Yarr! – The Weblog of Bob Heffernan

In light of the arguments of the previous posts, it seems to me that if we are to deny the authority of the ecumenical councils we must arrive at a doctrine of scripture and of a closed canon that does not rely on their authority. Also, such a doctrine must take seriously the fact that Jesus is the Word and must also take seriously the continual presence and speaking of the Spirit.

Finally, it must not overstate the role of scripture over and against the role of the Spirit and of Jesus as Word. The earliest believers were not a `people of the book’ even though they held the OT in high regard. It seems problematic to suggest that there should be a fundamental difference between the church prior to the closing of the canon and the church after this event. It also seems clear that the continuing existence of the church in no way depends on the continuing existence of the Bible. The Bible provides a norm when it comes to teaching and provides at least some consistency of teaching over time but if the Bible were lost the church would continue to exist so long as people continued to preach the message of the Lordship of Jesus Christ and of his life death and resurrection and continued to repeat the narratives of God’s acting in and through Israel and in and through the early church. The NT is the record of the first generation’s preaching of this gospel and telling of this narrative but in its absence surely the Spirit could ensure that the truth would not be lost in the retelling and that, when error crept in, men like Paul would rise up to correct it. So, the scripture is a wonderful gift from God and serves a useful purpose but it is not constitutive of the church. Any doctrine of scripture we propose should keep this in mind.

The arguments in the previous post, and probably many more, give enough reason to suggest that even if we did not have a notion of canon and did not regard anything beyond the OT as scripture we would still find the NT writings to be trustworthy and worth reading. We do not need a doctrine of scripture to make the historical narratives of Jesus and the early church absolutely essential reading. Similarly, the teachings of the apostles is also essential (and trustworthy) even if we haven’t included the documents in which they are recorded into a formalised canon of scripture.

However, The doctrine of scripture and of canon gives us more than this. It allows us to equate directly the words of Paul and the other NT writers with the words of God himself. A doctrine of scripture gives us assurance that the NT writers have not made some mistake on a vital point. So, while the writings of Paul, say, would carry much authority because of Paul’s importance as an early believer and a person who saw the risen Jesus, they carry much more authority when they are identified with the very words of God.

A doctrine of a closed canon allows us to be sure that we have not missed any important documents and that we need not continue to add documents to the canon. It allows us to assert that scripture is sufficient as we have it and that God is not going to reveal anything substantial that he has not revealed already.

It seems to me that there are a number of reasons to accept and trust the NT documents as we have them even before we introduce notions of scripture and canon:

1. Firstly, it is indisputable that the reconstructed documents that we have correspond almost exactly and in a very precise way to the original documents written. The science of textual criticism has, because of the unprecedented number and quality of the extant copies the NT documents, has allowed us to reconstruct them with remarkable accuracy. The NT we read today is absolutely trustworthy in this regard.
2. Secondly, earlier scepticism with regard to early dating of the NT documents has been assuaged and it is now generally felt by most scholars that they are all relatively early. This gives us confidence that they correspond, in the way that they claim, to the teachings of the apostles.
3. With regard to the Gospels and Acts, modern scholarly study is (slowly) recovering from the biases of the liberal scholarship of the past few centuries and is rediscovering that the gospels have all of the hallmarks of being well-researched eye-witness accounts. It is becoming increasingly clear, from a scholarly perspective, that they are largely trustworthy as historical documents. This may not yet be the consensus but the liberal dismissal of the historicity of the Gospels and Acts has been seriously and convincingly challenged. For scholars who reject the presuppositions of liberalism (many of which were pre-scholarly biases disguising themselves as scholarly scepticism) the historical documents of the NT have been found to be much more trustworthy than once thought. Moreover, much of this work is being done by non-evangelical scholars. As such, even from a simplistic pre-faith point of view, it seems reasonable to accept the Gospels and Acts as reliable historical documents (in they way we would accept other similar early histories). Even without positing a doctrine of scripture or of canon we, as Jesus followers, will be interested to read these documents to learn about Jesus and his teaching and to learn about the practices of the apostles and early churches. This, one must remember, will have been their original purpose. See, for instance, the introduction that Luke writes to his gospel.
4. With regard to the Pauline epistles it is beyond dispute that many of the letters that bear his name were written by him. Even many of those letters that were previously thought to be inauthentic are now being reconsidered and found to be genuine. Paul was an important and influential early believer and so we will want to read his writings even before we have decided they are scripture. Moreover, Paul argues convincingly for his points and argues that they themselves are inspired by the Spirit and are truth (without reference to a notion of scripture). We can read them, think on them, and find them convincing.
5. The same holds for the other epistles. Even in cases where they may not have been written by those whose names they bear they were all composed so early as to almost certainly correspond to apostolic teaching. The general unity of teaching in the NT would seem to back this up. Thus if we, as the early believers did, wish to hold fast to the teachings of the apostles we will eagerly read them even if we have not formulated a doctrine of canon or of NT scripture.
6. The Revelation of John claims, in a manner similar to the OT prophets, to be a record of prophecy. In fact, John claims he was told to record the prophecy by Jesus himself. There is even a command not to alter the words of the prophecy or add to it. Thus, the Revelation demands to be read as scripture. So, apart from any considerations involving other NT documents, this book must be read as scripture or not at all. We must choose to accept it, as we choose to accept other scripture, or choose to reject it entirely. It has a different status from the other NT books, which mostly do not claim to be written scripture (even when they claim to be true) and where the authors do not appear to be conscious of writing scripture.

