No true cessationist

I’ve never in my life knowingly met a bona fide cessationist. Cessationism, recall, is the doctrine that the signs and wonders performed by the Holy Spirit through baptized believers in the first century ceased with the passing of the apostles (whether gradually or abruptly, either way they stopped). So that, from about the year 100 to the present, the supernatural gifts of the Spirit—his charismata bestowed upon the faithful—no longer occur and/or have not occurred. These include:

1. Speaking in tongues (whether natural or angelic languages)

2. Healings of the sick (through inexplicable, divinely wrought means)

3. Exorcisms (casting out demons from those possessed by them)

4. Dreams/visions from God (e.g., Saint Paul’s vision of the Macedonian man)

5. Foretellings of the future (whether prophecies, “words,” images, visions, or dreams)

6. Ecstatic heavenly rapture (e.g., Paul’s experience in the “third heaven”)

7. Suspension of natural laws (e.g., walking on water; levitation)

8. Spectacular miracles (e.g., feeding the five thousand; blood spilling from a consecrated host)

9. Relics of saints/martyrs charged with spiritual power (e.g., Paul in Ephesus)

10. Communication with or visions of the dead (e.g., Samuel and the witch of Endor; the souls of the martyrs beneath the altar in Revelation)

That’s far from an authoritative list; I can imagine alternative taxonomies. The point is that none of them are “natural” occurrences; all of them are “supernatural” happenings. The biblical point is that they are the work of God; that God’s word attests them; that no Christian disputes their occurrence in the first century; and that some or all of them were understood to be special gifts of the Holy Spirit, “signs and wonders” performed by him through the baptized as evidence of the power of Christ and the truth of the gospel.

Testimony of such “signs and wonders” continues throughout the church’s history. So far as I can tell, nobody disputes this either (with the possible exception of tongues). The question is whether the testimony is true.

As I understand it, cessationism rose to modest prominence in and after the Protestant Reformation and has been a durable minority strand of Christian teaching and practice since then, particularly in the last two or three centuries—before Pentecostalism, as a check on Roman superstition; after Pentecostalism, as an additional brake on charismatic enthusiasm run rampant.

Here’s the thing. I grew up in a (sometimes tacitly, sometimes overtly) cessationist tradition. I know plenty of others who have similar experiences. I’m well aware that I can Google “arguments for cessationism” or “are tongues still spoken” and find plenty of websites and writers selling me on the doctrine.

And yet. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for: a flesh-and-blood cessationist. By which I mean, a Christian who is willing and able to defend actual cessationism as a principled and consistent doctrine.

Sure, I know plenty of folks who are put off by glossolalia, not to mention the peculiarities and sometime abuses of hyper-charismatic or fraudulent or prosperity preachers. But the moment I ask about the other nine signs and wonders listed above, they quickly fall into one of the following seven categories:

1. “Sure, I may not attend a charismatic church, but obviously some/all of those things have happened since the apostles’ passing and/or still happen today.”

2. “Well, I’ve not personally experienced/witnessed such things, but I don’t doubt they still happen.”

3. “Granted, I have trouble believing such things, but I’ll also admit that I have good friends whom I would trust with my life who swear that they have seen/experienced such things, and I can’t deny their credibility or honesty.”

4. “For myself, I’m extremely wary of any and all claims regarding miracles and supernatural happenings, and I take for granted that many (perhaps most) claims about them are false … but if I’m honest, since I believe they happened in the Bible, and the same God alive then is alive now, then yes, sometimes they really do happen here and now.”

5. “I’m a functioning cessationist, but I don’t actually have very good reasons to support it besides my own skepticism and disenchantment; in other words, I realize how weak my grounds are for disbelieving in any signs and wonders whatsoever performed through special gifts of the Spirit in the last two millennia—so I basically shrug my shoulders and admit that I’m probably wrong, though I wish I wasn’t and live that way too.”

6. “God is God and I am not; who am I to tell him that he’s not allowed to work wonders since the apostles? or that I know without a doubt that he hasn’t? or that it’s impossible?”

