A Fragment on Canon, Authority, and Hermeneutics

The following is a comment I left in various arguments with e-Orthodox over the issue of 'sola scriptura'. I was challenged on how I could defend 'sola scriptura' when one can see divergent canon lists in the early church. The punch-line is: if you can't rely on scripture, you must rely on *the* church to know what scripture is! Since Protestants (in the main) don't have any claim on the historic church, in terms of strictly organizational continuity, then they can't sustain the norm of scripture. QED.

But this argument depends upon a shell-game. Orthodoxy depends upon the "mind of the church" to establish truth from fiction, true councils from false councils, doctors from heresiarchs (that this concept is highly slippery and gels with 19th c. Romantic irrationalism is another story). But no patristic source has a single shred of doubt about the scripture. Every father is quite consistent in pointing to "scripture" as a stable body of texts. They never once say they are discerning what the scriptures are, but are simply receiving the truth as it had been handed down. Where there was doubt, with Origen and Jerome, these are exceptions that prove the rule: they are quite aware that they're in the minority and show deference to what had always been the case. The patristics saw "the Church" in continuity with Israel, not a novel body: the faithful people of God persisting through the different dispensations of God's revelation (however that is particularly understood). From Adam through Israel to Christ, the Church existed through time. And so here's the shell-game: the "mind of the fathers" is to replace the fundamental instability of canonical scripture, and yet the near unanimity among fathers shows that scripture is a clearly known category. Thus, to defeat sola scriptura you depend upon a line of argument that calls into question the veracity of the fathers upon which you offer your alternative. My interlocutors couldn't understand this point (unaware of the sand they built their arguments on) and I was asked: how did I make sense of these things? I wrote the following:

"First of all, it has to be noted that the word 'canon' meant more specifically something read in church. As far as I understand it, the Greek church still doesn't read Revelation, whereas the Russians do. It doesn't mean they don't think it's scripture. Therefore, when the council of Carthage professes the deuterocanon as part of the OT, it has more to do with whether it can be read in church or not. On that definition, some Anglicans and Lutherans consider deuterocanon books to be canonical since they're still read.  

Scripture too had a bit of a fuzzy definition, but not in an arbitrary or amorphous sense. The typical method for counting the books of scripture followed a kind of literary metaphor: usually 22 (because of 22 letters in the Hebrew "alphabet"), but sometimes 24 (the number of letters in the Greek alphabet). Whether it was Josephus or Athanasius, there was not even a flash of uncertainty about the books. And so I would actually go as far as to argue that there wasn't any disagreements about scripture, but there was flexibility on what was to be read in church lectionaries and a kid of descending holiness of scripture. Hence, when rabbis debated at the so-called "council of Yamnia", it wasn't whether Esther or Song of Songs were scripture or not, but whether "they stained the hands", whether they had the same level of holiness as the rest. But these were, I think, minority positions mostly concerned with the content (Esther, without Greek additions, doesn't mention God at all and is somewhat scandalous, and Song of Songs is, superficially, erotic royal poetry) when stacked up against something more clearly central like the Torah or the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel.  

Christians accepted, in general (with exceptions like Marcion that prove the rule), the original uncontested list of the 39 books of the Protestant canon with some slippage (like whether Baruch is an appendix to Jeremiah or something else). They also accepted as scripture the 7 books of the deuterocanon. But again, scripture can (and did) have fuzzy boundaries. There's no evidence that these additional books were considered part of the 22, and yet they still have weight (being quoted as scripture by Christians).  

Now when we get to 16th c. debates, the question of scripture had taken on a more exacting sense. Most of the reformers (with the major exception being Luther) were humanists and most humanists (roman and reformed) were concerned with questions of textual purity. Valla discovered the donation of Constantine was a fraud by textual analysis. Erasmus wanted to cut the Comma Johannem out as an interpolation. There had been, for centuries, a fuzzy boundary and openness about the deuterocanon as scripture properly. But the Reformation resulted in a line being drawn in the sand. When Luther imperiously wrote dismissive intros to James, Hebrews, and Revelation, it wasn't that he was removing them from the Bible (the line about "throwing little Jimmy in the fire" is, as far as I know, a mistaken anecdote referring to a statue, not the letter) but classing them down into a subsidiary holiness, placing them as deuterocanon. Pretty much every other reformer rejected this move simply because it was a rejection of the church's reception history. 

