Hans Madueme is assistant professor of theological studies at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, and Themelios book review editor for systematic theology and bioethics. He recently completed his thesis, “The Evolution of Sin: Sin, Theistic Evolution, and the Biological Question—A Theological Account” (PhD diss., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2012).

The gist of this new book by Peter Enns is that evangelicals should revise their expectations of Genesis and Paul—with reference to Adam and the fall—in order to relieve perceived tensions between Christianity and evolution.1 This thesis turns out to be controversial.

On the one hand are evangelicals who disagree with Enns and judge his basic argument a capitulation to modern science. If Enns is right, then present-day conservative evangelicals are wrong, the early twentieth-century fundamentalists were wrong, pre-nineteenth-century Protestant Christianity was wrong, the post-Reformation scholastic tradition was wrong, the Reformers were wrong, and the entire medieval and patristic tradition was wrong. And why? Because Darwinian natural science and the biblical criticism that emerged with the rise of historical consciousness in the eighteenth/nineteenth century are right.

On the other hand, those sympathetic with Enns are worried that old bugaboos like inerrancy are tearing apart the evangelical movement and bringing unnecessary disrepute to the Christian faith. This also places an unbearable strain on younger evangelicals who seek to cultivate the best Christian minds as they follow Christ: Are they to play the ostrich, bury their heads in the sand and deny what every sane, intelligent person believes in the twenty-first century?

That is the situation—alas—and Enns is brave enough to begin a conversation (p. 112). Taking him up on this, this brief reflection offers a perspective on why many Protestants, myself included, have significant reservations about his arguments. I shall simply assume that readers have already read the book; specific details of Enns’s argument can be found in other reviews (e.g., see countless print, online and blog reviews). 2 Better yet, read the book for yourself. It is well-written, accessible, and provocative. My main purpose is to dialogue with Enns from my location as a Reformed systematic theologian. Like Enns, these reflections “are an outworking of my own Christian convictions” (p. xii, with italics); I have good friends who disagree with some of the claims I make here. Further, this review is not comprehensive since there are vital matters I do not touch on—not even to wave as I drive by.3 Instead, (1) I begin with initial observations before broaching a few areas worthy of discussion: (2) the doctrine of Scripture, (3) natural science and historical criticism, (4) further theological concerns, (5) a methodological aside, and (6) concluding thoughts.

1. Preliminary Remarks

Ever since 1859, when Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species, Christians from across the theological spectrum have been retelling the doctrine of the fall, some explicitly rejecting relevant aspects of evolutionary theory, others consciously embracing them. In The Evolution of Adam, Enns offers a creative and provocative argument in the latter category.4 If the mainstream theory of evolution is true—an assumption he makes in the introduction (p. x) and throughout—then his proposal ranks easily as one of the strongest on offer. Enns sees clearly the niggling problems in many evangelical and non-evangelical attempts at reconciling the scientific and theological data, and he pushes for a more compelling solution.

This book is a sequel to Inspiration and Incarnation, another controversial volume that was part of the reason Enns left Westminster Theological Seminary.5 My own view is that WTS was right to part ways with Enns, a move that perhaps should have been made years earlier. But I sometimes wonder if, in the broader evangelical debate, Enns has unfairly become the fall guy. In my experience, a fair number of evangelical biblical scholars, socialized in the same guild, share many of Enns’s methodological commitments (it is not always clear why they would have strong disagreements with the ideas expressed in his latest book). Who knows how many evangelical scholars—both young and old—are privately sympathetic to Enns’s ideas but too afraid to come out of the closet? In other words, to what extent do Enns’s proposals actually point to broader questions within the state of evangelical biblical scholarship today?6 These are tough questions.

As we tend to do in reviews like this, I will belabor areas of disagreement—but not because there is nothing I agree with! To pick three at random: I think Enns is right when he argues that Gen 2:17 refers to spiritual and physical death (p. 67); I am sympathetic to his criticism of attempts to interpret Adam as a federal head of a society of hominids (p. 120);7 and I am grateful when he acknowledges that the book’s conclusions flow out of his own “Christian convictions” (p. xii). This latter point applies to everyone who is part of this conversation—if ever there was a place where theology is autobiographical, this is it.

