A High View of Scripture?

Criag Allert

4/5

"I really liked it"

As an evangelical, and a Protestant, I’ve been raised to believe in sola scriptura: the Christian doctrine that the Bible is the only reputable authoritative source for my faith and beliefs about God. Protestants have multiple defining features, but this is one of the most important ones— for us, the Bible is everything. But like many other Protestants, I haven’t put that much thought into why we believe in sola scriptura, or how that doctrine functioned in the early church, or why the earliest Christians canonized the specific books they did. But, “by accepting the Bible as authoritative,” Allert says, “we must also accept the process and means by which it came to be.”

There is a tacit acceptance of the institution of the historical ecclesiastical community when we accept its canon. This is why I can say that my study of the canon led me to see the indispensability of the church. This realization changes the way one thinks about theology and the Christian tradition.

— Craig D. Allert

Do Protestants really hold “A High View of Scripture?” In this book, Craig D. Allert discusses what it means to be an evangelical and a Protestant (both of which he claims for himself), and why the ways the early church treated Scripture is important for us today. For Allert, it’s one of the most important questions in Christianity.

…the study of theological history, particularly the function of Scripture in the early church, has impacted every other area of my theological study. Few other issues in theological study have so many implications: biblical studies, biblical theology, historical theology, systematic theology, and even worship have a stake in the question of the canon.

— Craig D. Allert

Protestants, including myself, have a “canon consciousness”— a sense that, when it comes to the Bible and early Christian literature, there is a fine line between what is “in” and what is “out”. The Gospel of Matthew is “in”; the Gospel of Thomas is “out”, for whatever reason. We’ve been taught this is the historical position of the church. Allert calls the Protestant view the “binder mentality”, and it goes something like this: in the 100s AD, some guy sat with an open binder, receiving the Gospels and Paul’s letters as they were written, and placing them in the permanent Christian canon forever.

But, reality is often disappointing. No such binder exists, and neither does Saint Joseph Kanonizer. The reality of the early church canonization process is much more opaque.

For early Christians, “Scripture” and “canon” were not yet synonymous. It’s also not like they foreknew the number 27, and stopped when they hit that many books. Yes, they had our 27 canonical books in possession, but the “canon consciousness” didn’t develop for quite some time. You see, for these earliest Christians, using a book, citing it as an authority, regarding it as “Scripture”, or assigning it as “canon” are all very different things. In fact, even the Old Testament wasn’t codified into a canon until the 3rd century AD; why would they see the New Testament differently?

The earliest Christians weren’t interested in creating a biblical canon to codify their doctrines. They used other things, like rites, hymns, and other experiences, in combination with the Scriptures to create their Christianity. The eventual creation of a canon was also not to lay a new groundwork for future Christians to interpret things for themselves. Early Christians even complained about how heretics would quote Scripture in abundance; they believed that a personal interpretation of Scripture did not often lead to true doctrine.

…it is doubtful that the first-century Christians had the expectation that the New Testament books would one day form a fixed, single book. Further, even by the end of the second century, the period identified as decisive for many, there was still an openness to receive other books, to add them to the “canon”… When the fourth-century church fathers and councils were limiting canonical lists, they were simply codifying what were, most likely, already accepted lists.

…

…many treatments of the doctrine of Scripture assume that the overriding concern of the church was to form a written collection (a New Testament canon) so that it might have a solid rule by which to govern its faith and life. This, however, is a misunderstanding of the canonical heritage of the church.

— Craig D. Allert

Allert describes the canonization process in 3 blurry steps:

1. Before the end of the first century, a foundational core set of books is being cited a lot (including gospels, but not all 27 books yet).
2. Secondary books (e.g. minor Pauline letters, Revelation, etc.) are cited more often and increasingly treated similar to the Old Testament. The canon is still open, and nobody is thinking in a binary “canon or not?” way.
3. “Fourth-century rulings about the canon become firm.” But, books outside the canon are still considered important.

Instead of asking the early church, “What is in and what is out?” it would be more accurate to ask “How did these documents function?”

Though it’s inconvenient for Protestants, the way we think about Scripture didn’t really come about until 300-400 years after Jesus’s death, when the church leaders eventually had to decided which books were to be considered canon. In case the irony isn’t clear, the entire identity of Protestantism lies in rejecting “the church” in favor of “the Bible”, but the Bible is a product of the church.