7. “You’d think I’m a cessationist, and yeah, I attend a cessationist church, and sure, I’m not evangelistic about this, but … [begins to whisper] … I’ve never told anyone this … [whispering quickens] … I’ve actually [seen/experienced/performed] a miracle, and I’ll go to my grave knowing in my bones that [X supernatural event] happened; you could never convince me otherwise.”

I’m not exaggerating when I say I have never encountered another type of response from a purported cessationist, at least not “in real life.” I’ve also known plenty of non-cessationists—there are a lot of Pentecostals and Catholics in the world!—and it’s a given that their response to this conversation is one long eye-roll.

So where are they hiding? Or why does it seem like once you start poking and prodding, the cessationist shell is hiding an inner charismatic—or, to be more precise, a thoughtful Christian unwilling to deny either charismatic gifts or signs and wonders in the present? I’ve speculated elsewhere that this is part of a broader American evangelical loosening. I’ve also seen, more and more, both pastors and normies falling back on one of four things:

1. awareness of miracles in Christian history;

2. awareness of miracles in the contemporary global south;

3. awareness of the paucity of biblical arguments for hard cessationism;

4. a profound respect for divine power and freedom.

Put those together, and they form a strong allergy to anything like doctrinaire denial of signs and wonders. And in the decline or absence of thick denominational identity with recognized teachers who authoritatively denounce charismatic belief, you can see why cessationism would be on the wane—if it is.

Trusting the Bible

I have a dear friend I’ve known most of my life who came to me recently with a question. The friend in question is a lifelong Christian; he loves Jesus, attends church, is a faithful person. He doesn’t struggle with “doubt” per se. It’s not the spooky stuff in Christian teaching that bothers him; God exists, Jesus rose from the dead, we’re sinners in need of grace, angels and demons are real—whatever: all a given.

No, what trips up my friend is the Bible. But again, a particular sort of obstacle. Not the Bible per se. He finds the Gospels utterly trustworthy: they give us Jesus, the real Jesus, the Jesus who lived two thousand years ago and who is alive and active today. Their accounts of him are accurate and we’re right to turn to them to hear his voice, learn his way, follow his example and teaching.

The rest of the Bible? Not so much. Or at least: TBD. Sure, the rest of the New Testament gives us much of importance. But just because it’s “apostolic,” does that necessarily mean it bears divine authority? that it’s infallible? that it’s inerrant? Might it call for a bit of picking and choosing, or sifting the wheat from the chaff?

All the more so, my friends avers, regarding the Old Testament. Does it contain wisdom and beauty and powerful stories? No doubt. Is it “revealed,” though? Not so sure. Is it all true? Meh. Is it “the word of God” himself? Nah.

At least, that’s his disposition, his instinctual posture toward the Old and New Testaments excepting the Gospels and granting the basic truth of (e.g.) the Apostles’ Creed. Knowing that this combination of beliefs—the reliability of the Gospels (and of the gospel) alongside the relative unreliability, or basic human fallibility, of the rest of the canon—is not exactly the traditional Christian position, he came to me with the question: Why should he place his trust in the Bible-full-stop? Why should a Christian like him who loves and follows Jesus confess that the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms and the Epistles are all alike “the word of the Lord”? Why, for instance, care about “getting the text right” when the text is Genesis 1–3? Why not just say it’s a lovely story full of rich insights without going further and committing oneself to believing it to be true in the sense of divinely inspired truth?

That’s the question. I think it’s a very good one. And I bet it, or something like it, is a lot more common in our churches than we might suppose. So I’d like to try to answer it as best I can below, leaving aside whatever is immaterial to the substance of the particular question in view.

I can think of six overall reasons to believe the Bible as such is God’s word, three regarding the Old Testament and three regarding the New.

