Sometime ago now Westminster Theological Seminary suspended
Peter Enns, one of its OT faculty members. I was especially interested that the Christianity Today report opened with the following sentence:
“Two of the hottest issues in evangelical theology right now are the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament and evangelical textual criticism.” (Ted Olsen,
‘Westminster Theological Seminary Suspends Peter Enns’)
It is great that our blog is one of the two hottest issues in evangelical theology; but unfortunately I couldn’t detect much interest in textual criticism in Enn’s book
Inspiration and Incarnation (2005); or in the debates initiated by it, for an introduction to these see e.g.
Green Baggins and
Digital Brandon.
Now, however, WTS have released some of the
internal faculty documents (debating papers), which are quite helpful in clarifying (some of) the issues that have divided their faculty. At a fairly basic level this reflects an important debate about the role of the phenomena of Scripture in clarifying and modifying a doctrine of Scripture derived initially from Scripture’s direct self-testimony; with a predictable division between the biblical scholars (‘yes the phenomena are really important’ - see the Hermeneutics Field Committee’s Reply to the HTFC, pp. 28-97) and the systematicians (‘phenomena? ha! they didn’t pose a problem in the 17th century so why worry about them now?’).
But in this document we also have some discussion of textual criticism, as illustrating the principle that reformed theologians have had to adjust to the changes in the realia since the 17th century, and that Warfield in particular was at the heart of various theological adjustments in the light of hard evidence - in one case regarding the Long Ending of Mark (Hermeneutics Field Committee’s Reply to the HTFC, pp. 50-52).
