The Biblical Canon Controversy & Sola Scriptura
The three major branches of Christianity all disagree about which books to include in the Bible. Catholics have 73 books and two appendixes. Orthodox have 79 with two appendixes. We only have 66 books in our Bibles. The Ethiopian Church includes 86!
The Bible is the most important Christian text, and with all this confusion it's easy to understand why we'd want to clarify what God intended to be included in it. The situation isn't as dire as it might first appear. Most of the confusion centers around the Old Testament. The New Testament canon is almost universally agreed upon, but what should Christians do about the intertestimental books that include the historically indispensable Maccabees? This is where the confusion arises.
Canonical questions are especially prescient for the Churches of Christ because we believe the Bible alone communicates God's will. Every additional book we add to the Bible could potentially shift our doctrinal understanding. The Bible never tells us what books should be included in its canon, and some have pointed to this as an example of why the Bible cannot be taken as a lone authority.
Christians haven't historically viewed the Bible as a standalone authority. They saw the Bible as a product of the church. The Bible didn't create the church, the church created the Bible. The question of canonocity, then, wasn't a pressing question for the Catholic and Orthodox traditions because the institutional church could simply decide the issue with a collective decision they assumed to be guided by the Holy Spirit.
For those of us in the Church of Christ, however, the question is more difficult. We see the Bible as a blueprint the church should be patterned off of. The Bible is the final authority, but this presents the problem of who put the Bible together. The standard answer is God, but how did God do this? Our typical answer is that God guided the process through the Holy Spirit, but if God guided it then why do modern Christians disagree about what should be included? The standard reply is that the Catholics and Orthodox "added to" the Bible.
In fact, most Church of Christ members simply have no real idea where the Bible came from. Our lack of historical consciousness leads us to think the Bible just kind of fell from heaven in its current form at some point during the foggy vagueness of ancient history. The more educated members will say that Christians everywhere just agreed early on the accepted books and thus sealed the canon. Can this be true, however, when so many other books are quoted within the Bible as being authoritative? The books of Jasher and Enoch are among the extra-biblical books cited as authoritative. Does Enoch belong in the Bible?
At this point, most Church of Christ members would simply dismiss everything I'm asking and tell me I just need to "use common sense" (or something to that effect), but this isn't a real answer. This isn't good enough when it comes to securing our doctrine of the scripture, the thing upon which everything else we believe is founded.
While it's true that all three major branches of Christianity now agree on the 27 books included in the New Testament, that was not always the case. It wasn't true that early Christians simply reached a conclusion about the accepted books. The early canon lists, even those composed hundreds of years after Jesus' birth, often omit or add books from the New Testament. Consider the following chart.
It wasn't until AD 230 that we have Origin of Alexandria writing that he accepted all the current 27 books. However, Origin also admitted that six of them were disputed. Finally, in AD 397, Augustine of Hippo seems to mark the point at which the New Testament canon was agreed upon. Some commentators have written that Jerome's Latin Vulgate translation of AD 394 was the real point at which consensus was reached on the subject. Jerome's translation was a practical useful development that de facto defined the Bible.
I want to quote one commentator at length because I think he does a good job of summarizing the early church situation:
"At the turn of the fifth century (400s), St Jerome translated the Bible into vernacular Latin… Jerome did not accept the authority of all the books before him, especially some Christian works as Revelation, the epistle to the Hebrews, and the epistles of Peter. The Pope, however, pressed him to translate these, anyway... If there was any single point in time where the Biblical canon was 'decided,' this was it; for Jerome's translation, the Vulgate, eventually became the current Roman Catholic canon. In reality, however, the matter was still under discussion after Jerome’s time. The Synod of Trullo (692), for example, discussed the canon, and other writers such as Nicephorus of Jerusalem offered their own canon lists... One could say that the books of the Vulgate became the Biblical canon, merely by default - no other versions of the Bible were as widespread or frequently-quoted. Ultimately, the Roman Catholic canon was not formally declared until the Council of Trent (1545-1563)... the Church of England specified a policy concerning the deuterocanonical books; they had illustrative value and could be read during services, but could not be used as the basis for doctrine. Since the nineteenth century the deuterocanonical books have typically not been included in Anglican Bibles. Interestingly, this means that the King James translation includes the deuterocanonical books, since the Church of England had not disposed of them by the turn of the seventeenth century. Most King James Bibles published in the United States, however, do not include them, since it’s Protestant denominations which use that translation."
If you've ever wondered why Catholics balk when Church of Christ members ask them to give "book, chapter, and verse" evidence to defend Catholic traditions this is the explanation. Catholics don't view the Bible as a separate authority center from which to criticize the Church. They see it as a product of Christian history in relation to the church. The Biblical canon was never officially declared, and even the King James Bible of 1611 contained the intertestimental books now ridiculed as "additions" by the Churches of Christ.
We in the Churches of Christ have a serious problem. We've built our entire theology on the idea that Christians are only authorized to act via command or example from the Bible, but we've never bothered to truly understand the Bible. We've taken the Bible as an unquestioned first principle. We've assumed the Bible is a kind of elemental spiritual fact without ever analyzing where it came from, who's worked on it, and what Christians outside the Reformation have said about it.
The Church of Christ claims to be outside Protestantism. We claim to be the first century church founded in AD 33, but our theology of the Bible betrays our unquestioned acceptance of the Protestant principle of sola scriptura. Have we extracted this principle from the Bible itself? Where is the canon list within the Bible? Where is the biblical reference to sola scriptura? If the Bible isn't self contained, if it never defined its own existence independently of the hierarchical church of the late ancient and early middle ages, then how can we expect it to serve as a blueprint for our twenty first century churches? When Matthew was writing his gospel, when Paul was writing his epistles, when John was recording his revelations were these men aware that one day their works would be canonized into a single official document called the Bible? We may never know, but they didn't write any evidence of this in their original texts. If we're going to take the Bible seriously then we need to see it clearly rather than viewing it through the lens of Protestant idealism.
How can we solve these problems? I don't pretend to have the answers, but at least if we're aware of the issues we can begin exploring theological solutions. The Church of Christ has often been hesitant to explore the workings of the Holy Spirit due to our practical naturalistic worldview, but perhaps we can find something in that reserve to begin resolving these paradoxes. Why did the Holy Spirit wait so long before allowing the Bible to come together into a single agreed upon volume? Why did he allow for the rise of the hierarchical church before fusing the inspired documents into what we now call the Bible? Somewhere in these questions lies the solutions to our deepest weaknesses.