1. The first and best reason for trusting the Old Testament as God’s word is that Jesus did so. This reason doesn’t apply to people who don’t already believe in Jesus, but if you already know Jesus and trust him, then that trust should follow Jesus’s own judgment that the scriptures of Israel are holy, reliable, and a revelatory vehicle of God’s will, character, and commands. Pick any Gospel at random, and you can’t go three paragraphs without finding Jesus somehow at the center of a question surrounding the interpretation of the Old Testament. Moreover, as children are rightly taught early in their time in Sunday school, Jesus’s manner of battling the temptations of Satan consists of nothing but the quotation of Torah. This is God himself in the flesh, facing down a rebellious angel who supposes he can force God’s hand with petty offers of power and fame, and what God does is put the words of Moses on his own lips. That’s because Moses’s words are his words; Jesus stands behind Moses. Quoting Moses is quoting himself, as it were, finding the right occasion for those words’ truest meaning and supremely fitting application. A holy mystery!

2. The second reason for trusting the Old Testament as God’s word is that it speaks of Jesus before his advent. One way of describing this is to say that Israel’s scriptures “predict” the coming of Jesus. That’s a perfectly fine way to talk about it, but it lends itself to oversimplification. The Old Testament isn’t merely a collection of oracles, each of which finds one-to-one correspondence with something that happens later in Jesus’s career. Rather, its correspondence is much greater, more encompassing, and therefore more interesting than that. Jesus, as the Gospels and other apostolic writings proclaim, “fulfills” the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms. They “speak” of him, sometimes with astonishing clarity, sometimes with mysterious hiddenness. But they speak of him nonetheless—Jesus himself says so: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” (John 5:46-47). Or consider the time following his Resurrection, when Jesus appeared to the apostles and said, “O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (Luke 24:25-26). Then the Gospel goes on: “And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (v. 27). And a little later, just before ascending to heaven:

“These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” (vv. 44-48)

Jesus, in short, was a Jewish rabbi who believed what all Jewish rabbis have always believed about the scriptures. This belief was and remains a nonnegotiable given for anyone who would come to follow Jesus or put faith in his name. This doesn’t mean such belief is easy, simple, or straightforward. But given Jesus’s own trust in the scriptures, and his teaching that those scriptures have much to tell us about him—miraculously, ahead of his coming, by the work of the Spirit in the minds, hearts, and words of the scriptures’ authors and editors—it follows that Christians have good reason to call the Old Testament the word of God for the people of God.

3. The third reason for trusting the Old Testament as God’s word follows from the first two: namely, that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is none other than the God of Israel revealed in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. The God of Jesus is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah, the God of Joseph and Moses, Aaron and Miriam, Joshua and Rahab, Hannah and Samuel, Ruth and David, Solomon and Josiah, Ezra and Nehemiah, Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel—and the rest. (Go read Hebrews 11: Jesus’s God is their God, the God of the cloud of witnesses, because Jesus is the One to whom they looked and in whom they placed their faith, ahead of time.) In other words, if you want to know who the God is whom Jesus called Father, go read the book of Exodus. Read the Psalms. Read the Song of Songs. Read Jonah. That’s him. That’s the one. No one else. And that’s part of the point: there is no other God except this God. As the Shema says, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God, the Lord is one” (Deut 6:4). Consider this encounter in the twelfth chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel:

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” And the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that he is one, and there is no other but he; and to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” (vv. 28-34)

There is even more than this, however. It isn’t just that the Father of Jesus is one and the same as the God of Israel whom we find in the pages of the Old Testament—though that is true. It’s that the God we meet in Jesus is himself the Lord of Israel. That is to say, the God who is incarnate in and as the man Jesus is YHWH: He who called Abraham, the One who appeared to Moses in the burning bush, the Almighty who delivered Israel from slavery—in fact, the Creator of heaven and earth. “The Word became flesh” means that to see Jesus is to see the God of Sinai; to embrace Jesus is to embrace the very One Jacob wrestled with by the Jabbok River. The face of Jesus, in a word, is the face of God, the one true God manifested to Israel. This gives greater depth and meaning to the claim that the Old Testament speaks about Jesus. It certainly does, since it speaks about God, and this God became incarnate in Jesus.

So much for the Old Testament. What about the New?

