Is the Bible “Self-Attesting,” or Do We Need the Church?

You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So I was torn this week whether to look at where the Bible came from or to look at some arguments about Mormonism, and I decided to split the difference and look at this idea of biblical self-attestation. Now, this idea is not coming from Mormonism, but as you’re going to see, it has some implications for Mormon theology. This idea is actually coming from Protestantism. So to put the idea really simply in a nutshell, the question is, “How do we know we’ve got the right books in the Bible?” And if you are a Protestant reformer who’s arguing the Catholic Church is hopelessly corrupt on a lot of different issues, you don’t want the answer to be, “Because the Catholic Church tells us so.” And so you need some other kind of answer.

So one of the answers that certain Protestant reformers, particularly John Calvin, but we see some of this in Luther as well, they come up with this idea that Scripture reveals itself to be Scripture. So I’m going to let John Calvin lay the argument out. First, I want to look at the Westminster Confession of Faith. Then I’m going to let John Calvin spell the argument out a little more, and then we’ll unpack the argument piece by piece. So to begin with, the Westminster Confession of Faith from 1647, this is maybe the most important Calvinist declaration of faith. There’s a couple of important ones, but this one’s one of them. It talks about how the books, commonly called apocrypha, these are the seven disputed books between Catholics and Protestants. They claim they’re not of divine inspiration, are not part of the canon, they’re of no authority in the Church of God, and they’re not to be otherwise approved or made use of than other human writings. So they’re no more authoritative than mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, or fill in the blank.

How do they get there? In the next paragraph, they explained, the authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, depends not on the testimony of any man or church but holy upon God, who is truth itself, the author thereof, and therefore it’s to be received because it is the Word of God. Now, you might hear that and think that sounds awfully circular. The seven disputed books aren’t part of the biblical canon because they’re not the Word of God, and we know the Word of God is the Word of God because it’s the Word of God and it is circular. In fact, you see this, the more Calvinist authors try to explain why it’s not circular, you’ll start to see the circularity become really apparent.

But before we get into all of that, I want to look at Calvin putting the best spin on this. He’s the guy who basically invents this idea and is certainly the one who fleshes it out in its fullest form. So I want to give his version of the argument. He says that we should hold it as fixed, that those who were inwardly taught by the Holy Spirit, acquiesce implicitly in Scripture. That Scripture, carrying its own evidence along with it, deigns not to submit to proofs and arguments but owes the full conviction with which we ought to receive it to the testimony of the Spirit. In other words, you can’t use logic or reason to prove the Scriptures. You have to rely on these spiritual gifts. If you really are one of the electives, you really are chosen by God. Then you already know internally which books belong in the Bible.

You don’t need any logic, proof, or evidence. So Calvin says, “Enlightened by Him,” The Holy Spirit, “We no longer believe either on our own judgment or that of others that the Scriptures are from God, but in a way superior to human judgment, feel perfectly assured, as much so as if we beheld the divine image visibly impressed on it, that it came to us by the instrumentality of men from the very mouth of God.” That you have such a strong feeling inside of you that you don’t need evidence, logic, or reason. You can just tell from your feelings that this is obviously Scripture as much as if you were just watching God impress His image on the pages Himself.

Calvin goes on, “We asked not for proofs or probabilities on which torest our judgment, but we subject our intellect and judgment to it as too transcendent for us to estimate. This, however, we do, not in the manner in which some want to fasten on an unknown object, which, as soon as known, displeases, but because we have a thorough conviction that, in holding it, we hold on a saleable truth. Not like miserable men whose minds are enslaved by superstition, but because we feel a divine energy living and breathing in it, an energy by which we are drawn and animated to obey it willingly, indeed, and knowingly, but more vividly and effectually than can be done by human will or knowledge.”

So that’s the argument that we don’t know which books are in the Bible for any logical reason, historical reason, or because we trust the church. Nothing like that. We don’t have to look to history. We don’t have to look to the church. We instead just look to our feelings. So in a nutshell, there’s three parts to Calvin’s claim. Number one, instead of leading the church into the proper biblical canon, the Holy Spirit leads each individual believer inwardly in. His words again, “Let it therefore be held as fixed that those who are inwardly taught by the Holy Spirit acquiesce implicitly in Scripture.” That inwardly is critical. It’s not the Holy Spirit who is externally leading the church. The Holy Spirit is internally leading the individual. That’s the first part.

Second, we can tell we’re inwardly led by the Holy Spirit in this way because of our feelings. In his words, we feel a divine energy living and breathing in Scripture. Third, on the basis of our feelings, this feeling that we’re convinced is coming from God. We have perfect clarity about which books do and don’t belong in the Bible. There’s no hard questions about whether to accept or reject a book because we have a way superior to human judgment, and we feel perfectly assured as much as if we beheld the divine image visibly and pressed on the Scriptures.

