Second, all these criteria are considered to have arisen from the mind(s) of the churches, of the second or third centuries, according to their perceived “needs.” This ignores any inherent, transcendent or divine properties of the books themselves. It assumes that the idea of a set of authoritative, specifically Christian Scriptures was a late idea and far from the intention of Jesus, the apostles, or any of the actual Scriptural authors. We’ll come back to this issue later on.
Third, if the church kept only what it thought “met its changing needs,” where is the place for God’s disruptive, admonitory voice, for “correction and reproof” as Paul says Scripture gives (2 Tim. 3:16)? Left to decide for itself, is it likely the church would have chosen the dire warnings and condemnations of some of its tendencies, such as are contained in many New Testament books? For instance, the book of Revelation contains charges levelled by the risen Christ against most of the seven churches it addresses and it threatens dreadful judgment against them. The charges include the sins of abandoning love, tolerating immorality, and the eating of food sacrificed to idols. Paul’s letters to the Corinthian church reveal that some of its members were engaged in immoral behaviors, were mistreating each other, or were denying basic tenets of the faith. Some in the Galatian churches were toying with what Paul called a desertion of God and an exchange of the true gospel for a false one. None of these are things any church would want to advertise about itself to other churches or to outsiders in a permanent collection of Scriptures. And who would want to put oneself under a continual threat of divine judgment for misbelief or misbehavior?
Fourth, if “use” is the key criterion, we cannot account for the acceptance of books like James or Jude, or even an “acknowledged Pauline” book like Philemon, books which, if we had to judge by our current evidence, were not “used” all that often. As far as we know, there was never any controversy about Philemon, but it is hardly ever cited or mentioned in the early church (not entirely surprising because it is so short). Even McDonald has to concede that some New Testament books “were not cited or used as often as such noncanonical sources as 1 Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, Barnabas, and the Epistles of Ignatius, and possibly also the Martyrdom of Polycarp.”34 I think McDonald may have gotten a little carried away here, but the underlying point is true.
Scholars usually just see this as a simple case of inconsistency.35 The church couldn’t even be consistent in applying its own criteria! So, it is a problem for the canon. Instead, scholars should see it as a problem for their method. Rather than calling into question the legitimacy of the books in the church’s canon, this “inconsistency” calls into question the idea that the church was using a set of criteria to determine the books in the canon.
For one thing, this approach tends to glide over the fact that some books were valued and “used” for different purposes. Some were seen as useful for catechetical training or simply for good Christian reading, but were not Scripture. According to our current artifactual evidence, one of the most popular Christian writings in the early church was The Shepherd of Hermas. More early fragments of this work have been found than of almost any New Testament book, excepting John and Matthew! The late second-century author of the Muratorian Fragment says this about The Shepherd of Hermas: “it ought indeed to be read; but it cannot be read publicly to the people in church” (lines 77–78).36 This apparently mirrored the attitude of many Christian writers, including Irenaeus,37 who saw it as quite useful, but not as Scripture—except for Tertullian, who condemned it as apocryphal and false (On Modesty 10.12). In the fourth century, Athanasius would call it catechetical but not canonical (Ep. Fest. 39).
III. PROOF
One important thing the political and the practical approaches have in common is that they both perceive the process of selecting the books of the New Testament as the collective act of the church, pure and simple. It may have been a drawn-out battle, full of fractious debates and government coercion. Or it may have been an honest but tedious, evolving process of finding consensus through the inconsistent application of more-or-less legitimate criteria. It may even have been, as many would assert, the authoritative declaration of a particular church hierarchy. But in any case, it was in the church that the idea arose, and it was the church—particularly the church of the fourth and fifth centuries—that spoke with the defining voice.38
Any way you slice it, this seems problematic for evangelicals and for historic Protestantism, those who do not believe in an infallible church. How can we place ultimate confidence in a list of books chosen by the church, unless the church too is infallible, at least on par with Scripture or above it in authority? Thus for some, the study of canon has seemed to lead toward Rome, and the Roman Catholic way of looking at things. Since no Scriptural book gives us a list of Scriptural books, how do we know what that list is, unless the church tells us?
A. Self-Attesting, Self-Demonstrating
This was a burning issue at the time of the Reformation, when reform efforts were necessarily focused upon the ultimate source of authority in the church. Was that ultimate divine authority to be sought in Scripture above all else, or was even Scripture’s divine voice subject to the church? Calvin refers to those in his day who asked, “Who can assure us that Scripture has come down whole and intact even to our very day? Who can persuade us to receive one book in reverence but to exclude another, unless the church prescribe a sure rule for all these matters? What reverence is due Scripture and what books ought to be reckoned within its canon depend, they say, upon the determination of the church” (Institutes of the Christian Religion I.7.1). Calvin and other Protestant theologians answered that the consensus voice of the church is indeed a legitimate and powerful support, once we have faith in the Scriptures. But our confidence in the Scriptures ultimately rests not on human testimony, even the testimony of the church, but on the testimony of God himself by the Holy Spirit, speaking in the Scriptures. The Scriptures are αὐτοπίστοι [autopistoi] self-authenticating, self-attesting, and this extended to the question of canon as well.39 Calvin put it memorably,
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 (Inst. 1.7.2).
[T]hose whom the Holy Spirit has inwardly taught truly rest upon Scripture, and that Scripture indeed is self-authenticated [αὐτόπιστον]; hence, it is not right to subject it to proof and reasoning (Inst. I.7.5).40
The key word in the last clause is “subject.” As he explains,
Unless this certainty, higher and stronger than any human judgment, be present, it will be vain to fortify the authority of Scripture by arguments, to establish it by common agreement of the church, or to confirm it with other helps….41 Conversely, once we have embraced it devoutly as its dignity deserves, and have recognized it to be above the common sort of things, those arguments—not strong enough before to engraft and fix the certainty of Scripture in our minds—become very useful aids (Inst. I.8.1).