Animal Farm

Peter Enns just finished a radio interview on WHYY 90.9, the national public radio station based in Philadelphia. The interview brought clarity to a lot of issues that those outside the seminary may not have fully understood. The most interesting part came during the call in section where a man who identified himself as a catholic who had lost his faith said that after hearing about Dr. Enn’s ideas he might buy the book and reinvestigate Christianity. To this Pete, in a very pastoral tone, encouraged him to do just that — to reinvestigate his previous thoughts about God. Pete went on to warn that many Christians had developed a Platonic view of God who is removed from humanity and who is so utterly different that we almost can’t conceive of him. Pete encouraged the young man to discover the God of scripture, who is comfortable dealing in the messiness of humanity. A God who doesn’t shirk difficulties, but who communes with us even incarnating and becoming one of us.

                Here I don’t advocate a philosophical pragmatism, saying that since Enns seems to have reached someone with his ideas that his ideas are therefore orthodox or correct (although I personally believe they are both orthodox and correct). Pragmatism has often been use to justify very flawed methodologies and ideas, and I don’t wish to do that. However it should give some of Enn’s detractors pause. One of the repeated criticisms of Enns work is that the “target audience” is being created by the work instead of the work responding to an audience that already exists. In other words some have argued that trying to answer the messiness of scripture simply isn’t profitable.

                I would say that this interview somewhat destroys this criticism, if for no other reason that it gave a voice to one of those who could be helped by Enn’s work. There is a broad group of people who have trickled out of our churches precisely because they didn’t have a paradigm to honestly engage the various secular arguments they hear. Dr. Enns has provided a very workable methodology which is faithful to scripture and the reformed tradition; and yet he is being pushed outside of that tradition. Many of his detractors frame this issue as one of holding to the confessionalism instead of just being progressive. In fact the issue they have is that Enns is outside of the confession, he isn’t ‘reformed’ proper, but is just a garden variety evangelical. They see Enns as simply inventing answers to non questions; to things which ought not to bother a truly grounded reformed believer. They argue that he is making a stink where none is needed; fixing something that in their opinion is not broken.

                Over the course of about a week I have been debating on of Enn’s detractors, D.G. Hart, on the Conn-Versation blog. The topic has become the relationship between the gospel and social activism. His understanding of ecclesiology is that the Church ought to provide only for word and sacrament ministry (e.g. preaching and giving communion/baptism) and that social missions are best left in the hands of the government because the church’s only responsibility is to create faith. Furthermore he argues that …

 “Over the last century we have discovered that the government is much better equipped to engage in acts of mercy.”

On a political note I totally disagree with him, government bureaucracies are terribly inefficient when it comes to social “acts of mercy.” However something else occurred to me while having this discussion, and after listening to the radio interview today. D.G. Hart is another of Enn’s detractors, who doesn’t see much need for his work. I think there is a connection to this and Hart’s stated ecclesiology.            

In other words the disagreement shown for churches which are active in social reform seems to have creeped over into the theological understandings of Dr. Hart. The same socially aloof stance that Hart believes the church ought to hold in its physical interaction with society is repeated in its stated theology. The common denominator seems to be a church which is functionally removed from the world, only preaching, teaching and administering sacraments. All other functions are supercilious and detract from the ‘true nature’ of the church. Furthermore any theological movement which is meant as a way to help struggling souls or non-believers with finding a paradigm to confront their unbelief is probably unnecessary, since this is not the churches job. Rather the church just preaches the gospel – it has no room or time to contextualize it; to either the underdeveloped world or to the post modern world. Both feeding the poor and explaining Genesis 1 in light of Babylonian creation myths are just pointless endeavors which waste the time of the church. There seems to be a theological reductionism at work in this sort of thinking. It reduces the gospel to a stoic expression of belief; instead of an adaptive power which meets people where they are and speaks into their experience. This is the heart of the issue; if the church need not worry about social reform, why should it worry about placing its theology (within orthodox boundaries) inside of some new theoretical container to make the message relevant to struggling people. For someone like Hart the gospel is a static doctrinal position, and the church is likewise simply a replicator of this theological stone tablet, the presentation of which cannot and shouldn’t adapt to the needs of the people it aims to reach.

It may be the case that Enn’s beliefs go to the heart of the gospel, but not in the way his detractors often mean (or that he intended). Rather than exposing him as being heretical it brings clarity to the a theology of some sectors of the church which reduces the gospel by presenting it as a pledge of allegiance instead of a vibrant and adaptable ontic reality.