A Response to Paul Helms Review of Inspiration and Incarnation

(http://peterennsonline.com/ii/a-response-to-paul-helms-review-of-inspiration-and-incarnation/)
The following review of Inspiration and Incarnation (I&I) is by Paul Helm and appeared first on
Reformation 21 (www.reformation21.org), the online web magazine of the Alliance of
Confessing Evangelicals, in April 2006. I do not like responding to reviews in such an untimely
fashion, if at all, but there was no available venue for me to respond to at the time. As one can
see from reading my responses in red below, I do not find Helms review to be very helpful; at
times I find it bewildering.
For that very reason I thought long and hard about what purpose a response to this review would
have. At the end of the day I decided it is worthwhile responding, (1) because I have fielded
questions about it from both supporters and non-supporters of the review, and (2) because I find
the review so flawed that some response was required, given the prominence of the author.
I include below the introductory note written by Reformation 21 editor Derek Thomas
Editors Note: As one of the churchs most highly respected philosophers, Paul Helm is uniquely
qualified to review this book on issues of Old Testament canon [I&I is not about Old Testament
canon], for as his review shows, Enns has written less as an Old Testament scholar and more as
a (mistaken) philosopher. [I do not accept the observation as valid. I am trying to draw some
long-needed lines of conversation between theology (not philosophy!) and modern biblical
studies. I am most certainly not writing as a philosopher, mistaken or otherwise, and the editors
claim seems little more than an unfortunate attempt to place my book in the arena of philosophy
to give Helms review more credibility than it deserves. The review would have been much more
helpful had the editor introduced it as offering a particular philosophical perspective (and for
Helm to follow through with a review that matched that tone) rather than presenting Helms
limited experience as the final court of arbitration over difficult biblical matters. As we shall see,
Helm seems to be unfamiliar with the challenges of biblical scholarship and seems content to go
no further than the restatement of prolegomena.] Helms recently re-published title, The Divine
Revelation: Basic Issues (Regent), will provide the reader with further clarity on issues of
revelation.
A book about the identity and purpose of the Bible must be of interest to any serious Christian.
But at first glance Inspiration and Incarnation seems daunting. [This is puzzling given the
clearly popular level at which the book is presented.] Peter Enns, a Professor of Old Testament at
Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, is an Old Testament specialist who through his
awareness of the Problem of the Old Testament [The point of I&I is that the OT really isnt a
problem provided one approaches the data with an incarnational paradigm.] invites us to ask
fundamental questions about the Bible. However, we shall see that the big picture can be
separated fairly easily from the details.
He writes about the identity and purpose of the Bible by concentrating on the difficulties of
interpreting some Old Testament data. This should immediately arouse our suspicions. [It is

worth mentioning the rhetorical move Helm attempts here of assuming as immediately obvious
what really needs to be demonstrated. This type of argumentative rhetoric is more suited to score
points than achieve understanding and, unfortunately, characterizes the entire review.] Nearly
fifty years ago in Fundamentalism and the Word of God J .I. Packer (following B.B. Warfield)
had this to say
Christians are bound to receive the Bible as Gods Word written on the authority of Christ, not
because they can prove it such by independent enquiry, but because as disciples they trust their
divine Teacher. We have pointed out already that no article of Christian faith admits of full
rational demonstration as, say, geometrical theorems do; all the great biblical doctrines -the
Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, the work of the Spirit in man, the resurrection of the body
and the renewal of the creation are partly mysterious, and raise problems for our minds that are
at present insoluble, The doctrine of Scripture is no exception to this rule.(108)
God, then, does not profess to answer in Scripture all the questions that we, in our boundless
curiosity, would like to ask about Scripture. He tells us merely as much as He sees we need to
know as a basis off or our life of faith. And He leaves unsolved some of the problems raised by
what He tells us, in order to teach us a humble trust in His veracity..Is it reasonable to take
Gods word and believe that He has spoken the truth, even though I cannot full comprehend what
he has said? The question carries its own answer. (109)
So Enns is beginning from the wrong end. Not from Christs and the apostles teaching regarding
the nature of Scripture, but from problems, the difficulties identified by his own specialism,
[sic] Old Testament scholarship. [I am truly searching for words for how to respond. This is a
perplexing observation and seems to have missed the entire point of the book. The fact that Helm
can cite Packer as if I were in some fundamental tension with Packer suggests, at the very least,
that we are speaking past each other. It should be perfectly clear that I am not trying to prove
the Bible is Gods Word by looking at external evidence (see Packer quote). I am doing the exact
opposite: I am assuming Scriptures divine origin and inspiration, and arguing that the external
evidence, while needing to be taken into account, does not deter from that fact one bit, although
it does and should affect how we articulate our understanding of Scripture. Helm has missed this.
