************ Sermon on Belgic Confession Article 4 ************
Doctrine: The Canon of Scripture
By: Rev. Adrian Dieleman
This sermon was preached on February 1, 1998
B.C. 4
2 Timothy 3:10-17
"The Canon of Scripture"
I We Can't Quarrel With the Canon of Scripture
A Is Iraq producing weapons of mass destruction? Has it ever tried to produce a nuclear bomb, or a chemical bomb, or weapons for germ warfare? I've heard two answers. One answer is "Yes, Saddam Hussein is trying to produce weapons of mass destruction." The other answer is "No, Saddam Hussein is not trying to produce weapons of mass destruction." How do we know which to believe? To determine the accuracy of the claims, we want to know their source. Is the claim based upon hearsay? Is the claim based upon the ravings of a lunatic? Is the claim based upon a credible expert in the field? Is the claim made by someone who has proven themselves to be truthful and trustworthy?
Is Saddam Hussein producing weapons of mass destruction? Right away, we know we can dismiss the claim that he is not because that claim comes from Baghdad and Saddam Hussein, and time after time they have proven themselves to be liars and not worthy of trust and belief. And, right away we know we can believe the claim that he is making or has made weapons of mass destruction because that information comes from the United Nations and the Pentagon and is confirmed by the news media.
B We all know that the Bible was written by human beings. The human authors wrote human words with human pens in their own individual vocabulary, grammar, and style. None of the human authors were omniscient. Yet these human writings claim to be more than mere human opinions. Jeremiah did not preface his prophetic utterances by saying, "I think," or "It is my opinion that," or "I consider." He prefaces his declaration by saying, "This is what the Lord says." In our text from 2 Timothy, Paul sums this up by saying, "All Scripture is God-breathed."
We usually use this text to say that Scripture is inspired. To inspire something means "to breathe into it." The word that Paul uses, however, is not the word for breathing in but for breathing out. A more literal translation would be "All Scripture is God-expired."
What difference does it make whether we speak of inspiration or expiration? A significant difference. The term inspiration says something about how the Spirit of God worked in and upon and with human writers to insure that what they wrote is the Word of God. On the other hand, the term expiration says something about the source of Scripture. "All Scripture is God-breathed." "All Scripture is God-expired." In other words, "All Scripture is from God." God is the source.
The source of the Bible is not an unimpeachable, reliable, and trustworthy human — for there is no such human. Rather, the source of Scripture is the all-knowing, all-seeing, omniscient God.
C I am sure you realize what this means. The Belgic Confession says this means that with the Bible, the canon of Scripture, "there can be no quarrel at all." We can't quarrel with the Bible, we can't disagree with it, because its source is God. This means that the Bible, like God, is infallible. We learned last time that to say Scripture is infallible is to say 3 things:
1. Scripture does not deceive; it does not tell us one thing and mean another; it does not stretch the truth, twist the truth, or falsify the truth.
2. Scripture is inerrant; it does not contain mistakes and errors; it is not wrong on any fact or figure.
3. Scripture is non-failing; we can rely on it; we can trust it; we can stake our lives upon it.
D Many scholars within the church no longer believe that the Bible is infallible or inerrant. They have come to the conclusion, for instance, that Genesis is wrong. They say God did not form man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; rather, man evolved from a sub-human species. They say there was no snake talking to a real Eve in the Garden of Eden. They say there was no flood which covered all the high mountains and killed every living thing on the face of the earth.
Many scholars within the church do not believe in an infallible, inerrant Word of God. Called into question are not only the events of Genesis, but also the miracles of Christ, the virgin birth, the resurrection, and anything else which seems impossible or incredible by human standards. These scholars believe that one must go through Scripture and pick out all that is unreliable and inaccurate and unbelievable and throw them out. These scholars are forgetting something: if the Bible errs, then it is not and can not be the Word of the omniscient God; and, if the Bible is the Word of God, then the Bible does not err and with it we cannot quarrel!
II The Formation of the Canon
A "All Scripture is God-breathed." God is its source. Therefore, with it "there can be no quarrel at all."
