The Church And The Canon
CHAPTER FIVE
GOD’S WORD WRITTEN
In this chapter, we shall sketch in the view of Holy Scripture to which the last two chapters have been pointing - which is, in fact, in all essentials the view embodied in our historical Anglican formularies.1 To clear our path, we start with some further comments on the ‘critical' study of Scripture, as practised today.
THE ‘CRITICAL' METHOD
What marks off the ‘critical' movement, so-called, from the biblical scholarship of earlier days is that it approaches the Bible first and foremost as a book of ancient history, and studies it in the light of a view of history as a developing process with its own causal laws inherent in itself - a view which came of age as one of the secularized, ‘scientific' speculations which filled the German universities in the last century. Accordingly, biblical study in Protestant centres of learning, as witness their textbooks and examination papers, is now dominated by, on the one hand, minute enquiry into the sources, dates, authorship, occasion, and purpose, of the various biblical books, and, on the other hand, attempts to reconstruct from the ‘modern' point of view, as an intelligible self-contained process, the sequence of events which the Bible itself narrates as the story of God’s work in creation, providence, and grace.
It is clear that this method, as described, squares more easily with a naturalistic, evolutionary, anti-miraculous, uni-formitarian outlook than it does with any form of the belief that biblical and Church history, while conditioned at all points by prior factors which historians can tabulate, has actually been caused by repeated intrusions (revelatory, miraculous, regenerative) of the power of God in new creation, intrusions which produce in the lives of men and nations effects that are ultimately inexplicable in terms of what went before. And in fact the pioneers of historical biblical criticism linked their enterprise so closely to anti-supernatural axioms, including a dogmatic denial of biblical inerrancy, that an impression was created that biblical study would not be ‘scientific’ at all, in any sense, if done on any other basis. From this secular superstition - for such it is - later Protestant scholarship has never quite broken free. (Its Roman counterpart, which, though embracing the historical approach, cleaves to an explicit supernaturalism and an equally explicit doctrine of biblical inerrancy has on the whole done better at this point.2) Today, most English Protestant scholars, more conservative, as ever, than their opposite numbers in Germany and America, guardedly accept the miraculous and maintain, however blurrily, the broad outlines of the biblical faith; but almost to a man they still execrate the doctrine of inerrancy. Meanwhile, ‘biblical criticism’ remains identified in many Christian minds with an unlawful craving to tone down the Bible and justify unorthodox beliefs, and so continues suspect.
It needs to be said clearly that, though such distorting pseudo-scientific assumptions as those mentioned must certainly be rejected, the use of an historical method of studying Scripture is a theological necessity none the less. For God’s revelation really did take the form of an historical process; God’s Word concerning it really does take the form of a book of ancient history; the reality of biblical inspiration does imply that we learn God’s message through finding out what the human writers meant (for what they said, He says); and unless we understand their statements historically - in terms, that is, of their intended meaning when first made - we are bound to misunderstand them, more or less. This was the point of the Reformers’ insistence that Scripture must be interpreted ‘literally’, as opposed to allegorically. Their plea was for what in the American tongue is known as ‘grammatico-historical’ exegesis - a technique of which, by common consent, John Calvin himself was as great a master as the Church ever had. The truth is that, as Jesus of Nazareth was no less truly human than divine, so it is with the Scriptures. The mystery of the Word incarnate is at this point parallel to that of the Word written. And as we must see Jesus in His human, historical context, and study His recorded words as the sayings of a first-century Jew, if we would fully grasp their message to us as words of God, so it is in interpreting all the words of the Bible. Therefore enquiry into the linguistic, cultural, historical, and theological background of the various parts of Holy Scripture, and into the outlook and aims of their respective authors, must be welcomed as a necessary discipline if the Bible is to be rightly understood. Historical criticism, then, though in the past abused, is really essential; there can be no good commentaries, or accurate exposition, or sound theology, without it. We do well to remember at this point that the proper meaning of ‘criticism’ is not censure, as such, but appreciation. It would be as misguided to discourage appreciative study of the human aspects of Scripture, for fear of losing our grip on its divinity, as it would be to discourage frank recognition of the manhood of our Lord on similar grounds. The only proviso is that our study of the Bible, as of Christ Himself, must be based on fully biblical presuppositions about that which we are studying.
SOME INADEQUATE POSITIONS
Those who, following the current conventions of criticism, reject Augustine’s axiom that what Scripture says, God says, divide sharply over the questions of how God’s truth reaches us, and what its content is. Thus, for instance, Anglican ‘broad churchmen’ in the Platonist tradition, like the authors of Essays and Reviews, in the last century, still think of revelation in terms of a quickening of conscience to embrace moral and spiritual imperatives on the basis of a robust cosmic optimism - a belief, that is, that goodness will triumph in the end, or love will be the last word, or something similar. Revelation, on this view, certainly occurs through contact with the Bible, but the communicated content is only a slice of the Bible; in particular, the event of revelation does not necessarily lead to a positive avowing of apostolic theology, as such, as divine truth, or to any clear link between the doctrine of grace and Christian ethical imperatives comparable to that which we find in the epistles of Paul. This outlook is not unlike that of the old Continental Liberalism, which was based, not on Platonism, but on mysticism framed by historical positivism. Both views in practice by-pass the apostles and concentrate on the Jesus of the gospels as teacher, pioneer, and example of the good life.
By contrast, ‘dialectical’ theologians like Brunner, and Niebuhr, have held that the Word of God in Christ with which the Bible confronts us is a reality which has to be set forth in the categories of apostolic teaching about sin and salvation - though this, they would have said, does not oblige us to echo the apostles at every point, since details of the apostolic witness to the Word of God sometimes need recasting and improving. Those in this camp would all say that Jesus Christ rather than Scripture is the Word of God (an improper antithesis, as we saw); but if we ask them, on that basis, to give us an account of Jesus Christ, and to tell us how the two Testaments belong together, and how the Christ of apostolic faith stands related to the Jesus of historical fact, their unanimity dissolves at once into a shambles of conflicts and confusions.
A third, ‘existentialist’, type of view, popularized earlier this century by the work of Bultmann and Tillich, is that the Word of God is, strictly speaking, neither Holy Scripture nor Jesus Christ, but God confronting individuals in a way which produces within them a liberating assurance, assuaging their otherwise incurable angst (restless anxiety). This assurance — ‘openness to the future’, Bultmann called it - was equated with faith. It does not come, said its exponents, without our contemplating the (largely unhistorical and mythological) New Testament witness to Jesus, but it is none the less consistent with denying Jesus’ personal deity, pre-existence, virgin birth, miracles, bodily resurrection, and indeed every bit of information about Him that the New Testament gives us save the bare fact that He was crucified.
