The church didn't create the canon. The church simply sought to recognize the foundation of the household of God upon which it had already been built by God's own design. Welcome to MidAmerica Reformed Seminary's Roundtable Podcast, a broadcast where the faculty of MidAmerica discuss everything from Reformed theology, cultural issues and all things seminary. This is episode 83 and I'm your host Jared Luchaboard. Thank you for tuning in. You ever wonder how we got the 66 books of the Bible, otherwise known as the canon of scripture? With us once again is Dr. Marcus Menninger, professor of New Testament Studies, to help us answer this question. Why do we have the 27 books of the New Testament in our biblical canon? What basis is there for that? Throughout the history of the church, there's been a lot of debate over that topic, of course, and that debate includes debate in our own time, even an increase of that debate in some respects of late. Most of the critics on the topic of canon don't usually suggest a lot of specific changes to the table of contents of our Bibles, as if they are recommending that we add or subtract specific books out of the 27. More often, the nature of the criticism isn't so much at that level, adding or removing specific books, more with regard to how we view the 27 books that we do have. What is the rationale for having them in the first place? What undergirds that? There have been very strong objections to a traditional notion of New Testament canon in recent times, some publications in the last couple decades. And in particular, the statement is often made that the canon as an idea, even having something called canon, is an idea that was invented by and based upon the preferences of, say, the 4th century church, particularly in the era of Constantine, that in that 4th century time period, the church decided for the first time to have a canon by identifying the documents that it preferred, whose teaching it preferred, and then conferring a unique sort of authority upon those documents in order to squelch opposition from various groups that were not in power, groups that the majority would call heretical. they were squelching these minority opinions in a sense by creating a canon. So the canon then would be a fourth century political power move. We can look at a book like the 2006 volume by David Dungan called Constantine's Bible, Politics and the Making of the New Testament. I think you can tell from the title and the subtitle where he's going in some respects, but he says on page three of that book, in terms of the history of Christianity, A canon of scripture, properly so-called, did not appear until church officials, acting under the guidance of the highest levels of the Roman government, met together on several specific occasions to create a rigid boundary around the approved texts forever separating them from the larger, quote, cloud of sacred texts. Dungan's point, of course, is that under Constantine's guidance, something new was created, came into existence, again, as part of the politics of that time period, bringing something into being that hadn't existed before. Harry Gamble in 2002 wrote something similarly in the book called The New Testament Canon, Its Making and Meaning. And of course, again, there you can see that he wants to describe the making of the New Testament canon. He says on page 57, a complex interplay of ideas, circumstances, and historical forces conspired to create the concept of a canon of Christian scriptures to influence the pace and direction of its development and to determine its contents. Apart from these, again, apart from these confluence of ideas, circumstances, and historical forces that came later on in church history, apart from these, the existence and the character of the New Testament are hardly to be understood. And he goes on and says, Christianity did not begin as a scriptural religion. The faith of the earliest Christians was evoked by and focused on a person, Jesus of Nazareth, and he was apprehended not in written texts, but in the preaching about him as the crucified and risen Messiah, and in the charismatic life of the Christian community. The immediacy of Christian experience and the fervor of its eschatological hopes made superfluous even the composition of Christian writings. And there's no intimation at all that the early church entertained the idea of Christian scriptures, much less a collection of them. Therefore, the New Testament, as we think of it, was utterly remote from the minds of the first generation of Christian believers. And then he says elsewhere, nothing dictated that there be a New Testament. Now, those are strong words, of course, but words spoken, written prominently by notable scholars in our own day. I also think, though, that they are words that are inaccurate both historically and theologically, and I want to give a thumbnail sketch here of something of why. It's true that the New Testament does not give its own table of contents. Nowhere in it does it list its own set of books. Of course, neither does the Old Testament do that either. And we should note then that this is not evidently the sort of testimony that Scripture intends to provide. However, the New Testament does testify strongly to its own emergence. It testifies to this by describing the emergence of a specific, unique, limited set of new revelation emerging within the Church of the Apostolic Era, new revelation which is not to be added to or altered, and which the church must recognize and use as its sole authority. And within that larger topic, it also specifically describes the emergence of new documents, not just new oral revelation, documents which must be received as authoritative from God and therefore are to be distinguished from all other merely human documents." There are several lines of thinking and teaching in the New Testament that help us show this, and the first one we need to start with is the New Testament's description of what we would call the Old Testament. Of course, the Old Testament wasn't originally called the Old Testament, it was just called Scripture. That's what Jesus called it, that's what Paul generally called it, but It's still the case that what we call the Old Testament functioned for Jesus, for Paul, for the other apostles as a canon. A specific, unique, authoritative set of documents that was not to be added to or altered. We see this, the specific contents are assumed all throughout the pages of the New Testament. When Jesus in Matthew 5, 17-18 says that not one yoda or stroke of the pen will pass away from the law and the prophets until all has been accomplished, Jesus shows that he has a clear understanding of which strokes of the pen he's speaking of that will not pass away until they've been accomplished, which he of course calls scripture. It's a collection of documents with specific contents that he refers to and his audience understands him. Similarly with Paul in Romans 1-2, speaks about the holy writings through which the gospel had been promised beforehand, Romans 1-2. Or when Acts 18 says that Apollos was well instructed in the scriptures. All of these statements and many others show that the scriptures, what we would refer to as the Old Testament, have a specific set of content that is a known quantity to these speakers and authors. It's also very clear that this specific set of documents operates in a unique and authoritative way for Christ and the apostles. 