So that’s the argument. That’s scriptural self-attestation. You will find other versions of it by later Protestants, but this is the original version of the argument or the original, again, fleshed-out version of them. You get something like this in Luther, but I think Calvin has a much more thought-out argument, and I want to address that. So I want to look at each of these three aspects. First, should we trust our own individual infallibility and guidance by the Holy Spirit, or should we trust the infallibility of the church? Second, how much can we trust our feelings? And third, how much did the reformers actually produce perfect clarity about which books were and weren’t in the Bible? So let’s look at those in turn. First, on infallibility. Who is infallible? You, me, or the church?

You’ll remember again, that’s the first of the three prongs, and the biblical basis for this idea that somebody is being led into all truth is coming from the Gospel of John at the Last Supper, other places as well. But the Gospel of John at the Last Supper is maybe the clearest. In John 14 in verses 25-26, Jesus promises, “These things I’ve spoken to you while I’m still with you, but the Counselor, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I’ve said to you.” So there’s some kind of promise that someone, He says you, and it’s the you plural here that’s going to be significant, that somebody is being given the Holy Spirit or will be given the Holy Spirit to be led into all truth and bring to remembrance of everything that Jesus taught. Two chapters later in John 16, we’re still at the Last Supper. It’s very long in John’s gospel.

He tells us that when the Spirit of Truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth. He won’t speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears, He will speak, and He’ll declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take what is mine and declare it to you. And then Jesus says something really remarkable, “All the Father has is mine. Therefore, I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” That is, everything that Jesus has from the Father, He is giving through the Holy Spirit to you, whoever this you is. So who is this you? Broadly speaking, we can talk about two possibilities. One is that Jesus, because he is saying you plural means the church, the apostles, and beyond, the apostles, the disciples. So the church has all the truth. We should trust the church. The other view, much closer to what Calvin seems to be arguing for, is that each individual Christian believer has all the truth. I think we should see a couple obvious flaws with that line of reasoning.

Number one, if you individually, as a believer, have been led into all the truth, you should not disagree with another believer on anything. Hopefully, that’s clear that you and your Christian neighbor can’t both be infallible and disagree about doctrine, and yet Christians disagree about doctrine all the time. Now, when people point this out, the standard issue response is, “There are doctrines we all have to agree on and doctrines we don’t all have to agree on.” But here’s the thing, we don’t agree on which doctrines are which, we don’t agree on which are the core doctrines everyone needs to agree on, and we don’t agree on which doctrines are ones that should be left to the individual conscience. If we’re being led into all the truth, how do we not even know which things are matters everybody has to agree on which ones are matters that are up to Christian liberty?

So by all means, I think there’s something true to the fact that Jesus is not promising everyone will agree on everything all the time. That clearly has not been the history of Christianity. But if He’s promising all the truth, then surely He means something more than just, you’re going to get some things right some of the time, which is what it seems to be the case for the individual Christian track record. So if this all the truth actually means something like all the truth or all the truth Jesus intends to give, we need to be looking beyond the individual.

The second is a grammatical issue. He doesn’t say you singular, an individual reader. He’s speaking to the 12 at the Last Supper, and He says you, and it’s you plural. So the institutional church in its original form seems to be given this promise, but the third way we can make sense of this is by looking to what this text refers to. So Augustine and others will argue that this is really a promise in many ways of Pentecost, that when you think about, “Where are these promises fulfilled, that Jesus goes away and then sends the Holy Spirit?” Very clearly, Jesus ascends into heaven in Acts 1 and the Holy Spirit comes in Acts 2.

The Holy Spirit comes in a pretty remarkable way, namely that when the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place, and a sound comes from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind. It fills the house where they were sitting. There appeared to them tongues as a fire distributed and resting on each one of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. So who are the they and the them in this house receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit, receiving the gift of tongues, and having all these spiritual gifts?

We’re told that in the prior chapter in Acts 1, beginning with verse 12, running to verse 15, we’re told who’s there. It’s the 11 disciples. Judas Iscariot has gone his own way, and they are, with one accord, devoted to prayer together with the women and Mary, the mother of Jesus, and with His brethren, the brethren of Jesus. We’re told that in those days, Peter stood up among the brethren, the company of persons was, in all, about 120. So you’ve got 120 of Jesus’s followers, including the 11 apostles, is actually 12 by the time we get to Acts 2, because at the end of Acts 1, Peter has them choose a replacement apostle for Judas. So it is the organized church. It’s a small church, but it is still a visible church, and we’re told that they begin speaking in tongues. There’s a multitude in Jerusalem because Pentecost is a Jewish feast day, and they’re amazed and they wonder, saying, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?”