In fact, the Packer quote meshes entirely with the intention and content of I&I. This
misunderstanding of my book, presented at the outset as a basis for the remainder of the review,
puts the review on a track that can only set up a straw man and thus mislead Helms readers who
themselves might not have read I&I. As the review progresses, it almost seems as if Helm is
determined to read the book through the prism of his own discipline while also disregarding the
plain statements I make re: the divine origin of Scripture and my interaction with data from
which no philosopher can afford to be isolated. I am writing so that thinking Christians can pool
their resources and address difficult matters of biblical scholarship, whether or not Helm is aware
of them or feels they are worthy of serious attention.]
So though Inspiration and Incarnation could be a deeply unsettling book for the orthodox
Christian, it ought not to be, and need not be. Strangely perhaps, this fact has nothing to do with
any of the claims made in the book about the language and literature of the Old Testament, or
with what is said about the relationship between the two Testaments, on which Enns lavishes a

great deal of attention. But it has everything to do with the weakness of the method that Enns has
adopted.
In justification of his approach the author offers an incarnational paradigm (or parallel or
analogy) for our understanding of Scripture. As the Word of God was incarnated at a particular
time and in a particular cultural matrix, so the Bible was brought to us through a variety of
cultural situations. The encultured qualities of the Bible, therefore, are not extra elements that
we can discard to get to the real point, the timeless truths..Christs Incarnation is analogous to
Scriptures incarnation . (17-8) We must therefore give priority to the human marks of
Scripture. [How this comment can follow the quote before it is bewildeirng to me. The level of
distortion of my words leaves me doubtful as to whether Helm will or can give the book a fair
hearing. Is the human dimension of Scripture so unfamiliar to Helm that its introduction poses
such a threat? The incarnational analogy should alert Helm immediately to the fact that humanity
of Scripture is not given priority any more than Christs incontestable humanity has priority
over his divinity. Helm is setting up a dichotomy I am intent on avoiding.] It is only by attending
to these phenomena, and especially to the successive contexts in which the various parts of the
Bible came to be written, Enns believes, including the styles and methods of literary composition
that they reveal, that we shall be able to understand the Bibles diverse nature and so not
approach it with closed minds that shut down the interpretative options. But having in mind the
diverse phenomena of Scripture is nothing new. [This is another example of a poor reading of
I&I. The first sentence in the book should have alerted Helm that I, being a biblical scholar and
seminary trained individual, am fully aware that the information in the book is not new: The
purpose of this book is not novelty, but synthesis (preface). Even if he disagrees strongly with
me, Helm should have assumed that I am not quite so incompetent as he suggests. This
recognition might have moved the review in a much more positive direction. Every Bible reader,
especially trained ones, know that there is theological diversity in Scripture and that its meaning
is tied in with its historical context. The point of my book is certainly not to point that out, but to
show struggling evangelicals that the human element of Scripture is in no way a hindrance to a
full embrace of its inspiration. Too many evangelicals have fallen by the wayside because they
have not been exposed to a theological model for holding both the divine and human elements of
Scripture together. I present such a model, which itself is hardly new. What is new, if anything, is
my directness in stating the obvious and by bringing a lot of evidence together under one cover.
