Props to Lincoln Mullen.

Dr. Hendershot began the article with a piece of correspondence to Carl McIntire from an anonymous listener of his radio show, The Twentieth Century Reformation Hour.

500 years ago Moses said, “Pack your camel, pick up your shovel, mount your ass, and I shall lead you to the Promised land.” 500 years later, F.D. Roosevelt said, “Lay down your shovel, sit on your ass, light up a Camel, this is the promised land.” Today, Nixon will tax your shovel, sell your camel, kick your ass, and tell you there is no promised land.

P.S. I am glad that I am an American, I am glad that I am free, but I wish I were a little doggy and Nixon were a tree.

Those within the Anglican church who are sympathetic to Gene Robinson’s cause tend to be theological liberals who disbelieve in the inerrancy of Scripture. These Anglican liberals tend also to be from wealthier portions of the developed world, sometimes referred to as the Global North. They are typically Caucasian.

Those within Anglicanism who are uncomfortable with homosexual clergy tend to be theological conservatives who ascribe to the inerrancy of Scripture. These Anglican conservatives are mostly from the developing world, often called the Global South. They are mostly African, Indian, and Asian. There are exceptions among both groups, but the generalization is viable.

A group of around 250 conservative bishops held an alternative conference in June called GAFCON.
Both sides have been lobbing grenades at one another. The conservatives accuse the liberals of heresy and the liberals attack the conservatives as being out of touch.

But contemporary liberals have had to soft-peddle their criticism, unlike in the grand old days of the 1910s and 1920s when the kid gloves came off. Guys like H.L. Mencken had a field day with Billy Sunday and the like; Fundamentalists were simply uneducated hicks in the South and Midwestern United States.

Anglican liberals today have to toe a careful line. They dislike Fundamentalism and would normally blast the Fundamentalists in question, native African conservatives. But like most liberals they have a strong sense of “White Guilt.” They believe that Western imperialism is largely responsible for Third World woes like poverty, corruption, and war. It is politically incorrect and frankly uncouth to accuse Africans of being the source of any problem (i.e. the support Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe received from Western liberals until very recently), so they have to find someone else to blame.

Aha! The Economist [July 26th 2008] discovered that blame can be assigned to “missionary work in Africa [that] was carried out by evangelicals who reflect a rather fundamentalist strain of British Christianity.” It wasn’t the poor Africans’ fault at all, but those evil British Fundamentalists!

Some African conservatives have cried foul. It is insulting for liberals to insinuate that Africans just believe what they were taught. No one likes to be accused of being passive, gullible, and simple. Men like Archbishop Henry Orombi of Uganda prefer to trace their heritage to native African revivals. Others decry attempts by the “western press” to villify African prelates. Indeed it can be argued that liberals are practicing a modern version of cultural imperialization. If Africans want to be taken seriously in liberal circles than they must make sure that their theology conforms to Western liberal ideals. Not particularly multicultural, eh?

Peter Enns was educated at Messiah College (BA 1982), Westminster Theological Seminary (M.Div. 1989), and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1994). He has been teaching at Westminster since 1994 and was the editor of the Westminster Theological Journal for five years. Just after earning tenure at Westminster in 2005, he published Inspiration and Incarnation, which is at the heart of the current controversy. Dr. G. K. Beale’s review does better justice to the book than I can. Simply put, many orthodox scholars are critical of Enns’ integration of post-modernist perspectives into the doctrine of Scriptural inspiration. The fear is that a lowered view of inspiration leads to a disbelief in Biblical inerrancy.

The decision to suspend Peter Enns is conflicted:

1) While the President (Peter Lillback), the Chairman of the Board (Jack White), and a majority of the Board supported the decision, a third of the Board, including the Vice Chair (Peter Jansson), backed Peter Enns.

2) In Fall of 2007 the faculty of Westminster were asked if they supported Peter Enns’ position on inspiration. The majority of the faculty sided with Enns, voting 12-8 in his support.

Here is the central irony of Peter Enns being suspended from Westminster: a more “liberal” faculty, 20 of whom voted, has been overruled by a more “conservative” administration.

In the 1920s the 17 member faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary found itself in an awkward position. The faculty, led by J. Gresham Machen, was more conservative theologically than the Modernist-influenced Board of Trustees. As a result, in 1929 Machen and three other faculty members left Princeton to found Westminster Theological Seminary.

It is indubitably ironic that eighty years later Westminster now faces the inverse situation. The paralells aren’t exact, i.e. Machen left somewhat voluntarily whereas Enns hasn’t much say in the matter, but I find the comparison interesting.

I listened to the audio from a meeting on April 1st where the Administration answered student questions about the proceedings against Peter Enns. Several aspects of the dialogue stand out:

1) There are connections to the New Perspective on Paul controversy. President Lillback explicitly mentioned the 1982 dismissal of Norman Shepherd from the Westminster faculty. Shepherd’s work on covenental nomism was controversial enough then, but the ideas he espoused have grown into a major debate over the nature of the Pauline understanding of justification. Westminster recently encouraged the resignation of another faculty member, Steve Taylor, over the issue.

2) Enns was accused of “heterodoxy.” His lack of conformity to orthodox beliefs was not described as being Biblically unsound, rather his position was not found in accordance to the Westminster Confession. Many conservative evangelicals and moderate fundamentalists will undoubtably see the Enns case as evidence of a diminishing gap between the two movements, but this opinion is problematic since Enns’ dismissal is based on confessional separatism rather than in opposition to ecumenical cooperation. He has not been “Reformed enough,” which is different from not being “Evangelical enough.”