It is clear that such ‘faith’ is not very different from the unfocused cosmic optimism of the Anglican ‘broad church’ outlook - which perhaps helps to explain how the author of Honest to God could feel at home with Bultmann and Tillich, and even hail the oracular but vacuous abstractions of Bultmann’s letter to the Sheffield Industrial Mission, setting out his ‘demythologized’ version of the Gospel, as an example of ‘profound simplicity’.3 Indeed, analysis shows that the modern ‘broad church’, liberal, and existentialist positions, however superficially different, are all really members of the same theological family. They are all versions of what we may call Renaissance theology, the Erasmian type of thought within Protestantism. Renaissance theology is characteristically rationalistic, anti-dogmatic, and agnostic in temper, ethical and humanitarian in its interests, and ready to hail almost any kind of religious outlook and belief about God (and some moderns have added in certain types of atheism too) as having in it the substance of Christian faith, so long as it recognizes the absoluteness of Christian moral values. Between, on the one hand, Renaissance theology and, on the other, the Reformed and ‘Catholic’ traditions, which agree at least in holding that Christian faith involves believing the Creed, so great a gulf is fixed that both evangelicals and ‘catholics’ often find themselves unable to treat teaching of the Renaissance type as Christian at all. Certainly, as both these schools within the Church of England stressed a century ago, when faced with Essays and Reviews, and as both have stressed again more recently in face of Honest to God, our formularies make it impossible to regard any type of Renaissance theology as other than a cuckoo in the Anglican nest.
Cuckoos, however, grow to considerable size, and Renaissance theology has recently been ‘in’ in a big way in the Church of England. The most popular form of it centres on the thought that Jesus, though a fine man whose life was an act of God in a special way, was not the second person of the Trinity incarnate, for God is not, strictly speaking, tripersonal at all. Into this revamped unitarianism the concept ‘Word of
God’ hardly entered: the New Testament witness to Jesus Christ was read in Bultmann’s way, as unhistorical myth, all thought of revealed truth was dismissed, and Christian faith was reduced to a sense of ultimate value in Jesus’ manner of life, as a model for imitation and a way of actually tuning in to God. Whether such threadbare theology can last long is doubtful, but in books like Dennis Nineham’s The Use and Abuse of the Bible (1976), Maurice Wiles’ The Remaking of Christian Doctrine (1974), Don Cupitt’s Jesus and the Gospel of God (1976), and the symposium, The Myth of God Incarnate (1977), and more recently the American John Spong’s Rescuing The Bible from Fundamentalism (1991) and Born of a Woman (1992), it has certainly had a good innings.
Of all these varieties of Renaissance theology, and with them the cross-bred ‘dialectical theology’, which has one foot in the Reformation camp and the other in the Renaissance camp, and shifts its weight from foot to foot according to who expounds it, three things have to be said. First, these positions are all subjectivist in character - that is, they all depend on denying at some point the correlation between Scripture and faith, biblical revelation and inward illumination, the Spirit in the Scriptures and the Spirit in the heart, and on appealing to the latter to justify forsaking the former. In other words, one only reaches them by backing at some point one’s private view of what the Bible is, or should be, driving against what it actually says, and jettisoning in practice part of what it teaches in order to maintain this private opinion. In principle and method, these subjectivist positions all part company with both Reformation and ‘Catholic’ theology to line up with the sixteenth-century Anabaptists and seventeenth-century Quakers, who held that the ‘internal word’ or ‘inner light’ justified them in sitting loose to ‘God’s Word written’.
Second, these positions are all unstable, for they recognize no objective criterion of truth, nor method for establishing it, save the more or less speculative reasoning of individual theologians, whose conclusions never command full agreement within their own camp, let alone outside it. The pendulum keeps swinging all the time; systems rise and fall; theological fashions, like fashions in the styling of cars or ladies’ hats, rapidly come and go. The first quarter of this century was the age of liberalism, dominated by Troeltsch and Harnack; the second quarter was the age of dialecticism, dominated by Brunner and Barth; the third quarter was the age of existentialism, dominated by Bultmann and Tillich; the fourth quarter has been the age of liberation theologies, chiefly Latin American, black and feminist; the twenty-first century will no doubt see other fashionable ‘isms’, and other dominant thinkers rising and falling. The truth is that the world of Renaissance theology is a desert of continually shifting sand, where stability is impossible. Listening to the babel of Renaissance theologians’ voices, confident though they often are, one soon sees that there is no hope of reaching certainty about anything in such company. Relativism is the ruling principle; every question goes back again and again into the melting-pot; syntheses are merely provisional, and the state of flux is never-ending.
Third, so far as they fail to uphold the authority of the Spirit in the Scriptures over the Spirit in the theologian, and deviate from the task of expounding and applying what the Bible actually says, these positions are really sub-Christian; as the rest of this chapter will show.
GOD-BREATHED SCRIPTURE
We come now to state in outline what we take to be the true view, as it is certainly the historic Anglican view, of the Holy Scriptures. Traditionally it has been summed up by calling the Bible, as in the marriage service, ‘God’s Word’, or, as in Article XX, ‘God’s Word written’. The value of such phraseology is that it at once indicates, first, that what Scripture says, God says (the Word of God); second, that the Scriptures together make up a total presentation of God’s message to mankind (the Word of God); third, that the Scriptures constitute a message addressed directly by God to everyone who reads or hears them (the Word of God) - in other words, that the Scriptures have the nature of preaching. The ‘Word of the Lord’ conveyed by the prophets in their oracles, and the ‘Word of God’ set forth by the apostles in their sermons, was always a word applying directly to its hearers, summoning them to recognize that God Himself was thereby addressing them, calling on them to respond to His instruction and direction, and working in them through God’s own Spirit to evoke the response which it required (cf. I Thess. 2:13). Similarly, the Bible as a whole, viewed from the standpoint of its contents, should be thought of, not statically, but dynamically; not merely as what God said long ago, but as what He says still; and not merely as what He says to men in general, but as what He says to each individual reader or hearer in particular. In other words, Holy Scripture should be thought of as God preaching - God preaching to me every time I read or hear any part of it - God the Father preaching God the Son in the power of God the Holy Spirit. God the Father is the giver of Holy Scripture; God the Son is the theme of Holy Scripture; and God the Spirit, as the Father’s appointed agent in witnessing to the Son, is the author, authenticator, and interpreter, of Holy Scripture. This is the position which we shall now try to elucidate, by means of some further study of what biblical inspiration implies.
