Do We Have the Right Books of the Bible?
Written by Michael J. Kruger |
Wednesday, November 30, 2022
The New Testament canon that we possess today is due not to the machinations of later church leaders or to the political influence of Constantine but to the fact that these books imposed themselves on the church through their internal qualities. In other words, these books were used the most because they proved themselves to be worthy of that use.
From the very beginning, Christians have plainly affirmed that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the inspired Word of God. That much is clear. But looming in the background of such an affirmation is a question that won’t seem to go away: How do we know that these books are from God? It’s one thing to say that they are from God; it’s another thing to have a reason for saying it.
Of course, critical scholars have long challenged the Christian view of Scripture at precisely this point. It’s not enough to merely claim that these books are inspired. Christians need to have some way of knowing whether they are inspired. As James Barr liked to point out, “Books do not necessarily say whether they are divinely inspired or not.”
Over the years, Christians have offered a number of answers to this question. Certainly, the Apostolic origins of a book can help identify it as being from God. If a book can be traced to an Apostle, and Apostles are inspired, then we have good reasons to think that the book is from God.
But this is not all that can be said. Christian theologians—especially in the Reformed world—have long argued that there is a more foundational way that we can know that books are from God: the internal qualities of the books themselves.
In other words, they have argued that these books bear certain attributes (Latin indicia) that distinguish them as being from God. They argue that believers hear the voice of their Lord in these particular books. In modern theological language, they believe that the canonical books are self-authenticating. As Jesus said in John 10:27: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.”
Anyone familiar with Reformation-era authors will know that this was the core argument given by the likes of John Calvin, William Whitaker, and John Owen in some of the key discussions on Scripture. Moreover, the idea of self-authentication is expressed in the Westminster Confession of Faith, which holds that the Bible does “evidence itself” to be from God by its own internal qualities:
We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the church to a high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scripture. And the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is, to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God. (1.5)
Beyond this, the concept of a self- authenticating Bible played a central role for later Reformed thinkers, particularly Herman Bavinck, as they sought to explain how we know that books are from God.
But some will wonder, Is this whole idea of a “self-authenticating” Bible just a novel invention of the Reformers? Did they invent the idea just as a tool in their fight against Rome? Not at all. When we look back even in the patristic period, we see that this concept was there from the beginning. Here are a few examples.
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The “Young, Restless, Reformed” Movement Wasn’t Enough, but It Wasn’t a Mistake
Written by Samuel D. James |
Wednesday, April 13, 2022
The problems of the present are real, but so were the blessings of the past. The passing of a particular moment in evangelical life is lamentable not because it was irreplaceable, but because it accomplished something real, and those who saw it are, in a very real sense, different people for having experienced it.The needle that I tried to thread in my response to David Brooks’s essay on evangelicalism could be expressed this way: The dominant evangelical institutions from 2006-2016 were rocked by Donald Trump’s presidential victory, the reasons for this are multifaceted and complex, but when the smoke cleared it was a particular strain of Reformed evangelicalism that was most fractured by it. The chief division right now in evangelical life seems to be between people who rejoice at this fracturing and those who lament it, but everyone agrees that 1) it happened, and 2) the evangelical moment known as “young, restless, and Reformed” was the most spectacular casualty of it.
In a few weeks the final gathering of Together for the Gospel will take place in Louisville. It’s very easy to overstate the influence of a single conference for pastors. But if you were shaped at all by the Reformed theology, expositional preaching, and culture-engaging ethos that came from places like Southern Seminary, Ligonier, and Redeemer Presbyterian Church, you probably were influenced in some way by the conference. It mattered to a comparatively small but comparatively influential moment in time for complementarian Calvinists. The conference’s ending, of course, is part of the larger shift of the YRR moment. I haven’t talked to one person who believes the conference would be ending in 2022 if Donald Trump and Ferguson had never happened. The conference is ending because the coalition it represented has changed.
Very briefly, I want to make one point about this. The rending of the YRR fabric has been traumatic for many, and the damage it has caused to friendships, institutional partnerships, and the mental and spiritual health of many evangelical pastors and leaders has been terrible. It is very, very tempting to look into history and see this fate coming. It is tempting to look at the YRR moment and see how its flaws and blind spots presaged such a fracture. They are there if you want to see them: the development of a celebrity teacher culture, the reliance on pastors and ministry models who were “growing,” the tendency within the movement to rely on the backchannel instead of strong leadership. Yes, these flaws and more set the stage for the frustration we feel now. What I take away from this, however, is that the YRR movement was never enough, but it also wasn’t a mistake.
