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011 | Introduction to the Canon | Understanding the Canon
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In this episode, we talk about the three “Is” of the Bible: Inspiration, inerrancy, and infallibility. We also talk about the meaning of canon, why it matters, and how authority of Scripture affects us today.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Verity' Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Verity. I'm your host, Felicia Masonheimer, an author, speaker, and Bible teacher. This podcast will help you embrace the history and depth of the Christian faith, ask questions, seek answers, and devote yourself to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. You don't have to settle for watered-down Christian teaching. And if you're ready to go deeper, God is just as ready to take you there. This is Verity, where every woman is a theologian.
Season Two Focus: Bible Compilation
00:00:30
Speaker
Well friends, we are back for season two of Verity podcast and I cannot tell you how excited I am for this season. We are talking all about the canon of the Bible or how the books that we are holding in the Bible today came to be there. How were they compiled? How were they chosen? Why do they have authority? Why do we believe what they
Understanding Biblical Concepts
00:00:54
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say? This is going to be an in-depth look at how each
00:00:58
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section of Scripture from the Pentateuch, the first five books, to the New Testament were canonized and deemed part of an authoritative unit of Scripture. We're going to get into so much this season, but in this introductory episode, what I really want to talk about are the foundational elements of understanding the Bible itself. So inspiration,
00:01:23
Speaker
inerrancy, infallibility, all these words that we hear thrown around about the Bible but maybe don't entirely know what they mean. We're going to look at some scriptures that support the Bible as authoritative and we're going to talk a little bit about the church history that supports this as well but I'm going to save most of that church history for the in-depth discussions of
00:01:48
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each section of scripture that was canonized. So I hope you're as excited as I
Challenges to Scriptural Authority
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am. I think this is going to be extremely helpful to you in your conversations as you defend your faith, as you share with your co-workers. This is going to be one of the hot topics that you're facing
00:02:05
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as this generation and living in this time because even in the church now with the movement of progressivism and deconstruction we're seeing a lot of questioning of the authority of scripture specifically as pertains to the sexual ethic and so it's essential for us to understand where the bible came from, why we believe it,
00:02:27
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what elements make this holy scripture and not just, you know, tablets that fell out of the sky with no accountability. How do we know we can trust this?
God’s Role in Scripture Writing
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Well, that's what we're going to get into today. And we're going to start just by looking at inspiration.
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So if you ask any evangelical Christian, I would say actually, if you include Catholics, Protestants, you ask them, hey, what's the Bible? They would tell you it's inspired by God, written down by men. It is inerrant.
00:03:03
Speaker
and it's infallible. So those are the words that we use to describe it. However, a lot of people don't know what these words actually mean. They know they're supposed to believe them, but they don't know how they function. So that's what we're going to try to help today. So there's two types of inspiration. Verbal inspiration means that all of the Bible, all of its words were directly inspired by God himself and communicated from God to men.
00:03:34
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Plenary inspiration means that the entire thing, the wholeness of the Bible is also inspired.
Authority of Old and New Testaments
00:03:40
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So it's not just the words, but just the whole thing from beginning to end is inspired by God. Now, we also know from scripture that the writers of scripture believed that what they were writing was inspired by God. So if we look at 1 Timothy 3 16, you're probably familiar with this verse.
00:04:02
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we find that in this letter, Paul is writing to Timothy, and he says something that most of us know is pretty foundational to our faith. And it's actually 2 Timothy 3, 16, and it says, all scripture
00:04:32
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So this is really interesting.
00:04:35
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Interesting. For a couple reasons. First of all, it tells us the essential nature of Scripture for spiritual maturity and growth. You cannot be competent and equipped for every good work apart from the Word of God. So if we want those things to be mature Christians, then we need to be in the Word of God.
00:04:54
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But why would the Word of God change us? Well, he says here, because it's breathed out by God. And the significance of that phrase, breathed out, has to do with the Holy Spirit, because the word for Holy Spirit means breath.
00:05:11
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So the very Spirit of God inspired these words and made them profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness. Or, to say it in other words, for growing people up in what is good.
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So the only way that we can know what is good is through this scripture that is inspired by God. So another verse that's important to kind of go along with 2 Timothy is 2 Peter 1, 21.