Helm does not seem to be aware of the great difficulties encountered in modern biblical studies
and that Christians need places to turn to help incorporate them theologically.]
As Packer noted
The Word of God is an exceedingly complex unity. The different items and the various kinds of
material which make it up laws, promises, liturgies, genealogies, arguments, narratives,
meditations, visions, aphorisms, homilies, parables and the rest do not stand in Scripture in
isolated fragments, but as parts of a whole. The exposition of them, therefore, involves exhibiting
them in right relation both to the whole and to each other. Gods Word is not presented in
Scripture in the form of a theological system, but it admits of being stated in that form, and
indeed, requires to be so stated before we can properly grasp it grasp it, that is, as a whole.
(101)

However what is new, disturbingly new, is the claim that Enns makes about this cultural
embeddedness. We discover that the Bible itself is far from unique: [Perhaps we shall below see
how a philosopher handles the nuts and bolts of biblical interpretation that shows a working
knowledge of our growing understanding of the cultural setting of the inspired authors of
Scripture. Might it be that Helm is bothered by a Scripture that is so much a part of its historical
contexts? The Bible is not a book for philosophers, but for the common people. Part of what I&I
is about is to help readers understand the commonness of the Bible in its original settings] its
a diverse, culturally-biased product, which we can only ever hope to understand provisionally.
[The provisionality of our understanding of Scripture is not a function of its human element but
of its divine origin. It is precisely because the Bible is Gods Word that we will always have
adequate yet provisional knowledge of it.]
Itll be best to assess the book by considering a set of answers from Enns to three questions: Is
our interpretation of the Bible provisional? Is the Bible unique? And finally, and most
importantly, Is the Bible objective? These are among the central questions the author himself
raises. My argument in this review is that in his answers to such questions Professor Enns has not
gone too far as he occasionally fears, perhaps but that he has not gone far enough. The book
is troubling not because of the profundity of the treatment but rather because of its superficiality.
[I never claimed to be profound, but rather stating the obvious.] We shall find that Ennss
answers to each of these questions take him farther and farther away from being able to maintain
an orthodox doctrine of Scripture [As long as Helms own cultural blind spots are allowed to
determine what orthodoxy is, yes, then I am (quite happily) moving away from such an
understanding of a Scripture where its historical location is evidently such a problem.].
Is our interpretation of the Bible provisional?
Enns claims that our interpretation of the entire Bible is provisional. [I fear Helm is equating
provisional with wholly baseless, or completely unsettled. Helm is continuing his peculiar
reading of my book.]
But if even the Bible is a cultural phenomenon through and through, we should not be surprised
to see that our own theological thinking is wrapped in cultural clothing as well. This is why
every generation of Christians in every cultural context must seek to see how God is speaking to
them in and though Scripture. (67)
To hear that Our interpretation of the Bible is provisional is potentially unsettling and
destabilising to any sincere believer. [Only to those wedded to a modernist framework. It is a
great comfort to those to whom the book is directed. As the history of the church shows, biblical
interpretation is developingnot the gospel, but biblical interpretation. And I am a bit confused
as to how Helm can quibble with me for saying every generation of Christians in every cultural
context must seek to see how God is speaking to them in and though Scripture"!?] For it seems
that if our interpretation of Scripture is provisional it may be replaced, like a provisional driving
licence [sic] is replaced by the permanent version. The teaching we have presently distilled from
it is merely a first go. Of course this is monstrous. [A first go?! Does Helm really think I am
saying this?! This is bordering on willful distortion. It is at least incendiary rhetoric.] If we think
of the Bible on the analogy of a spiders web, then naturally there are many problems of

interpretation on its periphery, and that fact is of some importance. Nevertheless, on the central
matters, the heart of the web, the teaching of the Bible is clear. On the deity of Christ, say, or the
Trinity, or the penal character of Christs death, or election and predestination, or salvation by
grace through faith, it is just madness to suppose that our confession of the Bible has a
provisional quality to it. (168) [We are clearly talking past each other. Does Helm honestly think
that I think that my book calls into the question the fundamental truths of the gospel!? Is he
resorting here to the divisive rhetoric, or has Helms philosophical expertise so shielded him
from Scripture that he cannot see how an honest assessment of the evidence renders his
comments empty and even irresponsible?]