3) There is significant potential for continuing controversy. The studentbody was audibly perturbed and at least some of the students are markedly disatisfied with how the issue has been handled. One student remarked that he could not believe that such “bad fruit” could be produced by a “good tree.” When asked who would answer the questions of students who had been influenced by Enns, Chairman White said that the President and faculty would be responsible, a doubtful approach since a majority of the faculty supported Enns. Also, the President desired to take more time to discuss Enns’ beliefs than had been given 25 years prior to Shepherd. I wonder if it is possible that the prolonged dialogue has and/or will create more tension than just “ripping off the bandaid.”

The article that tipped me off about the whole situation provides a good summary, though the journalism is suspect in one area. At the beginning of the second page the author writes about Steve Taylor in such a way as to imply that Taylor is leaving the seminary in reaction to the decision on Enns rather than because of his adherence to the New Perspective on Paul.

I do not know enough about Enns to make a personal call on the matter, nor have I read the book. I first became aware of Enns when a dear friend mentioned his book to me in Janurary and proposed several questions about the orthodox doctrine of inspiration that I have also wondered about. So I don’t have an opinion about who is right or wrong and to what degree. I do feel kinda bad for innocently posting about the Church History program at Westminster last week while all this was being revealed…a bit like kicking a man while he’s down.

I hope you will join me in praying for our brethren at Westminster, that the Word of God will dwell richly in their hearts and school, and that both sides will appropriate God’s grace in this trial.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am currently attempting to earn a graduate degree focused on modern church history, but I believe a nearly exclusive focus on church history can create an unbalanced historiography and a misunderstanding of the impact of the Church. The visible church did not, and does not, operate in a vacuum. God worked His divine will in history through the Renaissance as much as the Reformation, through the rise of secular ideologies like Marxism and Freudianism as much as spiritual movements like Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, and in the lives of kings and nations as much as theologians and denominations.

Yet a pure church historian who earns his degree from most seminaries is never required, or even given the opportunity, to study social history, cultural history, or political history. A church historian can often give you a detailed outline of the development of various doctrines and movements over time, but may be weak on the secular culture that enveloped and impacted those changes.

Let me provide a personal example of the value of a social history course I took last Fall. We focused on the “common people,” rather than the elites. I did not realize how much my view of history had changed until I visited my fiancee’s family this past Christmas. The event itself was insignificant, but it revealed something new about how I thought. Her family and I were watching an episode of Poirot (Agatha Christie) when I realized the incredible socio-economic blinders inherent in each episode. Poirot spends most of his time associating with the cultural and economic elite of Britain; typically the only time a member of the lower class earns screen time is when they are the guilty party. Apparently Agatha Christie, and a whole subgenre of late 19th and early 20th century British authors, believed the lower classes to belong to one of two groups: 1) the insignificant or 2) the criminal.

This realization helped me see church history in a whole different light. Who do we honor in our church histories? The pastors, theologians, and missionaries. What do they tend to have in common (and I know there are exceptions…though the fact that they are exceptions proves my point)? They are white men, often members of the cultural elite. How has that shaped our understanding of church history? In all sorts of interesting ways.

I’m not saying that a history by a white male of white men is not helpful or valuable, I’m simply proposing that it results in only one of a number legitimate perspectives on history. Thus I believe that seminaries need a broader approach to historical education. Hmmmm, a liberal arts seminary?

The problem with Westminster’s course of study is compounded by an overemphasis on Reformed history. Once again, I believe Reformed theology to have played a critical role in the development of the modern church, thus it is eminently worthy of study. But of 31 courses offered over the next two years at Westminster, fully 21 of them deal explicitly with Reformed thinkers and thought, while the other 10 are split among basic church history surveys and asian/korean church history (because of the large Korean Presbyterian population at Westminster).

Upon further examination many of the classes are doubles, the same class being offered for both Masters and Ph.D. credit. Even so, once a student progresses beyond the surveys offered on the Masters level and into the Ph.D. classes, 11 of 13 courses have a Reformed focus.

Let me reiterate, I have nothing against Reformed history. Indeed I would love to take several courses at Westminster with Carl Trueman if the opportunity presented itself in the future. However, the balanced church historian should know something about both Methodism and Presbyterianism, the Wesley’s and John Calvin, and the Anabaptists and the Puritans. I’m sure these non-Reformed topics are mentioned at some point in class, but I would suspect they are examined in similar fashion to how a coach dissects the opposing team’s playbook…”know thy enemy.”

Okay, so the person who points out a problem should also propose a solution. I don’t expect anything huge. Westminster is a school that produces Biblically-centered Reformed pastors and theologians, so, like every other seminary, they will emphasize their perspective on church history. But I wish that students pursuing a graduate degree in church history at any seminary could enjoy a little broader historical perspective. Maybe that means another part-time professor teaching a survey course on social history. Maybe that involves a new class on gendered assumptions in the church.

There is no perfect universal solution. But if we can reform our understanding of church history God’s glorious working out of His divine plan may be revealed in fresh and exciting ways.

PS – Here’s a list of the 20 unique classes in church history offered over the next two years at Westminster:

Survey of Church History, The Ancient Church, The Medieval Church, The Reformation, The Church in the Modern Age, Asian American History and Theology, Readings in the History of American Evangelicalism, English Puritan Thought, God and Scripture in the Era of Reformed Orthodoxy, The Doctrine of the Church in Reformed Theology, The Hermeneutics of Jonathan Edwards, Scottish Presbyterianism, The Life and Thought of Francis Turretin, Reformed Confessions and Catechisms, The History of North American Eschatology, Studies in Old Princeton Theology, Readings in the History of Reformed Thought, History of the Korean Church from Korea to North America, The Life and Thought of John Owen, and Old Religion in the New World: Transatlantic Puritan Theology.