Having said that, the Confession looks at the canon of Scripture. What books properly belong in Scripture? What books are part of the holy, inspired, expired Word of God? What are the "canonical books with which there can be no quarrel at all"? This was a burning issue at the time Guido de Brés wrote the Belgic Confession. On the one side were the Roman Catholics, who enlarged the canon to include certain apocryphal books. On the other side were the Lutherans, who reduced the canon by leaving out certain books. Luther, for instance, called James "an epistle of straw" that did not belong in the Bible because it seemed to contradict Paul's teaching that salvation comes by grace through faith and not by good works. Luther also refused to include the letter of Jude as part of the canon because it quotes two apocryphal books, the Assumption of Moses and the Book of Enoch.
The term "canon" comes from a Greek word. Its literal meaning is "any straight rod or bar, especially to keep a thing straight." To use everyday language, it means a "measure," "rule," or "norm."
The canon of Scripture, then, is a collection or list of writings recognized as the measure, rule, or norm by which the faith and practice of the church is to be judged and kept straight. We know that norm or canon as the 66 books of the Bible.
B Article 4 makes a point of saying that the canon of Scripture is found in two volumes: the Old and New Testaments. That was and is of importance against the teachings of those who minimize the value of the Old Testament. In other words, God's authoritative Word for today is not to be found just in the New Testament.
C How did we end up with the Bible that we have today? The history of the Old Testament canon is somewhat vague. According to Jewish tradition, it was Ezra who first compiled the whole Old Testament canon. We don't know whether or not this is true. But we do know that the formation of the Old Testament canon involved a process that stretched out over a number of centuries. During that time there was some dispute as to the canonicity of Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Song of Songs, and Esther. However, by the time the Old Testament was translated into the Greek in the second century B.C., every book which we recognize as part of the Old Testament canon was included. The Old Testament Scriptures used by Jesus and His disciples is exactly the same as ours. The books were grouped, numbered, and arranged differently, but the writings are the same. It is clear from the New Testament itself that the early church regarded the 39 Old Testament books as the Word of God. They are repeatedly quoted in the New Testament as authoritative.
D Most of the 27 books of the New Testament canon were written within forty years of the death of Jesus, and all of them within seventy years, but it was not until A.D. 397 that the canon was finally agreed upon. The four Gospels and the 13 letters of St. Paul were the first to be accepted, and placed on the same footing as the Old Testament. Doubts persisted, however, in the case of Hebrews, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 & 3 John, and Revelation. On the other hand, certain writings, such as the Shepherd of Hermas or First Clement, were admitted by individual churches, though rejected by the majority. A Council held in Rome in 382 gave a complete list of the canonical books of both the Old and New Testaments, which — except for the inclusion of the apocryphal books listed in Article 6 — is identical to our list.
In regards to the New Testament canon, two rules of thumb were followed. First, every book in the New Testament canon had to be written by an apostle or a close associate of one of the apostles. Second, every book in the New Testament canon had to be widely used and accepted by the churches as being the authoritative Word of God.
Heresies and false teachers played an important part in the formation of the New Testament canon. One of the earliest controversies concerned Marcion. A wealthy shipowner and church leader in Rome, Marcion had become deeply impressed by the Apostle Paul's teaching that the coming of Christ had marked the end of Jewish law. Marcion misinterpreted this to mean the elimination and rejection of the Old Testament canon. So he sought to replace the Hebrew Bible with a group of Christian writings. His canon included his revision of 10 of Paul's letters and his own revised version of Luke's Gospel. Marcion caused the church to seriously think about what was and was not part of the canon.
Another heresy which hastened the formation of the New Testament canon was Montanism which claimed new revelation from the Spirit over and above that given by Scripture. To stop such claims the church had to settle the question of what belonged and what did not belong in the Bible.
The infiltration of Gnosticism further hastened the need to establish the canon. The Gnostics taught, among other things, that Jesus was not fully human and that He had not been crucified in the flesh. What's more, heretical gnostic writings to support this position began to circulate among the churches. Some of the writings — the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip, for instance — claimed falsely to be the works of Apostles in order to gain acceptance for the gnostic teachings among the early Christians. Again, these heresies raised the question of what was and was not part of the authoritative, inspired, expired, Word of God.
