components of the self-authenticating canonical model

Canon Revisited argues that “God has created the proper epistemic environment wherein belief in the New Testament canon can be reliably formed.”¹ Recall that the question at hand is the de jure objection: even supposing that the New Testament canon is true, how can Christians know that it is true? Truth does not necessarily confer epistemic access in general. But in this case, Scripture itself testifies to this epistemic environment. Unlike the externally authenticated models, which cannot authenticate the canon as the ultimate rule over the church, the self-authenticating canonical model properly grounds the Scripture, which bears the authority of God, who “[swears] by himself,” in itself as the ultimate authority.²

In this epistemic environment, it is as Christ says: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.”³ Christ’s voice is heard, and it is recognised as such by those whom he knows. For it bears the qualities of His voice, and those who know Christ and are known by him recognise it, just as a child recognises the call of his father or mother amidst a crowd of voices. So it is with Scripture which, being God’s Word, bears attributes of canonicity, not least among these divine qualities, or “marks” of divine origin. These attributes are recognised by his people whom he knows; the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit overcomes sin’s noetic effects to produce belief that the books are from God.

But Christ’s voice must first be heard at all, or else it cannot be followed. In the same way, the church cannot cannot recognise as canonical a book that it does not have. The church as a whole must be exposed to the book. This is quite critical; unless God providentially exposed the book to the church, then the church has no basis for supposing that it possesses a complete canon. Fortunately, Scripture attests to God’s intent in giving his Word to his people. The pattern of God’s redemptive-historical activity is to redeem a covenant community and then “give them covenantal documents that testify to that redemption.”⁴ And he is, of course, quite able to accomplish his intent. We can know, then, that the church at least knows of all the books which are canonical.

The canonical model must still, from the books available, distinguish the canonical from the non-canonical. The former books are distinguished by attributes of canonicity, for which the Scripture provides. In the first place, it is quite reasonable to expect that the Word of God should bear marks of divinity. John Murray reasons: “If the heavens declare the glory of God and therefore bear witness to their divine creator, the Scripture as God’s handiwork must also bear the imprints of his authorship.”⁵ These marks can be found in Scripture’s beauty, its efficacy, and its harmony, as say the Westminster Divines: “the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is, to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God.”⁶

Granted, however, that such marks are objectively present, how can one recognise and know that they are there? Moreover, many people do not acknowledge such marks exist nor, of course, accept Scripture as revelation from God. In fact, Scripture itself readily anticipates this: there are persons who do not “accept the things of the Spirit of God.”⁷ But those who do accept them do so thanks to the indwelling of the same Spirit. The Apostle John declares that the Spirit will “guide you into all truth,” and Paul likewise writes that “we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God.”⁸ The Spirit overcomes the noetic effects of sin to produce belief in the Scriptures.

This testimonium of the Spirit is active corporately and covenantally, just as God’s redemptive activity is covenantal. We should expect God’s covenantal documents to be received at a covenantal level. In this way, the reception of the New Testament books by the church is in fact an indicator of their canonicity. Indeed, the church’s reception is “a natural and inevitable outworking of the self-authenticating nature of Scripture.”⁹ The self-authenticating view means furthermore that, as Bavinck writes, “the testimony of the Holy Spirit is not a private opinion but the witness of the church of all ages.”¹⁰ Of course, this does not imply absolute unity amongst the church, but one should expect—and indeed, one finds—predominant unity with respect to the composition of the canon.

God’s redemptive work is furthermore historical, and the New Testament books are the “authoritative apostolic interpretation” of that “particular historical epoch in which God has acted in Jesus Christ.”¹¹ For Christ entrusted his message to his apostles, saying, “The one who hears you hears me, and the one who rejects you rejects me, and the one who rejects me rejects him who sent me.”¹² The pattern of Scripture, indeed, attests to the entrusting of God’s covenant documents to his covenant community through certain key messengers. Just as Moses and the prophets spoke with the authority of God to transmit the Scriptures of the Old Testament, the apostles “presided over the transmission of the apostolic deposit and labored to make sure the message of Christ was firmly and accurately preserved for future generations, through the help of the Holy Spirit.”¹³ Hence the New Testament is “a collection of apostolic writings—writings that bear the authoritative message of the apostles and derive from the foundational apostolic era (even if not directly from their hands).”¹⁴ Inasmuch as the New Testament books bear marks of divine origin, they bear evidence of apostolic origin, and here historical evidences as warranted by Scripture itself serve to testify to their canonicity.

This is the self-authenticating canonical model: the church is providentially exposed to the Scripture, which bears attributes of canonicity—its divine qualities, corporate reception, and apostolic origins—rightly recognised through the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit.