How To Handle Canonical Issues

An important step in addressing objections you get from a critic is to ask how much the objection could be applied to his belief system. That can help you communicate better with that critic, help you better explain to him why his objection is problematic, or get him to abandon the objection or adjust it or his handling of it in some way, for example. The value of taking that approach is especially significant in the context of interacting with Roman Catholics, since Protestants so often interact with Catholics and since they so often raise objections to Protestantism that they should be holding against their own belief system if they were to be consistent. But you sometimes come across that sort of inconsistency with Eastern Orthodox, atheists, and other groups as well.

One of the most popular objections raised against Protestantism is its supposed inability to justify its acceptance of a canon for its rule of faith, scripture. There is no table of contents in scripture, we rely on means outside of scripture to arrive at our canon, we supposedly accept our canon because a Roman Catholic authority of some sort gave us that canon, and so on. But it's not as though Protestants are the only ones who have a canon for their rule of faith. Every rule has a canon. So, ask yourself whether the group the person you're interacting with belongs to (e.g., Catholicism) handles its own canonical issues in a way comparable to how you handle yours. Is there a table of contents within the Catholic rule of faith? No. Do Catholics arrive at their canon by means outside that canon? Yes. And so forth. In fact, since the Catholic rule is so much larger and more complicated, the process of sorting through canonical issues is more difficult for a Catholic than it is for a Protestant. There are ongoing disputes among Catholics about what qualifies as tradition and what doesn't, which papal teachings are infallible and which aren't, who's been a true Pope and who hasn't been, etc.

Similarly, when atheists and other critics of Christianity claim that the canon of scripture was decided by Constantine or the Council of Nicaea, claim that Irenaeus gave us our canon of the gospels, or some such thing, we shouldn't just respond by explaining how erroneous their historical claims are. We should also notice that they make a lot of canonical judgments themselves and often approach those canonical issues in much the same way Christians do. In discussions about politics and matters like separation of church and state, they'll accept a canon of Thomas Jefferson's writings or some portion of that canon based on whatever they've been told by whatever scholar or other source they've consulted. They'll accept what a high school teacher, college professor, television documentary, book, web site, or some other source told them about the canon of Supreme Court rulings on a particular topic, what the Court said about the issue in question, and so on. We all do this type of thing many times and in many contexts in our everyday lives. So, when a Christian accepts a Biblical canon based on trusting various authority figures (parents, pastors, denominations, a historical consensus of professing Christians, a consensus of Bible publishers, etc.), that isn't much different than what atheists and other non-Christians do in other contexts. Whether an atheist or some other critic is being inconsistent in the objection he's raising will have to be judged case by case, but the possibility that he's being inconsistent should be considered and should be considered earlier rather than later in the discussion.

A lot more can be said about these issues, and we've said a lot more elsewhere (e.g., in my series of posts arguing for the New Testament canon and summarizing the case for the Old Testament canon here). But I want to reinforce the point that it's important to take a critic's objections and apply them to his belief system early in a discussion. That can go a long way in helping the discussion develop well. Protestants need to get better at doing that, especially with Catholics, but also with other groups.