Peter Enns on Reading Exodus (3): Contemporary Significance

Peter Enns, Exodus, NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000).

In the Introduction (downloadable here) to his commentary on Exodus, Peter Enns reflects on the three interpretive steps utilised in the NIV Application Commentary series:

(1) Original meaning
(2) Bridging contexts
(3) Contemporary significance

When it comes to contemporary significance, Enns begins by saying that we typically approach the question of application by assuming (1) that the passage has to ‘speak to us where we are’, and (2) that it has to be ‘practical’ in terms of pushing us to do something. Both assumptions, he holds, are right and wrong.

The problem with the first assumption is that much of the Old Testament is narrative, recording ‘a story about something that happened, and therefore it is not… apparent how that story should be applied’ (31).

But he makes it clear that the problem is not so much with Exodus:

‘When we think of application, we tend to think of ourselves as the immovable point and the Old Testament as something that has to be brought into our lives. We think that it has to speak to our circumstances without always considering whether it is our particular circumstances that the Bible is designed to speak to’ (31).

He goes on:

‘There is another way of thinking about application. The book of Exodus is not waiting there for us to bring it into our world. Rather, it is standing there defining what our world should look like and then inviting us to enter that world’ (31).

Exodus tells us what ‘God is like, how he thinks of his people, the lengths to which he will go to deliver them, and the proper response of God’s people to this great deed’ (31). Moreover, as Christians, we understand the story in the light of the Christ who completes the story, ‘and then we begin to see more fully how this story affects how we look at ourselves and our God’ (31).

On the second assumption (that application has to be ‘practical’), Enns notes that application may also be to change how we think, how we grow in our understanding of God and his love, or even to lead us to worship.

He wonders whether contemporary society obliges us to ask ‘What’s the payoff?’, as if to suggest that if there is nothing demonstrable or practical as a result of interpretation, then it must inevitably lack worth. He is not advocating Bible study as a mere intellectual exercise, but wanting to say that ‘“practical” application need not always translate into something we do. Rather, what may be in order is to change how we define “practical”’ (32).

In short, summarising the three steps:

‘This commentary attempts to explain Exodus in light of Christ’s coming. In doing so, I have tried to listen as carefully as I can to what the story would have communicated to ancient Israelite readers of the book. The theology of the book pushes me outward to consider how that theology fits into the whole story, a story that culminates in the person and work of Christ. It is knowing how the story ends up that forms the proper context within which we are “in Christ” (to use Paul’s words) apply those words to ourselves’ (32).