I’m not sure what to make of Peter Enns. On the one hand, I can see how a line of similarity might be drawn from my own ideas to his. And I don’t think he’s on to nothing. And I don’t entirely agree with his critics. And yet because I find myself often honking along similar lines as he does, I can’t help but be even more disturbed by his approach to things. Maybe if I was a professional theologian and had built my financial security on telling people what I think about such things, and had the habit of getting to stand up in front of people and have them listen to me, I could write with the same droll confidence he does.
For all his humor and his use of terms like offering understanding of the Bible for “normal people”, othering the serious beliefs of generations of Christians and the work of hundreds of scholars, I’m not convinced that his swagger doesn’t conceal a certain kind of contempt for the sort of earnest belief he’s trying to undermine in his work. And I don’t say that as one of the earnest believers myself, but as someone who himself is tempted to look down on the “Sunday school” simplicity of the beliefs of others who just take things at face value and can’t see, like me, how the cake was assembled. I find a similar and sympathetic tone that I’ve learned to suspect and resist in myself.
He gives you all the pleasure of believing in something without having to commit you to believing anything you might not like. It’s hard to say whether that’s being a Christian, or whether its making Christ into an Ustian. Rather than the scary and difficult and hard to accept task of becoming little Christs, we make Christ a little us.
The ask of the Bible is big. There are some huge claims in there, and some huge costs if you choose to believe them. So it’s very important that the evidence for those claims have some authority. If the means by which we learn that consistency and truth exist isn’t itself true or consistent, what are we to do with that?
Making Nobody Happy 