Some thoughts on Canon and a Video by D.A. Carson

I’ve always mused over the question: Did the church “discover” or “create” the canon? On the one hand, the formation of the canon was not simply a haphazard or even political decision to impose a body of literature on a diverse church. There was already in circulation a body of literature – Evangelium, Paulinum, Apostolos, Apocalypse plus other writings like the Didache and Shepherd of Hermas – that were venerated as sacred by many persons in the early church, precisely because they were thought to transmit the teaching of Jesus and the Apostles. The question was in later centuries, what is the universally agreed collection of sacred literature for the churches? The problem is that the scriptures do not tell you what books should be in the canon! It was the church looking to its apostolic foundations and being vigilant against spurious writings that led to several “canonical” lists being drawn up and then finally agreed upon at several councils.  I would suggest that’s God’s inspiration of scripture applies not only to the immediate production of the autographs, but to the transmission and canonization of the Christian Scriptures. Obviously, the church is created by the Verba Dei, the divine word, but it was charged with putting the scriptures into its canonical location. The Lord and his Word stand over and above the church, but it is the church who is the instrument to receive, revere, and ratify the divine word. This might sound way too “catholic” since it brings bibliology (doctrine of scripture) and ecclesiology (doctrine of the church) into close proximity. But we have no other choice. We cannot imagine the first Christian travelling around Palestine, Asia, and Greece with an inspiration-o-meter and collecting books that garnered a high reading. Furthermore, the problem with (hyper-)Protestantism is that it divorces scripture from church. This is what theological liberalism does. In fact, William Wrede argued that to accept the canon as the authoritative norm for theology was to bring oneself under the authority of the bishops and councils who developed the canon. Thus, whereas the Reformation sought escape from church corruption through the authority of scripture over the church, Liberal Protestants prosecute the logic by saying that one must in fact escape the authority of scripture in order to fully escape the authority of the church who gave us the canon in the first place. I have more on this in a forthcoming volume called Evangelical Theology, but that is all I’ll say for now.

See also the following video by D.A. Carson on “How can we trust the Canon created by the Early Church?”