The formation of the New Testament canon presents a significant problem for this restitutionist understanding of Christian history. The criteria of canonicity show us not only that the Bible grew in the cradle of the church, but also that the leaders of the institutional church had a significant hand in forming our New Testament canon. In other words, the Bible that is set apart as being the only trustworthy guide for the Christian was shaped from within the very church that restitutionists claim was corrupt.

— Craig D. Allert

In essence, Protestantism wants to have its cake, and eat it, too; Protestantism wants to reject the church, except during the convenient part when it created the Bible it holds dear.

The earliest list of a twenty-seven book New Testament appears in 367… Does it makes sense to say that the fourth-century church was making very good decisions about the Bible but mostly poor ones about everything else?

— Frederick Norris

If we were to argue that the church fathers were wrong to claim scriptural status for these documents or that they belonged to the postapostolic (i.e. corrupt) church, we would be faced with a further difficulty. We would need to explain how the Bible can remain the pure and uncorrected word when it was canonized in large part by supposedly corrupt church leaders in this church. How could the leaders in this church have been correct about what went into the canon but wrong about the scriptural status of the other books?

— Craig D. Allert

In sum, Protestants need to take a step back and consider where the emphasis of sola scriptura originated: the church. This considering does by no means render sola scriptura null and void, but as Allert puts it, “There is a tacit acceptance of the institution of the historical ecclesiastical community when we accept its canon.” Allert’s goal seems to be to move this acceptance from tacit to explicit.

A High View of Scripture? was a great read, and definitely challenged the way I think about Scripture, Protestantism, and the early church. He’s quite right that modern Christians spend little time considering these things, despite the incredibly important conclusions it draws about our faith.

…an appeal to the “Bible” as the early church’s sole rule for faith and life is anachronistic.

— Craig D. Allert

A number of Christians, scholars included, assert that the definitive Christian canon was formed within ~100 years of Jesus’s death, in the 100s AD. This would be really convenient for sola scriptura and Protestantism, because it would practically mean Christianity has always had the one true authority— the Bible! We never needed the Catholic church! …right?

What’s certain is that yes, 1st and 2nd century church fathers frequently quoted now-canonical Scripture as “Scripture”. But, there are some problems:

1. Second-century church fathers quoted now-noncanonical Scripture as “Scripture”.
2. Second-century church fathers distinguished between Scripture and “canon”.
3. Second-century church fathers emphasized Jesus’s words, not always from Scripture alone.
   • E.g. First Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, and Justin Martyr will sometimes quote Jesus with a clear reference to Scripture(s), but sometimes quote Jesus without a direct parallel in Scripture, or combine scripture with noncanonical material.

   • What mattered to these fathers was not that Jesus’s words appeared in the canonical Gospels, but rather that they were available to them via a reliable apostolic tradition. The Gospels manifest that tradition, but as we have seen, the tradition was not limited to these Gospels.

   • Tatian may have supported exactly four Gospels in his Diatessaron, but it’s unclear.
   • Irenaeus clearly argues for exactly four Gospels. But, he still incorporated material from noncanonical sources.

There is no doubt that the Gospels known to us as canonical were authoritative in the second century. But these Gospels were not the exclusive source for faith and doctrine in the early church. Thus to claim that they were canonical misleads the twenty-first-century evangelical to think that these were consciously collected and limited in order for them to serve as the sole guarantor of the sacred tradition. The function of doctrine in the second century was much broader than that.

— Craig D. Allert

Second-Century Heretical Movements

It’s also commonly argued that second-century heretical movements like Marcionism, Gnosticism, and Mantanism forced the church to respond with an authoritative canon to counter their beliefs, but this is unlikely. Those heretical movements used now-canonical Scripture to defend their beliefs, so it wouldn’t make sense for the church to try to cut them off by affirming the very Scripture they were already using.

I’d never heard of Mantanism, but I thought this snippet was interesting, because it seems like every Christian cult just copy and pasted this ancient Mantanism:

Mantanism called itself the “New Prophecy”, and most scholars place its inception around 170, when a man named Montanus began uttering prophecies… The general belief of the Montanists was that there was an outpouring of the Spirit upon the church, which brought a new and authoritative prophecy… It had an apocalyptic focus with a particular interpretation of Revelation. Prophecy and ecstatic speech were strongly encourage… Monanism’s basic conviction in its earliest form was that the heavenly Jerusalem would soon come to earth and be located in Pepouza, a Roman settlement about twenty miles northeast from Hierapolis in Phrygia.

