By Rob Golding
J. Gresham Machen’s epoch-setting work Christianity and Liberalism is worthy of the praise it received last year on the 100th anniversary of its publication. But the book wasn’t as effective as Machen would’ve hoped. Liberal aberrations of Christianity not only live but lurch forward in the current morass of the Western world’s spiritual smorgasbord. If we take a moment to look back upon the road we’ve traveled since Machen’s time, we will learn some essential lessons about being an effective Christian today.
“Unhitch your life from the Old Testament,” “develop a ‘bigger view’ of a God who wants nothing more than to ensure our happiness,” don’t worry about your cross to bear, you can have “your best life now.” What do all these infamous tropes have in common? Why do self-professing Christians who live in open and defiant sin look at you with bewilderment when asked about their profession of faith in the Lord, who told His followers to pluck out their right eye if it causes them to sin? Why does “Christianity” so often look like baptized paganism? Why hasn’t Machen’s project succeeded?
Peter Enns—who was dismissed from the seminary Machen founded—is not the cause of these deformations of American Christianity, but he is the most prominent torch bearer. Modern Christians who desire to keep their way of life intact without losing their Bibles look to him as their scholar and teacher. As the most prominent scholarly defender of this aberrant form of Christianity today, Enns’s project is to “reimagine” the Bible, and his work has largely been successful. The Bible has been reimagined as a self-help book for the down and out, a self-esteem booster for those who find themselves stuck in sin, and an ink-blot test that reveals precisely what we want it to.
How did we get here?
A Reimagined Bible
Enns was originally dismissed from Westminster Theological Seminary for non-Reformed theology that was, nevertheless, still “within the purview of Evangelical thought.” But theology that begins to look askance at God’s Word usually regresses further from orthodoxy. Enns beganby asking good questions about the way New Testament authors seem to use the Old Testament in ways that can be difficult to square with their original contexts. However, he eventually began answering those questions by stating that the Bible is simply a human document filled with inventive imaginations about God. For example, in his book How the Bible Actually Works, Enns discusses the incarnation of Christ this way.
“[The incarnation] is a rather striking reimagining of God and wisdom. By claiming that his logos became flesh, John is taking a familiar idea of his culture and infusing it with new meaning—and for the time, a rather absurd meaning at that. And it still is.” (pp. 204–205).
Here, Enns says that John had an “absurd,” reimagined view of God. In Enns’s view, John did not bear witness to the reality that God became flesh. Rather, he’s merely imagining things or “reimagining” them. And no, the “re” doesn’t make it better.
Enns doesn’t reserve the degradation of the Bible’s historicity for John. He says the apostle Paul “pushed too far” (p. 223), that his Old Testament exegesis is “tortured” (p. 224), and that he reads an Old Testament story in a way that it “wasn’t set up to handle” (p. 225). Enns asks, “Where do we see the biblical writers imagining God within the boundaries of their time and place?” To which the answer is, “Simply put, everywhere” (p. 126).
Reimagined Theology
So, what does Enns mean by “reimagine”? He says it this way.
When I see God presented today as a champion of the full equality of women, people of color, refugees, or the environment, I say, ‘Yes, this is my God too. This is the God I believe in.’ But this is a reimagined God. As hard as it might be to hear, the God of the Bible, strictly speaking, doesn’t actually champion these causes, however important they might be to us. . . The actual feeling of compassion for refugees [for example] doesn’t begin by reading the Bible. Rather, the Bible comes into the picture afterwards as a way of grounding that compassion in our faith tradition (p. 158).
This quote unveils Enns’s stock-and-trade liberal eisegesis. Liberal Christians believe what they want to believe; then, they take their beliefs to the Bible as a way of “grounding” them, as Enns says. Matthew Vines and Brandon Robertson, among others, work with Enns to “reimagine” (using the Bible) a sexual ethic that’s the opposite of what we find in the Bible. Theologians like these believe whatever they want; then they locate isolated Bible verses to prop up said beliefs. This is how liberal Christianity has been reimagining the Bible for a century.