Given that most non-evangelical scholars have learned to live without a historical Adam, it is worth asking why Enns’s book is so controversial. Is this not all so passé? Enns is a self-professed evangelical inerrantist, former WTS professor, and past editor of the Westminster Theological Journal (among other things). One reason for the book’s lively reception is this: conservative evangelicals typically insist on the inerrancy of Scripture; they often reject aspects of mainstream science; and they have tended in the academic context to develop different concordist approaches to dealing with apparent conflicts between science and theology with special reference to the early chapters of Genesis (some more persuasive than others). 8 Their liberal counterparts typically reject inerrancy and all its theological accoutrements; they embrace the scientific consensus; and they adapt their theology accordingly. In the debate about Adam, Enns is distinctive because he simply cuts the Gordian knot: we can remain fully committed to inerrancy but revise what we think Genesis and Paul are telling us about Adam. 9 Here we have a professed inerrantist (unlike classical liberals) who rejects concordism (unlike classical conservatives) and simply bites the bullet (by denying a historical Adam). As Enns concedes, most of what he is arguing is not new. What is new—and controversial—is that Enns defends his position as fully consistent with inerrancy and evangelicalism at its best.

This last point is a clue to the wider academic and cultural significance of Enns’s recent work. People usually assume that fundamentalists are anti-intellectualist and harbor a profound distrust of modern scholarship (not least the scientific disciplines), whereas genuine evangelicals affirm that all truth is God’s truth and the pursuit of true learning is the enduring privilege of bearers of the imago Dei. 10 For many younger evangelical scholars especially, it is precisely here that Enns emerges as the internal whistleblower. Having spent most of his professional life within its institutions, he exposes much of academic evangelicalism as a sham, a betrayal of the authentic evangelical heritage—beware the false advertising; that evangelicalism is fundamentalism after all. 11 In short, the debate over the historical Adam for many has become a test case for the abject failure of conservative evangelicalism. That is why a growing number of evangelicals find Enns and his project so compelling. There is no need for spooks or conspiracy theories here: these are scholars who were raised as evangelicals; they self-identify as evangelicals; but they are seeking a better, bigger, broader vision than the perceived ideological myopia of conservative evangelicalism, a vision genuinely open to pursuing truth critically by engaging the best of modern learning.12

2. The Doctrine of Scripture

In response to the charge that Enns abandons any viable notion of biblical authority in order to keep up with the Joneses of modern science, he might respond by distinguishing “inerrancy” and “hermeneutics.” Such evangelicals think that Enns has abandoned biblical authority, but they are confusing their faulty interpretations of Scripture with inerrant Scripture itself; if they come around to sound biblical exegesis, then they’ll see that inerrancy was never at stake. That response, or something like it, is very common among evangelical theologians debating controversial topics in science and theology. Enns is no exception, for he marshals the inerrancy-vs.-hermeneutics distinction, implicitly or explicitly, throughout the book. And no doubt it is a distinction worth making. Surely there are many exuberant lay Christians all over the world who need to meditate on such things. Thus Enns reminds the reader in his first thesis in the conclusion: “Literalism is not an option” (p. 137). He cites Augustine on how naive Christians should avoid making idiots of themselves by pitting the Bible against well-established cosmological views. “As this quote [from Augustine] indicates,” Enns remarks, “literalism can lead thoughtful, informed people to reject any semblance of the Christian faith” (p. 138).

Fair enough, but there is perhaps more to be said. First, while many scholars love quoting Augustine here, his words were not a hermeneutical manifesto for aborting any Christian convictions that seem ridiculous to non-Christian minds. It all depends. For example, what is the conviction on view, and how central is it to the gospel narrative of Scripture? After all, Augustine held all sorts of views that would have been considered “literalistic” and “ridiculous” by his contemporaries.13 Second, evangelical scholars and informed lay people already affirm the distinction between inerrancy and hermeneutics. To obsess about this distinction is to strangle a truism to death (everyone already thinks they have legitimate exegesis on their side). Indeed, it becomes a proxy for something else, namely, when you are more theologically conservative than me, it’s my way of telling you that I disagree with your views and find them too literalistic. The distinction is a rhetorical way to marginalize other views that are more conservative than mine. In the debate about Adam, there’s no problem with thinking others are wrong, but far better to demonstrate it than to assume it. In my view, beating the drum against “literalism” usually does not advance the conversation.

The book has a distinctive perspective on the doctrine of accommodation (revisiting earlier themes from Inspiration and Incarnation). 14 Enns argues that our doctrine of inspiration should be developed phenomenologically (bottom-up) not dogmatically (top-down). He concludes that God inspired errors in Scripture:

But when we allow the Bible to lead us in our thinking on inspiration, we are compelled to leave room for the ancient writers to reflect and even incorporate their ancient, mistaken cosmologies into their scriptural reflections. (p. 95)

[T]he scientific evidence we have for human origins and the literary evidence we have for the nature of ancient stories of origins are so overwhelmingly persuasive that belief in a first human, such as Paul understood him, is not a viable option. (p. 122)

On the question of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, Enns recognizes the christological implications when he concedes that even though Jesus is the incarnate Son of God we should not think that John 5:46–47 is decisive: “Rather, Jesus here reflects the tradition that he himself inherited as a first-century Jew and that his hearers assumed to be the case” (p. 153n19). In other words, even Jesus held many views given to us in Scripture that may have been mistaken.

