Gavin Ortlund has recommended The Church of Rome at the Bar of History by William Webster as a good resource for Protestants to read in efforts to evaluate the claims of Roman Catholicism. As I wrote in Part 1 of my response, two topics feature in Chapter 1: the sufficiency of Scripture and canon. In my first post, I focused upon the assumptions that are operating in Webster’s exposition of 2 Timothy 3.16-17. In this post I want us to wrestle with perspectives on the canon. Part II is here.
Grappling with Perspective and Asking the Right Questions
In the first chapter of The Church of Rome at the Bar of History, William Webster argues that the Protestant canon was established as early as the second century and that the Catholic inclusion of the Apocrypha was an erroneous, historically-late stratagem to manufacture textual support for controversial doctrines such as purgatory in the Reformation period. Now, in this article I am not terribly concerned about Catholic motivations behind the Tridentine definition of the canon nor about which books should be included. While such questions prompted passionate responses from me as an inexperienced Christian, they faded in importance and relevance as I was considering Catholicism because one does not need the Apocryphal books to assess Catholic doctrine positively. I didn’t use it at all because, as a Protestant, I denied their doctrinal value. Although such questions have value, I think it is more helpful for Protestants to take a step back and focus at a ten thousand foot view. I want to address the question: what does the historical development of the canon mean? And to a significant degree, the answer is important even if Webster is right, and the canon was settled in the second century.
The best answers come from asking the right questions, and right questions often depend upon having the proper perspective to even pose. To answer detailed questions about the texture and composition of mountain foliage, you need to touch the plants. But to answer questions about the topography and terrain of a mountain, or its situation in the larger range, you need to study it from above. Questions about the content of the canon are downstream from more fundamental questions about the canonization process.
It is critical to differentiate facts from interpretations of those facts. Two people can look at the same data and derive very opposite perspectives. There are multiple reasons for this, but there is a pinched approach to facts that hinders the pursuit of truth, causing us to miss the forest for the trees—to make small-scale observations while passing over larger ones. I want us to avoid that. What good is it to pan for gold if you are not even on the same mountain where it was spotted?
In our pursuit, I aim to ask: What should we make of those facts? How representative are those facts of the larger whole? And how might we approach our conversations from the perspective of unity?
Setting up the Problem
Webster’s discussion of canon on pp. 7-14 aims to deny the canonicity of the deuterocanonical books (also known by Protestants as the “Apocrypha”): “If it can be shown that these books were not accepted by the early Church as part of the legitimate scriptural canon, then the legitimacy of these distinctive Roman doctrines [like Purgatory] is destroyed” (7).
Let it be immediately noted that Webster’s articulated (and we might assume chief) problem with the Apocrypha are the (Roman) doctrines that seem to stem from it. Now, if one insists that all legitimate doctrine must derive from a written canon, then one should not use the doctrines they don’t like to make judgments about the source material. This is putting the cart before the horse. You don’t critique the canon on the basis of doctrines you’ve already deemed false; you use the canon to derive which doctrines ought to be deemed true. At this historical juncture, our likes or dislikes of any given doctrine should play no role in assessing the boundaries of our canon (although such preferences might raise the question). In any case, some problems surface in trying to move from a demonstration that Apocryphal books were not accepted by the early Church as canon to the conclusion that any given distinctive Roman doctrine “is destroyed”. The reader would do well to spend some time getting a handle on them.
