“The Bible Tells Me So”

I’ve blogged many times before about the dangerous, unorthodox, and heretical teachings of theologian Dr. Peter Enns, and I wrote a book review of his book The Evolution of Adam. Well, sadly, Dr. Enns has published a destructive new book called The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It.

In this book, Enns takes a very low view of Scripture. He denies the historicity of the Old and New Testaments, denies prophecy and miracles, and claims that when Jesus and Paul treated the Old Testament as history they were simply wrong. He basically discards everything in Scripture that he doesn’t like and yet still claims that Jesus was who He claimed to be. But how can we trust that Jesus really lived, died, and rose again if we can’t trust the Book that tells us that this is what happened?

One of our talented writers, Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell, recently wrote an excellent review of this destructive book:

Dr. Enns has taken the theistic evolution compromise to its next logical step. Unlike some compromisers, he doesn’t believe the Bible teaches either evolution or millions of years. But, at least partly because he believes those unbiblical teachings are undeniably true, he has convinced himself that the Bible is a collection of backdated stories designed to give the nation of Israel a history like other nations, and that God somehow used those stories to tell the tale of Christ. This would clearly make out both Jesus Christ—who spoke of numerous Old Testament events as if they were factual—and the New Testament writers who did likewise to be liars, deceivers, or at best ignorant. But Dr. Enns conveniently relieves Jesus and the New Testament writers of the guilt of presenting their subterfuge or misinformation as revelation from God by claiming that Jesus and Paul were merely communicating within the cultural tradition of their time.

I encourage you to read the rest of Dr. Mitchell’s helpful critique. As Christians, we need to guard ourselves against the false teaching of people like Peter Enns, who are doing great damage to the church. We also need to remember to pray that compromising Christians like Peter Enns will repent and trust in God’s infallible world.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,

Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.