Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer examines Cameron Bertuzzi’s and Gavin Ortlund’s recent videos on the problem of the Biblical Canon.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And last week Cameron Bertuzzi of the Capturing Christianity YouTube channel made a video called The One Question Every Protestant Must Answer That question if you’re wondering is about how we know which books are in the Bible, particularly which books are in the New Testament.
CLIP:
The question that every Christian has to answer is this, how do we know which books belong in the New Testament? The New Testament is where we find everything from the life of Jesus to the message of salvation, but Christians haven’t always agreed on which books belonged inside of it. There wasn’t always a really neat list of 27 New Testament books. Some books we now consider essential were heavily disputed while other writings were cherished and even read in church, but ultimately were left out.
Joe:
So after all, while virtually all Christians agree on the 27 books that make up the New Testament, some of those books were controversial. Books like James Hebrews second, Peter Second and Third John Book of Revelation and made it in. These are someone called the Antilegomena or spoken against books and then other books. So think of things like the Diday, the Epistle of Barnabas. First Clement Shepherd of Hermes were beloved early Christian writings that some Christians thought belonged in the Bible and that ultimately didn’t make it in. So to be clear, we’re not talking about heretical books, we’re not talking about the gnostic gospels or anything like that. Those are the easy kind of black and white cases. We’re talking about those gray area cases where some Christians think it belongs and some Christians think that it doesn’t. In technical terms, Cameron is proposing what’s called the canon question.
How do we know the contents or the canon of the Bible? And he proposes five ways that we could try to solve this problem. I’m going to look at a few others in the course of this video, but he says, number one, we could trust the authority of the church and by this point we’re largely talking the fourth century, so I don’t think you can really deny that. The church in question here is a Catholic church, more on that later. So that way works if you trust the authority of the church, you can trust we got the New Testament right? But obviously many Protestants are reluctant to trust the authority of the fourth century church. Second, you could look to things like apostolic authorship, but the problem here is that not all of the books of the New Testament are written by an apostle. For instance, the gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Luke.
Third, you could look at proximity to the apostles. Maybe you don’t have to be an apostle it enough to be friends or companions or close to an apostle. But here the problem is that there are other writings like one Clement that seem proximate to an apostle Clement is addressed presuming it’s the same person he’s addressed by name by St. Paul. And then fourth, you could say, well, we want the books that are consistent with orthodoxy. But of course, two problems. One, how do you know what’s Orthodox if you’re not getting it from the Bible? And two, there are plenty of good books that are Orthodox that doesn’t make them inspired. Scripture. Fifth you could say, well, I just have faith that God guided the church. Now hopefully, as we’ve already seen, two, three and four don’t really work very well. So that leaves us with one in five.
We trust the authority of the church and ultimately we trust God’s guidance of the church and that makes total sense. As a Catholic, I was wondering how Protestants would respond to that, and I was honestly disappointed in the caliber of the response that I was seen in his comments. Now I know what you’re saying, it’s YouTube comments of course, but oftentimes he has really good comments this time there were some good ones, but a lot of people attacked him just for asking the question. I even saw people who announced that they were no longer going to support him financially and encourage other Protestants to pull funding from his exploration of Christian apologetics because he was asking questions they didn’t want him asking. Now, I’m going to pause on this point and say, I don’t normally do this, but if you are so inclined you have the means and the desire to do so. I would encourage you to go over to Patreon and go on capturing Christianity and consider becoming a member because I think he’s doing really good work and I don’t like seeing him bullied financially by people who just don’t want him asking questions about how Protestants know which books are in the Bible.
If he’s going to lose some donors, let him get some donors who encourage his intellectual inquiry and his honesty. So again, I don’t want to also s think a lot, just the negative commenters. I was really disappointed in some of the comments, but there were some really good ones as well. And I would say in particular a really good response video came from Dr. Gavin Orland. Now, I’ve critiqued Gavin multiple times on this channel for things upon which we disagree, and I’m going to do that again today, but there’s a lot in his response that I thought was really good. So his response is called How do we know the New Testament cannon? I put the accent on the wrong word. How do we know the New Testament cannon in which he takes Cameron’s question seriously. Now, I actually found myself agreeing with Gavin much more than I thought I would and in particular I agree to some of his critiques of the Catholic case or the way the Catholic case is kind of popularly made involving infallibility. And I’ll explain why in a minute. But first let’s just say, okay, remember the five ways that Cameron sort of threw out that you could explore or defend the New Testament canon like me, Gavin is going to suggest that the first and the fifth of those are the intellectually strongest. These are the ones we should be relying upon the authority of the church and God’s guidance of the church.
CLIP:
And the answer I’ll give here has some resonance with his first and fifth options. If you watched his video, and that’s basically this, we can trust God’s guidance of the process of canonization in the early church even though it was a fallible process, the church’s reception of the canon can be fallible and yet still trustworthy.
Joe:
So we’re going to obviously disagree on that question of infallibility and I’ll get to why infallibility is needed. Shortly is going to be the bulk of what I talk about today, but right now, let’s just recognize we agree that if we’re going to have a New Testament, it’s going to be because we’re able to trust the authority of the church and trust God’s guidance of the church. That’s a really important point. Now in that response he made to Cameron Gavin linked to a much longer video that he did on the same topic in which he makes the point in really a stronger way. He talks about some of the early Protestant reformers, particularly those of more a reformed or Calvinist bent, and he concludes
CLIP:
They all agree the church has a role as the witness unto the word of God included as one aspect of that is canonization and it’s a necessary role. Without the church, we have no scripture.
