Of Cabbages and Kings

This post is part of a series on my selection of a Christian church. There will be a new post every few days.

Back in the days of the Protestant Reformation, one of the rallying cries was sola scriptura, “scripture alone.” This is the doctrine that the Bible is the only infallible guide to the Christian faith, that whatever the early church fathers or modern day theologians have to say, however insightful or helpful, it is always entirely subordinate to the Bible. This foundational tenet of Protestantism can be an appealing idea, but on closer inspection I believe it has some fatal weaknesses.

The weakness I will discuss in this post is the question of which books are in the Bible. The almost universal Protestant answer to this question is that the Bible consists of 66 books: the 27 books of the New Testament and the 39 books that formed the Hebrew Scriptures, called the Old Testament. But why these particular books?

Nearly every Christian church or denomination agrees on the list of books in the New Testament, but in the first centuries of Christianity various books were proposed or called into question before the New Testament canon was finalized. More recently, Martin Luther questioned the books of Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation, apparently seeking to remove these books from the Bible but ultimately just moving them to the end of his Bible. Most notably, Luther considered the book of James an epistle of straw because it appeared to directly contradict one of his other doctrines, sola fide, “faith alone” whereas James emphasizes the necessity of having faith and works together.

While the books of the New Testament were written during roughly the first half century since the establishment of the Church, even the most recent of the books of the Old Testament had been written centuries earlier. But the Hebrew canon in Jesus’ day had not yet been formally closed, so the early Church had to decide which books belonged in the Old Testament also. In the first century AD, no books had been added to the Hebrew language Scriptures for some 400 years, but the Greek Scriptures, the Septuagint, had some newer books written in Greek. The Septuagint was in widespread use among the Jews in Jesus’ day, and the New Testament authors frequently quoted the Septuagint.

To my knowledge, most of the extra books of the Septuagint were recognized as canonical from the early days of Christianity until the Reformation. (Some of the Septuagint books were not universally recognized as canonical—the Catholic Church recognizes seven books, and the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox recognize those books plus a few more.) At the Reformation, Martin Luther moved these books to their own section in between the Old and New Testaments. They were later cut from Protestant Bibles entirely.

This is the first difficulty with sola scriptura: how can you know that your Bible is complete, and contains no extraneous books? The 66-book canon is a product of Protestant traditions, descended from the Catholic New Testament and the Hebrew Bible, with no place for the books of the Septuagint. If one of the Apostles, for example, had written a table of contents for the Bible, there would be no trouble here. But as it is, there is no avoiding the fact that the list of books that get included in modern Bibles was developed by the church over time.

So in whichever version of the Bible you have, the table of contents has been passed on to you by church tradition. Protestant Bibles were edited by the reformers, so how can you know they were right and nearly everyone else was wrong for the first 1500 years of Christianity? Martin Luther, as I mentioned previously, had little enough faith in the Catholic Church and enough faith in himself that he took it upon himself to decide which books were canonical and which were not. But most Protestants would agree that some of his decisions were questionable: perhaps he went too far in demoting some of the New Testament books, or did not go far enough in not expunging the apocrypha (called the deuterocanon among Catholics). So Protestants are forced to accept the canon as formed by the Catholic Church, modified by Luther, and then re-modified by other reformers.

But what if a Protestant disagrees with the list of books in his Bible? Is it every Christian’s right to unilaterally decide which books make up the word of God, those books upon which everything rests if sola scriptura is true? Or was it just Luther et al who possessed this privilege?

The answer to this problem presumably appeals to the Holy Spirit: Luther was led by the Spirit to make corrections to the canon, and others were led by the Spirit to correct Luther. The Holy Spirit won’t lead anyone else to make corrections, because (hopefully) we have the correct canon now. As for the rest of Christendom, they must have stopped listening to the Spirit sometime around the year 400, when the canon was decided the first time.

I suppose that argument is at least somewhat plausible, but there’s a problem: the canon of the Bible was originally decided by ecumenical councils, but the Protestant revisions were decided by individuals. And if Luther can claim to be sufficiently guided by the Spirit as to overrule an ecumenical council and a thousand years of consensus as to the canonicity of particular books, then who has the authority to prevent other people from doing the same thing? Today’s independent street preacher or TV evangelist can claim to be led by the Holy Spirit just as easily as Martin Luther did. The fact that the 66-book Protestant canon enjoys widespread popularity today is no guarantee that it isn’t missing some books.

So those who accept sola scriptura have some difficulty defending their particular choice of canon. This is the first problem with the doctrine: the Bible is supposed to be the sole rule of faith, containing everything we need for salvation, but in the Protestant tradition it isn’t clear at all why the 66 books that fell out of the Reformation are the correct books. Arguments can be made in favor of those 66 books and against the books considered canonical in other traditions, but in the end there can be no certainty. All that’s left is to choose a Bible for yourself and hope that your choice is correct, or to appeal to the tradition of your choice as to which books were considered canonical by previous church leaders or reformers. Already, you have based your faith on a line of reasoning or a tradition outside the Bible.

Tags: Christianity