We saw in the last chapter what inspiration was in the prophets: a divine work, taking many psychological forms, whereby, having made God’s message known to them, the Holy Spirit so overruled all their subsequent mental activity in giving the message poetic and literary form that each resultant oracle was as truly a divine utterance as a human, as direct a disclosure of what was in God’s mind as of what was in the prophet’s. Also, we saw that the New Testament extends this concept of dual authorship to cover all the Old Testament, second-person psalms of address to God (cf. Heb. 1:8-12, 2:6ff.) or admonitions from the wise man to his pupil (cf. Heb. i2:5f), and third-person narratives of God’s words and doings, as well as first-person divine utterances spoken through prophetic messengers. Our Lord quotes the narrator’s marginal comment in Genesis 2:24 as what ‘the Creator . . . said’ (Mt. 19:4^). Paul tells the Corinthian Christians that the history of Israel’s wilderness wanderings was ‘written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfilment of the ages has come’ (I Cor. 10:11; cf. Rom. 15:4). Paul also calls the Old Testament as a whole ‘the very words of God’ (Rom. 3:2; cf. Acts 7:38), and twice says ‘Scripture’ when he means ‘God, as recorded in Scripture’ (‘the Scripture foresaw . . . announced . . .’ [Gal 3:8]; ‘the Scripture says to Pharaoh: “I raised you up for this very purpose,”’ [Rom. 9:17]). Thus he shows that for him biblical statements were, quite simply, words of God talking about Himself. Similarly, in Romans 4 and Galatians 3:6ff., Paul treats what ‘the Scripture says’ about Abraham (that he ‘believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness’) as divine testimony to the way of salvation. The New Testament concept of Old Testament inspiration is crystallized in the statement in II Timothy 3:16, ‘all Scripture is God-breathed’ (theopneustos, literally ‘breathed out from God’). The thought here is that, just as God made the host of heaven ‘by the breath of his mouth’ (Ps. 33:6), through His own creative fiat, so we should regard the Scriptures as the product of a similar creative fiat - ‘let there be Law, Prophets, and Writings’ (the three divisions of the Jewish canon in New Testament times). The New Testament faith about the Old Testament was that the real narrator of Israel’s history in the Law and Former Prophets (that is, the Pentateuch and historical books), and the real psalmist, poet, and wisdom-teacher in the Writings, as well as the real preacher of the prophets’ sermons, was God Himself.
Moreover, we have also seen that our Lord, according to His own explicit testimony, spoke from God, and so did His apostles, to whom He promised His Spirit to enable them to do precisely this in their witness to Himself (see Jn. 14:26, i5:26f., 16:7-15, 2o:2iff.; cf. Mt. io:i9f.; Lk. 10:16; I Cor. 2:i2f.). Apostolic witness to Christ, spoken or written, thus has the same Spirit-prompted, divine-human character - that is, is inspired in the same sense - as the sacred books of the Old Testament. As, therefore, we should follow the New Testament Christians in viewing the Old Testament as given by God for our learning, so we should read the New Testament as part of Jesus Christ’s legacy to us - as if at each point we heard Him say, T had Paul (or John, or Matthew, or whoever it is) write this in order to help you’. This is what it means to believe in biblical inspiration biblically.
The inspiring process, which brought each writer’s thoughts into such exact coincidence with those of God, necessarily involved a unique oversight and control of those who were its subjects. Some moderns doubt whether this control could leave room for any free mental activity on the writers’ part, and pose a dilemma: either God’s control of the writers was complete, in which case they wrote as robots or automata (which clearly they did not), or their minds worked freely as they wrote the Scriptures, in which case God could not fully have controlled them, or kept them from error. Exponents of this dilemma usually hold that the evidence for errors (false statements purporting to be true) in the Bible is in fact as conclusive as the evidence for spontaneous self-expression by its human writers. But our first comment must be that this is not so. That Scripture errs has been assumed by many, but it cannot in principle be proved, any more than it can be proved that Jesus was not morally perfect. Both questions are actually settled farther back: if Jesus was God incarnate, He could not but be morally perfect, and if Scripture is the Word of the God of truth it cannot but be true and trustworthy at all points. Moreover, the dilemma rests on the assumption that full psychological freedom of thought and action, and full subjection to divine control, are incompatible; and this is not true either. If the inspiration of the prophets was what all Scriptures say it was, it is absurd to deny that the whole Bible could be similarly inspired.
Instead of imposing on God arbitrary limitations of this sort, we should rather adore the wisdom and power that could so order the unruly minds of sinful men as to cause them freely and spontaneously, with no inhibiting of their normal mental processes, to write only and wholly the infallible truth of God. As B. B. Warfield observed, we are not to imagine that when God wanted Paul’s letters written ‘He was reduced to the necessity of going down to the earth and painfully scrutinizing the men He found there, seeking anxiously for the one who, on the whole, promised best for His purpose; and then violently forcing the material he wished expressed through him, against his natural bent, and with as little loss from his recalcitrant characteristics as possible. Of course, nothing of the sort took place. If God wished to give His people a series of letters like Paul’s, He prepared a Paul to write them, and the Paul He brought to the task was a Paul who spontaneously would write just such letters.’4 Of course - but what a marvel of providential management this was! And, for that matter, what a marvel of condescending mercy it was that God should speak to men at all! And what patience and skill He showed throughout the long history of revelation in always so adapting His message to the capacities of His chosen messengers that it never overran their powers of transmission, but within the limits set by their mind, outlook, culture, language, and literary ability, could always find adequate and exact expression! But such gracious self-limitation is typical of the God of Bethlehem’s stable and Calvary’s cross.
Inspiration took many psychological forms; here, as elsewhere, God showed Himself a God of variety. The basic form of the process was dualistic inspiration, in which the recipient of revelation remained conscious throughout of the distinction between himself, the hearer and reporter, and God, the Speaker to and through him. The inspiration that produced the Old Testament prophetic oracles, including the Mosaic legislation and the apocalyptic visions of Daniel and John the divine, was of this kind. But there were other forms, too, in which this consciousness was not present, so that the human authors may well not have been aware of being inspired, in the strict sense of the word, at all. There was, on the one hand, lyric inspiration, in which the inspiring action of God was fused with the concentrating, intensifying, and shaping mental processes of what, in the secular sense, we would call the inspiration of the poet. This produced the Psalms, the lyrical drama of Job (which as it stands is a highly wrought theological poem, whatever basis it may be thought to have in historical fact), the Song of Solomon (a parable of the love of God and His people, in the form of an exotic, erotic, ecstatic love-duet), and the many great prayers that we find scattered through the historical books. Then, on the other hand, there were various forms of organic or didactic inspiration, whereby the inspiring action of God coalesced with the mental processes - enquiring, analytical, reflective, interpretative, applicatory - of the teacher, seeking to distil and pass on knowledge of facts and right thoughts about them. This type of inspiration produced the historical books of both Testaments, the apostolic letters, and, in the Old Testament, the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. There was, of course, nothing to prevent the same man being the medium at different times of different forms of divine inspiration, and it seems clear that all three were combined in the highest degree in the inspiration of our Lord Himself. The importance of these observations lies in the fact that to recognize what form of inspiration each biblical passage displays is always the first essential for interpreting it soundly.