Joe:
So that’s a pretty strong statement for a Protestant to make. Without the church we have no scripture. You cannot have the scriptures without the church. I mean, think about it. If I said that as a Catholic, I think it’s fair to say many Protestants would accuse me of elevating the church to an idolatrous level of putting the church over scripture, and that’s not what’s happening. Gavin is very clear that both Catholics and Protestants agree that God and not the church is the author of scripture and the one who makes scripture inspired. But the church nevertheless has this indispensable and irreplaceable role in telling us what is and isn’t scripture. And so without that role, you don’t have the New Testament because you don’t know which things God did and didn’t inspire. It really is that simple, but I’m thrilled to hear Gavin say it explicitly and to back the claim up with an appeal to Protestant reformers.
Now, despite this, despite believing without the church, we don’t have the Bible, despite believing that we can trust the New Testament cannon to the extent that we can trust the authority of the church and God’s guidance of the church, Gavin nevertheless believes that this process isn’t infallible. He says in the bit I quoted a moment ago, we can trust God’s guidance of the process of canonization in the early church even though it was a fallible process. Now, I don’t dispute that something could be both fallible, capable of error and still right? If you’re doing basic math, two times two is four. You can get that right even though you are capable of screening up. Try some of the harder numbers and you’ll see your capacity to get math problems wrong, but you’re still trustworthy. You’re still right even though you’re capable of error, you’re fallible, but you’re not wrong.
So I don’t have a problem with that distinction. I have a problem with a different one. How could a process be both guided by God? That’s God’s guidance of the process of canonization means God is the one in control. He’s the one leading it and also capable of error, which is what fallible means. After all, I can see how you or I doing a math problem, we could get the answer even though we’re capable of getting it wrong, but if God is the one who’s the author, ultimately he’s the one guiding history. He’s the one leading the church into the truth. How is it still fallible? Now, Gavin’s going to argue three things in defense of why he thinks that this whole process is fallible. Why it’s not an infallible process even though it’s led by God. Two of them I’m not going to address because I’ve addressed him before.
He has a philosophical argument in his longer video about epistemology in the nature of infallibility that I don’t find very persuasive. I think he even realizes it’s not super strong. He kind of acknowledges that and I’ve addressed it before in a video called the Problem of personal interpretation. He also has a claim. The Jewish people in Jesus’ day didn’t have infallibility, but they still knew which books were and weren’t in the Bible. That’s just factually untrue as I point out in multiple videos. But most recently a video called the Bible in Jesus’ Day, how different was it looking at how they were actually ongoing rabbinic debates about which books did and didn’t belong in the Bible for centuries after Jesus. But I’m going to leave those two aside. Instead, I want to focus on the third argument he makes that I think is his strongest and I think he recognizes as his strongest. It’s the idea that there was no infallible counsel or ex catheter, a papal declaration in the early church settling the question of which books didn’t didn’t belong in the Bible. So here’s the way he makes the argument in the longer video.
CLIP:
Now, suppose that doesn’t convince you that’s the weaker argument. Oh, I should have started off with a stronger one. Oh, well that’s okay, let’s go forward. Here’s the real one because logical philosophical appeals are one thing, but here’s where it becomes very, I think, decisive, the historical argument. There’s a way that we can know with certainty that the church does not need infallibility to discern the canon, and that is just it didn’t happen that way. Infallible canon lists come way late in history toward the end of the Middle Ages, almost into the early modern era. In other words, if this is a problem for Protestants, it’s a problem for most Christians throughout history, most times throughout history.
Joe:
Now, Catholics might object, well, what about something like the third Council of Carthage or the Council of Rome? Didn’t they play this important role in setting the cannon? Yes, but Gavin would rightly respond to you by saying those weren’t ecumenical councils, those were regional councils. They were important ones in one case because Rome and another case because Saint Augustine is there, but they’re not of themselves infallible. This is not something either Catholics or Protestants believe about regional councils.
CLIP:
There were no infallible operations deciding the cannon during that first 1500 years of the church, the late fourth century councils 1500 ish. I’ll define Florence and Trent in a second. These late fourth century councils, I just have to say this upfront because everyone’s going to bring up some of these. They were local councils, they were fallible, and yet despite the absence of any infallible operations, the church came to a virtually universal agreement about the New Testament somewhere around the fourth century or really a little earlier than that, but totally finalized around then.
Joe:
Gavin is mostly right about all of this. If you’re a Catholic and you’re presenting the case, we can know the Bible because the Pope said so in some binding infallible way or because of an ecumenical council, something like that. I just don’t think that the top down case for our knowledge of the canon of scripture is particularly strong because there isn’t a ton of top-down infallible authority being exercised on this question. So I completely agree with Gavin here except for one thing, namely that process by which God leads the Christian people from confusion and disunity on the contents of the New Testament to as he puts, as this near unanimous unity that’s not just happening by human effort. That’s an infallible, divinely inspired and led process that is still infallible even though it’s happening organically and from the bottom up rather than top down. I’d say two things.
Number one, unaided men simply don’t arrive at unity this way. You can think outside of religion on something like politics. You can think about something like the Tower of Babel. How unified were we without the assistance of divine grace? Compare Babel to Pentecost or you can think about something like the nature of Protestant denominationalism. No one Protestant group has ever been able to convince all the other Protestant groups that they’ve got all the truth and everyone should become Presbyterian Baptist, fill in the blank. People move around and there’s kind of the merry-go-round denominationally. But in contrast, we don’t see that happening where you don’t just have groups going from A to B2C on the question of the canon where, well, I think Hebrews is in this week and you’ve decided it’s out and then we switch the next week. That’s not happening at all. Rather, you have this consensus emerging in a way that doesn’t look like human effort.
