A Brief Defense of a Self-Authenticating Canon with Michael Kruger

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Michael Kruger

   Some people think that when the New Testament writers wrote, they had no idea what they were doing. They didn't know they were writing authoritative books for the church. Paul was just writing letters with his friendly advice. You know, Luke was just writing what he thought happened. And only later did the church take those books and say, wow, these are really great. In fact, they're so great, let's call them scripture. And so then now you have a canon. So you can see that disparity. The books were written, but they were really written with a different purpose. And then only later they became canon. That is the narrative. And again, if that is how it happened, then I would have significant doubts.

2. 00:28

   Michael Horton

   Peter refers to Paul's writings as scripture, as Paul refers to Luke's Gospel on a par with Deuteronomy.

3. 00:36

   Michael Kruger

   Exactly. There's so much intratextual affirmation within the New Testament writings themselves, some explicit, and you just mentioned a couple explicit examples, some implicit, where you realize that, wait a second, there's no reason to think we had to wait for these books to be viewed as authoritative. They would have been recognized as authoritative by virtue of their authors and by virtue of their apostolic origins and would have been received as such from the very start.

4. 00:59

   Michael Horton

   We don't want to live in the Village Green at the end of the day. We can all leave and return to our houses of worship, but our goal is to encourage conversational theology in the Village Green where we can rub shoulders with Christians from different traditions and expressions.

5. 01:22

   Michael Horton

   Well, I get to talk to my good friend, Dr. Michael Kruger, today. Mike, thanks for coming on the program.

6. 01:28

   Michael Kruger

   Absolutely. So excited.

7. 01:30

   Michael Horton

   Mike Kruger is the Professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, and has written a lot of books ranging from helpful books for college, preparing your kids for college, all the way to the most academic books on New Testament canon and criticism. A lot of people, I think, assume that biblical studies and systematic theology are antagonistic. If you're into the Bible, then why would you want theological categories? Just read the Bible and it will all sort itself out. I know that that's exactly what you believe. So—

8. 02:17

   Michael Kruger

   Yeah, I think we've all heard that sort of argument from time to time, and I think it's driven by so many things. Some people have this idea that when they read the Bible, they have to do sort of this fresh first glance, independent, just me and God under a tree somewhere reading of the Bible. And so you can't let anything influence you—what your parents taught you, what the church has said, what theologians say. You just need to read it fresh and understand it. And the reason that has traction for people, even though obviously we would disagree with that, is that there's a little bit of truth to it in the sense that we obviously want to make sure that when we read the Bible, we're not just imposing our own ideas on it, right? That we make it say what we really want it to say. Of course, that's something we want to avoid. But of course, it misses the richness of God's involvement with his people for generations and helping them understand his word and the sort of time that's been spent by so many theologians and pastors and readers that have gone before us. And so there's a lack of real intellectual humility there to say, I'm just going to sit down with my college-level education and just quick glance this and figure out all the problems. I mean, we need to humbly put ourselves under the place of God's people's reading of this text for a long time. So all that to say that, yeah, you want to read the Bible and take it at face value, but at the same time, you can't divorce it from the historical reading of the Bible. So that's just another way of saying that biblical studies and systematic theology have to go together in a harmonious way.

9. 03:38

   Michael Horton

   And we need each other.

10. 03:39

    Michael Kruger

    We do. And you and I can speak to it because we both are on the other side of it, right?

11. 03:43

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, right. I mean, we use New Testament studies, and you're a theologian. I think of the image of B.B. Warfield and Gerhardus Vos, theologian and biblical scholar, walking arm in arm on the Sabbath through the Princeton Yard together—would have a different impression today, probably. But that's the—

12. 04:06

    Michael Kruger

    That's a little parable of systematics versus biblical theology being harmonious.

13. 04:09

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, it's the way it should be. You've also done quite a bit of work on the canon, which comes out of even your doctoral studies—set you on that trajectory. So if anybody has a question about Bart Ehrman and the critics of Christian claims, Michael Kruger is a good person to read, The Canon Revisited in particular. Can you give people some examples of how the popular criticisms of the Bible people hear and see on the internet today are easily answered from a scholarly perspective.

14. 04:56

    Michael Kruger

    Yeah, one of the things I've learned over the years is that the issue of kind of where the Bible came from, how it was put together, who made these decisions tends to be just such an ongoing hot topic that doesn't really ever go away. No matter what generation you're in, it's always something that comes up. There's things that stir the pot. Of course, we can think about The Da Vinci Code book that came out in the early 2000s, right? That stirs the pot. There's always things that remind people of why the issue matters. But this issue of where the Bible came from is so important. And the reason that it comes up is that lots of Christians have a very thin view of how it happened. And they tend to have what you might even argue is sort of an idealistic, almost quasi-Mormon view that God lowered the Bible from heaven on golden tablets, all nice and tidy and finished. And they don't realize that there was a process behind how it got put together. And as soon as you have a view that's that one-dimensional, it's easy to pick apart. So all you have to do is—

15. 05:47

    Michael Horton

    To the extent that it's human, it's not divine.

