Peter Enns

“What is so helpful about the incarnational analogy is that it really orients one to see that the Bible’s ‘situatedness’ is not a lamentable or embarrassing situation, but a positive one.”

Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation¹

Overview

Peter Enns (b. 1961) is an American Old Testament scholar whose 2005 book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament provoked a controversy at Westminster Theological Seminary that ended in his departure from the faculty in 2008.² The book proposed an “incarnational analogy” for the nature of Scripture: as Christ is fully God and fully man, Enns argued, the Bible is fully divine and fully human, and evangelical theology had not adequately reckoned with its human, historically situated side.³ Reformed evangelical scholars have written detailed responses arguing that it fails to account adequately for Scripture’s divine authorship.⁴

Life and Ministry

Enns was born January 2, 1961, in Passaic, New Jersey, to German-American immigrant parents.² He earned a B.A. from Messiah College (1982), an M.Div. from Westminster Theological Seminary (1989), and an M.A. (1993) and Ph.D. (1994) in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University.² He joined Westminster’s Old Testament faculty in 1994, was granted tenure in 2000, and was promoted to full professor in 2005; he also served as Associate Academic Dean from 1998 to 2001 and edited the Westminster Theological Journal from 2000 to 2005.²

The publication of Inspiration and Incarnation in 2005 led Westminster’s president, Peter Lillback, to open a faculty review of the book’s conformity to the seminary’s confessional standards.² Two internal committees produced competing reports, and the faculty itself voted 12-8 that the book was consistent with the seminary’s confession, but the Board of Trustees voted 18-9 on March 26, 2008 to suspend Enns.² By August 1, 2008, Enns and the seminary had agreed to part ways; nine trustees resigned in the aftermath of the vote.² Enns has since taught biblical studies at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania, where he holds the Abram S. Clemens professorship.²

Theological Contribution

The incarnational analogy

Enns states that his purpose in Inspiration and Incarnation was “to bring an evangelical doctrine of Scripture into conversation with the implications generated by some important themes in modern biblical scholarship,” particularly regarding the Old Testament, over the previous 150 years.⁵ He organizes the book around three lines of evidence: the Old Testament’s affinities with other ancient Near Eastern literature, such as the Babylonian creation and flood accounts; theological diversity within the Old Testament itself, such as between Chronicles and Samuel-Kings or within the wisdom literature; and the way New Testament authors handle Old Testament texts.⁶

Enns grounds his proposal in Chalcedonian Christology. Just as “Jesus is both God and human at the same time. He is not half-God and half-human. He is not sometimes one and sometimes the other. He is not essentially one and only apparently the other,”⁷ so, Enns argues, Scripture is both fully divine and fully human. A doctrine of Scripture that minimizes its human, historically situated character risks what he calls a scriptural Docetism: “What some ancient Christians were saying about Christ, the Docetic heresy, is similar to the mistake that other Christians have made about Scripture: it comes from God, and the marks of its humanity are only apparent, to be explained away.”⁸

On the theological diversity within the Old Testament, Enns argues that Scripture’s unity should be sought not by smoothing over such tensions but by reading the whole in light of Christ: “Christ is supreme, and it is in him, the embodied in word, that the written Word ultimately finds its unity. Christ is the final destiny of Israel’s story, and it is to him that the Bible as a whole bears witness.”⁹ He extends the same principle to how the New Testament authors read the Old Testament, arguing that they read it “christotelically” rather than according to each passage’s original context and intention: “To read the Old Testament ‘christotelically’ is to read it already knowing that Christ is somehow the end to which the Old Testament story is heading.”¹⁰

Later work

Enns has continued to develop the argument of Inspiration and Incarnation in books aimed at a broader audience. The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins (2012) questions whether Adam should be read as a historical individual. The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It (2014) and The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our “Correct” Beliefs (2016) extend his earlier argument toward a broader critique of doctrinal certainty, and How the Bible Actually Works (2019) argues that Scripture’s ambiguity and diversity are meant to produce wisdom rather than settled answers.² Enns served for several years as a senior fellow of biblical studies with the BioLogos Foundation, an organization promoting the integration of evolutionary science and Christian faith, and since 2017 has co-hosted the Bible for Normal People podcast with Jared Byas.²

Historical Significance

Inspiration and Incarnation drew published critical responses from several Reformed evangelical scholars. Gregory K. Beale published a lengthy review article in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society disputing Enns’s handling of the Old Testament’s relationship to other ancient Near Eastern literature, and James W. Scott answered Enns directly in a two-part article in the Westminster Theological Journal.¹¹ John Thomas English III’s dissertation on the trinitarian authority of Scripture devotes an entire chapter section to Enns’s incarnational analogy before concluding that Enns and a similar proposal by Kenton Sparks are “correct to assert that the Bible is authored by humans,” but “fail to consider properly divine authorship, particularly the authorship of the Son.”⁴

The Board of Trustees’ 18-9 vote to suspend Enns was followed by nine trustees resigning.² Since leaving Westminster, Enns has continued to develop his account of Scripture’s humanity in directions further from confessional evangelicalism, including questioning Adam’s historicity and, through his BioLogos fellowship, affirming evolutionary human origins.²

Related Doctrines

References

Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 20, quoted in English, “Thus Says the Lord,” 69-70. ↩
“Peter Enns,” Wikipedia, accessed September 2026; the Theopedia Library holds no dedicated biographical source for Enns, and Westminster Theological Seminary’s own 2008 statements on the controversy were unreachable from this session. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²
John Thomas English III, “The Begottenness and Incarnation of the Son and the Authority of Scripture,” in “Thus Says the Lord: A Trinitarian Account of the Authority of Scripture” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014), 67, summarizing Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 17. ↩
English, “Thus Says the Lord,” chap. 6, “Theological and Pastoral Implications of a Trinitarian Account of Biblical Authority,” 185-86. ↩ ↩²
Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 13, quoted in English, “Thus Says the Lord,” 67. ↩
English, “Thus Says the Lord,” 69-74, summarizing Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, chaps. 1-3. ↩
Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 17, quoted in English, “Thus Says the Lord,” 68-69. ↩
Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 18, quoted in English, “Thus Says the Lord,” 69. ↩
Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 109-10, quoted in English, “Thus Says the Lord,” 73-74. ↩
Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 154, quoted in English, “Thus Says the Lord,” 74. ↩
English, “Thus Says the Lord,” 67n5, citing Gregory K. Beale, “Myth, History, and Inspiration: A Review Article of Inspiration and Incarnation by Peter Enns,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 49, no. 2 (June 2006): 287-312; and James W. Scott, “The Inspiration and Interpretation of God’s Word, with Special Reference to Peter Enns,” Parts 1 and 2, Westminster Theological Journal 71 (2009): 129-83, 247-79. ↩