For the record, the classical Reformation doctrine of accommodation denies that God could ever inspire genuine errors in Scripture. By the eighteenth century, a Socinian, rationalistic, and historical-critical view of accommodation emerged that justified real errors in the Bible. 15 Enns’s position is consistent with the latter, not the former. Setting this aside, what about his substantive point?16 These are hardly new questions, and I happily acknowledge the difficulties here. But I must confess that I cannot see how Enns’s solution offers a better way forward. For example, he claims that Paul was right theologically about Christ’s resurrection and salvation but was wrong historically about Adam and the fall (see ch. 7). How does Enns know this? On what epistemological grounds does he know what part of Scripture is true and what part of Scripture is false? More specifically, how does Enns know that we can trust what Paul says about Christ’s resurrection and salvation? After all, one might argue that there were resurrection myths and beliefs in apotheosis contemporaneous with (and prior to) Jesus and the apostles,17 and the modern consensus today is that people do not rise from the dead— so if Enns is right about accommodation, why would we as modern Christians continue to believe in Paul’s soteriology and Christology? Does his thesis collapse on itself?

Enns acknowledges my concern and offers this explanation: “For Paul, the resurrection of Christ is the central and climactic present-day event in the Jewish drama—and of the world. One could say that Paul was wrong, deluded, stupid, creative, whatever; nevertheless, the resurrection is something that Paul believed to have happened in his time, not primordial time” (p. 125). The idea seems to be this: as long as apostles and prophets speak about things that they themselves experienced as actual events—rather than intellectual traditions about “primordial time” that they inherited—we can believe their testimony to be true. But this seems to be a very slender conceptual reed. How do we know that Paul’s interpretations of his experience are legitimate? How do we know that his first-century plausibility structures do not impinge inescapably on his interpretation? Sure, the NT records over 500 other witnesses (cf. 1 Cor 15:6), but why should we believe them? Thousands of Hindus claim to have seen Lord Shiva, but why should we believe them? Again, to use Enns’s own categories, we know scientifically that people do not rise from the dead, and we know historically that many people in Paul’s day (and before Paul’s day) had ancient resurrection myths—so why should we today believe what Paul thought about Christ and salvation?18 In short, Enns needs to give us more reassurance that, on the terms of his proposal, Paul’s Christology and soteriology are infallible.

Here is my point: I am not sure that Enns has a functional notion of biblical authority. Repeatedly in the book, he reassures us that he has not abandoned a high view of Scripture, but I do not know what he means. Jesus was the Son of God, and, so Enns says, because he was also a first-century man he could make erroneous assertions. But where does that leave us? How can “inerrancy” remain a viable concept on such terms? Scripture is a divine-human book. Enns almost exclusively privileges the human side of the equation. Enns tells us that Paul was wrong about Adam; Jesus was wrong about Moses; there are tensions, perhaps even contradictions, between different parts of the Bible; we should beware the impulse to “unify” inconsistencies in the Bible. And so on. All of these observations privilege the human dimension of Scripture, in part because Enns feels that evangelicals tend to neglect this reality. Maybe so. However, the cumulative effect is that Enns has lost any meaningful notion of divine revelation. Christians believe that Scripture is God’s Word; God is the single divine author of all of Scripture. Enns’s book does not help the reader make sense of such realities. They become problematic, even incomprehensible.19

3. Natural Science and Historical Criticism

Let me come back to Enns’s distinction between primordial time and present-day experience (pp. 125–26). What is really going on here? It seems to me that natural science is obviously in the methodological driving seat. At this point, it is worth noting, in Enns’s defense, that there need be nothing automatically sinister about science indirectly shaping some of our exegetical conclusions. As Christians “adjust” their understanding of the Bible in light of science, it could be that modern interpretations of scientific data are acting as a friend to bring to light previously erroneous readings of Scripture (e.g., the Galileo controversy). That is what Enns thinks he is doing. There is also the possibility, however, that modern interpretations of scientific data are in fact the enemy and are squeezing us into a more and more minimalistic—and mistaken—understanding of biblical authority. I hope I am wrong, but I worry that Enns is going down that path.

Read More (It’s long, but well worth it)

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