Now that is an interesting line because it’s not entirely clear from the text whether it’s just the apostles speaking in tongues or whether it’s all of the 120, and that may be a clue that it’s the apostles because Jesus has plenty of non-Galilean followers, but the people they’re hearing speaking in tongues appear to be Galileans. Nevertheless, we can’t say for sure on the basis of the evidence alone. We know there are 120 people gathered, but then we know in verse 14 that Peter is described as standing with the 11. So there’s 12 apostles, Peter and 11 others, and he lifts up his voice and he preaches the first Pentecost homily or sermon. He says, “Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and give ear to my words.” And he preaches, inspired by the Holy Spirit, an amazing homily, and at the end of it, his listeners are cut to the heart, and they say to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brethren, and what shall we do?”

Peter says to them, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” That’s a pretty interesting verse about baptism and its role in salvation, and also the promise of baptism, the gift of the Holy Spirit. Peter says, “This promise is to you and to your children.” Also interesting for baptismal debates, “Oh, should infants be baptized? Should children be baptized?” Seemingly, from what Peter’s saying, yes. But nevertheless, that’s not the point of this episode, so we’ll leave that for another time. Peter goes on and testifies with many other words and exhorts them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” And then verse 41, “Those who received Peter’s word were baptized, and they were added that day about 3000 souls.” Added to what? Added to the church.

We know this because the next verse says they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Now the breaking of bread is the way Luke describes the Eucharist, and so they’re entering into communion with the apostles. They’re entering into fellowship. So all that’s to say, when the Holy Spirit comes, it’s not in this wild, individualistic way. We sometimes have the mental impression, I think. When you have, especially, things like the gift of tongues, that it’s wild and chaotic and disorderly, but in the presentation in Acts 2, that’s not at all. The gift of tongues is orienting the listeners towards a sermon they’re about to hear proclaiming Jesus and leading to their conversion. Who’s the sermon by? It’s by St. Peter, the leader of the apostles, the one who can be described as Peter and the 11, instead of just saying one of the 12, if you say Buddy Holly in the Crickets, you’ve got a good clue who the lead singer is.

So Peter, the lead singer of the apostles, all that’s to say is, when the Holy Spirit comes, He comes in an orderly way. Yes, there are spiritual gifts poured out on everybody, but that doesn’t draw you away from the institutionally organized church. It draws you towards it. We see that in the way the Holy Spirit works here and in the way he works also in the sacramental ministry of baptism at the end of Acts 2. You have this really exciting what’s called charismatic outpouring in the beginning of Acts 2, you have a sacramental outpouring of the Holy Spirit at the end of Acts 2. But in both cases, it’s oriented towards unity with the church, not oriented away from it. This is really important because the way Calvin is interpreting this internal guidance of the Holy Spirit, it’s just something I have for myself apart from the church, making the church unnecessary, and that is a really bad understanding of spiritual gifts.

You don’t just know that from reading John 14, John 16, Acts 1 and 2, you also can know that from reading St. Paul’s theology on the spiritual gifts. He’s writing to the Corinthians, who frankly seem to have sometimes had a similar view of the spiritual gifts, said, “If you have the spiritual gifts, you don’t need the church.” Paul says, “No, not at all.” In 1 Corinthians 12, he says, “There are varieties of gifts but the same spirit. There are varieties of service but the same Lord. There are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all and every one. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” Now what common good is that? Paul goes on to tell us in verse 12, it’s the church, “Just as the body, as one, has many members, and all the members of the body, though many are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one spirit, we were all baptized into one body, Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, and all were made to drink of one spirit.”

In other words, don’t try to understand the charismatic ministry of the Holy Spirit apart from the sacramental ministry of the Holy Spirit baptizing you into union with the church. These gifts you have are for the upbuilding of the church, not for your own internal private guidance. Hopefully, that’s clear. Whatever gifts you’ve been given, and this is true frankly not just of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the extraordinary sense but all of your natural gifting, these things are not for your own individual private benefit. This is for the upbuilding of the common good and, in a special way, the upbuilding of the church. So we don’t see biblically any reason to believe that infallibility is given to the individual. We see a great deal of reason to believe infallibility is given to the church. I’d say of the first three claims, instead of leading the church into the proper biblical canon, the Holy Spirit instead teaches each true believer.

That doesn’t seem to be theologically sound. It also doesn’t historically stand up. We don’t see all individuals independently just coming to the same interpretation. We’ll get into that in a greater way, but we don’t see any evidence of individuals having this gift of the Holy Spirit and it doesn’t make sense given everything we know about the way the gifts of the Holy Spirit work. They’re not meant to be a shortcut around the church or around fellowship. They’re supposed to lead you into the church and into fellowship. So that’s the first of the three arguments. The second that we can tell this is the Holy Spirit because of our feelings, how much can we base the Bible off of our feelings. Now remember Calvin’s argument, he says, “Enlightened by the Spirit, we no longer believe either on our own judgment or that of others that the Scriptures are from God, but in a way superior to human judgment, feel perfectly assured.”

