Protestant Doctrine of Canon
The theological understanding of the Biblical canon, from a reformed and presuppositional perspective
As Reformed and Protestant Christians, it is a distinctive article of our faith that the Holy Scriptures are our ultimate authority in matters of theology and doctrine (and therefore, all of life as well—since God is Lord of all). Because the Scriptures are God’s inspired revelation (2 Tim. 3:16) whatever they say about anything is to be heeded.
Because of the fact that the Scriptures are so central and defining to the Protestant faith, it is very often at this point that the Protestant faith is attacked. “Cut the snake off at the head” as we are so often told. And this can manifest in different ways. Of course the atheists and the liberals attack the faith by attacking the Scriptures directly, but our Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox friends also combat us not in attacking the Scriptures directly (although sometimes less pious opponents fall into this) but rather challenging whether or not the Sola Scriptura believing Protestant has any epistemological warrant to trust the Scriptures. It is assumed by Roman Catholics, for example, that the only way to know what books really count as Scripture is to trust the teaching authority of the Church. Since Protestants have no such authority, they have no warrant to trust the Bible at all. Even atheists will go after the faith at this point in bringing up the gnostic Gospels and other like documents. How can we decide Matthew is Scripture but that the Gospel of Peter isn’t?
The thing in question here is called the canon of Scripture. In my estimation, it is one of the chief items of the faith that Protestant Christians ought to be ready to defend, and yet it seems to be an area that we are the weakest at defending. This isn’t for lack of trying; some great work has been done in this area (as you will see in the works I reference) but books on the canon of Scripture just don’t sell as well as books on prophecy.
What is the ‘Canon of Scripture’?
Canon is somewhat of an antiquated word, but it basically refers to a “rule” or a “standard”. In the Medieval period, it was often used to refer to the laws of the church. It comes from the idea of having a straight rod (think ‘cane’) that would be used as a reference point in measurements. In the history of Christian theology, it came to be used to refer to the authoritative list of the books of Scripture. And so, those books are canon which really are Scripture, as opposed to those books which are not Scripture.
A canon of Scripture is really a necessary effect of having any kind of written divine revelation, and so the concept is actually rooted in pre-Christian Jewish thought.1 The very minute you have a book that is inspired by God, you have a canon. Canon is not something that comes later on; the canon is simultaneous with the writing of the Scripture books themselves. This might seem like an insignificant detail, but it is truly foundational to everything else that will be said about the canon. The canon is what it is because the Scriptures are what they are. Dr. James White makes the point:
“The nature of Scripture determines the canon of Scripture; that is, the canon must be defined in light of what Scripture is. If Scripture is (1) God-breathed and (2) given for the purposes revealed within its own revelation, then vitally important conclusions must be drawn from these two truths, conclusions that deeply impact our understanding of the canon and its function” James R. White, Scripture Alone, Bethany House Publishers 2004, pg. 101
White shows that because Scripture is “unique,” discussions about the canon will be unique as well. You may be aware that there are debates concerning the canon of Shakespeare’s writings, whether or not everything we think was written by him really was written by him, and in those debates scholars are primarily dealing with facts of history, extant writings and so on and so forth. But when it comes to a discussion of the canon of Scripture, the conversation cannot be merely a matter of historical inquiry, but rather the issue is a theological issue. We need to see canon as having its origin in the mind of God.
Preconditions of Canonical Intelligibility
Okay, so I realize this heading is kind of a mouthful, so let me explain myself. In conversations about epistemology2 Christian apologists will often make the case that the Christian worldview alone provides the “preconditions of intelligibility”, meaning the parameters that must be in place for human beings to have knowledge at all can only be provided within the Christian faith. And so when I talk about the “preconditions of canonical intelligibility,” I refer to those parameters which must be in place in order for us to have knowledge of the canon. These parameters are:
A sovereign, all-powerful and all-conditioning God
God using human authors to communicate His thoughts in written works
God having an intention that these works be known
The first thing to be noticed here is that God is at the beginning of all of these points. Remember, the Scriptures are His revelation. Unlike the works of Homer, Shakespeare or Tolkien, these books come from the mouth of God Himself, and so we must look to God if we are to understand them. Never forget that this is a discussion about theology before it is a discussion about history. Secondly, the profundity of these points is seen in their simplicity. This is not high-flying abstract philosophical pondering that requires an extensive course on Immanuel Kant to understand. These three points are the kinds of things that the average Christian hears about in their Sunday morning sermons, and so hopefully you can feel encouraged that you are able to understand this topic. The next thing, which will especially be in view when we look at point 3 a little closer, is that they allow for an environment where Christians can know the canon of Scripture apart from a human authority. This is really the hinge upon which most of the debates about canon turn, and so those who want to defend the Protestant faith will want to make sure they grasp this concept.
