The Protestant's Dilemma (7 page)

By the time of Christ, the Septuagint contained the deuterocanonical books.

Historical evidence also shows that there were multiple, conflicting Jewish canons at the time of Christ. How could the Jews close their canon when they were still awaiting the advent of the new Elijah (John the Baptist) and the new Moses (Jesus)? Thus the argument that Christians should base their Old Testament off of the Hebrew Bible rather than the Greek Septuagint is dubious.
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Still, some say, should we be reading books as canonical to the Hebrew Bible if they weren’t written in Hebrew? Well, some of the seven deuterocanonical books were originally written in Hebrew and only later translated into Greek and other languages. Sirach and parts of Baruch are two such books, and an Aramaic version of Tobit was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hebrew manuscripts of Sirach were found amounting to two-thirds of the entire work, including one pre-Christian manuscript.
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These manuscripts had not been found at the time of the Protestant Reformation, and one might hope that Luther would have taken them into account. Their subsequent discovery, though, nonetheless cuts the legs out from under the objection that the seven deuterocanonical books should be excluded because they were not originally written in Hebrew.

Several other problems emerge from accepting as authoritative the (alleged) Jewish council’s decision at Jamnia at the end of the first century. First, most scholars today doubt that any such council ever took place. But even if it did, would Jewish leaders possess the authority to make a decision binding upon the Christian Church? Those Jews who had accepted Christ had already become Christians. The remainder had no rightful authority to decide anything about divine truth, as that authority had passed to those filled with the Holy Spirit (like the apostles). The same goes for the opinions of Josephus and Philo.

Finally, it should be pointed out that Protestants seeking to defend their canon based on historical evidence, even if they are convinced they have found sufficient proof, run into the problem that nowhere in Scripture does it say that this is the way to know which books belong in the canon. Such a criterion for choosing the canon in fact contradicts
sola scriptura
, because it is an extra-biblical principle. A consistent Protestant argument for selecting the canon of Scripture, then, must itself come from Scripture (which would create a circular argument). Unfortunately (but certainly providentially), no such instructions from God exist. Authority is our only appeal.

Regarding some Church Fathers who doubted the deuterocanonical books, it is true that several rejected one or more of them or put them on a level lower than the rest of Scripture. But many, including those with doubts, quoted them as Scripture with no distinction from the rest of the Bible. The broader fact is that the testimony of the Fathers was not unanimous on the Old Testament canon. Even Jerome, the great biblical scholar, early in his career favored the Hebrew canon but then changed his mind and submitted his opinion to the wisdom of the Church, accepting the deuterocanonicals as Scripture.
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THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true
, then for 1,500 years all of Christianity used an Old Testament that contained seven fully disposable, possibly deceptive books that God did not inspire. He did, however, allow the early Church to designate these books as Sacred Scripture and derive false teachings such as purgatory from their contents. Eventually, God’s chosen Reformer, Martin Luther, was able to straighten out this tragic error, even though his similar abridgement of the
New
Testament was a mistake.

9: A SELF-AUTHENTICATING BIBLE?

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

The canon of Scripture is subject to every Christian’s personal discernment.

The Reformers were not unaware of the conundrum we treated in the previous chapter, and some of them—John Calvin was the most influential proponent of this theory—offered an alternative: the self-authenticating canon. It states that a true Christian can read a given book and easily tell whether it is inspired by God or not. The Holy Spirit dwelling within the Christian would witness to the book’s inspiration.

Calvin’s Confident Theory

This theory did away with the need for trusting the corrupted early Church or for tracing the messy history of the canon’s development. Instead, you as a faithful Christian simply picked up your Bible, read the books, and listened for the inner witness of the Spirit telling you that the books were inspired by God. Similarly, you could theoretically pick up a non-canonical epistle or Gospel from the first or second century, read it, and note the absence of the Spirit’s confirmation of its inspiration. As Calvin described it:

But a most pernicious error widely prevails that Scripture has only so much weight as is conceded to it by the consent of the church. . . . It is utterly vain, then, to pretend that the power of judging Scripture so lies with the church and that its certainty depends upon churchly assent. Thus, while the church receives and gives its seal of approval to Scripture, it does not thereby render authentic what is otherwise doubtful or controversial. . . . As to their question—How can we be assured that this has sprung from God unless we have recourse to the decree of the church?—it is as if someone asked: Whence will we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter? Indeed, Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color, or sweet and bitter things do of their taste. . . . those whom the Holy Spirit has inwardly taught truly rest upon Scripture, and Scripture indeed is self-authenticated.
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Calvin makes two claims here: first, that the Church does not give authority to Scripture but rather Scripture has authority by the fact that God inspired it; secondly, that a Christian can know the canon from the Holy Spirit’s testimony within him, not by trusting a decision of the Church. Moreover, a Christian can know quite easily what is inspired and what is not, as easily as distinguishing “white from black, sweet from bitter.”