That it’s just his very clear feeling that he describes this of having, and he goes on to say something that sounds like Calvin may be from California. He says, “We feel a divine energy living and breathing in the Scripture.” So we just feel this divine energy. It’s just like chakras and auras, man. I joke but understand there’s something profoundly unchristian about this method of understanding the Bible of understanding anything we just know based on like, “Oh, we got a feeling in our heart and that’s how we know.” You won’t find early Christians arguing in this way because this is a ridiculous way to try to understand which books are and aren’t the Bible. Calvin sounds like no one here more than Darth Vader. I’m going to let Darth Vader speak for himself.

No, I am your father.

No. It’s not true. That’s impossible.

Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

No.

So that’s the idea, search your feelings. You know it to be true, and I think the Christian response is Luke Skywalker’s response, just screaming, “No, that’s not a good way to do this at all.” That’s not what Luke is actually doing. But nevertheless, this is a good way to remember Calvin’s argument that this idea that we’re just going to know from internal feelings the right and wrong answer about which books belong in the Bible really is theological anarchy. Because if I’m basing this stuff just off of my feelings, my feelings are a horrible guide. So J.V. Fesko, who was the academic dean at Westminster in California, and I think he’s teaching as a systematic theologian down in Mississippi or somewhere now, has written on this. He’s a Calvinist. He tries to defend this idea, and in his words, he says, “In the simplest of terms, Christians must believe and obey the Word of God because God wrote it, and we know that God wrote it because the Bible says so.”

Now if that doesn’t sound circular, I’d just highlight that it is circular. He’s got to acknowledge that. He says, “In the history of theology, not all Christians agree on this point. The Roman Catholic Church argues we must believe the Bible because the church has identified it as the Word of God. In short, the church gave birth to the Bible.” That’s not a really good understanding of the religion of the church in the Bible. We’re not saying the church gave birth to the Bible as in turning uninspired works inspired, but rather, the Holy Spirit guided the church rather than the individual into recognizing which books were already inspired. Protestant theologians, however, instead argued, the Bible gave birth to the church, and hence the church must both acknowledge and submit to God’s words.

Now, historically, this is false. Let’s just put it that way. Think about St. Paul’s writings. He’s often writing to particular churches. As a matter of sheer history, the Christian Church is older than the New Testament, and the Christian Church produces the New Testament. Prior to even recognizing the books, the question of did the Bible create the church? Or did the church create the Bible? Is an easy one to answer in terms of the New Testament. The church created the New Testament just as Israel created the Old Testament. That doesn’t mean that either the human authors in the church or the human authors in Israel make the text inspired, but the idea of the church is born from the Bible is false. That’s not historically how Christianity comes into being. So if you are trying to create a church based on the Bible, you’re doing something profoundly unbiblical. You’re doing something that no one in the history of Christianity in its early days ever did, because that’s a ridiculous way to go about it.

Hopefully, that makes sense. The people of God exist before the writings do, and this is clear from the writings themselves, that are abundantly clear on this. Abraham is following God faithfully without a word of Scripture, and you go to the New Testament. Sure, they’ve got the Old Testament at this point, but they don’t have any of the New Testament in written form. So the idea that the church is born from Scripture is false, but so too is the idea that the church, in terms of recognizing the Scriptures, makes it become infallible or inspired. God does that, but he does that through the church, and then through the same church helps to recognize which books are in fact inspired. So I’ll just point this out, that Fesko’s vision of church history is profoundly and obviously false, but nevertheless, we’ll go on. He goes on to say, “Such an understanding of God’s Word might lead people to believe that they’re running in an intellectual circle. The Bible is God’s Word because the Bible says so?”

Exactly. Yes, that is a circular argument. And then he says, “Are there not many so-called holy books that claim divine origins?” Great point. If you just say the Bible is the Bible because the Bible says so, you have to also say the Quran is inspired because the Quran says so, and fill in the blank, other holy book. How do we set apart the Bible’s teaching from similar claims? So he’s going to try to answer this pretty serious problem. He says, “To confirm the authenticity of the Scripture’s self-attesting character, Protestant theologians have historically appealed to the doctrine of the internal witness of the Holy Spirit.” There it is. So hey, we’ve got this logical self-refuting circular reasoning we’ve fallen into. How do we get out of it? Feelings, the internal witness of the Holy Spirit.

We can’t point to any logical proof that would distinguish our claim from the Muslim claim, the Mormon claim, or fill in the blank, but just go with your feelings. So he points here to the Westminster Confession, which we already heard from, and he says that the Westminster Confession points out many noteworthy things about the Scriptures, namely the efficacy of the doctrine, the heavenly nature of its matter, the beauty of its style, the consent of its various parts, and its perfection. But nevertheless, the confession realizes that while all of these things and his claim abundantly demonstrate the Bible as a Word of God, are full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts. Okay, so there’s two claims here. One, the feelings claim the internal witness, and two, that there’s something that we can point to as objectively good doctrine that’s still very subjective, and it’s beautiful, very subjective.