16. 05:50

    Michael Kruger

    Correct. So all someone has to do is point out that, well, wait a second, you know, it wasn't until the 4th century that there was full unanimity on the canon. And then the Christians are like, what? And then someone else points out, wait a second, people disagreed over what books belong in the canon. And then they're thinking, really? And then you just go through the list. And so one of the things I've tried to do in my career is to help sort of alleviate some of these misconceptions that are out there. And there's so many. I actually whittled them all down to a blog series years ago called “Top 10 Misconceptions About the Origins of the New Testament Canon.” But there's so many of them. But one of them that stands out is this idea in people's mind that some group voted or decided on the canon in some official capacity in the 4th century, usually under the tutelage of Constantine, where the church didn't know what to read and everything was in literary chaos. And then finally, Constantine gets a bunch of bishops together and says, well, we'll pick the books for you. And they sort of pick the books they happen to like and they force them on the church. And that's the canon. Now, that narrative is great because it is persuasive to people and they love it and it feeds their preconceived notions that it's just a human product and it's just a bunch of guys in a smoke-filled room making decisions for you. And why should we think those decisions are better than any other decision? And I need to think for myself and not just take what was handed to me and this sort of thing. So that narrative has a lot of traction and it really bothers Christians. And by the way, if it happened that way, it should bother Christians. If I believed the Bible and I thought it was put together by a bunch of people under the influence of Constantine, I might wonder too whether I should take that at face value.

17. 07:13

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

18. 07:14

    Michael Kruger

    But of course, that's not how it happened. And I tell people, I said, you know, rhetoric is one thing, history is another. And when you look at the historical facts, you see that actually there was a canon, what we would call a core canon, present much earlier than that. Even by the middle of the 2nd century, we have about 22 out of 27 of the books well-established and well-received by the church. So the idea that you need a vote or you need a council or you need a decision is just simply out of sorts with the way the books emerged. They emerged naturally, organically, as God's people recognized God's voice in these books.

19. 07:47

    Michael Horton

    And they were authorized for public reading in the church, right? So people had been hearing these books read, authorized for reading. So everyone kind of knew, all right, we're not sure about Revelation or Hebrews maybe, or James or 2 Peter. But all of the rest of it, they recognized as, including the Old Testament, recognized as authorized for being preached and read on Sunday.

20. 08:19

    Michael Kruger

    Yeah, one of the ways I like to say to my students is that, you know, God's books in one sense authenticate themselves. And what I mean by this is that inasmuch as they're read, they're preached, they're taught, they kind of prove themselves, so to speak, to the audience. And that's exactly what we see happening in early Christianity. Christians coalesced around these books at a very early stage, recognizing not only their source having come from apostles authorized to speak for Christ, but also the voice in them as being the voice of Christ. And so they begin to be used and cited and preached from. And that type of repetition really solidified their canonical status. And so I tell my students, look, the canon wasn't voted on. It was recognized and seen for what it already was. So these people in the churches that read these books and used these books didn't make them canon. They simply recognized what was already true of them is that these were books that came from God's authorized spokespeople, namely the apostles, and therefore bore Christ's voice.

21. 09:18

    Michael Horton

    That's an important point for people to hear today, isn't it? Because it's not only Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, but sometimes Protestants also who give the impression that the church canonized these texts. And if you read the church fathers you're talking about, they actually talk about it as if they received, recognized, acknowledged what was already true.

22. 09:49

    Michael Kruger

    That's a really key thing I try to point out to people because imagine you have the narrative that these books were chosen and made canon. by the church. Well, now you have books that are written for one purpose, but then they're taken and used for a different purpose than what they were intended for. And then, for that matter, you have authority infused into the books and granted to the books, authority which they did not already possess. Now, of course, once you say that they were given authority, authority which they didn't already possess before they were looked at by the church, who's given them that authority? Where does that authority come from? Well, answer: the church. So once you make the church create or determine or in one sense infuse authority into books, then you've made the church higher than the books themselves, which is—

23. 10:30

    Michael Horton

    And its power arbitrary.

24. 10:31

    Michael Kruger

    Exactly, because it depends on the people who declared that these books were scripture.

25. 10:34

    Michael Horton

    And that's what a lot of people think.

26. 10:37

    Michael Kruger

    They totally think that way.

27. 10:38

    Michael Horton

    And you understand why. If that is how it happened, then you can understand why they would think that, well, it just happens to be a religion decided by a bunch of men in a smoke-filled room, as you said.

