There is a dust-up in progress at Westminster Seminary East. There are three basic issues involved, and I happen to be in a position to speak to two of them. The first would be the speaking habits of Westminster president Peter Lillback, the second would be reaction to Peter Enns’ book Inspiration and Incarnation, and the third would be the ins and outs of faculty relationships — who did or said what to whom and when. This last one I don’t to pretend to know anything about, and I hope and pray that those involved will be able to keep it that way.
This web site complained that the president of Westminster spoke at an event sponsored by Vision Forum. I am in a position to speak to this because Peter Lillback has spoken for us at a couple of our Trinity Fest conferences. I have spoken to him about his standards for doing speaking engagements, and I know for a fact that he doesn’t mind speaking for disparate groups so long as they don’t place restrictions on what he says. We didn’t, and he was happy to speak for us. I assume he had the same standard when he spoke for Vision Forum. Dr. Lillback is a first-rate scholar, and a Christian gentleman, and if he has the opportunity to speak for different kinds of groups and speak his mind, then he should just go for it. To fault him for this kind of “guilt-by-association” thing is just bogus. The fact that this is then characterized simplistically as “embarrassing flirtations with a far-right-wing political agenda” perhaps reveals more than the writer intended.
The second issue is Enns’ book, which I can also say something about, having read it. My review of that book can be read here.
A confessionally Reformed seminary exists, in part, to ask and answer the hard questions within the boundaries of the Reformed tradition. Peter Enns has done an exemplary job in asking honest, hard questions, and he does this without flinching. At the same time, as indicated in my review, I believe his answers fall short in a number of significant ways. Because of this, I believe that what he has written is fair game for his colleagues to question. But everyone who does this needs to do more than demonstrate that Enns got “the wrong answers.” Getting the right answers without asking honest questions is no virtue, and is an orthodoxy that can be readily mastered by a parrot or a digital recorder. The last thing we need is in a brand new season of What’s My Doctrine?, with your host, Pat Answers.