So let me just give you two examples of why this doesn’t work. The first is, when you read the Quran in the 17th Surah, Allah says, “Say, oh prophet, if all humans and jinn,” that’s where the word genie comes from. It’s like spirits, “were to come together to produce the equivalent of this Quran, they could not produce its equal, no matter how they supported each other. We’ve truly set forth every kind of lesson for humanity in this Quran. Yet most people persist in disbelief.” In other words, the Islamic claim about the Quran in the Quran is you can know this is true because it’s so beautiful and because it covers all the right doctrines.

That’s remarkably similar to what Westminster and Fesko are saying, but so too the Book of Mormon in the book called Moroni 10:4-5, “And when you’ve received these things, I would exhort you that you would ask God the eternal Father in the name of Christ if these things are not true, and he shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you by the power of the Holy Ghost.” So the Book of Mormon says, if you want to know if the Book of Mormon is true, just pray on it and you’ll know.

Similar claims are found in the Quran, strikingly despite Calvin’s argument, despite Westminster’s argument, despite Fesko’s argument. There’s nothing in the Bible that says anything like this. The Bible never says, “If you want to know if this book is true, just consult your feelings. Just prey on it, and you’ll get a good feeling, and then you’ll know.” None of that. That is a terribly unreliable method, as evidenced by the fact that people do this with the Quran, with the Book of Mormon, come away convinced, and then leave Christianity for one of those or any number of alternatives. What the Bible does is narrow the opposite. In Jeremiah we’re warned, Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt. Who can understand it?”

It makes no sense to say on the one hand that you’re depraved, the Calvinist claim that you’re totally depraved, and on the other hand, still trust those depraved feelings as being an accurate guide to the truth. They’re simply not. Even if the feeling is, this is coming from God and not from me, just have the humility to look around you. Don’t look at your own feelings. Look around you at everybody else who thinks they’re led by their feelings by God, and see how reliable that is for all of them. If they’re not being led into the truth, it’s strange to say, but I’m going to be the exception. How do I know? Because my feeling is the same unreliable source for everybody else’s. They’re not going to steer me wrong. Hopefully, you see that as not just a little bit of intellectual hubris but a very silly way to go about this, especially when, again, Scripture does not tell us to do things this way.

We are never told, “If you want to know the truth, the Bible, just pray on it, and you’ll know you’ll get a good feeling.” None of that is biblical. It is clearly Islamic, it is clearly Mormon, it is not Christian. So on the second claim that we can tell we’re led by the Holy Spirit because of our feelings, that is simply untrue. Likewise, I would say, we can’t prove the biblical canon because of subjective factors like whether we find its doctrine agreeable or whether we find it beautiful, because in all of those cases, we’re still the arbitraries. We are still the ones leading rather than the ones following God. We’re still putting our personal opinions, our personal feelings on top and then accepting the Bible if it agrees with our feelings. That is not a Christian way of approaching Scripture. It’s not a Christian way of approaching Christianity at all.

So that gets to the third part of Calvin’s claim that our feelings create a perfectly reliable biblical canon. Now obviously, if number one and number two are false, number three is going to be false, but I want to be really clear that Calvin’s argument is that we can know perfectly which books are and aren’t in the Bible on the basis of this internal feeling. In a way, in his words, superior to human judgment, we can feel perfectly assured as much as if we beheld the divine image, visibly impressed on the Scriptures. Elsewhere, Calvin is even clearer about this in Book I of Institutes of Christian Religion. He says, “How should we be persuaded that it came from God without recurring to a decree of the church?” In other words, how do you prove you’ve got exactly the right Bible without pointing to the church?

He blows off the question. He says, “It’s just the same as if it were asked, ‘How shall we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter?’ Scripture bears upon the face of it as clear evidence of its truth, as white and black do of their color, sweet and bitter of their taste.” That it is no harder to figure out, does the book of wisdom belong in the Bible as it is to tell white and black apart? It’s just that easy. It’s just that straightforward. Does that work? I’m going to highlight a couple problems. The first is John Calvin and Martin Luther, and the other reformers are making this doctrine up. When you look back to how the early Christians argued about which books did and didn’t belong in the Bible, none of them claimed to have a special spiritual gift that made them infallible to perfectly know which books belonged in the Bible.

Nobody was arguing that. Even the people who thought we should have a 66-book Bible like Protestants do, like Saint Jerome St. Rufinus, they didn’t say, “I know this because I’ve been privately led by the Holy Spirit into a perfect knowledge, and I can tell just as easily as telling black from white.” No, that is not how they argued at all. They argued on the basis of historical considerations, like which books were accepted by the Jews of their days. They argued on really technical grounds about authorship in all directions. Everybody was doing this. Nobody was appealing to private, inward, special, secret knowledge from the Holy Spirit. That is a profoundly un-Christian way of approaching the question. So when I say the reformers are making this up, people usually respond with exactly one Bible verse that they will claim supports this, when Jesus in John 10 says the sheep will hear His voice.