It looks like the work of God and the work of God is infallible. So that leads to the second point, which is that I understand where Gavin’s coming from. Oftentimes when Catholics talk about infallibility, we talk about it in a top down sort of way. What has the Pope said? What has an ecumenical council said? And so many people, Protestant and Catholic alike frankly don’t realize that the Catholic conception of infallibility doesn’t just work in that top down sort of way. So I think you see that in Gavin’s arguments. He seems to pretty explicitly link infallibility with a top down approach and he contrasts it with what he calls an organic process within the church, even though from a Catholic perspective, the Holy Spirit can work in both of those ways.
CLIP:
The canon coming together. New Testament canon is not the result of infallible mechanisms. It’s not the result of an ex cathedral statement from a pope, and it’s not the result of an ecumenical council. It was not a top down declaration,
Joe:
But of course the Holy Spirit can inspire the church from the bottom up in the organic of the process as he puts it just as much as he can from the top down with creeds and councils and popes and the like. So instead of talking about papal infallibility, let’s talk about people infallibility. Now, some of you watching this or listening to it might be thinking that doesn’t sound very Catholic of you because you have this image of the church being super hierarchical that every decision is resolved at the Vatican or at an ecumenical council, but that’s a caricature, a caricature that frankly many Catholics are guilty of propagating. It’s not what the church claims about herself or her own authority. For instance, the Second Vatican council is quite explicit that the holy people of God shares also in Christ’s prophetic office such that the entire body of the faithful anointed as they are by the holy one cannot air in matters of belief.
Notice this is explicitly about infallibility, but it’s not just the Pope or ecumenical councils that’s acting in an infallible way. Here’s the whole people of God collectively that organic unfolding of doctrine. Now, that process that Gavin has described where the people of God went from disunity to near complete unity on an important topic, namely which books belong in the Bible, that’s a perfect illustration of the kind of thing Vatican II is talking about is a sign of Christian anointing at work. The catechism of the Catholic church echoes this in paragraphs 91 and 92 saying that all the faithful share an understanding and handing on revealed truth that is not just the teaching office of the church. They all the faithful have received the anointing of the Holy Spirit who instructs them and guides them into all truth. This is how you can have, for instance, Catholic laity who can point out if their bishop is saying something that’s not quite right.
Paragraph 92 says, the whole body of the faithful cannot air in matters of belief. This characteristic is shown in the supernatural appreciation of faith called the census feet ae or sense of the faith on the part of the whole people when from the bishops to the last of the faithful, they manifest a universal consent and matters of faith and morals. So where’s this coming from? Is this just some crazy thing the catechism made up or Vatican two made up? Not at all. You can find the biblical support for this in places like one John chapter two in which St John writes that the anointing which you receive from him abides in you and you have no need that anyone should teach you as his anointing teaches you about everything and is true and is no lie just as it has taught you abide in him.
Now, to be completely clear here, John is clearly not meaning that you literally do not need Christian teaching. Obviously he’s writing them a letter after all, but he is saying that your knowledge of the faith isn’t just coming from the official teaching body of the church. The faithful don’t need every point of theology and every moral question settled by a top down sort of infallible decision or a definition by the church. If you’re wondering, should I go murder my neighbor? You don’t have to pull out the catechism or even the Bible you’d know at the level of your heart because you’ve been formed by Christ in this way. That’s the claim, and this again is not just at the level of the individual, but collectively the people of God are led in this way. We see this as well in places like John chapter 16, verse 13, in which Jesus at the last Supper promises that when the spirit of truth comes, he’ll guide you into all the truth for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears, he will speak and he will declare to you the things that are to come.
So notice it’s not that you or I individually has all the truth. It’s rather the people of God collectively the church broadly, not just in a hierarchical sense of church, but the church as the people of God has the fullness of the truth. So if the church or is being led into the phones of the truth is actually what he claims, that means that if the church has come to a consensus on a thing, we can trust it. And this is how the early Christians understood this promise very clearly. And so as a result of that, they would regularly point to the consensus of Christians as evidence that the Holy Spirit had acted in this way and that therefore that was binding even if the church hadn’t officially spoken on a matter and like an infallible top down sort of way is still possessed infallibility because of the organic consensus.
So I’m going to give you a couple examples of people who speak to this in the early church. One of them is St. John Cashin in sometime in the four twenties. He writes that the agreement of all ought then to be in itself already sufficient to compute heresy. Notice that I don’t have to persuade you by the arguments. Once you realize that everybody’s against you, you should realize you’re wrong. That’s the argument for the authority of all shows undoubted truth. Then he says that if a man endeavors to hold opinions contrary to these, we should in the first instance rather condemn his perverseness than listen to his assertions. For one who impugns the judgment of all announces beforehand his own condemnation, and a man who disturbs what has been determined by all is not even given a hearing. So if you have some new version of Christianity that doesn’t match the tradition that’s gone on for 2000 years, we don’t have to listen to it because if the Holy Spirit is leading us into all truth and you’re breaking that consensus, then either you or the Holy Spirit are wrong and the Holy Spirit’s never wrong.
So according to Cashen, the truth has once for all been established by all men. So then whatever arises contrary to it by this very fact is to be recognized at once as falsehood because it differs from the truth. Excuse me when he says when it has been. In other words, he’s not saying all doctrine is settled, but when a doctrine is settled, you can’t unsettle it. Now that Saint John Cian, but I realize not a lot of people have heard of him, more famous on this topic is St. Vincent of Lauren who wrote that in the Catholic church itself, all possible care must be taken that we hold the faith which has been believed everywhere, always by all. I occasionally hear Protestants use this in a kind of distorted way to argue against Catholic doctrines. They don’t hold, but I don’t hear them actually grapple with what Vincent is actually arguing for.