 In short: I think all the fathers basically agreed with what scripture was, but differed on how it was applied to church life. The canon lists are actually somewhat deceptive because they read back our modern anxieties. And again, as I've said repeatedly through this thread, there are differences between Protestants and Orthodox on the question of how various authorities relate to one another. But the epistemological crisis of the interpreting individual is not solved, but hidden. Prior to Orthodox apologists sounding like Roman Catholics (which is a really stupid move imo), there wasn't this radical skepticism about the contents of scripture."

The debate over 'sola scriptura' between Protestants and Roman Catholics has degenerated into an epistemological battle. Either an infallible scripture becomes the foundation or an infallible magisterium (crowned with, or solely consisting of, the ex cathedra statements of the pope) becomes the foundation. In the 17th c. this reached a crisis mode. Reformed scholastics, like John Owen, defended the vowel markings on later Hebrew texts as infallible. Roman Catholics, in turn, dipped into Pyrrhonian skepticism to undermine historical/textual resourcing (rejecting Renaissance humanism and their historically grounded hermeneutics). Instead, a magisterial divine fiat was the only way to possess epistemic certainty. It went nuts, reflecting the extreme blood letting of the 17th c. confessional wars (French Wars of Religion, 30 Years War, English Civil Wars, 80 Years War).

Yet I think this epistemological shift is a critical error. It depends upon the Rationalist epistemology of foundationalism, where some set of self-derived (and undisputed) axioms becomes the bedrock to build entire systems of knowledge upon. Both Rome and the Reformed shuddered when the alternatives of Nature and Reason were offered, originally from within their own ranks. It was a moderated civil religion that could stop the killing, but then produced its own cult and its own bloody war (e.g. the Terror was, in part, a theological war from Robbespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being against both entrenched, refractory, Catholics and atheists like Herbert). 

An alternative was always possible. British enlightenment figures like Berkeley knew the positivism of some of his fellow philosophers (viz. Locke, Newton, Hobbes) was something of a fraud, but he didn't reject the project to stabilize society. Various Germans (like Kant, Hamann, Herder) played a similar role on the Continent, not rejecting the Enlightenment in toto, but its false pretensions. The goal was a civil society grounded in a way that was true, but also common. Christendom was dead, but false appeals to universal reason needed to be tempered, lest it collapse into a new civil religion that then has to war against its own sets of infidels. Such set the stage for various alternatives, some better and others worse.

Yet, despite this history of European theological strife, 'sola scriptura' did not originate as an epistemological doctrine. Rather, it was a claim about the highest court of authority. It wasn't about the magisterium or the pope qua teaching/judging institutions, but their very grounds. It asked how the church could justify the pope, cardinals, various monastic orders and practices, when faced with scripture. The original debate devolved into epistemology when no one argument could simply offer a complete rout of the other, requiring stronger medicine to stabilize civil affairs. Protestants needed scripture to offer no epistemic doubt and Roman Catholics needed to offer a justification for the magisterium on its own terms. Christendom then collapsed in on itself. But the dust has settled and there's no need to relive these crises. Christians don't need to be captive to the logics of a monolithic social policy and, instead, return to the original question of authority.

I think the above solution works. I am not claiming it is historically perfect, but it matches all the historic data available and is relatively faithful to the subsidiary witness of tradition. The scriptures are in fact a stable body in terms of authority, and centuries of church authorities testify to this fact. Now, it may be true Protestants don't give due weight to other forms of authority, or rank them in the right way. But that's a question of contemporary practice, not historical fact. R.C. Sproul's "infallible scripture and fallible canon" ought to be rejected as a-canonical and hermeneutically shallow. The canon is authoritative because it has been what's received, testified from the very beginning. That's what all the fathers understood.