Assertions and Charges: Summary of Recent Thoughts

I've had much distraction the last few weeks and at least one partially written posts that has been discarded. I'm going to steal a page (or core concept, what's the difference between friends) from my friend's book, If Protestantism is True, and lay out some of my thoughts.

If Protestantism is True...

• the canon of scripture is the assertion everything else depends on:
• Sola Scriptura claims that everything for faith and holiness in contained solely in scripture and Priesthood of all Believers implies that each person should be able to do this.
• If scripture is all that is required for all knowledge of faith and holiness, then knowledge of the limits and boundaries of scripture is supremely important.
• Since all Protestants reject much of the decisions made before the canon was first defined in the early church, one cannot look to it to define the canon
• Picking and choosing various council's decisions to agree and disagree with smacks of being Ad Hoc unless one can define a clear historical event or line of reasoning why to accept some but not others (or other things those people believed)
• All arguments based upon Literary Criticism or "Criteria for Canonicity" are circular in nature. They assume the thing and then use it to prove itself. A believer in 300 AD could use none of them to determine what is scripture.
• I find no other way of sustaining the canon beyond claiming it as the root assertion of Protestantism. 
• Yes, this puts us in the terrible position of an assertion that is spelled out in more detail here. 
• Yes, this means I have no real basis to stand against a Mormon who claims their canon as an assertion.
• No, this doesn't make me feel much better.
• for at least 1100 years (formation of canon till reformation) the entirety of the Church, the body of Christ, was dangerously wrong on many important topics: Canon, Baptism, Communion, Church Authority
• What does this tell us about the providence of God? For 1100 years God chose to allow Christians everywhere to lack:
• A true understanding of scripture, which is "the sole and infallible source of truth about faith and holiness".
• A true understanding about Baptism, which is the act that scripture teaches us all believers should undergo. How many children were baptized as infants incorrectly over 1100 years?
• A true understanding about Communion (see below)
• A true understanding about church authority, following leaders who they believed to be the very successor of Peter. God allowed believers everywhere to follow leaders, who must not have been appointed, to lead them into error (see above).
• during those 1100 years many great Christians lived and died, none of which the Holy Spirit either told or had the courage to object to these incorrect beliefs strongly enough to be recorded in history. 
• I just finished a study on Francis of Assisi and even if one tenth of the historical record is true, this was a man who sought to follow Christ more fully that I ever could.
• The article here has a quote from Francis which seems to imply he very much believed the church's teachings on communion.
• While I can find records of many of the heresies of the time, none outside a dispute about the "Real Presence" (communion) have any possible match with modern Protestant doctrines. [1 (see Berengarius section)]

While not directly flowing from the core assertions made by Protestantism, I believe the following also follows given mainline interpretation of scripture by protestants:


If Protestantism is True...

• Eucharistic adoration is disastrously wrong and very likely idolatry. 
• Eucharistic adoration is the worship of communion itself, which is claimed to have the "Real Presence" of Christ: Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity.[2]
• The charge of idolatry is a charge of treason itself within the Christian community. No higher mistake could one level against another to claim they are worshiping something that is not in its nature God Himself. 
• Catholics everywhere since 1264 (Transiturus De Hoc Mundo) are guilty of this.
• It was not until the reformation (240 years) that this was corrected. God allowed a vast majority of Christians everywhere for 240+ years to unknowingly be in such a state.
• If this is true, what sort of heresies could I be caught in right now? If for 240 years God allowed believers in all of the Christian lands be guilty of such a serious error, what hope do I have?

Laying all of these assertions and charges out I believe does a good job showing where I currently feel I'm at. It is very possible that Protestantism is true, but if it is it has great consequences for how I view God and church history.

The more I study about Catholic doctrines and history, the more I realize how different Protestant are; which implies how wrong Catholics must have been for 1100+ years. If God allowed everyone living for 1100 years to mess up so much about the faith, does He really care about our doctrine at all? How certain, knowing what I know about the turbulent times of the reformation, do I think they got it right? It even took the generation after Luther and Calvin to fully reject Regenerative Baptism, Communion of Saints, and various beliefs about Mary.[3][4]

Here I end up again, with more questions than answers. Think my logic is faulty? My sources of information and history incomplete? I don't like these consequences very much myself, but I believe they must flow from the assertions the Protestant Reformation if it was true. Please write in comments, I'm searching for the truth and welcome any help I can get.