So Michael Kruger, who I actually mentioned in the last episode, I’m not trying to pick on the guy, but he’s one of the intellectual Protestants who’s trying to do work in this area, and his book Canon Revisited tries to defend what he calls the self attestation of Scripture. Now, Kruger’s version of self-attestation is actually very different than Calvin’s, but nevertheless, he claims we have every biblical reason to believe that the Spirit’s work is within the hearts of His people. He says both individually and corporately, it is affectual and that Christ makes good on His promise that My sheep hear My voice and they follow Me. He’s quoting part of John 10:27. Later, both sums it up, “Christ will establish and build his church by causing the church to accept just this canon and by means of the assistance and witness of the Holy Spirit to recognize it as His.”

Now, there’s two problems with this. One of those is, the church corporately did not agree on the Protestant canon. The church had corporately agreed on a 73-book canon that Protestants thought was wrong. So if your argument is, the Holy Spirit led the church collectively, I don’t care if you mean magisterium-like leadership of the church or whether you mean the overall just like Christian community. Overwhelmingly, at the time of the Reformation, virtually everybody used a 73-book Bible, especially in the West. You will find a handful of exceptions, but they’re just at their handful. If you’re arguing that the Holy Spirit is corporately leading His people into the truth and there is a single Bible, the Latin Vulgate, used by almost every western Christian and has 73 books, and you think actually the corporate church got it wrong, choose an argument. You can’t say both The Holy Spirit is leading the church collectively into the truth and the church collectively screwed this one up and it needed reformation.

They can’t both be right. Nevertheless, the other problem is just that Scripture is being badly abused here in this citation to John 10:27. Go read John 10, particularly 24 to 28, and you’ll see Jesus is saying nothing about how His followers will know exactly which books are in the Bible. There’s none of that. There’s nothing that comes even closer, hints at that. He’s asked the question by the Jewish listeners, who He’s just given the good shepherd, He’s given two, one about the sheep gate, about he’s going to choose a shepherd, lead his people, and they’ll hear his voice, and the second about how He’s the good shepherd. The Jews then gather around and say, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly. Jesus then answers and says, ‘I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name, they bear witness to Me. But you do not believe, because you do not belong to My sheep. My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.'”

So he’s not saying some special internal charismatic gift. Pentecost hasn’t even happened. He’s saying people are convicted on the basis of what? On the basis of the works that He’s doing in His Father’s name. He’s doing miracles, and those whose hearts are open to it, are saying this is the Messiah. They don’t understand everything. They don’t have all truth. You wouldn’t need only read the New Testament to realize they don’t have a perfect understanding of everything Jesus is doing. He’s not saying they have a perfect Bible, even less. There’s not even a hint about that anywhere in the text. This is just taking one sentence, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.” And saying, “Therefore, if they follow Him, they must have a perfect Bible.” That doesn’t logically follow at all.

That’s simply made up. But again, if you’re going to say that, if you’re going to say anyone who is one of the sheep of Christ will have a 66-book Protestant Bible, you need to be ready to say there were no followers of Christ between the time of the apostles and the reformation, or if there were, they were so small, we can count the known examples of them on two hands. That is remarkable if you’re going to make that claim. Otherwise, just admit, this verse does not teach what Kruger and others are manipulating it to say. It simply doesn’t teach that you’ll have some private internal gift. It’s not even about private internal gifts at all. It’s about the faithful seeing the external actions of Christ and responding to them because they realize that these miracles could only be done by Christ. The works He’s talking about are His signs, are His miracles, so it doesn’t teach that. The reformers are simply making this doctrine up.

Now I’m going to return to Kruger. As I said, his version of what he calls self-attestation actually differs from Calvin’s. He claims that this does not mean that we should expect to find perfect unity among the church, but it doesn’t mean that we should expect to find a corporate or covenantal unity, which is precisely what we do find. Two arguments here. First, we don’t actually find that in the Protestant direction. Protestants have a 66-book Bible. Nobody else does. Nobody prior to, like, “Find me a Christian community prior to the Reformation that has a 66-book Bible.” If your argument is for a covenantal unity or a corporate unity, there should be no problem. But two, he claims that the internal witness of the Scriptures doesn’t mean we should expect to find perfect unity among the church, but it does to Calvin. Remember, he says, “These questions are as easy as telling black from white or bitter from sweet.”? Everybody can do that.

If it’s really that easy, which is Calvin’s argument and makes sense, if you really have a special supernatural infallibility, you shouldn’t be batting 300, 400, 500. You should be batting 1,000. So what in the world is going on here if any of this stuff is true? That’s the first problem. The reformers are simply making this up. The second problem is, the reformers, bizarrely, don’t actually agree on the biblical canon. I’m going to give just a couple examples. The first one, Martin Luther. In 1522 and his preface to the Revelation of John, he says, “About this book of the Revelation of John, I leave everyone free to hold his own opinions. I would not have anyone bound to my opinion or judgment. I say what I feel. I miss more than one thing in this book, and it makes me consider it to be neither apostolic nor prophetic.”

