Last week, my pastor send me a link to an e-book he had found written by Steve Hays and posted free on a reformed theology website (monergism.com). His hope was that these writings would help me in my wrestling in the canon. Weighing in at over thirty one thousand words, there is more material here than I can cover in a single post. Therefore, I plan to make the rest of this post an overview of the text and submit my initial thoughts.
One of the first statements the text makes is "Over the years I’ve written a number of occasional pieces on the Protestant canon of Scripture....John Hendryx has kindly offered to collate this material in the form of an ebook."
This is an extremely accurate statement, and even a quick reading will find plenty of evidence of this fact. Each chapter is an "article" it itself, many laying out their own copy of references and the like. Chapters range from fully written out articles with quotes inline to what appears to be just talking points and/or notes from a talk. Without the background of a literary scholar, some sections of the text made very little sense to me, while others were written giving enough background to be understood easily.
The tone for many of the articles is casual, with the author's opinion of Catholic and liberal scholars spelled out with phrases like: "herd mentality of Roman Catholics", "Catholic apologists have Catholicism etched on their spectacles", "there are copycat liberals who simply regurgitate the latest fad in Bible criticism". While I find such comments detracting from the text itself, one should note (somewhat mitigatingly) that the text wasn't written as a cohesive text for publication, but as an assortment of pieces written over the years to various groups.
The chapter titles themselves are a fair description of what is covered in the text:
Chapter 1 - Retroengineering the canon of Scripture
Chapter 2 - Approaches to the canon of Scripture
Chapter 3 - Canonical criteria
Chapter 4 - How we got the New Testament
Chapter 5 - The Bible as autobiography
Chapter 6 - The OT witness to the OT canon
Chapter 7 - Hypothetical arguments for the Catholic canon
Chapter 8 - “The Magisterium in the NT”
Chapter 9 - Hebrews
Chapter 10 - Enoch & Jude
Chapter 11 - Pseudepigrapha
Chapter 12 - James and Jude
Chapter 13 - The legendary Alexandrian canon
Chapter 14 - For Further Reading
From what I can tell, the primary argument of the text can roughly be summarized as:
The canon of scripture is not an externally defined thing, but flows from the text itself. Given bits of the canon, one can reason the canonically of another section in a way that is similar to mathematics or the laws of physics. The evidence one uses to reason about the canonically of scripture are things like: authorship of a given book, intertextuality between the books, common sources/kinship/affiliation of the authors, etc.
I am very glad that another Protestant considers this topic important enough to spend a significant amount of time and text wrestling with it. In my experience, this is not a common at all. However, I don't find many of the author's arguments persuasive and am troubled with some of his statements. Unless things change while discussing the text in further posts, I don't believe the answer to my canon questions will be found here.
Yes it still has the "bootstrapping" problem, right? As in, you have to start with some verse/chapter/book that you somehow "know" is inspired. Perhaps the argument there would be something like: "well, even in the early second century the four gospels and some of Paul's letters already enjoyed widespread acceptance, so we can trust that decision of the early Church/opinions of the early Christians and start from there."
ReplyDeleteAnother problem I see with this is: did Christians for the past 2,000 years have advanced literary redaction techniques at their disposal? No. Did they have all the ancient sources available to them to compare? No. (In fact, I think that Jerome made his landmark translation of some books of the Old Testament with only one ancient manuscript.) So how, exactly, even given that intertextuality/intratextuality is the right way to know the canon, were Christians throughout history supposed to have access to it?
In any event, I don't find the arguments persuasive that even using this criterion--which I would point nowhere appears in the Bible itself as the way we are supposed to know the canon--we could "know" that Jude is inspired but 1 Clement is not, or that Proverbs is inspired but Wisdom is not. I mean, Matthew's account of the Passion is almost word-for-word from Wisdom chapter 2.
In any event, I look forward to hearing more. I'm still considering writing a mini-book rebuttal of it.
God bless!
Devin
It seems to me that we have no higher authority than Christ himself. I wonder how much of the OT/TNK could be "bootstrapped" starting with His references as recorded in the gospels. I know, I know this relies on accuracy and canonicity of the gospels...but I'm comfortable with that.
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