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Friday, July 22, 2022

Protestants Aren't The Only Ones With Complicated Canonical Issues

Cameron Bertuzzi recently retweeted some comments from Josh Rasmussen on canonical issues and referred to how "this is a good [argument] for Catholicism". Keep in mind:

- The alleged ability of Catholicism to settle canonical issues in this context only addresses a portion of Catholicism's canon. That canon involves more than scripture. And Catholics continue to disagree with one another (and with non-Catholics) about what qualifies as tradition and what doesn't, which papal teachings are infallible, and so on. There's more agreement among Protestants about the canon of scripture than there is among Catholics about the canon of their rule of faith.

- Canons are complicated by their nature. That's not just true of scripture canons, but also of canons more broadly. People can dispute what documents were and weren't written by an ancient philosopher or a more recent individual, like Thomas Jefferson. If you broaden the canon to include all of the writings of a particular ancient school of philosophy or America's founding fathers in general, then the canonical issues will get even more complicated. How should the school of philosophy be defined? Who belongs to it and who doesn't? Who qualifies as one of America's founding fathers and who doesn't? Which documents attributed to George Washington were actually written by him? And so on. Since a canon of scripture in the Christian context involves multiple figures over a lengthy period of time (especially if you're including the Old Testament canon rather than limiting yourself to the New Testament), it involves the complexities that inherently go with a multi-author canon covering a longer rather than shorter timeframe. And there are other such factors that can make any given canon more or less complicated.

- Here's a series of posts I wrote about an Evangelical justification for the canon of scripture. We've written a lot more about the topic since then. You can find some archives of many of our relevant posts (not all of them) here and here. To summarize, the best explanation for what the relevant sources tell us about the apostles (e.g., Old Testament precedent, what Jesus said about the apostles, what the apostles said about themselves, what the other early Christian sources said about the apostles) is that they were communicating Divine revelation, including scripture. We have to make a probability judgment about whether a given document was part of that revelation, but the same is true of the alternatives (how probable it is that all of the sources supporting Jude's canonicity, for example, were wrong; the likelihood of Catholic arguments about the alleged authority of their denomination; whether it's probable that something that's claimed to be part of Catholic tradition actually is part of that tradition; etc.). It's not as though Protestants are the only ones who have a position to defend or the only ones relying on probability judgments about history. We have more evidence for the canonicity of 1 Corinthians than we have for the canonicity of Hebrews. But the evidence doesn't have to be equally good for every book, and a rejection of Hebrews has to be defended, just as an acceptance of it has to be. We've said a lot more about these and other canonical issues in the threads linked above. See my recent post here for a brief overview of how all of us (including atheists, for example) have to justify our own canons in many contexts in life and how those canonical issues are often complicated.

2 comments:

  1. As an example of the more recent work we've done on canonical issues, see my posts earlier this year on the importance of Ephesus in early Christianity, such as here. Much of the New Testament is closely connected to Ephesus.

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  2. Here is my understanding of the general situation regarding the question of canon. Please let me know if anything is missing or incorrect:

    Catholic (and EO) partisans usually say “the Church gave us the Bible,” and “without our Magisterium (or Tradition), you cannot know what ancient writings belong in the Bible.” In other words, “without The Thing That We Have, you Protestants are lost.”

    It seems to me that the correct response is simple: There is no written record of early Christians making a decision about canon based on human authority. Nobody ever wrote something like the following: “By our authority as leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, we decree that the work commonly known as the Gospel according to Matthew is Scripture.”

    What they actually wrote is more like “the Church recognizes…” They never stood on any alleged authority to make the call.

    As for “the Church gave us the Bible,” what does it mean? Ordinarily, that string of words means that a subcommittee of an organization called “The Church” hired a group of writers to write works according to specifications set by the subcommittee. But we know that’s not what happened. The biblical writers wrote, and later some of their works were recognized to be God-breathed. At least that’s what the extant writings show.

    So questions of canonicity (and textual interpretation) cannot be answered by appealing to authority. When the canon was being established, it was being established by an organic process of recognition, not stipulation.

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