After we go over the preconditions of canonical intelligibility, we will be in a position to discuss actually how the canon is known to us.
1.) A sovereign, all-powerful and all-conditioning God. With as much love as I hold in my heart for my more Arminian brothers and sisters in the faith, I truly believe that the only adequate understanding of the canon of Scripture can be consistently held by those who worship a God that sounds an awful lot like the God of the Calvinists. If anything in the universe is left to chance, if there are any “maverick molecules” out there, then I do not believe we would be able to trust that God really has delivered to us once and for all the books of Scripture He intends for us to use in formulating our doctrine and practice. Lovers of history and literature lament to realize that the vast majority of literature produced prior to the printing press (and of course, all books of Scripture were produced over 1,000 years prior) has been lost to time. Whether it’s moths eating away the manuscripts, natural disasters, malicious destruction of written documents, or simply that things get lost over time, it is quite a rare, and therefore quite a special thing, to have access to the writings of the past. For example, as someone who has studied early Church history I know that there are countless books, letters and other pieces of literature in the early church that had to have existed, because people reference or quote them, but that I can (probably) never read because we just don’t have them anymore. And then think about the amount of literature that must have been written that didn’t get referenced and so we don’t even know existed at all.
The Christian belief is that the earliest books of Scripture were written by Moses over 1,000 years before Christ, and so that puts over 3,000 between us and the beginning of the Scriptural canon. Apart from a God who really controls all things, each and every minute detail, we would have to at least allow for the possibility that some books of Scripture have been lost. But thankfully, we don’t need to.
The Bible says that God has “declared the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10), that “He does all that He pleases” in “heaven and on earth” (Psalm 115:3, 135:6). No matter what man does, or aims to do, God’s purpose is accomplished (Psalm 33:10-11, Proverbs 16:9) because He is working “all things according to the counsel of His will” (Ephesians 1:11). The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith summed it up nicely in saying, “God the good Creator of all things, in His infinite power and wisdom does uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures and things, from the greatest even to the least, by His most wise and holy providence, to the end for the which they were created, according unto His infallible foreknowledge, and the free and immutable counsel of His own will; to the praise of the glory of His wisdom, power, justice, infinite goodness, and mercy” (2LBCF1689 5:1).
With this theological understanding of a sovereign God who is “all-conditioning”, as Van Til put it, we can trust that if God desires to reveal Himself in human writings, He can do so. But not only can He do this, He can ensure that these writings are known to be His special revelation, and that these writings are preserved throughout all generations. The Lord Jesus Christ Himself said, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Matthew 24:35).
2.) God using human authors to communicate His thoughts in written works. God spoke to Adam in the garden (Genesis 2:16) and had revealed Himself to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but inscripturation, God’s words being transcribed and preserved in written texts, really begins with Moses. Exodus 19 tells us about when Moses went upon Mt. Sinai and received the words of God that he was to give to the people of Israel. The text paints a rather dramatic scene for us. Thunder and lightning fill the sky as a thick cloud encompasses the mountain, a loud trumpet blast causing the people to tremble (Exodus 19:16). The Lord Himself is said to have descended upon the mountain (v. 18). The next few chapters record for us what these laws are that Moses gave to the people, but in chapter 24 we get some fascinating insight into the manner of the preservation of these words. Exodus 24:4 tells us, “Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord”. And so in this particular case, what we have is a transcription of God’s speech. Verse 7 calls what Moses wrote the “Book of the Covenant”.
In Scripture, God deals with His people by means of covenant because of the great chasm that there is between Him and us. There are multiple covenants in Scripture that have respect to God’s overarching promise of redemption (Ephesians 2:12) and in this context we have the Mosaic covenant, which organizes and sets apart the Israelites according to the things written in the book (the Law). And while this is not the place to enter into the fine points of covenant theology, we see that the written words of God are intended to be something held onto by the community of His covenant people. Although Moses would later record God’s interaction with the Patriarchs, the process of inscripturation begins with the organization of the covenant people. Scripture, you see, is different from the one-on-one private revelations the patriarchs received, because Scripture is to be recognized and even obeyed by all of God’s people.