— Craig D. Allert

Hmm… an emphasis on Revelation, prophecy, the Holy Spirit, and a soon-coming apocalypse? Sounds familiar…

What About Paul’s Letters?

Most of Allert’s discussion is focused on Gospel material, but he includes a short discussion on second-century references to Paul’s letters, stating that “None of the second-century apologists has any trace of the Epistles of Paul, and none of them explicitly appropriates his thought.” But why?

We can only speculate, but Allert suggests that it could be because Paul’s letters were originally meant for specific churches and were hard to understand (2 Peter). But, we see Marcion in the 1st century already collecting Paul’s letters in some sort of collection, so it’s a little unclear. They don’t appear to be combined with the Gospels in a single collection within the 1st or 2nd century.

It was only during the fourth and fifth centuries AD that the church began developing a “canon consciousness”. We can see this more evidently in two important pieces of fourth-century literature, the first being Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History, which covers the history of Christianity from Christ to Constantine’s conversion. In this work, Eusebius categorizes writings into either accepted (e.g. 4 gospels, Acts, Paul’s letters), disputed (e.g. James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John), and rejected/heretical (e.g. Gospel of Thomas). Eusebius doesn’t use the word “canon”, and doesn’t specify everything (e.g. which of Paul’s letters were accepted), and some of the so-called “disputed” works ended up being canonical later, but it’s an important list nonetheless.

The second important work, and clearer evidence of a canon consciousness, is Athanasius of Alexandria’s Festal Letter 39 from 367. Like we do today, Athanasius sees early Christian books as binary— either canonical or noncanonical. And, his list matches our modern New Testament exactly. And, 30 years later, the Third Synod of Carthage wrote a list of canonical books that matches Athanasius’s. But, not every church leader in Athanasius’s time agreed with his list (e.g. Didymus the Blind considered 2 Peter a forgery and refers to “the” epistle of John, not 3). It’s not until later in the fifth century that the fluidity of this early canon is settled. And importantly, even Athanasius, with his canon consciousness, lists some noncanonical books that should still be read.

This later fourth-century list is the first time that the scope of the New Testament canon is declared to be exactly the twenty-seven books accepted today as canonical, without making any distinctions of status among them. With this letter Atanasius is credited with being the first writer to use the term “canon” in reference to a closed collection of writings.

— Craig D. Allert

When the early church was evaluating Christian writings, from the 1st to the 5th century, how did they decide which books should be authoritative and/or canonical? A common modern Christian view is that, well, they didn’t decide, they just… “discovered” which books were inspired by God! …right?

First, we need to clear up a common misunderstanding about what we call “the canon.” It is this: It’s wrong to say that “the church” or the early church fathers determined what would be in the New Testament. They didn’t determine what would be in the New Testament—they discovered what God intended to be in the New Testament.

— Norman Geisler, Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist

Frankly, I find this attitude indefensible and ridiculous; it’s just a cop-out way to deal with the formation of New Testament canon. Allert states it plainly: it’s just not true.

Did the early church view only the documents that went into the New Testament canon as inspired and those alone? The short answer to this question is No.

— Craig D. Allert

Of course, all the canonical books were thought to be inspired, but they also thought other things were inspired (e.g., councils, martyrs, bishops). We also don’t see early church fathers calling noncanonical books “noninspired”. In fact, we see exactly the opposite: church fathers called noncanonical books “inspired”.

The church fathers who eventually decided on biblical canon did actually use a set of criteria, but it would be false to think of this process like a “checklist”. Each church valued these criteria differently, and for a book to make it in the canon, it needed to fulfill more than one. It was an opaque process, and they didn’t have this list in front of them.

1. Apostolicity: does the book have a direct link to an apostle?
   • Could be directly written by apostle (e.g. Matthew’s Gospel) or more indirect (e.g. Luke’s connection to Paul)
2. Orthodoxy: does the book “fit in” with standard orthodoxy?
   • Paul appealed to orthodoxy (Galations 1:9)
   • “Clearly, these appeals could not have been to a closed New Testament canon since they appear in documents that later were included in the canon.” — Allert
   • Inclusion of heresy (e.g. Gospel of Peter) would be a violation of this criteria.
3. Catholicity and Widespread Use: was the book being used by the church at large?
   • Some churches’ opinions were considered more important

Evangelicalism is a “movement” and is thus hard to define, because it dynamically adapts to the culture. Despite this, people attempt to define it. These are some core concepts of evangelicalism, but these are debated, and don’t really account for the diversity of evangelicals. And of course, some people who aren’t “evangelicals” also claim these core tenets.