The Canon: "God's Canon" E-Book (Part I)

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.

The Canon: Root of the issue (Part III)

I have trouble picking people's comments and turning those discussion items into posts. Even when done with the best motives, I always get the feeling reading them that the author is "beating up" that person in a public forum. However, comments "Shawn" made on the last two canon posts were in depth enough and interesting enough to require a long response. Please keep this in mind as I respond:

The relevant comments (in blue):

"Let's test your premise from the Gospels. It is obvious that Jesus and the NT writers understood what the OT/TNK was. To what council or entity did they refer to verify the veracity of the TNK that they used?"

"The main questions concern the OT/TNK and the apocryphal books. An obvious question would be, 'what books did Jesus and the NT writers recognize to be the books that comprised the OT/TNK canon?' or 'What was the Jewish canon at the time of Jesus?' Is there a Jewish writer who listed the TNK at the time of Jesus? Does the NT indicate anywhere what the extent of the TNK wold be? "

I will post my responses in red.

Let's test your premise from the Gospels. 

I'm very happy too. I'd like to state that unlike philosophy and logic, which I'd like to claim a minor amount of knowledge, I make no such claim to being in expert in this area. 

It is obvious that Jesus and the NT writers understood what the OT/TNK was.

I'm not sure I agree, nor and I sure it is obvious. A bit of google-fu divined that OT/TNK is Old Testament/T(orah),N(aviim, prophets) and K(etuvim, writings) [1], which is a term I never had heard of before tonight. For example, the Catholics here [2] find plenty of allusions and references they claim between various bits of the gospels/NT Writers and books not in the standard Protestant OT canon. I have not researched any of these reference, so I'm not claiming any/all of them are true references. However, it does show that they could be referring to materials not found in the standard Protestant OT canon. In the end however, I will agree they did have a canon they reference, and I'm very curious what canon it is. 

To what council or entity did they refer to verify the veracity of the TNK that they used?"
From what I can tell, the Jews did not even have a closed canon until around the time of Christ. Wikipedia, not always a great source of information, seems to point to some time between 200 B.C. to 200 A.D. [3], with a non-trivial number of people pointing to around 70 A.D (Council of Jamnia). [4]. It also appears that possibly some of the Jews of the time only held to the Torah itself. (I told you I wasn't in expert in these things.) I would say they appealed to no council since their canon wasn't even fixed. 

The main questions concern the OT/TNK and the apocryphal books.
I as a practical matter agree, as nearly every Christian of every age in the church has agreed about the NT canon (with Luther as a notable exception).

An obvious question would be, 'what books did Jesus and the NT writers recognize to be the books that comprised the OT/TNK canon?'
I agree. We don't have that information directly unfortunately. We can infer it based upon their writings, but as I noted before [2], others can make arguments that the NT writers obviously held book X in canon, since they referenced it in place Y. By what criteria do you want to use to determine what the NT writers recognized as the OT/TNK canon?

or 'What was the Jewish canon at the time of Jesus?' Is there a Jewish writer who listed the TNK at the time of Jesus?  
To be blunt, I am unsure how the Sadducees and/or Pharisees belief on the canon is helpful. As a Christian, I believe they were wrong on some of the fundamental aspects of faith (Deity of Christ for example). Even if they believed in canon X, I could have reasonable doubt in it for this reason. 

Does the NT indicate anywhere what the extent of the TNK wold be? "
Not that I know of. However, even if it was, wouldn't that be begging the question somewhat. We use the NT to determine what the OT is, but we claim the OT is the fulfillment of the NT.

As I noted, I have many more questions than answer. If I didn't scare him away, I invite Shawn to respond. I promise every response won't be in entry form :) . I appreciate him spending the time creating an account and writing in comments, and I hope to find answers, not just more questions. 

