WTS Documents 3

I finished reading the Hermeneutical Field Committee (HFC) report today, as well as the Edgar/Kelly motion, and the report from the 8 faculty members who formed the minority in the faculty vote in support of Professor Enns. Having read this report and the Historical Theological Field Committee (HTFC) report, I think they have generated more heat than light. The HFC report is somewhat defensive in tone. The HTFC report is marred by using a misquote from I&I as the basis of part of their analysis, and perhaps makes too much of what it believes is Professor Enns' doctrine of Scripture which he does not develop extensively. They extrapolate their understanding of what he says about Scripture to make their criticism.

I&I seems to have two starting points for its arguments: that the evangelical doctrine of Scripture needs to better reflect the phenomena of Scripture; and that the book is written for non-specialists. The HTFC report, for better or worse, focuses on the doctrine of Scripture set forth in I&I. Yet, for all its verbage, it gives short attention to Professor Enns' proposal. Why does the doctrine of inspiration need to be revised as Professor Enns seems to think? Why does he not name the scholars he thinks have not realized the implications of their work for the doctrine of inspiration? If it is to accomodate the intended audience, then I think he underestimates the audience. Older works like Thy Word is Truth by E.J. Young and Fundamentalism and the Word of God by J.I. Packer reached popular audiences by quoting sources.

As I indicated in an earlier post today, I wonder if Professor Enns was simply setting up straw men for the sake of argument. Given the tradition of WTS and the Old Princeton, it would be very strange that scholars like Warfield, Wilson, Allis and Young did not already address these concerns. Surely he must know that they knew the implications of their work for the doctrine of Scripture and still believed in the inspiration of Scripture by God. Surely he must be aware of Young's chapter on the human authors.

I will address the HFC response in a later post.