He says, we can follow this rule by holding to three things, universality, antiquity and consent. What does he mean by that? By universality, we ought to confess the faith to be true to the whole church throughout the world. Confesses, and this is pretty simple. As a Catholic, I can get on a plane, go to almost any country on earth and find other believing catholics there who have the same faith, the same creed, the same catechism. That’s universality. It’s right there in the name of Catholic. That’s what the word Catholic means. Second, there’s antiquity that just as I can get on a plane, I could also get in a time machine and find out that I have the same faith as our holy ancestors and fathers. And that’s true even if I go before the 16th century, which is it’s not something everybody can say a third, there’s this need for consent because Vincent realized that sometimes Christians disagree with each other.
Sometimes even the early Christians disagree with each other and he says that we should follow the determinations of all or at least of almost all priests and doctors. So the great theologians, the great priests, we should be listening to what they have to say because that’s one of the ways we can see the sense of the faithful. So there you have it, you look broad, you look deep into history and you look at the heights of who are the kind of great figures and that gives you a sense of what did everybody kind of agree on. So that’s Vincent and he’s speaking to really the sense of the faithful, but even more famous than John Cassen, even more famous than St. Vincent is of course St. Augustine and speaking on the canon question, he’s not looking at the canon of the New Testament. Augustine’s going to make an argument about the canon of the Old Testament.
He’s going to appeal to the book of wisdom and he’s going to argue that we can know its inspired scripture even though the church hadn’t said so at a council since for so long a course of years, that book has deserved to be read in the Church of Christ from the station of the readers of the Church of Christ. In other words has been read liturgically and to be heard by all Christians from bishops downward even to the lowest lay believers, penitent and catechumens with the veneration paid to divine authority. You’ll notice paragraph 92 of the catechism is referencing that in its description of how we know the census feed ae or the census fidelium. So that’s the idea when everybody just knows the thing to be true, even if there’s not an official definition or declaration out there, it is still binding infallible church teaching.
But notice as well, this understanding of the census failure doesn’t pit the people against their bishops or against the teaching office of the church. It’s just a common understanding. Even if the teaching office hasn’t exercised its authority in that way, sometimes you’ll get this kind of misconception of the census fidelium like, well, a lot of Catholics disagree with the church teaching on sexual issues. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about when the faithful, wherever you find them and whenever you find them have a common idea of what it is to be a faithful Christian, we can trust that even if there’s not some official church document that condemns cannibalism doesn’t matter, we already know that thing is Catholicism. Contrary to Christianity, you don’t need an official infallible church declaration. We can hold that consensus infallibly itself, okay? Now all of the people I’ve just cited here are from the late three hundreds and the early four hundreds, and I think that matters in part because this is a period of time in which the can of the New Testament was being finalized and being kind of propagated.
But I want to also go back further. I want to not just address the Christians at that time and look at their theological framework. I want to show that this is something they had actually received and inherited. This is not some new invention from the three hundreds. This is not some new way of understanding Jesus’ promises. I want to go all the way back about 200 years to Traian. Now he lived from about the year one 60 to about the year two 40, so he’s roughly 20. When we first hear the four gospels being listed exactly by St. Eu, in about 180 tells us that Matthew, mark, Luke, and John are the four gospels. Tullian is a young man at the time, so he is very close to this kind of early stage and Churchillian like RNA before him argues that we have to hold the faith of the church, in particularly the churches that are established by the apostles, even on things that haven’t been formally defined.
He makes the argument this way. He says that we can only know what Christ revealed by listening to what the apostles preached, and we only know what the apostles preach by listening to what the churches they had founded tell us that they preached and those churches we’re talking about places like Jerusalem, Antioch and Rome. Therefore, he concludes all doctrine which agrees with the apostolic churches. Those molds and original sources of the faith must be reckoned for the truth, and he concludes we hold communion with the apostolic churches because our doctrine is in no respect different from theirs. This is our witness of truth. So that’s how, if you have the sense of the faithful, do you believe the same thing the early Christians did and especially the early Christians of places like Rome? And if you do great and if you don’t, not great. Now of course there’s a certain irony in citing Churchillian on this because he ends up becoming a heretic.
He becomes a modernist, but he gives a model he should have followed himself that if you want to know if a thing is correct, you can look at Christian consensus including the historic Christian consensus. Now, you might be listening to this particularly if you’re not a Catholic and saying, well, how do we know that that’s right? How do we know the Holy Spirit really did lead everybody into the truth and that it isn’t just the case that all of the churches have aired? Because sometimes when I point out, Hey, look, the early Christians were unanimous on a doctrine, baptism, Eucharist, bishops, whatever it is, people will respond. Well, that just means that the error came in earlier than we thought. How do we know it’s trustworthy? And Churchillian has arguments for that. He’s going to really make two arguments. He writes, grant then all have aired that the apostle was mistaken in giving his testimony that the Holy Ghost had no respect to anyone meaning any one church to lead it into truth.
Although he was sent with this view by Christ and for this ask of the Father that he might be the teacher of truth. In other words, okay, so let’s just take as a starting assumption that everything Jesus promised wasn’t true. He’s trying to show you that this is silly and then says, okay, let’s then grant that the Holy Spirit neglected his office as the vicar representative of Christ permitting the churches for a time to understand differently. Notice that line. It’s really important. He’s going to argue that Jesus’s promise will have failed if the church even for a little bit of time goes into apostasy because that’s not the Holy Spirit leading us into all truth, it’d be leading us into error. So okay, even for a time, let’s say you think the Holy Spirit failed and led us to believe differently what Jesus himself is preaching by the apostles, then this poses a logical problem.