4. The first reason for trusting the New Testament as God’s word is that it is apostolic. Why should that matter? Weren’t the apostles only human like you and me? To be sure. But they were also more than that. The apostles were personally chosen by Jesus himself to be his emissaries in the world. To be an apostle is to have been commissioned by the risen Jesus for the lifelong work of bearing testimony to the good news about him to whoever might listen. In the final words Jesus spoke to the apostles before his Ascension (words recorded by St. Luke, the same author as the third Gospel):

It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth. (Acts 1:7-8)

The apostles are the reason any of us know or believe the gospel in the first place. No apostle, no gospel; no gospel, no faith; no faith, no church. And without faith or church, neither you nor I, as believers, exist. We have Jesus because of the apostles and only because of the apostles. Christian faith is mediated faith. Mediation is baked in from the beginning; it’s a feature, not a bug. We know Christ through others: first of all the apostles, then through their successors, then through all of Christ’s many sisters and brothers, including the parents or mentors or ministers or teachers who gave him to us—all, it goes without saying, by the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit.

For the purposes of our question, it is crucial to see that the Bible is part of this chain of mediation; in particular, the writings of the New Testament. In these writings we hear the voice of the apostles down through the ages, giving us once again their testimony concerning Jesus, risen from the dead. They knew him on earth. They saw him alive on the third day. They, and they alone, have the power and the authority to tell us the truth concerning him. All we have to do—all that falls to us to do—is either to trust their witness or to reject it. There’s no third option. We can’t take it piecemeal. It’s an all or nothing affair. That goes for the letters of St. Paul as much as the four Gospels. Every one of the 27 documents of the New Testament is “apostolic”: it contains and communicates the teaching of the apostles as the founders of the Christian community, apart from whom it would not exist and, consequently, none of us would know of the good news of Jesus. Most of the apostles eventually gave their lives for Jesus. Their credibility is airtight. We have all the reason in the world to trust them.

5. The second reason for trusting the New Testament as God’s word is that it is all of a piece. Jesus did not write the Gospels. His followers did. We are right to trust their testimony, but that testimony is not different in kind from other types of apostolic testimony, such as Acts, the Epistles, and the book of Revelation. All of them speak of Jesus, and all of them are apostolic in character. When the preacher of the sermon we call “Hebrews” tells us that Jesus is a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek, such a claim calls for our assent in the very same way as when the biographer we call “Saint Matthew” tells us that Jesus was born of Mary, a virgin betrothed to Joseph. The latter is not only a historical claim; it is theological, for it is supported in part by reference to the prophet Isaiah, just as Hebrews relies on Psalm 110 and Genesis 14. (Indeed, one useful way to approach the innovative way the apostolic writings reinterpret the Old Testament is as an extension of Jesus’s own exegetical practice: the disciples learned it first from him; it doesn’t originate with them alone.)

In short, believing Hebrews’ words about Jesus and believing Matthew’s words about Jesus are one and the same kind of action for Christians. There’s no reason to opt for one but not the other. Even biography is never mere reportage. It involves interpretation, selection of material, sequence of presentation, and so on. The gospel is mediated, as we’ve seen, which means it requires trust. To trust Jesus means trusting the testimony about Jesus given by his followers, which means finally trusting the whole New Testament, and not only part of it, in conjunction also with the prophetic (Mosaic and Davidic) testimony contained in the Old Testament.

Recall, furthermore, that I’m not adducing the best possible arguments for a nonbeliever to put her trust in the Bible. I’m offering reasons for someone who already believes that Jesus is risen from the dead and reigning from heaven as Lord to see why the Bible as a whole, and not only the Gospels, is reliable and true, is divinely inspired, and therefore is to be received and confessed as the word of the Lord to his people. Here’s one more.

6. The third reason for trusting the New Testament as God’s word is that the church does. What do I mean by this? Simply this: Christianity precedes us. We don’t make it up ourselves. We certainly don’t build it from scratch. It’s not a DIY project. It’s just there, waiting for us before we come on the scene. It possesses something truly precious, or so it claims. That something is the good news of Jesus. As I’ve argued above, the church has the good news to share with others because she received it first from the apostles. The church continues to preserve and proclaim this message, keeping faith with the apostles, by means of the New Testament (along with the Old). It is the texts of the New Testament that ground, govern, and norm the church’s teaching about the gospel. Were it not for the New Testament, we would have no means of ensuring we were still getting Jesus right, all these centuries later. They function not only as a source for our beliefs and practices but also as a judge or measure of them. They keep us on the straight and narrow. Without them, we’d be lost.

