Forget “poor attestation”. James is the only book that I know of that had the h-bomb (”heretical”) thrown at it before it was added to the canon. Yes, the h-bomb was about the faith/works thing. Marius Victorinus did NOT love the book of James …

Maybe an example will help. John 3:16 for example, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” We say that’s the Word of God right. But it can be “given” depending upon theological moorings in different ways. The giving of it may be explicit or implied due to the dogma in a “group”, but the point is, is it still the Word of God if not unvarnished?

E.g. 1 From a double predestinarian format – explicitly spoken or implied it could be stated/understood as: “For God so loved the world (the elect) that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”

E.g. 2 From a more arminian format – explicitly spoken or implied it could be stated/understood as: “For God so loved the world (that renders up faith from within) that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”

E.g. 3 From a Lutheran format – stated and taken AS IS (take hold of your nose as Luther once said): “For God so loved the world (literally) that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”

Here we have one verse from the Word of God, Scripture, but three different “words”, supposedly, from God. What has God actually spoken to us, that HIS WORD.

This is why I understand why Luther could call at one time James an epistle of straw. Because the central message of Christ and Him crucified did not come from it as it was being interpreted at the time. To me he, Luther, was simply taking Paul seriously in Galatians, “if an angel or apostle…give another gospel…”. And this COULD be and is MOST of the time from the Word of God itself. The devil always twists the real thing.

L

I see what you mean about the rest of us having a two-tiered approach; I guess the fact that our “second tier” is smaller is a difference. And that’s a fair question to which I don’t have an answer.

Anyway, a concrete example might be instructive. Where the conservative Lutheran rule of interpretation would come into play in the case of Jude would be the story of the body of Moses. It’s not unthinkable that in an inerrancy/inspiration fight, a Protestant church body could make the historicity of the dispute between Satan and Michael a litmus test for fellowship, ordination, etc. Likewise, it is not unthinkable that in some future age, the Roman Catholic Church could get over its pathological antipathy toward the Pentateuch, institute a series of cultic rites and feast days dedicated to Moses, including a Feast of the Heavenly Conflict based on the passage in Jude. Some academics may contest this based on textual criticism, and a particular conservative pope might react by promulgating a dogma about said conflict with language damning those who do not believe it, similar to Ineffabilis Deus.

The conservative hermeneutic effectually prevents this sort of thing from happening. It prevents us from creating binding dogmas without having textual certainty behind them.

1. It seems there is a difference between a canon of authoritative books and an authoritative canon of books. If so, which approach is proper to how understand the nature of the canonical books? (HT to Paul Owen at Evangelical Catholicity for this distinction.)

2. It seems that some sort an authoritative role for the Church in discerning the scope of the canon is unavoidable. That being said, one does not have to fall into the Roman error of an intrinsically infallible magesterium. However, there must be some degree of infallibility just by the very fact that the canon is, well, the canon. Perhaps some sort of consensual/Vincentian Canon approach is the best model?

2.a There seems to be a kind of symbiosis in the early Church between rule of faith, the liturgy of the Church, the tradition (paradosis) of the Apostles and later Fathers at work in discerning the canonical books (and probably a bunch of other things too). So should the canonical books be seen as embedded in the total life of the Church — in other words they are “Churchy” not “extra Churchy?”

This is a complex topic — these just some thinking out loud points.

Cheers.

I’m intrigued to find out the Lutherans use this approach. It strikes me as the most common-sensical view to take. I was kind of wondering how my own questions of “how do we know they got the canon right?” would be viewed by others. I find it entirely possible that they were mistaken in some cases (in principle), but I’ve seen online that that often gets taken as a Protestant view by Catholics (who hold to the idea that canonization was a divinely inspired process) and a liberal view by some Protestants (who hold to certain forms of inerrancy).

I’m a scientist, and I keep thinking of this in terms of observational data and our attempts to understand a physical law from them. In this case, the books of the Bible are our data points. The collecting of the data was carried out over many years through Church history, and we have access to much of their analyses and procedures: debates over provenance, authenticity, authorship, and so on. If we don’t hold to a divinely-guaranteed list, then we should be able to revisit the debates today, if we need to. Like a scientist reviewing another’s work, we can look at how the earlier work was done and correct mistakes, if we’ve really found them.

For those who say that without believing in a divine guarantee of perfect knowledge of the canon, that we can’t know anything in religion: we operate in physics without “perfect” knowledge of physical laws, but we are able, by our imperfect efforts in experimentation and observation, to establish the laws to greater and greater accuracy. We keep pushing the error bars smaller and smaller.

We can use the laws we’ve discovered, as long as we keep in mind how much uncertainty we have (the error bars).

You are correct. It is essentially a two tiered system. Who would argue that the Gospels have no primacy over 3 John or Philemon? Even the ancient Jews placed primacy on the Books of Moses and considered the Prophets and Writings to be commentary on the Torah. This view is attractive to me because it deals with all the variables in an even handed way and brings some sanity to bear on the subject.