BIBLICAL AUTHORITY
We are now in a position to take up the vexed issue of the authority of Scripture. Authority, the right to rule, belongs ultimately to God the Creator, and Christianity is ultimately a matter of bowing to His authority by obedient response to His revelation. On this formula all Christians agree. All, therefore, acknowledge Scripture, the written record of God’s revelation, as in some sense authoritative for faith and life. But when we ask, in what sense, agreement ends, and conflicts begin. A clear grasp, however, of the meaning of biblical inspiration, as set forth above, will go far to guide us through these tangles of controversy.
The first problem that arises concerns the nature of biblical authority. Liberal Protestants, viewing the Bible as no more than fallible human witness to the revelatory process, and doubtful whether that process really involved divine speech to man, or whether any Scripture statements can be taken as actual utterances of God, build their concept of biblical authority in terms of three thoughts: first, the necessity of the Bible, as the only source of knowledge about God’s revelatory acts; second, the quality of the Bible, as a testament of deep religious experience; third, the potency of the Bible, proved down the centuries, to bring moral and spiritual uplift to all sorts and conditions of men. On this basis, as is plain, questions like: Did all the things which Scripture records happen as recorded? Did the biblical writers’ thoughts express true insight at every point? Can every part of the Bible yield genuine instruction and guidance today? still remain open, and it is in fact assumed from the start that, the Bible being, for all its religious and theological expertise, a merely human book, the answer to all three questions is probably no. This approach makes the theologian appear, willy-nilly, as a sort of salvage man, using the criteria of modern mental culture to pick out what is of value from the mass of miscellaneous antique matter that the Bible contains. Also, it puts him on the defensive, making him hesitant and apologetic whenever, following Scripture, he ventures to affirm the supernatural, as if he expects every minute to be told by a colleague that the items he has selected from the mass were not really worth much. The substance of the common liberal complaint that conservative evangelicals give too little place to reason in formulating the doctrine of authority seems only to be a feeling of injury and offence that evangelicals do not approach these questions with the same negative presuppositions, nor show the same deference to the axioms and attitudes of unbelief.
But this whole approach is incorrect, for it views biblical authority in purely human, relative terms, whereas in fact, as the doctrine of inspiration makes plain, the authority of Scripture is the divine authority of God Himself speaking. The Bible is not only man’s word, but God’s also; not merely a record of revelation, but a written revelation in its own right, God’s own witness to Himself in the form of human witness to Him. Accordingly, the authority of the Scriptures rests, not simply on their worth as an historical source, a testament of religion, and a means of uplift, real though this is, but primarily and essentially on the fact that they come to us from the mouth of God. Therefore the real task for reason in this connection is not to try to censure and correct the Scriptures, but rather, with God’s help, to try to understand and apply them, so that God may effectively censure and correct us.
But, it is objected, does not the Christian stand directly under the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ, and is not Jesus Christ Lord also of the Scriptures? And if so, how can the Christian be said to be bound to the authority of the Bible? The answer is very simple. The antithesis is a false one. Jesus Christ is Lord of the Scriptures in the same sense in which any absolute monarch is Lord of the laws and proclamations which he sees fit to issue for the government of his subjects. The ruler’s laws carry his personal authority, and the measure of one’s loyalty to him is the consistency of one’s observance of them. But Holy Scripture, The sceptre of God’, as Calvin somewhere calls it, is Christ’s instrument of government: it comes to us, so to speak, from His hand and with His seal upon it, for He Himself commended the Old Testament to us as having His Father’s authority,5 and He Himself authorized and empowered the apostles to speak in His name, by His Spirit and with His own authority.6 So the way to bow to the authority of Jesus Christ is precisely by bowing to the authority of the inspired Scriptures.
BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION
But a second problem now arises. Granted that biblical teaching, because it is divine teaching, must be our rule of faith and life, how are we to interpret the Bible and extract its teaching from it?
We cannot here answer this question as it deserves, for that would take a book; what we can do, however, is to show that the guiding principles for interpreting Scripture all follow from the doctrine of inspiration.
Interpretation, says J. D. Wood, is The way of reading an ancient book in order that it may become relevant to the life and thought of a later day’.7 If the Bible is the divine-human product we take it to be, then the interpreting of it involves three distinct activities: exegesis, synthesis, and application. We will say a word about each.
Because the Bible is a human book, God having chosen to convey His teaching to us in the form of the inspired instruction of His human penmen, the way into His mind is necessarily via their minds. So the basic discipline in biblical interpretation must always be exegetical analysis - that is, the attempt to determine as exactly as possible just what the writer meant by the words he wrote, and how he would explain the sense of his statements could we cross-question him about them. Exegesis involves, on the one hand, setting each passage against its external background (historical, cultural, geographical, linguistic, literary), and, on the other hand, determining from its intrinsic characteristics its aim, scope, standpoint, presuppositions, and range and limit of interest. The first part of this task may call for a good deal of technical learning, but this does not mean that exegesis is work for scholars only; the decisive part of the task is the second part, for which the first is, at most, only ground-clearing, and in this the professional scholar does not stand on any higher footing than any diligent student of the text in any language. The supreme requirement for understanding a biblical book -or, indeed, any other human document - is sympathy with its subject-matter, and a mind and heart that can spontaneously enter into the author’s outlook. But the capacity to put oneself in the shoes of Isaiah, or Paul, or John, and see with his eyes and feel with his heart is the gift, not of academic training, but of the Holy Spirit through the new birth.
To take the measure of the mind of each biblical prophet, apostle, historian, psalmist, and wisdom writer, might seem work enough in itself; but in fact exegetical analysis is only the beginning of the interpretative task. Because the Bible is a divine book as well as a human one, and because the sixty-six separate documents that make it up, under all their human diversity, are products of a single divine mind setting forth a single message, it is necessary to proceed from exegesis to synthesis, and to seek to integrate the fruit of our study of the individual books and writers into a single coherent whole. We come to the task of exegesis with the knowledge that all the human author’s thoughts concerning God are God’s own thoughts too; but when we move on to the further task of synthesis, we soon become aware that at point after point God’s thoughts go further and embrace more than those of any one biblical writer did or could. The full significance of each passage only appears when it is set in the context of all the rest of Scripture - which its own author, of course, was never able to do. The Bible appears like a symphony orchestra, with the Holy Spirit as its Toscanini; each instrumentalist has been brought willingly, spontaneously, creatively, to play his notes just as the great conductor desired, in full harmony with each other, though none of them could ever hear the music as a whole. Not only the prophets who foretold Christ (cf. I Pet. 1:10-12), but all the writers of both Testaments, are constantly telling us more than ever they themselves knew. The point of each part only becomes fully clear when seen in relation to all the rest.
