Joe responds to the recent conversation between Gavin Ortlund, Javier Perdomo and Cleave to Antiquity about the integrity of the Protestant canon of Scripture.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and today I want to explore the Protestant Bible and whether it has the right number of books because as you may know, Protestant Bibles are seven books shorter than Catholic. Bibles are also shorter than Orthodox Bibles, and there’s a lot of debate about this and it matters a lot to know if we’ve got the right Bible. And I want to look particularly at some of the objections handled by three gentlemen recently over on Dr. Gavin Orland’s channel. It was Dr. Orland along with Javier Pomo and the guy behind Cleaver to Antiquity whose name I think is Matt, but I apologize if I’m getting it wrong. His name turns out to be Ben. So I want to look at first the sort of canonical problem, the canon conundrum as they call it, whether Protestants can solve it, whether Catholics are in the same boat, and then get into some of the historical evidence. So broadly speaking, I’m going to look at this in two halves. First, looking at authority and infallibility. Do Protestants know for sure which books are in the Bible? Do they need infallibility to be able to do that? And then what do the Bible of the early Christians look like? What can we say about the Bible in Jesus’ own day? So let’s do part one first and so here, and we’re talk about they are kind of laying out what they call the canon, what
CLIP:
Canon has to do with which books are in scripture. This is a huge issue. This is a one that I think a lot of people have anxieties about and uncertainties about. So you may be interested in this video if you’re just curious, how was the Christian Bible formed? What did that process look like? And especially if you’ve heard objections to Protestant views of the canon and you’re wondering how to respond to that, do we have a fallible list of infallible books and what does that imply? And then historical questions, is there any historical basis for a Protestant view?
Joe:
But I actually don’t think that they maybe go far enough in explaining why this is a problem. So let me give my perspective as a non Protestant to say why it seems like Protestants have a canon problem and then see if they offer a solution to that or if they’re right that everybody else has the same problem. So first, why do Protestants have a canon problem? What do I even mean by that? What does it mean when we talk about a canon conundrum? Start with the idea of sola scriptura. Now I realize, so script means different things to different people, but historically it meant something like this. The 1689 London Baptist confession, which is maybe the most important historic confession for reformed Baptists like Dr. Orland says that the holy scripture is the only and the word only there matters, the only sufficient certain and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience.
Now, I know Dr. Orland will describe sos script as just saying Scripture is the only infallible source, but it actually means a lot more than that historically. It means not only that scripture alone is infallible, but it’s also sufficient. So all you need is scripture, and it’s also certain, so you don’t have to rely on the church to explain it for you. All of that is very much what solo scripture is intended to do. You want to say on the one side, there is no infallible tradition, there is no infallible pope, there is no infallible church. So you can’t as a Protestant point to those as an infallible authority. They might help you to interpret scripture, but they can’t be a source of authority apart from scripture. So if a doctrine is not found in scripture but is found in tradition or is taught by the church or is taught by the Pope, whatever, then as a Protestant you’d say that’s off limit.
That is not valid, it’s unbiblical. Maybe these guys have a different version of Protestantism that they’re practicing, but historically this is where you are. So you can’t appeal to tradition the church or the Pope to the exclusion of the Bible. Your beliefs have to come from the Bible because it is again, the only sufficient certain and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience. On the flip side, positively, Protestants of this Friday would typically affirm that if you want to know the answer to any issue involving saving knowledge, faith, or obedience, you’re promised to find it in scripture. And a faithful Christian can clearly find all of these answers using what are called the ordinary means. And you don’t have to be learned and learned or an unlearned person into it. You do not have to do a deep dive on early Christianity to find the answer to your problem.
You don’t have to know 17th century reformed theologians. You don’t need to buy a leather bound set of anything to have the answer to your problems. This is critical to this whole system. The London Baptist Confession goes on to say that the whole council of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man, salvation, faith, and life is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the holy scripture. So whatever it is that you need for salvation, you’re either going to find it in the Bible or you’re going to be able to logically derive it from the Bible and you’ll find other confessions that say various things similar to that. And again, some of them are taught very clearly and explicitly. Others you can derive even if you’re not well-educated using ordinary means to sufficiently understand them. Those are the promises that the London Baptist confession makes.