It is for this reason that the church has always placed the scriptures at the center of her life, in her worship above all. Within that worship the full diversity of scriptural voices is always read—an OT text, a Psalm, an Epistle—but the heart or climax of the reading in the liturgy always comes from one of the Gospels. For these tell explicitly of Jesus and feature his very words. It is as if the “red letter Bibles” of recent American vintage were inscribed for centuries in the liturgical practice of catholic tradition: all rise, the priest processes with the holy Gospel to the center of the assembly, and both before and after the reading, all cross their minds, lips, and hearts, in order to hear the living Jesus speak in their midst by the words of his servants.

I am saying all this in order to complete the circuit we began earlier, regarding trust. We cannot trust Jesus without also simultaneously trusting his apostles; this trust in turn entails trusting the Bible, on one hand, and the church, on the other. For the church is the body and bride of Christ, and her task from Pentecost to Parousia is to maintain and to announce the gospel of Jesus. She does this by constant, daily recourse to the scriptures of Israel and the writings of the apostles. From them she hears the truth about God, God’s Son, and God’s Spirit; she learns of his ways and will and works in the world; she assents to what he would have her do, as she undertakes the great mission given her by Jesus between his Resurrection and Ascension. It follows that for us, for ordinary believers, to trust him is to trust her, for without her we would not have him; and vice versa, we would not have her were it not for him, for he and he alone is the founder, head, and Lord of the church, which is his body and the temple of his Holy Spirit on earth. It is she from whom we received faith in Jesus; she who baptized us in his name; she who feeds us his flesh and blood. And it is she who directs our eyes and ears to his living word in Holy Scripture. Having trusted him, we ought to trust her; having trusted her to give us him, we ought to trust her again that we will find him there, in the sacred pages of the canon.

In sum: The church believes the Bible is the word of God. If it’s good enough for her, it’s good enough for me. And, I hope, good enough for a faithful friend and member of the church, eager to learn from her what to believe about God’s word.

Inegalitarian Acts

For various reasons I’ve been reading and re-reading Acts a lot this year. One reason is that I’m co-leading a Sunday School class through the book, slowly, chapter by chapter. This past Sunday I had Acts 15: the climactic moment in the story, the hinge of the great gentile missions of the Jewish churches in Jerusalem and Antioch.

In the process of reading and teaching Acts I’ve acquired many unfounded and decidedly unsexy opinions about it. My sense of its dating has been moving steadily earlier and earlier (like Harnack), and I enjoy mentally fiddling with authorship questions (St. Luke? St. Titus? Another?). Since I’m not a New Testament scholar, I’m freed from worrying about being found out with this or that frumpy position on these questions. Theologians are allowed to speculate, no?

In any case, teaching Acts 15 brought home to me one thing in particular in a new way: namely, just how inegalitarian it is. By this I don’t mean to refer to contemporary Christian debates about gender. I’m referring instead to structures of leadership and authority. I’ve seen this chapter used countless times as a paradigm for how a local church should practice corporate discernment, or come to a decision on some contested matter. But reading the chapter, you realize that that’s a fundamental misconstrual of the Jerusalem council.

For the council is not, nor is it about, a local matter. It’s quite explicitly about a distant matter, prompted by events and experiences hundreds of miles away. The Jerusalem church isn’t full of uncircumcised converts to The Way. Rather, Jerusalem is the origin and abiding center of The Way, housing its primatial leaders and authoritative spokesmen. The matter of gentiles and circumcision is taken from Asia Minor and Antioch through Phoenicia and Samaria to Jerusalem. And even those who bring it to Jerusalem have only a testimonial role to play; it is St. Peter, the chief apostle of the Twelve, and St. James, the head of the Jerusalem community, who declare (with the only speeches reported to us) the Spirit’s will in the dispute.

