externally authenticated canonical models

Canon Revisited seeks to address the de jure objection to Christian belief in the inspiration and authority of the New Testament canon: even supposing that the belief is a true belief, Christians have no way of knowing that it is true.¹ In other words, Christians are not warranted in holding the belief rationally, since there is no justification for it. Though the question may seem alarmingly circular—if one assumes that Scripture is inspired and authoritative, why is there need to justify it?—but that a statement is true is distinct from one’s knowing that it is true. It may be raining outside, but if I am in a deep underground cell where I cannot see the rain, hear the drops, nor feel the moisture, then it is another matter to say that I know it is raining. I may sincerely believe that it is raining (because I believe that my sneezing three times within a minute usually means it is raining), and I happen to be right in that moment, but arguably I cannot be said to know the fact. Truth does not necessarily imply epistemic access.

How then can belief in the twenty-seven New Testament books as the ultimate rule and authority be justified? Kruger undertakes this question through the examination of canonical models. A model encapsulates the methodological, philosophical, and theological commitments which ultimately drive the process by which Scripture and the canon are authenticated—and determine whether or not the canon thus formed can properly function as the Christian’s rule. Naturally, then, the Christian canonical model begins with the inspiration and authority of Scripture itself, and the task is to show that Scripture “testifies to the fact that God has created the proper epistemic environment wherein belief in the New Testament canon can be reliably formed,” and that such a canon can function as the church’s ultimate rule and authority.² In this way, the Scripture is self-authenticating.

But in the initial two chapters, Kruger first considers a variety of canonical models—candidate models, one might say—whose characteristics will inform the self-authenticating model. They are divided roughly into two broad categories. Community-determined canonical models understand the canon as something “established or constituted by the people—either individually or corporately—who have received these books as Scripture.”³ The New Testament books are canonical not because of intrinsic qualities of the text but because the community has responded and ascribed to it such status. These models may appear quite different yet share this fundamental characteristic. Of course, the historical-critical model prevalent in the modern academy is one example, and it views the development of the canon (as all historical developments) as something of an accident in which so-called orthodox strains within the early church won out against their rivals, whether due to ordinary chance or political jockeying. The New Testament canon is the church’s self-description, perhaps especially against the heterodox. Needless to say, that the canon is entirely human-conditioned and devoid of divine involvement, though something that higher critics regularly attempt to prove, is the consequence of the historical-critical model’s precommitment to philosophical naturalism. This commitment is epistemologically precarious, though we will not discuss this now. Such naturalistic presuppositions are readily rejected by other canonical models, yet the canon’s fundamental determination by community response is shared, Kruger argues, by such disparate approaches as the Roman Catholic dogma (canon as decreed by the church), the so-called canonical-criticism (canon as the final redaction of the text), and the existentialism-neoorthodoxy of Barthian tradition (canon as defined by subjective encounter). Though we will not consider any of these deeply here, it can be said that these models rightly recognise the role of the churches in the development of the canon but make the mistake of absolutising the ecclesial aspect such that “it becomes the defining characteristic of canon.”⁴ A canon which is derived and established by the church is unable to rule over the church. Of course, to the higher critic this is typically no problem at all—he is quite happy to “deconstruct” the canon entirely—but for the Christian “the canon has so much become the church’s book that it is unable to be God’s book.”⁴

Whereas community-determined models focus on the reception of the New Testament books, historically determined models seek to establish the canon by investigation of their historical origins. One manifestation of this approach is the canon-within-the-canon model. The canon clearly includes much problematic material, said Kurt Aland in 1962, hence one must unearth the “canon within the canon” containing the genuine “core.”⁵ The methodologies are typically shared with historical-critical scholarship, and the search for the “historical” Jesus has all but consumed the post-Enlightenment academy. Besides the embarrassingly diverse and contradictory conclusions of higher-critical methodologies, philosophical and theological convictions inevitably creep back in. The canon is subjected to some standard chosen by the scholar—whether or not it teaches, say, “moral improvement,” or an egalitarian agenda, or the liberation of the oppressed; or even, as Luther famously wrote, “whatever preaches Christ.”⁶ The key question seldom answered is where that standard comes from and how it may be known, beyond the redactor’s private motives and concerns. Even J.D. Crossan, a founding member of the Jesus Seminar, laments that “it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.”⁷ The criteria-of-canonicity model encounters a similar issue. It appeals to criteria—orthodoxy, usage, and, principally, apostolicity—to demonstrate, via neutral historical investigation, the truth of the canon. We have already noted that, though Habermas should like to suggest that “we just must be careful not to read biases into the [historical] accounts,” neutral historical reconstruction is a Enlightenment illusion; nor does the Bible speak of so-called neutrality as a virtue.⁸ Additionally, whence these criteria? Again, it is not to say that the historicity and apostolicity of the New Testament books are not important—indeed, the model helpfully identifies these aspects as data of significance—but historical evidence cannot stand alone; it is not self-interpreting. This is the problem shared by all such externally determined canonical models: the canon is subjected to standards and measures external to Scripture itself, destroying its capacity to function as the ultimate rule over our lives, including our standards and measures. As much as the authority of the canon is dependent upon the church in community-determined models, in historically determined models it is contingent on the subjective and fragile accords of historical methodology. Hence “the canon ceases to be a norm that guides our historical investigations, but becomes merely the product of our historical investigations.”⁹

The flaw of these models is that “they all ground the authority of the canon in something outside the canon itself.”¹⁰ A canon which supposedly bears the very of authority of God, who is above all and “[swears] by himself”, cannot be grounded in human judgment or other lower authorities.¹¹ “If we try to validate an ultimate authority by appealing to some other authority, then we have just shown that it is not really the ultimate authority.”¹² This was the teaching of the Reformers and the foundation for sola scriptura: the canon must be self-authenticating; God himself bears witness to the authority of his Word. To answer the question of the canon then, one must engage in biblical theology. What does the Bible say about itself and how it ought to be apprehended? This does not mean that the extrabiblical data of historical study ought to be wholly diminished or ignored. They are indeed essential. Only, they are not independent of Scripture but “should always be seen as something warranted by Scripture and interpreted by Scripture”.¹³ Indeed, the self-authenticating canon testifies to its divine origins and authority through internal and external evidence, providentially received by the church and interpreted by the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit.