My critique of Enns may be broadly summarized by the following eight points:

1) He affirms that some of the narratives in Genesis, e.g., of creation and the flood, are shot through with myth, much of which the biblical narrator did not know lacked correspondence to actual past reality.

2) Enns appears to assume that since biblical writers, especially, for example, the Genesis narrator, were not objective in narrating history, then their presuppositions distorted significantly the events that they reported. He too often appears to assume that the socially constructed realities of these ancient biblical writers, e.g., their purported mythical mindsets, prevented them from being able to describe past events in a way that had significant correspondence with how a person in the modern world would observe and report events.

3) Enns never spells out in any detail the model of Jesus’ incarnation with which he is drawing analogies for his view of Scripture.

4) Enns affirms that one cannot use modern definitions of truth and error in order to perceive whether Scripture contains truth or error. However, this is non-falsifiable, since Enns never says what would count as an error according to ancient standards. This is also reductionistic, since there were some rational and even scientific categories at the disposal of ancient peoples for evaluating the observable world that are in some important ways commensurable to our own.

5) Enns does not follow at significant points his own excellent proposal of guidelines for evaluating the views of others with whom one disagrees.

6) Enns’s book is marked by ambiguities at important junctures of his discussion.

7) Enns does not attempt to present to and discuss for the reader significant alternative viewpoints beside his own, which is needed in a book dealing with such crucial issues.

8) Enns appears to caricature the views of past evangelical scholarship by not distinguishing the views of so-called fundamentalists from that of good conservative scholarly work.

Peter Enns might believe that my assessment of his book and its implications are inaccurate, but it would be difficult for him to contend that the evaluation and implications could not be construed as plausibly following from the statements he has made. In other words, he might contend that the conclusions and implications that I have drawn are not conclusions and implications he would draw, but I think many, if not most, readers would likely read him the way that I have. In some cases, perhaps, I have pointed out what is perchance the result of faulty writing or ambiguity rather than faulty theology or hermeneutics. Nevertheless, such things must still be pointed out, since the issues are so significant.

The nature of Enns’s book demands not only mere description of the author’s views but also, at times, interpretation because of the ambiguities and tensions among his statements. Anyone who wants to attempt to review Enns’s book thoroughly and to do justice to it will have to engage in interpretation of these kinds of statements. I have tried my best to do this and to cut through the ambiguities where they occur. Readers will have to decide for themselves whether or not I have succeeded at those points where I have been forced to interpret.

Indeed, why write a lengthy review of a book that is designed primarily to address a more popular audience and only secondarily a scholarly readership?⁴⁷ The reason is that the issues are so important for Christian faith, and popular readers may not have the requisite tools and background to evaluate the thorny issues that Enns’s book discusses. But I have also written this review for a scholarly evangelical audience, since the book appears to be secondarily intended for them,⁴⁸ and there have been different evaluations of Enns’s book by such an audience.⁴⁹