I sure hope that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. But it is something worth contending for. I see no reason to fight in Enns’ quotation. In fact, I think it is relativistic.
So the question is not subscription. If only it were that. It is whether theological truth actually exists, or if its all so corrupted that we throw in our lot with everyone else and become Methodoterianalistormians. I’m sorry, but we were here before. WTS was founded to avoid being there.
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Enns appears to be whistling a different tune now that he is off the faculty of WTS. He once insisted that he was standing in the noble Old Princeton/Westminster tradition while seeking to advance it and he attempted (very unsuccessfully I might add) to claim Warfield as the template for his incarnational analogy. His claim in this interview that he chose to leave WTS because he didn’t like the direction the seminary was heading-a direction he claimed was not that of the seminary when he was a student-is somewhat discondant on a number of fronts. To begin with the two senior professors at the seminary-Gaffin and Poythress-opposed Enns. Scott Oliphint, another of the professors that opposed Enns was a student during the time that Enns was, as was I (and many others) who found Enns’s book decidedly out of step with the tradition he claimed to be maintaining.
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Darryl, very interesting post. I certainly agree with you that we cannot approach the text without presuppositions. The confessions and our systematic theology does exercise controls on our exegesis. It must, unless we want to be subject to every whim of doctrine that comes down the pike. Would you also agree that the relationship between exegesis and ST is something like a spiral? That they mutually inform each other? Poythress argued in the spring 2008 WTJ that this was Vos’s position, and, having done the research in Vos for a paper, I have to agree that this is what Vos believed.
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Jonathan,
Yeah, if you went off on your own, you’d be like well, Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, Bucer or Vermigli!
Awe,Come on, individuals surely can make revisions to the Confession when the body is intransigent. That is exactly what the Reformers did. Can we say “autotheos?” Why is there any requirement to maintain the substance of the tradition? If the tradition is not scriptural in the individual’s judgment, then chuck it since the church tradition is fallible. Nothing can bind the conscience of the individual absolutely except Scripture, right? Why hold others to a standard that the Reformers were not held to? And if someone does go out to the land of the “free” why aren’t they entitled to use the word “Reformed” just as the Reformed did the same as still use the word “catholic?” This is special pleadingin the extreme. If you maintain that councils and synods are the legitimate mechanisms, then what this amounts to is councils and synods that match the a priori judgment of the Reformers apart from a council and a synod. 2nd Nicea is a perfect example. “Oh thats not according to Scripture!” Really? Who judged it to be so? Oh the Reformers, apart from a council. A bunch of leaky buckets gets you one big leaky bucket, a fallible synod isn’t any more normative than an individual. Peer preussure isn’t the same as an increase in normativity.
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Perry, do you think that the Reformers, or anyone for that matter, would even dare to write a creed if they thought their tradition was “a particularly insightful and deep tradition that hits upon numerous biblical and theological issues with clarity and gospel-fidelity—even to the extent that other traditions will be richer for the interaction—BUT that is also, by virtue of its location in particular historical/cultural circumstances, as prone to sin and error as anything else under the sun”? I don’t think they would. This is historicism, and historicists don’t write (or defend) creeds, they write Auburn Affirmations.
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Lane, I think this is right (and I’d like to know who Poythress and Frame work this out since the spiral analogy is pretty much what Richard Muller proposed and Frame rejected in favor of something approaching biblicism). But my point was even simpler — if one conceives of the Reformed faith as narrow, one is more prone to take a high view of biblical infallibility, and if broad, a fuzzier view of biblical authority. I guess I’m making an observation about things that always seem to go together. One could then draw out implications for either the intellectual components of these alignments, or even the personal and psychological ones — some people are more or less comfortable with boundaries. But my point really is that the Enns episode a lot less to do with the doctrine of Scripture, and a lot more to do with the nature of Reformed Protestantism.
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One other thing. It maybe just a coincident, but what are we to make of the fact that the majority of Enns’s defenders ( I am thinking of individuals like Kenton Sparks, Craig Allert and from the way he speaks in this series of interviews, Ken Schenck)-especially among those that were his students- display an openly hostile opposition to the doctrine of inerrancy as espoused by Warfield, Machen, Van Til & co.? Wasn’t that a major element in the seminary’s identity? It was very much the view of the faculty when I was a student there ( which, as I said in my previous comment ,happened to coincide with that of Enns).
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Perry,
I know that you’re like really really smart, so you should know this stuff. But for the benefit of others…
The EO and RC accounts really do have just as much trouble regarding the authority of councils/ecclesiastical declarations as Protestants do. The only difference is that Protestants are just honest about their own fallibility and insist on the final authority of Scripture for the church.
For Chalcedon you have your “Robber Synod” at Ephesus. For Nicea II you have your council at Hieria. For every claim to papal infallibility, you have that great pink elephant, the monothelite heretic Honorius I. For your late medieval papalist councils you have your conciliarist councils which saw fit to authoritatively denounce popes, and which are then subsequently themselves denounced by later popes. So much for the nice, neat authority claims of the “Catholic” communions.
Protestant conciliarism deals with this history by saying that church doctrine is reformable according to Scripture. But it does this by saying that it is reformable by the Church, not by private individuals. I would remind you that new churches were not founded in the lands where the magisterial Reformation took hold. Rather, the doctrine and practice of existing churches was reformed according to Scripture (not considered apart from tradition).
And in this regard, Luther, Calvin, and the other Reformers were quite insistent in their desire and call for a true ecumenical council to settle the issues, as I’m sure you know. This desire was quite unacceptable to the wonderful Roman tyrants, for whom the only valid council would be one in which their words, and not the words of Scripture, would be final. Yeah, so much for the “catholicity” of the Roman communion.
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