To be sure, we are told that the declaration involves the unanimous consent of the whole church (cf. v. 22); but even the most stubborn conservative will admit that the author is synthesizing and perhaps theologically airbrushing what continued, for some time, to be a question of considerable dispute among the churches—not least because they were spread far and wide, and technologies of communication meant that it took years of testimony, explanation, and persuasion to ensure that the faithful came to one mind on the matter. Note further, too, that it is not the people in general who gather for deliberation, but “the apostles and elders” (a phrase repeated no fewer than five times: vv. 2, 4, 6, 22, 23; following these mentions, the word apostolos does not appear in the remaining 13 chapters of the book, only presbyteroi—quite a fascinating lexical signal to the reader, when you think about it). Which means it is not only the formal, appointed leaders of the church who gather to discern and decide a contested question for “the” church; it is those leaders who reside in and speak from a location of recognized authority, in this case Jerusalem.

That sounds a whole lot like an ecumenical council, and not at all like a particular congregation practicing communal discernment. It’s neither local nor democratic. Some people’s voices bear authority, and others’ do not. Some are tasked with discovering the Spirit’s will, and others are not. Once the matter is decided, a document is issued, and the dispersed churches are tasked with receiving, obeying, and implementing the decision, not disputing or modifying it.

Again, isn’t this precisely what the episcopal synods of the fourth and fifth centuries, which set the template for subsequent councils, sound like? It’s not mere PR when the church fathers compare Nicaea and Constantinople and the rest to the blueprint of Acts 15. The Jerusalem gathering is the proto–ecumenical council, and thus the paradigm for all future attempts by the church’s supra-congregational hierarchy to respond to, and when necessary settle, volatile questions of major scriptural, theological, or moral import. Accordingly, the promulgations that proceed from such councils are rightly prefaced by, and received as justifiably asserting, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…”

All the more so if, as the church claimed from the beginning (and, so far as I am aware, continued to claim universally and unanimously from the third century through the fifteenth), her episcopoi are appointed, or ordained, as successors to the apostles. So that, in an ecumenical council beyond the apostolic age, episcopoi and presbyteroi gather on the model of Acts 15, hear testimony, deliberate, argue, pray, interpret Scripture, and render a judgment—with authority.

Perhaps there are reasons not to think such an action desirable, possible, or otherwise worth pursuing, whether in the past or in the present (after, for example, the Great Schism or the Reformation). At a minimum, it’s difficult to deny that the pattern is in strict imitation of the Jerusalem council, or that seeing in the Jerusalem council a pattern for local congregational discernment is a poor interpretation indeed.

Creatura verbi divini

On the Mere Fi podcast earlier this week, both Derek and Alastair pressed me on the question of whether the church is “the creature of God’s Word.” The theological worry here is that if one affirms, with catholic tradition, that the church creates the canon, then the proper order between the two has been inverted, since the people of God is the creatura verbi divini, not the other way around. How, after all, could it be otherwise?

You can listen to my answer on the pod. My reply was simple, though I can’t speak to how well I articulated it there. Here, at least, is what I would say in expanded form.

The word of God creates the church; but the church creates the canon. This is not a contradiction because, even though Holy Scripture mediates and thus is the word of the living God to his people, the canon of texts that Scripture comprises is wholly (though not only) human, historical, and just so a product of the church. Moreover, the canon as such does not exist at the church’s founding, traditionally identified with Pentecost. No apostolic writing is extant at that moment. Apostolic writings begin to be written a decade or two following; they are not completed for at least a half century hence (maybe more); and the canon or formal collection or list of apostolic writings received as authoritative divine Scripture on the part of the church does not exist in any official way for some centuries. And even once the canon is explicit, unanimity and universality of its acceptance take even more centuries to arrive. (If one agrees with the Protestant reformers regarding the excision from the canon of such deuterocanonical books as the Wisdom of Solomon and Tobit, then in point of fact the canon takes a full fifteen centuries to come into its final, public form.)