Enns says that if we understand the biases of Scripture, for example, the fact that the Old
Testament has an ancient Near Eastern setting, this in itself will raise the question of the
normativity of the Old Testament. (67) [No. What I am saying is that the ANE setting of Israels
law, for example, DOES raise the issue of normatively for many readers of Scripture. That
setting is beyond question and more than just window dressing, but it does NOT mean that the
OT is non-normative.] While one appreciates that, as an Old Testament specialist, Enns gives
its study pride of place, surely this suggestion is inept. For the Christian what raises and should
settle the question of the normativity of the Old Testament is the New Testament. [This skirts
the difficult hermeneutical issue of how the NT uses the OT, but my suspicion is that Helm and I
will disagree there as well and for the same reasons he has raised thus far.] The New Testament
treats it as the Word of God, and shows at the same time that many though not all of its
provisions are superseded in Christ. [Again, does Helm actually believe I am denying this?! I am
not following the logic of Helms point.]
What is maddening about Ennss free use of such terms as provisional, unique, bias, and
objectivity is that each of them has multiple meanings, and the author does little to separate
these from each other. Thus there is another sense of provisional, meaning incomplete, in
which it is obvious that the teaching of the Bible is provisional. It tells us so itself: there are
many things that at present we cannot bear, one day we shall know even as we are known for
at present we know in part, and so on. Because this incompleteness is clearly upheld by
Scripture it is much less unsettling, indeed not unsettling at all, but rather to be expected. But the
authors use of provisional makes the stronger claim, and should be rejected. Enns seems be
totally unaware of such ambiguities. He certainly does not identify them and so does nothing to
clear up sources of possible confusion. To put the point mildly, this is somewhat irresponsible. [It
is at this point where I question Helms or the editors decision to publish this review. I have no
problem at all with Helm or anyone disagreeing with me, but I&I, as much as it is aimed at lay
readers, seems to be outside of Helms area of familiarity. Moreover, certainly ALL words have
multiple meanings, including the very unhelpful wording of much of Helms review, e.g.,
normativity in the previous paragraph. Helm seems totally unaware of the ambiguities of the
notion of biblical normativity. Does he mean legal, narratival, sapiential, etc.? Appealing to the
NT certainly settles the matter of the normativity of the OT, for Helm as well as for me, but what
it does not do is tell the reader how the OT is normative. Addressing that issue is one of the
hermeneutical and theological issues I am addressing, but that Helm seems consistently to miss.]
Is the Bible unique?

A similar ambiguity afflicts this question to the one just discussed. The author both denies and
claims that Scripture is unique. [We agree. Scripture is unique because it is of divine origin. It is
not unique because it is somehow isolated from the particulars of history. That is the point of the
incarnational analogy I use.] He draws out parallels between parts of the Old Testament with
ancient Near Eastern documents, and emphasises [sic] the common cultural settings of both. In
these respects the uniqueness of the Old Testament is diminished. But there is nothing new here,
except the emphasis that Enns gives to these facts, and his failure to tell us what he means by
uniqueness. Is the Eiffel Tower unique? There is Blackpool Tower, and there was the Tower of
Babel. So the Eiffel Tower cannot be unique in being a tower, for there are and have been many
towers. But it is unique in being the Eiffel Tower, for it has features, important and significant
features, such as its design and location, which it alone has, perhaps which it alone could have.