The Westminster Confession says similar things. Historic Protestant confessions make these similar claims. Here’s the problem, if that’s right, if the Bible is what I need to figure out all of these things, then it seems really obvious that the most critical thing I need to get straight is well, which are the books of the Bible. And this is particularly an acute problem if it turns out that different groups of Christians have different Bibles with different contents. So I now run into two problems. Number one, we can’t have infallible certainty about which books are and are not in the Bible. And number two, whatever certainty we do have is based principally on things not found in or logically derived from scripture itself at all. You can think about this kind of concretely, so I’ll use this example later on, but think about the gospel of John. The gospel of John has some of the clearest statements about Jesus’s divinity.
It’s important that it’s in the Bible. It gives us a lot of information. You’re not going to find in Matthew, mark, Luke, or anywhere else in the Bible. Does it belong in the Bible? There’s no book in the Bible that quotes it. There’s no book in the Bible that says it is scripture. There’s no book in the Bible that says it is written by an apostle. And even if it did claim to be written by an apostle, that wouldn’t by itself prove that it was written by an apostle. After all, plenty of false gospels claim to be written by apostles. So how do I know if this belongs in my Bible or not? It can’t just be because I agree with its doctrine. It can’t just be because I like reading it. I might like reading any number of books that don’t belong in the Bible.
So on what basis? By what authority do I know? Even 1%. So a lot of times because we’re framing this about infallibility, people will say, oh, well you have an infallible, we just have a pretty sure list. And it doesn’t matter. It’s a 99% certainty versus a hundred percent certainty. That’s not it at all. Or at least that’s not only it. Whatever percent certain you are that the gospel of John belongs in the Bible is coming from somewhere other than the Bible. If you are 80% sure wherever you’re getting that 80% is something like, well, the early Christians believed in it or the early church used it liturgically. Or here are church fathers who quoted and treated as scripture or early Christians tell me it was written by John and so on and so forth. You are doing a lot of work outside the Bible relying upon scholarship or early church or something, and none of that certainty is coming from scripture itself.
So that’s the canon problem that you don’t have a very sure canon, particularly when it turns out that Christians dispute which books are in the canon and a lot of the historic reasons these were traditionally believed to be written by Paul or by an apostle or whatever. You find modern scholars who challenge all of that. How is an ordinary scholarly Christian supposed to know which books do and don’t belong in their Bible? Because remember, that’s the promise. The promise is the unlearned can know everything they need to know from salvation from scripture alone. And you can’t even know what’s in scripture from scripture alone. That seems like a pretty fatal problem. So in response to this, there are several points that the guys in question make and the first one I agree with, which is that the early Christians themselves don’t agree on the canon. Now that’s true, but as we’re going to see, I think that’s going to be a bigger problem than these guys realize.
CLIP:
But the simple fact of history is anybody who studies the medieval views of the canon will see how much diversity and disagreement there is. There is debate all the way up until Trent, and that’s just I think undeniable.
Joe:
There is clearly an overall consensus in favor of a 73 book Bible eventually by the four hundreds or so. But there are outliers, they’re minority views, and the east has much less consensus and certainty about this than the west does. That actually remains true to this day. I would draw from this an obvious point that I don’t see any of these guys making, which is this seems to pretty clearly prove that the early Christians don’t believe in scripture alone. They don’t believe in sola scriptura because look, it’s okay for two Christians to have a slightly different Bible if they share the same creed and they share the same theology. And so if you have a rule of faith as the early Christians call it, then Augustine and Jerome, even though they disagree on exactly which books belong in the Bible, can still be brothers in Christ.
So broadly speaking, the early church is focused less on having the same starting point of scripture and more on having the same end point of orthodoxy, small orthodoxy like we want to be orthodox Catholics in our belief. And so if you’ve got a slightly wrong Bible, you’ve got one too many books or not enough books. That’s only a problem if it leads you into heretical conclusions and otherwise there’s not a big push to make sure everybody’s Bibles match. And this is actually quite striking when you look at the especially early historical evidence as we’re going to see the early Christians focus on the books in people’s Bibles. Were less to make sure all Christians were reading the same book and more saying, what can we use to show you Jesus? So the early Christians in the second century were more interested in which books the Jews thought were inspired and less interested in making sure all of them agreed which books were inspired.
Even when you get movements that try to separate the old and New Testament against each other, when the Christians respond to those kinds of moves and say, no, it’s the same God of the old and the New Testament, they still don’t define exactly which books are and aren’t in the old and New Testament. It’s actually quite striking. Whereas if you read for instance, the Westminster Confession or the London Baptist confession, they typically start with defining which books are in scripture first before they can even move on to the trinity because how do they know what the trinity is? Well, from scriptures, they have to know scripture first. The early Christians don’t operate like that at all, and I think it’s worth probably pointing out like, Hey, this looks like pretty good evidence that they don’t have the same methodology as you do about scripture. They don’t believe in souls scriptura.