The mechanism Enns and his ilk use to reimagine the Bible is to point to the Bible itself. They claim, as quoted above, that the Jews didn’t believe in a God-made-flesh, so John had to reimagine God to make it happen. If John can do this, shouldn’t we? While some may want to throw out this line of reasoning as “liberal nonsense,” we must reckon with the fact that it has inherent power, especially for struggling Christians who are wont to change their beliefs if the Bible tells them to.
Revelation That Grows
How should we respond to Enns’s claim that writers like John and Paul were merely reimagining God in a way that the Old Testament would never have imagined? For decades,orthodox scholars have shown us that the Bible is progressive revelation. Geerhardus Vos compared the Old Testament to a seed that grows into a fully mature tree in the New.[1] It’s the same organism, but it looks very different in the end (cf. Gal 3:8). So, when the final product (the NT, or the tree) looks different from the starting point (the OT, or the seed), we cannot claim that God has been reimagined. Rather, He has simply and slowly revealed Himself in a consistent yet progressive manner. Now, the Bible has been finished, and we know what we need to know, this side of eternity.
B. B. Warfield used a similar analogy. He said the Old Testament is like a dimly lit room, and in the New, the light is flipped on. No furniture has moved, but the room looks different, so we see things we couldn’t have before.[2] The point is that the Bible is designed to reveal more and more truth slowly, but not in contradiction with what God previously revealed. If we read something in the New Testament and say, “That wasn’t in the Old!” The answer isn’t to side with Enns and say John or Paul reimagined God for his context. Instead, we should recognize that this was in the Old Testament, though in a way that was difficult to notice until now. As Augustine said, “The New is in the Old concealed; the Old is in the New revealed” (cf. Luke 24:44).[3]
Faith Seeking Understanding
Augustine also helps us with a related question brought up many times in Enns’s work regarding events that seem ahistorical. Augustine’s answer is “believe in order that you may understand.”[4]Christians should believe the Bible and then seek to understand what they believe intellectually. This process may include changed beliefs but will not involve reimagining God.
There are events recorded in the Bible that give us pause. Did the flood really cover the globe? Did the gospel writers make mistakes when they seemingly contradict one another? Enns answers such questions by claiming that the biblical authors made mistakes because they were only reimagining God for their personal contexts, not writing the inerrant word of God.
The Christian response to problems like these is never to brush them under the rug and pretend they’re not there. Rather, we meet these concerns by studying the text more closely to find solutions that maintain our faith in the Bible’s authority and inerrancy. Ironically, reimagined, progressive theology does the opposite. It doesn’t seek to find out how these texts are correct. Instead, it aims to find a way to accept that they’re not and then reimagines a faux version of Christianity that accepts a Bible like Thomas Jefferson’s—with all the “objectionable content” scissored out.
Once one walks the path of Enns, it will only be a matter of time until Jesus’s resurrection is “reimagined” and no longer revealed, if that time hasn’t come already. But a reimagined resurrection is no better than an imagined one. The historical and literal resurrection of Jesus Christ is our only hope (1 Cor. 15:12–19). It occurred, and John wrote about it. No reimagination is necessary.
For over a century, people like Enns have heaped up attempt after attempt to present a Bible that secular man will accept. Countless books have been sold, seminaries have been “revamped,” and denominations have transitioned from one thing into another. This gargantuan construction has been built upon the sand of a reimagined Bible, but it will not weather the current storm. Great will be its fall (Matt 7:24-29). May we not be resting in its shade—but rather building upon the rock—when it does so.
-Rob Golding – Pastor of First Artesia CRC
[1] Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments (Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2003), 7.
[2] Benjamin B. Warfied, “The Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity,” in Biblical Doctrines, The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932; reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 141-42.
[3] Augustine, Questions on the Heptateuch, 2.73
[4] Augustine, Sermon 43.7, 9.
The Fight of Faith 