The BioLogos Foundation is happy to announce that biblical scholar Pete Enns has joined our team as a senior fellow of biblical studies. Enns is an evangelical Christian scholar and author of several books and commentaries, including the popular Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, which looks at three questions raised by biblical scholars that seem to threaten traditional views of Scripture. Enns has also been a contributor to our blog Science & the Sacred. His full biography can be found under “Team Members” in our “About Us” section.

BioLogos represents the harmony of science and faith. It addresses the central themes of science and religion and emphasizes the compatibility of Christian faith with scientific discoveries about the origins of the universe and life.  To communicate this message to the general public and add to the ongoing dialog, The BioLogos Foundation created BioLogos.org.

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1. A “Snapshot” of Peter Enns

2. Is Peter Enns a Good Calvinist?

3. Peter Enns on Nazarenes

Defining “inerrancy” is certainly a topic of discussion among Evangelicals, and opinions are voiced from one extreme of maintaining older paradigms at all costs to jettisoning the term all together as hopelessly over-qualified in contemporary discussion.

I am among those who feel that the term inerrancy has become for Evangelicals severely overqualified because of the recognition of the tensions between older formulations of the term and the developments in our understanding of the Bible and its world. The Evangelical understanding has diversified and developed—sometimes begrudgingly, perhaps—over the last several generations, which is a fact that is both desirable and unavoidable.

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Featured speaker: Dr. Peter Enns

Evangelicalism has tended to have an uneasy relationship with biblical scholarship of the last several generations. In this lecture, Prof. Enns will look at one specific example of this–the book of Genesis–and trace how the challenges to Evangelicalism began, especially with events that happened in the 19th century. It is fair to say that modern biblical scholarship on the Old Testament began with questions on Genesis that came to a head during this time and earlier. Although there are numerous self-confessed Evangelicals who are very keen to address these issues form a perspective of faith, on the whole these issues have not worked their way into a positive Evangelical understanding of Scripture.

Tuesday, 16 September 2008, at 7:00 pm. Students receive chapel credit for this talk.

Location: Hostetter Chapel Sanctuary, Messiah College, Grantham, PA. Directions and a campus map are here http://www.messiah.edu/visitors/direction.html.

A 1982 graduate of Messiah College, Dr. Peter Enns worked with mentally challenged children before earning the M. Div. at Westminster Theological Seminary. He later completed the Ph.D. (1994) from Harvard University in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, where his main focus was on Second Temple hermeneutics and his dissertation was directed by James Kugel. Dr. Enns is author or contributor to many books, including Exodus Retold: Ancient Exegesis of the Departure from Egypt in Wis 10:15-21 and 19:1-9, which was published in 1997 by the Harvard Semitic Monograph series, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Baker, 2005) and Invitation to Genesis (Abingdon, 2006). His numerous academic interests include Old Testament theology, the New Testament’s use of the Old, wisdom literature, hermeneutics, and the intersection of biblical studies with evangelical thinking on Scripture. For additional information, including a NPR radio interview, go to http://peterennsonline.com/about/.

The Central Pennsylvania Forum for Religion and Science, based at Messiah College, has been made possible in part by a Local Societies Initiative grant (http://www.metanexus.net/lsi) of the Metanexus Institute (www.metanexus.net). For details about all Forum events, please visit http://www.messiah.edu/godandscience/ or contact Dr. Ted Davis (tdavis@messiah.edu), 717-766-2511, ext 6840.