And if they believe in the infallibility of tradition of the church and there are plenty of early writings that seem to say they do, then the whole debate about scripture is much less important. But okay, so we agree that the early Christians don’t have the same Bible. This also means you can’t just say, Hey, all the early Christians knew which books were in the Bible. It was so obvious. You don’t need an infallible church, you don’t need an infallible tradition, you don’t need a pope, you don’t need any of this because it’s so obvious. It’s like two plus two is four. You don’t need a special gift of the Holy Spirit to figure that out. And many of the ways the reformers spoke about it, John Calvin spoke for instance, of saying that the difference of telling which books did and didn’t belong in scripture was like telling white from black. Ironically, Calvin thought Baruch was in scripture and modern Protestants think it wasn’t so clearly. It’s not like that. Clearly the people who thought this was an easy problem, you could just look at the Bible and figure out which books went in it and didn’t. It’s not going to be that because the early Christians couldn’t agree, the reformers couldn’t agree. Modern Christians don’t agree.
That then leans to an obvious question, are we in the same problem? Do Catholics have the same canon conundrum that Protestants do? Now, I’ve previously pointed out that this argumentative move on behalf of Protestants is something of an informal logical fallacy called the two que fallacy. So I’ll explain what it’s here. This logical fallacy is called the two que fallacy. Now, two que is just Latin for U2. So it’s the U2 fallacy. I was trying to think of a good U2 joke to make there, but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Peter Van Vliet in his book on logical fallacies gives the example of a mom telling her daughter not to smoke and the daughter replies, why should I listen to you? You started smoking when you were 16, but if Van Vliet points out, the mother may be inconsistent, she might even be a hypocrite, but that doesn’t invalidate her argument.
Liars, manipulators, and even hypocritical parents can create good arguments. So if the critique is true, it doesn’t matter if the critic is a hypocrite for reasoning, this comes up all the time as Christians, if you call out immorality in the broader culture, people are quick to respond. Well, you’re also a sinner. That may be true, and maybe it’s even morally wrong for me to point out the speck in your eye without addressing the log in my own, but it doesn’t mean there’s not a speck in your eye. So lifewise, if I tell you you’re a Protestant, I say, Hey, your church is burning down, and you say, well, you Catholics, your church is burned down too. That doesn’t put out the fire burning down your church does it basically. Now to be clear, there are times where it is perfectly reasonable to say you are guilty of the same thing I’m guilty of it can point out someone is being hypocritical.
And if you’re forced to choose between two options, and I know the way they present this is just like, oh, Catholics are our opponents, and so if we can just prove Catholics are wrong, that’ll make Protestants right. That’s not how real life works in this context. If the issue here is Protestants don’t know what books are in the Bible with any great degree of certainty and they respond, nobody does. You haven’t saved Christianity, you haven’t defended Protestantism. All you’ve done is brought orthodoxy and Catholicism down with you. If you’re right. Now, as we’re going to see this just isn’t true, but listen to the quicksand analogy that Gavin is going to give where Catholics say, we’re on rock and you’re in quicksand, and rather than showing that Protestantism isn’t in quicksand where it’s just sinking to destruction because it doesn’t know how to solve this problem, he’s just basically going to say, yeah, Catholics are sinking too.
CLIP:
But the image that comes to my mind is that the emotional quality of this conversation is often at first what is put upon us is the Protestants are on quicksand and the non Protestants are on standing on a rock. They have this sort of stable position and ours is fluctuating. But then as you actually wade through the particulars point by point, you realize the ambiguities that are put upon the Protestants are not, the other side is not removed from them.
Joe:
Javier similarly is going to give an analogy about being in the closet. And when someone points out that he’s in the closet, his response is, but his bully’s in there too, which well listen for yourself. It’s a strange analogy.
CLIP:
It’s almost like if you have a kid who’s more scrawny, it is almost like the nerdy archetype in a Disney movie or whatever, and a bully shoves him into a closet, walks inside the closet, locks the door behind both of them, and then mocks ’em for the fact that he allowed himself to be put in the closet. And it’s like, dude, don’t you understand? We’re both in this closet now we got to figure out together how we’re going to get out of this.