First, a non sequitur is in play. Even if Webster’s demonstration weren’t flawed (but see below), it cannot achieve the end for which it aims. To discredit any given doctrine, he also needs to demonstrate (at least) three more things. First, he needs to demonstrate that the doctrine in question came exclusively from the Apocrypha (not just that it can be grounded in it). If the belief was derived from earlier Jewish writings, Jesus’ unwritten words (i.e., the agrapha) or any oral tradition (Jewish or apostolic), convictions of the post-apostolic early church, books of the Protestant canon, later theological reflection, Platonism, or any mixture of these options, the doctrine can stand on its own. Second, Webster needs to demonstrate that no early church Father included books from the Apocrypha in the canon. How else could we put the issue to rest, given that there is an acknowledged diversity of viewpoint and the concession by all that for some period of time the canon was not settled? Third, for his own argument to have validity, he must demonstrate that nothing outside a fixed, written canon (whatever it happens to be) can carry dogmatic authority. But if any authority resided elsewhere (and we all agree that it did in the cases of Jesus and the apostles), then we should recognize that different sources with differing levels of authority were cross-pollinating.
However, Webster does not attempt to demonstrate any of these three things. If he had, and his arguments were compelling, then he might claim that an authoritative textual basis for certain Roman doctrines would be undermined. But little else. This represents a substantial disconnect between premise and conclusions, and he does not seem to be aware of it.
The second major problem is that none of these dependencies can be established. In fact, the assumptions that Protestants make beg the question we are exploring. For example, the first and third are contingent upon this theological question: Can the source of a doctrine come from oral tradition, a new theological question, or theological clarification and/or development? When a Protestant says “no”, he is relying upon the same theological disagreement between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism (i.e., the sufficiency of Scripture) that we are trying to explore. It is possible that the belief in Purgatory came about from any number of things, including reflection upon canonical books everybody agrees on, or it may have existed in one form or another from the very beginning. Indeed, third century Christians like Origen believed there were periods (i.e., “ages”) after death wherein the soul continued to develop.
Since this fundamental disagreement falls so far down the stack of presuppositions, it has been argued with little progress and less consensus for five centuries. And it will never find that consensus because the question deals with (theological) presuppositions that, although historically estranged, nevertheless predominantly operate in the rational domain, which prioritizes all evidence, empirical and non-empirical, in whatever way it wishes. Reason can always find reasons to support its cherished presuppositions.
For example, everybody agrees that a period existed between Jesus’ and the apostles’ words and their written capture, and more time still transpired until their subsequent solidification into something approximating a fixed form. And everyone agrees that during those times the key functions of the church (i.e., worship, teaching, preaching, discipleship, missionary activity, etc.) occurred quite successfully within that matrix of oral and (unfixed) written testimony. But to the obvious question that arises, “Why should we anticipate any change?”, the Protestant mind rationalizes that the oral locus of truth and action was merely a temporary arrangement. Therefore, orality, instead of welcoming a fixed written word into the same important and symbiotic dialectic that had operated successfully from the beginning, abdicated its role entirely. Why should we buy this?
The third major problem is that Webster’s question assumes things it should not. For example, what do we mean by “accepted”? What periods and authors are we to include in “the early Church”? What do we mean by “legitimate”? Finally, what do we mean by “canon”? These may seem self-explanatory to us, but the data quickly reveals that this isn’t the case. For starters, what time period delimits the inquiry? If a fourth or fifth century father (like Augustine) includes the Apocrypha, what should be done about that? If a third-century father (like Origen) accepted the reading of apocryphal (and other pseudepigraphal) works, what about that? If an early father commented that he was aware of a book’s disputed status, now what? What if he then took no stance? Which camp benefits?
Next, Webster hasn’t defined how to prove that the Apocrypha wasn’t accepted by the early Church as canon. For example, how much of the Church must deny it? What do we do with books over which there was dispute, both for those that didn’t make it into the canon as well as for those that did?
Finally, and most significantly, Webster’s endeavor depends upon the assumption that there was a fixed canon in the early Church. What do we do if we discover (as we will) that there simply was no fixed canon in the earliest centuries? And if not, it would seem that the Church was either still wrestling with the question, in which case we would expect there to be a diversity of viewpoints, none of which can be considered representative or superior apart from some later standard, or it means that the Church wasn’t all that interested in fixing a canon. These are important questions of perspective.