In my view, magisterial Protestant doctrines of Scripture elide this crucial distinction in their claim that the church is created by the word of God and, thus, that Scripture creates the church. The word of God does indeed found the church, both (1) in the primary sense that the risen incarnate Logos from heaven pours out the Spirit of the Father on his apostles and (2) in the secondary sense that the apostles’ proclamation of the word of the gospel convicts and converts sinners to Christ wherever they travel, bearing witness to the good news. This is the running theme of the book of Acts. Nevertheless it remains the case that, within the very narrative of Acts, no canon of Scripture exists. Recall that St. Luke does not record the writing of any canonical text! Those texts he does record, such as the letter of St. James and the Jerusalem council to gentile believers, are not found elsewhere in the canon, but only here, as reported speech.

In our conversation, Alastair pressed a different point, an important one with which I agree but which, I think, I understand differently than he does. He observed that what doctrines of Scripture often overlook is the manifold and altogether material ways in which the production and dissemination of graphai influenced and shaped the early messianic assemblies dotting the shoreline of the Mediterranean basin. Apart from and prior to any theological redescription, that is, we can see just how letter-centric and letter-formed the early Christian communities were, evident in the extraordinary literary production of St. Paul alone. Letters (and homilies, and histories, and apocalypses, and …) are written, copied, distributed, shared, read aloud in worship, studied by the saints, transmitted and republished, so on and so forth, and this diverse and fascinating process is up and running, at the absolute latest, by the end of the second decade of the church’s existence.

As I say, I agree wholeheartedly with this observation. And it certainly bears on our theological and not only our historical understanding of the church’s origins. But, so far as I can tell, it doesn’t bear on the specific point raised by the question of whether the canon creates the church or vice versa.

That is to say: Granting the existence and influence of Pauline and other literatures in the first century of the church’s life (and on, indefinitely, into the future), this phenomenon seems to me to confirm rather than to contradict or even to complicate my original answer offered above. Yes, God’s word founds the church, both from heaven and through the spoken and, later, written words of the apostles. But from this undeniable fact we may not draw the conclusion that the canon—or even the apostolic writings eventually canonized—“create” the church, and for the same reasons. The canon does not exist in the time of the apostles. And although, intermittently and somewhat haphazardly, written apostolic documents begin circulating in the second half of the first century AD, these are far from universally shared by ekklesiai around the known world. There are churches in Africa and India and Spain and elsewhere that simply lack all or most of the apostolic writings later canonized until the second and even sometimes into the third or fourth centuries. The church simply cannot be said to be a creature of the canon or even of the apostolic texts subsequently included in the canon. The church predates both by decades, even centuries. Certain churches do receive and benefit from certain texts authored or commissioned by apostles. But for some time they are in the minority, and even they (i.e., the churches in question) preexisted their reception of any apostolic text whatsoever. Not that they preexisted apostolic teaching—but then, this question concerns graphai, not oral doctrina.

I hope this clarification is responsive to both Derek’s and Alastair’s questions and concerns. I hope especially that it is cogent. I look forward to hearing from them or others regarding where I might be wrong.

An unpublished footnote on Longenecker on Hays on apostolic exegesis

About a year ago Pro Ecclesia published my article, "Reading the Trinity in the Bible: Assumptions, Warrants, Ends" (25:4, 459-474). On page 466 I briefly reference Richard Longenecker's position on the (non-)exemplarity of apostolic exegesis, and in turn cite Richard Hays's counter to Longenecker. Unfortunately, in the version of the article I sent to the editors, I somehow neglected to include the lengthy footnote I had written in a previous version, summarizing Longenecker's position and responding critically to it. I wish it were in print—and perhaps someday it will be—but I thought I'd publish it here, for what it's worth.