You get the point. [Actually, I dont.] To deny or affirm the uniqueness of something is to make a
very weak claim, until we are clear in what precise respect it is claimed to be unique. It could
then amount to a very radical claim.
Is Scripture unique? Is it absolutely unique(56)? The Christian answer is that it is in certain
important respects unique: in one all-important respect absolutely so. It is fair to say that
Professor Enns wishes to make a distinction between these two senses. Yet what makes for
uniqueness? He says, for example, Exodus 21.2 is the preamble to the Ten Commandments and
lays out the reason why should be faithful to God.God acted in history to bring the Israelites
out of Egypt .(57, Ennss emphasis) The uniqueness of the Decalogue is not its ethical content,
which can be replicated from ancient Near Eastern sources (though one might think to doubt this
in the case of the first two commandments [Good point. I agree.]), but rather that it expressed the
moral demands of God to the newly-freed nation. Much more than that, presumably, given the
dominical and apostolic teaching about the law. Later Enns makes the stronger claim that
Scriptures uniqueness is seen not in holding human cultures at arms length, but in the belief
that Scripture is the only book in which God speaks incarnately.(168) But can we be sure what
God says? [I am not at all sure what conclusion Helm is coming to in this paragraph, but I am
making much more than a claim out of thin air. I am dealing with data. It would have been
refreshing to see Helm do likewise.].
Is the Bible objective?
So far we have noted that for Enns interpretations are always provisional and yet the Bible is
unique, in being the only place where God speaks to us. In addition Enns takes pains to highlight
the presence of bias in the Bible. Does the Bible consist of facts only, or of facts and
interpretations of those facts? Suppose that it does consists of facts and interpretations. [It seems
that Helm is denying the multiple interpretations of the same historical events such as we find in
the OT and NT synoptic texts. ] Which raises the question, If the Bible states facts and provides
interpretations of them, are these statements and interpretations objectively true? Objectivity,
according to Enns, is complete freedom from bias. Good historiography is necessarily biased
since it shapes the facts, it changes their shape, giving them shape from a particular standpoint
where before they had none.

In fact and this is getting to the heart of the matter in the strict sense of the word there really
is no such thing as objective historiography. Rather, all attempts to communicate the significance
of historical events are shaped according to the historians purpose. (66)
However, what according to Enns counts as bias is based on criteria which are themselves far
from obvious. [Not clear what Helm means here, and he doesnt explain this.] Further, while he
fleetingly claims that a statement can be true though not objective, he appears to think that
having an axe to grind necessarily implies falsity. This wholly neglects both the possibility that
the bias may be the true bias and that in any case the account provided by the axe-grinder may
nevertheless be true. [I say the opposite of what Helm says I say (i.e., I agree the biblical portrait
of God and reality, although varied, is nevertheless true while also being biased.). I wonder
how Helm explains the synoptic problem.] If we suppose that the human authors of Scripture are
the voice of God, that he speaks to us through them, then the bias is not only their bias, it is
His as well. [Absolutely. I agree.] And if among the biases of Scripture is the teaching that God
is unwaveringly truthful, and if we accept that bias, then we are led to reject the following
woeful argument [Does Helm think I am making the following argument?!?]
(i) Everything, including the text of Scripture, is written from a biased standpoint
(ii) Whatever is written from a biased standpoint is false, or only true in part,
(iii) Therefore, the texts of Scripture are false, or only true in part. [Defining false and true
would be helpful. Moreover, this is Helms synopsis of my argument, not mine. I find it
distracting and irrelevant.]
But in the case of Scripture it is better to avoid the language of bias altogether, even if we
carefully qualify it, since it is so patently misleading. It is a fact that a man hung on a cross. But
the significance of what was going on when he hung there that God was in Christ reconciling
the world, shall we say is an interpretation. [Why the easy example? How about Chronicles and
Kings (which I patiently lay out in I&I)? Or the theological agenda of Genesis 1 in its ANE
context? Unfiortunately, Helms reasoning process here supports the need for books like I&I.]