In this task of synthesis, the guiding principle must be the self-consistency of Scripture, in other words the principle that in giving us the Bible the Holy Spirit did not contradict Himself. The Reformers called this axiom ‘the analogy of faith’. As they understood it, it was really three principles in one. It was, first, the principle of working from the centre outwards, explaining what is secondary by the light of what is primary, and what is obscure in terms of what is clear. This in practice meant - and means - recognizing that the central themes of the Bible are the kingdom, people, and covenant of God, and the person, place, work, and glory, of the Lord Jesus Christ; the achieving, and applying of redemption; the law and the Gospel. Second, the Reformers’ phrase signified the principle of following out the inner links of Scripture. This meant, for instance, understanding Old Testament prophecy in the light of the New Testament account of its fulfilment, understanding types in the light of their antitypes, understanding Leviticus in the light of Hebrews, and the doings of Old Testament characters in the light of New Testament comment on them. Third, ‘the analogy of faith’ meant the principle of understanding Scripture harmonistically, not setting text against text or supposing apparent contradictions to be real ones, but seeking rather to let one passage throw light on another, in the certainty that there is in Scripture a perfect agreement between part and part, which careful study will be able to bring out. The Anglican Articles apply this principle twice. With our Lord (Jn. 5:39, 46), Paul (Rom. 4), and the writer to the Hebrews (passim), and against sixteenth-century Anabaptists and, along with them, earlier Marcionites and later liberals and dispensationalists, Article VII affirms that ‘the Old Testament is not contrary to the New; for both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to Mankind through Christ. . .’ Also, Article XX states that, ‘although the (visible) Church be a witness and a keeper of holy Writ', it may not ‘so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another' - for such exposition must be wrong.
So, then, to take one example, it would not be right to dismiss the imprecatory Psalms in the way that many do, as vindictive outbursts contrary to the mind of God, expressing the vengeful spirit which the New Testament condemns. The Homilies themselves warn us against this mistake. The truth is that what Psalms like 35, 58,109, and 137:7-9 are voicing is a zeal and passion for God’s glory, and for the triumph of His cause and His righteousness, which far exceeds ours, in the same way that Psalms 17:1-5, 26:1-5, and 131 express a humility and simplicity of spirit that is far above our own. Just as, had we written the words of these latter Psalms, they would have argued priggishness and conceit, and the words of triumph-songs like Judges 5, Isaiah 47 and Revelation 19:1-3, had they been our words, would have savoured of gloating, so too the words of the cursing Psalms, had we spoken them, would have revealed an all-too-human ill-will. But this only means that our hearts are less pure than the hearts of the psalmists. David, writes the homilist, ‘spake them [the imprecations] not of a private hatred, and in a stomach against their persons; but wished spiritually the destruction of such corrupt errors and vices, which reigned in all devilish persons set against God ... he hated the wicked . . . with a perfect hate (Ps. 139:21f), not with a malicious hate to the hurt of the soul. Which perfection of spirit, because it cannot be performed in us, so corrupted in affections as we be, we ought not to use in our private causes the like form in words, for that we cannot fulfil the like words in sense . . .’ (‘An Information for them which take Offence at certain places of the Holy Scripture': The Homilies, pp. 382f). Thus the truth is that here, no less than at other points, the psalmist is expressing true devotion at its highest pitch, and the fancied disharmony between his words and New Testament ideals does not exist. In fact, the same spirit is voiced in the New Testament also: see Rev. 6:10.
Therefore the attitude of those who decline to use these verses from God’s hymn-book in public worship seems doubtfully wise. Is it not good for us to be shown, even if we can hardly at present grasp, what true zeal for God’s honour is like?8
The third part of the work of interpretation is to apply biblical teaching to ourselves, individually and corporately. It is here most of all that we need the help of the Spirit who inspired the Scriptures to give us understanding. God-inspired Scripture, writes Paul, cis useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness’ (II Tim. 3:16); but we cannot reap this profit till the Spirit quickens our minds and consciences to measure and judge ourselves by Scripture, and to discern the issues of repentance, and faith, and obedience, and amending of our ways, which across the centuries Holy Scripture forces upon us. Here, again, the decisive qualification is not academic scholarship, but rather a praying, humble, teachable heart. The rule that applies is that to him that hath shall be given: it is only as we obey God up to the limit of our present insight into His will that our insight will be deepened and our vision enlarged. Live by the light you have as to the bearing of Scripture on your life, and you shall have more light; neglect the light you have, and you will actually darken it, so that in the outcome you will have less. This solemn alternative faces every Christian every day of his or her life.
It is obvious that in practice all three parts of the task of biblical interpretation will, and must, be carried on together, and that deepened insight at any one stage will result in deeper insight at the other two stages also. It is obvious too that the enterprise may break down at any of its three stages. It seems clear that in present-day Protestantism it has largely broken down at all three stages. Unwillingness to take seriously the biblical writers’ thoughts as being, strictly and precisely, the communicated thoughts of God; unwillingness to be led and bound by the analogy of faith in unifying the fruits of exegesis; and indolence in seeking to apply to human life what the Bible actually says - these are the root causes of our ‘famine of hearing the words of the Lord’. And there is no hope of the famine being alleviated till these things are penitently put right.
The kind of interpretation that results when these principles are properly applied can be sampled in the work of such people as John Chrysostom (fifth century), John Calvin (sixteenth century), Matthew Henry (seventeenth century), John Charles Ryle (nineteenth century), and Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones (twentieth century): five who would have hailed each other as blood-brothers in faith had they met (and who of course in heaven may already have done so). Those today who are hungry for the Lord’s words are guaranteed nourishment if they turn to these classic expositors.
INFALLIBLE? INERRANT?
When Thomas Hobbes declared that ‘words are the counters of wise men, they do reckon by them; but they are the coinage of fools’, he was warning us that words, being tools of thought and tokens of meaning, are neither magical nor impregnable, and we abuse our minds if we think otherwise. Anything you really understand you can express in more than one form of words, and no verbal formula is exempt from the possibility of reinterpretation, misinterpretation and debasement by those who come after its framers. It is well to remind ourselves of this as we weigh two words which twentieth-century English-speaking theologians have regularly applied to the view of Scripture as God-given verbal revelation which this book has been setting forth. The words are infallibility and inerrancy, both denoting qualities which adherents of this view ascribe to the Bible.
