Part 4 of Christian Orthodoxy and Personal Faith
The journey to (and through) the house is also a metaphor for the development of Christian doctrine through the centuries. Go back to the front door again. Have you ever wondered why the early church fathers talked about what they did, ignoring other questions? Or why the earliest councils and creeds settled the matters that they did, and left others alone? The very young church was just arriving and settling into their living quarters. Our first glance at that door was “of first importance,” as Paul said to the Corinthians. Those saints needed to arrive and enter first.
People find it curious that if the doctrines of salvation are so basic to Christian faith, then why did it take until the fifth century for the Church to make any ruling on it? And why did the early church fathers prior to Augustine seem to take such a positive outlook on man’s free will? In his magisterial work on Early Christian Doctrines, J. N. D. Kelly explains that,
“This was partly due to the Hellenic temperament, but partly also to the fact that the rival philosophy was Manichaeism, with its fatalism and its dogma that matter, including the body, was intrinsically evil.”1
Now even before the teaching of Mani burst onto the scene, this would have already been true of Gnosticism and other pagan thought. So everyone from Justin Martyr to Irenaeus to the Capaddocians had to spend much of their precious little ink on opening back up the dignity of man from its bondage to the cosmic machine and Eastern wheel of time. To read back into their writings a precursor to agreement with Pelagius is anachronistic. Then of course there is the plain matter than they, like all other mere mortals, got some things wrong as well.
Now I mentioned before that God “comes first” in the foundation of this house, and that is why the doctrine of God (or theology proper) comes first in a good systematic theology textbook. Some readers may have perked up at that point and noted my omission of the whole prolegomena section and especially the doctrine of Scripture. Is it not by the Word of God that we come to discover the true nature and ways of God? Yes, indeed, and there was no intent to leave that out. My reference was to all of the main loci of doctrine that the Bible speaks about. Now if we want to extend our metaphor we might say that everyone gets his book from the Master of the house at the front door, just as churches give away free Bibles to any visitors or new members.
For many this will only raise the question of which “books” are in that book? In other words the issue of canon. Our reasoning runs something like this: “Would not all parties have to admit that our present list of sixty-six books was not finally settled until Nicaea in 325, and that even the first lists of Melito of Sardis and Irenaeus in the second century do not exactly match ours? The so-called ‘catholic epistles,’ including Hebrews, were not universally agreed upon. Don’t we need some standard outside of the book to tell us what counts for being in the book?”
There are several different ways to answer this question, but since we are only wrestling among ourselves as Christians, let us limit ourselves. There is what we might call the church-over-canon model (Roman Catholic), the self-authenticating model (Reformed Presuppositional), and the criteria-of-canon model (Reformed Classical). What we will see fairly quickly is that the first two answers are entirely subjective and thus not really answers at all. One answer points our human minds toward other, apparently privileged, human minds, and says “He says so.”
And we call that the ad populum fallacy: a false appeal to the people. Now it begins with a faulty appeal to authority. But of course there have been many popes, here contradicted by other popes and there overruled by councils. So at the end of the day, which pope is pope enough is settled by appealing to something beyond the line of popes, and thus the circular reasoning dissipates into special pleading in the form of a handful of Scriptures, most famously Matthew 16:18.
Whether it is correct exegesis or not is quite immaterial, for the whole argument depends on papal authority being the final appeal for that anyway. In fact the first circle becomes a second by a quantum leap, passing in and out of our short attention spans. No doubt the Roman Catholic will not like his or her view treated under the heading of “subjectivism,” or hearing that papal ruling is nothing but another human perspective. Very well. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that the pope speaks for God. What follows? If my own reason is incapable of understanding the objective meaning of Scripture (hence my need for the pope) how exactly shall I fare any better at hearing the pontifical voice? Supposing two people disagree on what the pope means by what the Bible means? What breaks the tie? In fact we have an infinite regress covered up by a fancy hat.
Now the self-authenticating model claims roots in the Reformed tradition.2 Indeed it is correct to recognize that concept in the Westminster Confession, as well as to cite the work of the Holy Spirit in testifying to all those attributes of Scripture delineated by the Confession (I.4, 5). Nevertheless our presuppositionalist brothers have only moved the circle of avoiding the question a few steps sideways. They also happen to be confusing the means by which we are (subjectively) assured of Scripture’s authority and what we point to (objectively) in answering the question of what attributes make a book canonical. The Confession speaks of both. The presuppositionalist conflates the two. Once again the question goes unanswered.
We agree wholeheartedly that where Scripture defines canon, it will be precisely Scripture’s definition that we should defend. But if someone asks me what a particular biblical text means by “apostolic” or “tradition” or any other relevant phrases, I would be rather pedantic and obtuse to simply answer back with a repetition of the same words. In all fairness, Dr. Kruger, coming from the presuppositional model, does much more than this and his books on the canon are well worth adding to one’s library. But the moment he begins to speak of those attributes of the canon in any decisive way, he is at that point moving from a presuppositional to classical mode of speech, his methodological build-up notwithstanding. For the whole essence of presuppositionalism is to avoid any conclusion about Scripture from premises outside of Scripture. To argue from reason or nature to Scripture (a highly ambiguous notion at best!) is thought to operate by “autonomous reason.”
The classic model is an objective model. That is, when Christians have historically spoken in a way that is actually helpful for anyone wanting to know the difference between canon and non-canon, they have pointed to the object of the canon itself—its attributes. Objective criteria like apostolicity, orthodoxy, spiritual effect, and early church consensus. A combination of Scriptural definition and historical investigation then shows how our New Testament books meet these criteria.
Contrary to Dr. Kruger’s critique of this “evidentialist” rubric, this does not imply that the early church sent out something like a “search committee” to test the books by these “secular” standards.3 Apostolicity, orthodoxy, and spiritual transformation of its elect reader, are all defined by Scripture in both models.
The church’s reception of it is obviously outside of the Bible. However, what if when we look at that we find the church receiving precisely that canon that bears the marks that Scripture describes?
Coming back to our imagery, if we look carefully at the traffic first coming in to that front door, there is amazingly little trouble about that book being handed out. The question of canon really only comes up later, and where it is being talked about in those early days, it is only by the foreman and the cooks. Everyone that comes in seems to be receiving the same set of books. Many years later, here or there out in the yard, our inquisitive neighbors have found what appear to be other books that do not match in their contents.
Again, what looks at first glance like many different books fails to cut it in two tests. One is that those who populate the house are all reading from the same book (church receptivity), and the second is that the servants of the house have always been aware of these “other books” our friends speak of—they are indeed other. So other that they never fit the blueprints or recipes to begin with, and there was no mystery about why (apostolicity, orthodoxy, spirituality). Certainly we did not need Dan Brown or the History Channel to “spill the beans” on us.
Of course I am referring to Gnostic gospels and Apocryphal books, all of which were debated out in the open from time immemorial. Anyone who wants to delve further into that question may consult Dr. Kruger’s books, The Question of Canon and Canon Revisited, as well as the work co-authored with Andreas Kostenberger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy, which will shed light on the Gnostic volumes.
It is the goal of our metaphor to move quickly to those doctrines of the faith that are essential. While the doctrine of Scripture certainly fits that category, the greater controversies over it as a doctrine come later. But a word about canon was required at the beginning because of popular opinion. Those who study historical theology know that it did not play the inflated role that modern skeptics imply, but in our endeavor to be good servants in the house, we must accommodate the influx of troubling nonsense.
1. J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003), 344.
2. cf. Michael Kruger, Canon Revisited (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013), 88-122.
3. Kruger, Canon Revisited, 81-82.
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