1. High regard for the authority of the Bible (biblicist).
2. The centrality of the cross as God’s saving activity in history through Jesus Christ (crucicentric).
3. A personally appropriated conversion experience that manifests itself in personal piety and growth (conversionist).
4. Communicating this message to others for personal and societal change (activist).

It is a simple matter of fact that any theologically rigorous definition of evangelicalism tends to end up excluding an embarrassingly large number of people who regard themselves, and are regarded by others, as evangelicals.

— Alister McGrath

Historically, evangelicalism began with the Protestant Reformation, and its emphasis on biblical authority. But, there are many different types of evangelicals today, e.g. fundamentalist, dispensational, nondenominational, reformed, anabaptist, Wesleyan, Pentacostal, etc.

Thus, even though there may be an agreement in evangelicalism that the Bile is authoritative for the Christian, there is a wide range of ways to conceive and express this authority.

— Craig D. Allert

When evangelicals see themselves as standing against or protesting something, a custodial and combative mentality becomes implicit in the movement.

— Craig D. Allert

While it is true that conservative Christianity fought long and hard for the credibility of the Bible as God’s revelation, it also drank at the well of rationalism… the individual believer as the arbiter of interpretation became common. This strategy, comments Lints, is little different from that of the Enlightenment.

— Craig D. Allert

• In the 1910s, The Fundamentals: A Testimony to Truth were published, representing an attempt to unify the disparate denominations under a more unified doctrine.

Thus, evangelicalism is a protest against divergences from the norm of this core set of essentials, just as this same core set binds traditions and denominations together as evangelicals.

— Craig D. Allert

Traditionalism is doing or believing something simply because it is a custom, even if it is devoid of understanding, meaning, and/or significance. This is what contemporary evangelicals have done in retaining their core set of essentials… the evangelical is exhorted to believe the core set of doctrines because they have “always” been seen as essential.

— Craig D. Allert

Essentially what has happened is that the definition of a high view of Scripture as simply become synonymous with the verbal plenary doctrine of Scripture. Its adherents see this as the only possible high view of Scripture.

— Craig D. Allert

…the fathers are portrayed as maintaining strict verbal plenary inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible in spite of the fact that they regularly cite noncanonical literature as authoritative and that their collections of Scripture differed… using the fathers’ references to Scripture as a defense for verbal plenary inspiration forces us to adopt a wider canon than Protestants currently hold.

— Craig D. Allert

Inspiration was not seen to be the unique possession of only the documents that later came to be part of the New Testament canon.

— Craig D. Allert

His definition of verbal plenary inspiration: “the Bible is fully inspired… even down to the choice of the words and grammatical forms”

2 Timothy 3:15-17

• “Paul could not have referred to the whole Bible since it was not yet formed”
• “It is probable that the Christian church did not inherit a closed canon of Hebrew Scriptures. Further, given the fact that church fathers from the first to the fourth centuries cite noncanonical documents “as Scripture”, we have ample reason to question the idea that this is a reference to the Old Testament canon— to Hebrew Scriptures, yes; to Old Testament canon, no.”
• It’s disputed whether the word for “Scripture” (graphe) can refer to Scripture as a whole, or only specific passages, or relevant groups of passages. Allert seems to think it’s the letter. For him, this verse refers to the relevant Scripture Paul was just discussing beforehand.
• Theopneustos: since this is the only time this word is used in the Bible, it’s hard to know what it means. Quoting D. A. Carson, Allert calls this the “root fallacy”, where a word’s meanings is assumed from its roots. Any attempt to understand this word is an educated guess.
• Basically, this verse tells us that scripture is inspired, but doesn’t tell us which scripture, or how inspiration works.

2 Peter 1:19-21

To cast the net so wide as to include the whole Bible seems to be more than what Peter is trying to express here. The context is prophecy; it is not an extended account on the inspiration of the entire Bible.

— Craig D. Allert

Basically, Peter is talking about how the prophecies about Jesus are legit because they’re from God, and because there are eyewitnesses to their fulfillment.

John 10:34-35

Jesus’s emphasis is on the authority of Scripture; it says nothing about inspiration.