As an unsettling note, even if the Jews had a closed canon hundreds of years before Christ, it still wouldn't solve my issue with the canon in general. As a protestant, I claim that a given source of information is good (biblical), if it can be traced to Scripture. I claim that Scripture is the sole and infallible source of divine revelation. Even if every Christian every held the same NT canon (for different reasons), it doesn't resolve the fact that I need a non-arbitrary reason to hold that it is correct. Stating for 2000 years, roughly everyone agreed on it isn't good enough for me, since the reformation threw away a significant number of things that were held in high esteem for 1600 years.

As a note, I would feel amiss not linking to the original post that starting this entire canon question in motion for me. Found here [5], my friend Devin describes why struggling with this issue turned him Catholic. While I am not there, much of the logic does apply to my struggles as well.

Severity of Topic

While my somewhat detached writing tone might suggest this blog is only an intellectual exercise, I wanted to state for the record the severity of the topic at hand. Theology was once called the "queen of sciences" [1], and for good reason; knowledge about God and truth related to him are of monumental importance. Ignorance, fallacies, and heretical beliefs have the highest potential of harm. This is no theory, this has struck my own church. The harm done was non-trivial, splitting members off and throwing doubt into the life of some of them.

The knowledge that one is wrestling with truths that lay at the foundation of one belief system, conscious of the possibility that one could already be slipping into heretical beliefs is not pleasant knowledge. I know for a fact that I already have disagreements about core doctrinal areas with the leaders of my church. Things like the canon of scripture, communion, baptism, church authority and the like are important, and thus I wrestle with them despite the risks. Knowledge of God is of the utmost importance, knowing what you believe and why you believe should be the driving force in a person's life until they find full confidence in those beliefs.

The Canon: Root of the issue (Part II)

Last post, I laid out five common (or uncommon) views on who determines canon of scripture. I also hinted that I currently don't fall into one of these (or any really) right now. Walking through each argument and showing the faults I find in each should shed some light in the "abyss" I find myself.

1) The early church (Catholic)
    The cop out answer for why I find fault with this view can seen in the fact that I'm neither Catholic or Orthdox of some flavor. One holding this view almost directly leads to converting to one of these branches of the Church. The only way somebody could hold this view and not convert would involve the claim that that authority was lost at some point. I find this unlikely; if God invested a group of leaders such authority as is claimed, the removal of such authority would likely involve some sort of cataclysmic event in church history. Since I see no such evidence for such an event, and I must conclude the early church did not have such authority.
    Laying out the full reasons I am not Catholic is a post (or set of posts) in itself; considering the theological state I find myself in, it would also be unwise and/or premature.

2) The early church
   This view holds that God gave special authority to a specific group for this one time decision. Beyond a generic dislike that comes from being a programs related to special cases, I find this view lacking. In almost all of recorded history found in scriptures, special favor for momentous events involves the supernatural. The presence of God involved things like the Sun standing still, people rising from the dead (or dying suddenly), fire from heaven, etc. In history, I find no such occurrences. Much of the record seems to involves various groups coming up with various proposals and hammering out details over time. For God to give this group special authority, and then act in a way singularly different than most miracles of recorded church history is a strong claim; for me to find assurance in such a claim I need more evidence to wrap my brain (and heart) around.

3) The individual believer
    The most obvious fault with this theory is the billion[1] Catholics and 300 million[2] Eastern Orthodox Christians in the world today (ignoring the masses found throughout history). Even a very conservative 1% estimate of that amount being ones who are "saved" gives 13 million souls who disagree with the protestant canon. If it was obvious, a non-trivial number of them should have objected at some point.
    Ignoring that for a moment, the next fault is the fact that the church operated in some form for 1600 years roughly before the reformation and the removal of the old testament books in question. Even if only 1% of the Christians over those years were really "saved", and 1% of their complaints were written down and preserved, I should be able to point to somebody who found some books "obviously" uninspired.
    Beyond both of these thought experiments, one can look to the reformers themselves. It is a well recorded fact that Luther wanted to remove some books of the new testament for some parts of his life. Some Lutheran churches still order these books late in their canons. However, Calvin for example found no such flaw in these books. If the canon itself is as obvious as this view suggests, shouldn't these two patriarchs of the reformation agree?