Well, is it likely that so many churches and so great of churches should have gone astray into one in the same faith? Now I’m going to make sure you’re getting this argument. I think it’s really good He’s arguing. On the one hand, you’ve got all these biblical promises that won’t happen, so don’t worry about it. But on the other hand, even if you don’t believe those promises or don’t interpret them like that, you still have just a logical problem. How likely is it that the whole church is going to air in the exact same direction, right? No manmade action as he puts it, issues in one in the same result. Think again about politics, think about sports. Think about any number of things that people disagree on. They tend to factionalized. They tend to split into whether you want to call ’em denominations or sex or whatever.
If it’s manmade, if it’s not led by God, it breaks up into smaller and smaller groups. Thus Churchill says way, however that which is deposited among many is found to be one and the same. It is not the result of error but of tradition. Can anyone then be reckless enough to say that they were an error who handed on the tradition? And the answer to that is yes, there is someone who is reckless enough to say even where the church is unified, it’s still wrong and that’d be Martin Luther. Now promise I’m going to get back to the particular question of the canon of the New Testament. My point here is that this case for the canon also seems like a case against the Protestant reformation because Martin Luther makes the argument that we actually can’t trust the consensus of the early church. Something the early Christians were convinced was infallible.
He thinks not only is it fallible, he actually compares the early Christians themselves to the wicked men in the days of Noah and compares himself to Noah, the only one righteous. This is from his commentary on Genesis. It is a fascinating passage and I want to quote it at a little bit of length. He says, there is no doubt that a depraved generation hated him. Noah inordinately tantalizing him in various ways and insulting him Are thou alone lies? Does thou alone please God? Are the rest of us all in error? Shall we all be damned thou alone does not air, thou alone shall not be condemned and thus the just and holy men must have concluded in his mind that all others were in error and thus about to be condemned while he and his offspring alone were to be saved. Although his conviction was right in the matter, his lot was a hard one.
The holy man was in various ways troubled by such reflections. Now, in hearing this, you might be saying, wait a second, none of that’s in Genesis. We don’t find them saying, are you alone wise in Genesis? That sounds awfully autobiographical since we know that was one of the accusations made against Luther, and in case that was too subtle, Luther makes it very clear he’s not really thinking of Noah. He’s thinking about himself as the new Noah. He says, the wretched papa press us today with this one argument. Do you believe that all the fathers have been in error? It seems hard so to believe, especially of the Worthier ones such as Augustine, Ambrose, Bernard, and that whole throng of the best men who have governed churches with the word and have been adorned with the August name of the church, the laborers of such we both lawed and admire, right?
So you can see hopefully the wisdom of the Catholic argument is it really plausible that the whole church was led not into truth, but into doctrinal error and heresy, both the whole church collectively and the greatest minds of the church, the holiest and most beloved people, the Augustines and Ambrose’s and Bernards and the like, and Martin Luther sort of shrugs and was like, yeah, he says, well, surely Noah less difficulty confronted Noah himself, who alone is called just an upright at a time when the very sons of men paraded the name of the church. When the sons of the fathers allied themselves with these, they forsooth believed that Noah with his people raved because he followed another doctrine and another worship. I find this passage endlessly fascinating because of what Luther is saying about himself and about the reformation. I mean, he’s not only just saying that he thinks unlike all the early Christians, that the Christian consensus could be wrong.
He thinks the Christian consensus was in fact wrong and he openly is presenting himself as following another doctrine and another worship from the face of the early Christians. And this is okay because he’s like the new Noah and all of the early Christians who died for the faith are really just like the wicked men of old who hated Noah even though they claimed to be something, we don’t actually find them claiming to be righteous. We just find them being really wicked. But for the purposes of his argument, we have to imagine that they presented themselves as really holy but actually weren’t. It did bad analysis of Genesis. It’s a bad analysis of what Noah and his contemporaries we’re on about, but it is a very revealing insight into Luther’s own mind. And so we don’t have to wonder how the early Christians folks like St.
John Cassian would respond because they told us directly we should in the first instance rather condemn his perverseness than listen to his assertions. For one who impugns the judgment of all announces beforehand his own condemnation, and a man who disturbed what has been determined by all is not even given a hearing. I would just suggest it’s not possible for them both to be right either the early church is right or Martin Luther is right, but they cannot both be right because they have opposite theologies on important questions like can we trust the census? Fidel, we have opposite theologies on whether we can trust the Holy Spirit to lead the church into truth instead of error. Those just cannot both be right. A theology where he can say, I alone him just everyone else is going to hell is fundamentally not a Christian theology if Christianity has any historic meaning.
So that’s the case I’m arguing for in a nutshell. We can know which books belong in the New Testament because we can trust the consensus of the early Christians. We can trust this census fidelium. And I agree with Gavin except that I think this whole process is infallible because God is leading it even if it’s not top down, it doesn’t have to be. But if you take this seriously, several other things follow from that. You can’t then turn around and reject the consensus of the early Christians on baptism or on the Eucharist or on the authority of bishops or on which books were in the Old Testament, all of which I know Gavin rejects right? And all of which I know many Protestants reject. I don’t mean that as a personal site, I just mean to say you can’t point to one in five on, if you remember Cameron’s original frame and say we can trust the authority of the church and God’s guidance of the church and then turn around and reject the authority of the church and God’s guidance of the church when it doesn’t suit you.