2 Timothy 3, 16 describes those same Old Testament scriptures as breathed out by God. 2 Peter 1 says that the Old Testament Scriptures in the prophets of old spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. There's something very distinct about the very being of these documents, the essence of these documents because they come from God and not merely or primarily from man. And of course, Jesus says that these same scriptures, these authoritative, specific, unique, authoritative documents are not to be added to or altered. They are to be kept distinct from, distinguished from all other sources of teaching. In Matthew 15, Jesus asks the Pharisees, why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition." Or Mark 7 in the same parallel text, verse 7, he says that the Pharisees are teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. Jesus is saying that the Pharisees by holding to oral tradition alongside of the scriptures were actually violating the scriptures. That they were not respecting the utter uniqueness, the sole authoritative nature of this specific set of documents. They were violating that by adding something to it. So it's important to see then that Jesus and Paul and all of the members of the early apostolic church had canonical mindset from the beginning. They operated with a canon because they had the scriptures, which of course we would call the Old Testament. It's from that starting point then that we can see secondly how the New Testament also describes new revelation coming about, a new moment of revelation in which God is himself adding to what he had previously put in the Old Testament scriptures. We can see this in Hebrews 1, 1 and 2. He says, in the past, God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at various times and in various ways. That's all of the old revelation. But then he says, in the last of these days, God has spoken to us by a son. And he goes on to describe those who also were eyewitnesses of the son in chapter two, who spoke the word of truth, even to the audience to whom Hebrews was written. There's a new revelatory moment. Jesus says the same thing in Luke 24, 44 through 47. He describes what the scriptures had said previously, and then he commissions the apostles to be his witnesses, giving new additional revelation in the wake of his own death, resurrection, and ascension. So a new revelatory moment. Thirdly, within that moment in time, the time of Jesus and the Apostles. There is a new foundation of revelation being laid. Here we can look in particular at Ephesians 2.20 where Paul describes, he says in verse 19, so then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. And then as he describes that household, he describes it as a structure, a building or house structure with a particular foundation. He says that the household of God, verse 20, is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure being joined together grows. We see here a specific limited set of speakers providing the revelatory content, the revelatory foundation of the New Testament church. They're providing the content upon which everyone else must build. And of course, we know that it's a limited set of revelation for a few reasons. One is that the speaker, the groups of speakers are named. It's Christ, the apostles, and then some prophets alongside of them, New Testament prophets. But we also know it's limited because it's described as something that's given once for all, that is a foundation. A foundation is not something that you lay all throughout the time period when you're building a building, the foundation is something that you lay first and then build on top of. A foundation also provides the parameters to the building, its shape, its scope. If you're going to be a part of the building, you must build on top of the footprint of that foundation to be legitimately in the building. So there's this once for all activity of laying a new foundation of revelation, and of course that new revelation must be distinguished from all other forms of communication or teaching content. The church is called upon to distinguish this new revelation which Christ, the apostles, and prophets are giving from everything else. And so, you see in the page of the New Testament that the church is exhorted to distinguish new revelation given by God as this apostolic foundation from other messages, 1 John 4, 1 and following, John says, Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see if they are from God. And then he goes on to give some ways of testing that, that every spirit that is from God must confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, etc. Some doctrinal content in keeping with what John had already taught the church, for something to be truly a part of the revelatory foundation, this new revelation, it must agree with what John and the other apostles had taught about Christ. Or Paul says similarly in 1 Corinthians 14, that as people were speaking in the church, whether speaking in tongues and then being interpreted, giving new prophecy, that those who heard were to weigh what was said to see if it was in fact from God. Not everything spoken in God's name was from God. The church needed to distinguish what was truly a part of this foundation from something that was not. Apostle Paul even says in Galatians 1, if anyone preaches to you another gospel contrary to what I preached, let him be accursed." So the apostolic preaching provided a criterion on the basis of which the church was commanded to distinguish actual revelation, which was a part of that foundation being laid, from other things. New Revelation, then, is taking its place alongside of the Old Testament as a specific, unique, limited, norming content for the belief of the Church. content that would be the norm, the measure or rule for what the church was and was not to believe or accept as true. Fourthly then, as we've seen this Old Testament canon, we see this new revelatory moment clearly described in the New Testament, and then we see this new revelatory foundation being laid in a unique, limited, once-for-all way. Fourthly, along with all of that, we see that this new revelation, laying a foundation for the church, includes