4) "A fallible collection of infallible books"
    This view throws in the towel in any claim of authority in determining canon. In addition to being intellectually unsatisfying, there is a serious if not fatal flaw in reasoning about theology that springs from this view.
    Assume some doctrine that can be found in scripture but is not completely spelled out. I like communion, so I'll go with that. Communion has many things stated about it in scripture, but for example it never states how often one should partake. What if there was a second letter to the Romans sitting in some library somewhere, that states that a church must take communion every week? Our canon is a fallible collection of books, so it is possible that inspired letter is not in our canon. This means one holding to this view can not be 100% certain of any doctrine, as there could be a missing book that describes it further. The possibility of a book in canon that is not inspired should evoke enough fear of heresy that I shouldn't have to spell out that other possibility directly.

5) A particular group
    The view begs to have the blank filled in, which group do you believe God invested authority into determining canon? A generic case of "The early church", many of the same criticisms apply. The group given such authority would either:
 a) Still have that authority, and make the claims that the Catholic/Orthodox churches do
 b) Have had but lost that authority, I can't believe loosing that authority wouldn't come without a recognizable mark on history
 c) Had that authority for a short (set) period of time. All other short term investing of God's authority/power/Spirit come with some sort of visible signs, by why not this one?

And thus by excluding the vast majority of standard theories related to the canon and the authority to determine its bounds, I find myself in the abyss somewhat. I currently work under the assumption of the 66 protestant canon, but do not have a principled reason for this assumption. Thus, this blog and this (rather long) entry.

The Canon: Root of the issue (Part I)

Wikipedia describes the cannon as: "...a list of books considered to be authoritative as scripture by a particular religious community." Christians refine this definition to be the books divinely inspired and revealed by God. Since scripture itself is interpreted to lay out various doctrines, what we believe about canon has a non-trivial effect on our beliefs.

Since Christian's don't believe that all of scriptures fell from the sky completed, nor were they written by a one person in a given period of time, some entity must be given authority to determine what is included and excluded. Some entities that I have honestly seen put forth include (in no particular order):

• The early church (Catholic) - The authority given to Peter from Christ passed down through the rightful successors gave the respective councils authority to determine scripture.
• The early church - God chose to give a respective council one time authority to determine scripture. However, decisions before/after by the same people/group do not have the same authority
• The individual believer (via the Holy Spirit) - Any Christian should be able to tell if a given work is part of the canon just as a person knows the difference between sweet and sour.
• "A fallible collection of infallible books" - We have no way of being certain that the collection is correct, just that a given book is inspired or not.
• A particular group - God gave special authority to this group to make the determination. This is really a generalization of the second early church view. Common groups given authority include the early reformer (Luther/Calvin,/etc), leadership of ones specific church or denomination, etc.

In the next post, I shall discuss and critique these various views and note the limbo I currently find myself in.

Ground Rules: Divine Revelation, Assurance, and Truth

Any good logical argument or discussion generally begins by laying out the assumptions (implicit or not), and in this I will not differ.

• Divine Revelation 
• There is a God, and he chooses to reveal himself through various means. Primarily, this has been done through Sacred Scripture and the incarnation of Christ.
• Assurance
• I believe that the truth can be known with sufficient assurance to live believing ones beliefs with confidence. I do not believe God would reveal himself but leave sufficient doubt to know the fundamentals of the faith. This does however not imply perfect knowledge of every aspect of theology.
• Truth
• There is a God; He has actual views of various topic; He has opinions on various Church practices. This implicitly rejects the modern view of each person finding their own "truth". 
• For example, either God divinely revealed himself in 66, 73, or 76 books. He couldn't have revealed himself exactly in more than one number. 
• Either communion must be symbolic or in some way more than symbolic (Consubstantiation or Transubstantiation).