So other people aren’t going to agree. Many Protestants are going to hear this and say, well, maybe there’s some other way we can know which books belong in the New Testament. So I want to turn to that now and say, okay, we’ve looked at Gavin’s case, what about those who would give us a different model? And I would say to this that no other method works. I want to look at several other methods. Like I say, Cameron considers some different, he looks at those five different ways we could solve the problem. I want to add to that the arguments put forward by John MacArthur, Michael Krueger and John Calvin. So first John MacArthur in his book, why Believe the Bible mentions four different arguments for why he thinks you can know which books belong in the New Testament. And I would say on all four of these that they’re perfectly sound perfectly valid.
They’re great reasons if and only if you can trust the early church. So for instance, he says there’s Apostolicity was the book authored by an apostle or someone closely associated with an apostle? Now MacArthur claims he doesn’t really explain why, but he says that to be inspired, it had to be written by an apostle, someone who had walked and talked with the Lord or someone who had been a close companion of an apostle. He doesn’t really explain why God has to inspire in that way, but even if you accept that, fine, none of the four gospels tell us who wrote them. We know this information exclusively from external information like oral tradition affirming the apostolicity of the four gospels, which we know from the early Christians, not from anything within the Bible itself. No book refers to any of the gospels as Luke says or anything like that just does not happen.
So Apostolicity only works if you have access and reliable access to extra biblical tradition and you can trust that the early church preserved that tradition accurately and faithfully. So if you can trust tradition in the church, great, you can have the New Testament using this method as well. That’s the first of the four. Second orthodoxy did the writing square with apostolic doctrine. Well of course, how do you know if what you’re reading matches with what was preached unless you also know that the preaching is protected? And again, you have an appeal to tradition and to the church and preserving tradition. Otherwise, you’ve nothing to compare the putative New Testament writings against. How do you know if they’re Orthodox or not? Where are you getting your orthodoxy from, if not from scripture and or tradition and or the church? Where else are you going to get it?
We’re trying to figure out what is the New Testament. You can’t just say, here are my presuppositions about belief and I’m only going to accept the books of the New Testament that agree with what I already believe. That doesn’t make sense. So again, second test only works if you have tradition in the church or if you have this census. Fidelium. Third is liturgical usage. Was the church read and used in the churches? Was it part of Christian worship? Well, this is, I mean pretty explicitly an appeal to the reliability of the early church and likewise the fourth one, whether it was used by the next generations. And he looks at people as varied as Polycarp, Justin Martyr, trulian, origin U as tenacious Jerome and Augustine, and he calls all them Absol fathers, which they’re not, but that’s fine. Either way it’s an explicitly an appeal there to the authority of the early Christians.
So all I’ll say in summary there is all of his arguments work if and only if you can trust the orthodoxy and reliability of the early church. That’s MacArthur. The second one I want to look at is someone that Gavin had promoted himself, Michael Krueger, who’s worked specifically on the cannon. Gavin recommends in that longer video technical terms, Michael Krueger is what’s known as a presuppositionalist. He comes from this kind of van till school as kind of a weird Christian version of Tism and he makes the argument that we can’t possibly defend the cannon of scripture in the way that I’ve just done the way the early Christians did, even the way seemingly that Gavin did. He says we cannot possibly defend the canon of scripture by anything outside of itself. In his book, Canon Revisited, he makes this argument the canon as God’s word is not just true but the criterion of truth.
It is an ultimate authority. So how do we offer an account of how we know that an ultimate authority is in fact the ultimate authority? If we try to validate an ultimate authority by appealing to some other authority, then we’ve just shown that it is not really the ultimate authority. Thus, for ultimate authorities to be ultimate authorities, they have to be the standard for their own authentication. As I say, without getting into any further detail about what I mean by this, you’ll either understand this or you won’t. This is a kind of Christian communism and it’s based on a sort of weird metaphysics that just does not belong in Christianity. And I will say for now that it is thoroughly unbiblical, think about this claim that if we try to validate an ultimate authority by appealing to some other ultimate authority, then we’ve just shown that it is not really the ultimate authority.
Now think that claim and then think about the way Jesus has presented particularly in the gospel of John Jesus. In John five, verse 31 to 33 says, if I bear witness to myself, my testimony is not true. There is another who bears witness to me, and I know that the testimony which he bears to me is true. You sent to John and he’s born witness to the truth. So you’ll notice Jesus is not demanding we believe him by his own ultimate authority. That’s explicitly not what he says. If I bear witness to myself my testimony is not true. Instead he suggests you can believe in him on the basis of John the Baptist who is sent by God to bear testimony to him. Now, you could say, well, Jesus, I guess you’re not the ultimate authority then I guess John the Baptist is, but that’d be a silly thing to say to Jesus.
So let’s go on to John 14 at the last supper. Again, Jesus says the words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority. Hold on. Is Jesus not an ultimate authority? Then he’s going to speak on the father’s behalf, or is the Bible as an ultimate authority, a higher authority than Jesus? Either of those is a silly argument to make the words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I’m in the Father and the Father in me or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves. So now just as earlier he pointed to John the Baptist as a way of authenticating his message. Now he’s pointed both upwards to the Father and outwards to his own divine works both as ways of authenticating his authority.