Issues of epistemology have become increasingly important in recent Christian discourse. In the face of this many evangelicals cling strongly to a modernist epistemology in order to deny that issues of epistemology pose any problems to the scriptures speaking authoritatively. For instance, the following is part of one of the articles in the recent Together for the Gospel Statement released by several prominent evangelicals:

We deny that … the truth of the Gospel can be expressed or grounded in anything less than total confidence in the veracity of the Bible, the historicity of biblical events, and the ability of language to convey understandable truth in sentence form. (Emphasis mine)

This is not, however, the place for a long conversation about epistemology and whether or not a modernist epistemology such as that espoused above is necessary for the scriptures to be able to speak with authority. We may illustrate the problem of interpretation from a perspective that avoids most of this conversation by considering the problem of harmonisation.

Consider the issue of the two accounts of Judas’ death: the first in Matthew 27 and the second in Acts 1. Examples of passages such as these, which are held to be inconsistent, have often been used as grounds for denying the inerrancy of the scriptures but this is not our interest here. There are certainly certainly several questions raised by the two passages — `who purchased the field?’, ‘how exactly did Judas die?’, and so on — but let us assume that we can come up with some harmonisation of the two passages that allows us to answer these questions. For instance, it is often argued that when Luke says in Acts that Judas `acquired a field with the rewards of his unjust deed’ what he means that is that after throwing his money at the feet of the chief priests and elders and hanging himself, as in the account in Matthew, the chief priests purchased the very field in which Judas had hanged himself and so, in some sense, he `acquired’ the field indirectly via the chief priests. Furthermore, in the light of the fact that Luke was a physician it is argued that his account of Judas’ death simply records a detail of medical interest while leaving out the bigger picture; so Judas did hang himself, as in the account in Matthew, and he remained hanging for several days until the rope broke and his stomach, swollen from decomposition, burst open. Luke recorded the latter fact as it interested him that a body would burst open if it fell after several days of hanging.

Now, such a harmonisation is purely speculative. There may be, and probably are, alternative explanations that harmonise the two accounts. Only one such harmonisation, so long as it is plausible, is needed to defend against the charge of inconsistency. However, what is the status of these harmonisations when it comes to authority? Where is our confidence placed? In the two differing accounts in scripture? In our harmonisation of these accounts? If scripture is sufficient why should such harmonisations be necessary? Should we ever construct such harmonisations our should we simply treat competing passages separately from each other? There are many questions such as these raised.

While the construction of such harmonisations has long been part of the apologetic argument to deny that scripture contradicts itself it seems to me that the normal evangelical view of scripture does not allow us to formulate such harmonisations. When asked `what is the story of Judas’ death?’ we can only say that there are two different accounts in scripture and, while it might be possible to harmonise these two, we must read them on their own merits. To do anything more would be to place our trust in the harmonisation and not scripture itself. Most evangelicals would probably find this to be reasonable enough. However, the process of arriving at a harmonisation is the same as the process of deriving a doctrine from scripture. So, by analogy, when asked something like `what does Paul teach about eschatology’ we should only say that in this passage he says this, in that passage he says something else and while it might be possible to harmonise them in some way we must treat each passage on its own merits as to do otherwise would be to place our trust in a doctrine and not scripture itself. This is plainly not what is done in general.

In conclusion it seems to me that, while evangelicals generally treat scripture as a source from which we extract truths and rules for living, the normal evangelical view of scripture does not provide any real grounds on which to do this. Any doctrine of scripture we formulate must provide a clear explanation of how the authority of scripture is actually to be put into practice.

After God spoke long ago in various portions and in various ways to our ancestors through the prophets, in these last days he has spoken to us in a son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he created the world.

So opens the book of Hebrews and this sheds much light on how the early believers viewed scripture; Jesus, the Christ and the Son of God, had fulfilled the scripture and was now the Word of God incarnate (in the language of John). As such, Jesus himself now takes the place in the life of the church that the scripture took in the life of Israel. God once spoke through Moses and the prophets but now he has spoken in a final way through Jesus. The scripture was still important, certainly. Firstly it provided evidence that God had acted in exactly the way in which he had promised in scripture and that Jesus had fulfilled the prophecies of scripture. Secondly, in the words of Paul, the scripture was `able to give you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.’ Thirdly, and again in the words of Paul, by virtue of its inspired nature the scripture was `useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness’. So, scripture formed an important part in both the evangelistic preaching and the internal teaching of the early church.

However, it seems clear that the most basic authority in the early church was Jesus as Word incarnate and his speech in the life of the church through the Spirit. It is clear that the Spirit could not speak in such a way as to contradict scripture — Jesus had not come to contradict scripture but he had fulfilled it — but it seems to me that the modern language of scripture as the sole authority in the life of the church would have seemed odd, if not outright blasphemous, to the early believers.

While the principle of scripture as self-interpreting is a valuable hermeneutical rule-of-thumb — certainly the idea of inspiration is a good basis for some idea of unity among the varying parts of scripture and this allows us to clarify one part of scripture with other parts — this can not be taken as a denial of the clear fact that things external to scripture are important, and often essential, when it comes to interpreting scripture. In the first instance, much work needs to be done in the study of the classics and ancient languages before we can even begin to read the New Testament documents or translate them into another language. Moreover, knowledge of the cultural and historical background is vital to the understanding and interpretation of scripture. Much will be missed if we deny this, even if we are careful to look to other parts of scripture for elucidation.