The first thing to say, in the light of the last paragraph, is that nobody should feel wedded to these words. We can get on without them. If we speak of Holy Scripture as altogether true and trustworthy, or as wholly reliable in its own terms, making no false assertions, claims or promises on its own account (however many lies told by good men, bad men and devils it records), we shall be expressing in formula terms exactly what these words mean. If we prefer these formulae to the words themselves (both of which, be it admitted, have turned into noses of wax, malleable and often misshapen in recent discussion), that is our privilege, and none should want to deprive us of it. Conversely, adherence to traditional terms does not necessarily argue the profoundest grasp of what they stand for; it may only be a sign of a traditional mind.
Yet this is an age in which the view I am stating is often dismissed without argument, and indeed without understanding, as an assertion of Verbal infallibility’ or Verbal inerrancy’ (uncouth phrases! Why Verbal’ ? What other sort of infallibility or inerrancy might there be?). In such an age, it is more useful to explain and defend the words, and rebut the criticisms, than to renounce the words because they have been mishandled. Rightly understood, they are useful theological shorthand, and by explaining them we can clarify and develop some of the implications of what this chapter has said so far. Briefly, then (or as briefly as we can!):
First, their meaning. Infallibility is the Latin infallibilitas, signifying the quality of neither deceiving nor being deceived. Inerrancy is the Latin inerrantia, meaning freedom from error of any kind, factual, moral or spiritual. Infallible as a description of the biblical Word of God goes back at least to the English Reformation.9 Inerrant is an adjective that gained currency in the second half of the last century, in debates that arose from the budding ‘higher criticism’. Both words take colour from the contexts in which they were mainly used; thus, though they are virtually synonyms, infallible suggests to most minds Scripture determining a faith-commitment, while inerrant evokes rather the thought of Scripture undergirding an orthodoxy. But for practical purposes the words are interchangeable.
Second, their significance. Though negative in form, they are positive in thrust, like the Council of Chalcedon’s four negative adverbs about the union of Christ’s two natures in His one person (‘without confusion’, ‘without change’, ‘without division’, ‘without separation’). What those adverbs say is that only within the limits they set is truth about the incarnation found. What infallible and inerrant say is that only those who accept as from God all that Scripture proves to tell us, promise us or require of us can ever fully please Him. Both words thus have religious as well as theological significance; their function is to impose on our handling of the Bible a procedure which expresses faith in the reality and veracity of the God who speaks to us in and through what it says and who requires us to heed every word that proceeds from His mouth. The procedure, best stated negatively, is that in exegesis and exposition of Scripture and building up our biblical theology we may not (i) deny, disregard, or arbitrarily relativize anything that the writers teach, nor (ii) discount any of the practical implications for worship and service which their teaching carries, nor (iii) cut the knot of any problem of Bible harmony, factual or theological, by allowing ourselves to assume that the writers were not necessarily consistent with themselves or with each other. It is this procedure, rather than any particular results of following it, that our two words safeguard.
Third, their justification. The ground for affirming that Scripture is infallible and inerrant is its inspiration, which we defined earlier in this chapter in terms of God-breathedness or divine origin. No Christian will question that God speaks truth and truth only (that is, that what He says is infallible and inerrant). But if all Scripture comes from God in such a sense that what it says, He says, then Scripture as such must be infallible and inerrant, because it is God’s utterance. What our two words express is not confidence that by our own independent enquiries we can prove all Scripture statements to be true (we can’t, of course, and should never speak as if we could), but certainty that all Scripture can and should be trusted because it has come to us (in Calvin’s phrase) cby the ministry of men from God’s very mouth’.10
Fourth, how these words are misunderstood. Critics persistently suppose that both words, highlighting as they do the divinity and consequent truth of the Bible, express or entail a policy of minimizing the Bible’s humanity, either by denying its human literary sources or ignoring the marks of its human cultural milieu, or by treating it as if it were written in terms of the communicative techniques and conventions of the modern West rather than the ancient East, or by professing to find in it ‘technical-scientific’ as distinct from ‘naive-observational’ statements about the natural order, when the ‘technical-scientific’ study of nature is less than five centuries old. It is understandable that Christians who have not weighed the differences between our culture and that (or those!) of the biblical period should naively feel that the natural and straightforward way to express their certainty that the contents of Scripture, being divine, are of contemporary relevance (as they certainly are) is to treat Scripture as contemporary in its literary forms. No doubt many have done this, believing that thus they did God service. But our words have no link with this naivety; they express no advance commitment of any kind in the field of biblical interpretation, save that whatever Scripture, rightly interpreted (interpreted, that is, a posteriori, with linguistic correctness, in terms of the discernible literary character of each book, against its own historical and cultural background, and in the light of its topical relation to other books), proves to be saying should be reverently received, as from God.
Fifth, the self-involving logic of these words. For me to confess that Scripture is infallible and inerrant is to bind myself in advance to follow the method of harmonizing and integrating all that Scripture declares, without remainder, of taking it as from God, however little I may like it, and whatever change of present beliefs, ways and commitments it may require, and of seeking actively to live by it. Both words are often seen as belonging to worlds of doctrinaire scholasticism, but in fact they express a most radical existential commitment on the Christian’s part.