00:05:44
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Which says no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. So here's another founding father of our faith, Peter, writing the exact same thing that Paul is saying. He is saying all of scripture is inspired by God, led by the Holy Spirit,
00:06:09
Speaker
just written by men. It wasn't by their own will that they did this. It was because of God's inspiration. So he's working through the instrument of human personality. He guided what they wrote, but we still note that these men were in specific historical contexts with specific personalities and writing styles. We see the difference in writing style between Peter and Paul
00:06:36
Speaker
And between Moses and maybe Joshua or Samuel, whoever's writing these things, they're going to have a different writing style, different historical context that will affect the writing. And God allowed for that, but He inspired what was written. Now, one thing that comes up a lot when we're reading things like this,
00:06:57
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we look at these verses that are saying, all scriptures breathed out by God, well, people will say, well, that's just the Old Testament. They were talking about the Old Testament because that's what they had. True. Peter and Paul are talking about the Old Testament at this point, what would have been accepted as canon or authoritative by the Jews at this time.
Old Testament Canonization
00:07:19
Speaker
And we'll get into this more in future episodes, but at that time of Jesus, there was a Hebrew scripture that was a three-part Hebrew scripture. It started in Genesis and it ended in Chronicles. When the Hebrew scriptures were translated to Greek, this up to again,
00:07:37
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you saw a little bit of a rearranging into a chronological order instead of the original order. So you may remember at one point when Jesus is talking to the Pharisees he says that the blood of the prophets are on their hands from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah. What he was saying was
00:07:56
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you are responsible for the blood of the prophets from the beginning of the canon to the close of the canon because the canon that he was reading and working from at the time had the death of Zechariah at the end. So what this tells us is the Old Testament was canonized and authoritative in its completion at the time of Jesus just in a different order than the Greek New Testament that came along a little bit before.
Defending New Testament Authority
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So why is this matter, Felicia? This is a lot of information. Well, because when people say that this means these statements about God inspiring scripture only applies to the Old Testament, they're ignoring some very significant passages. And we're going to look at a couple of them that say and prove that the New Testament writers have equal authority, equal inspiration and inerrancy to the Old Testament writers. And we're going to look first at 1 Corinthians,
00:08:56
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1 Corinthians 14, 37. And now we know that in 1 Corinthians, Paul is writing to the church at Corinth. And he says, and he's kind of being, he's pushing them here. He's asking them a rhetorical question. He starts this by saying, was it from you that the word of God came? Well, obviously not. They know this, but he's challenging them. He says, or are you the only ones that it has reached?
00:09:25
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kind of questioning, hey, you think you know everything? You want to be arrogant? He says, if anyone thinks that he is a prophet or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I'm writing to you are a command of the Lord. And if anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized. Then he goes on to talk about prophecy.
00:09:45
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So what he's saying is, if you are not acknowledging my words, Paul's words, as authoritative, as a command of God, then you have no seat at the table with us. This is very pivotal to those who are questioning the writings of Paul. There's a huge movement in progressivism that is questioning the writings of Paul as even authoritative, saying he didn't write many of them.
00:10:12
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mainly to get rid of what he's saying about gender and sexuality. And this, along with another reference we're about to look at, proves to us, no, this is a command of the Lord that was accepted by the churches and recognized not just by Paul, but also by Peter.
Understanding the 'Canon'
00:10:32
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So let's go over to 2 Peter. In 2 Peter 3 16,
00:10:39
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Peter is writing about Paul, and he says, Just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all these letters, when he speaks in them of these matters, there are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.
00:11:05
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You, therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability, but grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." This is a very relevant passage for us today because this is still happening, you guys. Paul's letters are hard to understand, and the ignorant and unstable still twist those words to their own destruction.
00:11:30
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just as they do other scriptures. But note that Peter is holding Paul's commands on equal level with the other scriptures and saying you owe them the same kind of reverence and same kind of obedience.
00:11:46
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Don't be caught into this trap. Don't allow yourself to be deceived. So inspiration was for the Old Testament. It was also for the New Testament. There's equal authority there. And it's important for us to understand this and embrace this as a foundational element as we're moving forward in our study of the canon. I think all of us have been at a women's conference where we were told, you are a beautiful daughter of the Most High King.
00:12:16
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And it's true, but it's not the whole truth. The beauty of being God's daughter has some backstory, and it's left out in a lot of messages preached to women. So if you're tired of hearing the watered-down Christian teaching and you're hungry for a deeper spiritual life, I have something for you. It's my brand new book, Stop Calling Me Beautiful, finding so deep strength in a skin-deep world.
00:12:41
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Stop Calling Me Beautiful is a book about going deeper with God. I'm going to talk about pursuing the truths of who God is and who we are in relationship to Him, how to study Scripture, how legalism, shallow theology, and false teaching keep us from living boldly as a woman of the Word. I'm so excited to put this book in your hands. You can grab your copy on Amazon, or for more information, head to my website, FeliciaMasonheimer.com, and click the Book tab.