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The Bible and Witchcraft
Today witchcraft, wicca, the occult, spiritism, neopaganism, and various New Age beliefs and practices seem to be everywhere. While Christianity is in decline in the West, these other counterfeit spiritualities are on the increase. What should Christians make of all this? Here I will offer what Scripture says, and in future articles I will further explore this in various ways.
A recent headline caught my attention: “Scotland may pardon thousands of ‘witches’ it executed hundreds of years ago.” The article went on to say this: “Attorney Claire Mitchell leads activist group Witches of Scotland, which wants to have the names of the convicted legally cleared, a written apology letter from the government and a monument established in their memory.” nypost.com/2022/01/07/scotland-may-pardon-thousands-of-witches-it-executed-hundreds-of-years-ago/
This made me think of the famous line by C. S. Lewis in his preface to The Screwtape Letters: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”
If in times past some folks were overly concerned by such things, today most folks are too little concerned – or worse yet, they actually celebrate and promote such things. The Scottish situation (which the church is expected to go along with) is a case in point.
As to the issue of witchcraft trials (both in Europe and America), I have already penned a piece trying to provide some context and background to the situation. You can find that article here: billmuehlenberg.com/2015/01/19/on-the-witchcraft-trials/
Today witchcraft, wicca, the occult, spiritism, neopaganism, and various New Age beliefs and practices seem to be everywhere. While Christianity is in decline in the West, these other counterfeit spiritualities are on the increase. What should Christians make of all this? Here I will offer what Scripture says, and in future articles I will further explore this in various ways.
The Bible of course clearly condemns all of these activities, be it witchcraft, divination, necromancy, astrology, fortune-telling, spiritism, communicating with the dead, and so on. Here are just some of the passages that can be appealed to:
Exodus 22:18 You shall not permit a sorceress to live.
Leviticus 19:26, 31 You shall not eat anything with the blood, nor shall you practice divination or soothsaying…. Give no regard to mediums and familiar spirits; do not seek after them, to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God.
Leviticus 20:6, 27 And the person who turns to mediums and familiar spirits, to prostitute himself with them, I will set My face against that person and cut him off from his people…. A man or a woman who is a medium, or who has familiar spirits, shall surely be put to death; they shall stone them with stones. Their blood shall be upon them.
Deuteronomy 18:9-12 When you come into the land which the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. For all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations the Lord your God drives them out from before you.
1 Samuel 15:23 For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. NKJV
2 Kings 21:5-7 And he [Manasseh] built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord. Also he made his son pass through the fire, practiced soothsaying, used witchcraft, and consulted spiritists and mediums. He did much evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke Him to anger.
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Calvin’s Sermons on the Beatitudes: Paul Helm Review
It goes without saying that these sermons bear little or no resemblance to the After Dinner Speeches that nowadays often pass for sermons. No opening jokes to settle the refugees and the Genevois, to put them at their ease. Somehow, putting people at ease was not Calvin’s style. Did Jesus do that? It is interesting to reflect on the Christian ethic that Calvin seeks to impart through these sermons, with their emphasis on trial, suffering, hardship, pilgrimage, patient endurance and contentment. He was preparing his troops for battle.
Calvin’s sermons were delivered extempore, taken down by the remarkable Denis Raguenier, published by the diaconate of Geneva, and the proceeds used to support refugees. Initially, Calvin was not keen on them being published, but when he saw the level of competence of Raguenier and the copyists, realised the clamour of the printers and his public for them, he relented. Hundreds of them survive, many of them still unpublished, though they are gradually appearing. As Robert White, the translator and editor of these five sermons says, ‘it was the Word preached and applied from the pulpit which above all fashioned Geneva’s evangelical culture and made it the nerve-centre of Reformed Protestantism’. Not only that, but certainly that.
The preacher usually never saw the written results before they appeared. An exception to this rule was those collected as 65 Sermons on the Harmony of the Synoptic Gospels, published in Geneva in 1562, two years before Calvin’s death, to which he wrote an Introduction. Each sermon is thus an extended exposition and comment not on one text, but on parallel texts, where there are such. Calvin’s style is to comment on the meaning of the text and to apply it as he goes along. He seems to have held that the Beatitudes were not single sayings of Jesus, but summaries of his teaching, which accounts for the differences of wording in the Gospels. Seems reasonable. The text determines the form of the sermon. Calvin was still going through the Harmony in this way when he died.
These sermons on the Beatitudes, taken from the 65, were thus among the last that Calvin preached. They were the very last that Raguenier took down. As Robert White puts it, ‘Raguenier laid aside his pen and prepared himself for death, which came in the winter of 1560-1.’
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