Joe:
And there are two things to take from this. Number one, that’s not a rebuttal. If someone says you’re in the closet and you just say, I’m in the closet with the bully who put me in here. Okay, well, you’re still in the closet. You haven’t resolved, you’ve not beaten the allegations at all. And that’s a problem with this structure of argumentation. Catholics are saying, Hey, Protestants, this is a problem within your system. And the Protestant side isn’t saying no, it’s not a problem. They’re just saying, oh, you also have the problem. But that’s not solving the problem. That’s not actually saying there’s an answer to it. But then the second thing is Catholics don’t, we just do not have the same problem. It’s completely a false equivalence to pretend that we do. Now the usual explanation is, oh, well Catholics don’t have a full list of every ex cathedra statement or every infallible teaching.
Okay, we don’t need one. What is the argument there? Exactly? Again, take a really concrete example. Does the gospel of John belong in the Bible and how certain are you as a Catholic? I can have a hundred percent certainty because the Council of Trent Dogmatically defined it. And even prior to that, you have the clear teaching of tradition. You have the ordinary and universal magisterium, you have the ecumenical council of Florence, you have regional councils from way back. You have repeated usage by the church fathers with the book. And all of this amounts to certain infallible authority. But if I reject the infallibility of tradition and of the church and of councils and dogmatic definitions, well, how certain are you then? So it’s just not true to say that we’re both in the same position that it is just false. And unfortunately this leads to these positions that these guys take. And Gavin surprisingly takes it most vociferously where rather than defending Protestantism, they just tear Christianity’s reliability down. So you can see this from the example of Moses’ eardrums
CLIP:
And the philosophical appeal has to do with an infinite regress that there are certain ways of requiring infallibility for the discernment of an appropriation of infallibility that now push the can down the road and you’re going to need an infallible knowledge of that. And so what we can observe here is that every system has a cutoff point where you move from infallibility to fallibility. So there is a fallible reception of the infallible, and that can be the eardrums of Moses at the burning bush, which are fallible eardrums, but he’s still hearing God, and that’s an infallible voice coming from the burning bush. Or this can be the perception of the number of cathedral statements within Roman Catholicism, which is a fallible knowledge that is debated, and yet those are infallible teachings or the number of infallible councils for various eastern traditions, which is fall discerned, okay? There’s not been an infallible teaching that is universally agreed upon about that.
Joe:
So according to Gavin, even if God reveals something to you directly that is still fallible because maybe you misheard him. And so Moses, when he hears scripture is just as fallible as anybody else. It’s an infinite regress. But if that’s true, then the 10 commandments are fallible. So consider two people, we’ll call them Moses and Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson uses his best fallible wisdom and he comes up with 12 rules for life. He doesn’t claim they’re anything other than a fallible list. Moses gets a list from God himself of 10 commandments. Now by Gavin’s argument, both of these are equally fallible because Moses could have misheard, and that seems like an obvious undermining of scripture, an obvious undermining of revelation itself because these guys are so big on you can’t actually have infallibility. Nobody can really have infallibility, but if you really believe that, then you can’t talk about the inerrancy of scripture.
You can’t talk about any of these things being protected from error if everything is this radically subjective thing, and that is unfortunately what they’re left with because they don’t want to say, we have a fallible set of infallible books and we don’t really know which books do and don’t belong in the Bible and Catholics do because then Catholicism has a clear advantage in preserving Christianity that Protestantism lacks. And rather than saying, here’s a surefire, infallible way to know which books are in the Bible, which they can’t do, they have to just claim falsely that no one can know which books are in the Bible infallibly. So I think that they’ve made the wrong moves and that they’re positioning themselves in a way that unintentionally undermines Christianity itself rather than saving Protestantism in any way because you’ll notice they don’t show you how to get out of the fallibility problem.
They don’t show you how to get out of the canon conundrum. They just argue maybe we’re all there, but let’s look then at part two with the historical evidence. They do give some reasons for why they think that we should have the Bible that Protestants use today, and I’m going to give just a few of these things. There’s a lot of really in the weed stuff on the Gian dec cradles and what was and wasn’t said of the Council of Rome, I don’t find that stuff particularly interesting or important. Maybe I’m missing the importance of it, but it doesn’t seem obvious to me like why that would be where anyone would need to go, particularly if you’re a Protestant who believes even the unlearned can know the important saving truths and knowing which books aren’t on in scripture seems to fall in that category. I don’t think we’re going to have to resolve this based on scholarly debates about the authenticity of certain parts of the gian to cradles that doesn’t strike me as the relevant place for the conversation to go. Instead, I think Gavin’s asking a much better question when he asks what Bible Jesus used. So does Jesus use the same closed Protestant cannon used by Protestants and Jews? Today,
CLIP:
The better position is that the materials Jerome is working with in coming to his canon list are the mo... Read more on Catholic.com