Sixth, the objections to these words. Some deprecate them because using them, they think, has a bad effect. Affirming inerrancy is thought to cause preoccupation with minutiae of Bible harmony and factual detail to the neglect of major matters, and to encourage the unhistorical kind of exegesis that we glanced at two paragraphs back, and thus to thwart good scholarship. Asserting infallibility is held to spawn a superstitious bibliolatry which reveres the Bible as a sort of everyman’s-enquire-within-about-everything, and also thwarts good scholarship. It may be replied that none of this is necessarily so, and that it is worth disinfecting both words from association with these failures in responsible biblical interpretation. But if it is still thought best to eschew the terms as tainted, the point is not worth pressing; as we said, we are not wedded to words. Others, however, reject the terms on the grounds that factual, moral, and theological error in the Bible is now proven. Here I must limit myself simply to replying: not so at all. A responsible biblical scholarship exists with inerrancy as one of its methodological presuppositions; it appears no less successful in embracing and making sense of the phenomena of Scripture than is the scholarship which lacks this presupposition. (All scholars, of course, borrow from and interact with each other, and share a community feeling in consequence, whatever their presuppositions, but that is not the point here.) As long as a consistent Bible-believing scholarship can maintain itself in debate on problem passages, it is sheer triumphalist obscurantism to say that error in the Bible has been proved. And even if adequate Bible-believing scholarship were lacking, ‘proved' would still be too strong a word, for the various sceptical hypotheses are never the only ones possible.11
THE SUFFICIENCY OF SCRIPTURE
What we have said so far in this chapter might well lower our stock in the eyes of many liberal and ‘broad church' Anglicans, but would, we think, command the substantial assent of most Anglo-Catholics, and with them members of the Roman and Orthodox communions too. But now we come to the third problem in connection with biblical authority, the question of the sufficiency of Scripture, and here we reach the second great parting of the ways in connection with our view of the Bible.12 The so-called ‘Catholic’ (as opposed to ‘Reformed') tradition, in all its forms, holds that Holy Scripture, interpreted in terms of itself, is not sufficient as a guide for those who would live under the authority of God. Church tradition is necessary (it is said) to lead us into the right understanding of the Scriptures, which is not accessible from a straightforward study of the text. True, holders of this position disagree among themselves as to what ‘Church tradition' is. The Roman Catholic Council of Trent spoke of unwritten apostolic traditions, passed on orally in the Church down the ages, as being a second source of doctrine alongside the Scriptures - a fact which embarrasses many modern Roman theologians, who prefer to work with a dynamic, ‘open-ended’ concept of tradition as the word of God in the hearts of the (Roman) faithful, constantly crystallizing out through the Spirit’s stimulus into consensus of opinion which is then at point after point infallibly recorded in successive papal definitions. Anglo-Catholic and Orthodox teachers, by contrast, make use of an organic but circumscribed idea of tradition as, in general, the developed faith and outlook of the universal Church during the first centuries of its life and, in particular, its sacraments, creeds, Scriptures, and ministers, and its convictions about each. Detailed differences between these groups spring directly from their differing views of tradition, but these need not delay us. What concerns us at present is simply the fact that ‘Catholics’ of every sort unite against ‘Reformed’ Christians in insisting that tradition is more than the Scriptures, that the Scriptures are only part of the authoritative legacy of the past that must determine our faith, and that therefore they may not be detached from the rest of tradition and set to judge it, but must themselves be construed in harmony with it; for what tradition says is what Scripture must mean, and if we take it to mean anything contrary we necessarily misunderstand it.13
Thus, when ‘Catholics’ say (as in these days many of them are ready, perhaps too ready, to do) that the Bible is our authoritative rule of faith, what they mean is that our standard of truth must be the interpretation of the Bible which tradition gives us - which is not necessarily that interpretation at which one would arrive by simply comparing Scripture with Scripture. Endless confusion arises in discussion with ‘Catholics’, as modern ecumenical theology makes painfully apparent, when it is not seen that what they and what ‘Reformed’ Christians mean by biblical authority are two quite different things.
The issue here is whether Holy Scripture, as a written revelation from God, is in itself complete, clear, and decisive, as a rule for our faith and life, or not. On this question the Church of England took a firm and unambiguous stand four centuries ago. Article VI of the Thirty-Nine affirms the sufficiency of Scripture alone as a rule of faith. ‘Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation; so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith . . .’ Article VIII follows this up by telling us that the most venerable and time-honoured products of tradition - the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds - are to be taken as true, not just because they are traditional, but because ‘they may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture’. It is not denied that the ecumenical creeds offer themselves as a guide to the interpretation of Holy Scripture; what is denied, however, is that we may lawfully accept them in that capacity without first testing them by those very Scriptures whose substance they seek to set forth. For the creeds, like the decisions of all popes, councils, and individual churches (see Articles XIX, XXI), are the work of sinful men, to whom no personal infallibility was ever promised; therefore they must be verified by appeal to what the homilist calls God’s ‘infallible Word’ (we cited him above, p.36), and not seen as themselves an ‘infallible word’ which should control our interpretation of Scripture. The presupposition of our formularies is that Holy Scripture, interpreted from within itself in the manner which we have described, by means of grammatico-historical exegesis and the analogy of faith, constitutes a clear, definite, and obligatory rule of faith and life, by which all belief and behaviour, corporate and private, must be directed, and to which all controversies between Christians must be brought for settlement.
Such is the historic Anglican position: is it the right one? Unquestionably it is. It rests on two principles. The first is that all Christians of all ages must align themselves with the churches of New Testament times in direct subjection to the doctrinal and practical teaching of the apostles. The apostles were God’s chosen and anointed witnesses to Christ (cf. Acts 1:8, 10:39-43). Their teaching, organically linked with the Old Testament, the fulfilment of which they announced, was truth from God, revealed and inspired by Christ’s Spirit and set forth in His name and with His authority. As such it forms an authoritative standard of truth and criterion of error, not only for the apostles’ own time, but for all time. We find Paul and Peter and John all insisting that hearty acceptance of the teaching they had given, and submission to its authority, is a basic test of true spirituality and godliness, not to mention fitness for the ministry (I Cor. 14:37; II Cor. ii:3f, 13:2-10; Gal. 1:6-9; I Thess. 1:5, 2:13; II Thess. 2:13-15, 3:6-15; II Tim. 2:if, 3:13f; Tit. 1:9; II Pet. 1:12-2:3; I Jn. 2:21-24, 4:6; II Jn. 9f.). Were they back among us today, they would still say the same - perhaps even more emphatically! To throw over the authority of apostolic teaching in any degree is, to that extent, a lapse from Christianity. This is the first principle. The second is simply the incontrovertible fact that, as E. A. Litton puts it, ‘no apostolical teaching is certainly extant except that which is embalmed in the New Testament’.14 Hence it follows that the apostolic New Testament, read in conjunction with the Old, of which it is the completion, must always be our final authority and court of appeal. Christ’s Church was, and is, to be ruled by His apostles; therefore, by their providentially surviving writings. To say that Christ must be allowed to rule, that the Redeemer must be given His crown rights, is thus to say that Scripture must be allowed to rule, that the Bible must always have the last word.
