This is a hard post to write, and I have postponed it several times. Just as Fascism is easy to mock when it is on a different continent, so also PoMo is easy to mock when it is Episcopalian bishops or PCUSA bureaucrats. But when it is from one's own denomination, one's own seminary, one's own alma mater, from people you once respected, it is hard to laugh. Jesus said "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother..." And that is precisely how I feel, taking a sword to my spiritual fathers, a knife to my spiritual mother. But as Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma and Piacenza said, "He who draws his sword against the prince needs to throw away his scabbard." So with all due respect, take it, I won't be needing it any more.

Two weeks ago, Peter Enns, professor of Old Testament, was suspended from the faculty of WTS for a controversial book published in 2005, Inspiration and Incarnation. One would have thought that suspension would come, say, before the book was published. But the faculty didn't even vote on the issue until December 2007, when Enns won a split decision, 12-8. Now the board of WTS has weighed in, and the vote went the other way, 18-9.

Is this surprising? Hardly. One would be hard put to find any school in America that had a more liberal board than its faculty. In fact, given the pressure put to bear on dissenting faculty, any faculty vote that isn't unanimous should be examined closely by the board, as indeed the whole issue has been. Here's Ken Stewart blogging on a WTS chapel service,

The 'righteous indignation' often centers around what has appeared to the questioners as a disregard of the 12-8 faculty vote to sustain Enns' views as acceptable. The digressive answers, when stitched together provide a (to me at least) plausible explanation of why that 12-8 vote resolves nothing. According to the WTS administration, the school has been in a kind of crisis mode (at faculty level) since prior to the release of I&I. We will have to take his word for it, but Lillback relates an eyebrow-raising tale of intra-faculty estrangement with sessions run by Peacemaker Ministries longer than three years ago. Only in the last three years has there been any success in reviving theological discussion within the faculty;then I&I was released, triggering new levels of tension.
No one seems to be disputing this elaboration of the story since it was divulged yesterday. No one is disputing either the report, in that chapel meeting, of major donors witholding gifts, two presbyteries warning candidates against enrollment at this campus, and inquiries (of some kind) from the Evangelical Theological Society. There is a multi-level institutional crisis, with roots deeper than the release of I&I, but nevertheless exacerbated by it.
In my mind, the case for Trustee Board intervention is now very well established. So much will depend on the kind of process seen to be employed by the Personnel committee. No one should dream any more that this seminary can simply 'shrug off' a series of polarizations now at least five years old. All parties must agree that WTS cannot carry on this way.

What kind of issue is so central to the existence of WTS that it leads to this sort of unresolvable conflict? An existential one.

For the last 5 centuries, Protestants and especially Presbyterians have thought that intellectual belief could be made the bedrock of faith. If only all the professors would sign a creed, a statement of belief, why then there could be unity of purpose, of faith, of action! And so, WTS split off from Princeton Seminary, requiring all of its current 20 professors to sign and affirm the Westminster Standards, as indeed Wheaton College requires its professors to sign and affirm a somewhat less famous "Statement of Faith".  It is a well known tactic, going all the way back to the sixteenth century Reformation creeds and confessions, which are themselves a conscious reenactment of the Council at Nicea in the fourth century.

But did it work?

No, for the same reasons that Catholic Theology in all its Thomist splendor became the dead ash of the Scholastic Trent. Because above all, creeds are composed of words, and words must abide in the Vine, in the true Word lest they die and be burned. Philosophers have overtaken those dead branches, have pruned and gathered them, and we are now seeing the flames of such fruitless works. Today the sparks are PoMo, and the Creeds are tinder. While at Wheaton, I watched the last vestiges of its creed blacken and burst into flames. Now it is WTS turn with the more venerable Westminster Standards. And of course, the Episcopalians have made pencils of the Nicene Creed long ago. But as I read Vladimir Lossky, I began to understand the grief of the Eastern church over the 6th century filioque travesty. A mere 250 years stands between the Council of Nicea and its desecration, surely we should be surprised at the relative longevity of the Westminster Standards.

But what is there to do? Can the Standards be revived? As in the case of Nicea, creeds get added to creeds, but for what purpose, and for how long will they stand? Could one erect creeds in defense of the faith faster than the incoming tide of unbelief washes them away?

Children we were—our forts of sand were even as weak as we.
High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea.

No, the creedal walls had been sapped long ago, and our treasure house of sacred scripture was being emptied beneath our noses. To understand this failure of the creeds, to understand this destruction of our glorious inheritance, we have to dig a little deeper into Enns book. Now mind you, I am not accusing Enns of innovation, I have heard this argumentation at every evangelical school where I have looked -- Wheaton, Taylor, Gordon, Baylor--what I am accusing him of, is polytheism, of PoMo. Here then is an excerpt from I&I:

Therefore, the question is not the degree to which Genesis conforms to what we would think is a proper description of origins. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of Genesis to expect it to answer questions generated by a modern worldview, such as whether the days were literal or figurative, or whether the days of creation can be lined up with modern science, or whether the flood was local or universal…. It is wholly incomprehensible to think that thousands of years ago God would have felt constrained to speak in a way that would be meaningful only to Westerners several thousand years later. To do so borders on modern, Western arrogance….To argue, as I am doing here, that such biblical stories as creation and the flood must be understood first and foremost in the ancient contexts, is nothing new. The point I would like to emphasize, however, is that such a firm grounding in ancient myth does not make Genesis less inspired; it is not a concession that we must put up with or an embarrassment to a sound doctrine of scripture. Quite to the contrary, such rootedness in the culture of the time is precisely what it means for God to speak to his people…. This is surely what it means for God to reveal himself to people - he accommodates, condescends, meets them where they are.