What we see throughout the history of God’s covenant people (including in the New Covenant) is that various pieces of literature will be produced that the covenant people recognize as the Word of God. Peter says that “men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21) and Paul tells us, “All Scripture is God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16). And so even in cases, like historical writings or the epistolary literature of the New Testament, where you have something other than 1:1 transcriptions of God’s words, you still have divinely inspired writings.
It might seem unnecessary to talk about the fact that God has inspired some books (the Scriptures), but this is really where canon comes from. Again, the very minute you have a book inspired by God, you have a canon. Because God has inspired multiple books, those books make up the canonical list, and the list is known by God infallibly.
3.) God having an intention that these works be known. We might be tempted to think that this is a simple, and therefore silly and unnecessary point to make. Now it is very simple; you don’t need to be a philosopher to grasp this, but it is by no means silly and unnecessary. That the point needs to be made at all is only a reflection of how shallow much of our theological understanding is.
We saw in point 2 that the existence of Scripture came about with the Exodus, when God brought His covenant people out of Egypt. The “Book of the Covenant”, as it was called, was a preservation of God’s words to Moses not simply to satisfy the curiosity of people in the future, but rather these words were to be the very laws, rules and statutes that constituted the daily life and worship of the covenant people. That God marks off a covenant people and gives them rules to live by entails that He desires for His covenant people to do “all the words that the Lord has spoken” (Exodus 24:3).
Now, let’s not forget about point 1—since God is sovereign and can do anything He wants to do, if He wants His covenant people to know which books are the canonical books, He is able to make this happen. The only question is how He has done so.
The question of how will be important in our defense of the canon, but the simple fact that we see Christian theology satisfies the preconditions of canonical intelligibility is a powerful point of defense in and of itself. To anyone who would say that it is impossible for us to know what the canon is, we already have enough proof to refute that argumentation.
The Self-Authentication of the Canon of Scripture
In 2012, Michael Kruger published what is perhaps the single most important book on this topic in the modern period, coming from a Reformed theological perspective. His book Canon Revisited (Published by Crossway) argues for a “self-authentication model” in determining the contents of the Biblical canon.
“What is needed… is a canonical model that does not ground the New Testament canon in an external authority, but seeks to ground the canon in the only place it could be grounded, its own authority. After all, if the canon bears the very authority of God, to what other standard could it appeal to justify itself?… A self-authenticating model of canon would take into account something that the other models have largely overlooked: the content of the canon itself.” Michael Kruger, Canon Revisited, Crossway 2012, pg. 88
The idea of having a self-authenticating model of canon derives from the historic Protestant understanding of Scripture as self-authenticating in its authority, meaning that the authority of Scripture does not come from the Church, or any human authority, but from God Himself. As John Calvin articulated it, “For as God alone can properly bear witness to his own words, so these words will not obtain full credit in the hearts of men, until they are sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit”. In one of the most important sections of the Institutes of the Christian Religion he writes:
“Let it therefore be held as fixed, that those who are 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. Enlightened by him, 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. We ask not for proofs or probabilities on which to rest our Judgment, but we subject our intellect and judgment to it as too transcendent for us to estimate… This singular privilege God bestows on his elect only, whom he separates from the rest of mankind.” John Calvin, Institutes 1:7:5, Beveridge translation
What Calvin describes here has been foolishly mocked by Roman Catholics as “gnosticism,” but it is no such thing. He describes the fact that the elect (believers) have an assurance that the Scriptures really are from God because of the work of the Holy Spirit in communicating this to us.