00:13:10
Speaker
Okay, I want to take a quick pause before we move on to inerrancy and infallibility. We need to talk a little bit about canon itself. You might be like, what's a canon? Isn't there like something used in the Civil War or something? Well, yes, but that's canon with two ends, or rather three ends, C-A-N-N-O-N. We're talking about canon, C-A-N-O-N.
00:13:32
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And what that means is a canon or a set of books that are accepted as authoritative, specifically in a religious context. So to Muslims, the Quran would be a canon of scripture that's accepted writings, an authoritative for them. For us, it is the Bible. It is accepted as a canon of scripture.
00:13:56
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Now, what does a canon do? Well, it's a measure that says no more books can be added to this and no books can be taken away from this. This is what's accepted and embraced by the church and said to be authoritative.
00:14:10
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So how do we know that that's what canon means?
Eyewitness Accounts and Authority
00:14:14
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Well, it comes from a word, a Greek word, canon with a K, K-A-N-O-N. And this actually references an Egyptian read, R-E-E-D, read that grows alongside the Nile and was used for measuring. They would use it as a standard of measure. And so when we say this is the canon of scripture, what we're saying is
00:14:36
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our standard of measure for what constitutes Scripture is fulfilled in these books.
00:14:44
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Okay so what would be the standard of measure then? Great question. There's a couple things and Gary Habermas who's the premier apologist for the resurrection and a professor at my alma mater Liberty University has a wonderful discussion of the importance of our canonosity in context of the resurrection but we're going to take some of his principles and just talk about the bible itself and its authority here. So
00:15:12
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There are two things that you want to have when you are looking at a text and this applies to all historical texts. Whether you're reading something about Alexander the Great or about Julius Caesar, you want early documents and you want eyewitness documents.
00:15:32
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the earlier the better, the closer to the date, the better, and the closer to the eyewitness, the better, right? Because the further out, the more things can be forgotten or passed down or changed, and the fewer eyewitnesses, the more risk of untruth and changing the story. And so one thing that Habermas points out in his defense of the resurrection and the authority of Scripture is that
00:15:57
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The story of Jesus and his resurrection has more early eyewitness documents than anything on Alexander the Great, anything on some of our Caesars. In fact, most of the documents dealing with Jesus, so there's 18 non-gospel documents that are written about Jesus or mention Jesus within the first hundred years of his life.
00:16:25
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That's insane. The best documents we have on Alexander the Great are 400 years after his death. So early eyewitness accounts are so important to us in helping us determine what documents are trustworthy.
Early Church Fathers on Scripture
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And especially for those who are dealing with the Bible, this is going to become an authoritative text for spiritual lives
00:16:46
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we need something that we know is an early eyewitness account, and that is what we have in the form of the New Testament, but also in the Old. So as we go through this season, we're going to deal with each section of scripture. I'm kind of breaking it down to give you
00:17:03
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First the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, who wrote them, why can we trust that they were written by their author who was an eyewitness, and then moving on to the historical narrative books to prophecy and the wisdom literature. And then at the end we'll get to the New Testament. But the fundamental issue here every time is how close to the event was this document written?
00:17:30
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Who wrote it? Were they involved in the event? Were they writing to someone involved in the event? Those are all things that were taken into account by the early church fathers who were deciding canonosity.
Inerrancy vs. Infallibility
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So let's look at a few of these church fathers.
00:17:48
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Now the church fathers who I am going to read to you are all primarily before 400 AD. So these gentlemen are some of my favorite people to read, some really great fellows, and we're going to look at what they had to say about the inspiration and the inerrancy of scripture.
00:18:12
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Clement said, Scripture's true, and is given by the Holy Spirit, nothing unrighteous or counterfeit is written in them. Irenaeus said, Scripture is perfectly consistent. Justin Martyr, I am entirely convinced no Scripture contradicts another. Tertullian, the statements of Scripture never contradict the truth. Athanasius, he's my homeboy, there is no disagreement within Scripture.
00:18:42
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Augustine. The authors were completely free of error. So these are some of the absolute founding fathers of the Christian faith in those early, early years. And here they are saying, no, this is inspired.
00:18:57
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And we'll get into this when we talk about the canonization of the New Testament. Athanasius was one of the first people to send out a full list of books that constituted the Bible in one of his festal letters to the churches, and it listed the books that we have today. That was around 380 AD.
00:19:18
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380 AD. That's pretty early you guys and we saw similar lists even earlier than that. So we'll get into that again. I get too excited and I'm going to start to tell you too much stuff but I want to save it for the New Testament portion of our discussion.
00:19:32
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But what this gives us is enough information to say, okay, the church fathers affirm the authority of Scripture. They affirmed inerrancy and infallibility. So maybe we should, as Nathan Fanocchio says, check our chronological snobbery and stop thinking, oh, we know so much better than these guys. They must have just spent a bunch of clowns. They don't know how authoritative Scripture really is. And they're not as smart, you know,
00:20:00
Speaker
there's just a lot of stuff that comes with that kind of arrogance and that kind of setting ourselves up to say that we know better than every one of these church fathers who helped give us the foundation we have today. So we're going to go back to our three I's. We talked about inspiration,
00:20:18
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We talked about the authority of Scripture being tied to early eyewitness documents, and now we're going to talk a little bit about inerrancy. So what does it mean that something's inerrant? It means it's not in error. I know, complicated. But what it really is saying as it pertains to Scripture is it makes good on its claims. It achieves what the authors were aiming for.
00:20:45
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So it's not that, oh, there's never a copy editing error or there's not a discrepancy between two documents because there have been, but none of those discrepancies ever change the metanarrative. They never change the redemptive narrative. They never change doctrine. They were simply copy errors or slight differences in the documents that had nothing to do with doctrine.
00:21:09
Speaker
So the scripture that we're dealing with here is not in error. It's making good its claims. The other I word that we use is infallible. And what this means is unable to deceive.
00:21:23
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So it doesn't mean, oh, someone can take scripture and twist it and deceive people. That's perfectly possible, just like Peter warned against. But the Bible itself in its plain form is unable to deceive. So there's a difference between infallibility and inerrancy. But as the Chicago statement of inerrancy says, these two things may be distinguished, but they cannot be separated.
Scripture's Authority in Faith
00:21:53
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So, especially important when we're having this discussion is as the Bible is translated, we'll have a whole episode about translation in this series, as the Bible is translated, people can mess with that translation and they can result in heresy. So, for instance, let's talk a little bit about the Passion, quote, translation.
00:22:15
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This is a paraphrase developed by one man who has lied about his history as a translator with new tribes missions and changed much of the terminology in the Bible to reflect the new apostolic Reformation language. So a lot of anointing and kingdom language which while that is present in scripture in some
00:22:39
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parts, it is extremely expanded with the passion translation. And so is it a translation? No, it's a paraphrase by one man, not by a committee of scholars, which is how most or all rather authoritative translations are created. So what does this mean for us? What this is saying is infallibility and inerrancy
00:23:06
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may not apply to the Passion Translation. Why? Because the actual Greek and Hebrew that were supposed to be handled rightly and with integrity were messed with and changed. And so now doctrines can be pulled out of these texts that are not consistent with confessional Christianity, with what the church has traditionally confessed. And so this is why when we talk about infallibility and inerrancy, it really goes back to the original composition of Scripture.
00:23:36
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Those original languages, those original documents were infallible and inerrant and it is our job to do the very best we can to translate them accurately into the languages of the modern day.
00:23:49
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So this is a lot of information. It might be a little bit overwhelming. And if you need to re-listen and take some notes so that you have a foundation for what we do as we move forward in our discussion, that might be helpful to you. But I'm super excited to build on this for you as we start to dive into how the Old Testament was canonized, how it was decided what books to keep, how there are different
00:24:16
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ideas and theories about authors and what that means for us today. But the important thing to know is this stuff matters a lot. It matters a lot. This is not impractical information because at the end of the day everything you believe about Jesus really goes back to the Gospels and the Gospels go back to the Old Testament prophecies and the Old Testament prophecies go back to the covenants which goes back to Genesis.
00:24:46
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all of it is necessary. And when you start trying to take things out and change it to make it more palatable, more comfortable, to get around the tough parts instead of truly understand the authorial intent and the historical context, what you end up with is a faith that's actually not based on any foundation. So the authority of Scripture is an essential doctrine to Christianity.
00:25:10
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This is an issue that you can't unite with people who deny the authority of Scripture. So that's why we're talking about this. That's why we're talking about how the canon came to be because the more we understand it, the more confidence we have to stand upon the truth that God has revealed to us. I'm so glad to hear you guys and I can't wait to come back next week with our first episode on how the Bible was canonized.
Connecting with Felicia
00:25:38
Speaker
Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Verity. You can connect with fellow listeners by following me on Instagram at Felicia Masonheimer or on our Facebook page by the same name. Also visit FeliciaMasonheimer.com for links to each episode and the show notes.