Of course I’m over a week late with this news! I never promised to be timely that’s for sure! Well, I’m pretty bummed because I was hoping to have him for wisdom literature. I figured the class would be pretty interesting with him as the professor.
The seminary is losing a very gifted teacher. He challenged his students and made them address their presuppositions when they approached the Bible and made them really look at what the Bible was actually saying instead of what they thought it said.
I will be forever grateful to him for making me realize how superficial my own reading of the Bible has been and for widening the scope of my reading to include writers I might not necessarily agree with but who make interesting observations about the text (liberals, postmodernists, feminists, liberation theologians, etc.). They interpret outside the box and that’s been helpful for me to look at the Bible in new ways.
His course was humbling and a much needed correction to how I had previously viewed the Bible and I’m thankful I had his class before this controversy erupted. I feel sorry for those who will not have his introduction to the Old Testament. I’m hopeful though that the professor taking over the class will cover some of the same ground since it is imperative for the student to become familiar with the issues raised by critics of the OT (similarities between other Ancient Near East traditions and the OT, the theological diversity of the OT, the NT interpretation of the OT, etc.). Enns didn’t try to sugar coat the issues but encouraged the students to rest in the knowledge that God worked in and through these issues, he was sovereign over the Bible and we shouldn’t let these issues rob us of our faith that the Bible was the word of God. Understanding these issues helped us to read the Bible more carefully to determine why it was written the way it was in light of Ancient Near East texts or in light of the different theological focus of the authors when recording the same events (or even the same author such as Moses’ recording of the Mount Sinai experience.