new revelatory documents or writings. This is very important because many times, as we saw earlier from Harry Gamble, people try to hit oral revelation against written revelation as if the one had legitimacy and the other didn't. But Paul doesn't accept that. In 2 Thessalonians 2.15, for example, he says for the Thessalonians to stand fast and hold on to what they've been taught, whether by word of mouth or by letter. He puts the two hand in hand. He had originally spoken to them orally by mouth, word of mouth, but now he writes to them by letter. And he goes on, Else, in the surrounding context in 2 Thessalonians, he tells them that he is issuing them, in his writings, commands that have apostolic authority behind them that they are to obey. It's because of this, because God is giving the church not just new oral teaching, but written teaching, that the New Testament documents show an effort to distinguish themselves from all other writing. to show their genuineness and therefore their distinctness from other writings. 2 Thessalonians 2 also speaks about a letter seeming to be from us, meaning from Paul, and therefore 2 Thessalonians 3, in 2 Thessalonians 3.17, Paul says that he's signing his letter to them by hand as a sign of its genuineness As he does in all his letters, 2 Thessalonians 3.17, Paul is saying these documents are different. They must be distinguished from others. I sign them to show their genuineness so that you know how to take them, to take them as authoritative apostolic writing to be believed and obeyed. In John chapter 21, the Apostle John provides a kind of similar sort of testimony to his own document. He says, at the very end of John 21, he says, this, meaning the beloved disciple, this is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, meaning the whole testimony of the Gospel of John, this is the disciple who's bearing witness about these things in this book, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true. because the document was from the beloved disciple, an eyewitness, it should be received as true and authoritative. Or Revelation 22 says something very similar where it's a famous set of verses where it issues a curse upon anyone who would add to or otherwise change the book of Revelation itself. If anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life. So it's important that we see the New Testament's own attestation to the authenticity, the uniqueness, and the authority of these specific documents as they are part of the revelatory foundation. In fact, we don't have time to go into it here at length, but The New Testament shows again and again that the function of these written documents was very specific. It was in order to confirm in writing the content of what had previously been preached to the church in person. And it was to confirm that because the apostles could not always be with each church in person. In their absence, they wrote to confirm what it was that the true foundational revelatory message was. In other words, the writings were meant to solidify and make certain the nature of the apostolic foundation. You can look at 2 Peter 1, 13-18 in particular, would describe that. There the apostle Peter reflects on the fact that he's going to soon die, and because he's going to be absent then after his death, he says that he writes in order to confirm what it was that he had previously taught to the churches before. or look at Luke 1, 1-4, something very similar, or 1 Corinthians 15, 1 and following, all texts that show one of the great purposes of the New Testament writings. It's not surprising then, when we look at all of this together, that in the pages of the New Testament, the term Scripture, which originally was used for the Old Testament, comes also to be applied to New Testament documents as well. You look at 1 Timothy 5.18, or 2 Peter 3 16. In both cases a scripture of the New Testament is appealed to or cited and then called with that term scripture. All of this then is part of why we need to say that we have a New Testament canon because of the New Testament's own attestation to what it is. All of the ingredients of the idea of canon are present here in the New Testament's own teaching about itself. that it is providing a specific, unique, authoritative set of documents from authorized representatives of Jesus Christ that is to be distinguished from any other documents, and that together provides certainty regarding the foundation, the nature, and the boundaries of the Church of Jesus Christ already from the beginning. So the church is not called then, and it does not have the function of conferring authority on the canon, or much less creating the canon. Rather, the church is doing what these different texts have said, recognizing the authority and the status that these documents already have in and of themselves. by their own testimony. The church is called not to create a canon, but to recognize the existence of a God-created canon. Now, of course, it took some time for the church to come to agree about the exact list of documents that were in fact a part of that foundation. But that agreement came about in the end, not as a new humanly devised idea or invention of the fourth century. It came about instead through the influence of the very teachings in the New Testament, some of which we've just surveyed. In other words, it came about by these very teachings in these documents pressing themselves upon the church authoritatively. This is why we call the canon a self-attesting collection of documents. It's in response to its self-testimony that the church recognizes these documents to be what they are, and that they have the unique role that they are thought to have. The New Testament canon, then, we could say, is the New Testament's own idea, as it were. It's the result of its wielding its authority in our lives. and our responding to that authority, the church seeking to discern what it was that it was already being built upon. What it was, document-wise, that had already called the church into being and defined its very character. The church didn't create the canon. The church simply sought to recognize the foundation of the household of God upon which it had already been built by God's own design. While he's spoken on Optimism vs. Pessimism, the Canon of Scripture, next week Dr. Menninger will speak to Hebrews chapter 6. Perhaps one of the most well-known passages in scripture, more so for its striking language of apostasy in the Christian community. Tune in to hear Dr. Menninger's comments on that portion of scripture next week. For more episodes, you can find us on our website at midamerica.edu slash podcasts and wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Be sure to search for and subscribe to MidAmerica Reformed Seminary's Roundtable. I'm Jared Luchobor, till next time.