Book Review of Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty

My book review of Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our "Correct" Beliefs (HarperCollins, 2016) has just come out in the spring issue of Midwestern Journal of Theology, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2018): 162-165.

I have posted a pdf of the review to my academia.edu site (read here). You can find the entire journal online here (as well as back issues).

This book and the draft of my review was also the subject of Word Magazine # 90 (listen here).

JTR

WM 90: Revew: The Sin of Certainty by Peter Enns

I just posted WM 90: Review: The Sin of Certainty by Peter Enns (find it here).

This is an audio version of a review I’ve written on this work:

Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our “Correct” Beliefs (New York: HarperCollins, 2016): 230 pp.

At the end, I suggest that this book illustrates at least three significant challenges within modern “evangelicalism”:

1.   The problem of inerrancy as a theological concept to the define the nature and authority of Scripture.

Many modern evangelicals have either stretched the term “inerrancy” so broadly or twisted it so perversely that it hardly means what earlier men meant by it.

2.    The dangers of the desire for academic respectability.

3.    The problem of epistemology.

Enns elevates uncertainty, doubt, and mysticism, rather than certainty, faith, and reason.

I hear the same sentiments expressed in Biblical studies by those who want a canon of books but not canonical texts, who want Bibles with multiple suggested variants but no certain text. Is the quest for certainty necessarily sinful?

JTR