The so-called “‘Achilles’ heel’ of Protestant Christianity” is the problem of the canon: how can we know that we have the right books in the New Testament? If Christians, individually and corporately as the church, are called to dedicate their lives in their entirety to God and the gospel based on Bible, then it is certainly critical that those books which constitute that ultimate rule and authority actually be the inspired Word of God. But it seems that many things could go quite wrong. What if the books are not inspired, in whole or in part? What if there are inspired books missing from the canon? Even supposing that they are inspired, how could anyone know that they are? Is the Christian able to reasonably account for the origin and authority of his own canon?
The question addressed in Michael J. Kruger’s Canon Revisited is not a de facto one, that is, whether or not Christian belief in the authority and inspiration of the New Testament canon is true or false belief.1 Though this is important, the question at hand is a de jure one: whether or not Christians can have a rational basis for their thinking that they know the New Testament canon. A clarification is immediately necessary. The question is not about how a person comes to believe in the New Testament canon as Scripture (which may come about in many different ways), nor is it about how it may be “[proven] to the skeptic (in a way that would satisfy him) that these books are indeed from God.”2 Rather it is a question of epistemological accounting—even supposing that it happens to be a true belief, is Christian belief in the canon justified, or warranted? Here we say Christian with reference to a Christian worldview, not merely to say that the belief is a Christian one: can the Christian faith “give an adequate account for how it can be known that these books are canonical?”2
The matter may seem like a purely historical or scientific one—indeed, the main of modern scholarship has taken a heavily (and thoroughly fallacious) evidentialist approach, focusing on dates and textual variations and historical causes. Above all one ought to be objective in his approach toward such matters, eschewing his own religious and philosophical propensities, to be an utterly neutral observer undertaking an utterly neutral investigation. Of course, this is itself a dogmatic position, and one which forgets the fact quite blindly. There is no religiously neutral approach to historical study, just as there is no religiously neutral approach to anything.3 The world is not divided into those who import religiosity into scholarship and those who remain somehow outside religion; it is divided into those who acknowledge the presence of theological presuppositions and confessional categories and those who do not.
It is not to say that historical characteristics have no bearing on the issue of canon; in fact, they are quite important. But history alone cannot answer the question. For historical positions do not merely turn on differences in data or technique but stem from prior and “broader methodological, epistemological, [and] theological” commitments, which in the context of the present question Kruger calls the canonical model.4 One’s canonical model gives rise to the process or system by which books are determined or authenticated to be canonical or non-canonical. Then, it should be unsurprising that to speak of the Christian religion’s ability to account for its canon—the de jure question—should concern the Christian canonical model and therefore include much talk about Christian understandings of God and history and revelation. It must concern the Christian understanding of knowledge, which, in the biblical view, is always with reference to and depends on God.5 Canon Revisited is therefore “unashamedly theological in its approach.”6