And then John, the evangelist even points to his own writing in John 20 saying that he’s written these words that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name. So he wants you to believe in Jesus on the basis of his own words. Does that make the gospel of John a higher authority than Jesus? Hopefully your answer is of course not. Jesus is quite happy to have his person and message authenticated by John the Baptist, John the disciple, his own works, his father. Krueger’s whole framework here is just metaphysically, philosophically wrong and fundamentally unbiblical, but nevertheless, just realize that’s what’s going on. And many Protestants find this very convincing. And so Krueger is going to argue that for the Bible to be an ultimate authority, which he claims it is, it has to be self-authenticating the standard of its own authentication.
Well, what did that even look like? He says What’s needed is a canonical model that does not ground the new canon in an external authority. So you can’t say we believe that we got the New Testament right, because God guided the church because the church is an external authority and that would then put the church on too high of a level. That’s his argument. Even seemingly Gavin’s statement about how without the church you don’t have the scriptures would seem to give too much authority to the church and Krueger’s articulation of the view. I don’t know how you would interact with that, so I don’t want to speak for Krueger or Gavin or anybody, but it seems like they’re saying opposite things on this point. So he says we need a canonical model that doesn’t ground the New Testament cannon in an external authority, but seek to ground the canon in the only place that it could be grounded its own authority.
His argument is that God has to work in this way after all, if the canon bears the very authority of God to what other standard could it appeal to justify itself? Well, the obvious answer is God’s action outside the canon in the church in tradition, that it’s still God at work. Just as Jesus can ground his own divine ministry in the divine ministry of the Father with no contradiction, without saying that he’s not an ultimate authority, Trinitarian theology doesn’t work that way. And so God can work in tradition and the church and the two be mutually supporting, but fine, he argues it has to be internal to scripture. He then argues that the attributes that we’re looking for, he says there’s basically three. There are characteristics that distinguish canonical books from all other books. Notice that there are three attributes allegedly that distinguish canonical books, books that belong in the Bible from all other books.
And the three attributes are these. Number one, divine qualities. Canonical books bear the marks of divinity. Number two, corporate recognition. Canonical books are recognized by the church as a whole. And number three, apostolic origins. Canonical books are the result of the redemptive historical activity of the apostles. But again, obviously they don’t have to have been written by the apostles directly and the people who knew the apostles wrote books that both were and weren’t inspired. So they don’t really know how number three would work really. It comes out of this, the gospels of Matthew, mark, Luke, and John, which I mentioned before, they do not tell us they were written by apostles. Nothing internal to the New Testament tells us that nothing at all internal to the New Testament tells us that apostolic origin is not something we can know or evaluate on the internal evidence of scripture.
We have to appeal to an external authority like history, like tradition, like the early Christians like the church to know whether apostolic origins apply or not to a particular writing. It is not internal data, it’s external data. Likewise, corporate reception. Nothing in the books tells us that they’re going to one day be used as scripture in the church. None of the books claim that about themselves. None of those books make those predictions they could have. They don’t. They could have said, I Mark write these words. They don’t. These simply are not things that we find within the books themselves. These are all things we find external to the biblical canon. The only internal quality that Krueger can point to is this really vague one, that it has divine qualities, the marks of divinity. This becomes this incredibly circular argument where he claims on the one hand that any book with apostolic origins is a book constituted by the Holy Spirit and therefore will possess divine qualities.
But also if a book has divine qualities, then his content must derive from someone who speaks with the authority of God, namely an apostolic source. So if it’s apostolic, it’ll have divine qualities. If it has divine qualities, it’ll be apostolic. So you don’t really need all three marks. You could just have two fine, it’s circular. But you might say, well, how do we know which books do and don’t have divine qualities? Is this like wine tasting? You can just tell like, oh, it has a fragrant aroma of divine qualities. Well, kind of actually, because kruger’s argument is this radically subjective one on the internal witness of the Holy Spirit, not to the church collectively, but to each individual believer. Now he’s strongly indebted here to John Calvin. So I’m just going to turn to Calvin directly because I think he makes a stronger version of this argument and you can see why it doesn’t work.
From this more well-known and beloved Protestant reformer, John Calvin in the Institutes of Christian religion argues you just don’t need the church to know which books do and don’t belong in scripture. In fact, he kind of makes fun of the question. He says the question, how shall we be persuaded? The scripture came from God without recurring to a decree of the church is akin to saying, how shall we learn to distinguish darkness from light white from black or sweetness from bitter? Because according to him, scripture bears upon the face of it as clear evidence of its truth as white and black do of their color and sweet and bitter of their taste. So the question well, is this inspired or not is just so easy. It’s like telling white and black apart. There’s no gray area in Calvin’s view. Everything is sweeter, bitter, everything is black or white.
Everything is lighter or dark. There’s no hard cases. Even though we know historically there were, he is just convinced that we’ll know and how will we know? In his words, by the inward testimony of the spirit in your heart, you’re just going to know which books do and don’t belong in the Bible. That’s his argument. He then builds on that argument by more appealing to emotions and to just feelings. He says, if you read the work of the philosophers, Plato Aristotle sister on the like, and then you turn back and start reading the book of the Bible, you’re going to notice different things happening at the level of your heart. And this he claims makes it manifest that in the sacred volume there is a truth divine a something which makes it immeasurably superior to all the gifts and graces attainable by man. Now, on the surface, I think many people find this kind of argument persuasive and clearly Michael Krueger does.
He quotes from Calvin’s treatment of this topic, but there are several things that I hope are obviously wrong in this approach. The first is that this did not work for the early Christians. They actually debated which books belonged in the Bible. None of them claimed to have a special spidey sense about which did and didn’t belong. None of them claimed they were getting special feelings that solved everything easily. Second, in Calvin’s example, he’s comparing reading a secular book like Cicero with a spiritual book. But if you’ve ever read a spiritual classic, whether it’s St. Augustine’s Confessions and even something modern like C Cs, Lewis’s mere Christianity, for me, an introduction to the devout life, you may know that your heart can be moved and soar with things that are scripture. In fact, I would suggest that for many ordinary Christians reading the beautiful, brilliant writings of saints and great Christians throughout the ages, your favorite book might move you emotionally more than say a passage in numbers. Does that doesn’t prove that your favorite book belongs in the Bible in numbers, doesn’t it proves you’re not a reliable witness about these things? No offense, I’m not either. The third problem with this is that Calvin’s case for the New Testament here is as mushy and subjective as the case made by Mormon apologists. In fact, it’s the exact same case. Now in his original video, Cameron actually points this out that William Lane Craig was making a similar argument to Calvin and that this sounds more like Mormonism than it does like Christianity.
CLIP:
The first time that I had really confronted the problem of the cannon was years ago I had heard Dr. Boyland Craig defend his own Protestant version. At one point, Dr. Craig even suggested that the Holy Spirit sort of ultimately guides Christians to discern which books belong in the Bible, which actually sounds a lot more like how Mormons defend the Book of Mormon as being part of scripture, and that kind of seems like counterintuitive. Shouldn’t the Christian method of discerning the cannon be a bit more solid than something a Mormon could say?
Joe:
Now, a number of Protestants I think were offended by that in the comments, but that literally he’s right. This is actually an argument made in the Book of Mormon. In the book of Maroney chapter 10, four to five, it says, if you want to know the book of Mormon’s claims, if you want to know if they’re true, you don’t go to archeology or theology or anything like that. Instead, you prey on it. And if you feel what’s sometimes called the burning in the bosom, then you’ll just know by the Holy Ghost that these claims are true. In fact, I would even go further than Cameron does and say, it’s not just Mormons who make this kind of subjective claim. Muslims make basically the same claim that John Calvin makes about how Calvin’s going to say the Christian writings are so much better than things like the writings of Play-Doh. Muslims are going to say the Quran is more beautiful than any other book.
CLIP:
The Quran actually puts forward a challenge that if this book was from other than God, God challenges human beings to bring or to make something that is comparable to it
Joe:
Collectively, whether it’s Mormons, Muslims or Calvinists. I call these versions of the argument Darth Vader arguments is this just like search your feelings man kind of approach to theology into truth. It’s not true. That’s impossible. Search your feelings. You know it to be true. No. So the problem with Darth Vader arguments like this is that they’re completely and radically subjective. You may happen to find the Book of Mormon or the Quran really beautiful or inspirational. It doesn’t mean it’s true. But the fourth and final problem is actually kind of a hilarious one. So many early Protestants thought it was going to be really easy to solve the problem of which books belonged in the Bible. John Calvin being just the most famous of them. The problem is they couldn’t agree with each other, much less with the early church about what those books were. So Martin Luther, for instance, argues in his 1522 edition of the German Bible and his New Testament.
He doesn’t have Hebrews James Jude or Revelation. He moves them out of the New Testament canon into a section in the back. Many Protestants, almost all Protestants today would say he was wrong to do so. He also removes seven books from the Old Testament, and they’re going to say, he’s right to do so. Don’t ask me to defend the reasoning here. Meanwhile, John Calvin, who thought this was going to be super easy, like telling black and white apart, he actually thought the book of Baruch was divinely inspired scripture. He refers to the scripture numerous times, including in his commentary in one Corinthians where he quotes from the prophet Baruch and then describes it as the writings of the prophet. The problem is, while Catholics would agree with him, Baruch does belong in scripture, Protestants, including Martin Luther. Most of the other Protestant reformers didn’t think Baruch belonged in scripture.
So apparently there is some gray area. Apparently it’s not just telling black from white light, from dark sweet, from bitter, or to put it another way, if it is as easy as John Calvin and Michael Krueger would have you believe, there’s just these divine qualities that’ll tell us how come nobody trying this method can reliably come to the right conclusion with it or even agree with the other people trying to do it this way. So I think that’s where we’re at. If you can trust that God worked through the consensus of the church, you can know the canon infallibly even prior to the church speaking in a top down sort of way that God has already worked from this bottom up sort of way. You don’t even need to get to the Council of Florence as the Council of Trent or anything, any Pope has said on the question Vatican one, none of that.
It’s enough to trust the census fidelium. But if you’re going to do that, this seems to me you can’t also suggest that the early Christians were all wrong with the census fidelium on baptism, on the Eucharist, on Bishops, et cetera, et cetera. Either God is guiding his people or he isn’t, and if you don’t think that he’s guiding his people, if you think he led his people into error instead of truth that the church was not only fallible but actually got books wrong, like the seven books that are disputed in the Old Testament, if you think it got major doctrines wrong, how are we saved with justification? All of that stuff. If you think that then it seems to me you’ve got a much deeper problem that there seemingly is no way of knowing that these stray sheep or these misguided shepherds are actually right when they tell us which books do and don’t belong in the New Testament.
I just don’t see how you can have it both ways. It seems that you either accept the New Testament and the authority of the church, or you reject the authority of the church, but also undermine the New Testament. That’s the case in a nutshell. I’d love to hear if I’ve missed something, if there’s some really good way that you can separate Christ Church from his scriptures, if there’s a way you can sort those out, where you can accept the early Christian, we’re guided by God but still screwed up, not just individually, but collectively. I’m looking forward to, yeah, I guess how you’d engage with that because I think the Canon question is super important and I think it makes a lot of sense why once Protestants start asking where the Bible came from, they not infrequently end up becoming Catholics. Instead for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.