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

God guided his Church, but does not guide every individual Christian, to correctly discern the canon.

Calvin’s first claim—that the Church does not give Scripture its authority—has never been contested by the Catholic Church, the Orthodox churches, or any Christian. It is a straw man: The Church teaches that it
received
inspired texts from God (through human authors), and that God guided it in discerning which among many texts were truly inspired. The Church is thus the servant of written revelation and not its master.

Calvin’s second claim has become the common answer from Protestants who can’t concede that a corrupt Church selected the canon. There’s an element of truth to it: Surely the Holy Spirit
does
witness to our souls when we read the Bible. But Calvin sets up a false dichotomy here: Either the Church, by discerning the canon, imagines itself in authority over Scripture,
or
the canon is self-evident to any Christian. Calvin replaces the belief that God guided
the Church
in selecting the canon with the belief that God guides
me
or
you
in selecting it. He forces his readers to choose between these options, but in fact they are both false.

There is no principled reason, in Scripture or elsewhere, to believe that God would guide me or you in this discernment but not the Church. Moreover, Calvin’s subjective criterion for discerning the canon is surely impractical and unrealistic. How would a person seeking truth but not yet indwelt by the Holy Spirit know which books to read to find truth? What about a new Christian who had not learned to distinguish the inner voice of the Spirit from his own? At what point after his conversion would a Christian be considered ready to help define the canon? If two Christians disagreed, whose inner judgment would be used to arbitrate their dispute and identify the
real
canon?

Another problem with Calvin’s claim is that the facts of history flatly contradict it. As we have seen, the selection of the canon was not an easy, debate-free process that ended with the close of written revelation in the early second century. Rather, the canon emerged slowly through a laborious process, with differing canons being proposed by different Church Fathers during these centuries. If the canon were obvious and self-evident, the Holy Spirit would have led each of them to the same canon. Yet even these faithful, Spirit-filled men, so close to the time of the apostles and Christ himself, proposed different
canons. It was not until almost A.D. 400 that the canon was settled, and it contained the seventy-three books of the Catholic Bible. When, more than 1,100 years later, the Reformers changed the canon by rejecting the seven deuterocanonical books (and Luther unsuccessfully tried to discard others) it was another example of intelligent and well-meaning Christians disagreeing about the “self-authenticated” canon.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true
, then the books of the canon are obvious just from reading them—at least to any true Christian bright enough to discern black from white. (Apparently that excludes Martin Luther, the founder of the Protestant Reformation, since he wanted to jettison four books from the New Testament.) Of course, this makes the canon contingent on the subjective opinions of millions of individual Christians, each of whom would have to personally figure out what it’s supposed to be. It also creates a vicious circle, if: a) true Christians can tell in their hearts what the books of the Bible are, but b) the Bible is the only thing we have to tell us what true Christianity is. Without a trustworthy canon to tell us what true Christianity is, how can we know that we are true Christians able to discern what the canon is?

10: IDENTIFYING THE CANON

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

The Bible is a “fallible collection of infallible books.”

The historical realities of the canon of Scripture leave Protestants in a pickle. How can they know with certainty that the sixty-six books in their Bibles are
the
correct set of inspired books? They need to know with the strongest certainty possible, because they hold to
sola scriptura
—that from the Bible alone comes all of the saving truths that God revealed for man to believe and live by. But if they’re not certain that the books contained in their Bible are all inspired by God, then those truths become open for debate; likewise, if they can’t say for sure that they haven’t left out some inspired books, then they face the possibility that some saving truths are missing.

One influential modern Protestant leader has come up with a new way to handle this dilemma. It was Protestant pastor R. C. Sproul who first famously described the Bible as a “fallible collection of infallible books.”
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Since only processes or agents (people, groups) can be fallible, Sproul is asserting that God did not protect the process by which the canon was discerned.
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So the canon is the result of a human process that may very well have had errors—wrong books included and/or inspired ones excluded.

Is “Reasonable” Certainty Enough?

Sproul is an internationally recognized Calvinist pastor, author, and speaker who has published numerous books and whose radio programs are broadcast worldwide. Because of his influence, many Reformed Protestants accept his statement on the canon, arguing that it’s enough to know the canon with reasonable, not absolute, certainty. After all, every Christian church and denomination accepts the same New Testament; this alone is evidence that it’s the true one, apart from how the conclusion was reached.

The Jews in the Old Covenant didn’t have an infallible magisterium to tell them which books belonged in their canon, yet they were still the people of God and seemed to discern divine revelation just fine. So, some Protestants say, the Catholic assertion that we have to know the canon with “infallible” certainty is baseless. It is simply not necessary to have such certainty; instead, the proper use of our God-given reason can give us enough confidence in the canon of Scripture to allow us to know God’s will.