In the “Preface to the Second Edition” (Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975, 1999), xiii-xli), Longenecker responds to criticisms like mine above and those of Hays and Leithart, and engages directly with Hays (xxxiv-xxxix). He takes Hays to be missing his point, which concerns “the distinctiveness of the particular exegetical procedures and practices that Paul uses in spelling out . . . his theological approach” (xxxvi). It is these—along with, e.g., methods such as “dreams and visions, ecstatic prophecies, the fleece of a sheep, necromancy” as well as casting lots—which Longenecker deems “culturally conditioned and not normative for believers today.” He thus wants to distinguish “between (1) normative theological and ethical principles and (2) culturally conditioned methods and practices used in the support and expression of those principles,” a distinction he takes to be commonly accepted by Christian churches that are not restorationist or primitivist in bent (xxxvii). In this way, he agrees with Hays about the normativity of the New Testament’s interpretations of Scripture, but disagrees with him about their interpretive methods, judging these to be “culturally conditioned” (xxxviii). On the contrary, it is not “my business to try to reproduce the exegetical procedures and practices of the New Testament writers, particularly when they engage in . . . ‘midrash,’ ‘pesher,’ or ‘allegorical’ exegesis,” which practices “often represent a culturally specific method or reflect a revelational stance, or both.” (He does not specify what “a revelational stance” is.) Finally, Longenecker does not share Hays’s conviction about Christian hermeneutical boldness, which would seek to follow Paul’s example; similar attempts have been made in the church’s history, but “usually with disastrous results.” The proper contemporary task, for ordinary believers and Christian scholars alike, is to recontextualize the content of the apostolic proclamation today, seeking “appropriate ways and means in our day for declaring and working out the same message of good news in Christ that they proclaimed” (xxxix).

There are a number of problems here. First, regarding imitation of apostolic exegesis, it would be helpful to make a distinction between formal, material, and methodological. Longenecker is right to say that we may not need or want to imitate the apostles in the specific methods of their exegesis (though, even here, the emphasis is on “may not”). But this does not answer the larger question. Hays’s proposal is at both the formal and the material level: formally, we should read the Old Testament (with the apostles) in the light of the events (and texts) of the New; materially, we should read the Old Testament (with the apostles) as in fact prefiguring, mysteriously, the gospel of the crucified and risen Messiah and of his body, the church. In doing so, Hays suggests, we will have read well, and will be well served in our exegetical judgments.

Second, Longenecker uses the modifier “culturally conditioned” regarding apostolic practice as if it is doing a good deal more work than it is. As he allows, our own methods are equally culturally conditioned. Well, then we need reasons—good reasons—why our own exegesis definitely should not conform, or even loosely imitate, that of the apostles. Longenecker seems to think that we are a long ways away from apostolic practice. But we stand at the end of a tradition that reaches back to the New Testament, and a good deal of Christian interpretation since then has taken its lead from apostolic example; moreover, scholarly practice is not a useful indicator for the breadth of Christian exegetical habits. On the ground, churches around the world inculcate and encourage habits of reading that follow the New Testament’s example quite closely. If Longenecker’s only criterion is cultural conditionedness, does he have any objection to this? How could he?

Relatedly, third, beyond the unobjectionable fact that apostolic practice can be and has been adopted, does Longenecker have good reasons to object to Hays suggesting that apostolic practice ought to be adopted? It is not as if we are locked into the cage of our cultural context, unable to make decisions about what we should or should not do. Hays proposes we look to Paul and, in our own time and place, follow his practice in his time and place. What arguments does Longenecker have to offer against this, other than the (universally admitted and materially irrelevant) observation that the practice in question is culturally conditioned?

Fourth and finally, Longenecker veers too close to positing something like “timeless truths” in the New Testament texts, while simultaneously (and oddly) undercutting the possibility of making cross-cultural judgments about common corporate practices like reading. On the one hand, he thinks the apostles deliver to us the true and reliable gospel message, albeit arrived at by methods that are culturally conditioned and, for that reason, not to be imitated by us. On the other hand, his picture presents the methods of “then and there” as if they reside across a great unbridgeable chasm, beyond recovery or the desire for recovery; whereas the methods of “here and now” are similarly cordoned off from criticism coming, as it were, in the reverse direction—that is, criticism by the standards of the Bible’s own exegetical practices. This picture is problematic both at a historical and a theological level. Surely different eras and cultures can comment on and evaluate others, provided they do so with respect and charity. In short: Can Christians really envisage the church’s history in such a way that whole epochs are sealed off from interrogation and/or imitation, by virtue of no other fact than that they are another time and place than our own?