Webster’s approach suffers from two further problems. First, he admits two things, right off the bat, that bear upon some fundamental questions about canon and that undermine the legitimacy of his approach. The first is, “The first council in the history of the Western Church which officially defined the limits of the scriptural canon was the Roman Catholic Council of Trent . . . . It included the apocryphal writings” (8). Now, let’s think about this for a moment. If the Church never defined the limits of the scriptural canon until Trent, this means that the canon remained unsettled at the churchwide level for sixteen hundred years. And if it remained unsettled, what is the point in showing that some groups in the early period didn’t know about or accept the Apocryphal works? Unless it can be shown that everyone in the early period believed the same way, we have a situation where Christians held different opinions, and asserting the Protestant canon as the true canon is, in principle, simply a misleading and anachronistic thing to assert.
That’s what makes Webster’s second admission all the more perplexing: “Trent pointed to the North African provincial Councils of Hippo in 393 A.D. and Carthage in 397 A.D under the leadership of Augustine, in which, it [Trent] claimed, the ‘Church’ formally defined the content of the canon including the Apocrypha” (8). By so saying, Webster admits that it cannot be shown that everyone in the early period believed in just one way. What’s more, there simply cannot be a right canon until a council decides upon it. And he shows that when the actual question came to a conciliar decision in Latin-speaking African provinces, the council, with Saint Augustine, established the legitimacy of the Apocrypha. In light of this, doesn’t it become critical to find councils that adopt a different view? And wouldn’t this merely establish that the question remained open at the church-wide level for hundreds of years? The truth, we’ll see, is that although there were books that were (almost) universally accepted, the canon was not fixed.
Now, Webster seems partially aware of the conundrum that has been created. In efforts to undermine the universality of these conciliar decisions, he relativizes all the evidence he will spend the rest of the chapter providing by making this (true) claim: “Because these councils were geographically provincial, they could not speak for the Church as a whole” (8). He then proceeds to evince the testimony of various individual Christians he believes reject the Apocryphal books, each of whom is just as “provincial” as the councils he wishes to reject, and each of which represents just one viewpoint, on a topic with a diversity of opinions, from that province. The aware reader will recognize the inconsistency here.
Webster does not provide evidence of any councils that affirmed otherwise, and he denies that the Tridentine council was a worldwide council because it was called after the Reformation had started. It is noteworthy, however, that Trent was convened just 28 years after Luther posted his 95 theses, precisely because a rogue set of priests and laymen had made a decision about the canon without consulting the larger church. In other words, the Reformers pressed the canon issue. Had the council been called a hundred years earlier, it is doubtful there would have been any issues with the deuterocanonical books.
Before we go any further, I want us to see the situation clearly. Webster wants to have his cake and eat it to. He wants to reject the testimony of councils (and Augustine) while accepting that of individuals. He wants us to believe that the position of the early church reflects the Protestant canon by showing us some Christians who thought this, but he doesn’t want to accept the clear implication of having no church-wide decision on the matter, namely, that a valid diversity existed and makes impossible any claims to a fixed canon (as we understand canonization) in the early period. And he is willing to use an argument that undermines all his evidence in efforts to undermine the counter-evidence, and he doesn’t seem to realize it.
What does this amount to? I said earlier that there is a certain single-minded approach to facts that can cause us to miss the forest for the trees. But we must not miss the forest, for the same woods encompasses us all, and unity depends upon us recognizing it and our place within it. What good is it for a few trees to deny their place in the larger forest? Will they not succumb to the same fire that consumes the rest? Will they not blight from the same fungus and suffer under the same pestilence? Will they not fall by the same deforestation axes? Conversely, do they not benefit from the deep-rooted windbreakers during strong gales? Do they not drink from the same bubbling brooks? Do they not breathe and feed under the same sun? Do they not take root in the same ground? Are they not tended by the same Tree Shepherd?
Part II of this article may be found here.