28. 10:52

    Michael Kruger

    Yeah, and there's one little tidbit of evidence that I point out that I think undercuts that entire narrative that's really important. And that is to recognize, and I've made a case for this in a number of my books, that when the New Testament authors wrote, that they were aware of their own authority when they wrote. In other words, they did know they were writing authoritative books for the church. The reason that's so important is because some people think that when the New Testament writers wrote, they had no idea what they were doing. They didn't know they were writing authoritative books for the church. Paul was just writing letters with his friendly advice. You know, Luke was just writing what he thought happened. And only later did the church take those books and say, wow, these are really great. In fact, they're so great, let's call them Scripture. And so then now you have a canon. So you can see that disparity. The books are written, but they were really written with a different purpose. And then only later they became canon. That is the narrative. And again, if that is how it happened, then I would have significant doubts.

29. 11:39

    Michael Horton

    Peter refers to Paul's writings as Scripture, as Paul refers to Luke's Gospel on a par with Deuteronomy.

30. 11:47

    Michael Kruger

    Exactly. There's so much intratextual affirmation within the New Testament writings themselves, some explicit, and you just mentioned a couple explicit examples, some implicit, where you realize that, wait a second, there's no reason to think we had to wait for these books to be viewed as authoritative. They would have been recognized as authoritative by virtue of their authors and by virtue of their apostolic origins and would have been received as such from the very start. If so, then that means you could say in a sense that you have a canon as soon as the books are written. You have a canon as soon as the books were—the ink was dry on the page because of their authors and their unique status. status, not because of a later church council. So there's two different models here, and I haven't used these words yet, but the idea that the church creates the canon later is what I call an extrinsic model, that the canon was sort of given to the church by this council. And the thing that you and I are describing, which is the essence of sola scriptura, is what you would call an intrinsic model, which is the idea that the canon is birthed out of the apostolic office, grows organically, and is received by consensus in the church, not by some vote.

31. 12:52

    Michael Horton

    Do you find it significant, Mike, that if the church was united sufficiently to call it a Christian movement even, it couldn't have been a polity because you didn't have bishops yet? They were Presbyterians.

32. 13:11

    Michael Kruger

    I've actually made a case to some extent in one of my other books that that seems to be the earliest polity, but that's another conversation.

33. 13:16

    Michael Horton

    It does seem to be. It's not a hierarchical polity. Sometimes you even hear people sort of in the Bart Ehrman sphere sound like there was a pope. And of course, you know, you don't have bishops or you can't have a pope. Anyway, the people really rallied around this text. And you have church fathers like Basil saying, if you ask me what our tradition is, well, traditions differ from church to church. But our canon is this. And even heretics recognized when they wanted to twist the teaching of Christianity, they would say, it's not like it says in John. It's like this that prophet Fred received from Jesus last week. That the very fact that even the first commentary on the Gospel of John was written by a Gnostic heretic. They respected the canon that they nevertheless criticized, right?

34. 14:25

    Michael Kruger

    Oh yeah. Yeah. So I think the point you're making is that if you go with the narrative we've been talking about, which is that the canon was sort of imposed on the church and decided for the church and created by some council, you have to have some infrastructure in which to make that happen, some sort of authoritative agency by which you could do that. And like you said, most people assume that what they see now in, say, the Roman Catholic Church was present then, and that just like now, the church makes decisions, they could have made it then. But that was so not the case. Everyone knows this historically. The early church was very decentralized. They were very spread out geographically. There was no unified polity structure by which they could make these decisions. But here's what you find in the midst of all that sort of disassociation is a remarkable, remarkable amount of unity around this core collection of books. Wherever you look in the empire, it seems to be that the Gospels that were being valued and read as scripture were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Whenever you look around the empire, what letters were people thinking were really important? Paul's. When you look around the empire, you hear voices like Peter's and John's and these other smaller letters. And how do you create that if you don't have an infrastructure? And I think this is actually one of the evidences for the canon's authority, is it seems to have won the day itself. It seems to have, like, convinced people itself that these books are from God so much that the people of God in all these different regions responded reliably to it, even without someone to tell them that these books were from God. And I just think that's tremendous evidence for not only just the authority of Scripture in the abstract, but also particularly good evidence for our view of sola Scriptura as Protestants, which is that the church seemed to recognize their Lord's voice in these books without the help of an official church declaration. And I think that's key.

35. 16:02

    Michael Horton

    Well, thank you for your insights on this, Mike, and thank you for your writing. It's been so helpful. over so many years for many people, and we'll make sure that we have a list of especially the books relevant to our conversation today. Canon Revisited, particularly, people should get a copy of that, and look forward to reading your future works on the same subject.

36. 16:27

    Michael Kruger

    Thanks, Mike. Good to be with you.