Dear Friends,
Step into my study. Shall I fill you a pipe? Pour you a dram? Excellent!
On a recent trip to Florida Dr. Peter Lillback, President of Westminster Theological Seminary, gifted me a beautiful special edition boxed set of two books called Discovering Christ in the Old Testament. It is a collection of two books: Edmund P. Clowney’s The Unfolding Mystery, and a two-in-one compilation of works by Iain M. Duguid: Living In The Gap Between Promise and Reality, and Living in the Grip of Relentless Grace—all told, essentially, Duguid’s treatment of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
They are excellent works. But it was the “Foreword” to this special edition that caught my attention. It is written by Dr. Lillback himself, and it is notable because it is bold reaffirmation of Westminster Seminary’s commitment to a Christ-centered hermeneutic. That may not seem like a very big deal. “Reformed Seminary Believes Whole Bible to be a Christian Book” shouldn’t be a newspaper headline. But, as a matter of fact, it was during Lillback’s early tenure as President that Westminster Seminary had a bitter and divisive controversy over this very question.
And I had a front-row seat to much of what precipitated that crisis. Dr. Peter Enns was an Old Testament professor at Westminster in those days, and his views on the Christological nature of the Hebrew scriptures (or, rather, lack thereof), as well as his rather dubious commitment to biblical inerrancy, was bound to heat things up to the boiling point. And so it did, shortly after my graduation and departure. He wrote a book called Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. Putting his views in print frankly invited the seminary to take action. It was a really ugly affair. Dr. Enns was well-liked by many students and many of his fellow faculty members, and when the Board at last gave him the boot, there was, shall we say, collateral damage. It took the seminary a while to recover. My view at the time was that Peter Enns was, at least outwardly, a smart and really nice guy who also had no business whatsoever teaching at a confessionally Reformed seminary.
The seminary was vindicated, in my mind, because throughout the whole affair Enns’s defense was that his views were perfectly orthodox and within the bounds of the Reformed confessional standards. It seemed like maybe a day or two passed after his departure (I’m exaggerating, but it’s like when Horatio tells Hamlet he came to see his father’s funeral, and Hamlet replies, “I think it was to see my mother’s wedding.” “Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon”) when he decided to tell the world that he didn’t believe Adam and Eve ever existed, and that he openly rejects the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. When you reveal that your “defense” all along was actually in bad faith, whatever sympathies I otherwise might have had (and I didn’t have many) disappear.
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