Now for it. Here is my review of Gary Johnson’s article.
Gary Johnson starts off his article with a discussion of the purpose of polemics, using the Wesley/Toplady debates, as well as the example of John Calvin, as a starting point. His conclusion about this issue is that “the purpose of polemics is not argument for argument’s sake, but the critical evaluation of truth claims” (pg. 197). A second, vitally important concern is brought out shortly thereafter: “Polemical theology serves a noble and important role only when doctrine is highly valued” (ibid.). The reason this is important is that oftentimes in our current theological climate, the heat of polemics tends to be downplayed in its importance by the cold-blooded theological majority. All this is to set up a defense of Warfield’s polemics against Briggs, which Johnson views as necessary to the defense of the truth at that time. As Warfield points out (quoted by Johnson), “There are, regrettably, those in our midst who fear controversy more than error” (pg. 198, quoted from Warfield’s Shorter Writings, 2:216).
The next section of the article deals with Warfield’s polemics against C.A. Briggs. Briggs held to a “limited inerrancy” view, which refused biblical inerrancy to fields such as history, geography, and other subjects (!), but maintained that the Bible was authoritative for faith and practice (pg. 199, quoting James T. Dennison, Jr., The Letters of Geerhardus Vos, pp. 33-34). I am not going to relate all the details of the Briggs trial that Johnson so carefully documents. However, I will quote rather extensively from the Briggs quotation on pg. 205, which I deem of crucial importance today:
No one who has studied through the literature of Christology can do other than say that the researches of recent scholars have put the whole subject in such new lights that the writings of the older scholars have become for the most part antiquated. There are doubtless many still living who are unwilling to accept any theological opinions which have not been stamped with the approval of the antiquarians. For such the author does not write. The readers he desires are the open-minded and truth-loving, who would see the Christ as the apostles saw him, and who will not be restrained from the heavenly vision by the pretended perils of the Higher Criticism and of Biblical Theology, or by the supposed safer paths of traditional and ecclesiastical theology…The author has done his best to turn away from the Christ of the theologians and of the creeds and of the church, and to see the Messiah as he is set forth in the writings of the apostles. (from The Messiah of the Apostles, pg. ii).
As Johnson notes (ibid.), Briggs here completely rejects systematic theology in favor of biblical theology. I wonder how many of Briggs’s disciples today would react to this quotation from the great Geerhardus Vos:
The fact is that Biblical Theology just as much as Systematic Theology makes the material undergo a transformation. The sole difference is in the principle on which the transformation is conducted. In the case of Biblical Theology this is historical, in the case of Systematic Theology it is of a logical nature. Each of these two in necessary, and there is no occasion for a sense of superiority in either. (Biblical Theology, pg. 14, emphasis mine).
A close look at Vos’s incredibly helpful article on the covenant in Reformed theology (see Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation, pp. 234-267) will reveal that Vos was quite conversant in all of the scholastic Reformed theologians, and indeed viewed them as bread and butter for theological reflection. More importantly, he viewed their contribution to systematic theology as exercising an incredibly important impact on his conduction of biblical theology. This attitude towards systematic theology is almost completely lacking in most biblical theology done today. Instead, we see a complete bifurcation between the wrongly so-called “scholastic rationalization” of the 17th century Reformed authors (in particular) and a more “biblical” theology that is exegetical. Briggs would certainly have approved of this development in “Reformed” theology.
After briefly noting Warfield’s contempt for dispensationalism and the wild-eyed, but hermeneutically naïve systematics of various authors from that tradition, Johnson proceeds to draw some relevant applications of Warfield’s polemic for various contemporary issues. He takes aim at Sandlin, Franke, and Armstrong. However, I want to focus the rest of this review on Johnson’s critique of Peter Enns, a professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary, who has written a book entitled Inspiration and Incarnation. This is an extremely difficult thing for me to write about, since I had Enns as a professor, learned a lot from him, and consider him a friend. Nevertheless, the concerns which Johnson has of the book are concerns that entered my mind as I was reading Enns’ book. Especially important are the qualifications that Warfield puts on the incarnational analogy itself (see pp. 229-230), the problems inherent in making the dependability of the Bible dependent on other ancient sources outside the Bible (which is not something Van Til would have approved of: see pg. 226), and the problem of using the term “myth” to describe the Bible. On the latter point, it might have been nice to see a more explicit address of the question of historicity, especially given Enns’ definition of myth as “an ancient, premodern, prescientific way of addressing questions of ultimate origins and meaning in the form of stories: Who are we? Where do we come from?” (pg. 40 of Inspiration and Incarnation). In the context of this definition, Enns rejects the idea that myth, if it is to be used at all in the description of Genesis, is to be equated with “’untrue,’ ‘made-up,’ ‘storybook’” (ibid). However, Enns did not help himself by including the word “simply” in the sentence mentioned, as it would seem to imply that it is possible legitimately to include those three pejorative words, and yet still get at something deeper. Enns also shot himself in the foot on the next page, where he has this off-hand comment that would seem to contradict his earlier statement: “So, stories were made up that aimed at answering questions of ultimate meaning” (pg. 41). He rejected “made-up,” apparently, on pg. 40, and yet embraces the word on page 41. Then, in the next paragraph, he shifts back to the definition of myth as a prescientific story (definition of story would be nice here!) of origin. This is not pure nit-picking here. The question is this: are there errors or not in the Bible? Is Genesis, for instance, a made-up story of origin, or did it actually happen? This question is not assuming a modern scientific mindset in and of itself, since ancient people did in fact concern themselves with what actually happened. The continual recitation of the Exodus events ought to be proof enough of this. I am not asking the question of whether Genesis tells a scientific story, but whether Genesis tells a factual story.
Another important question is this: is Enns’ idea of “limitation” equivalent to Briggs’ idea that the Bible is fallible? What does Enns mean by “limitation?” He seems to advocate that the Bible readers were culturally limited in the sense that God made sure that His words spoke to the culture of that time. Is this equivalent to saying that the Bible is wrong in places? Since this would be a good discussion point, I will not answer the question.
Posted by Lane Keister
Green Baggins 