Since Christians confess that this is a God-given interpretation it is utterly free from bias, utterly
objective, since God himself is utterly without bias. [What an odd thing to say, seeing that the
Word that God himself inspired records varied interpretations of events. Is Helm indirectly
denying the inspiration of Scripture by saying that God is utterly free from bias when we see
the biases of biblical authors through and through? Helms only recourse, given this unbiblical
philosophical starting point, is to argue (which he in this review at least neglects to do) that the
biblical authors cannot exhibit biasi.e., cannot be humanthat their humanity is somehow
bypassed in the inspirational process.] But by his appeal to the universal presence of axegrinding bias Enns has painted himself into a corner, as we shall now see.
Fideism?
At frequent intervals throughout Inspiration and Incarnation Enns makes an appeal to Christ and
to inspired Scripture in order to ground his allegiance to the status of the Bible as the Word of
God. Jesus is must be both God and human. (17) The founder of the Christian community

was God with us, worker of miracles and sins atonement, whom God vindicated by raising
from the dead. (152) It is Gods word because it is. To be able to confess that the Bible is Gods
Word is the gift of faith. (66) Many evangelical instincts are correct and should be maintained,
for example, the conviction that the Bible is ultimately from God and that it is Gods gift to the
church. (13-4)
Is Enns here echoing Packer and Warfield? Unfortunately not. [I wasnt really trying to.] For
given the terms of his argument it is far from clear that such claims are able to ground anything.
The claims cannot be satisfactorily based on evidence, [Evidence? What does this mean?]
because (by his own arguments) all evidence is biased and provisional. So at the best the claims
that Enns makes for Scripture are provisional. According to the argument presented in
Inspiration and Incarnation our interpretation of Christ, [What does this mean?] orthodox or
otherwise, is subject to the partiality and provisionality that afflicts all our interpretations of
Scripture. If the Bibles portrayal of Jesus is culturally clothed so as to be biased, and our
interpretation of that portrayal is also culturally clothed, and so biased, partial and provisional,
how can we be sure that we ever gain access to the data to provide evidence to make such
confident Christian claims as Enns makes? The very idea of objective evidence on which the
Churchs conviction that Scripture is the Word of God is based vanishes into thin air. [What is
missing in all this rhetoric? The work of the Holy Spirit in guiding the church in all truth even if
it progresses in its understanding of that truth. Perhaps a tidy philosophical system has no room
for the active work of the HS in the churchs ongoing theological task.]
The conclusion to which one is driven is that Ennss Christian intuitions are only possible by
willing them to be true, not only without any evidence to support them but in the face of what
Enns takes to be the evidence against them. By a leap of faith we fight ourselves free of the
cultural bias that otherwise envelopes us. We see now that Ennss problems have little or nothing
to do with the discoveries and claims of Old Testament scholarship. Instead, they are due to two
basic failures. A failure in theological method, that of starting from difficulties instead of from
dogma. [I thought dogma was derived from reading Scripture. But again, I am not in any way
denying the dogmatic heart Helm is so energized to protect: the inspiration of Scripture.] And a
failure in epistemology, a commitment to the idea of universal cultural bias that makes
objectivity and finality about our faith impossible.
Let me say in closing that I respect Helm as a philosopher, but I do not think he was a good
choice to review I&I. Apart from some of the unfortunate rhetoric of the review (which will not
further discussion), Helm seems to be quite unfamiliar with biblical scholarship and the
challenges that stem from it. He, therefore, is limited in his perspective and so assesses I&I on
the basis of categories that are neither helpful nor relevant. I will repeat, however, that a
philosophical perspective (while also being well-informed of issues of biblical studies) would be
an extremely helpful dimension in working through perennial issues. Unfortunately, however,
reviews like this one will not contribute toward that end and will only exacerbate
misunderstanding.