THE CHURCH AND THE CANON
To turn the flank of this argument, Roman Catholics (not to mention certain Anglicans) are accustomed to argue that the authority of the post-apostolic Church as an on-going, living, Spirit-indwelt community must be prior and superior to that of the New Testament, inasmuch as it was the post-apostolic Church that established the New Testament as a ‘canon’ -that is, a yardstick - of orthodox faith. But this argument fails. The Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Sir Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity. God gave us gravity, by His work of creation, and similarly He gave us the New Testament canon, by inspiring the individual books that make it up. Newton did not create gravity, but recognized it, by considering (so it is said) the fall of an apple; similarly, the various churches of Christendom, through a gradual, unco-ordinated, seemingly haphazard and erratic process covering several centuries, came to recognize the extent and limits of the God-given canon, by checking and cross-checking the pedigree and contents of the many books that bore apostolic names, or were alleged to proceed from the apostolic circle, to find out which of them could make good their claim to be genuine apostolic products, embodying the revealed truth of which the apostles were trustees. Had one suggested to Christians of the second, third, or fourth century that by this means the Church was creating a canon for itself, choosing out some good-quality Christian literature to authorize as a standard of faith for the future, they would have shaken their heads and marvelled that anyone could dream up an idea so perverse and far from the truth. The belief that apostolic writings, as such, were inspired, and therefore intrinsically authoritative, was the presupposition of their whole inquiry. All that the churches were trying to do was to see which of the books claiming to be in some sufficient sense apostolic really were so - a question primarily of historical fact, though one on which character and content were also held to bear, both positively and negatively.15
After three centuries of inquiry, the greater part of Christendom was found to be agreed on its answer to this question, and its agreement was duly recorded by individual theologians and various conciliar decisions (though no conciliar decision, be it noted, was made at any stage to bring agreement into being). Good as the reasons certainly are for thinking that the Spirit, here as elsewhere, had led the Church to a correct discernment, the fact of having been guided to see which books have intrinsic authority can no more be held to give the Church authority over them, to limit their meaning to that which accords with its own tradition, than the fact of my having recognized what came in the post this morning as a genuine bookseller’s bill, made out to me, gives me authority over it, to pay only so much of it as I feel inclined to.
A question, however, remains. If we may not ascribe infallibility to the Church’s discernment of which books were inspired (and how can we?), then how may we be sure that our New Testament does not contain either too many books or too few? How can we be confident about the limits of the New Testament when we are so poorly placed, nearly two thousand years on, to check the early Church’s verdicts about the authorship and authenticity of each item in it? The answer is found by stringing together the following facts.
1. Christianity had both the idea and the reality of canonical Scripture from the start: for Christianity began as a Jewish sect, and Judaism was based on revering what we call the Old Testament as God’s tor ah (law, instruction). Jesus confirmed this attitude to His disciples by letting them see that in these Scriptures He recognized His Father’s voice, and that under their authority He lived and taught and died, not breaking them but fulfilling them. Naturally, therefore, pioneer missionaries like Paul gave the Old Testament to Gentile churches, which otherwise would not have known it, to function alongside apostolic teaching as their rule of faith and life. ‘All Scripture is . . . God-breathed and is useful . . . so that the man of God' - the Christian! and in this instance, the minister - ‘may be thoroughly equipped for every good work’ (2 Tim. 3:16-17). All of it was written ‘to teach ws, so that through ... the encouragement of the Scriptures we’ - we Christians! - ‘might have hope’ (Rom. 15:4; cf. 1 Cor. 10:11). It is basic to Christianity to receive the Old Testament as Christian Scripture.
2. An expectation of new canonical Scripture to stand beside the Old Testament is implicit in the work of God on which Christianity rests. New and climactic revelation came via Jesus to the apostles for the world, and it would have been incomprehensible if the God who caused His earlier revelation to be recorded for posterity had not done the same for that which completed and fulfilled it. When Jesus prayed for the whole Church, apart from the apostles, as those who should ‘believe in me through their message’ (Jn. 17:20), He assumed permanent availability of that word, which looks very much like anticipating an apostolic New Testament.
3. A New Testament (as it was called from the second century) actually emerged, as a collection of more or less occasional writings which all assume authority as authentic communication of God’s once-for-all revelation in Christ, and whose authors all identify themselves either by name or by relationship (thus, the author of Hebrews, anonymous to us, is a well-known colleague of Timothy [Heb. 13:23]). Theories of pseudonymous authorship of New Testament books (what was once called forgery) have been diligently explored over many years; here I can only say that none known to me convinces me, and I see strong external grounds in every case for concluding that each book is by the person whose name it bears, quite apart from the evidence of its own internal quality.
4. A number of spurious books ascribed to apostolic authors exist for comparison with our New Testament, and the drop in intellectual, moral, and spiritual calibre is very marked, as are the theological lapses into worlds of commonplace fantasy and magic. In the light of this comparison, there is no reason to think that anything unauthentic crept into the New Testament, or that anything available by a genuine apostolic writer was negligently left out.
5. The Church corporately testifies that the New Testament evidences itself to be the Word of God in a way that no other literature save the Old Testament does. As Jewish guards said of Jesus, ‘No-one ever spoke the way this man does’ (Jn. 7:46), so God’s people down the generations say of the New Testament, ‘Never did writing make such an impact on heart and mind and conscience, communicating God, giving knowledge of oneself before God, mediating fellowship with Christ and renewing disordered lives.’ Thus has the New Testament evidenced itself through the Spirit to be the Word of God; thus it does still.
The action of making us aware of the unique divine quality of biblical books, the divinity which is the source of the power and authority with which we find them addressing us, is the so-called ‘inner witness of the Holy Spirit’ in relation to Scripture. This ‘inner witness’ is not a particular experience or feeling, nor is it a private revelation; it is another name for that enlightenment of our sinful hearts whereby we come to recognize and receive divine realities for what they are - Jesus Christ as our divine Saviour, Lord and Friend, and Holy Scripture as God’s Word to us.16
The Church’s corporate witness to the divinity of the New Testament is not invalidated by individual oddities like Luther’s belief that the ‘strawy’ epistle of James had no place in the canon since (as he thought, though Lutherans generally, from his lieutenant Melanchthon on, have known better) it contradicts Paul on the point of justification by faith only, without works. Were Paul and James really at odds, Luther’s attitude would be defensible, for the inspiring Spirit of God does not contradict Himself; but in fact they differ only in their use of words, while agreeing in substance.17 And though Luther’s view that they were at odds was a scholar’s opinion, honestly held, knowledge that he was virtually alone in it should surely have given him pause. Who was Luther to challenge a book which down the centuries had imposed itself on, and been accepted by, the whole Church as part of the New Testament canon? Equally, who am I, and who are you, to do likewise? Surely it will be humbler and wiser to suppose that any present inability on your part or mine to recognize the Word of God in a particular canonical book, or to square what it seems to say with other biblical teaching, reflects a defect in us rather than in it; particularly when (as is invariably the case) learned and devout men can offer a possible, and usually a convincing, resolution of the problem that puzzles us.
So the answer to our question is that the Christian must ask himself, not whether he has reason enough to accept the Church’s canon, but whether he has reason enough not to. In reality, he never has.
We need to be clear that the continuing controversies between ‘Reformed’ and ‘Catholic’ Christians over such matters as the priesthood of the clergy, the apostolic succession, the authority of the episcopate, the infallibility of the pope, transubstantiation and the ‘real presence’, the mass-sacrifice, purgatory, indulgences, mariolatry, and the nature and number of the sacraments, cannot in principle be settled until both sides agree that the appeal to Scripture, interpreted in terms of itself - in this sense, sola Scriptura, Scripture alone - is final.18