Now, Luther will later revise his opinion. There’s some question by the end of his life, does Luther consider Revelation divinely inspired or not? He has a much softer prologue the second time he does a prologue for the book of Revelation. The important thing here is, Luther’s feelings that he’s citing don’t lead him to believe the book of Revelation is divinely inspired, which should be easy. If the Holy Spirit is giving Luther, as a true believer, the guide to know exactly which books belong in the Bible, why does he not know which books belong in the Bible? Because by Luther’s own admission, he doesn’t feel like this one is, and he leaves it up to everybody else’s opinions and feelings. You can decide it’s inspired for you and decide it’s not inspired for me. We can each have our own private, individualized Bible.

Now, that is a terrible way of figuring out Scripture because if I’m only bound by the Scriptures I feel are authoritative, what happens when I get to a part where my feelings don’t like what Scripture has to say because it’s telling me something I don’t want to hear? It’s challenging me or calling me to some. This is why the heart is deceitful above all things. Hopefully, you can see, in the same way I mentioned in one of the prior episodes, he rejects James because he thinks it disagrees with sola fide. He puts his own theology above Scripture. Likewise, here he’s put in his own feelings above Scripture, but the more striking one isn’t Luther, it’s John Calvin himself. John Calvin, after the Council of Trent, has a work that’s called the Acts of the Council of Trent with the Antidote.

In it, he argues against the Council of Trent and he argues that the Council of Trent, is wrong on the Bible, and specifically, he appeals to Rufinus in Jerome in arguing that five books that are accepted by the Council of Trent shouldn’t be accepted by Christians. Ecclesiasticus, that is, Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, Tobit, Judith, and the Maccabees. That’s 1 and 2 Maccabees. Sorry, I said five. I meant six. That’s leaving one book. That’s leaving the book of Baruch, and it’s not just that Calvin has forgotten about the book of Baruch. Calvin appears to believe that the book of Baruch is divinely inspired. How do we know this? Not just because he cites to it, but he actually cites to it as prophetic. In his commentary in 1 Corinthians 10, he says, “It is certain from the prophet Baruch that those things that are sacrificed to idols are sacrificed to devils.” That is a citation to Baruch 4:7, which he has described as a citation to the prophet Baruch.

He’s not claiming merely human authorship the way he does for the other books. In fact, he argues that St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 10, is getting his argument from the prophet. He says, “How much more likely is it then that Paul borrowed what he says from the prophet to express the enormity of the evil?” You actually see what Calvin’s talking about by comparing Baruch 4:7 and 1 Corinthians 10:20. In Baruch 4:7, he writes, “For you provoked Him who made you by sacrificing to demons and not to God.” In 1 Corinthians 10:20, St. Paul says, “I imply that what Pagan sacrificed they offer to demons and not to God.” You’ll notice the wording there is remarkably similar. Paul does seem to be alluding to Baruch. If you remember the prior two episodes on this, you’ll see that one of the common Protestant arguments is this idea that the seven disputed books are never cited in the New Testament, and that misunderstands how frequently they’re referenced.

They’re just not quoted as such because there’s a much smaller number of biblical texts that are directly quoted than are referenced, and Calvin is arguing here that 1 Corinthians 10 is based on Baruch 4 and that Baruch is prophetic. So modern Protestants don’t just reject the Bible accepted by the early Christians. They don’t just accept the Bible accepted by the Council of Florence or the Council of Trent. They reject the Bible advocated for by Martin Luther and John Calvin. That leaves two possibilities. If Calvin’s right that those who are inwardly taught by the Holy Spirit acquiesce implicitly in Scripture and can tell which books belong in the Bible as easily as they can tell black from white, and it’s true that John Calvin and Martin Luther couldn’t tell which books belonged in the Bible, which both Catholics and Protestants agree on, one of two things follow. Number one, those men were not led by the Holy Spirit, and/or number two, Calvin’s whole idea of scriptural self-attestation is false and demonstrably false.

Now, at least one of those two things has to be true. The reformers, the original reformers, were not led by God, and/or the Calvinist version of self-attestation of Scripture is false. It’s quite possible that it’s both, but you can’t have a situation where you say Calvin is led by the Holy Spirit, can tell black from white which books belong in the Bible and somehow still gets it wrong because his Bible does not agree with Protestants or Catholics. He just gets this one wrong. So then, remembering the three arguments that instead of leading the church into the proper biblical canon, the Holy Spirit instead teaches each true believer inwardly, we see that’s not true. The idea that we can tell we’ve been inwardly taught by the Spirit because of our feelings, we see that’s not true, and the idea that these feelings give us perfect clarity about which books belong in the Bible, we see that’s not true.