III The Canon Itself
A Article 4 lists for us the authoritative canon. Permit me a few comments about this list. Some of you may have noticed that Lamentations is missing; probably, it is included under Jeremiah — who was long thought to be Lamentations' author. Article 4 speaks of the Psalms of David, but we know that some of the psalms are not David's. Similarly, we know that Paul did not write Hebrews and that Ecclesiastes contains the teachings of Solomon but was not written by him. Furthermore, in confessing Moses as the author of the first five books, we do not claim that he actually wrote the last chapter which records his death. Who wrote that remains an unanswered mystery.
While acknowledging these problems with Article 4 we realize its purpose is not to bind us on the question of human authorship. Rather, its purpose is to define the canon for us. Article 4 speaks loud and clear about the canon. "There can be no quarrel at all" over what is and what is not in the canon.
B At the same time, if we accept the Bible as the holy and divine Scriptures, then we also have to accept what it says about its human authorship. Did you know, in the New Testament there are 85 references to Moses and what he wrote and said? The Bible itself views Moses as the author of the first five books. Yet this past week I had the chance to read an article that maintains that the author of the oldest parts of the Bible — the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Joseph, and Moses — was a woman. In an issue a couple of years ago, TIME Magazine — tongue in cheek — called her Ms. Moses. Modern scholarship says prophecy of future events is impossible so Daniel is no longer acknowledged as the author of the book which bears his name; furthermore, the book of Daniel is dated around the year 200 B.C. instead of 600 B.C. and placed after instead of before the events that are predicted. Let me quote something I came across this past week:
A computer program was recently used to prove that St. Paul is the author of only 4 of the 13 epistles attributed to him in the New Testament. Two researchers fed the computer a quarter of a million words of Greek prose to reach this conclusion. They said the method could be used to determine the authorship of any part of the Bible.
Truly amazing, isn't it, that a mindless machine questions the Word of God?! If its findings were correct, they would make Paul a liar, for he claims the authorship of all 13 epistles. Just think, a lifeless mechanism "proving" that the Bible is not true! The computer is now a disputer.
Now for the clincher. The same computer program was used to do an analysis of the book in which these conclusions were written. It was proven that the man who wrote the book couldn't have been its author.
C In talking about the canon of Scripture, we have to avoid at all costs the view that it is the church or a church council which established the canon. Rather, all that the church has done is publicly confess what writings have shown themselves to be the authoritative, inspired, expired, Word of God. The church does not establish or institute the canon of Scripture; she merely accepts the canon because it is God, not the church, Who has given the books of Scripture their authority. The church does not clothe the books of Scripture with authority; rather, she simply confesses which books she has accepted as revealing themselves to be holy and divine. The canon does not derive its authority from the church; the task of the church is merely that of custodian and witness.
Although we recognize a human element in the long process of canonization, we have to confess that God was active in guiding the church. This we believe was a special ministry of the Holy Spirit. He not only inspired the writers but also preserved their writings. He directed the gradual spread of these writings throughout the churches. He enabled the church to discern by faith that these writings constituted God's Word. This gracious activity of the Spirit enabled the church to preserve and spread the Holy Word throughout the ages.
Conclusion
In Article 4 Guido de Brés says, "We include in the Holy Scripture the two volumes of the Old and New Testaments. They are canonical books with which there can be no quarrel at all."
The story is told of a minister who took a seat in a dining car on a train traveling along the Hudson River. Opposite him was an atheist who, seeing his clerical collar, started a discussion. "I see you are a clergyman." "Yes," came the reply. "I am a minister of the gospel." "I suppose you believe the Bible." The clergyman, orthodox in his views, responded, "I certainly do believe the Bible to be the Word of God." "But aren't there things in the Bible you can't explain?" With humility the minister answered, "Yes, there are places in the Bible too hard for me to understand." With an air of triumph as though he had cornered the preacher, the atheist said, "Well, what do you do then?" Unruffled, the clergyman went on eating his dinner--which happened to be Hudson shad, a tasty fish but noted for its bony structure. Looking up, he said, "Sir, I do just the same as when eating this shad. When I come to the bones, I put them to the side of the plate and go on enjoying my lunch. I leave the bones for some fool to choke on."