The reason this is so important for Calvin is because of his disputes with the Roman Church. The Church wanted to rest the authority of the Scriptures upon its authority, but Calvin would not allow it. He places the authority where it always belonged, within God Himself. Hebrews 6 gives us an illustration of this in verse 13 when we read, “For when God made a promise to Abraham, since He had no one greater by whom to swear, He swore by Himself”. The authority of the promise God made to Abraham resided in the very same one who made the promise, the Lord God Himself. And when it comes to the authority of Scripture (God’s own direct speech) its authority is, likewise, based upon God’s own authority. At first, what I am saying might sound entirely circular in nature. I don’t run from the charge, but I do ask to clarify. The argument is circular (in that I am resting the authority of Scripture upon Scripture itself) but that doesn’t mean it is a vicious circle. When it comes to any kind of “ultimate authority”, for that authority to truly be ultimate, it cannot derive its authority from anything or anyone outside of itself. To say that the Scriptures are authoritative because the Church says so is to make the Church an ultimate authority above God’s own revelation! This we cannot do. God is creator. God is law-maker. God is God. Whatever He says, goes. And so the minute God speaks (and Scripture is His speech) it is by its very nature authoritative on the basis of what it is.
In John 10, Jesus tells a parable concerning sheep, shepherds and thieves. The thieves and robbers are false teachers who want to lead the sheep astray, but the sheep do not listen to them (John 10:8). Instead, the sheep hear the shepherd’s voice (John 10:16, 27) and they follow His voice alone, of course Jesus being the Good Shepherd (v. 14). The passage has vital soteriological implications, to be sure, but it also bears upon how the elect of God will respond to false teaching. Jesus promises that His sheep are able to detect what is really His voice, and what isn’t. If this is true with respect to false teaching versus true teaching, how much more so will this be true in regard to the very Scriptures themselves? The fact of the matter is that God’s covenant people not only are able to recognize what is Scripture versus what isn’t Scripture, but historically they have. A Christian can compare the writings of Moses to the writings of Homer, and know what is and isn’t Scripture. A Christian can compare the letters of Cicero to the epistles of Paul and know that Romans is Scripture while the letters to Atticus are not.
Now someone might say that this all sounds very “mystical” (hence the charge of gnosticism), but when we remember that the parameters for us knowing the canon of Scripture are already in place (see above) we have a basis upon which to grant the assurance we have in what we accept as canon. We are not simply saying, “The Gospels are canon because they are canon”; what we are saying is that “The Gospels are canon, and given my Christian faith, I have a justification for this belief”.
Michael Kruger argues that along with the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, that providential exposure to the canonical books (that the church has, in God’s Providence, actually encountered and received these books) and the books themselves bearing the attributes of canonicity (divine qualities, corporate reception and apostolic origins) provide us with a fully self-authenticating model for canonicity. Many of these points deal with historical inquiry, going beyond the scope of this article.3 In Canon Revisited Kruger deals with the historical evidence demonstrating that God’s people have recognized (early on) what the contents of the canon were. For thousands of years now, God’s people have recognized what we refer to as the 66 books of the Bible as the canon.4
The point being, for this section, is that Christian theology (based upon the Holy Scriptures) provides a basis for knowing the contents of the canon apart from any human authority.
But How Can I Be Sure?
I can imagine that someone might read everything I’ve said here, agree with the basic points that I have said, and still want more. Specifically, a desire for certainty. Roman Catholics like to point out how convenient it is for them to simply say, “I know James is canonical because the church tells me”, or because of tradition. Now that is certainly far more simplistic than anything I’ve argued for here, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good argument. A Roman Catholic might think this gives him more “certainty” than the Protestant who relies on the witness of the Holy Spirit, but in actual fact this isn’t true. The Romanist still needs to demonstrate the authority of the Roman Catholic church which means he must either defend it as self-authenticating or ground its authority somewhere else. If the Roman Catholic defends the Church’s authority as self-authenticating, then they have precisely the exact amount of certainty as we Protestants do. And if they ground the Church’s authority within God, they have to demonstrate from God’s revelation that He has given them this authority, which I do not believe can be done.
When all is said and done, the assurance that we have of the contents of the canon of Scripture is similar to the assurance we have of the existence of God. For the Christian, God’s Spirit bears witness with us every moment that He is and that He has redeemed us. And every time we read the Word, the Spirit testifies that it is so. The Protestant theology of canon is simply to say that Jesus’ sheep hear His voice.
For the history of the Hebrew canon, see my article on the topic Protestant Defense of the Old Testament Canon
Theory of knowledge, asking “how do we know what we know”
I have written on the history of the Old Testament canon (see footnote 1) and Lord willing will have an article of the history of the New Testament canon soon
Again, for a defense of the Protestant understanding of the Old Testament canon see footnote 1. There’s a reason I wrote that one first!