A Response to Peter Enns’s Attack on Biblical Creationism

This paper overviews the recent work of Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam, examining the implications of Enns’s conclusions for the topics of biblical inspiration and inerrancy, human origins, and the exegesis of the biblical text. Included in this overview is a discussion of Enns’s theological and philosophical assumptions that impinge upon his conclusions, as well as the published concerns that prominent biblical scholars have expressed relating to those conclusions. This paper contends that the views expounded in The Evolution of Adam are flawed at a foundational level, and aims to show that Enns’s incarnational model of Scripture is theologically unsound, that his presupposed view of the origin of humanity is scientifically unwarranted, and that his understanding of the purpose and meaning of the Creation account in both Genesis and Paul’s interpretation of Genesis is biblically unsubstantiated.