Now is Enns saying anything more than Calvin when he says "he accommodates, condescends" in his revelation? The short answer is yes. The long answer is no.

Enns believes that he is acting in the tradition of Calvin to say this, yet Calvin remained philosophically a medieval realist, so the accommodation Calvin reported was from/to a Christian philosophy. Enns lives in the Post-Modern 21st century, so the accommodation Enns writes about is to/from a polytheist, anti-Christian, pagan philosophy. Can one accommodate Christ to Belial? Can one worship God and idols? Can a spring bring forth both fresh and salty water? That was the short answer.

But Calvin himself comes at the dawn of the Enlightenment. He comes at the culmination of the Catholic faith, when Catholics themselves were modifying their creeds. Calvin was attempting to reform the Catholic church, and upon his failure, founded his own. But Lossky tells us that the failure of the Catholics (and ultimately of Calvin's reforms) lies in the filioque clause inserted by the Western church in 589 AD. For the abandonment of the Trinity for Reason led to this imbalance of rational thought, to this reliance on words instead of The Word, to this philosophical barrier of sand instead of the rock of faith. And faith that is built on sand may look impressive but will not survive the tempests of time.

Has the Eastern church survived time any better? No, it too has been breathing on only one lung. We are way past due for reconciling the three branches of the church, for without unity, we shall all soon perish. Let us then examine our peril, beginning with Enns book.

Enns argues that Genesis (as well as all of scripture) is "Such rootedness in the culture of its time..." Does this mean that the Bible does not transcend its time? Enns apparently argues that our interpretation may transcend, but not the words or intent of the original writer. The words somehow have become feet of clay on which the whole golden statue of theology begins to totter. Contrast this to the Jewish rabbinical tradition that every syllable, every waw and jod was inspired by God, written by his finger, and you begin to see how far Enns has come. Consider also that Enns too, has feet of clay, or more precisely, a multi-cellular appendage composed of inanimate proteins and purposeless elemental atoms. Does this mean that the thoughts of Enns about OT scripture are ultimately prescribed by his inanimate constituents? 

Well this is where Enns invokes the "incarnational" mantra, saying that his feet are both inanimate matter and animate appendages, they are some Cartesian dualist "incarnation." Yet like his feet, Enns has no clue how the incarnation actually operates. Because if he really understood the miracle of the carbon atom nucleus, the miracle of the carbon atom electronic wavefunction, the miracle of protein formation, the miracle of cellular organization, the miracle of cellular differentiation, the miracle of his birth, the miracle of the 20th century progress, the miracle of history, the miracle of man, then, and only then, would he have a snowball's chance at understanding the miraculous document he holds in his hands. For the recognition of the miraculous is the recognition of the sacred, of the holy. And once the Bible is seen as holy, then no amount of unholy Akkadian precursors can change that fact.

Here's Susan Wise Bauer's take on Enns' I&I:

The uniqueness of the Old Testament as a piece of literature has been seriously dented by the discovery of more and more ancient texts that predate (and anticipate) biblical forms. Creation story, flood story, prophecy, proverb: all of these were in use in Mesopotamia long before the first biblical book was penned.
So how can we claim that the Old Testament—and it alone from all the texts of that pre-Christian age—is divine communication from God to man? It's an interesting question, but it turns out to be small potatoes compared with the next problem that Enns, professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary, sets before us: It seems as though the Old Testament was also puzzling for Matthew and Luke and Paul. In fact, from where we sit, it looks as though the apostles were lousy at exegesis.

So if pagan documents predate God's, then they lose their divine authority? And if the apostles are worse exegetes than Enns, they lose their infallible authority? From whence does authority flow? Enns believes it flows from the rational method. Bauer continues,

This means, unfortunately, that we cannot cling to the comforting notion that grammatical-historical exegesis is a kind of high road to truth. Like the Second Temple exegesis of Paul and Matthew, it is a method—the method produced by our own time and place. Like the Second Temple exegesis, it can produce both truth and error. "Our own understanding of the Old Testament—and the gospel—has a contextual dimension," Enns writes. "As subjective as this sounds, it is nevertheless inescapable… . If any of this is troublesome, it may be because we have not adequately grappled with the implications of God himself giving us Scripture in context." Well, of course it is going to be troublesome, and Enns, who knows the evangelical community well, is perfectly aware of it. But Inspiration and Incarnation makes clear that Scripture, like the Incarnation itself, is a scandal: like Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the wise.

So you see, the very methodology used by Calvin, the very philosophy that founded the Reformation has now been held suspect. And rather than return to a pre-Reformational stance (my Trinitarian preference), Enns argues that a continuation of a known defective technique (rationalistic grammatico-historical exegesis) will lead to higher truth. In abandoning the Reformation faith, Enns holds fast to the Enlightenment reason, he has chosen the worst of all possible worlds.

But he cannot consistently hold such a position unless he be PoMo, unless he deny the absoluteness of truth and its exegetical approach. Thus the "accommodation" Enns describes is just another way of saying "white lies", which makes Enns himself the arbiter of the "whiteness" of the lie.  That is, Enns has bought into any number of modern philosophical assumptions, including the exclusion of the sacred, the tyranny of the intellect, and the insufferable condescension of the scribes and the Sadducees.  Under very similar questioning of his (2nd Temple) exegetical methods, Jesus reply was trenchant.

Jesus said to them, "Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?

Is this not the reason Enns is wrong, that he knows neither the Word nor the Holy Spirit of God? 

For without holiness, no one will see the Lord.