But I don’t want to just dismantle a bad Calvinist argument. I want to also propose a good one. What is the alternative to biblical self-attestation? And here’s the fun thing, I don’t have to just invent some new doctrine. I don’t have to just come up with some new schema where I say, “Here’s how we can tell…” I can point at what did the original Christians actually do. So St. Augustine talks about this in his work on Christian doctrine. He says that the most skillful interpreter of the sacred writings, then, will be he who, in the first place, has read them all and retained them in his knowledge, if not yet with full understanding, still with such knowledge as reading gives, those of them, at least, that are called canonical. So which ones are called canonical? He says, “Now in regard to the canonical Scriptures, he that’s the most skillful interpreter of the Bible must follow the judgment of the greater number of Catholic churches. And among these, of course, a high place must be given to such as have been thought worthy to be the seat of an apostle and to receive epistles.”

In other words, he’s given us two things to look at. Number one, how widely do Catholic churches accept a particular book? And number two, how widely are these books accepted in the really important Catholic churches, the ones founded by apostles and those that have received epistles, those like Corinth that have been written to by the apostles? “Accordingly, among the canonical Scriptures, he will judge according to the following standard, to prefer those that are received by all the Catholic churches to those which some do not receive.” And then he says, “Okay, what if you get in a situation in which the really important churches go one way and most other churches go the other?” In that hypothetical situation, he says, those two standards would be equal.

Nevertheless, this isn’t just a hypothetical. Augustine says, “If you were to apply this method, here’s what you’re going to get.” He says, “Now, the whole canon of Scripture in which we say this judgment is to be exercised, it’s contained in the following books.” I’m not going to read you all 73 of the books that he lists, but he lists the exact Catholic Bible. Ironically, he doesn’t have Baruch, but I’ll explain why he doesn’t have Baruch in a second. Tobit, he mentions Judith, he mentions the two books of Maccabees, he mentions Wisdom, he mentions Ecclesiasticus, that’s Sirach, and he points out that Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus were sometimes thought to be written by Solomon, and that’s probably not true. They’re probably written by Sirach. “Still,” he says, “they’re to be reckoned among the Prophetical books since they’ve attained recognition as being authoritative.” So in other words, it does not matter whether they were or were not written by Solomon.

We can tell from the reception by the church that these are authoritative books. That’s his standard. Now I mentioned Baruch, so let me get back to that. Baruch, in the version used by Augustine, is part of the book of Jeremiah because Baruch is the secretary of Jeremiah, and this is also possibly the reason why Calvin accepts it because in the early Christian version of Jeremiah, Baruch is included. So just throwing that out there, that’s an important thing. None of you won’t see Baruch mentioned on these lists, and you’ll sometimes see people who reject these other books still accept Baruch because they accept the two-agent version of Jeremiah had Baruch as part of it.

Nevertheless, Augustine says the authority of the Old Testament is contained within the limits of these 44 books. So I just give that as a way of saying, “If you follow the way Christians actually came to knowledge of the Bible, you’ll have a Catholic Old Testament and you’ll also have a Catholic and Protestant, an Orthodox New Testament.” Because this is an area we don’t disagree on because Augustine goes on to say which books we’d find in the New Testament, and he gets all of them exactly right by either a Catholic, a Protestant, or an Orthodox standard.

So I would suggest this is a better model to just say, “I don’t believe the Holy Spirit has given me some special gift apart from the church to know which books are and aren’t in Scripture.” Instead, the Holy Spirit is leading the church writ large into all truth. So when the church collectively says, “These 73 books are inspired Scripture.” I trust that more than I trust myself, more than I trust an individual theologian, more than I trust even a particular saint, because that’s not where the promise is made. The promise of infallibility is made to the church collectively. So I hope that makes sense. Biblical self-attestation is a popular argument because the idea is, if we don’t have that, then we’re giving the church authority over Scripture. But the truth is, either the church or the individual has to figure out which books are and aren’t in Scripture.

If that recognition makes you authoritative over Scripture, then the individual’s authoritative over Scripture in the Protestant system better than it be the church, the bride of Christ, the body of Christ, the one St. Paul describes as the fullness of Him who fills everything, the fullness of Christ, that is. This is what it really comes down to. Whose Bible are we going to trust? My Bible is built on my infallibility, or the church’s Bible is built on the church’s infallibility. So I hope that’s helpful. I hope that’s clear, and I hope you can see on the basis of this why no part of the argument from self-attestation is doctrinally sound that is built on projecting ideas onto Scripture. The Scripture has to be self-attesting when it doesn’t claim that it is, in which Mormons claim their Bible is self-attesting. Muslims claim their Quran is self-attesting. The Christian Bible does not claim to be self-attesting, and it clearly isn’t if one knows anything about church history.

All right, I think that’s more than enough. So I hope I haven’t belabored the point too much. If you’re interested, I look forward to reading the comments, and as I hinted, I’m going to be pivoting next week. I’m going to start with a few-week-long series, I think, on how to respond to Mormon theology. I hope you’ll check it out. God bless.

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